cheese it, the cops!

the master of no abilities

the other day i was complaining about the translation of the text of the wunengzi in john rapp's recent book daoism and anarchism. wunengzi (the "master of no abilities") was apparently a wandering daoist sage of the 9th century whose sayings were found on scraps of paper by a disiciple. i do not read chinese, so what i do below is this: i paraphrase the translation (attributed to catrina siu, edited by john rapp) into something that has something to do with the language that the text is being translated into.

i think the wunengzi is a fundamentally important text on multiple grounds. it shows that a persistent, explicit anarchist strain existed in taoism over centuries. (i certainly think it's there in the tao te ching  and the chuang tzu.) but it is also an extremely interesting set of developments in taoist metaphysics, ethics, and so on.

 

Wunengzi, Part 1, Chapter 1

Some people say that there is an important distinction between human beings and other sorts of things. The truth is that the distinction between ourselves and birds, mammals, reptiles, or fish is something we invented. "But wait, people have consciousness and language!" Well, birds and beasts, even insects and worms, all want life and avoid death, construct nests, gather food, give birth to their young and protect them, and so do we; we are more similar to these things than we are different. And anyway, how do you know they're not conscious? Each species calls and chirps and screeches, each in its own way. What makes you think that isn't language? You're making our ignorance your argument. They're probably listening to us chatter and thinking that we're the ones without language or intelligence. We are very similar to all these creatures, though our bodies are a little different. The other birds and beasts are as different from one another as we are from them: neither the similarities nor the differences are particularly unusual. For that matter, we've got as many similarities with and differences from one another as we do with regard to them.

      It's really too bad that we made such distinctions. The universe as a whole is sky and earth, yin and yang. We and the other creatures are part of it, immersed in its material flow (qi); we are of the same body. We're like fish in a river, like grasslands or woods in the mountains.

    Originally, all creatures lived together indiscriminately, with no distinction or hierarchy between men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, older and younger brothers. They slept in nests or caves, not in mansions or palaces. They hunted and ate what they found raw. There was no stealing or murder. The living moved around; the dead keeled over; there were no funeral rites. They followed the world: there was no ruling or shepherding one another. In their original simplicity, they lived long lives.

     At some point, a group of  naked animals began to call themselves 'people'. They tried to establish rules so they could dominate the animals with feathers, fur, and scales. They taught themselves sowing and planting and began to use the plow. They made axes and cut trees and made bricks to build palaces. They instituted marriage and the hierarchical distinctions between men and women, fathers and sons, older and younger brothers. They made nets to catch the other creatures, and developed a taste for prepared food. Their simplicity gave way to selfishness, and they thought all these distinctions were natural. Those that held themselves to be 'intelligent' appointed a leader, and everyone else was his servant. He could control the multitude, but they couldn't control him. From this came the distinction between ruler and ruled, the exalted and the lowly.

    Eventually, a whole human hierarchy was established by the "wise" and "intelligent". Material wealth distinguished high and the low, and only the rich could satisfy their desires. Sometimes they called the wise and intelligent ones 'sages'.

    Soon, the disgraced became envious of the honored, the poor became envious of the wealthy; these distinctions drew everyone into conflict. The people who called themselves sages were worried, and they said, "We separated ourselves from the other creatures by calling ourselves 'people'; then we separated ourselves from one another into rulers and ruled. Then we created a hierarchy of wealth and rank, which inflames everyone's greed.  We honored people for being wealthy and they taxed the poor and disgraced them. Now we live in a world of chaos: of crazy desires, competitiveness, and mutual destruction."

    One among the "sages" arose and said "I have a plan!" He [Confucius] taught benevolence, loyalty, truthfulness, and that the people could be regulated by ritual and music. When a ruler oppressed his subjects, he was to be called cruel, and his government illegitimate. In turn, the ruler would call them traitors. A father should be criticized for not loving his son, he taught, a son for not obeying his father, a younger brother for being unfilial to his elder, married people for not being faithful. People, the sage taught, should sorted out by how they behaved: the right should be honored and the wrong disgraced, so that people would find pleasure in doing right and pain in doing wrong. This succeeded in suppressing conflict to some extent for some time.

    But as time went on, things again broke down; people turned their backs on benevolence, truthfulness, and loyalty, and they transgressed the standards for ritual and music that the sage had set. Then the people who thought themselves wise decided to crack down. They established laws and punishments and organized armies and police forces to constrain people. When there were small offenses, they punished people. For big offenses, they sent armies to kill people. Prisons and whips spread over the country. Spears and pikes and bows and arrows spread out into the world. Families were destroyed, whole kingdoms full of people were annihilated. Too many people died to count. People sank into poverty and starved; it spread everywhere.

   The original problem was distinguishing ourselves from the animals as something higher, and then thinking of some people - in their mansions and palaces, with their fine meals - as higher than others. Honoring some and disgracing others made people want to hurt each other; imposing benevolence, ritual, music distorted people's spontaneity. Imposing laws and punishments and armies immiserated people and made them lose what was essential; together in great numbers they died. They could not revive the past. It was the fault of those who thought themselves wise.

against happiness

addressing 'positive psychology', or measuring the success of societies by happiness quotients, or self-happy-help, neuro-happy-stuff, as well as some big chunks of the western tradition, i would like to make some observations. 'happiness', i think, is a variable or blank indicating the sum total of everything people want (insofar as these are compatible with one another: no one can have everything he wants, of course, probably by definition, thank god). in that sense it doesn't really mean anything intrinsically, and you get to fill up the empty vessel with any vision of wonderfulness you prefer. indeed, 'wonderfulness' is a word like 'happiness'. what if i told you that everything is of value insofar only as it contributed to wonderfulness, that wonderfulness is what we're really after, that we want everything else for the sake of wonderfulness, but that we don't want wonderfulness for the sake of anything else. it's sort of obviously true, but also empty and ridiculous. really? because i think that the goal of human life is total phatness. total phatness is some pretty amazing shit. look, obviously, we live for one purpose: to avoid suckiness. every human being always chooses wonderfulness over suckiness, right? if you don't choose wonderfulness over suckiness, you are irrational; in fact that's the very essence of rationality. so what circumstances make for much unsuckiness? we have empirical data on that, for we are anti-suckiness scientists! namely what people say about stuff that sucks or is totally phat.

'happiness' is just a positive-valence blank, or it is not the purpose of human life. that is, once you give it any particular meaning, then some people want it and some people don't, sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. so you could define it hedonically: balance of pleasure over pain. but people seek pain all the time, and not just for the sake of more pleasure later on. sometimes pleasure is good; sometimes it's bad. if it's prosperity, some people seek poverty, etc etc. the actual things people want are irreducibly multiple.

i guess i could raise the philosophical-type objections: what if you could hook yourself to a machine that made you happy, etc? people want truth, or some do sometimes i hope. and they want all sorts of other things too, for their own sake: we do not want beauty or justice for the sake of happiness any more than vice versa, and likewise for a million other things. we want music for the sake of music, not as an instrument of happiness, or not only as that. listening to billie just makes me melancholy, but here i am, putting her on again. let's say people are happier when they are politically unfree (i'd say history is incomprehensible without the idea that people at least think that being subordinated is an element of happiness). still they should be free. still they should free themselves. still they should want to be free.

so, aristotle first supposes that there must be some one goal of human life: there is no argument for that, and in my opinion it is obviously false. he calls it eudaimonia, which, again, functions as a variable. when he then describes what happiness is, well, it takes him a whole long book: it is all the virtues, it is learning, it is friendship, it is not a state but a process of a whole life, it happens in relation to a polis or even is primarily a condition of a polis rather than an individual, etc etc. that is what gives his eudaimonia content, and the content is actually human moral life: a hundred different values, virtues, desires, events, a plurality reduced to unity only by gathering them up and tacking a word on them.

aks yourself: do you want sex in order to be happy, or insofar as it is conducive to happiness? what kind of sex do you want? only ever happy sex? or is it possible that you want sex for its own sake? ever had sex in a situation wherein you knew it was unlikely to increase your happiness quotient? i no more want to write good books in order to be happy than i want to be happy in order to write good books. even if writing books made me miserable, and insofar as it has, i still want to write good books.

now, aristotle is one thing: the account is extremely subtle, elaborate, and addresses many of the apparent implausibilities of the claim that all we wanrt intrinsically is happiness. he's wrong, but still. positive psychologists are something else again. maybe they mean whatever anyone takes the word to mean when they fill out the questionnaire, maybe they have some sketchy hedonism or whatever it may be in the background. even if they meant something, it would not follow we should devote our society to or measure it exclusively by, happiness, or that if in some sense we did or could, that would actually mean anything, any more than we might mean by measuring wonderfulness. we're not doing anything but whirling around in empty non-concepts of our own invention, grappling only with an intolerable meaningless simplification. that any other position seems incomprehensible is a tribute only to the positive valence of the word, which is all the content it has, finally. 

so, we're going to measure policies or the quality of societies by self-reports of happiness. but there is nothing that they are all self-reporting on except the analytical implications of their own quasi-concepts. it sounds like the goal of human life: self-evidently the goal, and none of these researchers question that status at all. but it's just trivially the goal in that it means whatever the goal is. each respondent just fills in those blanks herself, with a picture of whatever she wants: shoes, chardonnay, and george clooney, say. and with each actual content, whether aristotle's or shoes, chardonnay, and clooney, it is not the only goal and not everyone's goal. it's the very air of tautology that draws you in or makes it all seem inevitable: happiness is the goal of human life: that doesn't tell you any more about actual humans in an actual world than does the observation that no bachelor is married. studying happiness like this isn't any more helpful or any better a use of resources than going out and trying to emprically find the married bachelors.

it is just not helping us understand anything.

state of the union

the only interesting thing about jay-z and beyonce's performance at the grammys was her butt, which i admit is the very center of american culture.

the state of our union is stupid, vicious, and over.

here's what i propose to do with the common core curriculum: flay it with a razor knife and peel off its skin, dangle it from a noose and dip it in a vat of vinegar, pull it back up and club it like pinata to see what's inside, soak it in kerosene and set it on fire, and, in the process of putting it out, drown it, then insert sticks of dynamite in each of its orifices in a rape-like manner and light the fuses. after that, we will step back and re-assess.

every value that barack obama ever espoused, every ideal, every hunk of sort-of inspiring bullshit that he has muttered in his entire career, is given the lie by the nsa. democracy, freedom, equality, justice, america, etc: in his mouth, they are nothing. he yaps like king, but he is j. edgar hoover.

if you think that the democratic party has any way to reduce inequality, or that it wants to, you have not been watching. who is telling them how to ameliorate poverty? oh, you know, bill and melinda gates. as the cult of bill gates shows, we are a people who believe that wealth is equivalent to goodness, wisdom, and truth, no matter how bad the software sucks. a society like that loves and wants and deserves its extreme inequalities. on whose behalf do obamas or clintons administer the country? goldman-sachs. this technocracy they've created of harvard j.d.'s and wharton mba's is as hierarchical a caste system as could be imagined. 

who wrote the common core? the bill and melinda gates foundation. obama wants the richest man in the country running absolutely everything, for he is the very best among us: provable in $$$. that's how we're going to get more equal. perhaps we should ask poor people, like people who actually know something about the situtaiton, how to address inequality. wait. poor people? those ignorant hilarious fools, those rednecks, black folks, and meth addicts? if they were smart, they'd have the cash/credibility. only billionaires and harvard professors know anything about poverty, bro.

i'll prove to you that poor people know nothing about poverty: where are their ted talks? the state of our union is gates.

wow i am in a nasty mood, i guess. i need to find some aspect of the news or our culture that i can affirm. 

 

 

los seis nombres de la belleza

i was surprised to find out that there's a new spanish translation of six names of beauty. it's a super-cute little object, too. i look back with mortification on some moments of my writing history, but i'm happy and proud that i wrote that book.

daoism, anarchism, and, um, incompetence

i was extremely pleased to get ahold of daoism and anarchism, by john rapp. that's my religion and my politics, or my anti-religion and anti-politics, together like bacon and eggs, abbott and costello, love and pain. let me start with the amazing strengths, what makes it worth its excessive price in spite of everything. there are several texts here, appearing for the first time in english, or at any rate very little known to western scholars, that fully substantiate a history of extremely clear taoist anti-statism and anti-hierarchical thinking more or less all the way through. in particular, texts denoted 'bao jingyan' (5th century ad) and 'wu nengzi' (9th century ad), were completely new to me and, i believe, are fundamentally important in the history of both daoism and anarchism.

now for the extreme drawbacks. 'john rapp' sounds like the name of a native speaker of english, but his own text appears to have been mistranslated from mandarin or something. he's got some uselessly doctrinaire vision of what anarchism is and is always apologizing that taoist sages don't sound more like bakunin. but it'd be tough to be a taoist sage in the tenth century pursuing violent proletarian insurrection, i feel. in every case including the whole book he starts by formulating devastating objections from imagined interlocutors to his own project, but it is impossible to say why. this material needs an enthusiast and a scholar, not a series of defensive manouevers against the last 3 bakuninists.

on behalf of the wunengzi, he apologizes to anarchists cause it's too tolstoyesque, and to enthusiasts for taoism because it's too buddhist. but all the great chinese philosophy of that era and hundreds of years before and after is actually syncretic; all the mnost interesting stuff has taoist, confucian, and buddhist elements. this is true of the great neo-confucians, for example. it can be done in a profound way, and often is, and you have got to take the era on something like its own terms to get it at all.

when in his appendix of texts he reprints burton watson's translations, one can't quibble, of course. but he seems to have commissioned his own translation of the wunengzi, which could be a major contribution to the taoist canon in english. (nevertheless, rapp apologizes to anarchists for its taoism, etc; he doesn't appear very impressed with it, has all sorts of reservations.) the translation is an unbelievable wretched mess, just as though no one even read it over in english before they published it. here's a sample and i tell you it is representative: "People of ancient times until now, those determined to be their relatives were their blood-kin, thereupon their affections had a point to specialize on." there is sentence after sentence like that, and sheer gobbeldygook is, believe it or not, only one of the grotesque issues. bloomsbury academic published this in the uk, continuum in the us. no, absolutely not. 

what i am going to do here in a bit is re-work part 1, chapter 1, which appears to me to be extremely profound on multiple levels, into something resembling contemporary english.

hardcore

oh dang i'm all obsessed with the amazing jamey johnson. probably after i've spent a couple of days marinating in the ouevre i'll do a long thing. here's why, if they still existed, occupy and tea party should be as one, a nice connection of hardcore redneck outlaws to david graeber.

 

and here's the greatest song ever, by a good long way:

 

normative heterosexuality and gender as a dichtomomy really were often very fun and funny, i tell you! perhaps not invariably...

time to prosecute yourselves

let's say that the "independent executive review board" (whatever that may be, exactly) is right that the nsa surveillance programs are illegal (than which nothing could be more obvious). and then stipulate that we live under the rule of law. (admittedly, i have argued that rule of law is conceptually impossible, on multiple grounds; let's take seriously the way politicians talk for a second.) well then, actual persons have committed actual crimes. general keith b. alexander has committed literally billions of criminal acts. if no one is above the law, then if these things are indeed illegal, then every person embedded in this bureaucracy ought to be prosecuted as an individual. correct? that's what their own rhetoric, which admittedly is a bunch of bullshit, demands. barack obama and george w. bush are guilty of directing a vast criminal conspiracy. indeed, this is as extreme a case as you'll run into of racketeering, as organized a crime syndicate as has ever existed.

here's how a pres gets out of this: "alberto gonzales wrote me a memo saying it was ok!" i suggest you try that in your next trial for murder, rape, theft, or whetever hobbies you may have of which the authorities disapprove. really, that's the defense? your own lackeys told you that organized crime was no prob? anyway, if we just held these people to their own proclaimed standards and their own simulated sacred commitments and deepest beliefs, anarchy would be here this afternoon. and i just want to remark to the conspirators as they gaze into the mirror that you can indeed immunize yourself from the legal consequences. you can't be imprisoned if you've already hung yourself in shame at your betrayal of your selves. this is where roman senators fell on their swords or samurai committed seppeku. where's your honor, man?

billions

 there are many striking formulations of the fact that extreme inequality is devouring our species, but this is a good one: the richest 85 people in the world have as much as the bottom 3 billion. we spend a lot of time admiring, loving, and rewarding those 85: think of how people treat gates or buffett or that fuckwad whatshisname who ran apple. but there is only one possible solution: all forms of hierarchy must be simultaneously dismantled. you can't use the political hierarchy to ameliorate the economic hierarchy, because the two are completely intertwined. understand that the political state and international multi-state organizations are what has made this degree of inequality - which is a completely absurd moral disaster - possible. beefing up the state sector to redress the injustices of global capitalism is exactly as plausible as beefing up the governments of spain, portugal, france, and england in 1670 to redress the injustices of colonialism.

release elizabeth warren on this and you just reinforce the sorts of mechanisms that made it possible in the first place. try equalizing on a state-control-of-the-economy basis and one thing you get is this: chinese princelings stashing their nation's wealth in caribbean havens. that is how marxism-leninism-maoism-etcism has turned out in the real world. seriously, this thing where we're going to use political power to equalize wealth is an article of faith: it is empirically absurd. look at the actual intertwined histories of capitalism and the state. nothing has ever been more obvious. 'davos' is a good name now for this identity. it is the place where all hookers gather to fellate the corporate state, which is really the hobby of all of us, essentially our whole lives. communism is just a slight permutation of this, and historical communism is yet another demonstration that political and economic hierarchies are mutually reinforcing.

people appear to be mystified that inequality increases under both democratic and republican administrations. oh my god! you've got to stop listening to what these people say about themselves. right? they both have entirely hierarchical orientations. they are both up inside wall street like tapeworms in your intestines. dems and reps, right and left: they have different adjustments in mind for your pension. and that appears to be enough to make y'all absorb your whole lives screaming at each other. they have massively the same political and economic orientation. surely you see that. america at the historical crossroads: hillary clinton or jeb bush? oh for heaven's sake.

the only coherent position, and the only position that is responsive even vaguely to reality has to be: oppose all coercive hierarchies. otherwise i'm telling you this just gets worse and worse. it gets worse under neocons. it gets worse under leftists: they all have the same position, really, and it is underlain by the desire to subordinate and to be subordinated. i don't actually see the distinction between the positions of paul wolfowitz and mao. or rather i hear their opposed rhetoric and i see their identical reality. i think that paul ryan and elizabeth warren have the same position, stated in slightly different ways for slightly different audiences. they do not know this about themselves, but they are perfectly complementary: we can oscillate between reinforcing the state hierarchy and reinforcing the corporate hierarchy, but these are the very same hierarchy. but also the tea party and occupy don't know this about themselves either, but they are on the same side too: the only other side.

Stupid people place equal importance on all things...

Bit of military nostalgia and wisdom this evening...just because entropy increases doesn't mean we have to like it or even give in gracefully... Oh, the gray is links the green is music.... 

civilized sexual mores

the french are so civilized! i have often heard people admiring their sexual mores; remember mitterand's funeral, where his wife made out with his mistress or whatever? so civilized are french men that they promise to be faithful to you and are fucking someone else that afternoon. and so civilized are french women that they don't mind that at all; in fact, they like it when you lie to them, which i admit is actually a feature of civilized societies. americans are so provincial and puritanical. so what the hell is valerie trierweiler doing in a hospital for a suicide attempt or whatever it may be? it is treason to the french republic! a civilized, open-minded man acts like dominique strauss-kahn. we need to emulate these behaviors, or else we'll get fat. oh, the wine, the food, the clothes, the accent! i can hardly bear the romantic civilizedness of it all. let's go to provence and rape some maids, honey.

stick it

obama and many other rationalizers of oppression take this approach, among a hundred other distractions, red herrings, etc, to the nsa: hey google and facebook do it, so hahaha! first of all, no they don't, in many dimensions. really do you think facebook is putting backdoor code into google, etc? but here's the thing: i'll be as worried about google or verizon having my info as i am about the us government when google has 'the greatest military the world has ever known', sprawling systems of incarceration, the power of coercive taxation, thousands of heavily armed thugs in suits, predator drones, high-end torturers, and so on. until then, take this argument and stick it.

aca, nsa, ins, irs, dod, etc

on aca and nsa: i was always opposed to the individual mandate on fundamental 'what the gov could legitimately do' grounds. but on the other hand i took a strategy that i've taken to lately: well, if i were screaming, this isn't the first thing i'd scream about, because actually it sucks that people don't have access to healthcare. but reading the healthcare law through the nsa: we are dealing with a government that really has no respect for the autonomy, privacy, or liberty of anyone. so, for one thing, all info you provide to these exchanges is available to corporations, is available to the nsa, is available to homeland security, immigration, irs etc. the aca crystallizes as a very serious dimension of authoritarian control and insufferable, indefensible, and extremely threatening surveillance. the latter is what really has put paid to the american political tradition. obviously, the whole thing is cheneyesque, and if you think i didn't or don't blame the bush admin, you're wrong. but for the dems, it fits in really with a vision of state dominance of every aspect of human life: the economy, education, health, information, etc. it fits with the idea that individual rights is bourgeois ideology (which of course is a remark that has only ever been made by members of the bourgeoisie). they really believe that actual human beings have no rights their government is bound to respect, on the hilarious grounds - the obviously false and entirely disingenuous grounds - that after all the government is all of us working together: it is our collective identity, and there's no such thing as individual identity. that's why we're coercing and surveiling you in every possible aspect: because that's actually who you are even though you may be confused about that. the ridiculousness of that doctrine is matched only by its disastrous consequences: it is a premonition of genocide.

at any rate, you might think about a situation in which you are dependent for your most basic needs, for your life itself, on someone who is all the while abusing you. say you are gendergapy leftish woman. you could perhaps reflect on the fact that this is what you want, or at least what you vote for. otherwise i'll be blaming the victims, at least such victims as are enthusiastic endorsers of and collaborators in their own abuse. look, she wanted it all along: every blow was justified by her own desire. yes i monitored her every move; that's why i couldn't let her out of the basement: because i love her, really. and of course i was feeding her the whole time, so why is she whining now over there at the shelter? try not to be a people of whom that is actually true (as reflected in polling or voting, e.g.), is my advice to us.

#1

here's a plausible candidate for the worst advertisement in the history of our species, and of course advertising is what separates us from the lower animals. you don't see squirrels or viruses trying to get you to buy stuff with a steaming pile of hooha. obviously, the whole thing is neuro: this thing triggers the advertising region of your brain, which is just at the crown of the head. and of course, any very pervasive feature of our species has been selected for by evolution, and really bad ads are evolution's crowning achievement, the only reason that we have, sadly, survived and adapted and become so amazingly incredible.

 

 

pee tardy

i just want to say this up top: no doubt the tea party consisted of ignorant rednecks operating out of racial resentment. their opinions were manipulated by fox and rush, rather than by the harvard j.d.s manipulating the opinions of decent people from portland. however, they were so, so right about obama, and about the nature of the american government now, and about the fact that the american political tradition of freedom, as enshrined in the constitution, is over, betrayed. so absorb that. pardon my 'you' but i can't help it: they were right and you were wrong. they were true and you were false. they were clear and you were muddy. they were zoysia and you were astroturf. they were oppressed and you were oppressors. they said something and you said nothing. birtherism turned out to be a nice false symbol of the truth, which is perhaps why it has a bizarre power and immunity to evidence. right the man was born in america. but he is not an american as i would understand what that means.

liberalism: making racism look good

so let me ask you this, antiteapartiers. if i think barack obama is a tyrant, does that make me a racist? i'm reading, for example, the individual mandate in obamacare back through the lens of the nsa: this is a person who runs roughshod over the constitution, has no concept of individual rights, and sees no limits to the legitimate use of state power (well, in these senses he's a culmination of american liberalism; indeed, the basic leftist position is that individual rights are merely capitalist ideology). this is a man that thinks you can be forced more or less at gunpoint to purchase specific items. and he is a person who yaps democracy and commits utterly to a secret program of universal surveillance paid for by its victims. let's just say i'm confident i'd feel the same if it were hillary, though of course then i'd be a sexist. indeed, i think on the pc account, any opposition to tyrranical power is racist and sexist. so, either you're an advocate of oppressing certain groups, or an enthusiast for the oppression of everyone. quite a bleak dilemma, actually, and we have indeed landed in quite a bleak future.

sic, and sic, and sic

here's all i got for obama on the nsa: sic semper tyrannis, baby.

zeale

google reminds us that it's zora neale hurston's birthday (i wrote about her extensively in act like you know). this is indeed something to be celebrated, and in my opinion she is the greatest of american novelists, more or less. now, i would like to see, say, melissa harris-perry, or all those feminist/anti-racist guardian columnists really grapple with how absolutely free she was to express whatever she damn pleased abiout race, how pointedly and continuously boldly anti-pc she was. this is part of how she ended up dying in loneliness, poverty, and obscurity. see, langston hughes and richard wright and paul robeson were, more or less, stalinists, the doinks, and they and others tried to enforce this as well as, say, w.e.b. dubois racial orthodoxy, on every black artist. you better enforce it, because you sure ain't got no argument for it. zora, on the other hand, is actually fucking free: she let herself be free, and she paid the price. but that, as well as the super-excellence of the writing and the folklore etc, is why i love her.

how it feels to be colored me 

how it feels to be colorless me

 

taking a diip

current temp at york springs, according to weather underground: -3.4. that is unusual! ok, tell you what, i won't use this as 'evidence' against global warming if you don't use the heat wave next august as 'evidence' for it. ok? otherwise every dip is relevant.

realizing the dream

i need my moment of grandiosity and achievement, and i propose to revel in it on the grounds that, if my previous life is any indication, various devastating humiliations are likely to be in store. but at any rate: i believe i just discovered the whereabouts of the holy grail of card handling, what we've been chasing for the last century and a half: the invisible shift. i can nullify your cut, bitch! if you don't know what 'the pass' or 'the shift' is, you don't know nothin. go read your erdnase, your dai. christ. do i have to tell you everything?

now, am i going to tell you how to do an invisible crispy shift? no i am not. i am going to try to figure out some way to sell it to you.

bye, bye phil

i'd probably prefer to listen to the everly brothers than any other 'mainstream' pop act of their period (well, i'm also very partial to dion and the belmonts). i think the basic thrust was country, and they updated the 'brother harmonies' of people like the louvin brothers. but boy did they have great songs and great voices: the shit is just so so sweet.

 

 

Not exactly civil, but noisy and nonproductive -- Arab State? Republican caucus?

 

I first read the Times piece in a hurry and got the impression that Al Qaeda had taken over Anbar province in Iraq...silly, AXE, nothing is ever taken in the Arab world because that would imply a stage of some sort on the road to somewher, even if nowhere...at least Sysiphys was able to move the damn rock up the hill before it rolled down. The Islamic world is like a continuous replay of Zeno and his goddamn rabbit, only with bombs, fire, torture and incest. While I'm sure the neo-Cons are in an orgy of negative masturbatory ecstasy, THIS IS NOT OUR PROBLEM AND WE"LL ONLY MAKE IT WORSE! Run away, damnit!

 

here is the intro to entanglements.

no chance

so, bill de blasio and the whole dem party is shifting to the issue of economic inequality. quite the urgent issue, not that it's atypical of any large state-dominated society in the history of the world. but i do not believe that what they are proposing - insofar as they are proposing anything - can have any effect on structural inequalities, and i suggest that this is as demonstrable as anything along these lines can be. so what do you suggest? more food stamps? longer-term unemployment benefits? do these things change people's basic social or economic status? (right, it is important that they might enable hungry people to eat!) going to try again or pretend to try again to equalize education across poor and wealthy communities? what in the world would make you think that this has any effect on the basic structural or relational situation? has the welfare state or compulsory public education redressed structural inequalities? i would like to see the evidence. i would point you toward a century of dicking around with education to no effect. giving poor people more benefits can slightly ameliorate their situation. but it does nothing to change the structure, and indeed i suggest that it freezes the situation into place, that it and also public education, for example, makes the basic structure chronic. public education has been a caste system and a reproducer of the class structure in the next generation since it was instituted. if you look squarely at the real history of these programs, i believe that's what you see. well, maybe you are going to do them better this time. no, you'd have to actually do something comepletely else.

unsystematic

a little slice of the intro to entanglements, trying to say a bit about the sense in which it does and does not constitute a 'system':

Now if ‘philosophy’ gives some people, especially some philosophers, the willies, the idea of ‘system’ gives me them to me. It is true, I think, that the great systems of philosophy - above all those of the German idealists - Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and Schopenhauer, for instance - are among the most impressive achievements in the history of the human intellect. If my project were to do what Hegel did, or thought he did - explain all of the universe and the human relation to it from the ground up in a way that led to perfect self-consciousness - then I would have regarded the project as too intimidating to set out on. The project is intimidating enough conceived as I conceive it.

Impressive as these systems are, they are, I believe, fantastic. Even if each hangs together within itself (which seems unlikely), it has abandoned what I might term the weirdness of the real: its recalcitrance to our categories; its unpredictability; its contingency; its arbitrariness; its excess to human experience. And each such system, to the extent it is successful in achieving its own goals, leaves behind also our strangeness to ourselves, our excess to ourselves, the ways we elude our own grasp. Fortunately and necessarily, there is deep obscurity at their heart; the unplumbed mystery that comes from trying to parse the syntax.

I will construct a system in the sense that I will try to take up the outstanding issues - many of them, at any rate - in the history of philosophy, and formulate a set of answers that will, I hope, hang together fairly well with one another. But I will not seek certainty at the foundations, or I will deny that it is forthcoming. I will argue that at the heart of any picture of the universe is a faith, a commitment, that is ultimately personal: any philosophical system must rest on an inchoate and ultimately unjustified sense of where and what one is. There is no escaping this situation, I believe, and it is not entirely unsatisfactory. So the status of the claims I put forward is to try to capture and make compelling my own fundamental commitments, my own fundamental sense of where and what I am. Whether the stuff is true or not is, I believe, a genuine question. But for me it is of equal importance - and connected to the question of truth - that it be an honest representation of my real experience and thinking.

So if what follows is a system of philosophy, it is an anti-systematic system: the goal is to open up to a world around and outside and running through us, not to constrain the world to the conditions of human reason or even consciousness. It is not a system that could give you the assurance that you now understand all that was before concealed in shadow. Even with these qualifications, however, I must remark that the idea of system remains problematic, and one is constantly in danger of being seduced away from the world by the niftiness of some notion or of the way a whole bunch of stuff hangs together. That is a danger to which philosophy has succumbed again and again, and though I cannot claim to have avoided it, I can at least say that I have been alert to the problem.

I am not sure there has ever been a more ponderous, less human, or more humorless discourse than systematic philosophy, though the first great systematizer - Plato, of course - had various semi-comic and ironic moves at his disposal. Now humorlessness is, I believe, a problem. It’s a failure of character. But it is also a symptom of the real problems of systematic philosophy: its lack of a sense of the limitations of the mind of the thinker. Even a Kant or Schelling made mistakes, harbored prejudices, had to start where he actually was, however he portrayed himself, or whatever authorial voice he took up. The groping, confusion, doubt are erased. There is not a hint of the actual comedy continually being enacted: a finite, merely human intellect, suffering as it may be from a head cold, speaking in a voice and with a knowledge the model of which is God, slipping continuously on banana peels that it is itself strewing around itself. The ambition is to be God; we might call it Satanic. It is an infinite ambition, carried on by a finite creature, like a little boy who’s sure that if he flaps his arms hard enough he will ascend into the sky. In its incredible ambition, systematic philosophy is touching, noble, and redolent of tragic, excessive pride and comical inability to pay off on it.

disentanglements

me via phil mcreynolds, formulating the basic orientation of entanglements.