I gave a talk at harvard the other day at a conference on terrorism (specifically, that of the Red Army Faction - they didn't call themselves "terrorists" of course, though, as one participant asserted, "the society saw them that way." - now why would that be?). I talked about consciousness. Any organism that uses a mental picture to interact with and manipulate the world would require that this mental picture have two characteristics: it must be relatively stable, otherwise action over time and remembering where you left your food would become difficult, and it must be essentially fluid, otherwise it would be incapable of adapting to the shifting form of reality itself. Fundamentalism is rooted in the stable aspect of consciousness, and liberalism, understood as a relativistic formalism, is rooted in the other. Come to think of it, liberalism combines both aspects, in the formalism of law's rule, and in the tolerance and freedom of thought that it encourages and protects. Truth, I claimed, resided in the fluid adaptability of consciousness, in the movement from one stable state to another, and not in any particular stable state that consciousness adopts in order to negotiate a particular configuration of the real. Pedagogy should encourage this transversal movement, should teach it as the form of truth, rather than teach a specific or particular proposition. In doing so, pedagogy fulfills the Enlightenment's vision of a free humanity, a humanity made free by the truth. This is, however, the devil's pedagogy - for the devil, in the gnostic schema, frees humans by revealing to them the truth of this world's imprisoning deception. The devil, who only exists for fundamentalists after all, is not evil because he does bad things, but because he is a relativist, and thus attacks fundamentalism at an ontological level, at its foundation, just as the chaotic flux of reality itself does.

something else to say about the war: IT HASN'T HAPPENED. everyone's freaking out about it and our minds are getting pumped full of details about how devestating, horrible, atrocious, brutal, it will inevitably be, but it is still just a possibility (however probable). it's important to hold on to its not-yet-ness - there's still time, still hope ["for what?" you might ask - max c. sez: "no hope=no fear" - trungpa rinpoche stresses the "hopelessness" of enlightenment, etc.]. feel like Ginsberg declaring the Vietnam War over in "Wichita Vortex Sutra." but there is that utopian moment before something has happened, the utopia of "still not yet."

for what it's worth, doesn't the fact that we are willing to send troops into Iraq imply that we (notice the "we" - written like a true American - "our troops" "our president" "our country" - who were "we" again?) believe Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction? If they did, wouldn't they be using them?
the media coverage makes the whole buildup seem slow motion. we've been talking and thinking about this for months. the slow motion makes it all appear scripted. what will happen next? has the end been composed already? what if there's a surprise ending? what if the whole thing isn't about Iraq after all, but about, say, the UN? What if Bush is just building up to the US leaving the UN or asking them to move shop to Brussels? the war seems so real and pending to so many - what if it were neither?

and is this imperialism? the war on Iraq seems like imperialism in the traditional, Schumpeter sense - forcible extension of sovereignty over another national territory, and not just the plain old leninist capitalism=imperialism. that is, no longer a metaphor of indirect control but a real, physical control of another country.

Whatever is physically occurring now, exists. Anything that does not belong to the realm of currently transpiring physical reality does not exist. But this reality itself does not persist as a stable entity from one moment to the next - it is this instability itself, this transpiring (what's that tumbling over the event horizon?). However, we have access to things which do not exist through memory, fantasies, and dreams, which themselves are with specific physical events occuring with(in) the consciousness through which we experience and perceive. There are physical realities that we do not, in fact, in principal can not, perceive. The question for us is: Does it make sense to speak of "non-physical" reality? For example: meaning. How does the meaning of a word exist? More pointedly: Where does it exist? If something exists, we assume that it is localizable in space. If something is "nowhere," how can it be anything? Etc. God is nowhere.

Many have mentioned it before, but I'm still surprised and disturbed by the juxtapositions of data we encounter daily in the news media. Sometimes they are as appalling as, "The perpetrator of this brutal rape is still at large. Up next, the cutest doggy you ever saw!" In this morning's New York Times email, I found this:

QUOTE OF THE DAY
=========================
"We believe that a persuasive case will be there at the end
of the month that Iraq is not cooperating."
-SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN L. POWELL

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/international/middleeast/18ASSE.html?todaysheadlines

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So, while the administration plans for war, those with disposable income plan their vacations.

The "Temporary Autonomous Zone," however, may be the last refuge of the slacker - or merely the dream of the quiet suburban home where anything goes as long as the doors are closed and the shades drawn (and volume is kept to reasonable levels). As the structures solidify, the gaps too become institutionalized, disciplined. Anything completely outside the system, is irrelevant to it. Think different.

Hope for the hopeless: While you hold the center, the periphery frays; when you secure the periphery, the center decays.

And living in the empire, the land of the pharoah, as they're calling it, where any human being can be killed anywhere in the world at the whim of the intelligence forces, and the chief executive can declare a person an "enemy combatant," thus exempting that individual from the civil rights afforded merely criminal citizens, and this declaration cannot be appealed or reviewed. On a day to day level, for many, little has changed. The changes will come in the future, gradually, as living conditions and the basic assumptions of function change. Of course, its a race against entropy.

The forces of chaos can only be circumscribed - no thing or agent penetrates to the heart, because, unlike order, chaos is primal, the fundamental state - order is an afterthought, epiphenomenal, and the evolving persistence of chaos demands ever increasing energy expenditure on the part of the order-worshippers. Their scheme is a house of cards. The meanings they erect are fetishes to the ego and vain ambitions. There are local victories, of course, subjugated zones, degrees of tolerance. And, naturally, what has been done, will always have been done - this is the nature of occurence. But the goal to which they aspire - permanent, unassailable control - is an illusion, though it can be real enough in specific, timebound circumstances.

Image courtesy of julauch.

Every website is a neuron, or is it every word on the web? It goes down to the smallest attribute, the tiniest tributary, since you can link from any discrete point to any other. So, the thoughts and images are the ganglia, snaking out to exchange charge across a sea of neurotransmitters. What will happen if the Web has a stroke? Gaps, holes, realms of the inaccessible, the entire schema like a sponge of information - a fractal volume, coexistent with absence.

children are an acquired taste.
watching high on fire the other night, trying to stay awake through the battering, i was aware of their music as a finite entity, limited, predictable, relentless. it was not engaging, mysterious, surprising or, utlimately, inspiring. more than anything else, it made me think that the strength (and weakness) of music, as well as the crux of its affinity with magic (and myth), lies in the power of illusion. because the world we perceive, the perception we live, is constructed, provisional, ad hoc, we are susceptible to hallucination, wizardry, and mystification. the evocative quality of music shrouds the performer in dream. but when you see through or past the oneiric veil, you see young men posturing and playing, and (little) more. they assume the forms of violence and fury, and even inhabit them, enact them, manifest them, but always under the banner "as if."
there was also a strange detachment about the band. matt pike (the leader) perfunctorily introduced the band, though not the individiuals, and named the songs, but did not interact with the audience in any meaningful way. was he drunk, out of it, insouciant? case in point: they played "baghdad," one of their best songs, but there was not irony or even indication that "baghdad" might refer to anything in the real world, at a time when "war against iraq" is under constant discussion. was he, by omission, telling us something about the "reality" of the world presented by the media, insisting, unconsciously, on the baseline of their brute, physical presence as existential anchor?

formidable jaws gaping wide - who will clean these teeth? lambswool clotted with blood, crown and throne up-ended and shattered. a blizzard of flaming stones, a sea of ground glass. take a step. take a breath. the eyes are open. the ears are listening. what subtle words of destruction and awesome commandments of revelation await? turn away the curve of the earth. peel away the sun. behind the underneath of everything it is slumbering now. it is dreaming then. now: AWAKEN

On NPR this morning, at the end of a story concerning separation of powers and the ongoing "war on terrorism," the reporter stated that the government was having trouble figuring out the roles of its various branches in a war, "with no identifiable enemy and no foreseeable end." Of course, if this is a clear statement of the case, as I believe it to be, then we have entered a realm (in point of fact, entered it quite a while ago) in which war is a state of affairs, rather than an activity undertaken for a particular end. If there is "no identifiable enemy," how can there be a war at all? If the war has no end, what differentiates it from its opposite?
The American Empire has no identifiable other, no counter-empire, against which is opposes itself. Instead, it only has threats to its structural integrity. "Terrorism" is the word currently used to describe a class of threats, and is, as such, the enemy itself. "Crime" is another word to describe a class of threats. It is related to the class of threats which fall under the term "Drugs," though the latter is ambiguous since, in the case of an anthrax vaccine, "drugs" may actually refer to a class of preventative agents or events.
The system cannot proceed against a class, since it is the system alone which defines it as a class. However, the system can proceed against members of a class. The challenge thus becomes clearly defining the members of the class. The recent debate concerning whether or not we should, unilaterally or not, intervene against the regime of Saddam Hussein is related to the complex described above. If Saddam Hussein can be effectively defined as belonging to the class "Terrorism," then the system can proceed against him. As we have seen, this has not been as easy as one might presume. The international community is not in agreement concerning his classification, and similar doubts have been raised domestically. While there does seem to be a consensus that Hussein, in his attacks on the Kurds, for example, has committed crimes against humanity, the problem with assigning him to the "Crimes" class is that the function of this class is to define internal threats to system stability. Neither the Kurds nor Saddam Hussein nor the gassing of Kurdish civilians can be situated inside the system. As horrible or atrocious as they may be, they belong to the outside of law.
But there may be another problem, deeper than one associated with evidence. The class "terrorist" itself may need further specification, particularly as the justice department begins the process of constructing an internal surveillance network in the US (very 19th century). Prior to an actual terrorist act, and apart from specific plans to carry it out, what observable actions define a member of this class? When will "sympathy" become such an attribute? When will legitimate critique of governmental policies and actions become such an attribute? When will defending yourself against a false accusation become an attribute? When will (did) your name appear on a list?
This set-up, the "war on terrorism," breeds such paranoid musings and is itself a product of them. The bigger question thus becomes, how do we define "threat to systemic stability"? What "system" is the government trying to maintain, what "system" does is thereby create, and, as a result, what other "system" is either destabilized or prophylactically made impossible?

In "Sein und Zeit," Heidegger described "Sein zum Tod," or "Being unto Death," as the authentic existential posture for any "Being there" (what you and I would probably call a "being"). As I recall it through the haze of my post-graduate years, Heidegger was advocating a quasi-buddhistic "keep your eye on your death" approach to living. You will die. You are going to die. Your death is yours alone. It is inevitable, out there, waiting. "Death comes ripping," as Glen Danzig reminded us many moons past. By choosing your own personal and ultimate death as a closing bracket for your life, the latter is illuminated by the proper light of actuality.
The subtext here is that the one thing every human has in common, is this lowering fate. The odd thing to me was the abstractness of it. Certainly, we all die. But some will die before I finish typing this sentence (may you now rest in peace), some will die wasting away in a hospital bed, some will did obliviously as they drunkenly drive their cars over embankments, some will die suddenly of heart attacks on commuter trains, some will die of diseases that were preventable, etc. In fact, unless you commit suicide, the fact of your death remains shrouded in potentiality.
On the other hand, and I think I'm ripping this idea off of Heidegger's old flame, Hannah Arendt, it is a demonstrable fact that everyone living was born and the precise moment and circumstances of that birth are very specifically situated in time. By focusing on this birthedness of us, rather than our eventual mortality, we choose a perspective that gives greater wait to our deep connection to other humans (moms in particular). It anchors our way of living in a (past) certainty rather than a (certain) future possibility. The one event is concrete (I appeared covered with blood and amniotic fluid from my mother's vagina), the other conjectural (I will leave this world in some as yet to be defined way). The one creates a perspective in which our specific origin and subsequent experiences are acknowledged as the necessary foundation for our life as it is, the other creates a perspective in which an idea (that of our death) becomes the basis of our life and actions, thereby facilitating all forms of actionistic fanaticism (either of a heroic or diabolical nature).
All religions focus on death - how to prepare for it and how to overcome it. They leave birth alone because it has already happened (though, of course, some religions focus on death as a way of preparing for a better next birth - nevertheless, even in these cases, birth is mediated by death). When we reverse our perspective and consider birth as the primary, organizing event in our lives, we turn our backs on the so-called spiritual, the beyond, etc., and ground ourselves in the real situation of living here in this world in this way right now. Our death is not the doorway to the beyond, but the beyond itself. There is nothing (literally) on the other side.

Thomas Friedman wrote an editorial in the Times today (if you, whoever you may be, are reading this more than 2 weeks in the future of this posting, you may no longer have access to the above) in which he stressed "context matters." He was talking about democracy in India and how it has prevented the growth of Islamic militancy by providing Muslims (150 million minority population in Indai) real opportunities for social movement and self-actualization. He also stressed, as I have done, that America and the world would be better served by a campaign to promote democracy, rather than a campaign to end terrorism. If you did the one, I believe, the other would follow (and there are real historical examples of this occuring). But that was not what intrigued me. A few days ago, I was writing up a preliminary ethics in which I wrote "Know your context." Which was my way of saying "Context matters," while putting the emphasis on the subjective relationship to context, rather than the latter's objective significance. This is a basic relativist tenet (and critical to the emerging philosophy which calls itself "transversal") and, indeed, relativism provides the context for the contextualization of context. Tis true that context matters, but what, precisely, is the context for any particular thought or event? That is: democracy is the context for Indian Muslims.The European Enlightenment and Ghandi are the context for Indian democracy. The rise of humanism and capitalism in Europe (along with the collapse of Euro-feudalism) provide the context for the Enlightenment (and, by extension, the French revolution). The dark ages are the context for the rise of euro-feudalism. Fall of Rome (and rise of Gothic tribes) context for that. Decline of Alexandrian world context for rise of Rome, etc. etc. Of course, these are merely historical contexts. I could have chosen climactic changes, species migration, technological advances, spiritual innovations, etc. And, of course, the what is the context of the earth itself? of the Milky Way? The history of the universe? Remember: context matters, meaning precisely, what you view as the object of interest and what you choose as its context.

Limits, borders, boundaries, barriers. Strange how few actual, physical limits there are. Most borders, for example, are conventional or merely legally defined. Where does Mexico end and Texas begin? Does the Earth know and respect these relations? Of course not. What if you could arrest clouds or wind for crossing state lines? Which leaves us with the "other" boundaries, those imposed by our thought-patterns or by specific social groups. To be a Kurd in Turkey means something (it may mean that you will be put in prison and executed, if you are politically inclined, or want to teach children to read Kurdish). To be a Kurd in the US doesn't mean anything. The line that distinguishes between Kurd and Turk does not exist here, indeed, it does not exist anywhere, although it is enacted by Turkish soldiers and citizenry.
Such lines can be condensed under the rubric of difference. A difference does not exist in, but in between. The difference is the boundary, the borderline, that only appears through the window of relation. The relation creates the difference and can likewise uncreate it (through rearrangement of the related). This begs the question: Is there ever a "real" difference? Of course, all differences are real. But difference itself faces its own threshold, that dividing sense from the senseless. There is a difference between Turks and Kurds here in the US (differences of language, history, memory, desire, fury, etc.). It is just that, in this context, the difference is senseless.

struggling with the concept of "space-time." everything is a four dimensional object occupying four dimensional spacetime. I realize that the math works, but there seems to be something amiss on the conceptual level. even in the string world, they talk of "x spatial dimensions, and 1 temporal dimension." isn't this formulation itself an acknowledgement, that at least in one regard, time is different from space? indeed, the notion of "spacetime" itself, embeds this difference in its awkward compoundity. heidegger (that wily ol' nazzy), faulted contemporary physics for its "spatialization of time," since this invovled an attempt to make time, the Insubstantial, substantial. Looking at an old Wired magazine (circa '98) the other day, I came across the same tendency in the quote: "Today, time is the only truly scarce commodity." It's a strange sort of commodity since, you can't increase or decrease it quantitatively. You can't stockpile or hoard it. Time simply and inexorably elapses. (Funny to think of "elapsing" as something one thing does to another: "I will elapse you." The triumph of the intransitive.) We spatialize time as a matter of course when we say things (do we "say things"?) like, "This is taking place IN real-time," or "at that point IN time." Spacetime can consist of points (located in some sort of four dimensional grid), time cannot. Our brains, or at least my own, seem incapable of modeling such a structure, though I seem to have no trouble existing as such. We believe that, since there are other places in space, there must be other places in time. is time not the "place" that all space occurs in (or the Space the Place occurs in)? Time resides in the occurrence itself (even if this occurrence takes the form of endurance). We tend to think of time as an abstract, uniformity in and through which the events of the universe unfold. Time, however, is what these events (and ourselves as events), "bring to the table." We (and they by extension, or vice versa) are the fourth dimension.

Just a little tidbit: Command performance for a captive audience.

heard some kids talking in the cd store. costs about 1.50 to produce a cd. so, the logic of one kid, you're getting ripped off if you pay 7.99 for it. other kid said, yeah, but you're paying for the time it took to make it, etc. what are we paying for when we buy cds? how long will it be (2years/5 years) before the idea of buying cds will seem absurd (Why did we ever do that?) Why do I do it? Why did I just spend 50 bucks for 4 discs? In all cases, I was buying from indy labels, so I assume that the artist will get more than at the majors. But what's really going on? I wanted to spend some money and I did. As a friend of mine once put it, "My mother and sister went shopping together, because that's how they feel." She didn't mean, "they feel like shopping." She meant, "Their relationship to the world is mediated by purchasing clothing, etc." When she said that, probably more than 10 years ago, now, I did not identify with the mother and the sister. But today, I do. Depressed this week and so, in order to feel like I have some control over the universe and the ability to satisfy my needs (take care of myself - feel), I bought a bunch of cds. I'll be surprised if I listen to any of them 10 time before I die (though, frankly, its not out of the question - though listening to them 10x before next year is a little more questionable). I like to collect. I like to acquire. I makes me feel like I actually exist. I do not know what existence is. The future belongs to the irreplaceable and the singular. Like me.

and reminded yesterday in the presence of an androgynous funk sorceress of the power of music. this is materialist mysticism. no gods. no beyond. no elsewhere. music, generated and evaporated in the flux of time. that we can spend our time this way, dancing, playing. and every religion on earth a construct, a convention. "would you walk the path of righteousness if you knew that there was no heaven, no god, no eternal reward?" many would hesitate; many more would simply walk the path, realizing that that too is one way to live here on earth, to reenact the dramas of faith, the carnival of belief. not believing is possible as well. knowing is possible. not knowing, also. but a bunch of humans together under the spell of music, the energy focused and broadcast through one particularly active node, nodding, funking, precipitating the flow. we're in it too.

words are coins. we use them, though they don't belong to us, are not produced by us. nor do they end with us. a wider variety of riches. what we hammer from these divers metals. what we accept as is and pass along as was.

plagued, or nagged, today, by the hierarchy. the primate play of things. esteem rises and falls with the shifting perspectives of our inter-actors. negotiated against our self-esteem.

Beset lately by the solipsism of experience and the indifference of the natural world. The same sun shines down on the torturer and the tortured. As the latter jerks and spasms on the blood and urine bespattered floor of the torture chamber, the shocking sensations wracking his or her body remain hermetic, an inexchangeable (though not inexpressible) data point. Whether a child is raped and murdered or spends a joyous afternoon at the playground is of no matter to the air or the earth. Both eventualities are possible, inscribed in the open nature of Being. Likewise, a person can drive along the highway listening to music on a nice car stereo, stop for a drink with friends, and then proceed to relax in his modest home in a quiet suburb, while elsewhere on the globe, in the Sudan for example, unfortunates are pressed into slavery. From freedom to imprisonment, from birth to death, from love to hatred, such is the spectrum of this world. And yet, our thoughts and feelings, our celebration or condemnation of this state of affairs, are transient and private chemical states - a certain, momentary disposition of the substrate. The thought that everything we cherish, every ambition, every reaction, is reducible to itself, and devoid of any place in a more cosmic skein of meaning or purpose drives many to God, failing to consider the great absence in which even this great figure aimlessly drifts.

what wild thoughts cause men to weep, and ancient secrets crack open the hardened ground of oblivion? capitalists may have conscience, but capitalism has none. it is the universal solvent. ever traditional bond or primitive structure will bow and rupture neath its anarchic brunt. this is its beauty. shiva, the universal destroyer, made systemic. there is no law or code inscribed in its sinews of distribution and exchange.

william bennett's denunciation of relativism. how can any thinking person not be relativistic, or at least recognize the political value of relativism when it comes to discrediting opposing ideologies? Even Pat Robertson realized the deconstruction's privileging of the text, and post-modernism's celebration of pastiche offered the Christian Right an opening - it could actually justify/legitimate itself in terms of the theories that nominally opposed it.

what do I mean when I say, "I love America"? What do I love, precisely?