After reading "With the Old Breed" I have come to appreciate something about war. It is a foreign experience. It places in stark relief the horrors of warfare, battle, fatigue, shelling, explosions, fear, sleeplessness, wet, hunger, dysentery, exposure, hate, sadness, resignation, sobbing, gunshots, luck, sheer luck, against a familiar world. The two placed together makes each all the more strange. And since war is the transient state its technology, machinery, and the full experience strikes one as an alien presence. Sledge points this out on Okinawa and is reminded of his grandmother's remark that a blight had settled upon the land during the Civil War. It's the same other-worldly and ultimately damaging presence of technique and knowledge in the service of annihilation. This is a sacred knowledge that is preserved in the hardened bodies of warriors who practice it in the theater of war. This knowledge has an ultimately defensive purpose. It is enlisted to secure the beliefs of a people. But warfare leaves an indelible mark on those people enlisted, drilled, and sent to war. Upon returning they find they cannot re-enter society so easily nor see the world the same again.
The point of warfare is to erase one's competitor completely. This has culminated in exploding the other to bits with bombs or shooting him fatally from afar. A body motivated to annihilate another must meet that body. This is done by so many telepresent technologies, which allow the person's motive to issue from a gun into a projectile aimed at the body to be annihilated.
Burke notes that an ideology takes up residence in a body and makes it dance in peculiar ways. The techniques of warfare quickly drilled into each soldier for that transient event are just this, ideology. The one rule of war is to kill. When this occurs the body dancing to its ideology becomes mute. With no place to hold purchase, no phenomenal accoutrement through which its rules become actions, its values become voices, the ideology fades into a mist of blood, a last breath and dances no more--dead body, dead ideology.
The goal of war is to end it as quickly and decisively as possible as a winner. In accomplishing this goal the machines of war churn up the landscape, redirect resources, and dump raw bodies onto the war effort. War is a catalyst for change. War is a catalyst for social organization. War necessitates rapid advancement of a society. This is labeled 'mobilization.' Unstuck from its pastoral time, this society becomes the machine for war. Vast wealth and riches pour into the war effort. Careers are diverted. Lives are ended. Families are ripped apart. Children are lost. Histories and futures get blown to smithereens. Some get rich. Others become poor. The tenuous bonds of a society are destroyed in war only to be restrung according to a plan designed from without by war planners. Lives are wasted as the profits of war justify the design.
War unleashes the demons that lie within us all. War lets loose the destructive fury inside each of us.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Gestalt psychology and the fetish
Gestalt psychology is the study of the how people reconstruct the world around them. Taking in sensory data, people reconstruct into wholes the world around them.
Perhaps in the process of this reconstruction we will find the pathologies that lead people to treat others so dispassionately? Could it be a simple problem of fetishizing another that affects how we reconstruct that person into a whole.
"Are you an ass man or a tits man?"
This seems like a rather pedestrian question, but it does hint at the ways that we focus on some aspect of another person objectively. From this we reconstruct someone and perhaps this view of another on terms that are selfish, albeit visually violent can bleed into the Gestalt.
This is merely an observation. I seek to look at it more.
Marxist fetishism and Gestalt psychology are the watchwords.
Perhaps in the process of this reconstruction we will find the pathologies that lead people to treat others so dispassionately? Could it be a simple problem of fetishizing another that affects how we reconstruct that person into a whole.
"Are you an ass man or a tits man?"
This seems like a rather pedestrian question, but it does hint at the ways that we focus on some aspect of another person objectively. From this we reconstruct someone and perhaps this view of another on terms that are selfish, albeit visually violent can bleed into the Gestalt.
This is merely an observation. I seek to look at it more.
Marxist fetishism and Gestalt psychology are the watchwords.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
To sing a prayer
Dear lord,
Grant me serenity from the things that afflict me.
Grant me the strength to shout once the truth of my affliction and eject it from my mind and my body.
Allow me the strength and prescience to find attainable goals, goals that fortify me with confidence and good manner.
Show me a righteous path toward which I could find workshop for my body.
Keep me company.
Speak to me.
Dance with me.
Kiss me.
Hold me.
Coo at me.
Cry for me when I go.
Remember me when I'm gone.
Say nice things about me when I'm not around.
Water my plants.
Take out the trash.
Answer the door.
Pet my cat.
Grant me serenity from the things that afflict me.
Grant me the strength to shout once the truth of my affliction and eject it from my mind and my body.
Allow me the strength and prescience to find attainable goals, goals that fortify me with confidence and good manner.
Show me a righteous path toward which I could find workshop for my body.
Keep me company.
Speak to me.
Dance with me.
Kiss me.
Hold me.
Coo at me.
Cry for me when I go.
Remember me when I'm gone.
Say nice things about me when I'm not around.
Water my plants.
Take out the trash.
Answer the door.
Pet my cat.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
technique
Gents,
Do you put much stock in the apparatus by which you produce your writing? I know this shit has been batted around at least as long as Sam Clemens’ admiration for the typewriter. The speed and accuracy of the typeset word was essential, so says Beninger, to contain the complexity of the emerging modern corporation in the context of a guilded age society run on horse drawn carts and very little standardized information sharing.
But I digress. I want to address the phenomenology of writing, how it’s experienced, what gives it substance, what validates the time spent ‘creating’ in words ideas that are richer and perhaps much more synesthetic as ideas before being put through the labor of communication.
I am reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s technique for writing. He set up shop in his kitchen. He preferred to write in a high-traffic and non-private space. He also learned how to write by literally typing out, word for word, the books of authors that he admired.
I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s commentary upon his authorship where he basically stands at a computer and pecks with one hand as he edits the notes that he wrote down. He points to the fact that he fools himself into writing by producing complex ideas in his note taking, which then become the stuff of his books with little work in the transition. I’ve done the same. I think I’ve witnessed Michael do the same as well.
Then there’s this.
“According to Wired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put up for auction at Christie's. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machine for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy reckons he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". The typewriter was auctioned on Friday, December 4, 2009 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500.[12] The Olivetti's replacement for McCarthy to use is another Olivetti, bought by McCarthy’s friend John Miller for $11.[13] The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.”
What makes a creator so beholden to one’s artifacts? What makes the habits so persistent? I keep coming back to this over and over—neuroconsolidation. We build a repertoire of habits upon which we hang newer experiences. I would consider the idiosyncrasies of human behavior to be the outward signs of the brute natural limitations of neurology. One’s inability to remember some things can be a consequence of one memory’s place too close to another, creating an inhibition. I’m reminded that to remember George Orwell’s name, I’ve stored it in the shadow of another famous person’s name, Orson Wells. I rarely remember George’s name first, but I’ve grown to find ways of dealing with the limitations of how I’ve established remembering. I find it poetic that I've resorted to some newspeak workaround to recall the name of a famous writer whose very preoccupation was modern power elites' desire to control the masses through their ability to think and speak.
Enough for now. Drinking gets me thinking.
Do you put much stock in the apparatus by which you produce your writing? I know this shit has been batted around at least as long as Sam Clemens’ admiration for the typewriter. The speed and accuracy of the typeset word was essential, so says Beninger, to contain the complexity of the emerging modern corporation in the context of a guilded age society run on horse drawn carts and very little standardized information sharing.
But I digress. I want to address the phenomenology of writing, how it’s experienced, what gives it substance, what validates the time spent ‘creating’ in words ideas that are richer and perhaps much more synesthetic as ideas before being put through the labor of communication.
I am reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s technique for writing. He set up shop in his kitchen. He preferred to write in a high-traffic and non-private space. He also learned how to write by literally typing out, word for word, the books of authors that he admired.
I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s commentary upon his authorship where he basically stands at a computer and pecks with one hand as he edits the notes that he wrote down. He points to the fact that he fools himself into writing by producing complex ideas in his note taking, which then become the stuff of his books with little work in the transition. I’ve done the same. I think I’ve witnessed Michael do the same as well.
Then there’s this.
“According to Wired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put up for auction at Christie's. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machine for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy reckons he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". The typewriter was auctioned on Friday, December 4, 2009 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500.[12] The Olivetti's replacement for McCarthy to use is another Olivetti, bought by McCarthy’s friend John Miller for $11.[13] The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.”
What makes a creator so beholden to one’s artifacts? What makes the habits so persistent? I keep coming back to this over and over—neuroconsolidation. We build a repertoire of habits upon which we hang newer experiences. I would consider the idiosyncrasies of human behavior to be the outward signs of the brute natural limitations of neurology. One’s inability to remember some things can be a consequence of one memory’s place too close to another, creating an inhibition. I’m reminded that to remember George Orwell’s name, I’ve stored it in the shadow of another famous person’s name, Orson Wells. I rarely remember George’s name first, but I’ve grown to find ways of dealing with the limitations of how I’ve established remembering. I find it poetic that I've resorted to some newspeak workaround to recall the name of a famous writer whose very preoccupation was modern power elites' desire to control the masses through their ability to think and speak.
Enough for now. Drinking gets me thinking.
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