Metaphor on Hierarchy

the conception of hierarchy is one of an institutionalized power structure, sort of like a pyramid scheme, in which one's quality of life is measured by how many people are below some quantitative measurement of that society's values, like holiness, literacy, intelligence, wealth.

this is a seductive idea. but i'm skeptical of it.

i believe that we recreate our bodily structures on the scale of our lives, assuming one role in a complex communal body. these are the "systems" of the body recognized by science
(read: wikipedia). i will give the societal approximation (keep in mind that any conception, as a comparison, metaphor for the world, is only an approximation):

• Circulatory system: pumping and channeling blood to and from the body and lungs with heart, blood and blood vessels. societal equivalent: circulation of goods within a society- the transportation system

• Digestive system: digestion and processing food with salivary glands, esophagus, stomach, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, intestines, rectum and anus. societal equivalent: the production of useful products out of raw material from outside out bodies

• Endocrine system: communication within the body using hormones made by endocrine glands such as the hypothalamus, pituitary or pituitary gland, pineal body or pineal gland, thyroid, parathyroids and adrenals, i.e., adrenal glands. societal equivalent:information relay, the media. this is regulation of emotion

• Integumentary system: skin, hair, fat, and nails. societal equivalent:border control, and also the parts of us that are dead, like the homeless and infirm, who exist only so we can take care of them.
  

• Lymphatic system: structures involved in the transfer of lymph between tissues and the blood stream, the lymph and the nodes and vessels that transport it including the Immune system: defending against disease-causing agents with leukocytes, tonsils, adenoids, thymus and spleen. societal equivalent: all caring for well-being, as far as being healthy is concerned. doctors! parents! and all regulation. the people who get upset when you're sick.
  

• Muscular system: movement with muscles. societal equivalent:movement of society through the world: expansion, colonization, nomads. based on internal dissemination (circulation), of course, but all these systems are mutually dependent.

• Reproductive system: the sex organs, such as ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, vagina, mammary glands, testes, vas deferens, seminal vesicles, prostate and penis. societal equivalent:respiratory politics. masters fucking slaves. rape after war. finding new members of the clan and taking advantage of their bodies/ DNA.
  

• Respiratory system: the organs used for breathing, the pharynx, larynx, trachea, bronchi, lungs and diaphragm. societal equivalent:i'm going to say energy extraction, like wood, oil, fat. what gets moved about by the circulation system.
  

• Skeletal system: structural support and protection with bones, cartilage, ligaments and tendons. societal equivalent: government? tradition? the foundation, tenets, core, of a society.
  

• Urinary system: kidneys, ureters, bladder and urethra involved in fluid balance, electrolyte balance and excretion of urine. societal equivalent: recycling and garbage. keep anything we can use, get rid of all else. maybe someone else can?
  

• Endocannabinoid system: neuromodulatory lipids and receptors involved in a variety of physiological processes including appetite, pain-sensation, mood, motor learning, synaptic plasticity, and memory. societal equivalent: education. the part that cultivates passions in people, in order to serve society. all advertisement, all carrots, all sticks. all art. all these things teach us what it means to be a human in our society.

maybe you noticed a big one missing. the one that holds everything together. the one we privilege over the others, in our conceptions, which isn't odd, considering the nervous system is what does the conceiving anyway.

the possibility of hierarchy comes down to this, for me: can our brain be said to control our bodies? if not, no society can control people, since our fundamental method of intracommunication is insufficient to support such a system.

say that our brain really can make the body do whatever it wants to. still, it is bound by what the body can do, while its own conceptions show it how lacking those capabilies are, leading to the meaninglessness of life (and remember, this is the best case scenario!).

Some well-known Uncle Toms

- any artist who has been subsidized/ patronized, or fucking all of them: any renaissance shit you want to bring up, mark rothko, fuckin' everyone ever. the beatles, dylan, beethoven, mozart. entering into society to do art is a classic uncle tom maneuver; whether you're getting paid by the king or the comp'ny ain't nothin' but a G thang. the risk of persuasion is here represented by "selling out." ya know?

- it's an easy one, but have you heard of a "wigger"? same old prejudice.

- a prospective revolutionary. our first alliance is always with ourselves. when we compromise our views to enter an organization, we're taking a risk, that we wind up being in the group because it helps us do what we want to, and are not exploited by only being able to strive for what is "possible" given the structure of the group, and our place in it.

from one uncle tom to another: we should choose different names! like "progressives"

people take shits on uncle toms all the time.

i see it kind of like affirmative action, in that it was begun with good intentions and good results and then failed to adapt to changing times. it must be noted that slave in cahoots with the master is likely to be treated better than one who is obviously against him (house negros versus field negros). aside from this, it can also be interpreted as a sign of agency among slaves, and their attempts to escape captivity.

but think about it. everyone hates uncle toms. uncle toms were treated as "race traitors" by both blacks and whites. a domesticated native shows two things:

1) foreign peoples can be dominated, showing that their capacity for knowledge was not limited by their bodies,
2) there was never anything intrinsic about the white man's ability to perform his duties in the world. the meaning of his existence did not turn out to be particular about him, and exposing that all he was capable was only an expression of a general human capability, thus killing his ability to see himself as a god.

the leaders of peoples used to be considered gods! on another plane, unreachable. emperors are a watered-down version of this, although they can be backed up by a strong religious conviction (exhibit I: the vatican). monarchs are a little further down, since it starts to matter who your family is, as opposed to pharaoh dominating their family life. that's evolutionary power. 2,000 wives? hello?? Let's call this what it is: someone using power explicitly to have as many children as possible. Or to act out satisfying the craving of fucking tons of virgins, without realizing that his was acting dialectically.

that's what power is. reproduction. that's a big secret but it's soo true. check it: "i am the state." no politician can claim that today, and if they can, it's a big secret. no one accepts total domination point blank anymore. which makes power more insidious, because it becomes more fluid. another effect is that any one person on the planet today cannot wield as much power (whatever that means) over another as was possible in the past. we have gotten more social. it's what we evolved to do and goddamnit, we're doing it.

i believe "uncle toms," domesticated slaves (t can't believe I have to use that word in basic history. slave? what the FUCK, CATHOLICISM. you make me think about slavehood, i should never have had to know such a thing could ever exist. my life is beset by the contradictions i perceive, and is motivated only by a militaristic need to stand by my fellow man, and be strong in their face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rNPooTVM3Q

clearly, this is not a human aspect that's particular to slaves. everyone feels the things a slave feels. our brains are wired to feel them, no matter what our stimula, for the regulation of our bodies! enhanced emotion is a higher evolutionary function, people!),

were the plot of a revolutionary movement of slaves. we don't usually think of slaves as being capable of planning things, down to deliberately not explaining government policy to citizens. down to sterilizing people of color. but all these things are the same "racism." slaves were just as smart as we are. maybe smarter (i'm trying to sneak my way into goldman sachs but it's not going too well).

the reason a revolutionary organization would want to create uncle toms is to facilitate the infiltration of the masters house and find out more about him. that's the first thing you would need to do, as a prisoner. try to see if you should be trying to fight or make friends. as more is learned, that benefit starts to go down. If you learn the language, you can try to trick them into giving you information about them if you're nice, which might help you get better conditions or find out how to escape. thinks the slave: show me the riverroad. so the infiltration method is only the first step of a larger process.

the only thing that can keep you from getting to the second step is:

- Persuasion.

yep, just one. as long as you don't go over to the other side, you remain part of the group and resist their reality. but this exposes itself as a general approach to reality (which requires the internal/external divide):

as long as you stay inside yourself, inside conceptions of what's happening in your body, regulating your emotions as your first priority, you are yourself. when you choose to allow the outside world into your thought process, and don't think about what comes in to see if it makes sense of not, given your experience, you give yourself over to an authority. author-ity. get it? within this metaphor (these are all but signs), it is up to you to write your own story of the world.

so the slaves have created a community amongst themselves. they are aware of different personalities among their members, remember complex emotional histories, and construct projections of what consequences their actions can have. when they leave that history, they join the other group.

but in fact, every person is a group. you can be as literally biologically as you want, but even as far as ideas are made up of many voices. all the variety of human expression can only begin to express the plurality and infinite of human emotion. today i am happy adam and tomorrow i am sad adam. where is "adam"? and yeah, organs? cells? ribosomes? where is the "individual"? this is but an image of humanity- if you squint, you can't see it anymore. so here's the news:

ALL SOCIETY IS SLAVERY.
ALL COMMUNITY IS SOCIETY.
ALL COMMUNICATION IS COMMUNITY.
ALL MEANING IS COMMUNICATION.
ALL INFORMATION IS MEANING.
ALL PERCEPTION IS INFORMATION.
ALL IS PERCEPTION.

in that vein, working with the idea that there's some slavery of each group of people to the others, here's one of the central ideas behind the "savage"/ "noble savage" idea:

(by the way, what a fucking stupid idea.

actually, consider this: colonizers were also noble savages. clearly they were winning people from the other clan. that's all it is: getting followers to have your group win in case of a war, which happens when there's too many people and resources are scarce. the only difference now is that in business, the leader is not personally connected to his workers, but ideologically. the same leaders ride the companies over the sea of the economy (and this is one of the purest metaphors for the economy that exists, along with ripples on a pond and vibrations of a string), and all the sailors fancy themselves as pirates, and can't wait to become a captain and do their thing.The threat of an other is that they will win over members of your own sect. a "noble slave" is thus hated by both the masters and the slaves, because they tread the no-man's land between the two groups' competing interests. by doing what is best for the individual, community with others is destroyed for the noble savage, and everyone else.


as far as moralizing goes, there are a couple pressing questions. the most important of these is:

were other societies of slaves hierarchical? and what does that say about humanity as a whole, and both the races as members of that existence?

which leads to another deciding question: were other slave societies inclusive?

we hear about the killings of twins, of cannibalism. but could ancient societies truly have been respectful to everyone? "maybe with fewer people..." we think. but maybe that emotion was an evolutionary signal to start wars and curb population growth? why are we so sure the past was not in harmony, and the present is? what is that special property of the present that makes it special to us? it seems controllable, we can do something about this. the past is the past is the passed.

when an other is created, the domestic is defined. the boundaries tell us what we think of ourselves, where we choose to end our sense of familiarity. we now become acquainted with tens of thousands of people in our lifetimes, ethnic cabdrivers, to fellow banished smokers at a bar. think about how any people we have to become, the ways our identity is fractured. every picture, every product of human presence. this is not home. this is a frighteningly partially engineered environment.

so for an individual labeled an uncle tom while not actually having been persuaded by the masters to renounce his former history, the experience is quite complex. "loyalty" is a word simply thrown around, but here the double slave has three perspectives: their own, that of their slave collective, and that of the masters. on top of that, every level has its own politics. as fluid as we are, so are our environments and fellow people. "active" and "passive" are arbitrary designations, defined by "power," an extremely nebulous concept.

being persuaded to the master's point of view (rejection of self and clan) or not (either embracing clan membership as a voluntary extension of self or rejecting self and embracing the clan's ideology (Weltanschauung)) is an equally imaginary binary. Is it wrong to see the master as a human being? does this betray the revolutionary movement? And how do you deal with being an effective actor? you become a double agent, a triple agent, a quadruple agent, trying to convince everybody, and getting confused about whom you're convincing under pretext and whom you're convincing because you really identify with them. no to mention being frustrated because what if there are no communities you want to join?

what would you do if you had to watch tv and there was nothing on you wanted to watch?

this is the life of a slave, of everyone.

i'm trying to show that "uncle toms" are what we all are, caught in a place with many authorities who want us to join their society. the thing is, though, that we are all our own gods. our bodies mean something. we're not in an ether, swimming with everyone else.

YOU ARE YOU AND NO ONE ELSE IS YOU.

Word/ Wake Up!

- A Private College Student's Take on what Ails Us as a People

The oppression of the police can be easily summed up in the following way: the police do not follow the laws more often than the rest of the population- on the contrary, less so.

The idea of having a sector of society, who have both more effective means and looser codes of conduct than other sectors' with regard to the treatment of other human beings, not only tolerated but venerated sickens me. I know that many find it unappealing to talk about things on an abstract level, but listen a moment.

It is supposed to be the case that the police and the people had an equal degree of secrecy: both try to keep as much from each other as possible. Civilians working with the police is a direct influx of capital into politics. Here, this is one of the spigots of water filling the tub faster than it can drain, and here we are, drowning.

Isn't it weird how much the police oversee? Can you imagine the villagers of Washington's time standing for a foreign owned security force? The subjugation of land inevitably leads to the expansion of the perceived "domestic" and the perceived "foreign," as more territory is subsumed, but ever more is discovered and the subjugation process repeats itself. Simultaneously the system gets more complex on the inside, so that more power can be contained in a smaller geographic space (I'm talking about industrialization, the formation of concentration camps, or cities, for people to dedicate their work to the state in).

Regardless, in strict social terms, the people we know are not the only important people in our lives, or even the most important. If Uncle Sam drafts me into the Vietnam war, maybe I die at nineteen. Where is my mother when I am on the field of battle? My father is there.

The entirety of the United States government has ZERO seats in congress or the senate. Political parties violate the spirit of our government because they create a bureaucratic hierarchy of political discourse. The faults of this nation were not all created when the Constitution was written; it was a progressive document when it was written, and we should not forget or scorn our history as progressives. What I mean to do is point out that our country does not have to be the way it is, based on our constitution. Think about all the other laws that were written after that, all the drug bannings, antisuffrage and pro-slave moments

(pro-slave? Are you fucking kidding me? Try talking about how you're uncomfortable with your body in 1857 when it turns out the government literally wants to enslave people and doesn't even try to hide it. Cheese and Crackers! Are you also having trouble imagining how hard it must have been to live in those times? Let's cut the founding fathers some slack. Think of progressiveness over time as a kind of inflation: no matter how progressive you are (how cheep coke used to be), after a certain amount of time you become an asshole (it takes more dough to get some! It's great that you have nickels from 1957, but this Coke's from 2010). We're all going to be assholes in the future, let's be honest. Unless we create a different environment now! Don't let people create scapegoats in the ghosts of our past. We are people, one.),

that were ratified by the politicians and their children to whom we gave (or: who took) the power of government when this country was formed, and are not inherent to the document itself. Then again, if you want to see it was the document that only represented a generally brutal and bloodthirsty folks, which I can also get behind. I guess it just comes down to how you judge statements like this:

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. "

Do you think Jefferson is more implying:

1) that democracy is a foolhardy idea, and that he thinks tyrannical impositions must be made on such a system, or

2) does he think that the idea of democracy is just the best idea we've had so far?

This is what it means to be radical. To know that none of us has succeeded yet, because as long as some are under domination, all are under domination. This is intrinsically true of all social activity. If you're visiting a couple and the wife is bossing the husband around and not letting him get any words in (or vice-verse), and you don't say or do anything, you are also being dominated. Since it's established that the "kingdom of god" has not been established, nowhere, and that no idea has "changed the world" in and of its own accord, and that there is no "ideology" as such, until we learn to trust our own judgment in terms of what we personally believe, and not based on the best available group or club, we, friends, will not be human agents. People in the future are going to be blaming us for all the shit that's happening now. Doesn't that seem unfair, since the government is so fucked up now? Well here's the news: it's always been fucked up. All proletarians have always denied agency when it comes to their collective history! And we follow in those footsteps. This is the sense in which the founding fathers are our ancestors. They mixed shit up. Were they corrupt? Sure, but so are we. There is nothing special about the present.

So stop living that way!

Adam Wadley

People in the future are going to be blaming us for all the shit that's happening now. Doesn't that seem unfair, since the government is so fucked up now? Well here's the news: it's always been fucked up. All proletarians have always denied agency when it comes to their collective history!

The oppression of the police can be easily summed up in the following way: the police do not follow the laws more often than the rest of the population- on the contrary, less so.

The idea of having a sector of society, who have both more effective means and looser codes of conduct than other sectors' with regard to the treatment of other human beings, not only tolerated but venerated sickens me. I know that many find it unappealing to talk about things on an abstract level, but listen a moment.

It is supposed to be the case that the police and the people had an equal degree of secrecy: both try to keep as much from each other as possible. Civilians working with the police is a direct influx of capital into politics. Here, this is one of the spigots of water filling the tub faster than it can drain, and here we are, drowning.

Isn't it weird how much the police oversee? Can you imagine the villagers of Washington's time standing for a foreign owned security force? The subjugation of land inevitably leads to the expansion of the perceived "domestic" and the perceived "foreign," as more territory is subsumed, but ever more is discovered and the subjugation process repeats itself. Simultaneously the system gets more complex on the inside, so that more power can be contained in a smaller geographic space (I'm talking about industrialization, the formation of concentration camps, or cities, for people to dedicate their work to the state in).

Regardless, in strict social terms, the people we know are not the only important people in our lives, or even the most important. If Uncle Sam drafts me into the Vietnam war, maybe I die at nineteen. Where is my mother when I am on the field of battle? My father is there.

The entirety of the United States government has ZERO seats in congress or the senate. Political parties violate the spirit of our government because they create a bureaucratic hierarchy of political discourse. The faults of this nation were not all created when the Constitution was written; it was a progressive document when it was written, and we should not forget or scorn our history as progressives. What I mean to do is point out that our country does not have to be the way it is, based on our constitution. Think about all the other laws that were written after that, all the drug bannings, antisuffrage and pro-slave moments

(pro-slave? Are you fucking kidding me? Try talking about how you're uncomfortable with your body in 1857 when it turns out the government literally wants to enslave people and doesn't even try to hide it. Cheese and Crackers! Are you also having trouble imagining how hard it must have been to live in those times? Let's cut the founding fathers some slack. Think of progressiveness over time as a kind of inflation: no matter how progressive you are (how cheep coke used to be), after a certain amount of time you become an asshole (it takes more dough to get some! It's great that you have nickels from 1957, but this Coke's from 2010). We're all going to be assholes in the future, let's be honest. Unless we create a different environment now! Don't let people create scapegoats in the ghosts of our past. We are people, one.),

that were ratified by the politicians and their children to whom we gave (or: who took) the power of government when this country was formed, and are not inherent to the document itself. Then again, if you want to see it was the document that only represented a generally brutal and bloodthirsty folks, which I can also get behind. I guess it just comes down to how you judge statements like this:

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. "

Do you think Jefferson is more implying:

1) that democracy is a foolhardy idea, and that he thinks tyrannical impositions must be made on such a system, or

2) does he think that the idea of democracy is just the best idea we've had so far?

This is what it means to be radical. To know that none of us has succeeded yet, because as long as some are under domination, all are under domination. This is intrinsically true of all social activity. If you're visiting a couple and the wife is bossing the husband around and not letting him get any words in (or vice-verse), and you don't say or do anything, you are also being dominated. Since it's established that the "kingdom of god" has not been established, nowhere, and that no idea has "changed the world" in and of its own accord, and that there is no "ideology" as such, until we learn to trust our own judgment in terms of what we personally believe, and not based on the best available group or club, we, friends, will not be human agents.

Bringing it all Back Home is a huge breakup with the listener.

The first half, rollicking, is the demonstration of the new Dylan, the one we wish hadn't come along. The one that really spoiled the whole messiah vibe he had going for him. This was the death of a celebrity with a soul (or what we thought showed a soul). Maybe he we showing us that that image was soulless, and that this was soul, or maybe he was saying it was impossible to ever convey soul through music, and that he wasn't even trying. Or maybe his martyrdom was that he was trying, so we that we wouldn't have to.

And you know what? You can't help but love it. That sharp guitar in Subterranean Homesick Blues, that voice that vibrates to your soul? The harmonica- for what reason, exactly? Coddling? And the didactic lyric, Dylan showing us what he thinks of us, our capability for meaning for existence. "Don't follow leaders, a-watch your parkin' meters." "Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift." He's describing an industrial dystopia. And it's awesome.

And now we've got sort of a soundtrack-to-your-mind Dylan song. It's supposed to lead succession of images in the listener's mind (like a lot of his songs), and the music reinforces that mood in an understanding way, a coddling way, that Dylan doesn't often bring out (Just Like a Woman, Like a Rolling Stone). A way that makes us feel good for listening to it, because the universe it creates is sympathetic for the song's existence. Desolation Row was a cab ride. Come on. This is heartbreak! This is transcendence!

So now we get a protest song, and it becomes clear: Dylan is parading out his former selves. We got a "funny-cool-deep" song (Talking World War Three Blues, Motorpsycho Nightmare), an "emotional song with resonance" (Don't think Twice, It's Alright, It ain't Me, Babe), and an "anti-establishment in a biting and funny way" song (I Shall be Free & I Shall be Free no. 10, John Birch Society Paranoid Blues).This is horrible. He knows what we're thinking. The lack of a real "Blowin' in the Wind" type song speaks to Dylan's ability to take the distilled essense of that distinctive quality about the song and dilute it into all his songs, making us get closer to them to feel the same way. Sucking us in.

And here's a horror of a song. For two minutes, this is the most adorable, heartwarming song. Yet it still totally insults the listener: we're the ones "drawing conclusions on the walls" and "talking of situations." We're the pawns holding grudges. He's doting on someone on his level, someone who understands what he says. They're laughing at this song. But then the last verse, he trows that under the bus. It's like he's undercutting everyone under them in order to make her seem great, and then we at least see soul in that, but then he undercuts even her! Is he a solipsist? or what?!

Now here comes the real new Dylan. He shows us that ^ is what he's been doing. "Ain't it hard to stumble and fall into some lagoon." And he "won't hang no picture," or even a frame. He might look like the assassin of soul, of humanity, he says no, I am the Hero of this story. He then goes on to aspouse his virtues.

On the Road Again is Dylan telling us why he has to move on from our town, our reality. We're the ones asking why he doesn't want to live here, with us. Here's what he says: he's in the bed with our women, and our fathers don't like it and wear "Napoleon Bonaparte" masks. He goes on to aspouse the banality of our lives. Can you believe what he put to tape for millions of people to hear? I mean, do you really think his thinking only gets as far as broadcasting to a mass? He's selling music to an atomized crowd. And he knows it.

Bob Dylan's 115th Dream is one of the artist's finest works, in my opinion. It begins with a false take, Dylan solo with guitar, only he can't do it and cracks up. How hilarious, that Dylan should want to do an acoustic song? What the fuck do those people think I am? Dylan doesn't think of the folk genre as something he's expanding; he's exploding it, transcending it. And goodbye to anyone who thinks he telling you anything different that what you are. In this song Dylan brings up the major parts of industrial life: the police, money, etiquette, funeral homes, banks, collateral, Columbus, France, homeless protests, trucks, poverty, hunger, the American Flag, Jesus (a great line about him), irony and humour, absurdity, Moby Dick, cabs, "fab", "advertising Brotherhood," Bowling balls, pay phones, etc. And all the verses are the same! Set up sitiuation, introduce quirk, then in the last four lines blow it all to hell and proffer commentary. The music shows this too, with that "twilight zone" tone toward the end of each verse. He's travelling through our universe, where he used to live, and showing us its riduculousness. He's returning to the cave to show the shadows of our shadow world, what is possible when you realize it's all only a dream.

Mr. Tamborine man is the biggest coddle job on the whole disc. It's the idyllic Dylan, here again. He is arisen! It only took the picking up and flipping of the record. That side was the other, this is the familar, the true. Any number of daulistic metaphors could be made here. But all this is only the background of the songs text. It is the context for his message. Dylan speaks through our voice for the last time here, and our song is directed at him. He is the Tamborine Man. The song is our plea to go with him, to take him with us as he travels on some other mystical plane, and suddenly Dylan is implying that what we just left behind was ourselves, our level. What we can understand. Suddenly it's no longer about anything between Dylan and me. He's saying I can't understand it. I feel he then drops the heavy shit on us.

Gates of Eden is one of the richest songs I've heard. Fuck, man. rich? Class struggle, class struggle. I guess it's got what you'd call soul, but maybe that's just a structure of Class power, too. Whom does not lying serve, anyway? The authorities. Anyway, the plurality of possible derivations of meaning from this song is amazing, a true masterpiece of structuralism, almost a Gordian knot of a song- you know the key is Eden, but what next? And in between, it's all like "this is you. no, this is you. or is this them? or is that them? or those other ones, with the bread crumb sins? huh? me? you? soup?"

Then It's Alright Ma, (I'm only bleeding) is kind of ridiculous. How much more explicit could he be in downright manipulation? Like, it's a fuckin' bandsaw of a song, if you let it be. It's resonated with me to the core. But then you see what it is, image rap. Bam, Bam, Bam. Short story after short story, until it all sort of runs together as a sort of lecture. A slam poetry-rollickin'-beat-masterpiece-transmission of the human soul lecture. Maybe he's saying "these are the basic emotions. learn these, and then we can talk." Except not even really, because he's not going to meet millions of us. We're not all going to be able to make this guy a part of our lives. It's folly, it's idolatry. And this, somehow, is part of the lecture. And it's so in character! But think: where, in the real world, would you see a song like this performed? Nowhere? Someone we'd think was depressed and weird? It's the imposition of an other, or, if the listener's already on his level, or thinks he is, he sees the song as a great list of things to think about. This is how I thought about it for a long time.

Let him spell it out for you: It's All Over Now. That "Baby Blue" kind of softens that blow, doesn't it? This is him saying, alright, I've gotta go now, you only get this from me. Affirmation isn't on this record.


My interpretation is very theoretical, and I wish more music reviews were. Think about it: it's the discourse on the most beloved media transmissions of all time. It can build our consciousness of them, unless we let the media themselves do it. But then, reviews are media, yadayada. But anyway, more personal reviews yeah!!!

I am inspired by the idea that music artists know their music will be heard by the itemized and alienated masses, and write music for each individual listener to relate to in a totally different way. Maybe we show our love the same way (the same dance move, the same quotation and incorporation into our lives), but its origins can be vary multiduniously in each person who views these media. This excites me because I think reaction to media can become an art form in its own right, the next logical step in the semblence of truth in media.

guy debord kicks my complit class's ASS.

we learned about "structuralism" in class today, and how the europeans call what we call structuralism AND what we call post-structuralism structuralism. anyway, here's what guy has to say:

"In order to understand "structuralist" categories, one must keep in mind, as with every historical social science, that the categories express forms as well as conditions of existence. ust as one cannot appraise the value of a man in terms of the conception he has of himself, on cannot appraise- and admire- this particular society by taking as indisputably true the language it speaks to itself; "...we cannot judge such epochs of transformation by their own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained in the light of the contradictions of material life..." Structure is the daughter of the present power. Structuralism is the thought guaranteeed by the state which regards the present conditions of spectacular "communication" as an absolute. Its method of studying the code of messages is itself nothing but the product, and the acknowledgement, of a society where communication exists in the form of a casecade of hierarchic signals. Consequently it is not structuralism which serves to prove the transhistorical validity of the society of the spectacle; it is on the contrary the society of the spectacle which serves to prove the cold dream of structuralism."

Snap!

the camera is a chimera.

penetrates the scene, and is penetrated by it.

breakdown of activity and passivity.

camera is not needed for this to happen.

they never existed.

the dialectic is, then, a very mysterious thing. commodity?

my biggest problem right now is this:

if:

1) the universe operates dialectically, and
2) everything is meaningless and equivalent,

how does the dialectic proceed? it's all about keeping the good parts of the thesis and antithesis and getting rid of the bad parts, leading to a stronger hypothesis. like in evolution.

eureka!

what i advocate is the circumstantial dialectic. the process of dialectics itself operates dialectically, as does this process, and on and on and on... :D this is great! all is fluid, the structures are fluid, the mechanisms are fluid, to the point that one could almost say there's no dialectic at all. but what of it?

a person holds an ice cube, and doesn't want it to melt, though it must.

he blows on it to cool it down, but even his breath is too warm. the process of evaporation, and his knowledge of this interaction, slows the melting some, but all the while he holds it, and his nature destroys the ice cube's.

it starts to hurt. his hand gets cold, his peripheral being is wounded. but how can he let go?

in a while the ice cube is gone, forgotten. its puddle evaporates and can no longer even be consumed.

i think i'm more conscious than my peers and even my professors. when they try to teach me i feel like they're pleading with me not to move beyond them, so they can stay the same and not feel left behind. sentimental nonsense.

today people were talking about there being no biological basis for race. that's idiotic. variations in physical characteristics are indicative of separate evolution and adaptation to different environments. also, physical attributes don't necessarily point to internal characteristics, but who is to say that the "psychology," or inner organic machinery of people from different sects has not also evolved separately?

it's just foolhardy to deny that when people are apart, they evolve differently. this is not to say that what we have in common is not more important; as long as we can breed with other animals, i feel that cannot be the case. we're sort of like the twins, separated at birth, except that all of humanity is just a branch off the same tree that contains all other things. we exist because the dialectical process of the universe has made us this way.

people think: appearances are everything. no facts, only interpretation. anything, though, is in conflict between it's existing and the inevitability of its nonexistence. "truth" does not apply to "there are no facts, only interpretations" because that statement itself is only an interpretation. when we think of expressions of people as just the transmission of what is inside their head to ours, or that as the "ideal" method of interpretation, with the end result being love, the unification of two individuals, whose charm lies in its inexplicability, its inability to be proven.

consciousness of alienation = freedom? maybe. people feel like just because they're talking about ideology, they must be doing it critically. that just saying certain words proves your credibility because "the man" doesn't want you to talk about your dick, or what racism is, or how the superbowl is stupid. but that's just the thing: this mindset makes one's identity a matter of simple social interaction, which is how we want to see everything because that's what gets us through our days. just as bad as talking about mainstream concepts, though, is developing a mainstream alternality, that doesn't want to listen. such subsets of society only serve to recreate the ideological movements of society (the world, the universe, all possible universes) in a transformed and distilled way, a process which is the essence of what domination is all about. people think they can approach "truth," or at least gain knowledge that is "more true" by sitting in a college classroom, when the whole point is to realize and feel that no knowledge is more true than any other knowledge.

heisenberg:
you can know
1) where something is, or
2) what its change is like.

"truth" is the attempt to define #1, and asserts that #2 is part of #1. it privileges the present, in that it defines something's change as the modification of its characteristics. in other words, it says "the dialectic is true" in that it is acknowledged by perceivers as such, and can only be one thing at one time. "truth" serves to define the present through the past, and considers the future to be a distant past.

the dialectic is the attempt to define #2, and asserts that #1 is part of #2. it labels the present meaningless, since what exists at any moment does not exist the next, and something's present characteristics is only a point, dimensionless, on the curve of its history. thus it says "the truth is dialectic" in that what is true changes, etc. "dialectic" serves to define the present through the future, and considers the past to be a traveled past future.

both perspectives deny a contradiction despite the either/or nature of the supposition. realizing their unity in this aspect, however, is a dialectical act. realizing that can then be labeled "truth."

there is no difference between where something is and how it is changing. dialectic truth and the true dialectic, as concepts, are united. they imply a telescopic infinite pro- and regression like the infinite reflections of a mirror, and are equivalent because our idea of the progression of time is arbitrary- why could we not be going back in time? this is the aspect of my thought which i believe transcends humanism, because i assert that the world is not the sum of its appearances.

"the simulacrum is the truth which hides the fact that there is none."