State and Religion November 25, 2010
Posted by Elena in Uncategorized.trackback
This blog is about the separation of the State and Religion and its effects on our inner and outer world. Religion to me is about connecting to other dimensions within the human being that have traditionally been called spiritual and politics is about living the consciousness of those dimensions in our social lives. The actualization of consciousness in our practical lives implies the relationship we establish between our inner self and the world at large. The separation of politics, religion, science and the arts is, in my point of view, an schizophrenic expression of our present level of consciousness and it is the aim of this blog to explore and question that separation and find solutions that will help us reconnect the multiple aspects of our life inwardly as much as socially. I am a beginner in all of this and see it as an exploration of the questions and points of view, which are open to change should the reasons be worth the shift.
Comments
Sorry comments are closed for this entry
The Public Square 
This is worth listening to again and often enough as one works along the stony edges of words.
Lyrics and Music:
Don McLean, Vincent 1971.
Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer’s day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.
Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they’ll listen now.
Starry, starry night.
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze,
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue.
Colors changing hue, morning fields of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand.
Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they’ll listen now.
For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.
Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls,
Frameless heads on nameless walls,
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget.
Like the strangers that you’ve met,
The ragged men in the ragged clothes,
The silver thorn of bloody rose,
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.
Now I think I know what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they’re not listening still.
Perhaps they never will…
It’s a pleasure for me to start finding people talking about the things that I’ve been trying to explore since I left the Fellowship cult. I don’t seem to be able to reproduce this text here so it must be read there for now.
Click to access ReligionSecularismandPublicReason.pdf
John Pilger on The War you don’t see
http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com/2010/06/john-pilger-war-you-dont-see.html
A wonderful debate on freedom of speech.
http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com/2010/06/julian-assange-alde-seminar-on-self.html
It’s very beautiful to find these people after all this time blogging about such things without others willing to support or dialogue about it and attacking and mocking me for it. Times are changing!
http://joyb.blogspot.com/
The 21st century will be the century of the common people – the century of YOU of US
The ideologies of the old school of politics, media, monetary systems, corporations , and all known structures are in a state of transformation. They are crumbling. Now is the time for fundamental change on all levels, we have to seize this moment. Because this is THE moment.
It is rare that generations and so many individuals get such an opportunity to transform the world as we know it. The big question is how do we transform it? Lets start by turning the pyramid of power upside down.
It is obvious that we are running out of planet, many people have lost the vital connection to our environment, most of humanity doesn’t comprehend cause and effect of lack of sustainability anymore and many of us feel lost, displaced and lonely. All the structures we thought would take care of us, be it systems, ideologies, religion, politics or institutions are failing. Big time!
To follow my intuition as a politician makes a lot more sense to me then the rivalry and manipulations of left or right ideology. The right and wrong ideology of the old world has simply outgrown itself. No longer do we have strong parliaments with a direct link between the general public and decision maker. We have so called professional politicians that are far removed from the reality most of us live in.
Parties and politicians are often in an unhealthy marriage with corporations and corruption is thriving in the political arena all over the world. Many governments and politicians talk about transparency yet the process of politics and laws is shredded in secrecy.
When everything collapsed in Iceland in 2008 I sensed that within this crises was to be found an incredible opportunity for change. Because of that I helped create a political movement February 2009. Its chief agenda was to bring forth democratic reform, such as people being able to call for national referendum and sever the ties between corporations and politics.
In order for profound change to be possible those of us inside parliament have to behave like activists by changing the traditions and revealing the unwritten rules of power.
We are creating a haven for freedom of information in Iceland. Information will set you free and thus it should be free to access by everyone. We went on a quest to find all the best possible laws from around the world that ensure freedom of expression, information and speech. By basing our laws on legislation that has already proven to be strong enough to withstand attacks from those that want us to live in a world with less flow of information about the darker side of politics, international corporations, war and oppression.
Information doesn’t have any borders any more. We live in a world where the super powers want to put global censorship laws on the Internet. We have to be a step ahead of them.
I joined forces with Wikileaks because I feel it is so incredible important that there are places in our world where whistleblowers and sources can feel save to drop important documents that governments and corporations want to hide from us.
Immi will make it possible for investigative journalists from around the world publish their stories if they are under treat to be placed under gag orders in their own countries, everyone should have free access to information, in our world there should be no gag orders, no prior restriction. Immi will provide a shield against that.
We should have a haven for those that are willing to risk their lives to blog or write news about things in their own world, even if we might not be able to save them from the risk they take, we could at least make sure that their stories will not be taken down from the internet, no matter what.
My hope is that immi will transform into the International modern media initiative, because everyday the freedoms we want to protect with it are eroding at an alarming rate. Here in Italy you are witnessing the end of the freedom of media with a new set of laws called legge bavaglio. There is no copyright on immi. Use it now! Without freedom of information, you don’t really have democracy but dictatorship with many heads.
The 21st century will be the age of us, the common people, where we will understand that in order to live in the reality we dream of, we have to participate and help co-create that reality.
I strongly encourage you to join this incredible Movement Beppe Grillo has co-created, run for office, be part of this opportunity of change. If I could become an MP in the Icelandic parliament, anyone can become a member of parliament.
Here is our first task: If there is something we have to make sure stays under the guardianship of nations not corporations then it is the following, water companies, energy companies, social welfare, education and health systems.
We have made everything so complex and grand, perhaps it is time to return to more simple ways, more self sustainable ways, we can do that by learning from each other, by helping each other locally and globally and by remembering that we as individuals can change the world, and now is the time to step forward – take on that challenge and be the change maker. Don’t expect others to do it, your time has arrived to make a difference!
A year and a half ago, I was temporary unemployed, single parent with the simple goal of figuring out how I as an individual could help create a sustainable future for the next generations. Needless to say: no one really believed I could be where I am today. Yet it is not a Cinderella story but a story I co-created with my society.
Most people have seen that left and right politics doesn’t have any meaning anymore. To create political movement based on common agenda of pressing issues of basic human rights and democratic reform is so important right now.
In order for the common people like us to co-create our society we have to have the democratic tools to do that. People need to get into parliaments to change the laws so we all can have the power that is rightfully ours, to impact our society and apply real pressure on those in power to work for us, not the elite.
M political movements chief aim has been to inspire ordinary people to take on political responsibilities. We don’t want people with political training, we don’t want professional politicians and we above everything else don’t want to be a political party. And remember no matter what they will tell you: power corrupts and disconnects people from the reality other citizens live in.
We created the Movement 8 weeks before elections, we had no money, and no one knew us, yet we got more then 7% of the vote at the general elections in 2009. I hope to see the same sort of numbers for your Movement in the 2010 elections.
One of the reasons why it is so important for groups to get representatives into places of power, is that it is a lot easier to get media attention on your causes, and it is handy to be able to confront or talk with ministers and other mps about important issues without delay.
When I was working as an activist one of the hardest challenges was to get the attention from both the media and the people in power to the cause, getting some changes implemented was nearly impossible. Now that I am getting a better understanding on how things work within the legislative body I have much better chance to help other activists and the general public to get attention and even legislative changes and resolutions on issues they are concerned about.
What might seem impossible now might be quite possible tomorrow because we are experiencing very rapid changes on all levels. So I encourage you to start to make the blueprint for the future you want to live in, to be passionate about your cause and to believe that everything is possible, today failings might turn into tomorrows successes.
But the most important part is if you have a chance to work within the belly of the beast to not become like them but to listen to your heart, to listen to your intuition and to be impeccable with your word. And finally not care at all if you loose that place of power.
Thank you all the people of the Movement in Italy – I know I am experiencing a truly historical moment here today. Thank you all who dare to be part of this massive movement of transformation of politics.
Don’t tell me this isn’t a lot of fun! It’s 12.40 am, who could go to sleep with this happening in the world?
WikiLeaks: the revolution has begun – and it will be digitised
The web is changing the way in which people relate to power, and politics will have no choice but to adapt too
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/29/the-revolution-will-be-digitised
Heather Brooke
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 November 2010 22.45 GMT
Article history
Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.
Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn’t sharing information that had put the nation’s security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous “lost opportunities” to stop the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself. Collaboration and information-sharing was the new ethos. But while millions of government officials and contractors had access to Siprnet, the public did not.
But data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks, which is how I came to obtain the data. It even slipped past the embargoes of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland, on Sunday. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting updates on Twitter. It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor.
Individually, we have all already experienced the massive changes resulting from digitisation. Events or information that we once considered ephemeral and private are now aggregated, permanent, public. If these cables seem large, think about the 500 million users of Facebook or the millions of records kept by Google. Governments hold our personal data in huge databases. It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.
But when data breaches happen to the public, politicians don’t care much. Our privacy is expendable. It is no surprise that the reaction to these leaks is different. What has changed the dynamic of power in a revolutionary way isn’t just the scale of the databases being kept, but that individuals can upload a copy and present it to the world. In paper form, these cables amount to some 13,969 pages, which would stack about 25m high – not something that one could have easily slipped past security in the paper age.
To some this marks a crisis, to others an opportunity. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography – replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency.
The former US ambassador to Russia James Collins told CNN the disclosure of the cables, “will impede doing things in a normal, civilised way”. Too often what is normal and civilised in diplomacy means turning a blind eye to large-scale social injustices, corruption and abuse of power. Having read through several hundred cables, much of the “harm” is embarrassment and the highlighting of inconvenient truths. For the sake of a military base in a country, our leaders accept a brutal dictator who oppresses his population. This may be convenient in the short term for politicians, but the long-term consequences for the world’s citizens can be catastrophic.
Leaks are not the problem; they are the symptom. They reveal a disconnect between what people want and need to know and what they actually do know. The greater the secrecy, the more likely a leak. The way to move beyond leaks is to ensure a robust regime for the public to access important information.
Thanks to the internet, we have come to expect a greater level of knowledge and participation in most areas of our lives. Politics, however, has remained resolutely unreconstructed. Politicians, see themselves as parents to a public they view as children – a public that cannot be trusted with the truth, nor with the real power that knowledge brings.
Much of the outrage about WikiLeaks is not over the content of the leaks but from the audacity of breaching previously inviable strongholds of authority. In the past, we deferred to authority and if an official told us something would damage national security we took that as true. Now the raw data behind these claims is increasingly getting into the public domain. What we have seen from disclosures like MPs’ expenses or revelations about the complicity of government in torture is that when politicians speak of a threat to “national security”, often what they mean is that the security of their own position is threatened.
We are at a pivotal moment where the visionaries at the vanguard of a global digital age are clashing with those who are desperate to control what we know. WikiLeaks is the guerrilla front in a global movement for greater transparency and participation. There are projects like Ushahidi that use social networking to create maps where locals can report incidents of violence that challenge the official version of events. There are activists seeking to free official data so that citizens can see, for example, government spending in detail.
Ironically, the US state department has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for technical innovation as a means of bringing democracy to places like Iran and China. President Obama has urged repressive regimes to stop censoring the internet, yet a bill before Congress would allow the attorney general to create a blacklist of websites. Is robust democracy only good when it’s not at home?
It used to be that a leader controlled citizens by controlling information. Now it’s harder than ever for the powerful to control what people read, see and hear. Technology gives people the ability to band together and challenge authority. The powerful have long spied on citizens (surveillance) as a means of control, now citizens are turning their collected eyes back upon the powerful (sousveillance).
This is a revolution, and all revolutions create fear and uncertainty. Will we move to a New Information Enlightenment or will the backlash from those who seek to maintain control no matter the cost lead us to a new totalitarianism? What happens in the next five years will define the future of democracy for the next century, so it would be well if our leaders responded to the current challenge with an eye on the future.
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.~ Mahatma Gandhi”
Gordon Brown pleading for a common cause
http://www.avaaz.org/en/global_economy_gb_video_2/?cl=844261096&v=7667
Thank you Mr. Pratt
Deception is a tactical necessity. Deception should not be used as strategic policy. No friendship is maintained through deception, and decaying relationships are aggravated further by dishonesty. The people must hold their governments accountable. I am genuinely wounded when I see the United States Government denying American Citizens the basic rights, not only guaranteed to them by The Constitution, but rights which some of us have fought so hard to provide to those in Iraq. Men and women have have died trying to provide the Iraqi People with the right to criticise, scrutinize and reform their government, for the right to understand and be of one mind with their government. Apparently while we fought abroad, our rights were being chipped away at home.
Former Soldier
IsaacRyanPratt
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/jul/26/afghanistan-war-logs-wikileaks-assange
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/jul/25/julian-assange-wikileaks-interview-warlogs
Intimidating people to maintain them in ignorance
It’s amazing that the tactics in the big world are exactly the same as the tactics in cults. This is no different to Girard telling members of the Fellowship not to read the blog. And it seems to work in the long run unless something more human is strong enough to overcome the difficulties.
http://gawker.com/5705639/us-military-in-iraq-tries-to-intimidate-soldiers-into-not-reading-wikileaks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/oct/16/uselections2008-iraq-afghanistan
A soldier and his guardian angel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2007/dec/14/baghdad.iraq.jared.yoon
Is this young man old enough for this?
Why are almost children being put to do this kind of job? Isn’t it a man’s job if it were in anyway justified?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/dec/11/us-military-marrocco-walter-reed
Families talk- The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/oct/16/uselections2008-iraq-afghanistan
Support – Isn’t it beautiful?
US pressure against whistleblowing site
Individuals redirecting parts of their own sites to Swedish internet host amid ‘censorship’
Share
92
Charles Arthur, technology editor
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 5 December 2010 14.49 GMT
Article history
WikiLeaks: American pressure to dissuade companies in the US from supporting the WikiLeaks website has led to an online backlash. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
American pressure to dissuade companies in the US from supporting the WikiLeaks website has led to an online backlash in which individuals are redirecting parts of their own sites to its Swedish internet host.
Since early on Friday morning, it has been impossible to reach WikiLeaks by typing wikileaks.org into a web browser because everyDNS, which would redirect queries for the string “wikileaks.org” to that machine address, removed its support for Wikileaks, claiming that it had broken its terms of service by being the target of a huge hacker attack. (See What is DNS?)
Without a DNS record, it is only possible to reach WikiLeaks by typing in the string of numbers which, for most web users, is too unmemorable to make it feasible.
That, campaigners say, points to the principal weakness in the internet’s pyramidial DNS setup, where a limited number of site registrars can control whether a site is findable by name or not.
Website hosts are being encouraged to add a “/wikileaks” directory into their sites, redirecting to which redirects to http://88.80.13.160/, run by the Swedish hosting company Bahnhof.
At present, that location redirects users to a Wikleaks page at http://213.251.145.96/, which is run by a French company, but if pressure from the French government pushes Wikileaks off that host, it will still have the Swedish location.
At the same time, scores of sites “mirroring” WikiLeaks have sprung up – by lunchtime today, the list was 74-strong and contained sites that have the same content as WikiLeaks and – crucially – link to the downloads of its leaks of 250,000 US diplomatic cables.
The backlash has also gained its own tag on the microblogging service Twitter, where people who have linked to the main site are using the hashtag #imwikileaks.
The technical details of how to make a site’s subdirectory point directly to the WikiLeaks site are described by Paul Carvill, a British developer, and Jamie McClelland.
“I’ve done this as a simple gesture of my support for WikiLeaks and my opposition to arbitrary censorship of the web by governments and corporations,” Carvill says on his page, while McLelland says that adding his support “seems like a good way for us all to really pitch in and share the risk that the folks at WikiLeaks are taking all by themselves”.
WL Central An unofficial WikiLeaks information resource
Search this site:
LoginRegister
NEWS »
EVENTS »
MEDIA ARCHIVE »
EDITORIAL »
TOPICS »
ABOUT »
MISC »
2010-12-06: [Admin notice] WL Central server migration
Submitted by admin on Mon, 12/06/2010 – 11:52
Please note that we will be migrating to higher availability infrastructure later today in order to support increased traffic to the site. WL Central will be down during this time.
For updates, please follow our Twitter feed: @wl_central.
Thank you.
2010-12-06: Cablegate: Journalists in defence of WikiLeaks, part 8
Submitted by admin on Mon, 12/06/2010 – 08:00
(If you missed the previous installments in this series, please click here.)
New Zealand Herald: Editorial: Red alert over WikiLeaks unnecessary
“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has suggested the disclosure “puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems”. Such language does not bode well for a cogent and calculated response. In fact, the intelligence information released so far contains nothing to substantiate Mrs Clinton’s claims.[…]
Obviously, Washington is embarrassed. But, so far, that is all. There has, contrary to the Secretary of State’s view, been no irresponsible naming and endangering of individual lives or national security.
Much of the credit for this must go to WikiLeaks’ decision, as with military documents released this year, to rely on three major newspapers – the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel – for a reasoned analysis of the cables. This has been no anarchic exercise, based on a naive view that it is right and proper for all information to be in the public domain.[…]
The cork is out of the bottle. If WikiLeaks is silenced, others will pick up its ideas.”
Read more
Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch: What the Wiki-Saga Teaches Us
“The reaction to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange tells us all we need to know about the total corruption of our “modern” world, which in fact is a throwback to the Dark Ages.
Some member of the United States government released to WikiLeaks the documents that are now controversial. The documents are controversial, because they are official US documents and show all too clearly that the US government is a duplicitous entity whose raison d’etre is to control every other government.
The media, not merely in the US but also throughout the English speaking world and Europe, has shown its hostility to WikiLeaks. The reason is obvious. WikiLeaks reveals truth, while the media covers up for the US government and its puppet states.”
Read more
Guy Rundle, Crikey: Bob Brown supports WikiLeaks, is Phillip Adams in the frame?
“Greens leader Bob Brown has spoken out in support of WikiLeaks, following its Cablegate document release to major media that began last week. While urging the global whistleblowing website to be “diligent” in ensuring that its released documents do not put lives at risk, Brown told Crikey that “the documents have caused increased scrutiny on often controversial aspects of US foreign policy. Such scrutiny is a good thing.”
Brown’s statement comes as the Gillard Labor government, which remains in power with the support of Green MHR Adam Bandt, continues to explore ways in which it can prosecute Julian Assange. Attorney-General Robert McClelland stated yesterday that “… the Australian Federal Police are looking at whether any Australian laws have been breached,” a repeat of earlier statements. However, he is yet to specify any crimes with which Assange might be charged.
McClelland has also raised the possibility of cancelling Assange’s Australian passport, though again no grounds on which this might occur have been raised.[…] The move is reminiscent of actions by the Menzies government at the height of the Cold War, when passport cancellation or refusal to issue was one of several techniques of political censorship and repression.”
Read more
Jeff Jarvis, The Huffington Post: Transparency: The New Source of Power
“Government should be transparent by default, secret by necessity. Of course, it is not. Too much of government is secret. Why? Because those who hold secrets hold power.
Now WikiLeaks has punctured that power. Whether or not it ever reveals another document — and we can be certain that it will — Wikileaks has made us all aware that no secret is safe. If something is known by one person, it can be known by the world.
But that has always been the case. The internet did not kill secrecy. It only makes copying and spreading information easier and faster. It weakens secrecy. Or as a friend of mine says, the internet democratizes leaking. It used to be, only the powerful could hold and uncover knowledge. Now many can.[…]
Now, in WikiLeaks, we see a new concern: that secrecy dies. It does not; secrecy lives. But it is wounded. And it should be. Let us use this episode to examine as citizens just how secret and how transparent our governments should be. For today, in the internet age, power shifts from those who hold secrets to those who create openness. That is our emerging reality.”
Read more
Micah L. Sifry, Tech President: After Wikileaks: The Promise of Internet Freedom, For Real
“So, while I am not 100% sure I am for everything that Wikileaks has done is and is doing, I do know that I am anti-anti-Wikileaks. The Internet makes possible a freer and more democratic culture, but only if we fight for it. And that means standing up precisely when unpopular speakers test the boundaries of free speech, and would-be censors try to create thought-crimes and intimidate the rest of us into behaving like children or sheep.
And, as Mark Pesce argues brilliantly, it’s not like we can make this all go away. The potential for a Wikileaks moment–where a dissenter with the genuine goods of how an imperial organization actually carries out its business leaks that information into the global communications grid–has been inherent for years; now it has arrived. We are all living in a new age. And it does feel like radical changes in how the world works may again be possible.”
Read more
Chris O’Brien, Mercury News: Why we should applaud Wikileaks
“The reaction has been fierce. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., and ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, said this week that WikiLeaks should be labeled a terrorist organization. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the disclosures an “attack on America’s foreign policy interests.”
But the reaction is misguided. Our government is undermining its own credibility with this overheated rhetoric. And this lashing out says more about our politicians than it does about Assange or WikiLeaks.[…]
The proper response to WikiLeaks should be a national conversation about what material should be kept secret — and to keep that at an absolute minimum. No one is arguing that there aren’t some secrets the government needs to keep. Even WikiLeaks has held back some of the documents it received. But the circle around the stuff that falls into this category should be drawn as small as possible.[…]
But there should be no doubt that WikiLeaks’ efforts to expose government secrets have done a great public service by puncturing a hole in the government’s arguments that it needs to keep expanding its bubble of secrecy to keep us safe.”
Read more
Read more
2010-12-05: Umberto Eco on WikiLeaks and Cablegate
Submitted by admin on Mon, 12/06/2010 – 06:46
(This article originally appeared in Libération)
“So why so much ado about these leaks? For one thing, they say what any savvy observer already knows: that the embassies, at least since the end of World War II, and since heads of state can call each other up or fly over to meet for dinner, have lost their diplomatic function and, but for the occasional ceremonial function, have morphed into espionage centres. Anyone who watches investigative documentaries knows that full well, and it is only out of hypocrisy that we feign ignorance. Still, repeating that in public constitutes a breach of the duty of hypocrisy, and puts American diplomacy in a lousy light.[…]
But let’s turn to the more profound significance of what has occurred. Formerly, back in the days of Orwell, every power could be conceived of as a Big Brother watching over its subjects’ every move. The Orwellian prophecy came completely true once the powers that be could monitor every phone call made by the citizen, every hotel he stayed in, every toll road he took and so on and so forth. The citizen became the total victim of the watchful eye of the state. But when it transpires, as it has now, that even the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp, the surveillance ceases to work only one-way and becomes circular. The state has its eye on every citizen, but every citizen, or at least every hacker – the citizens’ self-appointed avenger – can pry into the state’s every secret.[…]
One last observation: In days of yore, the press would try to figure out what was hatching sub rosa inside the embassies. Nowadays, it’s the embassies that are asking the press for the inside story.”
Read more
Read more
2010-12-05: WikiLeaks in today’s media: Cablegate coverage
Submitted by admin on Mon, 12/06/2010 – 04:36
The Guardian: WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists
“Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton.
“More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said. Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.”
Read more
The Guardian: Brazil denied existence of Islamist militants, WikiLeaks cables show
“Brazil’s government covered up the existence of Islamist terrorist suspects in São Paulo and border areas in an apparent bid to protect the country’s image, according to secret US documents released by WikiLeaks.
The administration of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva publicly denied that militant Islamists were active in Brazil, even while its law enforcement agencies co-operated closely with the US in monitoring suspects.
“Despite publicly expressed sentiments of high-level officials denying the existence of proven terrorist activity on Brazilian soil, Brazil’s intelligence and law enforcement services are rightly concerned that terrorists could exploit Brazilian territory to support and facilitate terrorist attacks, whether domestically or abroad,” said a US embassy cable.”
Read more
The Guardian: WikiLeaks cables claim al-Jazeera changed coverage to suit Qatari foreign policy
“Qatar is using the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera as a bargaining chip in foreign policy negotiations by adapting its coverage to suit other foreign leaders and offering to cease critical transmissions in exchange for major concessions, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks claim.
The memos flatly contradict al-Jazeera’s insistence that it is editorially independent despite being heavily subsidised by the Gulf state.”
Read more
Der Spiegel: At Sea in the Desert: US Diplomats Bewildered and Bamboozled in Baghdad
“Roughly 5,500 classified cables from the US Embassy in Baghdad paint a grim picture of why America’s stunning military victory over Iraq devolved into disaster: The Americans allowed themselves to get entangled in the Sunni-Shiite conflict while being systematically outmaneuvered by the Iranians.[…]
Indeed, America’s relations with the liberated Iraq have been anything but “friendly” and “constructive.” Within just five years, the State Department went through five ambassadors and an army of analysts and consultants. And what made them fail can be gleaned from over 5,500 secret and confidential dispatches from the embassy in Baghdad.”
Read more
Der Spiegel: ‘Redder than Red’: An American Portrait of China’s Next Leader
“It is thought that Xi Jinping will become China’s next president. But who is he? A source close to Xi has provided US diplomats with a detailed portrait of the up-and-coming functionary — and says he is neither corrupt nor a fan of democracy.
He isn’t corrupt, and money seems unimportant to him. He apparently has enough. He likes the United States, and was at one time fascinated by the mysteries of Buddhism and Asian martial arts.
On October 18, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party appointed 57-year-old Xi Jinping vice-president of the powerful Central Military Commission. This makes it all but certain that he has been chosen to succeed Hu Jintao as Communist Party leader and Chinese president in 2012 and thus become one of the most powerful men in the world, if not the most powerful.
But who is Xi Jinping?”
Read more
Der Spiegel: US Dispatches from Beijing: ‘True Democracy’ Within China’s Politburo?
“Is there any place in dictatorial China where votes are taken and discussions held — rather than orders given and decrees issued? Indeed there is. And it is where one would least expect it: In the heart of Chinese power.
If one is to believe US diplomatic sources in Beijing, “true democracy” prevails in the Politburo of all places, within that little-known group of top apparatchiks consisting of 24 men and one woman.
No one outside China’s ruling cadre knows who at the top of China’s power structure decides what and why. No one knows who thinks what, who is allied with whom and who really has influence. Public debates are rare. But by talking to leading functionaries, experts from the US Embassy in Beijing managed to get a glimpse inside of China’s inner circle.”
Read more
Der Spiegel: Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal on WikiLeaks: ‘People Will No Longer Speak to American Diplomats Frankly’
“The United States has suffered serious political damage as a result of the WikiLeaks publication of secret documents, says Prince Turki bin Faisal, 65, the former intelligence chief and ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington. “America’s credibility and honesty are the victim of these leaks,” Turki said in an interview with the news magazine DER SPIEGEL. “People, including officials, will no longer speak to American diplomats frankly.””
Read more
Le Monde: WikiLeaks : l’Arabie saoudite et le financement du terrorisme
“Le financement des activités terroristes ou des groupes considérés comme tels constitue une cible pour les experts américains dans la région du Golfe, tout particulièrement en Arabie saoudite.
Autant ils se félicitent de la réaction saoudienne contre ces groupes après les attentats d’Al-Qaida perpétrés dans le royaume, à partir de 2003, autant ils se plaignent des difficultés rencontrées pour convaincre le régime saoudien de la “priorité stratégique” que représentent les circuits de financement, selon une note de 2009 obtenue par WikiLeaks et consultée par Le Monde, pour Al-Qaida, les talibans afghans et leurs homologues pakistanais.”
Read more
Le Monde: WikiLeaks : Les ingérences de l’Iran en Irak tracassent les Etats-Unis
“Menaces et promesses, aide financière, manipulations politiques, espionnage tous azimuts, tentatives d’influence religieuse, fournitures d’armes et d’explosifs à des milices “pro” ou “anti” gouvernementales selon les périodes, incidents sporadiques plus ou moins provoqués sur les frontières communes, contacts et visites multipliées entre les deux pays…
A en croire les télégrammes diplomatiques écrits entre 2004 et février 2010 par l’ambassade américaine de Bagdad, obtenus par WikiLeaks et révélés par Le Monde, la stratégie iranienne en Irak a usé, au fil des ans, de tous les instruments possibles et imaginables pour influer sur les affaires intérieures de son voisin.”
Read more
Le Monde: WikiLeaks : France-Brésil, le couple, le sous-marin nucléaire et le Rafale
“La diplomatie américaine cherche à décortiquer les ressorts de la relation France-Brésil. Les évolutions du géant d’Amérique latine ne peuvent laisser Washington indifférent, pas plus que les transferts de technologie, notamment militaire, vers cette partie “émergente” du monde. En novembre 2009, dans un télégramme intitulé “la France et le Brésil : le début d’une histoire d’amour”, l’ambassade américaine à Paris se penche sur le duo formé par Nicolas Sarkozy et le président du Brésil, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.
Le constat le plus saillant est que derrière l’affichage très médiatisé d’amitié personnelle entre les deux chefs d’Etat, se nichent des enjeux stratégiques en termes de défense, avec une aide majeure apportée par la France au Brésil en matière de capacités militaires. Car au-delà du suspense – qui dure toujours – sur les perspectives de vente d’avions Rafale, une affaire plus discrète a été négociée : la livraison au Brésil du premier sous-marin à propulsion nucléaire du continent sud-américain.”
Read more
El Pais: Cómo nos ven los estadounidenses: “Zapatero lleva mal que le den clases de algo”
“José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero y los políticos españoles más poderosos del momento son descritos descarnadamente en los documentos secretos y confidenciales de la Embajada de Estados Unidos en Madrid, que dedican especial atención al presidente del Gobierno y a los integrantes de sus dos círculos más próximos. En el primero, la legación estadounidense sitúa al vicepresidente Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba; al ministro de Fomento, José Blanco; al portavoz socialista en el Congreso de los Diputados, José Antonio Alonso, y al secretario general de la Oficina del Presidente, Bernardino León, al que llaman “el chico de oro del Gobierno”. En el segundo mencionan al “impredecible” Miguel Ángel Moratinos, ex ministro de Exteriores, a la “inmadura” Carme Chacón, ministra de Defensa, y al embajador en Estados Unidos, Jorge Dezcallar.”
Read more
El Pais: Los lugares estratégicos de la Tierra
“Los cables secretos de la diplomacia estadounidense atestiguan el poderoso esfuerzo ejercido por la superpotencia en los rincones más lejanos y aparentemente insignificantes de la Tierra para proteger sus intereses y garantizar su seguridad, estabilidad y desarrollo. Uno de los ejemplos más esclarecedores del alcance de esa actitud global es la lista que el Departamento de Estado redacta cada año seleccionand o las infraestructuras civiles y recursos naturales del mundo que considera estratégicamente más relevantes.
La selección de 2008 contenía unos 300 elementos. Los puntos de interés suelen ser puertos, gasoductos, minas y empresas del sector químico, farmacéutico o de defensa. En España, por ejemplo, EE UU seleccionó tres elementos: el estrecho de Gibraltar, el gasoducto que une a la Península con Argelia y el laboratorio catalán Grifols. La importancia de los lugares es valorada por el grado de dependencia de ellos de EE UU, por el impacto que su eventual destrucción o alteración en el funcionamiento tendría sobre “la salud pública, la estabilidad económica y/o la seguridad nacional” estadounidense.”
Read more
El Pais: EE UU acusa a donantes saudíes de financiar el terrorismo islamista
“”Los donantes en Arabia Saudí constituyen la fuente más significativa de financiación de los grupos terroristas suníes en todo el mundo”, asegura un despacho diplomático enviado hace un año por la Secretaría de Estado a sus embajadas en Riad, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Islamabad y Doha (documento 242073). El texto, uno de los más claros exponentes de la preocupación de EE UU por el dinero del terrorismo, les pide que recaben la cooperación de esos Gobiernos para poner coto a la recaudación de fondos de Al Qaeda y los talibanes. Pero en los 1.110 cables que tocan el asunto se vislumbra que las prioridades de algunos de sus aliados van por otros derroteros. Las menciones al progreso llevado a cabo por éstos no logran eclipsar la frustración estadounidense por la lentitud de sus avances.”
Read more
El Pais: EE UU y Brasil colaboran en secreto contra los islamistas
“El Gobierno brasileño mantiene un doble discurso sobre la lucha antiterrorista en su propio país. Por un lado, niega que exista esa amenaza y protesta airadamente cuando se le menciona la triple frontera (entre Argentina, Paraguay y Brasil) como posible foco de apoyo a la organización islámista Hezbolá o de financiación de grupos extremistas, y por otro, colabora plenamente en el campo operativo con las agencias antiterroristas de Estados Unidos, no solo para investigar los indicios que le proporcionan, sino para intercambiar información propia. Así se desprende de los telegramas enviados por la Embajada de Estados Unidos en Brasil a lo largo de los últimos años.”
Read more
Read more
2010-12-05: Cablegate: News from the infowar front [Update 2]
Submitted by admin on Sun, 12/05/2010 – 16:02
“The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops,” wrote John Perry Barlow on Twitter.
The censorship vs. free speech battle is escalating. This week has seen Amazon, Tableau, EveryDNS and PayPal dropping WikiLeaks services in quick succession, DDoS attacks that caused the site to go offline multiple times, and mounting political pressure from the US (2), Australian and French governments.
The US government went so far as to warn Switzerland against granting Julian Assange political asylum, reports 20 Minuten. In an open letter in Der Sonntag, the US ambassador to Switzerland, Donald Beyer, wrote that “Switzerland will have to consider very carefully whether to provide shelter to someone who is a fugitive from justice.” However Swiss politicians including Cédric Wermuth, president of the Young Socialist Party, Bastien Girod, president of the Greens National Council, and the Swiss Pirate Party have reiterated their support for Assange and willingness to grant him asylum.
The onslaught is creating growing resistance. “American pressure to dissuade companies in the US from supporting the WikiLeaks website has led to an online backlash in which individuals are redirecting parts of their own sites to its Swedish internet host,” writes The Guardian. “At the same time, scores of sites “mirroring” WikiLeaks have sprung up – by lunchtime today, the list was 74-strong and contained sites that have the same content as WikiLeaks and – crucially – link to the downloads of its leaks of 250,000 US diplomatic cables.” The mirror list counts now hundreds of domains.
WikiLeaks’ Swiss host, Switch, said that there was “no reason” why the site should be forced offline, despite demands from France and the US, in a statement released by the Swiss Pirate Party. French host OVH declared that it was up to judges, and “not up to the politicians or OVH to request or decide the closure of the site,” in a response to the French government.
Jon Karlung, the CEO of WikiLeaks’s Swedish host, Bahnhof, told The Daily Beast that “The service is provided in Sweden — where Swedish law applies. We are not subject to American law, Chinese laws or Iranian laws either, for that matter. WikiLeaks is just a normal business client. We do not treat them any different than any other client.” He said that the US had not contacted the company to ask it to cancel hosting for WikiLeaks, and when asked whether Bahnhof would comply if such a request were made, he answered “Of course not.”
Evgeny Morozov has cautioned in The Financial Times that the US backlash against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange may have unintended consequences: “WikiLeaks could be transformed from a handful of volunteers to a global movement of politicised geeks clamouring for revenge. Today’s WikiLeaks talks the language of transparency, but it could quickly develop a new code of explicit anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism and anti-globalisation.[…] An aggressive attempt to go after WikiLeaks – by blocking its web access, for instance, or by harassing its members – could install Mr Assange (or whoever succeeds him) at the helm of a powerful new global movement able to paralyse the work of governments and corporations around the world.”
Update: Internet activist group Anonymous has joined the fight, with a manifesto in support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
The New York Times reports: “Gregg Housh, a prominent member of the group, said by telephone from Boston that an orchestrated effort was under way to attack companies that have refused to support WikiLeaks and to post multiple copies of the leaked material.[…] “The reason is amazingly simple,” Mr. Housh said of the campaign. “We all believe that information should be free, and the Internet should be free.” ”
Read more
2010-12-05: Sweden case updates [Update 1]
Submitted by admin on Sun, 12/05/2010 – 15:04
In an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, lawyer Mark Stephens said:
“In Sweden it’s quite bizarre though, because the chief prosecutor, the director of public prosecution in Sweden dropped the entire case against him, saying there was absolutely nothing for him to face, back in September. And then, a few weeks ago, after the intervention of a Swedish politician, a new prosecutor, not in Stockholm, where Julian and these women had been, but in Gothenburg, began a new case, which of course has resulted in these warrants and of course the Interpol red notice being put out across this week.
It does seem to be a political stunt, I mean, I have, and his Swedish lawyer, have been trying to get in touch with the prosecutors since August. Now, usually, it’s the prosecutor who does the pursuing, not the pursued. And in this particular case, Julian Assange has tried to vindicate himself, has tried to meet with the prosecutors, to have his good name restored.”
He remarked that “A warrant was issued on Thursday by reports. We’ve asked for it. We’ve been ignored at this point,” adding that “He’s only wanted for interview, why not have that interview by consent, rather than this show trial?”
He also talked about the calls for assassination coming from “credible sources around the world,” and particularly the United States, including people as high up as Sarah Palin. He said that Julian Assange would certainly fight deportation to Sweden on the grounds that it could lead to him being handed over to the US, where senior politicians have called for him to be executed.
Stephens added: “I’m really rather worried by the political motivations that appear to be behind this (the Sweden case). It doesn’t escape my attention that Sweden was one of those lickspittle states which used its resources and its facilities for rendition flights.”
(You can watch part of the BBC interview here. The full interview is available on BBC’s iPlayer for UK audiences only.)
Swedish attorney Björn Hurtig echoed the same concerns: Reuters: “I have seen the documents, and I can’t say that I think it is a set-up by the CIA or something. But I suspect that there is someone else who is pushing Sweden to (take) these most unproportional measures that they are doing right now, and is pushing Sweden to push Interpol to make this arrest warrant public. I think somebody has an interest in getting Julian to Sweden and maybe asking for him to be extradited to another country (from there).”
In an earlier statement to the press, Mark Stephens wrote:
“Mr. Assange has repeatedly sought meetings with the Prosecutrix – both in Sweden and subsequently – in order to answer her questions and clear his name. It is relevant that Mr. Assange sought permission from the Prosecutrix to leave Sweden and she gave him her permission. Since leaving Sweden Mr. Assange has continued to seek meetings with the Prosecutrix, but his requests have either been ignored or met with a refusal.”
“Bizarrely, the Prosecutrix – having ignored or rejected those offers of voluntary cooperation – instead sought an arrest warrant to have Mr. Assange held incommunicado without giving his Swedish lawyer sufficient notice, access to evidence or information to take proper instructions from Mr. Assange. This action is all the more peculiar as she has not even issued a formal summons for his interrogation or brought charges against Mr. Assange,” the statement added.
“Since the rape charge has been dropped, the current allegation he faces does not – as a matter of Swedish law – justify an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange. The sole ground for the warrant is the Prosecutor’s blatantly false allegation that he is on the run from justice: he left Sweden lawfully and has offered himself for questioning,” Stephens said.
“At this point in time we have no evidence pointing to a link between these allegations from August and the issue of the Interpol alert just two days after the WikiLeaks first release of US diplomatic cables. However, it is highly unusual for a red notice warrant to be issued in relation to the allegations reported as having been made, since Swedish law does not require custodial orders in relation to the allegation – indeed to our knowledge this is a unique action by the Swedish prosecuting authorities in applying for a red notice on the basis of these allegations,” Stephens’ statement concluded.
“We are also investigating whether the Prosecutor’s application to have Mr. Assange held incommunicado without access to lawyers, visitors or other prisoners – again a unique request – is in any way linked to this matter and the recent, rather bellicose US statements of an intention to prosecute Mr. Assange.”
In an interview with Sweden’s TV4, prosecutor Marianne Ny has categorically refused to meet with Julian Assange in the UK, despite repeated offers from Assange’s lawyers, reports Expressen.
Update 1: Jennifer Robinson and Mark Stephens told The Guardian that they had been watched by people parked outside their houses for the past week.
“I’ve noticed people consistently sitting outside my house in the same cars with newspapers,” said Robinson. “I probably noticed certain things a week ago, but mostly it’s been the last three or four days.”
Stephens said he, too, had had his home watched. Asked who he thought was monitoring him, he said: “The security services.”
Robinson said the legal team was also experiencing “other forms of pressure” from Washington,” including an inappropriate attempt by the State Department to “elide client and lawyer” in correspondence: “It’s quite a serious situation,” she said, adding that, according to the UN’s Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, governments should ensure that lawyers “are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference” and that “lawyers shall not be identified with their clients or their clients’ causes as a result of discharging their functions.”
Read more
For our full Sweden case coverage, please click here.
Read more
2010-12-05: El País: Interview with Julian Assange
Submitted by admin on Sun, 12/05/2010 – 13:29
Julian Assange: “Geopolitics will be separated into pre and post ‘Cablegate'”
El País features an interview with Julian Assange in the December 5th edition. He talked about the numerous death threats he has been receiving, the attacks against WikiLeaks, the significance of the Cablegate release, and fighting the Swedish case allegations.
On death threats: “We have hundreds of specific death threats from US military militants. That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on. Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending out to our lawyers and my children. However it is the specific calls from the elites of US society for our assassination, kidnapping and execution that is more concerning. These range from a US senate bill by John Ensign which seeks to declare us a “transnational threat” to assassination calls from former Bush speechwriters such as Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post and Bill O’Reilly of Fox News.”
On the consequences of Cablegate: “It is too early to say yet. The ripples are just starting to flow throughout the world. But I believe geopolitics will be separated into pre and post Cablegate phases.”
On the Swedish charges: “We will fight them and expose them, naturally. That there is something “wrong” with this case is now obvious to everyone.”
Read the full interview in English or Spanish
Photo credit: AFP
Read more
2010-12-05: International Federation of Journalists statement
Submitted by admin on Sun, 12/05/2010 – 10:20
IFJ Condemns United States “Desperate and Dangerous” Backlash over WikiLeaks
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today condemned the political backlash being mounted against the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks and accused the United States of attacking free speech after it put pressure on the website’s host server to shut down the site yesterday.
The website’s host Amazon.com blocked access to WikiLeaks after United States officials condemned the torrent of revelations about political, business and diplomatic affairs that has given people around the world unprecedented access to detailed information from United States sources, much of it embarrassing to leading public figures.
“It is unacceptable to try to deny people the right to know,” said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary. “These revelations may be embarrassing in their detail, but they also expose corruption and double-dealing in public life that is worthy of public scrutiny. The response of the United States is desperate and dangerous because it goes against fundamental principles of free speech and democracy.”
The IFJ has taken no position on the justification for the release of hundreds of thousands of internal documents which have made headlines around the world in the last few days, but it has welcomed the decision of WikiLeaks to use respected channels of journalism including Der Spiegel, The Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde and El Pais to filter the information.
“This information is being processed by serious, professional journalists who are well aware of their responsibilities both to the public and to people implicated in these revelations,” said White. “It is simply untenable to allege as some people have that lives are being put at risk here. The only casualty here is the culture of secrecy that has for too long drawn a curtain around the unsavory side of public life.”
The IFJ is also concerned about the welfare and well-being of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and Bradley Manning, the United States soldier in Iraq who is under arrest and suspected of leaking the information. Both men are the target of a growing political campaign mounted by government officials and right-wing politicians.
Assange has been forced into hiding and is the subject of an international police investigation over allegations concerning sexual offences in Sweden. The IFJ says that calls by right wing commentators for Manning to be executed and that Assange be hunted down as a spy, as demanded by former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, show a mood of intolerance and persecution that is dangerous not just for the two men but for all journalists engaged in investigating public affairs.
“The IFJ and its members support the rights of whistle-blowers and the responsible reporting of information in the public interest,” said White. “This over-reaction by politicians and their allies illustrates that they have not understood the historical significance of these events. The people’s right to know is not something that can any longer be willfully ignored. They have to adjust to the fact journalists have a duty to report, fairly and accurately and with due respect for the rights of all parties in the public interest.”
For more information, please contact IFJ on + 32 2 235 22 07
The IFJ represents more than 600.000 members in 125 countries
Source
Read more
2010-12-05: SA Supreme Court Solicitor Darren Bailey: Letter to Australian Prime Minister
Submitted by admin on Sun, 12/05/2010 – 09:18
By Darren Bailey, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of South Australia
Submitted on 04 December 2010
Subject: Julian Assange
Dear Prime Minister,
I wish to strongly associate myself with the letter addressed to you from NSW Supreme Court solicitor Peter Kemp, dated 4 December 2010, concerning the treatment of Mr Julian Assange.
His rights as an Australian citizen are clearly being infringed and should be vigorously protected “though the heavens may fall”. As this nation’s Prime Minister, and as a lawyer yourself, you ought to know this fact far better than your official statements would indicate.
Please address this issue as a matter of urgency. Demonstrate that to be an Australian citizen actually counts for something.
Sincerely,
Darren Bailey
Solicitor of the Supreme Court of South Australia
Read more
2010-12-05: WikiLeaks domain move under way
Submitted by admin on Sun, 12/05/2010 – 09:05
The Swiss Pirate Party, who was hosting the wikileaks.ch domain, has told The Associated Press that their main server in France has gone offline. Dennis Simonet, speaking for the Swiss Pirate Party, was unable to confirm the cause of the server problems.
The wikileaks.ch domain is being redirected to Bahnhof servers. The move is expected to take a few hours.
In the meantime, the site is accessible at http://46.59.1.2/
A list of mirrors is available at http://savewikileaks.net/another-wikileaks-address/
Read more
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 next › last »
User login
Username: *
Password: *
Log in using OpenID
Create new account
Request new password
Navigation
Recent posts
Search
Recent blog posts
WikiLeaks Revelation: Prophetic Diplomacy for the Global Age
Ghoul Directory
GoodShipGuppy’s Guide to the Wikileaks on the WorldWideWeb
US Ambassador to Germany says he is not leaving
WikiLeaks’ Annoying Vulnerabilities?
They do notice us
[Admin notice] Frequent falsehoods update: Debunked: “WikiLeaks is Anti-American”
[Admin notice] Frequent falsehoods update: Debunked: “Julian Assange is a Traitor (U.S.)”
CIA flights with permission of the Spanish government [Update 2]
When they came for me…
more
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Much courage is needed to be simply human
It’s beautiful to see thousands of signatures being collected from all over the world in response to Mr. Assange at Avaaz.org
Bravo for us everywhere!
There are 85.136 thousand signatures at 10.15 pm on this 8th of December 2010!
Most of the people signing at the moment are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Australia. Bravo!
From the Guardian’s williamdelosarboles
It seems the few that have nationalized have had it hard for themselves but that is not surprising when the rest of the world’s leaders and corporations keep pushing for their personal interests and not the people’s.
I do not like Chavez’ dictatorship but whoever thinks that American rule is not as much of a dictatorship using local governments to rule everywhere is simply an ignorant. Replacing one ruler for another won’t do, as China for America. What is needed is a balanced distribution everywhere, step by step, with all the necessary love for our humaneness. “Love” “connectedness” “self-respect” “mutual respect” “decency” “dignity”: Everyone everywhere not allowing others to mistreat them and no one mistreating anyone because of their so called “higher position” in the hierarchic structure, not only economically but socially, psychologically, intellectually from the family, to the school, across the military and corporations everywhere. This revolution is about human dignity.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-oil-giants-squeeze-chavez
http://personaldemocracy.com/pdfleaks
So how is Julian? and Bradley?
Why don’t they tell us how Julian is in wikileaks? Don’t they know how much we care? We don’t vote him man of the year or get over 600.000 thousand signatures in a few days because he doesn’t matter to us. He matters and what he represents matters even more. Thank you Julian.
Not that he’s my new guru or that I’d like his ego to grow like Robert Burton’s who we loved and allowed to turn against his own self and the rest of us but I do hope he is as proud of himself as he should be. BRAVO Julian, BRAVO even if you have two women for sex in the same week and scream like a dictator to people who work with you because the ego was already a little overgrown, BRAVO. No one can take away the positive things you’ve done for yourself and us and no one but yourself can take away the negative things you’ve done for yourself and us. Bravo for your love for freedom of speech, I salute you!
I am a much happier person since I met you just around two weeks ago? Met you through Iceland that I was looking into just before you were put in jail. “Met” you because you have certainly reached us all as you wanted with your leaks.
I’ve been so happy that I’ve even began singing for the first time in forty four years since I was a little girl. Really singing!!! And the guitar is teaching me the notes, what they sound like and I copy it and it’s so much fun! I always liked Simon and Garfunkel but to be actually singing their songs is “heroic” in me!!
You see all the miracles you’ve made possible?!!!
And all the other miracles that have already been possible because of your and wikileaks’ group of people, all of them, even those who left and opened their own shop elsewhere because you couldn’t agree with each other anymore but the fact is that someone had to put up the face and bare with the consequences and you’ve done it and that is a very great thing. Everyone is so afraid of doing something like that, we are so afraid of getting hurt and there you are, in prison, getting hurt anyway for prison is painful: the power of people to shut one up because one expressed one’s points of view and revealed the absurdity of the status quo. They have different ways of putting one away and one of them is by simply not listening but it is better that they don’t listen as long as one can continue to speak.
Speech is the language of the soul with which an individual tells the rest what the world inside is like. Human beings are simply mirrors reflecting their inner world in the outside world and chaotic as it looks it is still ever so magnificent. But speech is much more than that, much more than an individual’s right, it is our right for the individual cannot survive without others. And it is a “right” in its full meaning because without dialogue and freedom to speak we dry up like plants without water. As we move out of individualism, we’ll come to understand more fully each day that that is not just a metaphor. Speech is to us like water to plants is an actual fact, a necessity for our survival because only as long as we are willing to engage each other in dialogue do we have a chance to develop love and love is the only absolute necessity of our Self. We cannot develop individually or socially without it. What you’ve done is a great act of love. Hopefully we’ll have the being not to crucify you for even if you’re no angel or saint or Jesus, people are being crucified for being simply human. Hopefully you’ll not have to pay such a huge price for us to understand how seriously we’ve got to fight.
And Bradley Manning? Where are you? How are you? You matter no less than Julian. I love and salute you for your courage to understand at such a young age what was worth doing. To punish you as a traitor would be treason from your people for you have not betrayed your people, on the contrary, you have made your people remember what they have fought for: Freedom of Speech, freedom of the individual, freedom from abuse of power and crime and ilegitimacy. The American people have granted the world with the being to understand such principles in practice, why would they ever turn against themselves and crucify their own essence?
It is very beautiful to see some American people organizing themselves to stand against those wishing to stop leaks from being spread out when the corruption is such that it has long overstepped the human. How many are working to help you out? Where are they? Why isn’t Avaaz. org organizing support for your freedom? Maybe I should write to them suggesting that now.
It is no coincidence that it has in fact been you, a 22 year old young man, who has unleashed this fire in our lives. So many older people could have done it long before you but they were already too old to not be afraid. How can they take your freedom away for attempting to free us from so much inhumanity?
You are certainly a hero. My gratitude to your life.
Emotions are usually kept in place but in times like this they tend to reach down deeper than normally and we long for each other’s company more intensely. It’s a good thing that we are forced to remember that it’s never too late to love.
I would like to wish the few silent but constant visitors to this blog a very merry christmas and new year, to all in the Fellowship blog and all in the Fellowship of Friends Cult, who, beyond our many differences and intense struggles, were the people I shared twenty years of my life and who continue to be as present in it as when I joined. Time passes but people don’t. We might not see each other or have regular contact but once we’ve connected we can no longer disconnect and continue to act on each other’s lives indefinitely.
For those of us who know that that connectedness is what life is about and who are not trying to buffer the suffering, it’s a welcoming experience.
Best wishes to us all.
I do wonder how long it’ll take before we, human beings, assimilate objective realities. Assimilated in such a way that people live their lives conscious of them, conscious that they are protecting them because they are essential for human development.
Freedom of Speech is an objective reality that has to be protected now that it has resurfaced with such force in the person of Julian Assange and wikileaks. It must be protected and practiced not only by the media but also by people in every institution. To speak freely makes individuals strong and societies powerful. Language and the freedom to use it has been taken hostage by the academy and power institutions that have established that only people with credentials are given the opportunity to speak. A housewife like me would not have a chance to speak in those places! Every human being is worth being heard, every human being should feel freedom to express him and herself without fear of being made fun of, without fear of making a fool of him or herself because they don’t have a degree or the supposed education to know about the subject.
We are old enough to know. All of us. Everywhere. A child should be able to cry in front of a camera and let the world know about his and her despair because of the tremendous violence that they are being submitted within the family, the society, the nation and the world at large. Children are not put in front of the camera because those in power shy away from essence looking at them and telling them the truth about the consequences of their actions. We should make many films in which children tell their story not because they’ll sell more or have some success but because adults need to remember what it is like to be in essence. They are so much more mature in their suffering than adults… willing to bare it and not buffer it.
Women should be allowed to speak. Men should start speaking one day. Real men. Men who have not yet lost contact with their own self and who can tell their story.
We’ve become such great artists that we can fool anyone and make them believe that we still hold enough integrity and humaneness that we are worth the presidency of the United States, like Barack Obama, who has betrayed what he stood for while looking for the election. We still hold with intense hope to such figures of authority convinced that they’ll bring the change that we are unable to step up to and actualize for our selves. No one can give us what we are not ready to have and replacing authority figures for our own authority is a step that we must give our selves if we are to become more than ants in a nest. The human dream is still a dream from which we are woken up every once in a while by figures like Ghandi, who can stop the occupation of power by sitting patiently on the road. There is a Ghandi in every human being but there’s also a Hitler and from the ego ness of a Hitler to the surrenderance of a Ghandi are all the necessary lifetimes that justify a life. It is not necessary to be Ghandi to know the Ghandi within one’s self, or to be Hitler to know the fascist within. Most of us practice both of them most of the time as if the script of existence had already been written and every play is the repetition of the same story, but experienced by each individual. What is truly naïve about individualism is that those invaded with it are convinced that their lives are absolutely unique to only themselves and don’t realize that life is the same for us all. We are each a different thread in its tapestry but the tapestry in which we weave cannot be changed by us. Each individual life is like a flower from a plant but the soil and sun and moon that embrace our days and nights are beyond ourselves until we come to meet them with our death: The death of individualism and the birth of wholeness, not necessarily physical death.
Life in turned upside down and upwards when we take that step in a very wonderful way for when we are centred in our individualism or egotism everything that we meet is dishonoured by our presence, dishonoured and swallowed as if it existed only as Maya, as illusion. When the ego dies or begins to die everything that we meet is honoured by our presence and left untouched to fulfil its own process, only that instead of the process continuing as a descending octave, it becomes an ascending octave. A conscious being is the presence of another dimension in the dimension of illusion. The presence of reality in the dimension of illusion and by the sole presence of that dimension, the dimension of illusion is filled with reality. Illusion is the world of our individualism. When our being is in our ego we confront the illusion of our karma. When we step beyond our ego into our wholeness, we confront the reality of our destiny.
“Our” destiny is “ours”. We are connected to each other. Every man and woman is affecting every other man and woman, every human being that has ever lived is within every human being that is alive today. Most of us have to “fight” to be acknowledged because we are haven’t acknowledged the presence of every other human being within our selves. “Being” is the being of the whole of humanity in each individual. Were we conscious of this, things would certainly change because we would be working for the weaving of love in people’s lives and not their destruction. It is in the mind frame of individualism that private property exists as such. The ego must dress itself with possessions because it does not posses itself. Dressing one’s self up with possessions is the way the ego or an immature individual reveals his and her imaginary picture to the people around him who have been the soil for it to develop it. This is a “natural” process. Every human being is born within a family, society, nation and “the” world and each sphere of development is conditioned by the consciousness that that individual acquires in his and her passage through every sphere. The family conditions the individual differently to how they are conditioned in the school, university, military, company, bar… each place with its particular people has its own conditioning and meaning and they are all necessary, all could be wonderful, all be completely different if we could live them without the individualism that determines the hierarchic excesses of authoritarian power. It is sad to see a man that cannot be a father because he holds up an imaginary picture of himself that doesn’t allow his emotions to be expressed. My father was like that and my husbands were little less harmed. Equally sad is a teacher that cannot extend out his or her arms to embrace their students because we are afraid that they’ll manipulate them sexually. And the boss of every factory doing his best to produce enough to pay people’s income is equally sorrowful when he or she consider themselves worthy of a thousand times more profit than their workers. All these are aspects of the individualistically centred state of consciousness in which we happen to be immersed. Capitalism is the epitome of individualism and communism the epitome of individualism. Communism as has been lived, is individualism imposing communism, not consciousness of the whole allowing for Democracy. In both systems as experienced thus far, the individualistic mentality has overpowered the outcome. It is not that people in either system did not hope or aim for a different result, it is that the people in either system were still too self centred for it to be possible to work. There are equally human beings in both systems trying to figure our selves out. This is probably a “natural” development when seen from other dimensions and even from our “worldly” dimension, in as much as each nation struggles for its sovereignty and the threat of invasion is involved but identification with the nation is another illusion, an aspect of our immaturity as human beings. The earth belongs to all of us and holding up a nationality to take away from others is an aspect of our unconsciousness. Third world countries are rich and their people are still hungry, first world countries are not so rich anymore and their people are equally suffering. We are all suffering the unconsciousness of our individualism.
To be “identified” with our nationality is very different to being conscious of our nationality. To allow our ego to reflect itself in the mirror of our nation and allow it to be used against other human beings in criminal assassination of innocent people is the expression of our lack of individual freedom or the maturity to act against crime in no matter what sphere. Our world is so upside down and backwards that we take teenagers to wars to carry out crimes precisely because they are too young to stand up for the human being, against it, because they are still young and immature to have understood the sanctity of their own life or that of others and are still living under the shadow of their family, social and national sphere without having developed the sphere of the human being or the consciousness of The World and its unity, within themselves.
A young man should not be asked to kill before he has given birth or had a wife or worked because just as the video shows, they are young and immature enough to laugh while they take other people’s lives away. It is very different when a mature human being is called upon to act against crime. Young people today don’t even know what is the value of the life they are supposed to be protecting, for their lives were as shattered in the military as the lives they destroy. The military institution and all its techniques is designed to squash the individual just like in cults, so that the soldiers give up their lives for the authority in power. Young people are innocent and beautiful enough to think that if they give up their lives the world will be a better place but until they realize that they are just being manipulated by power, they will continue to act against the human being.
Life is the stage in which we are meant to actualize our humaneness. Every human act adds to the development of our self, individually and humanly, “humanly” as in “worldly”, not just socially. Today we must even go beyond our “socially” into our “humanly”. When we confront the human with what we are within the family, the society and the nation, it is very easy to realize how far each one of us is from consciousness.
Actualizing our humaneness simply means living as decent a life as possible. Life is people. We are woven into each other as part and parcel of our selves. Those that loved us never leave, nor do those that didn’t love us. In time we realize that every one of them was doing their best and so were we. Individualism as an aspect of a mistakenly developed essence “breeds” crime. Individuality as an aspect of a mature essence breeds integrity, responsibility, consciousness. Nature is the stage on which people can actualize their humaneness and the destruction of nature is another expression of our unconsciousness, of the criminality of our essences gone mad. Nature is one with the human being like the bones and muscles and blood are one with the individual. Nature is our “human body” and how we treat it simply reflects our consciousness of our selves. Just like individuals go through phases of self-destruction, drugs and crime against themselves and others and eventually settle down into less destructive forms of themselves if we are lucky, we seem to be in a phase of unconscious destructiveness of our Earth or “human body”. For the majority of us nothing means anything. Everything represents status for the ego, not the richness of a world that is meant to be shared and protected. Everything falls under the theatre of power for the egos of the privileged to be exhilarated with them selves. The ego breeds envy, it lives in its imaginary power owning more than others and submitting every one else to its false authority conditioned by the dependency others have. Love is not “love” when it is a form of submission and dependency. The economic and political difficulties we are facing, as much a the social and psychological problems people are suffering, are not the reflection of our external reality, our external reality is the expression of our inner reality: the state of our lack of consciousness: our egos gone wild.
Religion use to be the sphere of the spiritual in times past but religion today is the sphere of the multiple dimensions of the individual human being and politics is the external expression of the consciousness of those dimensions within the individuals. Every religion is a system meant to pave the way for each individual to walk out of individualism into consciousness of the whole. We are walking from I to US. That is religion and politics is the actualization of that consciousness in our lives. We elect dictators because we reflect in the power of one individual the egocentric reality of our own lives in our societies. We follow gurus because we have no command of our inner authority. We submit to work in factories for a lifetime because we are unable to overcome our dependence on other authorities beyond our selves and “work” creatively for ourselves and our society, not just make those “authorities” that we’ve over-inflated to become way richer than they can handle. The poverty of the masses is counteracted by the excesses of power and the party of madness leaves everybody equally wasted. The actors of the world, the artists, remain silent at the hands of those in power if they are to make their bread, filled with riches if they play the game. The “creativity” of the human being is placed at the hands of very few privileged artists while the majority repeat the same schedule for a lifetime. In the sphere of the I, of the self, of Our Self, we are as depressed as a young addict. The suffering of women at no matter what age is still hard to name, raped by their fathers, sold and abducted from their countries to serve as whores in the developed countries, the men being slaughtered in wars, and the so called “decent people” who avoid that destiny and profit from it are so corrupt that they never even smile with sincerity.
A decent life is not easy to accomplish. But a decent life in which children can grow up to creativity is our right as human beings. No one has to submit to anyone else. Everything belongs to all of us for we are One.
Happy New Year
Love is an eternity
Not that love but this one that was there from the beginning
even if you were unable to notice and afraid to acknowledge.
It is a joy in the heart
Not so painful
even if your absence delineates your presence
It is a well of good wishes
wherever you are
with everyone you are
All is well
Torture/Interrogation Debate
Seeking Answers from Social and Personality Psychologists: 10 Research Questions in the Torture/Interrogation Debate
September 30, 2010 — PsySR Blog
Bradley Olson
As someone trained in personality and social psychology—and now also working as a community psychologist—it’s clear to me that social and personality theory and research make essential contributions to understanding social justice issues.
I’ve long been an activist on the American Psychological Association (APA) torture issue and a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR). This led to an invitation to participate in a session chaired by Chris Crandall at the 2009 Society for Experimental Social Psychology conference in Portland, Maine. The session involved presentations of several excellent studies related to U.S. torture and interrogation. My role was to act as a discussant and to suggest what other areas, as an activist, I thought should be studied empirically.
For several decades, the horrors of WWII and the racism that led to the civil rights movement inspired the work of U.S. social and personality psychologists. As several participants mentioned at the session in Portland, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and Guantanamo can have similar influences on the discipline in the years ahead. I agree. From my perspective as an activist, here are 10 questions I would love social and personality researchers to help answer:
1. How does a nation that once publicly reviled torture come to accept it as an unfortunate necessity?
Group-oriented social psychologists have often focused on social conversion and societal change. Norm changes may reflect compliance or internalization, minority influence or polarization. But bringing the political world into the social psychological laboratory and exploring these paradigms with GWOT stimuli would advance our understanding of the national dynamics around the issue of torture.
2. How can the public be inoculated against propaganda and pro-torture political media and marketing?
Briefings from the White House, conservative cable media outlets, and each episode of “24” present social psychologists with research opportunities that can lead to policy changes and preventive interventions. Elaborations on McGuire’s inoculation theory — to prepare people for pro-torture arguments (like the ticking time bomb)—would be a good start. Such interventions could focus on protecting the American public by giving them stronger ethical and intellectual foundations against torture. Public norms on torture may be pushed to extremes through normative and informational influence. One hope is that if all the sound arguments against torture were available, torture would be less acceptable. If Americans could be encouraged to search more thoroughly for deeper and varied pools of informational influence, would they polarize against torture? One hypothesis is that we would be better off if more Americans vigorously exposed themselves to a wider variety of arguments—even those of the pro-torture side.
3. What are the distinct roles of authoritarianism, conformity, and aggression in pro-torture views?
Right-wing authoritarianism is a topic that combines personality and social psychology. Its nature and its surrounding correlates involve a fairly complex set of characteristics. Right-wing authoritarianism is somewhat different from the construct of social dominance. Social dominance is different from low openness; a high level of fear and insecurity is different from the cognitive narrowing associated with dogmatism. We might ask, for instance, when does escalation of insecurity play a role in pro-torture views? A tendency toward aggression or prejudice might be other pieces of the puzzle. How might some or all of these human characteristics moderate American views, decisions, and actions around the issue of torture? And, how do these views interact with the reasons people give for supporting torture? Research of this type might contribute to more effective ways of influencing those who might otherwise endorse or promote national uses of torture.
4. Does psychological salience impact empathy for and action to help detainees at places like Guantanamo?
Milgram’s original salience and proximity manipulations in his obedience studies still teach us much. Latane’s social impact theory also emphasized salience. Salience may be the most interesting concept in understanding torture in the Global War on Terror. The holding facility for terror suspects was placed on Guantánamo, an island located on the southeastern end of Cuba, at least partly for psychological reasons. The distant and inaccessible island reduces psychological salience, for Americans and for the rest of the world. Without salience, it’s hard to have empathy, and without empathy, it’s difficult to motivate the public around justice-oriented causes. Research could examine this issue more closely. For instance, what effect does diminished salience have on public support for torture? How might increases in salience motivate greater public resistance against pro-torture policies?
5. Why is psychological torture perceived by Americans to be more socially and legally acceptable than physical forms of torture?
It appears that the American public grossly underestimates the harm associated with psychological forms of torture compared to physical forms. Many are were convinced that techniques like sensory deprivation are more innocuous than physical techniques, whereas released detainees consistently say the opposite is true, that the psychological abuse is the most unbearable. Although ethical constraints prevent us from tackling this question directly, social psychologists may be able to devise stimulus materials and experimental designs to better understand these perceptions. Such studies could begin to understand more about our beliefs and attitudes around psychological versus physical harm. For example, is psychological harm perceived as less harmful because it’s invisible, thereby reducing natural human tendencies toward empathy?
6. How does the average American make moral decisions around torture?
Naturalistic and descriptive work on moral decision-making around torture would also be useful. Do people use some variation of Kant’s categorical imperative (e.g., what if everyone did this)? Do they apply Rawls’ veil of ignorance (e.g., putting the most vulnerable at the forefront in their minds)? The world would benefit from some experimental tests of folk theories. On the torture issue, do we apply a utilitarian equity and exchange model (e.g., weighing costs and benefits, to individuals or to society at large)? If so, do we consider costs and benefits for ourselves, for our ingroup members, or for society at large? What interventions would lead to more reasoned and ethical choices?
7. What is the relationship between American exceptionalism and ingroup favoritism? And how might such factors play a role in the torture debate?
Allport believed it was often ingroup love that initially forms prejudice—and there is no doubt that these problems can occur at a national level. Once that love becomes exclusive, an implicit fence is built—and there is always something on the other side of that fence. Is American exceptionalism a macro-level variation of ingroup favoritism? Are there unique features to exceptionalism? Does it lead Americans to believe detainees don’t deserve the protections of U.S. law or that international law is irrelevant? How does ingroup favoritism as exceptionalism contribute to the widespread acceptance of torture for non-citizens?
8. What is the psychology of bureaucracy and how does it contribute to torture-accommodating policies in organizations?
Organizational bureaucracy can epitomize the banality of evil. Many saw the APA not as consciously pro-torture, but as an association with an organizational culture that had its values in the wrong place. Its 2002 revision of Ethical Standard 1.02 seemingly usurped every other proscription in the code. Under the requirements of regulations, law, or governing authority, standards such as “Do No Harm” and “Do Not Exploit” could be ignored. Whether 1.02 was intentionally adopted to protect military psychologists or whether it was excessive moral caution in the service of guild-based interests is unclear given the current evidence. Bureaucratic features like guild-based protectionism seemed to be a primary problem for the APA, on Standard 1.02 and every other torture-related policy. Paradoxically, risk aversion imperiled the stability of the organization. How can such processes and decisions be better understood? Are they inevitable in large bureaucracies, or are effective interventions possible?
9. What non-violent dissident strategies are most effective in bringing about positive forms of social change?
The early minority influence work of Moscovici provided hope in a world of majority influence. How can we defy senseless forms of majority influence and obedience in places that support torture? What are the best strategies for the non-violent, social justice-oriented dissident? Saul Alinsky, the famous Chicago community organizer, believed verbally aggressive approaches worked best. He stated definitively: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Gandhi’s social action required the exact opposite, arguing that “Non-cooperation is not a movement of brag, bluster, or bluff” and “Not a negative thought or action should be had against others. One may not respect another, but do not insult him.” The comparative effectiveness of such strategies could be separated in the laboratory.
10. What are the psychological dimensions of truth and reconciliation commissions compared to current U.S. trial systems?
The field of psychology and the law has brought substantial knowledge about how our traditional legal system works. But what do we now know about alternatives to this system? Can we experimentally compare truth and reconciliation approaches with more punitive methods on issues related to torture?
The global war on terror and the mainstreaming of torture and interrogation, by psychologists and others, has put social psychology at the center of another scientific and philosophical crisis. Fortunately, key advances in our understanding and potential solutions are solidly within the domain of experimental social psychology. Many people will benefit from the efforts of social and personality psychologists to address these challenging questions in their work.
PsySR Treasurer Brad Olson is Assistant Professor of Psychology at National-Louis University in Chicago and Co-Director of the Community Psychology Doctoral Program. He is also a member of the Coaltion for an Ethical Psychology. Brad can be reached at bradley.olson@nl.edu. This essay originally appeared in Dialogue, the official newsletter of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology .
Posted in Member Essay. Tags: psychology, torture, psychologists, War on Terror, law, Interrogation, ethics, experiments, social psychology. Leave a Comment »
LikeBe the first to like this post.
No Responses Yet to “Seeking Answers from Social and Personality Psychologists: 10 Research Questions in the Torture/Interrogation Debate”
Elena Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
January 4, 2011 at 11:39 am
First of all I would like to thank you for addressing these issues. I hope my replies come of help.
1. How does a nation that once publicly reviled torture come to accept it as an unfortunate necessity?
The question is broad and I think the issue needs to be viewed in smaller groups and communities to understand the mechanisms involved. Small groups of people conditioned by the same influences will tend to adopt the same structures of behavior that the overall society is living under. A nation functions like cults and cults function like any hierarchic structure with a power at its center dictating the rules of the game. They both have their particular agenda and structures. To overcome the mechanisms, each individual would need to confront the “human” with the agenda and discard the inhuman from the practices it tends to justify and reproduce. That would be one aspect worth exploring much further.
Another aspect is the fact that we are moving from the fascist- dictatorial- authoritarian forms of government towards more democratic, individualistic consciousness and centralized power is being challenged by the power of the people still weakly and in great disadvantage as Mr. Assange and Mr. Manning prove in the personal sphere but still receiving strong enough support for the cause: freedom of expression.
If you look at the cult phenomenon you will find that, like in society, the inner circle of the guru in power tends to support his or her power through forms and regulations on how, what, where, when, why and with whom anything can take place. In regular society what ever is not regulated is outlawed. The structure of power and its hierarchies immediately condition each individual that enters the group and the gradual brainwashing and conditioning necessary for the process of adaptation and obedience begins to take place until the adepts have surrendered enough to commit suicide en masse if the guru so orders. Jonestown is only one of the many cults in which this process has taken place.
Physical torture is only one form of torture. As we develop more consciosness, we realize more deeply that torture is everything that stunts human development in an individual as much as in society. The hierarchic conditioning of individuals to repetitive activities that don’t allow for their individual development as “creators”, that is, wherever the creativity of the human being is thwarted and limited to a repetitive job in which the individual is nothing more than “another” in the mass of people necessary for indiscriminate production, development is thwarted. From the moment individuals accept to play the role of mechanical production proper of mass production, they submit their human capacities to extreme limitations and with them their will to the hierarchic order. Maintaining such order is the role of those in power who profit and live of the status quo. The irony of the plot is that it is as inhuman and damaging for those who submit to the work as for those who live on it because the practical outcome is that neither actually develop human capacities or creativity, they limit themselves to repeating the same role more psychologically numbed in each generation consuming and working to consume without properly developing and numbed to the violence exerted on anyone threatening the status quo. Life becomes a digestive process of producing and consuming without a human aim. The intermediaries that make the system work and live on it are economically just barely more economically comfortable than those in the lower echelon so the only ones who truly profit enough to be allowed to expand their own creativity are the owners. Both the middle and the lower class become locked in the production for production game without a human objective and strongly protecting the status quo because they are instinctively dependent on it. These intermediaries who are so strongly dependent on such a status quo for their living are strongly susceptible to having the role and the capacity to implement any form of coercion necessary to maintain the status quo. Without their fear, the system would collapse and their fear is supported by their ignorance of the overall structures -the system lives on such ignorance or the unconsciousness of the whole. The military, (or the huge number of still young and “idealistic” people are easily manipulated into supporting the system like people in cults are manipulated through “idealistic” visions), has the role of maintaining the structures in place so it is no surprise the actual physical torture is deployed by them. Those who survive military life have to do so through giving their own self up so the numbness to other people’s suffering is very strong. They have themselves much suffered to be able to belong to that institution. The middle class maintains the psychological torture by “firing” the people unwilling to submit to the system and re-enacting in their lives the role of the “authority” that they represent but can never practically achieve.
torture/Interrogation Debate 2
2. How can the public be inoculated against propaganda and pro-torture political media and marketing?
Elena: What is beautiful about understanding the issues you are raising is that we can tap more deeply on actual human needs and structures. Propaganda and pro-torture political media and marketing is the intellectual discourse of a system and realizing that every single human being is functioning psychologically justified by the reasoning it is convinced of, is a very great achievement in terms of understanding social behavior. It confronts the individual with the fact that individuals function “en masse” until they are mature enough to rise above mass behavior and choose their own actions. Human behavior is no different to animal behavior as long as it is conditioned by the clan mentality. The difference arises when a human being stands above his own conditionings and begins to act in accordance to his or her own “human” consciousness and not the one that he’s been submitted to. Every human being has the birthright to be a human being and not act like an animal in a clan but very few throughout history have acted their possibilities out. Those few have carried whole generations across the human bridge. The process of “individuation” is a lonely process in which individuals confront themselves with their conditionings and allow the human within to flourish above them. That would be one aspect of understanding the true function of religion. They are then mature enough to play a more conscious role in society not simply repeating the established mechanisms but procuring new forms of interaction.
The “public” cannot be inoculated against propaganda and pro-torture political media while religion is used to keep it submitted to the status quo with a divine and authoritarian figure above ruling its destiny or centralized forms of government that have taken all their social functions away at the service of a few agendas.
What we are coming to understand is that what conditions individuals to certain behaviors is the way the “life” giving “attributes” of “life” itself are distributed. Physical exploitation is not nearly as harmful as the lack of freedoms that empower communities. The individual’s “self” is not as “shunned” by physical exploitation as badly as by the conditioning of participation in the overall life of society. The lack of an environment for self expression is a great deal more harmful than having to work more hours. As capitalism matures in the best of its expressions, it has a demolishing effect on the social cohesion and civil rights and everyone is run into an individualism without humanism. Families exist without the children or the old people playing a significant role in the production process and their status as human beings is much neglected while adults have to carry the load of support in a race for production that is, in the long run, equally inhuman. One of the effects of that neglect is what we are seeing in random killers in schools, restaurants and institutions. Schools and universities are as “impersonal” as corporations and the military. “People” are supposed to “function” no matter how inhuman the environment is. The ideal hero of film and television does not “feel”, has no family and kills as coldly as the bad guys supposedly protecting human ideals that he never actually plays out. That numbness towards other human beings and life itself is what is understood as the ideal “professional” worker capable of discarding no matter who as long as the interests of the “company” are carried out.
Psychological torture is our everyday life so how could the “public” be innoculated from physical torture carried out by the richest governments of the world? Every nation or group justifies the torture done against those who do not belong to it or act against it. To not justify torture we would need to raise our consciousness to a human consciousness beyond our personal, family, social or national interests and SHARE our Earth like human beings.
torture/Interrogation Debate 3 Psychological
5. Why is psychological torture perceived by Americans to be more socially and legally acceptable than physical forms of torture?
It appears that the American public grossly underestimates the harm associated with psychological forms of torture compared to physical forms. Many are were convinced that techniques like sensory deprivation are more innocuous than physical techniques, whereas released detainees consistently say the opposite is true, that the psychological abuse is the most unbearable. Although ethical constraints prevent us from tackling this question directly, social psychologists may be able to devise stimulus materials and experimental designs to better understand these perceptions. Such studies could begin to understand more about our beliefs and attitudes around psychological versus physical harm. For example, is psychological harm perceived as less harmful because it’s invisible, thereby reducing natural human tendencies toward empathy?
Elena:
Psychological torture is perceived by Americans to be more socially and legally acceptable than physical forms of torture because when we come to understand the mechanisms that make psychological torture effective we’ll realize that we’ve been psychologically submitting each other to different forms and levels of psychological torture for decades in our regular societies and that the mechanisms of those forms of social torture are at the peak of confronting the semi-democracy with the option of fascism.
Isolation is psychological torture and it is the first ingredient in a process of brainwashing and vulnerability of the individual so that he cooperates with the guards and power behind them. There are various ingredients to isolation worth looking into. The “personality” of individuals is made up by the reflections on it from the people around them. Those that they love and don’t love are equally necessary in its makeup. The ideals, the illusions and the overall make up of personality depend on the multiple references. When an individual is imprisoned and isolated his personality is gradually “deconstructed” and it is reconstructed and brainwashed into “doing” what the authorities want him to do through conditioning his need for human contact and allowing for it as long as he or she cooperates. The Stocholm syndrome well explains the process. The individual becomes emotionally connected to those torturing him because THAT IS THE HUMAN CONDITION: TO BE HUMANLY CONNECTED! The need for that contact is so strong that most individuals give in to the torture and end up cooperating with the torturers. This process can also be clearly studied in cults. The “torture” process in cults is not physical, the isolation happens through psychological separation from the rest of humanity who are “sleep”, families and society making the adept totally dependent on the guru and the cult.
Isolation as torture proves how humans are dependent on other humans not just physically but psychologically. That connectedness that is widely taken for granted is nevertheless what the best expressions of capitalism as much as communism, have run over. Individuals are not physically but psychologically isolated because neither system can protect the individual, both run the individual over for the system to stand. The individual is not protected no matter how many individuals “make it”. What they “make” is the maintenance of the status quo. Neither system can work at the cost of the individual, no matter how much individualism succeeds. Do “civil rights” have any actual power in America today? They’ve never had any power in many third world countries but do they still have any in the developed nations?
Are workers any less captivated by the status quo than people in prison? Can people survive without the job? Don’t they submit physically and psychologically, program themselves to accept every code of behavior so that they are not sacked? People in general have already accepted the status quo, are conditioned by it and are willing to play by its rules because the possibility of perceiving another form of social development is alien to them. Individualism cannot understand the process of “sharing”. To be “civilized” not only with those of one’s clan means to be human and we are still far from living up to our selves.
video of an address by Chris Hedges
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9217110
PsySR Open Letter on PFC Bradley Manning’s Solitary Confinement
January 3, 2011
The Honorable Robert M. Gates
Secretary
100 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301
Dear Mr. Secretary:
Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) is deeply concerned about the conditions under which PFC Bradley Manning is being held at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia. It has been reported and verified by his attorney that PFC Manning has been held in solitary confinement since July of 2010. He reportedly is held in his cell for approximately 23 hours a day, a cell approximately six feet wide and twelve feet in length, with a bed, a drinking fountain, and a toilet. For no discernable reason other than punishment, he is forbidden from exercising in his cell and is provided minimal access to exercise outside his cell. Further, despite having virtually nothing to do, he is forbidden to sleep during the day and often has his sleep at night disrupted.
As an organization of psychologists and other mental health professionals, PsySR is aware that solitary confinement can have severely deleterious effects on the psychological well-being of those subjected to it. We therefore call for a revision in the conditions of PFC Manning’s incarceration while he awaits trial, based on the exhaustive documentation and research that have determined that solitary confinement is, at the very least, a form of cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment in violation of U.S. law.
In the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court case Medley, Petitioner, 134 U.S. 1690 (1890), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller wrote, “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.” Scientific investigations since 1890 have confirmed in troubling detail the irreversible physiological changes in brain functioning from the trauma of solitary confinement.
As expressed by Dr. Craig Haney, a psychologist and expert in the assessment of institutional environments, “Empirical research on solitary and supermax-like confinement has consistently and unequivocally documented the harmful consequences of living in these kinds of environments . . . Evidence of these negative psychological effects comes from personal accounts, descriptive studies, and systematic research on solitary and supermax-type confinement, conducted over a period of four decades, by researchers from several different continents who had diverse backgrounds and a wide range of professional expertise… [D]irect studies of prison isolation have documented an extremely broad range of harmful psychological reactions. These effects include increases in the following potentially damaging symptoms and problematic behaviors: negative attitudes and affect, insomnia, anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hypersensitivity, ruminations, cognitive dysfunction, hallucinations, loss of control, irritability, aggression, and rage, paranoia, hopelessness, lethargy, depression, a sense of impending emotional breakdown, self-mutilation, and suicidal ideation and behavior” (pp. 130-131, references removed).
Dr. Haney concludes, “To summarize, there is not a single published study of solitary or supermax-like confinement in which non-voluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days where participants were unable to terminate their isolation at will that failed to result in negative psychological effects” (p. 132).
We are aware that prison spokesperson First Lieutenant Brian Villiard has told AFP that Manning is considered a “maximum confinement detainee,” as he is considered a national security risk. But no such putative risk can justify keeping someone not convicted of a crime in conditions likely to cause serious harm to his mental health. Further, history suggests that solitary confinement, rather than being a rational response to a risk, is more often used as a punishment for someone who is considered to be a member of a despised or “dangerous” group. In any case, PFC Manning has not been convicted of a crime and, under our system of justice, is at this point presumed to be innocent.
The conditions of isolation to which PFC Manning, as well as many other U.S. prisoners are subjected, are sufficiently harsh as to have aroused international concern. The most recent report of the UN Committee against Torture included in its Conclusions and Recommendations for the United States the following article 36:
“The Committee remains concerned about the extremely harsh regime imposed on detainees in “supermaximum prisons”. The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to, the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (art. 16).
The State party should review the regime imposed on detainees in “supermaximum prisons”, in particular the practice of prolonged isolation.” (Emphasis in original.)
In addition to the needless brutality of the conditions to which PFC Manning is being subjected, PsySR is concerned that the coercive nature of these conditions — along with their serious psychological effects such as depression, paranoia, or hopelessness — may undermine his ability to meaningfully cooperate with his defense, undermining his right to a fair trial. Coercive conditions of detention also increase the likelihood of the prisoner “cooperating” in order to improve those circumstances, even to the extent of giving false testimony. Thus, such harsh conditions are counter to the interests of justice.
Given the nature and effects of the solitary confinement to which PFC Manning is being subjected, Mr. Secretary, Psychologists for Social Responsibility calls upon you to rectify the inhumane, harmful, and counterproductive treatment of PFC Bradley Manning immediately.
Sincerely,
Trudy Bond, Ph.D.
Psychologists for Social Responsibility Steering Committee
The challenge is to recover transparency
and allow for the gold within to shine
untainted
Then it’s easy for anyone to be with one’s self.
Heme aquí
Un cuerpo que ya se delinea más allá de la vida
alma que late cual mariposa, espíritu que
no pierde el hilo de su propio aliento.
Se es joven mientras la muerte le es inconcebible a la esencia
Y afortunado cuando la esencia da lugar a sus dimensiones
Más allá del cuerpo, la sangre en movimiento
Más acá de la vida, el hálito inconmensurable de la muerte.
No se es nada
Porque se es todo
Cuando se deja de ser todo
Se es algo: nada
Aún con demasiada piel en el alma
Añoro el otoño
Para ver el tronco y las ramas
Delinear el invierno
No se apena el árbol de su desnudez
Porque habría de apenarse el ser humano de su honradez?
Y se vive cada día con la misma intensidad con que las estaciones marcan su paso inexorable
Se encuentra uno
de pronto
más allá de un verano
y se contiene en el alma
lo que ya no queda en el cuerpo
aunque haya llovido demasiado
y también se haya sido desierto.
Se canta
Se canta una canción no de amor sino algo más firme que las emociones
Más dulce que las caricias
Más sólido que la penetración.
Se canta
No uno
sino lo que se canta en uno
El destino que se extiende al interior
Oscuro como la noche
Bienvenido como el descanso
Y caen como lágrimas
Los seres que amamos
Que dejamos
Que marcharon
Como hojas secas
Iluminadas bajo el agua de la tierra.
Caen?
Caen en Sí mismos
Y nos dejan el aliento
Pintan nuestro destino
Marcan sus huellas en el cielo
Y vuelan hacia su propio Yo:
el nuestro.
No somos menos que los ángeles en la primavera
Ni menos que los Dioses en el invierno
Pero si humanos en el verano y
Andróginos en el otoño.
Si la tierra no fuera el cielo
Y el cielo, la tierra y el infierno
Como haríamos para llegar
De nuevo al paraíso?
La poesía es la muerte que se asoma a la vida
Por entre las rendijas de cada día
La literatura, la vida que se asoma a la muerte
Por entre las rendijas de cada noche
La ciencia es la piel de la muerte en el cuerpo de la vida
la religión, la muerte, en el alma de la vida y
La política, la muerte, en el espíritu de la vida
El arte es la muerte en vida y
La muerte, la vida de la vida!
Es la muerte la resurrección que se necesita
para darle sentido a nuestra vida.
La muerte o la dimensión que da aliento a la vida.
La existencia no es una línea recta de la vida a la muerte
sino dos líneas que se encuentran y fructifican
líneas, fuerzas, dimensiones
interconectadas entre sí.
Long Live Death!
Here am I
A body beyond life
Butterfly of the soul
Spirit
We are still young when death is inconceivable to essence
And fortunate when essence gives way to its dimensions
The moving blood beyond the body
The incommensurable breathe of death closer than life
We are nothing
Because we are everything
When we stop being everything
We are something: nothing
Still with too much skin on the soul
I long for the autumn
The trunk and the branches
Delineating the winter
The tree is not shamed by its nakedness
Why would a human being be shamed by the honesty?
Each day is lived with the same intensity with which the seasons mark their inexorable pace
One finds one’s self
Suddenly
Beyond summer
And holds in one’s soul
What is no longer in the body
Even if it rained too much
Or dried in the desert
It sings
Not a love song but something more firm than emotions
Sweeter than caresses
More solid than penetration
It sings
Not one’s self
But what sings within one’s self
Destiny that extends within
Dark as night
Welcome as rest
And they fall like tears
Those we loved
Left and
Moved on
Like dry leaves
Lit under the Earth’s water
They fall?
They fall in themselves
And leave us their breath
Paint our destiny
Mark the sky with their footprints
And fly towards them selves: Our I
We are no less than the Angels in spring
Or the Gods in winter
But human in the summer and
Androgynous in the autumn
If Earth weren’t heaven and
Heaven, Earth and Hell
How would we ever return to Paradise?
Poetry is death glimpsing at life through each day’s loopholes
Literature, life glimpsing at death through each night’s cracks
Science is the skin of death in the body of life
Religion, death, in the soul of life and
Politics, death, in the spirit of life
Art is death itself
And death, the life of life
It’s death that needs to be resurrected
To give life sense
Death: life to life
Existence is not a straight line from life to death
But lines that meet and fructify
Lines, forces, dimensions
Interconnected within.
Quisiera compartir contigo mi cielo, que después de la guerra viene la paz y casi toda la juventud es como la guerra.
Brota
Como un aroma
El invierno del alma
La blanca nieve de la vida
El frío dulce de la soledad
En la oscuridad del silencio
Palomas multicolores
felicidad de ser y estar
Corre el sufrimiento entre la gente
El ruido de la injusticia se desata
La sombra del dolor nos acompaña
Corre la vida entre los niños
La luz de jóvenes que en oscuros arrebatos
Nos condenamos a trabajar la vida entera
En hacer reparos
Y en un solo instante
Nos perdonamos
De pie
De frente
Ante nosotros mismos
El Karma no es una condena
Sino una condición.
La oportunidad de visitar nuevamente
Los rincones olvidados,
Las claves perdidas
Es un espacio y tiempo en el cual el ser se confronta consigo mismo
Un potro que lucha contra el arnés y a la vez se amansa
Consciente de que la rienda no es tortura
Ni la silla sufrimiento
Y el peso de uno mismo: alegría
El karma
No es la vida
Sino el canal que la contiene
Tan pronto karma como destino
Canal y río
La vida es…
Vida
Capullos que nacen
A pesar del invierno
A pesar del verano
A pesar del pesar
Y crecen en la primavera rosada
Los capullos son las semillas del cielo
Las semillas, los capullos de la tierra
Procesos en distintas dimensiones
Y la vida cuando brota
Llueve una alegría
Más profunda que la noche
Más entera que la luna
Más sincera que la piel
Somos
Crecemos entre nosotros
Como si fuésemos cáscara y fruto al mismo tiempo
Tierra y abono
Y lo que fue karma se convierte en destino
Lo que fue sufrimiento se vuelve tierra firme
El Ser es el Ser porque Es
Y cuando somos, somos
No hay ningún otro Ser
Que el que Es
No es mi ser sino el ser el que Es
Porque cuando Soy, Es, Somos
No yo sino El Ser
pero esta es solo otra manera de decir
Yo Soy
si pudiésemos comprenderlo así
El Ser puede ser el mío
Pero el ser no es mi yo
Sino el nuestro
En esa dimensión siempre estamos juntos.
Sin esa dimensión
Siempre estamos solos.
Yo es el karma
Nosotros
Somos el destino
Pero no vayas a pensar en nosotros cuando te recuerdes a ti misma
Cuando te recuerdes a ti misma, no pienses
El pensamiento no es una llave para esa dimensión
La consciencia no es un pensamiento sino un atributo del Ser.
Somos tan niños, tan jóvenes aún, que aún se piensa que la mente rige
Pero la mente es tan solo la rienda con que se lleva el karma
La tinta con que se inscribe
No la autora de la vida
No vayas a pensar en nosotros
Ni hagas de nosotros una religión
Aunque toda religión sea esa conexión
Se nosotros en lo humano
No hagas de nosotros un pensar
No podemos “pensarnos”
aunque podamos pensar en nosotros
Sino “sernos”
“Vivirnos”
no pensándonos
Sino siéndonos
Ha-siéndonos
Es lo que somos en nuestros actos lo que expresa nuestra consciencia
y los actos lo que la esculpen
No lo que pensamos
La mente es esclava del rey en el poder
la voluntad en el trono
La inspiración y la alegría de la mente viene del exterior
La voluntad inspira y alegra desde el interior
Cada ser humano es un Sol y ya hay millones de nosotros allá afuera
Somos
Eso que llamamos humano en cada uno de nosotros y que tratamos con tan poco respeto en las colas de los teatros y los bancos, en las barricadas de soldados que ofrecemos a la muerte sin pensarlo y en las playas de turistas, es lo que palpita en la consciencia
No el americano, Ruso o latino, el europeo o el árabe, no el africano, el asiático ni el primitivo del Amazonas sino el americano y el latino, el Europeo y el árabe, el africano, el asiático y el “primitivo” del Amazonas.
Somos
Un solo ser humano
Una sola vida llena de vidas
Células en la piel de la tierra
Átomos en el corazón del Universo
Somos
I wanted to share with you my love that after the war is peace and all youth is like war
Like a scent
The winter of the soul rises
The white snow of life
The sweet coldness of solitude
In the obscurity of silence
Multicoloured butterflies
The joy of being
Suffering runs amongst the people
The noise of injustice is let loose
The shadow of pain Is with us
Life amongst the children runs
The light of young people who in obscure strokes
Condition our selves to a life
Of reparations
And forgive our selves
In just one instant
Standing up
Face to our selves
Karma is not a condemnation
But a condition
The opportunity to visit anew
The forgotten corners
The lost keys
A space and time to confront one’s self
A foal that fights the harness and tames itself
Both at the same time
Conscious that the reign is not a torture
Nor the seat a suffering
and the weight of one’s self: a joy
Life is…
Life
Buds that sprout
In spite of the winter
In spite of the summer
In spite of the odds
And grow pink in spring
We are
We grow amongst our selves
Like peal and fruit at the same time
Soil and manure
And what was karma becomes destiny
What was suffering becomes firm earth
Being is
And when it is, we Are
There is no other Being
Than what Is
It is not I who is
Because when I am,
It Is
But this is just another way of saying I Am or
We Are
If we could understand it like that
My deepest being
is not “mine”
It is ours
In that dimension
We are One
Without it
We are not
I is the karma
We
The destiny
But don’t think about us when you remember your self
When you remember yourself, don’t think
Thought is not a key to that dimension
Consciousness is not a thought but an attribute of being
We are so childish,
such teenagers while convinced that the mind can be
When it is only the reigns of karma
The ink that inscribes it
A tool
Not the source of life
Don’t think about Us
Or make a religion of Us
Even if all religions are about that connection
Be
Us
in the human within
We are not a thought
We cannot “think” our selves
We have to “be” our selves
Live our selves out
“Make” ourselves
Its what we Are in our Acts what expresses our consciousness
Acts what sculpt it
Not what we think
the mind is a slave to the king in power,
the will on the throne
The joy and the inspiration that come from the mind comes from the exterior
From within it’s the will that inspires
Each human being is a Sun and there are many already out there
We Are
That
That we call human
And that we treat with such contempt while making a line at the
theatre, the bank or refer to “the tourists” “the masses” and those in the barricades that we offer so easily to death without thinking
Not the American, the Russian or the Latin, the European or the Arab, the African, the Asian or the primitive from the Amazones but the American, Russian, Latin, European, Arab, African, Asian and the primitive from the Amazones
We are
One human being
A life filled with lives
Cells in Earth’s skin
Atoms in the heart of the Universe
In the Presence of My Enemy: A Reflection on War and Forgiveness
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/in_the_presence_of_my_enemy_a_reflection_20110120/
Posted on Jan 20, 2011
By Ron Kovic
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. (Psalms 23:5)
As this, the 43rd anniversary of my wounding in Vietnam approaches, and I once again try to find meaning in that day and the days which were to follow, my thoughts return to the northern bank of the Cua Viet River on Jan. 20, 1968. It is a day that will change my life forever.
I am medevaced from the battlefield to the intensive care ward in Da Nang, Vietnam. For the next several days I struggle with everything inside me to live. The dead and dying are everywhere. I am in and out of morphine every four hours. I awaken to the screams of the wounded all around me—young men like myself, 19, 20-year-olds. I am told by a doctor that I will never walk again, that I will be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
Still I am grateful to be alive, to still be breathing. I dream of my hometown, of my mother, my father and my backyard where I had played as a boy. All I want to do now is survive, to get out of this place somehow and return home. I completely lose track of time; I don’t know if it is day or night. They keep bringing in the wounded and carting out the dead.
It is the eve of the Tet offensive. A young Vietnamese man who has been severely wounded is brought into the intensive care ward. I can still remember that day clearly—his face, the fear in his eyes. One of the nurses tells me that he is a Viet Cong soldier who had been shot in the chest only a few days before. I look into his eyes as he is carefully placed in his bed directly across from me. “He’s the enemy, the Viet Cong, the ‘Gook,’ the Communist,” I think to myself, “the one my country sent me to fight and kill. The one I must fear, the one I must hate, the man who is not even human.”
That belief and hatred had been reinforced in Marine Corp boot camp, at Parris Island, S.C., where we had chanted, “I’m going to go to Vietnam. I’m going to kill the Viet Cong!” Perhaps he was the one who had pulled the trigger a few days before, trying to kill me, the one who had shot and paralyzed me from my mid-chest down for the rest of my life. I will never know for sure. Yet as I lie in that hospital bed and our eyes meet, I feel no hatred or animosity toward him. On the contrary, I feel compassion for this man I had been taught to hate, this man who is my enemy.
Each day upon awakening from the morphine I look at him and he looks back at me, our eyes meeting, our gaze a recognition of each other’s presence, our humanity, an understanding that both our worlds have been turned upside down and we are now in a far different place than we had been only a few days before. We reach an equality of sorts in this place of the wounded and dying, that great leveler, where distinctions vanish, where there is no prejudice or hatred, where all becomes equal. We are two wounded young men in late January of 1968 simply trying to survive, two human beings who only want to live.
A sort of unique bond begins to develop between my “enemy” and myself over the next several days, a strange and at first somewhat uneasy camaraderie without words, which is both unsettling and at the same time seems completely natural to me. I do not think of him as my enemy anymore. I begin to care about him more and each time I awaken from the morphine, and with the screams of the wounded and dying all around me, I reach out to him with my eyes, with my heart, as he lies across from me in his bed. I now want him to live just as much as I want to live.
“Keep fighting,” I think as I watch him trying to communicate. We are together in this now, and none of those other things seem to matter anymore. “If you don’t give up I won’t give up,” I think, pressing my lips together, reaching out to him, one human being to another, no longer enemies—two young men struggling to live and go home, leave all of this sorrow behind, back to our families, our homes and our towns where it was simple again, where it was safe.
The days and nights and hours pass. The lights are always on and I never know if it is night or day, and after a while it doesn’t really matter anymore. I awake one day and look across and see the empty hospital bed. He is gone, and the nurse tells me he has died. There is no emotion in her voice. She is very tired, and there will be many more dead and many more wounded before it is all over. I stare at his empty bed for a long time, feeling a sadness I could not fully comprehend.
In the years that have passed, I have often thought about those days on the intensive care ward and about that young Vietnamese man, my “enemy,” who lay in that hospital bed across from me, and how we are all perhaps much closer to each other as brothers and sisters on this Earth than we realize. Despite all our differences, there is, I believe, a powerful connectedness to our humanity—a deep desire to reach out with kindness, with love and great caring toward each other, even to our supposed enemies, and to bring forth “the better angels of our nature”—that is undeniable and cannot be extinguished, even in death.
This, I believe, is the hope of the world. This is the faith we now need in these times.
In the years that followed, I would attempt to write about the war and about that long and often difficult journey home, trying to give meaning to what I and so many others had gone through. There would be other profound moments of reconciliation and forgiveness to come, but almost always my mind would drift back to that young Vietnamese man who laid across from me for those few brief days on the Da Nang intensive care ward in 1968.
Posted by elena at 22:10 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: Reflection on War and Forgiveness
THURSDAY, 20 JANUARY 2011
Suicide in the Army
WASHINGTON (Jan. 19, 2011, Army News Service) — The Army vice chief of staff reported a slight reduction this past year in suicides committed by Soldiers on active duty, from 162 in 2009 to 156 in 2010.
“While we achieved modest success in reducing the number of suicides of these Soldiers on active duty,” said Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, “we saw a significant increase in the number of suicides of Soldiers not serving on active duty, to include a doubling in the Army National Guard.”
In 2009, the number of Guard and Reserve Soldiers who committed suicide while not serving on active duty was 80. In 2010, that number nearly doubled to 145.
“In 2010, we’ve got two obvious questions: first of all what happened and second, we have to be able to respond and tell people what we are doing about it,” Maj. Gen. Ray Carpenter, acting director of the Army National Guard, said.
According to Carpenter, the analysis for 2010 shows that it’s not a deployment problem, because more than 50 percent of the people who committed suicide in the Army National Guard had never deployed. It’s not a problem of employment, because only about 15 percent of the people who committed suicide in fact were without a job.
“As you look at it, part of it is a significant relationship problem, because over 50 percent of those who committed suicide had some sort of a partner problem that they were dealing with whether it was marriage, divorce, or boyfriend, girlfriend, that kind of thing. Our effort is to build resiliency in Soldiers,” Carpenter said.
To help understand the factors involved with suicide, the Army has partnered with the National Institute of Mental Health on a program called Army STARRS.
Army STARRS, the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers, was officially launched in late 2008.
Over the course of the five-year study, to run through 2014, and by working with up to 400,000 Soldiers, NIMH and the rest of the research team – including the Uniformed Services University of the Health Services, University of Michigan, Harvard University and Columbia University – hope to identify the risk and protective factors that affect a Soldier’s psychological resilience, mental health, and potential for self-harm.
“When you realize that we’re taking a young American in the Army today, psychologists will tell you, in six years in the U.S. Army under the OPTEMPO that we’re on right now, we’re putting them under as much stress in a six-year period as they would have if they lived to be 80 years old in Seattle, Washington, and whatever they did there,” Chiarelli said.
Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of Army Health Promotion, Risk Reduction Task Force, said in an earlier release that research and analysis of the suicide cases of this past year continue to reinforce that there are no universal solutions to address the complexities of personal, social and behavioral health issues that lead to suicide within the Army.
“The positive thing I see is that some of our programs are beginning to work, but more important than anything else, our leaders are fully engaged with this problem right now. We’re getting at the stigma issue, we’re getting people the help that they need and I hope you’re going to see these numbers go down significantly in the coming year,” Chiarelli said.
Suicide is the fourth-leading cause of death among 25- to 44-year old people in the United States. Historically, the suicide rate has been lower in the military than among civilians. In 2008 that pattern was reversed, with the suicide rate in the Army exceeding the age-adjusted rate in the civilian population (20.2 out of 100,000 vs. 19.2).
While the stresses of the current wars, including long and repeated deployments and post-traumatic stress, are important potential contributors for research to address, experts point out that suicidal behavior is a complex phenomenon.
The study will examine a wide range of factors related to and independent of military service, including unit cohesion, exposure to combat-related trauma, personal and economic stresses, family history, childhood adversity and abuse, and overall mental health.
“I really believe when we put more time between deployments that is going to be a huge factor in helping get at a lot of these problems,” Chiarelli said. “I really believe that dwell is one of the things we have to look at, and has an impact on all kinds of problems, not just suicides, but you know, all the things that fall short of suicide from relationship issues to drug and alcohol abuse, to high-risk behavior, to all those things. The more time we can get between deployments, the better off we’ll be.”
Elena: What’s interesting about this “order” in which the authority and the money makers are not separated is that there is no separation of spheres like in cults. The guru decides everything no matter the cost to the members. In such a status quo, the weakest are the great losers. In society, the majority.
Reversing ‘Citizens United’
Network NewsXPROFILE
View More Activity
TOOLBOX
ResizePrintE-mail
Yahoo! BuzzReprints
COMMENT
105 Comments | View All »
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
It will be a year this week since Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative activist colleagues on the Supreme Court joined together in a dramatic assault on American democracy. Their decision in the Citizens United case overturned more than a century’s worth of precedent by awarding corporations the rights of citizens with regard to electioneering. The court did away with limits on when corporations can spend on elections, how much they can spend and how they can spend their money, allowing unlimited contributions from corporate treasuries to flood the electoral landscape.
As The Nation noted in the days after the case was decided, “This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation’s most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.”
According to Bill de Blasio, New York City’s public advocate, Citizens United spending – that is, spending that was only made possible by the Court’s ruling – accounted for 15 percent of the roughly $4 billion spent on the 2010 midterm elections. Eighty-five million dollars of Citizens United money was spent on U.S. Senate races alone. Worse, 30 percent of all spending by outside groups was funded by anonymous donations, an illegal action prior to the ruling. Forty million of the dollars spent on Senate races came from sources that might never be revealed.
But as striking as these consequences might be, the 2010 election was just an experiment, the first opportunity to test the new law. In future elections, corporations and shadowy organizations will have a clearer understanding of the boundaries they are operating within, a reality that is sure to translate into more undisclosed cash. And the savvier corporate players know that the mere threat of a corporate onslaught of funding for or against a candidate is enough to win legislative favor, in effect blunting prospects for sound regulation, consumer protection and fair tax policies. As former senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), himself a victim of Citizens United spending, said, “It is going to be worse in 2012 unless we do something – much worse.”
Yet even as we lament this decision, we should recognize the opportunity it presents. Justice Roberts and his allies overreached so brazenly that they have created an opening for genuine reform.
There are multiple steps that can be taken, both short-term and long-term, to roll back the corrosive impact not just of Citizens United but of preceding campaign finance cases and statutes that already had flooded the electoral landscape with special interest spending. At the more modest end of the spectrum is the option of reviving the Disclose Act or introducing similar legislation that would require corporations to show how they spend money on elections and provide disincentives to spending it. This would be a good step, but it is mere triage; if not accompanied by a broader push for a bolder set of reforms, its success would do little to curb the corporate takeover of American elections.
One potential policy change that could accompany greater disclosure would be the introduction of a public financing system, which would empower small donors. Legislation has already been introduced in Congress – the Fair Elections Now Act, which has more 160 supporters in the House. A similar system has been adopted in Arizona, and, in 2007, New York City adopted an intriguing mechanism of public finance in which the city matches small donations at a 6-1 ratio, boosting grass-roots fundraising.
The result? According to the New York Times, the changes “drastically curtailed the role of businesses, political committees and lobbyists in campaigns” and, importantly, “caused a major drop in donations from those doing business with the city.” Such a system, implemented on the national level, could greatly increase the influence of average citizens. In the post-Citizens United era, there are already efforts afoot to weaken such systems. In Arizona, for example, the Chamber of Commerce is working aggressively to overturn the state’s clean-money legislation. A push for national public financing, then, must be accompanied by a strong defense of those systems already in place.
The clearest and boldest counter to the court’s ruling would be a constitutional amendment stating unequivocally that corporations are not people and do not have the right to buy elections. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) introduced such an amendment to counter Citizens United during the last session of Congress and sees it as the only sure way to beat back the court. “Justice Brandeis got it right,” she noted last February. ” ‘We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’ ”
Campaigns for constitutional amendments demand a great deal of patience and tenacity. But as Jamie Raskin, professor of constitutional law at American University, notes, “American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy’s enemies.” Not only is a push for an amendment a worthy act, it also provides a unique opportunity to educate the broader public, raise the profile of this important issue and force elected officials to go on record as to where they stand. The campaign could create enormous pressure on state legislatures and Congress, prompting changes to campaign finance even before an amendment is ratified.
Success will require a coalition that transcends party. In this case, there is promising news. An August 2010 Survey USA poll found that 77 percent of all voters – including 70 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents – view corporate spending in elections as akin to bribery. Broad majorities favor limiting corporate control over our political lives. A coordinated effort, executed right, could unite progressives, good-government reformers and conservative libertarians in a fight to restore democracy.
The multitude of reform groups working to build a more just and democratic political system understand that if this issue is to grip people’s imaginations, it must be about more than process. In a nation where recovery still feels like recession, the suffocating grip of corporate money is anything but abstract. Mobilizing the American people to make reform a priority will demand making the clearest possible link between the rise of corporate power and the challenges of everyday lives.
That’s not a tough pitch.
In just the past two years, corporate money can be blamed for watering down consumer protections and diluting health-care and financial reform. In truth, there is almost no conversation we have in American politics in which corporations don’t occupy all the seats at the table. As Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged while talking about big banks during last year’s financial reform debate: “They frankly own the place.”
Changing that dynamic might well be the central challenge of this generation. Reversing Citizens United is about more than any one issue or court case – it is, at its base, a question of whether American democracy itself can beat back a corporate takeover, whether our most cherished principles of self-government can ultimately prevail.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.
Elena: I’m presenting this article because it deals with the power of the media to control people’s minds even against their well being… like in cults. It is no different to the “dogma” and what all this exposes is the fact that people do what other people are doing and approve what they sense the majority is approving. What is in the “news” is perceived as what is acceptable, what “we” are thinking, and going against it requires a knowledge and a consciousness above average.
Eventually we’ll need to realize that there is an objective power to “expression” independent of the political discourse. The powerful “necessity” to “belong” to a “community” makes people choose to listen to what they sense is the “majority” and even if those in the media are not the majority, they are the one’s who are most heard. People perceive them as the “truth” that is accepted. Language sculpts people’s “mind frames” and people react “en masse” to it because there’s an instinctive tendency to “group” our selves with the “strongest” even if the strongest are in fact acting against the majority.
These raises questions: Why do those in power act against the majority? Because they are themselves acting instinctively acquiring as much economic, social and political power? That is in fact the “natural” tendency of the instinctive center? The instinctive center “naturally” tends to posses? Like in animals people functioning under the predominance of their instinctive dimension must “posses” land, goods, power unable to understand the difference between “possessing” and “sharing”?
I do not understand how human beings pretend to find solutions to the multiple conflicts we face without a knowledge of the human being. What Systems of Knowledge do is give us a sound foundation on which to place the different forces in action. From the perspective of the instinctive center the behavior of people in the “right wing” is absolutely coherent. The impulse to own, hold, posses power and all its attributes for themselves and only for themselves is no different to animal clans protecting their territory. In that “frame of behavior” power is hierarchically structured and its clearest expression is the fascist model with a dictator at the center of the status quo. In such model, people relegate their own authority in the authority of the dictator. In the animal framework, it is the alpha dog as leader of the group. It works perfectly in animal life. But when that model is used for human life the result is “inhuman”.
What then would be a human model? A human model would imply the capacity of each individual to act from his own authority without relegating his own power to another. The capacity to act for the well being of every other human being not in his own detriment but with the willingness to sacrifice his own tendency to act from the instinctive center amassing more for his and her own self than what is beneficial for the whole. The power to decide on what is human and inhuman behavior cannot be relegated by any human being, each has to have enough consciousness and will to live up to it when necessary. The majority of atrocities that we are witnessing today occur from the hands of those at the blind service of power in the military, who willingly carry out the will of power and only realize their absurd behavior after they’ve much suffered if they manage to survive. Young people in the military are no different to people in cults. Young people are inspired by “the nation” in a similar way that people are inspired by the “spiritual” and the “spiritual” is as manipulated by the guru and its inner circle as “the nation” is manipulated by the class in power.
Democracy or the power of the people can only be achieved by individuals conscious of their own power and their willingness to act for the well being of mankind. I doubt democracy is possible as long as we are divided into “nationalities”. We are technically advanced enough for globalization but not conscious enough to assume the responsibility of a “human” order. In such an order people from all nations would need to assume that the aim is to rationally distribute the goods that we ALL own for the benefit and survival of each and everyone. First we would need to stop spending on arms and start spending on peace. that people are inspired by the “spiritual” and the “spiritual” is as manipulated by the guru and its inner circle as “the nation” is manipulated by the class in power.
Democracy or the power of the people can only be achieved by individuals conscious of their own power and their willingness to act for the well being of mankind. I doubt democracy is possible as long as we are divided into “nationalities” against each other. We are technically advanced enough for globalization but not conscious enough to assume the responsibility of a “human” order. In such an order people from all nations would need to assume that the aim is to rationally distribute the goods that we ALL own for the benefit and survival of each and everyone. First we would need to stop spending on arms and start spending on peace. Put all our effort on developing technology for a “sound” “exploitation” of resources. It does seem clear today that the means to use sun and wind and electromagnetic energy that will not contaminate like oil are available and that what is holding that step is the race for economic power. Again the instinctive centre in people working against the well being of humanity.
Such consciousness to act for the well being of the whole and the capacity to sacrifice one’s self in that status quo, need not act against the individuals and their potential expansion. One of the problems today is that people think that money must be the result of their work but what money is giving a few is what everyone should have a right to. The problem is the “excesses” that money is being used for. A human being has only “so much”, only “so many” possibilities and we would all be a lot richer if we trusted each other instead of mistrusting. I wonder if “trust” is a purely human experience. In the animal realm we find that there must be trust in the puppy towards the mother, trust in the clan to the leader otherwise there would be no “obedience”. What’s interesting is that in the human being obedience should never be given to “instinctive” “power” but to “consciousness”. Obedience should be at the service of the Trust that every individual has on our integrity as human beings. Obedience should be an objective force at the service of justice: humaneness. Humaneness is what is trustworthy and people should obey to humaneness and every time what is human is “disobeyed” “inhumaneness” ensues.
To be able to understand what is human we would have to agree on certain principles, we would have to have the possibility of agreeing and people cannot agree on what they don’t even know. Every human being is human. Every human being is conscious of his and her own humanity. Every human being is conscious of treating another humanly or inhumanly. But hardly anyone knows what being human means.
In “essence” all people are conscious of their humanity but in “personality” very few people know in practice what it means to be human, what rights or obligations that implies. Individually most people are conscious of their being and feel their joys and sufferings but most individuals are unconscious of the scope of their social existence as human beings.
The human being today seems to be enough of an individual but not enough of a human being: a social puppy.
If we look at an individual life, most people are conscious of themselves as individuals throughout their childhood and teenage years but to be mature means to realize that one has responsibilities towards others. Mankind today continues to act like a child and teenager who does not understand its responsibilities towards others. People in power in every nation pulling towards their own benefit and not that of their people or all of mankind simply express the state of consciousness of mankind today: it’s the rule of the instinctive centre, the natural condition of “animal” consciousness amongst human beings.
How much can we “blame” our selves for such condition? Blame is not the answer but the possibility of assuming responsibility not for our mistakes but for our crimes seems to be the only possible answer towards taking the step from a purely “instinctive animal order” to a “conscious human order”. We need to understand the sphere of the law as an objective reality to actualize our human will. The fact that the laws are being manipulated at will by economic interests shows how far the instinctive center has overpowered human life. The law represents the human will and to be able to use the military to condition obedience to a political system of Trust amongst human beings is the right use of the law and its armed force.
Going back to this article on the media, until we understand the power of the media to communicate with each other, we will not have begun to live our human soul out. It is not the power of the media to brainwash each other to submission to power what can make us more human, it’s the power of the media to communicate more humanly what can develop trust amongst our selves. Without trust, we are nothing but animals living our lives instinctively like a pack of wolves.
The Disappearance of Keith Olbermann
By Robert Parry January 22, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/71-71/4691-the-disappearance-of-keith-olbermann
Keith Olbermann’s abrupt departure from MSNBC should be another wake-up call to American progressives about the fragile foothold that liberal-oriented fare now has for only a few hours on one corporate cable network.
Share this article
ShareThis
Email Printer friendly
Though Olbermann hosted MSNBC’s top-rated news show, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” he disappeared from the network with only the briefest of good-byes. Certainly, the callous treatment of Olbermann by the MSNBC brass would never be replicated by Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing Fox News toward its media stars.
At Fox News, the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have far greater leeway to pitch right-wing ideas and even to organize pro-Republican political events. Last November, Olbermann was suspended for two days for making donations to three Democratic candidates, including Arizona’s Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was wounded in the Jan. 8 shooting in Tucson.
Now, with Olbermann’s permanent departure on Friday, the remainder of MSNBC’s liberal evening line-up, which also includes Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell (who will fill Olbermann’s 8 p.m. slot), must face the reality that any sustained friction with management could mean the bum’s rush for them, too.
The liberal hosts also must remember that MSNBC experimented with liberal-oriented programming only after all other programming strategies, including trying to out-Fox Fox, had failed – and only after it became clear that President George W. Bush’s popularity was slipping.
In nearly eight years at “Countdown,” Olbermann was the brave soul who charted the course for other mainstream media types to be even mildly critical of Bush. Olbermann modeled his style after legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow, who stood up to excesses by communist-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, even borrowing Murrow’s close: “Good night, good luck.”
But MSNBC’s parent company, General Electric, never seemed comfortable with Olbermann’s role as critic of the Bush administration, nor with the sniping between Olbermann and his Fox News rival, O’Reilly, who retaliated by attacking corporate GE on his widely watched show.
In 2009, the New York Times reported that GE responded to this pressure by having GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt strike a deal with Murdoch that sought to muzzle Olbermann’s criticism of O’Reilly, in exchange for O’Reilly muting his attacks on GE.
Olbermann later disputed that there ever was a truce and the back-and-forth soon resumed. But it was a reminder that GE, a charter member of the military-industrial complex and a major international conglomerate, had bigger corporate interests at play than the ratings for MSNBC’s evening programming.
So, too, will Comcast, the cable giant that is assuming a majority stake in NBC Universal, which controls MSNBC. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that sources at MSNBC quashed speculation that Olbermann’s departure was connected to the Comcast takeover, which was approved by federal regulators this week.
Media Orphans
The troubling message to progressives is that they remain essentially orphans when it comes to having their political interests addressed by any corporate news outlet. While the Right has built its own vast media infrastructure – reaching from newspapers, magazines and books to radio, TV and the Internet – the Left generally has treated media as a low priority.
Though some on the Left saw hope in the MSNBC evening line-up, the larger reality was that even inside the world of NBC News, the other content ranged from the pro-Establishment centrism of anchor Brian Williams to the center-right views of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to CNBC’s mix of free-market extremism and corporate boosterism.
While gratified to be given a few hours each night on MSNBC, the Left surely had nothing to compare with Murdoch’s News Corporation and its longstanding commitment to a right-wing perspective on Fox News and News Corp.’s many other print and electronic outlets.
As I wrote in an article last November, “Olbermann and the other liberal hosts are essentially on borrowed time, much the way Phil Donahue was before getting axed in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, when MSNBC wanted to position itself as a ‘patriotic’ war booster.
“Unlike News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who stands solidly behind the right-wing propaganda on Fox News, the corporate owners of MSNBC have no similar commitment to the work of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.
“For the suits at headquarters, it’s just a balancing act between the ratings that those shows get and the trouble they cause as Republicans reclaim control of Washington.”
Those corporate priorities also were underscored in the pre-Iraq invasion days when MSNBC dumped Donahue, then the network’s biggest draw. But Donahue had allowed on some guests critical of Bush’s planned war.
After the invasion in March 2003, MSNBC’s coverage was barely discernable from that of Fox News, with both networks superimposing American flags on scenes from Iraq and producing pro-war promotional segments showing heroic images of U.S. soldiers being welcomed by happy Iraqis (with no scenes of the war’s carnage). [See Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s Matrix.”]
The ongoing significance of America’s media imbalance is that it gives the Right enormous capabilities to control the national debate, not only during election campaigns but year-round. Republicans can deploy what intelligence operatives call “agit-propaganda,” stirring controversies that rile up the public and redound to the GOP’s advantage.
These techniques have proved so effective that not even gifted political speakers, whether the savvy Bill Clinton or the eloquent Barack Obama, have had any consistent success in countering the angry cacophony that the Right can orchestrate.
One week, the Right’s theme is “Obamacare’s death panels”; another week, it’s “the “Ground Zero Mosque.” The Democrats are left scrambling to respond – and their responses, in turn, become fodder for critical commentary, as too wimpy or too defensive or too something.
The mainstream media and progressives often join in this criticism, wondering why Obama let himself get blind-sided or why he wasn’t tougher or why he can’t control the message. For the Right and the Republicans, it’s a win-win-win, as the right-wing base is energized, more public doubts are raised about the President, and the Left is further demoralized.
Like Clinton before him, Obama has reacted to this political/media landscape by shifting rightward toward the “center,” further alienating his liberal base. Many on the Left respond by denouncing Obama as a sell-out and deciding to either sit out elections or vote for a third party.
This dynamic has been instrumental to the Right’s political victories over the past three decades even as those policies – from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush – have worsened the lives of middle- and working-class Americans.
The sudden disappearance of Keith Olbermann from television is another ominous omen that this dynamic will continue.
[For more on these or related topics, see Robert Parry’s Lost History and Secrecy & Privilege, which are now available withNeck Deep, in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books,Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
On Health Care and Human and animal Care!
These articles I read and present inspire me to write about them as much as other things. Since this is not a dialogue but a monologue I will not apologize for the length or reach of my posts. If they only serve me to better clarify my understanding of life, they will have served well. If they serve anyone else they would be a source of profound joy.
The strange thing about health care and no care from the government is that both positions are right depending on the prevalent status quo. In capitalism, the centre left tends to organize a paternalistic government trying to minimize the damages to people from the system of exploitation while the right pretends that even that is not necessary because it’ll make people more dependent on the government and not develop their own will and capacities and unfortunately, they are both so right.
While it may be an altruistic move, healthcare is a very dangerous tool because if people have an average job, enough food and their health is taken care of they will tend to accept the status quo without striving for anything better and THAT is what keeps the status quo in place. People “function” like animals function until they “grow up”: instinctively. Human beings have the mechanism to adapt instinctively to the outside world and cannot “face it” “look at it” until they are mature enough to not react instinctively to its conditioning. People “live” conditioned lives by their outside nature, like animals, and humanize themselves and their society when they mature enough to free themselves from the instinctive conditioning. At that point they become “creators”, they “innovate” forms that are soon assimilated by society and form part of the status quo. This dynamic interchange between individual and society needs to be better understood. The aim of human life is to develop a mature individual: a creative being. Without “creation” the human being is simply surviving in their “natural” social environment just like animals survive in nature. Society is to the individual what nature is to the animal.
Of course, that’s a premise that few would accept in our times when “creativity” is the privilege of a few but from this perspective, creativity is the main characteristic of a healthy human being and life itself is simply the medium with which to evolve through allowing one’s creativity to develop through one’s work. The world is the stage on which to “create”. An “evolving” human being is one who is consistently in a process of creation not only of the outside world but also of his inner world, with “work” as an “objective reality” or the “objective factor” that “sculpts” both the individual and society.
As long as the perspective we hold in society is based on economic growth and protecting those who produce no matter what and how, it’ll be impossible to undertake a more human direction in which what matters is not how much is produced economically but why, how and what is produced.
The healthcare bill is obviously a necessity in a capitalist society in which people are not paid enough to pay for their own health and many don’t even have a job but it is from a human perspective of development of the empowerment of the individual, a tremendously dangerous tool that will tend to make people accept the capitalist status quo and it is that status quo what needs to be revised and modified if evolution is the aim.
I would then have to define “evolution” as the capacity of each and every individual to empower his and her self to a constantly increasing process of creation. An “evolving” society would then be one in which individuals can develop them selves “creatively”. A society in which the majority of individuals are performing mechanically repetitive jobs without a chance of improvement in which all the basic necessities are taken care of with “creativity” reserved for the privileged few, is a society in a retrograde process and in a tendency to self destroy.
I state this after verifying that human beings can be manipulated to exist a lifetime of service to others without ever serving themselves or the well being of the whole. What the cult experience clearly reveals is that human beings can use their lifetime to “evolve”, that is, to develop their own self beyond a purely instinctive life like animals do, into a purely “human” creative life, like human beings should do.
In that perspective the job of the government is to aid in the implementation of mechanisms that will free people from totally uncreative lives for the benefit of the few owners of production and direct production towards the creative process of the people for the benefit of the whole.
A “creative” society is not one in which the basic needs are not taken into consideration but one in which the basic needs are seen for what they are: basic instinctive human needs. Human beings like animals must eat, drink, shelter themselves and die but unlike animals, human beings have the possibility of “creating”. A human being is in its purest essence, a “creative” being.
People should not only be able to feed themselves like animals do but to develop themselves through their creative work. The aim of every “work” should be to reach a creative harmony between the human being and the world around him: a creative harmony between man and nature and man and society.
The destruction of nature as is being carried out is an expression of lack of consciousness: the unconsciousness of the whole of the human experience as intrinsically connected to nature.
The “divas” in the “arts” are also an expression of lack of consciousness, enthroning a few with the privileges of all. It’s necessary to view the arts and art as an objective creative process to which all people have a “Right” to be able to understand what being human means.
The “arts” are in themselves an “area of experience” to which all human beings should have access to but there should be “art” in everything people do no matter what they are doing. In this sense, what we understand by “art” is the skill with which the act being realized is in harmony with the whole.
There is no harmony in destroying nature to produce plastic guns for children: Guns, dolls and so many other millions of objects that given to children keep them from developing their own creativity. The first step towards allowing people to develop is to not “give” them everything. It’s a strange paradox. And the fact that people who have had “little” turn out to be amazingly creative and capable in their adult lives, should reveal to us the necessity of not stunting creativity in childhood as the capitalist model encourages. Indiscriminate consumption is what the capitalist model conditions people to do and that is a wildly dangerous vicious circle for any society: a few privileged produce what the many are to consume even if what they are consuming is against their own well being.
It’s interesting to note that this “model” of “life” in a society oscillates between two extremes: the few privileged and the many, the workers and the owners, the rich and the poor: Two extremes that benefit the few while the “whole” is simply not taken into account. What reveals the level of consciousness of an individual as much as a society is the capacity to act in harmony with the whole.
The “whole” or “unity” is not just a notion proper of spiritual development and the idea that individuals are enlightened by the experience of “unity” is not unique to spiritual practices. The inability to be conscious of the “whole” in society and therefore acting against some of its parts be they nature or people, is an aspect of unconsciousness. If it is clear that human beings are in a “process” of development, it should also be clear that “mistakes” are part and parcel of that process, necessary “steps” in the overall scheme. The struggle for development is not a straight line.
Some would pose that “war” is the natural condition of the human being and I would question that just as I would question that people should be breast-fed all their lives. It’s interesting to realize that “Conquests” have never been made by starving people but by strong people with a leader and have had the effect to mix races and nationalities of human beings. I wonder to what extent all our struggle has been towards not only becoming the “owners” of all our nature but the co-participants of all our human potential. In other words, did the human being set out to conquer nature by expanding and occupying every corner of the world and in so doing also to connect to human beings and their experience everywhere?
If that were so it would be no different to the particular process in which individuals must come to understand all the aspects of their own self if they are to master their lives: their bodies as much as the dimensions within their bodies. Their physical self as much as their emotional, intellectual and moving dimensions and their will to use each in harmony not only with his individual laws but with the laws of the universe.
The separation of the arts, science, economy and politics is an expression of the schizophrenic level of consciousness that we live in our times. “Life” is an expression of our level of consciousness: we cannot “organize” our societies different to what we ourselves are.
If the people in the lower income class do not empower themselves to understand their rights as human beings and demand that society be organized in such a way that it guarantees them a healthy development and people in the middle class equally dis-empower themselves playing the game of the people in the upper class, submitting to models of life in which they are willing to act against the people in the lower classes to “survive” in the status quo, and the people in the “high” classes are incapable of relegating their own economic gains towards a greater gain for the whole, we will continue to live in essentially inhuman conditions. If the “creative” potential of the high classes and those in power were at least overwhelmingly positive even to themselves, perhaps the status quo could be somewhat justified but the decadence of the high classes everywhere is significant enough to understand that the model is no longer one to be held on to.
Perhaps the “king” and all authority figures have been necessary for us to develop a sense of the unity and hierarchic order of all things only to come to realize that we are each the author of our own destiny and can bring society to a balanced status quo.
That balance cannot come from exploiting what belongs to all by a few and for a few. Nature has to be exploited and protected for the whole.
Without Obama, We Lose So Much More Than an Election
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/without_obama_we_lost_so_much_more_than_an_election_20110124/
Posted on Jan 24, 2011
By Bill Boyarsky
The selfish negativity expressed by Republicans in the House health care debate last week showed why we should fight hard for President Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012.
Although their speeches were so canned, repetitive and boring that it was almost impossible to listen to them, the message was clear: Beat Obama, dismantle the health bill and take government out of the business of helping people. “Put a president in the White House who will repeal this bill,” said Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the tea party’s chief harridan, “a Senate that will repeal this bill. We will continue this fight until Obamacare is no longer the law of the land.”
Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Republican leader on fiscal matters, expressed the goal in even starker terms, going far beyond health care and heaping scorn on the very idea of the safety net that has been part of American life since the Great Depression:
“Over time, Americans have been lured into viewing government—more than themselves, their families, their communities, their faith—as their main source of support; they have been drawn toward depending on the public sector for growing shares of their material and personal well-being. The trend drains individual initiative and personal responsibility. It creates an aversion to risk, sapping the entrepreneurial spirit necessary for growth, innovation, and prosperity.”
These words are from Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future,” which he issued a year ago to the great approval of Republicans and even tips of the hat from those Democrats who are more concerned about the deficit than the unemployed.
With Republicans in control of the House, Ryan now has great power. As chairman of the House Budget Committee, he has been given authority to in effect write the budget that will be voted on by all the members. Because of new Republican House operating policies, he can do this himself by setting limits for domestic spending categories—“more power than has ever been invested in a budget committee chief,” noted The New York Times.
His “roadmap” gives a clear view of what the Republicans see as their path to win the Senate, keep control of the House and unseat Obama in 2012.
One of the GOP’s major proposals is eliminating Medicare as we know it, except for those now being covered. Current Medicare recipients would get a small tax credit to purchase policies in any state, opening the door to unregulated marketing of health insurance that may not cover necessities such as maternity care and cancer screenings. Government would also provide a small cash grant and let you invest in a medical savings account. Social Security would be gutted, with recipients being encouraged to turn over a third of their government pensions to the stock market. Ryan’s Budget Committee may also try to eliminate funds to implement the health care law.
Another House Republican plan, this one from the tea party-influenced Republican Study Committee, would cut federal funds given to states for Medicaid medical care for the poor.
That program is one of the best features of the health care act that the House voted to repeal last week. By 2014, the working poor, now excluded, will be eligible if the plan is not repealed.
The health care plan—Obamacare, as the Republicans call it—was never much liked by a substantial number of liberal Democrats. Obama’s refusal to embrace the best plan—Medicare for all—infuriated them. So did his decision against including a government health insurance plan among the options to be offered to Americans beginning in 2014.
As a result, support from an important part of the Democratic base was absent in the crucial days before passage of the law. Abandoned by the left, assaulted by the right and afflicted with an odd case of inarticulateness, the president and his administration failed to explain what they had given to the country.
Now, too late for the 2010 election, supporters of the law are beginning to defend it. In the House debate last week, one Democrat told stories of how constituents have already benefited.
Young adults under 26 are remaining on parental policies. Policies can’t be canceled unless the insurer proves fraud. There are no longer lifetime limits on benefits (such limits permitted cancellation after a certain limit had been reached). New policies must offer free preventative services. Patients can choose their primary care, OB/GYN or pediatric physicians from their insurance network without referral from another doctor. There is a new right to appeal insurance company decisions. Medicare recipients have received a $250 rebate from the prescription drug plan. Small businesses are receiving tax credits for offering health insurance to employees. People with pre-existing conditions can buy insurance. You can use the nearest emergency room without suffering insurance company penalties.
By 2014, the landscape will change much more. Consumers will shop for the best policies at state exchanges, with competition hopefully driving the price down.
Of course, key parts of this plan are threatened by the lawsuits brought by Republican state attorneys general, who may succeed in the current Supreme Court. But even so, much of the law will remain, and be revised and strengthened over the years, just as happened with Social Security and Medicare.
The Republicans want to repeal the entire package and wipe out the other government programs created to help people in economic distress. All they have to offer is a ringing call for a return to Victorian days, as proposed in Rep. Ryan’s roadmap. And they insist on doing it as the country is barely recovering from a recession caused by Republican policies. That’s reason enough for us to start working now to make sure Obama wins another term.
AP / Charles Dharapak
The Human Being – Work in process – I
Until individuals develop a mature I, they function in society like animals function in nature: instinctively. Human beings have the mechanism to adapt instinctively to the outside world and cannot “face it” “look at it” “confront it” “separate from it” until they are mature enough to not react instinctively to its conditioning. People “live” conditioned lives by their outside nature, like animals do, and humanize themselves and their society when they mature enough to free themselves from the instinctive conditioning. At that point they become “creators”, they “innovate” forms that are then assimilated by society and form part of the status quo of the next generation. This dynamic interchange between individual and society throughout generations needs to be deeply explored and better understood. The aim of human life is to develop a mature individual: a creative being. Without “creation” the human being is simply surviving in the “natural” social environment just like animals survive in nature. Society is to the individual what nature is to the animal.
There is nothing “wrong” with instinctive life in animals and it is a necessary step in the human being’s process but when the whole social life of the human being threatens to condition people into living purely instinctive lives without developing themselves enough to “create” through their life and work, then the human being enters a retrograde process of self destruction.
It is not only natural but naturally positive to be one with nature for an animal. Knowledge is not necessary. Likewise, human adaptation to the social environment surrounding us is natural. Human beings imitate, copy, act and react like others in the particular environment. This period of “imitative” life is what I call the instinctive period of the human being. While animals continue to imitate and reproduce their natural conditioning, human beings, by the sole fact that they posses “will” separate from the natural, instinctive period and begin to mature an independent “self”. Each human being is a source of “life”, of “inspiration”, of “new force” and the maturity of that being depends on the possibility of separating from the purely instinctive conditionings.
People in every nation are submitted to particular “instinctive conditionings” but people in every nation mature enough and develop a human consciousness free from the instinctive conditioning.
As we “globalize” what becomes clear is that we are all human beings with very different “instinctive conditionings” and that in as much as those behaviors confront our mutual understanding of “the human” we will continue to go to war.
Globalization is meaning that the national practices are confronted with universal practices. The individual is confronted with the human. Societies are confronted with the “universal”.
There are sound fears that “globalizing” will do away with national identity and that is certainly a possibility but at the other end of the spectrum is also the possibility of a mature human consciousness that will give new force and meaning to the particularities of each nation.
The tendency of globalization to implant a neo-liberal status quo the world around is presently being deeply questioned by the Tunisian and Egyptian, by the “shock of consciousness” that Wikileaks detonated.
Wikileaks has brought home the fact that we are now capable of communicating world-wide and that people everywhere who think alike can act together to question power. It is a very great evolution, not revolution, because we are not “revolving” with it. We are evolving. The consciousness that Speech and its Freedom are essential to the human being is one of the greatest steps for an “evolving” society. In as much as we are mirrors to each other we need to be able to “communicate”. Where there is communication there is “community”. “Community” as I understand it, is a social order that guarantees the healthy development of each of its participants in which a human being does not simply “function” but exercises his and her WILL.
To exercise one’s will does not just mean to do what one likes. The Will of a human being is not limited to an individual’s personal life for a human being is not separate from his or her society, the rest of the universe or mankind as a whole. Each human life exercises its will in five different dimensions:
The personal
The family
The social
The national
The universal
In the purely personal realm, a human being is just a fifth of his or her potentialities. The family, the social, the national and the universal act on him and her and they on them consciously or unconsciously, throughout life. Each realm has its own dynamics and they all interact in particular ways transforming each other.
Human beings, like animals, can align themselves in a society or live independent from society to a certain extent according to the “nature” in which they are to survive as much as the particular inclinations.
The hierarchic status quo of animal societies is purely instinctively conditioned to mechanisms of survival. Animal societies do not live to create but to reproduce. Animals have a purely instinctive “will”. They have basic necessities to satisfy in order to survive. Human beings have the same basic necessities that animals have in relation to their physical survival on planet earth, but besides an instinctive realm and function, in which the whole of medicine, nature and food can be placed, the human being has a dimension of movement with which we sculpt, construct, model, design from clothes to cathedrals, from huts to palaces; A moving realm with which we build bicycles, cars, planes and spacecraft. We transform the physical “nature” of our surrounding and adapt it to our inner whims.
Besides a “moving” dimension, the human being has an emotional dimension that allows us to feel the world; To “see” the world with our heart. To experience essential sympathy and antipathy and mature both into what is positive and negative for evolution.
The intellectual dimension of the human being has its own characteristics. We “think” but we only really think when we are mature enough to do so. In the meantime the mind adapts to the general current of thought, adapts and justifies one’s acts and behavior according to the conditioned structure. “Thought” can be “worked on” like the body can be exercised and the heart “purified”.
The sexual realm of the human being is used for reproduction like in animals, but it is also the supplier of “life energy” for creative purposes.
All these dimensions of a human being are and can be conditioned by society like nature conditions animal behavior. All human beings, in as much as they live a life strictly geared towards instinctive survival, reproduction and death live purely “instinctive” lives. They can “eat”, “work”, “love”, “think” and reproduce and never for a second experience more than a purely instinctive life.
“LIFE” in a human being is much more than instinctive survival. Evolution implies the development of “individual” as much as “social” will. The will as a quality of the “self” in the individual and a quality of the “people’s will” in society, is a “creator”. It is in the Will that people come to love, question or confront each other. It is “I” who stand with or against you, “I” who decide whether I move closer to you or separate from you, “I” who will my body, heart and mind to come into harmony with your “self” or turn against it. What people everywhere do depends on their will and their will depends on their consciousness.
“Consciousness” is the main characteristic of the “I”. It is the “state of consciousness” that prompts individuals to act and react in particular ways in similar situations. What then is “consciousness?”
Re: “What then is “consciousness?””
recognize firstly that there are different ‘consciousnesses’ — the consciousness of a protozoa is different than that of a plant, the consciousness of a plant is different than that of an earth worm, the consciousness of an insect is different than that of an that of a vertebrate, which is different than the consciousness of a planetary body… you get the point. but assuming your question here is asked in terms of “human consciousness” — i.e. “what is HUMAN consciousness? ” the self-reflective quality has to be considered foremost– the implications (and results), of an abilty for self-reflection defines humanity, it is through this ability that the human being is most human and humane, it is through self-reflection that the human being approaches the infinite, it’s what makes humans human… or conversely, something less than human if the ability for self-reflection is impaired, atrophied or otherwise undeveloped, or mis-guided, ignored, etc.
this could be of interest….
http://www.gaiamind.org/Gebser.html
part of an essay by georg feuerstein on jean gebser about the shifting of human “consciousness” —
Hi Ton, thank you for this, it is of great help.
THE PRIMORDIAL LEAP AND THE PRESENT: THE EVER-PRESENT ORIGIN – AN OVERVIEW OF THE WORK OF JEAN GEBSER
by Ed Mahood, jr.
Opening remarks
The German author Jean Paul Ricther once wrote, “What has puzzled us before seem less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.” This seems a fitting motto for our investigations into one of the least understood areas of human knowledge: consciousness. There has been a great wave of interest in this area in recent years, but it is clear that as much as has been accomplished all the more there is yet to do.
Before anything else, we need to come terms with the word itself, not in any final sense, but as a first approach to the matter. What is consciousness? Is it our emotions, our intelligence? Is is equivalent to the term ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘gnosis’? Does it have anything in common with these terms? Is it a separate and distinct phenomenon or is it embedded in nature and experience (whatever these may be)? When we discover what it is, will we really recognize it? The choice of starting point will seriously impact where we arrive in the end.
Our purpose here is to become acquainted with Jean Gebser’s seminal work, The Ever- Present Origin [1]. To this end, it would be helpful at the onset to gain a little background on Gebser’s life and work, which, in turn, should help us overcome the intellectual inertia present is such a task. This brief paper, then, is comprised of several parts: first, a quick biographical sketch of the author; second, a summary introduction to the work, focusing on Gebser’s approach, third a closer look at each of the structures in exemplary detail; fourth the introduction of two key notions for understanding Gebser’s work, systasis and synairesis; then, finally, a brief summary.
Biographical background
Jean Gebser was born August 20, 1905 in the Prussian town of Poznan (which is now a part of Poland). His lineage dates back through an old Franconian family that had been domiciled in Thuringa since 1236. His uncle was the German Chancellor von Bethmann- Hollweg and on his mother’s side he was a descendent of Luther’s friend Melanchthon. He came into this world at an auspicious time to be sure. Five years earlier, Freud had published his groundbreaking work, The Interpretation of Dreams, that was to form the foundations of psychoanalysis and change the course of the study of psychology. In the very year of his birth, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity that was to have a significant impact on Gebser’s thinking as well as on the world of science as a whole. Max Planck, the great German physicist was promulgating his quantum theory; and Edmund Husserl, a then unknown Austrian philosopher, published his Logical Investigations which were to become the foundation of one of the most influential schools of philosophic thought in the 20th century, namely phenomenology. This was also a time of a great occult revival as well, for the primary rosicrucian organizations that are still operating in the United States, for example, were incorporated around this time as well.
Gebser’s father was a lawyer of some renown; his mother a whimsical, self-seeking beauty many years younger than her husband. He grew up, then, in an educated and cultured environment. Difficulties between his parents drove him inward and he instinctively turned toward literature as his medium of discovery; this was especially true after his father’s death in 1922. Being forced to interrupt his studies upon his father’s death, he spent two years in an apprenticeship in a bank, a task that he disliked severely. A year after beginning this training, however, he and a friend started at literary magazine called the Fischzug, where his first poems were published. In Berlin at the time, and at least a part-time student, he listened to many of the renowned faculty teaching at the university there. Among these was the Catholic philosopher Romano Guardini whose depth of knowledge and spirituality left an indelible impression upon Gebser. During this time he also discovered the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke which had a tremendous impact on his thinking. It was during his Berlin years, however, that he first confronted suicidal despair and the realization that he must venture out into the world in order to find himself. The appearance of the first Brown Shirts in Munich provided him with the reason he needed to leave Germany.
The first stop on his journey was Florence, where he worked for a while in a second-hand bookstore. It was here that he came to the realization that all the books he read had never taught him how to live, hence he began a more active quest toward fulfillment. He tried Germany again, but bade it a final farewell in the Spring of 1931, first going to Paris and then on to Southern France. It was here that he changed his German first name “Hans” to the French “Jean.” Following the footsteps of Rilke, Gebser moved to Spain. He managed to learn the language and obtain a position in the Ministry of Education, in fact, and made friends with many prominent Spaniards, among them Federico Garcia Lorca. Gebser also published a volume of translations of some of these newer Spanish poets. It was in Spain that Gebser first conceived of the ideas that would later take form in his works, Decline and Participation and, of course, The Ever-Present Origin. Shortly before his home in Madrid was bombed in 1936, he managed to flee from Spain. Gebser settled in Paris and made the acquaintances of many of the notable French artists and intelligentsia of the day, including Pablo Picasso. He was involved in writing and literature for the most part, translating Hölderlin’s poetry into Spanish and some of his Spanish friends’ political essays into German; he also produced some of his more minor works. Two hours before the Germans sealed off the borders to France, Gebser again managed to flee, this time to Switzerland, where he would reside from then on. These years were the most productive for Gebser, although life still was not easy for him. He supported himself by freelance writing for the most part, but it was in Basel that he befriended Carl Gustav Jung, at whose institute he also taught for many years. In 1949/1950, his efforts culminated in the publishing of The Ever-Present Origin, his most profound statement regarding the unfoldment of consciousness in man. Throughout all of Gebser’s writings we find him wrestling with this subject, trying to find real answers to the important questions in life, such as “Who am I?,” “Where do I come from?” and “Where am I going?” This work is an answer to all these questions on behalf of us all. During the remainder of his life, Gebser taught, traveled, wrote and lectured. Each subsequent publication elucidated and illuminated various aspects of his most fundamental theme, the evolution of consciousness. He had come into his own and enjoyed a certain, yet modest, renown for his work. On May 14, 1973, Jean Gebser passed through transition, as Feuerstein describes it, “as his death mask bears witness, with a soft and knowing smile.”[2]
The approach
Ancient mythology informs us that the destruction of worlds is accompanied by catastrophic circumstances. Wherever we look today we see evidence of impending catastrophe. Would it be wise to deduce quickly then that our world is coming to an end? Maybe, maybe not. We definitely know that something significant is impending. Many of us feel it, we intuit it; and we are seeking confirmation for this working hypothesis. But where can we find it?
Certain support for this notion of earth-shattering change can be found in the works of Jean Gebser, so it is here that I should like to devote our attention in this presentation. Gebser is not a psychologist, economist, or scientist, in a more narrow sense, but is perhaps best characterized by the concept of Kulturphilosoph, a German term that literally means “cultural philosopher.” A student of literature, poetry, psychology and science, Gebser brings a unique combination of talents to bear upon the subject of his investigation: the unfoldment of consciousness. By better understanding the forces that are at work and our own role in this process, we can better hope to rise to the challenges that confront us so that our world truly becomes “the best of all possible worlds.” The fundamental premise of Gebser’s work is that we are on the threshold of a new structure of consciousness. Overall, Gebser describes four mutations, or evolutional surges, of consciousness that have occurred in the history of man. These mutations are not just changes of perspective, they are not simple paradigm shifts (although the word simple may seem inappropriate at this point); rather they are fundamentally different ways of experiencing reality. These four mutations reflect five separate eras of development that are not distinct and isolated from one another but are, instead, interconnected such that all previous stages are found in subsequent ones. Each of these stages is associated with a dimensionality, beginning with the geometric origin of zero and progressing to the fourth, the transition which we are experiencing at this time. Gebser identifies these five phases as the Archaic, Magical, Mythical, Mental, and Integral stages respectively.
Another key element of Gebser’s theory encompasses two fundamental concepts: latency and transparency. The former deals with what is concealed; as Gebser describes it, latency is the demonstrable presence of the future.[3] In this manner the seeds of all subsequent phases of evolution are contained in the current one. It is on the basis of this aspect that integration takes place. The second term transparency deals with what is revealed. According to Gebser, transparency (diaphaneity) is the form of manifestation (epiphany) of the spiritual.[4] This is perhaps the most important statement he makes. The origin, the source from which all springs, is a spiritual one, and all phases of consciousness evolution are a testimony to the ever less latent and ever more transparent spirituality that is inherent in all that is. Without a recognition of this fundamental and pivotal idea, Gebser cannot be understood and we will not be able to understand ourselves. It is not just an intellectual development that is being described in his theory, rather it is the ever more apparent manifestation of the spiritual that underlies and supports the concept of evolution itself. And finally, one further element must be mentioned. The manifestation of these structures occurs in a quantum-like, discontinuous leap, not in a slowly developing and changing framework as is postulated for Darwinian evolutionary theory, for example. There are overlaps in these structures in as far as different peoples and cultures may be manifesting different structures at the same time, but a clear development can be recognized and it is to be expected that all cultures will eventually go through the same process.
It would seem, then, that we are dealing with a kind of historical description of a linearly unfolding schema, but this would be a grave misinterpretation of his thesis and it does injustice to his approach. At first blush it would appear that Gebser is approaching his subject as we would expect any historian to proceed, but it must be emphasized that Gebser’s approach is quite deductive. We are presented at the very beginning with the model; later we are taken step-by-step through the ‘evidence’ which he believes supports the claim. Consequently, we find a number of historical, archaeological, and philological arguments presented that are not necessarily in keeping with generally agreed-upon theories in these disciplines. At times, these appear quite creative but this is most often a result of reading Gebser in a strictly intellectual and analytical manner. This is not to say that he should be approached uncritically, for he should be, yet the text itself is not a logical argumentation as one would expect to find, let us say, in a philosophical treatise. In accordance with his own model, he attempts to make of his book an example of the type of thinking one would encounter in the Integral structure of consciousness. It is not reasoned in a linear manner; in fact, the book would probably have been better suited to a hypertextual presentation. It would be some years, however, before this form of document would be developed so we are forced to deal with a non-traditional approach to a broader than usual subject that has been forced into a well-known and familiar medium: the book. Failure to recognize this idiosyncrasy can cause the reader untold difficulties from the beginning.
The consequences: A closer look
We should refine this general presentation, of course, and take a closer look, now at each of these structures, in turn. In this way we can perhaps come closer to an understanding of consciousness in general, but of Gebser’s approach in particular.
The Archaic structure of consciousness
The Archaic structure of consciousness is perhaps the most difficult to understand, for it is the one most removed from our present-day way of thinking. Stated succinctly, it can be likened to zero dimensional mentation, a world devoid of any perspectivity at all. It is a stated in which the holder of consciousness is perhaps only minimally aware of himself or his relationship to the world around him. According to Feuerstein, this structure denotes “a consciousness of maximum latency and minimum transparency.”[5] The term “archaic” as used here is derived from the Greek arce, meaning inception, or origin. Origin (or Ursprung, in the original German) is the source from which all springs, but it is that which springs forth itself. It is the essence which is behind and which underlies consciousness. As Gebser understands the term, “conscious is neither knowledge nor conscience but must be understood for the time being in the broadest sense as wakeful presence.”[6] This presence, or being present, excludes two further overpowering by the past (past-orientation) or any future-oriented finality. He writes:
At the origin, there is not past to overwhelm and the future is complete potentiality. Consequently, that which we understand to intuit consciousness to be is qualitatively different from this original structure. What hampers any investigation into it is the fact that we have no records, no written testimony, regarding it. It is a state that is swallowed by the primal shadows of a far-distant past. It is referred to in myths and legends, but these references are of a much later time. About all we can say in this regard is that within the Archaic structure the consciousness is quite undifferentiated; it is just there, and things just happen. Man is still unquestionably part of the whole of the universe in which he finds himself. The process of individuation of consciousness, in any sense of the word, has not taken place. This type of consciousness “can be likened to a dimly lit mist devoid of shadows.”[8] This is not consciousness in any sense that we understand it today. Instead, it can be likened to a state of deep sleep; one that eludes the specification of particularity or uniqueness.
The Magic structure of consciousness
Around some unspecified time far back in our past, a change took place. Man entered into a second phase of development and gained a new structure of consciousness, the Magical structure. This structure is characterized by five primary characteristics: (1) its egolessness, (2) its spacelessness and timelessness, (3) its pointlike-unitary world, (4) its interweaving with nature, and (5) its magical reaction to the world.[9] A rudimentary self- sense was emerging and language is the real product of this change. Words as vehicles of power are typical of this time and structure; incantations as precursors to prayer emerged. Consciousness, in this phase, is characterized by man’s intimate association with nature.
This is perhaps the most notable characteristic regarding this structure. Man, at this time, does not really distinguish himself apart from nature. He is a part of all that surrounds him; in the earliest stages it is hard to conceive that he views himself apart from his environment. The plants, animals and other elements of his surroundings share the same fate as he does; they experience in a similar manner. Latency is still dominant; little is transparent. Magic we can define in agreement with Gustav Meyrink as doing without knowing,[10] and it is magic man who is engaged in this activity in all aspects of his existence. The hunting and gathering, the quest for survival are all activities that consume most of his waking hours. But in the quiet of the evening around the fire; there is time for reflection of sorts. The activities of the day were codified (in speech) and recounted. Memory was collective, tribal, and all things were shared and experienced by all. The “I” is not a factor; the “we” is dominant.
This is a one-dimensional, pre-perspectival, point-like existence that occurs in a dream- like state. Unlike the dreamlessness of the previous structure, a recognition is developing in man that he is something different from that around him. Not fully awake to who he is or what his role in the world is, man is recognizing his self as an entity. The forms of expression for this structure can be found in the art and other artifacts that have been recovered from this time. Graven images and idols are what first come to mind. However, ritual should also be considered here, for it is in the specific and directed execution of certain actions and gestures that conveys much about this consciousness structure. Feuerstein feels that this structure persisted till around 40,000 BC and the advent of the Cro-Magnons.
Another feature of this structure that we should bring to mind is its spacelessness and timelessness. The idea that space and time are illusions derives from this stage in our development as human beings. The fact that this is one of the first lessons one learns when embarking upon the esoteric path is further evidence of this idea. To Magic Man, closely linked as he is with others of like mind, space and time need not concern him. In fact, I am not convinced that he would understand them anyway, for there is no need that he do so. Magic, however, is very much alive today, and it comes as no surprise (nor should it be) that there is such a strong interest in magic today. It seems that the fast growing branches of occult study seem to be Wicca (overlayed as it is with feminism) and similar earth magic(k) studies. What is more, it is the most vital and emotional of all structures. We live in very decisive times, potentially catastrophic times. This is a time when emotion rises near the surface of our consciousness and it is here that magic manifests itself. The proliferation of stories and films dealing with Voodoo and similar matters (e.g. The Serpent and the Rainbow) further substantiate our claim. Yet, this is not the only structure that seems to be making a comeback these days.
The Mythical structure of consciousness
With the advent of the Cro-Magnons, man became a tool-making individual, also one who formed into larger social structures. As Feuerstein points out, it is clear from the archaeological finds that the Cro-Magnons had evolved a symbolic universe that was religious and shamanistic. Part of this appears to have been a keen interest in calendric reckoning, and with it we may presume the existence of a fairly complex mythology.[11] This structure can be considered two-dimensional since it is characterized by fundamental polarities. Word was the reflector of inner silence; myth was the reflector of the soul.[12] Religion appears as the interaction between memory and feeling.[13] Man is beginning to recognize himself as opposed to others. The next 30,000 odd years or so spent developing these various mythologies. Language is becoming ever more important, it will be noted, and not only receptive, but active, language at that. Not the ear, but the mouth is important in making transparent what is involved in being and life. The mouth now becomes the spiritual organ. We witness, as well, the initial concretization of the “I” of man.
Many myths deal explicitly with man’s (unperspectival) separation from nature. Witness the story of the Fall in Genesis (and its admonition to go forth and dominate nature); and the myth of Prometheus and the giving of fire to man. These both indicate a strong awareness of man’s differentness from nature. Man is coming into his own, although he is anything but independent of it. One could characterize this as a two-dimensional understanding of the world. Within the circle of believers is where the important acts of life take place. The mere forces of nature have a beingness, often anthropomorphized, but a beingness nevertheless. Myth, then, or the mythologeme is the primary form of expression of this period. Subsets of this basic form would be the gods, symbols and mysteries. These figures provide the emerging consciousness with imaginative images around which to center man’s knowledge and understanding of the world. If the Magic structure of consciousness is the emotional aspect, then the Mythical structure is the imaginative one. It is this fact that makes mythology so difficult for us as moderns to deal with. The plethora of images (gods) and the seeming inconsistent pantheons of deities brings the rational mind quickly to confusion. Who can keep track of all these figures, their meanings, their correspondences and their associations. This is the time of the dream.
Up until this time, that is in the magical structure of consciousness, souls and afterlives were not of great importance (at least we do not find a lot of evidence thereof). Yet in the fully developed mythical consciousness, this is important. The entire civilization of Egypt, as we know it, revolved around this very issue. When we are told, then, in certain rosicrucian documents that we must descend into Egypt, we are being told that we must regain, not revert to, our mythical heritage.
Mouths begin to play a more important role. Not only is the shaman and wise person of the tribe a repository of wisdom, others, the poets, such as Homer, begin to play a more important role in the culture. This does not really begin to happen until the mythical structure of consciousness, however. The “I” of man is not yet fully developed, to be sure, but it has developed to that point that it recognizes and demands a separation from nature, from its environment. We can take this as evidence of an increasing crystallization of the ego. We are on the way to selfhood.
Of course, mythology is very much alive today. This explains the popularity of Joseph Campbell and his work on myth. It explains the appeal that Robert Bly and his “Gathering of Men” workshops have. What both Campbell and Bly do is tell stories: imaginative, intuitively understood stories that reveal to us things that our current rational mode of thinking prohibits us from knowing. We have much to learn from myth, however, and should be ever aware of its influences.
The Mental structure of consciousness
The next shift in consciousness took place between 10,000 B.C. and 500 B.C. This was the transition to the Mental structure of consciousness. It was at this time that man, to use Gebser’s image, stepped out of the mythical circle (two-dimensional) into three- dimensional space. Mythology had become so deficient (and it should be noted that each structure has its “efficient” as well as “deficient” form), that man needed a clean break with the past. The plethora of gods and contradictory stories of creation, formation of institutions, and so on threatened to overwhelm the consciousness of man; he practi- cally stood on the verge of drowning in a deluge of mythological mentation. In reaction to this, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and of course, Pythagoras stepped forth to counteract this trend. The mental structure was inaugurated and this coincides with the “discovery” of “causality,” Abstraction becomes a key word to describe mental activity and we find man using his mind to overcome and “master” the world around him. With abstraction comes philosophizing, hence the philosopheme is the primary form of expression. Monotheism almost universally replaces the plethora of gods of bygone days; dogma, in both allegory and creed, replaces the symbols of previous times; method replaces the mysteries as man develops an ever-increasing desire to penetrate, and, of course, master nature. This has given rise to the idea of science as the dominant religion of today. Also at this time, time itself was conceptualized (spatialized) as an “arrow” that points from the past to the future by way of the present.[14]
About the time of the Renaissance, man came into his own and really mastered space. It was at this time that perspective was actually introduced into art. Since that time, perspective has come to be a major part and aspect of our mental functioning. Perspective is the life blood of reasoning and the Rational structure of consciousness, which Gebser considers to be only a deficient form of the Mental structure. What we have is the full development of the ego and its related centeredness. We conceive things, events and phenomena in terms of our own perspectives, often at the expense of others. The eye, it will be seen (and the last of the openings in the head), becomes the spiritual organ representative of this structure. Our language, our entire imagery and dominant metaphor takes on visual, spatial character. Space is finally overcome, in the true sense of the word. With the supercession of space, man finally accomplishes his egoistic, individual separation from nature. In this concretization of the “I,” we become very aware of our existence, of our beingness, of our individuality. And so it should be. But in a deficient mode, the outcomes, of course, are loneliness, isolation, and alienation, which are so characteristic of our own American culture. In fact, our current materialistic approach to understanding reality is perhaps the final stage of this structure. There is also much everyday evidence to indicate that we are moving through a great change at this time.
We should remember, however, that this is also the time of philosophy. The mental ordering and systematization of thought becomes the real dominant mode of expression. The myths have lost their vibrancy and existential connection to reality. Greek thought followed later by the Scholastics and finally the Enlightenment are all periods in which this particular structure of consciousness flourishes and strongly manifests. It is not without its opposition, of course, since any change will bring about the requisite opposition to its own development. By the time of the Renaissance, though, this structure had firmly established itself and was prepared to move into the next phase of its development. At this time, as was pointed out earlier, a very profound and significant event occurred: man incorporated space into his thought. We cannot underestimate, or overstate, the importance of this development. It is literally at this time that the world begins to shrink. The seeds of our one world community are planted at this time. The ripples begun during the magical structure are widening significantly: first spirit, then soul, now space have become constituents of man’s consciousness. Three dimensions have been established and we are prepared for the next significant step we are taking now.
The Integral Structure of Consciousness
As can be guessed, then, Gebser feels that we are on the threshold of a new structure of consciousness, namely the Integral. For Gebser, this structure integrates those which have come before and enable the human mind to transcend the limitations of three- dimensionality. A fourth dimension, time, if you will, is added. This integration is not simply a union of seemingly disparate opposites, rather it is the “irruption of qualitative time into our consciousness.”[15] The supercession of time is a theme that will play an extremely important role in this structure. In fact, the ideas of arationality (as opposed to the rationality of the current structure), aperspectivity (as opposed to the perspective, spatially determined mentation of the current structure), and diaphaneity (the transparent recognition of the whole, not just parts) are significant characteristics of this new structure. Stated differently, the tensions and relations between things are more important, at times, than the things themselves; how the relationships develop over time takes precedence to the mere fact that a relationship exists. It will be this structure of consciousness that will enable us to overcome the dualism of the mental structure and actually participate in the transparency of self and life. This fourth structure toward which we are moving is one of minimum latency and maximum transparency; diaphaneity is one of its hallmarks. Transparency is not a “not seeing” as one does not see the pane of glass though which one looks out a window, rather one sees through things and perceives their true nature. Statements about truth are superseded by statements as truth. Verition not description is what we experience and know. Philosophy is replaced by eteology; that is, the eteon, or being-in-truth.[16]
This structure is difficult to describe since it depends to a great deal on experience, not just that we have them, but on how intense they are and what we glean from them for now and the future. Intensity is a key characteristic of this mode of consciousness. By intensity, I do not mean simply an emotional relationship to experience or the feeling or deepening of emotion itself. This would be a magical response not an integral one. Perhaps it would be best to review a few examples of what is meant by fourth dimensionality, arationality and aperspectivity.
Let us start with intensity and use the analogy of love. Love is the energy (yet it has only recently been referred to as such) or the driving force behind true spirituality and spiritual growth. We learn early as mystics and students of the other arts, that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. This is, in fact, one of the two great commandments given us by the Christ and the theme of Love is one that was very strongly developed by the great apostle, Saint Paul, as well. However, it is easy to love those who are our neighbors (even though at times they are exasperating) because they are so much like us. We recognize ourselves in them and so we love them. The affinity of interests, locale, or any other of myriad possibilities makes loving those who are like us a joy. We fulfill our spirituality by adhering to this commandment; it is a yoke that we gladly bear. Nevertheless, this love is a three-dimensional love at best. We love those who fit neatly into our perspectives of being and life. We choose who they are and when and how often we extend that love to them. An integral love, a fourth dimensional love, though, would go beyond that. The Christ also informed us of what that love is when he admonished us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. It is this love that is intense for it is required without asking our opinion (our point of view, our perspective) of it. This is the love of Judas. This is a demanding love that not many are willing to offer.
Gebser’s Eteology
Each structure has had its “method” even if it was not characterized as such. Magic and the ritualistic invocation of other powers is a method, whether we recognize it as such or not. Visualization and mystical contemplation is also a method of knowledge acquisition and it served a useful and valuable purpose at one point in our development. In the transition from Mythical to Mental, however, a rejection of previous method arose, particularly in our now deficient, Rational structure. This was part of a natural process, I believe, for the rational cannot tolerate anything other than itself. This in no way negates the value of the mental approach for the scientific method has proven to be a very useful, albeit limited, way to garner knowledge. But, just as the scientific method became the predominant means of acquiring and evaluating knowledge in the Mental structure of consciousness, a new structure demands a new method. This is the dynamic aspect, then, of Gebser’s approach. Two notions characterize this methodology and both are newly coined terms: systasis and synairesis, and it is upon these that we will focus our attention in this section.
Systasis and Synairesis
It is difficult to separate these concepts for they are intimately related to one another. What is more, such an artificial separation is indicative of a mental-rational approach, to which we are trying not to fall prey. It should be remembered that the analytical separation demanded of this approach ultimately ends in death, and it is life, the birth of a new method, that we seek. The method which Gebser describes is predicated on the idea of the eteologeme which was introduced earlier. It is this “being-in-truth” which lies at the heart of his approach. Up until now, particularly within the scientific community, the necessary, sometimes forceful, separation of subject and object has been required. It is this dualism that must be transcended if we are to arrive at a more comprehensive, intensive understanding of the world around us and ourselves. Consequently, Gebser’s approach should not be considered the building of a system in our current understanding of the term, for such would also be a product of a three-dimensional mentality.
But, the question arises, “What lies beyond system?” And to answer this particular question, Gebser coins a neologism to describe his approach, namely systasis, which he defines as, if you will, “the conjoining or fitting together of parts into integrality,”[17] “a process whereby partials merge or are merged with the whole.”[18] This is a subtle and difficult concept to understand completely and in all its ramifications. It has in common with system building that the end result is a greater or better comprehension than at the outset of the process. System, however, deals always with parts, not with the whole. Also, system deals primarily with the product rather than the process. Gebser goes on:
[Systasis’] acategorical element is the integrating dimension by which the three- dimensional spatial world, which is always a world of parts, is integrated into a whole in such a way that it can be stated. This already implies that it is not an ordering schema paralleling that of system. We must especially avoid the error of considering systasis — which is both process and effect — as that which is effected, for if we do we reduce it to a causal system. We must be aware that systasis has an effective character within every system. Systasis is not a mental concept, nor is it a mythical image (say) in the sense of Heraclitus’ panta rei (“all things are in flux”), nor is it a magic postulation of the interconnection of everything to and with everything else. And finally, it is not integral, but integrating.[19]
Or as Feuerstein phrases it, “Systasis, in contrast to systematization, deals with the proper ‘arrangement’ of intensities (rather than quantified ‘extensities’).”[20]
What, then (to express it in mental rational terms), is the aim of this method. We have spoken of increased understanding, of more complete comprehension, but these are only approximations. It is here that Gebser introduces the second of this important pair of notions, namely synairesis “which is an integral understanding, or perception, of reality.”[21] More specifically, Gebser notes,
Synairesis comes from synaireo, meaning “to synthesize, collect,” notably in the sense of “everything being seized or grasped on all sides, particularly by the mind or spirit.”[22] Whereas synthesis is a logical-causal conclusion, a mental (trinitary) unification of thesis and antithesis (and falls apart because it becomes itself a thesis as a result of the dividing, perspectival perception), synairesis is an integral act of completion “encompassing all sides” and perceiving aperspectivally.[23]
And again:
The synairesis which systasis makes possible integrates phenomena, freeing us in the
diaphany of “a-waring” or perceiving truth from space and time.[24]
This freedom from space and time is an important notion in Gebser’s entire approach, not just in his method. It will be remembered that one of the key features of this approach is its incorporation of the notions of latency and transparency. What has passed is not dropped and forgotten (although this is what the mental-rational structure of consciousness tempts us to do), rather it is incorporated into our mentation as effective elements thereof. As Feuerstein has pointed out, “it is this insight into the continuing presence and efficacy of the past that distinguishes Gebser’s model of the unfolding of human consciousness from other similar attempts.”[25] I would hasten to add that it is the equal efficacy of the future that rounds out and completes Gebser’s poignant insight. Feuerstein writes,
And that [synairetic] perception, or “verition,” occurs on the basis of the integration of archaic presentiment, magical attunement (or what Gebser calls “symbiosis”), mythical symbolization, and mental-rational systematization in the integrative act of arational systasis. Here it is important to remember that all structures are co-present (and co- active) in us and hence need not be invoked through historical imagination.[26]
Not being bound by merely past or future is a theme that has permeated much of our discussion of Gebser thus far. This time- and space-free approach introduces a further dimension to our ability to perceive and state:
By introducing systasis into simple methodology, we are able to evince a new “method” which is not longer three-dimensional. This new method is four-dimensional diaphany; in this what is merely conceivable and comprehensible becomes transparent. Diaphany is based on synairesis, on the eteological completion of systasis and system to an integral whole, for integrality is only possible where “temporal” elements and spatial magnitudes are brought together synairetically. The concept which makes possible the “comprehension” or, more exactly, the perception of the “temporal elements” is that of systasis. If we also take into account the systatic concepts, the mere methodology of systems is intensified to synairetic diaphany; and this must be achieved unless we are to remain caught in the three-dimensional scheme of thought.[27]
In its supercession of three-dimensionality, Gebser’s method firmly entrenches the observer in the process of perception and “waring.” This grounding, if you will, is described by Gebser through the term “concretion,” “the integrative act by which otherwise merely abstract proposition are anchored in actual life.” Consequently, this approach is immanently practical, yet does not fall prey to the weaknesses of pragmatism, namely its relativism and short-term expediency. It demands that the observer be as aware of his own role in the process as being aware of the process, and its results themselves.
The integrator, then, is compelled to have not only concretized the appearances, be they material or mental, but also to have been able to concretize his own structure. This means that the various structures that constitute him must have become transparent and conscious to him; it also means that he has perceived their effect on his life and destiny, and mastered the deficient components by his insight so that they acquire the degree of maturity and equilibrium necessary for any concretion. Only those components that are in this way themselves balanced, matured, and mastered concretions can effect an integration.[29]
The means of knowing and knowledge itself become integral aspects of Gebser’s methodological approach. The mere illumination of what was not previously known and understood, that is philosophy, must then yield to eteology, or being-in-truth. “The Greek word eteos means ‘true, real’; as an adverb, eteon means ‘in accord with truth, truly, really’ and comes from the root se:es, meaning “to be.”[30]
Eteology
It is the comprehensiveness of this term that has brought us to choose it as the prime means of describing Gebser’s approach. The new structure of consciousness to which we are transitioning demands new means, new processes, and new methods. It should be repeated that this ushering in of the new in no way indicates or dictates a discarding of what has come before, far from it. We must keep in mind that it is the activity and presence of the past that distinguishes Gebser’s approach from others. Supercession does not mean invalidating; replacement in this context intimates an intensification rather than a nullification. Nevertheless, the inevitability of this transition should be recognized as well. This particular term best illustrates this new way of understanding. Eteology is then a new form of statement. But it should be noted:
We are speaking advisedly of “forms of statement” here and not of forms of representation. Only our concept of “time” is a representational form, bound — like all forms of representation — to space. The search for a new form of representation would give rise to the error of establishing a new philosopheme at the very moment that philosophy of an individual stamp is over. What is necessary today to turn the tide of our situation are not new philosophemes like the phenomenological, ontological, or existential, but eteologemes.
Eteology must replace philosophy just as philosophy once replaced the myths. In the eteologemes, the eteon or being-in-truth comes to veracity or statement of truth, and the “wares” or guards verity and conveys the “verition” which arises from the a-waring and imparting of truth. Eteology, then, is neither a mere ontology, that is, theory of being, nor is it a theory of existence. The dualistic question of being versus non-being which is commensurate only with the mental structure is superseded by eteology, together with the secularized question as to being, whose content — or more exactly whose vacuity — is nothing more than existence.
Every eteologeme is a “verition,” and as such is valid only when it allows origin to become transparent in the present. To do this it must be formulated in such a way as to be free of ego, and this means not just free of subject but also free of object; only then does it sustain the verity of the whole. This has nothing to do with representation; only in philosophical thought can the world be represented; for the integral perception of truth, the world is pure statement, and thus “verition.”[31]
We can see, then, that this approach places great demands upon us all. It is not sufficient to merely describe or approximate, rather we are required to show what is in its fullest essence. This has, I believe, far-reaching ramifications for science and its allocation of recognition and funding. The actual contribution of knowledge, its freedom from the constraints imposed upon the researcher due to fiscal, economic, academic or political reasons must all be let go in favor of a direct, revelation of truth. This will not be an easy task for many, especially those who are bound to what is “right” as opposed to what is “true.” We see this reflected in all aspects of our societal lives. Eteology is an approach of liberation.
It will be noted that we have not attempted a systematization of criteria and measures that are to be used in our subsequent evaluations. This would be out of step with the free-form nature of the approach described thus far. Yet Gebser does not leave us without assistance in this regard. He provides a list of key terms that will assist in identifying the themes and motifs of the aperspectival world, and these are:
The whole,
integrity,
transparency (diaphaneity),
the spiritual (the diaphainon),
the supercession of the ego,
the realization of timelessness,
the realization of temporicity,
the realization of the concept of time,
the realization of time-freedom (the achronon),
the disruption of the merely systematic,
the incursion of dynamics,
the recognition of energy,
the mastery of movement,
the fourth dimension,
the supercession of patriarchy,
the renunciation of dominance and power,
the acquisition of intensity,
clarity (instead of mere wakefulness),
and the transformation of the creative inceptual basis.[32]
Summary
The focus here has been Gebser’s approach to understanding the unfoldment of human consciousness. The first part dealt exclusively with the model examining each of Gebser’s structures of consciousness in turn: the Archaic, Magical, Mythical, Mental, and Integral. We saw the Archaic structure could best be described as a zero- dimensional, non-perspectival world which could be likened to a state of deep sleep. It was characterized by non-differentiation and the total absence of any sense of separation from the environment. This was a world of identity between self and surroundings; not a world in which we could speak of consciousness in any terms that would be meaningful to our modern understanding of the term. By contrast, the Magical structure was characterized by a certain separateness, but not a total separation by any means. Dimensionally this could be described as one-dimensional; a pre-perspectival state of timelessness and spacelessness. It was likened to a state of sleep. Magic man was much a part of his environment, to be sure, and felt secure only within his group, his tribe or clan. It was the transition from the Archaic to Magic structure of consciousness that has probably been mythologically captured in the story of the “Fall of Man.” The clothing of knowledge in myth is what characterized the transition to the Mythical structure of consciousness, the two-dimensional, unperspectival state of consciousness that can best be likened to a dream. Imagination and attunement with natural rhythms became important factors in man’s life. The separation begun in the Magic structure reaches a tensional climax in the Mythical. This structure is superseded by the Mental structure, whose appearance coincides with the rise of Greek civilization. In this regard, it can be seen that modern thought disregards a good deal of mankind’s history, for it is to the Greeks that we most often trace our intellectual roots. By comparison, the Mental structure of consciousness is a three-dimensional, perspectival world that we described with the term wakefulness. The polar tensions of mythology are replaced by the analytical separation of duality and opposition. Thinking is primary, and in its latter phase rational thinking is primary. But this structure, too, is yielding to a final mutation which Gebser identifies as the Integral structure of consciousness. This is described as a four-dimensional, aperspectival world of transparency. This is a time-free, space-free, subject- and object-free world of verition.
Finally, we examined the methodological aspects of Gebser’s approach. Here, three fundamental notions were involved: systasis, synairesis, and eteology. The first term, systasis, best describes Gebser’s approach. It was seen that systasis goes beyond mere synthesis, which is a mental-rational concept, to achieve a total integration of all parts simultaneously. Synairesis was the means of achieving the end just described. It emphasized the how of such total grasping, namely by the mind or spirit. It is synairesis that enables us to achieve the transparency that is indicative of the Integral structure of consciousness. Finally, eteology replaces philosophy as the way of knowing and acquiring knowledge. Eteology becomes the statement of truth in lieu of the philosophical statement about truth. We saw that this approach goes beyond the limitations of space- and time-perception to a complete and liberating understanding of the whole. It should be noted that this transition is in process; it is not yet a completed act.
Endnotes
[1] Jean Gebser, The Ever-present origin (Authorized translation by Noel Barstad with Algis Mikunas. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986).
[2] Georg Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness: The genius of Jean Gebser ­p; An introduction and critique. (Lower Lake, CA: Integral Publishing, 1987), p. 32.
[3] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 6.
[4] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 6.
[5] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 51.
[6] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 42.
[7] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 43.
[8] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 57.
[9] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 61.
[10] Gustav Meyrink, Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster(Bremen: Schuenemann, n.d.),
p. 426, as quoted in Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 60.
[11] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 75.
[12] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 79.
[13] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, pp. 87f.
[14] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 98.
[15] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 130.
[16] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 309.
[17] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 310.
[18] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 292, Note 4; see also Feuerstein, Structures of
Consciousness, p. 194.
[19] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 310.
[20] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 194.
[21] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, pp. 194-195.
[22] Menge-Güthling, Griechisch-deutsches Wörterbuch(Berlin: Langenscheidt, 281910),
p. 542.
[23] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 312, Note 5.
[24] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 311.
[25] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 192.
[26] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 195.
[27] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 334. It is also interesting to note that Arthur Young
develops his Geometry of meaning (Mill Valley, CA: Richard Briggs, Associates,
1976) on an increase of dimensionality as well. Although approaching the matter from quite
different perspectives, their conclusions are remarkably similary in many regards. The
notion of dimensionality, therefore, may be more fundamental than we generally suppose.
[28] Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness, p. 198.
[29] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 99.
[30] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 312, Note 4.
[31] Gebser, Ever-present origin, p. 309.
[32] Gebser, Ever-present origin, pp. 361-362.
Copyright © 1996 by Ed Mahood, jr. All rights reserved.
Ed Mahood, jr., PhD, MBA
Synairetic Research
PO Box 111504
Campbell, CA 95011-1504
email: bookworm@slip.net
germaniac@juno.com
I had posted these posts in the other blog in the past few days which are related to the subject. I don’t have time right now but the framework of Gebser’s outline is wonderfully helpful, I’ll look at it in detail soon. Thank you again Ton.
The Humana Being – Consciousness and the mind 3
We rarely dare to talk about consciousness as if we had experienced it but I am convinced most people have experienced it but have not acknowledged it with their reasoning mind. There’s a great difference between consciousness and the mind. It would be interesting to try to clarify the differences betwe”en them.
The mind reasons. Consciousness Is. It doesn’t reason. It is another dimension in which reason cannot enter but reason can reason about consciousness which is very much what I’ve been trying to do. The mind exists within the dimension of time, thinking is an “organic process” subject to laws. Consciousness is not under the laws of time. Consciousness is an experience of eternity and yet eternity is a dimension within every human being even if we are not conscious of it. In relation to time, consciousness is timeless. In relation to people, there is no separation between us but “I” am no longer “X”.
The particular characteristics of Elena, John, Henry, disappear in consciousness and there is the “beingness” of the human. Consciousness is still a human dimension, a completely human dimension and yet a supra human dimension. In relation to space, there is none and yet everything is included within it.
No time, no space, no matter and yet it is more real than time, space and matter that are in a process of destruction. Ah, this is important. Without consciousness we don’t realize that life is in fact in a process of destruction: We die. We live to die. But the problem is that we’ve “killed” death. We are convinced in our materialistic times, that death is the end, that there is no life after death and life is just a particular process in the life of the spirit.
I’ll continue later…
Posted by elena at 08:50 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: The Humana Being – Consciousness and the mind 3
FRIDAY, 28 JANUARY 2011
On Chomsky’s lecture
Noam Chomsky’s lecture is not complete unfortunately but it elucidates very well how nations function very much like cults do with a few on the top, another few in the middle watching over the many and all “rights” reserved for the top. It is absurd to see these phenomenon only from the point of view of economy, we need to be able to see these processes from the point of view of consciousness. Everything is “right” according to the particular level of consciousness acting it out. What needs to change is not only the physical order that conditions our lives but the consciousness that is conditioning our lives in such a way. From the point of view of America, expansionism, imperialism, domination is right for its ego-centric-ness, it has moved the world in particular ways and many of them are very positive, it’s the dark aspects of domination and exploitation that need to be addressed and modified without attacking the American people. THAT’s the difference: that what we need to agree on is on what is really more human? more conscious? And stand up to actualize THOSE realities everywhere without hurting each other further. War should not be necessary to change our level of consciousness, war delays the change in level of consciousness, it is a buffer to avoid the necessary effort to do what is right towards everyone’s well being but people should not avoid being firm enough for fear of dying.
Posted by elena at 15:55 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: On Chomsky’s lecture
The Human Being -Will and Consciousness- 2
Yesterday I stated that will depends on consciousness and that is not correct. What I was trying to say is that the direction that will takes depends on the level of consciousness. If the individual has a purely instinctive consciousness tied to the ego, it is impossible for him or her to act less selfishly. Consciousness is always consciousness of the Whole but most people have only experienced that “wholeness” a few times in our lives. To be so conscious of it that there is nothing separating one’s being to another’s is full consciousness. It is not difficult to know this, all systems of development have been saying so since we can remember but to actually experience it and practice it is a completely different matter.
What I think is important today is to bring the understanding of “wholeness” down to our practical lives and avoid the tendency to connect consciousness only to spiritual, religious experiences. At the service of power, religion has tended to keep the masses under control conditioning them to accept the status quo or justify their being put in jail for opposing it, arguing that violence is unacceptable to the law but the passive violence of the status quo guaranteed by the army is never measured. What I think is possible today, is to bring the consciousness of the whole, unity, into our lives and begin to understand why is it that we live and act as if we were enemies hurting each other or allowing some to hurt others were possible.
“Well being” is being well not only physically, but emotionally and the more harmony there is between one’s self and those around one, the stronger the feeling of “wellness”. The “wellness” of a baby with his mother could one day be measured as energetically healing for the baby. Each interaction between people has energetic repercussions on the well being of those involved.
One possible point of view of the phenomenon at hand is the realization that at the end of the stick of purely instinctive consciousness is a human being trapped in “possessing” the physical world. In that “frame of mind” the individual feels he has to “own” things. Right wing politics seems to be the clearest expression of such a mind frame. Left wing politics seems to have been able to understand that everything belonged to everyone but everyone belonged to the state and that didn’t work either. Today what is needed is a system in which the “authority” falls on each and every individual protected by definite rights and the government is in charge not of playing a hierarchic role of RULING the people but a Democratic role of SERVING the people. That sounds so different it’s almost unconceivable!
Every human being is in fact an authority. The problem with those in power today is that they are convinced that they are the authorities and must submit everyone else but consciousness does not allow for submission. Consciousness only allows for service. It is very different to serve others willingly than to serve others because one is submitted. Good. This gives us a clue to begin to understand how the different levels of consciousness determine the will.
Instinctive consciousness tied to the ego, the “ego-centric self” is fixed on owning the physical world as if that ownership could protect it from death. The more materialistic the individual the more attached to life and the physical aspects of life. Consciousness on the other hand is first and foremost consciousness of the transience of life itself and one’s physical being with it. Consciousness knows that the only thing it owns in the physical sphere is a short period of time. What one “has” does not matter nearly as much as what one “does” with it.
Studying people’s relationship to time is a very good way of understanding their fixation to the physical world. People in “power” tend to never have time for others below them, not even their family or friends but always seem to have time for those who they are trying to seduce. This is interesting because “teenage love” acts very much in the same way.
I’m thinking out loudly. So many things connect to each other, so many threads that I could pick on and follow but the exercise is more productive if I try to focus more closely.
Consciousness is conscious of US. The USA and its people too! It is conscious of the dimension in which all human beings exist just like an Italian is conscious of belonging to a particular nation. Consciousness is conscious of the “human dimension” in which not only people from different states but people from different nationalities belong.
Every human being experiences that dimension in life most often when connected with the death of a loved one, witnessing suffering or experiencing it and also with profound joy.
We all have and live that dimension of consciousness but the current education and “savoir” (knowledge) have not helped us to acknowledge or understand what those experiences are about.
There is always the possibility of measuring one’s self with the “humane” and finding multiple areas of action in which one can improve.
Yesterday I also stated that:
Each human life exercises its will in five different dimensions:
The personal
The family
The social
The national
The universal
I think there is an earthly dimension before there is a universal dimension.
These dimensions probably follow the law of seven, I should be missing still another one but if I can formulate the connectedness between the social and the individual in a coherent way, I will have put in my grain of sand.
It’s a good thing that this is a work in process. The marvelous thing about the exercise of writing is that it helps one understand what one is even more than what one knows! It is as if words were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and one came to understand the picture one was trying to portray after moving them around and trying them out in different places. It is as if being able to put in words what is in one’s consciousness elevated one’s being into more physical firmness! The inner landscapes one is trying to portray are beautifully delineated when one manages to “color” them with words. Words are not the experience of consciousness but they are like brooms sweeping it out of the dust, brushes that help one polish it more clearly and actualize it in one’s reasoning.
As I talk about the “wholeness”, the “We are US” I realize how similar it sounds to the concept of God that people have in the best sense of the term. In the worst sense, the problem is that people have been taught that God is unreachable and that the pope and the guru and every figure of authority that wishes to submit them holds the power of God. When I experience “wholeness” I do not have the reasoning that it is God but “wholeness” but speaking about God I’ve often heard people say that “God is in everything”, that “God knows everything” and that is very much the experience of connectedness that I’ve had when I experience “wholeness”, “unity”.
Let me clarify then that I do not consider myself a spiritual leader or a leader of any kind. I have a rough time leading my own life to pretend to lead anyone anywhere but I do believe that we can share and that no matter how confused we are, we are still great, beautiful and divine human beings. I am one who is often confused and delighted at sorting out the confusion, struggling to actualize consciousness as I’ve experienced it, in my every day life.
We rarely dare to talk about consciousness as if we had experienced it but I am convinced most people have experienced it but have not acknowledged it with their reasoning mind. There’s a great difference between consciousness and the mind.
Posted by elena at 14:52 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: The Human Being -Will and Consciousness- 2
Noam Chomsky lectures on nation’s problems
Noam Chomsky lectures on nation’s problems
KRISTIAN SMITH, STUDENT LIFE EDITOR
Published: Wed Jan 26, 2011 | Modified: Wed Jan 26, 2011 08:02 a.m.
Tia Patron • The Daily Beacon
A large crowd consisting of students, faculty and the public wait in long lines in the Cox Auditorium lobby for the doors to open for the Noam Chomsky lecture on Jan. 25. The line eventually reached the new constructed sign for the Hill before the lecture was to start.
Topics presented to packed crowd included role of government, public relations
Renowned linguist, philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky spoke to a packed house Tuesday night.
An emeritus professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky opened the lecture by telling the audience he wanted to address “some serious problems we’re having here at home.”
“The guiding principle (for American government) is that as long as the public is under control, everything is fine,” he said. “(The traditional argument is) the powerful should gain ends by any possible means. As long as the public is kept under control, public will doesn’t matter.”
Chomsky referred back to this principle many times throughout his lecture and said it was the base of many of the nation’s problems.
He said the principle was a security threat to the U.S. and was at the root of both terror and the huge military budget that is strangling the economy.
“The military budget is half of the deficit,” Chomsky said. “The other half is the heavily privatized health care system. We would not have debt and might even have a surplus if we did not have (the health care system).”
Chomsky also discussed terrorism and the post-Sept. 11 United States.
“Bush said terrorists committed crimes because they hate our freedoms,” he said.
Contrary to this statement, Chomsky said that Muslims actually hate our policies, not our freedoms.
Chomsky said United States’ policies actually benefit Jihadists.
“The U.S. remains Bin Laden’s only ally,” he said.
Chomsky discussed the United States’ support of dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia, Georgia, Jordan and Colombia. He said this too falls under the “guiding principle.”
“A post-Sept. 11 poll showed anger because of U.S. support of dictatorships and blocking democracy,” he said.
Though Chomsky said the “guiding principle” was apparent in all aspects of government, he also said it could have very severe consequences.
“The most serious case is in Pakistan where there is a threat of radical Islamists getting a hold of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Chomsky said this “guiding principle” is not a recent thing, though.
“Throughout American history, there has been a constant struggle over who should control and who should obey,” he said. “The Founding Fathers were ambivalent about democracy.”
Chomsky added that James Madison, one of the framers of the Constitution, was concerned that if voters could determine policy, it would challenge the privileged.
“This is why he put the power in the hands of the Senate, whose primary task is to protect the opulent minority against the majority,” he said.
Chomsky also discussed the history of the labor movement and how it applies to issues today.
“The United States has a violent labor history,” he said. “The rallying cry of the late 19th-century labor movement was, ‘Those who work in mills should own them,'” he said.
Chomsky said this holds significance today, specifically with the automobile industry.
“Obama took over the auto industry, so the government owns it,” he said. “The government is closing plants when they could turn them over to the workers and let them run it for profit.”
He also discussed how history plays a role in today’s public relations and marketing industries.
“By World War I, the business class realized that because of new freedoms, it was impossible to control the public by force, so they need new means,” he said. “They tried to control of opinion and attitude to divert people from the public arena. This is why the public relations industry was started.”
Chomsky called elections today “public relations extravaganzas.”
“You don’t want to provide information about the candidates; that’s the last thing you want to do,” he said. “So you delude people with slogans.”
In regards to political parties, Chomsky said they have shifted sharply to the right.
“Democrats today are what used to be moderate Republicans, and today’s Republicans are so deep in the pockets of business, you have to have a magnifying glass to find them,” he said.
Chomsky also discussed tax cuts and their benefit to the wealthy.
“There has been a spectacular increase in wealth in the top 1 percent of the population,” he said. “The Bush tax cuts of 2011 were made to benefit the rich but were crafted so people would not realize what was happening.”
He said Social Security also plays into this.
“Social Security is actually in good shape, despite what you read,” he said. “The rich want to get rid of Social Security, because it is based on the principles of compassion and solidarity, and (the spread of these principles) could be dangerous for the rich.”
Students said they gained valuable insights from Chomsky’s lecture.
“I though he did a very good job of historically representing what has been covered up in this country,” Cori Kunberger, senior in psychology, said.
Chomsky ended his lecture with a question for the audience.
“Will we subject ourselves to the guiding principle?” he said.
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
“Love after Love” by Derek Walcott
Thank you for your participation Ton. Poetry too is welcome.
I’m very grateful to Ton for presenting this paper. Mr. Mahood’s synthesis of Gebser’s work is wonderfully useful, I should read Gebser himself soon to delight myself in his contribution to the understanding of consciousness.
There seem to be parallels between Gebser’s and Steiner’s approaches to the evolution of consciousness but I find Gebser’s very clear about the particular shifts, as if he had focused with even more detail on the particularities of each period.
I would like to approach the subject from here, I’ll simply write “Elena:” before I make a comment:
The Integral Structure of Consciousness
As can be guessed, then, Gebser feels that we are on the threshold of a new structure of consciousness, namely the Integral. For Gebser, this structure integrates those which have come before and enable the human mind to transcend the limitations of three- dimensionality. A fourth dimension, time, if you will, is added. This integration is not simply a union of seemingly disparate opposites, rather it is the “irruption of qualitative time into our consciousness.”[15] The supercession of time is a theme that will play an extremely important role in this structure. In fact, the ideas of arationality (as opposed to the rationality of the current structure), aperspectivity (as opposed to the perspective, spatially determined mentation of the current structure), and diaphaneity (the transparent recognition of the whole, not just parts) are significant characteristics of this new structure.
Elena: This is beautifully stated. _______End
Stated differently, the tensions and relations between things are more important, at times, than the things themselves; how the relationships develop over time takes precedence to the mere fact that a relationship exists. It will be this structure of consciousness that will enable us to overcome the dualism of the mental structure and actually participate in the transparency of self and life. This fourth structure toward which we are moving is one of minimum latency and maximum transparency; diaphaneity is one of its hallmarks. Transparency is not a “not seeing” as one does not see the pane of glass though which one looks out a window, rather one sees through things and perceives their true nature.
Elena: This too is wonderful. I would like to emphasize the idea that the tensions and relations between things are more important than the things themselves. How the relationships develop over time takes precedence to the mere fact that a relationship exists.
This fact is what can allow us to understand the idea of an objective reality that I’ve been working on before. The “objective reality” of the “thing itself” is one aspect and how the individual interacts with the “thing itself” is another. The “how” the interaction takes place is fundamental because it is determined by the level of being of the individual performing the “act” but even if the level of being of the individual performing the act is not very “conscious”, the act itself “sculpts” the individual’s being. There is a perfectly dynamic relationship between the individual and the object through the act. I don’t know that I would affirm that the tensions and relations between things are more important than the things themselves, everything is “important” but understanding the objective reality of each of the “things” that come into a relationship does not in any way take importance away from the relationship between them.
If for example, we take the act of eating, the objective reality of the individual is one aspect, the objective reality of food, another and the digestive process between them a third one. The process of digestion itself is as significant for the food as for the eater but it is even more significant if we can grasp the multiple dimensions that are being affected by the event.
In the purely instinctive dimension, a body is fed but there is no such a thing as a purely physical dimension. Human beings today hardly understand where matter comes from, how food exists, why carrots, apples or beans, what planets influence the making of such substances and how the Sun and the Earth itself actually play into their making. We also don’t understand in our full reasoning, how exactly each “ingredient” affects not only our physical self but the whole of our self. There is knowledge, a great deal of mental, rational knowledge about all these things but to be able to experience all these things through one’s consciousness is another matter. THAT is what all this is about. The limitations of the mind are such that the mental period of development has limited the extent of our reach as if we had cut our wings. Is it necessary for the human being to “learn” through our minds to be able to perceive through our “self”? Did coming down to Earth, the “Fall” mean that we had to taste the physical through the mind? Taste it to the point of intoxication? Destroy our selves in the unconsciousness of possession? Is it precisely because we are unconscious of the universality of our being that in the period of mental development we become “possessed” by “possession”, even though nothing physical that we’ll ever possess can be possessed longer than our short period of life? The fact that only a few in power posses what belongs to all precisely reveals the state of consciousness that conditions those facts. It is a state of consciousness in which the ego pretends to hold the “whole” through “physical ownership” but even the rich cannot avoid death and loose everything they own.
The shift into “integral” consciousness HAS to mean that the individual human being realizes that the race of “individualism” to own the planet for the few in power is simply self-destructive. To address only one example, the fact that although it is clear that the climate is being altered by the use and abuse of natural resources for the car industry, the businesses and governments related to it continue to pretend to exploit it to its full, even though millions of people are dying due to the “man made disasters” all over the world. It’s THAT lack of “integral” consciousness what determines the actions of these people. They are still fully tied to the mental consciousness tied to the physical plane in which what matters is the few who are “gaining” from the exploitation of resources.
Do I seem to have deviated from the subject of consciousness? If we cannot actualize our consciousness to our practical lives, then it is a consciousness that continues at the service of the mental stage that projects reality to fit its instinctive dimension through imagination. If we cannot actualize consciousness in our every day lives, we are simply in imagination. Consciousness cannot go back. “Instinctive” consciousness aimed at using the mental for personal satisfaction is a retrograde process in human evolution. People do not matter in that consciousness and that is exactly what we are seeing in capitalism. Capitalism justifies the death of no matter who or how many as long as those in power can “own” the goods. In “human” consciousness, people matter. In it, it doesn’t matter what is lost to save no matter how few.
This is what people didn’t understand in the fofblog: that people in the fellowship cult mattered more than the whole system of laws of the United States of America. That what is needed is to question the laws that legalize crime in no matter what institutionalized cult, corporation or agency. That laws that allow some people to abuse, exploit and psychologically annihilate people while still leaving them to function as slaves are not human laws. That people in every institution of our world today in which a few in power literally annihilate the rights of the many at their service are systematically abusing each and every individual’s rights as human beings. That in the “integral” period of consciousness, WE do not adhere to hierarchies of any kind to act on our own name and free will, that WE do not respect anyone above our selves, that WE respect everyone too much to belittle our selves or anyone else.
It is this consciousness what beats powerfully in the Tunisian and Egyptian and in the wikileaks phenomenon, We are shifting from the hierarchic order of things in which a few people submit others into the democratic order of things in which the majority submits itself to the law for the well being of the whole. But for that to happen we need a full reform of the laws so that governments SERVE the people instead of “dominate” them for an indefinite exploitation by the few.
It is a very great time what we are living today, it is a great privilege to be a witness to one’s times!
I need to go, I’ll check for corrections later.
? heard of the chinese curse?
may you live in interesting times…
From nowhere do we come, to nowhere do we go; we sort of rest in near-accomplished meaning. We think of this and that, yet that is part and pain; the world is world and glass and July or March, is open and not void, is origin, not beginning; from nowhere do we come, to nowhere do we go.
Jean Gebser 1974
an explication, a point of view:
despite the hubbub of everyday existence, its countless goals and projects, there is no progress… moving, we are not going anywhere. movement is an oddity which does not strictly fit rational categories of motion and rest…. “we sort of rest.” not going anywhere because we are not coming from anywhere, and vice versa. ordinary journeys have a starting point and a destination but at a deeper level of analysis, human life does not display linearity, even though the surface impression is that we are on the way from somewhere to somewhere. this belief is axiomatic to human civilization, we need to think that we are on some kind of a journey which has a beginning and an end. this is true even of tribal societies, though in their case the rational model of linearity is replaced with cyclical imagery befitting the mythic structure of consciousness.
from one point of view, our birth is a beginning and our death is an ending, but Gebser does not subscribe to the limited materialistic perspective of human life. what appears to the conventional mind as an entirely new beginning is, for him, merely a transition from one state to another–a re-birth. what the average individual of postindustrial civilization laments as a final end is only a gateway to the invisible realm, with its own regularities and laws. our life is more an infinite loop than a finite line connecting point A and point B… epistemologically, there is movement — “We sort of rest,” which also means: we sort of move. we are not entirely stationary, for this would imply nonexistence, but we are lso not actually progressing from A to B. Rather, our lives are embedded in the infinity of existence, which is the sum total of all possible points: A, B, C … Z.
the progress we tend to associate with our lives belongs to the province of meaning–the domain of the human mind…. thinking makes it so. unlike the great adepts of the East, we are not satisfied with resting in the presence of the “ever-present Origin”– but are forever seeking to conceptualize reality. this intellectual endeavor largely relies on the categories of space and time, which are the forte of the mental structure of consciousness. there is in reality only a “…. buzzing confusion,” to use William James’s words, but we construct a world that extends in space and endures in time. we project upon this construct all kinds of meanings–our personal and collective mythologies and models.
reality is larger than the semantic net we can cast upon it, and so our understanding changes and we find ever new ways of conceptualizing reality. there is no completion to this task, and thus our meanings are always only “near-accomplished.” intellect operates on the basis of categorization, or division. but reality, as the Upanishadic sages taught long ago, is neither this nor that–neti, neti. “This” and “that” pertain to the mind, to human thought…. but “this and that” is “part and pain.” partial experience of reality entails an element of suffering. the incompleteness of experience keeps the quest going. ken wilber called this the “Atman project,” the deep-seated impulse to wholeness, transcendence, perfection, and the unmediated realization (rather than mediated experience) of reality. we protest our finitude, or incompleteness.
civilization, is built upon a profound denial of death, yet, even while we deny death and long for perfect wholeness, we continue to look for it in the wrong place–namely in our conceptualized worlds. but those worlds, or creations, are makeshift arrangements that guarantee no fulfillment, on the contrary, they are as the Sufis put it, a veil of tears. all partite existence is painful: this is the intent behind the phrase “part and pain.” to desist from looking at the world through diverse intellectual spectacles even for a brief moment, we would discover reality as it is: “the world is world. . .” not what the intellect specifies it to be. it ceases to be a “hell hole” from which we must escape, just as it ceases to be a “Garden of Eden,” which we must cultivate.
gebser is not saying that the world lacks all determinate qualities . this would be absurd. He does not deny evolution or history. He does, however, claim that evolution and history are so overburdened with concepts that the realities for which they stand have become hidden from our view. when viewed from the Origin, evolution is neither development nor progress but the crystallization of what has been predetermined in the invisible dimension. strictly speaking, no labels apply to reality. gebser tries to express this almost surrealistically by saying that the world, as it is in itself, is “glass/and July or March.” this is an echo of the Zen statement that upon enlightenment the blue hills are simply blue hills. this nonconceptual world is transparent, is “glass.” when not wearing any semantic goggles, reality is crystal clear, murkiness is a feature of the mind that is not attuned to reality.
the transparent world is not merely empty but open, it is not an utterly featureless world of unsurpassable anonymity. when we truly see, then all distinctions manifest in the same strong light. openness suggests a situation where there is much light. heidegger spoke of a clearing in the forest of being, and this is perhaps a convenient metaphor in the present context. the Buddhist concept and spiritual realization of shunya, which is often translated as “voidness,” suggests a condition that is marked not merely by the absence of things but by a fundamental openness. talking about reality in this way, we are stretching the conceptual mind to its limits, and we can only understand these meanings if we allow ourselves to intuit them by stepping beyond the constraints of language. the world is not just the universe that mysteriously sprang into existence some five billion years ago. the actual world is the ever-present Origin, this implies that we are continuously immersed in the larger reality, which is also the claim of Mahayana Buddhism, even though we are generally not consciously in touch with it.
being out of touch with the ever-present Origin is precisely our dilemma, because it pushes us into partial experiences of reality and thus into the simultaneous experience of suffering (“pain”). but the fact that the Origin is not located in time but is ever-present gives us reason for optimism: we can transcend our partial experiences and come to a realization of the world as it is prior to all superimposed concepts. we can, to use religious language, enter the Kingdom of God, which is always at hand. this is the task before us as a result of the emergent integral structure of consciousness.
the above is from feuerstein on gebser — rich sources for questions regarding ‘consciousness.’ have fun!
http://www.democracynow.org/
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Long live the Public Squares of the world where we fight for freedom!
We will all die but some of us will die fighting for freedom while others will die hurting and allowing others to hurt many. Being passive before inhumanity is in itself inhuman.
FREEEDOM!! Freedom for the soul of the human being in its struggle for self determination in every nation and individual. FREEEEDOM!!
I salute the Egyptian and Tunisian people, you are opening roads that will help so many of us follow.
May my gratitude reach your hearts.
Hello Ton,
Congratulations for what seem changes in your understanding. Until quite recently you were insulting and questioning me for having an outlook on our oneness, wholeness or unity and you are now quoting a similar stand by Gebser
I guess the good thing about all struggle is that no matter how little the shift, it makes the effort worthy.
Interesting that you still seem unable to speak for your self and have to present other people’s words to speak, unable to communicate. How difficult is it really to actually be without fear? To dare to think and act for one’s self without fear of making mistakes, resolved to correct one’s self again and again whenever anyone is gracious enough to point out one’s weaknesses? To love with love and not the pain of having to hide behind made up excuses? To have to justify one’s self over and over again for no one else’s sake but one’s self, paying homage to justifications because one is unable to pay homage to the truth? The simple living truth of reality? You and I speaking to each other?
I have no idea who you’re trying to perform for but if you wish to write here please write from your heart and soul without fear like a friend and with love or don’t write at all. I am not interested in anyone who cannot acknowledge his own love for life, people and truth.
and you haven’t changed one iota…. why the animosity toward me elena? do you understand why you are so angry? and why do you feel you need to direct this anger at me? where does your rage reside elena? what purpose does it serve to direct it at me ? it would seem you’ve chosen me to be the enemy ? ! that will get you nowhere… only stuck… and that’s why you haven’t changed.
No Ton, I have not changed, I am still standing for everything you’ve been insulting and questioning against me for a long, long time, long before you had me banned from the fofblog for the second time. Since you haven’t changed either nor are you willing to apologize at any point in time although you seem to be changing your points of view, since you still seem to want to have your superiority act with me, hide behind other people’s words and cannot speak for your self on what is actually presented here, showing yourself as if you always had to have the upper hand on the questions without ever willing to actually dialogue directly about them and can’t ever acknowledge One of your many mistakes, what are you still doing here when you can clearly see that I am NOT willing to change what I’ve been standing on since I left the Fellowship cult?
find it in your heart dear elena,
to let go of these feelings…
Is THAT your hero? Why don’t you go talk to the angels Ton, then you can find your equals, like in the fofblog for example!!
Are we going to have your dear Elena act first and your lunatic hipocrite then or are you actually here to talk about what this blog is about? Talk Ton, not just quote people. Talk from your very own self, what YOU think, what YOU can dare to stand up for? Is it too difficult for you to understand that the public square of every city is for the people? You? Not your imaginary picture of you but you. Crying, screaming, walking, singing but you.
We’ve worked together long enough Ton and we haven’t gone anywhere, why do you want to insist? What are you here to further justify about your behavior? Not good enough yet for you?
Or is it that you still don’t understand that words don’t matter nearly as much as acts. How, why and to whom you speak? You come with your quotes and put them in the river like sail boats that you are unwilling to own, terrified that the wind might actually lift you up and take you away with them, confront your soul with its spirit and call on you to put your face to your words.
You still don’t understand me Ton. You don’t realize that my madness is upside down to yours, another extreme in the play of expressions but one willing to play itself in the arena with honesty unashamed to show the odds. I am not putting out little baits for the fools trying to convince them that the bait doesn’t hide the hunger behind the rod with a sophistication of a people that invested themselves in a world of appearances that they themselves can no longer touch.
How different are you to Robert Burton Ton? You even carry the Ton of the Burton, how casual! Is that the real problem for all of you in the fofblog to not actually finish the cult? That you all carry the man inside your selves? That you learnt his ways so well that you cannot bring your selves to stop him no matter how much harm you know he is doing? How did you convince your selves that the harm wasn’t harmful enough for you to stop it? That you had to convince yourselves that I was the mad one on the boat and not him and you who question him but support him?
I guess you don’t realize how similarly you behave to him, using language indirectly, placing quotes from the great people of the world in your mouth but avoiding to own them your self so that no one can ever confront you, touch you, love you but hold the imaginary picture up in reverence so that you don’t crumble down to the nothingness.
It is not that you are not as human as anybody else, you all are, Robert included. It is that you yourselves have stepped outside your own humaneness and actualize the inhumanity in each gesture, step and speech. You are unwilling to touch your own nothingness too afraid of its beauty for the nothingness of every human being is the fact that we are all equal, equally human with no one above anybody else and that is so infinitely beautiful.
You come back to this blog after running away when things became adverse to your play convinced that it is always the same, that nothing has changed and that I’ll put up with you again and again playing out the same trend only because you are incapable of acknowledging what is and has always been my case. We have a case and play ourselves around that case. What we are reveals itself in the way we move around it and our selves.
So I ask you, what are you here for Ton? Are you interested in the separation of state and religion? Cults? Is there anything of value here that you can address and talk about and establish a dialogue from your soul to my soul without patronizing me in any way? All dialogue is about sculpting each other’s soul. It is about respecting the other enough to submit to the sculpting. We trim each other with love when there is enough humaneness in the dialogue. But where there is no love or respect which is its consequent quality, there is no dialogue.
I don’t think there is love between us Ton. At least not enough for the kind of dialogue that I would like to carry out here. You come here after years of struggling with each other trying to justify yourself again and again and trying to convince me that I am a lunatic that deserved to be whipped out of the fofblog hoping that banning me would quiet your own souls. It doesn’t happen like that Ton. Language is more powerful than that. It rests in our hearts like water and penetrates no matter the buffers we try to impose on it.
You and the fofblog have been no different than the Fellowship cult. You institutionalized your selves and your mentality and justified your lack of action against the cult and banned me just like the Fellowship bans the people that it doesn’t agree with. So WHAT are you doing here?
I already know what you’ve come here for before. If you’re coming for the same agenda please be kind enough to turn around and leave through the same door you entered. If your agenda is different please state it so that I can consider it for I am no longer willing to give you the tolerance I’ve had with you before.
Thank you nevertheless for the opportunity to clarify myself about these issues, it is always good to actualize one’s present self!
Where did you leave this America Ton?
Or this one?
Think we’ll ever dance?
the songs we’ve shared in life?
why the continued attacks elena? is there no civility in you ? this is the type of behavior that got you banned at the fofblog…. but since you’ve created your own space here you can get away with whatever. elena, i know this is your blog and you know it’s your blog, but you say it’s ‘a public square’ — that’s false advertising, you can’t even accept that i visit here from time to time, i need a ‘reason’ !?! what, are you going to ban me again if i don’t present you with a ‘proper’ reason ? how’s this: we’re two old ‘friends’ and occasionally i like to check in to see what you’re up to… i’m a ‘casual’ observer who posts from time to time… is that a ‘good’ enough reason for you elena? or are you going to ban me again?
apparently you didn’t benefit from any new understanding by reading gebser, you might have been able to restrain the venom in your latest attack on me if you had learned anything from the gebser article… it might have dawned on you to realize that consciousness is without an object…. (your original question was about consciousness, right ?) one way gebser and feuerstein describe consicousness is that it’s without an object, but the individual and her experience fills it full of mind-stuffing, it’s this ‘conditioned’ mind and its’ responses which distort any potential clarity.
so elena, you ‘see’ in me what you ‘want’ to see and so i become a target for your hostility… you ‘saw’ in gebser what you ‘wanted’ to see, you filtered it through that silly slogan you keep repeating endlessly, as if repetition will make it more true… and that’s all you could get out of gebser ?! through a glass darkly…
elena, you rant and rail and rage against me every time i post here… why is that ? you banned me from posting here elena, i never banned you! that says something about you, not me. it’s your blog elena, you can do what you will, but don’t call it ‘a public square’ — you cut and paste literally hundreds and thousands of pages here and that’s ok…. but when i paste a few paragraphs for ‘public’ consideration, you fly into a rage and attack me… don’t you find that a little odd? do you hate me because i’m american, do you hate me because i’m male, do you hate me because i was in a cult, do you hate me because….??? what happened to “we are one” ???
i’m not your enemy elena, and to defend myself against your assaults only feeds that illusion…. you treat me here with aggression, in your eyes i’m something less than human, i’m simply a target for your hostility as it turns out. you’re obviously still hurting real bad inside… i’m sorry for you…. they say time heals all wounds…. i’ll check back with you later.
Oh yes, you did ban me and made no protest about it and hunted me down knowing you had the whole blog on your side and every time you come here it is to find something with which to justify yourself or give another of your “lessons” so that I CHANGE!!
I’m not changing Ton so stop wasting your time. You don’t need to put words in my mouth, I don’t hate you but I no longer trust you or believe in your “good” intentions and it feels so good to remind you how things happened so that the theater you staged up is even more visible.
You’re not my enemy? Well, with friends like that, who needs enemies?!!
And about We are One, we are one Ton in a dimension that you cannot actualize. Now you’re talking to me because you can’t avoid my confronting you but that was not your intention. Your intentions are the same as always: trying to show me how deranged I am so that I change and you can justify your beatings in the fofblog with posts on consciousness and things that I’ll reach if I follow you word by word and submit to you. You’ve got a real problem here as long as you keep trying that out. I’m afraid Bobby was a great teacher, I don’t buy the likes of him no matter how well disguised.
So if you think we’ve had enough of our little drama, then maybe I can get on with the things that this blog is really about.
On your approach to consciousness we don’t agree. You have the same approach Girard and the Fellowship have: that the mind doesn’t participate in consciousness. That truth has been manipulated and distorted badly and people without consciousness think that functions have nothing to do with consciousness nor are they able to see consciousness or the lack of it in the world in precise ways. The state of consciousness does not need the mind to be but it is consciousness what determines what the mind thinks. A low level of consciousness acts and thinks in specific ways. It is unable to grasp the whole of no matter what situation. It sees one side or another but not both sides and tries to annihilate the other side that it is not willing to see to justify the fact that it doesn’t see it. That is how ridiculously destructive it happens to be and there is nothing funny about it no matter how ironic. It is the lower eating the higher. That’s good, I’d never actually seen that law so clearly. In practical terms it bans, imprisons and kills people who do not agree with it. It destroys nature because the greed doesn’t allow it to see it as a necessary dimension of and for human development. The saddest aspect of fascism is that it is not conscious people performing evil but unconscious people performing their best understanding strongly attached to their egoness.
Let’s take a look at your post 52
52. ton – January 30, 2011 [Edit]
? heard of the chinese curse?
may you live in interesting times…
From nowhere do we come, to nowhere do we go; we sort of rest in near-accomplished meaning. We think of this and that, yet that is part and pain; the world is world and glass and July or March, is open and not void, is origin, not beginning; from nowhere do we come, to nowhere do we go.
Jean Gebser 1974
Just like Girard. So you think consciousness has nothing to do with the world and we are going nowhere and if I find our times wonderfully interesting, you think its a curse!!!!
No, of course not, now you’ll say that wasn’t you but Gebser right? So easy when you never speak for yourself unless you’re put against the wall, to blame those you quote…. like Bobby!!
And this style of yours Ton is so sick, can’t you ever just SAY it? Speak? Do you have to “imply” things so that if I actually come at you, you can run to the sides?
THAT is the great problem with a dialogue with you. That you can’t dialogue. The first condition of consciousness between two people is that they openly and sincerely acknowledge each other. “Hello” wasn’t just invented for the comfort and vanity of some people Ton, “HELLO” or any form of acknowledgement of the person one is talking with and to is the first sign of good will and consciousness in those participating but you like Bobby think it’s “feminine dominance”. That you are above everyone and everything and have to account for nothing. If all you can answer to the post I wrote is that “interesting” is a chinese curse, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? WHY DO YOU EVER COME IF NOT TO SIT IN YOUR OWN DISCOMFORT?
What I mean with this is that although the “state” of consciousness is independent of functions, a “conscious being” is aware of the whole and expresses it in each and every function. Rituals were created to express consciousness in our actions. What we have most lost is the connectedness of our selves to our action. We act without presence and have hence, lost all meaning to reality and its objective dimension. This is the greatest mistake and horror of our times. The individual is worthless, meaningless disconnected to his actions and realities and “reality” is equally worthless and meaningless disconnected from the human being. Western people in particular have lost the meaning of their own selves and the world and think just like you, that “the world” is not the stage on which consciousness actualizes itself. This implies that people are no longer connected to the food they eat, or the work they perform, or the people they have sex with or talk with. Like you they send out words without ever addressing anyone and hoping no one actually sees them, desperately hoping that they will but equally desperately afraid that they will.
I am a woman of my times and have lived ALL those things like most other people and it’s incredibly difficult to reconnect to the meaning of things but I keep trying and am not willing to buffer the fact that we don’t do it. We were badly hurt in the cult and reduced our selves to the first line of work using it against our own will to submit to the guru but as life expands out of the cult, the recovery of genuine social life, genuine human life with all its amazing richness is beautifully “healing”. “Life” starts falling into place and fills one with meaning.
You ask me if I hate you for being American. Do you hate me for being delighted that the Egyptian people recover their dignity and affirm their own will freeing themselves from American monopolization of power, using puppet governments to hurt people everywhere? I do not hate you for being American or Americans Ton but I do hate fascism in no matter what nationality and it is as strong in yours as in mine. Fascism as we’ve well verified was the hallmark of the cult. People abusing their power to destroy others physically or psychologically is fascism. People banning people because they call on them to act against crime is fascism. People hurting people is fascism.
I don’t hate Americans or Colombians and there are as many fascists in Colombia as in America. You’ve played your fascist with me, I don’t doubt I’ve hurt many with my screams and played my part. But I got banned, labelled and insulted by you and you still pretend to play here without even an apology. So yes, I am weary of your presence here, I’ve learnt my lesson and won’t let you set me up easily again. You are accountable here.
You talk about my wounds as if I had no reason to be wounded but I am very glad to feel the pain that you’ve caused me, you and those in the fofblog, trying to set me up with the idea that I am”crazy” because I think you’re all sickly protecting the cult thinking laws that protect crime are too much to challenge. I am not afraid of the pain you cause me or the wounds I still have, why should it surprise me when you’ve allowed the Fellowship to go on for almost forty years without ever seriously challenging it? We learn to live with the pains others cause us; what I’ve never known is how to live with the pains I cause others. Perhaps that is why I am quick to apologize. I apologized for my excesses not for saying the truth as I understand it. Don’t be sorry for me Ton, be sorry when you manage to feel sorry but not for me. I am actually very glad that I was able to stand up for what I believed even if you all turned your backs on me the more I pushed for serious action against the Fellowship. As time passes I affirm and reaffirm what I believed was necessary.
You also ask me if I hate you for other so ridiculous things that I won’t even address them.
Have a lot of fun elsewhere Ton. Let me enjoy what I find of joy. We are not friends and that’s alright. We don’t need to hurt each other though and if for that we are better off not talking to each other then let’s not talk to each other. We each sit at our different ends of the world, were you to care for me, you would write me an email but here you keep trying to play out your own agenda and you’ll have to make up your own blog for that. This one has a different aim that you’re unwilling to play up to.
http://vimeo.com/19554279
e: “And about We are One, we are one Ton in a dimension that you cannot actualize.”
please tell me about this “dimension” elena…
e: “Now you’re talking to me because you can’t avoid my confronting you…”
i could very easily avoid you elena… what you call confronting is just an excuse for hostility and aggression — every time i post here this cycle occurs… you target and attack me for reasons only known to you and then you proceed to justify your horrible lack of civility by conflating me with a list of other people who have wronged or slighted you in the past… you are a bitter woman elena and i do feel sorry for you because you are stuck in this.
e: “…but that was not your intention. Your intentions are the same as always: trying to show me how deranged I am so that I change and you can justify your beatings in the fofblog…”
putting ‘words into my mouth’ and attributing ideas to me which is fabrication on your part… you are doing a pretty good job yourself of showing how deranged you are, apparently, no, obviously i am simply a “trigger.” you keep bringing up the fofblog, i don’t even think about that when i post here, but you’re stuck in the past… and you keep pretending that i had you banned… you need to take responsibility for your own actions elena.
e: “…with posts on consciousness and things that I’ll reach if I follow you word by word and submit to you. You’ve got a real problem here as long as you keep trying that out. I’m afraid Bobby was a great teacher, I don’t buy the likes of him no matter how well disguised.”
this is you elena, i never suggested you “follow” or “submit” to anything whatsoever… you’re living in the past. your initial response to the gebser was one of interest, enthusiasm and even gratitude — e: “Hi Ton, thank you for this, it is of great help” — you started cutting and pasting quotes from gebser/feuerstein and then you suddenly flipped and started attacking me again…. what happened elena? obviously i strongly disagree with you elena, in many areas but especially when you say “bobby was a great teacher”– maybe he was for you but then you spent a lot more time in the cult than i, apparently you learned more than i did from he and his little toy robot gerald. i don’t have a “real problem here elena” but obviously you do.
e: “So if you think we’ve had enough of our little drama, then maybe I can get on with the things that this blog is really about.”
just as you create the blog you create the drama here elena… you seem to thrive on it. were this truly a ‘public square’ you would recognize and try to accept outside influences in the form of contributions and suggestions… in that case it would be a co-creative endeavor but you’re really not interested in that elena, this blog appears to be about a topic or a catch phrase or a slogan you introduce to discuss with yourself… an attempt to contribute here is looked upon with suspicion bordering on paranoia leading to histrionic outbursts which have the effect of further isolation… this blog is about constructing an ivory tower with ramparts and walls to protect yourself from any other point of view. are you familiar with this concept yet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder
e: “On your approach to consciousness we don’t agree. You have the same approach Girard and the Fellowship have: that the mind doesn’t participate in consciousness.”
we disagree on a lot of things elena and that’s ok. you pretend to understand my point of view regarding ‘consciousness’ but it’s obvious here you don’t and do you know why you don’t understand… it’s because you don want to, because you would rather conflate me with your ex-husband girald, that’s easier for you than to care enough to really understand another point of view, you see me through the lens of your past experiences and that keeps you from really hearing or understanding in the present. so let me explain my point of view (although i don’t expect you’ll really get it) — i didn’t say that the mind does not participate in consciousness, that’s what you are saying and attributing to me. quite to the contrary, the mind does become ‘conditioned’ – this conditioning is what is called ‘learning’ and more generally this conditioning is experientially based… this ‘conditioned’ mind is what constitutes the contents of individual consciousness… the conditioned mind is an integral ‘paricipating’ aspect of individual consciousness… you see elena, there’s a great deal of difference between your idea of what i think and my actual thoughts on the subject, but i’m sure you’re more content to continue to conflate me with the assholes who have wronged you in the past, that way you can continue to vilify me and use me as a target and a vent for your pent-up hostility and frustration.
e: “A low level of consciousness acts and thinks in specific ways. It is unable to grasp the whole of no matter what situation. It sees one side or another but not both sides and tries to annihilate the other side that it is not willing to see to justify the fact that it doesn’t see it.”
if only you would take this insight to heart and to see it in yourself…
e: “That is how ridiculously destructive it happens to be and there is nothing funny about it no matter how ironic. It is the lower eating the higher. That’s good, I’d never actually seen that law so clearly. In practical terms it bans, imprisons and kills people who do not agree with it…. The saddest aspect of fascism is that it is not conscious people performing evil but unconscious people performing their best understanding strongly attached to their egoness.”
still quoting fof scripture… still stuck in the past… i have to ask: are you really seeing how this works in yourself or are you simply parroting ‘catchy’ slogans…. you’ve exhibited this behavior over and again elena, do you see that clearly ?
e: “Just like Girard. So you think consciousness has nothing to do with the world and we are going nowhere and if I find our times wonderfully interesting, you think its a curse!!!!”
look elena, i’ve already responded to you putting words in my mouth regarding what ‘consciousness’ is… i think something is lost in the language translation here, you obviously didn’t get the implication… and i don’t know that i can explain it so you’ll understand — consider for a moment what it is that makes for “interesting times” — it has to do with social changes based on the play of shifting ideologies… for example what’s happening in cairo…. these changes are also fraught with danger, danger and the unknown possibilities contained in change make for interesting times… in this context you might even substitute “dangerous times” for “interesting times” — it is in the ‘danger’ of change wherein lies the ‘curse.’ one might conjecture that the source of this was a taoist chinese farmer who would have been contented and happy to live life from cradle to grave without major shifts in the social fabric. change makes for ‘interesting times’ but for those who are not interested in changing, it can be seen as a curse… i’m sure you can relate to this elena since you are so opposed to change yourself.
e: “No, of course not, now you’ll say that wasn’t you but Gebser right? So easy when you never speak for yourself unless you’re put against the wall, to blame those you quote…. like Bobby!!”
look elena, you do this all the time elena, do you understand what conflation is? this keeps you from the possibility of actually hearing anything or relating to the individual as an individual…. this tendency has a lot to do with misguided misjudgment, your confusion of me with either ‘bobby’ or anyone else is based on conflation. Conflation occurs when the identities of two or more individuals or concepts become confused until there seems to be only a single identity — the differences appear to become lost. treating two distinct individuals or concepts as if they were one often produces errors and misunderstandings, a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure a clear analysis of ideas or relationships which are emphasized by contrasts. distinctions between two concepts or individuals are ignored by you because through this glib and superficial sort of treatment it’s easier to interpret the other individual through your filter of already familiar categorizations… this keeps you unwittingly stuck stuck in a box of your own making.
e: “And this style of yours Ton is so sick, can’t you ever just SAY it? Speak? Do you have to “imply” things so that if I actually come at you, you can run to the sides?”
is it my style that you react to with such hostility ? i suspect there is a lot more to it… like i said, i am simply a trigger for your aggression, your hostility which is based on….? something more than my ‘style.’
e: “THAT is the great problem with a dialogue with you. That you can’t dialogue. The first condition of consciousness between two people is that they openly and sincerely acknowledge each other.”
and what is the problem with you elena? that you can’t dialogue? that there is so much venom and vitriol in your reaction to my presence here? i’ve already indicated that part of the problem is that you don’t care to acknowledge me as an individual, you’ve already placed me in a box along with other males who have harmed you, along with the other cultists who have harmed you… you are unable or unwilling to relate to me as an individual because of the confusion induced by your continuing conflating; in this you are very much stuck in the past…. here is yet another example — e: “…you like Bobby think it’s “feminine dominance”. you’re stuck in the past the idea of “feminine dominance” is something i left behind when i left the fof many years ago and yet you still hang on to and carry that rotting baggage…. let it go if you can elena.
e: “If all you can answer to the post I wrote is that “interesting” is a chinese curse, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? WHY DO YOU EVER COME IF NOT TO SIT IN YOUR OWN DISCOMFORT?”
why do i have to explain my presence to you elena, are you so insecure ? i thought this was a “public square” elena. am not experiencing “discomfort” by visiting you but it is you who experience “discomfort” when i come here because of your own insecurity… this has to do with your reactive defensive responses to me…. what is that about?
this is getting longer than i expected and i have to move on to other things but i’ll return later to address the rest of your post… i’m sorry that it makes you uncomfortable but if it does too bad, after all this is supposed to be a ‘public square’ wherein we have to learn to be tolerant of other points of view… i think this is a valuable lesson for you to learn. thank you for allowing me to continue to help you with that.
Oh Ton, I have tried again and again to allow you to be here but you tire me so quickly I will surely ban you again if you keep it up and that is not a threat but a fact.
We don’t agree Ton. We simply don’t agree and don’t want to agree and each one of us has his and her own reasons not to. I’ve told you mine and you’ve told me yours and I am not going to change mine to please you or you to please me. Since that is alright at this point, since to me you can go on laying out all your sophistry and continue avoiding the facts I present which are all here from the beginning, there is no point for me in insisting.
I do consider this a waste of time. I do not appreciate your position Ton and your unwillingness to actually explain your presence here reveals you more clearly than anything else you’ve said. It’s so difficult for you to stand up for yourself and be honest. People don’t go anywhere they don’t like and when they do it is because their deranged mind is out to get a kick out of bothering the person they don’t like. That is what you’re doing here: bothering me. You find nothing of value here and come with your posts implying that you are here to give me lessons. That is your real problem Ton: your superiority complex. It’s a hard one to get over isn’t it? You who seem to have some institutionalized knowledge of psychology should know it so well. That is why you and I cannot dialogue because I simply won’t take your act.
Again and again you can’t avoid your own imaginary picture that you are so superior to me that you are here to teach me something, the valuable lesson you think I have to learn from you and wanting to “help” me because in your mind I am deranged!. Are you this lousy with the other people you treat as a so called therapist? Is that why you come here even though I don’t even pay you? I am not trying to offend you although that certainly sounds offensive but it might make you actually think about it.
You are in a box Ton, take a look at it and try to find a hole out of it when possible. Then perhaps you’ll get human enough to actually address the things I present here with the human approach that I am willing to connect to. I’ll probably be a better partner for a dialogue then.
So if you really wish to participate here allow me to give you some guidelines that might make it easier for you.
1. Pick a subject and expose it as you understand it then add to it with other people’s quotes if you need to.
2. Even better, choose from what is already here and discuss it, that is, digest it in your own way and then we’ll discuss it if I find it of interest. Since you are a visitor here that would be the most “civilized” approach: to acknowledge what you find and add or take from it.
3. If you continue your superiority act I will avoid your posts.
4. Speak from your self. I am not interested in what others write as much as what you think: a dialogue between us. Others are very welcome in as much as they write about what you and I are already dialoguing about and we can use others to emphasize our points of view but not to replace our whole self with them as you tend to do. The cult definitely lingers in that behavior letting the “guru author” think it out and play your part!
5. Should you not be interested in following these guidelines please refrain from posting here.
6. I will also not read posts from authors that you yourself don’t substantiate and if they are not related to my research I will eventually delete them.
6. I will give us two weeks to a month to try this out and if it doesn’t work I’ll probably ban you again and continue working on the things that interest me.
Good luck!
Going back to your post and explanation of the “curse”, this is good because it reveals you: interesting times, dangerous times. This second explanation allows me to better relate to your post. Cairo. You find it dangerous? I am not surprised being it such a confrontation to the US but maybe eventually Americans will find that there are also humans on the other side of the world wishing to live and not destroy the planet as Arabs are usually portrayed by your people. Even more interesting is the expression of “integral consciousness” as Gebser put it. People everywhere realizing that they not only exist but count!
Please also read the post above but to get on with the things that matter….
Ton: so let me explain my point of view (although i don’t expect you’ll really get it) — i didn’t say that the mind does not participate in consciousness, that’s what you are saying and attributing to me.
Elena: you didn’t say anything it was Gebser
Ton: quite to the contrary, the mind does become ‘conditioned’ – this conditioning is what is called ‘learning’ and more generally this conditioning is experientially based… this ‘conditioned’ mind is what constitutes the contents of individual consciousness… the conditioned mind is an integral ‘paricipating’ aspect of individual consciousness…
Elena:
In relation to that we are saying the same thing but I’ve added a lot more to that not only talking with you but before so if you don’t read what I write what is the point of the dialogue?
I’ll restate once more for the sake of trying but this won’t go on and on.
We actually agree that” the mind does become ‘conditioned’”
We are not saying anything new here Ton, we verified this over and over again when we studied brainwashing and how it was possible in cults. The formatory apparatus is conditioned not only in cults but in average life and people “adapt” their thinking to the “consciousness” of those around them which is not actually their own consciousness but the generalized attitudes about anything and everything. This is what you call learning.
( I will continue to use work language because I still find it useful and am not about to sit and invent other terms that I already know work so if that is an obstacle for you as you said, its too bad. I find it of great advantage that you know the language so that we can expand and communicate with it, regular psychology doesn’t speak as clearly about centers, division of centers and so on. Other systems are probably as good and complete but having learnt this one I intend to use it, remember, I threw out the dirty water not the baby.)
Ton:– this conditioning is what is called ‘learning’ and more generally this conditioning is experientially based… this ‘conditioned’ mind is what constitutes the contents of individual consciousness… the conditioned mind is an integral ‘paricipating’ aspect of individual consciousness…
Elena: So yes, this I understand but what I’ve been talking about is taking all that and putting it upside down and forward, that is, we’ve verified that the mind of a human being can be trained and conditioned like a dog and that is exactly what happens in cults, it is the outer world sculpting the inner functions of an individual without his self presence and control, that is, without his own consciousness. What I am talking about is the step beyond that when individuals become conscious of themselves, their self and allow that consciousness of the whole to penetrate all their functions. The mind then learns and can be reconditioned as much as all the other centers but something else that happens is that the “world” becomes alive to the individual.
In the first process the individual is passive and the world is active. The world acts on the individual and conditions him or her. In the second process the individual is receptive to the world, active, and allows the world to objectively act on his or her being rendering “meaning”. The ACT, the relationship that connects the individual and the world then becomes and objective reality in which both world and human act towards their mutual development.
An individual is not just conscious of himself. An individual is conscious but what that really means is that “life has objectified itself in the individual”: that “reality” has come to life in its full expression in a particular individual and he or she are hence aware of its intensity, vividness, connectedness, wholeness. This is important and must be explored carefully for I am thinking out loud.
The “mind consciousness” I believe, is still attached to the ego but integral consciousness is not. What the ego cannot conceive is the objectivity of the world with or without its presence. That is why it becomes attached to the physical aspect of the world and has to “possess” it, “own” it. That is the private property impulse playing itself out big time. The integral consciousness is not attached to the ego. It is conscious of the whole.
Music for example, is in itself an objective reality, so is eating, working, moving. The subjective individual does not allow for the reality of the music, the food or the work he or she is doing to “impress” them objectively because in the unconscious state they “buffer” the impression and subjectify it. They “subjectify” it particularly in their identification with it. Because of the identification with it, they cannot be objectively impressed by it and the world fails to “feed” their spirit sucking out their subtle “energies” through their own identification.
Yes, that is one way to put it. I need to go. Bye
sophistry? ha ha ha… that’s a good one elena coming from you who tries to bury and hide truth with words piled on top of words piled on topo words–a dog chasing it’s own tail comes to mind.
indeed this has become, once again, like fighting fire with fire — it’s a waste of time. you see me as an intrusion into your own ‘private idaho,’ your artifical world of insulation from reality, and you don’t like me here because you see me not as an individual or a person but as an intrusion, a mere inconvenience…. and you have your ways of dealing with such a situation, you eliminate the intrusion… and who has a superiority complex?! once again, the kettle calls the pot black. i understand your desire to be alone, this is an aspect of your narcissim, and i will leave you to it, but please elena, don’t call this a public square, that’s just plain nonsense.
before i take my leave i would have liked to go back and address what you’ve written to me here but we’ve traveled that path too many times before and frankly i don’t have the time or energy right now to deal with you… you weary me… maybe later.
before closing here i would offer an editorial comment and suggest that if you cannot recognize and aknowledge the danger inherent in the current social unrest occurring in cairo you are in serious need of a reality check… how many have been killed and injured so far… that does not represent danger to you !?! i suppose the individuals who are hurt by this probably don’t matter to you, since “we are one” you probably don’t even stop to consider the individual who is harmed by the volitility of the situation…. the individual doesn’t matter right elena, it’s all about the collective and the ‘righteous’ cause of “democracy” and “freedom” right elena?
i chose to use the unrest and turmoil in cairo to help you understand the “chinese curse” comment because the unrest is current… i hoped you would better understand the sense of my referense to said “chinese curse” but you still didn’t get it… maybe this was a bad example to try to explain it to you…. elena, it has nothing to do with nationality elena, but of course leave it to you to filter it through a lens distorted by bigotted stereotypes. you don’t get it and that’s fine elena, keep your head buried in the sand if that’s what you need.
one more question before i go elena, would you not agree that the “ultimate superiority complex” here is exhibited and wielded by you yourself with your repeated flourishes and grandiose declarations of ‘rules’ and the illusion of having the ‘final word.’ threats to banish me (again) from your private ivory tower of babel, do no harm to me elena. the threats and attacks and hostility issue from your own superiority complex in action, the repeateded threats and attacks reflect nothing more than your own intolerance and lack of civility. go ahead elena, dismiss me (again) i’m bored to tears with you anyway.
Hello Ton, I see you’ve been actively coming to check for a reply, forgive me if I have delayed it but I rest a lot more these days.
Thank you for your post Ton and for clearly revealing your self and your agenda here once again.
I have before talked about vices in speech in relation to our interactions and here we can again see the same patterns:
1. You avoid to write about the things that matter taking legitimacy away from the individual talking about them. i.e. you totally avoid the post on consciousness.
2. You attack personally over and over again showing that what you are after is undermining the person you’re talking to. Were the person identified with your valuation she or he would fall for the attack but after that happening over and over again the person finally learns to stand up on his or her own self no matter the valuation others have.
It cannot be said that you do these things “consciously”. The problem is not a conscious intention to hurt but simply unconsciousness of the other person and the issues being presented.
I’ll talk about the points in which we disagree in a following post.
Ton: before closing here i would offer an editorial comment and suggest that if you cannot recognize and aknowledge the danger inherent in the current social unrest occurring in cairo you are in serious need of a reality check… how many have been killed and injured so far… that does not represent danger to you !?! i suppose the individuals who are hurt by this probably don’t matter to you, since “we are one” you probably don’t even stop to consider the individual who is harmed by the volitility of the situation…. the individual doesn’t matter right elena, it’s all about the collective and the ‘righteous’ cause of “democracy” and “freedom” right elena?
Elena:
I understand your position Ton but your interpretation of the problems is poor.
The fact that people die in all struggles is so common for us in the third world that what shocks and what I find beautiful about Egypt is that only a few people have died because it is clear that Mubarak and his inner circle knows that if he were to attack and hurt more people he would lose even more support for there is still something sacred about life in those cultures that has long been lost in the West.
One of the most impressive images I’ve seen recently, is Tahrir Square full with thousands of people peacefully praying and then vigorously defending themselves from the violence. In the Arab world they cut your arm if you steal, that is how seriously the laws there are actualized. It is difficult for an American to understand the differences in the life experiences of people that they have become used to seeing as “inferiors”.
In the imaginary world that people in America and Europe have been trained to accept, what counts is not the millions of dead that their governments have killed one way or another in the hidden and silent imperialism putting puppet governments to rule willing to sell their people and riches away, but the threat of a nation that stands up against such domination.
I understand you Ton. You are in the box of your American dream like millions of Americans and it is time for you to wake up to the horrors of your people and move beyond them into a more human version of yourself in which you are able to see the crimes your people have committed with full consent of their laws and those they’ve imposed on the world over. To see and understand that does not take away from the greatness of America in other areas. What we’ll come to realize in time is that nations like individuals, have their light and dark side, both with equal intensity. To overcome this inability to see both sides is the task of the next generation and it comes with the actualization of compassion in our being.
Compassion comes when we experience the duality in our own selves and active consciousness and will begin when we force our selves to control the purely instinctive impulses in our acts. Until then, individuals and nations move with the inertia of the past without conscious action like animals do in nature. This is why people cannot be found responsible in their unconsciousness in the spiritual dimension although they are certainly liable in the human dimension and crime against others can be judged by the laws. But when the laws are manipulated against the people, crime has become the modus vivendi of the status quo, just like in cults.
It’s interesting that the more consciousness we acquire as human beings, the more we stand up for the actualization of the laws that people in all civilizations held up from the beginning. The human “ideal” is already there and we are simply striving to “realize” it, actualize it, socially, nationally, universally and individually.
On the subject of rules here, there are rules in every blog Ton and this one is no different. You adhere to them or stay out. Why would that surprise you if not because you think you are the authority and I should submit? But thinking is not being and the facts here are that I am in charge of this blog, I set the standards and you submit to them: to the standards, not to me.
You are to me my equal: a human being, full of mistakes and inconsistencies, like me. We have both dwelled for long in the dimension of opposite thinking, willing and acting. We struggle with the inconsistencies in each other’s unclarified domains in the first, second and third lines of experience: the personal, the social and the universal.
We have struggled for long and dug into each other’s dimensions enough to know that We are there in the end as two human beings with the experience of their particular times and place.
I wish you all the best Ton. I wish all the clarity and well being that life can give you. The enmity we experience in one dimension is just an aspect of our own selves struggling to come together in better harmony. Disharmony in one dimension is not disharmony in all of them and once in a rare while when we experience harmony in many dimensions, consciousness lights up in our beings and impregnates them with clarity.
The chairos times that we are experiencing with wikileaks, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordania and Egypt are a flourishing that millions of us have been waiting for all our lives. The division of the world into civilized and not civilized people cannot continue. We are all equally human. American and Europeans need as much help to heal their inhuman inconsistencies as third world countries need to heal their inhuman inconsistencies. What was right a century ago is no longer right and what is right now will not be right in a century. We are simply stepping on the step of our turn and cannot jump over it but we will be seen as savages three centuries from today.
I realize you are unwilling to hear me when I speak thus but I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to your heart from my heart, for we are one in that dimension.
From: Reader Supported News
Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities
By Robert Parry
February 6, 2011
When you’re listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable “aw shucks” manner.
Share this article
ShareThis
Email
Printer friendly
After all, the true measure of a president shouldn’t be his style or how he made us feel but rather what he did with his extraordinary power, what were the consequences for real people, either for good or ill.
Yet, even as the United States celebrates Reagan’s centennial birthday and lavishes praise on his supposed accomplishments, very little time has been spent reflecting on the unnecessary bloodbaths that Reagan enabled in many parts of the world.
Those grisly deaths and ugly tortures get whisked away as if they were just small necessities in Reagan’s larger success “winning the Cold War” – even though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was already winding down before Reagan arrived on the national scene. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Myth.”]
Yet, Reagan’s Cold War obsessions helped unleash right-wing “death squads” and murderous militaries on the common people in many parts of the Third World, but nowhere worse than in Latin America.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as Latin American security forces were sharpening themselves into finely honed killing machines, Reagan was there as an ardent defender, making excuses for the atrocities, and sending money and equipment to make the forces even more lethal.
For instance, in the late 1970s, when Argentina’s dictators were inventing a new state-terror program called “disappearances” – the unacknowledged murders of dissidents – Reagan was making himself useful as a columnist deflecting the human rights complaints coming from the Carter administration.
At the time, Argentina’s security forces were rounding up tens of thousands of political opponents who became subjects of ingenious torture techniques often followed by mass killings, including a favorite method that involved shackling naked prisoners together, loading them onto a plane, piloting the plane out to sea and shoving them through the plane’s door, like sausage links.
However, since Argentina’s rightists were devout Catholics, they had a special twist when the prisoners were pregnant women. The expectant mothers would be kept alive until they reached full term and then were subjected to either induced labor or Caesarian sections.
The babies were handed out to military families and the new mothers were loaded aboard the death planes to be dumped out over the sea to drown. The children were sometimes raised by their mothers’ murderers. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Argentina’s Dapper State Terrorist” or “Baby-Snatching: Argentina’s Dirty War Secret.”]
As ghastly as Argentina’s “dirty war” was, it had an ardent defender in Ronald Reagan, who used his newspaper column to chide President Jimmy Carter’s human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, for berating the Argentine junta.
Reagan joshed that Derian should “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin Andersen’s Dossier Secreto.]
Sympathizing with Torturers
So, there was good reason for the right-wing oligarchs and their security services to celebrate when Reagan was elected president in November 1980. They knew they would enjoy a new era of impunity as they tortured, raped and murdered their political opponents.
Even before Reagan took office, four American churchwomen in El Salvador were kidnapped by elements of the right-wing Salvadoran military. Because the women were suspected of harboring leftist sympathies, they were raped and executed with high-powered bullets to their brains, before their bodies were stuffed into shallow graves.
The incoming Reagan administration was soon making excuses for the Salvadoran killers, including comments from Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
The brutal Argentine generals also got a royal welcome when they visited Washington. Kirkpatrick feted them at an elegant state dinner.
More substantively, Reagan authorized CIA collaboration with the Argentine intelligence service for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel force created to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The Contras were soon implicated in human rights atrocities of their own.
Torture was also on the Reagan’s administration’s menu for political enemies. A 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, examining the CIA’s abusive “war on terror” interrogations under President George W. Bush, noted the spy agency’s past “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.”
The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching these techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.” The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.
Euphemisms aside, the CIA Inspector General cited a 1984 investigation of alleged “misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual.” In 1984, the CIA also was faced with a scandal over an “assassination manual” prepared by agency personnel for the Nicaraguan Contras.
While the IG report’s references to this earlier era were brief – and the abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan’s glorified presidency – there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this earlier “dark side” on the peasants, workers and students of Central America. Arguably, the worst of these “dirty wars” was inflicted on the people of Guatemala.
Genocide in Guatemala
After taking office in 1981, Reagan pushed to overturn an arms embargo that Carter had imposed on Guatemala for its wretched human rights record. Yet even as Reagan moved to loosen up the military aid ban, U.S. intelligence agencies were confirming new Guatemalan government massacres.
In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said.
According to a CIA source, “the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas” and “the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved.” The CIA cable added that “the Guatemalan authorities admitted that ‘many civilians’ were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants.”
Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted Guatemala’s army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.
Confident of Reagan’s sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology.
According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders met with Reagan’s roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left no doubt about their plans. Guatemala’s military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, “made clear that his government will continue as before – that the repression will continue.”
Human rights groups saw the same grisly picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for “thousands of illegal executions.” [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]
But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A State Department “white paper,” released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist “extremist groups” and their “terrorist methods,” inspired and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
More Massacres
Yet, even as these rationalizations were pitched to the American people, U.S. intelligence agencies in Guatemala continued to learn of government-sponsored massacres.
One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province.
“The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance,” the report stated. “Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.”
The CIA report explained the army’s modus operandi: “When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.”
When the army encountered an empty village, it was “assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. …
“The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.”
In March 1982, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup d’etat. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed Official Washington with his piety. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.”
By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called “rifles and beans.” The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get “beans,” while all others could expect to be the target of army “rifles.”
In October 1982, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations, internal U.S. government cables revealed.
Defending Rios Montt
Despite the widespread evidence of Guatemalan government atrocities cited in the internal U.S. government cables, political operatives for the Reagan administration sought to conceal the crimes. On Oct. 22, 1982, for instance, the U.S. Embassy claimed the Guatemalan government was the victim of a communist-inspired “disinformation campaign.”
Reagan personally took that position in December 1982 when he met with Rios Montt and claimed that his regime was getting a “bum rap” on human rights.
On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala, authorizing the sale of $6 million in military hardware, including spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations.
State Department spokesman John Hughes said the sales were justified because political violence in the cities had “declined dramatically” and that rural conditions had improved, too.
In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in “suspect right-wing violence” with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies.
CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt’s order to the “Archivos” the previous October to “apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.”
Despite these ugly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey sugarcoated the facts for the American public and praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala.
“The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year” 1982, the report stated.
A different picture – far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government – was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.
New York attorney Stephen L. Kass cited proof that the government carried out “virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents.”
Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said. Children were “thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed.” [AP, March 17, 1983]
‘Positive Changes’
Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face.
On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised “positive changes” in Rios Montt’s government. But Rios Montt’s vengeful Christian fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.
Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to kill anyone deemed a subversive or a terrorist.
When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that “Archivos” hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights.
In late November 1983, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army.
By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala.
In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan’s State Department “is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala’s image than in improving its human rights.”
Other examples of Guatemala’s “death squad” strategy came to light later. For example, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable in 1994 reported that the Guatemalan military had used an air base in Retalhuleu during the mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in southwest Guatemala – and for torturing and burying prisoners.
At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects. “Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning,” the DIA report stated.
The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for political victims, according to the DIA report.
Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and live prisoners marked for “disappearance” were loaded onto planes that flew out over the ocean where the soldiers would shove the victims into the water to drown, a tactic that had been a favorite disposal technique of the Argentine military in the 1970s.
The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the early 1990s when a Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their own vegetables on a corner of the base. But the officer was taken aside and told to drop the request “because the locations he had wanted to cultivate were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence] during the mid-eighties,” the DIA report said.
‘Perception Management’
Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency and paramilitary operations — and then sought to cover up the bloody facts.
Deception of the American public – a strategy that the administration called “perception management” – was as much a part of Reagan’s Central American activities as the Bush administration’s lies and distortions about weapons of mass destruction were to the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003.
Reagan’s falsification of the historical record became a hallmark of the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala. In one case, Reagan personally lashed out at a human rights investigator named Reed Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100 witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported Contras in Nicaragua.
Angered by the revelations about his beloved Contras, Reagan denounced Brody in a speech on April 15, 1985, calling him “one of dictator [Daniel] Ortega’s supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo.”
Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature of the Contras. At one point in the Contra war, Reagan turned to CIA official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the Contras be used to destroy some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua.
Clarridge recalled that “President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, ‘Dewey, can’t you get those vandals of yours to do this job.'” [See Clarridge’s A Spy for All Seasons.]
On Feb. 25, 1999, a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that Reagan and his administration had aided, abetted and concealed.
The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the Guatemalan conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.
Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.
The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. “The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala’s history,” the commission concluded.
Mayan Exterminations
The army “completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops,” the report said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter “genocide.”
Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. “The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice” by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.
The report added that the “government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations.” The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed “acts of genocide” against the Mayans.
“Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals,” said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.
“Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people,” Tomuschat said.
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala.
“For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake,” Clinton said.
Though Clinton admitted that U.S. policy in Guatemala was “wrong” — and the evidence of a U.S.-backed “genocide” might have been considered startling — the news was treated mostly as a one-day story in the U.S. press. It prompted no panel discussions on the cable news shows that were then obsessed with Clinton’s personal life.
But there was another factor in the disinterest. By the late 1990s, Ronald Reagan had been transformed into a national icon, with the Republican-controlled Congress attaching his name to public buildings around the country and to National Airport in Washington.
Democrats mostly approached this deification of Reagan as harmless, an easy concession to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship. Some Democrats would even try to cite Reagan as supportive of some of their positions as a way to protect themselves from attacks launched by the increasingly powerful right-wing news media.
The Democratic goal of looking to the future, not the past, had negative consequences, however. With Reagan and his brutal policies put beyond serious criticism, the path was left open for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to return to the “dark side” after the 9/11 attacks, authorizing torture and extrajudicial killings.
Now, Reagan’s “greatness” is being sealed by the elaborate celebrations in honor of his 100th birthday, including a special homage paid during the Super Bowl. In recent days, commentators, like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, have scrambled to position themselves as Reagan’s admirers, all the better to protect their careers.
But amid all the extravagant hoopla and teary tributes to the late president, perhaps some Americans will stop and think of all the decent people in Latin America and elsewhere who died horrible and unnecessary deaths as Ronald Reagan cheerily defended their murderers.
[Many of the declassified Guatemalan documents have been posted on the Internet by the National Security Archive.]
[For more on these topics, see Robert Parry’s Lost History and Secrecy & Privilege, which are now available with Neck Deep, in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
From Reader Supported News RSN
Wallflowers at the Revolution
By FRANK RICH
Published: February 5, 2011
RECOMMEND
TWITTER
COMMENTS (290)
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL
PRINT
REPRINTS
SHARE
A month ago most Americans could not have picked Hosni Mubarak out of a police lineup. American foreign policy, even in Afghanistan, was all but invisible throughout the 2010 election season. Foreign aid is the only federal budget line that a clear-cut majority of Americans says should be cut. And so now — as the world’s most unstable neighborhood explodes before our eyes — does anyone seriously believe that most Americans are up to speed? Our government may be scrambling, but that’s nothing compared to its constituents. After a near-decade of fighting wars in the Arab world, we can still barely distinguish Sunni from Shia.
Enlarge This Image
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Frank Rich
Go to Columnist Page »
Related
Times Topics: Egypt News — The Protests | Al Jazeera
Enlarge This Image
Barry Blitt
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (290) »
The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video — even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.
Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.
Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.
The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”
No one would deny that social media do play a role in organizing, publicizing and empowering participants in political movements in the Middle East and elsewhere. But as Malcolm Gladwell wrote on The New Yorker’s Web site last week, “surely the least interesting fact” about the Egyptian protesters is that some of them “may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.” What’s important is “why they were driven to do it in the first place” — starting with the issues of human dignity and crushing poverty that Engel was trying to shove back to center stage.
Among cyber-intellectuals in America, a fascinating debate has broken out about whether social media can do as much harm as good in totalitarian states like Egypt. In his fiercely argued new book, “The Net Delusion,” Evgeny Morozov, a young scholar who was born in Belarus, challenges the conventional wisdom of what he calls “cyber-utopianism.” Among other mischievous facts, he reports that there were only 19,235 registered Twitter accounts in Iran (0.027 percent of the population) on the eve of what many American pundits rebranded its “Twitter Revolution.” More damning, Morozov also demonstrates how the digital tools so useful to citizens in a free society can be co-opted by tech-savvy dictators, police states and garden-variety autocrats to spread propaganda and to track (and arrest) conveniently networked dissidents, from Iran to Venezuela. Hugo Chávez first vilified Twitter as a “conspiracy,” but now has 1.2 million followers imbibing his self-sanctifying Tweets.
This provocative debate isn’t even being acknowledged in most American coverage of the Internet’s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.
That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience. We see the Middle East on television only when it flares up and then generally in medium or long shot. But there actually is an English-language cable channel — Al Jazeera English — that blankets the region with bureaus and that could have been illuminating Arab life and politics for American audiences since 2006, when it was established as an editorially separate sister channel to its Qatar-based namesake.
Al Jazeera English, run by a 35-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, is routinely available in Israel and Canada. It provided coverage of the 2009 Gaza war and this year’s Tunisian revolt when no other television networks would or could. Yet in America, it can be found only in Washington, D.C., and on small cable systems in Ohio and Vermont. None of the biggest American cable and satellite companies — Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner — offer it.
The noxious domestic political atmosphere fostering this near-blackout is obvious to all. It was made vivid last week when Bill O’Reilly of Fox News went on a tear about how Al Jazeera English is “anti-American.” This is the same “We report, you decide” Fox News that last week broke away from Cairo just as the confrontations turned violent so that viewers could watch Rupert Murdoch promote his new tablet news product at a publicity event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.
The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.
This week brings the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. The eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is to follow. As we took in last week’s fiery video from Cairo — mesmerizing and yet populated by mostly anonymous extras we don’t understand and don’t know — it was hard not to flash back to those glory days of “Shock and Awe.” Those bombardments too were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.
re: 73
in the past i’ve responded to condescending and arrogant posts like this by writing something that i felt represents “a mirror” (what you call a ‘superiority complex’ is something you see in me but fail to see in yourself. you don’t care to see yourself through the eyes of another, to see yourself from another’s perspective makes you uncomfortable, you find it disturbing. so when i hold up the mirror for an already reactive girl like you, you don’t take in the impression to digest it, instead you over-react and the vicious cycle continues. your self-understanding is apparently very limited and although i’ve tried to get through to you, the the thickness of your character armor keeps you ‘safe’ and secure in the illusion of your superiority. you’re not interested in change anyway, you find the idea of change to be disturbing. well elena, for now i’ve lost interest in the game of reflecting back to you yourself. in the past i’ve responded to you by acting out of a persona which i am seeing in you, it’s a persona which for me feels completely absurd, bombastic and frankly, more than a little nuts. i’m not interested right now in engaging in this nonsense in order to help you to see yourself… and you do need help, whether you acknowledge the fact or not — no one is an island. you who are so adamantly against change — and that’s part of your problem — you may think it’s a strength but it’s only the mere shadow of strength. you are unable to relate to me as an equal elena, and when i return that attitude to you in kind, you react with extreme hostility. the truth is that it’s YOU who cannot relate to me here as your equal, and that’s something you just don’t get. you are obviously not interested in getting it, you need to feel you have the upper hand in order to hide your own insecurities. so this strategy of “fighting fire with fire” does not work, that’s ok, i tried to help you to see yourself and for a while it was mildly amusing but now i’ve lost interest. we all have psychological ‘blind spots’ — a fact to which you obviously prefer to remain oblivious. it’s more accurate to say you don’t have a choice and so you remain too smug, too vain, too arrogant to consider that you might have defects. when you are challenged you are too reactive and that leads to the vicious cycle. obviously you don’t like the notion of change because you’re comfortable and self satisfied which feeds the arrogance and condescension…. arrogance and condescension which you’ve once again leveled at me in 73. this is your problem now elena, because you cannot see it for what it is. talking down to me as you are wont to do only demeans to you, continuing to talk down to others from your “high horse” only feeds your delusions. when you can learn to relate to me as a unique individual and as an equal, only then will we ever begin to have a civil conversation.
Thank you for your understanding Ton, I am glad you’ll stop “treating” me.
I have for a long time told you you are not someone I wish to be treated by. I am finally very comfortable with what you call my “madness”.
Asmaa Mahfouz
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/8/asmaa_mahfouz_the_youtube_video_that
Thank you Amaas Mahfouz for the beauty of your words and the clarity and passion with which you actualize for all of us the immense force of freedom throbbing within each and every human being no matter where we are
Your call for freedom is as true in Egypt as elsewhere, in those who call themselves the first world but continue to live in as much injustice within their countries as in the world over.
Thank you to all the Egyptian, Tunisian, the people from Yemen and Jordania for lifting up your voices and calling for freedom. We need your help and inspiration in all of the third as much as the first world, for we must begin by realizing that we are One World.
Gratitude is where we sit and share our love with each other.
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/8/the_heroes_are_the_ones_in
We are like seeds looking for a place in which to plant our humaneness
And grow like trees into cultures
And fall under the storm over and over again
Only to lift our selves
Further beyond
There’s a whole “culture” that thrives on hiding itself. This is very interesting. Those in power feel they must hide from those under their power. That they must hide their personal selves and lives and a great deal of their power comes from that mystery that they hide in. If we look at our recent interchange we’ll realize that there is a real impossibility to communicate the inner life. In fact if we look at the whole phenomenon of the Fellowship blog we’ll find that most people were incapable of actually revealing themselves to the public.
That schism between the public and the private is very interesting. Robert had to hide himself from his followers and of course that enigma was part of the show. Authorities in general keep themselves “unreachable” and that is an aspect of their “importance”. They are important therefore they are not accountable to those less important than themselves. There is a powerful relationship between the lack of accountability and the power they hold. That unaccountability is an aspect of what becomes an impediment to actually “share” themselves with others.
YES!!! Yes, this is wonderful! I remember when we walked the streets and I was a little girl. It was getting dark and I was with my brother and sister and father and we saw a very poor child sitting on a porch alone, the same age as me and l felt very sorry for her with a sadness that has never left me. I stood there and watched her in sorrow and insinuated that we take her with us but my father dragged me away and conveyed to me that she was not one of us. I must have been around five or six for we still lived in the center of the city at the time close to my grandmother’s. It was the same with the maids. I loved the maids for they fed us and took care of us but they were not supposed to be loved and they were sent away every six months or after a year when we were too close to them. That separation between us and others marked a huge barrier that didn’t exist in my heart. And that “barrier” is similar to the silence people are unable to overcome to speak about themselves in front of the “wrong” crowd. Is that Ton’s problem too? I ask him to speak from his self and he cannot. He has never been able to nor were most of the people in the fofblog.
This is very interesting. I live in a low class neighborhood and I cannot truly speak about myself to the people around me. There is a great deal of love and respect between us. I’ve come here because I love their “freedom” which I don’t feel in upper class neighborhoods but I don’t communicate much. There is a similar barrier.
There are differences for sure but the barriers are illusory. They are more open with me than I can be with them but of course we are in “their” territory. When they are in another territory they also don’t communicate freely.
This is interesting because those psychologically made up barriers are what hold the status quo and make us less human with each other. Those economically more privileged hide our “good luck”, hide the money we’ve spent, hide the richness we’ve wasted, the guilt that we have consciously or unconsciously, about belonging to a class that we did not choose to belong to and took what we are not so sure we own. We hide it in our silence and our inability to actually communicate like human beings to those economically above or below us.
There are some great people that do it: communicate from their humaneness with no matter who. They gave up what didn’t belong to them and freed themselves from the barriers.
Recognizing the Language of Tyranny
RECOGNIZING THE LANGUAGE OF TYRANNY
http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/133-133/4894-egypts-youth-will-not-be-silenced
Posted on Feb 6, 2011
AP
By Chris Hedges
Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes. The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.
This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately. But to the members of our dwindling middle class—as well as those in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and economic configuration—the powerful use phrases like the consent of the governed anddemocracy that help lull us into complacency. The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion. Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to. Those who consume and perpetuate the lies—including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party—abet our disempowerment. No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance.
The tactic of speaking in two languages is as old as empire itself. The ancient Greeks and the Romans did it. So did the Spanish conquistadors, the Ottomans, the French and later the British. Those who inhabit exploited zones on the peripheries of empire see and hear the truth. But the cries of those who are exploited are ignored or demonized. The rage they express does not resonate with those trapped in self-delusion, those who continue to trust in the ultimate goodness of empire. This is the truth articulated in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India.” These writers understood that empire is about violence and theft. And the longer the theft continues, the more brutal empire becomes. The tyranny empire imposes on others it finally imposes on itself. The predatory forces unleashed by empire consume the host. Look around you.
The narratives we hear are those fabricated for us by the state, Hollywood and the press. These narratives are taught in our schools, preached in our pulpits and celebrated in war documentaries such as “Restrepo.” These narratives humanize and ennoble the enforcers of empire. The government, the military, the police and our intelligence agents are lionized. These control groups, we are assured, are the guardians of our virtues and our protectors. They produce our heroes. And those who challenge this narrative—who denounce the lies—become the enemy.
Those who administer empire—elected officials, corporate managers, generals and the celebrity courtiers who disseminate the propaganda—become very wealthy. They make immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news, sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of spectacle and entertainment. They all pay homage, even in moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the illusions that keep us passive and amused. But as our society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power. The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with the overt language of force. It is hard to continue to live in a state of self-delusion once unemployment benefits run out, once the only job available comes without benefits or a living wage, once the future no longer conforms to the happy talk that saturates our airwaves. At this point rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can channel that rage inherits power. The manipulation of that rage has become the newest task of the corporate propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to defend core liberal values has left its members with nothing to contribute to the debate.
The Belgian King Leopold, promising to abolish slavery and usher the Congolese into the “modern” era, was permitted by his European allies to form the Congo Free State in 1885. It was touted as a humanitarian gesture, as was the Spanish conquest of the Americas, as was our own occupation of Iraq. Leopold organized a ruthless force of native and foreign overseers—not unlike our own mercenary armies—to loot the Congo of ivory and rubber. By the time the Belgian monarch was done, some 5 million to 8 million Congolese had been slaughtered. It was the largest act of genocide in the modern era until the Nazi Holocaust. Leopold, even in the midst of his rampage, was lionized in Europe for his virtue. He was loathed in the periphery—as we are in Iraq and Afghanistan—where the Congolese and others understood what he was about. But these voices, like the voices of those we oppress, were almost never heard.
The Nazis, for whom the Holocaust was as much a campaign of plunder as it was a campaign to rid Europe of Jews, had two methods for greeting arrivals at their four extermination camps. If the transports came from Western Europe, the savage Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards, with their whips, dogs and clubs, were kept out of sight. The wealthier European Jews were politely ushered into an elaborate ruse, including fake railway stations complete with flower beds, until once stripped naked they became incapable of resistance and could be herded in rows of five under whips into the gas chambers. The Nazis knew that those who had not been broken, those who possessed a belief in their own personal empowerment, would fight back. When the transports came from the east, where Jews had long lived in fear, tremendous poverty and terror, there was no need for such theatrics. Mothers, fathers, the elderly and children, accustomed to overt repression and the language of command and retribution, were brutally driven from the transports by sadistic guards. The object was to create mass hysteria. The fate of the two groups was the same. It was the tactic that differed.
All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs. It speaks to those who remain in a state of self-delusion in the comforting and familiar language of liberty, freedom, prosperity and electoral democracy. It speaks to the poor and the oppressed in the language of naked coercion. But, here too, all will end up in the same place.
Those trapped in the blighted inner cities that are our internal colonies or brutalized in our prison system, especially African-Americans, see what awaits us all. So do the inhabitants in southern West Virginia, where coal companies have turned hundreds of thousands of acres into uninhabitable and poisoned wastelands. Poverty, repression and despair in these peripheral parts of empire are as common as drug addiction and cancer. Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and Palestinians can also tell us who we are. They know that once self-delusion no longer works it is the iron fist that speaks. The solitary and courageous voices that rise up from these internal and external colonies of devastation are silenced or discredited by the courtiers who serve corporate power. And even those who do hear these voices of dissent often cannot handle the truth. They prefer the Potemkin facade. They recoil at the “negativity.” Reality, especially when you grasp what corporations are doing in the name of profit to the planet’s ecosystem, is terrifying.
All tyrannies come endowed with their own peculiarities. This makes it hard to say one form of totalitarianism is like another. There are always enough differences to make us unsure that history is repeating itself. The corporate state does not have a Politburo. It does not dress its Homeland Security agents in jackboots. There is no raving dictator. American democracy—like the garishly painted train station at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka—looks real even as the levers of power are in the hands of corporations. But there is one aspect the corporate state shares with despotic regimes and the collapsed empires that have plagued human history. It too communicates in two distinct languages, that is until it does not have to, at which point it will be too late.
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly columnist for Truthdig. His latest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”
No shame for having lived
We should not be ashamed of exposing our lives
They’ve weaved our times
The fear of exposing our selves because some will use the truth against us, the suffering we’ve endured, the inconsistencies we’ve practiced to undermine our right to participate and exist as equals with those who pretend that their lives were any better.
Everyone in our times has much suffered because our societies are upside down and backwards: inhuman. We will need a great deal of compassion with our selves to overcome the myriad mistakes our parents, grandparents and our selves have made.
The idea of “perfection” that the “king” carried, the gurus and wise men associated with authority is no longer there. The authorities of our times have fallen way below their subjects and all subjects are raising their consciousness to the realization that we are all equally human and no one deserves the overdose of riches that some are struggling to hold on to.
There is a great difference between the riches and the privileges. We all deserve the privileges. We can all share in them to a certain extent and the facts are that many of us are actually already sharing in the privileges because the technology of our times allows it.
We live in beautiful and exciting times. Difficult and challenging ones but well worth experiencing. Our hearts are growing out of their bodies and reaching out to each other for love. It is a wonderful experience!
TV ad sparks death threats
Josh Jasper thought his television commercial, which depicts a baby as a future rapist, would teach viewers about violence prevention.
Instead, thanks to YouTube, the ad has triggered an international debate and death threats for the Dubuque, Iowa, resident, who heads an advocacy group for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
Jasper, 36, the president and chief executive of Riverview Center in Dubuque, said the backlash prompted him to call the police and change his personal information on Facebook from the married father of a toddler to “single.”
“I appreciate and respect when people have differing viewpoints,” Jasper said. “But for individuals to take it to a personal level and threaten my life, that’s taking it too far.”
Jasper said the ad was intended to make a point that people are not born violent but can be conditioned to be that way.
He said donations paid for the commercial, which has aired for nearly a year on televisions in northeast Iowa and parts of Illinois and Wisconsin.
A different Riverview Center ad – one that encouraged Super Bowl viewers to look for sexually suggestive and violent ads Sunday – led international audiences to the baby commercial on the advocacy group’s Facebook page and YouTube channel.
A men’s blog that linked to the commercial said it promotes hatred of men.
The blog drew comments such as: “That is such a disgusting ad” and “I teach my son whenever I can: never protect a woman” and “Josh Jasper should suffer the same fate as Nazi sympathizers after WWII – taken out and shot after a five-minute trial.”
The responses exemplify the way anonymous online forums can bring out the worst in people, said Michael Lashbrook, president of the Iowa Police Chiefs Association.
“If people are provided with the forum in which they can post or make comments that are anonymous without any real fear or concern about reprisal, they’re going to be far more outspoken and emboldened in some cases to make those types of comments,” he said.
Cyberspace, however, doesn’t make death threats any less serious, Lashbrook added.
Jasper, a former U.S. Marine who was a crisis counselor for the Los Angeles Police Department, said he doesn’t try to target men in his work.
“I probably do focus my attention on redefining masculinity rather than femininity because the vast majority of violence perpetrated in society is done by men,” he said. “But an important distinction is that a vast majority of men aren’t violent.
“Unfortunately, there aren’t enough men and boys who are speaking up saying, ‘This isn’t OK,’ ” Jasper said.
Elena:
All the posts I put from other people are related to what I’m talking about. The fact that people are more outspoken when they are hiding behind a fake name confirms the idea that we are ashamed of our selves and our lives and hide behind strange names to hurt others and our selves for not feeling free enough to stand up to what one says is a strong aspect of the problem. The fear people have of other people is tremendously strong in our days. We have been taught to be afraid of each other, to not trust our selves but as we become acquainted with our humaneness, our own as much as that of others, we’ll realize it is not only possible to trust each other but that that trust will bring us to a great civilization in which all nations will share.
re: post 88
i would agree that the anonymity of the situation in cyberspace does influence and contribute to what is being “said” and how it’s said… as well as how it’s interpreted… which on the positive side can also lead to a more direct honesty… some people are offended by directness, some people are offended by honesty, they prefer to have their ass tickled with lies, some folks are simple cranks. i would also agree that we come into this world trusting and with time and experience learn not to trust… there is a lesson in this… when dealing with the “real world” as it is, and not an imaginary pie in the sky, balance must be struck between trusting and questioning, between “faith” and doubt. can a better world than this be imagined? absolutely, but another balancing act is required in dealing with reality while holding onto one’s dreams and aspirations… that happens to be the state of affairs as it turns out, for better and for worse…. i think after we’ve lived for a while in what can be called “the real world,” if we’re fortunate enough we learn the lesson that blind faith and too much trust can lead to problems for the individual — the cult situation for example. i would say that during the process of living in this world as we find it, one learns to trust more in oneself, that’s where trust begins.
elena says: “…a fake name confirms the idea that we are ashamed of our selves and our lives and hide behind strange names to hurt others…” although elena may be “ashamed” of herself in this context, i don’t think she can accurately paint the rest of humanity with that brush, as is her habit when she assumes to speak for “we.” i can offer a different point of view regarding elena’s statement: “hiding behind a fake name” — you see, elena could have interpreted the usage of a “fake name” differently but she didn’t because that suits her agenda, more justification and rationalization, more fuel for the fire — i find her comments at the end of post 88 to be somewhat duplicitous… more on this later in this post.
in my own case, i go by “ton” in cyberspace as well as in “the real world” — you see, it’s a “nickname.” just so it’s understood, a nickname is a descriptive name given in place of, (or in addition to) the “official” name of a person, place or thing. a nickname can also be the familiar or truncated form of the proper name, which may sometimes be used simply for convenience. a nickname can be used as a sign of affection between those with a close emotional bond, a term of endearment. the term ‘diminutive name’ refers to nicknames that convey smallness, hence something regarded with affection or familiarity, when referring to a child for example. the diminutive use can also imply contempt (a usage apparently more to elena’s liking), distinction between the two is often blurred. use of a nickname can be a way to tell someone they are special and that you love them, a form of endearment or amusement. a nickname is sometimes considered desirable, symbolising a form of acceptance, but it can also be used to ridicule and in the past elena has in fact attempted to ridicule me in this way by conflating “ton” with “burton” — yet another attempt to attack and insult me. of course as elena conveys in post 88, she is more inclined toward interpreting through the lens of ridicule and insult which says something about her, it says nothing about the person whom she tries to impune and insult with suggested implications of cowardice when she says “hiding behind a fake name….” etc
more generally:
this little project here which elena misrepresents in the title banner by proudly declaring it as “the public square,” is in reality all about elena. although elena has strayed from focusing on the “topic” as described in her “mission statement” at the top of the page, this straying is understandable given the state of current events… and it’s also understandable given the fact that this project is hers and hers alone, the “conversation” goes wherever she wants it to go, everything here is filtered through her and therefore in one way or another, this is blog is literally all about her. any topic here would of course be fine by me, i’m not complaining about the “straying,” after all, i’m merely a curious observer, a pedestrian who occasionally wanders through this so-called “public square.” but i will say that the way elena conducts things here in her personal playpen is more than a little duplicitous. she of course rules her little fiefdom and so she holds the ultimate “trump cards,” she is able to justify and rationalize what she does on the one hand, whereas on the other, if someone else does similarly, she’s inclined to attack them or administer some form of censorship… often it’s a simple flippant dismissal of the other, but more often than not, it’s a defensive attack which can escalate to threats of banishment or actual banishing from the realm of the queen when her displeasure becomes extreme.
on the positive side, i must say that although i appreciate the kinder gentler version of elena recently on display, she’s obviously most comfortable here in isolation. but i’ve learned not to trust even this isolated version, her direct attacks on me have for the time being, become more oblique; now she’s treating me as if i were merely a curious specimen rather than another human being and her equal… in 84 she says: “Is that Ton’s problem too? I ask him to speak from his self and he cannot. He has never been able to nor were most of the people in the fofblog.”
you see, she is unable recognize or to acknowledge me when i “speak from myself” — she simply and adamantly refuses to and she will once again refuse to acknowledge it when this is posted… why is that ? one might wonder. after reading her query into “ton’s problem” an old saying came to mind, to paraphrase: why worry about a speck of sawdust in the eye of your friend when you have a log in your own ? it’s a way for elena to ignore and deflect her own problem — which is essentially what this blog is about.
although i have contributed to this little project of hers on numerous occasions and in various ways, elena still does not recognize the fact. in fact she refuses to acknowledge me as an individual. rather than recognize me as an individual and treat me with a modicum of respect and dignity, she attacks, or simply dismisses me. to her, i am at best an interruption and an irritant but mostly she treats me as if i were a non-entity. you see she cannot recognize me as an individual, she forgoes the effort of differentiating and attempting to understand another individual’s point of view by filtering it through the mindset that “we are one” — and so when someone disagrees or offers another point of view, it does not compute, she does not understand how another might disagree with her point of view or and she gets defensive and goes on the attack or simply dismisses the other as “invalid.” when everyone gets lumped into that convenient little box of hers, there’s no need to recognize or acknowledge the individual… this seemingly intractable mindset comes from many, many years of cult indoctrination. rather than treat me respectfully as an individual, she repeatedly lumps me into one of her little category boxes tucked neatly away in her mind; for example she repeatedly conflates me with some of the demons from her past which continue to haunt her psyche… that’s an easy thing for her and apparently it’s what she needs to do, it simultaneously fuels and justifies her own lack of civility in this case. it would seem this sort of fuel is what she needs to feed the demons within her — in this respect i’m reminded of another old adage: “do unto others…” so when i’m satisfied she’s stopped using me in this manner, then i will stop with her. then and only then, when she is able to relate to me as an equal, maybe we can have a civil human conversation — but i won’t hold my breath.
otherwise if i visit here and see that she’s attempting even ‘obliquely’ to goad or incite or conflate me with others or otherwise to take me ‘in vain’ or for use in her own agenda and devices, i will give back to her what i get from her “in spades” as it’s said in my country… this in the hope that one day the lights may finally go on and she will see herself and the error of this attitude toward me as another individual. of course she will no doubt ex-communicate me again before this hope comes to fruition.
i say ‘duplicitous’ because although on occasion i do contribute in kind, that is, not always kindly (especially when i’m attacked), but “in kind” meaning “in a similar fashion to” her own way of doing things here; i.e. cutting and pasting information which i feel may be germane to the topic of “discussion” along with the occasional personal “editorial” comment about said materials…. although i on occasion contribute in this way, elena refuses to recognize that fact, in fact she denies it, dismisses it, deletes it, manipulates and attacks the suggestion — as i expect she will continue to do yet again. you see, elena is not really interested in a conversation here, she’s never been interested in the opinion of another, much less is she interested in a civil conversation. if another attempts to contribute, she’s interested in either playing the game of “one-upsmanship” (the attempting to outdo or to keep one jump ahead of a friend or enemy engaged in a round of verbal one–upmanship), or she engages in denial, dismissal or an outright defensive attack which sets the stage for creating of more psycho-drama.
in fact her own opinions are all that matter to her, she’s a closed book, she’s admitted as much and although it’s kind of sad, that’s the way she wants it and it’s fine with me… but she really should get down off of that high horse of hers and get a grip on her delusions, her grandiosity, her superiority complex, her vitriol, her attacks and insults… she should get a grip not so much for herself because she’s obviously too smugly self-satisfied to do anything about it, but at least she should get a grip for the sake of others: she should acknowledge certain facts about herself and her haughty behavior toward others. if she really and truly lived the truth of the catch phrases she endlessly repeats (as if repetition will make it more credible coming from her), then she would be less complacent about her own “madness” and more inclined to do something practical about it in an effort to actually help make the world a better place for all — one individual at a time, beginning with herself. but elena is happiest eating her pie in the sky , it’s so much easier than actually getting down and dirty to do something practical in order to effect a change, and the first place to start is the last place she’ll consider, i.e. her own mind. (by the way, qualifying her “madness” as she does in her post by using parentheses, is simply a denial and a way to reaffirm her own comfort and self-satisfaction…. had she the courage and clarity of conviction in this, she would simply acknowledge and embrace her madness for what it is, no parentheses required… qualifying it with the use of parentheses indicates that she still does not recognize it for what it is, much less does she truly embrace it… and yes of course there can be a certain kind of power, even a sort of “crazy wisdom” in madness; there is no shame in that but the culturally conditioned shame of a perceived ‘stigma’ is not an easy thing to overcome).
from repeated experiences of her attacks i’ve learned not to trust this janus faced shrew, the kinder, gentler elena is only a mask for something which lurks just below the surface waiting to pounce, something that is mostly unpleasant and this is the madness which she dismisses, denies or deflects, blaming her reactions on others. she’s likely to show this side of her character when she’s treated to a bit of her own medicine as i’ve attempted to do in this post — in this case, again i’ve attempted to amplify and reflect back to her how she’s treating me here. not being able to, or not caring enough to “converse” with another as an equal, instead she talks around a person as if he were not “in the room,” as if she’s finally rid of him and now he’s treated not only as an inferior, as a nonentity, but also as a specimen to be utilized for examination and then dismissed and disposed of as an example to be held up for scorn and ridicule. generally, it’s ironic how often a person wishing to show how much s/he knows, really only demonstrates ignorance… which is a good thing if one is able to learn from it instead of repeating it.
so elena has a clear choice: to declare a truce with me, make peace by stopping the abuse of me, stop treating me as an inferior, stop using me as an example for demonization… or she can expect more reflecting back of this treatment in kind. of course she can always play her trump card, excommunicate me again and then abuse and insult me without questioning, interruption, or interference from me.
Ton Dear,
You’re actually talking to me, not to a third person called Elena. You can say you Elena, you don’t need this strange third person use. When I used it recently I thought you were gone, since you’d said good-bye.
Ton: re: post 88 i would agree that the anonymity of the situation in cyberspace does influence and contribute to what is being “said” and how it’s said… as well as how it’s interpreted… which on the positive side can also lead to a more direct honesty… some people are offended by directness, some people are offended by honesty, they prefer to have their ass tickled with lies, some folks are simple cranks. i would also agree that we come into this world trusting and with time and experience learn not to trust… there is a lesson in this… when dealing with the “real world” as it is, and not an imaginary pie in the sky, balance must be struck between trusting and questioning, between “faith” and doubt. can a better world than this be imagined? absolutely, but another balancing act is required in dealing with reality while holding onto one’s dreams and aspirations… that happens to be the state of affairs as it turns out, for better and for worse…. i think after we’ve lived for a while in what can be called “the real world,” if we’re fortunate enough we learn the lesson that blind faith and too much trust can lead to problems for the individual — the cult situation for example. i would say that during the process of living in this world as we find it, one learns to trust more in oneself, that’s where trust begins.
Elena: To learn the lesson doesn’t mean that we allow fear to control our actions and continue to trust our selves as much as others because affirming our love is the only way forward for human beings. The real world is not only the harm that some do on others or the harm that most allow others to do but the healing impulses that we are each trying to bring forwards towards each other. That is more real than anything else. What we have to check is our identification with our imaginary status. It is that identification what stimulates the ego to act against those it thinks should carry out a subservient act. Men on women, first world on third world, high class on lower class, educated on uneducated… all are struggling with their own identification consciously or unconsciously to become more human because the problem with carrying out the identification is that it always brings suffering to the individual: separation from others.
elena says: “…a fake name confirms the idea that we are ashamed of our selves and our lives and hide behind strange names to hurt others…” although elena may be “ashamed” of herself in this context, i don’t think she can accurately paint the rest of humanity with that brush, as is her habit when she assumes to speak for “we.” i can offer a different point of view regarding elena’s statement: “hiding behind a fake name” — you see, elena could have interpreted the usage of a “fake name” differently but she didn’t because that suits her agenda, more justification and rationalization, more fuel for the fire — i find her comments at the end of post 88 to be somewhat duplicitous… more on this later in this post.
Elena: I’m afraid Ton that you don’t understand the context I’m speaking about. I am here referring to the author’s generalization that people hiding behind fake names tend to allow more aggression out than they would were they not using a fake name.————-
in my own case, i go by “ton” in cyberspace as well as in “the real world” — you see, it’s a “nickname.” just so it’s understood, a nickname is a descriptive name given in place of, (or in addition to) the “official” name of a person, place or thing. a nickname can also be the familiar or truncated form of the proper name, which may sometimes be used simply for convenience. a nickname can be used as a sign of affection between those with a close emotional bond, a term of endearment. the term ‘diminutive name’ refers to nicknames that convey smallness, hence something regarded with affection or familiarity, when referring to a child for example. the diminutive use can also imply contempt (a usage apparently more to elena’s liking), distinction between the two is often blurred. use of a nickname can be a way to tell someone they are special and that you love them, a form of endearment or amusement. a nickname is sometimes considered desirable, symbolising a form of acceptance, but it can also be used to ridicule and in the past elena has in fact attempted to ridicule me in this way by conflating “ton” with “burton” — yet another attempt to attack and insult me.
Elena: This is true Ton but I am not going to repeat here the myriad times you’ve offended me and continue wasting our times. Your imaginary victim picture hardly suits you Ton.————
of course as elena conveys in post 88, she is more inclined toward interpreting through the lens of ridicule and insult which says something about her, it says nothing about the person whom she tries to impune and insult with suggested implications of cowardice when she says “hiding behind a fake name….” etc
more generally: this little project here which elena misrepresents in the title banner by proudly declaring it as “the public square,” is in reality all about elena. although elena has strayed from focusing on the “topic” as described in her “mission statement” at the top of the page, this straying is understandable given the state of current events… and it’s also understandable given the fact that this project is hers and hers alone, the “conversation” goes wherever she wants it to go, everything here is filtered through her and therefore in one way or another, this is blog is literally all about her. any topic here would of course be fine by me, i’m not complaining about the “straying,” after all, i’m merely a curious observer, a pedestrian who occasionally wanders through this so-called “public square.” but i will say that the way elena conducts things here in her personal playpen is more than a little duplicitous. she of course rules her little fiefdom and so she holds the ultimate “trump cards,” she is able to justify and rationalize what she does on the one hand, whereas on the other, if someone else does similarly, she’s inclined to attack them or administer some form of censorship… often it’s a simple flippant dismissal of the other, but more often than not, it’s a defensive attack which can escalate to threats of banishment or actual banishing from the realm of the queen when her displeasure becomes extreme.
Elena: I am sorry that you’re trapped in the same discourse over and over again. You could move out of it if only you really wanted to.——–
on the positive side, i must say that although i appreciate the kinder gentler version of elena recently on display, she’s obviously most comfortable here in isolation. but i’ve learned not to trust even this isolated version, her direct attacks on me have for the time being, become more oblique; now she’s treating me as if i were merely a curious specimen rather than another human being and her equal… in 84 she says: “Is that Ton’s problem too? I ask him to speak from his self and he cannot. He has never been able to nor were most of the people in the fofblog.”
you see, she is unable recognize or to acknowledge me when i “speak from myself” — she simply and adamantly refuses to and she will once again refuse to acknowledge it when this is posted… why is that ? one might wonder. after reading her query into “ton’s problem” an old saying came to mind, to paraphrase: why worry about a speck of sawdust in the eye of your friend when you have a log in your own ? it’s a way for elena to ignore and deflect her own problem — which is essentially what this blog is about.
Elena: Here you have an interesting point worth discussing. What I mean with the idea that you never speak for your self nor did most in the fofblog is that you’re always merely reacting. Here is this beautiful, complex and at the same time terrible world and all you’ve done in what could be a dialogue is react to what I say, try to put me down without addressing what I am saying and never actually talk about your self from your own heart and honesty. I am far from perfect Ton but that’s O.K. with me. Not having to pretend that I am any better than I am is good enough for me but you and most of you people in the fofblog had to hide behind other people’s quotes to stand up for an inch of what you believed just like Bobby taught us. We weren’t good enough to express our selves from our selves and you’ve done that all these years. Isn’t it good that you’re at least coming out when actually arguing with me? That is a wonderful aspect of an argument: that the I comes out of its cocoon and says: I exist! I do like that when people exist!———
although i have contributed to this little project of hers on numerous occasions and in various ways, elena still does not recognize the fact.
Elena: Oh no Ton, there you are mistaken and the Alzheimer must be getting at you because I am very clear about what your agenda has always been here:
1. Ignore Elena through such acts as:
1. Don’t be personal with her. Be distant
2. Don’t talk as an equal but as a superior “treating” her
3. Send her loads of homework to read so that she is directly or indirectly dominated by my will (Ton’s) implying that I know better things than she knows but never actually letting her know what I know or think.
4. Use particularly hurting darts so that in her vulnerable condition she will react with anger and behave like a lunatic insulting and raving so that we can justify having banned her from the fofblog and my participation here and the lowlesness of it can also be justified.
The sad thing about all this Ton is that you don’t even realize that you’re doing these things, you just do them mechanically like Robert and all people who feel superior to others do. ———-
Ton: in fact she refuses to acknowledge me as an individual. rather than recognize me as an individual and treat me with a modicum of respect and dignity, she attacks, or simply dismisses me.
Elena: Strange that you should be feeling now just as you’ve treated me for such a long time. The opposite of the spectrum is a law isn’t it? Does it surprise you to be getting a taste of your own medicine? Will it help you learn anything?———-
to her, i am at best an interruption and an irritant but mostly she treats me as if i were a non-entity. you see she cannot recognize me as an individual, she forgoes the effort of differentiating and attempting to understand another individual’s point of view by filtering it through the mindset that “we are one” — and so when someone disagrees or offers another point of view, it does not compute, she does not understand how another might disagree with her point of view or and she gets defensive and goes on the attack or simply dismisses the other as “invalid.” when everyone gets lumped into that convenient little box of hers, there’s no need to recognize or acknowledge the individual… this seemingly intractable mindset comes from many, many years of cult indoctrination. rather than treat me respectfully as an individual, she repeatedly lumps me into one of her little category boxes tucked neatly away in her mind; for example she repeatedly conflates me with some of the demons from her past which continue to haunt her psyche… that’s an easy thing for her and apparently it’s what she needs to do, it simultaneously fuels and justifies her own lack of civility in this case. it would seem this sort of fuel is what she needs to feed the demons within her — in this respect i’m reminded of another old adage: “do unto others…” so when i’m satisfied she’s stopped using me in this manner, then i will stop with her. then and only then, when she is able to relate to me as an equal, maybe we can have a civil human conversation — but i won’t hold my breath.
Elena: Oh Dear Ton, I don’t even know what it is you disagree with since I’ve never heard you actually talk about anything I am talking about from your self. You put these authors for homework and then say I disagree with you, how strange!———
otherwise if i visit here and see that she’s attempting even ‘obliquely’ to goad or incite or conflate me with others or otherwise to take me ‘in vain’ or for use in her own agenda and devices, i will give back to her what i get from her “in spades” as it’s said in my country… this in the hope that one day the lights may finally go on and she will see herself and the error of this attitude toward me as another individual. of course she will no doubt ex-communicate me again before this hope comes to fruition.
i say ‘duplicitous’ because although on occasion i do contribute in kind, that is, not always kindly (especially when i’m attacked), but “in kind” meaning “in a similar fashion to” her own way of doing things here; i.e. cutting and pasting information which i feel may be germane to the topic of “discussion” along with the occasional personal “editorial” comment about said materials…. although i on occasion contribute in this way, elena refuses to recognize that fact, in fact she denies it, dismisses it, deletes it, manipulates and attacks the suggestion — as i expect she will continue to do yet again. you see, elena is not really interested in a conversation here, she’s never been interested in the opinion of another, much less is she interested in a civil conversation. if another attempts to contribute, she’s interested in either playing the game of “one-upsmanship” (the attempting to outdo or to keep one jump ahead of a friend or enemy engaged in a round of verbal one–upmanship), or she engages in denial, dismissal or an outright defensive attack which sets the stage for creating of more psycho-drama.
Elena: My Dear Ton, I answered your author’s posts on consciousness with a long post that you’ve neglected to address and now come up with these. You definitely are strange. I am very sorry that you cannot see it but ignoring what I write is just another way of undermining me. Unfortunately for your agenda, I’ve become pretty immune to it.——-
in fact her own opinions are all that matter to her, she’s a closed book, she’s admitted as much and although it’s kind of sad, that’s the way she wants it and it’s fine with me… but she really should get down off of that high horse of hers and get a grip on her delusions, her grandiosity, her superiority complex, her vitriol, her attacks and insults… she should get a grip not so much for herself because she’s obviously too smugly self-satisfied to do anything about it, but at least she should get a grip for the sake of others: she should acknowledge certain facts about herself and her haughty behavior toward others. if she really and truly lived the truth of the catch phrases she endlessly repeats (as if repetition will make it more credible coming from her), then she would be less complacent about her own “madness” and more inclined to do something practical about it in an effort to actually help make the world a better place for all — one individual at a time, beginning with herself. but elena is happiest eating her pie in the sky , it’s so much easier than actually getting down and dirty to do something practical in order to effect a change, and the first place to start is the last place she’ll consider, i.e. her own mind. (by the way, qualifying her “madness” as she does in her post by using parentheses, is simply a denial and a way to reaffirm her own comfort and self-satisfaction…. had she the courage and clarity of conviction in this, she would simply acknowledge and embrace her madness for what it is, no parentheses required… qualifying it with the use of parentheses indicates that she still does not recognize it for what it is, much less does she truly embrace it… and yes of course there can be a certain kind of power, even a sort of “crazy wisdom” in madness; there is no shame in that but the culturally conditioned shame of a perceived ‘stigma’ is not an easy thing to overcome).
from repeated experiences of her attacks i’ve learned not to trust this janus faced shrew, the kinder, gentler elena is only a mask for something which lurks just below the surface waiting to pounce, something that is mostly unpleasant and this is the madness which she dismisses, denies or deflects, blaming her reactions on others. she’s likely to show this side of her character when she’s treated to a bit of her own medicine as i’ve attempted to do in this post — in this case, again i’ve attempted to amplify and reflect back to her how she’s treating me here. not being able to, or not caring enough to “converse” with another as an equal, instead she talks around a person as if he were not “in the room,” as if she’s finally rid of him and now he’s treated not only as an inferior, as a nonentity, but also as a specimen to be utilized for examination and then dismissed and disposed of as an example to be held up for scorn and ridicule. generally, it’s ironic how often a person wishing to show how much s/he knows, really only demonstrates ignorance… which is a good thing if one is able to learn from it instead of repeating it.
Elena: Indeed Ton, we are medicine to each other for wasn’t that what you did in the Fellowship blog? Hunt me down with all your knowledge about this and that and how I would not understand it no matter how much I tried, dialoguing with you over and over again to see if you people would accept me until I realized that that was not in the agenda?
It’s alright Ton if you cannot love me and I don’t love you either although you’ve been so persistent in coming here, you’ve put your foot in it so badly, you’ve made so many mistakes, that I am sorry for you, I am sorry because you are unable to acknowledge your mistakes and keep repeating them over and over again without ever being willing to apologize. Deep down we know each other well, we’re like a marriage gone sour in which two people who honestly tried to love each other only managed to hurt each other. We are, in the end, good representatives of our times——
so elena has a clear choice: to declare a truce with me, make peace by stopping the abuse of me, stop treating me as an inferior, stop using me as an example for demonization… or she can expect more reflecting back of this treatment in kind. of course she can always play her trump card, excommunicate me again and then abuse and insult me without questioning, interruption, or interference from me.
Elena: I am not fighting with you Ton, I am defending myself from you which is very different. I’ve become fairly good at it over time. After a while it gets easier to tolerate people attacking one. I should be a professional after the fofblog, you and the others here.
So the question again is, what are you doing here. The rules are the same as before:
1. Try to speak from yourself
2. Deal with kindness and decency between us and concern yourself mostly with the things we are discussing about a specific subject.
3. Attach your thinking to the author’s you present
4. Answer the posts that are sent to you on the subjects,
in fact, you have not answered my post on consciousness, nor many others so if you really are not interested in what I post why bother to come here to tell us that I am wrong, wrong, mad, etc again and again?
I am wrong, mad, etc again and again in your eyes Ton and that is alright with me.
Take good care of your self.
Thanks for the post. I was having a quiet Sunday and enjoyed the interaction.
It is also fine with me that you don’t trust my kindness. It is good not to think that because I am kind I cannot be firm, aggressive or violent when necessary. I am simply feeling alright with myself and fighting you or anyone else because you find me disagreeable is not worth it. You have a right to your opinion about me and everything else, just as I have a right to be free of you when I consider you harmful to my well being. So do you: you can just leave. Isn’t that what you’ve been threatening over and over again for years? Wasn’t that why you had me banned? Because I wasn’t good enough for you people? Because you thought you had to teach me a lesson of subserviance? You thought that without you I could not write but I do not need people cheering me on to speak about the things that matter to me.
That too is an aspect of freedom.
Be well Ton. Forgive me if I don’t answer you again another similar post . This has become a vicious circle and I am not interested in its viciousness. Should you wish to address the post on consciousness and dialogue about what we actually started to talk about that would be welcome. Should you not wish to, that too is fine but the victim dialogue is over. I have not been your victim since I was banned of the fofblog for the second time, that actually freed me from it for all I wanted was to apologize for my excesses there and I did and you’re not my victim here, the ridiculousness of the figure is not worth my attention.
To learn the lesson doesn’t mean that we allow fear to control our actions and continue to trust our selves as much as others because affirming our love is the only way forward for human beings. The real world is not only the harm that some do on others or the harm that most allow others to do but the healing impulses that we are each trying to bring forwards towards each other. That is more real than anything else. What we have to check is our identification with our imaginary status. It is that identification what stimulates the ego to act against those it thinks should carry out a subservient act. Men on women, first world on third world, high class on lower class, educated on uneducated… all are struggling with their own identification consciously or unconsciously to become more human because the problem with carrying out the identification is that it always brings suffering to the individual: separation from others.
It would be interesting to explore the real problems we face and not dwindle in our personal misgivings which are many and at the same time it seems the conversation we have is in accordance with our level of being and the poverty of it simply reveals where we are.
The real problems to more harmonious interaction between people certainly relate to their identification with their imaginary picture or status quo. It is precisely that identification what keeps us from understanding the objectivity of the situation:
A dialogue is conditioned by the people involved in it.
Master and servant
Authority and subject
Man and woman identified with their manhood or womanhood unable to perceive themselves as human beings rather than people of a particular genre
Parents and children where the parents live out their identification with authority in their humiliating domination of their children
These structures have been a reality for centuries. We are still living under them widely in most continents. They account for ninety five percent of the injustices the world over. Complaining or crying over them is of no use, we need to empower ourselves for the struggle for equality between human beings is real. The dynamics of empowering our selves is necessary. There are those who exercise their empowerment against others but they do it mechanically because of their unconscious repetition of the role they’ve been born into. It always acts against us when we repeat a model without consciousness because what was right for one generation is seldom right for the next one.
The dialogue itself is just an expression of the being of the people involved. A true dialogue between human beings is in itself probably the greatest art form: a healing and evolving activity between two people. An act of creation. Like making love.
The more open and human the dialogue, the more trust and connectedness between the speakers. This trust and connectedness, this “love” between them is an aspect of the “logos”. The “word”. But as I understand it, the logos is not only related to language and dialogue, it is a possibility in every human act. It is a consistent interaction of energy between the many dimensions both outside and inside the human being.
The logos is the language of the spirit. It is the healing vitality of life acting on people. The energy between people can be both healing and harming. When it is harming, it is not an ascending healing and strengthening interaction but a depleting one. Instead of revitalizing each other the participants drain each other’s energy. They are being drained or draining each other in world 96 or lower. Every individual has the responsibility of not allowing others to drain their energy. This interchange of energies is a law in our lives. We are always challenging each other through our identification with each other. The life energy in each one of us is sacred. We need it for our personal as much as our human evolution. What we can come to understand in relation to dimensions or worlds is that they are an objective reality. In world 96 we experience our selves and our reality in a very definite way. When people say “the real world” they are usually referring to that harshness of world 96 in which the individual barely perceives more than the grouse aspects of his own multiple dimensions.
Should we study carefully we would be able to pinpoint how we are in the dimension of false personality or world 96 in a dialogue and we should do this not to pinpoint the failure of each other but to learn together how to avoid falling into the same vices. When we begin to live as equal human beings, what we must be able to achieve is to make our lives “objective” without hurting each other for our multiple misgivings. This does not mean that we will not punish crime. Crime will continue to be punishable in every generation because what each generation brings is the freshness of the ideal human and the old generation is confronted and overcome eventually.
This is complex but it is a step forward in my research. We’ve cleared some aspects of consciousness in my previous post but here we are beginning to deal with how that consciousness lives itself out in our actual lives. The tool of worlds presented in The System can be useful for those who’ve verified it but for those who haven’t it is better to think of dimensions.
This is delicate because I’ve been referring to dimensions more from the point of view of the inner dimensions of an individual while “world 96,48,24,12,6, 3 and one” in the System refer not only to layers of consciousness but to being used as tools to objectively name a phenomenon or to place a phenomenon within its objective reality.
Obviously the objective reality is absolutely connected with the being of the people involved, hence we can have a dialogue that belongs to world 96, 48, etc and the quality of energy that is experienced within the dialogue is what will go back to the participants and heal them or harm them, needing their own individual digestion either way.
This inner digestion enters the space of what I would call religion or psychology. For me there’s no difference between them. Psychology has come to replace the absurdity of a religion that took the divine out of the individual and made human beings subservient to each other but religion in its original esoteric essence is a connectedness between human beings, and actualization of their spirituality in their lives.
The interaction between people would then belong to the sphere of politics: civility. How civil can people be to each other is what actualizes the logos in their concrete lives, in their every day lives. The uprising in Egypt is an actualization of the logos in our lives. To live up to that new paradigm that is emitted from the uprising is what life itself must carry out. The uprising is an expression of the people’s spiritual will, the following actualization of that will is a realization of their consciousness.
This interaction between politics and religion, between the social being and the individual being is what allows for evolution both as individuals and as human beings. The social is the womb in which we develop our individualities and when we overcome the womb and actualize our individuality, transform and transport it once again into the social sphere as mature human beings, we renew not only our selves but the world. The new generation is transformed not only externally by the changes we’ve actualized but inwardly affected by the spiritual realizations that we’ve achieved. We may not see the energies flowing within the spiritual dimensions of the human being but they are more quickly connected to each other than our physical selves.
We are our selves many versions of our human evolution just like our many cells are many versions of our individual existence.
I wish to come back again and again to the objectivity of our reality because I believe that if we can begin to perceive it in grand scale, we will begin to recover the sacred in our lives not with a God that lives outside of our selves but a dimension of humaneness that lives within our selves and that can be actualized in our social relationships.
A musician must know that the music is an objective reality not just a noise to dance to. We all “know” that and yet we don’t know it. In our times we live in so much noise that we’ve forgotten the music and even music tends to become the privilege of a few although it is a birthright of all human beings in every civilization. We must begin to think not only of music as an objective reality that we share and affects us, with a healing or harming effect, with a uniting or separating effect in our lives, but of everything we share: food and its production, architecture and its construction, technology and its construction: life.
We live in a beautiful world and we are its people.
I need to leave the corrections for later.
7
Arne De Boever 2010
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22, November 2010
ARTICLE
The Allegory of the Cage: Foucault, Agamben, and the Enlightenment
Arne De Boever, California Institute of the Arts
ABSTRACT: This article reconsiders the relations between Immanuel Kant and Michel Fou-
cault’s essays on the Enlightenment and adds Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‚What is an Appara-
tus?‛ to this constellation. It explores, specifically, the relations between Foucault’s definition
of enlightenment and the central notion of Agamben’s philosophy: potentiality. The relation
between potentiality and enlightenment is then mobilized in the article in the context of a
discussion of technology in Kant, Foucault, and Agamben. What might be the relevance of the
relation between Foucault’s enlightenment and Agamben’s potentiality for our understanding
of technological developments today? The article engages with this question through a dis-
cussion of Foucault’s writings on the care of the self, Agamben’s theory of art, and Bernard
Stiegler’s work on technology. It closes with a discussion of an artwork that stages the dra-
matic relation between all of these texts.
Keywords: Stiegler; Agamben; Foucault; Enlightenment; technology
‚It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus,‛ said the officer to the explorer, and surveyed with a certain
air of admiration the apparatus which was after all quite familiar to him.
—Franz Kafka, ‚In the Penal Colony‛
The question, I think, which arises at the end of the eighteenth century is: What are we in our
actuality? < ‚What are we today?‛
—Michel Foucault, ‚The Political Technology of Individuals‛
Technics and Enlightenment
In his recent book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Bernard Stiegler discusses a constel-
lation of texts including Immanuel Kant’s essay ‚What is Enlightenment?‛, Michel Foucault’s
essay ‚What is Enlightenment?‛, and Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‚What is an Apparatus?‛ For
readers familiar with Stiegler’s early work, in particular the first volume of the six-volume
project titled Technics and Time,1 it comes as no surprise that Stiegler would be interested in a
1
See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George
Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
8
fellow philosopher’s discussion of apparatuses.2 Stiegler’s general argument in this book is
that philosophy is yet to think through technics. Criticizing philosophy’s widespread ressen-
timent against and repression of technics, he offers an overview of some theorists of technical
evolution (including both lesser known names such as Bertrand Gille, Lucien Febvre, René
Boirel, and André Leroi-Gourhan, and more famous ones such as Martin Heidegger and
Gilbert Simondon) in order to develop, in the brilliant second chapter of the book, a discussion
of technics in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The position that shines through in these
chapters as well as in the rest of the book is that contrary to what is generally thought, human
beings did not invent technics; it is, rather, the other way around: technics invented human
beings. The human being came about through a technical change in the constitution of the
being that preceded it. Thus, the who emerges out of the what; the question of technics actually
precedes that of the human.
Given Stiegler’s project, it makes sense that he would appreciate Agamben’s attempt to
think through technics. But that does not mean he is with Agamben. His reading reveals,
rather, that in Agamben’s essay, technics is repressed once again in favor of what Stiegler cha-
racterizes as an ‚enigmatic,‛ ‚mysterious,‛ and even ‚mystagogic‛3 praise for the ‚profana-
tion‛ of apparatuses that would ‚bring to light the Ungovernable, which is the beginning and,
at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics.‛4 Agamben’s essay ends with this
sentence, and without offering any further explanation of what this ‚Ungovernable‛—which
is pitched against both apparatuses and government—might be. In contrast with Agamben’s
2
One should note from the beginning the ambiguity of the term ‚apparatus.‛ In the translations that I am
working with, ‚apparatus‛ translates both the word for ‚device‛ (‚appareil‛ in French) and what Foucault
famously calls ‚dispositif‛ (which refers not so much to a device as to a network established between dif-
ferent elements such as ‚discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, admini-
strative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions‛ *Foucault
quoted in Giorgio Agamben, ‚What is an Apparatus?" in Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And Other
Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stephan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2]). The Italian
word in Agamben’s title that is translated as ‚apparatus‛ is ‚dispositivo‛ (the choice was inspired, ap-
parently, not just by the fact that ‚dispositif‛ in Foucault is usually translated as ‚apparatus,‛ but also by
Agamben’s note ‚that the torture machine from Kafka’s In the Penal Colony is called an Apparat‛ *Giorgio
Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stephan Pedatella (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 55]. The reference to Kafka reveals much about Agamben’s general take on
technics and technology: from the get-go, the apparatus that Agamben is trying to define is associated with a
torture machine. I will come back to this throughout this essay. In ‚What is an Apparatus?‛, Agamben uses
the term ‚dispositivo‛ to refer to both ‚appareil‛ and ‚dispositif.‛ Inevitably, my own essay is marked by
this slippage. One other obvious lineage of the term ‚apparatus‛ is its use by Louis Althusser in his essay on
the school as an ‚ideological state apparatus.‛ Althusser’s essay, which pertains to education, is very much
within the scope of my own project, even though I will not address it explicitly. Finally, one should note that
the obvious inter-text for Agamben’s essay on the apparatus is Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‚Qu’est-ce qu’un dis-
positif?‛, which marks a powerful engagement with Foucault’s thought. I will leave aside here these obvi-
ous references in order to explore instead a much less obvious connection, namely the relation of Agamben’s
essay to Kant and Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment. For an exploration of Foucault and Agamben’s
uses of the word ‚dispositif,‛ see Jeffrey Bussolini’s contribution to this special issue.
3
Stiegler, 299.
4
Agamben, ‚Apparatus, ‛ 24.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
9
facile opposition in the essay of ‚two great classes: living beings <and apparatuses,‛5 Stiegler
insists on technics and human beings’ shared becoming: on the shared processes of indivi-
duation through which they both become. As Stiegler’s recent work makes clear, this does not
mean that he blindly embraces technics as humanity’s redeemer. Indeed, if Stiegler’s early
work insists on undoing the ressentiment against and the repression of technics in thought, his
more recent work pairs this insistence on technics with a reflection on the Enlightenment’s
emancipatory dimension, specifically its relation to education.
Like some of Stiegler’s other recent works—most explicitly, the volume titled La télé-
cratie contre la démocratie6—Taking Care of Youth and the Generations discusses the ways in which
technics, and in particular modern technological apparatuses such as the television, are in the
process of destroying the contemporary youth’s capacity to pay attention. In addition, because
our present situation is one in which our memory is exteriorized in apparatuses such as tele-
visions, computers, cellular phones, and iPads, human beings become particularly vulnerable
to the appropriation—the expropriation and manipulation—of their memory, a state that risks
to short-circuit what Stiegler calls, after Simondon, human beings’ psychic and collective
individuation. Once our memory is taken away from us and replaced with what-ever govern-
ments or capital might want to replace it with, our capacity to psychically and collectively
individuate ourselves is destroyed. Television is one of the modern technological apparatuses
contributing to this destruction, which Stiegler characterizes as a destruction of the spirit. In
response, Stiegler (as well as the other members of the Ars Industrialis collective) calls for a
new politics of the spirit, in which television might very well—will have to, even—play a role.7
But it is up to us to democratize this modern technological apparatus so that it can become the
support of human beings’ psychic and collective individuation.
It is here—in other words, precisely where Stiegler demystifies Agamben’s closing call
for a ‚profanation‛ of apparatuses—that his interest in the emancipatory dimension of the En-
lightenment comes in. Whereas Agamben’s negative view on apparatuses is traced back in
Taking Care of Youth and the Generations to Foucault’s insistence, in his reading of Kant, on the
second motto of the Enlightenment that Kant distinguishes—‚Argue as much as you will, but
obey!‛*emphasis mine+—Stiegler for his part proposes a return to Kant’s first motto: ‚Dare to
know!‛ What might this educational imperative still mean in the era of ‚telecracy‛? That
Stiegler takes this question seriously may be clear from one of Ars Industrialis’ most recent
projects: the creation of a school of philosophy.8 This essay will engage, first of all, with the
triangulation of Agamben, Kant, and Foucault—in other words, with the connection between
the technical and emancipatory dimensions of the Enlightenment—that I uncovered in
Stiegler’s work through a consideration of the close relations between Foucault and Agam-
ben’s engagement with technics and the Enlightenment. After an analysis of the tension be-
5
Ibid., 14.
6
See Bernard Stiegler, La télécratie contre la démocratie: Lettre ouverte aux représentants politiques (Paris: Flam-
marion, 2008).
7
See Bernard Stiegler, Réenchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel (Paris: Flammarion,
2006).
8
For more information, see : Bernard Stiegler, ‚Ecole de philosophie d’Epineuil le Fleuriel,‛
http://pharmakon.fr/wordpress/.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
10
tween potentiality and actuality in Agamben and Foucault, the essay will further its con-
clusions through a discussion of a work of art that stages the dramatic relations between the
essays by Kant, Foucault, and Agamben. This artwork will be presented as a demystified in-
stantiation of what Agamben in ‚What is an Apparatus?‛ calls the ‚profanation‛ of the
‚counter-apparatus‛: a practice that is able to break with the dark underside of Enlightenment
technologies, and restore them to their common use.
Actuality, Potentiality, Contingency
In 1986, Giorgio Agamben gave a lecture entitled ‚On Potentiality‛ at a conference in Lisbon
organized by the Collège International de Philosophie. Agamben begins the lecture by saying that
‚I could state the subject of my work as an attempt to understand the meaning of the verb
‘can’ *potere+. What do I mean when I say: ‘I can, I cannot’?‛9 This statement arguably finds
its most radical articulation in the essay that closes the edited collection Potentialities in which
‚On Potentiality‛ was first published, namely Agamben’s essay ‚Bartleby, or On Contingen-
cy.‛ Uncovering the importance of Herman Melville’s enigmatic scrivener, Bartleby, for the
history of philosophy, Agamben argues that Bartleby—a law-copyist who, on the third day of
his employment in an office on Wall Street, begins to refuse any and all tasks that are assigned
to him by repeating the formula ‚I would prefer not to‛— is a figure of ‚a complete or perfect
potentiality that belongs to the scribe who is in full possession of the art of writing in the
moment in which he does not write.‛10 In the history of philosophy, this ‚complete or perfect
potentiality‛—what Agamben calls, specifically, a ‚potentiality not to‛—has become eclipsed
by another kind of potentiality: one that is always already tipping over into actuality.
Bartleby, however, calls this eclipse into question. The scrivener’s enigmatic formula—‚I
would prefer not to‛—marks the persistence of that other kind of potentiality—the potentia-
lity not to—that Agamben is interested in.
As the title of Agamben’s Bartleby essay indicates, Bartleby is ultimately associated in
the essay with contingency. For his definition of this term, Agamben relies on Duns Scotus,
who wrote: ‚By contingent< I mean not something that is not necessary or eternal, but some-
thing whose opposite could have happened in the very moment in which it happened.‛11 If
Bartleby is thus a messianic, savior-like figure, as Gilles Deleuze, for example, has argued, he
does not come: ‚like Jesus to redeem what was, but to save what was not. < Bartleby comes
not to bring a new table of the Law but <to fulfill the Torah by destroying it from top to
bottom.‛12
This passage should not be misunderstood: what Agamben has in mind is not the
actual destruction of the Law. What he is interested in, rather, is what he refers to as ‚another
use‛ of the Law, its ‚deactivation‛ or ‚inactivity *inoperosità+.‛13 As a figure of the potentia-
9
Giorgio Agamben, ‚On Potentiality,‚ in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed.
and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 177.
10
Giorgio Agamben, ‚Bartleby, or On Contingency,‛ in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 246-247.
11
Duns Scotus quoted in Agamben, ‚Bartleby, or On Contingency,‛ 262.
12
Agamben, ‚Bartleby, or On Contingency,‛ 270.
13
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 64.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
11
lity not to and more specifically of contingency, Bartleby opens up the possibility of this
deactivation or inactivity because he perpetually situates the Law at a poetic distance from
itself, in the region of its own saying. In other words: in that space where the Law could
always also have been otherwise.
The central importance of the notion of potentiality for Agamben’s work has already
been demonstrated.14 For the purposes of this essay, I propose to reread Foucault’s answer to
the question ‚What is Enlightenment?‛—and specifically, his relation to Kant on this count—
through the lens of the tension between potentiality and actuality that lies at the heart of
Agamben’s project. Much has already been said about the relation of Agamben’s analysis of
the contemporary political situation to Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics.
But what about the solutions that Agamben proposes in response to this analysis? What might
be the relation of this particular dimension of Agamben’s work to Foucault? Although I will
focus on Foucault’s ‚What is Enlightenment?‛, my general suggestion is that in order to an-
swer this question, one must explore the relation of Foucault’s late work on ‚the care of the
self‛15 to Agamben’s writings.
“The Undefined Work of Freedom”
From 1978 until his death in 1984, Foucault repeatedly referred back to Kant’s essay ‚What is
Enlightenment?‛ Kant’s essay famously begins with the definition of Enlightenment as
‚man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,‛16 and follows up with a definition of ‚tute-
lage‛: ‚Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from
another.‛17 ‚Have the courage to use your own reason!‛18 is thus the first motto of the Enligh-
tenment. Kant insists on human beings’ potential to actively make use of their own reason;
Enlightenment is defined as human beings’ release from the incapacity to do so. At the same
time, however, the term Enlightenment refers to a historical period, a present to which human
beings are passively exposed. It refers, in other words, not only to an enlightened act but also
to an enlightened age. Kant addresses this double-sidedness—human beings’ active and pas-
sive relation to the Enlightenment—towards the end of his essay, when he raises the question:
‚Do we now live in an enlightened age?‛19 His answer is, unambiguously, ‚No.‛ ‚*B+ut we
do live in an age of enlightenment,‛20 he continues. With this shift from ‚an enlightened age‛ to
‚an age of enlightenment,‛ Kant manages to combine the active and passive aspects of the
Enlightenment: he evokes a historical period that is produced through human beings’ actions.
Thus, it is not so much the age that is enlightened, and that as such guarantees one’s En-
14
See Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2009).
15
See Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3., trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1988).
16
Immanuel Kant, ‚What is Enlightenment?,‛ in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa
Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 29.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid., 35.
20
Ibid.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
12
lightenment, but one’s Enlightenment that produces the age. The final responsibility remains
ours.
Although Foucault’s essay ‚What is Enlightenment?‛ is no doubt the best known of his
many engagements with Kant’s text, Sylvère Lotringer has recently collected a number of the
others in a volume titled The Politics of Truth. Since then, Foucault’s 1983 lectures on Kant’s
text have also been published, in both French and English. From these different publications,
it appears that for Foucault, the question of the Enlightenment was one that could not be
settled. Its answer never quite actualizes in his lectures and his writings. Instead, it is per-
petually deferred, like a potentiality that is reactivated in each instance in which it is addres-
sed. It is not difficult to see how this feature of Foucault’s engagement with the Enlighten-
ment—specifically, the tension between the actual and the potential that characterizes it—is in
fact a central component of his answer to the question of the Enlightenment.
Indeed, the tension between the potential and the actual around which Agamben’s
entire oeuvre revolves is equally central to ‚What is Enlightenment?‛ Towards the end of the
essay, Foucault summarizes the two arguments that he has been trying to make. On the one
hand, he has tried to:
emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation—one that simultane-
ously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the
constitution of the self as an autonomous subject—is rooted in the Enlightenment.21
On the other hand, he has tried to emphasize that what connects ‚us‛ (Foucault and his
audience, his readers) to the:
Enlightenment is not a faithfulness to doctrinal elements but rather the permanent reactiva-
tion of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent
critique of our historical era.22
If the first argument could be rephrased as an argument about the human being’s simultane-
ously ‚passive‛ relation to history and its constitution as an autonomous subject, the second
pushes the latter aspect of that argument into an investigation of a more ‚active‛ ‚attitude.‛23
Tying this attitude back to the first part of the first argument, it is described earlier on in the
essay as:
a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; a
way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same
time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what
the Greeks called an ethos.24
21
Michel Foucault, ‚What is Enlightenment?‛ in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa
Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 109.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 105.
24
Ibid.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
13
In the closing paragraphs of the essay, Foucault also refers to this attitude as a ‚philosophical
life.‛25 What connects ‚us‛ to the Enlightenment is the permanent reactivation of this life.
But how is one to understand this ‚reactivation‛ exactly, given the obvious tension
between the active and the passive, and specifically the actual and the potential, that haunts
Foucault’s essay? What is certain is that Foucault pitches his understanding of this ‚reactiva-
tion‛ against Kant. One might suspect that he is attempting to ‚enlighten‛ Kant here about
something that he considers Kant’s essay to be missing (or perhaps better, that he considers
Kant to be missing—for Kant’s text puts one on the track of it, even though Kant himself might
be missing it). Foucault reveals that he wants to transform Kant’s enlightened interest in the
limits of reason into an investigation of transgression. He is interested in how one can ‚trans-
form the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that
takes the form of a possible transgression.‛26 Foucault points out that such a critique would be
both archeological in the sense that it will seek ‚to treat the instances of discourse that
articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events‛ as well as genealogical in
the sense that: ‚it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the
possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.‛27
If the notion of ‚contingency‛ in this passage appears to be tied to what Foucault
elsewhere in the essay calls the present, one’s historical mode of being, Foucault appears to
want to push it here toward Duns Scotus’ understanding of it as ‚something whose opposite
could have happened in the very moment in which it happened.‛ Such would be an en-
lightened critique of contingency, the transformation of contingency into the possibility of
transgression. Foucault calls such a practice the ‚undefined work of freedom.‛28
From the closing paragraphs of Foucault’s essay, one gathers that it is not entirely
certain that such a transformation entails keeping one’s faith in the Enlightenment. Rather, to
‚enlighten‛ the Enlightenment, to push it towards the ‚potentiality not to‛ that is central to
Agamben’s intellectual project, means to question any actualization of the Enlightenment
itself, so as to return it instead to the question that both Kant and Foucault choose as their title.
Any enlightened conception of the Enlightenment would thus refrain from presenting the
Enlightenment as an answer; instead, the Enlightenment is crucially a question, is defined as a
‚potentiality not to‛ that permanently resists actualization. Thus, Enlightenment doctrine—
the Law—is pushed back into the poetic regions of its own saying, into those liminal spaces
that Agamben is so interested in, where the Enlightenment is always also otherwise.
Once More, Philologically
This is why Foucault, in one of his contributions to a book entitled Technologies of the Self,
asserts that ‚*t]he question, I think, which arises at the end of the eighteenth century is: What
are we in our actuality? < ‘What are we today?’‛29 This passage does not only reveal—more
25
Ibid., 170.
26
Ibid., 113.
27
Ibid., 114.
28
Ibid.
29
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gut-
man, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
14
so than some of the other translations of Foucault’s work on the Enlightenment—Foucault’s
explicit interest in actuality. The shift that one finds from the first question to the second—i.e.
the shift from ‚actuality‛ to ‚today‛—also marks one of the main problems of translation in
Foucault’s essay on the Enlightenment, as well as in his lectures on Kant’s essay. The problem
lies in Foucault’s use of the term ‚les actualités,‛ usually translated as ‚the present.‛ From the
opening paragraphs of Foucault’s essay, it is obvious that ‚the present,‛ ‚today,‛ is a major
concern in his engagement with the Enlightenment. However, to translate ‚les actualités‛
merely as ‚the present‛ means to lose the notion of actuality that is inscribed in the original
French term, ‚les actualités.‛ In French, ‚the present‛ is of the order of the actual: to inquire
into the present means to inquire into the actual. Foucault’s main critique of such a concep-
tualization of the present will be to insist on the potential, specifically on the ‚potentiality not
to.‛ From this perspective, the present becomes contingent (in Scotus’ and Agamben’s sense
of the word): it could also always have been otherwise. If we are still living in the present of
the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment is thus not so much ‚les actualités‛ but, rather, poten-
tiality—specifically, the ‚potentiality not to.‛30
Foucault’s obsession with the tension between actuality and potentiality, and speci-
fically with the word actual, is particularly obvious in the French original of his lectures on
Kant’s essay. Enlightenment is ‚la question du présent,‛ he states, ‚c’est la question de l’ac-
tualité.‛31 Note how the present, ‚le présent,‛ is immediately translated here into the actual,
‚l’actualité.‛ ‚Qu’est-ce qui, dans le présent, fait sens actuellement pour une réflexion philo-
sophique?‛32 Here Foucault establishes once again the connection between the present and the
actual, this time through his use of the adverb ‚actuellement‛: ‚What is it that, in the present,
makes sense today *actuellement+ for philosophical reflection?‛ At a crucial point in the first
lecture, Foucault insists very forcefully on the centrality of actuality for his reflection on the
Enlightenment by asking: ‚Quelle est mon actualité? < Quel est le sens de cette actualité? Et
qu’est-ce que fait le fait que je parle de cette actualité?‛33 ‚What is my present? < What is the
meaning of this present? And what causes me to speak of this present?‛ In each of these
cases, ‚actualité‛ could just as well have been translated by ‚actuality.‛ Whereas the reader of
the English translation risks encountering a text that is obsessed with the present—an en-
counter that would not entirely be missed, since the present is obviously a central concern in
Foucault’s text—the reader of the French original encounters in addition a text that is obsessed
with actuality.34
At the end of his first lecture on Kant, Foucault evokes specifically the tension between
actuality and potentiality that informs Agamben’s work. He asks: ‚Quel est le champ actuel
30
John Rajchman comes very close to stating this in his introduction to The Politics of Truth: John Rajchman,
‚Enlightenment Today‛ in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine
Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 9-27. See in particular page 15.
31
Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France 1982-1983, ed. François
Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 13.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid., 15.
34
All translations from Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres in both this paragraph and the following are mine.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
15
des expériences possibles?‛35 ‚What is the present *actuel+ field of possible experiences?‛ En-
lightenment, for Foucault, will have to do with separating out from the actuality of what one is
‚the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.‛ Enlightened
freedom thus comes about not as a state that would be achieved once and for all but as a
process, a kind of ‚work‛: it is a ‚patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.‛36
Enlightenment is thus inscribed at the very end of Foucault’s essay in the aesthetico-ethical
practices of self-cultivation that Foucault at this point in his career is analyzing in his work on
sexuality. It is theorized here as an ‚art of existence,‛37 a form of what Foucault in the second
volume of The History of Sexuality calls the ‚technè tou biou‛38 or ‚care of the self.‛ In ‚What is
Enlightenment?‛ Foucault theorizes Enlightenment as an ‚art of living,‛39 a practice which be-
comes part of the practices of the ‚cura sui‛40 that he reveals to be a central concern in classical
philosophy. In the Enlightenment essay, the ‚labor‛41 implied by the ‚care of the self‛ is tur-
ned into the ‚undefined work of freedom.‛ Enlightenment is a social practice through which
one attends to oneself and thus, ultimately, to others.42
What thus emerges in my discussion of Foucault’s understanding of Enlightenment is a
theory of Enlightenment as a biotechnic, a technique of taking care of one’s life. Enlighten-
ment is theorized by Foucault as a technique of care-taking. In the next section of this essay, I
discuss further the place of technics and specifically of technology in both Kant’s and Fou-
cault’s essays, in order to then turn towards the third text in the constellation that is under
discussion here: Agamben’s ‚What is an Apparatus?‛ Indeed, while Agamben cites the first
volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, specifically its closing section on biopower, as
one of his major influences in the introduction to his study of sovereign power titled Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Foucault’s shift in the third volume of The History of
Sexuality from biopolitics to biotechnics remains largely unthought in his writings. Instead,
whenever Agamben is forced to address it, a careful thought of technics, technology, and the
care of the self is pushed aside in favor of what Stiegler has characterized as a mystical politics
of the Ungovernable, marked for example in Agamben’s book on Saint Paul, by his embrace of
messianism.
35
Foucault, Gouvernement, 22.
36
Foucault, ‚Enlightenment,‛ 119.
37
Foucault, Technologies, 43.
38
Foucault, Care, 43.
39
Ibid., 45.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., 50.
42
Ibid., 53. One of the many valuable points made by Jeffrey Nealon in his recent Foucault Beyond Foucault—
a book that reexamines Foucault’s importance today, and turns to Foucault’s Enlightenment essay through-
out its argument—is that this enlightened care of the self should not be understood as theory’s version of
Nike’s ‚Just Do It‛ motto. Indeed, as my discussion of the tension between potentiality and actuality in
Foucault shows, the ‚doing‛ of ‚care‛ and the ‚labor‛ or ‚work‛ it implies might ultimately have more to
do with an ‚undoing‛ or ‚unworking‛—with the ‚worklessness‛ and ‚inoperativity‛ evoked by Agamben
—than with Nike’s sweatshop-tainted imperative. See Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008), especially the first chapter.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
16
The Question of Technology
Early on in his description of the Enlightenment, Kant evokes the curious image of domes-
ticated animals made dumb by their guardians who ‚have made sure that these placid
creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are
tethered.‛43 In his second lecture on Kant’s essay, Foucault comments on Kant’s use of the
word ‚Gängelwagen‛ for what is translated in the English version of the essay as ‚cart.‛44
Foucault points out that the German word refers to a kind of walking rack that was used in the
eighteenth century to both help infants to walk and to prevent them from walking wherever
they liked. The cart is thus a technical object that both enables freedom and enforces a degree
of obedience. One can understand why Foucault would have been interested in this word: he
considers it to be emblematic of Kant’s answer to the question of the Enlightenment. The cart
evokes, specifically, the second motto that Kant gives in response: ‚Argue, but obey!‛ The cu-
rious fact, however, is that Kant, in his text, rejects the cart as what prevents people from using
their own reason. To have the courage to use your own reason means precisely to learn to
walk without the help of the cart. Foucault’s analysis will show, however, that Kant’s en-
lightened subject nevertheless remains tied to the cart.
Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment thus appears to coincide with a rejection of a
technical object. To become enlightened means to become independent from technical supple-
ments. It means for the human being to ‚finally learn to walk alone.‛45 Even though the En-
lightenment is usually associated with the exponential increase of technological developments,
Kant’s definition of Enlightenment appears to install a separation between human beings and
technology. It is a definition of Enlightenment that is suspicious of the relation of techno-
logical development to freedom.46 This suspicion is echoed in Foucault’s essay, which partly
aims to show that ‚the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autono-
my are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed‛:
And we have been able to see [Foucault writes] what forms of power relation were
conveyed by various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with
economic aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of
communication): disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of norma-
lization exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of
population zones, are examples. What is at stake then, is this: How can the growth
of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?47
In this passage, Enlightenment technology is closely associated with power. It operates in the
service of collective and individual discipline. In this sense, it prevents the autonomy (that the
Enlightenment so prides itself on) from coming about.
43
Kant, 29-30.
44
Foucault, Gouvernement, 28.
45
Kant, 30.
46
Many have commented on Kant’s suspicion of technology. See, for example: R.L. Rutsky, ‚The Spirit of
Utopia and the Birth of the Cinematic Machine,‛ in R.L. Rutsky, High Technè: Art and Technology from the
Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 23-47.
47
Foucault, "Enlightenment,‛ 116.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
17
One should note, however, that the key question to which this insight leads is not a
rejection of technology. Foucault asks, rather, how the growth of Enlightenment technologies
could be disconnected from the intensification of power relations. One could read this as a
version of the genealogical question, formulated elsewhere in the essay, about ‚the possibility
of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think‛: how could Enlightenment
technologies be used otherwise?
In this, Foucault’s engagement with the particular problem of Enlightenment techno-
logies appears to differ fundamentally from that of one of his students, Giorgio Agamben.
Although they are not the obvious inter-texts for Agamben’s essay, ‚What is an Apparatus?‛
clearly refers to both Kant and Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment. Foucault is, as always,
one of the main interlocutors in Agamben’s text; but Agamben focuses on the dark side of
Foucault’s analyses rather than on his late work on the aesthetico-ethical techniques of the self.
When Agamben speaks towards the very end of his essay of how ‚the harmless citizen of
postindustrial democracies< readily does everything that he is asked to, inasmuch as he
leaves his everyday gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and
his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by apparatuses,‛48 it is not
only Foucault and his discussion of governmentality and biopolitics that resonates here. One
is also reminded of the second paragraph of Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, where Kant
criticizes human beings who do not have the courage ‚to be of age‛: ‚If I have a book which
understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet,
and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay—others will readily
undertake the irksome work for me.‛49 The echoes of Kant in Agamben’s essay allow one to
understand that Agamben is also engaging with the Enlightenment in ‚What is an Appara-
tus?‛ Like Kant, he is calling for an emancipation; even more explicitly than in Kant, the
emancipation that Agamben has in mind is an emancipation from apparatuses—from the
apparatuses that command and control ‚in the smallest detail‛ the lives of human beings.
In this loaded context, Agamben proposes a distinction between two major classes:
‚living beings‛ on the one hand, and ‚apparatuses‛ on the other. In addition, he distinguishes
a third class, which is produced in the power struggle between living beings and apparatuses:
‚subjects.‛50 Agamben’s vision of life’s relation to technology is one of a perpetual war be-
tween living beings and apparatuses. Foucault’s question: ‚how can the growth of capabilities
be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?‛ thus appears to become tainted
in Agamben by the specter of blind rejection.51
48
Giorgio Agamben, ‚What is an Apparatus?‛ in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. by David
Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 22-23.
49
Kant, 29.
50
Agamben, ‚Apparatus,‛ 14.
51
Of course, one might argue that Agamben’s distinction is ultimately merely analytical, and does not reflect
the nuances of his thought on technology. As Anne Sauvagnargues remarked in response to a conference
presentation I gave on Agamben and Simondon, Agamben’s ultimate interest might simply be modes of
subjectivation. Although this point is well taken, it does not adduce the tone of Agamben’s essay, which is
one of struggle and conflict between human beings and machines. For my text on Agamben and Simondon,
see Arne De Boever, ‚Agamben et Simondon: Ontologie, technologie, et politique,‛ trans. Jean-Hugues Bar-
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
18
However, although Agamben explicitly says that he is not interested in ‚another use‛
of technology,52 ‚blind rejection‛ does not appear to describe his position correctly either.
Somewhat enigmatically, the closing pages of the essay reveal him to be calling for a ‚pro-
fanation‛ of apparatuses, meaning a restoration of apparatuses to their ‚common use.‛53 In
this sense, profanation would function as a ‚counter-apparatus‛54; a technique or technology
against technologies that would halt the destructive progression of modern Enlightenment
technologies. It would end the ‚telecracy‛ that Stiegler also warns against. Whereas appara-
tuses have become part and parcel of what Agamben calls the theological economy of
government—a division of power that intends to saturate the entire field of life with the
violence of the law—our task is to liberate apparatuses from this arrangement and restore
them to their common use. As to what this might mean, exactly, with respect to an apparatus
such as the cell phone, which Agamben comes close to rejecting in his essay, remains vague.
And it precisely on this account that Stiegler attempts to push Agamben further. But what are
the realms included in Agamben’s work in which the counter-apparatus of profanation might
be witnessed in action? What might be the link that is included (and lies occluded) in Agam-
ben’s work between the profanation that Agamben is calling for and what Foucault in his late
work calls the ‚art of the self‛?
This question might ultimately not be all that hard to answer. One realm of technical
production in which such profanation becomes possible is art. In the opening chapter of his
first book titled The Man Without Content, Agamben calls for a notion of the aesthetic that
would do justice to the human being’s technical capacities, specifically the human being’s
uncanny ‚ability to pro-duce, to bring a thing from nonbeing into being.‛55 Such an under-
standing of the aesthetic would reconsider art from the position of the creator (rather than
from the position of the spectator from where Kant considers it in his Critique of Judgment) and
return it to its Ancient, political vocation: to pose a danger to the polis, to the city-state. In its
technical dimension, art is something profoundly dangerous. The tragedy of our time is that
art has lost this dimension, and has turned into something that is ‚merely interesting‛; it is
‚*o+nly because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting‛ that ‚we
welcome it so warmly.‛56 Aware of the danger that art poses to the city, Plato instead bans it
from his ideal republic. A terrifying judgment, at first sight; but at least Plato took art serious-
ly. Agamben theorizes art in the opening chapter of his book as ‚the most uncanny thing,‛ as
a capacity that inspires ‚divine terror‛ because it reveals human beings’ essential capacities for
production, for ‚divine‛ creation and destruction.57
In his work on the care of the self, Foucault as well appears to maintain a positive
connection between art (‚technè‛) and life (‚bios‛) as a way for the subject to become the
thélémy, Cahiers Simondon, no. 2 (2010), 117-128.
52
Ibid., 15.
53
Ibid., 17.
54
Ibid., 19.
55
Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. by Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999), 4.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
19
author of her or his own life, to cultivate her or his own existence. It is here that the con-
nection between biological and psychic life and technics and technology can begin to move
from the horrific nightmare of biopolitics and biotechnology (instantiated in the imagination
of film directors such as David Cronenberg, for example), to the more positive promise of
biopower and biotechnics. The latter can be found not just in Foucault’s work on the care of
the self but also in the visionary volume titled Incorporations edited by Jonathan Crary and
Sanford Kwinter, in more recent publications such as William Connolly or Catherine
Malabou’s books on the brain (titled Neuropolitics and What Should We Do With Our Brain?), or
even in cinematic explorations of the figure of the samurai in films by Akira Kurosawa (Seven
Samurai), Jim Jarmusch (Ghost Dog), or Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill).58 Today, and in line with
both Foucault and Agamben’s suggestions, it is the new interest in bioart that appears to be
one of the most promising realms for such a new discussion of techniques of life. It would
seem appropriate, then, to explore in the final section of this essay, the ways in which a work
of art contributes to the theoretical debates with which I have engaged, specifically with the
dramatic relations between Kant, Foucault, and Agamben that this essay has uncovered.
The Allegory of the Cage
During the Fall 2009 semester, a few weeks before I was set to teach a cluster of texts including
Kant and Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment, as well as Agamben’s essay ‚What is an
Apparatus?‛, I came across a minimalist art installation at the California Institute of the Arts
that seemed to capture not just something about each of these three texts, but also about their
dramatic relation.59 The installation consisted of a rectangular cage that was open in the back
but set up against a wall. The front of the cage and the right side of the cage were closed with
chicken wire. Although the cage was locked in its top right corner, the wire in the bottom left
corner was peeled up, suggesting the possibility of a way in or out. Inside the cage, a pink
neon light stood slanted against the left wall of the cage. Against the right side, there was a
small mirror reflecting (depending on the viewer’s position) either the pink light on the op-
posite side of the cage, or the chicken wire and the space outside the cage. Resting on top of
the cage was a white neon light. It turned out that this was a work by Photography and Media
student Lee Perillo, who was at that time taking my BFA upper-level philosophy course titled
‚What is Biopolitics?‛ Perillo’s work was part of a group show on ‚queer art.‛
Perhaps because I had the Enlightenment on my mind, this work made instant sense to
me within the constellation of essays about the Enlightenment that I have been discussing.
Couldn’t one think of the pink light inside the cage as Kant? Kant’s answer to the question
‚What is Enlightenment?‛ revolves around two mottos. The first is ‚Sapere aude!‛ ‚Have the
courage to use your own reason!‛60 For Kant, to become enlightened means to come ‚of age‛:
it means to move from being a minor, who can only walk with the help of a frame, to being a
58
On this point, see George Collins’ contribution on the figure of the samurai to the study group on the
‚Techniques de soi‛ organized by Ars Industrialis, available at http://www.arsindustrialis.org/petite-
annonce-pour-un-sous-groupe-de-travail-sur-les-cultures-de-soi.
59
A photograph of the installation is shown on the cover of this issue of Foucault Studies.
60
Kant, 29.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
20
major, to walking ‚alone.‛61 Kant’s second motto, however, is: ‚Argue as much as you will,
and about what you will, but obey!‛62 It is this second motto—argue, but obey—that seemed to
justify Kant’s position inside the cage.
Although Kant’s text is clearly about a way out—‚Enlightenment is man’s release from
his self-incurred tutelage‛63—that way out comes with the necessary limitation of obedience
(the cage). The mirror standing against the right wall of the cage reflects this truth back to
Kant. It is for this reason that Foucault, at the beginning of his text about Kant’s essay, can (no
doubt partly as a joke) refer to Kant’s essay as ‚a minor text, perhaps‛64: from where Foucault
is standing, it appears that Kant’s enlightenment is not entirely enlightened yet. Kant’s own
text had not fully completed the process of ‚becoming major.‛ Foucault’s reference to Kant’s
text as a ‚minor‛ text can be read as a joke, given the emphasis that Kant puts on becoming
major, ‚of age.‛ Enlightenment is, for Kant, about growing up, about turning from a minor
into someone who can walk and think for her- or himself. And so Foucault sets out to ‚finish‛
this task—a completion that in Foucault’s essay never quite takes place, as I have already
discussed above. In Perillo’s work, the white light could thus be said to represent Foucault, or
Foucault’s understanding of the Enlightenment, which has worked its way out of the cage.
Nevertheless, even Foucault’s Enlightenment is not entirely freed of the cage. The
white neon light rests on top of the cage; it is supported by it. This relation between the white
light and the cage appears to draw into question the ‚completion‛ that Foucault’s text at first
sight might appear to provide. And indeed, the point of Foucault’s essay appears to be that
the process of Enlightenment might never be completed. It involves, rather, a ‚patient labor
giving form to our impatience for liberty.‛65 In other words, Enlightenment is not a perma-
nent state that can be achieved, but the very movement from inside the cage (the pink light) to
outside the cage (the white light) that Perillo’s work captures. It involves, in other words, a
patient work upon oneself—a turning back upon oneself and one’s limitations from a per-
spective that is gained through one’s labor for freedom. Might this not be why the titles of
both Kant and Foucault’s essays take the form of a question? Might this not explain why
Foucault’s essay exists in many different versions, all of them exploring the same question
from slightly different angles, with slightly different concerns?66 As the title of my essay sug-
gests, this understanding of Enlightenment also recalls Plato’s dialectic: the point of Plato’s
allegory of the cave is not simply to move outside of the cave and into the realm of the ideas,
where one is blinded by the sun; it is, rather, to return back into the cave after one has grasped
the ideas, and to try to explain them to those who can see only shadows.67 There is thus an
emphatically pedagogical dimension to Plato’s allegory, as Stiegler in his reading of the Kant-
61
Kant, 29-30.
62
Kant, 31.
63
Kant, 29.
64
Foucault, ‛Enlightenment,‛ 97.
65
Ibid., 119.
66
See Foucault, The Politics of Truth.
67
See Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 532a-533a.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
21
Foucault-Agamben constellation has suggested.68 Perillo is staging a veritable allegory of the
cage here.
Perillo’s joke, of course, is that Kant is represented by the pink, ‚queer‛ (slanted) light
and Foucault by the white, ‚straight‛ light. Given that the work was part of a ‚queer art‛
group show, the play with colors is no doubt significant. By putting the pink light inside the
cage, the artist might want to evoke the ways in which queer identity is, as queer identity, still
very much caught up in the normativizing constrictions that a more radical, a more en-
lightened, queerness might instead aspire to subvert. To be identifiably pink might ultimately
be no more queer than to be identifiably straight. A radical politics of queerness would, per-
haps, undermine these identitarian constructions and draw out, instead, a more universal,
more enlightened, humanity.69 At the same time, however, the artist’s choice of the color
white to represent this enlightened humanity that has worked its way out of the cage draws
into question the use of the color ‚white‛ to represent this ideal. To what extent is humanity
still caught up in the moralizing color scheme—darkness is bad, sunlight is good—within
which Plato’s allegory of the cave already operated? It might be, and here is where the work
again captures the spirit of Foucault’s ‚What is Enlightenment?‛, that the white light—which
is still supported by the cage—might need to do some further work on itself. It might be that
its whiteness is not quite as ideal as one might have assumed.
Finally, and now we come to Agamben’s essay, there is the technical dimension of Pe-
rillo’s work. Perillo’s minimalist installation makes no attempt to hide the technologies on
which it depends: the work needs to be set up near a power outlet, and it leaves clearly visible
the electric cables connecting the lights to the outlets. Whatever thought the work enables,
thus explicitly depends on the support of technology. Technology is not Perillo’s enemy. In-
stead, the artist mobilizes it within the context of a radical Enlightenment project—a project
that goes beyond Kant and stages the dramatic relation of Kant to Foucault.
Perhaps Perillo’s work thus provides us with an example of what Agamben calls the
profanation of the counter-apparatus. Its bricolage-like assembly of the frame of the cage, the
chicken wire, the neon lights, and the lock on the cage, recalls Agamben’s memorable de-
scription, in a chapter from State of Exception, of a day when humanity ‚will play with law just
as children play with disused objects: not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to
free them from it for good.‛70 This practice is described by Agamben not as a destruction but
as a ‚deactivation‛ or rendering ‚inoperative.‛71 It is perhaps in this ‚inoperativity,‛ this
‚worklessness,‛ that the link between the profanation of the counter-apparatus and Fou-
cault’s understanding of Enlightenment—marked by their shared interest in potentiality—
becomes most clear. For as I remarked in a footnote earlier on, one should not confuse Fou-
cault’s theorization of Enlightenment as a technique of attending to oneself with the ‚Just Do
It‛ imperative that governs contemporary culture. Instead, both Foucault’s theorization of
68
See Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford UP,
2010), from Chapter Seven onwards.
69
See Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
70
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 64.
71
Ibid.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
22
Enlightenment and Agamben’s theorization of profanation challenge such blind actualization
by insisting on a potentiality that precedes any actuality and marks actuality’s capacity of
being otherwise—what I have called in the second section of this essay, its contingency. It is
this powerful truth that a philosophy of technics and technology, of human beings’ uncanny
capacity to bring something from nonbeing into being, also entails.
In Perillo’s artwork, the incapacitating technology of the cage thus becomes the capa-
citating—understood here in the sense of potentializing—component of the work of art, enclo-
sing the slanted, pink light representing Kant’s Enlightenment, and supporting the straight,
white light of Foucault’s Enlightenment. As a work of profanation, it liberates the cage from
being an actualizing technology of government, turning it into a dramatic, playful staging of
Kant, Foucault, and Agamben’s answers to the question ‚What is Enlightenment?‛
Arne De Boever
Assistant Professor of American Studies
School of Critical Studies, MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics
California Institute of the Arts
24700 McBean Parkway
Valencia, California 91355-2340
USA
TUESDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2011
The Allegory of the Cage
The Allegory of the Cage
During the Fall 2009 semester, a few weeks before I was set to teach a cluster of texts including
Kant and Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment, as well as Agamben’s essay ‚What is an
Apparatus?‛, I came across a minimalist art installation at the California Institute of the Arts
that seemed to capture not just something about each of these three texts, but also about their
dramatic relation.59 The installation consisted of a rectangular cage that was open in the back
but set up against a wall. The front of the cage and the right side of the cage were closed with
chicken wire. Although the cage was locked in its top right corner, the wire in the bottom left
corner was peeled up, suggesting the possibility of a way in or out. Inside the cage, a pink
neon light stood slanted against the left wall of the cage. Against the right side, there was a
small mirror reflecting (depending on the viewer’s position) either the pink light on the op-
posite side of the cage, or the chicken wire and the space outside the cage. Resting on top of
the cage was a white neon light. It turned out that this was a work by Photography and Media
student Lee Perillo, who was at that time taking my BFA upper-level philosophy course titled
‚What is Biopolitics?‛ Perillo’s work was part of a group show on ‚queer art.‛
Perhaps because I had the Enlightenment on my mind, this work made instant sense to
me within the constellation of essays about the Enlightenment that I have been discussing.
Couldn’t one think of the pink light inside the cage as Kant? Kant’s answer to the question
‚What is Enlightenment?‛ revolves around two mottos. The first is ‚Sapere aude!‛ ‚Have the
courage to use your own reason!‛60 For Kant, to become enlightened means to come ‚of age‛:
it means to move from being a minor, who can only walk with the help of a frame, to being a
58
On this point, see George Collins’ contribution on the figure of the samurai to the study group on the
‚Techniques de soi‛ organized by Ars Industrialis, available at http://www.arsindustrialis.org/petite-
annonce-pour-un-sous-groupe-de-travail-sur-les-cultures-de-soi.
59
A photograph of the installation is shown on the cover of this issue of Foucault Studies.
60
Kant, 29.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
20
major, to walking ‚alone.‛61 Kant’s second motto, however, is: ‚Argue as much as you will,
and about what you will, but obey!‛62 It is this second motto—argue, but obey—that seemed to
justify Kant’s position inside the cage.
Although Kant’s text is clearly about a way out—‚Enlightenment is man’s release from
his self-incurred tutelage‛63—that way out comes with the necessary limitation of obedience
(the cage). The mirror standing against the right wall of the cage reflects this truth back to
Kant. It is for this reason that Foucault, at the beginning of his text about Kant’s essay, can (no
doubt partly as a joke) refer to Kant’s essay as ‚a minor text, perhaps‛64: from where Foucault
is standing, it appears that Kant’s enlightenment is not entirely enlightened yet. Kant’s own
text had not fully completed the process of ‚becoming major.‛ Foucault’s reference to Kant’s
text as a ‚minor‛ text can be read as a joke, given the emphasis that Kant puts on becoming
major, ‚of age.‛ Enlightenment is, for Kant, about growing up, about turning from a minor
into someone who can walk and think for her- or himself. And so Foucault sets out to ‚finish‛
this task—a completion that in Foucault’s essay never quite takes place, as I have already
discussed above. In Perillo’s work, the white light could thus be said to represent Foucault, or
Foucault’s understanding of the Enlightenment, which has worked its way out of the cage.
Nevertheless, even Foucault’s Enlightenment is not entirely freed of the cage. The
white neon light rests on top of the cage; it is supported by it. This relation between the white
light and the cage appears to draw into question the ‚completion‛ that Foucault’s text at first
sight might appear to provide. And indeed, the point of Foucault’s essay appears to be that
the process of Enlightenment might never be completed. It involves, rather, a ‚patient labor
giving form to our impatience for liberty.‛65 In other words, Enlightenment is not a perma-
nent state that can be achieved, but the very movement from inside the cage (the pink light) to
outside the cage (the white light) that Perillo’s work captures. It involves, in other words, a
patient work upon oneself—a turning back upon oneself and one’s limitations from a per-
spective that is gained through one’s labor for freedom. Might this not be why the titles of
both Kant and Foucault’s essays take the form of a question? Might this not explain why
Foucault’s essay exists in many different versions, all of them exploring the same question
from slightly different angles, with slightly different concerns?66 As the title of my essay sug-
gests, this understanding of Enlightenment also recalls Plato’s dialectic: the point of Plato’s
allegory of the cave is not simply to move outside of the cave and into the realm of the ideas,
where one is blinded by the sun; it is, rather, to return back into the cave after one has grasped
the ideas, and to try to explain them to those who can see only shadows.67 There is thus an
emphatically pedagogical dimension to Plato’s allegory, as Stiegler in his reading of the Kant-
61
Kant, 29-30.
62
Kant, 31.
63
Kant, 29.
64
Foucault, ‛Enlightenment,‛ 97.
65
Ibid., 119.
66
See Foucault, The Politics of Truth.
67
See Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 532a-533a.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
21
Foucault-Agamben constellation has suggested.68 Perillo is staging a veritable allegory of the
cage here.
Perillo’s joke, of course, is that Kant is represented by the pink, ‚queer‛ (slanted) light
and Foucault by the white, ‚straight‛ light. Given that the work was part of a ‚queer art‛
group show, the play with colors is no doubt significant. By putting the pink light inside the
cage, the artist might want to evoke the ways in which queer identity is, as queer identity, still
very much caught up in the normativizing constrictions that a more radical, a more en-
lightened, queerness might instead aspire to subvert. To be identifiably pink might ultimately
be no more queer than to be identifiably straight. A radical politics of queerness would, per-
haps, undermine these identitarian constructions and draw out, instead, a more universal,
more enlightened, humanity.69 At the same time, however, the artist’s choice of the color
white to represent this enlightened humanity that has worked its way out of the cage draws
into question the use of the color ‚white‛ to represent this ideal. To what extent is humanity
still caught up in the moralizing color scheme—darkness is bad, sunlight is good—within
which Plato’s allegory of the cave already operated? It might be, and here is where the work
again captures the spirit of Foucault’s ‚What is Enlightenment?‛, that the white light—which
is still supported by the cage—might need to do some further work on itself. It might be that
its whiteness is not quite as ideal as one might have assumed.
Finally, and now we come to Agamben’s essay, there is the technical dimension of Pe-
rillo’s work. Perillo’s minimalist installation makes no attempt to hide the technologies on
which it depends: the work needs to be set up near a power outlet, and it leaves clearly visible
the electric cables connecting the lights to the outlets. Whatever thought the work enables,
thus explicitly depends on the support of technology. Technology is not Perillo’s enemy. In-
stead, the artist mobilizes it within the context of a radical Enlightenment project—a project
that goes beyond Kant and stages the dramatic relation of Kant to Foucault.
Perhaps Perillo’s work thus provides us with an example of what Agamben calls the
profanation of the counter-apparatus. Its bricolage-like assembly of the frame of the cage, the
chicken wire, the neon lights, and the lock on the cage, recalls Agamben’s memorable de-
scription, in a chapter from State of Exception, of a day when humanity ‚will play with law just
as children play with disused objects: not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to
free them from it for good.‛70 This practice is described by Agamben not as a destruction but
as a ‚deactivation‛ or rendering ‚inoperative.‛71 It is perhaps in this ‚inoperativity,‛ this
‚worklessness,‛ that the link between the profanation of the counter-apparatus and Fou-
cault’s understanding of Enlightenment—marked by their shared interest in potentiality—
becomes most clear. For as I remarked in a footnote earlier on, one should not confuse Fou-
cault’s theorization of Enlightenment as a technique of attending to oneself with the ‚Just Do
It‛ imperative that governs contemporary culture. Instead, both Foucault’s theorization of
68
See Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford UP,
2010), from Chapter Seven onwards.
69
See Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
70
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 64.
71
Ibid.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
22
Enlightenment and Agamben’s theorization of profanation challenge such blind actualization
by insisting on a potentiality that precedes any actuality and marks actuality’s capacity of
being otherwise—what I have called in the second section of this essay, its contingency. It is
this powerful truth that a philosophy of technics and technology, of human beings’ uncanny
capacity to bring something from nonbeing into being, also entails.
In Perillo’s artwork, the incapacitating technology of the cage thus becomes the capa-
citating—understood here in the sense of potentializing—component of the work of art, enclo-
sing the slanted, pink light representing Kant’s Enlightenment, and supporting the straight,
white light of Foucault’s Enlightenment. As a work of profanation, it liberates the cage from
being an actualizing technology of government, turning it into a dramatic, playful staging of
Kant, Foucault, and Agamben’s answers to the question ‚What is Enlightenment?‛
Elena:
Plato’s allegory is clear: return to the cavern and reveal it to others so that they too can leave it.
But leaving it for us is not going anywhere but being in it without being it. We are beyond Kant and Foucault in that the problem is not so much knowing that it is a cave but transforming it into the womb of freedom through conscious action.
In the transition people have tended to think that it is about non-action but the problem is not non-action, non-action allows for the status quo to reproduce itself, the problem is conscious action. The problem is not no laws but THE LAWS. The laws that we are willing to live up to because they guarantee our freedom, our evolution, our humaneness.
Knowing what is is not being. Being is becoming in action. Sculpting our selves through our daily lives. From one’s self to our selves. From the individual to society, back and forth in an ever more human dialogue. That is “Life”.
We do not need to be identified with “us” to work for our freedom, but if we take our selves away from the freedom, we’ve lost the power behind it.
Posted by elena at 23:25 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: The Allegory of the Cage
Foucault- 5. Technology
The Question of Technology
Early on in his description of the Enlightenment, Kant evokes the curious image of domes-
ticated animals made dumb by their guardians who ‚have made sure that these placid
creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are
tethered.‛43 In his second lecture on Kant’s essay, Foucault comments on Kant’s use of the
word ‚Gängelwagen‛ for what is translated in the English version of the essay as ‚cart.‛44
Foucault points out that the German word refers to a kind of walking rack that was used in the
eighteenth century to both help infants to walk and to prevent them from walking wherever
they liked. The cart is thus a technical object that both enables freedom and enforces a degree
of obedience. One can understand why Foucault would have been interested in this word: he
considers it to be emblematic of Kant’s answer to the question of the Enlightenment. The cart
evokes, specifically, the second motto that Kant gives in response: ‚Argue, but obey!‛ The cu-
rious fact, however, is that Kant, in his text, rejects the cart as what prevents people from using
their own reason. To have the courage to use your own reason means precisely to learn to
walk without the help of the cart. Foucault’s analysis will show, however, that Kant’s en-
lightened subject nevertheless remains tied to the cart.
Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment thus appears to coincide with a rejection of a
technical object. To become enlightened means to become independent from technical supple-
ments. It means for the human being to ‚finally learn to walk alone.‛45 Even though the En-
lightenment is usually associated with the exponential increase of technological developments,
Kant’s definition of Enlightenment appears to install a separation between human beings and
technology. It is a definition of Enlightenment that is suspicious of the relation of techno-
logical development to freedom.46 This suspicion is echoed in Foucault’s essay, which partly
aims to show that ‚the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autono-
my are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed‛:
And we have been able to see [Foucault writes] what forms of power relation were
conveyed by various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with
economic aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of
communication): disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of norma-
lization exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of
population zones, are examples. What is at stake then, is this: How can the growth
of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?47
In this passage, Enlightenment technology is closely associated with power. It operates in the
service of collective and individual discipline. In this sense, it prevents the autonomy (that the
Enlightenment so prides itself on) from coming about.
43
Kant, 29-30.
44
Foucault, Gouvernement, 28.
45
Kant, 30.
46
Many have commented on Kant’s suspicion of technology. See, for example: R.L. Rutsky, ‚The Spirit of
Utopia and the Birth of the Cinematic Machine,‛ in R.L. Rutsky, High Technè: Art and Technology from the
Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 23-47.
47
Foucault, “Enlightenment,‛ 116.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
17
One should note, however, that the key question to which this insight leads is not a
rejection of technology. Foucault asks, rather, how the growth of Enlightenment technologies
could be disconnected from the intensification of power relations. One could read this as a
version of the genealogical question, formulated elsewhere in the essay, about ‚the possibility
of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think‛: how could Enlightenment
technologies be used otherwise?
In this, Foucault’s engagement with the particular problem of Enlightenment techno-
logies appears to differ fundamentally from that of one of his students, Giorgio Agamben.
Although they are not the obvious inter-texts for Agamben’s essay, ‚What is an Apparatus?‛
clearly refers to both Kant and Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment. Foucault is, as always,
one of the main interlocutors in Agamben’s text; but Agamben focuses on the dark side of
Foucault’s analyses rather than on his late work on the aesthetico-ethical techniques of the self.
When Agamben speaks towards the very end of his essay of how ‚the harmless citizen of
postindustrial democracies< readily does everything that he is asked to, inasmuch as he
leaves his everyday gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and
his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by apparatuses,‛48 it is not
only Foucault and his discussion of governmentality and biopolitics that resonates here. One
is also reminded of the second paragraph of Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, where Kant
criticizes human beings who do not have the courage ‚to be of age‛: ‚If I have a book which
understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet,
and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay—others will readily
undertake the irksome work for me.‛49 The echoes of Kant in Agamben’s essay allow one to
understand that Agamben is also engaging with the Enlightenment in ‚What is an Appara-
tus?‛ Like Kant, he is calling for an emancipation; even more explicitly than in Kant, the
emancipation that Agamben has in mind is an emancipation from apparatuses—from the
apparatuses that command and control ‚in the smallest detail‛ the lives of human beings.
In this loaded context, Agamben proposes a distinction between two major classes:
‚living beings‛ on the one hand, and ‚apparatuses‛ on the other. In addition, he distinguishes
a third class, which is produced in the power struggle between living beings and apparatuses:
‚subjects.‛50 Agamben’s vision of life’s relation to technology is one of a perpetual war be-
tween living beings and apparatuses. Foucault’s question: ‚how can the growth of capabilities
be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?‛ thus appears to become tainted
in Agamben by the specter of blind rejection.51
48
Giorgio Agamben, ‚What is an Apparatus?‛ in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. by David
Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 22-23.
49
Kant, 29.
50
Agamben, ‚Apparatus,‛ 14.
51
Of course, one might argue that Agamben’s distinction is ultimately merely analytical, and does not reflect
the nuances of his thought on technology. As Anne Sauvagnargues remarked in response to a conference
presentation I gave on Agamben and Simondon, Agamben’s ultimate interest might simply be modes of
subjectivation. Although this point is well taken, it does not adduce the tone of Agamben’s essay, which is
one of struggle and conflict between human beings and machines. For my text on Agamben and Simondon,
see Arne De Boever, ‚Agamben et Simondon: Ontologie, technologie, et politique,‛ trans. Jean-Hugues Bar-
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
18
However, although Agamben explicitly says that he is not interested in ‚another use‛
of technology,52 ‚blind rejection‛ does not appear to describe his position correctly either.
Somewhat enigmatically, the closing pages of the essay reveal him to be calling for a ‚pro-
fanation‛ of apparatuses, meaning a restoration of apparatuses to their ‚common use.‛53 In
this sense, profanation would function as a ‚counter-apparatus‛54; a technique or technology
against technologies that would halt the destructive progression of modern Enlightenment
technologies. It would end the ‚telecracy‛ that Stiegler also warns against. Whereas appara-
tuses have become part and parcel of what Agamben calls the theological economy of
government—a division of power that intends to saturate the entire field of life with the
violence of the law—our task is to liberate apparatuses from this arrangement and restore
them to their common use. As to what this might mean, exactly, with respect to an apparatus
such as the cell phone, which Agamben comes close to rejecting in his essay, remains vague.
And it precisely on this account that Stiegler attempts to push Agamben further. But what are
the realms included in Agamben’s work in which the counter-apparatus of profanation might
be witnessed in action? What might be the link that is included (and lies occluded) in Agam-
ben’s work between the profanation that Agamben is calling for and what Foucault in his late
work calls the ‚art of the self‛?
This question might ultimately not be all that hard to answer. One realm of technical
production in which such profanation becomes possible is art. In the opening chapter of his
first book titled The Man Without Content, Agamben calls for a notion of the aesthetic that
would do justice to the human being’s technical capacities, specifically the human being’s
uncanny ‚ability to pro-duce, to bring a thing from nonbeing into being.‛55 Such an under-
standing of the aesthetic would reconsider art from the position of the creator (rather than
from the position of the spectator from where Kant considers it in his Critique of Judgment) and
return it to its Ancient, political vocation: to pose a danger to the polis, to the city-state. In its
technical dimension, art is something profoundly dangerous. The tragedy of our time is that
art has lost this dimension, and has turned into something that is ‚merely interesting‛; it is
‚*o+nly because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting‛ that ‚we
welcome it so warmly.‛56 Aware of the danger that art poses to the city, Plato instead bans it
from his ideal republic. A terrifying judgment, at first sight; but at least Plato took art serious-
ly. Agamben theorizes art in the opening chapter of his book as ‚the most uncanny thing,‛ as
a capacity that inspires ‚divine terror‛ because it reveals human beings’ essential capacities for
production, for ‚divine‛ creation and destruction.57
In his work on the care of the self, Foucault as well appears to maintain a positive
connection between art (‚technè‛) and life (‚bios‛) as a way for the subject to become the
thélémy, Cahiers Simondon, no. 2 (2010), 117-128.
52
Ibid., 15.
53
Ibid., 17.
54
Ibid., 19.
55
Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. by Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999), 4.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
19
author of her or his own life, to cultivate her or his own existence. It is here that the con-
nection between biological and psychic life and technics and technology can begin to move
from the horrific nightmare of biopolitics and biotechnology (instantiated in the imagination
of film directors such as David Cronenberg, for example), to the more positive promise of
biopower and biotechnics. The latter can be found not just in Foucault’s work on the care of
the self but also in the visionary volume titled Incorporations edited by Jonathan Crary and
Sanford Kwinter, in more recent publications such as William Connolly or Catherine
Malabou’s books on the brain (titled Neuropolitics and What Should We Do With Our Brain?), or
even in cinematic explorations of the figure of the samurai in films by Akira Kurosawa (Seven
Samurai), Jim Jarmusch (Ghost Dog), or Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill).58 Today, and in line with
both Foucault and Agamben’s suggestions, it is the new interest in bioart that appears to be
one of the most promising realms for such a new discussion of techniques of life. It would
seem appropriate, then, to explore in the final section of this essay, the ways in which a work
of art contributes to the theoretical debates with which I have engaged, specifically with the
dramatic relations between Kant, Foucault, and Agamben that this essay has uncovered.
Elena:
This is a delicate paragraph because the author separates the technical from the artistic without realizing that the layer of reality that is numbed to the individual of our times is as equally numbed in the sphere of the "technocrats" as in the sphere of the artists. The issue is not replacing technology with art but giving to both the vividness of "conscious" action.
What is interesting about technology today is that it does submit the individual more fully into repetitive action without will enforcing the tendency in individuals to reproduce the status quo in an increasingly descending process but art is equally void of meaning in that it has increasingly separated from the people and established itself in a niche of the privileged few. It has become a tool of the status quo as powerful as technology and ironically, it is technology what is freeing the individual and society because it is being used to communicate with each other. The Egyptian uprising is an example of that.
What needs to be understood is that beyond the technology of technology is the human element that it is used for. In the realm of communications, the technology frees the possibility of reconnecting and expressing our will. What then becomes interesting is "technology" as an art form.
Posted by elena at 23:02 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: Foucault-5 Technology
"doing" and "not doing"
What thus emerges in my discussion of Foucault’s understanding of Enlightenment is a
theory of Enlightenment as a biotechnic, a technique of taking care of one’s life. Enlighten-
ment is theorized by Foucault as a technique of care-taking. In the next section of this essay, I
discuss further the place of technics and specifically of technology in both Kant’s and Fou-
cault’s essays, in order to then turn towards the third text in the constellation that is under
discussion here: Agamben’s ‚What is an Apparatus?‛ Indeed, while Agamben cites the first
volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, specifically its closing section on biopower, as
one of his major influences in the introduction to his study of sovereign power titled Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Foucault’s shift in the third volume of The History of
Sexuality from biopolitics to biotechnics remains largely unthought in his writings. Instead,
whenever Agamben is forced to address it, a careful thought of technics, technology, and the
care of the self is pushed aside in favor of what Stiegler has characterized as a mystical politics
of the Ungovernable, marked for example in Agamben’s book on Saint Paul, by his embrace of
messianism.
35
Foucault, Gouvernement, 22.
36
Foucault, ‚Enlightenment,‛ 119.
37
Foucault, Technologies, 43.
38
Foucault, Care, 43.
39
Ibid., 45.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., 50.
42
Ibid., 53. One of the many valuable points made by Jeffrey Nealon in his recent Foucault Beyond Foucault—
a book that reexamines Foucault’s importance today, and turns to Foucault’s Enlightenment essay through-
out its argument—is that this enlightened care of the self should not be understood as theory’s version of
Nike’s ‚Just Do It‛ motto. Indeed, as my discussion of the tension between potentiality and actuality in
Foucault shows, the ‚doing‛ of ‚care‛ and the ‚labor‛ or ‚work‛ it implies might ultimately have more to
do with an ‚undoing‛ or ‚unworking‛—with the ‚worklessness‛ and ‚inoperativity‛ evoked by Agamben
—than with Nike’s sweatshop-tainted imperative. See Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008), especially the first chapter.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
Elena: Interesting that the author is split between the extremes of doing or not doing when what does is not done while what is done, is passively accomplished, that is, without identification.
This same mistake is made in cults in which people's possibility of taking responsibility for their act is taken away from them and they are turned into machines doing what the guru wishes them to do: work like slaves to carry out his personal agenda.
Posted by elena at 22:38 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: doing and not doing- Foucault 4
The "Present"- foucault
(Text continued)
Once More, Philologically
This is why Foucault, in one of his contributions to a book entitled Technologies of the Self,
asserts that ‚*t]he question, I think, which arises at the end of the eighteenth century is: What
are we in our actuality? < ‘What are we today?’‛29 This passage does not only reveal—more
25
Ibid., 170.
26
Ibid., 113.
27
Ibid., 114.
28
Ibid.
29
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gut-
man, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
14
so than some of the other translations of Foucault’s work on the Enlightenment—Foucault’s
explicit interest in actuality. The shift that one finds from the first question to the second—i.e.
the shift from ‚actuality‛ to ‚today‛—also marks one of the main problems of translation in
Foucault’s essay on the Enlightenment, as well as in his lectures on Kant’s essay. The problem
lies in Foucault’s use of the term ‚les actualités,‛ usually translated as ‚the present.‛ From the
opening paragraphs of Foucault’s essay, it is obvious that ‚the present,‛ ‚today,‛ is a major
concern in his engagement with the Enlightenment. However, to translate ‚les actualités‛
merely as ‚the present‛ means to lose the notion of actuality that is inscribed in the original
French term, ‚les actualités.‛ In French, ‚the present‛ is of the order of the actual: to inquire
into the present means to inquire into the actual. Foucault’s main critique of such a concep-
tualization of the present will be to insist on the potential, specifically on the ‚potentiality not
to.‛ From this perspective, the present becomes contingent (in Scotus’ and Agamben’s sense
of the word): it could also always have been otherwise. If we are still living in the present of
the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment is thus not so much ‚les actualités‛ but, rather, poten-
tiality—specifically, the ‚potentiality not to.‛30
Foucault’s obsession with the tension between actuality and potentiality, and speci-
fically with the word actual, is particularly obvious in the French original of his lectures on
Kant’s essay. Enlightenment is ‚la question du présent,‛ he states, ‚c’est la question de l’ac-
tualité.‛31 Note how the present, ‚le présent,‛ is immediately translated here into the actual,
‚l’actualité.‛ ‚Qu’est-ce qui, dans le présent, fait sens actuellement pour une réflexion philo-
sophique?‛32 Here Foucault establishes once again the connection between the present and the
actual, this time through his use of the adverb ‚actuellement‛: ‚What is it that, in the present,
makes sense today *actuellement+ for philosophical reflection?‛ At a crucial point in the first
lecture, Foucault insists very forcefully on the centrality of actuality for his reflection on the
Enlightenment by asking: ‚Quelle est mon actualité? < Quel est le sens de cette actualité? Et
qu’est-ce que fait le fait que je parle de cette actualité?‛33 ‚What is my present? < What is the
meaning of this present? And what causes me to speak of this present?‛ In each of these
cases, ‚actualité‛ could just as well have been translated by ‚actuality.‛ Whereas the reader of
the English translation risks encountering a text that is obsessed with the present—an en-
counter that would not entirely be missed, since the present is obviously a central concern in
Foucault’s text—the reader of the French original encounters in addition a text that is obsessed
with actuality.34
At the end of his first lecture on Kant, Foucault evokes specifically the tension between
actuality and potentiality that informs Agamben’s work. He asks: ‚Quel est le champ actuel
30
John Rajchman comes very close to stating this in his introduction to The Politics of Truth: John Rajchman,
‚Enlightenment Today‛ in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine
Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 9-27. See in particular page 15.
31
Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France 1982-1983, ed. François
Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 13.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid., 15.
34
All translations from Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres in both this paragraph and the following are mine.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
15
des expériences possibles?‛35 ‚What is the present *actuel+ field of possible experiences?‛ En-
lightenment, for Foucault, will have to do with separating out from the actuality of what one is
‚the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.‛ Enlightened
freedom thus comes about not as a state that would be achieved once and for all but as a
process, a kind of ‚work‛: it is a ‚patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.‛36
Enlightenment is thus inscribed at the very end of Foucault’s essay in the aesthetico-ethical
practices of self-cultivation that Foucault at this point in his career is analyzing in his work on
sexuality. It is theorized here as an ‚art of existence,‛37 a form of what Foucault in the second
volume of The History of Sexuality calls the ‚technè tou biou‛38 or ‚care of the self.‛ In ‚What is
Enlightenment?‛ Foucault theorizes Enlightenment as an ‚art of living,‛39 a practice which be-
comes part of the practices of the ‚cura sui‛40 that he reveals to be a central concern in classical
philosophy. In the Enlightenment essay, the ‚labor‛41 implied by the ‚care of the self‛ is tur-
ned into the ‚undefined work of freedom.‛ Enlightenment is a social practice through which
one attends to oneself and thus, ultimately, to others.42
Elena:
What Foucault undestands by enlightenment I understand by religion: an art of living.
In this paragraphs it's even clearer that what he is talking about is in the Fourth Way System, the art of being present.
But there are multiple difficulties in the fact that we have the tendency to realize that we need to be present but then not in the present of our historical conditioning but in the present of our own self having transformed our historical reality: actualized it.
Another difficulty is in the tendency to negate our historical reality by neglecting it and separating from it as is done in cults instead of assuming and transforming it. In this case cults can be the traditionally understood cults but all other institutionalized behaviors that "mechanically" "unconsciously" reproduce the status quo.
Posted by elena at 22:31 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: The Present- Foucault
Foucault – Enlightenment 2 (continued) "potentially not to"
Continuation of the above article.
"If the notion of ‚contingency‛ in this passage appears to be tied to what Foucault
elsewhere in the essay calls the present, one’s historical mode of being, Foucault appears to
want to push it here toward Duns Scotus’ understanding of it as ‚something whose opposite
could have happened in the very moment in which it happened.‛ Such would be an en-
lightened critique of contingency, the transformation of contingency into the possibility of
transgression. Foucault calls such a practice the ‚undefined work of freedom.‛28
From the closing paragraphs of Foucault’s essay, one gathers that it is not entirely
certain that such a transformation entails keeping one’s faith in the Enlightenment. Rather, to
‚enlighten‛ the Enlightenment, to push it towards the ‚potentiality not to‛ that is central to
Agamben’s intellectual project, means to question any actualization of the Enlightenment
itself, so as to return it instead to the question that both Kant and Foucault choose as their title.
Any enlightened conception of the Enlightenment would thus refrain from presenting the
Enlightenment as an answer; instead, the Enlightenment is crucially a question, is defined as a
‚potentiality not to‛ that permanently resists actualization. Thus, Enlightenment doctrine—
the Law—is pushed back into the poetic regions of its own saying, into those liminal spaces
that Agamben is so interested in, where the Enlightenment is always also otherwise."
Elena:
Any enlightened conception of the Enlightenment would thus refrain from presenting the
Enlightenment as an answer; instead, the Enlightenment is crucially a question, is defined as a
‚potentiality not to‛ that permanently resists actualization.
One could say that these are just word games to try to understand the possibilities at stake. Is it not clear that these men are using a different language to convey the idea of "not being identified?"
They put it beautifully and differently: "the pontentiality not to, that permanently resists actualization is one way of saying it", another way could be: the potentiality to permanently actualize one's self
In the act of not identifying the I resists actualization or identification but in so doing it finds another dimension of itself in which to exist, a layer both within itself and the outside world that keeps it from falling in the "historical" present and remaining in the "eternal human".
This is to me a beautiful presentation of what religion is about, religion or psychology much more than philosophy unless by philosophy we were to understand the psychology of religion! My difficulty with the words is just a theoretical one for in my times the word philosophy is something we learn and study about while psychology deals with our "problems" while religion is for the "conservatives"! They all seem to depict our own confusion on knowledge and being but what is being dealt with in these texts that I've presented by Foucault is Being in its deepest expression and he masterfully depicts it not only in the individual but in society. It's no wonder that so many people are "following" him.
Posted by elena at 22:11 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: Foucault – Enlightenment 2 (continued) "potentially not to"
“The Undefined Work of Freedom”
Elena: This text on Foucault and others seems strongly related to what I've been talking about in relation to the possibility of letting go of our "programming" and developing our own self. It must be clear of course that this is not my idea but an idea in the fourth way system, a so called "esoteric" idea that seems to have become an exoteric idea.
What I find interesting about these writers is the way they so beautifully circumvent the ideas without actually formulating them as simply and directly as the System does. The System is supposed to come from conscious knowledge while these are the socially accepted philosophers. These socially accepted philosophers have something wonderful about them because they don't just "know" the ideas, they kind of "sculpt" them out of their lives.
“The Undefined Work of Freedom”
From 1978 until his death in 1984, Foucault repeatedly referred back to Kant’s essay ‚What is
Enlightenment?‛ Kant’s essay famously begins with the definition of Enlightenment as
‚man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,‛16 and follows up with a definition of ‚tute-
lage‛: ‚Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from
another.‛17 ‚Have the courage to use your own reason!‛18 is thus the first motto of the Enligh-
tenment. Kant insists on human beings’ potential to actively make use of their own reason;
Enlightenment is defined as human beings’ release from the incapacity to do so. At the same
time, however, the term Enlightenment refers to a historical period, a present to which human
beings are passively exposed. It refers, in other words, not only to an enlightened act but also
to an enlightened age. Kant addresses this double-sidedness—human beings’ active and pas-
sive relation to the Enlightenment—towards the end of his essay, when he raises the question:
‚Do we now live in an enlightened age?‛19 His answer is, unambiguously, ‚No.‛ ‚*B+ut we
do live in an age of enlightenment,‛20 he continues. With this shift from ‚an enlightened age‛ to
‚an age of enlightenment,‛ Kant manages to combine the active and passive aspects of the
Enlightenment: he evokes a historical period that is produced through human beings’ actions.
Thus, it is not so much the age that is enlightened, and that as such guarantees one’s En-
14
See Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2009).
15
See Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3., trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1988).
16
Immanuel Kant, ‚What is Enlightenment?,‛ in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa
Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 29.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid., 35.
20
Ibid.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
12
lightenment, but one’s Enlightenment that produces the age. The final responsibility remains
ours.
Although Foucault’s essay ‚What is Enlightenment?‛ is no doubt the best known of his
many engagements with Kant’s text, Sylvère Lotringer has recently collected a number of the
others in a volume titled The Politics of Truth. Since then, Foucault’s 1983 lectures on Kant’s
text have also been published, in both French and English. From these different publications,
it appears that for Foucault, the question of the Enlightenment was one that could not be
settled. Its answer never quite actualizes in his lectures and his writings. Instead, it is per-
petually deferred, like a potentiality that is reactivated in each instance in which it is addres-
sed. It is not difficult to see how this feature of Foucault’s engagement with the Enlighten-
ment—specifically, the tension between the actual and the potential that characterizes it—is in
fact a central component of his answer to the question of the Enlightenment.
Indeed, the tension between the potential and the actual around which Agamben’s
entire oeuvre revolves is equally central to ‚What is Enlightenment?‛ Towards the end of the
essay, Foucault summarizes the two arguments that he has been trying to make. On the one
hand, he has tried to:
emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation—one that simultane-
ously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the
constitution of the self as an autonomous subject—is rooted in the Enlightenment.21
On the other hand, he has tried to emphasize that what connects ‚us‛ (Foucault and his
audience, his readers) to the:
Enlightenment is not a faithfulness to doctrinal elements but rather the permanent reactiva-
tion of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent
critique of our historical era.22
If the first argument could be rephrased as an argument about the human being’s simultane-
ously ‚passive‛ relation to history and its constitution as an autonomous subject, the second
pushes the latter aspect of that argument into an investigation of a more ‚active‛ ‚attitude.‛23
Tying this attitude back to the first part of the first argument, it is described earlier on in the
essay as:
a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; a
way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same
time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what
the Greeks called an ethos.24
21
Michel Foucault, ‚What is Enlightenment?‛ in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa
Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 109.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 105.
24
Ibid.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
13
In the closing paragraphs of the essay, Foucault also refers to this attitude as a ‚philosophical
life.‛25 What connects ‚us‛ to the Enlightenment is the permanent reactivation of this life.
But how is one to understand this ‚reactivation‛ exactly, given the obvious tension
between the active and the passive, and specifically the actual and the potential, that haunts
Foucault’s essay? What is certain is that Foucault pitches his understanding of this ‚reactiva-
tion‛ against Kant. One might suspect that he is attempting to ‚enlighten‛ Kant here about
something that he considers Kant’s essay to be missing (or perhaps better, that he considers
Kant to be missing—for Kant’s text puts one on the track of it, even though Kant himself might
be missing it). Foucault reveals that he wants to transform Kant’s enlightened interest in the
limits of reason into an investigation of transgression. He is interested in how one can ‚trans-
form the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that
takes the form of a possible transgression.‛26 Foucault points out that such a critique would be
both archeological in the sense that it will seek ‚to treat the instances of discourse that
articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events‛ as well as genealogical in
the sense that: ‚it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the
possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.‛27
Elena:
This possibility of not being what we are programmed to be is no other than the idea that we can stop becoming identified with our imaginary picture and become the self of our own choice in "the
constitution of the self as an autonomous subject".
"Enlightenment is not a faithfulness to doctrinal elements but rather the permanent reactiva-
tion of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent
critique of our historical era" Foucault
This sentence could be understood as nothing other than the act of self-remembering and what is so beautiful about it is that he puts it to use not only in the social context but in the individual context. In relation to the permanent critique of our historical era, it is closely connected to what I've been talking about recently related to how each generation is confronted with the older generation and must necessarily revitalize itself to revitalize it's own times.
"Foucault points out that such a critique would be
both archeological in the sense that it will seek ‚to treat the instances of discourse that
articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events‛ as well as genealogical in
the sense that: ‚it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the
possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.‛27"
This difference between "archeological" and "genealogical" is interesting but I am not sure that I understand it as they actually put it, that is, the language is different. The way I've been presenting a similar idea is also social, historical as the force that "sculpts" and "programs" individuals and what he terms genealogical I've talked as being, the forces and dimensions within that allow for the individual to actualize his own reality in the outside world.
Looking at it carefully I do believe we mean the same thing but there it is said so very beautifully, it is a pleasure to find these people!
Posted by elena at 21:52 0 comments Links to this post Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz
Labels: Agamben, Faucault, Work of Freedom
The Allegory of the Cage: Foucault, Agamben, and the Enlightenment
http://ej.lib.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/3124/3288
Thinking about homosexuality this morning I came across an interesting observation that relates to the idea of men having a female soul and women a masculine one. In what has traditionally been called “normal”, the “soul” of the particular gender, male or female expresses itself quite in harmony with the traditional idea of what is a male or a female including all the extreme variations within those “frames” themselves but in homosexuals what we could witness in those particular terms, is that the individual steps beyond that frame into his or her soul and actualizes it. This of course is an unconscious process. It “happens” to the individuals. How or why, I don’t know but what the observation shows is that some homosexual males take the “feminine” to another dimension while some homosexual women, take the “male” into another dimension.
In homosexual males the degree of “exquisiteness” that they can achieve often exceeds those of the standard female. It is as if the dimension of the emotional expressed in the beauty of the surrounding is much enhanced in the homosexual male while we can observe the opposite process in female homosexuals: they blur their femininity and physically “appear” less “female” but their minds take on a much more masculine activity than in the average female or male. I’m thinking of Butler and Virginia Wolf for a start. This is the first time I explore this subject.
How or why this happens would be worth exploring. I personally think that in our times heterosexuals as much as homosexuals or transsexuals of any kind are ALL abnormal which makes them ALL normal! In this sense I don’t think human beings are very human, that we are in the process of humanizing our selves and that we need to look at who and what we are today to be able to accomplish that. It also means that no matter how “normal” or “abnormal” we term our “abnormalities” or “normalities” we are still “THE” human being worth every “pulse” of our heart’s strivings.
I don’t believe the average heterosexual with their macho background be that in females or males is any healthier than homosexuals with their macho background be it males or females. In the sexuality of our times we need to bare in mind that it is as conditioned by the status quo and its “inhumanities” as the rest of our psychology.
What I would call “normal” is the activity that allows an individual to “evolve” and what would be abnormal is the activity that conditions the individual to “involute”. In the differential geometry of curves, an involute (also known as evolvent) is a curve obtained from another given curve by attaching an imaginary taut string to the given curve and tracing its free end as it is wound onto that given curve; or in reverse, unwound
I then believe that people “evolve” in particular ways whether they are heterosexuals or homosexuals and that they can equally involute whether they are one or the other. What determines evolution is not the sexuality that is practiced but HOW that sexuality is practiced.
All these are extremely delicate terms because in an extremist position it would be terrible if people used the “you are involuting” condemnation to ban other people from society but from another perspective it seems utterly necessary to understand why and how the different activities that we do are in themselves harmful or healing.
These notions of course take us to the traditional concepts of good and bad, positive or negative, “sinful” or not “sinful” and while we are trying to move beyond those opposites in our understanding of sexuality, when placed within the boundaries of “evolution” “health” “development” we should be able to discriminate between what helps and hinders our processes and progresses.
What I think is worth exploring is how heterosexual activity can become as “harmful” to the individual as homosexual activity and how both can be equally healing. The question is when and how?
In observing heterosexuality in the porn activity what I realized was that the man involved, when in the sexual act itself, was aroused not by the woman in front of him but by the imaginary picture of the woman in front of him as if an intellectual process had to take place for him to become aroused.
In the female homosexual experience I’ve observed the same process in a particular case. What arouses the desire is a “loss” that needs to be healed. The “lost mother” is formulated over and over again to experience the experience of her presence. What “moves” or “impulses” the desire is the loss, the pain. Again the process is unconscious, there is a conditioning that chains the individual into its rails and freeing him or herself from those rails is equally liberating whether it is a homosexual or a heterosexual fixation. The suffering of “being in love” is equally suffered whether we are heterosexuals or homosexuals. The suffering and the joy of the fulfilled desire.
In as much as we can say that individuals are trying to compensate their losses in particular relationships could we affirm that these relationships are “NORMAL”? What would be normal is the impulse to compensate the loss but not necessarily the compensation for the compensation itself does not necessarily heal the loss, I would dare affirm that it often “fixes” it and often “increases” the loss in its inability to heal it. I would even dare say that the solutions we find to our losses are not necessarily solutions but that they often worsen and complicate the “problem”.
A “problem” needs to be defined. I would call a “problem” anything that fixes the individual and makes them viciously turn around the same place without finding a way out; Anything that “fixes” individuals in one dimension and keeps them circulating around it without being able to move beyond it often moving into “lower” dimensions.
In this sense we would need to understand that evolution means the freedom to move within all the dimensions of our selves in a balanced equilibrium and involution, becoming fixed in any one dimension and regressing into “lower” dimensions rather than expanding in “higher” dimensions. Another way to put it would be, involuting means a reduction in consciousness while evolution an expansion in consciousness and consciousness an awareness of the multiple dimensions and the interaction between them not only in the inner realms of the individual but their expression in the outer realms of society.
A “lower” dimension then needs to be defined and actually the idea of dimensions itself needs to be clarified.
A dimension is a cosmos with all its inherent laws. The physical dimension is a complete cosmos and it is at one extreme of the spectrum of dimensions. It isn’t necessarily lower or higher, the lowlessness or the highessness of it depends on the perspective we are looking at it from. From one angle the physical dimension is at the extreme height of the phenomenical possibilities, the “stage” in which the “non phenomenical” actualizes its reality. It is the highest expression of the “non phenomenical” in the physical dimenision and in that sense it does not matter whether the phenomenon being expressed is an involuting or evoluting act. The act is an “involuting act” not because it is being expressed in the physical dimension but because the individual performing it has become “fixed” to the dimension itself and in his or her “movement” tends to “descend” to even lower dimensions.
If we accept the idea that everything is “moving” then we have to accept that we are inevitably moving upwards or downwards in no matter what dimension or dimensions.
Let’s look at an example to see if we can clarify the ideas.
Take the heterosexual man who needs to look at porn images to become sexually aroused even when he is having sex with a woman. Then take that same man and place him in the arena in which he must have sex with increasingly younger women to become aroused. Female children. The younger, the more his sexuality is brought to life. What begins with a certain inclination to become aroused by simply looking at women ends with a powerful necessity to have “children” to become “properly” aroused.
Where would we draw the line of what is healthy and unhealthy? Where exactly is the unhealthiness of the deal? I suspect that there are various dimensions that need to be taken into consideration here. Why do both heterosexual and homosexual men tend to “like” “youth” in those extremes? What is “youth” in itself? Is it not a reality of “purity?” “naivety?” “essence?” Is “purity” itself what has become “arousable” for the man in question in his inner sublimation even if the outer expression of it becomes abnormal to the point of criminal? In his inner world can he find anything “wrong” in looking for the purest? So WHERE is the abnormality of the process?
Could we suspect that the “loss” that the individual is somehow trying to compensate for, transforms itself overtime and acquires definite forms that can enter into a dimension of crime? When would we call it crime? Presently we call it “crime” when an adult has sex with a young person under eighteen but to be able to understand whether this is criminal in all and every instance we would need to explore how THAT happens in societies in which the sexual initiation of the female child is taken up by the elders. The taboos of our society would not be enough to understand the phenomenon in question.
I suspect is that parallel to the process of becoming increasingly “fixed” in the need for “younger” individuals for “arousal” there is a “sublimation” process taking place. The individual sublimates the loss and projects it into other individuals then “purifies” it so to speak in his own inner world even if externally there is a clear tendency to move into crime.
The “crime” would not be in the act itself as much as in the manipulation necessary to carry out the act. In other words, an adult manipulating the child to get her or his approval, conditioning him or her with money and other determinants or overtly “raping” him or her.
This is where we can begin to see the act objectively and the variations of the act in their subjective lights. What makes the act healthy or unhealthy is the subjectivities involved in it.
Many questions to continue exploring. Leaving it there for now.
Elena: Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity by Johanna Oksala
Continuation of previous post.
The reason why violence is understood as a political question at all is because it is so often fused with power, even though by its very nature it is fundamentally antithetical to power.
Elena: This would make a beautiful definition of “being” or real authority. It has enough power to not resort to violence. _____
Under threat of violence, the capacity to realize the human possibility of acting in concert is diminished and potentially destroyed. Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.‛18 Violence can destroy power and politics, but it can never produce them.19
Elena: Various issues here. When you refer to power and politics in their own right and hold that they are destroyed when they take on violence you are talking about the sphere of the political in its objective expression. Once violence takes the lead, it is no longer politics. This helps us understand the “objectivity” of politics and with it, its capacity to “mould” individuals through “communication” “understanding” “conscious persuasion”. The “dialogue” within which that encounter between the “social” and the “individual” moves is the “logos”. The “logos” is the greatest force for the evolving human being. It is the dialogue of the spirit within the human. In our times of violence the connection between power and the people is not a “living” “evolving” one but an stagnating, constraining force. The unhealthiness of it is contrary to human development in as much as instead of fortifying individual’s SELF it alienates individual’s not only from their own self but from the rest of society and of course, instead of establishing a connectedness between the people and the government, it RULES over them and submits them.
Forced submission held through violence stagnates individual and social evolution. Submission is catastrophic for the human spirit when it is forced upon the people. Human beings can only consciously submit to the will of their own self in order to develop in our times. Submitting to the power of other human beings is contrary to evolution. There is “the law” but every individual has to come to their own understanding of why to obey the law against their own personal agenda when that agenda is contrary to the well being of the whole. Consciousness of the “whole” does not allow the individual to act against any of its parts because it would mean acting against his own self. The individual life is connected to the whole in a tight bow string that throws them beyond the instinctive natural realm into the “naturally” spiritual realm and that realm best expresses itself in the lawfulness of the public, social arena determined by the political status quo.
“Conscious” beings would design the status quo in such a way that they can guarantee an “evolving” environment for the people. The “things” that promote and guarantee evolution are:
1. Satisfaction of basic human needs. Just like the child needs to be fed and looked after, people must guarantee their instinctive well being
2. Play in childhood, work in adulthood. A “good” job is to an adult what a game is to a child.
3. A “good” job leads to a process of creation. It is not a stagnant, repetitive job but one in which the individual has the opportunity to create.
It is “creation” what outwardly reveals and inwardly permeates a human being’s self-worth. The improvement of the job or its conditions is an ongoing reality even in our present times, only that safeguarded for a few privileged. In that process of creation the “job” sculpts the individual human being in an evolving process and the individual human being “sculpts” society in an equally evolving progress. Society stagnates when the people have to obey and perform jobs that stunt their creativity because they are reduced to reproductive animals that is contrary to the human being and its “evolving” nature.________
Elena: Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity by Johanna Oksala
Continuation of previous post.
The reason why violence is understood as a political question at all is because it is so often fused with power, even though by its very nature it is fundamentally antithetical to power.
Elena: This would make a beautiful definition of “being” or real authority. It has enough power to not resort to violence. _____
Under threat of violence, the capacity to realize the human possibility of acting in concert is diminished and potentially destroyed. Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.‛18 Violence can destroy power and politics, but it can never produce them.19
Elena: Various issues here. When you refer to power and politics in their own right and hold that they are destroyed when they take on violence you are talking about the sphere of the political in its objective expression. Once violence takes the lead, it is no longer politics. This helps us understand the “objectivity” of politics and with it, its capacity to “mould” individuals through “communication” “understanding” “conscious persuasion”. The “dialogue” within which that encounter between the “social” and the “individual” moves is the “logos”. The “logos” is the greatest force for the evolving human being. It is the dialogue of the spirit within the human. In our times of violence the connection between power and the people is not a “living” “evolving” one but an stagnating, constraining force. The unhealthiness of it is contrary to human development in as much as instead of fortifying individual’s SELF it alienates individual’s not only from their own self but from the rest of society and of course, instead of establishing a connectedness between the people and the government, it RULES over them and submits them.
Forced submission held through violence stagnates individual and social evolution. Submission is catastrophic for the human spirit when it is forced upon the people. Human beings can only consciously submit to the will of their own self in order to develop in our times. Submitting to the power of other human beings is contrary to evolution. There is “the law” but every individual has to come to their own understanding of why to obey the law against their own personal agenda when that agenda is contrary to the well being of the whole. Consciousness of the “whole” does not allow the individual to act against any of its parts because it would mean acting against his own self. The individual life is connected to the whole in a tight bow string that throws them beyond the instinctive natural realm into the “naturally” spiritual realm and that realm best expresses itself in the lawfulness of the public, social arena determined by the political status quo.
“Conscious” beings would design the status quo in such a way that they can guarantee an “evolving” environment for the people. The “things” that promote and guarantee evolution are:
1. Satisfaction of basic human needs. Just like the child needs to be fed and looked after, people must guarantee their instinctive well being
2. Play in childhood, work in adulthood. A “good” job is to an adult what a game is to a child.
3. A “good” job leads to a process of creation. It is not a stagnant, repetitive job but one in which the individual has the opportunity to create.
It is “creation” what outwardly reveals and inwardly permeates a human being’s self-worth. The improvement of the job or its conditions is an ongoing reality even in our present times, only that safeguarded for a few privileged. In that process of creation the “job” sculpts the individual human being in an evolving process and the individual human being “sculpts” society in an equally evolving progress. Society stagnates when the people have to obey and perform jobs that stunt their creativity because they are reduced to reproductive animals that is contrary to the human being and its “evolving” nature.
Gratitude
May your days flourish like Spring
And your nights be warmed in the Winter
May your loved ones grow bright like a Summer
And your children beget our Earth like the Autumn leaves
I do not think about you often
And when I do, I do not think about you
But my hearts swells with love
In the joy of your silent presence
Perhaps you thought that it was possible to stop love
And in your silence could put an end to it
I too thought that could happen but
Am being pleasantly surprised
Perhaps one day you can bring your self to forgiveness
Put an end to the misunderstanding and intrusion
of a love that was much more powerful than anything that could have offended you
Even if I do not deny our struggles
How are you?
Is your heart as joyous as mine with the Egyptian people coming out to the Public Square of Liberation?
The American people of Wisconsin invading their Public Space with the Unions?
The human being recovering itself from the prevalent taming?
I place in your heart this joy
This gratitude
And share it with you
In and beyond time
May your days flourish like Spring
And your nights be warmed in the Winter
May your loved ones grow bright like a Summer
And your children beget our Earth like the Autumn leaves
I thank you above all for opening the seed of a love that even you cannot keep from expanding
With and beyond you
To all of Us.
From another blog:
I’ve been thinking about your post and have a few more thoughts that I’d like to share. I would like to continue to approach the question of sexuality and the church in which homosexuality is included from different perspectives if you allow me.
You say that it would be difficult to prove my claims scientifically and I wonder if we need to prove our claims scientifically when we can verify them in our being. Verifying them in our being is what I would understand by “religion”. Let me clarify that. When we talk about clarifying scientifically are we not asking for an external proof of our claim? What do we really mean by that? Is it that “everyone” can accept it or that the scientific community can accept it? Will that make “us” as individuals accept it? Or will we have actualized our findings and understandings in the phenomenical world or dimension in such a way that many of us can approve it and incorporate it in our status quo?
I’ve been working on the separation of state, religion, science and art claiming that they are four spheres of our lives that need not be separated but connected and understood and our discussion here can bring some light into that if you allow me the room to expand.
What do we understand by religion? I realize you’ve been talking about the church but the church is just the leaves of the tree. Why don’t we try to understand the tree?
Religion in my childhood was “going to Church”, something one “did” in one’s life so I turned to psychology and went to the shrink for a while and then I walked in and out of myself through the corridors of my own existence, spent my time as a child many times, recovered my youth, the parents within, the absences and presences of each and all in between and was… or became… aware of the multiple dimensions of the human being and am still in the process of doing so.
My question is, do we need to prove our claims scientifically when we can verify them in our being? While the former is an external social process the latter is an internal inner process. I call “religion” this “internal inner process” that has overtime been replaced by “psychology” although the role of the psychologist is not very different from the wise-man’s role in ancient times and yet, the psychoanalysis, religion, philosophy and sociology of our days are but splinters of a tree that we should be able to piece together again some day.
I would certainly like to try to organize my claims “scientifically” if that helped you to better understand what I am trying to convey without doubting that the more we explain the more we set ourselves up for confusion and yet unafraid of dealing with the confusion if we are to dialogue!
It is difficult to understand the dimensions of religion and “politics” if we come from a one way street from the tip of the iceberg of our own being to the tip of the iceberg of the social sphere. We need to try to reunite our different sciences in our consciousness in order to get a picture of the whole of our own self as much as of our selves.
In psychology and religion we might dive into the inner processes of our individual ways while in politics we deal with the external processes of our social encounters but do we not need to recover the tension of the rope that unites them to recover the sense of the whole?
Were we to study how we lost that connection we would realize precisely how not only our sexuality but all the crucial aspects of our lives are disconnected from each other.
If we study the external “version” of our history it would be interesting to place our selves in the times in which the Church separated the human being from the divine and established a monarchy of papal authorities to connect them. With that separation, the whole sphere of the “mystic” was appropriated by the Church and the “mystic” in the people was burnt at the stake particularly active in the burning of female “witches”. The sphere of the “divine” was taken away from the human being who became a “sinner” in an everlasting quest for redemption through sacrifice and submission. With the Church, the Monarchy and when the King and the Church collided Henry the eighth separated the church of England from Rome where we eventually witnessed the development of a completely “new” space for the “people” in the “industrial revolution”. God had been separated from the people as much as the dimension of the divine within the human being but the “Earth” had become a place for people with “civil rights”. When the king separated from the Church so that he could marry again at the cost of no matter how many women’s heads (!) so that he could give birth to a male successor, he broke the divine monopoly of the Church of Rome from the rest of the world. It is quite an irony that it should have been Elizabeth and not a man who reigned for the following forty four years.
From wikipedia:
Elizabeth established an English church that helped shape a national identity and remains in place todayThose who praised her later as a Protestant heroine overlooked her refusal to drop all Catholic practices. Historians note that in her day, strict Protestants regarded the Acts of Settlement and Uniformity of 1559 as a compromise. In fact, Elizabeth believed that faith was personal and did not wish, as Francis Bacon put it, to “make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts”.
Despite Elizabeth’s largely defensive foreign policy, her reign raised England’s status abroad. “She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island,” marvelled Pope Sixtus V, “and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all”.Under Elizabeth, the nation gained a new self-confidence and sense of sovereignty, as Christendom fragmented. Elizabeth was the first Tudor to recognise that a monarch ruled by popular consent. She therefore always worked with parliament and advisers she could trust to tell her the truth—a style of government that her Stuart successors failed to follow. Some historians have called her lucky; she believed that God was protecting her. Priding herself on being “mere English”, Elizabeth trusted in God, honest advice, and the love of her subjects for the success of her rule. In a prayer, she offered thanks to God that:
[At a time] when wars and seditions with grievous persecutions have vexed almost all kings and countries round about me, my reign hath been peaceable, and my realm a receptacle to thy afflicted Church. The love of my people hath appeared firm, and the devices of my enemies frustrate
You must realize what an ignorant I am in these matters and that I have to study what I intuit as I go along to be able to corroborate my intuitions but they are an exploration more than an affirmation of dogma for I am far from being knowledgeable enough in the “scientific” terms of the word.
I wanted to write about this to present the following piece from Augustine, and try to understand the picture of “women” that we’ve been carrying with us in our Western world. I believe it of utmost importance to study all these aspects of our “psychological make up” if we wish to come even close to understanding homosexuality, sexuality and the Church.
Born in North Africa; bishop of Hippo from 396 to his death.
Note. Augustine deserves much credit as a seeker, a theologian and a writer. But honesty demands that we also acknowledge another side to him. “This Augustine who had made love to women and perhaps to men, who could not control his own sexual problems, who was constantly torn between lust and frustration, who could in all sincerity pray: ‘Give me chastity . . . . , but not yet!’ (Confessions 8,7), who only became devout after he had ravished whores to his heart’s content, when his weakness for women, as so often happens to older men in later life, turned into the opposite . . . , this Augustine created the classic patristic doctrine on sin, a morality in which especially sexual desire was condemned. Augustine has influenced Christian morality decisively, as well as the sexual frustrations of millions of Europeans unto our own day.” (K. Deschner, De Kerk en haar Kruis, Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 1974, pp. 326-327).
Translation from the Ante-Nicene Fathers. For a complete electronic copy, visit the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, the New Advent Library. Italics in the text by John Wijngaards.
For Augustine it was an indisputable social and religious truth that women were subject to men.
0. It is natural for men to rule over women
0. It is according to the natural order that women serve their husbands
0. Woman is subject to man
0. Nothing is worse than a house where the woman commands and the man obeys
0. Augustine’s mother Monica obediently served her husband ever since the Roman ‘matrimonial tablets’ had been read out to her
0. The husband rules over his wife, in love
Though marriage is a divine institution, and therefore good in itself, the carnal desire that accompanies intercourse is a remnant of sin. In fact, it is the sign and carrier of original sin. Also in lawful marriages sexual intercourse should be avoided asa venial fault.
0. Sexual intercourse in marriage is permitted on account of human weakness, or to beget children
0. The male and female sexes are not evil in themselves
0. Having children is the only worthy fruit of sexual intercourse
0. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, God might have created children for them without the need of intercourse
0. Sexual intercourse in marriage not for begetting children is a venial fault
0. Sexual abstinence, to avoid lust, is rare among married partners
0. The children born from sexual intercourse engaged in because of ‘lust’, are not themselves evil
0. Jesus was not born from sexual intercourse, i.e. from ‘sinful flesh’
0. Intercourse in marriage is without fault, unless it be just for carnal pleasure
0. Shame about intercourse proves its origin from sin
0. Concupiscence, even in a good marriage, passes on original sin
0. Carnal pleasure in marriage is the consequence of original sin
0. Because of original sin, human seed is corrupted
0. Self-willed ‘lust’ in the sexual organs is a sign of concupiscence caused by sin
0. Pleasure (=‘shameful lust’) in marriage is a disease
0. A good Christian hates in his wife conjugal connection and sexual intercourse
0. The perfect Christian couple live together as brother and sister
0. ‘Lust’ during intercourse is the carrier of original sin
Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity- Arendt’s conclusions
The reason why violence is understood as a political question at all is because it is so often fused with power, even though by its very nature it is fundamentally antithetical to power. Under threat of violence, the capacity to realise the human possibility of acting in concert is diminished and potentially destroyed. ‚Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to
its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.‛18 Violence can destroy power and politics, but it can never produce them.19
To sum up this section, Arendt’s key concern was to redeem the intrinsic value of the political. Politics should not be reduced to an instrumental means to the apolitical ends of natural life: survival, pleasure and happiness. It has to remain an end in itself and therefore to retain its specificity as public action and speech. The distinction between the social and what is truly political is thus fundamental for her philosophical response to the crisis and decline of
the public realm of politics in modern societies. It is a resurrection of the ancient answer to the question of why men are not ants. The restoration of the ancient distinction between polis and oikos could restore not only the specificity but also the dignity of politics, and by the same token separate it from the realm of biological life and inescapable violence. Arendt’s under-
standing of the political thus provides an agonistic account of political action that is nevertheless irreducible to violence. This fortification of the political does not imply the strengthening of the state, but rather heralds the revitalisation of public life, political debate and participation.
The price we pay is the radical narrowing of the realm of the political, however. All issues belonging to the social—such as poverty, sexuality and gender—are economic, biological or technological questions rather than appropriately political questions. Political and social equality must remain distinct issues. As her critics have pointed out, in protecting the sui generis character of her politics and the purity of the public realm, Arendt effectively prohibits the politicisation of issues of social justice.20 While alerting us to the dangerous merging of life and politics in Modernity she would nevertheless insist that biopolitics must remain an oxy-moron, the merging of two ontologically incompatible concepts.
18
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 56.
19
James Dodd argues that Arendt’s instrumental account of violence appears more complex if her separation
of labour and work in The Human Condition is understood as leading to the idea that the order of instru-
mentality characterising work is a kind of violence. She describes the emergence of the sphere of human
works as a form of constitutive violence: the world of instruments, of produced and built things, represents a
violent breaking free from the monotony and impermanence of the incessant metabolism with nature that is
embodied in labour. The world, understood as more than nature, can thus be understood to be born of ori-
ginary violence against the giveness of nature. James Dodd, Violence and Phenomenology (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge, 2009), 58-60.
20
Bonnie Honig, ‚Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity,‛ in Bonnie
Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 135.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
Elena:
It’s quite shocking for me to watch the conclusions that Arendt reaches, separating politics from life thinking that would strengthen public life instead of continuing the schizophrenic separation into elites.
elena,
re: post 96 — this is a very odd thing to read… very odd indeed. do you know what elena? do you know what the strangest thing is in this very strange little editorial commentary? it is the obvious fact that in all the absurd “scientistic” talk about sexuality and arousal, you leave out the one most essential thing that makes us most human… it doesn’t surprise me that you write in 96 that you don’t think of yourself being very human… years of living in a de-humanizing situation (the cult) will do that to a person. where is your heart elena ? in all of your “erudite analyses” here of sexuality and arousal, you completely leave out the merest mention of LOVE… what about LOVE elena, where does that come in to your “scientific discussion” ? where does LOVE fit into your “scientific analyses” ? it’s stating the obvious to say that more often than not sexual arousal occurs without love… but it says a lot about you that you would dwell on the sordid details while completely overlooking any consideration of LOVE here… and it’s very sad to be without love.
post 96 is a very odd thing to read… very odd indeed. it begins with the morning you “came across” what you call “an interesting observation” — obviously you’re very impressed with yourself… as usual. you begin this post as if you’ve accidentally, yet propitiously stumbled onto the “discovery” of something hidden from view, this is something you are seemingly now going to “reveal” for the benefit of others… and i think you probably did make a discovery for yourself, but you reveal almost nothing here, in fact you go to great lengths to bury any personal epiphany beneath a pile of nonsensical sophistry. if you look at the contents of this post from the perspective of another (an other), your “discovery,” your “interesting observation” is a rambling testament to your own musings and imaginations… mixed of course with your personal experiences — the latter is really the most important thing to consider here but the odd thing is that your personal experiences and your discoveries are cloaked, disguised by a veneer of pretentious “objective” sounding language.
for the sake of clarity and in an attempt to dissolve the obfuscation that you regularly engage in, these personal experiences of yours should be kept foremost in mind. your personal experiences are really the basis for all of this “scientifically” expressed bombast — this “scientistic” bombast and purporting to speak for the entire human race is simply more obfuscating, deflecting from the real kernel. the personal experiences which are the wellspring for this “interesting observation” of yours, should be kept clearly in mind; these are experiences which only you know intimately and which only you have special insight into. but i can suggest and hint at the “tip of the ice burg” from my outside perspective, my suggestion here is based on what little you’ve revealed about yourself in your blogging, nevertheless this might indicate a place to start… the experiences to which i refer, the experiences upon which the facade of all of this absurd pretentious nonsense in post 96 sits, includes your own homosexual “encounters” AND your ex-husband gerald’s porn addiction. the post is in a roundabout way your attempt to understand your own personal journey, it is a processing of your own experiences.
it appears that you are deflecting and missing the mark by “objectifying” personal experiences as you do when you speak in such pretentious “authoritative” tones of “objectivity” which presume (again) to speak for all of humanity. in reality it is just one little individual (elena) processing her own personal experiences… which is valid and valuable in and of itself but valuable to who? to you and to you alone, so let’s get real elena, let’s be honest… this post is hiding the fact that it’s actually a very subjective attempt to try to understand and come to terms with very complex and personal experiences. this post is framed in language which comes off sounding like an attempt to appear “objective” or “scientific” and in the process it appears to be completely drained of blood, empty, it rings hollow.
from an outside perspective the actual contents read more like a lurid personal journal entry, minus the person. it’s full of hints at flights of fantasy cloaked in your usual bombast, pretending to speak for everyone… we are one… do you imagine you’ve made a discovery that will help the human race? start with yourself elena, maybe you have discovered something for yourself which you would like to share with an imaginary audience, but don’t pretend to speak in global terms — speak for yourself first, then maybe others can relate…. speak from you heart elena. if you’d put your “discovery” in different terms, if it were coming from you as a person and from your heart instead of your head, then it would be believable. as it is this post is more pretentious bombast written by a poser who pretends to be someone she is not, trying to impress with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. if you have made a discovery for yourself then that’s great for you but why go to such lengths in imagining that you can speak for an entire species…. why not speak for yourself, from your own heart, instead of pretending to speak for everyone else? after all elena, this blog is your personal journal and so speaking from that perspective would make this a much more honest place… but maybe you’re just afraid that you would have less to say if you were to speak from your heart? maybe there’s a void to fill therein… after all, what would you use to fill the pages without your precious “research,” the countless articles cut and pasted from the web (?)
instead of speaking from your heart to process your experiences, you cover it up in all this pretentious “scientistic” bombast, you attempt to “objectify” the experiences — you go about placing things into mental boxes, you categorize and catalog and you imagine you’re getting it all figured out for everyone else but you are burying the very issues beneath an edifice of “fine sounding” words and in the process you are very busy impressing yourself with your own “interesting observations” and your own imagined cleverness with “dissections” of the situation. write less from your head elena, start from your heart, write from your heart, that will lead you to the most important discovery, it will lead you back to yourself and back to love.
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the-health-benefits-of-journaling/
http://psychcentral.com/library/
Thank you for your post Ton.
The post was not about love, it was about sexuality and its expressions, pity I failed to express myself the way you could understand it. Love in those cases I mentioned seems to be not in the phenomenon that the individuals end up practicing but in the loss they are trying to compensate for. The child becomes fixed in the losses and spends youth and sometimes the whole of a lifetime trying to compensate for them “identified” with them. Love is not in the identification but in the freedom from identification of “fixedness”
It’s a pleasure to find that we continue to disagree and can still share the same space. You have no idea how grateful I am to you for having criticized me for so long. It is difficult to trust one’s self when the criticism is so intense and destructive as it has been by you and those in the fofblog but when one finally manages to, it is a blesssing more than a curse. If you had anything to say about the subjects and not just Elena’s misgivings we might actually be able to talk about something but you don’t seem to be able to see beyond Elena nor have anything to say for yourself about anything else. It’s interesting that what most bothers you is that I dare speak not only about myself personally but about the things themselves and take the public sphere into my perspective while what I find absolutely shocking about you is that you cannot move beyond the personal and for that matter only the personal Elena. Why would you limit yourself so? We can dare to think about what is beyond our selves Ton even if we make mistakes while at it. Thinking is not the private property of your favorite authors. But if that’s what you enjoy…. so be it.
I’ll skip your link for now, I’m too busy with my musings. Why do you even bother to come here love?
Agamben and the Originary Violence of Sovereignty
In their respective analyses of biopower, both Foucault and Agamben follow Arendt in maintaining that the political realm in Modernity has become more and more preoccupied with the management of biological life.
Elena: The way in which this is happening seems to follow the same structure within the family producing a “paternalistic” state that still rules over the people pretending to “order” all the realms of life______ .
They both deny that we should or could restore the classical political categories, as proposed by Arendt, however. This denial brings violence back to the heart of politics, but in fundamentally different ways. Whereas Foucault considers the birth of biopower a contingent historical fact, which he dates to the second half of the eighteenth century, Agamben sees it is as an originary phenomenon contemporaneous with the entire history of Western metaphysics.
Elena note: Biopower was a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations. From wikipedia
Agamben’s analysis of the relationship between political power and biological life in his influential book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, builds on some of the key ideas of Arendt and Foucault, but the way he appropriates them for his own theory is highly original and challenging. He begins by confirming Arendt’s claim that ‚Today politics knows no value< other than life.‛21 The politicisation of life as such constitutes a decisive event of
modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of Ancient thought. He breaks sharply with Arendt, however, in denying that the distinction between biological and political life has, ever since its very inception, held fast. Life has always been a definitive object of politics. The explicit preoccupation with life in modern politics only brings to light the way in which politics has always been founded on power over natural life. In taking biological life as its primary target, the modern state only exposes the hidden but originary bond between sovereign power and bare life.
Agamben acknowledges that politics was, since the time of Aristotle, explicitly
separated from natural life. The Ancient distinction between zoe and bios, natural life and political life, grounded the idea that politics was concerned with something more than just the perpetuation of biological life. It was fundamentally defined by such specifically human characteristics as justice, morality, language and self-reflexivity. According to Agamben, the dis-
tinction between bare life and political life was always an unstable distinction, however: a distinction that could never be fully maintained nor eliminated.
Elena: It’s interesting that they would even with to separate them when they are just two aspects of the whole.______
The exclusion of bare life outside of the political has to be understood to be at the same time an inclusion in being a founding act: it is the very act that establishes the community as political. He calls this inclu-
sive exclusion a relation of exception: it is the extreme form of relation by which something is
included solely through its exclusion.22
There is politics because man is the living being who, in language separates and opposes
himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare
life in an inclusive exclusion.23
Bare life, through its exclusion, is the hidden foundation of politics. It is what political, pro-
perly human life is not, and politics must therefore repeatedly enact its exclusion.
21
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 10.
22
Ibid., 18.
23
Ibid., 8.
Oksala: Violence
30
Elena: Wow! They are really going at it!: The separation of the realms instead of the connectedness. This sounds so similar to the relationship that men were supposed to have with women according to St. Augustine only spread out in the social realm with politics separated from bare life but at the same time ruling over it! It’s also interesting because from a completely different perspective if we think about non-identification, the individual is “present” to the world but at the same time not identified with it which has nothing to do with being separate from it or at least we must define what kind of separation is possible because it is very easy to think that the separation takes away the value of the “life” that it is separating from. I feel these problems present in Arendt’s text. But let’s go on.
This means that Agamben’s concept of bare life does not simply denote biological,
animal life. While he sometimes uses the term as a synonym for biological life as opposed to
political life, bare life is strictly neither natural nor political life, neither the public life of a
citizen nor the natural life of an animal. Agamben’s examples of it include: detainees of refu-
gee camps, brain dead patients in hospital wards and inmates in death row. In these exem-
plary sites, human life is in different ways reduced to bare life, to the simple fact of living
common to all living beings. Bare life is thus something that cannot be clearly demarcated and
then simply negated.24 It is biological life that has been politicised in being included in the
political community, but only through its exclusion.
Elena: All these inclusions seem to still be aspects of biological life. I wonder why they don’t just separate the realm of the body and its needs and clearly define it? This is so much better done by the Fourth Way System in its concept and understanding of the Instinctive center. It would be good to separate all the aspects of social life that have to do purely with the instinctive center because this would help us clarify the different realms in their own context and THEN establish their connectedness.________
The idea of exception is also central for Agamben’s conception of sovereignty, which is
decisively Schmittian: the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception.25 Schmitt
argued that any legal system had to rest upon a decision that could not itself take the form of
law. This holds true to both its limits as well as its origin: the judicial system requires a
political decision to give it limits as well as a set of fundamental principles and values. The
sovereign must have the power to set these limits and thereby provide the ungrounded
ground of the law. He must have the power to decide when the normally valid legal system
operates and when its validity is suspended in a state of exception. In establishing the thres-
hold between the legal and the non-legal he defines them both. Similar to the way that the
exclusion of bare life founds the realm of the political, the exclusion of sovereignty from the
realm of the law founds the legal order. The state of exception is not anarchy or chaos because
an order still exists, even if it is not the order dictated by laws. The exception is outside the
law, but it thereby defines its limits and creates the normal situation in which the law can be in
force.26
Elena: I cannot agree with this because here the sovereign is still able to dictate the law and that implies the rule of someone over others and that is not democracy. In democracy the individual, each individual is the ruler. Should I say in Democracy as I conceive it? Each individual human being has enough authority to be the ruler of his and her personal as much as social life and comes to an agreement with the rest of the population on the laws that he and she is willing to live by. When there is a disagreement between them, they look for a court to help them solve it. The court is not a ruler over the people but a protector of the law.
Catherine Mills argues similarly in her seminal book on Agamben that the notion of bare or naked life
(nuda vida) has given rise to a great deal of misunderstanding in literature on Homo Sacer. While Agamben
often appears to use the term simply as a synonym for natural or biological life (zoe), she shows that his aim
is in fact to question the distinction between bios and zoe. Bare life is neither natural nor political life because
it is the politicised form of natural life. See, Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen,
2008), 64, 69. Other commentators also note that the concept is never precisely defined. See e.g., Andrew
Norris, ‚The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer,‛
in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death. Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2005), 270. Peter Fitzpatrick, ‚Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insis-
tence of Law,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 65.
25
Carl Schmitt presents his influential theory of sovereignty in Constitutional Theory and the first volume of
Political Theology. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006). Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory (Durham and London: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
26
See Giorgio Agamben ‚The State of Exception,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death,
289. Peter Fitzpatrick argues that Agamben moves markedly beyond the conception of sovereignty extrac-
ted from Schmitt because for Schmitt the sovereign was still a juridical entity.
____________For Schmitt the sovereign
decision cannot be simply beyond the normal order and preformed law, but is also imbued with law. If
sovereign claims are to be any more than evanescent and assume operative continuance, they must be
integrally tied to law. Law constitutes the decision maker himself and constitutes the matters decided upon.
Exception must be distinguishable from juristic chaos and therefore it is the legal system itself, which can
anticipate the exception and suspend itself. Although the sovereign stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, and sovereignty remains a juristic concept. In other words, sove-
reignty could not be sovereign without the law. The law and sovereignty depend on each other in a way
that means that the law cannot simply be subordinated to sovereignty instrumentally. See Peter Fitzpatrick,
_______________
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
Elena: This last paragraph by Schmitt equally fits whether it is applied to the king, government or individual. In my claim that we are moving towards democracy: the rule of the people, it would apply equally to each individual. It is interesting because the individual human would remain “not identified” with “life” and therefore would stand outside of the “life dimension” only to render it with “meaning” and ”perspective”.______
31
Sovereignty, understood in this way, thus corresponds crucially to bare life. Bare life is
the exception within the political order because it forms the zone outside of the law and of po-
litical rights. The exclusion of bare life from the realm of politics establishes sovereign power
as the power that decides on that exception: bare life is the essential referent of the sovereign
decision. In other words, the exclusion of bare life as the exception forms the condition of
possibility of politics, and also of sovereignty. The state of exception excludes bare life from
the political community, but by the same token also captures it within it as the exception. It is
the permanent state of exception that constitutes the hidden foundation on which the entire
political system rests.27 For Agamben, the defining feature of political power in the West is
precisely its ability to suspend the law, and by the same act, to produce a sphere of bare life:
beings without political rights or properly human qualities.
Because the exclusion of bare life forms the foundation of sovereignty, and sovereignty
in turn produces bare life, the necessary counterpart of the sovereign in Agamben’s thought is
homo sacer—an ancient figure in Roman law who was without any political rights and who
could be killed by anybody without fear of any legal punishment. Similar to homo sacer, the
sovereign must be outside the law, he must necessarily stand outside the legal system in order
to be able to decide on its suspension. He is excluded from the political realm in the same
sense that homo sacer is excluded from it, and this constitutes their hidden and originary bond.
The sovereign is one who can kill without legal punishment—he is the point of indistinction
between violence and the law—and homo sacer is one who can be killed without legal
punishment. They both are within and without the legal order:
At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two sym-
metrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one
with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with
respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.
Elena: This understanding of the sovereign and the homo sacer seems precisely the status quo of the people in power yesterday when they could kill without being accountable but the Egyptian uprising together with all other movements that are calling for the accountability of people in government is shifting that understanding of the status quo. Neither the sovereign nor the human could be excluded from the law in a Democracy in which all humans are equal.___________
Bare life and political power, homo sacer and the sovereign are ‚the two poles of the sovereign
exception‛ irrevocably tied together.29 Homo sacer represents the bare life that must be ex-
cluded and negated in order for the political community to become more than an ant society.
Andrew Norris explicates the importance of the figure of homo sacer in Agamben’s account by
comparing it to René Girard’s superficially similar account of sacrifice. Whereas for Girard the
victim is a scapegoat for the murderous desires of the community, for Agamben the stakes are
considerably higher. Instead of an act of self-protection on the part of the community, the
killing of sacred life is the performance of the metaphysical assertion of the human: homo sacer
‚Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and
Death, 58-60.
27
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15-29.
28
Ibid., 84.
29
Ibid., 110.
Oksala: Violence
32
must die so that the rest of the political community may affirm the transcendence of their
bodily, animal life.30
Agamben’s account also significantly relies on Foucault’s concept of biopower, but the
way he appropriates this idea is different. Foucault’s analysis of biopower in the final section
of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 is short and fragmentary, but the key distinction that he
makes is between sovereign power, or juridico-institutional power and biopower. Whereas
classical sovereign power was essentially repressive and deductive, biopower has a funda-
mentally different rationality. Its purpose is to exert a positive and productive influence on
life, to optimise and to multiply it. It is an important tool in Foucault’s attempt to rethink
power: to find ways in which to theorize it that are not caught up in the narrow juridico-
institutional framework of sovereignty that has dominated Western political thought.
Although Agamben shares with Foucault the view that modern Western societies are
biopolitical, he challenges the idea that this is a historically recent development: ‚Biopolitics is
at least as old as the sovereign exception.‛31 More fundamentally, he also denies that the two
forms of power can be theoretically distinguished. Foucault’s key distinction between bio-
power and sovereign power is, in fact, a false one because these two forms of power essen-
tially intersect and depend on each other. They are intrinsically and originally tied together:
The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juri-
dico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this work has had to record
among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two analyses cannot be separated, and that
the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed –
nucleus of sovereign power.32
Agamben argues that Foucault’s thesis about biopolitics has to be corrected: what charac-
terises modern politics in not the inclusion of life—the fact that life as such has become the
principle object of the projections and calculations of State power. The decisive fact is rather
that the realm of bare life—which was originally situated at the margins of the political
order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and inclusion and exclusion, out-
side and inside, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. Bare life used to be exceptional
and excluded from public life, but in Modernity it has become coextensive with the political
realm as a whole. The boundary between bios and zoe that was always indeterminate and
blurry has now been completely eliminated and they are no longer distinguishable from each
other at all.
Agamben’s provocative claim is that the rise of this zone of indistinction in modern
societies means that the state of exception has gradually become more and more the norm: the
exception has become the rule. He argues that the obfuscation of the distinction among
legislative, executive and judicial powers became a working paradigm of government in
Western democracies in the course of the twentieth century. Although the state of exception
30
Andrew Norris, ‚Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,‛ in Andrew Norris
(ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 10.
31
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6.
32
Ibid.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
33
was initially meant to be a provisional measure, it has in fact become a lasting characteristic of
government. This transformation of an exceptional measure into a permanent technique of
government has resulted in the gradual erosion of the legislative power of parliament: it is
often limited to ratifying measures that the executive issues through administrative decrees
that have the force of law.33 ‚The state of exception< ceases to be referred to as an external
and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself.‛34
As a result, ‚exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter a
zone of irreducible indistinction.‛35
Sovereignty thus produces bare life by establishing a state of exception with no tem-
poral limits. We are all living in this state of exception, in a zone in which our life is subjected
to the unmediated power of various police sovereigns and managers of life. We are all
effectively reduced to the status of homo sacer. As citizens of modern democracies we are
obviously not excluded from the political realm or the legal system as such, but when the state
of exception becomes the norm or the rule the legal order operates only by suspending itself.
In the state of exception the suspension of the law has become the rule and the law is ‚in force
without significance.‛36 The law is not absent—we do not live in a lawless state—but it is
emptied of concrete meaning and suspended in its effective application. In this situation sove-
reign power becomes unmediated power over those whose existence is reduced to bare life.
Politics has been ‚totally transformed into biopolitics‛37 when it is impossible to distinguish
our biological life from our political existence anymore and when the resulting bare life can be
destroyed by sovereign power at any moment.
Elena: Now I am understanding this better and can agree with this last paragraph totally._______
Hence, although the biopolitical logic of modernity places the highest value on life, it
also, paradoxically, contains the exceptional power to take it away in an arbitrary fashion. It
produces human beings that are reduced to bare life without any political protection. Agam-
ben sees the concentration camp as the paradigm of this political predicament of modernity: it
is the exemplary biopolitical space in which politics has been completely transformed into
biopolitics and bare life has been subjected absolutely to sovereign power.
Elena: Cults can also be included here_______
The camps were
opened when the state of exception had become the rule in Nazi Germany. He notes that ‚the
Jews were exterminated exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice’, which is to say, as bare
life.‛38 The dimension in which the extermination took place was neither religious nor legal,
but biopolitical. Because the people sent to the camps were lacking almost all the rights that
are normally attributed to humane existence, and yet they were biologically alive, they came
to be situated in a limit-zone in which they no longer had anything but bare life. They moved
in ‚a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in
which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any
sense.‛39 The concentration camp was the most absolute biopolitical space that had ever been
33
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
34
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 168.
35
Ibid., 9.
36
Ibid., 51.
37
Ibid., 120.
38
Ibid., 114.
39
Ibid., 170.
Oksala: Violence
34
realised: it was a space in which life was reduced to the bare minimum and sovereign power
reached its maximum. It is therefore the exemplary place of modern biopolitics, ‚the hidden
paradigm of the political space of modernity.‛40
Agamben regrets that both Arendt and Foucault overlooked this crucial site. Arendt’s
mistake in her pertinent analysis of the totalitarian states of the postwar period was to omit
any biopolitical perspective. What escaped her was the way in which the radical transfor-
mation of politics into biopolitics had legitimated and necessitated total domination. Foucault,
on the other hand, missed the most glaring manifestation of biopower that confronted him.
His error was to overlook the most exemplary place of modern biopolitics, the politics of the
great totalitarian states. In other words, contemporary political thought has failed to situate
the totalitarian phenomenon in the horizon of biopolitics and therefore ultimately to make
sense of it.41 Agamben’s provocative claim is that until this is done Nazism and fascism will
remain with us. The camp is not just a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past; it
is the hidden matrix of the political space in which we are still living.
Elena: BRAVO! YES! He sees it clearly. All my blogging on cults and our societies has been about this and it is a true pleasure to find someone express it so clearly. Thank you.
For many readers, this emblem of the camp has come to stand in for Agamben’s
complex account of biopolitics. It has fuelled a lot criticism against him: he has been accused
of constructing politically debilitating metaphysical fictions and morbid intellectual pontifi-
cations. Michel Dillon argues that he ontologises political modernity and then ‚iconicises‛
this ontologisation in the compelling, but politically debilitating figure of the camp.43 Andreas
Kalyvas observes that he ‚gives us no explanation for the sovereign’s repeated victories and
unstoppable march toward the camp.‛44 His commentators have also pointed out that his
understanding of bare life is theoretically ambiguous and his notion of sovereignty distur-
bingly ahistorical: the originary bond between bare life and sovereign power not only survives
Antiquity, but extends unchanged over a period of twenty-five centuries right through to the
Modern age.
Elena: recognized only in the authoritarian patriarchal society.________
Sovereign biopolitics has uninterruptedly accompanied the ancients and mo-
derns alike, remaining unaffected by significant political events, such as the birth of the An-
cient Greek democratic city or the emergence of commercial capitalism. Agamben thus
operates with a conception of history that does not bring forth anything new, but is uniform
and unidirectional.45
It is important to note that Agamben’s claims about politics are precisely ontological
and not ontic, or that they are concerned with the history of metaphysics, not political history.
For him, metaphysics is the pivotal political question of our time. The radicality of his project
lies in the attempt to fundamentally disturb the metaphysical categories that he claims are
upholding our conception of the political: bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/
40
Ibid., 123.
41
Ibid., 119-120, 148.
42
Ibid., 166.
43
Michael Dillon, ‚Cared to Death. The Biopoliticised Time of Your Life,‛ Foucault Studies, 2 (2005): 38.
44
Andreas Kalyvas, ‚The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Meta-
physics, and Death, 112-113.
45
Ibid., 110-113. See also Peter Fitzpatrick, ‚Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law,‛ in
Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 54-56.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
35
inclusion. He shows how the construction, blurring and finally eradication of the distinction
between biological life and political life has determined the political destiny of the West.
Instead of defining the political through a focus on life that is recognised as just and good—the
form of life proper to human community—he focuses on the other side of this fundamental
dichotomy: on bare life, the forms of life that in one way or another fail to achieve what is
understood as truly human life. He wants to show that our conception of the political is not
constituted solely by the idea of a community inclusive of beings capable of morality, self-
reflexivity and speech, but by the exclusion of life that is unworthy of politics.
Elena: BRAVO Mr. Agamben Bravo! At last I am finding others that understand what I’ve been fighting about for the past five years. _________
Sovereign de-
cision is the moment of this fundamental and constitutive separation and exclusion. Sove-
reignty can therefore not be thought of as a historically specific political formation contem-
poraneous with modern nation states. It has to belong essentially and originally to our under-
standing of the political.
In sum, Agamben’s answer to the question of the relationship between violence and the
political is to acknowledge the irreducibility of sovereign violence over bare life. In relation to
the sovereign we are all ants. The political has inevitably been founded on violence since its
inception because of the fundamental bond between sovereignty and bare life. This is an
originary political bond or structure, which implies that political power, at least in the forms
we know in the West, is inseparable from violence because it cannot be separated from the
sovereign’s originary power to kill. Arendt’s attempt to resurrect the Ancient meaning of the
political as defined by speech and not violence is a doomed attempt because it was never in
fact achieved. The way of life in the Greek polis was not based on the eradication of violence, it
was founded on the exclusion and killing of bare life. This inclusive exclusion founded the
political community and sovereign power. The first foundation of politics is thus life that may
be taken away, a body that can be killed. Life is politicised irrevocably through its capacity to
be destroyed by the sovereign.
This means that, for Agamben, we cannot sever the originary bond between violence
and the political by any nostalgic restoration of Ancient metaphysics. The loss of politics is
not a modern problem, but happens already in the Ancient polis where zoe and bios were
originally separated. The only genuine possibility for breaking this essential bond would re-
quire a move beyond the metaphysical categories of bare life and political life to a sovereign-
less political community. This coming community would not be based on national or religious
identity, stable juridical or parliamentary institutions or political rights. It is a utopian, mes-
sianic idea of a community.46
46
A detailed discussion of Agamben’s idea of the coming politics must remain outside of this paper. In Ho-
mo Sacer Agamben suggests that we could move beyond the categories of bare life and political life: ‚<bare
life must itself< be transformed into the site for the constitution and constellation of a form of life that is
wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.‛ (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188). The
idea of a sovereignless political community is developed in The Coming Community (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). His critics have argued that he is the least convincing and the
most obscure when he attempts to offer us political alternatives to biopower. Andreas Kalyvas, for example,
argues that his elusive notion of the sovereignless coming community, beyond rights and legal norms, comes
dangerously close to one of an extralegal, permanent, though sovereignless exception. It ultimately dissolves
into an eschatological utopian vision of social life: society without institutions or any modern structure of
Oksala: Violence
Elena: BRAVO!!! Bravo again and again! We think very much alike and have received similar criticism when there’s been any in my case but the foundation is clear and solid and as practically founded as every study of cults and present day society reveals. Now we can go on from here.
Foucault on Sovereignty and Biopower
If Agamben has been criticised for operating with an ahistorical notion of sovereignty, Fou-
cault has been accused of eradicating the notion completely and replacing it with distinctively
modern forms of power, such as discipline and biopower. While it is true that he never deve-
loped any kind of explicit theory of sovereignty, the notion is nevertheless indirectly theorised
as the consistent contrast to his alternative conceptualisations of power.
Note for Elena: Take into account that Foucault never developed a explicit theory of sovereignty for this important. ______
In Discipline and Pu-
nish, sovereign power forms the contrast to discipline and in The History of Sexuality, the
central distinction organising the argument is between biopower and sovereignty. In his lec-
tures on governmentality, mechanisms of security are introduced as an alternative to both dis-
cipline and sovereignty. Rather than replacing sovereignty with these alternative forms of
power, it is my contention that Foucault was working towards a more historically and poli-
tically grounded conception of it. He thus contests traditional approaches to theorising
political power based solely on juridical and institutional models, and advocates a radical
rethinking in order to understand its historical changes and specific forms in modernity. His
idea was that sovereignty had to be analysed as a power formation that had undergone
fundamental transformations in Western political history. It has been challenged, modified
and undermined by competing counter-discourses and new techniques of power.
In his lectures on governmentality, he argues that the form of power that had
sovereignty as its modality or organising schema was not up to governing the economic and
political body of a society that was undergoing both a demographic explosion and industri-
alisation at the turn of the nineteenth century. Too much escaped the old mechanisms of
sovereign power, on both the detailed and the mass level. There was an acute need for new
power technologies focusing on individual bodies as well as on the species body. Sovereign
power was not comprehensive or flexible enough to respond effectively to new capital for-
mations and demographic changes.
Foucault explicitly notes, however, that charting the genealogy of modern forms of
power such as biopower is not a simple case of substitution. Mechanisms of biopolitical
governmentality did not simply replace juridico-institutional mechanisms. The old sovereign
right to take life or let live was not replaced, but was rather complemented with a new right to
make live and let die.47 He attempted to identify a turning point in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries when the management of population took pre-eminence without repla-
cing sovereignty and law. These two forms of power thus permeate each other and exist to-
gether forming a ‚scientifico-legal complex.‛48 This co-existence is not necessary or originary,
however, as Agamben claims; for Foucault, it is historically contingent.
rights and institutionalised liberties. Andreas Kalyvas, ‚The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,‛ in An-
drew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 116. For an interesting account of ‚affirmative biopolitics,‛
see Roberto Esposito, Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008).
47
See e.g., Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, ed. by
Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 219.
48
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1991).
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
37
Foucault’s short but influential discussion of biopower at the end of The History of
Sexuality, Vol. 1, begins with a summary definition of sovereign power: it is a form of power
that was historically founded on violence—the right to kill. Its characteristic privilege, since
Roman law, was the right to decide life and death. In its limited modern form, as in its ancient
and absolute form, it is dissymmetrical: the sovereign exercises his right of life only by exer-
cising his right to kill or by refraining from killing. In other words, he demonstrates his power
over life through the death he is capable of requiring. Sovereign power was exercised mainly
by means of deduction: it consisted of the right to appropriate a portion of the nation’s wealth,
a tax on products, goods and services, time, bodies and ultimately, life itself. It culminated in
the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.49 The obligation to wage war on be-
half of the sovereign and the imposition of the death penalty for going against his will were
the clearest forms of such power.
Foucault’s claim is that the West has undergone a very profound transformation of the
mechanisms of power since the seventeenth century. Deductive and violent sovereign power
has been gradually complemented and partly replaced by biopower, a form of power that
exerts a positive influence on life, ‚that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it,
subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.‛50 Deduction or violence is no
longer the predominant form of power, but is merely one element among others, working
towards a new objective under a new rationality. Biopower is bent on generating and or-
dering forces: the aim is to increase them rather than to impede or destroy them. In short, its
logic or rationality is not violent deduction, but positive production.
The era of biopolitics is marked by the explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the subjugation of bodies and control of populations: techniques that coordinate
medical care, normalise behaviour, rationalise mechanisms of insurance and rethink urban
planning, for example. The aim is the effective administration of bodies and the calculated
management of life through means that are scientific and continuous. It is power whose
highest function is no longer to kill but to ‚invest life through and through.‛51 What essen-
tially characterises biopower in Foucault’s account is thus not the fact that it is unmediated
power over bare life, but the fact that the mechanisms of power and knowledge have assumed
responsibility for the life process in order to optimise, control and modify it. In other words,
the exercise of power over living beings no longer carries the threat of death, but implies the
taking charge of their life. Life and its mechanisms are brought into the realm of explicit cal-
culation in the regimes of knowledge-power.
The rationality of biopower is markedly different from that of sovereign power in
terms not just of its objectives but also of its instruments. A major consequence of its develop-
ment is the growing importance of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law.
The law is always armed and is based on violence, whereas biopower takes charge of life with
the help of continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms based on knowledge. Foucault
argues that the rise of biopower means that we have entered a phase of juridical regression:
49
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, 23.
50
Ibid., 137.
51
Ibid., 139.
Oksala: Violence
38
I do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice
tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into the a continuum of apparatuses (medical
and administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A norma-
lizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life.52
According to Foucault, biopower uses administrative policies, strategies and tactics instead of
laws as its instrument, or it uses laws as a tactic. Biopolitical rationality treats the law as one
administrative technique among others that can be utilised to regulate and improve the life of
the population. Biopolitical techniques do not typically result from sovereign parliamentary
decisions, but are part of the administrative and managerial procedures legitimised by expert
knowledge.
Both Agamben and Foucault thus claim that we live in a society in which the power of
the law has subsided. Whereas Agamben sees this as a result of the sovereign state of excep-
tion that has become the norm, Foucault claims that it is the power of sovereignty itself that
has been undermined. Biopower is not political power in the traditional sense because it is not
reducible to the power of a democratically elected sovereign body, whether individual or
collective. It penetrates such political power, but it is essentially the power of life’s experts, in-
terpreters and administrators. The key problem with biopower is thus not the foundational
violence of the sovereign, but the depoliticised violence of expert knowledge.
Because Agamben connects sovereignty and biopower with an originary bond, his
framework makes it difficult to diagnose the profound tensions that exist in modern societies
between these two fundamentally different rationalities and types of power. Whereas the
essential feature of sovereign power is its license to kill, for biopower killing presents a
problem: it does not celebrate death and violence, but seeks to exclude or at least to hide them.
Foucault notes that death has ceased to be a collective and spectacular ceremony in modern
biopolitical society, but has become something to be hidden away: it is ‚not so much sex as
death that is the object of a taboo.‛53
This obviously does not mean that modern biopolitical societies are non-violent. On
the contrary, violence is harder to detect because it has to be hidden. Foucault readily ac-
knowledges the unprecedented violence of modernity: the biological conception of politics has
made killing possible on an unprecedented scale.54 Biopower is thus clearly capable of utili-
sing violence, but only under very specific conditions and restricted by defined limits. The
violence it uses has to be hidden away or called something else because it presents a problem
in the rationality of biopolitics, the explicit aim of which is the optimisation and enhancement
of life. The connection with violence has to be mediated: biopolitical violence must pass
52
Ibid., 144.
53
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76, ed. by Mauro Bertani
and Alessandro Fontana, English series ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. by David Macey (Harmondsworth:
Allen Lane, Penguin), 247.
54
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 136-37.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
39
through the regime of knowledge/power and it must be given a scientific legitimacy that is
compatible with the aims of biopolitics.
In arguing that Foucault does not analyse the politics of the great totalitarian states,
Agamben overlooks his last lecture in the series Society Must be Defended, in which he referred
to the phenomenon of State racism in Nazi Germany as an example of the paradoxes in the
exercise of modern biopower. He anticipated Agamben’s argument by acknowledging that
Nazi Germany could be seen in many ways as the extreme development of biopower: there
was no other state in which ‚the biological was so tightly, so insistently, regulated.‛55 How-
ever, he posed the question of how a political system so completely centred upon biopower
could unleash such murderous power and in fact utilise the old sovereign right to kill. ‚How
can power such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its
duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings?‛56
His answer was biological racism, which provided a way of separating the different
groups that exist within a population and then establishing a biological relationship between
them. This was not an adversarial relationship between enemies—the inferior group was not
the enemy threatening the nation’s existence in the Schmittian sense. It was rather a biological
relationship of abnormality: the inferior group had to be eliminated as a biological threat to
the population and its improvement. The death of the inferior race would make life in general
healthier. The objective to improve life for its own sake could thus legitimise killing within
the rationality of biopower. The logic of biological racism was the condition that made killing
acceptable in biopolitical societies.
In the biopolitical system< killing, or the imperative to kill, is acceptable only if it results
not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to
and the improvement of the species or race< Once the State functions in the biopower
mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.57
It is thus highly significant that the racism of Nazi Germany was essentially different from
‚ordinary‛ racism, which takes the form of mutual contempt or hatred between races. The
specificity of modern biopolitical racism is bound up with a technique of power that allows
biopower to work. When racism becomes the racism of a biopolitical state, ‚it is obliged to use
race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise sovereign power.‛58
In biopolitical societies, a sovereign power cannot simply assume unmediated power over
bare life if it wants to kill its own citizens, but must pass through the regime of power/
knowledge and gain bioscientific legitimacy. Biological racism provided a pseudo-scientific
discourse that was compatible with biopower, and through which biopower could be trans-
formed into sovereign power.
55
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 259.
56
Ibid., 254.
57
Ibid., 256.
58
Ibid., 258.
Oksala: Violence
40
The Third Reich thus became a monstrous combination of biopower and sovereign
power, exercising sovereign means for biopolitical ends. Genocide was carried out in the
name of care and the improvement of life:
We have, then, in Nazi society something that is quite extraordinary: this is a society which
has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign
right to kill. The two mechanisms – the classic, archaic mechanism that gave the State the
right the life and death over its citizens< and the new mechanism of biopower – coincide
exactly.59
Foucault thus agrees with Agamben that the tension between biopower and sovereign power
was dissolved in the Third Reich and the two coincided exactly. This coincidence was not ori-
ginary and necessary, however; it was historically contingent. It was made possible because of
two crucial factors. Firstly, biological racism worked as the mechanism that harmonised the
opposing rationalities of biopower and sovereign power, and masked the fact that a bio-
political society was killing its own people. Secondly, the Third Reich was also a society in
which the sovereign power to kill ran through its entire social body. It was granted not only
to the State, but also to a whole series of individuals, such as members of the SA and the SS:
Ultimately everyone in the Nazi Sate had the power of life and death over his or her
neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away
with the people next door, or having them done away with.60
It was sovereign power—not just biopower—that was taken to its extreme limit.
For Foucault, the seamless coincidence of sovereign power and biopower in Nazi Ger-
many was thus a historically contingent conglomeration of factors, ‚the paroxysmal point‛ in
the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower geared towards
the protection and enhancement of life.61 The concentration camp was not the exemplary un-
masking of an originary connection between violence and political power in modernity, but ‚a
demonic combination‛ of two fundamentally different rationalities of power: biopower and
sovereign power.62 As Mika Ojakangas observes, Foucault considered these two forms of
power to have become intermingled, modern states being the resulting combination. This is
not the case, however, because there are hidden de jure ties between sovereign power and bio-
power, as Agamben claims. It is rather that sovereign states have de facto used bio-political
methods, just as modern biopolitical societies have de facto hinged on principles of sove-
reignty.63
59
Ibid., 260.
60
Ibid., 259.
61
Ibid., 260.
62
Michel Foucault, ‚Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,‛ in Power: Essential Works of
Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 3, ed. by James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. by Robert Hurley and
others (New York: New Press, 2000), 311.
63
Mika Ojakangas, ‚Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault,‛ Foucault Studies, No 2,
(2005), 15.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
Elena: This is a wonderful and powerful text for the research I'm working on. It is of course obvious that my input at the beginning of the text is due to the fact that I have not read the whole text and understood the full spectrum of their views but my observations are nevertheless useful because they still help me in the long run to understand where I find the inconsistencies that are later dealt with or not dealt with in the text.
Conclusion: Biopolitical Violence
Both Foucault and Agamben describe modern biopolitics as a political system that is charac-
terised by the indistinction of tactics and laws, norms and facts. They both warn us that ‚in
the biopolitical horizon that characterises modernity, the physician and the scientist move in
the no-man’s-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate.‛64 However,
they differ on their views on the grounds of modern biopower as well the possible forms of
resistance against it due to their fundamentally different understandings of sovereignty.
Foucault has a more historically and politically grounded conception of sovereignty
than Agamben, but it is theoretically very rudimentary. He understands sovereign power es-
sentially as a repressive and coercive form of power, which operates through legal pro-
hibitions. This narrow conception leads him to claim that sovereignty fails to account for the
modern biopolitical techniques of power that function largely outside of the law. We need an
understanding of political power that can account for the way that sovereignty has incor-
porated elements that are productive of life: forms of power that administer and manage life
outside the juridical realm. Agamben, on the other hand, relies on a Schmittian understanding
of sovereignty according to which sovereignty is irreducible to the law because it must form
its constitutive condition: it can issue policies that are nothing other than politically driven
sovereign decisions. Therefore, it is exactly sovereignty that must account for those modern
biopolitical mechanisms that fall through the grid of the juridical realm.
Agamben’s account can be understood as a re-conceptualization of sovereignty, which
Andreas Kakyvas has aptly called ‚bio-sovereignty.‛65 Bio-sovereignty does not simply exer-
cise external control over its subjects or limit itself to the juridical regulation of social relations.
Its powers are not confined to mere repression and coercion, and it does not rule solely
through legal prohibitions. It is capable of producing, administering, and managing life itself,
and ultimately deciding on its value or nonvalue. However, by assimilating all power rela-
tions and political rationalities to this comprehensive, ahistorical and ontologised notion of
sovereignty, Agamben’s account makes it very difficult to imagine forms of resistance. He
does not offer us tools for the analysis of the theoretical tensions, political struggles and
historical transformations that have characterised sovereignty in modernity.
In Foucault’s framework, biopower and sovereign power cannot be assimilated into
one comprehensive power formation such as bio-sovereignty. Biopower is opposed to sove-
reign power not only in terms of its productive aims and rationality, but also in the sense that
it is essentially not the power of a democratically elected sovereign body. It is typically the
power of experts: managers and administrators of life. This opposition is important in terms
of imagining possible forms of resistance against biopolitical violence. Rather than attempting
to eradicate sovereignty, we are left with the option of trying to break apart bio-sovereignty—
a form of sovereignty in which biopower and sovereign power coincide seamlessly—and
strengthening the power of popular sovereignty. His analysis thus leaves open the possibility
64
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 159.
65
Andreas Kalyvas, ‚The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Meta-
physics, and Death, 109.
Oksala: Violence
42
that a viable way to resist biopolitical violence would be to reinstall legal protections and de-
mocratic mechanisms of accountability rather than launch a wholesale critique of sovereignty
aiming at its eradication.
There is no originary sovereign violence for Foucault because state-violence must al-
ways be understood as a set of specific practices connected with a historical power formation.
However, the rise of biopower in modernity means that the sites for practices of state-violence
unregulated by juridical mechanisms have potentially increased. Biopolitical practices of vio-
lence are typically grounded on effective policy, professional management and expert know-
ledge, or legitimised through the deployment of the law as an administrative tactic. They are
practices of violence that are not strictly illegal, but they are extra-legal.66
Hence, even if we do not accept Agamben’s analysis that we are living in a permanent
state of exception wholesale, the fact that techniques of biopower often fall outside, or through
the grid of politically accountable sovereign power, implies that they can, for this very reason,
easily revert to exceptional sovereign power in the Schmittian sense: biopower can become
sovereign power in a state of exception uncontrolled and unregulated by any law. The bio-
political practices of violence are often hidden within various institutions in which petty
sovereigns can reign, uncontrolled by parliamentary or judicial restrictions. Hence, even if we
deny any de jure connection between biopower and sovereign power, we have to be mindful
that the growing importance of the former in modernity means that the hidden sites for
exceptional sovereign violence—violence that is direct, unregulated and arbitrary—have
therefore also multiplied. Although Agamben’s analysis of the originary intersection between
sovereign power and biopower is thus inconsistent with Foucault’s understanding of
biopolitics to the extent that it ontologizes the biopolitical violence of the 20th century, it
should nevertheless be credited as a stark and radical exposure of the dangers of biopower.
The modern dominance of this distinct rationality of power centred on the care and protection
of life has opened up sites for unprecedented forms of violence.
It is thus my contention that if we want to understand the specific forms that political
violence takes in modernity, we need a careful analysis of the points of tension, as well as the
points of coincidence, between sovereign power and biopower. By such an analysis, Foucault
exposes a form of power that does not threaten us with violence, but is nevertheless an effec-
tive way of controlling and directing people’s lives. The effectiveness of biopower lies pre-
cisely in the fact that it explicitly refrains from killing and instead grounds its demands on
scientific truth and the goals of wellbeing and care of the population. Without an under-
standing of the rationality of biopower it would be difficult to explain how we willingly par-
take in the profound and violent disciplining and medicalisation of our lives that characterises
modern societies and their specific forms of biopolitical violence. Because violence is the in-
verse logic of biopower, biopolitical violence is in some ways even more dangerous than
sovereign violence because it is harder to detect and to regulate.
Elena:
I can’t agree with J. Oksala here because she’s failing to undertand that we participate in the mechanisms of biopolitics not because they protect our lives but because we do not know how to protect our lives our selves. Because we, the human being is and has been under oppressive and domineering structures for centuries and empowering our selves out of them is a problem of consciousness. The struggle seems to be necessary but the criminality of unconsciousness is not for that justified. This has been a wonderful and enlightening paper for me so I have nothing but gratitude for the expediency with which you’ve exposed the thoughts of these great thinkers that I must eventually look into properly, researching their books.
One of the problems I find in the text is that you are somehow avoiding to include the relationship between politics, biopolitics and property. Instead the division is made between politics and bare life and a separation between them is established. Politics has become biopolitics because sovereignty has shifted from the king to the government leaving out the people and appropriating the goods! The ideal of the King was not the appropriation of the territory for itself but for its people and the expansion of his culture nor was it for the destruction of the people through forced labor but for the protection and development of the people and their culture and when the monarchy falls into a descending decadent process the King abuses his sovereignty and is subsequently overthrown. (All this in my “language” but still clear enough to understand). If my intuition that we are moving from the rule of the King to the rule of the people stepping through the rule of governments representing the people has any viable accuracy, what we need to understand is the relationships that the particular “rulers” establish with what is ruled upon: essentially property and rights. What is and what rights we have in relation to those things that are objectively before us determines the characteristics of our culture. Culture is something else that is not being addressed in the text and the lack of it is certainly significant to the possibility of understanding the relationships involved. Let me check and see what definitions of culture I can find. Culture: The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. Of the many definitions on offer this is the one closest to how I am using it.
If we look at the ancient Egyptian kings there was an “aim” for the society and everyone participated in that aim. In the medieval structure there are also specific roles of participation. The inequality between the people and the monarchs was certainly there but the “vision” of the monarch embraced all the people. What has been lost in biopolitics is precisely the “vision” of the whole, the integrity of the human, of the “homo sacri” proper of the sovereign individual not just the king.
The question then resides in our willingness to discuss our relationship to what we have. If we opt for any form of racism, nationalism or classicism to justify the right of a few to have more than the many then every gesture of violence against the many claiming their rights on what we have is justified but if we opt for equality and the right of each and every individual to the whole and its corresponding portion, then we have to change and adapt our laws to that consciousness of our selves as human beings with equal rights to what is there.
The discussion would then not center as much on who but on how are we going to distribute what is there for us to share. And when dealing with how the complexities of the problems are a great deal more exquisite than when dealing with “who”. The creative power of our selves has to come into play to understand a myriad other factors in our lives besides the pie that we are going to share for some of us only need half of it, while others need twice the amount and for that to remain “human” we need to trust that in developing the consciousness that we each matter equally, we can trust our selves to share proportionately to our needs. Our “needs” then cannot be reduced to our instinctive needs but a whole sphere of physical, emotional, intellectual and self without the “ish” needs would need to be incorporated in our understanding of the “needs” of each and every individual as an individual as much as a “social” being.
The understanding of our needs would necessarily take us to the objective realities of life itself and by objective realities I do not only mean physical realities such as food and space but also non-physical realities such as music, love, sex, thought, speech.
We would need to recover the “vision of life” in its entirety to formulate for ourselves the path that we are each willing to struggle towards conscious of our individuality as much as our sociability.
There seems to be a parallel consistency in the inability to address “the whole” in the subject of study for what we talk about is what we our selves are able to perceive not only in the outside world but in our own selves. The justification that we are looking at just THIS aspect is valid in as much as we often need to focus on a particular point but we need to be careful to not exclude inherent aspects of the whole to justify our particular point of view. That too is an aspect of objectivity___________.
Oksala: To conclude, Foucault would agree with Arendt that what characterises modernity is
that we have become ants. He contends, however, that the reason we have become ants is not
that we mistakenly comprehend our biological life in political terms. We become ants pre-
cisely at the moment when we are no longer able to pose questions concerning our biological
life in political terms. Political power in biopolitical societies has evaporated and has been
replaced by purely administrative and economic power. Complex biopolitical techniques aim
at making our life as long and happy as possible with the most scientifically advanced means
available. There are no political decisions or debates left when the aims of biopower are
unanimous and its means scientific. The crisis of politics in modernity cannot be resolved by
depoliticising biological life in the sense of returning it to the private sphere. On the contrary,
it must be explicitly politicised by dispelling its naturalness and revealing its historically
specific connections with the biopolitical regime of power/knowledge.
Johanna Oksala
Philosophy Programme
School of Humanities
University of Dundee
Dundee DD14HN
Scotland, UK
Elena: Yes, Bravo! We would all agree to that: that we are in the process of becoming ants if we cannot empower our selves to be humans. In the end we seem to agree with Johanna Oksala but that point of how it is that we are to do so or how we got here is still in question.
My deepest gratitude for your work no matter the disagreements.
It is a fact that you may never see my work on your work for I write here to learn about what I understand more than to share with others who have not yet arrived but should that ever be possible, it would be a pleasure to deepen our knowledge and understandings and celebrate each other’s company.
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
On Death
The good thing about dying is that I can give everything away.
Living is like a horse, bicycle or car drive: it feels so good when you get home.
Put everything down before they send the envelope!
Living is a great ride with an equally great arrival.
Elena: At last I understand why they are so against We are One in the fofblog and Ton here! No wonder he rejects everything I say!
What Conservatives Really Want
Posted on February 19, 2011 by georgelakoff
—Dedicated to the peaceful protestors in Wisconsin, February 19, 2011
The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.
The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women’s rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting, and on and on.
Budget deficits are a ruse, as we’ve seen in Wisconsin, where the Governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement.
Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work, and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the President has discussed. But deficits are not what really matters to conservatives.
Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.
In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama accurately described the basis of American democracy: Empathy — citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility—acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions and empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one’s fellow citizens.
The conservative worldview rejects all of that.
Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don’t think government should help its citizens. That is, they don’t think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.
But where does that view of individual responsibility alone come from?
The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don’t have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.
The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, “Let the market decide” assumes the market itself is The Decider. The market is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest) and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand). As the ultimate moral authority, there should be no power higher than the market that might go against market values. Thus the government can spend money to protect the market and promote market values, but should not rule over it either through (1) regulation, (2) taxation, (3) unions and worker rights, (4) environmental protection or food safety laws, and (5) tort cases. Moreover, government should not do public service. The market has service industries for that. Thus, it would be wrong for the government to provide health care, education, public broadcasting, public parks, and so on. The very idea of these things is at odds with the conservative moral system. No one should be paying for anyone else. It is individual responsibility in all arenas. Taxation is thus seen as taking money away from those who have earned it and giving it to people who don’t deserve it. Taxation cannot be seen as providing the necessities of life, a civilized society, and as necessary for business to prosper.
In conservative family life, the strict father rules. Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father, the Lord, who rewards and punishes according to individual responsibility in following his Biblical word.
Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should NOT have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. To protect and extend conservative values themselves, the devil’s own means can be used against conservatism’s immoral enemies, whether lies, intimidation, torture, or even death, say, for women’s doctors.
Freedom is defined as being your own strict father — with individual not social responsibility, and without any government authority telling you what you can and cannot do. To defend that freedom as an individual, you will of course need a gun.
This is the America that conservatives really want. Budget deficits are convenient ruses for destroying American democracy and replacing it with conservative rule in all areas of life.
What is saddest of all is to see Democrats helping them.
Democrats help radical conservatives by accepting the deficit frame and arguing about what to cut. Even arguing against specific “cuts” is working within the conservative frame. What is the alternative? Pointing out what conservatives really want. Point out that there is plenty of money in America, and in Wisconsin. It is at the top. The disparity in financial assets is un-American — the top one percent has more financial assets than the bottom 95 percent. Middle class wages have been flat for 30 years, while the wealth has floated to the top. This fits the conservative way of life, but not the American way of life.
Democrats help conservatives by not shouting out loud over and over that it was conservative values that caused the global economic collapse: lack of regulation and a greed-is-good ethic.
Democrats also help conservatives by what a friend has called Democratic Communication Disorder. Republican conservatives have constructed a vast and effective communication system, with think tanks, framing experts, training institutes, a system of trained speakers, vast holdings of media, and booking agents. Eighty percent of the talking heads on tv are conservatives. Talk matters because language heard over and over changes brains. Democrats have not built the communication system they need, and many are relatively clueless about how to frame their deepest values and complex truths.
And Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks — talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. “Benefits” are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.
Democrats help conservatives when they use conservative words like “entitlements” instead of “earnings” and speak of government as providing “services” instead of “necessities.”
Is there hope?
I see it in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands citizens see through the conservative frames and are willing to flood the streets of their capital to stand up for their rights. They understand that democracy is about citizens uniting to take care of each other, about social responsibility as well as individual responsibility, and about work — not just for your own profit, but to help create a civilized society. They appreciate their teachers, nurses, firemen, police, and other public servants. They are flooding the streets to demand real democracy — the democracy of caring, of social responsibility, and of excellence, where prosperity is to be shared by those who work and those who serve.
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/5030-what-conservatives-really-want
WE ARE ONE!!!! ONE WORLD, ONE PAIN, ONE HUMANITY, ONE HOPE!
Published on Monday, February 21, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
From Cairo to Madison: Hope and Solidarity are Alive
by Medea Benjamin
Here in Madison, Wisconsin, where protesters have occupied the State Capitol Building to stop the pending bill that would eliminate workers’ right to collective bargaining, echoes of Cairo are everywhere. Protesters here were elated by the photo of an Egyptian engineer named Muhammad Saladin Nusair holding a sign in Tahrir Square saying “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.” The signs by protesters in Madison include “Welcome to Wiscairo”, “From Egypt to Wisconsin: We Rise Up”, and “Government Walker: Our Mubarak.” The banner I brought directly from Tahrir Square saying “Solidarity with Egyptian Workers” has been hanging from the balcony of the Capitol alongside solidarity messages from around the country.
My travels from Cairo to Madison seem like one seamless web. After camping out with the students and workers in the Capitol Building, I gave an early morning seminar on what it was like to be an eyewitness to the Egyptian revolution, and the struggles that are taking place right now in places like Libya, Bahrain and Yemen. Folks told me all day how inspiring it was to hear about the uprisings in the Arab world.
Some took the lessons from Cairo literally. Looking around at the capitol building that was starting to show the wear and tear from housing thousands of protesters, I had mentioned that in Cairo the activists were constantly scrubbing the square, determined to show how much they loved the space they had liberated. A few hours later, in Madison’s rotunda, people were on their hands and knees scrubbing the marble floor. “We’re quick learners,” one of the high school students told me, smiling as she picked at the remains of oreo cookies sticking to the floor.
I heard echoes of Cairo in the Capitol hearing room where a nonstop line of people had gathered all week to give testimonies. The Democratic Assemblymembers have been giving folks a chance to voice their concerns about the governor’s pending bill. In this endless stream of heartfelt testimonies, people talk about the impact this bill will have on their own families—their take-home pay, their healthcare, their pensions. They talk about the governor manufacturing the budget crisis to break the unions. They talk about the history of workers’ struggles to earn living wages and have decent benefits. And time and again, I heard people say “I saw how the Egyptian people were able to rise up and overthrow a 30-year dictatorship, and that inspired me to rise up and fight this bill.”
Solidarity is, indeed, a beautiful thing. It is a way we show our oneness with all of humanity; it is a way to reaffirm our own humanity. CODEPINK sent flowers to the people in Tahrir Square—a gesture that was received with kisses, hugs and tears from the Egyptians. The campers in Madison erupted in cheer when they heard that an Egyptian had called the local pizza place, Ians Pizza, and placed a huge order to feed the protesters. “Pizza never tasted so good,” a Wisconsin fireman commented when he was told that the garlic pizza he was eating had come from supporters in Cairo.
Egyptian engineer Muhammad Saladin Nusair, the one whose photo supporting Wisconsin workers went viral, now has thousands of new American Facebook friends. He wrote in his blog that many of his new friends were surprised by his gesture of solidarity, but he was taught that “we live in ONE world and under the same sky.”
“If a human being doesn’t feel the pain of his fellow human beings, then everything we’ve created and established since the very beginning of existence is in great danger,” Muhammad wrote. “We shouldn’t let borders and differences separate us. We were made different to complete each other, to integrate and live together. One world, one pain, one humanity, one hope.”
Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (www.codepinkalert.org). She is author of Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart.
WE ARE ONE!!!One world, one pain, one humanity, one hope!!
Published on Monday, February 21, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
FROM CAIRO TO MADISON: HOPE AND SOLIDARITY ARE ALIVE
by Medea Benjamin
Here in Madison, Wisconsin, where protesters have occupied the State Capitol Building to stop the pending bill that would eliminate workers’ right to collective bargaining, echoes of Cairo are everywhere. Protesters here were elated by the photo of an Egyptian engineer named Muhammad Saladin Nusair holding a sign in Tahrir Square saying “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.” The signs by protesters in Madison include “Welcome to Wiscairo”, “From Egypt to Wisconsin: We Rise Up”, and “Government Walker: Our Mubarak.” The banner I brought directly from Tahrir Square saying “Solidarity with Egyptian Workers” has been hanging from the balcony of the Capitol alongside solidarity messages from around the country.
My travels from Cairo to Madison seem like one seamless web. After camping out with the students and workers in the Capitol Building, I gave an early morning seminar on what it was like to be an eyewitness to the Egyptian revolution, and the struggles that are taking place right now in places like Libya, Bahrain and Yemen. Folks told me all day how inspiring it was to hear about the uprisings in the Arab world.
Some took the lessons from Cairo literally. Looking around at the capitol building that was starting to show the wear and tear from housing thousands of protesters, I had mentioned that in Cairo the activists were constantly scrubbing the square, determined to show how much they loved the space they had liberated. A few hours later, in Madison’s rotunda, people were on their hands and knees scrubbing the marble floor. “We’re quick learners,” one of the high school students told me, smiling as she picked at the remains of oreo cookies sticking to the floor.
I heard echoes of Cairo in the Capitol hearing room where a nonstop line of people had gathered all week to give testimonies. The Democratic Assemblymembers have been giving folks a chance to voice their concerns about the governor’s pending bill. In this endless stream of heartfelt testimonies, people talk about the impact this bill will have on their own families—their take-home pay, their healthcare, their pensions. They talk about the governor manufacturing the budget crisis to break the unions. They talk about the history of workers’ struggles to earn living wages and have decent benefits. And time and again, I heard people say “I saw how the Egyptian people were able to rise up and overthrow a 30-year dictatorship, and that inspired me to rise up and fight this bill.”
Solidarity is, indeed, a beautiful thing. It is a way we show our oneness with all of humanity; it is a way to reaffirm our own humanity. CODEPINK sent flowers to the people in Tahrir Square—a gesture that was received with kisses, hugs and tears from the Egyptians. The campers in Madison erupted in cheer when they heard that an Egyptian had called the local pizza place, Ians Pizza, and placed a huge order to feed the protesters. “Pizza never tasted so good,” a Wisconsin fireman commented when he was told that the garlic pizza he was eating had come from supporters in Cairo.
Egyptian engineer Muhammad Saladin Nusair, the one whose photo supporting Wisconsin workers went viral, now has thousands of new American Facebook friends. He wrote in his blog that many of his new friends were surprised by his gesture of solidarity, but he was taught that “we live in ONE world and under the same sky.”
“If a human being doesn’t feel the pain of his fellow human beings, then everything we’ve created and established since the very beginning of existence is in great danger,” Muhammad wrote. “We shouldn’t let borders and differences separate us. We were made different to complete each other, to integrate and live together. One world, one pain, one humanity, one hope.”
Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (www.codepinkalert.org). She is author of Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart.
Thus while Kuhn was interested in what we
might call political changes in scientific fields, Foucault was interested in developing the
46
Ibid., 11.
47
Ibid., 12.
48
Ibid., 14.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.
82
methodological tools appropriate to the study of political power. A crucial dividing line be-
tween them, emphasized by Agamben, is Foucault’s genealogical inquiry.
Recall that Agamben argues ‛that a principle of potentiality is inherent in every
definition of sovereignty.‛49 This principal of potentiality seems to be operative at every level
of sovereign figuration. This is to say that the principal of sovereignty is also at work in every
sovereign effect and thus in every effect of the juridical order including law, bare life, the
sovereign space (the Lager) and so on. Although freedom surely is one of these effects, it can
only be meaningful in relation to the sovereign decision on exception. We can think of this
meaning from several perspectives. Two, though, seem to be germane. First, freedom only
functions by its impotentiality suspending itself. Thus, freedom and unfreedom are simply
two sides of the same coin. Therefore, second, freedom is an effect of the decision on excep-
tion and not power or faculty of human beings which Aristotle’s concept of ‛potentiality‛
made it possible to think. The second point makes it clear that the conclusion Agamben draws
from his interpretation of δύναμις in Homo Sacer is incompatible with that drawn in ‚On
Potentiality.‛ While indeed the argumentation in the former supports the claim that the ‚ori-
gin of human power, which is so violent and limitless with respect to other living beings‛50 is
potentiality, it does not support the claim that being free is to be capable of one’s, by which I
understand ‘an individual’s’, own impotentiality. This is to say that the argumentation in
Homo Sacer does not support a liberal conception of freedom. Instead, that which is fully ca-
pable of its own impotentiality is the sovereignty to which all of us are subject. This sove-
reignty indeed is the origin of human freedom, but that freedom is a kind of sovereign
bestowal and not that described by Locke, Rousseau, Berlin, Schlegel, Antonio Negri, Hegel or
in ‚On Potentiality.‛
We cannot therefore say that Agamben understands the effect of Aristotle’s genius to
be nefarious. Bestowing the principal of potentiality to Western thought, Aristotle provided
the means to think and understand sovereignty. We most prominently see sovereignty when
it entirely suspends its potentiality not to be, such as in the body of Jean Charles de Menezes.51
Only on the basis of potentiality is this even thinkable within a liberal polity.
One surely wonders whether understanding Aristotle in this way is productive. I think
that it certainly can be, if we follow Foucault and suppose that universals do not exist. This is
to say that there are not a set of trans-historical phenomena from which practices and the
thinking emerge. How does it become possible for a practice, or practices, to be actualized at a
given time and place? Moreover, how does it become possible to think or understand a given
practice? What are the conditions of possibility of thinking such an act? Retrospectively con-
structing these conditions is what I consider genealogy. Genealogy is never neutral; it is al-
ways involved in agonistic relations with other genealogies, even the concept of History itself.
Nor is genealogy concerned with causes; rather, it concerns conditions which make, or made, a
given practice possible. But practices only become possible to the extent that they are in-
49
Ibid., 47.
50
Agamben, ‚On Potentiality,‛ 182.
51
Menezes was summarily shot in the head by the London Metropolitan police after being mistaken for one
of the tube/bus bomber plotters in summer 2005.
Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities
83
volved in what Foucault calls ‚a regime of truth‛ under which, ‛the articulation of a particular
type of discourse and set of practices, a discourse that, on the one hand, constitutes these
practices as a set bound together by an intelligible connection and, on the other hand,
legislates and can legislate on these practices in terms of true and false.‛52 Genealogy thus pro-
vides us a means of understanding how a particular practice came to be accepted and how it
was related to others in respect to its truthfulness or rightness.
Thus, projects like Agamben’s and Foucault’s provide us a means of understanding
that ideas, even very old ones, operate in a variety ways and are still involved in legislating
truth and falsity, even if they mutate over time—something akin to Foucault’s ongoing
interest in veridiction. On this basis, one would not say that Aristotle’s ideas in the Physics
were simply wrong. Instead, we ask how they conditioned a series of other ideas that were
(are) involved in various regimes of truth. From this perspective, thinking and Philosophy are
not simply something done in windowless classrooms and dusty offices, they are active and
engaged.
Considering an example of Foucault’s research in this respect reveals the genealogical
method and way of proceeding in his work. The noteworthy analysis he devoted to neo-
liberalism, as an epiphenomenon or related development of biopolitics, shows the technique
and the contours of his method. Foucault entitled his 1979 Colleège de France lecture course
‚The Birth of Biopolitics.‛ His initial goal for the course was to consider the ‚conditions of the
pos-sibility‛ leading to a significant shift in governmental technique which he had identified
in his lecture courses of the previous two years and in the last chapter of his book The History
of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction.53 This shift, Foucault argued, is characterized by a
change in the primary focus or object of government from the protection of geographic terri-
tory and the production of docile bodies, to the maintenance of the health of the ‛population‛
inhabiting the bounded territory of the nation-state. It was, Foucault argued, a shift from the
primacy of sovereign power, to what he called ‚biopower.‛
In the previous two courses, entitled Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory,
Population, Foucault detailed the novel practices, technologies, concepts and characteristics of
biopower. The Birth of Biopolitics was thus intended to develop and explain the conditions
under which these became possible. To accomplish this, Foucault decided that he needed to
further consider the development of the statistical concept ‛population.‛ Doing this, it turned
out, required him to analyze the way that this concept emerged from and morphed in eco-
nomic thought. As a result of this focus, The Birth of Biopolitics became a remarkably detailed
and uncannily prescient reading of the emergence of European and North American neolibe-
ralisms.
Throughout the analysis undertaken in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault reminds us that
his goal is to get to and explain the conditions of possibility for the emergence of biopower
and thereby further our understanding of biopolitics. This, though, never happens. Instead,
52
Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978-1979 (Paris: Éditions de Seuil,
2004), 41.
53
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York:
Penguin, 1978).
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.
84
he ends the course apologizing for not having arrived where he had hoped and stating that
even thinking that he could have gotten there without working through neoliberalism was im-
possible. The following year Foucault drops his analysis of biopower and focuses his attention
on what he eventually calls ‚technologies of the self.‛ This serves as a significant instantiation
of the premise that genealogy is not concerned with the search for origins, and that it cannot
be predicted or laid out in advance in a linear fashion.
Thus, the question remains open: what is the connection between neoliberalism and
biopower? This brief consideration provides an answer to this question. Specifically, that
Foucault’s analysis implies that the emergence of the concept of ‛population‛ out of develop-
ments in statistics made possible increasingly scientific techniques of management, particu-
larly the management of commercial interests. Foucault argues that the intensification of such
techniques, in turn, made possible the emergence of a scientific conception of ‛the market‛
differing from that of classical economists, such as Smith and Riccardo, which relied on non-
scientific metaphor for explanation, ‚the invisible hand‛ for example. Neoliberalism, from the
perspective of the argumentation provided in The Birth of Biopolitics, can be conceived as the
mapping of these scientific techniques of commercial management onto government, the latter
understood as—and this differs depending upon which neoliberalism is considered—being in
the service of, enhancing, protecting and/or producing this market. Given this, Foucault’s ar-
gument in the 1979 lecture course implies that biopolitics dramatically intensifies with the
emergence of neoliberalism. This is to say that as sovereignty wanes (or modifies) and bio-
power waxes, so too classical economics and neoliberalism. Thus, advanced neoliberal go-
vernmentality, to use Foucault’s now famous neologism, requires biopower and such power
cannot intensify, at least in the manner that Foucault thinks that it has and likely will, without
neoliberalism.
David Bleeden
Department of Philosophy
DePaul University
1 E. Jackson
Chicago, IL 60604
USA
Elena:
If there were to be a new paradigm in these times that we are talking in, it would be the paradigm of the Whole, Oneness. As a paradigm, it would have to include everything that’s been before us and everything that can possibly come. Consciousness should be able to see before and after because what matters to the human being is not conditioned by time.
One of the advantages of such a paradigm is that everything everyone has done or is doing, has been or is, matters. We are each looking through our own crystal and represent and act out a part of the whole that is worth being expressed. Those of us who happen to connect in the short period of our lives are no accident. Each in his and her own realm connect with those who are required. This is in our practical, daily lives. In our inner realm, we are all connected. I wonder if there is a greater experience of “reality”. Rich and complex as the phenomenical world is, it is the passing actualization of the non phenomenical. In that “passing” everything we can be, becomes, everything we are, IS, and yet We remain “untouched”. We are “too much” for any one of us to change THAT. The “juice” of our individual lives is for the glory of the “sovereign” within. We each “dissolve” into that “reality”. When we knock into each other, we “knock” into each other’s sovereignty, when we slip into each other, we slip into each other’s self, when we share, we actualize our selves. Love is Life.
Agamben’s Foucault 1- Snoek Suicide and sovereignty- Elena
Elena:
I realize how I use these texts at my will and convenience to expand where I feel I can do so. I would be filled with shame were I to distort them or dishonor them in any way, I could not be more indebted to them for providing a framework on which I can put my own grain of sand.
It is beautiful how Agamben and Foucault reconstruct our history and reinterpret it for us. It is so good to remember…
I’ve only worked on a quarter of this text today.
Anke Snoek 2010
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67, November 2010
ARTICLE
Agamben’s Foucault: An overview
Anke Snoek, Macquarie University / IVO Addiction Research Institute
ABSTRACT: This article gives an overview of the influence of the work of Michel Foucault
on the philosophy of Agamben. Discussed are Foucault’s influence on the Homo Sacer cycle,
on (the development) of Agamben’s notion of power (and on his closely related notion of free-
dom and art of life), as well as on Agamben’s philosophy of language and methodology.
While most commentaries focus on Agamben’s interpretation of Foucault’s concept of bio-
power, his work also contains many interesting references to Foucault on freedom and possi-
bilities—and I think that it is here that Foucault’s influence on Agamben is most deeply felt.
This article focuses on the shifts Agamben takes while looking for the Entwicklungsfähigkeit in
the work of Foucault.
Keywords: Foucault, Agamben, art of life, freedom, Entwicklungsfähigkeit
‚I see my work as closer to no one than to Foucault‛
– Giorgio Agamben
Introduction
The way Agamben uses the work of Foucault is controversial. Some speak of an ‘agambeni-
sation’ of Foucault, others see a revaluation of Foucault’s works through Agamben’s analyses.
Agamben himself often emphasizes the importance of Foucault for his work. But where in
Homo Sacer1 he speaks of correcting or at least completing one of Foucault’s theses—a phrase
that irritated many of Foucault’s fans—more than ten years later his tone has become more
modest, stating in Signatura Rerum2 how much he has learned from Foucault. A study of
Agamben’s references to Foucault offers a glimpse of the depth and broadness of this influ-
ence, which can hardly be overestimated.
In Agamben’s early works from the seventies to the early nineties, Foucault is
remarkably absent. In his first six books, only one short reference to Foucault is found (in
Infanzia e storia, 1979). This changes with the publication of Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la
nuda vita (1995), which was the first of a cycle of books, and was Agamben’s philosophical
1
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995/
1998), 12.
2
Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things. On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2008/2009), 7.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
45
breakthrough. In Homo Sacer Agamben gives an alarming analysis of the contemporary poli-
tical situation, and in this analysis Foucault’s notion of biopolitics plays an important role.
Since 1995 Foucault has been a well-known guest in the work of Agamben, especially through-
out the Homo Sacer cycle. Deladurantaye calls Foucault the single most decisive influence on
Agamben’s later works.3
Agamben once stated that he prefers to work with the Entwicklungsfähigkeit in the work
of the authors he likes. With Entwicklungsfähigkeit he means that which the author had to leave
unsaid, undeveloped, or as a potential.4 So in Foucault’s work, Agamben seeks to elaborate
the undeveloped aspects. Agamben’s contribution is not meant as criticism, although it some-
times radically changes Foucault’s concepts.
1. Foucault’s influence on the Homo Sacer cycle
The influence of Foucault on the Homo Sacer cycle as a whole is hardly ever commented upon.
Most commentaries focus solely on the first book, in part because the last parts have not yet
been translated into English. As of now, the Homo Sacer cycle contains the following books
(the chronological publication of the different volumes differs from the numbering of the
books):
I. Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (1995)
II.1. Stato di eccezione (2003)
II.2. Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo (2007)
II.3. Il sacramento del linguaggio. Archeologia del giuramento (2008)
III. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. l’archivio e il testimone (1998)
A closer look at the titles of the Homo Sacer cycle shows the apparent influence of Foucault. In
the first place on method: Agamben refers to a ‘genealogia teologica dell’economia’ and an
‘archeologia del giuramento.’ In Homo sacer II.2, the term regno seems to relate to Foucault’s use
of règne and governo to gouvernement.5 In Homo Sacer III, the notion archivio refers to Foucault
archive. While in Homo sacer II.3 only one short explicit reference to Foucault is found (with
regard to man as political animal), the sustained concern with veridiction indicates a close
association with Foucault. The notion of the oath (giuramento) is also mentioned in another
prominent citation of Foucault (on his distinction between two forms of veridiction or truth-
telling: the confession and the oath),6 which probably put Agamben on the trail of the impor-
tance of the oath.
In Homo sacer I (1995) Agamben mainly focuses on Foucault’s concept of biopower in
relation to sovereign power and the concentration camps. In an interview almost ten years
later, Agamben remarked:
3
Leland Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben. A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2009), 208.
4
Giorgio Agamben, ‚What is a Paradigm,‛ Lecture at European Graduate School (2002).
5
Jeffrey Bussolini, ‚Michel Foucault’s Influence on the Work of Giorgio Agamben,‛ in Sam Binkley and
Jorge Capetillo (ed.), Foucault in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 117.
6
Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 133.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
46
I sought to apply the same genealogical and paradigmatic method practiced by Foucault.
On the other hand, Foucault worked in many areas, but the two that he left out were
precisely the law and theology. It seemed natural for me to address my two latest studies in
this direction.7
In Homo sacer II.1–Stato di eccezione (2003), Agamben shifts his analysis to the field of law, and
in Homo sacer II.2–Il Regno e la Gloria (2007) to theology. Although in Stato di eccezione only one
reference to Foucault is found, Il Regno e la Gloria shows great explicit indebtedness to Fou-
cault.
In Homo sacer I (1995) Agamben had wondered why Foucault never brought his in-
sights on biopolitics to the concentration camp.8 Contrary to what may be expected, Homo
sacer III–Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998)—published only three years after Homo sacer I—cites
Foucault not only in relation to biopower, but also with regard to notions of resistance and
freedom (this is repeated in Stato di eccezione, 2003).
In the homo-sacer-cycle the main themes that Agamben makes use of from the work of
Foucault emerge: biopower, sovereignty, art of life and freedom, methodology, and language.
All these influences by Foucault will be further explored in this article.
2. Foucault’s influence on (the development) of Agamben’s notion of power
Early in the nineties Agamben’s philosophy made a shift from metaphysics, language and
esthetics to politics. This is also the first time Foucault made a serious entrance in the work of
Agamben. The influence of Foucault is most explicit in two books (Homo sacer I, 1995; Il Regno
e la Gloria, 2007) and an essay (‚Che cos’è un dispositivo?,‛ 2006). But references to Foucault’s
theory of power also appear in other books published in this period, such as in a beautiful
essay called ‚In this exile,‛ which can be found in Mezzi senza fine (1996), in Quel che resta di
Auschwitz (1998), and L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (2002). It is interesting that between the
publication of Homo sacer I (the first Homo sacer book) and Il Regno et la Gloria (chronologically
one of the latest Homo sacer books), Agamben’s notion of power makes a decisive turn; a turn
which is highly influenced by the work of Foucault.
Biopolitics and sovereignty
The starting point of Homo Sacer (1995) was Foucault’s analysis that ‚modern man is an animal
whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.‛ This is a revision of Aris-
totle’s claim that ‚man is a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence.‛9
Agamben transforms Foucault’s claim in stating that we are also—inversely—citizens whose
very politics is at issue in our natural body. In Homo Sacer Agamben develops a notion of bio-
power inspired by Foucault. Much is written about this topic, for example in Foucault Studies
2005 (2), and the apparent irreconcilability in Foucault’s and Agamben’s accounts of biopower
7
Gianluca Sacco, ‚Intervista a Giorgio Agamben: dalla teologia politica alla teologia economica,‛ Rivista
(2004): http://rivista.ssef.it/site.php?page=20040308184630627&edition=2005-05-01.
8
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 76.
9
Ibid., 105.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
47
has not gone unnoticed within the critical literature. It has even been suggested that a dia-
logue between Foucault and Agamben is impossible.10 Agamben himself, for his part, always
states his indebtedness to Foucault: ‚I first began to understand the figure of the Homo sacer
after I read Foucault’s texts on biopolitics.‛11 For this overview on biopolitics, I will only focus
on the three points at which Agamben revisited Foucault’s notion of biopower.
The first point at which Agamben revisited Foucault’s notion of biopower is the time
span. In the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that the regime of power
that emerged from the seventeenth century onwards involved a fundamental reversal of the
principle of power’s operation: ‚for the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence
was reflected in political existence.‛12 Against Foucault, Agamben claims that bare life has
long been included as the ‚original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power,‛ such that
biopolitics and sovereignty are originally and fundamentally intertwined.13 Agamben thus
extends the field of Foucault’s biopolitical inquiry to the origins of Western political expe-
rience in Greece and Rome. In a 2005 interview Agamben explains his shift of time-span with
the metaphor of a shadow:
Foucault once said something quite beautiful about this. He said that historical research was
like a shadow cast by the present onto the past. For Foucault, this shadow stretched back to
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For me, the shadow is longer< There is no great
theoretical difference between my work and Foucault’s; it is merely a question of the length
of the historical shadow.14
As Patton remarked, in the end the difference between Agamben’s approach and that of
Foucault is not so much a matter of correction and completion as a choice between epochal
concepts of biopolitics and bare life.15
The second point pertains to the role of sovereignty in relation to biopower. Agamben's
analysis of biopolitics is closely related to the concept of sovereignty. In Discipline and Punish
Foucault shows on the contrary how a sovereign model was replaced by a disciplinary model
of power. Resistance against the disciplinary model of political power is not to be found in re-
turning to a sovereign model as opposed to the disciplinary one. Foucault even suggested that
historians abandon their focus on sovereignty, and in the first volume of his History of
10
Mika Ojakangas, ‚Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power. Agamben and Foucault,‛ Foucault studies 2 (2005), 5-
28. Catherine Mills, ‚Biopolitics, Liberal Eugenics, and Nihilism,‛ in Matthew Calarco & Steven DeCaroli
(ed.), Giorgio Agamben. Sovereignty & Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
11
Hanna Leitgeb & Cornelia Vismann, ‚Das unheilige Leben: Ein Gespräch mit dem italienischen
Philosophen Giorigo Agamben,‛ Literaturen 2 (2001), 16-21.
12
Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2008).
13
Ibid., 64-65.
14
Abu Bakr Rieger, ‚Der Papst ist ein weltlicher Priester. Interview with Giorgio Agamben,‛ Literaturen
(2005), 21-25.
15
Paul Patton, ‚Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Biopolitics,‛ in Matthew Calarco & Steven
DeCaroli (ed.), Giorgio Agamben. Sovereignty & Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 218.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
48
Sexuality he called for a ‚liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty.‛16 According
to Deladurantay,
Agamben listens carefully to this advice—and does precisely the opposite. Instead of
liberating his reflections from a theoretical privilege accorded to sovereignty, he radically
intensifies them.17
In contrast to the historical succession of sovereignty and biopower that Michel Foucault
posits at times,18 Agamben sees a tight integration between sovereign power and biopower.
For Agamben the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.
In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception.19
This conception also implies that modern politics does not represent a definitive break
from classical sovereignty. The biopolitical regime of power operative in modernity is not so
much distinguished by incorporating life into politics as Foucault claimed—this is as old as
politics itself. What is decisive for our modern politics is that
together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of
bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins
to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and
zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.20
The third point concerns the relation with the concentration camps. In Homo Sacer I, Agamben
wonders why Foucault never brought his insights on biopolitics to the most exemplary place
of modern biopolitics: the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century and the concen-
tration camp.21 Agamben’s inquiry in Homo Sacer concerns the hidden point of intersection
between Foucault’s juridico-institutional and biopolitical models of power: the relation be-
tween the production of a biopolitical body and the sovereign exception.22
While Agamben speaks of correcting and completing Foucault, he is careful to
characterize Foucault’s choice as a conscious, methodological one that makes perfect sense in
light of Foucault’s aims, but that for his own study a treatment of legal structures could
‚complement‛ and ‚integrate themselves‛ into the line of speculation opened by Foucault,
and that he tried to bring ‚Foucault’s perspective together with that of the traditional juridical
16
Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 209.
17
Ibid., 209.
18
Foucault modifies his position on biopower and sovereignity in the lecture courses Sécurité, territoire,
population and Naissance de la biopolitique, where he no longer maintains that biopower and sovereignty are
distinct, nor that biopower displaces sovereignty, but that there is a more complicated interrelation and
interpenetration between them. This is presumably closer to Agamben's stance.
19
Catherine Mills, ‚Agamben’s Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life,‛ Contretemps 5
(2004), 46.
20
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9.
21
Ibid., 76.
22
Ibid., 11.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
49
and political ones,‛ adding that ‚there is no reason to keep them apart.‛23 As Bussolini re-
marked, Agamben seems to overlook the significance of Foucault’s brief analysis of the
military camp in Discipline and Punish, which shows close parallels with the analysis of Arendt
that Agamben cites,24 as well as Foucault's explicit treatment of the camps and the Nazi state
in Il faut défendre la société. Agamben partly corrects this in Quel che resta di Auschwitz by
drawing heavily from the Foucault lecture, but he does not fully indicate that he had unfairly
accused Foucault of overlooking this topic in Homo Sacer— so much for Homo Sacer I.
Auschwitz and caesuras in life
In Homo sacer III–Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998), which was published before the volumes of
Homo sacer II, Agamben further develops Foucault's analysis of biopower with regard to Hit-
ler’s Germany, stating that Foucault offers an explanation of the degradation of death in our
time.
Power in its traditional form (as territorial sovereignty), defines itself as the right over
life and death. This right is asymmetrical: the right to kill is more important than the right to
let people live. This is why Foucault characterizes sovereignty through the formula to make die
and to let live. When sovereign power progressively transformed into biopower, the care for
the life and health of subjects became increasingly important in the mechanisms and calcu-
lations of states. The ancient right to kill and to let live gives way to an inverse model which
defines modern biopolitics: to make live and to let die. This degraded death:
While in the right of sovereignty death was the point in which the sovereign’s absolute
power shone most clearly, now death instead becomes the moment in which the individual
eludes all power, falling back on himself and somehow bending back on what is most
private in him.25
But in Hitler’s Germany biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics: an unpre-
cedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute
generalization of the sovereign power to make die. How is it possible that a power whose aim
is essentially to make live instead exerts an unconditional power to death, Agamben wonders.
Foucault gives the answer to this paradox in his 1976 Collège de France lecture, where
he poses the same question: In so far as biopolitics is the management of life, how does it
make die, how does it kill? In order to re-claim death, to be able to inflict death on its subjects,
its living beings, biopower must make use of racism. Racism is the thanatopolitics of bio-
politics. Foucault states that racism is precisely what allows biopower to fragment the
biological domain whose care power had undertaken.26 Agamben sees this fragmentation, this
caesura in life, not only between Germans and Jews, but also more generally between animal
life and organic life, human and inhuman, and conscious life and vegetative life. But as there
is no given humanity of the human, this caesura is a moving border.
_______________________________
Elena:
It is the same with any separation: racism, nationalism, classism.
23
Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 209; Leitgeb & Vismann, ‚Das unheilige Leben.‛
24
Bussolini, ‚Michel Foucault’s Influence on the Work of Giorgio Agamben,‛ 107.
25
Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 1997), 221.
26
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 82-84.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
50
According to Agamben, the formula that defines the most specific trait of twentieth-
century biopolitics is no longer either to make die or to make live, but to make survive. This
survival is a mutable and virtually infinite survival, the absolute separation of animal life from
organic life until an essential mobile threshold is reached.27 What survives is the human in the
animal and the animal in the human. To ‚make survive‛ means to produce naked life, which
is subjected to death, but also, as we will see later, it means a change for resistance. This
survival is a dehumanization of the human in order to find his or her humanity—which can
never be found in any event as there is no human essence according to Agamben.
Elena: This is a strange affirmation but I need to read him to know how he means it.
Govermentality and economic theology
After a silence of four years, Agamben published a new volume of the Homo Sacer cycle (2007):
Homo sacer II.2–Il Regno e la Gloria, which marks a decisive turn in Agamben’s notion of power
in relation to Homo Sacer I. This turn can be marked as a shift from political theology to econo-
mic theology. Agamben explained this shift in focus in an interview:
It became clear to me that from Christian theology there derive two political paradigms (in
the wide sense): political theology, which locates in the one God the transcendence of
sovereign power, and economic theology, which substitutes the idea of oikonomia, conceived
as an immanent order—domestic and not political in the strict sense, as much a part of
human as of divine life. From political theology derives the political philosophy and
modern theory of sovereignty; from economic theology derives modern biopolitics, up until
the current triumph of the economy over every aspect of social life.28
Negri characterised this shift as moving away from the analysis of the nature of sovereignty
toward the practice of government.29 For Agamben,
The true problem, the main Arcanum of policy is not sovereignty but government, not the
king but the minister, not the law but the police force, that is, the state machine that they
form and keep in motion.30
Elena:
When government replaces sovereignty, instinctive life has taken over society and people are meant to work, work, work and survive, rather than live. Cults are masters at achieving that from people in short periods of time. “The state machine” is the projection of the lack of identity of the people and the people’s slavery for survival, a projection of the lack of sovereignty of themselves as much as the government.
It is very well possible that We needed to go through this step but the possibility of not being able to overcome it is terrifying.
It is also possible that what detonated this process in the political sphere and then in the individual sphere, was the Church’s separation of God and the divine from the human, with them as intermediaries. From their “intermediariness” to the intermediariness of the government between the people and sovereignty, is one small and simple step and then THAT reflected on individual’s lives is just another small gap. People “model” their inner world from how they perceive the outer world to be and there being no sovereignty in the outer world it is easy for us to neglect our own. It is neglected in our unconsciousness and that is precisely why the process might be necessary: because it is not enough to be sovereign without the consciousness of that sovereignity. The political process being as necessary as the individual one.
Suicide is also a phenomenon that should be related to this, for in suicide, the individual has interiorized the homo sacer and kills it even though he or she is completely innocent of crime. The people who commit suicide in our times are incapable of tolerating the dehumanization. They themselves become dehumanized and death is the only way out of it but it must be noted that it is rare for a person to kill him or herself, for the person rarely performs the act, the act performs itself on the person through the inertia of events and the individual is as much a victim of the forces in question as an actor. Were she or he present, where he or she the sovereign of his or her life, were he or she still there enough, he and she would be able to avoid the event. This is the same phenomenon as a government that has turned against the people and starts killing them as we are seeing in Kadafy’s Libia.
_____________
This shift seems to be closely related to Foucault’s work in its turning away from—or
fundamentally modifying—the analysis of sovereignty.
In a broad sense Il Regno e la Gloria is not as much a turning away from sovereignty, as
an attempt to formulate the complex relation between sovereignty and biopolitics (govern-
mentality) and to understand the complicated, if fractured, fusion between sovereignty and
biopolitics. Zartaloudis writes that in Il Regno e la Gloria Agamben reconsiders Foucault’s ana-
lysis of biopolitics by suggesting that instead of first having an ‚era‛ of supreme power and
then a transformation to nation-State and geopolitical sovereignty or ‚post-sovereignty,‛ what
27
Ibid., 155-156.
28
Sacco, ‚Intervista a Giorgio Agamben.‛
29
Antonio Negri, ‚Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of Earthly Life,‛ Journal for Cultural and
Religious Theory 9 (2008), 96-100.
30
Giorgio Agamben cited in Antonio Negri, ‚Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of Earthly
Life,‛ Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 9 (2008), 99.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
51
there has always been since at least the second century is a bipolar system where sovereignty
and government have always worked in tandem.31
Il Regno e la Gloria ‚proposes to investigate the ways and the reasons for which power
came to assume, in the West, the form of an oikonomia, that of a government of humans. It is
situated therefore in the track of Michel Foucault’s research on governmentality.‛32 But just as
in Homo sacer I, it is also a search for the Entwicklungsfähigkeit in the work of Foucault, or in the
words of Agamben: he ‚seeks to understand the internal reasons for which it *Foucault’s
study+ did not come to completion.‛ This Entwicklungsfähigkeit concerns the following points
especially.
First, Agamben approvingly references Foucault’s Sécurité, territoire, population with re-
gard to the problem between reigning and governing:
I was led to designate or see something relatively new(<): the privilege which government
starts to exercise with respect to the rules, to the point that one day we could say, to limit the
powers of the king, ‚the king reigns but does not govern,‛ this inversion of government in
relation to rule and the fact that government would be, at base, much more than the
sovereignty, much more than rule, much more than the imperium, is the modern political
problem.33
Agamben explores the same topic as Foucault, but just as in Homo Sacer I, the time span
Agamben uses is longer than Foucault’s: ‚The shadow of the theoretical interrogation of the
present projected on the past here reaches, well beyond the chronological limits which
Foucault assigned to his genealogy, the first centuries of christian theology.‛34 Agamben seeks
to use Foucault's method in important respects, but push back the historical time frame, or
shadow, of the inquiry. He notes that Foucault’s ‚lesson of March 8, 1978 is dedicated, among
other things, to an analysis of Aquinas’ De regno, showing that, in medieval thought and espe-
cially in the Scholastics, there is still a substantial continuity between sovereign and govern-
ment.‛35 Agamben tries to show, on the contrary, ‚that the first seed of the division between
Reign and Government is in the trinitarian oikonomia, which introduces into the divinity itself
a fracture between being and praxis.‛36 Foucault’s "methodological choice of leaving aside the
analysis of juridical universals does not permit him to fully articulate" what Agamben calls the
bipolar character of the governmental machine.37
Second, Agamben stresses the important insight gained from Foucault, according to
which the notion ‘economy’ is closely related to governmentality:
31
Thanos Zartaloudis, Giorgio Agamben. Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2010), 164.
32
Giorgio Agamben, Il Regno e La Gloria: per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo (Roma: Neri
Pozza, 2007), 9. This selection roughly translated by Jeffrey Bussolini (parts of the book pertaining to
Foucault), available at (http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/biogeo/2009/10/19/agamben-on-foucault/),
accessed September 25, 2010.
33
Ibid., 126.
34
Ibid., 9-10.
35
Ibid., 127.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., 300.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
52
Foucault situates the origin of governmental technologies in the Christian pastorate<
Another essential trait which the pastorate and the government of humans share is,
according to Foucault, the idea of an ‚economy,‛ that is of a management organized on the
familial model of individuals, things, and riches. If the pastorate presents itself as an
oikonomia psychon, an ‚economy of souls,‛ ‚the introduction of economy into political prac-
tice will be< the essential scope of government.‛ Government is nothing other, in fact, than
‚the art of exercising power in the form of an economy‛ and the ecclesiastical pastorate and
political government are both situated within a substantially economic paradigm.38
But, Agamben remarks, ‚Foucault seems to ignore altogether the theological implications of
the term oikonomia,‛ which he sets out to analyze in detail in Il Regno.39
Third, Agamben criticizes the absence of the term providence—which he considers
extremely important—in the 1977-1978 course of Foucault:
The theories of Kepler, Galileo, Ray, and of the circle of Port-Royal which Foucault cites, do
not, as we have seen, but radicalize this distinction between general providence and special
providence, into which the theologians had transposed in their way the oppositions between
Reign and Government. And the passage from the ecclesiastical pastorate to political
government, which Foucault strives to explain, to tell the truth in a none too convincing
manner, through the emergence of a whole series of counterconducts which resist the pasto-
rate, is all the more comprehensible if it is seen as a secularization of that minute pheno-
menology of first and second, proximate and remote, occasional and efficient causes, general
and particular will, mediated and immediate concurrence, and ordinatio and executio,
through which the theorists of providence tried to render intelligible the government of the
world.40
The influence of the work of Foucault on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben is marked on the
one hand by indebtedness and on the other by Entwicklungsfähigkeit. In the words of Anton
Schütz:
Schmitt’s theologisation of sovereignty has been subjected, 50 years later, to a ‘quarter turn’
by Foucault’s move from issues of domination to issues of government. After a further 30
years, radicalizing Foucault, Agamben’s archaeology of economy adds another ‘quarter
turn’:
authorize them, with a new, unexpected, political content and with a change of epistemic
paradigm.41
Schütz not only notes the well-known interpretive influence of Schmitt on Agamben, he also,
crucially, locates Foucault as a hidden term in this relation. Although Foucault did not
explicitly comment on Schmitt as Agamben has done, he was concerned with many of the
38
Ibid., 126.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 128.
41
Anton Schütz ‚Imperatives without imperator,‛ Law and Critique 20 (2009), 233.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
53
same political currents. In this way Schütz has identified Agamben's as a Foucauldian rea-
ding of Schmitt which strives, nonetheless, to further develop the line of inquiry.
Agamben’s Foucault: An overview Anke Snoek Part 2
Elena:
I’ve made only two short comments in the second part of this article and put in bold areas what I find particularly significant. For the record, the parallels between esoteric knowledge as conceived by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Zen and others, with this philosophy is clear and that is a great pleasure for me for in the long run we are moving on the same final structure. Understanding the points of contact as much as the points that miss-match is equally important for my present work and research.
Dispositives and the study of law
In 2006 a short essay by Agamben was published: Che cos’è un dispositivo? (What is an
apparatus?). The word dispositive is, according to Agamben, a decisive term in Foucault’s stra-
tegy. Agamben explores the genealogy of this term, first within Foucault’s oeuvre but also in
broader context. The essay Che cos’è un dispositivo? gives a first glimpse of Agamben’s turn
from political theology to economic theology, as he states that dispositio is the Latin translation
of the Greek word oikonomia. But the essay not only marks this transition in Agamben’s work,
but also a transition between power and resistance.
Agamben distinguishes three dimensions of Foucault’s definition of the dispositive:
First, the dispositive is a general and heterogeneous set. It includes virtually everything,
linguistic and non-linguistic, discourses and institutions, architecture, laws, police measures,
scientific statements, philosophical and moral propositions, and so on. The dispositive is the
network or the web established between those elements. Second it always has a strategic
function, it’s always inscribed in a power game, so it has a strong relationship to power.
Third it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge, the dis-
positive is in a margin.42
Agamben’s definition of dispositive concerns ‚Literally anything that has in some way the
capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, beha-
viors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.‛43
Agamben not only describes the dehumanizing work of the dispositive, but also what
strategy we can develop against it:
At the root of each apparatus (dispositive) lies an all-too-human desire for happiness … this
means that the strategy that we must adopt in our hand-to-hand combat with apparatuses
(dispositives) cannot be a simple one.44
It’s not about the destruction of the dispositives, nor using them in the right way; the strategy
we must maintain consists of rendering the dispositives inoperative by liberating that which
has been separated by them, i.e. liberating them by returning them to the common use.45
An example of liberation from the violence and power of the law is discussed in
Agamben’s review of Kafka’s story ‚The new attorney.‛ This new attorney does not practice
the law, but only studies it. This study renders the law inoperative.
42
Giorgio Agamben ‚What is an Apparatus,‛ in What is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009), 3.
43
Ibid., 14.
44
Ibid., 17.
45
Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2006/2007), 34.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
54
There is, therefore, still a possible figure of law after its nexus with violence and power has
been deposed, but it is a law that no longer has force or application, like the one in which the
‚new attorney,‛ leafing through ‚our old books,‛ buries himself in study, or like the one
that Foucault may have had in mind when he spoke of a ‚new law‛ that has been freed from
all discipline and all relation to sovereignty.46
Parallel with his exploration of the concept of biopower, Agamben explores possibilities for
‚resistance,‛—for ways of being free. This undercurrent mostly goes unnoticed. Foucault’s
shift from politics to a theory of art of life has puzzled many of his scholars, and the same goes
for Agamben’s considerations on freedom. Foucault’s and Agamben’s analyses of the power
which we are subjected to are so powerful that they mostly overshadow their efforts to work
on theories of freedom (which differ from the common view on resistance). Or, in the words
of David Butin while retrieving Foucault’s notion of resistance within education research, ‚If
this is resistance, I would hate to see domination.‛47 Nonetheless, the theory of freedom that
Foucault develops, with Agamben following in his footsteps, is fascinating.
3. Foucault’s influence on Agamben’s notion of freedom and art of life
In Homo Sacer I, Agamben remarks that the point at which Foucault’s two faces of power
(political techniques and the technologies of the self) converge remains strangely unclear in his
work, as these two lines converge but never cross.48 Agamben searches for the nexus in which
the two powers intertwine, and he finds it in the production of ‛bare life‛: life that is subjected
to power through the exclusion of its essential element. But this point of intersection is also
the place where Agamben develops his notion of resistance and ethics. Bare life is closely re-
lated to the ‚art of life,‛ or what Agamben calls a form-of-life. Foucault’s technologies of the
self are in themselves not a solution or response to political techniques. While the modern
state functions as a de-subjectivation machine, there is always a re-subjectivation of the de-
stroyed subject:
This is what Foucault showed: the risk is that one re-identifies oneself, that one invests this
situation with a new identity, that one produces a new subject< but one subjected to the
State; the risk is that one from then on carries out again, despite oneself, this infinite process
of subjectivation and subjection that precisely defines biopower.49
Agamben’s notion of freedom thus is closely related to Foucault’s idea of destruction of the
subject.
The references to Foucault concerning freedom, resistance, and art of life are more
scattered in Agamben’s work, but mostly they can be found in the books Quel che resta di
Auschwitz (1998), L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (2002), and the essay Absolute Immanence (1996).
46
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (California: California University Press, 2005), 63.
47
David Butin, ‚If This Is Resistance I Would Hate to See Domination: Retrieving Foucault’s Notion of
Resistance Within Educational Research,‛ Educational Studies 32 (2001), 157.
48
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 76.
49
Stany Grelet & Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, ‚Une biopolitique mineure. Entretien avec Giorgio Agamben,‛
Vacarme 10 (2000), 116.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
55
Art of life50
Just as Foucault had, Agamben rejects the idea of an a-priori subject, there is no given
‚humanity of the human.‛ What politics and human sciences try to do is to decide about the
humanity of living man, to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the inhuman
and the human.51 In exactly the same movement wherein biopower tries to create a subject, a
naked life, Agamben sees a movement in which the subject turns this subjectivation inope-
rative in a pure immanence, in a being-thus, in a form-of-life wherein it is impossible to dis-
tinguish between an essence and an existence, a life that is showed but never represented or
possessed. Ethics must be based on the simple ‚being-thus‛ of whatever beings.
For Agamben the notion of ‚resistance‛ against power (or an art of life) is tightly
connected to Foucault’s notion of an author, or the absence of an author:
The idea that one should make his life a work of art is attributed mostly today to Foucault
and to his idea of the care of the self. Pierre Hadot, the great historian of ancient
philosophy, reproached Foucault that the care of the self of the ancient philosophers did not
mean the construction of life as a work of art, but on the contrary a sort of dispossession of
the self. What Hadot could not understand is that for Foucault, the two things coincide.
You must remember Foucault’s criticism of the notion of author, his radical dismissal of
authorship. In this sense, a philosophical life, a good and beautiful life, is something else:
when your life becomes a work of art, you are not the cause of it. I mean that at this point
you feel your own life and yourself as something ‚thought,‛ but the subject, the author, is
no longer there. The construction of life coincides with what Foucault referred to as ‚se
deprendre de soi.‛ And this is also Nietzsche’s idea of a work of art without the artist.52
In another interview Agamben further elaborates on this aporia in Foucault’s last works:
There is, on the one hand, all the work on the ‘care of self’< But at the same time he often
states the apparently opposite theme: the self must be let go. He says so on many occasions:
'life is over if one questions oneself about one’s identity; the art of living is to destroy
identity, to destroy psychology.'53
Agamben argues for a new structure of subjectivity—that is, being a subject only within the
framework of a strategy or tactic. Central to this idea is to make sure not to relapse into a
process of resubjectivation that would at the same time be a subjection. Agamben identifies
this as a practice, not a principle.
50
It will be interesting to compare Agamben’s notion of art of life by Foucault with that of Joep Dohmen,
who focuses on Foucault’s techniques of the self in relation to his art of life instead of letting go of the self.
See also: Joep Dohmen, ‚Philosophers on the ‘Art-of-Living’,‛ Journal of Happiness Studies 4 (2003).
51
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 156.
52
Ulrich Raulff, ‚Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The Sate of
Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private life,‛ German Law Journal 5 (May 2004 – Special
Edition), 613.
53
Grelet & Potte-Bonneville, ‚Une biopolitique mineure,‛ 117.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
56
(Non)authorship and the life of the infamous
The Foucauldian concept of non-authorship is central to Agamben’s idea of freedom and
resistance. Agamben’s text ‚The author as gesture‛54 profoundly illustrates the influence of
Foucault. The title’s two notions are important in this analysis: Agamben’s notion of gesture
and Foucault’s notion of an author. What is a gesture? A gesture is a kind of movement that
stands beside the traditional relationship of means to an end, it is not a relation in which an
actor is in command of a tool to achieve a goal. The body, the physical, the human vulne-
rability, has a central role in the gesture.55 A gesture puts your life into play, irrevocably and
without reserve—even at the risk that its happiness or its disgrace will be decided once and
for all.56 A political example of a gesture is the student at Tiananmen Square who stood before
the tank. The student made no demands, but gestured. This gesture had no specific goal—a
human cannot stop a tank—but opened a mediality. This is an entirely different type of resis-
tance than, for example, Che Guevara, which is very focused on a person who makes certain
demands.
Agamben explicitly connects this notion of gesture with Foucault’s notion of an
author—or more accurately, the indifference toward the author—to emphasize the point that a
gesture is not only a different relationship between means and end, but also between actor and
act: the agent remains deliberately obscure in the texts of Foucault.57 Let us first look at Agam-
ben’s interpretation of Foucault. In 1969 Foucault presented the lecture What is an Author, in
which he uses a quote from Samuel Beckett: ‚what matter who’s speaking, someone said what
matter who’s speaking,‛ to illustrate how an author as individual is transformed in an author
as functional. Here on the one hand, the author is deprived from all relevant identity: ‚what
matter who’s speaking.‛ On the other hand, the same gesture affirms his irreducible necessity:
‚someone said.‛ ‚The author is not an indefinite source of significations that fills the work;
the author does not precede his work. He is a certain functional principle.‛58 This does not
mean that the author, beside his function, does not exist—Foucault explicitly states that there
is an author-subject—but it can only remain unsatisfied and unsaid in the work. The trace of
the author is only found in the singularity of his absence.
Agamben connects this notion of the author to another text by Foucault: La vie des
homme infames59 (which he also discusses in Remnants of Auschwitz60). This text is an intro-
duction that Foucault wrote for a collection of early-18th-century internment records. These
54
Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2005/2007), 61-73.
55
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History. The destruction of experience (London/New York: Verso, 1993).
Giorgio Agamben, Means without end (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996/2000). René
ten Bos, ‚On the Possibility of Formless Life: Agamben’s Politics of the Gesture,‛ Ephemera: theory & politics
in organization, 5 (2005), 26-44.
56
Agamben, Profanations, 69.
57
Ibid., 67
58
Michel Foucault, ‚What Is an Author?,‛ in James D. Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology,
(New York: New Press, 1998), 207.
59
Michel Foucault, ‚Lives of Infamous Men,‛ in James D. Faubion (ed.): Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology,
(New York: New Press, 2000).
60
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 141-143.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
57
‚infamous lives‛ appear only through quotes in the discourse of power, which fixes them as
responsible agents and authors of villainous acts. But to whom do these lives belong? Fou-
cault concludes that the real lives were ‚played out (jouées).‛ But, according to Agamben, who
played them out remains unclear. In French the word ‘jouée’ also means ‘put at risk’ in terms
of ‘playing.’ Agamben states:
The infamous life does not seem to belong completely to the infamous men, or the people in
charge of their internment. The infamous life is only played; it is never possessed, never
represented, never said—and that is why it is the possible but empty site of an ethics, of a
form a life.61
Agamben concludes:
The subject – like the author, like the life of the infamous man – is not something that can be
directly attained as a substantial reality present in some place; on the contrary, it is what
results from the encounter and from the hand-to-hand confrontation with the apparatuses in
which it has been put – and has put itself – into play< And just as the author must remain
unexpressed in the work while still attesting, in precisely this way, to his own irreducible
presence, so must subjectivity show itself and increase its resistance at the point where its
apparatuses capture it and put it into play.62
Elena:
It’s wonderful to find the same ideas of the System said with different words. The above understanding is no different to the idea of being present but unidentified. _________
Plebs
Close to the concept of the lives of infamous men, is Foucault’s notion of plebs as a form of
resistance. In Il tempo che resta (2000) Agamben refers to an interview between Jacques Ran-
cière and Michel Foucault from 1977, where Foucault spoke of the pleb as a non-demarcatable
element absolutely irreducible to power relationships, not simply external to them but mar-
king their limit in some manner:
The pleb does not exist in all probability, but there is something of the pleb, nevertheless (il y
a de la plèbe). Something of the pleb is in bodies, in spirits, in individuals, in the proletariat,
but, with each dimension, form, energy, and irreducibility, it differs in each and every in-
stance. This part of pleb does not represent some exteriority with regard to power rela-
tionships as much as it represents their limit, their ruin, their consequence.63
Just as in the study of the law and in the dispositive, a kind of resistance is developed that
marks another use and a rendering inoperative: the pleb also marks an end. But just as in non-
authorship and bare life, the pleb cannot be distinguished: it isn’t a property, an essence or an
existence.
61
See also: Charles Barbour & Greg Bowden, ‚The Subject as Author: Agamben’s Ethics,‛ presentation at the
Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association. University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, June
2008.
62
Agamben, Profanations, 72, emphasis AS.
63
Foucault cited in Agamben, The time that remains, 57/58.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
58
Sex and life as pure immanence
In L’aperto (2002, The Open) at the beginning of a chapter concerning the relationship between
man and nature and between creature and redeemed humanity in the work of Benjamin,
Agamben starts by citing Foucault: ‚All the enigmas of the world seem slight to us compared
to the tiny secret of sex.‛64 Yet in Homo Sacer, Agamben warns against Foucault’s plea at the
end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality for a ‚different economy of bodies and
pleasures‛ as a possible horizon for a different politics. Agamben is cautious in regard to this
statement because like
the concepts of sex and sexuality, the concept of the ‘body’ too is always already caught in a
deployment of power. The ‘body’ is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and
nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which
to oppose the demands of sovereign power.65
But Agamben’s own solution concerning the powers which we are subjected to also has an
important role for bare life as a possible impossibility of being grasped by these powers. And
here Agamben sees an analogy with Foucault's phrase about sex:
What serves – not solves – the secret bond that ties man to life, however, is an element
which seems to belong totally to nature but instead everywhere surpasses it: sexual ful-
filment. In the paradoxical image of a life that, in the extreme vicissitudes of sensual
pleasure, frees itself of its mystery in order to, so to speak, recognize a nonnature, Benjamin
has set down something like the hieroglyph of a new in-humanity.66
Here the importance of a non-subject or a non-author in relation to freedom and resistance is
emphasized.
Not only the body, but also the definition of (human) life plays an important role in
relation to power—reckoning the limits and confines of life is intricately tied to the definition
and exercise of power:
As Foucault has shown, when the modern State, starting in the seventeenth century, began
to include the care of the population’s life as one of its essential tasks, thus transforming its
politics into biopolitics, it was primarily by means of a progressive generalization and
redefinition of the concept of vegetative life (now coinciding with the biological heritage of
the nation) that the State would carry out its new vocation.67
Any thought that considers life shares its object with power and must incessantly confront
power's strategies. As Foucault states in La volonté de savoir, the forces that resist rely for sup-
port on the very object of investment, that is, on life and man as a living being. A new notion
of life is necessary behind the division between organic life and animal life, biological life and
contemplative life, or bare life and the life of the mind. In the essay ‚Absolute Immanence‛
64
Giorgio Agamben, The Open. Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002/2004), 81.
65
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 120.
66
Agamben, The Open, 83.
67
Ibid., 15.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
59
(1996) (chronologically closely related to Homo Sacer I), Agamben finds in the work of Foucault
‚a different way of approaching the notion of life‛ which can be a counterpart for biopower, a
point of departure for a new philosophy. Agamben discusses one of the last texts of Foucault:
‚Life: Experience and Science.‛ What interests him is a curious inversion of what had been
Foucault’s earlier understanding of the idea of life. While in The Birth of the Clinic Foucault
defined life (under the inspiration of Bichat) as ‚the set of functions that resist death,‛ in ‚Life:
Experience and Science‛ Foucault considered life instead as the proper domain of error:
At the limit, life< is what is capable of error< With man, life reaches a living being who is
never altogether in his place, a living being who is fated "to err" and "to be mistaken.68
Agamben claims that what is at issue here is surely more than pessimism: it is a new expe-
rience that necessitates a general reformulation of the relations between truth and the subject.
Tearing the subject from the terrain of the cogito and consciousness, this experience is
rooted in life: ‚Does not the entire theory of the subject have to be reformulated once know-
ledge, instead of opening onto the truth of the world, is rooted in the ‚errors of life?‛‛69
Agamben argues for a genealogical inquiry into the term ‘life’, which will demonstrate that
‘life’ is not a medical and scientific notion but a philosophical, political and theological
concept, and that many of the categories of our philosophical tradition must therefore be
rethought accordingly.
In Agamben’s art of life, the work of art has no author. Life is a contemplation without
knowledge, which will have a precise correlate in thought that has freed itself of all cognition
and intentionality.
Elena: What would be a better definition of presence?70
Tiqqun
In 2009 Agamben spoke at the (re)publication of some texts by a Paris collective named Tiq-
qun. Tiqqun was founded in 1999 as a space for experimentation with the aim of recreating
the conditions for another community. The term ‘Tiqqun’ is derived from the Lurianic Kab-
balah wherein it refers to the redemption of the world. According to Agamben, Tiqqun tries
to radicalize and blur together the two strategies of Foucault which never seemed to find a
point of junction in his work: the analysis of techniques of governance and the processes of
subjectivation. With Tiqqun there is no longer a relationship between mechanisms of power
and the subject. Tiqqun fully understood Foucault’s notion of non-authorship and non-sub-
ject. Not only is nothing in Tiqqun signed, all articles are more or less written collectively, but
Tiqqun also proposes a radical posture that is not concerned with the finding of a subject. The
gesture is not about looking for a subject that would take on the role of savior or revolutionary
subject; it begins with this flattening, symptomatic of the society in which we live, and tries to
search for unsuspected potentialities in it. In Tiqqun the anthropological critique that is pre-
68
Michel Foucault, cited in Giorgio Agamben, ‚Absolute immanence,‛ Potentialities. Collected essays in
Philosophy, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 220.
69
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (Vol. 4) (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Cited in Agamben, ‚Absolute immanence,‛
220-221.
70
Agamben, ‚Absolute immanence,‛ 239.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
60
sent in the work of Foucault reemerges in a radical form: thinking political action without the
anthropological reference to a subject.71
4. Foucault’s influence on Agamben’s philosophy of language
One of the first references to the work of Foucault that Agamben makes concerns language.
But with regard to Agamben’s philosophy of language, Foucault stays remarkably absent, ex-
cept in Infanzia e storia (1979) and Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998). Analogous with the idea of
a form of life in which biological life and contemplative life cannot be distinguished, Agamben
develops an idea of language in which ‚language itself, and the limits of language become
apparent not in the relation of language to a referent outside of it, but in the experience of
language as pure self reference.‛72 Agamben calls this an experimentum linguae, which he sees
closely related to a Foucauldian concept:
To carry out the experimentum linguae, however, is to venture into a perfectly empty
dimension (the leerer Raum of the Kantian concept-limit) in which one can encounter only
the pure exteriority of language, that ‚étalement du langage dans son être brut‛ of which
Foucault speaks in one of his most philosophically dense writings.73
The text Agamben refers to is ‚la Pensée du dehors.‛
In Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998) Agamben connects Benveniste’s notion of enun-
ciation to Foucault’s foundation of a theory of statements (énoncés) in The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969). Agamben also elaborates further on the concept of enunciation in The Sig-
nature of all Things (see the next section). Il sacramento del linguaggio is also heavily concerned
with the enunciation, with Benveniste, and with theory of language in relation to political and
existential questions.74 Benveniste’s enunciation concerns not what is said in discourse but the
pure fact that it is said—the event of language as such—which is by definition ephemeral.
Benveniste argues for a ‚metasemantics built on a semantics of enunciation.‛75 The incom-
parable novelty of The Archaeology of Knowledge consists, according to Agamben, in having
explicitly taken as its object neither sentences nor propositions but precisely ‚statements,‛ that
is, not the text of discourse but its taking place.
Like absolute immanence, or the plebs, enunciation is not a thing determined by real,
definite properties; it is rather pure existence, the fact that a certain being—language—takes
place. In the words of Foucault: ‚the statement is not therefore a structure
existence.‛ Foucault’s archeology perfectly realizes Benveniste’s program for a ‛meta-
semantics built on a semantics of enunciation.‛ But the novelty of Foucault’s method, accor-
71
For Agamben’s lecture see: http://www.contretemps.eu. For an (unauthorized) transcription of the text and the
following discussion, see http://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/tiqqun-apocrypha-
repost/. To read more about Tiqqun: http://tiqqunista.jottit.com/.
72
Agamben, Infancy and History, 11.
73
Ibid., 6.
74
This book is heavily concerned with veridiction (and performative speech), which is a key concept for
Foucault, although Foucault is only cited once in relation to man as political animal (and concerning the
relation between politics and language).
75
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 138.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
61
ding to Agamben, consists in its refusal to grasp the taking place of language through an ‚I.‛
The ethical implications of this theory of statements—how a subject can give an account of his
own ruin—is illustrated by Foucault in the text The Lives of Infamous Men.
After connecting Benveniste’s theory of enunciation to Foucault’s theory of statements,
Agamben connects Foucault’s notion of the ‘archive’ to the positive dimension that corre-
sponds to the plane of enunciation. The archive is a set of rules that define the events of
discourse, the archive is situated between langue (as the system of construction of possible
sentences—that is, of possibilities of speaking) and the corpus (that unites the set of what has
been said, the things actually uttered or written). The archive is the fragment of memory that
is always forgotten in the act of saying ‚I.‛ It is the relation between the unsaid and the said.76
Agamben transfers the problem that Foucault had sought to eliminate, namely, "how can a sub-
ject’s freedom be inserted into the rules of a language?" to a matter of situating the subject in the
disjunction between a possibility and an impossibility of speech: ‚how can something like a state-
ment exist in the site of langue?” Therefore Agamben develops the notion of the testimony: the
relation between a potentiality of speech and its existence. The relation between language and
its existence—between langue and the archive—demands subjectivity as that which, in its very
possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech.77 This very dense analysis
contains in a nutshell Agamben’s ideas of freedom: non-authorship, potentiality, language,
and existence.
5. Foucault’s influence on Agamben’s methodology
The way Agamben uses historical phenomena like the Nazi concentration camps has puzzled
many readers. Although he has stated that he uses historical examples as paradigms and not
in a historiographical way, this did not resolve a lot of questions in terms of what he meant by
‚a historiographical way.‛ In The Signature of All Things (2008/2009) Agamben elaborates on
his method, on which he says Foucault is the most decisive influence. Agamben extensively
underlines his indebtedness to Foucault in the preface. But what belongs to the author of a
work and what is attributable to the interpreter becomes, in the light of the Entwicklungs-
fähigkeit, as essential as it is difficult to grasp: ‚I have therefore preferred to take the risk of
attributing to the texts of others what began its elaboration with them, rather than run the
reverse risk of appropriating thoughts of research paths that do not belong to me.‛78
The book consists of three essays: on archeology and genealogy, on paradigms, and on
a theory of signatures. All three of these show the indication of deep influence from Foucault.
Via the Entwicklungsfähigkeit Agamben sees himself as not necessarily verbatim repeating the
conceptual moves of Foucault, but following a line of inquiry and research produced through
his reading of the possibilities for development and further thought in Foucault's texts.
76
Ibid, 144.
77
Ibid, 146.
78
Agamben, The Signature of All Things, 8.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
62
Philosophical archaeology
Central in Agamben’s method is, as he emphasized in an interview, archaeology: ‚I believe
that history—or better what Foucault called the archaeology of one’s own culture – is the only
way to reach the present.‛79 Agamben uses the terms genealogy and archaeology inter-
changeably, as they also remain unclearly distinct in Foucault’s body of work.80 Both terms
can be explicitly found in the titles of Agamben’s last publications of the Homo Sacer cycle,
Archeology of the oath and The Reign and the Glory: A theological genealogy of economy and
government.
In the last essay of The Signature of all things, ‚Philosophical Archaeology,‛81 Agamben
illuminates three points of the concept he derives from Foucault. First the idea of an essential
dishomogeneity between the arché and a factitious origin, which Foucault develops in his
essay of 1971, ‚Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.‛ Foucault distinguishes two terms used by
Nietzsche: Ursprung, which he reserves for origin, and Herkunft, which he translates as ‚point
of emergence.‛ Genealogy is not about Ursprung but about Herkunft: what can be found at the
historical beginning of things is never the preserved identity of their origin. Agamben makes
a first definition of archaeology:
We could provisionally call ‚archaeology‛ the practice which, within any historical
investigation, has to do, not with the origin, but with the question of the point from which
the phenomenon takes its source, and must therefore confront itself anew with the sources
and with the tradition.82
The second point is the historical a priori, for Agamben philosophical archaeology is about
grasping the historical a priori, as described by Kant and Mauss. As Murray writes, thought is
never empirical and cannot have origins except those bequeathed to it. So philosophy cannot
reach back into the past and pinpoint an arché, a first principle from which the world develops;
instead it can only grasp the history of thought by positing a structure of thought, conditions
of possibility, from which it will explore the very nature of that thought.83
Agamben recovers this idea of historical a priori in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses in
which archaeology presents itself as the research of a dimension both paradigmatic (see next
paragraph) and transcendental, in which learning and knowledge find their condition of
possibility. The a priori, which conditions the possibility of knowledge, is its history itself, sei-
zed at a particular level. This level is the level of its simple existence at a given moment in
time and in a certain way—that of its point of emergence:
The a priori inscribes itself in a determined historical constellation. It makes true, there, the
paradox of an a priori condition inscribed in a history which cannot be constituted other than
79
Rieger, ‚Der Papst ist ein weltlicher Priester. Interview with Giorgio Agamben.‛
80
Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), 58. For an analysis of Foucault and
Agamben’s use of the terms archaeology and genealogy, see also: Sophie Fuggle, ‚Excavating Government:
Giorgio Agamben’s Archaeological Dig,‛ Foucault Studies 7 (2009), 88-89.
81
The article on philosophical archeology is also published in Law and Critique 20 (2009), 211-231.
82
Agamben, ‚Philosophical Archaeology,‛ 217.
83
Murray, Giorgio Agamben, 27-28.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
63
a posteriori in respect to itself, a condition in which inquiry—in the case of Foucault, archae-
ology—must discover its object.84
Foucault describes a special kind of past which does not chronologically precede the present
as an origin, and which is not simply exterior to it. The archeologist, who chases an a priori, re-
treats back, so to speak, towards the present. In ‚What Is the Contemporary?‛ Agamben also
refers to this point, paraphrasing Foucault, who said that: ‚his historical investigations of the
past are only the shadow cast by his theoretical interrogation of the present.‛85
The third point Agamben derives from Foucault for his concept of archaeology consists
of the relationship between the past and the future. Important here is the analogy between
archaeology and psychoanalysis. In both archaeology and psychoanalysis it is a matter of
accessing a past which has not been lived but which has, on the contrary, remained present in
some way. The only way to access this past, is by going back to the point in which it has been
covered and neutralized: the point of emergence. In his preface to Binswanger’s Dream and
Existence Foucault describes the dream and imagination as strategies and gestures of archae-
ology:
The essential point of the dream is not so much what it resuscitates from the past, but what
it announces of the future. It foresees and announces the moment in which the patient will
reveal finally to her analyst that secret that she does not yet know and that is nevertheless
the heaviest load of her present It is the
omen of history, even before being the obligatory repetition of the traumatic past.86
The point of emergence, the arché of archaeology, is that which will happen, that which will
become accessible and present only when the archeological inquest will have fulfilled its ope-
ration. It has, therefore, the form of a futural past that is of a future perfect. It is that past
which will have been, once the gesture of the archaeologist has cleared the field. Only in the
form of this ‚will have been‛ can historical knowledge become effectively possible.
In the other two essays of the book Signature of All Things Agamben describes two other
strategies of archaeology which he derives (partly) from Foucault: the paradigm and the
signature.
The paradigm as an archaeological gesture
In the first essay, ‚What is a paradigm?‛, which is based on a lecture given at the European
Graduate School in 2002, Agamben explores the notion of the paradigm. He claims that para-
digms define the most characteristic gesture of Foucault’s method.87 Foucault frequently used
the term (and synonyms for it), although he never defined it precisely. In a lecture in May
1978 at the Société Française de Philosophie, Foucault defines a paradigm as ‚all procedures
84
Agamben, ‚Philosophical Archaeology,‛ 220.
85
Giorgio Agamben ‚What is the Contemporary,‛ in What is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 53.
86
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, volume I (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 127.
87
Giorgio Agamben ‚What is a Paradigm?,‛ in The Signature of all things. On method (New York: Zone Books,
2009), 17.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
64
and all effects of knowledge which are acceptable at a given point in time and in a specific
domain.‛ At first glance Foucault’s notion of the paradigm resembles that of Thomas Kuhn in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but Foucault almost never refers to him. This has a
practical reason: Foucault declares that he had read Kuhn’s book only after he had completed
The Order of Things. And maybe also a personal reason: Kuhn never cites Georges Canguilhem
as an historian of science who molded and inspired his thought. By not referring to Kuhn,
Foucault repays him for this discourtesy and cites only Canguilhem, who was a friend of his.
But the most important reason why Foucault does not cite Kuhn is that he wants to distinguish
his concept from that of Kuhn.
According to Agamben the analogy between the two concepts is only superficial: both
notions correspond to different problems, strategies and inquiries.
What is decisive for Foucault is the movement of the paradigm from epistemology to
politics. Unlike Kuhn’s paradigm, Foucault’s notion does not define what is knowable in a
given period, but what is implicit in the fact that a given discourse or epistemological figure
exists at all:
It is not so much a matter of knowing what external power imposes itself on science as or
what effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were,
their internal regime of power, and how and why at a certain moment that regime
undergoes a global modification.88
Agamben gives Foucault’s description of the Panopticon as an example: a model for a prison
as an annular building in the center of which a tower is built from which every cell can be
observed. The Panopticon not only performs a decisive strategic function for the under-
standing of the disciplinary modality of power, but it becomes an epistemological figure that,
in defining the disciplinary universe of modernity, also marks the threshold over which it
passes into the societies of control.89
Apart from Foucault, Agamben also investigates Aristotle's and Plato’s definitions of
the paradigm, as well as Victor Goldschmidt’s analysis of Plato’s use of paradigms (Gold-
schmidt was an author Foucault knew and admired). Two important insights for Agamben’s
definition of the paradigm are derived from Foucault: first, the movement of the paradigm
from epistemology to politics, and second, the connection between the paradigm and archae-
ology. In the paradigm, there is no origin or arche; every phenomenon is the origin, every
image archaic. Archaeology is always a paradigmatology. The paradigm determines the pos-
sibility of producing in the midst of the chronological archive the cleavages that alone make it
legible.90
88
Foucault in an interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, 1976. Michel Foucault, ‚Truth
and Power,‛ in James D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 (New York: New Press,
2000), 112-113.
89
Agamben ‚What is a Paradigm?,‛ 17.
90
Ibid., 32.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
65
Signatures as an archaeological gesture
In the second section of Signatura rerum, ‚Theory of the signature,‛ Agamben describes
archaeology as the science of signatures. Central is Paracelsus’s idea of signatures and Fou-
cault’s interpretation of it. The original core of the Paracelsian episteme is the idea that all
things bear a sign that manifests and reveals their invisible qualities. Paracelsus names three
signators: man, the Archeus (the vital principle or force which presides over the growth and
continuation of living beings) and the stars. Examples of signatures of the stars are the signs
that stars have imprinted on men’s faces and limbs or the lines of their hands which physiog-
nomy and chiromancy try to decipher. But, as Paracelsus writes, we are not only subjected to
the stars, we can also dominate the stars. So the relation expressed by the signature is not a
causal relation, but has a retroactive effect on the signator which needs to be understood.
Examples of signatures of the Archeus are the resemblances between plants and human body
parts which reveal their therapeutic power. Pomegranate seeds, having the shape of teeth, al-
leviate their pain. Here the relation is not between a signifier and a signified, but entails the
following components: the figure in the plant, the part of the human body, the therapeutic
virtue, the disease, and the signator. Signatures, which should appear as signifiers always al-
ready slide into the position of the signified, so that signum and signatum exchange roles and
seem to enter into a zone of undecideability.
Agamben claims that the examples Paracelsus provides of signatures whose signator is
the human being remained a sort of dead end in the Paracelsian episteme, before being
provisionally resurrected in the thought of Foucault and Melandri.91 Examples of the signa-
ture provided by man are the insignia that soldiers on the battlefield wear, signs that indicate
the value of coins, and signatures of an artist to mark his own work. Letters of the alphabet
are signatures. This refers, according to Agamben, to a use of language that is constituted not
by sentences but by paradigms, similar to what Foucault must have had in mind when, to
define his enunciative statements, he wrote that A,Z,E,R,T is, in a typing handbook, the
statement of the alphabetical order adopted by French keyboards.92
What is essential of signatures whose signator is man is that they add no real properties
to the object at all, but decisively change our relation to the object as well as its function in
society. The signature on a painting does not change in any way the materiality of Titian’s
painting, but inscribes it in the complex network of relations of ‘authority’, the signature on
coins transforms a piece of metal into a coin, producing it as money. In this way, the signature
resembles the paradigm.
Foucault elaborates on Paracelsus’s idea of signatures in two places in his work: di-
rectly in The Order of Things and more indirectly in The Archeology of Knowledge. In The Order of
things Foucault cites Paracelsus’s treatise, and remarks that signatures introduce into the sy-
stem of resemblances a curious, incessant doubling:93
91
Giorgio Agamben ‚Theory of Signatures,‛ in The Signature of all things. On method (New York: Zone Books,
2009), 38.
92
Ibid., 40.
93
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 26.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
66
Every resemblance receives a signature; but this signature is no more than an intermediate
form of the same resemblance. As a result, the totality of these marks, sliding over the great
circle of similitudes, forms a second circle which would be an exact duplication of the first.
obey a different law of distribution; the pattern from which they are cut is the same.94
Foucault distinguishes between semiology (the set of knowledges that allow us to recognize
what is a sign and what is not) and hermeneutics (the set of knowledges that allow us to
discover the meaning of signs, to make the signs speak). Between the two there remains a gap
where knowledge is produced. Signatures find their own locus in the gap and disconnection
between semiology and hermeneutics. Signs do not speak unless signatures make them speak.
This means that the theory of linguistic signification must be completed with a theory of
signatures.
Foucault does this in The Archaeology of Knowledge. According to Agamben, the
incomparable novelty of this book is to explicitly take as its object what Foucault calls ‚state-
ments.‛95 Statements are not merely reducible to the semantic sphere, nor to the semiotic
sphere, but enable groups of signs to exist, and enable rules or forms to become manifest.
Agamben’s hypothesis is that the statement in The Archaeology of Knowledge takes the place that
belonged to signatures in The Order of Things.
The theory of signatures (or of statements) rectifies the abstract and fallacious idea that there
are, as it were, pure and unmarked signs, that the signans neutrally signifies the signatum,
univocally and once and for all. Instead, the sign signifies because it carries a signature that
necessarily predetermines its interpretation and distributes its use and efficacy according to
rules, practices, and precepts that it is our task to recognize. In this sense, archaeology is the
science of signatures.96
Foucault’s archeology starts with the signature and its excess over signification. But, as there
is never a pure sign without signature, it is never possible to separate and move the signature
to an originary position. The archive of signatures in The Archaeology of Knowledge defines the
whole set of rules that determine the conditions of the existence and operation of signs, how
they make sense and are juxtaposed to one another, and how they succeed one another in
space and time. Foucauldian archaeology does not seek origin, but seeks in every event the
signature that characterizes and specifies it, and in every signature the event and the sign that
carry and condition it.
Criticism on Agamben’s Foucauldian method
Despite a number of points of relation, not all readers believe that Agamben's interpretations
of Foucault are accurate or astute. Some of Agamben’s critics show more skepticism about his
Foucauldian method. Not everyone is convinced that his readings of Foucault are accurate, or
that he fairly makes use of the same methodological approaches as Foucault. Alison Ross
94
Ibid., 28-29.
95
Agamben ‚Theory of Signatures,‛ 62; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.
96
Agamben ‚Theory of Signatures,‛ 64.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
67
finds that Agamben’s ‚approach reverses Foucault’s ascending methodology and leaves us to
ask what the reasoning from extreme instances tells us about the hold of Agamben’s analysis
of the phenomena it wishes to decode.‛97 Mills writes that ‚Foucault’s methodological ap-
proach to the concept of biopower is genealogical and historical, while Agamben strives for an
ontologization of the political.‛98 Agamben’s heritage is not so much the Nietzschean em-
phasis on relations of force that informs Foucault’s genealogical approach but the ontological
concerns of Aristotle and Heidegger.99 According to some, while Foucault’s genealogy rejects
the search for origins and instead traces the emergence of particular configurations of relations
of force, Agamben seeks to illuminate the ‚originary‛ relations (though Agamben may well
dispute this claim, especially given his analysis of the arche).100 Neal claims that ‚Agamben
reads Foucault structurally rather than genealogically‛—namely that he draws on concepts
and terms in Foucault, but that he largely leaves aside the meticulousness of the genealogical
accounts.101 For Neal, as for the critics above, this would constitute an important point of
divergence between the two thinkers.
Agamben looks for the Entwicklungsfähigkeit in the work of the authors he likes. He
focuses especially on those points in their thought which seem amenable to, indeed to call out
for, further development and elaboration. Perhaps this accounts for the peculiar tension in
which his interpretations, of Foucault above all, are held to be both close appropriations and
disloyal breaks. His approach is a guarantee for unorthodox interpretations and ‚quarter
turns in basic concepts.‛ His interpretations of Foucault’s work are rich and dense and almost
always develop in an unexpected way. Given Agamben’s insistence of Foucault's importance
to his thought and the myriad and increasing citations of Foucault's writings in Agamben’s
work, it will remain important to philosophically account for the influence between them. I
have tried here to give a general yet philosophically rigorous overview of the main points of
conceptual crossover between them.
Anke Snoek102
Department of Philosophy
Macquarie University
Sydney
Australia
97
Alison Ross, ‚Introduction,‛ South Atlantic Quaterly 107 – Special Issue: ‚The Agamben Effect‛ (2008), 6.
Cited in Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 422.
98
Mills, ‚Biopolitics, Liberal Eugenics, and Nihilism,‛ 180.
99
Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben, 60.
100
Ibid., 60.
101
Andrew W. Neal, ‚Foucault in Guant{namo: Towards an Archaeology of the Exception,‛ Security Dialogue
37 (2006), 39. Cited in Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 422.
102
The author wants to thank Gijsbert van der Heijden for the numerous discussions on Agamben.
Elena: This set up is so clear and are we just going to allow for it? One of the problems when a man like this is silenced is that a whole life impulse is silenced within us. Obama began a democratic impulse that Assange carried out and the people of the world extroverted but Obama turned against it and himself while others are moving ahead with it. He might still change his own course if there is still a hint of all that integrity that he wished to portrayed.
Julian Assange attacks ‘rubber-stamp’ warrant as he loses extradition battle
WikiLeaks founder can be sent to Sweden, Belmarsh magistrates court rules
Follow reactions to the ruling on our live blog
Esther Addley and Alexandra Topping
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 February 2011 15.53 GMT
Article history
Julian Assange speaks to the media outside Belmarsh magistrates court after a judge ruled he can be extradited to Sweden. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Assange will appeal, his legal team has confirmed. If they lose he will be sent to Sweden in 10 days.
Speaking outside Belmarsh magistrates court in south-east London after the judgment, Assange attacked the European arrest warrant system.
He dismissed the decision to extradite him as a “rubber-stamping process”. He said: “It comes as no surprise but is nevertheless wrong. It comes as the result of a European arrest warrant system amok.”
There had been no consideration of the allegations against him, Assange said. His extradition would thrust him into a legal system he did not understand using a language he did not speak.
Assange said the US government by its own admission had been waiting to see the British court verdict before determining what action it could take against him.
“What does the US have to do with a Swedish extradition process?” he asked. “Why is it that I am subject, a non-profit free speech activist, to a $360,000 (£223,000) bail? Why is it that I am kept under electronic house arrest when I have not even been charged in any country, when I have never been a fugitive?” Assange had earlier heard the chief magistrate, Howard Riddle, dismiss each of the defence’s arguments.
Assange’s legal team had contended that the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny did not have the authority to issue a European arrest warrant. The magistrate ruled that she did possess this authority and the warrant was valid.
Julian Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens reacts to the extradition ruling Link to this video
Ny’s credibility had been questioned by the defence team but Riddle said those doubts amounted to “very little”. A retired judge who had criticised her, Brita Sundberg-Weitman, had no firsthand knowledge or evidence to back up her opinion, he said.
The defence had argued that the allegations against Assange were not offences in English law and therefore not grounds for extradition. But Riddle said the alleged offences against Miss A of sexual assault and molestation met the criteria for extradition, and an allegation made by Miss B if proven “would amount to rape” in this country.
In his summary Riddle accused Assange’s Swedish lawyer, Björn Hurtig, of making a deliberate attempt to mislead the court. Assange had clearly attempted to avoid the Swedish justice system before he left the country, Riddle said. “It would be a reasonable assumption from the facts that Mr Assange was deliberately avoiding interrogation before he left Sweden.”
The judge was severely critical of Hurtig, who had said in his statement that it was “astonishing” Ny had made no effort to interview his client before he left Sweden. “In fact this is untrue,” said Riddle. Hurtig had realised his mistake the night before he gave evidence and corrected his evidence in chief, said the judge. But it had been done in a manner that was “very low key”. “Mr Hurtig must have realised the significance of … his proof when he submitted it,” Riddle said. “I do not accept that this was a genuine mistake. It cannot have slipped his mind. The statement was a deliberate attempt to mislead the court.”
Riddle acknowledged there had been “considerable adverse publicity against Mr Assange in Sweden”, including statements by the prime minister. But if there had been any irregularities in the Swedish system the best place to examine them was in a Swedish trial.
Outside the court Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, said the ruling had not come as a surprise and reaffirmed the Assange team’s concerns that adhering to the European arrest warrant (EAW) amounted to “tick box justice”.
“We are still hopeful that the matter can be resolved in this country,” he said. “We remain optimistic of our chances on appeal.”
The possibility of a secret trial – which Assange’s lawyers argue he could face if extradited – was “anathema to this country and to most civilised countries in the world”, Stephens said. During Assange’s extradition hearing Clare Montgomery QC, for the Swedish authorities, said trial evidence would be heard in private but the arguments would be made in public. This did not amount to a secret trial.
Stephens suggested Riddle had been “hamstrung” by the EAW. “We’re pretty sure the secrecy and the way [the case] has been conducted so far have registered with this judge. He’s just hamstrung,” he told reporters.
Assange had already paid large amounts to defend himself, with the cost of translating material alone amounting to more than £30,000, Stephens said. “That’s a cost the prosecution should be bearing. The prosecution should be translating everything into a language he understands.”
Assange has been fighting extradition since he was arrested and bailed in December. He has consistently denied the allegations, made by two women in August last year.
At a two-day hearing this month his legal team argued that Assange would not receive a fair trial in Sweden. They said the EAW issued by Sweden was invalid because the Australian had not been charged with any offence and the alleged assaults were not grounds for extradition.
Assange fears that being taken to Sweden will make it easier for Washington to extradite him to the US on possible charges relating to WikiLeaks’s release of the US embassy cables.
Sweden would have to ask permission from the UK for any onward extradition. No charges have been laid by the US, though it is investigating the website’s activities.
The most serious of the four allegations relates to an accusation that Assange, during a visit to Stockholm in August, had sex with a woman, Miss B, while she was sleeping, without a condom and without her consent. Three counts of sexual assault are alleged by another woman, Miss A. If found guilty of the rape charge he could face up to four years in prison.
Assange will be held in custody because there is no system of bail in Sweden until a possible trial or release.
The Australian ambassador to Sweden, Paul Stephens, wrote to the country’s justice minister last week to insist that if extradited, any possible case against Assange must “proceed in accordance with due process and the provisions prescribed under Swedish law, as well as applicable European and international laws, including relevant human rights norms”.
European arrest warrants were introduced in 2003 with the aim of making the process swifter and easier between European member states. But campaigners have raised concerns about their application, arguing they are sometimes used before a case is ready to prosecute and have been extended far beyond their original purpose of fighting terrorism. Last year 700 people were extradited from the UK under the system.
elena: “If you had anything to say about the subjects and not just Elena’s misgivings we might actually be able to talk about something but you don’t seem to be able to see beyond Elena nor have anything to say for yourself about anything else.”
but you are a subject here elena. and you continue to deny that i have something to say… what is at the root of you in this persistent dismissal and denial of another human being ?
“Elena: At last I understand why they are so against We are One in the fofblog and Ton here! No wonder he rejects everything I say!”
it takes a lot of sifting through the “materials” you’ve piled up here, i think that is purposeful on your part although i’m not sure you understand it. you’re right elena, thinking is not the private property of your favorite authors… even though you go to great lengths here to bury that fact beneath piles and piles of “thoughts” from your favorite authors. it takes a lot of sifting through what you’ve piled up here to get to the bottom of things — but in fact there is no bottom to this, it is simply a mill that churns endlessly, that’s the nature of the mind. a word of advice, get off the mill. i agree with you that thinking is not the private property of your favorite authors (or mine), but you fail to apply that bit of wisdom to yourself… a word of advice here: whereas thinking is not the private property of your favorite authors, your feelings and your experiences are your own. following your heart is a way to step off of the treadmill elena… i know it’s easier said than done, it takes practice to develop emotional intelligence, a way of understanding and knowing with the heart. get back into contact with that part of yourself elena, i know it’s still there… you are not the contents of your head or your eyes (I’s) , you are not controlled by the thinking of your favorite authors…. return to your heart elena, return to your heart, there is a way it is very personal, it is your own if only you can find it buried beneath all of this.
“Elena: At last I understand why they are so against We are One in the fofblog and Ton here! No wonder he rejects everything I say!”
another word of advice: don’t confuse your assumptions for understanding elena…. once again you’ve put your idea of me into a box which fits neatly in one of your mental compartments…. this way of “thinking” contributes nothing to truth or understanding, what it does is it shows your ignorance. this way of “thinking,” this habit of placing your ideas about people (individuals) into categories, is a way of dismissing them and it merely perpetuates a distorted view. you replace the possibilities for understanding with caricatures… this way of “thinking” of lumping individuals into category, replaces the possibility for a fully formed and real view of another, with a mere caricature… this is in fact a form of mental laziness, but worse than this is you don’t seem to understand that it’s yet another attempt to insult and incite…. i thought you had moved on from this behavior elena…. fooled again. this habit of yours is mental laziness, it is a lack of the application of will to understanding, this leads to your habits of creating facile caricatures which exaggerate and distort the essence of a person (or thing). rather than a living and breathing understanding and the true learning which comes from open mindedness, you prefer to fit things into one of your mental boxes and then you close it away neatly and conveniently in your mental filing cabinet. this is a way of dismissing another elena, you filter perceptions through easily identifiable “likenesses” and then describe for yourself the other person using exaggerations of some characteristics and the oversimplification of characteristics. this really is a trait of simple mindedness. it is in fact another way that you reject everything that i say…. speaking of which:
elena: “I’ll skip your link for now, I’m too busy with my musings. Why do you even bother to come here love? You have no idea how grateful I am to you for having criticized me for so long. It is difficult to trust one’s self when the criticism is so intense and destructive as it has been by you and those in the fofblog but when one finally manages to, it is a blesssing more than a curse.”
i am glad to help you…. withdraw projections elena… to begin to withdraw your projections, you have to first be aware that you are projecting, the trick is to catch yourself before or at least while you are doing it. first recognize the agitation at the source in yourself. ask yourself: what exactly is it i like or don’t like in the other? and what emotions are evoked by those qualities? how have I acted on those emotions? and where do I find these same qualities in myself? now what have I done to disown or repress them and why? and what ways might my experience of this person be similar to how i experienced someone from my family of origin or others from my past experiences?
re: culture — “civilization” is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in…. not a pleasant situation. yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. but we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons. culture is not your friend, it’s for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. it is not your friend, it insults you as an individual it disempowers you, uses and abuses you. who of us is well treated by culture? think about it…. is it the “mass of humanity” that is well treated or is it a very few? and yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. we understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important, but the culture is a perversion, it fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of silly religions and silly cults. it invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines or as a herd of animals controlled by instincts and the puppet masters who are able to manipulate them…
You would like to reduce me to your imaginary picture of what a woman should be, think and do. Too bad that you’re not in the present times Ton. It’s over my friend, I do not respond to your demands and that is alright whether you like it or not.
I thank you for the many times you’ve come here thinking you are here to help, I am sorry you’ve failed to accomplish your agenda. I am happily involved in a different research and too busy to address what you think are my misgivings. I can live with them Ton. You can too. Take them home and don’t go where you neither want to be nor are wanted.
Good luck my friend, it’s been enlightening to know you and very unfortunate that we could not develop a serious and long lasting friendship.
I take responsibility for all the mistakes I’ve made, I ask you to forgive me if I have ever offended you with the truth as I understand it and also for taking this decision of not reading your posts any more.
As you’ve said before, you are “dismissed”. I have for many years now tried to dialogue with you without moving a step ahead in no matter what subject but you dance over and over again to the same tune. I’ve heard it, I thank you for the dance and I kindly ask you to allow me to rest.
May life bring the best out of you and shower you with good and beautiful things.
Hello Ton,
Now I shall really have to apologize because when I received your last post I looked at the first three paragraphs using the same old tone and I was so disappointed that I didn’t even read your fourth paragraph. I must have been missing you already because I just read it:
re: culture — “civilization” is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in…. not a pleasant situation. yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. but we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons. culture is not your friend, it’s for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. it is not your friend, it insults you as an individual it disempowers you, uses and abuses you. who of us is well treated by culture? think about it…. is it the “mass of humanity” that is well treated or is it a very few? and yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. we understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important, but the culture is a perversion, it fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of silly religions and silly cults. it invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines or as a herd of animals controlled by instincts and the puppet masters who are able to manipulate them…
Elena:
I can hear you!! Wow! Congratulations Ton! Thank you for that. It is lovely to hear you speak about what you actually think.
I am very sorry I had not read this and thought your whole post was about me and my misgivings and dismissed it and you and gave up on us and the possibility of a dialogue. I’m not greatly optimistic now after four years of this and the balance going to the extremes, but it’s a beginning.
Your thoughts on culture and the six billion people stepping on each other and kicking each other’s teeth is perhaps very appropriate for someone in your situation. Is it really like that for you? Has it never been different? What culture are you talking about? American culture? I agree with you, it’s a tough one in its dark side but a very beautiful and great one in its light side. But We are One is not about culture, although a culture will spring out from that consciousness. It is about human beings knowing themselves, the immense and powerful beauty inside of us, the wonder of life, the presence of death in each of our days, hours, minutes and seconds. Death not as the end… or as the beginning of destruction, but as a reality that is alright to live with. We die. You and I will die one of these days and the one of us who is left will miss the other one terribly and that too is alright. We miss each other even when we haven’t managed to be great friends because we’ve shared our lives either way. Death must come to life again so that life can penetrate the realm of the spiritual and recover its meaning We must rem and by that I do not mean that war must come to life again, we’ve had enough of that, what I mean is that the dimension of the spiritual must permeate the whole of our lives. We need to remember and know that our time is counted and that what we do while we are here, matters. Life is an opportunity for love to develop itself. Too many of us, for too long, miss that opportunity.
The “mass of humanity” is a lot of people! Don’t the mere numbers of us surprise you in our magnitude? Do we really understand why so many of us? Are we even close to grasping what the opportunity of living is about?
These last few days for the first time since I left the Fellowship cult I have understood why life outside is so powerfully beautiful. There is so much of it! Do you remember what it is like inside the cult? The few of us unable to talk to each other, all doing the same thing, adoring the false calf, begging for a ray of sunshine from a God that we crowned in hell and chained to our destiny? Do you remember the silence? Our impossibility to talk? The ban on our freedom to speak our word because we weren’t good enough for the calf? no matter how mistaken we might have been it was our word! Our own voice is a wonderful thing and I can hear you I think almost for the first time, actually talking to me about how you see life. It is almost like when Helen Keller understood the word water from her tutor!
So many people out here, so many wonderful and fascinating people carrying out their lives and struggling for a democracy that we can barely smell in the sleeves of a world that is still hang up on the monarchy and allowing our governments to play dictators because we don’t know how to be ourselves enough to stop them.
You’re right Ton, the crisis’ we are facing are tough and the dehumanization is rampant but the world is big and rich with people and every generation struggles where the last one failed to win. We are winning! We are winning the most important battle of all times: The Battle of the Self! The consciousness of our selves as human beings and not animals that walk in herds to the concentration camps!
The monstrosities we see, like Gadafi’s annihilation of his own people, are horrifying to watch but the courage to fight the dictators everywhere, is worth living for.
Some cultures are deadly. True. But the deadliness passes and we come to life again and again like the Fenix. Darkness is within each one of us. It is easy to see the dictators outside of our selves but much more difficult to recognize them within. The individual struggle against one’s own dictator is as tough as the social struggle against the dictators of nations. Who are we to judge each other or each other’s nation? And yet, who are we to allow crime to spread itself without our intervention?
And we fail. We fail for so long. Don’t you and I know that? But failing is not falling, it is learning to walk!
Seeing the horrors of our world is as necessary as carrying them in our shoulders. When a few of us are willing to carry the load, it is not as heavy as when only one of us dares to take it on.
Whole nations are taking on the dictators with all their armies and we were unable to overthrow the dictator of our little cult and free the people chained to its shadow because we were unwilling to challenge the laws that protect him and those like him in all cults. Can’t you see why I called us fascists? It’s deadly when the people are unwilling to challenge crime wherever they see it.
You talk like an American who is disappointed about his culture but your culture is, much more than American, the culture of our times. We’ve all been through it and some are still racing to reach it. But what you see is only the dark side of the culture, the shadow. What is beautiful to see Ton is that life is real. The struggle is real. We do not just become. We are not just born. We have to make the effort to be, to develop our humanity, to struggle for our rights, to become conscious of our selves as individuals and as human beings. It is the toughest climb but the only one worth taking. No one but our selves is against us and how we deal with each other to overcome the injustices and stop the crime, matters. Was it not beautiful to see the Egyptian army unwilling to kill its people?
I do not love American crime in other nations and I loathe Colombian crime in my nation, did I tell you that the army here kills civilians so that they can get a little more money from Americans? But the suffering people go through is not forgotten and some are able to keep their integrity alive.
I beg you forgive me for not having read your whole post and thinking you were just repeating yourself against me. Forgive me too for the length of this post that has been unwelcome so often but allow me to give expression to the pleasure of hearing your voice, for once, actually expressing yourself about something that we can share.
Elena
http://exploringsuicide.blogspot.com/
In an attempt to put all my work in one place, this is a blog that was meant to explore suicide. As I see it today, this would be the back-bone of everything I’ve understood about the homo sacer versus the human sacri.
Affidavit of Deborah Layton Blakey (1)
and the Reflexive Emotional Self (1)
antidepressant drugs cause suicides (1)
Bariatric surgery and suicide (1)
Bereavement-grief (1)
Countries by suicide rate (1)
Cult Members Commit Mass Suicide Heavens Gate (1)
Cult suicides (1)
Cultural mass suicide (1)
Death- wikipedia (1)
Elena on international suicide prevention program (1)
Elena on Jonestown (1)
Elena on suicide and “milieu” (1)
Elena: Life is love The octave of impressions (1)
Emotional Intelligence: Elias (1)
Foucault (1)
Good video on prescription drugs (1)
In honor of all those who have died and their deep suffering (1)
In honor of my mother (1)
Internet suicide (1)
Islamic Suicide Bombers (1)
Jonestown 2 (1)
Jung on suicide- possesion (1)
Mrs. Pilkington and her daughter in England (1)
Nearly 100 Japanese commit suicide each day (1)
On Humanism and Suicide- Two posts (1)
parasuicide (1)
Suicide and Suicidal Behavior (1)
Suicide at foxconn (1)
Suicide circle- Japan (1)
Suicide in Korea (1)
Suicide in the Army (1)
Suicide on Campus video (1)
Suicide Sid (1)
Suicide- Canadian teens (1)
Suicide- Wikipedia (1)
Taiwan foxconn (1)
Telecom suicides in France (2)
Telecom suicides in France BBC (1)
Telecom suicides- Guardian (1)
Telecom suicides- video (1)
The blindness behind telecom suicides (1)
World Health Org. and Srikant Mallepally (1)
Elena: “I can hear you!! Wow! Congratulations Ton! Thank you for that. It is lovely to hear you speak about what you actually think.”
on the contrary elena, it is i who should be congratulating you… after all it is “lovely to hear” that something i’ve posted here actually got through to you. finally you’re able to acknowledge another human being — that makes you more of a human being in turn… but your acknowledgment is shot through with patronizing condescension and one-upsmanship again. now i have to ask: is the patronizing condescension intentional or unconscious… is this “congratulations ton” really just another backhanded insult? you see elena, while all this time i’ve been posting what i “actually think,” you are still dismissing that fact with another dismissive statement…. think about it.
so does this new tone from you represent movement and progress? i have my own misgivings as far as that goes…. you yourself say you’re “not greatly optimistic.” maybe you suffer from manic depression and you are on an upward swing of your mood cycle ? anyway, when i came by to offer a slightly different take on this idea that ‘culture is not our friend,’ the paradox of imagining the individual without culture came to mind — i.e. where would “we” be without culture… but what i found was another “dismissal” from you (this is ignorance — i.e. ignoring). and later you send me an email which by turns is an exercise in self-inflation and on the other hand it is groveling and begging my forgiveness because apparently the “lights” flickered on for a moment and you saw something about yourself. you don’t need my forgiveness elena, and please don’t beg, it’s demeaning to you and i don’t play that game. you see, i’m used to exercises in futility, i have a lot of practice — i’m sure you can tell by my endurance/persistence and that has kept me somewhat engaged here thus far. i’ve thought i could help you but you do not accept this, you ‘hear’ only what you want to, and in the process you deny me as an individual, you dismiss almost everything i’ve ever “said” here… and now the light finally goes on for you and i’m supposed to think you’ve changed your tune? i know what to expect from you elena, since you are already admittedly and seemingly proud of being “a closed book,” i have to ask myself again the question you’ve been asking: why bother? but at least you’re actually able to admit to your habit of shutting out the other (me)… although we still haven’t gottent to the bottom of why you engage in this type of behavior. this shutting out of another is a form of denial which you have now finally recognized…. at least for the moment.
elena: “Your thoughts on culture and the six billion people stepping on each other and kicking each other’s teeth is perhaps very appropriate for someone in your situation. Is it really like that for you?”
really elena, i posted this as one possible point of view, intended as both an illustration and as an antidote to the silly and dangerous idealism postulated in the empty mantra you constantly drone on about — “we are one.” think about it: if one person has to suffer to enrich another, then don’t “we” all suffer — without exception? if we are “one” isn’t this true? reflect on this favorite idea you’ve adopted, that “we are one” — now if this is the case, then if someone is being kicked in the teeth — and you know this is happening all the time elena, even though it may not be in your own backyard it is in fact happening all over the planet — then aren’t you, and i, aren’t “we all” the kickers and the kickees? come on elena, are you floating so far above the earth plane that you fail to recognize your own part and complicity?! are you too blind to see this… this is why you cannot speak for the collective “we” — it merely serves the blind spots you do not yet recognize, it is a “buffer” to seeing parts of yourself. you try to come off in this post as if you are above it all, most of this post has a rosy patina to it but it’s covering the obvious… it’s another attempt at one-upsmanship another habit you have of trying to outdo, outshine another… your need to feel you have an upper hand is to support the notion in your own mind that you are somehow superior to others…. i suggest this really has to do with underlying feelings of inferiority — we all have these feelings elena, i don’t mean to single you out. all of these questions to me in this post 119 you can answer for yourself if you just take time to reflect… and in the process of reflecting you can maybe see where you are replacing possibilities for understanding with assumption… the unexamined life is…
How very sad Ton, here you are again talking about me and not the subjects in question. It’s too bad. I cannot change the way you choose to perceive what I write. The long history of disagreement that we’ve had with each other makes the bias too strong and you are keen on finding weaknesses rather than simply taking it for what it is.
I understand that you can’t understand the idea of We are One as I try to convey it. Words won’t do to make it happen, that is a limitation of words when talking about a realization of being. We simply try to convey an experience but whether others are empathetic or adverse to it is their privilege. Well, at least it’s beautiful for me, I’m sorry you cannot share the beauty.
Your idea that if We are One and people are getting hurt then we all suffer is not quite the way I’ve experienced this. Our oneness is beyond the phenomenical world and doesn’t depend on our states of being within it. It is not reduced by our suffering or joys but it is actualized by our love towards each other.
I don’t agree with you that when one begs to be forgiven one is diminished. On the contrary, being sorry for a mistake is wonderfully relieving whether the other person has the grace to forgive or not. I made a mistake not reading the whole post and listening to your attempt to address the issue but the rest of your post was not worth reading and in this one you fall in the same pattern which I find truly distasteful.
You are not my therapist Ton. Why don’t you go and talk about those misgivings in the fofblog Ton? They’ll love you for them there and you don’t need to try to convince them like you do here. It is a well known buffer that when people don’t wish to hear the truth from somebody they call them crazy. You can call me crazy all you like and point out what you think are my misgivings but I don’t buy it anymore love.
No matter how much you neglect to value what I have worked on here I know its value and if its only good enough for me, that is plenty.
Do you not find it very sad that you have to deny everything someone else works on so that you can justify your mistakes towards her? Are you afraid that what I say may actually be valued by enough people that your role will be exposed? Is that why you come here since you find nothing else of value? Do you think that if you convince me that nothing of what I say and do here is of value I’ll stop writing and so attract no other attention ever? You’re so much like Robert it’s truly sickening. He also lives on convincing people that everything they do is of no worth and that they can only do what, when and how he tells them to do it. It’s mind control and I already learnt the process Ton so what makes you think that you can apply it again? What is interesting about it is that properly studied, what we’ll find in the long run is that these are specific techniques meant to create feelings of self-worthlessness in the person they are addressed towards but unfortunately for you, the more you try them on me, the less efficient they become and the more you reveal your self and your agenda here.
I do find it amazing how much you like to lie here for a public that doesn’t exist but you are so afraid of it that you put up the show anyway and write lies like this one:
“and later you send me an email which by turns is an exercise in self-inflation and on the other hand it is groveling and begging my forgiveness because apparently the “lights” flickered on for a moment and you saw something about yourself.”
You put it as if I had sent you a different email with all that but the fact is that I sent you exactly the same post I posted here just so that you would read it soon enough and know that I wanted it to be clear and personal but in your crooked mind you turned it against me and yourself. That is the pity of negativity: that it turns against the doer much more powerfully than who it is addressed to. May you be spared from it on my behalf and learn about your self without the need to suffer.
Bye Ton.
you are a subject in question elena…. and i know you keep trying to change the subject. i agree that the short history of disagreement between us does make your bias toward me too strong to hear anything i say, your habit of denial combined with the one-upsmanship is deeply ingrained. what do you suppose you have to prove ? and to whom ?
just as hate, anger, and negative emotions manifest here in the “phenomenical world” (your term) so too does the “immaterial” aspect of love manifest “phenomenologically.” so i really don’t know what you are talking about when you say “we are one” and yet you try to remove it from “phenomenological” reality… me thinks she speaks with a forked tongue.
i think asking for forgiveness is different than groveling… maybe that was not your intention but that’s how it “sounded” — the email you sent had the subject heading — “I beg you forgive me.”
elena: “It is a well known buffer that when people don’t wish to hear the truth from somebody they call them crazy.”
you’ve called yourself crazy here many times over and although you’ve provided plenty of evidence to support that assertion i’ve never said it about you… i do think you need support to sort things out, but i think we all need that, so you are no one special in that regard. are you manic/depressive elena ? and here is another question for you elena; what is the function of the buffer when someone repeatedly calls herself “crazy” while claiming that someone else is calling her “crazy” ?
elena: “Do you not find it very sad that you have to deny everything someone else works on so that you can justify your mistakes towards her? Are you afraid that what I say may actually be valued by enough people that your role will be exposed?”
this has me scratching my head a little… although i have probably not praised your work here as you would have liked, i have “denied” very little of what you present, i’m actually in agreement with a lot of it, and i’ve said this before… just because i’m not singing your praises with ringing endorsements doesn’t mean i disagree with everything you do here… on the contrary, and i’ve said this before but i guess your fragile ego needs a lot of boosting so i’ll say it again, i agree tacitly with the posts i’m not commenting on which means MOST of your posts i do see the point and a purpose… where i strongly disagree is when you direct your veiled or overt attacks toward me and when you lump your idea of me into one of the narrow categories colored by your mental blinders…. for example again you say “You’re so much like Robert it’s truly sickening….etc. ” this is the limited framework through which you experience the world, i am sorry for you in this regard but i continue to hold out hope that your mind will clear itself of it’s turbidity.
elena: “I do find it amazing how much you like to lie here for a public that doesn’t exist but you are so afraid of it that you put up the show anyway and write lies like this one…” elena, this is plainly delusional thinking. i write this only for you, who else would this be for elena?! i have no expectation that anyone else will see it…. this idea of an imaginary audience is your own grandiose delusions projected onto me — you are the one who acts like she is writing for an imaginary audience here– your insistence on speaking for “we” the people…. etc. my point is to get the “conversation” back down from your usual inflated perspective, to one which starts from an individual reality… pie in the sky might taste good but it’s all empty calories when it comes down to tangible changes.
elena: “You put it as if I had sent you a different email with all that but the fact is that I sent you exactly the same post I posted here…”
i never said otherwise elena, although you did leave out the subject heading “i beg you forgive me.” you are being very defensive in this… i think i understand why…. and then you become offensive when you say : “…but in your crooked mind you turned it against me…” look elena, i’m merely reflecting you back to you. if you are offended by it then you should examine that reaction and consider the source.
elena,
i’m sorry you think so poorly of me. i’m not going to change your opinion by traveling the paths we’ve been down before… with you, “tough love” and persistence doesn’t work… i’m sorry that i am unable to help you.
good bye
Tough love never worked with anyone Ton, it is not love in its principle, just authoritarism trying to impose itself, fascism in the realm of the personal. Thank you for realizing that and going your way. Be well. If you ever really wish to help anyone, sit with them without an agenda. We re-member our Oneness when we sit in each other’s presence. Bare with their anger and their pain. Allow them to scream and cry without judging them and embrace them from the confines of your heart until they recover theirs. I hope I too have learnt to do this here.
i thought we might be finished elena but you are still asking for more…. so here’s some more. a lot of people have the habit of tossing around words which they really don’t know the meaning of — you are not alone in this…. you use the word “fascism” in your “send off” to me when in reality that term accurately describes aspects of your own mindset. for your edification: fascism was originally founded by Italian national syndicalists in World War I who combined extreme right-wing political views along with collectivism. Fascists believe in singular collective identity, that a nation is an organic community requiring strong leadership, they claim that culture is created by the collective, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism. as an integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety. Fascists advocate the creation of a single-party state. Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement. sound familiar elena? “we are one” and all your threats to excommunicate anyone in disagreement with you the totalitarian dictator here… your constant denial of me as an individual…. etc.
if anyone has an agenda around here it’s obviously you… you who continually tries to control what i say and think, constantly threatening “excommunication” for freely stating my own opinions and noncompliance to your “demands.” worse still is your continual denial of me as an individual human being, negating and denying everything i say here as “not good enough.” if you call responding honestly to what i read and trying to help another soul in need an “agenda” — then so be it, i have an agenda. how dare you lecture me about “sitting with” another — i am well practiced at this my dear, and the fact that i have endured so many insults and such abuses from you would be proof enough for anyone a jot less self-absorbed than you have demonstrated here… this project in fact is nothing more and nothing less than a shrine and a testament to your own hubris and narcissism.
here are couple of other words you don’t know the meaning of…. gracious, and ingrate… now do your own research and draw your own conclusions.
re: your subject heading “state and religion” — what happens when “the state” becomes a religion ? thank you elena for providing so many minor examples here.
“During the past thirty years, people from all civilized countries have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients, the larger number being Protestants. Among all my patients in the second half of life–that is to say, over thirty five–there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that everyone of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain her religious outlook. That of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.
” This is brought about by the fact that the archetypes come to independent life and serve as spiritual guides for the personality…. As the religious person would say : guidance has come from God. With most of my patients I have to avoid this formulation, for it reminds them too much of what they have to reject. I must express myself in more modest terms, and say that the psyche has awakened to spontaneous life…. To the patient it is nothing less than a revelation when, from the hidden depths of the psyche, something arises that is not ‘I’ and is therefore beyond the reach of personal caprice. He has gained access to the sources of psychic life, and this marks the beginning of the cure.”
Jung, “Psychotherapy or Clergy”
re: post 126
My Dear Ton,
I do not try to control what you say and I do not abuse you or insult you, I simply point out that this blog is about an specific subject and you never address the subject and always point out what you think are my personal deficiencies. Pointing out your similarity to Robert and fascist behavior is a fact not an insult. In so doing, I state that your aim is to not only discredit what I say but try to convince me that what I am working on is of no value bringing a sense of worthlessness to myself and that THAT is a well known technique to disqualify people and get them to disqualify themselves. You have consistently proved that that is what you think of me although your last post in which you say you approve of everything that is here except apparently me is rather interesting because you have made of your own self a person who can never address positively what you agree with.
The truth is no insult Ton no matter how harsh it sounds.
The post you responded to is about tough love, not only fascism. Why do you think that you tend to isolate things and never actually manage to address the whole? The whole of this blog, the whole of myself, the whole of your self and the whole of US with all the positive and negative aspects in the spectrum? I think nothing defines fascism as much as the inability to see the positive side of anything, affirm it and reaffirm it until it flourishes well.
Tough love in the personal sphere is fascism. It is one person standing above another thinking that he can give her a lesson toughly and convinced that because he is consistent about it there is love. But there is no love in you Ton or at least it is so buried beneath the rubble that it would take great courage from you to dig it out. Some parents use to be like that and those who are left are leftovers of an old form that should have been done with by now. Some people still think that they can accomplish anything with authoritarism, I too have fallen into that but at least apologized but not you, you defend it as if it were the only thing you could ever resort to. Tough life!
Thanks for bringing the definition of fascism, at least it is an attempt to look at what I am trying to explore here.
“Fascists believe in singular collective identity, that a nation is an organic community requiring strong leadership, they claim that culture is created by the collective, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism. as an integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety. Fascists advocate the creation of a single-party state. Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement.”
It’s funny that you would post this and say that this blog is fascist. You have obviously not really read anything I’ve written but of course that is part of the agenda: ignoring everything that is said and bringing out what fits your own agenda.
Fascism is upside down and backwards to everything I’ve stood up for and I don’t need to prove that. Your limitation in understanding that is not mine.
As for banning you, yes, I have only so much patience with your agenda and if you become as abusive as you were before, you will certainly get banned.
I’ve found that my work progresses more positively when I don’t have to deal with your personal limitations or those that you think are mine. Tough love is not a method I care to act out or be acted with upon. The great limitation I’ve seen in you is that you cannot move from the personal sphere to the subjects in question. I would certainly agree with the idea that we can only see what our being allows and therefore our subjectivity determines our objectivity but since the aim of this blog is not simply the subjectivity of our selves, I do believe that it is worth making an effort to focus on the object of exploration to see if it brings light to our subjectivities.
I would appreciate it if you could share with us what it is exactly that you think you are helping me with Ton? What is the disability you see and what are the methods that you are using to address it? Your tough love technique is not welcome here so do you have something else that you can resort to that is more human?
Re: post 127
Thank you for this post Ton. Here you seem to understand much better than previously what this blog is about and prove more clearly than ever that if you actually wanted to add to the subject instead of detracting from it you could have done so all along but your aim was not helping but hindering. Has that changed now?
Interesting that Jung is so clear about something that I’ve much struggled to get to and don’t regret the struggle at any point in time. As Gramsci use to say, paraphrasing, an old truth is a new truth for the person that discovers it.
This text by Jung is wonderfully helpful and I must of course look into him more completely, would you have the link to the whole text?
It fits in my exploration very much in terms of the individual but also in the level of society. It is society that with the separation of state and religion brought about the “death” of religion but it seems to me that that separation of state and religion was actually brought about from the fact that it was the church itself that separated God from man and appropriated for itself the privilege of being the one and only authorized intermediary. It set with that a structure for all the subsequent organizations that have “plagued” our societies with a “divine” authority that cannot be questioned not only in the Church itself but in the government, military, schools and universities, family, industry, cults, etc.
The back bone of the patriarchal institution is clear and the disappearance of the female equally substantial. Why has the feminine had to be subdued with force so powerful? I’m presently understanding that when the great witch hunt took place, what was actually “killed” was the dimension of the divinity within each and every human being. The consolidation of the Church as the sole owner of divinity and contact with it took place then and not before and since then the fixation on the purely material physical world increasingly developed. Could we not affirm that capitalism is in fact the child of such a period?
The thousands of patients that Jung worked with and the millions that still need to be treated today are precisely the generations of human beings that have lost contact with the archetypes within themselves and in that loss, lost the meaning of life: death.
The main characteristic of capitalism in terms of its psychological input is that it killed death and life has to be lived fully and instinctively, the physical owned and appropriated to the rim of its existence without the possibility of sharing in an individualism that killed the human and death means the complete and absolute END. There is no room for spirituality in capitalism and the fact that there is no room for it is expressed precisely in the fact that religion and state have been separated and moved each into its particular schizophrenic expression blind to the whole.
That status quo is what people are growing up in and Jung’s patients like the majority of human beings today, lost their own inner connectedness: the consciousness of multiple dimensions within and without the individual and with it, the lawful connectedness of life between the individual and the social sphere.
The lack of room for spirituality in capitalism is what has brought about the cult as an outlet to the dimension of the unconscious but precisely because it is a scape valve rather than a channel, the cult has introverted the status quo instead of extroverting the spiritual life of the human being and “helped” people recover the dimension of spirituality in their practical lives.
Here I speak of capitalism not as the American capitalist order but a worldwide tendency to organize society with the separation of state and religion. In communist countries, the tendency was even more powerful and dictatorial with the state replacing the spiritual ethos itself. That is just an even deeper aberration very common in dictatorial states. That’s an interesting connection I hadn’t made. Of course! they simply replace the archetypes in the unconscious for the archetypes in the “nation” and “cult”. Why exactly? Like children unable to mature looking for a dictator or a guru that will take the responsibility that people themselves are unable to assume. Perhaps it’s a process within the process of self development. A particular kind of identification but what is interesting about it is that it happens in men as strongly as in women or even more so? There are also many ingredients in it similar to the “falling in love” but I’ve already looked at that phenomenon in cults.
What is most interesting about the exploration is that this is what happened looked at from one angle but there are many other things happening when looked at from different perspectives and dimensions. That is what makes an exploration an aspect of consciousness.
“… A fella ain’t got a soul of his own – just a little piece of a big soul. The one big soul that belongs to everybody …” J. Steinbeck
Elena: Could We are One have been put more beautifully?
It has been in the soul of all nations Ton, why is it that you cannot perceive it?
elena; “It has been in the soul of all nations Ton, why is it that you cannot perceive it?”
it is you who say that i can’t or don’t “perceive it” — that is simply again your own perception and projection of your idea onto me (the other). psychological projection is defense mechanism — a person unconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to other people. projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others have those feelings. projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them. an example of this behavior might be blaming another for self failure. the mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and by redirecting satisfaction by attaching, or “projecting,” those same faults onto another person or object.
you see elena both are true… one must acknowledge BOTH the individual AND the collective…. what you fail to do here is to recognize context…. it’s the context of your one-sided myopic refrain which glorifies the collective that i object to…. and that context here on your blog is YOU… everything here filters through your own subjective individual perception elena… just because you are ‘saying it aloud’ here, that does not make it objective elena — this seems to be what you fail to realize. what is behind this mindset of yours ? it does smack of a totalitarian, fascistic, cultic mindset. the source of the mantra you continually chant here is what i object to — that source here is YOU and your own subjectivity which hides beneath and behind the collective “we” in order to masquerade as a type of imagined objectivity. you cannot pretend to speak for me or anyone else, much less the mass of humanity while you are failing to recognize the individual and that includes your self elena, the subject is you which you continually deny. you certainly cannot pretend to speak for me when you don’t even acknowledge and recognize me as an individual…. this is how deep your denial is.
elena: “The thousands of patients that Jung worked with and the millions that still need to be treated today are precisely the generations of human beings that have lost contact with the archetypes within themselves and in that loss, lost the meaning of life: death.”
this is very pretentious elena — you read a couple of lines from jung and all of a sudden you imagine yourself an expert… and what is worse you use this tidbit as another way of denying your own situation elena, you act as if you are above it all, above the poor and huddled masses you pretend to speak for, you imagine that you are not one of “the millions that still need to be treated today” — the point is elena, what can you do for yourself in this context ? eating your imaginary pie in the sky changes nothing.
elena: “thank you for this post Ton. Here you seem to understand much better than previously what this blog is about…. ”
and yet you still don’t understand.
elena: “…and prove more clearly than ever that if you actually wanted to add to the subject instead of detracting from it you could have done so all along…”
this is simply more denial and the typical dismissive attitude that is your habit…. what you call “detracting” i see as a deeper examination of the source.
elena: “…I would appreciate it if you could share with us…”
who is “us” elena ? if you are referring to you and i, then i believe we both know what i’m talking about, god knows we’ve been over it ad nauseum. if by ‘us’ you are referring to your imaginary audience here, i would suggest you do a little more research into HPD http://psychcentral.com/disorders/sx17.htm
elena: “what it is exactly that you think you are helping me with Ton?”
it’s simple elena but obviously it’s not easy; i am trying to help you to see yourself… this is difficult for someone like yourself who is so armored with arrogance and egotism as you demonstrate here.
elena: “What is the disability you see and what are the methods that you are using to address it?”
interesting that you should use the word “disability” — your word not mine… but since you put it in those terms; it has to do with an inability to see yourself through the eyes of another… and a concomitant lack of empathy. in general there is a term you should be familiarize yourself with — psychological blind spots… we all have them elena, the problem is that we fail to recognize them as such because of “blindness” to these areas… ouspensky might have called it an aspect of “sleep.’
elena: “but your aim was not helping but hindering. Has that changed now?”
nothing has changed elena, i am still here offering my observations which you perceive as “hindering.” that is a matter of perception which you take to be somehow “absolutely objective” rather than recognizing it as your subjective reaction and response…. your arrogance and egocentric attitude keeps you from withdrawing this type of projection…. this is your mistake. when you say things like: “Pointing out your similarity to Robert and fascist behavior is a fact not an insult.” that is a subjectively filtered perception stated as if it were an absolute fact…. this is an example of how filters of experience create psychological blind spots which you are unable to see and therefore determined to deny.
elena: “I state that your aim is to not only discredit what I say but try to convince me that what I am working on is of no value…”
wrong elena, wrong again. i’ve said it before but i’ll say it again: what you are working on here is worthwhile to you and maybe to you alone… at least that’s a healthier and less inflated way to approach this project of yours. it is when you pompously pretend to speak for the rest of the human race or when in a seeming state of delusional grandeur you imagine an audience hanging on your every “published” word here — that’s where you go astray. i think this project IS worthwhile for you as a journaling exercise, i’ve said so before, even offering links for further research into this important type of therapy. but as usual you dismissed me and said you don’t have time to follow through — this is another form of denial elena…. i’ll offer you the chance again here elena: http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the-health-benefits-of-journaling/ when you dismiss me and attempt to marginalize me, when you treat me this way you are (in your own words): “bringing a sense of worthlessness to myself and that THAT is a well known technique to disqualify people and get them to disqualify themselves.” but you know what elena, that doesn’t work on me, because i know where i stand and what i am about.
elena: “…you have made of your own self a person who can never address positively what you agree with.”
and YOU on the other hand, are a person who cannot possibly get enough praise… you are addicted to it, you are addicted to your ego… you need attention, that is clear, even if in a negative form… that is what you are asking for when you hurl your attempted insults and denigrations at another…. that’s what i reflect back to you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder
elena: “The post you responded to is about tough love, not only fascism. Why do you think that you tend to isolate things and never actually manage to address the whole? The whole of this blog, the whole of myself, the whole of your self and the whole of US with all the positive and negative aspects in the spectrum? I think nothing defines fascism as much as the inability to see the positive side of anything, affirm it and reaffirm it until it flourishes well…”
and isn’t it you elena who continues to deny everything i say here? in fact you treat me as if i were a non-entity or as a punching bag against which to hurl your own pain… and yet you fail to recognize that in yourself. i’ve said it over and over elena, my aim here is to reflect you back to you… so let’s make a deal, shall we? when you can stop attacking and insulting and negating me, then i will stop reflecting you back to you…. but as long as you feel the need to play this way, i will continue to reflect it back for you in the hope that one day you will see the source in yourself… this is about coming to terms with the shadow side, the negative parts of yourself which you project onto another because of the fear or inability to see that in yourself.
the whole is reflected in the parts elena, if you overlook the parts in favor of “the whole” you miss the point. and if my teasing out the details offends you so, then you might ask yourself why? i try here to comment based on my reactions to what i read, and i tend to ‘read between the lines’ which means i try to examine the filter through which things are being perceived and ‘said’ here by you…. that is you, you are the filter. i’ve always said that you are in fact the subject here elena, and although you seem on the one hand to resent the type of attention i give to you, on the other hand you resent the fact that i don’t attend to you in other ways…. i’m sure if i played the role of your little lap-poodle here you would have a much different attitude…. when someone disagrees with you, or takes a different tack on the meaning and goals of “blogging” itself, you resent it, you look at it as a betrayal and defiance of your imagined authority and control…. to the point of the threatening and actual excommunication of the other…. that’s me. this is my dear, a type of psychological fascism which you exemplify over and again here. you say: “It’s funny that you would post this and say that this blog is fascist.” no elena, wrong again, i didn’t say “this blog is fascist” — what i said was: ” you used the word “fascism” in your “send off” to me when in reality that term accurately describes aspects of your own mindset.” what i was referring to was that you obviously don’t know the meaning of that word which you are so fond of throwing about and especially in your attempts to use as another insult against the other (me). the point again elena, is that you can’t see fascism at work in your own psychology, it’s another blind spot which you project onto others. then, when it’s reflected back to you, you deny it exists as part of your own psyche… you obfuscate, you deflect, you deny… it’s all part of you elena, everything you say and filter here is part of you, and yes you are a part of the whole — that is why when i choose to focus on you it is a way of talking about the whole if only in part… why can’t you see that?
elena: “Thanks for bringing the definition of fascism, at least it is an attempt to look at what I am trying to explore here.”
when you say “at least it is an attempt…” well thanks for the credit elena… i could go on and on outlining your many backhanded insults and your agenda to marginalize anything i might say here but frankly it’s boring and you are boring elena, you’re a spoiled little girl who craves attention when in reality you desperately need to get grip on yourself by giving yourself the proper type of attention…. yes elena, whether you recognize it or not, yours is a desperate cry for help. i repeat, i’m happy to stop this game with you but as long as you are crying to me for help i will play… isn’t it you elena who continues to deny everything i say here? in fact you treat me as if i were a non-entity or at best as a punching bag against which to hurl your own pain… you fail to recognize that in yourself. i’ve said it over and over elena, my aim here is to reflect you back to you… so when you can stop attacking and insulting and negating me, when you are able to recognize that you are in fact attacking and attempting to insult me, when you are finally able to withdraw your projections and see them in yourself, then at that point i will understand that you no longer need me to reflect you back to yourself.
elena; “It has been in the soul of all nations Ton, why is it that you cannot perceive it?”
it is you who say that i can’t or don’t “perceive it” — that is simply again your own perception and projection of your idea onto me (the other). psychological projection is defense mechanism — a person unconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to other people. projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others have those feelings. projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them. an example of this behavior might be blaming another for self failure. the mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and by redirecting satisfaction by attaching, or “projecting,” those same faults onto another person or object.
you see elena both are true… one must acknowledge BOTH the individual AND the collective…. what you fail to do here is to recognize context…. it’s the context of your one-sided myopic refrain which glorifies the collective that i object to…. and that context here on your blog is YOU… everything here filters through your own subjective individual perception elena… just because you are ‘saying it aloud’ here, that does not make it objective elena — this seems to be what you fail to realize. what is behind this mindset of yours ? it does smack of a totalitarian, fascistic, cultic mindset. the source of the mantra you continually chant here is what i object to — that source here is YOU and your own subjectivity which hides beneath and behind the collective “we” in order to masquerade as a type of imagined objectivity. you cannot pretend to speak for me or anyone else, much less the mass of humanity while you are failing to recognize the individual and that includes your self elena, the subject is you which you continually deny. you certainly cannot pretend to speak for me when you don’t even acknowledge and recognize me as an individual…. this is how deep your denial is.
elena: “The thousands of patients that Jung worked with and the millions that still need to be treated today are precisely the generations of human beings that have lost contact with the archetypes within themselves and in that loss, lost the meaning of life: death.”
this is very pretentious elena — you read a couple of lines from jung and all of a sudden you imagine yourself an expert… and what is worse you use this tidbit as another way of denying your own situation elena, you act as if you are above it all, above the poor and huddled masses you pretend to speak for, you imagine that you are not one of “the millions that still need to be treated today” — the point is elena, what can you do for yourself in this context ? eating your imaginary pie in the sky changes nothing.
elena: “thank you for this post Ton. Here you seem to understand much better than previously what this blog is about…. ”
and yet you still don’t understand.
elena: “…and prove more clearly than ever that if you actually wanted to add to the subject instead of detracting from it you could have done so all along…”
this is simply more denial and the typical dismissive attitude that is your habit…. what you call “detracting” i see as a deeper examination of the source.
elena: “…I would appreciate it if you could share with us…”
who is “us” elena ? if you are referring to you and i, then i believe we both know what i’m talking about, god knows we’ve been over it ad nauseum. if by ‘us’ you are referring to your imaginary audience here, i would suggest you do a little more research into HPD
elena: “what it is exactly that you think you are helping me with Ton?”
it’s simple elena but obviously it’s not easy; i am trying to help you to see yourself… this is difficult for someone like yourself who is so armored with arrogance and egotism as you demonstrate here.
elena: “What is the disability you see and what are the methods that you are using to address it?”
interesting that you should use the word “disability” — your word not mine… but since you put it in those terms; it has to do with an inability to see yourself through the eyes of another… and a concomitant lack of empathy. in general there is a term you should be familiarize yourself with — psychological blind spots… we all have them elena, the problem is that we fail to recognize them as such because of “blindness” to these areas… ouspensky might have called it an aspect of “sleep.’
elena: “but your aim was not helping but hindering. Has that changed now?”
nothing has changed elena, i am still here offering my observations which you perceive as “hindering.” that is a matter of perception which you take to be somehow “absolutely objective” rather than recognizing it as your subjective reaction and response…. your arrogance and egocentric attitude keeps you from withdrawing this type of projection…. this is your mistake. when you say things like: “Pointing out your similarity to Robert and fascist behavior is a fact not an insult.” that is a subjectively filtered perception stated as if it were an absolute fact…. this is an example of how filters of experience create psychological blind spots which you are unable to see and therefore determined to deny.
elena: “I state that your aim is to not only discredit what I say but try to convince me that what I am working on is of no value…”
wrong elena, wrong again. i’ve said it before but i’ll say it again: what you are working on here is worthwhile to you and maybe to you alone… at least that’s a healthier and less inflated way to approach this project of yours. it is when you pompously pretend to speak for the rest of the human race or when in a seeming state of delusional grandeur you imagine an audience hanging on your every “published” word here — that’s where you go astray. i think this project IS worthwhile for you as a journaling exercise, i’ve said so before, even offering links for further research into this important type of therapy. but as usual you dismissed me and said you don’t have time to follow through — this is another form of denial elena…. i’ll offer you the chance again here elena: when you dismiss me and attempt to marginalize me, when you treat me this way you are (in your own words): “bringing a sense of worthlessness to myself and that THAT is a well known technique to disqualify people and get them to disqualify themselves.” but you know what elena, that doesn’t work on me, because i know where i stand and what i am about.
elena: “…you have made of your own self a person who can never address positively what you agree with.”
and YOU on the other hand, are a person who cannot possibly get enough praise… you are addicted to it, you are addicted to your ego… you need attention, that is clear, even if in a negative form… that is what you are asking for when you hurl your attempted insults and denigrations at another…. that’s what i reflect back to you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder
elena: “The post you responded to is about tough love, not only fascism. Why do you think that you tend to isolate things and never actually manage to address the whole? The whole of this blog, the whole of myself, the whole of your self and the whole of US with all the positive and negative aspects in the spectrum? I think nothing defines fascism as much as the inability to see the positive side of anything, affirm it and reaffirm it until it flourishes well…”
and isn’t it you elena who continues to deny everything i say here? in fact you treat me as if i were a non-entity or as a punching bag against which to hurl your own pain… and yet you fail to recognize that in yourself. i’ve said it over and over elena, my aim here is to reflect you back to you… so let’s make a deal, shall we? when you can stop attacking and insulting and negating me, then i will stop reflecting you back to you…. but as long as you feel the need to play this way, i will continue to reflect it back for you in the hope that one day you will see the source in yourself… this is about coming to terms with the shadow side, the negative parts of yourself which you project onto another because of the fear or inability to see that in yourself.
the whole is reflected in the parts elena, if you overlook the parts in favor of “the whole” you miss the point. and if my teasing out the details offends you so, then you might ask yourself why? i try here to comment based on my reactions to what i read, and i tend to ‘read between the lines’ which means i try to examine the filter through which things are being perceived and ‘said’ here by you…. that is you, you are the filter. i’ve always said that you are in fact the subject here elena, and although you seem on the one hand to resent the type of attention i give to you, on the other hand you resent the fact that i don’t attend to you in other ways…. i’m sure if i played the role of your little lap-poodle here you would have a much different attitude…. when someone disagrees with you, or takes a different tack on the meaning and goals of “blogging” itself, you resent it, you look at it as a betrayal and defiance of your imagined authority and control…. to the point of the threatening and actual excommunication of the other…. that’s me. this is my dear, a type of psychological fascism which you exemplify over and again here. you say: “It’s funny that you would post this and say that this blog is fascist.” no elena, wrong again, i didn’t say “this blog is fascist” — what i said was: ” you used the word “fascism” in your “send off” to me when in reality that term accurately describes aspects of your own mindset.” what i was referring to was that you obviously don’t know the meaning of that word which you are so fond of throwing about and especially in your attempts to use as another insult against the other (me). the point again elena, is that you can’t see fascism at work in your own psychology, it’s another blind spot which you project onto others. then, when it’s reflected back to you, you deny it exists as part of your own psyche… you obfuscate, you deflect, you deny… it’s all part of you elena, everything you say and filter here is part of you, and yes you are a part of the whole — that is why when i choose to focus on you it is a way of talking about the whole if only in part… why can’t you see that?
elena: “Thanks for bringing the definition of fascism, at least it is an attempt to look at what I am trying to explore here.”
when you say “at least it is an attempt…” well thanks for the credit elena… i could go on and on outlining your many backhanded insults and your agenda to marginalize anything i might say here but frankly it’s boring and you are boring elena, you’re a spoiled little girl who craves attention when in reality you desperately need to get grip on yourself by giving yourself the proper type of attention…. yes elena, whether you recognize it or not, yours is a desperate cry for help. i repeat, i’m happy to stop this game with you but as long as you are crying to me for help i will play… isn’t it you elena who continues to deny everything i say here? in fact you treat me as if i were a non-entity or at best as a punching bag against which to hurl your own pain… you fail to recognize that in yourself. i’ve said it over and over elena, my aim here is to reflect you back to you… so when you can stop attacking and insulting and negating me, when you are able to recognize that you are in fact attacking and attempting to insult me, when you are finally able to withdraw your projections and see them in yourself, then at that point i will understand that you no longer need me to reflect you back to yourself.
elena: “I’ll skip your link for now, I’m too busy with my musings.”
when you are able to make time in your very busy schedule:
http://psychcentral.com/disorders/sx17.htm
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the-health-benefits-of-journaling/
I’m sorry Ton, there are more interesting things happening here than you and I but if that’s how you enjoy yourself, keep at it all you like.
I’m sincerely busy in understanding other people’s work and putting my own understanding in that context. If it is of no value for anyone but me let me have that joy, no one is pushing you to be here.
It’s sad that you cannot address the subject and give valuable insight through your own understanding but continue to limit yourself to the criticism, always the same. So be it.
I’ll open a page for your personal criticism of me and you can use it all you like for those interested in reading it.
dismissed again…
thanks for the condescending consideration elena
A ‘criminal’ like Bradley Manning today is a criminal only to the status quo acting against the people’s right to transparency, that is, to know what those in power are doing against human beings no matter in what corner of the Earth. The United States government stands against Manning’s act because his act reveals their actions against other human beings in other parts of the world. With that action Bradley Manning stands as human consciousness beyond national consciousness and in it resides its legitimacy. It must be so in the wake of globalization and consciousness of our selves as human beings.
71
Sacred Substance versus Zone of Indistinction
Agamben draws on Benveniste’s re-interpretation of the Greek term for oath, ὅρκος, horkos,
via ὅρκον ὄμνυμαι, horkon omnumai (to swear an oath, call to witness),
as ‛sacred substance,‛
rather than the traditional etymology in terms of ἕρκος, herkos, which means ‛fence, barrier,
bond,‛ in order to clear the ground of a ‛prejudicial misinterpretation‛ that he says impedes
the archaeology of the oath.72 Benveniste writes that horkos signifies, via his alternate etymo-
logy, ‛not a word or an act, but a thing, the material invested with the malevolent potency
which confers to the promise its binding power.‛73 This would seem to be attested given that
one of the meanings of horkos (Horkos the son of Eris) is ‛the witness of an oath, the power or
object abjured.‛74 Nevertheless,
____________
Agamben wishes to counter the almost-unanimous interpre-
tation according to which the ‛force and efficacy of the oath are sought in the sphere of
magico-religious ‘powers’ to which it belongs in origin and which is presupposed as the most
archaic: they derive from it and decline with the decline of religious faith.‛75 He finds this
unsatisfying since it relies on an ‛imaginary‛ notion of the homo religiosus, a ‛primitive‛ hu-
man intimidated by the forces of nature and the divine. This is unsatisfying because the sour-
ces treated, Agamben points out, present a human who is both religious and irreligious—both
loyal to the oath and capable of perjury.
___________
76 Thus he believes that this traditional explanation is
in need of further exploration, and in particular he wishes to dispel the interpretation in terms
of recourse to a ‛magico-religious sphere.‛
Agamben notes that even scholars as ‛perspicacious‛ as Benveniste and Bickermann
have erred in uncritically repeating the explanation by recourse to the sacred, indicating that
they several times refer to that explanation as one which is ‛always and everywhere‛ given to
account for the oath.77 The problem with this explanation refers back to Agamben’s earlier
work on the sacred (sacer), especially in Homo sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. At issue are
the insufficiency and the contradictions of the doctrine of the ‘sacred’ elaborated in the scien-
tific and historical studies of religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of the
confusion, he says, comes from the encounter and uncritical mixing between the Latin sacer
and the Melanesian concept of mana seized upon by anthropologists. Citing Robert Henry
Coddington and Max Müller, Agamben indicates that mana became the way in which ‛the
idea of the infinite, of the invisible, and of that which we will later call the divine, can appear
in vague and nebulous terms among the most primitive peoples.‛78 Agamben attributes this
to a lack of historical and interpretive knowledge on the part of the scholars, rather than to any
actually-existing concept or category. He also points out that, by uncritically joining the con-
cepts (sacer and mana), such commentators failed to pay heed to both contexts of study.
He says that mana pertained to contexts outside the cultural frame of reference of these
European scholars and sacer to contexts beyond their historical knowledge (often, specifically,
as that which was cast as ‛pre-history‛ or ‛pre-law‛ or the like). As, by the end of the 19th
century and for those seeking to establish a science or history of it, religion in Europe had be-
come something so ‛extraneous and indecipherable,‛ these scholars sought the keys to it in
concepts such as mana.79 They found it easier to assume that the ‛primordial‛ religious con-
texts of Europe must be similar to the ‛magico-religious‛ life of the so-called ‛primitives,‛
thus failing carefully to examine the historically specific genealogy of religion in each context.
Because of this he says that ‛they could not help but to reestablish, as if in a specter, the same
extravagant and contradictory imagination that these scholars had projected.‛80 A more fruit-
ful understanding of the concept, he says, would await the pivotal interpretation of Claude
Levi-Strauss.
Agamben maintains that Levi-Strauss put the understanding of the concept of mana
(and associated ones like orenda and manitou) on new ground because, unencumbered by the
same attachment to the notion of the ‛sacred substance,‛ he was able to recognize the crucial
facet of the concept: its indeterminateness. Levi-Strauss equates the term to those such as truc
and machin in French (which Agamben renders as coso and affare in Italian)—‛thing‛ and
76
Agamben, Sacramento, 18.
77
Ibid., 19.
78
Ibid., 20.
79
Ibid., 22.
80
Ibid. He says that the sway of this interpretation was such that it manifests in different ways in the work of
Durkheim, Freud, Rudolf, Otto, and Mauss (page 21).
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.
124
‛contraption, thingamajig, doohickey, gadget‛ in English—words which, notably, stand in for
something else, or refer to an unspecified quality. Agamben says they are ‛unknown objects
or objects whose use we can’t explain… a void of meaning or an indeterminate value of signi-
fication… whose sole function is to fill a gap between signifier and signified.‛81 So, rather than
a pervasive magical force, Agamben, following Levi-Strauss, thinks that such concepts have
more to do with an indeterminate, ad hoc, function in language on the part of anthropologists
and historians of religion. It is on this basis that Levi-Strauss commented that in the thinking
of the scholars, mana really is mana, implying that there it did function as a pervasive magical
force.
Citing Louis Gernet’s concept of pre-law and Paolo Prodi’s ‛primordial indistinction,‛
________
fuller understanding is given to the ‛ultra-historical fringe‛ as a phase in which law and reli-
gion were indistinct.
________
The difficult part, says Agamben, is using these concepts in a way that
doesn’t simply involve the simple retrospective projection of current notions of religion and
politics onto this fringe, such that we see it as the simple addition of two parts. He recom-
mends ‛a type of archeological epoché to suspend, at least provisionally, the attribution of
predicates with which we usually define religion and law.‛82 Instead he’d like to pay heed to
the zone of indistinction between them, trying to understand this as an internal limit that may
give rise to a new interpretation.
As against the interpretations of the oath that distinguish between an ancient religious
rite and a modern inclusion in law,
________
Agamben notes that the oldest documents in our posses-
sion show it to have an unmistakably juridical function, even if also serving religious ones.
83
He says that ‛in the oldest sources the Latin tradition allows us to reach, the oath is a verbal
act destined to guarantee the verity of a promise or an assertion,‛ and that the ‛same goes for
the Greek tradition.‛84 He also reminds us that for the Romans the sacred sphere was con-
sidered an integral part of law. On the basis of several examples he maintains that
the entire problem of the distinction between the juridical and the religious, in particular for
the oath is, therefore, wrongly put. Not only do we not have grounds to postulate a pre-
juridical phase in which the oath belonged only to a religious sphere, but perhaps our whole
habitual mode of representing to ourselves the chronological and conceptual relation
between law and religion should be reexamined.
__________
Elena: It’s good to find this unity in religion and the juridical. I think I’ve been looking for it all along! I don’t quite understand his argument against previous researchers on the exclusively religious and mana, it seems that if the oath is indeed both religious and juridical it would not stop the connection with the religious and would in fact presuppose it. “Agamben indicates that mana became the way in which ‛the
idea of the infinite, of the invisible, and of that which we will later call the divine, can appear
in vague and nebulous terms among the most primitive peoples.”
What all that is telling me is that they are both dealing with the dimension of the sacred and the dimension of the juridical and that there is no opposition in that continuity. They are the same “lawfulness” in different dimensions and are ‘connected’ by the human being. In the realm of the sacred, the infinite dimension, within each and every human being, in the realm of the juridical, society, the lawfulness with which the individual from his inner connectedness with the ‘divine’ acts in the plane of the earthly: society: the divine divided into multiple human entities acting on each other, ‘climbing’ towards self consciousness. But why? If the human being already possesses the divine within why do we have to ‘climb’ towards its consciousness? Is it a ‘climbing’ or an ‘actualizing’? And then the possibility of ‘failing’, of ‘falling’, in breaking the oath and attracting ‘the malevolent potency’ in the religious sphere and ‘crime’ in the juridical sphere do not contradict each other, on the contrary, they would attest for the fact that the individual commits an act of crime only when he or she “falls” outside of the ‘infinite’ ‘invisible’ ‘divine’ or the ‘whole’ ‘God’ in the religious sphere and the ‘integrity’ of the human in the juridical sphere. The homo sacer is outside of the law because he has fallen out of the circle and death inflicted on him is ‘lawful’ but when those inflicting death on the homo sacer are themselves outside of the circle killing those who are inside the circle, when the status quo is upside down and backwards to lawfulness, then that society has turned against his and her own integrity and is in a process of destruction. In suicide cults the self-annihilation shows the inability of the people to affirm the process of life and hold to its legitimacy. In the process of unhealthily separating from the rest of mankind, cult members gradually implode: they condemn themselves to the homo sacer status and self annihilate. It is interesting that as a reaction (meaning a mechanical response to the status quo), cults tend to self annihilate although the initial aim is to recover the lost integrity that people perceive in the status quo. Gadafy killing his own people is in a similar process of self-destructiveness within the nation.
Interesting also that the hero usually stands against a status quo that has turned against the integrity of the whole and privileges a few. The hero re-invokes the whole and calls on the spirit of the people to reinstate it in society overthrowing the status quo.
All that would bring us back to the circle, the whole. What those in power appropriate is the ‘whole’ represented in the divine authority with which they claim to act in ‘governing’ the people. Their acts are justified because they are supposed to own the sovereignty to exercise, ‘own’ it in their personal qualification: their ‘being’. ‘Sovereignty’ implies the lawful connectedness with the ‘whole’ ‘God’ ‘the people’ or ‘the human’ and it is what gives legitimacy to the ‘rule’ and its expression in the earthly sphere: the juridical status quo. When those in power lack the consciousness of the whole and appropriate a great deal for themselves against the well being of the many, they are acting without the ‘being’, that is, the consciousness of the whole and consequently, their acts are in themselves, outside of the whole: criminal. “Criminal” is each and every act that is performed outside of consciousness and consciousness is the awareness of the whole. The capacity of the human being to ‘fall’ out of consciousness and act against the ‘whole’ whether it is acting against their own self or that of others is ‘apparently’ what we are here to check! The ‘oath’ would come in as the “intention” to act lawfully and accept ‘punishment’ if unable to. This reminds me of the practice of suicide in high-ranking Japanese culture in which it is legitimate to take one’s life if one has dishonored the sovereignty of ones role.
All these would bring us to further questions on the meaning of life itself. Is life meant to be a process of realizing consciousness? Of walking from one’s self to our selves? That is, from individuality to sociability through one’s work? Is that not education? The preparation to legitimately participate in society through one’s work and action? Is that not what people are ‘prepared’ for, educated for? At birth, is the human being an individuality with the potential of becoming conscious of ‘the human’ in his own particular reality as much as internalizing and externalizing the reality of all human beings? Is ‘essence’, that is, all that is innately human at birth, the seed of consciousness but only the seed? Is life the road between the ego and the self? “Life”, the social earth on which the individual actualizes the human, the soil on which consciousness is developed through the actualization of the infinite wholeness within every individual in the practice and experience of a lawful life? What is a ‘lawful life’ if not the capacity of the individual to strengthen the whole through his and her life’s work? The ‘community’, NOT the status quo that acts against it but the integrity of the people that co-participate in it. A ‘criminal’ like Bradley Manning today is a criminal only to the status quo acting against the people’s right to transparency, that is, to know what those in power are doing against human beings no matter in what corner of the Earth. The United States government stands against Manning’s act because his act reveals their actions against other human beings in other parts of the world. With that action Bradley Manning stands as human consciousness beyond national consciousness and in it resides its legitimacy. It must be so in the wake of globalization and consciousness of our selves as human beings. Like all heroes before and after him, Manning stands for the well being of the whole of mankind versus individual interests.
On the Cult
The fourth way was a way meant to be lived in life. Why do you think that is?
I don’t doubt that you are happy and think you are well in the Fellowship, after all, some have organized for themselves a status quo in which people HAVE to follow them and Robert whether they want to or not because if they don’t they’ll tell them to leave. You’ve already brainwashed so many people that the new-comers have to adjust to the already settled behavior or leave. It’s been so long that you’ve been living like that that you don’t remember anything else. Why would that make me happy for you? Or the poor victims of your brainwashing? Life is so much more than a ridiculous dogma lived every day of one’s very short life.
The System was meant to be lived in life because it is in life were the right forces put it into work. Third line was the work for the human being because it is in that line in which one’s being can complete its realization but you instead made it an excuse for fools to buy Bobby shiny shoes and teenage boys and shine your imaginary picture in a priest’s podium. How easy to fool one’s self when someone as bright as you and Robert managed to destroy your own possibilities tying your lives to the tragedy of so many people’s spiritual slavery, physical surrender and intellectual annihilation. I do hate what you do but sadly you cannot even understand a word like hate. In your imaginary life you’ve taken out everything that could have opposed the manipulation of people’s lives including their horror at your actions on them.
I’ve been working intensely on the separation of the state and religion on a text by Giorgio Agamben, an italian philosopher who is still teaching. I do enjoy myself a very great deal reading Foucault and others and realizing that the System gave me enough vision to understand them and observe what they seem to be lacking as much as what they beautifully excel in. You would have had such a great challenge had you been willing to take life on its terms instead of reducing yourself to brainwashing people in a little cult with a sociopath at its head. One that you helped so intensely to become. I believe we are both clear on Robert’s sociopathy and you don’t really give a dam about it as long as you can continue to take your little trips and stay in the high podium. Is yours any less? You must experience great pleasure realizing how astute you are and how incredibly successful you’ve been at brainwashing so many people, for so long. The life energy that they give you must feed your vanity for it is an evil pleasure, not a labor of love. Love empowers people to freedom and self expression but you disempower them to obey and dress, think, speak and act as you’ve brainwashed them to do. Is it not clear to us that Robert didn’t have a third of the brains necessary to accomplish what you’ve organized for him? But he had the lust and you played it masterfully so that he would be satisfied with your role. And the others in the inner circle helped you wonders of course, they were not nearly as talented either but they were eager to put people under control so that their poor images of themselves could be raised a little with the false authority they incarnated. Is it not strange that evil in all people is simply the expression of the lack of self perception? The ignorance of their own being? Yours included? Had you seen the beauty within, you would have never allowed yourself to make slaves of people.
You don’t understand me though, you think I should respect your freedom to enslave people but I have no respect for it. It was strange to realize that I had married the most evil man I’ve known and yet know that there are millions as and more evil than he. The great irony must be the way evil was incarnated in the Fellowship and yet disguised with gold alchemy… talk about the golden calf!
I’ve never seen anyone act as much like Robert than Muamar Gadafy, including the clothing but of course you would not be able to see the similarity for it is forbidden to you to listen to news or know about the life of the “six billion dead, sleeping people of the planet”. Gadafy of course must think the same as you and Robert, for he is also willing to destroy his own people: they are just in their fifth or sixth life-time unlike you who are in your ninth, right? Gadafy is in the sphere of the political what Robert is in the sphere of Religion. They, and you of course, pretend to decide for the people what is best for them and you all do it out of vanity: a tremendous false personality that thinks itself superior to the rest. Pity that you were unable to overcome your destructiveness. You think your superiority is proven in the fact that people indeed submit to your will but for your information, you were not such great master, people were already predisposed when you met them, they had already been conditioned enough by the status quo to submit to yours. Had you not succumbed to the same mechanisms, you would have never allowed your self to stand above others.
The horror of unconsciousness is that it acts itself out within exactly the same structures as consciousness: life, people, but it carries within its womb a tremendously powerful destructive force. Why do you think that so many other cults ended up in mass suicide? Or Gadafy in mass murder? You think your cult is better than theirs because you wear pretty clothes and refrain from ever expressing your life force? It is precisely that repressed life force that ends up imploding into destruction. To think that the more mediocre the cult, the more chances the people have of surviving it.
Of course, you must think I am mad talking about the destruction of the Fellowship members when they all look so clean and proper! Give you smiles and presents and pay you loads to brainwash them a little better but pretty clothes and expensive dinners are far from LIFE and the freedom to be one’s self. One cannot learn to tame one’s spirit if one is tamed like a circus dog and made to perform for every Sunday meeting. No one can develop control of their own functions if they are made to repeat the same behavior, the same dogma, the same act day after day with variations on a theme that guarantees the repetition but behind the scenes the horrendous escape of all those uncontrolled desires that turned into psychophants in the despair of their repression: a love that was never given the chance to live itself out in fresh air that has to hide from the face of the Earth because it creates so much shame… or… would you do it in public?
Our lives are indeed tragic. I am sorry that yours was too much for you to overcome the temptation of becoming a ruler of slaves. What does it feel like to realize that none of your wives bought it? That we were lucky to be close enough to know the man behind the man, the truth behind the settings?
You have heard me say these same things in every different language, e-mail, post, why would I give you an approval that I could not condescend to?
If I could only share with you the beauty of recovering LIFE, the six billion “dead”, alive, one’s self and one’s mind, heart and body and the freedom to decide when, where, what and how one is to be. It’s a slow process and a fearful one because the mind had gotten used to not thinking and the heart had been filled with fear and the body had been uniformed and programmed and the I had been shunned to its lowest expression but each aspect of one’s self slowly recovers and reconnects outside the constraining sphere of cult life.
You have no idea the expansion that comes from allowing all human beings to wildly invade the confines of one’s self. You who are so afraid of people, almost allergic, taking them in timed dosage and only packed in the mass behavior of conditioned meetings or in the elusive extravaganza of the screen. People everywhere struggling for a better world is the greatest spectacle that I have seen, the spirit of the human being fighting to become more conscious. Your people, Americans everywhere, protesting because their rights are being robbed by others like you, wishing to enslave them, have made me respect and admire a people in who I had lost faith after we failed to make a serious move to free all of you from the cult, although everyone in the fofblog knows that it is a rape factory. They ended up being your purest supporters: Not one serious act against the cult. They needed to hide their own participation. What is surprising about how well you trained them is that they fail to act against you long after they are gone.
The amazing thing about unconsciousness is that people are unable to acknowledge how harmful things can become. They are afraid of destroying what hurts them because they are not conscious of what can heal them. It’s the greatest tool of those in power: people’s ignorance: the inability to respond like a human being to what hurts and harms them or others. A human being, not a dead, sleeping being as your cult has had to make of people to be able to brainwash them.
You probably won’t read this or pass it by unperceived as all my other efforts to convey to you what love is about: desiring your freedom before it’s too late. Do not seal your death without freeing your self from hurting others. I will not pray for you after that.
re: ‘on the cult’
i applaud your attempts at ‘eloquence’ but all of your heartfelt sentiments here are not going to change the minds of the hypnotized – on the other hand i understand your felt-need to try and your felt-need to express these emotions. i think you, of all people, that you should know by your own example that it’s not possible to ‘save’ anyone who doesn’t want to be ‘saved.’ not a criticism just an observation.
re: ‘on the cult’
this is for the record here —
your ‘witnessing’ begins with “to whom it may concern” — it might be asked, and not at all flippantly, “who does this ultimately/intimately concern”? the question could be answered in different ways especially if one waxes philosophically and invokes the oft repeated and therefore jaded phrase “we are one” — (yes, “we” ARE interconnected, that’s a much more accurate way of looking at the situation than the attempt to lump everything into an amorphous “oneness” — i’m sure you would agree that the situatiion is really much more nuanced and complex). but getting back to “to whom it may concern” — again, ultimately “it may concern” ONLY someone who CARES enough to give pause and to consider, if even for a moment… in this case, that begins with YOU. thank you for caring clara… (swithching gears, let’s get ‘real – as for expecting the same caring concern from others, and the hope of changing someone’s mind — that change of mind starts “at home” and false hopes blind us to real possibilities, hope is a longing for a future condition over which one has no agency… what one says when a statement or a thought is prefaced with “i hope,” is that one has no real, ‘immediate’ control over the situation. by invoking “hope,” one abdicates real, tangible, ‘immediate’ possibilites for control of the situation to “the fates” — a type of ‘magical thinking’).
“To whom it may concern,
This is the account of my experiences in the church known as the Fellowship of Friends.
I was member of the Fellowship of Friends from March 1990 until March 2007. From 1998-2002, I functioned in the role of ‘center director’ for a satellite branch of the church located. From early 2002 until March 2007, I lived in Oregon House, California the location of both the church’s headquarters and church leader’s primary residence. In 2003, I married Mr. Girard Haven, the second in command of the church. During my marriage, I accompanied my husband on ministerial trips to at least ten different satellite centers of the church across the globe.
In course of my 17 year participation in the organization of the church and direct contact with the church’s leader, Mr. Robert Earl Burton, I became aware that Mr. Burton was suffering from a condition known as satyriasis, which manifested as an uncontrollable sexual predation of young men in the church. In conversation with former members and victims of the leader’s sexual behavior, it became clear to me that the leader was not expressing his sexuality in a healthy, open manner, with equanimity, but exploiting his position of authority, misusing his power and influence, and covertly sexually abusing these young men. Many have left the church. To my knowledge, not one man ever initiated sex with Mr. Burton. Mr. Burton always initiated the sexual contact, and exclusively with young male church members, often 30-40 years younger than he.
This behavior was sanctioned and supported by the leading figures of the church and longtime members through preaching and promoting the churchÕs doctrine of unquestionable support for the leader, who maintains divine status within the church.
I also witnessed what I believe to be emotional and physical abuse by church members, in the neglectful treatment of an 86 year old member, named Mrs. Dorothy F. Mrs. F suffered from Alzheimer’s and died in March, 2007. I volunteered to assist in her care in 2002 and then to my horror discovered that she had not been bathed for over a year, her fingernails had not been trimmed for equally as long, and she had a foul body odor. She also appeared underweight, and I witnessed that she had been fed mostly bread sandwiches for her meals.
When I became aware of Mrs. F’s deteriorating condition, I offered to care for her in my own home, and was dissuaded for three months from doing so by the church members responsible for her care.
When Mrs. F’s legal guardian finally agreed to let her stay with me, she was brought to me weak, on the verge of death, appearing overmedicated, unable to stand or walk and having seizures. This neglectful treatment was sanctioned by the church members’ assertion that Mrs. F was an ‘empty shell’ and would soon be dead. Under my care Mrs. F continued to live for another three years.
To the detriment of the community, I witnessed another elderly member being shunned from participating in teaching events involving Mr. Burton because she ate too much at a dinner. Also, I believe that Mr. Burton’s homosexual lifestyle was reflected in the church as misogyny particularly toward the wives of the heterosexual men that he seduced and in general to the rest of the women in the community. He attributes any protest from the wives, husbands or any member to ‘feminine dominance’, a key church concept he developed. It is a doctrine that imposes a dangerous and destructive behavior on members to self-censor and work against their own self-interest, dignity and moral integrity.
Around 1999 much influenced by The Fellowship’s indoctrinating ideas that our “life families” were nothing but biological connections without real meaning in our lives, I left my younger daughter with her father. This has proved the greatest mistake I have ever made and has created terrible suffering for both my daughter and myself. Although other factors involved my leaving her with her father I would have never taken that option had the idea of biological families not been introduced to me by the Fellowship of Friends.
During my marriage to Mr. Girard Haven I witnessed the horrendous psychological effect that the Fellowship of Friends has had over Mr. Haven who has fallen into blind idolatry for Mr. Burton at the cost of his family and himself in exchange for a position of power in the Cult. He hit me various times over disagreements about the Fellowship and refused to pay for my medications on a traveling teaching trip although I had to work as hard as he did. I will never understand this from my husband or a person I worked with or an institution I was there to help.
I have witnessed peopleÕs freedom of speech totally controlled within the Cult. For over three years I have seen Robert Burton allow only two or three members speak at events in a community of over six hundred people in Oregon House. I have seen how people stop to communicate after such long periods of such conditioning. Connected to this, I have seen how the exercises given by Mr. Burton are designed to control peopleÕs intellectual activity in specific directions so that they lose the ability to question the real conditions of their lives. These are facts, not opinions. A close study of the techniques used in the Fellowship of Friends will reveal the systematic indoctrination of peopleÕs emotional, intellectual and physical existence. Such a long study is not pertinent here but all that is being said here can be proven.
I have witnessed that people are valued in the Fellowship of Friends only in as much as they provide the Cult with money. Cheap labor, easy talents, people’s good will is succinctly exploited without the Cult giving anything but more economic demands in return and depriving people from real participation in what is really happening inside. Mr. Burton’s control is total and totally dangerous to the well being of the community.
I have witnessed the indoctrination given by the Fellowship of Friends referring to the rest of humanity as ‘the six billion dead people on the planet’ or ‘sleeping masses’. When Mr. Burton predicted that California would collapse after an earthquake, thousands of dollars were taken out on loans by students thinking they would never have to pay for them. This is the kind of mentality that is promoted towards the rest of humanity in the Fellowship of Friends.
Sometime around 1998, when I posed a question to Mr. Burton during a church meeting and refused to yield the floor to him (who tried to stop me) until I had finished my question, I was required by Mr. Burton to maintain silence at meetings for a period of two years or I would be ex-communicated from the church. The humiliation that I felt from this censorship contributed to feelings of inferiority and subjugation. It had a lasting effect by compromising my social interactions with members and non-members from then on. I became very insecure, withdrawn, and depressed. I formally left the church and separated from my husband in late March 2007. I was physically exhausted, spiritually depleted, angry, depressed, and sad.
I have witnessed the silent suffering of hundreds of students who have forgotten themselves for over twenty years. People who no longer know who they are or if they ever were anything else. People walk disguised in silk clothes in the Fellowship of Friends, but have had to leave their soul at the entrance.
Now that I am in the process of healing the emotional, physical and spiritual damage brought about through my involvement in this Cult, I am openly supporting every investigation of the practices and character of this corrupt organization and its leader.
People, including Jesus, have paid with their lives for this Oneness, why would you wish to live without it?
I also think I have a right to choose my destiny and therefore the time in which I wish to publish my name here but thank you for reposting that story.
Another lesson from Persia is in the life and words of the great Sufi mystic Hallaj, who in the year 922 was tortured and crucified for having declared that he and his Beloved —namely God—were one. He had compared his love for God with that of the moth for the flame. The moth plays about the lighted lamp till dawn, and returning with battered wings to its friends, tells of the beautiful thing it found; then, desiring to be joined to it entirely, flying into the flame the next night, becomes one with it.
The Mythology of Love
from Myths to Live By
© Joseph Campbell, 1972
and used with permission of the Joseph Campbell Foundation
http://www.mythicjourneys.org/newsletter_feb07_campbell.html
1967
What a wonderful theme! And what a wonderful world of myth one finds in celebration of the universal mystery! The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every loving heart. There were, moreover, two orders of love, according to the manners of manifestation of this divinity, in his terrestrial aspect and celestial. And Dante, following the classical lead, saw love suffusing and turning the universe, from the highest seat of the Trinity above to the lowest pits of Hell.
One of the most amazing images of love that I know is Persian — a mystical Persian representation of Satan as the most loyal lover of God. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused — because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to this Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love.
Now it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be, who could not bring himself, even on God’s own word, to bow before any other beings!
The Persian poets have asked, “By what power is Satan sustained?” And the answer that they have found is this: “By his memory of the sound of God’s voice when he said, ‘Be gone!'” What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!
Another lesson from Persia is in the life and words of the great Sufi mystic Hallaj, who in the year 922 was tortured and crucified for having declared that he and his Beloved —namely God—were one. He had compared his love for God with that of the moth for the flame. The moth plays about the lighted lamp till dawn, and returning with battered wings to its friends, tells of the beautiful thing it found; then, desiring to be joined to it entirely, flying into the flame the next night, becomes one with it.
Such metaphors speak of a rapture that we all, one way or another, must at one time or another, either intensely or not so intensely, have experienced or at least imagined. But there is another aspect of love, which some may also have experienced, and which is likewise illustrated in a Persian text. This one is from an ancient Zoroastrian legend of the first parents of the human race, where they are pictured as having sprung from the earth in the form of a single reed, so closely joined that they could not have been told apart. However, in time they separated; and again in time they united and there were born to them two children, whom they loved so tenderly and irresistibly that they ate them up. The mother ate one; the father ate the other; and God, to protect the human race, then reduced the force of man’s capacity for love by some ninety-nine per cent. Those first parents thereafter had seven more pairs of children, every one of which, however—thank God!—survived.
The old Greek idea of Love as the eldest of the gods is matched in India by that ancient myth from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad cited above of the Primal Being as a nameless, formless power that at first had no knowledge of itself but then thought, “I,” aham, and immediately felt fear that the “me” it now had in mind might be slain. Then, reasoning, “Since I am all there is, what should I fear?” it thought, “I wish there were another!” and, swelling, splitting, became two, a male and a female; out of which primal couple there came into being all the creatures of this earth. And when all had been accomplished, the male looked about, saw the world he had produced, and thought and said, “All this am I!”
In the meaning of this story, that Primal Being antecedent to consciousness—which in the beginning thought, “I!” and felt fear, then desire—is the motivating substance activating each one of us in our unconsciously motivated lives. And the second lesson of the myth is that through our won experiences of the union of love we participate in the creative action of that ground of all being. For, according to the Indian view, our separateness form each other in space and time here on earth—our multitude—is but a secondary, deluding aspect of the truth, which is that in essence we are of one being, one ground; and we know and experience that truth—going out of ourselves, outside the limits of ourselves—in the rapture of love.
The great German philosopher Schopenhauer, in a magnificent essay on “The Foundation of Morality,” treats of this transcendental spiritual experience. How is it, he asks, that an individual can so forget himself and his own safety that he will put himself and his life in jeopardy to save another from death or pain — as though that other’s life were his own, that other’s danger his own? Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one. He has been moved not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself as separate from others, but from an immediate experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all one in the ground of our being. Schopenhauer’s name for this motivation is “compassion,” Mitleid, and he identifies it as the one and only inspiration of inherently moral action. It is founded, in his view, in a metaphysically valid insight. For a moment one is selfless, boundless, without ego. And I have lately had occasion to think frequently of this word of Schopenhauer as I have watched on television newscasts of those heroic helicopter rescues, under fire in Vietnam, of young men wounded in enemy territory: their fellows, forgetful of their own safety, putting their young lives in peril as though the lives to be rescued were their own. There, I would say — if we are looking truly for an example in our day — is an authentic rendition of the labor of Love.
In the religious lore of India there is a formulation of five degrees of love through which a worshiper is increased in the service and knowledge of God — which is to say, in the Indian sense, in the realization of his own identity with that Being of all beings who in the beginning said “I” and then realized, “I am all this world!” The first degree of such love is of servant to master: “O Lord, you are the Master; I am the servant. Command, and I shall obey!” This, according to the Indian teaching, is the appropriate spiritual attitude for most worshipers of divinities, no matter where in the world.
The second order of love, then, is that of friend to friend, which in the Christian tradition is typified in the relationship of Jesus and his apostles. They were friends. They could discuss and even argue questions. But such love implies a deeper readiness of understanding, a higher spiritual development than the first. In the Hindu scriptures it is represented in the great conversation of the Bhagavad Gita between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his divine charioteer, the Lord Krishna.
The next, or third, degree of love is that of parent for child, which in the Christian world is represented in the image of the Christmas Crib. One is here cultivating in one’s heart the inward divine child of one’s own awakened spiritual life — in the sense of the mystic Meister Eckhart’s words when he said to his congregation: “It is more worth to God his being brought forth spiritually in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.” And again: “God’s ultimate purpose is birth. He is not content until he brings his Son to birth in us.” In Hinduism, it is in the popular worship of the naughty little “butter thief,” Krishna the infant among the cowherds by whom he was reared, that this theme is most charmingly illustrated. And in the modern period there is the instance of the troubled woman already mentioned, supra, p. 100, who came to the Indian saint and sage Ramakrishna, saying, “O Master, I do not find that I love God.” And he asked, “Is there nothing, then, that you love?” To which she answered, “My little nephew.” And he said to her, “There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.”
The fourth degree of love is that of spouses for each other. The Catholic nun wears the wedding ring of her spiritual marriage to Christ. So too is every marriage in love spiritual. In the words attributed to Jesus, “The two shall be one flesh.” For the “precious thing” then is no longer oneself, one’s individual life, self-transcended in that knowledge. In India the wife is to worship her husband as her lord; her service to him is the measure of her religion. (However, we do not hear there anything like as much of the duties of a husband to his wife.)
And so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods of this world and one’s place in the world, wealth, social position and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in the love’s fire. In the legend of the Lord Kishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: “When one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, ‘O my Lord,’ one can say, ‘now reveal thyself!’ and he will have to respond.”
There is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husband’s beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss.
The underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships, these pertaining only to the secondary world of apparent separateness and multiplicity. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in the same spirit, sermonizing in the twelfth century on the Biblical text of the Song of Songs, represented the yearning of the soul for God as both beyond the law and beyond reason. Moreover, the excruciating separation and conflict of the two orders of moral commitment, of reason on one hand, and passionate love on the other, have been a source of Christian anxiety since the beginning. “The desires of the flesh are against the ‘Spirit,'” wrote Saint Paul, for example, to the Galatians, “and the desires of the Spirit, against the flesh.”
Saint Bernard’s contemporary Abelard saw the highest exemplification of God’s love for man in the descent of the son of God to the earth to become flesh and his submission to death on the cross. In Christian hermaneutics the crucifixion of the Savior had always presented a great problem; for Jesus, according to Christian belief, accepted death voluntarily. Why? In Abelard’s view, it was not, as some in his day had proposed, as a ransom paid to Satan, to “redeem” mankind for his keep; nor was it, as others held, as a payment to the Father, in “atonement” for Adam’s sin. Rather, it was an act of willing self-immolation in love, intended to invoke in response the return of mankind’s love from worldly concerns to God. And that Christ may not have actually suffered in that loving act we may take from a saying of the mystic Meister Eckhart: “To him who suffers but not for love, to suffer is suffering and hard to bear. But one who suffers for love suffers not, and his suffering is fruitful in God’s sight.”
Indeed, the very idea of a descent of God into the world of love to invoke, in return, man’s love to God, seems to me to imply exactly the contrary to the statement I have just quoted of Saint Paul. Implied, rather, it seems to me, is the idea that as mankind yearns for the grace of God, so God for the homage of mankind, the two yearnings being reciprocal. And the image of the crucified as both true God and true man would then seem to bring to focus the matched terms of a mutual sacrifice — in the way not of atonement in the penal sense, but of at-one-ment in the marital. And further: when extended to symbolize not only the one historic moment of Christ’s crucifixion on Calvary, but the mystery through all time and space of God’s presence and participation in the agony of all living things, the sign of the cross would then have to be looked upon as the sign of an eternal affirmation of all that is, ever was, or shall be. One thinks of Christ’s words reported in the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas: “Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone, you will find me there.” Also those of Plato in the Timaeus, where he states that time is “the moving image of Eternity.” Or again, those of William Blake: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” And there is a memorable passage in the writings of Thomas Mann, where he celebrates man as a noble meeting [eine hohe Begegnung] of Spirit and Nature in their yearning way to each other.”
We can safely say, therefore, that whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns — one of flesh, the other of spirit, one of time, the other of eternity — wherever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such opposites are at one.
The most widely revered Oriental personification of such a world-affirming attitude, transcending opposites, is that figure of boundless compassion already discussed at considerable length, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, known to China and Japan as Kuan Yin, Kwannon. For, in contrast to the Buddha, who at the conclusion of his lifetime of teaching passed away, never to return, this infinitely compassionate one, who renounced for himself eternal release to remain forever in this vortex of rebirths, represents through all time the mystery of a knowledge of eternal release while living. The liberation thus taught is, paradoxically, not of escape from the vortex, but of full participation voluntarily in its sorrows — moved by compassion; for indeed, through selflessness one is released from self, and with release from self there is release from desire and fear. And as the Bodhisattva is thus released, so too are we, according to the measure of our experience of the perfection of compassion.
It is said that ambrosia pours from the Bodhisattva’s fingertips even to the deepest pits of Hell, giving comfort there to the souls still locked in the torture chambers of their passions. We are told, furthermore, that in all our dealings with each other we are his agents, whether knowingly or not. Nor is it the aim of the Bodhisattva to change — or, as we like to say, to “improve” — this temporal world. Conflict, tension, defeats, and victories are inherent in the nature of things, and what the Bodhisattva is doing is participating in the nature of things. He is benevolence without purpose. And since all life is sorrowful, and necessarily so, the answer cannot lie in turning—or “progressing”— from one form of life to another, but only in dissolving the organ of suffering itself, which — as we have seen — is the idea of an ego to be preserved, committed to its own compelling concepts of what is good and what is evil, true and false, right and wrong; which dichotomies — as we have likewise seen — are dissolved in the metaphysical impulse of compassion.
Love as passion; love as compassion: these are the two extreme poles of our subject. They have often been represented as absolutely opposed — physical, respectively, and spiritual; yet in both the individual is torn out of himself and opened to an experience of rediscovered identity in a larger, more abiding format. And in both it is the work of Eros, eldest and youngest of the gods, that we must recognize: the same who in the beginning, as told in the ancient Indian myth, poured himself forth in creation.
In the Occident the most impressive representation of love as passion is to be found in the legend of the love potion of Tristan and Isolt, where it is the paradoxology of the mystery that is celebrated: the agony of love’s joy, and the lovers’ joy in that agony, which is by noble hearts experienced as the very ambrosia of life. “I have undertaken a labor,” wrote the greatest of the great Tristan poets, Gottfried von Strassburg, from whose version of the legend Wagner took the inspiration for his opera, “a labor out of love for the world and to comfort noble hearts: those that I hold dear, and the world to which my heart goes out.” But then he adds: “Not the common world do I mean, of those who (as I have heard) cannot bear grief and desire but to bathe in bliss. (May God let them dwell in bliss!) Their world and manner of life my tale does not regard: its life and mine lie apart. Another world do I hold in mind, which bears together in one heart its bitter sweetness and its dear life and sorrowful death, dear death and sorrowful life. In this world let me have my world, to be damned with it, or to be saved.”
Do we not recognize here an echo of that same metaphysically grounded sense of a coincidence and transcendence of opposites that we have already found symbolized in the figures of Satan and Hell, Christ on the cross, and the moth consumed in the flame?
However, in the medieval European experience and understanding of love, as interpreted not only by Gottfried and the Tristan poets, but also by the troubadours and Minnesingers of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there is an altogether different tone from anything of the Orient, whether of the Far, Middle, or Near East. Essentially, the Buddhist quality of “compassion,” karuna, is equivalent to the Christian of “charity,” agape, which is epitomized in the admonition of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself! — and even better, beyond that, in the words that I take to be the highest, the noblest and boldest of Christian teaching: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust….”
In all the great traditional representations of love as compassion, charity, or agape, the operation of the virtue is described as general and impersonal, transcending differences and even loyalties. And against this higher, spiritual order of love there is set generally in opposition the lower, of lust, or, as it is so often called, “animal passion,” which is equally general and impersonal, transcending differences and even loyalties. Indeed, one could describe the latter most accurately, perhaps, simply as the zeal of the organs, male and female, for each other, and designate the writings of Sigmund Freud as the definitive modern text on the subject of such love. However, in the European twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, in the poetry first of the troubadours of Provence, and then, with a new accent, of the Minnesingers, a way of experiencing love came to expression that was altogether different from either of those two as traditionally opposed. And since I regard this typical and exclusive European chapter of our subject as one of the most important mutations not only of human feeling, but also of the spiritual consciousness of our human race, I am going to dwell on it a little, before proceeding to the final passages of this chapter.
To begin with, then: Marriage in the Middle Ages was almost exclusively a social, family concern — as it has been forever, of course, in Asia, and is to this day for many in the West. One was married according to family arrangements. Particularly in aristocratic circles, young women hardly out of girlhood were married off as political pawns. And the Church, meanwhile, was sacramentalizing such unions with its inappropriately mystical language about the two that were now to be of one flesh, united through love and by God: and let no man put asunder what God hath joined. Any actual experience of love could enter into such a system only as a harbinger of disaster. For not only could one be burned at the stake in punishment for adultery, but according to current belief, one would also burn forever in Hell. And yet love came, even so, to such noble hearts as were celebrated by Gottfried; not only came, but was invited in. And it was the work of the troubadours to celebrate this passion, which in their view was of a divine grace altogether higher in dignity than the sacraments of marriage, and if excluded from Heaven, then sanctified in Hell. And that the word AMOR was the reverse in spelling of ROMA seemed marvelously to epitomize the sense of the contrast.
But wherein, then, lay the special quality of this new order of love, the love that was neither agape nor eros, but amor?
Debates of the troubadours on the subject were a favorite theme of their poems, and the most fitting definition achieved was that which has been preserved to us in a stanza by one of the most respected of their number, Guiraut de Bronelh, to the point that amor is discriminative — personal and specific — born of the eyes and the heart.
So, through the eyes love attains the heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not otherwise can love be born or have commencement
Than by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.
To be noted well: such a noble love is not indiscriminate. It is not a “love thy neighbor as thyself no matter who he may be”; not agape, charity or compassion. Nor is it an expression of the general will to sex, which is equally indiscriminate. it is of the order, that is to say, neither of Heaven nor of Hell, but of earth; grounded in the psyche of a particular individual and, specifically, in the predilection of his eyes: their perception of another specific individual and communication of her image to his heart — which is to be (as we are told in other documents of the time) a “noble” or “gentle” heart, capable of the emotion of love, amor, not simply lust.
And what, then, would be the nature of a love so born?
In the various contexts of Oriental erotic mysticism, whether of the Near East or of India, the woman is mystically interpreted as an occasion for the lover to experience depths beyond depths of transcendent illumination — much in the way of Dante’s appreciation of Beatrice. Not so among the troubadours. The beloved to them was a woman, not the manifestation of some divine principle; and specifically, that woman. The love was for her, and the celebrated experience was an agony of earthly love: an effect of the fact that the union of love can never be absolutely realized on this earth. Love’s joy is in its savor of eternity; love’s pain, the passage of time; so that (as in Gottfried’s words) “bitter sweetness and dear grief” are of its essence. And for those “who cannot bear grief, and desire but to bathe in bliss,” the ambrosial potion of this greatest gift of life is a drink too strong. Gottfried even deified Love as a goddess, and brought his bewildered couple to her hidden wilderness-chapel, known as “The Grotto for People in Love,” where stood, in the place of an altar, the noble crystalline bed of love.
Moreover — and this, to me, is the most profoundly moving passage in Gottfried’s version of the legend — when, on the ship sailing from Ireland (with which scene Wagner’s opera commences), the young couple unwittingly drank the potion and became gradually aware of the love that for some time had been quietly growing in their hearts, Brangaene, the faithful servant who by chance had left the fateful flask unattended, said to them in dire warning, “That flask and what it contained will be the death of you both!” To which Tristan answered, “So then, God’s will be done, whether death it be or life. For that drink has poisoned me sweetly. I do not know what the death of which you tell is to be, but this death suits me well. And if delightful Isolt is to continue to be my death this way, I shall gladly court an eternal death.”
What Brangaene had meant was only physical death. Tristan’s reference to “this death,” however, was to the rapture of his love; and his reference then to “an eternal death” was to an eternity in Hell — which for a medieval Catholic was no mere flourish of speech.
I think of that Moslem figure of Satan, the great lover of God, in God’s Hell. And when I recall, furthermore, in the light of these words of Tristan, that scene of Dante’s Inferno where the poet, describing his passage through the circle of the carnal sinners, tells of having beheld there, carried past on a burning wind, the whirling, screaming souls of all the most famous lovers of history — Semiramis, Helen, Cleopatra, Paris and yes! Tristan, too; telling of how he had spoken there. Francesca da Rimini in the arms of her husband’s brother Paolo, asking what had brought those two to that terrible eternity; and she told him of how they had been reading together of Guinevere and Lancelot and at a certain moment, looking at each other, kissed, all trembling, and read no more in the book that day…. When I recall, as I say, that passage in the light of Tristan’s welcome of “an eternal death,” I cannot help wondering whether Dante could have been quite correct in regarding the condition of his souls in Hell as of unmitigated pain. His point of view was that of an outsider; one, furthermore, whose own love was bearing him onward and upward to the summit of the highest Heaven. Whereas Paolo and Francesca had the inside point of view of a passion of a much more fiery sort, for a clue to whose terrible joy we may take the word of another visionary, William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of genius which to Angels look like torment and insanity….” For the point about Hell — as of Heaven — is this: when there, you are in your proper place, which, finally, is exactly where you want to be.
The same point has been made in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, where the setting is a hotel room in Hell, sparely furnished in Second Empire style and with an image of Eros on the mantel. Into this single chamber three permanent guests are to be introduced by the bellhop, one by one.
The first, a middle-aged pacifist journalist, has just this minute been shot as a deserter, and what his pride now most requires is to be told that his attempt to escape to Mexico and publish there a pacifist magazine was heroic; he was not a coward. The second to be ushered in, then, is a Lesbian who lost her life when a young wife whom she had seduced turned on the gas secretly in her apartment and expired with her, asphyxiated, in bed. Immediately despising the craven male who is to be her companion here forever, this coldly intellectual female gives him no comfort whatsoever in his need. Nor can the next and final entrant, a man-crazy young thing who had drowned her illegitimate child and driven her lover to suicide.
This second female, of course, becomes immediately interested in the male, who requires, however, not passion but compassion. The Lesbian blocks every attempt they make to reach some kind of accord, making moves of her own, meanwhile, toward the other female, who has neither any interest in, nor understanding of what she wants. And when these three — so exquisitely matched — have brought their unrelenting demands on each other to such a pitch of frustration that escape, one way or the other, would seem to be the only thing that anyone in such a spot could desire, the locked door of their room swings open — showing an azure void — and nobody leaves. The door swings shut, and they are locked forever in their chosen cell.
Bernard Shaw says much the same in Act III of his Man and Superman: that delicious scene where a little old lady, faithful daughter of Mother Church, is informed that the landscape through which she is happily strolling is not of Heaven but Hell. She is indignant. “I tell you, I know I am not in Hell,” she insists, “because I feel no pain.” Well, if she likes (she is told), she can easily stroll on over the hill into Heaven. However, the strain of remaining there has been found intolerable (she is warned) for those who are happy in Hell. There are a few — and they are mostly English — who nevertheless remain, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in Heaven. “An Englishman,” states her informer, “thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.” And with that telling Shavian quip, I am carried to my final reflections on this chapter’s theme.
For it was in the legend of the Holy Grail that the healing work was symbolized through which the world torn between honor and love, as represented in the Tristan legend, was to be cured of its irresolution. The intolerable spiritual disorder of the period was represented in this highly symbolic tale in the figure of a “waste land” — the same that T.S. Eliot in his poem of that name, published in 1922, adopted to characterize the condition of our own troubled time. Every natural impulse in that period of ecclesiastical despotism was branded as corrupt, with the only recognized means of “redemption” vested in sacraments administered by authorities who were themselves indeed corrupt. People were forced to profess and live by beliefs they did not always actually hold. The imposed moral order held precedence over the claims of both truth and love. The pains of Hell were illustrated on earth in the torture of adulteresses, heretics, and other villains, torn apart or set afire in public squares. And all hope of anything better was pitched high aloft to that celestial estate of which Gottfried spoke with such scorn, where those who could bear neither grief nor desire were to be bathed in a bliss everlasting.
In the legend of the Grail, as rendered in the Parzival of Gottfried’s very great contemporary and leading literary rival, Wolfram von Eschenbach, this devastation of Christendom is symbolically attributed to the awesome wounding of the young Grail King Anfortas, the meaning of whose name is “infirmity”; and the expected issues of the awaited Grail Knight was to be the healing of this dreadfully wounded youth. Anfortas — significantly — had only inherited, not rightly earned, the high office of guardianship of the supreme symbol of the spiritual life. He had not, that is to say, been properly proven to his role, but instead still moved in the natural way of youth. And like all noble youths of that period, he rode forth one day from the Castle of the Grail with the battle cry “Amor!” And he encountered immediately a pagan knight from a land not far from the walled garden of Paradise, who had come riding in quest of the Grail and with its name engraved on his spearhead. The two settled their lances, rode at each other, and the pagan knight was slain. But his lance, inscribed with the name of the Grail, had already unsexed the young king, and its head, broken off, remained in the excruciating wound.
This calamity, in Wolfram’s meaning, was symbolic of the dissociation within Christendom of spirit from nature; the denial of nature as corrupt, the imposition of what was supposed to be an authority supernaturally endowed, and the actual demolishment of both nature and truth in consequence. The healing of the maimed king, therefore, could be accomplished only by an uncorrupted youth naturally endowed, who would merit the supreme crown through his own authentic life work and experience, motivated by a spirit of unflinching noble love, enduring loyalty, and spontaneous compassion. Such a one was Parzival. And though we cannot in these few pages review the whole course of his symbolic career, enough can be said of four of the main episodes to suggest the burden of the poet’s healing message.
The noble youth had been reared by his widowed mother in a forest aloof from the courtly world, and it was only when he chanced to see a small company of questing knights go riding past his farm that he learned of knighthood and, abandoning his mother, set forth for King Arthur’s court. His training in courtesy and in the skills of knightly combat he received from Gurnemanz, an old nobleman who admired his obvious qualities and offered him his daughter in marriage. But Parzival, thinking, “I must not simply accept, I must earn, my wife!” courteously, gently refused the gift and, alone again, rode away.
He let the reins lie slack on his charger’s neck, and was thus carried by the will of nature (his mount) to the besieged castle of an orphaned queen his own age, Condwiramurs (conduire amour) whom he next day heroically rescued from the undesired assaults of a king who had hoped to add her feudal estates through capture and marriage to his own. And it was she, then, that lovely young queen, who became the wife he had earned; and there was no priest to solemnize the marriage — the poet Wolfram’s healing message here being that noble love alone is the sanctification of marriage, and loyalty in marriage, the confirmation of love.
Proposition two, to which the poet then addressed himself, was of human nature fulfilled — not overcome or transcended — in the achievement of that supreme spiritual goal of which the Grail was the medieval symbol. For it was only after Parzival had met the normal secular challenges of his day — both in knightly deeds and in marriage — that he became involved without either forewarning or intent in the unpredicted, unpredictable context of the higher spiritual adventure symbolized in the Grail Castle and wondrous healing of its king. The mystical law governing the adventure required that the hero to achieve it should have no knowledge of its task or rules, but accomplish all spontaneously on the impulse of his nature. The castle would appear like a vision before him. Its drawbridge lowering, he would ride across it to a joyous welcome. And the task then expected of him, when the maimed king on his litter would be carried into the stately hall, would be simply to ask what ailed him. The wound would immediately heal, the waste land become green, and the saving hero himself be installed as king. However, on the occasion of his first arrival and reception, Parzival, though moved to compassion, politely held his peace; for he had been taught by Gurnemanz that a knight does not ask questions. Thus he allowed concern for his social image to inhibit the impulse of his nature — which, of course, was exactly what everyone else in the world was doing in that period and was the cause of all that was wrong.
Well, to cut a long and wonderful story very short, the result of this suppression of the dictate of his heart was that the young, misguided knight — scorned, humiliated, cursed, derided, and exiled from the precincts of the Grail — was so shamed and baffled by what had happened that he bitterly cursed God for what he took to have been a mean deception practiced upon him, and for years he rode in desperate, solitary quest, to achieve again that castle of the Grail and release its suffering king. Indeed, even after learning from a forest hermit that it was God’s law of that enchantment that none seeking the castle would find it and none who had failed once should ever have a second chance, the resolute youth persisted, moved by compassion for its terribly maimed king, whom his failure had left in such pain.
But his ultimate victory followed, ironically, rather from his loyalty to Condwiramurs and fearlessness in combat than from his obdurate determination to rediscover the castle. The immediate occasion was a great and gallant wedding feast — with many a fair lady thereabout and much fashionable dalliance among colorful pavilions — from which he rode away, not in moral dudgeon but because, with the image of Condwiramurs in his heart (whom he had not seen through all these cruel years of unrelenting quest), he could not bring himself to engage in any of the pleasures of that marvelously fair occasion. He rode away alone. And he had not ridden far when there came charging at him from a nearby wood a brilliant knight of Islam.
Now Parzival had known for some time that he had an elder half-brother, a Moslem; and it happened that this was he. They clashed and gave battle fiercely, “And I mourn for this,” wrote Wolfram; “for they were the two sons of one man. One could say that ‘they’ were fighting, if one wished to speak of two. Those two, however, were one.: ‘My Brother and I’ is one body, like good man and good wife. Contending here from loyalty of heart, one flesh, one blood, was doing itself much harm.”1 The battle scene is a recapitulation transformed of the encounter of Anfortas with the pagan. Parzival’s sword, however, here broke on the other’s helmet. The Moslem flung his own blade away, scorning to murder a defenseless knight, and the two sat down to what proved to be a recognition scene.
Clearly implicit in this critical meeting is an allegorical reference to the two opposed religions of the time, Christianity and Islam: “two noble sons,” so to say, “of one father.” And marvelously, when the two brothers have found their accord, a messenger of the Grail appears to invite both to the castle — which in a Christian work of the time of the Crusades is a detail surely remarkable! The maimed king is healed, Parzival is installed in his stead, and the Moslem, taking the Grail Maiden to wife (in whose virgin hands alone the symbolic vessel had been carried), departs with her to his Orient, there to reign in truth and love — seeing to it (as the text declares) “that his people should gain their rights.”
But this wonderful Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach simply has to be read.2 Humorous, joyous, altogether different both in spirit and in meaning from the ponderous opus of Richard Wagner, it is one of the richest, greatest, most civilized works of the European Middle Ages; and as a monument, moreover, to the world-saving power of love in all its forms, perhaps the very greatest love story of all time.
So let me now, in conclusion, turn to the writings of an author of our own day, Thomas Mann, who already in his earliest novelette, Tonio Kröger, named love the controlling principle of his art.
The young North German hero of this story, whose mother was a woman of Latin race, found himself set apart from his blue-eyed blond companions, not only physically, but also temperamentally. It was with a curiously melancholy strain of intellectual contempt that he regarded them; yet with envy also, mixed of admiration and love. Indeed, in his secret heart, he pledged himself to them all eternally — and particularly a certain charming blue-eyed Hans and beautiful blond Ingeborg, who represented to him irresistibly the appeal of fresh human beauty and youthful life.
On coming of age, Tonio left the north to seek his destiny as a writer, and, moving to a city of the South, met there a young Russian, Lisaveta by name, and her circle of heavy thinkers. He there found himself no more at home, however, among those critics and despisers of the commonalty of the human race, than he had formerly felt among the objects of their scorn. He was thus between two worlds, “a lost burgher,” as he termed himself; and departing from this second scene mailed back, one day, to the critical Lisaveta and epistolary manifesto, setting forth his credo as an artist.
The right word, le mot juste, he had recognized, can wound; can even kill. Yet the duty of the writer must be to observe and to name exactly: wounding, even possibly killing. For what the writer must name in describing are inevitably imperfections. Perfection in life does not exist; and if it did, it would be — not lovable but admirable, possibly even a bore. Perfection lacks personality. (All the Buddhas, they say, are perfect, perfect and therefore alike. Having gained release from the imperfections of this world, they have left it, never to return. But the Bodhisattvas, remaining, regard the lives and deeds of this imperfect world with eyes and tears of compassion.) For let us note well (and here is the high point of Mann’s thinking on this subject): what is lovable about any human being is precisely his imperfections. The writer is to find the right words for these and to send them like arrows to their mark — but with a balm, the balm of love, on every point. For the mark, the imperfection, is exactly what is personal, human, natural, in the object, and the umbilical point of its life.
“I admire,” wrote Tonio Kröger to his intellectual friend, “those proud and cold beings who adventure on paths of great daemonic beauty and despise ‘mankind’; but I do not envy them. Because {and here he lets fly his own dart} if there is anything capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is this burgherlike love that I feel for the human, the commonplace. All warmth, goodness, and humor derives from this; and it even seems to me that it must be itself that love of which it is written that one may speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet, having it not, be as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals…”
“Erotic” or “plastic irony,” is the name that Thomas Mann bestowed on this principle; and through the greater part of his creative career it was the guiding principle of his art. The unflinching eye detects, the intellect names, the heart goes out in compassion; and the life-force of every life-loving heart will be finally tested, challenged, and measured by its capacity to regard with such compassion whatever has been by the eye perceived and by the intellect named. “For God,” as we read in Paul to the Romans, “has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.”
Moreover, life itself, we can be sure, will provide every one of us ultimately with a test of our capacity for such love — as it in time tested Thomas Mann, with its transformation of his blue-eyed Hans and blonde Ingeborg, under Hitler, into what he could only name and describe as depraved monsters…
What does one do under such a test?
Saint Paul has said, “Love bears all things.” We have the words also of Jesus: “Judge not that you may not be judged.” And there is the saying, too, of Heraclitus: “To God all things are fair and good and right; but men hold some things wrong and some right. Good and evil are one.”
There is a deep and terrible mystery here, which we perhaps cannot, or possibly simply will not, comprehend; yet which will have to be assimilated if we are to meet such a test. For love is exactly as strong as life. And when life produces what the intellect names evil, we may enter into righteous battle, contending “from loyalty of heart”: however, if the principle of love (Christ’s “Love your enemies!”) is lost thereby, our humanity too will be lost.
“Man,” in the words of the American novelist Hawthorne, “must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest.”
New page
elena,
for post 142, it’s very deep, rich — thank you.
Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is “likely to be detrimental to that system.” There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.
by (a) commoner
This world, in which we are born and take our being, is alive. It is not our supply house and sewer; it is our larger body. The intelligence that evolved us from star dust and interconnects us with all beings is sufficient for the healing of our Earth community, if we but align with that purpose.
Our true nature is far more ancient and encompassing than the separate self defined by habit and society. We are as intrinsic to our living world as the rivers and trees, woven of the same intricate flows of matter/energy and mind. Having evolved us into self-reflexive consciousness, the world can now know itself through us, behold its own majesty, tell its own stories–and also respond to its own suffering.
Our experience of pain for the world springs from our inter-connectedness with all beings, from which also arises our powers to act on their behalf. When we deny or repress our pain for the world, or treat it as a private pathology, our power to take part in the healing of our world is diminished. This apatheia need not become a terminal condition. Our capacity to respond to our own and others’ suffering–that is, the feedback loops that weave us into life–can be unblocked.
Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only intellectually validated, but experienced. Cognitive information about the crises we face, or even about our psychological responses to them, is insufficient. We can only free ourselves from our fears of the pain–including the fear of getting permanently mired in despair or shattered by grief–when we allow ourselves to experience these feelings. Only then can we discover their fluid, dynamic character. Only then can they reveal on a visceral level our mutual belonging to the web of life.
When we reconnect with life, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity. Not only do we experience our interconnectedness in the community of Earth, but also mental eagerness arises to match this experience with new paradigm thinking. Concepts which bring relatedness into focus become vivid. Significant learnings occur, for the individual system is reorganizing and reorienting, grounding itself in wider reaches of identity and self-interest.
The experience of reconnection with the Earth community arouses desire to act on its behalf. As Earth’s self-healing powers take hold within us, we feel called to participate in the Great Turning. For these self-healing powers to operate effectively, they must be trusted and acted on. The steps we take can be modest undertakings, but they should involve some risk to our mental comfort, lest we remain caught in old, “safe” limits. Courage is a great teacher and bringer of joy.
Copyright © 2009 joannamacy.net.
All Rights Reversed
Part Two, Sonnet XXIX
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent Earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
elena, re: 142
i apologize for posting that letter with your name attached — the content seemed fitting here… and as ‘moderator’ you can always remove your name if you so choose.
you wrote: “People, including Jesus, have paid with their lives for this Oneness, why would you wish to live without it?”
who would WISH to live without it…? a question is do ‘you’ have a choice, the second question is connected to the first: who is the ‘you’ you refer to ?
the first word in the slogan “we are one,” is “WE” — the VERY FIRST WORD acknowledges and implies multiplicity, meaning ‘discrete,’ separate entities, individual ‘entities’ which constitute “this Oneness.” a constant drum you beat here is “this Oneness” — yes of course, the part is connected to the whole… this is by no stretch of the imagination a new revelation. emphasis on the warm and fuzzy loving embrace of feelings of “Oneness” notwithstanding, another approach to the actuality and reality of the situation could be less vague, less amorphous… whatever view one chooses, it must be acknowledged that to come to any relevant and ‘objective’ truth would certainly require a multitude of perspectives.
to simply lump everything and everyone into “this Oneness” overlooks the obvious, it doesn’t say much about the details… it doesn’t say much at all ub fact. thinking in terms of ‘interconnectedness’ more accurately addresses the situation ‘at hand.’ why? you may ask… because interconnection acknowledges the individual in relation to the whole. the human ‘primordial’ sense of interconnection has been layered over by current-culture-conditioning… the ‘point’ of ‘this Oneness’ you are so fond of, is represented by the aggregate of individuals in the ‘matrix’ which forms ‘this Oneness.’ the matrix is ‘this Oneness,’ this Oneness” is a priori, it’s a situation wherein the aggregate of individuals take form, and give shape to… it’s the stew each individual flavors… “this Oneness is already “a given” and so the real question involves individual free will and individual choice in the context of interconnection and interactions of the individual(s). free will / choice, depends in some way upon developing or increasing awareness of being connected / interconnected to everything else… this is the point, and the point is about individuals coming into an integrated relationship with the whole. focusing soley on “this Oneness” is only about half the equation, it’s disregarding the rest and it’s ignoring ‘the point.’
what constitutes individual integration into “this Oneness” is an ongoing lifelong process, in the current jargon it’s called ‘personal growth’ by the human potential movement, and it’s about individuals taking responsibility for balancing human impact on Great Nature. the process begins “at home” with individual increasing of awareness, self-reflection and appropriate conduct/action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Potential_Movement
Hi Ton,
Thank you for your posts. The lady seems to beat on a similar drum that I’ve been beating on all these years, thank you for posting her article here.
I think I better address the second part of your criticism in this new page, particularly in the second post.
We need to reiterate ‘who we are’ because we are not. We are becoming. Life is a becoming from our self to our selves: consciousness. We actualize that becoming in our history: our social orders and struggles that allow us to be one not only with our own self but with our selves in the vital connectedness of life itself. Life is life with or without our individuality, we all continue to struggle for the actualization of our selves in the social sphere whether many of us die without ever reaching consciousness but we leave traces of our struggle so that the conditions of life for future generations have a better standing towards a more human status quo.
The individual cannot do more than that but individual freedom and consciousness is also not dependent on the consciousness of the whole to actualize his or her own consciousness. In the sphere of the political, the individual actualizes his consciousness as social actor, in the sphere of the religious, the individual frees his and her self from the sphere of the living-political status quo and with that, from the determinism that engulfed them. The socio political has it’s own laws and determinations, it is a cosmos of its own and so is the individual and within their particular spheres they are each sovereign. We must better expand and understand this, it is beautiful!
Bye for now.