The goal of anarchistnews.org is to provide a non-sectarian source for news about and of concern to anarchists.

Melbourne, Australia: Captain Cooks Cottage Trashed With Paint for Invasion Day

Sun, 01/27/2013 - 20:35 -- Anonymous (not verified)

The monuments and museums that fill this dead city only enrage us.

They impose on public space the supplanting societies creation myth.

The creation myth of Australian society is that rather than looting, murdering, and displacing the original inhabitants, the Europeans were bringing a higher order of civilisation, economic organisation and religion to savage lands.

The denial of this brutal and revolting history is nowhere more evident than on the 25th of January, the celebration of Australia Day – the date of invasion.

This is why we trashed the absurd shrine to genocide, Captain Cooks Cottage, with paint.

The Australian state has constructed a deceitful myth of consensus. That we have all signed some kind of social contract to be good Australian citizens. Well fuck that we don't want your bourgeois morality or your so called “civilisation”.

We refuse to quietly submit and bow our heads to this commodified life of wage slavery.

We must act on our own behalf, directly and without mediation.

We must break with any group that seeks to limit the struggle, to negotiate, or to reconcile with the state or capital.

We must abandon the concept of appealing to the “justice” of the coloniser and instead embark on a direct path of destruction of the existing order and a concrete practice of solidarity.

SOLIDARITY TO THE ORIGINAL PEOPLES OF THIS LAND FIGHTING BACK
FROM MUTITJULU, TO REDFERN, FITZROY, PALM ISLAND, AND EVERYWHERE

DESTROY THE COLONIAL SYSTEM THAT OPPRESSES US ALL

Category: 

Comments

Submitted by doubting thomas (not verified) on

photos?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I see that "anti-colonization" is the new anarchist pet issue. When this anarchy fad falls to the wayside, I wonder what will take its place? Maybe anti-I-69 will make a retro comeback...

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

you must be new here. anti-colonialism has been around for quite a while...

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Why don't you go be post-anarchist and join the military, a NGO, "Against Me!" or something?

We don't have pet issues. Everything must be destroyed.

Submitted by Sebastian Dange... (not verified) on

Be careful. They will label you terrorists and kill and incarcerate you, without proper judicial process. If they can get away with such extreme abuses in the US, they can do it in Australia. You will find yourselves stuck on an off shore prison like your illegal immigrants. That is your new illegal immigrants, not the raping, murdering land thieves of yesteryear. I wish you every success, but don't send our emigrants back.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

25th of January?

Submitted by Deerjaw (not verified) on

Hell yeah Aussies. Take your country back. Just try and be cool to the folks like Steve Irwin. You know they got respect for ya.

Submitted by emile on

Your behaviour is abnormal. Abnormal behaviours disturb the peace and will be punished if those responsible are apprehended.

Meanwhile your behaviour is natural. The colonizer practice of controlling space by way of a central authority that sustains a standing army, judiciary and police force is unnatural and absurd. In the days of early resistance, your behaviour was both natural and normal, but the brute force oppression coming from colonizer values applied to the dynamics within the ‘controlled space’ [the sovereign state ‘pen’] soon shifted the ‘normal’ from its correspondence with ‘natural’ to its colonial correspondence with the ‘unnatural’ or the ‘absurd’.

“State sovereignty "is a 'religion' and a faith." ---Mark Owen Lombardi, "Third-World Problem-Solving and the 'Religion' of Sovereignty: Trends and Prospects."

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development ... but also because of their systematic structure.” --- Jens Bartelson, ‘A Genealogy of Sovereignty.’

“Western political thinking itself is grounded in theological concepts of "Christian nationalism." The notion of "absolute, unlimited power held permanently in a single person or source, inalienable, indivisible, and original" is a definition of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. This "God died around the time of Machiavelli.... Sovereignty was ... His earthly replacement." ---R. B. J. Walker and Saul H. Mendlovitz, “Interrogating State Sovereignty."

The people of sovereign states commit to giving absolute power to a central authority, a pure ‘idealization’ that speaks through the mouth of a ‘leader’ that is elected to sit in the ‘magic seat’ which turns his words into ‘gospel’. the word 'gospel' comes from ‘godspel’, old english for ‘good tidings’, teachings through which one could bring on 'redemption'. In case the people fail to understand what a wonderful gift this is, the sovereign state maintains a standing army, judiciary and police force to encourage and assist such understanding.

Within this controlled space, the God-like central authority preserves peace and harmony by enforcing laws that incorporate Christian moral code; e.g. thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal etc. [these prohibited behaviours are reserved by the central authority which, since it is the law-maker, is ‘above’ the law].

So, the same moral law that is in Christianity applies to the people living within the controlled space of the colonizer state.

The only difference is that instead of ‘God’ or some ‘Great Spirit’ that you have a personal relationship with being ‘the enforcer of the moral law’, the moral law is enforced by a bunch of people that have come up with this secularized theological concept of a centrally controlled space, called a ‘sovereign state’. So you have a religious belief system forced on you. This is an aggression which many would naturally and rightly fight against. But the Central authority reserves the right to deal with conflicts, so one is put in the position, in appealing for justice and the elimination of this aggression of being made a slave of a religion you detest, that the appeal must be made to the high priest of this religion. Since the appeal translates into an undermining of the basic premises of the religion of state sovereignty, it is not allowed.

The person suffering the aggression of having a religious belief imposed on him therefore has no recourse but direct physical counter-aggression to resist the imposing of an unwanted and totally UNNATURAL religious belief.

It is entirely NATURAL for the individual to resort to direct physical counter-aggression to the aggression of having a religious belief forced upon him, ... a belief in the supreme authority of a person who sits in sacred office or sacred seat/throne which is said to turn his words into gospel, and which everyone in the sovereigntist cult must believe is gospel, if they are to retain the privilege of residing in the controlled space granted conditionally by the spokespersons of the founders of the sacred seat, who first sat in the sacred seat to declare the creation of the sacred seat. Those who do not believe that the words of an ordinary person turn into ‘gospel’ when he speaks them while sitting in the sacred seat, jeopardize the ‘privilege’ granted to them [by pronouncements from the sacred seat], of their right to reside and roam freely within the controlled space.

Summary:

Sovereignty is a ‘religious belief system’. One must believe that if a designated person sits in the sacred seat of central authority, his word becomes ‘gospel’. Sovereigntist believers maintain a standing army, court system and police force, ... ‘just in case’, ... there may be unbelievers amongst those residing in the controlled space.

NORMAL behaviour is behaviour that is compliance with this absurd system.

This forcibly-imposed religious belief system was founded to serve the aims of colonization.

“The emergence of the sovereign state was ... the necessary instrument of Europe's colonial expansion.” Joseph A. Camilleri, "Rethinking Sovereignty in a Shrinking, Fragmented World."

Because of the success of the imposing of this religion around the globe, NORMAL behaviour within the controlled space is ‘submission to the aggression of imposed religious beliefs’.

Meanwhile, it is entirely UNNATURAL to submit to this aggression.

Your problem (and ours) is that the aggression has been so successful that it is ABNORMAL to ACT NATURALLY.

Since the judiciary and police are the enforcement arm of the imposed religious ‘sovereigntist’ belief, they are in a conflict of interest situation relative to adjudicating conflict associated with the imposing of religious beliefs; i.e. they are an agency within the religious belief structure that is being imposed, and are, in fact, part of the belief-imposing process.

Beyond the sovereign state judicial system, there is the Ecumenical Council of sovereign states known as ‘the United Nations’, however, the agreement in the Ecumenical Council of sovereigntist states is that the absolute power of the central authority of the individual sovereign state, and those decisions spoken from its sacred seat, concerning its own domestic affairs, shall not be interfered with. Moreover, all assistance shall be given to a member state, to secure the capture and return of anyone seeking to avoid judicial process and/or judgements by that member state.

Therefore, the absurd has effectively been made into a GLOBAL NORM by colonization, making it ABNORMAL on a global basis to be NATURAL as in countering the aggression of forcible imposing of religious beliefs.

In the views of the ABNORMAL NATURALS around the globe, countering aggression with defensive aggression ‘makes sense’, however it is not the case with NORMAL UNNATURALS which unfortunately predominate in the world at present, although ‘natural actions’ are stirring transformation which is putting ‘natural’ back on the path to being reinstalled as the prevailing ‘normal’.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Hey emile, longtime reader/fan. Actually I want to rip out my eyes and stir my brains with a dull knife through my bloody sockets every time you mention mach, but I like this post!

Sort of reminds me of this analogy I read about the jerks who invented written language and currency. Wind the clocks (fuck that clock guy too) back to some ancient babylon or where ever and the priests of the temple come up with the concepts of money and writing. They use these inventions to foster relationships with the local warlords and basically invent modern civilization (along with large-scale agriculture, shut up zerzan, I know).

To the uninitiated, the idea of transmuting tangible wealth and spoken meaning in to abstract concepts seems like some kind of black magic. That's not to say that all the rest of the people were stupid, they were simply excluded from this specialized knowledge creating a huge power imbalance and basically enslaving everyone else by default through their ignorance.

So I can understand these things rationally but I still really like that analogy of evil sorcery. Like we should loose something like the spanish inquisition on the bankers. BURN THE WITCH! You know?

Anyway, I feel the same about nationalism and you just explained it better than I ever could so, carry on mad genius! Carry on!

Submitted by emile on

thks, ... here's a bit more on the same theme.

the ‘reason’ in language is kind of like black magic; e.g.

"Reason" in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” --- Nietzsche

how else would one describe the “ ‘great error’ of confusing cause and effect”, as F.N. poins out;

“There is no more insidious error than mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason. Yet this error is one of the most unchanging habits of mankind: we even worship it under the name of "religion" or "morality." Every single principle from religion or morality contains it; priests and moral legislators are the originators of this corruption of reason.”

“Moral: whatever is of the first rank must be causa sui [self sourcing]. Origin out of something else is considered an objection, a questioning of value. All the highest values are of the first rank; all the highest concepts, that which has being, the unconditional, the good, the true, the perfect — all these cannot have become and must therefore be causes. All these, moreover, cannot be unlike each other or in contradiction to each other. Thus they arrive at their stupendous concept, "God." That which is last, thinnest, and emptiest is put first, as the cause, as ens realissimum [the ultimate reality, God]. Why did humanity have to take seriously the brain afflictions of these sick web-spinners? We have paid dearly for it!”

Nietzsche mocks the notion of anything being sourced within itself [causa sui] as in the concept of ‘authority’. The ‘authoritarian leader’ is not the source of his authority, the people are. They just laughed when the monkey got on the throne or presidential podium, grabbed the mic and started barking orders. Likewise when the little kid tried it on. When the president steps onto the podium, we say that ‘ he commands authority’, but if his generals had smoked too much weed, and the pres kind of looked like a monkey, ... they might just laugh their guts out every time he said; ‘but this is serious business. ... i command you to ...’.

“That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word "authority" is even spoken out loud.” ---Nietzsche

‘The storm grew larger’, ... ‘the earth rotates’, ... ‘the farmer produces crops’, ... ‘the authorities restored order’, ... these all imply ‘causa sui’, that the causal source originates within the thing; , the storm, the earth, the farmer, the authorities. That is bullshit, superstition, black magic;

The physical reality is that these actions are sourced from the relational space they are included in. But as Nietzsche observes; “Origin out of something else is considered an objection, a questioning of value.”

“Al Gore invented the internet”, “CO2 emissions cause global warming”, ... these are ridiculous, they are a joke, buffoonery. One has to be superstitious to believe them. The physical reality is that we are included in a transforming relational spatial Plenum; i.e. the forms and their dynamic are the universe expressing itself; the atmosphere expressing itself is the source not only of the storm but its development and dissipation. the transforming universe not only gives rise to the earth but to its rotation, and the same for the farmer and his crops. There are no ‘causa sui’ in a transforming relational space.

it’s the same thing with ‘money’ and ‘writing’. we want to find a cause so that we can position it at the point IN TIME before which the ‘entity’ (money, writing) did not exist and after which it did exist. this is all about ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’, right?, it’s like pro-lifers and pro-choicers that argue about when the baby/embryo becomes a ‘being’.

Question: When did ‘Katrina’ become a storm-cell?

Answer: Whenever we noticed her and linguistically idealized her as a ‘being’ by giving the relational flow-feature in the flow-continuum a ‘name’.

in physical reality, ‘she’ never did ‘individuate’ out of the flow except by the black magic of linguistic idealization, she was always ‘the universe expressing itself’, as all forms are in a transforming relational space, including human forms.

re “the transmuting of tangible wealth to an abstract concept [money] seeming like some kind of black magic”.

the same understanding applies as with the ‘monkey on the president’s podium’. if some one offers you a confederate $100. in exchange for a sack of potatoes, you will laugh, just like you did when the monkey got on the presidential podium. but we impute ‘value’ [causa sui] to money just like we impute authority to the president. we have cause and effect backwards. we say that Katrina is the sourcer[or] of her own growth and movement but that is superstition. it is like crediting the volcanic cone with its eruptive power even though the eruptive power source is non-local, non-visible, non-material [stress fields] and built the volcanic cone.

physical reality is relational-spatial. it’s linguistic idealization that reduces it to ‘beings’ and ‘time’ and establishes historical birthdates and death dates for ‘flow-features of interest’; i.e. language allows us to operate on ‘things considered in themselves’ and reduce them to ‘things-in-themselves’ [that is, to start with the relational feature that is ‘the universe/community expressing itself’ and reduce it to a thing-in-itself equipped with causa sui]

the things-in-themselves aren’t physically real [the forms considered in themselves are features in physical reality but the ‘forms-in-themselves’ are idealizations] and neither is the ‘causa sui’ of things-in-themselves.

taking language literally makes one into a superstitious person; i.e.

"Reason" in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” --- Nietzsche

if your watching plant biology these days, scientists are ‘freaking out’ over ‘smarty-plants’, plant behaviours that involve amazing cooperation across different species of plants and insects, birds etc. i.e. they can’t figure out where all this ‘intelligent behaviour’ is coming from since plants don’t even have central nervous systems.

pretty soon biology is going to have to concede that ‘plants are like Katrina, they are the universe/ecosphere expressing itself’; i.e. they are features in the continually transforming relational space they share inclusion in.

but the reason they don’t let go of the causa sui concept of ‘plant behaviour’, which is pure superstition, is because they feel it would be scary/superstitious to even consider that the source of these ‘intelligent behaviours’ was invisible phantom-like influence coming into the plants from outside and possessing them, ... rather than coming from inside them. the problem with science is that they invested in superstition [reason in language] and banished the notion of relational space which was too spooky for them. now they’re going to find that what they banished as ‘superstition’ turns out to have been ‘physical reality’, and what they kept and grounded themselves in was ‘superstition’.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Hey emile good shit, but I got a genuine question for yeah that's a bit off topic, do you have any idea what the nature of mental illness among indigenous societies was prior to colonizations?

Submitted by Troll Commander (not verified) on

The above is some of the best bait I've ever seen. Good job, cadet!

Submitted by Dora Marsden (not verified) on

IF the skill of a doctor were bespoken to effect the cure of a madman, and he proceeded to attempt the systematising of the insane ravings while giving no heed to the existence of the madness one would say there was little to choose from in soundness of mind between doctor and patient. Yet no one marvels when from all those who have a nostrum to offer as a cure for the disease of civilisation and its complications no voice is heard drawing attention to the species of sickness which is its antecedent cause. It remains nameless and unsuspected, to be indicated only by a description of its symptoms.

It begins with the failure of the self-assertive principle of the vital power: a failure of courage. Tolerated, it acts on the power of the heart and thins it out to a degree at which it is too light to retain its seat there, and forthwith mounts to the head where transmutation begins. The power of the heart, already grown virtueless and thin, distills poisonous clammy vapours which emerge from the head. As they grow denser they settle, a heavy cloud of mist about the head. Descending, they breathe a film upon the eyes and dim the senses. Within, the heart left tenantless of power is contracted by ghostly hands – the hands of fear. The face becomes pallid under the Thought-wreaths with the chillness of fear. The vapours become the breath of his nostrils and are breathed in as Duty and Circumspection. They penetrate each limb and fibre, inoculate with obedience and virtue. The hands fold meekly: the man walks with circumspection. He is already civilised: he awaits merely the idiosyncracy of the particular civilisation.

Submitted by emile on

yes, dora, glad to find that you are still amongst us. your poetic style is great, but would you mind if i did a little ‘translation’ into the terms of physis, the world understood in terms of space and energy?

1. the fear: --- of not being independent of ‘other’, the light free of darkness.

2. the heart: --- the strength in us that comes from our being ‘the universe expressing itself’.

3. the degeneration of the heart and its hijacking by the mind: --- the ego insisting on the independence of the self, and casting off all notion of our being ‘the universe expressing itself.’

4. arrival in our ‘civilization-ready’ state: --- ‘remove from the box, all the ingredients [including all your major fear indemnifying elixirs] for the particular civilization you have selected, add pablum and milk (from the breast, if available), stir well and administer to all children from birth to death.

* * *

examination of the diverse multiplicity of packaged civilization boxes will show that they fall into one of two categories, ‘dualist’ and ‘non-dualist’. dora is speaking of the dualist category. it is the one which seeks to have the mind hijack and dissolve the heart.

as schroedinger would say, the non-dualist preparation accepts that the world is a continually transforming relational spatial Plenum. it is One thing with many things within it, in the manner that the atmosphere is one thing with many ‘flow-features’ within it. these flow-features are ‘the universe expressing itself’, they are NOT ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own ‘causa sui’. the ‘individuality’ of the flow feature [the flow feature or ‘form’ being the nexus of energy-charged relations within the flow-plenum] derives from its unique, situational inclusion within the transforming relational spatial-plenum.

the dualist preparation satisfies individualism by assuming absolute independence of the flow-feature, thus imposing ‘thing-in-itself’ status to it, as pleases the ‘ego’ since it resolves the fear the self will be lost in the otherness, and this self-declaration of independence resolves that with great clarity, in the mind at least. justification is provided by the visual senses; e.g. the hurricane on a satellite photograph is seen as pinwheeling thing on its own, its thick white body often surrounded by clear and empty skies. of course thermal fields and pressure fields which are the source of both the development and behaviour of the hurricane, are non-local, non-visible and non-material; i.e. they are ‘relational’ as ‘fields’ are wont to be. nevertheless, the dualist preparation gets rid of the notion that the form is ‘the universe expressing itself’ [there goes the ‘heart’!] which leaves the ‘local independent self’ [ego] as the jumpstart source of the behaviour of the self. the dualist preparation claims that the behaviour is coming from ‘knowledge, intellection and purpose’ all of which reputedly lie within the interior of the ‘flow form’. Katrina ‘knows’ how to feed on the energy in the warm waters of the gulf, ‘she’ does her own development; i.e. her own growing larger and strengthening. she is her own ‘causa sui’. at least, that’s how our mind has to equip her in order to break her out of her interdependence within the continuously transforming relational spatial-plenum, and endow her with ‘independence’. if we can do it for katrina, we can do it for our ‘self’, all it needs is the magic of language;

"Reason" in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” --- Nietzsche

so, the dualist preparation acts on the mind so that it hijacks and dissolves the heart. this effectively ‘disconnects’ the self from its awareness that ‘it’ is ‘the universe expressing itself’, and in its newly disconnected self, it is awaiting internal programs to animate its behaviour [it has disabled its natural mode of ‘rising to the situation’; i.e. responding to what calls to it to take its place in the unfolding relational space it is uniquely situationally included in, and it is not allowed to read mary oliver’s ‘wildgeese’]. in short, it has to develop its own purely locally, internally jumpstarting program for behaviour. the top of the cranium is now open, monty-python style, ready for receipt of political and religious theory depositing which will provide the programming for jumpstart sourcing of one-sided inside-outward asserting behaviour, which will over-ride without exception, any ‘calls from the naturally unfolding world, to rise to the occasion and take one’s place in the naturally unfolding scheme of things’. no, the mind is strong, and one cannot be distracted if one is going to work on one’s campaign to rise to a position of power within the limited prime time available in one’s ladder-climbing career. the infant that has fallen into creek and is being carried right by where i am walking on the bank, ... is unfortunate that i am heading off to one of the most important meetings of my life in a brand new expensive suit and tie and with carefully groomed hair and spit-polished shoes. she would have likely died in spite of my efforts, had i made them, and perhaps i would have as well. if my meeting goes well, i will become the ‘central authority’ in my division of the corporation.

this translation is in the service of exploring ‘antecedent cause’; i.e. to put a name on it [the relative precedence of dualism and non-dualism] and to bring it out from its condition of ‘unsuspectedness’ into our foreground awareness, so that we are not just developing all sorts of nostrums and remedies that address symptoms rather than causes, whose efforts that seem to be closing in on a solution are like the efforts of fishermen energetically hauling in their nets to bring in the ‘big one’, unaware that the ‘fish is not in the net’.

“Yet no one marvels when from all those who have a nostrum to offer as a cure for the disease of civilisation and its complications no voice is heard drawing attention to the species of sickness which is its antecedent cause. It remains nameless and unsuspected, to be indicated only by a description of its symptoms.”

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

There is a wonderful phrase by Tom Robins concerning some of our errant idealizations: To wit, it's "because of our neuro-muscular chauvinism". The "spatial plenum", or more comfortably (for us old farts), "aether", consisting of variabilities in density giving the illusion (as well as allusion) of discreteness (or is that discretion?) presents a contradiction at worst or a paradox at best for dialectical/dualist thinkers. If the sail-boat analogy pertains, such that the verse expresses itself as a harmonic flow of influential currents, where does one attach the rudder and what to do with it?

The doer-deed dialectic follows the self/ego-other contradiction right behind the particle chasing after waves for a bout of mutual antagonism. In a world of complex entanglement (aka, "chaos" or "dynamic systems" for the more squeamish), there is no contradiction. The rudder is for course correction, assuming there is a destination. Even without destination, one must be wary of storms and other modulations in density. In such a world view, everything is possible simply because everything's alive, animated or in motion. If anything's alive and everything's connected/related, (and assuming "thing" here is a matter of discourse and not a discourse on matter) Descartes' cogitating problem as well as the question of agency would never arise.

Dora's egoism is still the verse expressing itself, but courageously because at extreme polar latitudes, navigating by the stars alone (by convention or 'normality') will get one nowhere but in a circle. There are a multitude of currents and cross-currents available, so the rudder is essential if one wishes not to be taken in. And without chance generated by uncertainty (or vice versa), there is no topic to hold our interest, either in self or other – all expression becomes muted. On the topic of metaphor, the three symbols associated with Lady Fortuna (aka, Tychee) are the spinning globe (or wheel), the cornucopia and the rudder.

Perhaps we should omit the word, "cause" altogether and stick with "antecedent" alone. That could refer to a position in or out of any constructed sequence. Should we list symptoms without naming the set (beyond "unhealthy"), we can see them as obstacles like rocks along the coastline and attempt to steer around them. In this navigational sense (also a communicative sense of the verse as self-observing in all 'her' manifold perspectives) critique may be more generative than the best laid plans: "Over yonder, there be dragons". Dora's egoism is not concerned with the self and other, but rather, addresses the question of what to do with the rudder. Sometimes transgression is the better part of any value, and a cause is merely an ounce of prevention, in our case, the 'outside' generating a rudderless craft set adrift (the 'hypercivilized' dualist well on the way to schizophrenia, the split-brain caught in a no-win scenario). Mach's principle is meaningless without the simultaneity of outside-in (external or 'epigenetic' influence, which is as well to say, "encouragement") and inside-out (courage at the helm, which is as well to say, "transgression" as it is "a response to influence").

the Egoist will take the liberty to inquire how anyone can be engaged in judging of anything without having taken an interest in it...

Self-interest is usually restricted to pecuniary interest and the like, ignoring what is reciprocal in the pleasures of companionship and what affords intellectual satisfaction. Selfishness is commonly used to indicate self-gratification in disregard of the feelings of others. All these words indicate Egoism, but they indicate it with special determinations. In the word selfish the termination arrests attention. It is generally disparaging; either connected with bad words or it gives them a contemptuous shade of meaning, as knavish, thievish, foolish, mawkish, bookish, monkish, popish. Hence when a man acts in certain ways causing disgust in other people they declare his action selfish, not merely a manifestation of self, but one which they purpose castigating by adding the termination expressive of aversion and contempt. The linguistic instinct appears correct to this extent, however incorrect may be the popular judgment regarding certain actions which are thus stigmatized. For want of this thought some writers have laid the whole popular judgment, expressed in the reproach of selfishness, to the account of opposition to the principle of self. There is certainly a great deal of that. It is selfism, of course, which protests, and selfishness which protests most against selfishness of others and against the principle of self in others. Selfishness argues that its pasture will be greener and richer in proportion as others yield in particular desires to the preaching of unselfishness and self abnegation, which terms, the genius of selfishness cunningly declares to be synonymous whenever its ends are to be served by such a view. Self-abnegation, however, in its full sense, is evidently in sanity, while unselfishness may be only selfism without any feature which can be calculated to arouse the antipathy of other individuals (that is, the unishness of the self). This is a new analysis and I do not pretend that users of the word unselfish are generally conscious of any force in the termination, to which the private prefix may apply, but I refer to Webster's definitions of selfishness and self-love respectively for support as to the usage...

Egoism is (1) the theory of will as reaction of the self to a motive; (2) every such reaction in fact. This double definition is in accord with the usual latitude due to the imperfection of language, in consequence of which an identical term covers theory, individual fact and mass of facts. I apprehend that in making this fundamental definition I shall have provoked the dissent of some readers well enough grounded in mental philosophy to perceive that on accepting the definition they must speedily consign any claim for an unegoistic philosophy to the realm of mental vagaries. They will accuse me of begging a question in the definition; but I cannot wish to lay down a definition less fundamental than that which will be found sufficiently comprehensive and exact in every relation of rational motive and resulting volition and action. When I shall have done justice to "Altruism" it will be seen that there is here no begging of any question. The alternatives which the "Altruists" propose may accord with such of their own conceptions as they wish to term "Egoism," with which, however, I have no complicity.

By "the self" I mean the living person or animal, as recognized by the senses and consciousness, and not any mysterious, intangible entity or supposed entity, – "soul," "mind" or "spirit."

By "motive" I mean any influence – sight, sound, pressure, thought or other energy – operating upon the self, and thereby causing a change in self, under which process it reacts to seize what contributes to its satisfaction or to repel or escape from what produces or threatens its discomfort or undesired destruction.

Such is the route (not to be confused with destination) of decolonization, the expropriation of possibility. In a relational space, every self is simultaneously an other – such is perspectivism. It is not a dead end, just an unraveling of tethers, where tether is a metaphoric presence of the absence of a rudder – an ill-equipped boat. I suspect this is what Nietzsche meant by "will to power", the instinct toward that which others have called "direct action", a field where a crowbar may be more well suited than any tiller, should one be more inclined toward Maletesta or Geronimo. It's a matter of interest which transforms an observer into participant, and that is a matter of passional seduction over rational discourse. Intent alone only produces simulacra, fiction or "objectivity" (detachment).

The solvent acid of analysis cannot be set working in this age of "Causes" and "Movements" without causing heart-burnings, and causes and movements are as far as this age attempts to go. The two run together: a cause is a form of activity energised by a slogan: which ensures it going thus far and no farther, the slogan being the form of speech which is intended to dam up thinking, while a movement mentally necessitates a standing still; a pause before the fixed idea. Analysis would gobble up the war-cry and the inhibited mental processes would flow on, overwhelm the stationary idea, and put an end to the "Cause." War cries exist only because they are protected from analysis; as ice exists only by being protected from heat. Slogans and analysis require to be kept apart: an analysed war-cry is a contradiction. The workings of an analytic spirit in this pretty, pretty age of "problems" and catch-words would mean devastation. It would produce only such a solution of the "problems" as fire would with the problems set out on the chess board: solve them by destroying them: the last thing to be desired by the posers of problems. Only by keeping the catch-word intact can the problem with its accompanying "cause" be made permanent, and the to-do about verbalities kept up. And failing verbalities only forces remain, and force is too violent, unmanageable, unimpressible by oratory, to hold anything save horror for a delicate age. – Dora Marsden

Submitted by emile on

The question; 'Where does the rudder attach?' ... is a commentary on the difficulty our culture-trained thoughts have in shifting from the EITHER/OR logic-of-the-excluded-third, absolutist dual-state material-and-void paradigm to the BOTH/AND logic-of-the-included-third relational non-dualist form-and-flow paradigm. That is, such a question anchors the metaphor in the ‘old, lesser, paradigm’ while trying to adapt it to the 'new, more comprehensive, paradigm'.

We don’t have any trouble in watching this video of the 2008 hurricane season, waiting for interesting flow-features such as Bertha to appear [8 seconds from the start] and doing that ‘magic’ with language to identify ‘her’ as a ‘thing-in-herself’, and likewise for the others. Once we start talking about Bertha, Cristobal, Edward, Fay, Gustav, and their size and intensities and trajectories, ... what remains of the primary physics? ... the relational-spatial atmospheric flow that, experiencing infusions of thermal energy from solar irradiance and from warming ocean waters, gets all hot and bothered as if it is coming to the boil, and expresses itself by ‘dimpling up’ in this manner. The [linguistic idealizing] power of ‘the word’ is such that by talking about these dimple-figures’, we lose track of ‘the ground’, the PRIMARY physical phenomenon.

So, let’s be ‘honest’ about how our mind deals with this situation in which Atman [the personal self with its space and time history] = Brahman [the continuing/eternal plenum self]. Typically, we just ‘forget about’ Brahman, the ‘greater self’ and treat Atman as ‘all she wrote’. Our SAE language facilitates this for us because it has us talking in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things do’ in absolute space and absolute time. And our science has the tools to break out Bertha and describe her in terms of three coupled differential equations, to boot, so that we notionally lift Bertha out of the relational flow that she, in reality, never leaves, and we give her a new home in ‘x,y,z,t’ space, which allows us to talk about ‘her growth’ and ‘her travels’ and ‘her behaviour’ as if these dynamics really and truly belonged to her, and we do likewise for Cristobal, Edward, Fay, Gustav etc. ... as if they are each and all ‘individuals’ with ‘their own development and behaviour’, living in an absolute x,y,z,t operating theatre.

“Continual transition does not allow us to speak of “individuals,” etc; the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would say nothing of time and know nothing of motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see stillnesses beside turbulences. The same applies to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of “empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception of space.” - Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 520

Let’s be honest. They are NOT individuals living in an absolute x,y,z,t operating theatre, they are flow-features living in a flow. The space they live in is a relational space, not a fixed absolute x,y,z,t container. We impose the notional x,y,z,t container like a gunsight over the flow-features of interest to us and use gunsight/reference-frame to describe ‘its development and movement OUT OF THE CONTEXT OF THE RELATIONAL FLOW IT IS INCLUDED IN. There goes Brahman, our eternal self, as our Atman or personal self rises to its own apparent ‘primacy’, and declares its ‘independence’ and its ‘free will’ (its independent-self-operated behavioural ‘rudder’).

No, it’s steerage is relative rather than a faculty that ‘it has’.

Consider a cell in our body. For a long time the conception was, in the biological sciences, that the ‘cell’ had ‘its own rudder’ and thus it reproduced itself depending on the circumstances it was in. It ‘knew’, as it lived in the stump of the tail of the planarian that had just lost most of its tail, that it should reproduce into muscle cells to extend the tail. In other words, biologist thought that the ‘blueprints’ for the planarian, or humans or whatever organism, were somehow stored within the cells so that the cells had their own ‘rudders’ and could steer their own behaviours based on their own internal understanding of the project that the cell collective was working on, cooperating and coordinating with one another as they did so. Cell research has recently identified ‘epigenesis’ as a process in which ‘genesis’ is grounded and this effectively re-defines what steers the cell’s behaviour’ i.e. it re-defines the cell’s ‘rudder’. The nucleus of the cell [or some imaginary point-sourcing power within the nucleus] is no more seen as the driver of the cell’s behaviour than the nucleus [eye] of the hurricane is seen as the driver of the hurricane’s behaviour. We have to look instead, to the relational space which is the engenderer of the forms within that relational space.

So, what does the cell’s new ‘rudder’ look like and where does it ‘attach’ to the ‘body’ of the cell?

‘Receptors’ on the surface of the cell’s membrane are continually conveying ‘environmental signals’ to the ‘effectors’ which carry out cell behaviours. This is the same relational topology as with the hurricanes in the atmosphere, and in all of these cases, the ‘BOTH/AND logic of the included third is called for wherein we understand the ‘inhabitant’ is, at the same time, the ‘habitat’, as given in Mach’s principle; “The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants.”

This is the ‘relational space’ view of relativity and quantum physics. The ‘spatial plenum’ which is engendering these forms within it, which are at the same time transforming the plenum, is not the same thing as the historical ‘aether’ which was a fullness that was conceived of as being in space rather than ‘void’, but the ‘space’ was still ‘euclidian space’. Relational space is not ‘euclidian’, it is like the space of our experience in living in the space on the surface of the sphere of the earth. This ‘spherical’ space is an interdependent connectedness that wraps or loops back around into itself; e.g.

Relationist physicists such as John Baez and Carlo Rovelli have criticised the leading unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics, string theory, as retaining absolute space. Some prefer a developing theory of gravity, loop quantum gravity for its 'backgroundlessness'.” --- Wikipedia

“In Newtonian and special relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities – particles and fields – what remains is space and time. In general relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. The space and time of Newton and Minkowski are reinterpreted as a configuration of one of the fields, the gravitational field. This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale. Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.” — Carlo Rovelli, in ‘Quantum Gravity’

So, one more try at thinking of ‘rudder’ in BOTH/AND logic of the included third ‘country’. One already has the idea, from the new view of the body cell, that it is not a ‘local, independently-existing system with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviour’. Rather than a ‘unit of being’, it has been described as a ‘unit of perception’. Note the difference here in that ‘it’ is no longer ‘doing some perceiving’ and then ‘deciding where to steer to’ based on ‘its perceiving’. In this new view, ‘it’ itself is the ‘perceiving’. The form it is continually taking on/developing is ‘the perceiving’. The form is a perceiving organ within [inextricably and always] the spatial-plenum, IT IS NOT AN INDEPENDENT BEING WITH THE POWERS OF PERCEIVING THAT USES ITS FREE WILL TO CHOOSE ACTIONS APPROPRIATE TO ITS PERCEPTIONS.

It is not so hard for us to accept that a hurricane or tornado or convection cell, or maybe even body cell is a unit of perception within the relational spatial plenum, that is in essence the coniuntio of recepting and effecting, but we, the western language acculturated ‘we’, ... are extremely reluctant to accept this for ourselves, for a ‘human’.

If we are out at sea, even in a ship of the class of a Titanic, we will admit that we are inextricably included in a habitat dynamic that, while it nurtures us, can easily crush us and recycle us. There is no place for us to go. ‘Outer space’ is ‘the same place’, we do not leave one place and arrive in another, we simply resituate ourselves within the same space. But our language keeps persuading us that we are local, independently existing ‘beings’ with our own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour.

What we have going on here is a battle with our ‘ego’;

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

How we think of ‘rudder’ depends on whether we can get our ‘ego’ under control. To our ego, our ‘rudder’ is something we control and our ego sees ourselves as having the faculty of perception and will, so we see ourselves as first perceiving and then acting on our perceptions, using our rudder to direct our actions. Meanwhile, if we can get our ego to step and side and play the supporting role to the self rather than hijacking the helm, ... we can acknowledge, even as relational physics would have it, that IT IS NOT THAT ‘WE PERCEIVE’ and have all the onboard equipment for perceiving and steering, it is that, like the convection cell, we are ourselves organs of perception [letting linguistic idealization cast us as units of being equipped with faculties of perception and steering of jumpstart behaviour is just that, ‘idealization’].

The tornado is a resonance within the flow, but it ‘looks like’ a local individual acting in its own right. It’s ‘rudder’ is like that of the jellyfish, it consists of opening up some more portals over here and some more jets over here. The ‘rudder’ is the conjugate engaging of outside-inward orchestrating influence and inside-outward asserting influence, relative to the flow in which the form is included. The ‘rudder’ is not a ‘faculty’ or tool that the self uses to direct itself according to ‘its will’, it is ‘the self’, in the sense that ‘the self’ is the universe expressing itself; i.e. ‘the self’ is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own internal process based power-drive and steerage, as in the linguistic idealizations of our Standard Average European language architecture.

Finally, we all know ‘how convenient’ it is, for discourse, to pretend that the world dynamic is constituted by ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things do’, as if the bigger dynamic we are included in, the continual transformation of the relational space we are ‘dimplings’ in, did not even exist; i.e. that the whole show starts from these local material beings and consists of what these being do with themselves and with one another, as if they are move about and interacting within an absolute space and absolute time operating theatre. It is convenient but it is neither consistent with our experience, nor with how modern physics understands the world, ourselves and our self-world-other relationship [see ‘Mach’s principle’].

Far less convenient to discourse, ... and in fact, taking us into the difficult ground of a physical reality which Lao Tsu and other philosophers observe, is impossible to directly articulate in words [one has to allude to it as in poetry or Zen koans], is the purely relational world of ‘field’ or ‘flow’ [Tao] where there is no ground whatsoever, and everything, including ourselves, is ‘made of relations’ which are non-local, non-visible and non-material. I am not talking ‘mysticism’ here but about the findings of modern physics as understood by Mach, Poincaré, Bohm, Schroedinger etc.

The dissolving of the common sense of ‘standing there as a being in our own right, so that we ‘become one with everything’ is facilitated by meditation and hallucinatory drugs (a common ritual practice in aboriginal societies). As Alan Watts (‘Way of Zen’) observes;

“It is generally felt that there is a radical incompatibility between intuition and intellect, poetry and logic, spirituality and rationality, To me, the most impressive thing about LSD experiences is that these formally opposed realms seem instead to complement and fructify one another, suggesting, therefore, a mode of life in which man is no longer an embodied paradox of angel and animal, of reason fighting instinct, but a marvelous coincidence in whom Eros and Logos are one.”

One no longer needs a ‘rudder’ in this non-dualist understanding of self-other, since the manner that one inhales and exhales is, like the squid and jellyfish, one’s ‘steerage’, as is the nature of steerage within a transforming relational space wherein the moving forms are agents of transformation [where there is no ‘motion’ other than ‘relational-spatial transformation’, since ‘motion’ requires ‘things-that-exist’ aka ‘beings’ that ‘move’ with respect to some ‘fixed space’].

The ease of discourse is always going to take us back to the NON-RELATIONAL absolute space of ‘things’ and ‘void’ where we can employ our preferred EITHER/OR logic, yet the space of fields on fields that is purely relational, of which Rovelli and others speak, seems to better capture the physical world of our experience, if not the world of our linguistically idealized reality. As Einstein and Infeld write;

“We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone. But the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality. This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy.” Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, ‘The Evolution of Physics’

While your comments raise ‘apparent’ problems in trying to move old metaphors based on a ‘things-and-void’ linguistically idealized reality, into a new ‘relational reality’ consistent with physical experience, the basic symmetry of the shift from a matter-and-void space to a relational energy-flow-spatial-plenum, informs us that the ‘field’ space can do everything that ‘matter-and-void’ space can do, including emulating the matter-and-void space as the special case wherein the local energy-concentrating ‘figures’ hijack so much of the energy in the mothering ‘ground’, that the exhausted mother can be ignored as we turn our focus to the plurality of energized children, who now seem to ‘run the show’ on their own.

In fact, ‘field’ can go beyond where matter-and-void has the capability of going; i.e. ‘field’ can go to non-dualism wherein the figure and the ground are ‘mutually inclusive’ rather than ‘mutually exclusive’. I.e. ‘field’ can accommodate the concept of non-dualism where A=Not.A [the ‘ying/yan’ equation of BOTH/AND logic of the included third]. In Schroedinger’s philosophy, this is where Atman [personal self] = Brahman [eternal self, or ‘continually transforming relational spatial-Plenum].

‘Field’ as in the relational spatial plenum contemplated by Rovelli and Mach and others, accommodates the non-dualist physical world that is inherently beyond the capability of the matter-and-void mental modeling paradigm that is foundational to the ‘linguistically idealized’ mental model of self and world of our globally dominating western culture. In our psychological navigating of the non-dualist physical world, the BOTH/AND logic of the included third is required for use as the ‘primary logic’ [it can deal with the situation wherein the inhabitant is, at the same time, the habitat, as in the Taoist and aboriginal worldview]. The EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third is also available as the secondary logic for dealing with the individual ‘flow-features-in-the-flow’, taken to be ‘things-in-themselves’ with ‘their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviours’. As in Alan Watts ‘LSD view’, these two ‘realities’ are mutually complementary. Our modern societal problem is that we elevate ‘rationality’ which is the EITHER/OR logic based ‘matter-and-void’ dualist worldview, unnaturally, to primacy, eclipsing the BOTH/AND logic based relational-spatial non-dualist worldview.

Our instincts inform us that our rationality, which we construct using linguistic idealizations, is insufficient to the job of capturing and understanding of the real physical world of our experience. It is the folly of our culture to have elevated rationality into an unnatural primacy over our sensory experience informed intuition.

“When one finds it necessary to turn reason into a tyrant, as Socrates did, the danger cannot be slight that something else will play the tyrant. Rationality was then hit upon as the savior; neither Socrates nor his "patients" had any choice about being rational: it was de rigeur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or -- to be absurdly rational. The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato on is pathologically conditioned; so is their esteem of dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness, that means merely that one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent daylight -- the daylight of reason. One must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward. – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

The authoritarian culture, with its ethic of control; i.e. with its belief that to lose control, to have our ‘rudder’ break off, ... to perhaps flounder in the currents, ... sees this as a fate worse than death. This authoritarian culture is struggling with modern day clamour to cast off ‘rudders’ like feminists cast off bras, and let it all hang loose. It [the established/institutionalized authoritarian culture] believes that any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward

Submitted by popeye (not verified) on

Emile, I think we are in more agreement than not. For example, I've always thought of the "aether" outside of the historical (academic) sense as being both the medium and its own perturbation – in other words, particles are only ethereal intensities whose becoming radiates ripples back on itself. Is this what they mean by wave-form? At any rate, it's visually more than intellectually attractive, so for me makes sense (I don't consider Mr. Grey-matter a sense organ). So I like your insinuation that we are not equipped with a rudder, we are it. I think of the rudder as a juxtaposition of the "neuro-muscular" with aesthetics (and in this day and age, that may just be the excluded middle,on the analogy of R. Buckminster-Fuller's interpretation of gravity as the synergy between "objects" rather than within them).

Without the notion of transgression (the will to "sin", or inclination to jump aboard a different wave), the whole different-drummer scenario falls into the void and we are left with fatalism (or, worse yet, democracy). The world of our senses presents a quite different picture. In fact, despite the 'fact' that most speakers are stay-at-homes or wanna-be's, SAE is drenched in motion and navigational metaphor, to the point that a neuro-linguist from the future might think, despite the archaeological evidence, that we were all wandering tribes. Which brings me to another point. Bertrand Russel said most people would rather die than think. Dora Marsden said they merely confuse thinking with having thoughts, thinking being a matter of free-association rather than the accumulation and enumeration of stored trivia. The point is, they are not rational creatures. In fact, most members of any congregation aren't even believers (at least in private) – "It's traditional". Traditional behavior is usually not informed by an ontology any more or less than it informs it. Many do well without an ontology at all beyond the economics of the moment. Even so, they may not even know the high priests, Adam Smith or Karl Marx. I refer back to your quote elsewhere from Chuang Tsu:

"They were upright and correct without knowing that to be so was righteous. They loved one another without knowing that to do so was benevolence. They were sincere without knowing that to do so was loyalty. They kept their promises without knowing that to do so was to be in good faith. They helped one another without thought of giving or receiving gifts. Thus their actions left no trace and we have no records of their affairs"

Of course, their actions did leave a trace, just not in the history books. By the same token, there are loggers and strip miners in Montana who would not even consider rape as an acceptable social relation. Consistency and integrity are more comfortable in mathematics than social relations. Like logical consistency, ontology may be a bit over-rated. It was the bad shit emanating from the civil relation (such as the inquisition and it's resultants like the black death) which spurred forward the "rational" enlightenment, following an error in logic that if folks only thought things through, the "evil" would go away. The errant idealization was, of course, that folks are rational beings. Like any recursive system of fields upon fields and ripples from different perturbations meeting on the surface of a pond, we are returned straight away back onto the sea of morality for a tranquil lunar landscape.

So back to the rudder, transgression is essential to sail boating. No boat will long stay afloat leaving fate (or variable ocean currents) to decide its route. The character played by Omar Sharif told Lawrence "Unlike you, we Arabs have no love for the desert. It is oases we love". I suspect the island hoppers had a similar attitude regarding the sea. One could say all movement entails a transgression, by definition. Choice must be free, there are always choices/possibilities. It's the consequences which can get expensive. If this were not the case, we'd all be omniscient and no question would be tolerated (Oh shit, that's...). This says nothing concerning inside-out or outside-in influences or constraints. Just that in a complex dynamic, there are always other currents or fields within hopping distance. And to choose, one must have a sense of aesthetics or desperation. Passionate engagement will look like desperation, but free association should limit its negative interpretation. Like relaxation and intention, a paintbrush, crowbar or rudder, creation and destruction are in some sense the same, in some sense different and in some sense meaningless. Going with the flow is not always politically correct. We don't need a more perfect language, but we might need a sense of poetry.

– see Jain Epistemology

Submitted by emile on

Yes, we have the same modern concept of ‘aether/plenum’; i.e. the ripple is the crinkling of the relational space, and not ‘something the earth moves through’ [michelson-morley expt].

so, there is a lot in common, but where you say;

“So back to the rudder, transgression is essential to sail boating. No boat will long stay afloat leaving fate (or variable ocean currents) to decide its route. The character played by Omar Sharif told Lawrence "Unlike you, we Arabs have no love for the desert. It is oases we love". I suspect the island hoppers had a similar attitude regarding the sea. One could say all movement entails a transgression, by definition. Choice must be free, there are always choices/possibilities.”

my choice of sailboating was in combination with powerboating and storm-cells; ... 'powerboating' to distinguish the sourcing of power and steerage, which in the latter case is fully onboard-derived, and in the former case derives from the dynamics the sailboat is situationally included in.

the sailboat metaphor ‘works’ in this sense, but it doesn’t go far enough. I don’t know if you have read Jantsch, ‘Design for Evolution’, but he divides the relation of self to other into three metaphorical levels of (1) rational: man on the river bank , (2) mythical: man boating in the riverflow, (3) evolutionary: man included in the flow.

in terms of choosing words/metaphors to share the point, it’s harder to get to (3) because (3) is the relation between the storm-cell and the flow, so it’s simultaneously the flow and the dimple in the flow

so to understand ourselves as crinkles in space, we are the rudder, and there is no such thing as ‘transgression’, which is in any case one of those ‘dialectics’ that you don’t like and neither do i, and no such thing as ‘choices’ because in order to make sense, these ‘choices’ would have to be actions exercisable by the ‘self’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’, and the ‘self’ is not a ‘thing-in-itself’. to cite joseph campbell, john lennon here, since they seemed to be ‘on same page’;

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” … “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” - Joseph Campbell
.
“Life is something that happens to us while we are busy making other plans” – John Lennon

in a relational space, there is no motion and no transgression and no choices, there is only transformation. self and other transform simultaneously. the self, like the storm-cell, is an agent of transformation. it does not ‘move’ and it does not ‘transgress’ but it does participate in transformation. in our language, i use the word ‘it’ and make ‘it’ a subject, but as Nietzsche says, ‘is this not the greatest stupidity’? i.e. is it not the greatest stupidity to call a storm-cell ‘Katrina’ and make out like she is the subject of ‘her own actions’?

in the flow of the freeway, the web of relations we are included in opens up possibility for us to move, but as ‘we move’ the relational configuration we are included in transforms, and ‘transformation’ is the more comprehensive view of these dynamics although a outside observer can describe them in terms of ‘drivers moving’. but in order to tie down ‘their trajectories’, he needs to impose a space and time measuring reference frame, which is after-the-fact nonsense; i.e. if i am included in a friendly group, when i move a path opens for me that was not there when i started [i don’t really ‘start’ because there is a CONTINUAL transforming of relational space].

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” —John Anster’s free translation from Goethe’s Faust

the sailboater metaphor does not go far enough to capture the sense of SIMULTANEOUS CONJUGATE TRANSFORMATION wherein the emboldened actions of the storm-cells-in-the-flow, ... are the flow giving its energy up to express itself through them. but the sailboat metaphor does go far enough to capture the sense that its form [sails], power-drive and steerage derive from the flow [i.e. the sailboat metaphor falls short of where the storm-cell metaphor gets to; i.e. to simultaneous conjugate transformation]

this is implicit in the aboriginal sense of ‘tread lightly’ because the view here is that we are strands in the web-of-life so that as we move the relational web-of-life simultaneously transforms.

to ‘tread lightly’ suggests ‘transgression’ but ‘strands in a relational web’ do not ‘transgress’, they transform. but you say;

One could say all movement entails a transgression, by definition. Choice must be free, there are always choices/possibilities.

it may be that you are using ‘two levels’ of consciousness, rational and aesthetic while i am using three, ... in the manner of erich jantsch’s [austrian physicist and systems theorist] ‘Design for Evolution’. he called the three levels ‘rational’, ‘mythical’ and ‘evolutionary’. these are not three separate levels but each level includes those below it [BOTH/AND logic is required]

1. rational: in my terms this is powerboater level. destination oriented. in his terms it is sitting on the bank of the flow and gathering information. ["Many people choose to remain on the stream bank, forever gathering data. They think they will gain enlightenment simply by accumulating information. They watch and learn but never become a part of something larger"]

2. mythical: the sailboat metaphor fits here. here we push off from the bank the way we do in a sailboat and the tides catch us right away and we get that feeling that we are caught in currents that could capsize us or put us on the rocks if we are not careful. this is a very distinctly different feeling from that on solid ground or from the solid selfhood of the powerboat. in grappling with the currents, we don’t know what exotic port or island we are going to end up in. we have to focus on the journey [staying upright] and our destinations are going to be like john lennon says; ‘something that happens to us while we were busy making other plans’.

3. evolutionary: the storm-cell metaphor fits here. we are a dimple in the transforming relational space here. this is where the ‘strand-in-the-web-of-life’ awareness comes in. this is the aboriginal can feel himself to be ‘the universe expressing itself’. there’s no longer any ‘movement’, only transformation. this is the feeling in a ‘circle process’, one lets the energy come through the circle and transform the participants. one can imagine what the storm-cell feels like, getting all these signals from all around it and from inside of it too, and the only way to resolve this dialectic is to transcend it, to allow transformation to become the dynamic.

here’s how someone with a yoga background, Judith Anodea, describes the jump from the ‘mythic’ [sailboat] to ‘evolutionary’ [storm-cell] level wherein one becomes ‘one’ with the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum [where, in Schroedinger’s terms, Atman = Brahman]. she doesn’t stick to the ‘systems’ terms but she does a not bad job if one can ‘let that go’;

“At the mythic level, we battle forces that have lives of their own. In order to survive, we must become one with the force, but we have to leave the stream bank in order to have this experience. This is the aspect of spirituality that involves letting go. The stream bank is our familiar world, our rational mind, our safety and security. It is our body of knowledge. As we enter into mythic consciousness, the rational system does not disappear but is transcended by a deeper experience.
.
Becoming “one with the river” does not mean that we lose ourselves. If we simply gave up and surrendered to the water we could drown or be dashed on the rocks! This is the challenge that most of us meet on our spiritual path. How do we become one with a force greater than ourselves without losing ourselves? Our third chakra will has to engage and drive the feet to kick. We have to learn our relationship to the river and interpret our many feelings that tell us just how to move among the rocks. Once we jump fully into the stream of energy flowing through our bodies and our lives, we are forced to deal with larger challenges.
We are forced to evolve.
.
By this merging---not just jumping in but learning to swim until it is a glorious free-flowing dance---we enter the third level of consciousness: the evolutionary system. At this point I and thou become we. This is the expansion into universal mind, the union with the divine, and the all-inclusive state of being where system boundaries have dissolved and reformed to a greater and deeper whole. Again, we do not lose the I, we reframe it. The I now includes the all. Here is our final transcendence into cosmic consciousness.
.
Many spiritual disciplines, especially those oriented towards ascendance, advise us to give up the self, to surrender all to a master, guru, or a particular concept of God. While it is important to give up the attachment to the lower egos, what is really called for is to become one with the divine. There is no we without an I. To become one with the divine is not to abandon the Self (as archetype of wholeness) but to realize that divine consciousness is who that Self really is.
.
To become one with the divine is to dissolve or transcend the boundaries that keep us separate. These boundaries exist in our mind alone. What we do need to give up is our attachment to the stream bank, our refusal to take the plunge and get wet, to take the chance on the unknown. We need to give up our clinging to the rational mode when it is unable to give us the deeper meaning of what it is like to be in the stream.”

this sounds very high-falutin, but i share it here because she captures the topology of ‘self’ rather well. we all know what it feels like to be in destination mode where we are in the powerboat and everything is under control and we ‘know where we are going’ as in jantsch’s ‘rational’ mode. and then, again, we know what it feels like to have ‘left the bank in a sailboat’ and are quickly caught in the currents, as when we are ‘swept off our feet’ in a relationship or like the poor syrians in the refugee camp, who are just trying to keep their family vessel upright, as in the mythical level. at some point in the turbulence of the mythical level, one may at some point say wtf and accept that one is ‘the universe expressing itself’, which is very relaxing because the self is no longer struggling to keep the vessel upright. i mean, it is, but the self is highgraded in the manner of Atman = Brahman, and this notion of being ‘the universe expressing itself’ steps in. Anodea captures that quite well with; “To become one with the divine is not to abandon the Self (as archetype of wholeness) but to realize that divine consciousness is who that Self really is”

in my view, the aboriginal circle process facilitates this feeling, and it might be there also in something like the OWS ‘assembly’ process. it comes over one like this; ... every one comes to the circle in pain and anger or sadness but the circle is not to amplify that in the manner that it is your night to bitch at the table of friends in the bar, and you rant and your friends support you and you talk about what you’re gonna do to that sonofabitch etc. etc. instead, each one gets the chance to talk about their ‘bitter and sweet’ and everybody knows that they’re not ‘in control’ and then the feeling comes that we are all ‘the universe expressing itself’ and then it may happen that one starts feeling oneself to be, like, ... ‘treading water’ [jantsch compared it to brownian motion]. i think this is because the energy is flowing in through the circle and it is a powerful, calming feeling, like after a friend has died and there’s nothing that can be done so that in that moment, you relax. my sense is that it is one’s ego that dies as the Brahman in us gives the Atman a break.

anyhow, my view is that in this third ‘storm-cell-in-the-flow’ [evolutionary] level, while we do not ‘abandon’ the personal self, it gets off its podium and ‘makes way’ for the recognition of self as ‘the universe expressing itself’ [eternal self aka Brahman] to take over the helm for a while [it doesn’t last, but it’s good and what’s more, one knows that it is possible to get to it].

the rudder in this ‘evolutionary level’ is pure transformation. one becomes the storm-cell whose assertive 'movements' are perfectly accommodated by the flow one is in, even if one doubles one’s size and strength, and marches off to the north to kick ass; i.e. there is no ‘transgression’ because all of this dynamic, both development and behaviour is constituted by ‘transformation’. 'perfectly accommodated assertive movements' are not 'movements' but 'spatial-relational transformation'.

Submitted by Emily Heisenberg (not verified) on

Good points. Thankyou. We may be coming to a point of sharing a language here. Familiarity comes easier when mixing metaphors (as well as states of consciousness/perspective), so I appreciate the inclusion of J. Anodea, despite some of the "new age" language. When you get down to it, every new age discourse is merely a transformation of the old. Nietzsche also said "they don't want to go back, but they do wish to get away therefrom" (or something to that effect). Transformation is probably a better term to use in this context than transgression, and more appropriate to myth-time narratives. It is essential to every Trickster tale as well as expressed by Dante and William Blake and later, Arnold Van Genep. We should also be mindful that every Trickster is also a bumbling clown prone to error, and sometimes the experts just plain lie. Life endures despite our plans. I take Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy as gospel, and that is no paradox.

I use the terms almost interchangeably: in non-euclidian space, I tend to think they are synonyms, although in our own, modern views, transformation is a structural term (form) while transgression suggests behaviour (doing nothing can be transgressive and result in any number of transformations and at the same 'time', it is the result of transformations in it's own milieu). Obviously, the universe would not be seen to transgress against itself (I think the dictum against contradiction in nature disagrees with Hegel's and Aristotle's dialectics – in most cases, one would be right to suggest nature needs neither synthesized nor fixed. But there are still obstacles which may need be destroyed or navigated, given "a little more strength, swing, courage, and artistic power" (F.N.). This "destruction-creation" is necessary to endure as a "self" or a "we". As you implied, sometimes interacting ripples can swamp the boat – we wouldn't want to lose ourselves in the process.

Nurture is just as comfortable whether as nursing aid or defensive attack. Ask any mother of any species of mammal about both-and logic, when the greater good refers to her young'ns! It's an instinct (however you define it) akin to "love" and not a morally derived "duty" (although in this day and age, there seems to be some confusion). Henri Bergson may have been correct to juxtapose love, memory and duration, it's the will to live – what's power to do with it, unless one has in mind "the power of" (distributive energy) rather than "the power over" (politics). The difference is between "keep it (life) living" (tread lightly) and an open pit mine.

But we're just playing language games, and that's never a bad thing unless we confuse the "word" for "real". Perhaps a dead metaphor is safer than a reified fetish if one wishes to avoid antagonism or create/influence a winner-loser (dialectic) transformation indistinguishable from the typical flow of argument in these sorts of forum. I think the circle discourse idea is great, but without a poetic sense, acknowledging that, in lieu of telepathy, we are limited to metaphor, we are likely to be sucked back onto moral lines of constructed "reality" common to think tanks and churches and mono-logic, academic institutions – the problem of truth by consensus. Word-play lets us know up front that when we call 'her' Katrina, there is a silent prefix (or suffix) meaning something like "as if". John Huizinga said play destroys the (presumed) logical foundation of the universe. It is not ir-rational, it is a-rational. What it transgresses is the rigid. It is as well been long suggested as the impetus (or imp) of childhood learning (transforming) through participatory play (as opposed to "being taught" – tightened or rather "uptightened").

Mixing metaphors has the same function as word-play. It opens things up, it extends our perceptual horizon, it (ironically, to SAE plain-speakers) facilitates communication. It should be obvious by now that when I say "poetry", I'm not talking rhyme and meter. These are only matters of "form". (There's another old dead guy who's been rather well buried you might be interested in, Ludwig Feuerbach, who described essence as the milieu, that the hypercivilized have been separated from their essence like a fish out of water. Not at all what Plato had taught. Marx had a hard time with him because he, Marx, couldn't get out of that rigid view of aristotelean structuralism which equates being, form and essence – the par excellent "thing in itself".) Like Tau, the so-called "Red Path" is not a straight line of moral righteousness, but a meandering like the paisley patterns on Hindu tapestries or the life of experimental "sin" promoted by Rasputin. And like the "walk-about" or vision-quest", Distributivity (in this sense) plays in every stream which comes by so as not to be taken down a mighty river and over the falls to certain doom. One of Nietzsche's more redeemable quotes is this:

"The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us."

I can dig the "evolutionary level" in terms of zen, like zen bowling or the lucky streak or playing music with others when it all jives and you can't seem to fuck up like usual. I guess it really does come down to holding infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Again, thanks for engaging with me here. I admire your persistence in this den of PR-recuperators, manly meddlers and the occasional human passersby.

Submitted by emile on

It appears as if the foundations of our approach to understanding are largely ‘in common’, whether or not that leads to common values or not, i’m not certain, at this point.

i put your response into a word document and highlighted everything i agreed with, assuming of course, that i was capturing the understandings that you were intending. so, pretty much everything ‘got highlighted’, while one paragraph contained two views that i would put a question-mark beside;

“Nurture is just as comfortable whether as nursing aid or defensive attack. Ask any mother of any species of mammal about both-and logic, when the greater good refers to her young'ns! It's an instinct (however you define it) akin to "love" and not a morally derived "duty" (although in this day and age, there seems to be some confusion). Henri Bergson may have been correct to juxtapose love, memory and duration, it's the will to live – what's power to do with it, unless one has in mind "the power of" (distributive energy) rather than "the power over" (politics). The difference is between "keep it (life) living" (tread lightly) and an open pit mine.”

in my own worldview, i accept the utility of ‘playing the language game’ where we formulate a story to explain ‘what is going on’ in terms of ‘things’ and ‘what things do’, as in your ‘species of mammal’, and once one tranposes one’s sensory experiences into this ‘thing-based’ mode of story-telling, one is forced to come up with inside-outward animating sources such as ‘instinct’, because, ... how else i am going to explain this behaviour of the mother in regard to her young, vis a vis ‘threats’ from ‘others’? that is, once one has committed to explaining what is going on in terms of local, independent things-in-themselves, then we must invent the necessary equipment to run them as machines, ‘instinct’ being a piece of equipment necessary to explain those feeling in ourselves that we seem be born with, and that we can impute to other animals, which is what contributes to nietzsche’s charge that ‘science’ is anthropomorphism. i.e. because we know we are born with certain automatic responses that are there from the get-go, like suckling, we impute such ‘instincts’ to ‘other species’ as well.

now, if you look at my last few sentences, the propositions all assume that there is something such as ‘I’, that is the owner of these responses, otherwise we wouldn’t be asking questions such as ‘what is making me do this?’ ... ‘is it something i learned, or is it something inborn’, ... ‘is it ‘nature’ [determined by my genetic makeup] or is it ‘nurture’ something that is prompted in me, by the dynamics of the environment that i am situated in? none of these inquiry would make sense, without the assumption, that there is an ‘I’ that is animated from the inside outward by (a) internal genesis of assertive actions, and (b) sensing external stimuli and responding to them, ... both (a) and (b) assuming the ‘local existence’ of a ‘thing-in-itself’ that we equip as necessary [with genes to determine its form and internal components and processes including senses to determine ‘what’s out there’ and respond to it]. we need to invent one more thing to keep this hanging together, a place for it to live in. this must be a place that doesn’t interfere with what we have invented so far, a local, independently-existing thing-in-itself with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour. that is, we need to invent absolute space and absolute time to go with this nice-and-clean concept of our ‘self’ which imputes the animative sourcing of development and behaviour of the ‘self’ to be fully and solely inside-outward acting. how complex would our discourse be if we acknowledged that Katrina does not live in absolute space and absolute time, that she lives in a relational flow, whereby we cannot claim that her development and behaviour is ‘hers’ but must acknowledge, as Lamarck, Nietzsche, Rolph, Roux, Rüdimeyer and other ‘anti-Darwinists’ implicitly did, that ‘she’ is the nexus of outside-inward flow [endosmosis] and inside-outward flow [exosmosis].

should we be talking about ‘behaviour-animating instincts’ being built into ‘things-in-themselves’, ... which is a necessity once we assume the existence of ‘things-in-themselves’, or should we be talking about ‘instincts’ being built into the space we gather in, that associate with our gathering and being regathered within the space? as Emerson said, the genius of nature infuses ‘talent’ into the forms, like the pear-tree’, that emerge within it, and the pear-tree has the instinctive talent to produce pears, but the ‘genius’ of nature is the engenderer of both the ‘thing’ and ‘its talents’.

Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ was not an ‘instinct’ inside of man-as-thing-in-itself, it was a ‘rising-to-the-situation’ sort of instinct immanent in the world, and what is the world in this mental modeling paradigm? it is NOT a collection of ‘things-in-themselves’ that live in an absolute space and absolute time theatre of operations, but, according to Nietzsche, and to Mach, Bohm and the relational space physicists;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067
.
“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm

So, back to the ‘values’ that may or may not spring forth from our alternative worldviews here in terms of a world of ‘things-in-themselves’ or a world that is an interdependent connectness, or ‘web-of-life’ or ‘continuously transforming relational spatial-plenum’.

whatever language we speak, we have the option to understand the world and our relationship with it, and the forms within it, as a collection of ‘things-in-themselves’ or as ‘one thing’ in which are a sort of periscope of perception/experience, that gets to look out at ‘the rest of ourselves’ almost as if the rest of ourselves, in which we are centred, is not part of ourselves.

there are social values associated with our choices of worldview here. these values crop out in our different interpretations of the same words. for example, the words of aboriginal writer, Scott Momoday in ‘A House Made of Dawn’ through the experience of Abel as a boy growing up;

“… and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while, the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it, anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything — where you were little, where you were and had to be.”

You were “right there in the center of everything”.

Did God fly Abel in there and give him the pleasure of a look at all this stuff, or is Abel like the storm-cell in the atmosphere, a ‘nexus’ arising within the relational space he is included in. Is Abel transforming within this transforming space, or is he a transgressor? if he rapes and pillages the things he finds in this space, is he raping and pillaging himself?

that is, i know that neither of us are ‘hung up on words’, but is our admission that ‘words are not it’, that words are tricksters, obscuring something; i.e. is it hiding the understanding that, as Mach says, ‘nature is not a trickster’. i.e. do we, or do we not associate with the values of a, for example, frédéric neyrat;

““In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.” — Frédéric Neyrat, ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’

nature is not a trickster, our language and intellect is the trickster. sure, we can conceive of our psycho-physical relation, in multiple ways, ‘rational’, ‘mythical’ and ‘evolutionary’, ... the latter having us conceive of our experiencing selves FIRSTLY as a purely relational ‘nexus’ within a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, ... a kind of ‘relational perceptual centre’. and sure, we can alternatively see ourselves as sailboater, a wandering barque in life’s tempestuous sea, as the christian hymn would have it, and sure, we can alternatively see ourselves as the rational scientist sitting on the bank and observing the ‘objective’ world out there, as if it were in a glass case, incessantly gathering more data and never ‘jumping in and getting wet’.
metaphors and more metaphors and if our intellectual reach cannot exceed our experiential grasp, what’s a ‘meta’ ‘phor’?

but in the end, our life needs some ‘values’. if we are to be Abel-rational, Abel-mythical, Abel-evolutionary all at once, we are going to have to manage three personas in one. when we encounter a beautiful female other, should we apply some date-rape drug and gorge ourselves on breasts and pussy as a scientist taking pleasure from a lab specimen? or should we think in mythical terms of prince and princess and teach ourselves how to court as a couple, ... or should we understand ourselves as ‘the universe expressing itself’ and come together like high pressure system and low pressure system, doing the swirling dos-a-dos dance together, accepting our nexal roles as agents of transformation within a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum?

to an Abel-rational, the richly populated land around us is ‘the promised land’ that ‘God [or probability and statistics] flew us in to gorge ourselves on’. this is the colonizer-culture Abel, who, when he finds himself in the centre of plenty, understand this as God-given [or random chance given] ‘good fortune’ and proceeds with the gorging of all this gorgeous otherness that surrounds him. It is this herd of Abel-rationals that tramples on their brothers and sisters in pursuit of this gorging [if you don’t gorge it and gorge it while the gorging is good, someone else will, except for those dumb aboriginals that Ayn Rand notes are too stupid to recognize good gorging even when they are constantly tripping over it. if you can't see that a giant sequoia is holding 630,000 board feet of construction grade lumber in it, you are a hopeless case.].

so, word constructs are definitely tricksters, but nature is not, so that the alternative characterizations of who we are in relational to one another and the world confuse what may lie beneath all the intellectual idealization, something that is surely going to ‘bite us’ if we cloak it and ourselves with inappropriate metaphors.

Submitted by B Terwiliger (not verified) on

emile can i have your autograph on a t shirt or golf ball or something

thankx

-boyce

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"the Egoist will take the liberty..."

That was James L. Walker.

Submitted by Henri Hors-Text... (not verified) on

The paragraph in question was in poor taste or badly constructed, so if it presents a problem, thank you. That, of course, was not my intention. It's a matter of stumbling through the language. One could also say that bumbling is a sort of spontaneity or epicurean swerve in the brownian motion, so there should be no moral implication attached except to sticklers of plans or projectuality. Our friend, Lau said take away morality and folks will do the right thing. Laizes Faire is like let it be or let go, and usually works except when you try it with the economy, which withers away in its own entropy without constant negentropic meddling. Then there's an explosion. That only illustrates a refusal to accept transformation or death or those other changes or more Dyonesian practices. And we're back again to morality which has caused more massacres than both soap and the big bang. Discourse can be infinitely recursive, just like paisley, but one also finds repeats and resemblances in the pattern. They call them laws of nature but really, we're talking about statistical regularities and probabilities, expectations, given the notion of infinity. The thing is that it is hard to translate non-euclidean or any "other" perspective into SAE. We are only comparing stories to see if there are kin or ancestors we are familiar with. Accurate translation (an economic or tit-for-tat notion) is impossible when the context of the speech environment is not also shared.

So I will start anyway with some background for my use of the word "instinct" in the context of nurture, which usually implies outside-in learning or influence, but with a little help from Samuel Butler who said instinct is just a repeated pattern(s), practiced till consciousness is not involved, if it ever was in the first place, and Henri Bergson, suggesting memory exists on the outside, not the inside, but whose more intriguing contribution to an altered state of perception was duration and simultaneity. Without our familiar space-time thinking of the world (aka, verse) geometrically, the more accurate word for offspring would be "dopplegangers" with a difference. The process is symbiosis which produces diversity, not sameness (think of the lichen or the jellyfish). As far as "I" go, it is a euphemism for "we" (but I don't want to give the impression of a royal we or an internal democratic consensus). Or "I" is an inversion where there is also an infinitely recursive verse Emily Dickenson there-in found portals to the outside, and this is well symbolized in the animated graphic you gave us the other day, the bright doughnut with arrows dashing in and out. Cells and organs are themselves merely the bigger members of the community called self. I got this idea as a kid confusing the words "community" and "immunity" thinking about where taste comes from every time my mom tried to force-feed green beans. I've been interested in etymology ever since. In other words, the inside and outside may be an optical illusion. I never really liked the genetic blue-print theory. Instincts are autopoietic, just like every species is a transformation of statistical regularities but not necessarily along a line. In his critique of geometry, Buckminster-fuller (after Charles Peirce) pointed out that there are no lines in space, particularly infinite ones. I got that word, "autopoeisis", not from Erich Jantsch but from Humberto Maturana who, like Bergson, said:.

History is a process of transformation through conservation. History is a process of transformation that is continually arising on what is being conserved... such that although something ended, something fundamental was conserved... If conservation stops, history ends... There has to be a continuity in the story. This is exactly what we find in the history of living systems: some life forms disappear but living systems go on. And what is conserved? Living.

So the history of living things is a history of the conservation of living, with many changes in form, each of which conserves living. We are one of these millions of forms that comprise the biosphere [ecosphere]; a biosphere which is the present of a history of the conservation of living. We are part of the biosphere, the natural landscape has to do with us. We look at the biosphere and find it beautiful because we are coherent with it. We are coherent with it because we belong to the same history - as well as to the local coherences we may have generated.

Several years ago, before I came to think of subjects and objects as absurdly as I now do, I said this:

Western thinking is Enstatic, 'standing-within-oneself'. Enstasy is the source of the phrase, das ding an sich. It praises the unique, and rightly so. But it leads to a schizm between the subject and object. We are all rendered schizophrenic, minds in conflict, unless we retreat back into a pure objectivity or pure subjectivity and this reproduces the "modern" condition from one generation to the next. But of course, these are limited views. Ectasy derives from the ability to occasionally stand outside oneself and interact with the world from a different perspective. This is the source of empathy, the development of rapport, the creation of the participant-observer. It is the first condition for the ethnographer, without which, comparison is replaced by co-optation or appropriation. It constitutes communication, which is a mutual influence or it is nothing. This is not a world changing event, but can lead to changing the world. Poiesis is the root of poetry, creation, revolution. Autopoiesis is the organic community.

Then, following your lead, I would attempt to approach value, with the help of Eduardo Viveriros de Castro and Ludwig Feuerbach: if the skin is not the end of me, but the beginning of the other (and vice versa), like the fuzzy surface of the pond and the fog above it on a Fall morning, then as you say, what I do "to" the outside, I "do to" myself will generate an unspoken – and unnecessarily so at that – golden rule, the reciprocity that is not a tit-for-tat exchange but the "attitude" that what goes around comes around, the kind of gifting or provision approached in the movie, Pay it Forward. Keep it living is the praxis of a mountain lion when I try to make pets of her cubs and bring them home to meat the folks who may not have had the foresight to give me siblings my own age. There are more malicious intents in the verse (we call them monsters). The freedom of a feline mountain mama makes real monsters self-limiting, so institutional justice never comes up. Back in the day, snitches were found dead in the alley, so the problem of friends wearing wires rarely came up.

Sorry, this is the way I talk without too much planning. They say it is a problem with brain chemistry but I think of it as an advantage: Holes in the head can also mean "open mind" and protect you from dogmatic rivers and righteous paths. It's also less wordy, and I still have to melt some snow for today's water.

There's another little ontological tidbit I'd like to present: Instead of our familiar assessment that there is one nature and many cultures, a local or "anarcha-indigenous" might assume there is one culture ("our's") but many natures. This is the local perspective accessible to our senses, referred by experience, relayed in stories, and is not tied up, hardly even concerned with "truths" or "logical generalisations". If one is not hung up with the 'True' nature of 'real' Nature (multiplicity would suggest many natures), epistemology need not be entertained. Even so, and just in case, there are epistemological referents "embedded" (which is a mechanical way of saying "grammatically uttered") in many, if not most indigenous languages. This is not theoretical, one can hear them. We also have them in some of our demonstrative pronouns. Consider in Spanish 'aqui', 'alla' and 'allí' – for any specificity, a difference must be less a matter of taxonomy (a sort, part or stage of something else) than of sharing a perspective.

So another metaphor for the individual and other is local synapse in a cosmic brain, if we're talking about communication. I quit that metaphor when they started to fetishize the word, "information", but it is still usefull now and then.

Every utterance can be said to consist of an auditory perspective with a twist, and of no less significance than a visual image (even though it need not be a 'sign'). Why should we have an intellectual problem with speech as a perspectival expression (thinking, as we are taught, it only reflects or represents "cognitive processes" which, if well ordered through a rigorous training period, precisely matches the outside world) but insist on perspectivity for a graphic artist (who then only finds employment as a sign painter, representing or adopting the boss's commercial interests in order to eat)? In fact, when we hear an unappetizing utterance, we often respond with "That's just your point of view" and anticipating a hostile reply, protect ourselves with the magical incantation, "From my point of view..."

"The question for Indians, therefore, is not one of knowing "how monkeys see the world", but what world is expressed through monkeys, of what world they are the point of view."

..."The question is not discovering who is wrong, and still less who is deceiving whom. An equivocation is not an error, a mistake or a deception, but the very foundation of the relation which it implicates, and which is always a relation with an exteriority. An error or deception can only be determined as such from within a given language game, while an equivocation is what unfolds in the interval between different language games. Deceptions and errors suppose premises that are already constituted, and constituted as homogenous, while an equivocation not only 'supposes' the heterogeneity of the premises at stake – it poses them as heterogenic and presupposes them as premises. An equivocation determines the premises rather than being determined by them. Consequently, equivocations do not belong to the world of dialectical contradiction, since their synthesis is disjunctive and infinite. An equivocation is indissoluble, or rather, recursive: taking it as an object determines another equivocation 'higher up,' and so on ad infinitum.

The equivocation, in sum, is not a subjective failure, but a tool of objectification [sic]. It is not an error or an illusion – it doesn't involve imagining objectification in the post-Enlightenment and moralizing language of reification or fetishization (today better known as 'essentialization') –, but the limit-condition of every social relation, a condition which itself becomes super-objectified in the limit-case of so-called 'interethnic' or intercultural relations, where the language games diverge maximally.

...if the equivocation is not an error, an illusion or a lie, but the very form of the relational positivity of difference, its opposite is not the truth, but the univocal, as the claim to the existence of a unique and transcendent meaning. The error or illusion par excellence consists, precisely, in imagining that the univocal exists beneath the equivocal, and that the anthropologist is its ventriloquist."

– please see Eduardo Viveriros de Castro, Perspectivism, equivocation

The Koan of Three Postlates & Choralaries:

1. Boiled brain is the substance of choice for tanning hides;
1.1. Hot heads make supple skin;
2. Hatred unifies all oppositions;
2.1. Love produces and embraces difference.
3. Inner turmoil is the battle between the Lizards and the Grey Men;
3.1 Outer turmoil is the battle between the Grey Men and the Lizards.

Submitted by emile on

i agree with you that “its a matter of stumbling through the language”, and i agree that there are no ‘absolutes’ and i agree with lao tsu; “take away morality and folks will do the right things.”

i also agree with the pursuit of understanding of one another, as in anthropology, that looks for less simple translation techniques. but i have to say that that is not where my philosophical investigations have been going, and when i read de castro, and yourself, there is a depth there that doesn’t open up for me without a lot of effort; i.e. it would require ‘work’ on my part to gain a facility with the concepts and language. i would contrast that with the work of mach, nietzsche, poincaré, bohm, schroedinger, in that i already knew what they were talking about before ‘they spoke’, so to speak.

more than that, their anger and frustration smoldered in the same places as mine does, and the same for their pleasures and free-flow feeling.

i am not making any relative value judgements here, because i see values only in terms of what pulls on one to move in a certain way, rather than some judgement of worth or worthlessness that one imposes on the works of others. as with works of art, if it doesn’t induce resonance in me, i do not claim to know whether what is lacking is in me or in it.

i am just saying that i am not ‘pulled on’ by the direction of de Castro, and that well may be because i don’t know enough and the fog of not knowing is obscuring those places that i might really enjoy going to.

but in any case, what brings me into this forum and into these discussions is very simple, and it is the injustice of the globally dominant Western civilization and its institutions, and the involuntary ferment that has brewed up in me that ‘sees a massive flaw’ in the intellectual premises of colonialism [the modern unfolding of Western civilization that includes sovereigntism, authoritarianism, capitalism, retributive justice], that is doing massive avoidable injury to spirit and body. and so it comes naturally to me to seek to ‘undermine the intellectual premises of colonialism’, not because i am ‘political’, i am not, but because, like nietzsche and mach, i see it as coming from ‘an error of grammar’, a mistaken ‘subjectizing’, in the mind, of the sourcing of dynamics; i.e. of confusing linguistic idealizations for physical reality, the imposing of absolute space and time and therefore of RE-rendering dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, as if such convenient, reductive economy-of-thought, achieved semi-automatically by linguistic idealization, can be done with impunity from social dysfunction, ... it cannot.

one couldn’t pick up any work by nietzsche, and poincaré that did NOT have this flavour in its prose; i.e. that did NOT try to bring to the surface how our hidden or forgotten basic assumptions about subject and object, space and time can screw us up by infusing our individual and collective behaviour with ‘incoherence’ [bohm], as in retributive justice where, because our biological model of a human is, for convenience, reduced to a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviour, the state claims that a violent outburst by a penned in member of an oppressive state absolutely jumpstarts from the individual, so that the state or privileged classes fail to acknowledge the sourcing of oppressive tensions in the relational web of social context, that privileged members are jumping on like linebackers on the same trampoline with bean-poles.

so its very simple stuff that draws my interest; “undermining the intellectual premises of colonialism”.

other questions have interested me that are closer to anthropology such as ‘how do whales experience the world’ and how does their sonar ‘signalling/communicating’ fit into their individual and collective experience? it would be curious for a human to experience using sonar chirping; e.g. it would be like being in the dark and each time you spoke, your words would illuminate the space all around you, so that those regions you wanted to illuminate would determine how you spoke. meanwhile scientists record whales and use the human language model to try to correlate different chirps with different behavioural responses of their family members or the pod. i have back-backburnered those sorts of inquiry. they are fascinating, complex and require a dedicated commitment.

The other thing about ‘anthropology’ that dilutes my focus, is that the Western culture is the only culture i know that believes that its individuals, and its corporations and its sovereign states are ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally originating, internally jumpstarting development and behaviour, and combined with a rewards and justice system that ‘believes this’, its fucking lethal. as mach’s principle says, the powerful inhabitants launder out the squeeze they put on the less powerful, by conditioning the relational medium, so as to make the others come begging; “the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants.”

as prince hal says in shakespeare’s henry iv, when we alter the relational web of social context, all sorts of different behaviours show themselves;

Prince. Why then, it is like, if there come a hot June and this civil buffeting hold, we shall buy maidenheads as they buy hob-nails, by the hundreds

of course, western justice, just like western science, models humans as local, independently-existing things-in-themselves whose behaviours jumpstart from their own interiors. that must be so since our globally dominating concept of law-based society has laws that based on moral code applied to individual behaviour, or individual corporation behaviour or individual sovereign state behaviour.

if mach’s principle were true, then there would be a huge, fundamental hole in the theory of western justice, right? powerful people could condition the relational space in such away that they would be fine but many people living on edge would be desperate, and princes and their fellow travellers ...shall buy maidenheads as they buy hob-nails, by the hundreds and after having de-flowered these whores, report them to the authorities since their behaviours jumpstart from nowhere else but their internal will, intellect and purpose, ... that’s the foundational assumption in western justice. at the level of sovereign states, the most powerful states can buy virgin resources as they buy hobnails, by the hundreds. the weak will form an obsequious ‘coalition of the willing’ around the powerful, prostituting their natural and labour resources.

Anthropologists like de Castro are out there studying the tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere and coming up with theories of ‘perspectivism’ etc. to better understand them and us and our continuing evolution. but nietzsche’s ‘philosophical anthropology’ exposes the peculiarities of western european civilization while anthropology itself has a much broader scope. and, insofar as anthropologists are looking for answers in terms of the ‘emergence of radical political theorists’, they are barking up an entirely different tree [from that of mach and nietzsche in exposing a flaw in the foundational assumptions of western european colonizer culture];

“What kind of imaginary inspires radical politics today and what role can critical anthropological thought have in the formation of this imaginary? Only a few years ago, this question might have come across as very ‘1960s’ and dated. Today it seems of increasing pertinence. It is so thanks to the growth in radical politics that has marked world events in recent times, and which has included the various forms of anti-globalisation and ecological protests, the Spanish ‘Indignatos’, the spate of Arab revolutionary upheavals, and most recently the various ‘occupy’ movements that have mushroomed internationally. But as I will argue, it is also thanks to an increasing reaffirmation of the critical anthropological tradition that we have been witnessing since the turn of the century. In their work ‘Commonwealth’, Hardt and Negri mobilise the work of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in their search for a way to conceive the struggle for what they call alter-modernity. I want to contend that this rapprochement between radical political theorists and the anthropology of Viveiros de Castro is more than a mere isolated event. Rather, it points to a more pronounced opening in the radical political imaginary to the offerings of the traditional anthropological tradition.” ---Ghassan Hage, 'Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Political Imaginary Today

the arabs are pissed off about colonization. they have never recovered from it. we still live in a colonized world. they have lived under the puppets of the western colonizing powers and where a local anti-colonizing-powers leader has risen to power, he still inherits the colonizer’s governing device; i.e. the central authority controlled sovereign state, and their overt strategy of getting rid of him is to put sanctions on him that make the lives of the people so miserable that they rise up against him [with the help of the colonial powers, of course]. but what will the next and the next rogue leader caught in the hotbox do first? the lesson being learned by kim jong-un et al from saddam hussein, muamar qaddafy, bashar al-assad, may be to 'make sure to screw the colonial powers before they bring you down.'; i.e. colonialism is clearly at play here. there is no mystery as to the rise of radical politics. the colonized world is fertile ground for diverse varieties of it.

the colonizing culture derives from confusing linguistic idealization for physical reality. one doesn’t have to study tribes in the amazon and elsewhere and theorize a ‘struggle for alter-modernity’ to get to, and address colonization and decolonization. de Castro and Nietzsche have two different investigative orientations. my energies lie with nietzschean philosophical anthropology, and from there to ‘undermining the intellectual premises of colonialism’.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

No argument here. Despite certain areas where I tend to cringe, Nietzsche is just a damn fine writer, so if there is a string which can set to resonating, he can pluck it. As far as anthropology goes, the problem is academia itself, and in the last ten or twenty years, it's been getting worse.

Here is what they don't teach the young'ns any more:

"To the ordinary person, the standards by which he lives seem logical, and natural, and even inevitable. But when we discover how differently other peoples act in identical situations,.or how differently they meet a common problem, the question is raised: "Are these ways really logical? Are they natural? Are they inevitable?" It then becomes apparent that much of what one group may consider logical and natural and inevitable, another will deem illogical, unnatural, and contrived" – Melville Herskovitz

But of course, there are "individuals" in any field who still dance to a different drum, as there always will be. Most you will never hear from because they are excluded or they eventually self-secede from the institution, in either case, dropped from the belly of the beast. Undermine away.

Add new comment

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
q
5
@
6
k
1
Y
Enter the code without spaces.
Subscribe to Comments for "Melbourne, Australia: Captain Cooks Cottage Trashed With Paint for Invasion  Day"