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Spoken word is mirror of the mind: canon is mirror of the voice, when one voice repeats or reflects what another has stated. GV-MMBP-171
There is a fascinating example in Milton's Paradise Lost of the process of intellectual anesthesia. Milton's problem, which is that of orthodox theology, is to explain how Satan, who has supreme created intelligence, should immediately be able to intuit the results of any sin. Therefore the problem is: how can he be said to commit sin and be of high order of intelligence? Milton solves this problem wittily by showing how Satan uses language to obscure his thinking. CA-MMWW-14
Imagination is that ratio among the perceptions and faculties which exists when they are not embedded or outered in material technologies. When so outered, each sense and faculty becomes a closed system. GG-MM-314
The Analogical Mirrors. IL-MM-63
If a language contrived and used by many people is a mass medium, any one of our new media is in a sense a new language, a new codification of experience collectively achieved by new work habits and inclusive collective awareness. But when such a new codification has reached the technological stage of communicability and repeatability, has it not, like a spoken tongue, also become a macromyth? How much compression of the elements of a process must occur before one can say that they are certainly in mythic form? Are we inclined to insist that myth be a reduction of collective experience to a visual and classifiable form?
Languages old and new, as macromyths, have that relation to words and word-making that characterizes the fullest scope of myth. The collective skills and experience that constitute both spoken languages and such new languages as movies or radio can also be considered with preliterate myths as static models of the universe. But do they not tend, like languages in general, to be dynamic models of the universe in action? As such, languages old and new would seem to be for participation rather than for contemplation or for reference and classification. MY-MM-340
Here is the prologue to the drama of Big Brother Watching You that later unfolds in the Tatler and the Spectator (lo spettatore nel centro del quadro). VP-MMHP-109 (this probe is collated with the Portrait of the Countess of Meath by Peter Lely)
This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. GG-MM-44
Utopians and antiutopians are always obsessed with a period preceding their own. Orwell's 1984 happened in 1930. TT-MMBN-75
Not Big Brother Is Watching But All The Brothers. VV-MM-Item 15
Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer. LT-MM-370
There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is His master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored. LT-MM-387
Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws. Nature now pays 5 million %. Applied science now the master usurer. To hell with our top soil. We can grow potatoes on the moon tomorrow. How you goan to expose that while there is still human "life" on the planet? LT-MM-219
LIFE Jan1/51 War assets issue. Pin-up girls featured as major asset. I have tried, in forthcoming (March) Mechanical Bride to devise a technique for elucidating this scene. It can't be satirized. Trouble with duffers like Geo. Orwell is that they satirize something that happened 50 yrs ago as a threat of the future ! Effect is narcotic. LT-MM-219
Wyndham Lewis's The Art of Being Ruled ... is probably the most radical political document since Machiavelli's Prince. But whereas Machiavelli was concerned with the use of society as raw material for the arts of power, Lewis reverses the perspective and tries to discern the human shape once more in a vast technological landscape which has been ordered on Machiavellian lines. LT-MM-222
Surely, it is not unbelievable that decision-makers are totally out of touch with the world they live in? How could any contemporary person in any age be entrusted with powers carefully developed and monopolized by people from the previous time? CO-MM-104
Overkill, the technologies for total destruction of mankind and the planet, create a "peace" that passeth all technology. Bernard Mandeville built his Fable of the Bees on the same observation: "Private vices, public benefits". CA-MMWW-46
With the coming of film and TV, representative government itself has been transformed into image-making, a subculture of Madison Avenue PR. The American dream that has been scrapped is, of course, that of "the open road", which has now merged with jet city. CA-MMWW-139
Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. CA-MMWW-202
It will take the hijacking of 5,000 Boeing 747s to equal the simple hijack of a single small city, destination unknown. Both hijackers impose their preferences on service environments designed for others - and hijack can be applied to any environment - the air, a business, a culture or the nation itself.
Hijacking a business is easier in proportion to the size of the business, as witness the Pennsylvania Central where $7 billion of assets had been hijacked by the bookkeepers to non-transportation uses. The bigger the operation, the less the shareholders know about the flight plan. Hijackers don't presume to have expertise. They allow the plane, or the business, or the country that they take over, to be operated by those normally in charge. The hijacker does not interfere with the operation, but with the flight plan. He decides where to land. GR-MM-111
The owners themselves are concerned more about the media as such, and are not inclined to go beyond "what the public wants" or some vague formula. Owners are aware of the media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with "content" or the media within the media. UM-MM-60
Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. Something like this has already happened with outer space, for the same reasons that we have leased our central nervous systems to various corporations. As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse. UM-MM-73
Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. TT-MMBN-63
Electrotechnics scrapped the Westerner's industrial technology and retrieved and flooded him with the primitive modes of awareness of preliterate man. That is why all bureaucracies of all sovereign and national entities have collapsed in the West. It is the speed-up of information by telephone and telex, etc., that destroys bureaucracies regardless of geography or ideology. China and Russia, as much as France and the U.S.A., experience this collapse at the same time. MR-MMGK-3
Everyone will be involved in role-playing, including those few elitists who interpret and/or manage large-scale data patterns and thus control the functions of a speed-of-light society. JC-MMBP-199
The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. TT-MMBN-157
Henry Kissinger seems to be the current triggerman in this planetary game among the intervals of the first, second, third and fourth worlds, the first world being the industrialized West, the second being Russian Socialism, the third the nonindustrialized lands, and the fourth the electric world that has gone around the rest, becoming the primum mobile of inflation in all the rest. MI-MMBN-L29
The information environment of the electric world has increasingly merged private and public sectors of the older industrial world, pushing the world of staples and commodities out of the marketplace and into the political sphere. For banking, the question today would seem to be what is its new role in a world where information is superseding hardware and in which politics has become a major form of show business? As show business becomes world business, the banker will experience an enormous extension of his advisory role in the political and bureaucratic sphere. The development of banking will be, not toward the take-over of business, but of politics. CN-MM-x&xi
In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. TT-MMBN-211
Old colonialism exploited the raw materials, i.e., "hardware". New colonialism exploits productive capacity and skilled management and labor, i.e., "software". Economic nationalism of governments is thus defeated by economic inter-nationalism of corporations. What is good for General Motors may ultimately be great for everybody but the United States. TT-MMBN-196
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. TT-MMBN-92
Today, apart from government itself, the biggest show business is putting "secrets" on display: whether of the CIA, FBI, KGB, MI5, or Watergate - not like Perry Mason, but the "real McCoy" - as Nature imitates Art. Private history "in camera" has become public myth by time compression "on camera", just as the hitherto ob-scene is now on stage: a deja vu of all times and places now here. By recognizing this cliche´-archetype pattern, we can "prophesy" what has already happened: Scenarios, obsolescent at peak performance, will proliferate as art forms, while present action moves from sequent play to simultaneous interplay and instant replay. KP-BN-129
One of the many flips of our time is that the electric information environment returns man to the condition of the most primitive prober and hunter. Privacy invasion is now one of our biggest knowledge industries. CO-MM-24
He (Douglas Cater) emphasizes the paradox that the press is dedicated to the process of cleansing by publicity, and yet that, in the electronic world of the seamless web of events, most affairs must be kept secret. Top secrecy is translated into public participation and responsibility by the magic flexibility of the controlled news leak. UM-MM-190
When the electric speed is introduced into such a delegated and representational organization, this obsolescent organization can only be made to function by a series of subterfuges and makeshifts. These strike some observers as base betrayals of the original aims and purposes of the established forms. UM-MM-182&183
The maintenance of social power is, in fact, the manifestation of social identity. TT-MMBN-261
The superenterprise, like the superaudience, works for itself. TT-MMBN-205
"The computer is the first machine that consumes and produces the same material - information. - William Jovanovich" TT-MMBN-90
The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. TT-MMBN-152
The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the global village. It has more spite and envy. The spaces and times are pulled out from between people. A world in which people encounter each other in depth all the time. The tribal-global village is far more divisive - full of fighting - than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth. HC-MMGS-279&280
The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. This would seem to be a normal, and even amiable, trait ensuring a maximal degree of social continuity and permanence amidst change and innovation. But all the conservatism in the world does not afford even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media. On a moving highway the vehicle that backs up is accelerating in relation to the highway situation. Such would seem to be the ironical status of the cultural reactionary. When the trend is one way his resistance insures a greater speed of change. Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force. UM-MM-179
We torment others by "hardware", using the old organization chart, and we participate in this torment through "software" by holding the new media mirror up to old Nature, as it were. This process transforms the torture of work into the refined torture of art - the primal curse laid on man: he will earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Today the sweat is empathy, and the self-knowledge that is the most awful form of torment is awareness of one's own sordid motives manifested in their consequences. TT-MMBN-166
We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. TT-MMBN-166
The "flower people", likewise, will soon take over the bureaucratic function of state and army in order to propagate peace and Peter Pan. CA-MMWW-184
Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half "under surveillance". This, in fact, is the hang-up of the age of "software" and information. In the preceding "hardware" age the "haves" of the world had kept the "have-nots" under "surveillance". This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment. The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters and "crediting" agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant. TT-MMBN-25&26
Instant Replay
(a) Instant replay of experience equals the cliche´; amplifies cognitive awareness
(b) Wipes out the merely representational and chronological
(c) Retrieves "meaning" (I. A. Richards)
(d) Flips from individual experience to pattern recognition, the nature of the archetype. GV-MMBP-176
That group of archetypalists who consider the linguistic form to be a recurring pattern of literary experience describe what is antithetic to the cliche´ as probe. CA-MMWW-15
A cliche´ is an act of consciousness: total consciousness is the sum of all the cliches of all the media or technologies we probe with. CA-MMWW-150
Consciousness is not a verbal process. UM-MM-87
Today the multimedia have, as noted, demobilized consciousness. We speak of a lie as "credibility gap". "Truth" once again becomes "trust", not Cartesian certainty. CA-MMWW-34
The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. CA-MMWW-45
The Happening exploits not only the clash of one cliche´ against another, but also the much more effective interface of a cliche´ from one medium with cliches from other media. CA-MMWW-205
One of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world concerns the use of surrounding services which have been obsolesced by daily innovations and discoveries. A vast new industry has been born from this conflict, and its name is "Camp", and its motto is: "Throw something lovely away today. Help beautify junkyards." Despite the grotesque aspect of "Camp" as the incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence, it has already been itself obsolesced by the popular technology of the video replay. The instant replay, available mainly to the audiences of sporting events, offers, as it were, the meaning minus the experience, reversing Mr. Eliot's observation that "we had the experience but missed the meaning." The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception. The instant replay, indeed, offers not just cognition but re-cognition, and leads the mind to the world of pattern recognition, to aftersight and foresight. IC-MM-44
"Camp" is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives. ZZ-MM
For America, the electronic revolution from industrial products and consumerism to information and custom-made services, is a reversal of the entire way of life, with goals and directions suddenly yielding to roles and figures. America has found the paths of industrial uniformity and continuity no longer to its taste. Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change that is manifested directly by the TV service of the instant replay. Is not the instant replay the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself? For the replay would seem to offer both cognition and re-cognition; the same pattern of reversal, in the transition from the industrial to the electric age, appears in the role of Sputnik(1957) in placing the planet inside a man-made environment. IC-MM-54
For the dominant environment of our age has itself become information or "software". Since at electric speed any figure tends to become ground, and anything, however trivial, can acquire infinite mass, the temptation and the desire to gamble with everything and anything becomes obsessive. One dollar at the speed of light can do as many transactions as a million at pre-electric speeds. Quantitative projections and rational critiques cannot cope here. MI-MMBN-L29
Joyce knew that any technology is at once internalized by men, with a resulting shift in the ratios among their senses. This shift is recorded exactly in the tones and colors and interplay of words. Language is itself the very drama of cognition and recognition. RE-MM-166
They are the representatives of the age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. The drama of cognition itself. IL-MM-32
The outer trip has been specialist and Western. The inner trip has been echological and Oriental. Both kinds of trips are cliche´-probes. Each has its own methods and preferences of retrieval from the rag-and-bone shop of past experience. The outer trip prefers to retrieve antiquities or archetypes. The inner trip prefers the probing cliche´ world of the module. CA-MMWW-14
Language is a technology which extends all of the human senses simultaneously. All the other human artifacts are, by comparison, specialist extensions of our physical and mental faculties. CA-MMWW-20
The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliche´ - an old cliche´ retrieved by a new cliche´. Since a cliche´ is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment. CA-MMWW-21
Any cliche´, pushed to a high degree, is scrapped in favor of a new cliche´ which may be the revival of an old one - e.g., old cliche´ as new archetype = old archetype as new cliche´. CA-MMWW-50&51
All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of these forms does not limit their action upon our sensibilities. Just as the rim-spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and low- pressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other extensions of our powers are constantly creating new climates of thought and feeling. Since the resulting symbolic systems are numerous, they are in perpetual interplay, creating a kind of sound-light show on an ever-increasing scale. CA-MMWW-57
Alfred North Whitehead mentions in Science and the Modern World that the great discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. The art of discovery itself is now a cliche´, and creativity has become a stereotype of the twentieth century. CA-MMWW-58
Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliche´ to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. CA-MMWW-99
It might be argued that a main cause of the merging of the archaic attitude to cliche´ with the modern notion of archetype as a more intense reality resulted from our great variety of new techniques of retrieval. CA-MMWW-117
Mr. Eliot is quite explicit about myth as a structure of parallels without connectives. Mythic form is necessarily double. Its doubleness is a matter not of matching but of making, not of the mirror and reflection but of the lamp and illumination. CA-MMWW-141
Joyce sets up the chain of cognition and recognition itself: "In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality". CA-MMWW-136
One of the etymologies of "matching" is "making" (mac-ian). This polarity is inherent in consciousness as such. Certainly in the cliche´-to-archetype process, if cognition is matching our sensory experience with the outer world, re-cognition is a repeat of that process. We have seen how dreaming involves a ricorso of this waking experience of the day: "The unpurged images of day recede" (Yeats). The whole of Finnegans Wake is a ricorso, a scrubbing purgation of private and corporate experience in the collective "dreaming back". "Making sense" is a phrase that indicates repetition of some experience which yields a sudden truth or meaning. In Le Demon de l'Anglogie Mallarme´ reveals a creative process as a recap of the actual stages of apprehension. That is, creativity is the parallel of cognition, a retracking of the labyrinth of sensation. Ancient mythology is packed with examples of this awareness. Daedalus, the mightiest maker or engineer of antiquity, contrived the labyrinth that enclosed the Minotaur. CA-MMWW-148
Necessarily, therefore, all artistic imitation first arose from the pagan liturgies or mysteries. If Daedalus was the first to note this relation, Joyce was the first to see in these ancient rituals of descent and return the perfect externalization, in drama and gesture, of the stages of human apprehension. The retracing of any moment of cognition will thus provide the unique artistic form of that moment. And its art form coincides with its quiddity, except that the artist arrests what is otherwise fleeting. IL-MM-34
Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. JQ-MM-5
Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since it is a kind of recap of natural processes, whether of making sense via cognition or of making a house by following the lines of Nature. CA-MMWW-149
Biogeneticists say today that a growing organism, at every point in its growth, has to know what the whole organism is doing in order to develop. The consequences of the images are the images of the consequences. This involvement and polarity, knowing and growing, is both creative and destructive. CA-MMWW-150
In contrast to private awareness, social consciousness is a process of scrapping, retrieving, and probing. The emphasis for the most part is upon retrieval and the accumulation of vast residues. With the development in the nineteenth century of many new technologies(cliches), the supremacy of unified print consciousness gave way to multiconsciousness. There was no garbage heap, no middenheap, there was no unconscious large enough to contain all of the materials generated by the breakdown of so much probing and environing. CA-MMWW-152
The present probe tests cliche´ as the current technology, and the archetypal world as the "rag-and-bone shop" of old perceptions and techniques. In the electric age there are far too many cliches available for retrieval. The paradoxical result is the end of garbage or of "rag-and-bone" shops. As we tend to extend consciousness itself by the new technology, we probe all, and scrap all, in a deluge of fragments of cultures for creativity. CA-MMWW-158&159
Chesterton's entire vision was paradoxical because it was based on perception as process. G.K. knew that analogy was community, and that is why he was able to write what Etienne Gilson considers one of the best books on Aquinas. CA-MMWW-159
Like Alice, Joyce pushed all the way through the Narcissus looking-glass. He moved from the private Stephen Dedalus to the Finnegan corporate image. The mirror, like the mind, by taking in and feeding back the same image becomes a wheel, a cycle, able to retrieve all experience. CA-MMWW-163
The whole of Finnegans Wake, including the title, is paradox; based on what Joyce considered man's greatest invention - the mirror of language, the "magazine wall" of memory and all human residue. CA-MMWW-163
In literature, works like Eliot's The Wasteland, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot are concerned with the destructive aspects of the enormous creativity of the electronic age. All of Pop art, Funk art, Op art, and the various other versions of mini-art reiterate the process by which cliche´-probe destroys and creates. CA-MMWW-184
How to elicit creativity from these middenheaps has become the problem of modern culture. CA-MMWW-184
"Camp" is a kind of dropoutism resulting from the new electric environment. All the earlier forms go into quotes, as it were, when they have this new world to encompass them. CA-MMWW-188
"Camp" is not a form of retrieval but rather simply rear-view-mirror nostalgia. It is not a new service environment or cliche´, but a means of escaping into the gingerbread world of Mom and nursery. CA-MMWW-189
As an art form, the Happening does not so much address the audience as include the audience. It expects the audience to immerse itself in the "destructive element", as it were. At various times in the history of the theater, the audience has been included in the show to a considerable degree. In the newspaper it is decidedly the audience that is the show. Such, in large degree, is the nature of language. It is a Happening that includes all publics and all past perceptions in an inclusive Donnybrook of coincidences and adjustments. Once Joyce discovered language in this way, he knew he had found out the means to transform the entire human community into a work-force for the artist. Gerd Stern and the other poets of the Happening are delighted to discover that all human artifacts are available as dramatis personae in their theatre. It is the same discovery of the "world" that has created Camp. CA-MMWW-198
Physically, the young seem to feel that the planet has become their stage. They want to act outside, in the street, on the campus. They have shifted their dramatic quest for new identities away from the expression of private opinions to the enactment of a new kind of group theater. The new program they offer for scrutiny and participation seems to many people to be trash such as has never been seen before - a wild orgy of "law and ordure".
Rich material for the hypothetical probe that the satellite environment offers the planet itself as a new kind of theatrical stage, is to be found in the Walker Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. DE-MM-1
Technologies would seem to be the pushing of the archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness. May this not help explain why technology as environment is typically unconscious? The interplay between environmental and content factors, between old and new technologies, seems to obtain in all fields whatever. In politics, the new conservatism has as its content the old liberalism. Every new technology requires a war in order to recover an image made by the old environment. CB-MMHP-31
Electronics As E.S.P. VV-MM-Item 3
The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP. CB-MMHP-23
The extremely mobile individual consciousness of the print-oriented man now reverses into the tribal inertia of multi-consciousness. CA-MMWW-6
The new cult of ESP is a natural adjunct to telecommunications. When you put your nervous system outside as a world environment, ESP would seem to be rather "Plurabelle". CA-MMWW-40
MM- Electricity makes possible - and not in the distant future, either - an amplification of human consciousness on a world scale, without any verbalization at all.
Playboy- Are you talking about global telepathy?
MM- Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous translation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed-forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? PL-MMEN-72
The present electric ESP age of multiple interfaces finds no problems in metamorphosis or transubstantiation such as baffled abcede-minded culture of the sixteenth century and after. CO-MM-82
The cavemen of Madison Avenue have begun to get sensitive to the ESP power of names to shape perception and to control energies. CO-MM-276
In the same way, the filling in of the gap between the old biological environment of our bodies and the new electric environment of our extended nervous system automatically evokes the world of ESP and LSD. CO-MM-180
When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment. This extension of consciousness has already begun with the computer and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and occult awareness. TT-MMBN-14
ESP IS OLD HAT WHEN EFFECTS PRECEDE CAUSES. The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural. Any administrator today is aware of his environment as a universal teaching machine. TT-MMBN-193
If there is, indeed, a terrible nihilism in the photo and a substitution of shadows for substance, then we are surely not the worse for knowing it. The technology of the photo is an extension of our own being and can be withdrawn from circulation like any other technology if we decide that it is virulent. But amputation of such extensions of our physical being calls for as much knowledge and skill as are prerequisite to any other physical amputation. UM-MM-173
It is this fragmentation that enables him (Western man) to ignore cause-and-effect in all interplay of technology and culture. It is quite different in Big Business. There, tribal man is on the alert for stray seeds of change. UM-MM-237
In the future, the only effective media controls must take the thermostatic form of quantitative rationing. Just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media fallout. Education will become recognized as civil defense against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defense is the print medium. The educational establishment, founded on print, does not yet admit any other responsiblities. UM-MM-267
For lack of observing so central an aspect of the TV image, the critics of program "content" have talked nonsense about "TV violence". The spokesmen of censorious views are typical semiliterate book-oriented individuals who have no competence in the grammars of newspaper, or radio, or of film, but who look askew and askance at all non-book media. The simplest question about any psychic aspect, even of the book medium, throws these people into a panic of uncertainty. Vehemence of projection of a single isolated attitude they mistake for moral vigilance. Once these censors became aware that in all cases "the medium is the message" or the basic source of effects, they would turn to suppression of media as such, instead of seeking "content" control. Their current assumption that content or programming is the factor that influences outlook and action is derived from the book medium, with its sharp cleavage between form and content. UM-MM-274
The Western way of life attained centuries since by the rigorous separation and specialization of the senses, with the visual sense atop the hierarchy, is not able to withstand the radio and TV waves that wash about the great visual structure of abstract Individual Man. Those who, from political motives, would now add their force to the anti-individual action of our electric technology are puny subliminal automatons aping the patterns of the prevailing electric pressures. A century ago they would, with equal somnambulism, have faced in the opposite direction. German Romantic poets and philosophers had been chanting in tribal chorus for a return to the dark unconscious for over a century before radio and Hitler made such a return difficult to avoid. What is to be thought of people who wish such a return to preliterate ways, when they have no inkling of how the civilized visual way was ever substituted for tribal auditory magic? UM-MM-275
Failure to understand the organic character of electric technology is evident in our continuing concern with the dangers of mechanizing the world. Rather, we are in great danger of wiping out our entire investment in the pre-electric technology of the literate and mechanical kind by means of an indiscriminate use of electrical energy. UM-MM-218
It may be simplest to say at once that the real use of the computer is not to reduce staff or costs, or to speed up or smooth out anything that has been going on. Its true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and galactic environments and energies in a harmonious way. For centuries the lack of symmetry and proportion in all these areas has created a sort of universal spastic condition for lack of inter-relation among them. In merely terrestrial terms, programming the environment means, first of all, a kind of console for global thermostats to pattern all sensory life in a way conducive to comfort and happiness. Till now, only the artist has been permitted the opportunity to do this in the most puny fashion. The mass media, so-called, have offered new materials for the artist, but the understanding has been lacking. WP-MMQF-89&90
So the process of renewal can't come from above. It can only take the form of reawakened critical faculties. The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will. Psychological decentralization. A merely provisional image of how it might (not how it should) occur could be formed by supposing every mechanical agency of communication in the world to be suspended for six months. No press. No radio. No movies. Just people finding out who lived near them. Forming small communities within big cities. It would be agony. All psychological drugs cut off. No capsulated thoughts or melodies. To say that anything like this could never happen, or that it should never be allowed to happen is a remark worthy of those mesmerized practical men who are efficiently arranging for the obsequies of our world's mind and body alike. If something like this doesn't happen it is quite plain what will happen. PY-MM-159
MM- All these convulsive changes, as I've already noted, carry with them attendant pain, violence and war - the normal stigmata of the identity quest - but the new society is springing so quickly from the ashes of the old that I believe it will be possible to avoid the transitional anarchy many predict. Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society.
Playboy- How?
MM- The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it's technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.
Playboy- How do you program an entire society- beneficially or otherwise?
MM- There's nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programing of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you'd realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their over-all needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. We could program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election, or lay on an additional 25 hours of TV in Venezuela to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio the preceding month. By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world's competing economies.
Playboy- How does such environmental programing, however enlightened in intent, differ from Pavlovian brainwashing?
MM- Your question reflects the usual panic of people confronted with unexplored technologies. I'm not saying such panic isn't justified, or that such environmental programing couldn't be brainwashing, or far worse - merely that such reactions are useless and distracting. Though I think the programing of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically, I don't want to be in the position of a Hiroshima physicist extolling the potential of nuclear energy in the first days of August 1945. But an understanding of media's effects constitutes a civil defense against media fallout. The alarm of so many people, however, at the prospect of corporate programing's creation of a complete service environment on this planet is rather like fearing that a municipal lighting system will deprive the individual of the right to adjust each light to his own favorite level of intensity. Computer technology can - and doubtless will - program entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and nations. The content of that programing, however, depends on the nature of future societies - but that is in our own hands. PL-MMEN-72&74
Keeping in mind that the user is necessarily the content of any man-made service environment or media, it is noteworthy that, with Sputnik, men put the planet inside its first man-made container. From that time people had an immediate sense of being the "content kings" of the Earth. As the content of the planet they suddenly noticed how poor a job Nature had done in keeping men in line. If "what the public wants" was the first child of the telegraph press, ECOLOGY was the first progeny of Sputnik. When processes moved up to electric speeds, it became obvious that "everything causes everything". For every cause there are many effects, just as every effect has many causes; this becomes apparent to those existing in an electric environment of information. Those existing as the content of a man-made environment never cease adjusting it to their own behavior, just as they adjust their behavior to the environment. "Programming" the environment had this form of slow adjustment earlier. However, for the residents of the "wired planet", or the magnetic city, the programming now begins to assume the character of rapid and extensive change, which we take for granted on radio, movies, and TV. Sputnik and the moon shots brought about, in effect, the institution of a new kind of global theatre, in which all men become actors and there are few spectators. The population of the world is both the cast and content of this new theatre. The repertory of the theatre consists of a perpetual happening, which can include the retrieval or replay of any previous happenings that men choose to experience.
The replaying of past events in "realistic" ways began with the power of print to retrieve the ancient authors and historians. The Elizabethan stage projected scenes and characters of the past as a staple entertainment. Our power to reconstruct the past has grown steadily with media enlargement, till Hollywood made such replays into a major feature of this century. TT-MMBN-145
As the detective reconstructs events, so the artist by retracing the processes of cognition (mimesis) bridges the world of sense and the world of awareness. James Joyce presents this cognitive bridge in monumental and dramatic form in Finnegans Wake: the entire tribal cycle of society now begins again, but awake. ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS CREATES A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE OLD ACCIDENTAL AND THE NEWLY PROGRAMMED EVENTS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE FOR ENRICHMENT THROUGH DIVERSITY. TT-MMBN-11
In this book there is no intent to endorse or condemn what has happened. Our concern is to explore and to reveal the process patterns of current happenings. Since it is no longer safe to wait for the harsh judgement of results, we must discover how to anticipate effects with their causes in order to avoid the "inevitable" by "programming Fate". TT-MMBN-6
The familiar idea of "making the news" now yields to making the world itself. For the best part of a century, we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the "natural" program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness. Everybody becomes a voluntary participant in creating diversity without loss of identity. TT-MMBN-297
Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. TT-MMBN-11
These new forms - television and radio - are new languages. They're huge extensions of ourselves which enable us to participate in one another's lives, much as language does. But these forms lay down their own ground rules; the modes of participation are already built into the technology. There are real, rigid art rules, for each form. The fact that we have many media now enables us to leap across the barriers from one form or one set of rules to another. And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, the servo-mechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them he is beginning to awaken. Because he can't live with them all. PR-MM-366
T. S. Eliot's famous account of "the auditory imagination" has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world. PT-MM-18
During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a question that admits of a wide solution. UM-MM-19
It is equally conceivable that the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls, might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960's. UM-MM-123
To put the matter abruptly, the advertising industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society. Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. UM-MM-202
For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting. UM-MM-222
Many may think that we are now safely ensconced inside a utopian kingdom like Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme, the fantastic world of do-as-you-like. In fact, we have now to replace nature itself, remaking it as an art form perfectly accommodated to the totality of human needs and aspirations. Such an enterprise requires nothing less than inclusive awareness of human resources and limitations. Man-made nature, fashioned according to life as art, may tax human creativity far beyond anything levied on presatellite man. Having engineered into existence this giant rim spin around all human transactions, we now have to discover the means of adjusting the speed of this spin in order to accommodate the responsive spins of all the components.
As concertmaster, satellite man would have to audition such selections as the Manhattan Project with exquisite prescience of "audience" effects. The "audience" of satellite man includes the "actors" and is not merely human but consists of all the resonances awakened everywhere. Satellite man no longer inhabits visual space, but a resonating acoustic space whose boundaries are nowhere. Today, he is an information hunter in ECO-land. TT-MMBN-294&295
But like Shakespeare and Chesterton, Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language. And it was years after he had begun the Wake before he saw that the babble of Anna Livia through the nightworld of the collective consciousness united the towers of Babel and of sleep. In sleep "the people is one and they have all one language" but day overcomes and scatters them. IL-MM-46&47
For the electric puts the mythic or collective dimension of human experience fully into the conscious wake-a-day world. Such is the meaning of the title Finnegans Wake. While the old Finn cycles had been tribally entranced in the collective night of the unconscious, the new Finn cycle of totally interdependent man must be lived in the daylight of consciousness. GG-MM-319
Today, when we live in a time of sudden transition from mechanical to electric technology, it is easier to see the character of all previous technologies, we being detached from all of them for the time being. UM-MM-299
Just why we are no longer content to leave our experience in this subliminal state, and why many people have begun to get very conscious about the unconscious, is a question well worth investigation. People are nowadays much concerned to set their houses in order, a process of self-consciousness that has received large impetus from photography. UM-MM-172
Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. UM-MM-56
Since the advent of TV, the exploitation of the unconscious by the advertiser has hit a snag. TV experience favors much more consciousness concerning the unconscious than do the hard-sell forms of presentation in the press, the magazine, movie, or radio. UM-MM-202
All technologies are collective unconscious. All arts, science and philosophy are anti-environmental controls that are ever merging into the environmental and losing their power to create awareness of environment. When arts fail to cope with the environment by being anti-environment then there can be a shift to a rapid succession of innovations as ersatz anti-environments. CB-MMHP-31
Humanism, as a practical way of describing such notions of Freedom/Necessity, begins with attention to the creative individual, whose inventions make general progress possible. Freedom means initially the conditions favorable to the discovery and propagation of new fundamental laws, new ways of doing things, by individuals. Humanism is therefore also occupied with the conditions required to produce such gifted individuals, the material and political conditions necessary to produce the numbers and varieties of gifted individuals society requires for maintaining the necessary rate of general progress. As a corollary, humanism is also occupied with the material and political conditions of the population more generally, its mobility, cultural development, and material preconditions of cultural development: that new inventions might be realized for practice by a general society culturally qualified to assimilate the conceptions involved in such practice. BP-LL-43
The evolution of man is absolutely contrasted to the existence and behavior of any of the lower beasts, chimpanzees included. In the lower beasts, including the higher apes, virtually no alteration in the range of behavior occurs progressively from generation to generation. The per capita caloric throughput and the rates of potential growth of that species of biomass material are essentially fixed - at least in range. With man, the physiology of creative mentation, exhibited in a more rudimentary fashion by Koehler's chimpanzees, has led to deliberatively synthesized new technologies, equivalent in effect to a species' deliberatively turning itself (by will) into a higher species (higher negentropic values). It is, indeed, man's study of his own progress through such processes of deliberation which makes possible and is scientific knowledge. BP-LL-45
Reductionist psychology locates the primary data of mind in mental events which exhibit the form of logic, in terms of discrete images or psychological material susceptible of being made conscious in the form of discrete images. Like logic, reductionist psychology accounts for the motivation of those images (elements) in terms of metaphysical notions of relations (e.g., "instincts", "drives", etc.). Even those forms of radical behaviorist psychology which pretend to deny the existence of "drives", "instincts", etc., do nothing more than rather hysterically ignore the necessary implicit assumption of such axiomatic "drives" in their schemas. We insist, on the basis of the kind of evidence cited, that the process associated with creative mentation is the "primary substance" of the human mind, and that all other mental phenomena are determined (subsumed) by those primary processes. BP-LL-45
A certain crude, empirical conception of physical science did of course exist prior to and following Kepler, but the advantage of Kepler over, for example, the outlook of Galileo is qualitative, not one of degree. Before Kepler, as with those who maintained or regressed to the pre-Keplerian thrust toward empiricism, the notion of the study of the regular order of nature was "pluralistic". Various categories of phenomena were treated as if separate categories of the Divine Will, within which narrow confines man could explore regularity through observation and experiment, hoping thereby to adduce the specific regularity of God's Will (Dispensation) for such classes of phenomena. Kepler cut through such pathetic forms of inquiry, specifying that the entire universe was subject to a single principle of lawfulness, which subsumed all other, more particular forms of law. Kepler expressed this view in the argument that God's infinite (i.e., unique, comprehensive, existent) Will was rational, i.e., susceptible of being mastered as human knowledge of even human individuals. BP-LL-46
This has the most profound implications. From this standpoint, we cannot regard great art of any medium as either mere entertainment or indifferent to scientific criteria. Art, as a medium for the concentrated expression of the creative faculty by artist and audience, addresses itself to that in the individual which is human, those qualities of mentation upon which the advancement of society, even the mere perpetuation of society, depends absolutely. To the extent that any form of art contains and expresses creative activity of the form of Freedom/Necessity, it is a special and indispensable form of universal labor; the artist, as the great abstract mathematician does in a different way, arouses and shapes new creative powers in the audience at the same time his work celebrates and strengthens those powers which are already matured.
By contrast, any art which is merely an application of established artistic canons, mere repetition of sensuous gimmickry without creative development (bestialized art: e.g., Rock, "socialist realism", etc.), is anti-human, reactionary. Art could not be a matter of personal taste-preferences; it is not personal tastes which properly judge art, but art which judges the mental condition reflected by the symptomology of taste. To the extent that any individual prefers Rock or serial-composed music to Beethoven, that evidence alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the individual has been bestialized in his self-estimation; no person could "enjoy" Rock or regard serial-composition as honest music unless his alienation had become sufficiently pathetic that he no longer even desired to recover those human qualities he has been denied. As for the person who "likes both Beethoven and Rock", that is sufficient, too, to prove that he has lost the power to listen to the content of Beethoven's music. BP-LL-53
In the composition of poetry, a similar process applies. The initial conception of a great poem exists for development as a mood and a snatch of some line, usually the opening line. The conception of the whole poem exists at the initial point of elaboration as a kaleidoscopic fabric of feeling-states, a would be Gestalt of such feeling-state patterns identified by that bit of thematic line. This is the subject of the poem. The poet unfolds the poem from this, words marching in phrase-groups, feeling-states and feeling-state clusters seizing upon the appropriate cathexis which comes to the fore from unfolding association with the thematic snatch of line. The end-result has ostensible symbology, metrical and other prosodic subtleties, such that from those isolable features foolish, banal critics may indeed attempt to fashion a logical interpretation, but their effort is pathetic. The intent of the poem's elaboration was to communicate to the reader the Gestalt from desire for which the elaboration began for the poet. This is more emphatically the case for great music - as we have already emphasized.
The primary feeling-state is love, the affective content and form of recall of the creative process itself, the invariant human quality of the mind. To understand the dynamics of love, one begins by inquiring as to what practical expression can be given to the direct calling forth of the universal for all particular expressions of social creative activity. Every detail dissolves; the mind is dissolved into pure creative ferment, the universality of the creative act. What, then?
We have emphasized that thought is the demand for an act. The omission of the act for the thought is a denial of the reflected benefit of the act for the identity, and correspondingly a dimunition of the identity. The force (emotion) of the thought would therefore seem to be in direct proportion to the force of reaction against the sense of identity (anxiety) experienced by frustration of the act. Experience substantiates such an hypothesis. Furthermore, it is demanded that the act must be in proportion to the force of the thought.
Then, what is the act corresponding to the "pure emotion" of love? What, but the intensely sensuous concretized celebration of creative sociality in general? The mood must seize upon a concrete individual as its object. Either a concrete universalizing (social) creative act - as a great work of art, or sensuous loving of a concrete (universal) person. BP-LL-84
The most efficient way in which to identify the distinctions to be made is this. In abstraction of ordinary consciousness, the control of mental productions and communications is associated constantly with notions of one's self. Perhaps the individual ordinarily does not reflect on this, and ordinarily is therefore usually unaware of the existence of these executive controls; it is not difficult to provoke such awareness (indeed, a skillful operator in a "therapy group", or in any group which can be directed to act as a "therapy group", can readily force the attention of virtually all participants to such "feelings" very quickly. Once one has done this several times, the ability to replicate the effect becomes almost automatic.) In ordinary states, the form of these notions of ego-ideals is what one would best describe as feelings about attributes of a monad-like "little me". In general, the instant one succeeds in "cutting through the persona" of an individual to force his reflection on these "feelings", the usual sensation experienced by the "opened-up" individuals is "I am a fraud". ("Original Sin"?) There is a more or less immediate recognition that the self one presents to the outer world is a synthetic character, a mere persona, a manufactured (e.g., artificial) product created for the propitiatory edification of the credulous. Thus, one's self as presented to the world is not "the real me", not the "soul". Very quickly the affected individual can begin to discover and detail "how I operate". Accompanying this enlarged awareness there is usually a growing depression, associated with the sense that the "real self" is a kind of monad, a "little me". The fact that such a monad could only be an empty construct forces the individual to regard the criteria "by which I operate" as necessarily the only existent qualities attributable to the "little me". Consequently, these being the same qualities associated with the production of the "fraudulent outer self", the persona, the "little me" is a degraded thing, intrinsically "unloveable". ("How could God love my miserable little soul?")
At bottom, in this respect, the effort to get at the "inner self" brings us, in the ordinary case, to a little hard ball, a monad of sorts, from which apparently emanate the qualities, the "feeling-states", "instincts", etc., which one otherwise encounters in cathexis in consciousness and semi-consciousness. Ostensibly, any effort to probe the self more deeply, to "get within" the monad, results in locating only an "it", an Id. In fact, precisely such results can actually be obtained.
When the same self-analysis is effected in the case of individuals in a state of self-conscious creative production, the phenomena of the monad are not obtained. The ego-ideal and the notion of "inner self" are instead united in a single quality. Examined more superficially, one could obtain the apparent result emphasized by Kubie. At first inspection, the idea of creative activity for its own sake is the ego-ideal, a form whose content is the activity of "negentropic synthesis" itself. Accordingly, if one studied artistic and other personalities who are merely creative, or only yet potentially self-conscious, one would tend to concur with Kubie's argument that the creative process must be regarded as a virtue in itself. BP-LL-78&79
What is thought? It is the judgment which is regulated by the increase or decrease of the sense of identity. One acts not merely to attain fixed objects, fixed sensuous acts, but to obtain those objects, actualize those thought-acts which mediate an increased sense of identity. In the pathological state, the force of judgment is regulated by an internalized babble of images, dominated usually by the mother-image. With small effort, one can bring up the mother-image either re-enforcing or reducing the sense of identity as an immediate regulator of "sincerity of feeling" in the adult. It is the same in politics.
In this sense, the neurotic adult must be systematically regarded as a pseudo-adult - either as the victim of individual neurosis or of that collective neurosis recognized as bourgeois ideology. His sense of identity is pathologically determined by childish fantasies, and not by self-consciousness of his positive basis for adult existence. By contrast, the revolutionary is essentially the only true adult by contrast with the pseudo-adult children about him. The neurotic loves his wife as a surrogate for his mother; the adult loves his mother and father not as internalized images, but as actual human beings, and loves his wife as an actual human being in her own right. He has put aside his mother and father, who become specially-loved peers on the outside of his identity, and locates his identity in the adult woman who has become the focus of his sense of identity. SI-LL-46
In the case of the individual clinging to the bourgeois infantile ego, either through the mediation of the mother-image or the love-object of a banalized sexual relationship, the experiencing of even a significant outpouring of the fundamental emotion is an experience of psychological near-death. The "threat" of the emotion is associated with the shrinking of the ego down to a "point", surrounded by a "Schwaermerei" of fragmented thoughts and feelings. In such instances, where they occur in a clinical setting, the problem is resolved by bringing the self-conscious identity to "wakefulness" at the same time that the individual is disassociated from whatever infantile preoccupations are causing strong attachments to the infantile ego.
One should add, for emphasis, that there is a direct connection between this sort of phenomenon and the remedying of even severe psychosomatic illnesses. Intestinal psychosomatic involvements and migraine headache syndromes are among the most accessible to remedy in this way. (Indeed, the variety of disturbances falsely deemed of organic etiology which are susceptible of remedy or significant improvement through analysis indicates that psychosomatic medicine is of far greater importance and engages much more of the realm of "organic" disorders than is usually admitted even by professionals. If the "organic" problem can be remedied or checked by psychoanalytical clinical methods, then the case for its probably psychosomatic origins has been strongly made.) The link between psychological disorders and somatic disorders shown to be connected to this psychopathology is through the mediation of the fundamental emotion, which is obviously linked to proprioceptive and ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone) dynamics. SI-LL-63&64
There is no intrinsic "competition" between man and the biosphere of which he is a hegemonic part. Quite the contrary. The phenomena of "ecological crises" which we witness today are accounted for primarily by the dysfunctional primitive accumulation characteristic of capitalist development, and are not intrinsic to the industrial expansion and technological development otherwise characteristic of the social-reproductive process.
The development of society has brought us to the point, during the past ten thousand years, that human social-reproductive processes have taken over the biosphere to the extent that the very existence of that biosphere depends essentially on its willful maintenance and development as a part of social-reproductive processes. The notion that the ecology would prosper if man were to abandon it to freely resume some hypothetical "wild, natural" state is a simpleton's absurdity. Pull man out of the ecology, and a disastrous ecological collapse would quickly ensue.
Man has transformed the biosphere from a pre-human lower level of negentropic values to higher forms. In this process the earth has been transformed from a lower level of existence as a wild state into a higher level as man's garden. The higher state of the ecological processes represented by that garden could not have developed without man, and cannot maintain themselves without appropriate human activity. Remove the gardener or reduce his gardening activities to a level below that required, and the garden will deteriorate. To remove man or reduce his role is to deprive the biosphere of the key species on which the balance of ecology depends.
The problem is not maintaining the garden in some fixed present state. The present ecology as a whole is subject to the same essential principle as the first phases of the development of the biosphere. The free energy characteristic of living forms demands that the process of further development must continue or the ecology must turn into an auto-cannibalistic phase. Since the only means by which the ecology generally is able to effect the necessary progress is its human agency, a reduction in the negentropic activities of mankind (such as putting society into a "zero" state of negative, auto-cannibalistic reproduction) must result in a corresponding onset of auto-cannibalistic processes in the biosphere generally.
The general way in which ecological auto-cannibalism occurs is well known. It is broadly analogistic to the heuristic outline we gave for economic auto-cannibalism. The weakening of the conditions for the maintaining of higher forms of life in the ecology shifts the ecological values to emphasize the proliferation of relatively primitive forms which mediate the obliteration of the thermodynamically doomed higher species. The actions of insects, fungi, bacteria, and viruses as lower forms performing this mediating entropic function of auto-cannibalism are generally known, the elaboration of that here would be more entertaining than essential.
The essential point is that for thermodynamic auto-cannibalism, the process of decay is not a matter of the appearance of just one mode of auto-cannibalism. The action of the initial mode is to reduce the thermodynamic value of the ecology as a whole, lowering the "temperature", and shifting the mode to a lower, less efficient form of auto-destruction, and then to another. Like the economic model for fascist economy, the process of ecological auto-cannibalism is a chain-reaction. RF-LL-31&32
Reductionist biology locates the evolution of the species in the isolated biological individual, a hotly defended opinion in defiance of the relevant empirical evidence. An array of species (to put the point in broad terms) corresponds to a negentropic state of an entire ecology. The effect of shifts in populations of included varieties is to alter the negentropic state for better or worse. (The analogy to variations in specific commodities is slightly strained but not otherwise inappropriate.) An adverse result lowers the negentropic state, with corresponding effects on the plenum of species; an enhanced negentropy mediates further variations, which mediate further variations. Thus, the universal, the entire biosphere or specific ecology, mediates its own negentropy through the determination of the individual variety.
In economy, the determinant of negentropy is immediately located in the single creative individual. This individual is variously creative either in synthesizing new conceptions whose realization increases the negentropy of the economy as a whole, or "more passively" develops conceptions which enable him to master the conceptual innovations created by others. The material-cultural conditions of life determine the kinds of creativity of this import available to the society. In this way, realized inventions, by enhancing the negentropy of general material-cultural existence, foster the advancement of the creative powers of the population, which is then a potential for new inventions which are realized as further advances in the material-cultural negentropy of the society as a whole. CT-LL-4
Obviously, not every invention which might be made at any point is a useful solution to the problem of technological progress. Not only must the amount of useful energy per capita be increased by inventions, but we have to compare such an increase with two offsetting increases in cost of production. First, the cost of labor per capita is increased doubly: the ratio of productive workers from the entire population is reduced, in tendency, as by increasing the years for child-rearing, and the rate of consumption by each individual is absolutely increased in energy equivalents. Second, there is generally an increase in the absolute cost (energy equivalent) of maintaining the means of production. If we designate the cost of labor from households by its equivalent for a capitalist economy (V=Variable Capital) and the cost of maintaining means of production in a similar fashion (C=Constant Capital), and the residue after meeting those prime social costs as S or social surplus, we have again the now-familiar expression, S'/(C+V). The invention which satisfies necessity for development must at least maintain the value of that free energy expression, which it cannot accomplish unless the innovation has the universal content (as a reflexive chain-reaction) of an impulse for an exponential increase in that ratio.
Except to the extent that any society exists by looting nature without developing an equivalent resource, or that one section of society exists by looting another, exponential expressions for an increase in the impulse-value of the ratio S'/(C+V) are ultimately in correspondence with what we shall term a trans-invariant or "world-line" for human progress. Those innovations which satisfy that invariant or characteristic requirement have the effect of representing evolutionary solutions for the perpetuation of human existence. They have, therefore, the immediate content-value of free energy expressions satisfying positive exponential values for functions of S'/(C+V). These innovations satisfy the requirement of negentropy, and satisfy the rigorous definition of what we otherwise term freedom. RF-LL-33&34
The Three Levels of Human Consciousness:
Simple Belief is the level of individual judgment defectively based on narrow experience and informed chiefly by prejudices and mythologies, corresponding to the "man of woman born" of Christian doctrine, and the image of "donkeyness" common in the Renaissance. It was illustrated by Renaissance humanist artist Albrecht Durer in his Offer of Love, 1495.
Understanding is the level of judgment which comprehends fixed categories of scientific knowledge, corresponding to Christianity's enlightened state of knowledge effected by the Holy Spirit (Logos). Illustrated by a Durer woodcut showing two artists studying perspective, from his 1525 Treatise on Measurement.
Socratic Reason is knowledge based on the self-conscious comprehension of the process which characterizes the historical progress of scientific knowledge, a process identified in Christian theology with atonement in outlook with the Godhead, the creator. The humanist Durer depicted this level of mentation in his 1514 print, St. Jerome in His Study. SE-LL-13
The point of the Platonic dialogue is not to compare different views; if one attributes such a trivial significance to the Platonic dialogue, one condemns oneself to benighted ignorance forever. The object is to make one's own consciousness an object for, a subject of one's willful consciousness, to make consciousness an object of willful consciousness for itself. SE-LL-28
It is the ordering of the evolution of human culture according to the principles internal to scientific progress which is the primary feature of competent historiography, the standard of reference with whose governance we comprehend inclusively the failures of human history.
The key to scientific method, and thus to the mastery of both science and history, is the method of the Platonic dialogue. This is also properly termed the dialectical method, as such a method is associated with Thales, Heraclitus and Plato. SE-LL-36
The Platonic method rightly distinguishes three qualities of knowledge, mental levels, among people.
The first, lowest condition of the human mind is the level of simple belief, belief premised on popular mythologies and prejudices, and on the state of ignorance concerning individual experience otherwise known as "common sense".
The second, next-higher level of knowledge is equivalent to the condition of understanding defined by Immanuel Kant, the mere understanding. Persons at this level have consistent knowledge of the ostensibly lawful features of practice in certain, various categories of human practice in general. This is a condition corresponding to the lowest level of what may be termed scientific knowledge. Such persons do not know why such categories exist, or how or why the ostensibly lawful principles appropriate to such categories are determined. They have merely practical knowledge of consistent cause-and-effect features of practice in those categories of experience in which they have been educated.
The third, highest level of human knowledge is reason, otherwise termed Plato's Socratic reason. It is only on this level that truth can be efficiently comprehended.
The knowledge of the two lower levels is necessarily mythological, false, or, as Spinoza specifies, "fictitious".
For such reasons, the Platonics judged mythologies twofoldly. All mythologies they knew to be inherently false (fictitious), but no person could rise above mythologies except by attaining reason. Therefore, in dealing with masses living at the inferior levels of mental life, it was deemed necessary to deal with them on the terms of mythological beliefs. The issue of practical politics therefore took the task-oriented form of distinguishing among destructive and useful mythologies. Those forms of simple beliefs or mere understanding which tended to allow society to move in directions otherwise required by reason were deemed the tolerable class of mythologies. Those other mythologies, which tended toward evil consequences, were evil beliefs, which must be fought accordingly.
It is impossible to understand the central doctrinal issues among leading Christian theologians, from the apostolic period to present times, without taking that Platonic view inclusively into account. These theologians have been concerned for themselves and for determination of policy with the issues of truth according to reason. They have been, at the same time, otherwise concerned with popular mythologies, respecting chiefly whether this or that popular belief led away from or toward the realization of the dictates of reason. Although the objective has been to bring all of mankind into the state of reason (atonement), for immediate purposes the rule has been that this effort must be situated within terms of the problem defined by the simple beliefs of the ignorant.
The Aristotelians and their heirs, notably including Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther and the Presbyterian leaders, had and continue an opposite policy concerning mythologies. The original Aristotelians were the intelligence-services arm of the oligarchies jointly controlling the court of Philip of Macedon and the contemporary Persian court of that time. Their objectives were to stop technological and scientific progress, and to create zero-growth synthetic mythologies as the simple beliefs of the ignorant masses. These efforts they regarded as the means to establish permanent world-rule by a landlord-based oligarchy, deemphasizing cities in favor of the countryside, and maintaining "Malthusian" zero-growth, antitechnology policies against scientific progress. They have not altered that method or purpose to the present day.
The innermost belief of the leading Christian theologians with access to reason is typified by the outlook of the famous Abelard of the eleventh century A.D. Where strict Aristotelians argued that God made himself impotent by creating inalterable laws for the universe - and hence only omniscient - Abelard defined the function of man's existence according to reason to be the helper of God in the continuing work of creation. Abelard located lawfulness in the lawfulness governing the ordering of continued creation. The exact opposite position was classically argued by the twelfth-century Bernard of Clairvaux, a point of importance we shall cover in the course of this report. SE-LL-12,13&14
Again, the only aspect of human consciousness which is in correspondence with such a transfinite - or transinvariant - principle of the universe, is the quality of progress in human scientific knowledge, rather than any specific, subsumed scientific knowledge as such. The adducing of that principle, in turn, provides the methodological principle for ordering thought to the effect of willfully "energizing" the progress of scientific knowledge. That is the method of rigorous hypothesis. That is the meaning of the dialectical method, the method of rigorously developing valid hypotheses.
The method employed is the Platonic method of negation, as applied from the standpoint of the level of reason. The method of negation means to isolate those axiomatic fallacies of existing knowledge (understanding) which bear upon crucial-experimental problems confronting us. The qualitative elimination of the axiomatic fallacy permits the defining of experiments which can be represented in terms of quantitative relationships. The essential, underlying test of the validity of an hypothesis (as an hypothesis) posed in this way, is the test of whether the hypothesis, if successfully demonstrated, implies a means for increasing the negentropy of human practice.
Such hypotheses are defined by Riemann as "unique hypotheses". Their distinction in effect is that they test the laws of the universe for a category of knowledge, rather than merely testing the applicability of extension of established principles to a problem without involving a testing of general laws. Such hypotheses are more commonly, less rigorously, termed "crucial-experimental hypotheses".
In the case such an hypothesis fails experimentally, no loss. The failure of the hypothesis narrows qualitatively our approach to the axiomatic fallacy it attacked, and thus acts as positive progress in knowledge for attacking that axiomatic fallacy in a more effective way. SE-LL-59
One cannot spin out concrete physics from a philosopher's chair. The relationship of philosophy to physics is, more narrowly, to discern which philosophical statements by physicists are intrinsically, methodologically absurd. On the positive side, given adequate knowledge of physics to date, philosophy shows us how to select the experimental conception which will be most fruitful in gaining the next step of progress in mastery of the principles appropriate to physics. That, in general, is all that philosophy can accomplish with respect to positive sciences. That is all, but that is indispensable to the progress of science. That is the means by which the approach selected by the creative scientist is properly determined - just the approach, just the indispensable matter of approach.
The case of the electron paradox is appropriately illustrative. Confronted with a problem involving "elementary particle" experimentation, knowing that the electron doctrine of accredited physics is intrinsically absurd is representative of that kind of philosophical knowledge which guides the experimenter to the most fruitful experimental hypotheses. That illustrates the method to be applied in a more generalized way to order the progress of science in general.
Reason, which is definable in a consistent way in principle over the ages, is thus a kind of "constant". However, reason is not otherwise constant, not linearizable. As it assimilates to itself the fruits of its own accomplishments in mastering the lawful ordering of the universe, reason develops itself in its particular powers. In this process of self-development of reason, mediated through the practical scientific progress effected by efficient action of reason, reason parallels and intersects the fundamental, also self-developing, lawful ordering of the universe. SE-LL-66
Over the years, the question often arose, what is the basis in authority for imposing certain criteria of hypothesis upon work in the physical sciences. To this question, the consistent answer given was, and rightly so, the proof of that method in political economy. The fact that the order of the universe appropriate to the above-indicated features of the physics of Riemann has been crucially proven once in the domain of political economy proves also that the entire universe is ordered according to such principles. Political economy, viewed and developed in that way, is the highest form of science, the crucial source of authority for scientific knowledge in all domains.
The crucial experiment upon which human knowledge is essentially dependent is human existence itself. Since all particular knowledge is ultimately and necessarily superseded, no form of knowledge as such (understanding) can embody proof of the validity of scientific knowledge in a lasting way. What is proven by human existence is the efficiency of creative reason in ordering the progress of knowledge to the effect of maintaining and advancing the human species's ecological population-potential. It is as political economy situates the direct connection between progress of knowledge and changes in the ecological population-potential of human practice based on advancing knowledge, that the essential connection is made, and uniquely so. It could not be otherwise. SE-LL-68&69
Poetry (and great musical composition) is the concentrated expression in communicable forms of the most direct and intense expression of synthetic a priori mental activity - preconscious creative activity. For example, Poe's explanation of the composition of The Raven in his essay, The Philosophy of Composition, is identical in outlook with Beethoven's method of musical composition.
Continuing with the moment that thought whose name is sought in memory is still "on the tip of my tongue", this condition is not merely the desire for a thought, it is the Gestalt form of a definite thought. It is a definite thought, distinguishable from other preconscious thought, and able to recognize appropriate predicates (words, communicable images, and so forth). It is a universal with respect to all the predicates which might properly be attached to it. It is the interplay of two or more preconscious Gestalts which selects predicates determined by their conjunction, their interplay - an interplay which is also a Gestalt.
This configuration leads to orders of such Gestalts, orders which are in correspondence to George Cantor's notion of transfinites.
It is the reality and power of preconscious thought, that conscious thought is merely the ordering of communicable images of communication and other practice by preconscious thought, which makes the preconscious processes empirically recognizable as the "self", the inner mind. It is the preconscious processes of mind which define the ambiguity and agreement of the terms "mind" and "soul".
There are, however, three qualities of "souls", as Plato's Socrates, in particular insists. In the doctrine of "Phoenician lies", the lowest order of souls are "iron souls", the next higher order, "silver or bronze souls", the next higher order "golden souls". Poetry is the language of "golden souls". But that is to disguise the truth of the matter by "Phoenician lies".
The three qualities of souls - lies put aside - are the infantile or Dionysian, the adolescent or Apollonian, and the adult-human or Promethean. These are otherwise expressed respectively by irrationalism-Sophism-Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and Platonism-Neoplatonism. In Poe's satire against the traitor Martin Van Buren, Mellonta Tauta, the three qualities of soul are respectively characterized by the method of crawling (Baconian Hoggishness, or inductive method), by the method of creeping (Aries Tottle, or deductive method), and by the method of soaring (Platonic method, or reason).
The Platonic method - the method embedded in the Platonic dialogue - is a rigorous method for evoking creative mental activity to act upon the preconscious processes to the effect of transforming the infantile mind into the adolescent mind into the adult-human mind, to transform the sense of personal identity and world outlook from the existentialist to the Kantian to the Platonic-Neoplatonic, to the condition of reason.
Reason is nothing but the creative mental process (preconscious creative activity) deliberately conscious of itself. Those are no mere words, represent no mere construct. That is an empirically demonstrable actuality. That is the subject of poetry.
Preconscious processes in one person do not communicate preconscious conceptions directly to the preconscious processes of another person. They communicate indirectly; their communication is mediated. Words, communicable images are the forms of the mediation. Poetry and musical composition ordered by Platonic-Neoplatonic principles are the fundamental modes of intensified communication our species has developed for achieving the relatively most immediate kind of mediated communication among the preconscious processes of persons. PP-LL-8,9&10
In other words, a society characterized by zero technological growth as a policy of general practice is a dying society, a form of society morally unfit to continue existing. Repetition of modes of production and related cultural practice inherited from fathers, grandfathers, and so on, is the distinguishing policy of a dying society. For this and related reasons, all economic analysis and policy-shaping premised on systems of simultaneous linear equations, such as those proposed by the late John von Neumann and others, are worse than absurd.
Conversely, a successful form of society is characterized by technological progress. Such progress is the characteristic feature of the total activity of the labor force of that society. Technological progress is the precondition even for merely maintaining a fixed constant value of potential relative population density.
However, to overcome absolutely the apparent limits to growth associated with the "natural resources" of a fixed range of technology, there must be technological revolutions periodically, through which leaps in potential relative population density occur. Moreover, technological progress always tends to cause a net increase in the required social division of total labor, which in turn signifies an increase of population - and therefore of population density. Thus increase of potential relative population density is the irreducible datum required. It is human activity integral to effecting that increase of potential which is the irreducible definition of human activity.
It is that specific, irreducible datum of human activity which correlates directly with those qualities of the human mind which distinguish humanity absolutely from the beasts.
This "economic" form of human activity is mapped to the activity of the human mind by aid of Plato's conception of the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. From the standpoint of hypothesis (e.g., rational problem-solving activity of the mind), the human mind has three distinguishing possible states: (1) Simple Hypothesis, (2) Higher Hypothesis, and (3) Hypothesis of the Higher Hypothesis. These are summarily defined as follows, using modern language.
Simple Hypothesis. On the lowest level of human problem-solving (rational) activity, we attempt to comprehend a problem by aid of the assumption that prevailing opinion is broadly correct. We seek to describe the problem considered in a manner which is credible and acceptable to either prevailing assumptions of general opinion, or the body of opinion associated with some chosen professional or other peer group of reference. This is what is sometimes described as an "other-directed" state of mind, which limits one's self-approved thoughts to such thoughts one imagines to be approved among neighbors, family, prevailing authorities, and so forth.
In scientific work, the peer group of reference is one's old university professors (who awarded one the social, professional status of a scientific degree), one's professional peers (as typified by co-workers and referees of professional publications), current or prospective employers, and so forth. The prevailing (e.g., textbook) lattice-work of algebraic formulations, and the axiomatic assumptions directly or implicitly underlying such lattice-works, are accepted as broadly inalterable, and similar assumptions are made bearing on prevailing professional opinion in the specialized domain of experimental practice in which the problem treated is assumed to lie. The formulation of the simple hypothesis seeks consistency with such lattice-works.
Persons in this state of mind will never discover anything of useful importance bearing upon fundamental issues of scientific knowledge. Worse, they will be hostile to creative discoveries, no matter how exhaustively, conclusively demonstrated, and will have enormous difficulty in attempting to master such discoveries. If obliged by pressures of practical circumstance to employ such a discovery, they will attempt to explain the discovery away, to reject the method by which the discovery was actually formulated.
Higher Hypothesis. In this approach to problem-solving, the thinker rejects the "other-directedness" of simple hypothesis. He is interested chiefly in those kinds of experiments which test one or more of the underlying, axiomatic assumptions of prevailing opinion, and expects to be able sooner or later to overturn one or more of such assumptions through a "crucial" experimental demonstration. This creative thinker is inherently an "iconoclast" in the eyes of his "other-directed" fellow professionals, and they "philistines" in his eyes, as such were in the eyes of Plato's Socrates. He is "inner-directed"; he must prove everything for himself, especially those features of the logical lattice-work of established opinion which are underlying, axiomatic.
The formulation of the higher hypothesis is best accomplished by a thorough education in the internal history of ideas, especially scientific ideas, with reliance upon the original sources of the present and past. This historical approach to contemporary scientific work emphasizes those kinds of axiomatic assumptions which are ontological, which bear directly on identifying which aspects of the universe as a whole are properly treated as efficiently substantial, and also how such ontological assumptions implicitly determine the method of adducing the lawful principles governing action in the universe. From such an historically-informed vantage point, the thinker is able to recognize that the elaborated logical lattice-work of the algebraic formulations associated with some branch of scientific inquiry is a kind of "hereditary" elaboration of the axiomatic ontological-methodological assumptions which underlie those constructed edifices of algebraic formulations. From this vantage point, the thinker is enabled to recognize that certain classes of experimental problems put an entire edifice of that sort into question, that certain classes of experimental problems, properly defined in that light, have implicitly a "crucial", or "revolutionary" significance for scientific knowledge in general.
So, the formulation of a higher form of experimental hypothesis is addressed to some selection of empirical evidence, evidence which is appropriate to prove whether or not certain prevailing assumptions of scientific work must now be overturned in order that scientific (and, technological) progress might continue. If this experiment is successful, a greater or less scientific revolution - or, the equivalent in some other aspect of knowledge - results. If this occurs, the entire edifice of mathematical knowledge resting hereditarily upon flawed assumptions collapses, and a new, replacement edifice must be constructed according to the hereditary implications of the newly proven principle.
In the final analysis, the question whether such experimental proof of a new principle is valid or not, is determined: does this discovery implicitly lead to an increase of the potential relative population density of society? Does the discovery effect an increase in mankind's per capita power over nature as a whole?
There are many false discoveries which purport to be of this form. Everywhere, this or that anarchist whose ego has been inflated by a little professional learning, prankishly deludes himself that iconoclasm for its own sake, merely being eccentrically different, constitutes valid discovery. The case of so-called modernism in art today, or nineteenth-century romanticism, is illustrative. Fellows who have never mastered Albertian perspective, to say nothing of Leonardo's system of convex-spherical mirror projection, delude themselves that childish smears, echoing infantile smearing of feces on walls, constitutes an expression of "creative freedom". In music, those who have no comprehension of the principles of coherent contrapuntal development (such as that of the post-1782 Mozart or Beethoven), delude themselves to surpass the classical masters by the anarchistic chromatic imbecilities of a Liszt or Wagner or the irrationalist nihilism of Webern and Schoenberg. In scientific work, such feces-smearing artistic productions would be regarded as the bungling of illiterate tinkerers.
In significant degree, the toleration of such artistic and social sciences frauds by society today echoes a breakdown in primary and secondary education. If students today were educated at standards of classical education associated with the eighteenth-century French-Italian Oratorians, the leading schools of the young United States, or the Humboldt program in Germany, the graduates of secondary institutions would already possess a much higher degree of education in fundamentals than is commanded by more than a tiny minority of professionals holding terminal degrees today. The steeping of the student in the original classics, beginning with Greek classics, is not unnecessary exposure of the student to dead languages and "outdated" opinions. It is affording the student both a familiarity with the past 2,500 years of development of the ideas of Western civilization, and the power to think of ideas in terms of universality and historicity. Out of such education emerges a sense of rigorous thinking, the power to discriminate between new eruptions of what has been proven trivial nonsense many times in the past, and genuinely new solutions to problems left unresolved from the entirety of whole spans of work of mankind up to the present.
For example, all fundamental accomplishments in modern European mathematical physics over the recent five hundred years are derived most directly (hereditarily) from the work of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. Cusa's adolescent training was under the Brothers of the Common Life, education based on rigorous reworking of the classics prior to mid-adolescence. Cusa's principal discoveries in science centered around his thorough reworking of the writings of Archimedes, most emphatically Cusa's rediscovery of the isoperimetric principle of topology as a superior approach to that of Archimedes in treatment of the problem of quadrature of the circle. The genius of Karl Gauss, the greatest thinker of the past two centuries, is typified by and centered in his thorough reworking of the work of Kepler. In Georg Cantor's Grundlagen, in which Cantor summarizes the solution to comprehension of transfinite manifolds, Cantor devotes much of the writing to reviewing the preceding centuries' work in that same direction.
The work of formulating valid higher hypothesis is not less rigorous than that of formulating simple hypothesis; it is far more rigorous, more demanding upon the historical education in depth and concentration span of the investigator.
Once one has worked through one such discovery (as the author experienced this in the culmination of five years of work in 1952, in his fundamental discovery in economic science), one has broken through into the inside of the matter of method, and from that vantage point, to descend once more into the lower realm of simple hypothesis is like eating bad dishwater for soup. The term, "genius", for persons associated with fundamental scientific discoveries, is an unfortunately mystical, and therefore wickedly misleading choice of term. "Genius" is learned, as a development of a potential inherent in every newborn (biologically undamaged mental apparatus) human individual. Depth and width of development of that potential, strongly motivated "inner-directedness", and the experience of one good, worked-through true discovery, are all that is required to bring forth such potentialities in almost any human being.
From this vantage point, we must view as criminal the educational policies associated with John Dewey, and the more radical steps in the same direction fostered by the National Education Association under influence of the National Training Laboratories during the more recent decades. Where proper education might have produced legions of true "geniuses", we permit our children to be encouraged in irrational infantilism, to "protect them" from the "oppression" of rigorous development of their creative potentials in depth and breadth of classical and pre-science education, and to deny them the development of that rational maturity indispensable to survive psychologically as adults.
Hypothesis of the Higher Hypothesis. The fact that successions of higher hypothesis (scientific-technological revolutions) prompt increase of potential relative population density of society, implies that such a succession of scientific revolutions has an ordered character. In other words, the succession of higher hypotheses subsuming such an ordered succession of scientific-technological revolutions has an ordered character. This defines a new experimental problem for hypothesis, the experiment which isolates the consistent feature of successive scientific revolutions, the common principle of discovery uniting revolutions which are otherwise different. This defines an hypothesis of the higher hypothesis.
Just as no experimental hypothesis can be the last word in human knowledge, the same is true for successful hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. It cannot be perfect, and it need not be perfect. It is required that the successive improvements in this hypothesis successfully direct man to the needed next step upward through scientific revolutions.
It is in this latter activity, successful testing of the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis, that true human scientific creativity lies. This is the irreducible feature of human mental activity which distinguishes man from the beast, the irreducible datum of a science of the human mind. SM-LL-6,7&8
First, let us consider the issue in terms of a purely formal problem.
Either the whole of musical development represents a coherent domain, and this coherent lawfulness is therefore the primary reality of music, or the notes of the twelve-tone scale are the self-evidently "atomic" sensualities of music. If the former, then the notes are determined in value by the requirements of a system which is coherent with respect to all of the lawfully ordered development within music. If the latter, then the values of the notes, as self-evident "atoms" of sensuality, can be determined by any variously arbitrary or consistent standards apart from music. In the latter case, music is axiomatically degraded to a matter of sensual effects.
The former standpoint is the Platonic (or, Neoplatonic) epistemological standpoint, as exemplified by Plato's Timaeus. The latter standpoint is that of Aristotle and his successors, and coincides with the classical arguments of the British Secret Intelligence Service in adopting Rameau as its prophet during the British monarchy's attempted inquisition against J. S. Bach during Bach's period at Leipzig.
The Aristotelian standpoint was also the common standpoint of Goethe, Mendelssohn, and Richard Wagner, among others, in those persons' philippics against the line of development of musical composition exemplified by Beethoven. The same issue was reflected, although in an often confused form, in both of the principal Wagner controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, between Wagnerians and Brahmsians, in the once case, and Wagnerians and Verdians in another. Although both Brahms and Verdi reflected the depressing influence of the romantic decay of nineteenth century musical (and other) aspects of European culture, relative to the Wagnerians they were the sane currents, and represented to that extent a continuation of the thrust of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, et al.
From the Platonic standpoint, the notes of the well-tempered system are ephemerals. The student must not be left misguided on the significance of that term. "Ephemeral" is not equivalent to "sloppy", "arbitrary", "illusory". Indeed, individual life is an ephemeral in the whole development of humanity, yet an individual person is not only definite, but what he or she may do to secure a meaningful place in the process of human development as a whole is also a definite matter. The notes within a well-tempered system have a determined, exact value as notes. There is no caprice, no margin for indifference within the range of audible discriminations, or within a tolerable range of beats produced by the variation between produced tones of the same nominal set of values.
When we insist that the values of notes are ephemerals, we are merely insisting that the values of musical notes are not determined a priori, independently of music. We are merely insisting that the principles of lawful development necessary to effect beauty within musical composition rigorously determine the values of notes, with no obligation to any aprioristic assumption of what those sensual values must be independently of beautiful music.
From the standpoint of the Aristotelian and irrationalist (empiricist-positivist) schools - such as the Frankfurt School's protege Arnold Schoenberg, downward through Webern into Stockhausen and John Cage - the values of the notes are either properly determined as if they were self-evident atoms, prior to any musical consideration, or purely arbitrary valuations might be given to them. IG-LL-9
Themes in music are as lines to a poet. They are musical ideas, even on the level of primitive culture's comprehension of music. A theme must "parse", it must have the preconscious form of a musical-idea utterance, such that the mind seizes that utterance as a gestalt, something corresponding to a musical-idea statement in and for itself. The process of composition then presents the mind with an ambivalence. Each of the musical-idea statements subsumed in the developmental process is at first glance an ordinary musical-idea statement. Yet it is also essentially something else, a mere predicate of the developmental process whose meaning is essentially the latter. It is the polemical struggle within the mind between the two kinds of meaning which is the musical experience of the audience.
However, to put the composition together as a unity, the mind must subordinate the theme-by-theme hearing to hearing the developmental process. The simple statement corresponds to ordinary knowledge, the developmental process in a great musical composition corresponds at best to the higher hypothesis of Plato. Hence, the difference between the master of existing musical knowledge, Johannes Brahms, and the creator of new musical knowledge, Beethoven. Brahms is satisfying as a composer because he achieves lawful creative processes of musical development; he is uninspiring, relative to Beethoven, because Brahms's mastery of music seldom touches those processes which correspond to the higher hypothesis. Brahms is to Beethoven as Immanuel Kant stands as a poet with respect to Friedrich Schiller.
This sort of use of predicated objects to force the mind to a higher-order process-conception is identical with the notion of higher hypothesis in Riemann's great habilitation paper and the notion of transfinite in Cantor's work. Process-conceptions occur as distinct mental notions in terms of transfinites, as Cantor defines transfinites. The higher hypothesis of Plato is the highest-order transfinite possible in Cantor's implicit schema. Conversely, examining the lawful ordering of Bach's well-tempered system from the standpoint of both Beethoven and Cantor's notion of transfinite orderings, we have a more advantageous standpoint from which to comprehend both the general principle of the well-tempered system and contrapuntal methods generally.
What defines the well-tempered system for al-Farabi and his European followers through Beethoven is not the matter of agreement of tones as such. The well-tempered system is defined by the process of musical composition under contrapuntal rules. Counterpoint within any lawful ordering within modes leads inevitably to juxtapositions which are paradoxical: they contradict the apparent law and yet they arise through the realization of the law under contrapuntal conditions. These paradoxes are dissonances - lawful dissonances, or singularities within the domain of law. These cease to be unlawful if they are properly developed as transitions to other modes. Hence, the system of law within composition is not conserved except by allowing for the implicit, concurrent existence of every other mode within each mode. The well-tempering principle is determined by this principle of necessary agreement. The values of tonalities are those which admit of coherent lawfulness within the process of musical composition as a whole.
Music is not located in the physiology of a human ear, or the neurophysiology of the acoustico-lateral lobe; music is located in the creative-mental processes peculiar to the human being. It is as music is defined accordingly that the distinction between the human and the bestial in various proferrings of so-called music is determined. This was understood by Plato, by al-Farabi, by ibn-Sina, and by their European continuators.
The distinguishing feature of rock, of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and other aspects of the guitar-strumming "modern folk-song" cults is that they combine monotony with arbitrary dissonances. The "modern folk-song" side of this overall spectrum is the most boring sort of monodic strumming, relieved scantily by occasional transpositions. The addition of the arbitrary dissonance, sometimes merely whining or cacophonous bellowing into a microphone, is the element of "personal style" - irrational idiosyncrasy - added on the tensible pretext of relieving the internal monotony of the rest.
There is no doubt that a gifted chimpanzee could replicate every cognitive aspect of this sort of performance. In a chimpanzee, the spectacle would represent - in brief, occasional zoo exhibitions - a certain kind of achievement, at least to the purpose of clarifying the cognitive levels of an Elvis Presley, a Bob Dylan, or of any one of a large accumulation of grunters, strummers, and squirmers - of bedrockers. CM-LL-23
The higher formal ordering of joking, as we identified it above, is suggestive of the principles of creative genius. By being made conscious of lawfulness in the use of a good joke to bring forth important conceptions simultaneously in the minds of a substantial portion of a definite audience, the person experiencing that awareness is made conscious of lawfulness in the ordering processes of his or her own judgment.
Thus, a poor joke - or poorer joke - is one which simply plays upon the ambiguities of simple consciousness, without structuring the experience to bring into play a forced reflection on a process of a lawful ordering of insight.
What is required is a truly great joke: art. This must be a quality of joking one qualitative level higher than the evoking of self-consciousness by good joking. Instead of being merely conscious of the lawful ordering of one's preconscious processes, one must have a great joke which prompts one to be aware of a lawful principle for transforming those preconscious processes.
This achievement brings forth the laughter of great, fundamental scientific discovery. This brings to consciousness a knowledge of the lawfulness of those mental processes by which one may willfully effect a qualitative advancement in one's mental-creative powers. PC-LL-20
By wide-ranging observations and measurements, Leonardo da Vinci and his physicist collaborator Luca Pacioli, demonstrated that the morphological patterns of living processes were harmonically ordered according to convergence upon the principle of the Golden Section. Leonardo applied this knowledge to his design of machine technologies, where the principle of the Golden Section and self-similar spiral rotation is used to concentrate the power and increase the energy-flux density of the machine, thus accomplishing work. Leonardo recognized that the same principle of negentropy governs the lawful development of the physical universe and the human mind. SM-LL-5
Formal algebra, like syllogistic systems, is based on the function of the middle term. This middle term has the associated significance of stating such things as "equal to", "identical with", "not part of", "part of", "greater than", "lesser than", and so forth. The objective of formal mathematics of this sort is to assemble all knowledge, or at least a great part of it, into one gigantic, continuous syllogism, such that one might trace one's way from the subject of a single syllogism, by way of middle terms, through every syllogism in that entire part of human knowledge. In other words, a syllogistic lattice-work.
All knowledge, or purported knowledge, of this syllogistic form, is either anarchistic nominalism, such as the irrationalism of William of Ockham, or is formal nominalism, like that of the neo-Aristotelian scholastics. The one is Dionysian, the other Apollonian; both are pure nominalism, noun-ism.
The practical issue is posed by stating that the nominalist approach chooses nouns as the data of experimental inquiry, whereas the negentropic approach chooses data of the form of verbs.
In the latter method, the verb "to be" adopts the self-reflexive transitive form of itself: "to cause itself to become". This is another way of stating the verb "to create", or to "cause to exist". Wherever the verb "to cause" is employed, the meaning of that verb is referenced "hereditarily" to the verb "to create", "to cause to exist", and to the ultimate verb, "to cause itself to become". All verbs, at least as they are employed to define data of scientific thought, must be defined by the hereditary principle of connection to "to cause itself to become".
Insofar as this pertains to the work of classical philologists, we leave the rest of that aspect of the discussion to them, to report how these principles may be located within Sanskrit writings, or at least some among them, and the form of classical Greek used by Plato. Having identified this aspect of the point, we proceed onward. SM-LL-24
The relevance of the subject of well-tempered scales to our general sub-topic here is that the author and his collaborators have demonstrated that the discovery of the well-tempered principle depends upon the point of departure of a conception equivalent to the isoperimetric principle, and is determined precisely by projection of a self-similar conic spiral onto the circular base of the cone. The implication of this demonstration is that such notions arise "naturally" from applying the verb "to create" to a rigorous study of astronomical evidence. Although we can merely infer, if rigorously so, that ideas in this direction were implicit in the pre-Vedic arctic culture, we have more precise indications to related effect from the interaction of the Egyptian temple of Ammon with classical Greek culture, as well as leading internal features of Mosaic Judaism. The specific kind of monotheism of both the temple of Ammon and Moses converges, at least, upon the consubstantial doctrine of monotheism of Plato's Timaeus. The essential part which the notion of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis performs in the Timaeus, and the interdependence of that with geometrical notions rooted in a version of the isoperimetric principle is rigorously demonstrated.
It is only necessary, if we are to make such argument conclusive, to show that in Plato's classical Greek, for example, the verb "to be" is sometimes employed in the self-reflexive form of "It causes itself to become". If physical geometry is defined by a notion equivalent to the isoperimetric principle, and if the evidence so ordered is defined as data from the standpoint of the verbal, rather than the nominative form, the rigorous development of astronomy for aid of wide-ranging navigation is adequate empirical basis for discovering the existence of a monotheism like Plato's from the evidence of nature.
This is not to project such an advanced form of monotheism upon the pre-Vedic arctic civilization of interest to Tilak. It is only to indicate that such an urban maritime culture was on the track leading toward such advanced notions. Otherwise, it indicates the reasons why the development of the well-tempered system in music tends to reflect the course of development in such directions.
In the same vein, we must compare the degraded conception of man and nature embedded in the writing of Hesiod with the heroic conception of man of the Iliad and Odyssey, the latter conception better, more clearly defined by Aeschylus. Aeschylus's Prometheus rejects the evil gods of Hesiod's pantheon as usurpers, and references a higher power, implicitly the Composer of Plato's Timaeus. It is provocative to read what Diodorus Siculus reports the ancient Atlas people to say of the Hesiodic pantheon, that all these supposed gods were nothing more than a principally rascally collection of fellows whose civil strife destroyed the culture of the urban maritime colonization of their region. As corroborated by Manetho's king lists for Egypt, the victorious scalawags of that ancient Moroccan strife employed their maritime culture to colonize regions of the Mediterranean, imposing the worship of their ancestors and associated mythologies upon the credulous subjects of these colonies.
The Hesiodic pantheon was evil enough. The substratum upon which that pantheon is superimposed embodies the essential evil, the anti-Logos principle. This substratum is the Chaldean-Philistine system associated with worship of the earth goddess (Shakti, Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, Cybele) and her phallic-symbol son (Siva, Osiris, Satan, Dionysos) and also with a third male figure (Horus, Lucifer, Apollo, etc.). This substratum is the irrationalistic, hedonistic doctrine of "blood and soil". Together, the Hesiodic sort of pantheon and the substratum, define the characteristic theology of oligarchical culture. The Hesiodic pantheon symbolizes the capricious tyrannies of a degraded, squabbling collection of families of an ancient "jet set". The philosophical world outlook congruent with such ordering of society is the degraded belief-structure exemplified by the cult of Isis-Osiris-Horus.
The contrast between the Promethean man of Judeo-Christian monotheism and the degraded man in the alternating images of Apollo and Dionysos, is paradigmatic for the deeper study of cultures. The first approximates a culture based on the principle of the Good, the latter cultures based on the principle of Evil. The development of mankind according to the ordering principle provided by the first coincides with the cited injunction of the Book of Genesis: mankind must "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it". The fulfillment of this injunction is measured as increase of potential relative population density. The study of advances in technology, by means of which this injunction is fulfilled, compels us to probe the principles of discovery common to successive advances in technology. This obliges us to advance toward discovery and mastery of the notion of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis.
Good is the principle of beauty and love, akin to the joy of a child in discovering new knowledge to replace earlier beliefs. Joy and beauty are a world of such surprises, a world of ironies which are beautiful because they are lawful. This beauty is a sense of freedom. Not freedom to violate the law, but freedom to discover the limitless advancement of human knowledge and of the human condition available to mankind through mastery of the law.
Evil is the principle of the wicked child's rage against the parents who threaten to "interfere" with the impulses of infantile, irrationalistic hedonism. Evil is therefore essentially hateful against Reason and all that Reason implies; it is the dionysian terrorist's hatred against Reason and against the urban culture which destroys the bestial freedom of fang and claw of the wilderness. Evil is Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Good in culture is the rule of prometheans over the apollonians and dionysians. Good in the individual is the subjugation of the evil of infantilism within himself - the enslavement of the Apollo and Dionysos within himself. On this account, the Good culture is "authoritarian" in the hate-filled eyes of the Nazi follower of Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, "authoritarian" because it represents Reason's "suppression" of infantile bestiality, irrationalism, by Reason. To all good men, a society according to the model of Sparta - the freedom of the beast unleashed in the form of man - is an evil tyranny, from which mankind must be liberated. So evil modern men, like Nietzsche, hate Friedrich Schiller, hate Socrates, and are determined to eradicate from culture the image of Jesus Christ, as Adolf Hitler was so determined.
Human culture is primarily the struggle of Good to eradicate Evil from this world. It is not a Manichean struggle, to be foreseen as alternate periods of rule by Apollo and Dionysos over endless eras. It is a struggle to eradicate Evil from culture, and to eradicate therefore cultures which are evil. It is at the same time, a struggle to define the process by which the evil of the newborn infant, that infant's irrationalistic hedonism, is brought under the control of and ultimately destroyed by the spark of the divine, the potential for Reason in that same infant.
It is in that latter respect that the principles of culture, as we have thus far described those principles, determine what is more or less conventionally identified by the term culture in scholarly opinion. Culture is the elaboration of a principle, which principle is more or less Good or Evil, to shape both the education of the infant, child, and adolescent in society, and to shape also the body of ideas of practice which the adults employ to educate the young. Culture is essentially the development of the potentialities of the new individual, essentially through his or her sixteenth to eighteenth birthday, as Wilhelm von Humboldt's program for primary and secondary education addresses this principle. Otherwise, culture is the developing body of ruling ideas, according to this principle, which governs the aggregate practice of a society composed of individuals whose potentials have been developed in that way.
The general approach required for a science of culture applies the conceptions we have thus far developed to the outline afforded by Dante's Commedia, together with other writings focussed upon the same issues. What culture is, is measured first by finding the place on the "ladder" of the Commedia on which that culture is located, and at the same time, determining whether the motion of that culture is up or down the ladder. SM-LL-42,43&44
A fixed culture is at once characterized by codes of conduct which are on relatively higher or lower rungs of the ladder as codes of conduct by the group within society, such that a group within the lower rungs of "Purgatory" of this sort is to be preferred to such a group on the rungs of the "Inferno". Yet, the relatively moral grouping of such fixedness is at best deceptively moral; it is incapable of true love, as a cultural type, and is moral only by means of negativity - Kant's negation of the negation - and is therefore a society which often uses its morality as a license for great, immoral acts of cruelty in the name of punishing offenders who breach the code. It is a society which keeps order by keeping its members in pigpens, moral pigstys called "homes" usually. It is either a dionysian society, as a society of Raskolniki (Old Believers of Russia) must be, or an apollonian society of bestial Cadmuses wearing their Sunday clothes on way to church meeting. It is English Victorian society, which butchers and loots entire colonial nations, but which renders outcast a woman who shows an ankle in public, or a man who speaks publicly of the fact that ladies also walk on legs. It is like the society of Lady Chatterly, a respectable British lady with certain habits which are not made public by gentlemen. It is an apollonian sort of Victorian society whose characteristic collective productions are the sodomic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, theosophical Lucifer-worshipping cults, John Stuart Mill's doctrine of irrationalist hedonism (utilitarianism), and the dionysiac Fabian Society of philosophical mass-murderers H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and so forth.
The divine spark of humanity is development congruent with the principle of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. The moral potential so expressed, moral as it is adopted as the central principle of social identity by societies, by cultural currents within society, or by individuals, is the characteristic feature of the sense of personal identity - to greater or lesser degree. It is the absence, or suppression of that spark which is evil.
The individual's moral conflict with his peers presents us, in the extreme, with two opposite moral types, the potential martyr and the criminal personality. An individual who rises morally above the potential of an "infernal" or lower rung "purgatorian" society or peer group, is much like the legendary "ugly duckling", as if a creature of a higher moral species than those among whom he or she is immediately situated, an "eccentric", whose supposed "eccentricity" is feared as an alien thing among the peers. Without a social mooring in a peer group appropriate to his or her moral nature, the "ugly duckling" will become "eccentric" in fact; lacking a peer group of reference, corresponding to his or her moral sense of identity, the "ugly duckling" will tend to construct an arbitrary culture as an individual, a culture which is for the "ugly duckling" the establishment of a culture superior to that of the immediate peers. The individual dionysian - the anarchist or existentialist personality - will also tend to create a "sub-culture" with reference to the peer group, by negating the authority of whatever morality happily characterizes the peer group; he acts against morality because it is morality, out of rage and hatred.
The second principal class of conflicts between individual and peer group are of the form of conflicts between the individual's family household and society. This may be rooted in the differentiated morality among the households of a social stratum which otherwise participates in a common ethic. The most notable problematic features of such conflict are those rooted in the infantile personality's attachment to the "oedipal" image of the mother, either an actual mother or a transference of the idea of "mother" to an adopted surrogate, assigning this surrogate value either to a personality or a mere fantasy construct. To the infantile mind, "mother" protects the infantile ego from the obligation to be weaned socially. As long as the individual's sense of identity is "I am my mother's child", the authority of the infantile ego, the rejection of the social responsibilities of the weaned adult, is sustained. Most psychotic and neurotic behavior has, of course, this characteristic pathogenic core. This latter is the root of anarchism, existentialism, and so forth, as the autobiographical writings of the late Jean-Paul Sartre rather obscenely illustrate the point of connection. The pathological droolings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, or of Voltaire, exhibit the same pathology most shamelessly. The reek of incest in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky, is also illustrative.
A special case of this pathological influence of the idea of family is provided by the oligarchical family's rearing of its offspring. The idea that such families are "the best people", destined to rule over their inferiors, and the placing of the capricious will of such family as a matter of imagined right over society, is nakedly Hesiodic. This applies not only to nominally aristocratic families of such dispositions, but also large strata of the U.S. rentier-financier patrician class, the so-called blue bloods.
The republican principle, that all persons qualified to be citizens are politically equal as persons, members of the highest social rank tolerated in society, is not a "democratic" principle, but a political principle rooted in the harshest requirements of morality. Granted, societies require elites, but this only to the degree that someone must take efficiently leading responsibility for uplifting the majority of society not only to the moral qualifications of true citizens, but to assume the rights and responsibilities of true citizens. The republican elite never considers itself biologically superior to the rest of society, but only as the most dedicated servants of the betterment of society as a whole. In the families of such republican elites, the rearing of the child is directed toward successful weanings, as John Adams prudently entrusted the adolescent education of his son, John Quincy Adams, to the greatest republican figure of that time, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, this to the great benefit of the United States at a later point. By contrast, the oligarchical individual is a permanently infantile individual, by virtue of the idea associated with the "family". The similarities of the typical oligarchical mind to the criminal mind are functionally determined. SM-LL-47&48
Over the past four centuries, reductionist natural science has been mobilized on the side of political reaction at each moment of revolutionary social upheaval: Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century against the English Revolution, Buffon et al. against the French Revolution in the 18th century, Malthus against the rising British proletariat in the first half of the 19th century, Darwin and the social Darwinians in the second half of the 19th century against the First International and the Paris Commune, German-Italian fascist science in the first half of the 20th century against the Russian Revolution and upsurge in the advanced sector, Rockefeller-fostered "Zero Population Growth" in the last decade against the imminent potential for world revolution.
In each instance of conjunctural crisis, the underlying terror that there is "no way out", i.e., the absence of a conception of man's creative potential to determine "progress" beyond the crisis point through scientific breakthroughs and social organization on a higher level, expresses itself in the political motif of "Every man for himself". Science as it exists for the mind of the empiricist, the mind which denies its own coherency, at such moments exposes its underlying vicious ideological prejudices by "coming out" of the laboratory - onto the side of reaction. SB-WH-13
The key is the measurement of usable energy available per square kilometer. The level of biological reproduction potential is determined by the minimum value reached by a continuous supply of usable energy per capita. In what aspect of food gathering culture at the most primitive level is the supply of usable energy for human existence sufficiently concentrated to permit qualitative increase in population density? The answer is fishing, especially fishing near the mouths of important river systems.
The sequence of human development commonly given by anthropologists is: (1) hunting and gathering society (primitive society), (2) animal husbandry, (3) small garden patches supplementing animal husbandry, (4) agricultural revolution, (5) "hydraulic" society - urban culture based on water management near the mouths of large river systems. The Diodorus account and other evidence already cited give a different sequence: (1) fishing, (2) maritime culture leading into fixed urban settlements based on development of navigation through aid of astronomy, (3) development of the agricultural revolution by urbanized maritime society, (4) collapse of wide-ranging maritime culture shifting the center of culture to a culturally lower level based on development of "hydraulic" societies around colonies of the collapsed maritime culture. SM-LL-41
The same sort of paranoid games apply to most forms of popular dramatic entertainments: novels, movies, plays, TV dramas, and - most emphatically - "soap operas". The ordinary "formula" or "Plotto" sort of dramatic entertainment so popular on TV is a half-way case between paranoid-schizophrenia and the ordinary neurotic perception of events. Their value for the neurotic is both catharsis and, equally important, suggesting new fantasy-material to the observer. Literary, drama, and TV critics may be regarded as the Duncan Hines's of the masturbation circuits.
The best qualified CIA "covert operations" planning executives are to be found among hack paperback novelists and TV dramatists. The credulous neurotic projects reality onto the banal stage and TV screen "productions" because of his strong desire to believe that the combination of painted backgrounds, papier-mache, costume, and montage has such reality. There is no way in which to conceal repeated "covert operations" unless the public wishes to be credulous. Give that public a fantasy of the sort to which it is susceptible, and no amount of mere fact will easily dissuade the majority of such persons from believing in whatever illusion the covert operation is designed to create. The application of the calculated deception of the successful hack novelist and dramatist to the so-called "documentary film" and "non-fiction expose" is the connecting link between outright pornography-writing and the techniques for designing a CIA-type "covert operations" scenario. (If, by chance, a covert operation is "blown", the CIA's obvious remedy is to prompt one of its subsidiaries or sister-agencies to whip up a fresh expose of the CIA! Give the credulous public a "believable" expose scenario and the expose provides a deeper cover than the original plot itself.)
It is not accidental therefore that the leaders in all branches of psychological warfare have included leading dramatists, novelists and newspapermen. The accumulation of "organic" knowledge of what will effectively induce the public to deceive itself - the normal practice of the successful fiction-writer and journalist - represents a developed talent out of which both "white" and "black" propaganda can be shaped, and from which can be developed the scripts in which news media and "covert operations" specialists combine their roles to create an artificial reality for the gullible. All Anglo-American psychological warfare operates as the peddling of paranoia. The artisans of this craft often have no real knowledge of the mental processes on which they are operating; they merely have certain talents which have been shown to be workable. RF-LL-59&60
Having now established that Woodward's Veil is an artful blending of fact and fiction, I come to the main purpose of this book review. Woodward employs the "Fleming effect" to accomplish more than to simply falsify particular U.S. covert operations. The selection and arraying of facts in the book as a whole, is a gross misrepresentation of the way in which intelligence operations work.
I concede that many of Woodward's facts about U.S. operations are true, like an artist's colors used to produce a painting. It is the painting produced with those colors, which is false. I also not only concede, but stress, that the false picture painted is only partially the result of Woodward's conniving. On one level, the lower level, Casey did understand the detailed side of covert operations; on the higher level, professional Casey was the bungling amateur we recognize him to have been in reviewing the net result of his reign as CIA director. Woodward deliberately misrepresents only those mechanics of covert intelligence operations which Casey understood very well. On the higher level, Woodward's misrepresentation is a reflection of his own self-confident ignorance.
The postwar U.S. intelligence community, like that of Britain, has been a parody of the mythical gods of Olympos. The intelligence community as a whole is run by invisible men and women, chiefly men and women who hold no official position inside government. Advisory committees, such as the old "Forty Committee", Reagan's PFIAB-IOB, and so forth, are merely reflections of the overall direction by an establishment which exists independently of the control of elected government.
This establishment is a pastiche, somewhat like the late Meyer Lansky's corporate form of direction over U.S. organized crime, of various factional elements among "the gods of Olympos". The establishment reaches decisions which determine the fate of individuals, governments, and nations. The official intelligence community merely executes the collective decisions reached within this establishment.
The resulting situation properly reminds us of Aeschylos' Prometheus Bound, and also of one of Goethe's most successful poems, his Prometheus. In Aeschylos, Prometheus warns the gods of Olympos, that there is a real God, and that the Creator's world has embedded within it laws which shape the ultimate doom of whoever sets himself up as an Olympos in defiance of the Creator and His laws.... So, under the establishment's rule, intelligence functions on three levels: 1) the choices of policy-directions by the higher echelons of the establishment itself, from which a man on Casey's 1981-87 level is absolutely excluded; 2) the shaping of the implementation of establishment policy directives by committee-like formations composed of the designated representatives of sundry factions of the establishment, into which Casey was integrated; 3) the shaping of implementation by somewhat free-wheeling intelligence "barons" at the level of Casey and below.
A Casey would receive directions from the highest level, which he could not challenge. He could participate in the shaping of policy on the second level, and would carry out the choice of implementation of policy which was adopted at that level. Within the limits of that decision, a man at Casey's level had wide latitude to do almost anything he could get by with, within understood guidelines.
Woodward's book addresses only the third, lowest, of these three levels, and generally runs to the underside of that level.... On the lowest level, most current U.S. intelligence operations are pure "psy-ops" (psychological-warfare operations). On this level, the lower-ranking people, such as liberal news media journalists or entertainment media people, carry out the psy-ops, while the higher-ranking circles on this operational level plan and coordinate the psy-ops operations. ER-LL-29,30&31
The peril this nation is imminently confronted with, in fact the peril to the whole human species, is nothing less than complete elimination of what mankind has historically regarded as its soul. Our brainwashers are proposing the complete extirpation of mankind's inner sense of identity, and the placement, in the vacant space, of an artificial, synthetic pseudo-soul.
Before you howl "incredible!" you ought to review the technical study that was prepared in May 1974 by the Stanford Research Institute, whose contents were later used in popularized form in Marilyn Ferguson's book.
The study is entitled Changing Images of Man, Contract Number URH(489)-2150, Policy Research Report No.4/4.74, prepared by SRI Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, Director. Dr. Harmon later personally coached Marilyn Ferguson in writing her popularized version, The Aquarian Conspiracy. The 319-page mimeographed SRI report was prepared by a team of 14 researchers and supervised by a supervisory panel of 23 controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence and others.
The study begins with the argument that the fundamental self-conception of mankind, the "image" that mankind has of itself, determines the behavior of mankind. To change mankind's behavior from industrial progress to "spiritualism", one must first force a change in mankind's "self image".... The report asserts that in our present society, the "image of industrial and technological man" is obsolete and must be "discarded".... The image of man appropriate to that new era must be sought, synthesized and then wired into mankind's brains. The SRI report conducts a summary review of the "dominant images of humankind throughout history" from 250,000 B.C. to the present. It identifies 19 "images of man" that dominated in various epochs. From each one of those it extracts such features as are useful in replacing the "industrial-technological image". Totemism and identification with animals in the Upper Paleolithic era is reported useful today; the "farmer son of Goddess earth" of the neolithic era is useful; the Sumerian image of submission to ruling elites must be retained in the postindustrial image; the Old Testament image of man having "dominion over nature" is dangerous and must be dropped; the Zoroastrian image needs to "be worked on"; the Indian image of yogi is good, will contribute to the "self-realization ethic"; the Chinese Confucius image will contribute to the "ecological ethic" of our future society; the Greek dionysian/mystical image can contribute to deemphasize material overconsumption; the Greek apollonian image can help combat the "technological ethic"; the Christian image of the New Testament must be reworked; the Christian image of the Gnostic Gospels can contribute a new "self-realization ethic"; but, the image that emerged from the Italian Renaissance, the "economic man", individualist, rationalist, materialist, seeking objective knowledge, this is inappropriate and must be discarded. AC-CFL-11&12
Now, re-examine the same historical connection from the vantage-point of our earlier discussion of curvatures of physical space-time. Let us recognize thus, that the approximate simultaneity of the collapse of the Anglo-American and Muscovite economic systems shows the convergence of effects of the two systems sharing in common certain among the most flawed axiomatic assumptions implicit in each.
The history of European civilization, including the post-1492 Americas, is essentially, as Schiller portrays this, the struggle of republicanism (such as Solon's reforms in Athens) against the barbaric heritage of ancient Mesopotamia, usury-ridden oligarchism. British philosophical liberalism, the root of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mills, and Smith's "moral philosophy", and of eighteenth-century British (Haileybury) political-economy, is in all essential features, a utopian pantheistic ethical dogma, modeled chiefly upon pagan imperial Rome, but also upon the ancient, pantheistic Delphic cult of Gaia, Python-Dionysus, and Apollo. The principal forerunners of Delphic oligarchism in Ancient Greece, is the so-called "Babylonian" model of ancient Mesopotamia and Canaan.
To adduce the relevant common axioms implicit in the collapses of the British and communist political-economies, it is perhaps sufficient to compare British and communist dogmas of national and super-national economic practice with the following reference-points in ancient and Renaissance history. We begin with the succession of usury-caused collapses of the ancient Mesopotamian "bow-tenure" system of agriculture. We include reference to the circumstances of Solon's anti-usury reforms in Athens. We examine the crucial, related issues associated, successively, with the Flammarian and Gracchi reforms of pre-imperial Rome. We include the process of collapse inhering in the axiomatic features of the pagan imperial Rome of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, and Diocletian.
We examine the reasons for the upsurge of economic power generated by the Golden Renaissance, and view this with a reflection upon the great enterprises set into motion by Charlemagne earlier.
Two opposing features of these cases are emphasized: the role of usury, and the issue of increase of the per capita productive powers of labor, scientific and technological progress.
The forms in which usury's systematic taking of unearned income (i.e., "theft") occurs may be reduced to three general sub-classifications. First, there is simple usury : payment taken on account of debt, whether the original principal amount of that nominal debt may have been created in payment of money or real value advanced, or simply imposed upon the debtor either by fiat, or kindred means. Second, there is the role of monopolies (e.g., the international grain cartel), in exacting usuriously unearned income from both producers and consumers of some essential commodity. Third, there are the sundry guises of ground-rent usury. We include among these the evolution in the modern British model of central banking, and related forms of public indebtedness, from roots in ancient (e.g., Mesopotamian) tax-farming.
We counterpose earned profit of physically productive enterprise to the merely nominally "earned" profit and interest of usurious activities. We explain the necessity and functional basis for this distinction. SC-LL-37
The problem of scientific development in the setting of mathematical physics is a useful point of reference.
The most wretched fallacy which might be introduced into creative scientific work is the notion that platoons of scientists working according to predetermined specific objectives are the "most efficient" mode for progress. In fact, such procedures or bureaucratic measures to similar effect, are the most certain means for minimizing the gains of progress so undertaken.
The process of conceptualization by which new scientific achievements are generated is an individual activity. Not only must the thinker be afforded the opportunity to think without interruptions or other interference for protracted periods, but he must have means for "toying with" experimental approaches as certain features of his individualized creative activities demand. (Demand that he delay this until his duly-elaborated proposal has been approved, and the progress of fundamental scientific work virtually ends until such a silly bureaucratic control practice ceases.) To all immediate practical intents, the processes of creativity are contained within the person of the thinker and cannot be reduced to an externalizable "division of supervised labor" form without destroying their integrity.
This is not the complete picture. To the extent that self-consciousness is developed in creative personalities, there is a fruitful increase in the degree of communicability between the creative aspects of the mental processes of all involved. This is not a dissolution of several creative intellects into one larger mass, but represents a more frequent intersection - through which the partial progress of one collaborator stimulates new directions of mental activities among the others.
The particular creative discovery is, in every case, the private impassioned agony of the individual working in some degree of isolation. The activity of synthesis which every relatively negentropic Gestalt represents is uniquely coextensive with the individual's cognitive processes, which cannot be directly merged in their primary form with the similar processes of other individuals. "Interruption" and "distraction" are terms which traditionally express the destructive effects of intrusion into the necessary privacy of the creative process.
The creative individual's effort in any new undertaking begins with tugs at a few elusive clues of incommunicable prescience. The thinker seldom begins with any better assurance of a definite kind of success than the certainty that the effort will be fruitful if pursued long enough with sufficient intensity of concentration. Creative discovery is in this sense a process of exploration of unknown territory, for which a sense of direction, broad training and resourcefulness are the essential prerequisites. At the beginning, there can be no maps in existence of that which is to be explored, nor can one establish any meaningful schedules concerning one's intended arrival at definite new discoveries in particular.
During the ensuing process, the thinker's initial partial successes do not appear as definite solutions to a preestablished problem, but only as new ways of considering a problem, or the importance of a certain detour, or a new overview of the entire nature of the problem to be solved, or solutions to problems which had not been considered relevant to the original undertaking, and so on. In between each moment of articulable progress in this experience, the ongoing process assumes forms which are indispensable to accomplishment, but are not susceptible of direct social expression.
Although creative work is uniquely individual in those repects, it is the most social of all activities. The development of the mental processes in preparation for creative work is entirely social. Not only are the actions impinging upon the individual's development social, but the content of this influence reflects the internal geometry of society. In fact, it is to the extent that the individual apprehends his experience in just such terms that he is orienting the results of his experience for fruitful creative efforts. Similarly, the definition of problems requiring solution is determined by social criteria, as social criteria on the broadest scale of reference determine which hypotheses represent probable insight-solutions to these problems.
The distinctive outlook of the creative thinker is associated with the extent of its scope of reference in respect to the much greater breadth of its current relevance and its historical setting. The conceptions and principles of scientific work are the accumulated accomplishment of approximately six centuries of European progress since the early period of the Renaissance. They have been evolved under the impact of changes in technology as such and changes in the social relations through which technology is realized. The characteristic interchangeable terms of creative effort are "universal", "fundamental", and "revolutionary". RF-LL-85&86
With that said, let's turn our memories to March 23, 1989, when two of the world's leading authorities in electrochemistry, Professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, issued the shattering announcement that they had achieved nuclear fusion of hydrogen isotope deuterium in a room-temperature environment by means of an experimental apparatus which might fit upon a kitchen table-top. After a few stunned outcries of admiration and curiosity from some circles, the subject of cold fusion and the hundreds of cold fusion scientists, have been subjected over the past two-odd years to one of the nastiest political witch-hunts in recent history.
Today, nearly 30 months after the first cold fusion announcement, the findings of approximately 600 scientists working in various parts of the world, is that the essential original claims of Professors Fleischmann and Pons are validated. Whatever the cold fusion experiments lead us to discover in the end, it is clear now, that the cold fusion experiment is what science calls a crucial or unique quality of discovery. It is the kind of discovery which will force much of the physics textbooks to be rewritten sooner or later. EI-LL-59
The point so illustrated, is that the idea is not contained within the explicit communication. Rather, the communication is a more or less reliable guide, as a key to a locked compartment, to the secret of the message. The receiving mind does not "decode" the message. Rather, the receiving mind relives - "unlocks", in a sense - the sequence of mental actions prescribed as the explicit message (geometric construction is an example of this). It is the interior of the creative processes of mind, in response to the stimulus represented by the message, which regenerates more or less faithfully the concept which prompted the sender to compose the selected set of instructions which are aggregately the relevant working-content of the message itself.
To oversimplify, without doubt, the relevant features of the process of communication are aggregately devised, by the sender, to set up the receiver's state of mind in such-and-such a combination of ways. Thus, respecting the essential idea to be regenerated in the mind of the receiver, the message is not the medium. SC-LL-56
In a planetary village of contemplatives, nature could be great, the machines tiny, and man in just proportion between the two. No longer need there be economies of scale in which massive amounts of fossil fuel are used to grow wheat in vast acreages so that huge trucks can burn gasoline to take flour into the enormous cities where great factories can make Ritz Crackers that can then be trucked again to the airports so that jumbo jets can fly them down to Venezuela where multinational forms of advertising can convince the peasants to abandon their locally made tortillas in favor of the creations of Nabisco. No longer would Madison Avenue heat up the economy so that shoddily built goods with built-in obsolescence could destroy nonrenewable resources and produce disastrous pollution. In industrial society, you are what you own. In contemplative cultures, your being is the source of your identity. Contemplatives need less, consume less, and therefore can produce less. No man need labor eight hours a day at the same dreary task of putting a door on a Cadillac. In industrial culture, poverty is a disgrace; in contemplative culture, poverty is the elegance of simplicity. As long as we continue to live in industrial culture, we will need an authoritarian government to control unemployment, create jobs, subsidize the auto industry, and strip-mine the Dakotas so that America can become one continental Los Angeles. If we have a spiritual transformation and create a meta-industrial culture, the drastic solutions of mass government will be unnecessary. EW-WT-99
When God created the world He divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. The human body is a recapitulation of this principle of order, for the body itself is the firmament which divides the waters of the brain from the waters of the genitals. Because of the sacred numinosity of the waters, all the fluids of the human body - saliva, sweat, semen, and blood - are sacred and mysterious substances. If Onians has dug up an ancient image of the body in which head and genitals intercommunicate through the spinal column, we do not have to wonder what such a system of meaning could have been like, for that ancient physiology still survives in Tantra yoga.
In Tantric practice the yogi silently intones a special mantram while he focuses his attention upon his "third eye". After several years of this practice, the yogi reaches a state in meditation where the vibration in his brain reverberates (note the literal meaning of this as a vibrating word) in his spinal column and begins to stimulate a sympathetic resonance at the base of his spine. The spinal column then begins to feel like a rod in which there are two strong magnetic poles at the extreme ends. As the vibration at the base of the spine responds to the vibration intoned with the mantram in the brain, the genitals become flooded with another feeling of vibration, the penis becomes erect, and the vibration within the brain becomes light, intensely energetic, and ecstatic. In Tantra, the Fall into the body is reversed and human consciousness is able to escape its entrapment in matter. In the religious traditions of Tantra, "loss of semen is loss of soul", and so the yogi is counseled to keep himself free of women so that the seminal flow may reverse itself to move up into the brain in the awakening of kundalini. In the ancient Jewish tradition, the seminal flow of men was also emphasized. In other stories of the midrashim, Adam, in penance for his fall, abstains from sexuality for 130 years, but he is not able to control his nocturnal emissions; in his dream state female spirits, the succubae, come and have intercourse with him, and with Adam's seed they give birth to demons. The succubus lying on top of the man in his sleep and stealing his semen away is, of course, another image of Lilith, the female being who refuses to stay in her "proper place".
The physiology of Tantra yoga focuses on the magical numinosity of the male semen, but the experience of the awakening of kundalini is not an exclusively male phenomenon. With women, however, it is the menstrual blood which is seen as the sacred carrier of power, and it is the womb which is its sacred vessel. The spinal polarity in women is not between the genitals and the brain, but between the heart and the womb. In the intense religious practices of yoginis or nuns, the menstrual period can stop altogether. When the energy (prana) associated with lunar menstruation is stopped, time stops and the woman is taken up into eternity. She gives birth to herself. By withdrawing into celibacy, the woman no longer generates karma (relatedness and relatives in time); instead she gives birth to the divine child. At this stage the nun may have visions of the baby Jesus nursing at her own breast. Now, whereas the experience of the awakening of kundalini in man floods the genitals and causes spontaneous erection in meditation, the equivalent experience in the woman causes an ecstatic rapture that can be described as "an orgasm in the heart", or "giving birth in the heart". The sudden opening of the heart, chakra, causes an ecstatic experience of illumination; the heart of the woman becomes at the heart of the universe. The Sufi image of this experience is the winged heart. It is for good reason that the sculptor Bernini pictured St. Teresa in ecstasy as a woman in orgasm with an angel opening her heart with an arrow.
In the etheric body of a yogini in meditation, the polarity is, therefore, not between the brain and the genitals, the second and sixth chakras, but between the inner sexuality of the womb and the heart. Some Marxist feminists who have never practiced yoga become exercised at what they imagine is a sexist doctrine that locates man's consciousness in his brain, but woman's consciousness in her heart. In fact, consciousness is not, as Whitehead would say, "simply located" in the brain; the consciousness is suffused throughout the subtle bodies, and after a yogi has opened certain centers in the brain, he is counseled to center his being in the heart, not the head. Thus the place where yogi and yogini alike end up on the path of Illumination is the heart, to experience "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle " (the love that moves the sun and other stars). TF-WT-18,19&20
It is absurd to give a lecture in five minutes, so I'm going to be even more absurd to try to give a mini-lecture on one end of history to the other in 4-1/2 minutes. The geologists who spoke before me have tried to give us a sense of where we are as a way of gaining a sense of where we are going, so I want to talk about history by talking about cultural change, about six great cultural transformations: the Hominization of the primates, Symbolization and the origins of notation and art in the Upper Paleolithic, Agriculturalization in 9000 B.C., Civilization in 3500 B.C., Industrialization in the eighteenth century A.D., and the cultural transformation we are in now, Planetization.
The first one, the Hominization of the primates, should be called the feminization of the primates, because it all started when we got kicked out of the forest in the Pliocene, and we became so scared, being out in the open, subject to predation, that the females unconsciously lured the males around them by abandoning the old estrus system and becoming open to sexuality at all times. So the males left palling around with their buddies in the old male pair-bonding pattern and clustered around the females. Next thing you know, there is a whole new set up, with the males scrounging and the females gathering: that created the basic division of labor between male and female.
So, the origins of human culture come from women, and so, Thank You, since I'm a cultural historian that's important to me. The women did it again in the next big change, Symbolization. When language began to emerge it really split consciousness by creating the unconscious and the conscious. Like an island rising out of the sea, language was a piece of the old ocean floor held up to new light, and the symbol, like a piece of coral or a rock, could help to relate the one to the other. One seemingly small thing which helped relate the one to the other was menstruation, for it established the first observable periodicities between the phases of the moon and the internal life of the womb, with ovulation at the full and menstruation at the dark of the moon. In observing this synchronicity between their bodies and nature, and in keeping track of the ten lunar months of pregnancy on the lunar tally sticks of the midwife, woman was the first to establish the system of notation and symbolism upon which all later calendrical systems are based. So, the roots of science, contra Marshack, are with women; it's the story of the Great Mother holding up the lunar calendar incised on the crescent of the bison's horn (the well-known Venus of Laussel), and not the story of the Great Father with his phallic wand.
The third basic change came again from women when, through gathering wild cereals, they discovered that they could collect enough food in three weeks to last an entire year. Women and children could collect more food than man the hunter could ever kill. But the food required storage and heavy grinding bins, and so they began to settle down to create agriculture and the neolithic village. Unfortunately, agriculture gave us enough of a surplus that men had some time on their hands. Since they now had "property" which could be taken away, the men found that trading and raiding could be as exciting as the old days of the hunt, and so warfare came into being.
After the domestication of plants and animals in Agriculturalization came the next big change, the domestication of women, or Civilization. Warfare enabled the old custom-bound, religious, matrilineal society of the neolithic village to grow into the great city with its patriarchal structure, its great male gods, its religiously controlled economic surplus, and its standing armies. Small wonder that the Sumerian goddess, Inanna, comes to the great male god, Enki, and says: "I, the woman, why did you treat differently; where are my prerogatives?" Enki responds by saying, "Enki perfected greatly that which was woman's task." A woman as a cook is a mere housewife, but a man is a chef. Woman may have invented the lunar tally stick, but man takes it over to create writing, the measurement of wealth in the temple storehouse.
From 3500 B.C. to the eighteenth century A.D., all the civilizations of the world are agrarian, but then in Great Britain another big change comes along and we get the next transformation, Industrialization. Industrialization is really an intensification of Civilization, and so through science and technology the culture becomes even more patriarchal and militaristic than its Sumerian ancestor. In Hominization, the old forest home had been absorbed into the clump of trees, the new home base for the hominids. In Symbolization the animals were absorbed into artistic images on stones and cave walls.
In Agriculturalization the plants were absorbed, and in Civilization women were absorbed. In each case of cultural absorption there was an attendant process of miniaturization: first the forest had been miniaturized in the clump of trees of the home-base, then the animals had been miniaturized into an artistic image and time was miniaturized in a lunar tally stick; then plants were miniaturized in a garden, and finally women and neolithic matrilineal culture were miniaturized in the patriarchal household. In the eighteenth century all nature was surrounded and miniaturized by culture. The wrought iron and glass structure of the Great Exhibition of 1851 surrounded the trees and fountains of Hyde Park and proclaimed for all the world to see that in the Crystal Palace of industrial technology, wild nature had been turned into a potted plant. (Small wonder that most Victorian drawing rooms became civilized jungles of potted ferns.) We historians now see all this, of course, with 20-20 hindsight. Then people thought they were returning to nature in romanticism, and the Great Exhibition featured such camouflage of industrialization as Sherwood Forest Robin Hood Chairs, Gothic sewing scissors, and rose-decorated sewing machines. Through the Medieval Court in the Crystal Palace, everyone grooved on nostalgia, with cute little vines engraved on the legs of the machines. You can see it all in the world's first Whole Earth Catalog, the catalog for the Great Exhibition itself.
What was true of Industrialization is true of Planetization. A nostalgic and false consciousness tried to camouflage the structure with a romantic content. All the artifacts and cultures of the world were miniaturized in Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and although people grooved on wood stoves and fantasies of self-sufficiency, the catalog itself was absorbing everything into its giant collage. All culture was now being absorbed and miniaturized as the preparation for stuffing it into one of Stewart's beloved space colonies. Just as the Victorians had once grooved on rose-decorated sewing machines, so people now grooved on wood stoves, windmills, and solar collectors, but the folksy nostalgia merely camouflaged the technological collectivization. When the CoEvolution Quarterly later openly came out in favor of Herman Kahn and O'Neill's space colonies, it showed the true skull and bones under the costume: all nature was to be turned into a potted plant in a tin can, and all culture was to be trashed into a television-sensibility collage.
But the Whole Earth Catalog and the CoEvolution Quarterly do not express the full dimensions of Planetization. In what Sri Aurobindo would call "the descent of the supra-mental", there is a new level of human consciousness which is now surrounding, absorbing, and miniaturizing the old civilized and technological consciousness. As the Supramental surrounds the old mental level, the mind becomes an artifact, and intellection becomes a mind-dance. Ratio becomes logos once again and the central icon of the econometric state, the dollar sign $ falls on its side and the bars that cross it melt and turn it into a sign for infinity. CQ-WT-106&107
Politics unbound from the nation-state is the world that's after us, taking hold of our poetic imaginations in this century, but making claim to our political allegiances in the next. No escape except annihilation can protect us from this ancient Greek necessity, for all our efforts to avoid changing only seem to have thrust changes upon us.
It will not be in the rational forms of the Enlightenment that world political leaders will come together in some Planetary Constitutional Convention, for such conscious, volitional activity would require a relaxed openness to the future, and in the late 1970s humanity everywhere willed to reject transformation and reassert a new and more hysterical form of the fundamentalism of the past, from the Islamic fundamentalism of the Shiites to the industrial fundamentalism of the Reaganites. And so humanity has precipitated its collective unconscious into the world as the part of itself it sees as "other" and calls the environment. Of necessity, then, it will be in the form of a globally damaged ecology that the new world body politic will experience itself: not as the legalistic creation of patriarchal states, but as the unconscious manifestation of the planet; not the reactionary involutions of Ouranos that seek to abort all change, but the creative evolution of Gaia that emasculates old gods with new and subtle technologies. (In an earlier version of this book, published as a pamphlet by the Findhorn Foundation in 1982, I did rather naively imagine that some sort of Planetary Constitutional Convention was a possibility for the future. That pamphlet version was based upon lectures I gave at Findhorn in December of 1979, and so I focused on such current events as Jerry Brown's campaign for the American presidency and Zbigniew Brzezinski's leadership of the Trilateral Commission. In entirely rewriting From Nation to Emanation and doubling the length of the manuscript, I have changed my mind as I have watched the rise of Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms. I can see now that a Planetary Constitutional Convention is too ethnocentric a projection, too derivative from Western Enlightenment values. I have tried to darken my excessively bright New Age projections to bring the perspective more in line with the world of Khomeini's Iran, Thatcher's Great Britain, and Reagan's United States of America. I have also taken out some esoteric material that, in pamphlet form, was intended only for the specific context of the Findhorn Foundation's interest in the Western esoteric tradition.) PS-WT-1,2&32
Everybody looks at the King's Road in London and they see these punks, these people that are irresponsible, vulgar, living on the dole, parasites on the industrial system. Everybody looks at Concords and nuclear power and says this is a positive investment in developing the national or the European economy. Look at all the money that's put into products like Concords and nuclear power. If you really believe in nuclear power, hock your spouse and your mortgage and your house and take everything you've got and buy shares in Wilco. You'll have it coming to you in what you'll get from that kind of capitalism. But now look at what these funny teenagers have done: They have created a music industry, a magazine industry, a fashion industry, and a music video industry. Add up all the informational transactions from that planetary culture of information and divide it by the dole and you'll see an incredible return on investment. But we don't look at these kids as the J.P. Morgans and captains of industry of the modern world. We look at them as parasites, aliens, predators, and the rest of it. That's because we can't see punk as the working class transformed into an art form. These kids are smarter than Maggie Thatcher. They know no one needs them. They're not needed as slaves in the old system. They're not needed as serfs in the medieval system and they're not needed as proletariat in the industrial system. Nobody needs them. What have they done? They've created a role for themselves in the planetary culture by doing for industrialism what the circus did for pre-industrialism. IB-WT-29
If one takes all of the five future transforms together, they form a pattern, a slight aikido move that is necessary to transform the militarism of Reagan into a new populist liberalism for a transformed Democratic Party in the nineties. If the Democratic Party remains the party of the industrial past, of labor unions and ethnic blocs, it will, like Mondale, become a fossil. And if the Democratic Party tries to become identical to Reagan's party and to woo the same constituency, it will only prove itself to be shallow, thought-less, opportunistic, and completely lacking in credibility as well as power. If, on the other hand, a new American ecological party were to try to make it on its own, such a movement on the Left would generate its mirror-opposite on the far Right, and Lyndon LaRouche's thermonuclear fusionists would probably match the Greens vote for vote, with each party taking about 15 percent of the electorate. It would be far better for the Democratic Party to take the best of the ecological party and the best of American Big Science, to move the new ethnic majority in defeat of the white suburban affluent constituency that supports Reagan. Paradoxically, it is this new Latin and Asian America that is more truly expressive of the California culture that first put Reagan into power.
I doubt if the Democratic Party will adopt Gaian politics in 1988; most likely it will try to copy the Republicans with someone like Iacocca, and our politics will be the typical American cultural situation of Avis and Hertz, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Burger King. But history is full of surprises like Chernobyl, so I would imagine that by 1992 this awful generation of the fifties, these hideous reruns of the anti-intellectual McCarthy era, will have spent themselves. Just as the sixties introduced a quantum leap in consciousness for the whole human race, so will the nineties take us up one more step. It won't take a national charismatic leader to effect such a cultural shift, for by the nineties the generation of the sixties will be spread throughout the establishment as corporate presidents, as politicians, as popular musicians and video artists, as university leaders. As they look around and see themselves in position, they will remember, and those camp-followers who now celebrate their neoconservative orthodoxy will change spots and drag out their old sixties credentials and begin to boast about how many demonstrations, love-ins, and rock festivals they took part in. Once again, it will be fashionable to be idealistic, and patriotic, not simply for Springsteen's U.S.A., but the entire planet. Such is the fantasy of one who came of age in the sixties, and such is my fantasy of a new Gaian form of politics for the nineties. GP-WT-15
So the loss of American hegemony is one thing, but there's another quality coming on at the same time. It does like it's sort of a return of the Middle Ages in the sense that nationalism is not as important as it used to be, but class, in a Marxist sense, has not gone away. In many ways, one's access to education, whether one goes to Harvard or not, seems to be now a function of family. And the society is beginning to take on very medieval characteristics. There is a ruling class at the top that communicates through oral means, face-to-face. Then there's a scientific/technical class which would be like the "informational knights"; these are the equivalents of the lords and the knights of the Middle Ages, and they communicate through electronic, scientific, and technical means. And then there's a kind of artisanal class, and at the bottom there's an underclass. So it's almost like a return of the Vedic four-fold caste system: mouth, eye, hand, and rump. The oral class has the right accent, and has wealth; the class of the eye reads and studies, and has science and art; the class of the hand works; and the bottom is on its ass. So things are becoming extremely hierarchical as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the smaller ruling class just rules the masses through pageantry and illusion. So television is the means of disseminating and creating this electronic state of entertainment, but the people who are outside are, by definition, not part of the "electro-peasantry". Television really is the means that defines whether you are a knight of information or an electro-peasant. CC-WT-31
The recognition of this civilizational unconscious, this hidden cultural reality, is the end of a process that began intellectually in the early 20th century. Freud began with the instinctive unconscious. Jung followed him and reflected the instinctive life into consciousness as it was created in the collective unconscious and reflected in patterns of imagery that would occur in science or poetry or dreams or the rest of it. It wasn't instinct. It was instinct reflected in imagery creating consciousness. The third wave came in Paris with people like Levi Strauss and Foucault who studied the intellectual unconscious. Foucault looked at the epoch from the 17th century to now, and said there is a hidden framework that unites economics, linguistic theory, art and philosophy, yet no one in the 17th century was really aware of these hidden correspondences. So Foucault, in a sense, discovered the intellectual unconscious. Levi Strauss went off to the Amazon, and showed how if you look at all of the mythologies of South America, there are these hidden patterns and hidden structures that the people telling the stories don't see. It's only the ethnographer writing the mythologie who can show you the intellectual unconscious.
Now in the later 60's, following the work of the French thinkers, Gregory Bateson using cybernetics showed that there is actually a civilizational unconscious, that mind is not separate from nature, that mind is in nature, and that in many ways the ecology is the unconscious of the societal system. So what we have in pollution, for example, is a real expression of the being of humanity in this moment of time. What we have in our conscious structures - our institutions - are the Disneyland movie sets. IB-WT-28&29
When one moves from the academies of philosophy into mind jazz, one can never tell who is going to play in a way that makes a jam session possible. Some people's books are great, but the people themselves are so autistic that they cannot listen to anyone else to shift their own tunes in response or in exploration of new implications of their old patterns of thinking. They have been so isolated in life by their own gifts, and never having found colleagues, they become shaped by adversity into cosmic soloists; but because their gifts are respected, they are not tagged as insane and are accepted as gurus. Both Bucky Fuller and Marshall McLuhan suffered from this kind of cosmic autism and ended up, through multiple recitals of their ideas, becoming holographic tape recordings of themselves. Messiahs to the electronic media, they became its sacrificial victims and showed how the United States dulls bright minds with spotlights. People like Ralph Abraham, Jim Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco Varela seemed much more open to a kind of intellectual chamber music in which we all learned and changed from playing with one another.
So as the New Age movement began to define the new as paleolithic shamanism, neolithic feminism, pharoahonic architecture, and medieval Islamic geometry, I moved away to stand next to the instrumentalists who were playing new tunes, or new and interesting variations of old ones. It didn't happen all at once, and for a while I was stuck between two stations and was picking up a lot of noise. I was no longer tuned to the MIT of the 1960s, and I was no longer tuned to the holymen and gurus of the 1970s, but I had not yet met the scientists with whom I would work in the 1980s. IS-WT-xv&xvi
We are, again, at one of those exciting times when the creative imagination of an entire civilization is undergoing a transformation of its basic mentality in the shift from one geometry to another. It appears to me that there have been three of these mentalities in Western civilization and that we have now entered the fourth. The first mentality was the arithmetic, the line of counting goods in space and generations in time. This is the mentality of Hesiod's Theogony and of Genesis. The second mentality is the geometric and it expresses the intellectual revolution wrought by Pythagoras and Plato. For these ancients, motion was imperfect and sinful, and only the unmoving geometry of the perfect spheres in the ideal realm was a true expression of the Good. The third mentality was the dynamic mentality of modernism, the mentality of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, in which motion and falling bodies became the focus of attention. Now we are moving out of this modernist science with its narratives of linear equations into a postmodernist science of which Chaos Dynamics is one important visual expression. From my external point of view in the humanities, the behavior of these aperiodic phenomena is neither chaotic nor dynamic, and I argued with Ralph Abraham in Los Angeles that these patterns would have been more appropriately called "processual morphologies", and this is the term that I used in Pacific Shift. Because I had cut my philosophical teeth in high school on the process cosmology of A. N. Whitehead, I felt that these patterns were only chaotic to a mind restricted to the linear reductionism of scientific materialism, but Chaos Dynamics is the term the scientists have chosen, so the decision has been made and this infant science has been named. Like the Foucault pendulum following its basin and attractor, we do seem to swing from extremes - from technological materialism to New Age psychism, or from a modernist obsession with systems of control to a postmodernist fascination with chaos. IS-WT-xviii&xix
In Culture the ego was diffuse; in Society the ego became articulated and defined in the mystery school of death; in Civilization the ego became discrete, a literately defined center with a sharply defined periphery; in Industrialization the ego became a turbulent flow, a chaotic attractor with the power of a Cosimo di Medici, a Descartes, a Beethoven, and a Napoleon to break through boundaries and definitions to amass the glory, and power, and wealth that it felt was its proper destiny; now in Planetization the ego is no longer diffuse, certainly no longer articulate, unable any longer to be discrete in the privacy of its civilized study, and no longer able to expect the biosphere to sustain the amassing of its glory and wealth. The diachronic flow of the ego has come to its end, and now the synchronic dimensions of the spiritual Daimon is beginning to infold itself into temporal consciousness. Multidimensionality begins to be experienced as the personal field of consciousness, the interrelatedness of all sentient beings in "the innumerable universes that are suspended from the tip of Buddha's hair". Lacking the appropriate and futuristic image to "imagine" this, so very much like a cultural historian, I fall back upon the past and envision the Sephiroth, the Tree of Life from the Judaic Kabbalah, but I see this flat rendering on a two-dimensional page transformed into a multidimensional crystal in which the lattice is a recursive one in which the "ego" is the foundation, but all the other nodes are also part of the architecture of an individual, but enlightened consciousness.
Between the angelic heights of the macrocosm of the Gaian atmosphere and the elemental depths of the microcosm of the bacterial earth lies the middle way of the Mind, and it is in this imaginary landscape of the middle way, whether we call it the Madhyamika of Buddhism or the Christ of Steiner or the Da at of the Kabbalah, that we humans take our life and come to know our world as the dark horizon that illuminates our hidden center. IS-WT-168&169
The rise of paranoia, from right-wing fulminations against the world conspiracy of the Trilateral Commission to Lyndon LaRouche's hatred of the British Secret Service, is an important signal that the literate, rational citizen of the post-Enlightenment era is being replaced by the subject in a shift from identity through logical definition to identity through participation and performance. In one form of consciousness, identity is seen through similar logical predicates; but in paranoia, identity is seen metaphorically as the participation mystique of common subjects. Looking at the erosion of good pietist values from electronic evangelical broadcasting, and looking at rock festivals, we can see that democracy is in for some hard times. PS-WT-134&135
History is rarely a happy place, so there is always the danger that the end of the Cold War could bring a racial convergence in which a new European civilization proposed to the Russians by Gore Vidal, one that stretches westward from Vladivostok to Vancouver, will try to stand off "the yellow peril" of a rich Japan and a prodigious China. If the cultural bifurcation of the world continues along these lines, then zones of cultural entropy in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, will so terrify entities such as Israel and South Africa that they will never surrender to forces of liberal tolerance but will become entrenched, technological fortresses in which the Great White Race makes its last stand.
But persuaded by my years of living in Toronto and partaking of the insights of the Torontonian school of Innis and McLuhan, I do not think that the formations of nineteenth-century empires can now reassert themselves, for they were built on print, bureaucracies, and the center-periphery dynamics of railways and shipping lines. In a global ecology of mind that is polycentric and electronic, I think that the nativistic movements of premodernist Islam and modernist Europe are both bound to fail, just as the Ghost Dance and Louis Riel's rising of the Metis failed in North America. Precisely in order to avoid a world organized along lines of racial hatred, my allegiances are to such universal forms of human association as are expressed in Varela's Western science and Eastern Buddhism. IS-WT-164
The world of electronics is Top and Pop culture; it is an energizing of opposites: the elitist science of Stanford, Cal Tech, and the Silicon Valley, and the media and musical reproductions of Hollywood. GK-WT-195
What is making the process move more rapidly is not just global television, but global mysticism. Individuals less centered in their egos are discovering the patterns of convergence and synchronicity in their lives and the life of the new culture. It almost seems as if the consciousness of a racial, planetary Being were surrounding civilization, compressing it, and turning it into a miniaturized artifact of the past. The artist caught inside civilization feels the pressure and is demoralized because he is holding on tight to his civilizational identity; witness the mythologizing of the ego in the work of Norman Mailer. It is the work of the artist to reinterpret the world, but since the civilized artist cannot understand this new world, he has chosen to perish with the old.
With the death of the art of civilization, the art of planetization is born. Once the romantic artist, like Yeats, made the emerging nation, like Ireland, conscious of its national identity; now the planetary artists are trying to make the races conscious of their emerging planetary identity. The old artist sculpted with stone, painted on canvas, or told stories about a day in the life, but whether it is conceptual art, nonfiction, or the music of Stockhausen, the new medium is information itself. The place where information is densest is the university; and that is why many of the new artists have come out of that setting, not as artists in residence or professors of creative writing, for those are civilized roles, but as jugglers of information. Where the expert is enthroned, there the fool is forced to say "uncle", but masks his subversion by crying "nuncle".
To understand contemporary culture, you have to be willing to move beyond intellectual definitions and academic disciplines. You have to be willing to throw your net out widely and be willing to take in science, politics, and art, and science fiction, the occult, and pornography. To catch a sense of the whole in pattern recognition, you have to leap across the synapse and follow the rapid movement of informational bits. You treat in a paragraph what you know could take up a whole academic monograph, but jugglers are too restless for that: the object of the game is to grasp the object quickly, and then give it up in a flash to the brighter air. EW-WT-77&78
We slay with technology and save the victim with art. IS-WT-146
The Postmodern Scene evokes, and then secretes, the fin-de-millenium mood of contemporary culture. It is a panic book: panic sex, panic art, panic ideology, panic bodies, panic noise, and panic theory.
Indeed, the text itself should be read as immanently postmodern. Thus, for example, while Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in response to the outbreak of the fascist mind, The Postmodern Scene is written in response to the outbreak again of the dialectic of enlightenment. In an age where computers reify the meaning of memory and panic sex is the language of the postmodern body, then it may still be salutary to meditate anew on historical remembrance as the basis of politics. The Postmodern Scene, while thriving in the detrital scenes of cultural amnesia, is also a market of remembrance. Decay/ecstasy, hyper-pessimism/hyper-optimism, memory/amnesia: these are the double signs under which this text has been written. If this sounds paradoxical, ambivalent and contradictory, this just means that like the quantum age which it seeks to describe, The Postmodern Scene is a quantum, that is to say postmodern, sign of its times.
For who can now speak with confidence of the future of a postmodern scene when what is truly fascinating is the thrill of catastrophe, and where what drives onward economy, politics, culture, sex, and even eating is not the will to accumulation or the search for lost coherencies, but just the opposite - the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into excess, waste, and disaccumulation. When technology of the quantum order produces human beings who are part-metal and part-flesh; when robo-beings constitute the growing majority of a western culture which fulfills, then exceeds, Weber's grim prophecy of the coming age of "specialists without spirit"; and when chip technology finally makes possible the fateful fusion of molecular biology and technique: then ours is genuinely a postmodern condition marked by the deepest and most pathological symptoms of nihilism. Not just science as the will to power, but also medicine as an empty will to knowledge (of the lascerated body), penology as a grisly will to surveillance of the body politic, and ethics itself as enucleated within the dynamic language of instrumental activism. The Postmodern Scene is, therefore, a catastrophe theory for a hyper-modern culture and society which is imploding into the seductive simulacra of its own dark, and negative, sign.
Consequently, a deep (panic) thematic runs through the text. It explores the passive and suicidal nihilism of contemporary culture from the shifting perspectives of popular culture (Sunshine Reports), classicism (Sign Crimes), poststructuralist philosophy (Sliding Signifiers), and art (Ultramodernism). Whether viewing the postmodern scene from the perspective of its first theorist (Augustine), its philosophical precursors (Nietzsche and Bataille), its artists (Fischl, Chirico, Magritte, and Woodman), or its key social theorists (Baudrillard, Serres, Foucault), it is the same thing, just speeded up a bit. Thus, if the writing moves at hyper-speed to the point of trying to achieve escape velocity from the language of positivist sociology and conventional ideological discourse, that is because The Postmodern Scene also seeks to evoke a certain literary mood - panic reading - as a way of participating directly in the ruins within and without of late twentieth-century experience.
Refusing (with Nietzsche) the pragmatic compromise which only seeks to preserve, The Postmodern Scene can recommend so enthusiastically panic reading because it seeks to relieve the gathering darkness by a new, and more local, cultural strategy. That is, to theorise with such hyper-intensity that the simulacrum is forced finally to implode into the dark density of its own detritus, and to write so faithfully under the schizoid signs of Nietzsche and Bataille that burnout, discharge, and waste as the characteristic qualities of the postmodern condition are compelled to reveal their lingering traces on the after-images of (our) bodies, politics, sexuality, and economy. Hyper-theory, therefore, for the end of the world. PM-AKDC-i&ii
What is postmodernism? It is what is playing at your local theatre, TV studio, office tower, doctor's office, or sex outlet. Not the beginning of anything new or the end of anything old, but the catastrophic, because fun, implosion of contemporary culture into a whole series of panic scenes at the fin-de-millenium. And so, some panic theses as a seismograph of the postmodern mood.
Panic Politics. It's fun time under the big top when the portable politicians of the postmodern parade come to the parodic dome. The clones are out, wired to the computer consoles; electronic waves piercing the body politic agitating the crowd to glee with each melodramatic surge. Hurray! Hurray! To that age of reversals, an age as Nietzsche describes it that "wants publicity and that great actors' hubbub, that great drum banging that appeals to its funfare tastes". It's time to get on the merry-go-round as quantum politics begins its spin under the barrage of particle beams from the repeating cannons of the cathode rays.
Postmodern politics begins with Mark Gertler's Merry-go-round (1916). The soldiers, sailors and business men mount up on the automated carrousel of hysteria. Each cloned in magical threes, mirrored imaged, breasts protruding, backs curved in the ellipsoid arc ready for the high speed chase. The horses are genetically pure, beyond mutation, beyond the cancerous errors of nature poised for the visciousness of the war to come - a ready automated machine. Yet what is this, the protruding buttocks, rounded open and fleshly white? The solar anus open to the culture of fun/fear ready to receive consummation as the carrousel picks up speed.
Politics becomes the flashing anus of promises of the better world constantly present as the carrousel becomes the succession of white strobe-like flashes and as the waste system runs into the now of party time. The cries of the paraders poised on the edge of aggression and terror, unable to dismount, caught in the imploding vortex of the fashion swirl. Tunics pressed, hats in place, mouths open ready for the distortion of the cyclorama.
It is just this world of Gertler run now at hyper-speed which, through the distorted images of the carrousel, creates the holograms that characterize the political. The path of Presidents, or Prime Ministers, trace/race after images across the nation. Cameras with open shutters hopeful that the celluloid will inscribe the sunny soul of the nation from the black hole of paranoid politics. Just as the video camera in the President's office oversees Red Square equally well as surveying the latest troop movements. Instant on, instant politics, instant off.
Panic Money. Advanced capitalist economies now face the severest liquidity crisis ever as the economy itself begins to liquidate. Capital begins to disappear. Nowhere is this crisis more apparent than in the shattering of its chief icon - money. The money illusion has become real as the economy reverses itself. No longer does one find relevance in the wrangle over monetary policy, supply side economics, Laffer curves, revealed preferences or unrevealed preferences, but rather in the self-liquidation of value itself. Money is caught in the grand cancellation of the sign of political economy. It finds itself homeless and constantly put to flight. It is abandoning the "worthless" world of contemporary capitalism.
Money was saved from ruination by Marx who realized the shift from pre-modern production turned, finally, on breathing life (once again) into money as universal exchange-value. Hence money was given an extended life in its role as the externalization of the nineteenth-century self. Money could do things the body couldn't as it travelled about the social in high style hidden from view by the fetishism of commodities. But the bodies in the twentieth-century have been invaded, and blown apart. The fetishes have grown up. Consumption has regained the primitive ritual of symbolic exchange in its abolition of the modern.
Facing the onslaught of the cancellation of the referent, money finds itself circulating faster, and more violently, to maintain itself as the universal clinamen. But in the age of superconductors the chilling effect is immense as everything approaches the end of Einstein's world at the speed of light. In this world the parasitism of money begins to slow the process. This pushes money into even longer hours with the advent of twenty-four hour exchange. Yet, the "red-shift" in the velocity of circulation only hastens the disappearance of money from the planet prefigured in the vast sums for star wars.
Already money has given place to its opposite, credit, in the creation ex nihilo which marks all contemporary advances from insider trading to take-over bids. Just how far the game is up becomes evident in the repudiation of the debts of the large corporations, or of the working class. Everything is owned, possessed by the other so that the economy can only run "on empty". Money becomes the spent fuel of an over-heated reactor. Nobody knows what to do with it, yet all know it must be expended.
Money as value only appears at the vanishing-point of its afterimage. It is no longer one's filthy lucre, only that of the sanitized electronic display of the computer monitor. For money always moves on in its role as the chief vagrant of the collapsing capitalist economy.
Panic Noise. If the Newtonian law of gravity could postulate a real body whose objectivity is established by its mass, the (quantum) law of postmodernity eclipses this body by flipping suddenly from mass to energy. We now live in a hyper-modern world where panic noise (the electronic soundtrack of TV, rock music in the age of advanced capitalism, white sound in all the "futureshops") appears a kind of affective hologram providing a veneer of coherency for the reality of an imploding culture.
When mass disappears into energy, then the body too becomes the focus and secretion of all of the vibrations of the culture of panic noise. Indeed, the postmodern body is, at first, a hum, then a "good vibration", and, finally, the afterimage of the hologram of panic noise. Invaded, lascerated, and punctured by vibrations (the quantum physics of noise), the body simultaneously implodes into its own senses, and then explodes as its central nervous system is splayed across the sensorium of the technoscape. No longer a material entity, the postmodern body becomes an infinitely permeable and spatialized field whose boundaries are freely pierced by subatomic particles in the microphysics of power. Once the veil of materiality/subjectivity has been transgressed (and abandoned), then the body as something real vanishes into the spectre of hyperrealism. Now, it is the postmodern body as space, linked together by force fields and capable of being represented finally only as a fractal entity. The postmodern self, then, as a fractal subject - a minute temporal ordering midst the chaotic entropy of a contemporary culture which is winding down, but moving all the while at greater and greater speeds.
Similarly, the social as mass vanishes now into the fictive world of the media of hypercommunication. Caught only by all the violent signs of mobility and permeability, the social is already only the after-glow of the disappearance of the famous reality-principle. This world may have lost its message and all the grand recits - power, money, sex, the unconscious - may also be abandoned, except as recycled signs in the frenzied world of the social catalysts, but what is finally fascinating is only the social as burnout. The world of Hobbes has come full circle when the (postmodern) self is endlessly reproduced as a vibrating set of particles, and when the social is seductive only on its negative side: the dark side of sumptuary excess and decline.
Thus, power from the bounded, reserved and inert flips now into its opposite sign: the domain of the unbounded, spent and violent. And what better examplar of the unreal world of the social in this condition than music. Music/vibration as servo-mechanism enters directly into the postmodern body and passes through it without a trace, leaving only an altered energy state. Everywhere music creates the mood, the energy level, of the postmodern scene. Never seen but equally never shut out, music as panic vibrations secretes through the body of the social. Always ready to enter, it is also always ready to circulate. Being itself possessed, it does money one better by creating social relations which require no possessions. It may be "born in the U.S.A.", but it has become universal. Always in time, it (finally) prepares for the abandonment of history. Music, then, with no past, no future, no (determinate) meaning, but perfectly defining, perfectly energizing, perfectly postmodern. The liberal burnout of contemporary culture as taking the spectral forms, therefore, of fractal subjects, fun vibrations, and panic noise.
Panic Waiting. Alex Colville's painting, Woman in Bathtub, is a powerful evocation of the postmodern mood. Here, everything is a matter of cancelled identities (the background figure has no head, the woman's gaze is averted), silence (broken only by the ocular sounds of surveillance), and waiting with no expectation of relief. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche spoke eloquently and prophetically of a new dark age which would be typified by passive nihilists, driven by despair over their own botched and bungled instincts towards predatory styles of behavior, and by suicidal nihilists, who would always prefer to will nothingness rather than not will at all.
Following Nietzsche, Woman in Bathtub is a haunting image both of the postmodern self as a catastrophe site and of the meaning of paradox as the deepest language of postmodernism. In this artistic production, an aesthetics of seduction (the muted colours of cool art) counterpoints the presence of inner decay; and the promise of human companionship as reciprocity is immediately cancelled by the reality of communication as radical isolation.
Panic Questions. To the question posed by one American reader: "Is The Postmodern Scene sadistic?", we respond that sado-masochism, in the postmodern condition, is not what it used to be. The Postmodern Scene works also to show that sado-masochism is now a little sign-slide between the ecstasy of catastrophe and the terror of the simulacrum as a (disappearing) sign of the times. Anyway, what is sadism in the age of the hyperreal but the sense of living today on the edge between violence and seduction, between ecstasy and decay? And why not? The postmodern mood can alternate so quickly between hermeticism and schizophrenia, between the celebration of artifice and nostalgic appeals for the recovery of nature, because the self is now like what the quantum physicists call a "world strip", across which run indifferent rivulets of experience. Neither fully mediated nor entirely localized, the self is an empty sign: colonized from within by technologies for the body immune; seduced from without by all of the fashion tattoos; and energized by a novel psychological condition - the schizoid state of postmodern selves who are (simultaneously) predators and parasites.
And to question: Must The Postmodern Scene be so pessimistic? We would respond that hyper-pessimism today is the only realistic basis for a raging will to political action. This in a double sense. First, cultural pessimism is the only sharpening of the will which permits us to break forever with all of the liberal compromises which seek only to save the appearances at the dying days of modernism: the desperate search now for the recuperation of the subject (in the age of the disappearing self); the valorization anew of value itself (at a time when value is the deepest language of the technological will to the mastery of social and non-social nature); the turning back to the critique of the commodity-form (in the age of panic money); and the triumphant return of the new historicism (when history has already imploded into the Baudrillardian scene of a smooth and transparent surface of hypercommunication). And second, pessimism is a deliberate intellectual strategy for breaking beyond the cyberspace of telemetried bodies and culture. We seek to create a theoretical manoeuvre in which hypermodernism implodes into the detritus of its own panic scenes. Why? It is our conviction that the catastrophe has already happened, and that we are living in a waiting period, a dead space, which will be marked by increasing and random outbursts of political violence, schizoid behaviors, and the implosion of all the signs of communication as western culture runs down towards the brilliant illumination of a final burnout. PM-AKDC-ii>vii
To dismiss McLuhan as a technological determinist is to miss entirely the point of his intellectual contribution. McLuhan's value as a theorist of culture and technology began just when he went over the hill to the side of the alien and surrealistic world of mass communications: the "real world" of technology where the nervous system is exteriorised and everyone is videoated daily like sitting screens for television. Just because McLuhan sought to see the real world of technology, and even to celebrate technological reason as freedom, he could provide such superb, first-hand accounts of the new society of electronic technologies. McLuhan was fated to be trapped in the deterministic world of technology, indeed to become one of the intellectual servomechanisms of the machine-world, because his Catholicism failed to provide him with an adequate cultural theory by which to escape the hegemony of the abstract media systems that he had sought to explore. Paradoxically, however, it was just when McLuhan became most cynical and most deterministic, when he became fully aware of the nightmarish quality of the "medium as massage", that his thought becomes most important as an entirely creative account of the great paradigm-shift now going on in twentieth-century experience. McLuhan was then, in the end, trapped in the "figure" of his own making. His discourse could provide a brilliant understanding of the inner functioning of the technological media; but no illumination concerning how "creative freedom" might be won through in the "age of anxiety, and dread". In a fully tragic sense, McLuhan's final legacy was this: he was the playful perpetrator, and then victim, of a sign-crime. TC-AK-85&86
Nietzsche is, then, the limit and possibility of the postmodern condition. He is the limit of postmodernism because, as a thinker who was so deeply fixated by the death of the grand referent of God, Nietzsche was the last and best of all the modernists. In The Will to Power, the postmodernist critique of representation achieves its most searing expression and, in Nietzsche's understanding of the will as a "perspectival simulation", the fate of postmodernity as a melancholy descent into the violence of the death of the social is anticipated. And Nietzsche is the possibility of the postmodern scene because the double-reversal which is everywhere in his thought and nowhere more so than in his vision of artistic practice as the release of the "dancing star" of the body as a solar system is, from the beginning of time, the negative cue, the "expanding field" of the postmodern condition.
Nietzsche's legacy for the fin-de-millenium mood of the postmodern scene is that we are living on the violent edge between ecstasy and decay; between the melancholy lament of postmodernism over the death of the grand signifiers of modernity - consciousness, truth, sex, capital, power - and the ecstatic nihilism of ultramodernism; between the body as a torture-chamber and pleasure-palace; between fascination and lament. But this is to say that postmodernism comes directly out of the bleeding tissues of the body - out of the body's fateful oscillation between the finality of "time's it was" (the body as death trap) and the possibility of experiencing the body (au-dela of Nietzsche) as a "solar system" - a dancing star yes, but also a black hole - which is the source of the hyper-nihilism of the flesh of the postmodern kind. PM-AKDC-9&10
What is the Panic Encyclopedia? It's a frenzied scene of post-facts for the fin-de-millenium. Here, even the alphabet implodes under the twin pressures of the ecstasy of catastrophe and the anxiety of fear. From panic art, panic astronomy, panic babies and panic (shopping) malls to panic sex, panic perfect faces and panic victims, that is the postmodern alphabet. Not then an alphabetic listing of empirical facts about the modern condition, but a post-alphabetic description of the actual dissolution of facts into the flash of thermonuclear cultural "events" in the postmodern situation.
As the dark, reverse and imploding side of all the modernist encyclopedias, Panic Encyclopedia begins with the fateful discovery in contemporary physics that ninety percent of the natural universe is missing matter, just disappeared and no one knows where it has gone (physicists most of all). Panic Encyclopedia argues that with the triumph of science and technology as the real language of power in postmodern culture, that ninety percent of contemporary society is also missing matter, just vanished and that no one knows where it is gone (sociologists most of all).
Indeed, since we are probably already living in post-millenial consciousness on the other side of the Year 2000 (calendar time is already too slow: Jean Baudrillard was correct when he said recently in the French newspaper, Liberation, that we should take a vote to jump immediately to the Year 2000 and thus end the interminable and boring wait for the millenium), we are the first human beings to live in the dead zone of a fatal attraction between postmodern science and popular culture. More than we may suspect, panic science is now the deepest language of consumption, entertainment, politics, and information technology just as much as the oscillating fin-de-millenium mood of deep euphoria and deep despair of contemporary culture is the ruling ideology of postmodern science.
Between ecstasy and fear, between delirium and anxiety, between the triumph of cyber-punk and the political reality of cultural exhaustion: that is the emotional mood-line of Panic Encyclopedia. Here, in fact, panic has the reverse meaning of its classical sense. In antiquity, the appearance of the god Pan meant a moment of arrest, a sudden calm, a rupture-point between frenzy and reflection. Not though in the postmodern condition. Just like the reversal of classical kynicism (philosophy from below) into postmodern cynicism (for the ruling elites) before it, the classical meaning of panic has now disappeared into its opposite sense. In the postmodern scene, panic signifies a twofold free-fall: the disappearance of external standards of public conduct when the social itself becomes the transparent field of a cynical power; and the dissolution of the internal foundations of identity (the disappearing ego as the victory sign of postmodernism) when the self is transformed into an empty screen of an exhausted, but hyper-technical, culture. Panic? That is the dominant psychology of the fully technological self, living at that vanishing-point where postmodern science and culture interpellate as reverse mirror-images in a common power field. If the hyper-technological self is also "falling, falling without limits", this may indicate that it, too, is already a post-fact in the post-millenial alphabet, with one final (literary) existence as an entry in the Panic Encyclopedia.
Consequently, the Panic Encyclopedia is all about a double complicity. Postmodern science as the social physics of a fading cultural scene, and postmodern culture as the sure and certain source of the ideological theorems of contemporary science. We understand panic science as postmodern political theory in the intensive, but disguised, form of a theory of a fading nature at the fin-de-millenium; and we read postmodern culture - from panic Hollywood, panic viral computers and panic finance to panic urine - as explicit materializations of the catastrophic, but hyperreal, formulations of postmodern science at the levels of fashion, money, liquid TV, and sex. PE-AKMKDC-15,16&17
Panic Zombies (Carson and Letterman). If advertisements are the truth-sayers of the TV programs, which are their media vehicles, then Alpo Dog Food names the Johnny Carson show correctly. Johnny and Ed are America's favorite pets. The show occurs between prime time and sleepy time, with all of the nocturnal pleasure of a regular bowel movement.
The Carson Show is, anyway, a real panic scene. Not, however, panic of the frenzied type, but the reverse: panic inertia. An unchanging format for a static submass, which has disappeared into the white suburban Bantus, and taken to Carson as its nightly excremental habit. As Carson likes to insist, it's just entertainment: he's the parasite; the audience, the bored voyeur; and the guests, changing particles in promotional culture.
And David Letterman? He is the Johnny Carson of the Reagan youth generation. A little cynicism, a little humor for a generation that the American political philosopher, Michael Weinstein, has described as distinguished by a "strong sense of self, but a weak ego".
As a graduate of Ball State University in the middle of Indiana, Letterman has moved his Hoosier personality from the regions into the center of New York media culture. With Letterman, the dinner party runs its course from hospitality to hostility to the hospital. Letterman is, in fact, the perfect predator: of his audience (his popularity rests with denigrating the audience); of his guests (celebrities are brought out as living targets); of himself (as a supposedly unlikely talk show host); and of TV (Tonight with David Letterman parodies the medium of talk shows).
While the secret of Johnny Carson's success is as a cultural parasite; Letterman is a media predator. Here, America at night finds its final destiny as a Hoosier predator, alternating between envy and resentment. PE-AKMKDC-261&262
What is generally taken as "extremism" in the U.S., is the opposite of the collective state of political apathy that is maintained by those in positions of power. There are two ways of understanding the phenomenon. First, the relative quiescence and political ignorance of the American population represents an opportunity, a field of action, for "activists". The lack of political consciousness is fertile ground for manipulation based upon the most exaggerated claims. In this sense, apathy tends to encourage "extremism". Second, the presence of "extremists" works to the benefit of those in positions of power and authority who are quick to explain that any deviation from the political orthodoxy of the moment will degenerate into "irrationality" and violence. Social criticism is thus a sign of irresponsibility. In other words, the myth of "consensus" implies the creation of scapegoats. Over the past twenty years individuals like Joseph McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, etc. have succeeded in imposing themselves upon the public by profiting from the civil apathy and political ignorance of the North-American population through the process of scapegoating. Products of the myth of "consensus", these men have also contributed to its destruction. TL-LP-34
The myths of communism and capitalism, then, as floating signs - degree zero-points - for the cancellation and imminent reversibility of all the polarities: the mutation of the (socialist) struggle for justice into cynical power; and the materialist dream of the (liberal) flight from politics into the triumph of cynical ideology. Like "strange attractors" in astrophysics which can exercise such a deadly fascination because of their ability to alternate energy fields instantly, the myths of state capitalism and state communism are alternating sides of the rationalist eschatology: the symptomatic signs of the appearance of the bimodern condition.
Bimodernism? That is the contemporary historical situation in which the great referential polarities instantly reverse fields, changing signs in a dizzying display of political repolarization. A violent metastasis in which all the referential finalities of the political code of the twentieth century - capitalism and communism most of all - begin to slide into one another, actually mutating into their opposites as they undergo a fatal reversal of meaning. No longer justice versus the acquisitive instinct, power versus ideology, (socialist) history versus (consumer) simulation, or (economic) liberalism versus (political) democracy, but now the instant reversibility of all the referents. A fatal eclipse of the empire of the sign in which capitalism and communism do a big historical flip. Not just the myth of capitalism in desperate need of the communist "other" to sustain itself or communism as a barrier against the universalization of the commodity-form, but now communism aping the economic form of primitive capitalism, and capitalism taking on the political form of the command economy of late communism. The capitalist societies, then, as the forward frontier of the communist valorization of power; and communist societies as the last and best of all the primitive capitalisms. In one, the inspiring faith in commercial accumulation and the resuscitation of law of value of the production machine; and in the other, the radical depoliticization of the population, its actual body invasion, by a totalitarian image-reservoir under the control of a cynical political mandarinate. In one, the recuperation of the productivist myth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a policy of economic reconstruction; and in the other, the Leninist use of all the mass organs of media manipulation as a way of coordinating private opinion with the war machine. IP-AKMK-ix&x
Stairway to Heathen tape side 1 has some good "surf and play jazz" parts
-also George's 22 stuff.
(This tape primarily deals with U of T - Kelly, etc.)
HOT BOB TAPE SIDE ONE (says '2' on the tape box)
-some good 22 updates, ie: Aryan Rockets>VOA&RM/George
(1st 1/4 of tape deals with the) "old dialectic of visual space vs. acoustic space is now thrown out, it's been superseded in the 20th century by Kinetic and Tactile space. TV brought in tactile space, that reigned for 10-15 years in the 50' & 60's. Once the planet extended itself with the Sputnik environment: the satellite environment; you were then faced with a situation of tribal replay of the archetypes: technological themselves. So, tactile space, pushed to its extreme, flips into kinetic space. The dialogue between kinetic space and tactile space since 1950 is the hidden ground of what's been going on. We only talk about this in terms of visual space and acoustic space to give a subgenius novice an acquaintance with the sensory dynamics involved, and just to master the effects of the alphabet and printing - which is visual space - is the task that takes a while. Especially when you're born into an environment that is kinetic and tactile: its basic ground. So, we go back, we educate about visual space, then people begin to realize the acoustic-space effect under electric conditions via radio and telegraph - So, when Irving Layton discusses poetry moving into the movie form, the filmmaker as a new poetics, he is just beginning to realize that the oral tradition was superseded by the kinetic tradition since the Twist." ----should we?------
RAP MUSIC - "The basic ground of the oral tradition mixed with the tactile space of television creates a preference for the kinetic tradition. Now, in the rap tradition...why that's surfacing now as a major mood-mud that people can dance to is symptomatic of (edit) how we have retrieved human scale.....because the distinctive feature of rap is the emphasis on words again. A kind of - ironically (why is it ironic?) - hard-edged verbiage, as more dominant than the rhythm part. Human scale is a return to words. Words were the tribal environment/ground centuries and millennia ago."
*n.b. MM Counterblast "...The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP."
-------------(Also resonates with low tech 60's activity marking human scale emphasis and it's reemergence in the later 70's as the punk democratization of acoustic preference and involvement in making and participating on a corporate level previously reserved for Genesis, Led Zeppelin and ELO. Presently, prepaired percept previous artifacts/archetypes are acoustically sculpted including James Brown's humanly executed and looped to mark it's cyclical resonance in the new time zone pre- and post-immortal funky drummer, ghetto budgets, street knowledge, attitude, mud, human scale rebellion simultaneous subsumed or cancelled out effect indeed, etc.) ----------------------
Caller: "I need some advice - lesbian roommate, what should I do?"
Bob: "You mean, you can't accept her lesbian habits."
(weird Yoko SFX)
Bob: "Nice."
Caller: "I'd like to readjust your threshold of pain."
Bob: "Thank you."
------this part suggests its own answer call rhythm. There's similar stuff later on the tapes that use a similar structure, check notes, and experiment with edits-----------
Call 1/3rd through side one hot bob tape :::Kid cheering frantically, then kicks into stuff Bob really digs....----use as transition to 50's style song?-----
------can you find "No Place to Play" quote?-----end the song maybe with the follow up part: Bob: "I apologize for hijacking the airwaves, Myke, that is my stuff...it's not over yet."
Satellites....Bob: "That's like when the Challenger blew up, that proved the earlier Challengers were blown up as Dr. Beter said, and finally it showed up for us right in the regular mainstream of kinetic retrieval." ('mainstream of kinetic retrieval'??)
CBC TAPE CBC TAPE CBC TAPE CBC TAPE CBC TAPE CBC TAPE
side one (using Alpage cassette counter)
32 - Brent Bambury: "And still ahead tonight, J. R. Bob Dobbs."
155 - Bob: "I run the solar government. Just give me access to satellite hookups and the whole planet can share the space - the discarnate interval with me...."
187 - "It's not that I'm a bureaucrat and you have to match with my state of mind. It's through understanding."
*196 - "The problem is we're going to have to shut you down - CBC - and all media - including CKLN - temporarily, as a media fast to set up the artform of our intended goal and agenda which is media ecology.....OK...too many words? Too many words?......
Brent: "No, no, the words are fine, the ideas are a bit thick."
208 - David Lynch - crackily crack
218 - Bob: "Tetrad: to manage the turbulent times we're going through."
---------let's arrange a 'song' that can readily teach the public tetrads - or at least give them a damn good percept -and
their tactile bias of sculpting, arranging and understanding visual/acoustic/kinetic space effects,. And we'll also be presenting it through an acoustic form bias-------
222 - Brent: "What about the 'Exists'? (Bob that's brilliant language fascism by the way) Where did they land and what is their significance?"
Bob: "Aaah, the Xists are from Bootes, a constellation out there, pretty close, but check your maps for the actual location of Bootes."
331 - "Many people know I'm a woman, we have female girls and male girls, those are our callers - so, I'm not preaching to men, are we not men? - man is the tactile interval of a post-conventional male/female split - so, in the tactile interval we don't know what we are, we're something new."
480 - "The post-tactile, post-electronic mood is what we call eco-fascism as a pink reflex. But, really what we want to deal with is that since the television, radio, computer and satellite environments have merged into a mixed corporate-media, discarnate collective water; then we brought in VCR's, remote control, satellite (hookup) therefore having personal electronic interaction with the electric content in the electric water; we've had that for ten years. And all the political and cultural images reflected that we now are exhausted with because every, say, 12 months under electric conditions we go at least 2,200 years - so, this can exhaust our preference. Human beings are sensory and they will get tired of a similar constant kind of stimulation. So, we now have an anxiety or a need, phantom pain for something that's beyond the electric environment, but we can't do it. You can't have it. We can look at all these rearview mirror archetypal retrievals and try and live in them. The only way to get around it, to meet this new post tactile need, is to turn off - at least the tactile mesh of television and computers - temporarily."
CBC Tape Side two
59 - Bob: "The only thing that shocks me is the success of my operation."
Brent: "How successfull are You?"
Bob: "Well, listen......(silence).......(laughter)........"
BOB FEB 22ND TAPE BOB FEB 22ND TAPE BOB FEB 22ND TAPE
Side A
199 - Garrett: "Bobby, bobby, bobby, who can take even one word you say, and understand it?" (some good laughter)
229 - Garrett: "I better go before I faint."
254 - Garrett: "Make a recording of it, Bobby, and play it to me one Christmas Eve, when the children are talking about when they were children, and the mothers are talking about when they had lovers, and the farms are talkin'bout when they had their fields. Play it back to me someday, will you?"
Bob: "We have made a recording of it."
Garrett: "Alright, OK. Bobby, Bobby, Bobby...."
311 - Caller: "Marshall McLuhan thought privately the electric environment had something to do with the Anti-Christ?"
Bob: "Yeah....Lyndon LaRouche says (tells bckgrd. re:Larouche,
which holy office: logic, etc. re:technology)...No, Bob Marshall interviewed him. He (LaRouche) wouldn't agree with Marshall McLuhan."
---------------use LaRouche interview there maybe---------
"....... you decide if MM or LL is correct. I suggest you follow both of them at the same time."
335 - Bob: "Simultaneous, comprehensive mythmaking"
432 "I'm different when I'm on the air than when you meet me in person..."
Caller: "...Ooohhh..."
Bob: "That's a different context."
441 - "These offices are used in different contexts, different grounds and they're also subsumed into the discarnate state, which actually we use the figure of Marshall McLuhan to talk about that, but that's not the only side, or point of view, or pattern of looking at it. Just because you talk about the discarnate state doesn't mean you know what it is./ You've got to apply it."
----------------(could go to "Bob's talk show famous phone call" ending in laughter seagoing to Garrett's laughter?)-----------------------
"That's why our jobs become our hobbies, and our hobbies become our jobs."
MM:- "Where involvement is high, work is low." Counterblast 1969
450 - Bob: "Savings and Loans banks: 22 of them to funnel money to Contras."
495 - "We've gone from global theatre to solar theatre with this dimension."
Sean: "OK, now, who's orchestrating in the solar theatre? Is it the Xists?"
503 - Bob: "The Xists are part of our future, and they are a result of my Perfect Pitch chart that's in High Weirdness by Mail (page 147). You can see that even the universe, and before that, the solar system, is subsumed into the electronic, discarnate state, so the aliens are corporate media that come here to act out as actors like other media on the stage, they're showing up as actors, therefore they are controlled by the master playwright: myself, right? Yeah, OK."
--------------could we add dabblings of Reese's peanut butter cup circle sightings campaign?-------------------
526 - "Well, the point of media ecology - and that's what you do in a solar gov't position - is you orchestrate the grammars of all the media - not just print or alphabetic media - I would never read a Margaret Atwood novel, etc..................I study the effects on different audiences. I don't read the content of books. But as a hobby I will read the book and content. I prefer Finnegans Wake for private novelistic reading."
550 - "....No time for narrative stories, because my narrative, my own verbalized drama is the most incredible narrative and retracing of the processes of cognition - and cathartic at the same time."
557 - "That's media ecology. You study the audience; HCE in Finnegans Wake stands for 'Here Comes Everybody': the audience as archetype."
617 - (2nd phase of evolution.....man's extension of himself,
re-creation - the creation of new time and space zones (daily) check written notes for quote)
MM:- "We must invent a NEW METAPHOR, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature." Counterblast
652 - "Now we get into Barbara's question: about human scale. What's the difference between living at the speed of light and human scale? Human scale is that point when we flip beyond electric autonomy - and that's really hard to talk about." --------maybe add as comment re: explaining human scale in the mood mud cylical-- 60's punk rap-----------------------------
661 - Bob laughs - click - "OK .....Ok, let's go back to Sean, I'm sure Sean just loved what I just said, he probably has something to input on that, go ahead Sean, what do you say about what I just said? I wasn't listening. Why not? 'Cause I'm not supposed to."
FEB 22nd/90 BOB Side B FEB 22nd/90 BOB Side B FEB 22nd/90
42 - Edward: "A man who lives in an infernal region which is a parody of our world - noxious chemical plants, christmas turkeys that leak 10w40 on the table as we watch in fascination." (talking about Eraserhead)
75 - "......risen above the industrial pollution, how could you do that?" Bob: "Through the electric discarnate state. The idea of the singer is just referring to the song of acoustic space and tactility."
172 - (Bell rings) "Aaah, my time is up." - click - "OK, we're going to go on to Heaven? I know this alarm clock isn't popular........"
258 - "Do you know that not one psychic or one occultist or anybody predicted that Germany would be unified within '89-90 other than me? Do you realize that I predicted it in an interview in Los Angeles, it's on the record. I am one of the - I am the only person on the planet who predicted it. Now there's one psychic group that did, the Xists, but they did it a month after I did. So, let's realize that you're correct in saying I know what's going to happen because...."
Caller: "Praise Bob!!"
Bob: "Yeah, let's have some testimonials here, we'll get into some new knowledge."
322 - "The 4th Reich is operating out of North America, the territory of the 4th Reich is shrinking, and now it's shrinking in Europe, hoping to build opposition to Gorby. The answer is gd. times are coming - they'll still operate out of North America - Germany is more considerate of Gorby than the 4th Reich. They're going to have to do some media ecological news management.
The matter was settled seven years ago, Germany doesn't exist anymore. The obligation for the power structure, before '82 - already got involved and made their deal with Gorby, you're just seeing an acting out of images; this is the theatre, these are the archetypes that you can study if you know the - (garbled or hidden by alarm and caller)-(hidden ground) as secret battle."
Caller: "Slack, you're great."
359 - Bob: "This is the Church of the SubGenius, we are over our hour, yee hoo, I get to stay on and rule some more."
394 - NASA re: Gorbachov - solar level.
"So, don't worry about the involvements and ramifications of cultural archetypes merging and separating on the planet; that's the stage, that's the theatre. We're talking about what's happening in the universe on a solar gov't level for bureaucratic control; that's what Gorby controls, that's why he's let it all go because he doesn't need this area of control. He's operating from the satellite zone. That's what they won in 1977: the Battle of the Harvest Moon."
407 - Dublin: "People can't live in space long without medical bad effects."
Bob: "There's no problem. Stay on the planet and supersede space by being discarnate. The electric experience goes beyond Newtonian space. The space program is essentially Newtonian, we're post-Euclidian here in the discarnate state, we have access to the whole universe. We can stay on the planet and travel faster and farther than anyone who's stuck in a capsule, he's like an old version of the angel; he can go anywhere he wants, but he's only at that point when he's there. When you're discarnate, you're everywhere at the same time, you're not limited to one body. Just by watching TV or listening to the radio electric environments, that's where it's at, that's where we get our slack. I'm not going out to space on the pink program."
474 - "That's right, rampant narcissism. Narcissism?! Collective narcissism, that's why you should never buy another album, never buy another CD, don't go to another club, do not apply for another grant, do not take a job, find out how to get slack in that prison situation....." Bob O'Leery
555 - "OK, yes, you're on."
Caller: "Whoa, whoa -woo who who - real radio - what's this with the reverb and taped interfaced. It's like a cross between John Cage and Pink Floyd - yeah, yeah, it's resonating - ooooow Heaven."
BOB DOBBS MAR 15/90 SIDE ONE BOB DOBBS MAR 15/90 SIDE ONE
410 - Bob: "A lot of this was arranged ten years ago. We're just seeing the appendages of the media archetypes as figures such as Gorbachov and Bush acting out the script of the effects of the interplay of the media archetypes. And what you're seeing here is the retrieval of human scale."
420 - "Came in the 60's, it was the main conceptual framework for the counter-culture, human scale came in when the satellite went around the major media archetypes: book, telegraph, movie, radio and television; then we have human scale. Problem is that it was an environmentally created situation of human scale."
MM:- "We must invent a NEW METAPHOR, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature." Counterblast
(Bob goes into history of tactility in 20th century, quite detailed, refer to tape.)
--------question of how can we elaborate and sculpt an illustration of the history of tactility in the 20th century-------------------------------------
*444 - "Tactility is the interplay of all the senses."
485 - "Bob returns to human scale: increased accessibility at CKLN."---------------------------maybe cut to Brent Bamberry saying "My, you're accessible">---------------check for this on CBC tape, I think side b---------------------
(Start of this tape, and 1/2 through 'hot bob' tape is same stuff)
Sean calls.
Bob: "A lot of this happened ten years ago. We're just seeing the appendages of the media archetypes, figures such as Gorb and Bush acting out the script of the effects of the interplay of the media archetypes. What you're seeing here is a retrieval of human scale. You know, Sean, human scale came in the 60's. It was the main conceptual framework for the counter-culture. Human scale came in when the satellites went around the major media archetypes - book, telegraph, movie, radio and television. But, it as an environmentally created situation of human scale."
Cool form to Hot form Cool medium pushed flips to hot form.
Ed Sullivan vs. Heraldo
Low tech vs. Hi tech
"The musical complement to that was the Punk Movement, the retrieval of, futile - but, the retrieval of the low-tech, human scale effort of the 60's."
Hi tech is opposite of cool - Punk is retrieval of low tech.
Hot baroque mood of mixed corporate-media: Punk as an anti-environment.
532 - "You have the atmosphere that Gorby set by going into street situations and talking one-on-one with people. He'd taken the advice from me that the Russian people would never believe the major media, trusted slightly the Samizdat, the Russian underground, but I told Gorby if he brings in human scale figure-mood atmosphere by the middle 80's, then he would surface as a barometer of our times and be very popular. So, the human scale manifested lately by Gorbachov threatening to resign in January. That's human scale. That's someone you could have access to and who'll listen to your grievances - but on the larger corporate-media effect, he does have to be President for a larger span of time. Why? President is a top-down position, and you have to be part of the solar gov't to be President. The popular reflection of that is to have come out of the intelligence agencies which both he and Bush did. Bush is trying to play catch up ball, trying to offer a gentler, kindler nation; that's human scale." 550
(2/3rds through 'hot bob' tape says how Bush relates top-down dilemma into human scale for the global audience. The hot media of top-down control is now advocating - via the United Nations - neo-fascism and world gov't)
595 - "The world gov't will be retrieved as an archetype and agenda for fake action by the hot media, which is what Bush and Gorby represent and recommend. The figures are just appendages of media archetype actors. The main circuit river of the mood-and-effect archetypal interplays is Advertising."
611 - Advertising as blood
"Any activity is a mere surface species spume; an appendage of the larger effect of these archetypal environments. Small reflections like that on the surface of the bloodstream aren't the area of advertising. Advertising is the form of communication between these huge environments. The hard sell of the hot world before 1950 - in the cooler 60's:- soft sell happened."
650's - discussion re: Futurist manifesto in the 20's leads into "period after WWII - cliches made new; that's our job - nothing's new under the sun, nothing old under the sun now." 661
689 - Caller: "He's Bob, but he's a little pink around the edges."
Bob (laughing):
"That's the human scale Bob, see we're no longer polarized in the old pink/subgenius dialectic - that's why I'm the biggest pink around. This Bob you're talking about is holding the fort - not ready to merge with the pink in himself. Bob on human scale has a pink aura." 694
696 - "What d'ya make of what I just talked about? I'd never said that before, it's pretty amazing, isn't it? It's big talk."
Caller: "It's big talk, it's big talk."
BOB DOBBS MAR15/90 SIDE .2....................................................
29 - Myke: "We, ah, OK? Anybody fall asleep yet? No....."
More on advertising as blood. Polstergeists. Consume/subsume/interplay does each media with other existing ones............(important Marshall point)
172 - Bob: ".... since the mixed-media corporate version are the actors and their archetypes; then, what do we call the artist? The entertainment figure would have to be an appendage of those effects. If mixed media effects are the corporate actors in the global solar theatre; the prominent artist would mix and mime the subtleties, the nuances between the interplay of these media. For example, here's what I propose: this is an update of what I said a year ago. You take Frank Zappa as specialist form of artist. He sculpts kinetic and acoustic space effects via visual space bias. They have to be proficient and charismatic in all media involved in order to have any staying/lasting power."
302 - "OK, if you think of the kinetic environment as movie and car, the acoustic as radio and speech, the visual as book, photo, newspaper, geometry. And the computer and television as tactile; let's try Burroughs. Burroughs visualizes kinetic and acoustic and old tactile space effects."
Dublin: "Old pieces of newspapers cut up and rearranged."
Bob: "That's the visualizing of the American and radio, occult and extra sensory ESP groups which I'd call the old tactile, not the new electric tactile."
318 - "Notice I don't say sculptures, 'cause he visualizes, he uses print media."
320 - "Captain Beefheart: he sculptures visual and acoustic space, poetry and music via old tactile space bias. The Paleolithic ESP, pre-Agrarian, pre-civilized modality." (Dublin triggered into dinosaur/fossil recollection by the word, "Paleolithic".)
350 - "You take LaRouche, he sculptures - 'cause he's political - kinetic and visual space, the American environment and book and geometry effects via acoustic space bias. More like the radio image - part of the hot media spiral retrieval that Reagan was - and acoustic is the perceptual bias of his trying to articulate process in geometry and geometric form." (? is this whole segment entirely correct?)
358 - "I then would say, the supreme artist would be McLuhan, because he sculptures kinetic, acoustic and visual space effects via a tactile space bias. In other words, he's the one who's more accurately the appendage of television."
404 - "This could be something to follow in the future; how the Irish deal with this new atmosphere of human scale."
----------------Hidden Agenda comes out nine months later, talk about the birth of universe theatre archetypes manifesting under the top isn't just down apparently auspices and kineticizms of Bob's particularbeam vision, yo baby yo, surfin' jazz with my top down, bottom's up, since having fun seems like an appropriate task when job's become hobbies--------------------
523 - "They're using concepts and not percepts; but, that's jargon, right?"
530 - Edward compliments show, having fun, then does an amusing mind theatre abrupt sign off.....
590 - Bob: "That's why the electric age is creating so much diversity, because you can hoick up 200,000 people under electric conditions since you have access to billions of people, every person can access, as a kind of cult artform - cult as artform; have access to a couple hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, whatever."
620 - "It means that you have the time to put a lot of emotional and intellectual energy into your hobbies - edit - you are daily involved in a massive work of making sense. Everybody in the global theatre is making sense, and that's a very taxing and demanding activity, no matter what role you play you're contributing as much as everybody else, including the cancel-out factors of you cancelling the work, counter-work, that's being done by someone else."
648 - "It's the narcissism of the body. Hoping to last forever. And that is the visual-space, Greek form of the body bounded by a line on a bag of chemicals."
Listener: "I lost you."
Myke: "That's OK, we're going."
Bob: "You're putting me to sleep, caller. I don't think I can go on."
-------Nature; an invention of the Greeks ?---------
-------deep freeze or biological immortality?---------
-------ah, never mind.------
BOB DOBBS MARCH 28TH 1990 side one BOB DOBBS MAR 28/90
SIDE 1
54 - Taped message from caller: "Ooooh Bob, I'm merging with your fragments. I am loving every minute of it, it's so wonderful. It goes over and over and over in my tape deck all the time in the car and I love it. I keep turning it on and turning it off. It's Sue in Halifactsfaxedfaxedfastmediaartstrikecognizingmediaecologybutasanunsurgicalshutdownasopposedtomorecarefulmanagementmodesproposed. And thank you for sending me that wonderful tape."
126 - Bob: "Bob's going to be covered in the major media pretty shortly and we have a member of the global theatrical brain police here tonight monitoring and giggling, knowing he's got a monopoly on the situation at this point. He can be the fulcrum of the Esperanto for awhile - therefore, he's here to study the show and monitor. This means difficult days ahead, but I've been to the mountain top."
What's the fulcrum of global collective consciousness? Is there such a thing, or is this a product of visual space sculpted with a tactile bias? Thus as a previous visual-mechnical bias of having a point on which something is raised? Both.
280 - Women - surveillance software - re: Godfather - doesn't get the Godmother - Connie as hidden ground - Tribal societies mafia-ridden - electric/preliterate mafia-ridden.
Bob: "Now the major media archetypes are the mafia effects. Big Brother had to go inside, so he's busy fighting himself like the legs of an octopus confusing each other. Therefore, they keep arresting and freeing each other. Because they're not the hidden ground. The hidden ground is the mafia of the media archetypes - that's Ma."
Sean: "And the emphasis is on Ma - fia, it's not Dad - fia, is it?"
Bob: "Good one, Sean, you're hot tonight."
Sean: "Yeah, the eyes are blind, they always look with their eyes instead of listening or touching..."
Bob: "Yeah, FBI Eye, CIA eye yi yi, they're private."
(Visual space enhances surveillance, as does electricity which also changes the time space force of surveillance making it inclusive, hence paranoia and brain police effects)
327 - "It took us, what? 2500 years to get out of visual space. Now we're into acoustic space - of course, we're not using those terms anymore - we've moved into kinetic and tactile. 'Telekinetic' is another term for tactile vs. kinetic. So, we're well beyond the categories for men and women, right now. We're just superhuman, discarnate things. Right now. That's why Women's Lib rose up as an objection to being assimilated into the old categories. They don't apply anymore. They just wanted role mobility like man thought he had, but he's not very good at it. So, women are going to dominate from here on in." (clapping in background)
"By surpassing writing, we have regained our sensorial WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural plane, but on a cosmic plane. We have evoked a super-civilized sub-primitive man. NOBODY yet knows the languages inherent in the new technological culture; we are all technological idiots in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present. We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth."
MM Counterblast 1969
354 - Bob: "What was I talking about, Sean?
Sean: "TVO."
Bob: "Just before that?"
Sean: "The New Age."
Bob: "I'm moving fast here, I'm moving fast, Sean; I'm resonating fast, I don't want to say that I'm moving. We're not moving anywhere, just dancing on the spot here, swimming on the spot. Bobbing Bobbing, when you swim, you bob...Bobbing............The New Age is : they're trying to conceptualize the basic telekinetic percept and they try to fit it into the old archetypal retrievals of Blavatsky to ? to Cherokee tradition, to who's before that...Atlantis, and they go out to be alone and inside to be social, no actually they go out to Sirius? and head out - the solar system as a garbage dump."
Sean: "They're heading back to Atlantis 'cause it's a choral society."
Bob: "Did ya get that, Myke? A choral society, not an oral society...Yet, it was a study that they sang, they sang and they had great ecological sense which we hope to mime, but we can't use their concepts for our new media ecology. Man, I'm hot tonight with this brain police monitoring me, I'm just flowing with the concepts and percepts. Sean, you hogged the show two weeks ago, call back Sean, 'cause you know your stuff, and you can get me going. OK."
418 - "Colour is a tactile medium, but, that's a visual expression of tactility, whereas white, black and white, dull greys are abstract, visual space, alphabetic effects of colour. ----could implement into 'history of tactility' section----
I'm tactility, which would mean I would include all media."
430 - Re: Bob escapes monitoring throughout 60's and 70's by ordering surveillance of independent left groups and journalists as a protective cover for his own unhampered operations.
442 - "There's a movement in Vancouver maybe, I know Wayne Morris had a guy on who represents a group that have an art strike on-----maybe put in silence ... to cbc part re:BB: 'I didn't hear anything'>-----The Art Strike strike. But, I do it on a solar level in the form of media ecology....Where we shift and , ah, respond, and turn on and off the collective environment, the archetypes, the mythic images."
550 - "Information is a perceptual threat to your anthropomorphism, which is pinkness." (Bob's response to reaction to Dr.Beter's Robotoid pronouncements)
688 - "You were thinking something they brought up? I thought that I told them that? Well, in this situation, where we are subsumed in this collective Finnegans awake; these collective archetypes dreaming awake, therefore they're hallucinating. We can naturally, as a by-product, have telepathy, therefore anybody can take credit for anything, that's the global Esperanto......Let's go to the phones."
720's - "Not just your body or mind, but the interval between the two."
_________________MAR 28/90 SIDE 2 MAR 28/90 SIDE 2
2 - Bob: "Follow your own rhythm, drummer beat."
22 - "All the media have become private, interactive. The telephone with the answering machine - that meant you could have your own private bubble; still interactive efficiently with the telephone environment, but not have to respond immediately as if a drum beat was imposed on you. Then you had VCR - tape shows and watch at own pace. Remote zapper: bypass advertising. Tape deck, satellite dish, PC, etc. brought back the sensation of interactive and demand media, like cable. All these things came in from the middle 70's and that's when the 'Me Decade' and the neo-conservative retrieval of the 18th century - chafing at the bit to get back to the original autonomy of the original ideals in the American constitution, whether liberal or conservative. The 18th century concepts had been retrieved as an icon; as an effect of the retrieval of the human scale, the human scale meaning that these monster media don't impose their drumbeat on you anymore." ------this is a relational variation applying the idea of human scale. Is man striving for it by tendency?-------
64 "We're now beyond the bureaucratic structures as solutions."
-----could be restated more clearly on tape---if need be to use it-----
Caller: "We're free."
Bob: "That's right, we're free to suffer at our own rate, and of course, suffering always flips into ecstasy..."
-----cut to 'the march/campaign goes on for Bobby's 30's/Jimmy Stewart kinetic persevering???---------------
America's Home Videos
78 - "We have another caller...."
SFX of kids playing (over phone) ----keep in mind a mary day----
"So, is this an example of taking Bob's show to human scale? I mean is there a hijacking going on here, with people using their own cassette operations and mixing them with telephone and radio? Therefore, becoming private broadcasters and generators of their own church syndrome?" (edit)
Myke: "I think it's just people wanking off."
Bob: "That's very important. They say that masturbation is the thinking man's television. Now, think of that."
118 - Caller: "Listen, I really enjoy your show, but I've got one question."
Bob: "What's the 'but' for? You imply that having a question takes away your enjoyment."
------Bob's tactile sculpting/rhetorical mastering of a visual indicator of a faulty conclusion into a charming probe ephemeral under new time-space energy percepts probe yet lasting in the moment it lasted: Percept. You had to be there--------
158 - "The only source of top-down information relevant for the post '79 period is Dr. Beter. He was part of the hidden gov't, so he was the only person who could know it. Mae Brussell was a housewife working through the major pink press; it was an excellent job what she did, but she didn't have access to vast changes that happened as we got into the final turn, which happened from '79 to '82."
168 - "You get, for basic education, you study the holy offices of Mae Brussell, then you escalate from that to Lyndon LaRouche and then you move into a little Sherman Skolnick and then Dr. Beter. Always as you're doing that, studying Marshall McLuhan , because he knew that, but figured out as a member of the Establishment how to talk about it. How to talk about it without naming names."
202 - "Iran-Contragate had no effect, it was entertainment. It was a nostalgia for the feeling that Big Brother still was doing some dirty work behind the scenes. We've gone well beyond the control of Big Brother. It's now a solar gov't level. They don't need to deal in dope, that's left for spinoffs from unemployed intelligence agents. Because intelligence is obsolete too, information is obsolete; you've gotta start lookin' on the solar gov't level, and that's Dr. Beter's stuff. That's why Iran-Contra had no effect in the way the regular researchers thought that it would upset the Reagan Presidency. This is stuff that's irrelevant from this point on, but it's necessary for young people or old people or slow people to study this stuff just to get their basic mathematics. That's why Mae Brussell is the holy office of mathematics. You're counting, you're numbering figures. But, you have to study McLuhan to understand the ground. The macromyths. Alright. So, that's a mouthful, I expect you to understand that."
Caller: "Yeah, I'm with you on most of it, I think."
Bob: "Yeah, you should be."
Caller: "OK, well thank you very much."
Bob: "Spread the Gemstone File around."
Caller: "I have been actually."
Bob: "Are you a high school teacher?"
Caller: "Well, I'm going to teacher's college right now."
Bob: "OK, well put that stuff on your course when you get a job, give those kids in grade six a little taste of the past."
Caller: "Romanticism."
Bob: "They'll love it, they'll wanna read again."
277 - "That's the new."
Dublin: "Didn't you hear the 'the the the'."
Bob: "Yeah."
280 Dublin: "It's beautiful to listen to a child babbling....."
Bob: "It's miming, dreaming away, it's trying to use language to see."
327 - "Every new child, every new being, every new pink, subgenius has to look at the world through the other, that way forms their own identity, so, they have to absorb the other. That's the macromyth, that's the historical heritage."
310 - "What's a metaphor? Well, when man's or woman's or its reach exceeds its grasp."
355 - "When we die our body weight does not change, yet 20 yrs. ago people thought it did change. They measured it and there was a change in weight, but then they found out it was some chemical in the body. So, the mind is weightless....soul is weightless, so, it doesn't exist in physical terms, but it's not outside the physical, it is in-between, like an X-ray, it interpenetrates metaphor and the brain. That thing you can't locate is carving out the metaphor."
366 - Dublin: "Well, it's interesting because...."
Bob: "It's not interesting."
Dublin: (laughter).
375 - Bob: "Look at the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. That's what metaphors are: artificial intelligence. Language is an artificial intelligence. It gives us a grasp of the world, it gives us a way of looking at the world, but is not the whole of intelligence."
386 - "To exceed your grasp is what we do when we speak because, you can't pin it down what you're talking about in the essential bit, yet, you're talking and using it. So, we are making something out of nothing , and so that makes Jesus possible. There was a possibility of 'virgin birth'. That would be within the laws of the universe: that something could come out of nothing. So, I think I converted a hundred people tonight."
437 - "The Women's Lib shows up in the electric age when the electric environment can't be bought, sold or stolen. So, they will take over as a false myth, but you won't have any control, because you can't at this time, and that's perfect for them 'cause they don't want to control it."
477 - "That's what we do here, we make sense, we don't match with some standard, we make sense, we make it up, but it's important, it's miming what's going on in the world. We're basing the world on illusion right now."
514 - Sean: "Hello Bob."
Bob: "Ooooh, oh Sean's back, yeah Seannigan, we're making big progress. Oh yeah, it's a great show, this is a great show, you taping it? Yeah, yeah, it's gonna take weeks to digest what we're grasping, right?"
535 - "Women want role mobility, men want role mobility, everybody wants to be everybody, everybody wants to wear everybody else. It's like you said two weeks ago: all cultures are trying to get under each other's skin. All media are trying to get under each other's skin, all human beings are trying to get under each typology of skin, right?....So, what is the cause of that? The need comes from the hidden ground, and it's the electric discarnate state."
567 - "We put on the kinetic as a costume, as ghostlike costume, while we deal with the telekinetic effects - which is total obliteration."
580 - "Burroughs just visualizes kinetic and acoustic and tactile space effects, visualized into the novel form. That's nowhere near what McLuhan does; he sculptures kinetic, acoustic and visual effects via tactile space bias. Burroughs just visualizes it."
598 - "Now we're in a situation where human scale's come back. So, you see the Nazis start getting gentler and kindler.....we're going to have a Utopia here that's going to drive us crazy."
627 - "How are we gonna wake up to the fact that Finnegan's awake? Our mixed corporate-media are dreaming awake, how we gonna wake 'em up. We can imitate them by falling asleep. That's why Reagan falling asleep at the wheel was the perfect expression of media ecology."
(Marshall didn't believe the medium was the message.) ----should we play the 'tape' testifying to this ?--------
656 - "We can say anything - dogma changes every 15 seconds here."
APRIL 18/90 SIDE ONE
185 - Bob: "A tetrad on the microphone - that's us. What does the microphone enhance? It enhances the torch singer who whispers in everybody's ear. OK? that's the microphone. It enhances the inflated persona for everyone to wear. Hey, that sounds like me: Bob. The inflated persona for everyone to wear. The private individual voice, the intimacy of Bob. What does it obsolesce? Private space and privacy, it obsolesces the big band, the old-fashioned orator - or the big-mouth. Retrieves the close group, the tribal mode; that's the Church, right? And it retrieves intimacy, the cozy nightclub. When pushed to its extreme, it flips into the closed, collective space, the wrap-around sound-bubble. I'll cuckold the cockeyed woild."
Tape goes into Robotoids with Dr. Beter
484 - " The cliches come back as new archetypes. The old comes back anew."
--------maybe play the signature 'pump up the jam' matrix sample>>mix to musical excerpt of Jolly Giant somewhere in the middle where the music's hipper-------
648 - backwards swedish acoustic space speech sounds on phone line.
Bob: "...That was on my message machine."
Myke: "We've heard this before (Myke hangs up). No need to hear it again."
Bob laughs at Myke's powerful hit: "Just hang up the phone and disconnect thousands of people."
BEEHIVE TAPE JANUARY 9/91 SIDE A
304 - Bob: CBC New Year's address.
393 - Brent Bambury: "That was J. R. Bob Dobbs of the Church of the SubGenius, and you're listening to Brave New Waves on CBC Stereo, the CBC that was formerly a tool of the left-wing counter-capitalist movement, but now, a mere cog in the homeopathic revolution of the Church of the SubGenius - Praise Bob - now, more music from Big Pink."
415 - Bob: "Touche´, Tom....you've been leaking secret info."
Tom Touche´: "You're so washed up, Bob, that I can talk to you."
518 - Caller: "I want more info. re: conspiracy to wipe socialism off the map and replace it with Christianity."
Bob: "Are you a socialist?"
Caller: "Yes."
Bob: "Top-down or bottom-up? Top-down plays catch up with the bottom-up effect. Socialism was wiped out by TV. Not the content, medium itself. TV brings in New Left/New Right. Neither effective in the long run. Decentralization means you're free, you don't need an external gov't to control your situation. You're free! Of course, that means everyone else is free to run amuck over you. So, you've got to be paranoid."
560 ---bob dobbs > bob marshall 580 berlin wall Gehlen - hijacking ...of "characters with heart JFK, MLK, etc." ----cut out most of caller's stuff - too slow------
584 - "Difference between capitalism and communism?"
(Now, watch ladies and gentlemen how McLuhan's very applicable at a John Birch Society or This Magazine meeting, or one with Henry Kissinger, whoever is figure for some human form you lations carefree owing to Bob's or Marshall's rhetorical tactile mastery and sense a rhyee interplay with the mythic audience in any particular given situation, though from a top-down recognition you still might get replaced by a nasty paramilliontary shadows reveal more or less than light refracting kinetic fascist film production smoking pistol lightening man high impact close-ups and alarming haunting sus spensory rear stage shadows eliciting sudden acceleration car movie effects silent movie set in motion eventual computer environment says Marshall back to cigarette torch singer hot medium that's detached pounding leather boots that 'landed where the hand of man never set foot." , Fascism archetype/mood tremoringly filter resonates - as other mythic proportions can within many discarnate space biases - like the soul between the mind and body
The new media are not
be -bridges- tween man and nature: they are nature Counterblast MM 1969 our nature inn our image
that recreated ethereal archetypes inside the mythic hardware of aryan beauty in perfume and designer genes ads were the sepiotones that so covered the dream artifacts of experience in hot kinetic ground mythic residue in the later tactile soupzone from the soupies, a decade you probably haven't heard of in my mix because it was covered up by other stuff, but since it's of mythic proportions nowadays new decades can be offered as probes into the history of the new time-space energy nature linked to man. Whatever one's to make of this can reside in the almost certainty that everything's approaching everything eventually though they may never meet...now bobby, this theme of yours using the 4th reich and kinetic space as a ghostlike costume in the transformed ground more approximating the present technihilogical splatters dust gets in your eyes and also mood mud them into bobby marshall, sounds perfectly hectic. And what the heck did. Percept. Including Bob's documented 4 nanosecond one in March of 90 according to Stanford researchers/spoke as a persons but in the end certainly hoicked up their bodies as a shared medium of human scale or grounding zone for discarnate man, therefore the propaganda didn't matter from the onset. Dreaming awake can't merely be transformed by shutting off the TV. We can hardly designate the ramifications of turning it on and recreating time and space and developing an infrastruct around it but now inside it as figure for the ground around it, like the soul interpenetrating the mind and body. Maybe.)
584 - "Difference between capitalism and communism? No difference, both by-products of the newspaper age 1830 and before - filtered through cultural bias. We're living in a world of mythic stage now, where you take your mythic social pattern and run amuck, you play hardball with it, you don't dialogue. So, the capitalists were able to hardball the electric autonomy mood that rose in the 80's under satellite, VCR, remote control conditions. You know, the cocoon of electric software addiction that most people are involved in."
(Myke has some classical music playing in bgrd.) Post-TV age
608 - "The golfers are not fighting in the Gulf; they're fighting with their satellites on the solar structure level."
617 (sounds neat with Myke's music, use it as a canvas for our own sounds)
Caller: "The CIA and the Pentagon had actually had this machine in their possession through some sort of ...I don't know how they got it....."
Bob: "I think Tom Touche´ gave it to them."
Caller: "....It had a weird effect on people like R. Nixon and J. Carter, who had more brains than Nixon."
Bob: "Are you sure about that?"
Caller: "I don't know."
Bob: "Then, that's a myth you bought into, mighty assumption you're using in your own thought processes."
651 - "Capitalism didn't win...I mean Bush is collapsing too as much as the Soviet Union, Britain and Canada...and note who isn't collapsing: Germany and Japan. Why?"
Caller: "'Cause they lost WW11?"
Bob: "Yeah, there's no way of -----gd. example of bottom-up response to a usually top-down topical consideratorium-----succeeding other than through failure. (chuckle) That's true, you stoop to conquer."
Caller: "That's right, I guess so."
Bob: "You now know. Take this percept...now go from there, don't run back into your confusion."
Caller: "Praise Bob. Thank you."
Bob: "Conversion right there."
--------should we musically bring in something 40's? A lot of these quotes end with reference to music--reoccuring motif's mood sewn/sculpted with instrumentation depicting various time zones, particularly the 20th century--seems quite appropriate--I'm sure no one on the committee Will Object-----------
**link to other sections employing this idea>> 689 - Caller: "You didn't sound at all like yourself on the CBC New Year's broadcast."
Bob: "Oh no, that's another part of Bob Dobbs; that's the serious Bob, the Secret-Council-of-Ten Bob. You've never heard me talk about employment figures or this - ---definite zone to bring up gold story wash---a bunch of nonsense, but when they tell me, I merge with the medium, play off the particular media of CBC."
696 - Caller: "I'm doing artwork, yes."
Bob: "You wanna make any album covers?"
Caller: "No, ah, do I?? Ah, yeah sure."
Bob: "Ok."
Caller: (laughter).........."Room 222 is back on air at 2:30."
Myke: "Bad prints, pubic hair caught in the lens...." (laughter)
Caller: "They replay it for the number 22."
Bob: "It's 22 weeks since Saddam attacked Kuwait, now they're having a summit...---initiated war against Iran Sept 22/80?---- Cycles of history are based on these numbers, 19 and 22. What's your address?"
Caller: "Well, 592."
Bob: "592, that's 5+9=14, that's 14. Well, you're part of the new pattern, 14's the new number coming up...Gimme the last four digits of your phone#."
Caller: "Uhhh, 3298."
Bob: "3+2+9+8 = 22.....You're a 22 also. Case closed."
Caller: "That's marvellous!!!" - (cut)
BEEHIVE TAPE SIDE 2 BEEHIVE TAPE SIDE TWO BEEHIVE TAPE side B
185 - Vladimir phones in the Kabbalistic meaning of 22. 22 letters in the 'mystic' Hebrew alphabet...we can't use this part anyway cause Myke's getting silly with the "where were you on Nov 22/91?" quote.
308 - Bob: (Bob explains Myke's purpose) "We have a dialectic here. We have me who involves everybody. I'm Bob, I'm everybody. I contain multitudes in the discarnate state. We have to have a knowable level of the discarnate state by using words, so, I have to have a person who believes in the English language; will use it when you bark it at him. --edit--So, if I say the English language, he'll think I'm talking to him and I can use that as a red herring while I'm communicating discarnately. Well, Heather, you have a great knack of pushing the percepts beyond what I've said before."
Heather: "Oh, that's good."
Bob: "Anything more?"
Heather: "Not really."
Bob: "C'mon, c'mon, you guys can have multiple orgasms...c'mon."
Heather: "Oh, let me just think."
Bob: "Yeah, let's rest for a second."
Heather: "Don't want to waste airtime while I come up with something."
326 - Caller: "I'm not up on LaRouche..."
337 - Bob: "LaRouche didn't do anything, he's one of the nicest people, the most moral person of the 20th century. Just because he inspires dupes and useful fools to run around at airports - he's made breakthroughs in the intellectual territory and in conceptual space. And his effects he's not totally responsible for."
343 - Caller: "What are some of the bad things about Mr. LaRouche?"
Bob: "He doesn't understand Marshall McLuhan or too many of the other holy offices. He doesn't have complete comprehensive awareness which I'm the only person that has, so, I wouldn't knock him for not having that, nobody else on the planet has it....(Myke: "Bob is Good.")....You can develop that if you stay regular in your taxi cab. What's your licence#?"
Caller: "P.O. Box 1324."
Bob: "You're a 22 cabby, way to be."
Caller: "Well, there's a little more to life than just that, don't you think?"
Bob: "Not much."
Caller: "Not much?"
Bob: "There's no life before death anymore."
Caller: "Oh, OK..."
*550 - Bob: "The ad maker, the wordsmith, doesn't have a point of view. Marshall McLuhan would have talked to Kissinger, even though he called him the Kissinger of Death. He would have related to him, just like LaRouche has to relate to the Mafia and the Gehlen-Nazi network. When you're involved in an imploded zone, you can't use value judgements."
568 - Re: leasing our eyes and ears to private corporations.
Bob: "That's why we shouldn't talk about rights. What should we talk about? -----Cosmic Awareness quote from one of the first two issues of Perfect Pitch?-----What's a strategy, a form of protest, so that we don't fall into the trap of obsolete issues? How can we protest?"
Tom Rich: "I think the way to protest is to shut 'em off."
Bob: "Yeah, we refuse to buy the Toronto Star, refuse to do the CBC."
Tom Rich: "It's not the Toronto Star, the newspapers. It's CNN."
Bob: "Mulroney's on the right track by taking the budget away from CBC. Next, turn off the media coverage of him."
592 - "'Media Ecology' is the slogan, and what it is, it's not just private, say, boycotting of your own TV; it's demanding your politician to deal with this one issue. It's becoming monomaniacal about Media Ecology, not about nature, oil, high prices. Ignore everything, get the public to engage in that level of sloganeering."
611 - breakdown as breakthrough
Bob: "War and peace. Bypass concepts of war and peace because it's man vs. his inventions, it's not war or peace.........I just want to stop 'cause I know there's other callers."
Tom Rich: "Do you?" (laughter).
* Any comments not in quotation marks and any underlinings were made by David Newfeld, my studio butler.
MEMO TO PRINCE CHARLES
June 4, 1990
As I sit here dictating this memo to you and watching Connie dancing with herself hugging the letter in her arms, you might hear the tears running down my face (that's You're Still the One in the background). Pardon me, but I can't believe how we got here, 22,000 miles above the earth, and I'm drifting back- they just mentioned Zareski again on the radio- back to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in the summer of 1966 when we watched little Bobby Dean and tiny Carolyn Wheeler go on their separate little adventures never to be seen again. Oh, they would be "seen" again but everyone knew they weren't the same. That fall, their last year in high school, Bobby was famous for having hitchhiked to California and back again with only five dollars given to him by some kind of Taco Bell franchiser who had driven him for about 1000 miles. Carolyn had spent the summer in Sherbrooke, Quebec where she checked out the transformative powers of French kissing. It worked. She was very popular that first Darteen dance in September. That hadn't happened before. She was different. And indeed they both were! These facts served just perfectly as "covers" for what had really happened. The truth of the matter was that they were victims of Walk-ins - namely, me and Connie!
What a year that was for us! There we were, both 44 years old and veterans of Mata Hari/James Bond scenarios since World War Two, pretending we were teenagers in a little town on the Eastern rim of the North American plate. But, as usual, such was our luck that it was the best time to be a teen - or rather, to pretend to be youth. Actually everyone in the world was trying to act young and wild! However, for us it was an assignment and the stakes were very high. But, Charles, right now as Connie and I float in the arms of victory I see those faces drift by and I wonder what the citizens of Dartmouth will think when these memos are published. Of course, the majority will hardly even remember who Bobby Dean and Carolyn Wheeler were except for a couple of vague rumours. In 22 years from now they will be the ones who will build the tourist monuments. Still, those who knew and shared our local schemes will now have many questions answered. Perhaps they will feel it was all not in vain and even a little significant.
Take Steve, for example. He suddenly found Bobby sitting next to him in A-5 (a Grade 12 division in Dartmouth High School), a not very academically inclined class (Steve was in there because he was too smart to study), after Bobby had been "streamed" through the advanced class with Mike and Karen and Phil and Don and Christine (now a politician with a Minister's portfolio sometimes) and Peter (rumoured to be a doctor in Annapolis Valley) and Terry (later murdered in the '80's) for five years. By shrewdly dropping chemistry, biology, German and picking up Social Problems I arranged for Bobby to be put in Steve's class so he would have a very light homework load giving me much free time for our real assignment. Phil and Don would later refer to this period as the time when Bobby "died". But Steve can now understand why Bobby suddenly became obsessed with his FREAK OUT album by the Mothers of Invention. Bobby was going to be a physicist, couldn't even hear music and back in '65 wanted to form a band with Steve and Alan Billard and call it The Valets. The Valets!!! Steve was outraged. Understandable because Steve was studying guitar by listening to Paul Butterfield records. But Bobby was a good dancer (he had learned from his childhood buddy Butch Lucas) and was often mistaken for a "coloured" person at the Banook Canoe Club dances. But suddenly Bobby couldn't stop requesting to hear Frank Zappa's music whenever he was at Steve's house. Then there was that moment in February, 1967 when the substitute teacher for Paul Kutner's physics class (a Beatnik) gave a copy of McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage to Steve and Bobby. Why did he pick them out? For the first time (if anybody had cared to notice) Bobby was distracted from doing his homework. This went on for a couple of weeks and the consequences were felt for years after by his close friends. The next catastrophic change that actually affected Steve personally was Bobby's announcement to him that he would not be travelling around the world with Steve when they graduated from high school. He was going to go to college with Carolyn. This seriously disrupted the intended path for Steve's life but I couldn't tell him why then. That would have to wait another year.
Meanwhile, back to Connie's and my mission. The echoes of the kids' relationship started to be felt around the world. On October 9, 1966 John Lennon and Yoko Ono first met in that gallery in London - the very day Bobby declared his designs on Carolyn to his hockey buddy Phil. Oh, that reminds me of an echo when Bobby was in California the summer of '66 when I made my initial "possession" of him. It was Friday night, July 29, 1966 - the night of Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident and the first advertised Mothers' Freak Out! (Dave Walley might argue with you on that point but not with me because he doesn't know how to reach me.) Bobby wasn't at the dance that night but he was in Los Angeles. He had just made the first "radical" move in his tiny, tiny life. He, two draft evaders, a gambler, and a Mexican had just quit lemon-picking at a camp in Carpinteria. They probably had 75 dollars between them. That night was an extremely resonant echo. Another important echo which became more significant in the later '70's was the case of Walter Bowart's 40-day long pure Sandoz acid journey during the fall of '66. Walter, you remember, was the founder with Ishmael Reed of the East Village Other in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Bobby tried to get his driver's license that wonderful autumn but failed miserably because I had not mastered my "control" of his ambidextrous functions (check with Colin May on that embarrassment). But the Luck Plane was slanted our way because events escalated rapidly as Rhyee returned to the Plane of Essence (notice it was completed in Feb. '67 when Bobby was given McLuhan's paperback) and during that intense time Connie and I needed to be alone to attend to our intelligence activities without being distracted by high school football games and parties. Having no transportation gave us an alibi. Also, we had the alibi of Bobby's rapidly deteriorating interest in hockey and subsequent dropping from the team roster even though he was the assistant captain. Incidents such as having Bobby fire the puck at his own coach when he had a breakaway probably hastened the coach's decision. Still, it was a drastic personality change from his friends' point of view attributed no doubt to the fact he was either getting laid or he wasn't getting laid. These new tendencies of seeming rebellion culminated in Bobby being expelled in the last month of his high school career in May of '67. Of course, this was necessary for Connie and I to do some scarey stuff during the hyper-serious Arab-Israeli War in the first week of June. Few people know how close we came to Armageddon that time. On the other hand, Connie did not need the sultry "rebellious" cover since her job was to monitor the satellite reconnaissance set-up in her bedroom. Her long hours alone in her room was understood by Carolyn's parents as her preparation for the Provincial Examinations. And Carolyn was even able to have time to finish out the Vice-Presidential term on the Student's Council after Joey Blades ran off to Greenwich Village wearing an earring. Oh yeah, there was a big scandal that spring when some students stole the provincial exams. Bobby was never caught but Norman could verify Bobby's role.
In the fall of '67 Connie and I had to get Bobby and Carolyn away from their parents. We arranged for them to register at Mount Allison University in the marshy little town of Sackville, New Brunswick. Nobody would notice them there. However, one mistake was made. Bobby's roomate, Paul Brison, was "rural" enough to notice something was very strange about Bobby and Carolyn's relationship. So we "inspired" two sophomores, Barry Ellis and Ben Harnish, to form the Mental Mutants "anarchist" club as a cover for our intelligence work. Some of their rantings were even printed in the student paper (check out the Feb.13, '68 issue). And the editor of the paper was so intoxicated by the Mutants' work he offered Bobby the editorship for the next year! But, alas, we would not be staying in Sackville for long.
One of the echoes of that interim was the longest brain surgery in history done in New York City on Nov. 25, 1967 - Marshall McLuhan - under the knife for 22 hours.
Back in Dartmouth for the summer of '68, Connie and I schemed on how to set up a new "cover" to explain our increasing need for a more far-ranging mobility. The college fake would no longer do. We had to use the "dropout" scam. We decided to float the story that we were going to Montreal. That seemed plausible since Leonard Cohen's hit Suzanne had raised the profile of that city for the counterculture. But we needed some kind of tribal group - a commune. So we recruited some local high school kids with the help of Steve. Of course, this meant I had to let him in on our little secrets, or at least some of them. You know, a "need to know" basis. Well, you can imagine the rumours flew that summer about Eddie, David, Tommy, Ingrid, Nolan and Chris. Steve's mother, a very shrewd and perceptive Conservative, went so far as to call Bobby the Anti-Christ and banned him from their home. She knew something awesome and disturbing was brewing in her tiny, tiny town. But it worked and Bobby and Carolyn got to Montreal with no trouble except for a little resistance from their parents. There were some hard feelings but our work had to be done and we knew the benefits of it would be realized later.
Once in Montreal, with the semi-comprehending assistance of Barry and Drapkin (from Mount Allison) and Steve and Shirley (from Dartmouth) we established contact with Dean Latimer, Allan Katzman, David Walley and Lita Eliscu at the East Village Other in Manhattan; with David Worcester and Vern Christenson and Cosmic Awareness in Seattle; with Joe Dun Sloan and the D-cell in Los Angeles; and with Don McBrearty and the film industry in London and later Toronto. From '68 on through the Seventies and into the early Eighties these friends provided safe houses for key periods of crisis in the unfolding of history/evitable fate. But during that particular autumn in Montreal, Barry played a very important role as a liaison with Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque. Drapkin was an important conduit to the pharmaceutical industry. Oh, that reminds me, a curious side-effect of my "control" over Bobby was that he would sometimes lose the basic essentials of his identity rooted in his childhood memories. This would require establishing personal contact with some early close childhood friend where obscure details of their mutual past would be dragged out for major scrutiny in the intensity of their reunion. Montreal reminds me of this because it was there that Randy House had moved in 1964 from Dartmouth and he was periodically visited by us so Bobby could be "reoriented". I'm sure Randy will remember these sessions when he reads this but will marvel at how many years have passed since he last had one (it was 1975, Randy). Excuse me, Charles, while I clear something up and give Randy a particularly cute memory that only he would fully appreciate. Remember, Randy, when in the heat of one of these nostalgic laughing debates that fall of '68, you, Bobby and Carolyn dropped in on Cathy Bowes at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal where she was a nurse and left your names at the front desk because she was not available. None of you guys were really very close to her so she must have been puzzled. Well, Cathy, wherever you are (though Steve told me last summer that he talked to Charlotte Hutchinson and he thinks she mentioned that Cathy Bowes married a doctor and is living in Arizona, but Steve's not sure because he never knew either Charlotte or Cathy) now you know why their names appeared in your life at that time. They were drunk on memory so Bobby could remember who he felt like he was.
For the next few years Connie and I criss-crossed all over the northern Western Hemisphere using the above-mentioned refuges for Solar Government debriefings from the Secret Council of Ten. More on that later. Meanwhile, we found that Montreal was increasingly inhospitable after the FLQ Crisis of Oct. '70 so we decided we could safely relocate in Dartmouth and later Halifax. Steve had long left Montreal and returned home mainly because of exhaustion, and Barry, searching for autonomy, went back to his family farm on P. E. I. to work the land for potatoes. Their responsibilities in our mission were largely superseded by archetypes merging/fragmenting at the speed of light so a rest was well-deserved. Once back in Nova Scotia I had to deal with the karmic fallout from the previous cover of the "commune". The original members plus new hangers-on had fallen into lives of complete disarray.
The subsequent counselling sessions with this Dartmouth gang unexpectedly brought out a new role for Carolyn which we realized would create a great new cover for Connie. If Carolyn became a medical student then we would have the next ten years, at least, taken care of. We knew the management of the solar government was settling in for the long haul after the rapid changes of the Sixties and Connie's satellite surveillance work would be relatively stable. A medical role would be perfect. I still had much travelling to do in my work but Connie could be free to join me around the world during the summers. One important person from Bobby's past, Charles, was a character named Flaps who was one of the original Troika- Steve, Bobby, and Flaps. You see, Bobby always had a healthy streak of megalomania that he kept to himself. That's why I picked him. And Flaps was the one friend he could rehearse this with. Bobby first made contact with Flaps on this level in 1964 when they both agreed they could see "Butch the Electron" - their name for those little spots in the air. Also, Flaps had a similar bent of mind for nostalgic details - even obscure ones that he could hilariously mimic. But as for the megalomania trait, Flaps also was sure that either he or Bobby or Steve was the Second Coming of Jesus the Christ. So this required hours of humorous debate and subtle probing between he and Bobby. Flaps even dropped all his other courses at St. Mary's University in Halifax after his freshman year and began taking Theology classes (about 20 of them) over the next five years. Little did he realize that he actually was teasing and philosophizing with me, Bob Dobbs, all that time. Flaps also provided some great opportunities for he and Bobby's major fetish - ball hockey! This allowed me to do some fine, superfine thinking whenever I was in Nova Scotia. While Bobby was trying to win the scoring title and beat the Seagulls (consistently the best team) for five years (until 1977 - the year of a cosmic power shift when we finally left Halifax and moved to Dallas, Texas), I made some of my greatest perceptual breakthroughs under the alchemical effects of such disciplined physical exertion. Thanks, Flaps. During this period in Halifax, when I could spare the time, I also studied Dennis Young, Vickie Cameron and Eric Fischl (his favorite film at that time was Greaser's Palace) at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
By the way, for the record, the dates for significant first encounters between 1968 and 1977 are:
September 25, 1969 - David E. Worcester
March 1, 1970 - Frank Zappa
March 2, 1970 - Joe Dun Sloan
March 1, 1971 - Marshall McLuhan
July 12, 1971 - Captain Beefheart
October 8, 1971 - Garrett Deane
October 22, 1973 - Harry Whittier
January 10, 1974 - Edgar Z. Friedenberg
May 1, 1975 - Andy Warhol
May 7, 1975 - Paul Krassner and Ken Kesey
May 12, 1975 - Cecil Taylor
February 27, 1976 - Allen Ginsberg
August 8, 1976 - Charles Bukowski
And I forgot July 22, 1970 - Sun Ra - while Bobby and Carolyn were having their honeymoon in New York City (Steve was there, too.)
According to Rev. Stang's Book of the SubGenius (1983), I introduced myself to Philo Drummond in 1978. This is correct. Connie and I had set up headquarters in Dallas after we left Halifax in '77 where I had kept a very low profile whenever I was there - not one of Carolyn's fellow medical students at Dalhousie can say they ever met her husband. The move to Dallas was necessary after the Battle of the Harvest Moon on Sept. 27, 1977 which caused a major change in the structure of the solar government. Most of the scenarios that unfolded in the early Eighties were orchestrated out of Texas (remember J. R., Dallas, Dynasty, and Bush - Lorimar Productions) so that was where I was stationed until '83. Connie would continue Carolyn's medical cover in Toronto where she set up a phenomenally successful nutritional medicine practice that had the same impact on the medical game in Canada as Wayne Gretzky had on hockey. At that time Toronto was a branch plant of the shenanigans in Texas (for details of that fact see Robert O'Driscoll's "action" poem, NATO and the Warsaw Pact Are One) and Connie was assigned to that city until I could join her permanently for more public performances in '84 after Dr. Beter and I had triumphantly interrupted the Bolsheviks' attempt to start Nuclear War One with a First Strike against the Soviet Union on Sept. 17, 1982. For followers of Stang's scene this explanation should clear up the mystery of why the Reverend staged my assassination on Jan. 21, 1984. Because I had left Dallas after Dr. Beter and I put a hold on nuclear annihilation in '82, Stang had nothing left to do but market what he could salvage from my files. But how could he explain my absence? It's obvious what he and Puzzling Evidence were forced to fake.
What did those files contain? Well, again, for the record, here are the dates for significant encounters of Phase Two from 1978 to1984:
March 20, 1978 - Charles Bukowski
April 20, 1979 - Marshall McLuhan
December 2, 1979 - Walter Bowart
April 28, 1980 - Joe Dun Sloan
July 29, 1980 - Mae Brussell
August 8, 1981 - Sherman Skolnick
November 18, 1981 - Ian Arlett
April 3, 1982 - Paul Shockley
April 22, 1982 - Dr. Beter
June 23, 1982 - Barrington Nevitt
June 15, 1983 - Nelson Thall
September 10, 1983 - David E. Worcester
December 29, 1983 - Garrett Deane
August 14, 1984 - Frank Zappa
On August 28, 1984 Bob Marshall made his first broadcast of the International Connection on CKLN-FM, 88.1 in Toronto. This was the beginning of Phase 3. Connie and I privately referred to this act as WHO'S FORGOTTEN FURRY LINT? "Bob Marshall" was Bobby Dean's new role as a journalist and broadcaster. For the next three years Marshall was the figure to prepare the ground for the unveiling of me and my awesome mission - Phase 4. Bobby Dean, with the assistance of his friend Art McKay, had quietly rehearsed this new public visibility by giving a lecture on the work of Marshall McLuhan to a small class at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax on January 6, 1984.
As you well know, Charles, in January of 1987 I met with your representatives in London to arrange your purchase of a large quantity of gold bullion. After that we were ready. We duped Adam Vaughan, the manager of CKLN at the time, by having Bob Marshall replay some audio tapes by Dr. Beter (which Vaughan had forbidden). Bob Marshall was fired. Myke Dyer was upset. Myke invited Bob onto his show at the same station. LO!! I now had a discarnate forum to stage my campaign for chairmanship of the Secret Council of Ten. It was June 17, 1987 - in the middle of the Iran- Contra hearings and two months to the day before the Harmonic Bobvirgins. The world began to feel the effects of decades of planning as momentous changes became obvious to everybody.
A footnote: to illustrate how the forgotten details in peoples' lives resonate and often are prophetic, consider these facts:-
1. Carolyn Wheeler had a boyfriend before she met Bobby Dean. His name was Bob Dyer.
2. Bobby Dean had a girlfriend before he met Carolyn Wheeler. Her name was Carroll Dyer.
3. Bob Dyer, Carroll Dyer and Myke Dyer were not related and never knew each other.
Oh, Gotta Go,
Let Me Know,
Bob
INDEX
AC LaRouche, Citizens For. "Stamp Out the Aquarian Conspiracy".
Published by Citizens for LaRouche, June, 1980.
BP LaRouche, Lyndon. "Beyond Psychoanalysis". The Campaigner,
September/October, 1973.
CA McLuhan, Marshall, and Watson, Wilfred. From Cliche´ to
Archetype. New York: Viking Press, 1970.
CB McLuhan, Marshall, and Parker, Harley (via George Thompson).
Counterblast. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1969.
CC Thompson, William Irwin. "Culture, Chaos, and Planetary
Transformation". The Quest, Vol. 4, No. 1
(Spring, 1991).
CM LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Cantor Transfinite in Music and Poetry".
The Campaigner, December, 1979.
CN McLuhan, Marshall. "The Future of Banking".
Canadian National Bank (Montreal) 100th
Annual Report Publication, December, 1974.
CO McLuhan, Marshall. Culture Is Our Business. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1970.
CQ Thompson, William Irwin. "William Irwin Thompson".
The CoEvolution Quarterly, Issue No. 20
(Winter, 1978/79).
CT LaRouche, Lyndon. "Physics and Economics".
The Campaigner, January/February, 1976.
DE McLuhan, Marshall. "Vertical Suburbs are Hi-Rise Slums".
The McLuhan DEW-Line Newsletter,
Vol. 1, No. 7 (January, 1969).
EI LaRouche, Lyndon. "Aristotle Is the Root of the Evil We Confront
Today". Executive Intelligence Review,
Vol. 18, No. 35, September 13, 1991.
ER LaRouche, Lyndon. "Woodward's Book on Casey: A Blend of
Fact and Fiction". Executive Intelligence Review,
Vol. 14, No. 41, October 16, 1987.
EW Thompson, William Irwin. Evil and World Order. New York:
Harper & Row, 1977.
GG McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. New York: Mentor Books, 1962.
GK Thompson, William Irwin. "Gaia and the Politics of Life." In Gaia:
A Way of Knowing - Political Implications of the
New Biology. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Press,
1987.
GP Thompson, William Irwin. "A Gaian Politics".
Whole Earth Review, Issue No. 53
(Winter, 1986/87).
GR McLuhan, Marshall. "The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, Planets
in the Age of Spaceship Earth". University
of Toronto Graduate, Spring, 1971.
GV McLuhan, Marshall, and Powers, Bruce. The Global Village:
Transformations in World Life and Media in the
21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.
HC McLuhan, Marshall. McLuhan: Hot & Cool - A Critical Symposium.
Edited by Gerald Stearn. New York: Dial Press,
1967.
IB Thompson, William Irwin. "It's Already Begun".
In Context, Winter, 1985/86.
IC McLuhan, Marshall. "The Implications of Cultural Uniformity".
In Superculture: American Popular Culture and
Europe. Edited by C.W.E. Bigsby.
Bowling Green: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1975.
IG LaRouche, Lyndon. "How to Introduce Beethoven to American
Laymen". The Campaigner, September, 1979.
IL McLuhan, Marshall. The Interior Landscape: The Literary
Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962.
Selected by Eugene McNamara. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1969.
IP Kroker, Arthur, and Kroker, Marilouise, eds. Ideology and Power
in the age of Lenin in Ruins. Montreal: New World
Perspectives, 1991.
IS Thompson, William Irwin. Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds
of Myth and Science. New York: St. Martin's Press,
1989.
JC McLuhan, Marshall, and Powers, Bruce. "Ma Bell Minus the
Nantucket Gam: Or the Impact of High-Speed
Data Transmission". Journal of Communication,
Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer, 1981).
JQ McLuhan, Marshall. "Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process".
Renascence, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1951.
KP Nevitt, Barrington. Keeping Ahead of Economic Panic.
Montreal: Gamma Institute Press, 1985.
LT McLuhan, Marshall. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Edited by
Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and
William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1987.
MI McLuhan, Marshall, and Nevitt, Barrington. "A Media Approach
to Inflation". The New York Times,
September 21, 1974.
MR McLuhan, Marshall, and Kern, Gary. "An Interview:
McLuhan on Russia". The McLuhan DEW-Line
Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 6 (May/June, 1970).
MY McLuhan, Marshall. "Myth and Mass Media".
Daedalus, Vol. 88, No. 2 (Spring, 1959).
PC LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Principles of Composition".
The Campaigner, September, 1979.
PE Kroker, Arthur, and Kroker, Marilouise, and Cook, David.
Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide
to the Postmodern Scene. Montreal: New
World Perspectives, 1989.
PL McLuhan, Marshall, and Norden, Eric. "Playboy Interview:
Marshall McLuhan". Playboy, Vol. 16, No. 3
(March, 1969).
PM Kroker, Arthur, and Cook, David. The Postmodern Scene:
Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics.
Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1986.
PP LaRouche, Lyndon. "Poe's Conception of Poetry".
The Campaigner, August, 1978.
PR McLuhan, Marshall. "Prospect". Canadian Art,
Vol. 19, September/October, 1962.
PS Thompson, William Irwin. Pacific Shift. San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1985.
PT McLuhan, Marshall. Letter in Playboy, February or March, 1970.
PY McLuhan, Marshall. "Psychopathology of 'Time' and 'Life'".
In Scene Before You: A New Approach to
American Culture. New York: Rinehart, 1955.
(First published in Neurotica 5, 1949).
RE McLuhan, Marshall. "Phase Two". Renascence,
Vol. 14, Summer, 1962.
RF LaRouche, Lyndon. "Rockefeller's 'Fascism with a Democratic
Face'". The Campaigner, November/December,
1974.
SB Hamerman, Warren. "The Self-Development of the Biosphere".
The Campaigner, January/February, 1975.
SC LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Science of Christian Economy".
Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 18, No. 22,
June 7, 1991.
SE LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites".
The Campaigner, May/June, 1978.
SI LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican
Socialist Party". The Campaigner, November,
1973.
SM LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Science of the Human Mind: A Treatise
on Fundamentals". The Campaigner, February,
1984.
TC Kroker, Arthur. Technology and the Canadian Mind:
Innis/McLuhan/Grant. Montreal: New World
Perspectives, 1984.
TF Thompson, William Irwin. The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light:
Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.
TL Portis, Larry. "On the Rise and Decline of Totalitarian
Liberalism: Schlesinger, Bell, LaRouche".
Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory, Vol. XII, No. 3 (Fall, 1988).
TT McLuhan, Marshall, and Nevitt, Barrington. Take Today:
The Executive as Dropout. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
UM McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
New York: Mentor Books, 1964.
VP McLuhan, Marshall, and Parker, Harley. Through the Vanishing
Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York:
Harper & Row, 1968.
VV McLuhan, Marshall. Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations: Studies
In Culture and Communications. New York:
Something Else Press, 1957.
WP McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quentin. War and Peace in the
Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the
Current Spastic Situations That Could Be
Eliminated by More Feedforward. New York:
Bantam Books, 1968.
ZZ McLuhan, Marshall. Whispered to me during a late-night
telephone conversation in 1971.
** Note: Due to technical difficulties, the following words in this
book do not have graves and/or acutes :
au-dela, cliches, deja vu, expose, Metis, recits, Theleme
When you come across them while reading, please imagine
they do.
download ePub
Dedicated to Everyone at CKLN-FM, Audience included,
who auditioned to be my Understudy, and to, of course,
inevitably, perhaps, CONNIE.
“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrows followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.”
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
PHATIC COMMUNION with BOB DOBBS
McLUHAN
McLUHAN
Spoken word is mirror of the mind: canon is mirror of the voice, when one voice repeats or reflects what another has stated. GV-MMBP-171
There is a fascinating example in Milton's Paradise Lost of the process of intellectual anesthesia. Milton's problem, which is that of orthodox theology, is to explain how Satan, who has supreme created intelligence, should immediately be able to intuit the results of any sin. Therefore the problem is: how can he be said to commit sin and be of high order of intelligence? Milton solves this problem wittily by showing how Satan uses language to obscure his thinking. CA-MMWW-14
Imagination is that ratio among the perceptions and faculties which exists when they are not embedded or outered in material technologies. When so outered, each sense and faculty becomes a closed system. GG-MM-314
The Analogical Mirrors. IL-MM-63
If a language contrived and used by many people is a mass medium, any one of our new media is in a sense a new language, a new codification of experience collectively achieved by new work habits and inclusive collective awareness. But when such a new codification has reached the technological stage of communicability and repeatability, has it not, like a spoken tongue, also become a macromyth? How much compression of the elements of a process must occur before one can say that they are certainly in mythic form? Are we inclined to insist that myth be a reduction of collective experience to a visual and classifiable form?
Languages old and new, as macromyths, have that relation to words and word-making that characterizes the fullest scope of myth. The collective skills and experience that constitute both spoken languages and such new languages as movies or radio can also be considered with preliterate myths as static models of the universe. But do they not tend, like languages in general, to be dynamic models of the universe in action? As such, languages old and new would seem to be for participation rather than for contemplation or for reference and classification. MY-MM-340
Here is the prologue to the drama of Big Brother Watching You that later unfolds in the Tatler and the Spectator (lo spettatore nel centro del quadro). VP-MMHP-109 (this probe is collated with the Portrait of the Countess of Meath by Peter Lely)
This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. GG-MM-44
Utopians and antiutopians are always obsessed with a period preceding their own. Orwell's 1984 happened in 1930. TT-MMBN-75
Not Big Brother Is Watching But All The Brothers. VV-MM-Item 15
Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer. LT-MM-370
There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is His master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored. LT-MM-387
Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws. Nature now pays 5 million %. Applied science now the master usurer. To hell with our top soil. We can grow potatoes on the moon tomorrow. How you goan to expose that while there is still human "life" on the planet? LT-MM-219
LIFE Jan1/51 War assets issue. Pin-up girls featured as major asset. I have tried, in forthcoming (March) Mechanical Bride to devise a technique for elucidating this scene. It can't be satirized. Trouble with duffers like Geo. Orwell is that they satirize something that happened 50 yrs ago as a threat of the future ! Effect is narcotic. LT-MM-219
Wyndham Lewis's The Art of Being Ruled ... is probably the most radical political document since Machiavelli's Prince. But whereas Machiavelli was concerned with the use of society as raw material for the arts of power, Lewis reverses the perspective and tries to discern the human shape once more in a vast technological landscape which has been ordered on Machiavellian lines. LT-MM-222
Surely, it is not unbelievable that decision-makers are totally out of touch with the world they live in? How could any contemporary person in any age be entrusted with powers carefully developed and monopolized by people from the previous time? CO-MM-104
Overkill, the technologies for total destruction of mankind and the planet, create a "peace" that passeth all technology. Bernard Mandeville built his Fable of the Bees on the same observation: "Private vices, public benefits". CA-MMWW-46
With the coming of film and TV, representative government itself has been transformed into image-making, a subculture of Madison Avenue PR. The American dream that has been scrapped is, of course, that of "the open road", which has now merged with jet city. CA-MMWW-139
Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. CA-MMWW-202
It will take the hijacking of 5,000 Boeing 747s to equal the simple hijack of a single small city, destination unknown. Both hijackers impose their preferences on service environments designed for others - and hijack can be applied to any environment - the air, a business, a culture or the nation itself.
Hijacking a business is easier in proportion to the size of the business, as witness the Pennsylvania Central where $7 billion of assets had been hijacked by the bookkeepers to non-transportation uses. The bigger the operation, the less the shareholders know about the flight plan. Hijackers don't presume to have expertise. They allow the plane, or the business, or the country that they take over, to be operated by those normally in charge. The hijacker does not interfere with the operation, but with the flight plan. He decides where to land. GR-MM-111
The owners themselves are concerned more about the media as such, and are not inclined to go beyond "what the public wants" or some vague formula. Owners are aware of the media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with "content" or the media within the media. UM-MM-60
Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. Something like this has already happened with outer space, for the same reasons that we have leased our central nervous systems to various corporations. As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse. UM-MM-73
Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. TT-MMBN-63
Electrotechnics scrapped the Westerner's industrial technology and retrieved and flooded him with the primitive modes of awareness of preliterate man. That is why all bureaucracies of all sovereign and national entities have collapsed in the West. It is the speed-up of information by telephone and telex, etc., that destroys bureaucracies regardless of geography or ideology. China and Russia, as much as France and the U.S.A., experience this collapse at the same time. MR-MMGK-3
Everyone will be involved in role-playing, including those few elitists who interpret and/or manage large-scale data patterns and thus control the functions of a speed-of-light society. JC-MMBP-199
The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. TT-MMBN-157
Henry Kissinger seems to be the current triggerman in this planetary game among the intervals of the first, second, third and fourth worlds, the first world being the industrialized West, the second being Russian Socialism, the third the nonindustrialized lands, and the fourth the electric world that has gone around the rest, becoming the primum mobile of inflation in all the rest. MI-MMBN-L29
The information environment of the electric world has increasingly merged private and public sectors of the older industrial world, pushing the world of staples and commodities out of the marketplace and into the political sphere. For banking, the question today would seem to be what is its new role in a world where information is superseding hardware and in which politics has become a major form of show business? As show business becomes world business, the banker will experience an enormous extension of his advisory role in the political and bureaucratic sphere. The development of banking will be, not toward the take-over of business, but of politics. CN-MM-x&xi
In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. TT-MMBN-211
Old colonialism exploited the raw materials, i.e., "hardware". New colonialism exploits productive capacity and skilled management and labor, i.e., "software". Economic nationalism of governments is thus defeated by economic inter-nationalism of corporations. What is good for General Motors may ultimately be great for everybody but the United States. TT-MMBN-196
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. TT-MMBN-92
Today, apart from government itself, the biggest show business is putting "secrets" on display: whether of the CIA, FBI, KGB, MI5, or Watergate - not like Perry Mason, but the "real McCoy" - as Nature imitates Art. Private history "in camera" has become public myth by time compression "on camera", just as the hitherto ob-scene is now on stage: a deja vu of all times and places now here. By recognizing this cliche´-archetype pattern, we can "prophesy" what has already happened: Scenarios, obsolescent at peak performance, will proliferate as art forms, while present action moves from sequent play to simultaneous interplay and instant replay. KP-BN-129
One of the many flips of our time is that the electric information environment returns man to the condition of the most primitive prober and hunter. Privacy invasion is now one of our biggest knowledge industries. CO-MM-24
He (Douglas Cater) emphasizes the paradox that the press is dedicated to the process of cleansing by publicity, and yet that, in the electronic world of the seamless web of events, most affairs must be kept secret. Top secrecy is translated into public participation and responsibility by the magic flexibility of the controlled news leak. UM-MM-190
When the electric speed is introduced into such a delegated and representational organization, this obsolescent organization can only be made to function by a series of subterfuges and makeshifts. These strike some observers as base betrayals of the original aims and purposes of the established forms. UM-MM-182&183
The maintenance of social power is, in fact, the manifestation of social identity. TT-MMBN-261
The superenterprise, like the superaudience, works for itself. TT-MMBN-205
"The computer is the first machine that consumes and produces the same material - information. - William Jovanovich" TT-MMBN-90
The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. TT-MMBN-152
The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the global village. It has more spite and envy. The spaces and times are pulled out from between people. A world in which people encounter each other in depth all the time. The tribal-global village is far more divisive - full of fighting - than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth. HC-MMGS-279&280
The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. This would seem to be a normal, and even amiable, trait ensuring a maximal degree of social continuity and permanence amidst change and innovation. But all the conservatism in the world does not afford even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media. On a moving highway the vehicle that backs up is accelerating in relation to the highway situation. Such would seem to be the ironical status of the cultural reactionary. When the trend is one way his resistance insures a greater speed of change. Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force. UM-MM-179
We torment others by "hardware", using the old organization chart, and we participate in this torment through "software" by holding the new media mirror up to old Nature, as it were. This process transforms the torture of work into the refined torture of art - the primal curse laid on man: he will earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Today the sweat is empathy, and the self-knowledge that is the most awful form of torment is awareness of one's own sordid motives manifested in their consequences. TT-MMBN-166
We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. TT-MMBN-166
The "flower people", likewise, will soon take over the bureaucratic function of state and army in order to propagate peace and Peter Pan. CA-MMWW-184
Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half "under surveillance". This, in fact, is the hang-up of the age of "software" and information. In the preceding "hardware" age the "haves" of the world had kept the "have-nots" under "surveillance". This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment. The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters and "crediting" agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant. TT-MMBN-25&26
Instant Replay
(a) Instant replay of experience equals the cliche´; amplifies cognitive awareness
(b) Wipes out the merely representational and chronological
(c) Retrieves "meaning" (I. A. Richards)
(d) Flips from individual experience to pattern recognition, the nature of the archetype. GV-MMBP-176
That group of archetypalists who consider the linguistic form to be a recurring pattern of literary experience describe what is antithetic to the cliche´ as probe. CA-MMWW-15
A cliche´ is an act of consciousness: total consciousness is the sum of all the cliches of all the media or technologies we probe with. CA-MMWW-150
Consciousness is not a verbal process. UM-MM-87
Today the multimedia have, as noted, demobilized consciousness. We speak of a lie as "credibility gap". "Truth" once again becomes "trust", not Cartesian certainty. CA-MMWW-34
The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. CA-MMWW-45
The Happening exploits not only the clash of one cliche´ against another, but also the much more effective interface of a cliche´ from one medium with cliches from other media. CA-MMWW-205
One of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world concerns the use of surrounding services which have been obsolesced by daily innovations and discoveries. A vast new industry has been born from this conflict, and its name is "Camp", and its motto is: "Throw something lovely away today. Help beautify junkyards." Despite the grotesque aspect of "Camp" as the incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence, it has already been itself obsolesced by the popular technology of the video replay. The instant replay, available mainly to the audiences of sporting events, offers, as it were, the meaning minus the experience, reversing Mr. Eliot's observation that "we had the experience but missed the meaning." The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception. The instant replay, indeed, offers not just cognition but re-cognition, and leads the mind to the world of pattern recognition, to aftersight and foresight. IC-MM-44
"Camp" is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives. ZZ-MM
For America, the electronic revolution from industrial products and consumerism to information and custom-made services, is a reversal of the entire way of life, with goals and directions suddenly yielding to roles and figures. America has found the paths of industrial uniformity and continuity no longer to its taste. Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change that is manifested directly by the TV service of the instant replay. Is not the instant replay the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself? For the replay would seem to offer both cognition and re-cognition; the same pattern of reversal, in the transition from the industrial to the electric age, appears in the role of Sputnik(1957) in placing the planet inside a man-made environment. IC-MM-54
For the dominant environment of our age has itself become information or "software". Since at electric speed any figure tends to become ground, and anything, however trivial, can acquire infinite mass, the temptation and the desire to gamble with everything and anything becomes obsessive. One dollar at the speed of light can do as many transactions as a million at pre-electric speeds. Quantitative projections and rational critiques cannot cope here. MI-MMBN-L29
Joyce knew that any technology is at once internalized by men, with a resulting shift in the ratios among their senses. This shift is recorded exactly in the tones and colors and interplay of words. Language is itself the very drama of cognition and recognition. RE-MM-166
They are the representatives of the age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. The drama of cognition itself. IL-MM-32
The outer trip has been specialist and Western. The inner trip has been echological and Oriental. Both kinds of trips are cliche´-probes. Each has its own methods and preferences of retrieval from the rag-and-bone shop of past experience. The outer trip prefers to retrieve antiquities or archetypes. The inner trip prefers the probing cliche´ world of the module. CA-MMWW-14
Language is a technology which extends all of the human senses simultaneously. All the other human artifacts are, by comparison, specialist extensions of our physical and mental faculties. CA-MMWW-20
The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliche´ - an old cliche´ retrieved by a new cliche´. Since a cliche´ is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment. CA-MMWW-21
Any cliche´, pushed to a high degree, is scrapped in favor of a new cliche´ which may be the revival of an old one - e.g., old cliche´ as new archetype = old archetype as new cliche´. CA-MMWW-50&51
All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of these forms does not limit their action upon our sensibilities. Just as the rim-spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and low- pressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other extensions of our powers are constantly creating new climates of thought and feeling. Since the resulting symbolic systems are numerous, they are in perpetual interplay, creating a kind of sound-light show on an ever-increasing scale. CA-MMWW-57
Alfred North Whitehead mentions in Science and the Modern World that the great discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. The art of discovery itself is now a cliche´, and creativity has become a stereotype of the twentieth century. CA-MMWW-58
Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliche´ to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. CA-MMWW-99
It might be argued that a main cause of the merging of the archaic attitude to cliche´ with the modern notion of archetype as a more intense reality resulted from our great variety of new techniques of retrieval. CA-MMWW-117
Mr. Eliot is quite explicit about myth as a structure of parallels without connectives. Mythic form is necessarily double. Its doubleness is a matter not of matching but of making, not of the mirror and reflection but of the lamp and illumination. CA-MMWW-141
Joyce sets up the chain of cognition and recognition itself: "In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality". CA-MMWW-136
One of the etymologies of "matching" is "making" (mac-ian). This polarity is inherent in consciousness as such. Certainly in the cliche´-to-archetype process, if cognition is matching our sensory experience with the outer world, re-cognition is a repeat of that process. We have seen how dreaming involves a ricorso of this waking experience of the day: "The unpurged images of day recede" (Yeats). The whole of Finnegans Wake is a ricorso, a scrubbing purgation of private and corporate experience in the collective "dreaming back". "Making sense" is a phrase that indicates repetition of some experience which yields a sudden truth or meaning. In Le Demon de l'Anglogie Mallarme´ reveals a creative process as a recap of the actual stages of apprehension. That is, creativity is the parallel of cognition, a retracking of the labyrinth of sensation. Ancient mythology is packed with examples of this awareness. Daedalus, the mightiest maker or engineer of antiquity, contrived the labyrinth that enclosed the Minotaur. CA-MMWW-148
Necessarily, therefore, all artistic imitation first arose from the pagan liturgies or mysteries. If Daedalus was the first to note this relation, Joyce was the first to see in these ancient rituals of descent and return the perfect externalization, in drama and gesture, of the stages of human apprehension. The retracing of any moment of cognition will thus provide the unique artistic form of that moment. And its art form coincides with its quiddity, except that the artist arrests what is otherwise fleeting. IL-MM-34
Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. JQ-MM-5
Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since it is a kind of recap of natural processes, whether of making sense via cognition or of making a house by following the lines of Nature. CA-MMWW-149
Biogeneticists say today that a growing organism, at every point in its growth, has to know what the whole organism is doing in order to develop. The consequences of the images are the images of the consequences. This involvement and polarity, knowing and growing, is both creative and destructive. CA-MMWW-150
In contrast to private awareness, social consciousness is a process of scrapping, retrieving, and probing. The emphasis for the most part is upon retrieval and the accumulation of vast residues. With the development in the nineteenth century of many new technologies(cliches), the supremacy of unified print consciousness gave way to multiconsciousness. There was no garbage heap, no middenheap, there was no unconscious large enough to contain all of the materials generated by the breakdown of so much probing and environing. CA-MMWW-152
The present probe tests cliche´ as the current technology, and the archetypal world as the "rag-and-bone shop" of old perceptions and techniques. In the electric age there are far too many cliches available for retrieval. The paradoxical result is the end of garbage or of "rag-and-bone" shops. As we tend to extend consciousness itself by the new technology, we probe all, and scrap all, in a deluge of fragments of cultures for creativity. CA-MMWW-158&159
Chesterton's entire vision was paradoxical because it was based on perception as process. G.K. knew that analogy was community, and that is why he was able to write what Etienne Gilson considers one of the best books on Aquinas. CA-MMWW-159
Like Alice, Joyce pushed all the way through the Narcissus looking-glass. He moved from the private Stephen Dedalus to the Finnegan corporate image. The mirror, like the mind, by taking in and feeding back the same image becomes a wheel, a cycle, able to retrieve all experience. CA-MMWW-163
The whole of Finnegans Wake, including the title, is paradox; based on what Joyce considered man's greatest invention - the mirror of language, the "magazine wall" of memory and all human residue. CA-MMWW-163
In literature, works like Eliot's The Wasteland, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot are concerned with the destructive aspects of the enormous creativity of the electronic age. All of Pop art, Funk art, Op art, and the various other versions of mini-art reiterate the process by which cliche´-probe destroys and creates. CA-MMWW-184
How to elicit creativity from these middenheaps has become the problem of modern culture. CA-MMWW-184
"Camp" is a kind of dropoutism resulting from the new electric environment. All the earlier forms go into quotes, as it were, when they have this new world to encompass them. CA-MMWW-188
"Camp" is not a form of retrieval but rather simply rear-view-mirror nostalgia. It is not a new service environment or cliche´, but a means of escaping into the gingerbread world of Mom and nursery. CA-MMWW-189
As an art form, the Happening does not so much address the audience as include the audience. It expects the audience to immerse itself in the "destructive element", as it were. At various times in the history of the theater, the audience has been included in the show to a considerable degree. In the newspaper it is decidedly the audience that is the show. Such, in large degree, is the nature of language. It is a Happening that includes all publics and all past perceptions in an inclusive Donnybrook of coincidences and adjustments. Once Joyce discovered language in this way, he knew he had found out the means to transform the entire human community into a work-force for the artist. Gerd Stern and the other poets of the Happening are delighted to discover that all human artifacts are available as dramatis personae in their theatre. It is the same discovery of the "world" that has created Camp. CA-MMWW-198
Physically, the young seem to feel that the planet has become their stage. They want to act outside, in the street, on the campus. They have shifted their dramatic quest for new identities away from the expression of private opinions to the enactment of a new kind of group theater. The new program they offer for scrutiny and participation seems to many people to be trash such as has never been seen before - a wild orgy of "law and ordure".
Rich material for the hypothetical probe that the satellite environment offers the planet itself as a new kind of theatrical stage, is to be found in the Walker Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. DE-MM-1
Technologies would seem to be the pushing of the archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness. May this not help explain why technology as environment is typically unconscious? The interplay between environmental and content factors, between old and new technologies, seems to obtain in all fields whatever. In politics, the new conservatism has as its content the old liberalism. Every new technology requires a war in order to recover an image made by the old environment. CB-MMHP-31
Electronics As E.S.P. VV-MM-Item 3
The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP. CB-MMHP-23
The extremely mobile individual consciousness of the print-oriented man now reverses into the tribal inertia of multi-consciousness. CA-MMWW-6
The new cult of ESP is a natural adjunct to telecommunications. When you put your nervous system outside as a world environment, ESP would seem to be rather "Plurabelle". CA-MMWW-40
MM- Electricity makes possible - and not in the distant future, either - an amplification of human consciousness on a world scale, without any verbalization at all.
Playboy- Are you talking about global telepathy?
MM- Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous translation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed-forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? PL-MMEN-72
The present electric ESP age of multiple interfaces finds no problems in metamorphosis or transubstantiation such as baffled abcede-minded culture of the sixteenth century and after. CO-MM-82
The cavemen of Madison Avenue have begun to get sensitive to the ESP power of names to shape perception and to control energies. CO-MM-276
In the same way, the filling in of the gap between the old biological environment of our bodies and the new electric environment of our extended nervous system automatically evokes the world of ESP and LSD. CO-MM-180
When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment. This extension of consciousness has already begun with the computer and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and occult awareness. TT-MMBN-14
ESP IS OLD HAT WHEN EFFECTS PRECEDE CAUSES. The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural. Any administrator today is aware of his environment as a universal teaching machine. TT-MMBN-193
If there is, indeed, a terrible nihilism in the photo and a substitution of shadows for substance, then we are surely not the worse for knowing it. The technology of the photo is an extension of our own being and can be withdrawn from circulation like any other technology if we decide that it is virulent. But amputation of such extensions of our physical being calls for as much knowledge and skill as are prerequisite to any other physical amputation. UM-MM-173
It is this fragmentation that enables him (Western man) to ignore cause-and-effect in all interplay of technology and culture. It is quite different in Big Business. There, tribal man is on the alert for stray seeds of change. UM-MM-237
In the future, the only effective media controls must take the thermostatic form of quantitative rationing. Just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media fallout. Education will become recognized as civil defense against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defense is the print medium. The educational establishment, founded on print, does not yet admit any other responsiblities. UM-MM-267
For lack of observing so central an aspect of the TV image, the critics of program "content" have talked nonsense about "TV violence". The spokesmen of censorious views are typical semiliterate book-oriented individuals who have no competence in the grammars of newspaper, or radio, or of film, but who look askew and askance at all non-book media. The simplest question about any psychic aspect, even of the book medium, throws these people into a panic of uncertainty. Vehemence of projection of a single isolated attitude they mistake for moral vigilance. Once these censors became aware that in all cases "the medium is the message" or the basic source of effects, they would turn to suppression of media as such, instead of seeking "content" control. Their current assumption that content or programming is the factor that influences outlook and action is derived from the book medium, with its sharp cleavage between form and content. UM-MM-274
The Western way of life attained centuries since by the rigorous separation and specialization of the senses, with the visual sense atop the hierarchy, is not able to withstand the radio and TV waves that wash about the great visual structure of abstract Individual Man. Those who, from political motives, would now add their force to the anti-individual action of our electric technology are puny subliminal automatons aping the patterns of the prevailing electric pressures. A century ago they would, with equal somnambulism, have faced in the opposite direction. German Romantic poets and philosophers had been chanting in tribal chorus for a return to the dark unconscious for over a century before radio and Hitler made such a return difficult to avoid. What is to be thought of people who wish such a return to preliterate ways, when they have no inkling of how the civilized visual way was ever substituted for tribal auditory magic? UM-MM-275
Failure to understand the organic character of electric technology is evident in our continuing concern with the dangers of mechanizing the world. Rather, we are in great danger of wiping out our entire investment in the pre-electric technology of the literate and mechanical kind by means of an indiscriminate use of electrical energy. UM-MM-218
It may be simplest to say at once that the real use of the computer is not to reduce staff or costs, or to speed up or smooth out anything that has been going on. Its true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and galactic environments and energies in a harmonious way. For centuries the lack of symmetry and proportion in all these areas has created a sort of universal spastic condition for lack of inter-relation among them. In merely terrestrial terms, programming the environment means, first of all, a kind of console for global thermostats to pattern all sensory life in a way conducive to comfort and happiness. Till now, only the artist has been permitted the opportunity to do this in the most puny fashion. The mass media, so-called, have offered new materials for the artist, but the understanding has been lacking. WP-MMQF-89&90
So the process of renewal can't come from above. It can only take the form of reawakened critical faculties. The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will. Psychological decentralization. A merely provisional image of how it might (not how it should) occur could be formed by supposing every mechanical agency of communication in the world to be suspended for six months. No press. No radio. No movies. Just people finding out who lived near them. Forming small communities within big cities. It would be agony. All psychological drugs cut off. No capsulated thoughts or melodies. To say that anything like this could never happen, or that it should never be allowed to happen is a remark worthy of those mesmerized practical men who are efficiently arranging for the obsequies of our world's mind and body alike. If something like this doesn't happen it is quite plain what will happen. PY-MM-159
MM- All these convulsive changes, as I've already noted, carry with them attendant pain, violence and war - the normal stigmata of the identity quest - but the new society is springing so quickly from the ashes of the old that I believe it will be possible to avoid the transitional anarchy many predict. Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society.
Playboy- How?
MM- The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it's technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.
Playboy- How do you program an entire society- beneficially or otherwise?
MM- There's nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programing of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you'd realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their over-all needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. We could program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election, or lay on an additional 25 hours of TV in Venezuela to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio the preceding month. By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world's competing economies.
Playboy- How does such environmental programing, however enlightened in intent, differ from Pavlovian brainwashing?
MM- Your question reflects the usual panic of people confronted with unexplored technologies. I'm not saying such panic isn't justified, or that such environmental programing couldn't be brainwashing, or far worse - merely that such reactions are useless and distracting. Though I think the programing of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically, I don't want to be in the position of a Hiroshima physicist extolling the potential of nuclear energy in the first days of August 1945. But an understanding of media's effects constitutes a civil defense against media fallout. The alarm of so many people, however, at the prospect of corporate programing's creation of a complete service environment on this planet is rather like fearing that a municipal lighting system will deprive the individual of the right to adjust each light to his own favorite level of intensity. Computer technology can - and doubtless will - program entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and nations. The content of that programing, however, depends on the nature of future societies - but that is in our own hands. PL-MMEN-72&74
Keeping in mind that the user is necessarily the content of any man-made service environment or media, it is noteworthy that, with Sputnik, men put the planet inside its first man-made container. From that time people had an immediate sense of being the "content kings" of the Earth. As the content of the planet they suddenly noticed how poor a job Nature had done in keeping men in line. If "what the public wants" was the first child of the telegraph press, ECOLOGY was the first progeny of Sputnik. When processes moved up to electric speeds, it became obvious that "everything causes everything". For every cause there are many effects, just as every effect has many causes; this becomes apparent to those existing in an electric environment of information. Those existing as the content of a man-made environment never cease adjusting it to their own behavior, just as they adjust their behavior to the environment. "Programming" the environment had this form of slow adjustment earlier. However, for the residents of the "wired planet", or the magnetic city, the programming now begins to assume the character of rapid and extensive change, which we take for granted on radio, movies, and TV. Sputnik and the moon shots brought about, in effect, the institution of a new kind of global theatre, in which all men become actors and there are few spectators. The population of the world is both the cast and content of this new theatre. The repertory of the theatre consists of a perpetual happening, which can include the retrieval or replay of any previous happenings that men choose to experience.
The replaying of past events in "realistic" ways began with the power of print to retrieve the ancient authors and historians. The Elizabethan stage projected scenes and characters of the past as a staple entertainment. Our power to reconstruct the past has grown steadily with media enlargement, till Hollywood made such replays into a major feature of this century. TT-MMBN-145
As the detective reconstructs events, so the artist by retracing the processes of cognition (mimesis) bridges the world of sense and the world of awareness. James Joyce presents this cognitive bridge in monumental and dramatic form in Finnegans Wake: the entire tribal cycle of society now begins again, but awake. ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS CREATES A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE OLD ACCIDENTAL AND THE NEWLY PROGRAMMED EVENTS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE FOR ENRICHMENT THROUGH DIVERSITY. TT-MMBN-11
In this book there is no intent to endorse or condemn what has happened. Our concern is to explore and to reveal the process patterns of current happenings. Since it is no longer safe to wait for the harsh judgement of results, we must discover how to anticipate effects with their causes in order to avoid the "inevitable" by "programming Fate". TT-MMBN-6
The familiar idea of "making the news" now yields to making the world itself. For the best part of a century, we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the "natural" program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness. Everybody becomes a voluntary participant in creating diversity without loss of identity. TT-MMBN-297
Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. TT-MMBN-11
These new forms - television and radio - are new languages. They're huge extensions of ourselves which enable us to participate in one another's lives, much as language does. But these forms lay down their own ground rules; the modes of participation are already built into the technology. There are real, rigid art rules, for each form. The fact that we have many media now enables us to leap across the barriers from one form or one set of rules to another. And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, the servo-mechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them he is beginning to awaken. Because he can't live with them all. PR-MM-366
T. S. Eliot's famous account of "the auditory imagination" has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world. PT-MM-18
During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a question that admits of a wide solution. UM-MM-19
It is equally conceivable that the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls, might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960's. UM-MM-123
To put the matter abruptly, the advertising industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society. Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. UM-MM-202
For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting. UM-MM-222
Many may think that we are now safely ensconced inside a utopian kingdom like Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme, the fantastic world of do-as-you-like. In fact, we have now to replace nature itself, remaking it as an art form perfectly accommodated to the totality of human needs and aspirations. Such an enterprise requires nothing less than inclusive awareness of human resources and limitations. Man-made nature, fashioned according to life as art, may tax human creativity far beyond anything levied on presatellite man. Having engineered into existence this giant rim spin around all human transactions, we now have to discover the means of adjusting the speed of this spin in order to accommodate the responsive spins of all the components.
As concertmaster, satellite man would have to audition such selections as the Manhattan Project with exquisite prescience of "audience" effects. The "audience" of satellite man includes the "actors" and is not merely human but consists of all the resonances awakened everywhere. Satellite man no longer inhabits visual space, but a resonating acoustic space whose boundaries are nowhere. Today, he is an information hunter in ECO-land. TT-MMBN-294&295
But like Shakespeare and Chesterton, Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language. And it was years after he had begun the Wake before he saw that the babble of Anna Livia through the nightworld of the collective consciousness united the towers of Babel and of sleep. In sleep "the people is one and they have all one language" but day overcomes and scatters them. IL-MM-46&47
For the electric puts the mythic or collective dimension of human experience fully into the conscious wake-a-day world. Such is the meaning of the title Finnegans Wake. While the old Finn cycles had been tribally entranced in the collective night of the unconscious, the new Finn cycle of totally interdependent man must be lived in the daylight of consciousness. GG-MM-319
Today, when we live in a time of sudden transition from mechanical to electric technology, it is easier to see the character of all previous technologies, we being detached from all of them for the time being. UM-MM-299
Just why we are no longer content to leave our experience in this subliminal state, and why many people have begun to get very conscious about the unconscious, is a question well worth investigation. People are nowadays much concerned to set their houses in order, a process of self-consciousness that has received large impetus from photography. UM-MM-172
Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. UM-MM-56
Since the advent of TV, the exploitation of the unconscious by the advertiser has hit a snag. TV experience favors much more consciousness concerning the unconscious than do the hard-sell forms of presentation in the press, the magazine, movie, or radio. UM-MM-202
All technologies are collective unconscious. All arts, science and philosophy are anti-environmental controls that are ever merging into the environmental and losing their power to create awareness of environment. When arts fail to cope with the environment by being anti-environment then there can be a shift to a rapid succession of innovations as ersatz anti-environments. CB-MMHP-31
LaROUCHE
Humanism, as a practical way of describing such notions of Freedom/Necessity, begins with attention to the creative individual, whose inventions make general progress possible. Freedom means initially the conditions favorable to the discovery and propagation of new fundamental laws, new ways of doing things, by individuals. Humanism is therefore also occupied with the conditions required to produce such gifted individuals, the material and political conditions necessary to produce the numbers and varieties of gifted individuals society requires for maintaining the necessary rate of general progress. As a corollary, humanism is also occupied with the material and political conditions of the population more generally, its mobility, cultural development, and material preconditions of cultural development: that new inventions might be realized for practice by a general society culturally qualified to assimilate the conceptions involved in such practice. BP-LL-43
The evolution of man is absolutely contrasted to the existence and behavior of any of the lower beasts, chimpanzees included. In the lower beasts, including the higher apes, virtually no alteration in the range of behavior occurs progressively from generation to generation. The per capita caloric throughput and the rates of potential growth of that species of biomass material are essentially fixed - at least in range. With man, the physiology of creative mentation, exhibited in a more rudimentary fashion by Koehler's chimpanzees, has led to deliberatively synthesized new technologies, equivalent in effect to a species' deliberatively turning itself (by will) into a higher species (higher negentropic values). It is, indeed, man's study of his own progress through such processes of deliberation which makes possible and is scientific knowledge. BP-LL-45
Reductionist psychology locates the primary data of mind in mental events which exhibit the form of logic, in terms of discrete images or psychological material susceptible of being made conscious in the form of discrete images. Like logic, reductionist psychology accounts for the motivation of those images (elements) in terms of metaphysical notions of relations (e.g., "instincts", "drives", etc.). Even those forms of radical behaviorist psychology which pretend to deny the existence of "drives", "instincts", etc., do nothing more than rather hysterically ignore the necessary implicit assumption of such axiomatic "drives" in their schemas. We insist, on the basis of the kind of evidence cited, that the process associated with creative mentation is the "primary substance" of the human mind, and that all other mental phenomena are determined (subsumed) by those primary processes. BP-LL-45
A certain crude, empirical conception of physical science did of course exist prior to and following Kepler, but the advantage of Kepler over, for example, the outlook of Galileo is qualitative, not one of degree. Before Kepler, as with those who maintained or regressed to the pre-Keplerian thrust toward empiricism, the notion of the study of the regular order of nature was "pluralistic". Various categories of phenomena were treated as if separate categories of the Divine Will, within which narrow confines man could explore regularity through observation and experiment, hoping thereby to adduce the specific regularity of God's Will (Dispensation) for such classes of phenomena. Kepler cut through such pathetic forms of inquiry, specifying that the entire universe was subject to a single principle of lawfulness, which subsumed all other, more particular forms of law. Kepler expressed this view in the argument that God's infinite (i.e., unique, comprehensive, existent) Will was rational, i.e., susceptible of being mastered as human knowledge of even human individuals. BP-LL-46
This has the most profound implications. From this standpoint, we cannot regard great art of any medium as either mere entertainment or indifferent to scientific criteria. Art, as a medium for the concentrated expression of the creative faculty by artist and audience, addresses itself to that in the individual which is human, those qualities of mentation upon which the advancement of society, even the mere perpetuation of society, depends absolutely. To the extent that any form of art contains and expresses creative activity of the form of Freedom/Necessity, it is a special and indispensable form of universal labor; the artist, as the great abstract mathematician does in a different way, arouses and shapes new creative powers in the audience at the same time his work celebrates and strengthens those powers which are already matured.
By contrast, any art which is merely an application of established artistic canons, mere repetition of sensuous gimmickry without creative development (bestialized art: e.g., Rock, "socialist realism", etc.), is anti-human, reactionary. Art could not be a matter of personal taste-preferences; it is not personal tastes which properly judge art, but art which judges the mental condition reflected by the symptomology of taste. To the extent that any individual prefers Rock or serial-composed music to Beethoven, that evidence alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the individual has been bestialized in his self-estimation; no person could "enjoy" Rock or regard serial-composition as honest music unless his alienation had become sufficiently pathetic that he no longer even desired to recover those human qualities he has been denied. As for the person who "likes both Beethoven and Rock", that is sufficient, too, to prove that he has lost the power to listen to the content of Beethoven's music. BP-LL-53
In the composition of poetry, a similar process applies. The initial conception of a great poem exists for development as a mood and a snatch of some line, usually the opening line. The conception of the whole poem exists at the initial point of elaboration as a kaleidoscopic fabric of feeling-states, a would be Gestalt of such feeling-state patterns identified by that bit of thematic line. This is the subject of the poem. The poet unfolds the poem from this, words marching in phrase-groups, feeling-states and feeling-state clusters seizing upon the appropriate cathexis which comes to the fore from unfolding association with the thematic snatch of line. The end-result has ostensible symbology, metrical and other prosodic subtleties, such that from those isolable features foolish, banal critics may indeed attempt to fashion a logical interpretation, but their effort is pathetic. The intent of the poem's elaboration was to communicate to the reader the Gestalt from desire for which the elaboration began for the poet. This is more emphatically the case for great music - as we have already emphasized.
The primary feeling-state is love, the affective content and form of recall of the creative process itself, the invariant human quality of the mind. To understand the dynamics of love, one begins by inquiring as to what practical expression can be given to the direct calling forth of the universal for all particular expressions of social creative activity. Every detail dissolves; the mind is dissolved into pure creative ferment, the universality of the creative act. What, then?
We have emphasized that thought is the demand for an act. The omission of the act for the thought is a denial of the reflected benefit of the act for the identity, and correspondingly a dimunition of the identity. The force (emotion) of the thought would therefore seem to be in direct proportion to the force of reaction against the sense of identity (anxiety) experienced by frustration of the act. Experience substantiates such an hypothesis. Furthermore, it is demanded that the act must be in proportion to the force of the thought.
Then, what is the act corresponding to the "pure emotion" of love? What, but the intensely sensuous concretized celebration of creative sociality in general? The mood must seize upon a concrete individual as its object. Either a concrete universalizing (social) creative act - as a great work of art, or sensuous loving of a concrete (universal) person. BP-LL-84
The most efficient way in which to identify the distinctions to be made is this. In abstraction of ordinary consciousness, the control of mental productions and communications is associated constantly with notions of one's self. Perhaps the individual ordinarily does not reflect on this, and ordinarily is therefore usually unaware of the existence of these executive controls; it is not difficult to provoke such awareness (indeed, a skillful operator in a "therapy group", or in any group which can be directed to act as a "therapy group", can readily force the attention of virtually all participants to such "feelings" very quickly. Once one has done this several times, the ability to replicate the effect becomes almost automatic.) In ordinary states, the form of these notions of ego-ideals is what one would best describe as feelings about attributes of a monad-like "little me". In general, the instant one succeeds in "cutting through the persona" of an individual to force his reflection on these "feelings", the usual sensation experienced by the "opened-up" individuals is "I am a fraud". ("Original Sin"?) There is a more or less immediate recognition that the self one presents to the outer world is a synthetic character, a mere persona, a manufactured (e.g., artificial) product created for the propitiatory edification of the credulous. Thus, one's self as presented to the world is not "the real me", not the "soul". Very quickly the affected individual can begin to discover and detail "how I operate". Accompanying this enlarged awareness there is usually a growing depression, associated with the sense that the "real self" is a kind of monad, a "little me". The fact that such a monad could only be an empty construct forces the individual to regard the criteria "by which I operate" as necessarily the only existent qualities attributable to the "little me". Consequently, these being the same qualities associated with the production of the "fraudulent outer self", the persona, the "little me" is a degraded thing, intrinsically "unloveable". ("How could God love my miserable little soul?")
At bottom, in this respect, the effort to get at the "inner self" brings us, in the ordinary case, to a little hard ball, a monad of sorts, from which apparently emanate the qualities, the "feeling-states", "instincts", etc., which one otherwise encounters in cathexis in consciousness and semi-consciousness. Ostensibly, any effort to probe the self more deeply, to "get within" the monad, results in locating only an "it", an Id. In fact, precisely such results can actually be obtained.
When the same self-analysis is effected in the case of individuals in a state of self-conscious creative production, the phenomena of the monad are not obtained. The ego-ideal and the notion of "inner self" are instead united in a single quality. Examined more superficially, one could obtain the apparent result emphasized by Kubie. At first inspection, the idea of creative activity for its own sake is the ego-ideal, a form whose content is the activity of "negentropic synthesis" itself. Accordingly, if one studied artistic and other personalities who are merely creative, or only yet potentially self-conscious, one would tend to concur with Kubie's argument that the creative process must be regarded as a virtue in itself. BP-LL-78&79
What is thought? It is the judgment which is regulated by the increase or decrease of the sense of identity. One acts not merely to attain fixed objects, fixed sensuous acts, but to obtain those objects, actualize those thought-acts which mediate an increased sense of identity. In the pathological state, the force of judgment is regulated by an internalized babble of images, dominated usually by the mother-image. With small effort, one can bring up the mother-image either re-enforcing or reducing the sense of identity as an immediate regulator of "sincerity of feeling" in the adult. It is the same in politics.
In this sense, the neurotic adult must be systematically regarded as a pseudo-adult - either as the victim of individual neurosis or of that collective neurosis recognized as bourgeois ideology. His sense of identity is pathologically determined by childish fantasies, and not by self-consciousness of his positive basis for adult existence. By contrast, the revolutionary is essentially the only true adult by contrast with the pseudo-adult children about him. The neurotic loves his wife as a surrogate for his mother; the adult loves his mother and father not as internalized images, but as actual human beings, and loves his wife as an actual human being in her own right. He has put aside his mother and father, who become specially-loved peers on the outside of his identity, and locates his identity in the adult woman who has become the focus of his sense of identity. SI-LL-46
In the case of the individual clinging to the bourgeois infantile ego, either through the mediation of the mother-image or the love-object of a banalized sexual relationship, the experiencing of even a significant outpouring of the fundamental emotion is an experience of psychological near-death. The "threat" of the emotion is associated with the shrinking of the ego down to a "point", surrounded by a "Schwaermerei" of fragmented thoughts and feelings. In such instances, where they occur in a clinical setting, the problem is resolved by bringing the self-conscious identity to "wakefulness" at the same time that the individual is disassociated from whatever infantile preoccupations are causing strong attachments to the infantile ego.
One should add, for emphasis, that there is a direct connection between this sort of phenomenon and the remedying of even severe psychosomatic illnesses. Intestinal psychosomatic involvements and migraine headache syndromes are among the most accessible to remedy in this way. (Indeed, the variety of disturbances falsely deemed of organic etiology which are susceptible of remedy or significant improvement through analysis indicates that psychosomatic medicine is of far greater importance and engages much more of the realm of "organic" disorders than is usually admitted even by professionals. If the "organic" problem can be remedied or checked by psychoanalytical clinical methods, then the case for its probably psychosomatic origins has been strongly made.) The link between psychological disorders and somatic disorders shown to be connected to this psychopathology is through the mediation of the fundamental emotion, which is obviously linked to proprioceptive and ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone) dynamics. SI-LL-63&64
There is no intrinsic "competition" between man and the biosphere of which he is a hegemonic part. Quite the contrary. The phenomena of "ecological crises" which we witness today are accounted for primarily by the dysfunctional primitive accumulation characteristic of capitalist development, and are not intrinsic to the industrial expansion and technological development otherwise characteristic of the social-reproductive process.
The development of society has brought us to the point, during the past ten thousand years, that human social-reproductive processes have taken over the biosphere to the extent that the very existence of that biosphere depends essentially on its willful maintenance and development as a part of social-reproductive processes. The notion that the ecology would prosper if man were to abandon it to freely resume some hypothetical "wild, natural" state is a simpleton's absurdity. Pull man out of the ecology, and a disastrous ecological collapse would quickly ensue.
Man has transformed the biosphere from a pre-human lower level of negentropic values to higher forms. In this process the earth has been transformed from a lower level of existence as a wild state into a higher level as man's garden. The higher state of the ecological processes represented by that garden could not have developed without man, and cannot maintain themselves without appropriate human activity. Remove the gardener or reduce his gardening activities to a level below that required, and the garden will deteriorate. To remove man or reduce his role is to deprive the biosphere of the key species on which the balance of ecology depends.
The problem is not maintaining the garden in some fixed present state. The present ecology as a whole is subject to the same essential principle as the first phases of the development of the biosphere. The free energy characteristic of living forms demands that the process of further development must continue or the ecology must turn into an auto-cannibalistic phase. Since the only means by which the ecology generally is able to effect the necessary progress is its human agency, a reduction in the negentropic activities of mankind (such as putting society into a "zero" state of negative, auto-cannibalistic reproduction) must result in a corresponding onset of auto-cannibalistic processes in the biosphere generally.
The general way in which ecological auto-cannibalism occurs is well known. It is broadly analogistic to the heuristic outline we gave for economic auto-cannibalism. The weakening of the conditions for the maintaining of higher forms of life in the ecology shifts the ecological values to emphasize the proliferation of relatively primitive forms which mediate the obliteration of the thermodynamically doomed higher species. The actions of insects, fungi, bacteria, and viruses as lower forms performing this mediating entropic function of auto-cannibalism are generally known, the elaboration of that here would be more entertaining than essential.
The essential point is that for thermodynamic auto-cannibalism, the process of decay is not a matter of the appearance of just one mode of auto-cannibalism. The action of the initial mode is to reduce the thermodynamic value of the ecology as a whole, lowering the "temperature", and shifting the mode to a lower, less efficient form of auto-destruction, and then to another. Like the economic model for fascist economy, the process of ecological auto-cannibalism is a chain-reaction. RF-LL-31&32
Reductionist biology locates the evolution of the species in the isolated biological individual, a hotly defended opinion in defiance of the relevant empirical evidence. An array of species (to put the point in broad terms) corresponds to a negentropic state of an entire ecology. The effect of shifts in populations of included varieties is to alter the negentropic state for better or worse. (The analogy to variations in specific commodities is slightly strained but not otherwise inappropriate.) An adverse result lowers the negentropic state, with corresponding effects on the plenum of species; an enhanced negentropy mediates further variations, which mediate further variations. Thus, the universal, the entire biosphere or specific ecology, mediates its own negentropy through the determination of the individual variety.
In economy, the determinant of negentropy is immediately located in the single creative individual. This individual is variously creative either in synthesizing new conceptions whose realization increases the negentropy of the economy as a whole, or "more passively" develops conceptions which enable him to master the conceptual innovations created by others. The material-cultural conditions of life determine the kinds of creativity of this import available to the society. In this way, realized inventions, by enhancing the negentropy of general material-cultural existence, foster the advancement of the creative powers of the population, which is then a potential for new inventions which are realized as further advances in the material-cultural negentropy of the society as a whole. CT-LL-4
Obviously, not every invention which might be made at any point is a useful solution to the problem of technological progress. Not only must the amount of useful energy per capita be increased by inventions, but we have to compare such an increase with two offsetting increases in cost of production. First, the cost of labor per capita is increased doubly: the ratio of productive workers from the entire population is reduced, in tendency, as by increasing the years for child-rearing, and the rate of consumption by each individual is absolutely increased in energy equivalents. Second, there is generally an increase in the absolute cost (energy equivalent) of maintaining the means of production. If we designate the cost of labor from households by its equivalent for a capitalist economy (V=Variable Capital) and the cost of maintaining means of production in a similar fashion (C=Constant Capital), and the residue after meeting those prime social costs as S or social surplus, we have again the now-familiar expression, S'/(C+V). The invention which satisfies necessity for development must at least maintain the value of that free energy expression, which it cannot accomplish unless the innovation has the universal content (as a reflexive chain-reaction) of an impulse for an exponential increase in that ratio.
Except to the extent that any society exists by looting nature without developing an equivalent resource, or that one section of society exists by looting another, exponential expressions for an increase in the impulse-value of the ratio S'/(C+V) are ultimately in correspondence with what we shall term a trans-invariant or "world-line" for human progress. Those innovations which satisfy that invariant or characteristic requirement have the effect of representing evolutionary solutions for the perpetuation of human existence. They have, therefore, the immediate content-value of free energy expressions satisfying positive exponential values for functions of S'/(C+V). These innovations satisfy the requirement of negentropy, and satisfy the rigorous definition of what we otherwise term freedom. RF-LL-33&34
The Three Levels of Human Consciousness:
Simple Belief is the level of individual judgment defectively based on narrow experience and informed chiefly by prejudices and mythologies, corresponding to the "man of woman born" of Christian doctrine, and the image of "donkeyness" common in the Renaissance. It was illustrated by Renaissance humanist artist Albrecht Durer in his Offer of Love, 1495.
Understanding is the level of judgment which comprehends fixed categories of scientific knowledge, corresponding to Christianity's enlightened state of knowledge effected by the Holy Spirit (Logos). Illustrated by a Durer woodcut showing two artists studying perspective, from his 1525 Treatise on Measurement.
Socratic Reason is knowledge based on the self-conscious comprehension of the process which characterizes the historical progress of scientific knowledge, a process identified in Christian theology with atonement in outlook with the Godhead, the creator. The humanist Durer depicted this level of mentation in his 1514 print, St. Jerome in His Study. SE-LL-13
The point of the Platonic dialogue is not to compare different views; if one attributes such a trivial significance to the Platonic dialogue, one condemns oneself to benighted ignorance forever. The object is to make one's own consciousness an object for, a subject of one's willful consciousness, to make consciousness an object of willful consciousness for itself. SE-LL-28
It is the ordering of the evolution of human culture according to the principles internal to scientific progress which is the primary feature of competent historiography, the standard of reference with whose governance we comprehend inclusively the failures of human history.
The key to scientific method, and thus to the mastery of both science and history, is the method of the Platonic dialogue. This is also properly termed the dialectical method, as such a method is associated with Thales, Heraclitus and Plato. SE-LL-36
The Platonic method rightly distinguishes three qualities of knowledge, mental levels, among people.
The first, lowest condition of the human mind is the level of simple belief, belief premised on popular mythologies and prejudices, and on the state of ignorance concerning individual experience otherwise known as "common sense".
The second, next-higher level of knowledge is equivalent to the condition of understanding defined by Immanuel Kant, the mere understanding. Persons at this level have consistent knowledge of the ostensibly lawful features of practice in certain, various categories of human practice in general. This is a condition corresponding to the lowest level of what may be termed scientific knowledge. Such persons do not know why such categories exist, or how or why the ostensibly lawful principles appropriate to such categories are determined. They have merely practical knowledge of consistent cause-and-effect features of practice in those categories of experience in which they have been educated.
The third, highest level of human knowledge is reason, otherwise termed Plato's Socratic reason. It is only on this level that truth can be efficiently comprehended.
The knowledge of the two lower levels is necessarily mythological, false, or, as Spinoza specifies, "fictitious".
For such reasons, the Platonics judged mythologies twofoldly. All mythologies they knew to be inherently false (fictitious), but no person could rise above mythologies except by attaining reason. Therefore, in dealing with masses living at the inferior levels of mental life, it was deemed necessary to deal with them on the terms of mythological beliefs. The issue of practical politics therefore took the task-oriented form of distinguishing among destructive and useful mythologies. Those forms of simple beliefs or mere understanding which tended to allow society to move in directions otherwise required by reason were deemed the tolerable class of mythologies. Those other mythologies, which tended toward evil consequences, were evil beliefs, which must be fought accordingly.
It is impossible to understand the central doctrinal issues among leading Christian theologians, from the apostolic period to present times, without taking that Platonic view inclusively into account. These theologians have been concerned for themselves and for determination of policy with the issues of truth according to reason. They have been, at the same time, otherwise concerned with popular mythologies, respecting chiefly whether this or that popular belief led away from or toward the realization of the dictates of reason. Although the objective has been to bring all of mankind into the state of reason (atonement), for immediate purposes the rule has been that this effort must be situated within terms of the problem defined by the simple beliefs of the ignorant.
The Aristotelians and their heirs, notably including Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther and the Presbyterian leaders, had and continue an opposite policy concerning mythologies. The original Aristotelians were the intelligence-services arm of the oligarchies jointly controlling the court of Philip of Macedon and the contemporary Persian court of that time. Their objectives were to stop technological and scientific progress, and to create zero-growth synthetic mythologies as the simple beliefs of the ignorant masses. These efforts they regarded as the means to establish permanent world-rule by a landlord-based oligarchy, deemphasizing cities in favor of the countryside, and maintaining "Malthusian" zero-growth, antitechnology policies against scientific progress. They have not altered that method or purpose to the present day.
The innermost belief of the leading Christian theologians with access to reason is typified by the outlook of the famous Abelard of the eleventh century A.D. Where strict Aristotelians argued that God made himself impotent by creating inalterable laws for the universe - and hence only omniscient - Abelard defined the function of man's existence according to reason to be the helper of God in the continuing work of creation. Abelard located lawfulness in the lawfulness governing the ordering of continued creation. The exact opposite position was classically argued by the twelfth-century Bernard of Clairvaux, a point of importance we shall cover in the course of this report. SE-LL-12,13&14
Again, the only aspect of human consciousness which is in correspondence with such a transfinite - or transinvariant - principle of the universe, is the quality of progress in human scientific knowledge, rather than any specific, subsumed scientific knowledge as such. The adducing of that principle, in turn, provides the methodological principle for ordering thought to the effect of willfully "energizing" the progress of scientific knowledge. That is the method of rigorous hypothesis. That is the meaning of the dialectical method, the method of rigorously developing valid hypotheses.
The method employed is the Platonic method of negation, as applied from the standpoint of the level of reason. The method of negation means to isolate those axiomatic fallacies of existing knowledge (understanding) which bear upon crucial-experimental problems confronting us. The qualitative elimination of the axiomatic fallacy permits the defining of experiments which can be represented in terms of quantitative relationships. The essential, underlying test of the validity of an hypothesis (as an hypothesis) posed in this way, is the test of whether the hypothesis, if successfully demonstrated, implies a means for increasing the negentropy of human practice.
Such hypotheses are defined by Riemann as "unique hypotheses". Their distinction in effect is that they test the laws of the universe for a category of knowledge, rather than merely testing the applicability of extension of established principles to a problem without involving a testing of general laws. Such hypotheses are more commonly, less rigorously, termed "crucial-experimental hypotheses".
In the case such an hypothesis fails experimentally, no loss. The failure of the hypothesis narrows qualitatively our approach to the axiomatic fallacy it attacked, and thus acts as positive progress in knowledge for attacking that axiomatic fallacy in a more effective way. SE-LL-59
One cannot spin out concrete physics from a philosopher's chair. The relationship of philosophy to physics is, more narrowly, to discern which philosophical statements by physicists are intrinsically, methodologically absurd. On the positive side, given adequate knowledge of physics to date, philosophy shows us how to select the experimental conception which will be most fruitful in gaining the next step of progress in mastery of the principles appropriate to physics. That, in general, is all that philosophy can accomplish with respect to positive sciences. That is all, but that is indispensable to the progress of science. That is the means by which the approach selected by the creative scientist is properly determined - just the approach, just the indispensable matter of approach.
The case of the electron paradox is appropriately illustrative. Confronted with a problem involving "elementary particle" experimentation, knowing that the electron doctrine of accredited physics is intrinsically absurd is representative of that kind of philosophical knowledge which guides the experimenter to the most fruitful experimental hypotheses. That illustrates the method to be applied in a more generalized way to order the progress of science in general.
Reason, which is definable in a consistent way in principle over the ages, is thus a kind of "constant". However, reason is not otherwise constant, not linearizable. As it assimilates to itself the fruits of its own accomplishments in mastering the lawful ordering of the universe, reason develops itself in its particular powers. In this process of self-development of reason, mediated through the practical scientific progress effected by efficient action of reason, reason parallels and intersects the fundamental, also self-developing, lawful ordering of the universe. SE-LL-66
Over the years, the question often arose, what is the basis in authority for imposing certain criteria of hypothesis upon work in the physical sciences. To this question, the consistent answer given was, and rightly so, the proof of that method in political economy. The fact that the order of the universe appropriate to the above-indicated features of the physics of Riemann has been crucially proven once in the domain of political economy proves also that the entire universe is ordered according to such principles. Political economy, viewed and developed in that way, is the highest form of science, the crucial source of authority for scientific knowledge in all domains.
The crucial experiment upon which human knowledge is essentially dependent is human existence itself. Since all particular knowledge is ultimately and necessarily superseded, no form of knowledge as such (understanding) can embody proof of the validity of scientific knowledge in a lasting way. What is proven by human existence is the efficiency of creative reason in ordering the progress of knowledge to the effect of maintaining and advancing the human species's ecological population-potential. It is as political economy situates the direct connection between progress of knowledge and changes in the ecological population-potential of human practice based on advancing knowledge, that the essential connection is made, and uniquely so. It could not be otherwise. SE-LL-68&69
Poetry (and great musical composition) is the concentrated expression in communicable forms of the most direct and intense expression of synthetic a priori mental activity - preconscious creative activity. For example, Poe's explanation of the composition of The Raven in his essay, The Philosophy of Composition, is identical in outlook with Beethoven's method of musical composition.
Continuing with the moment that thought whose name is sought in memory is still "on the tip of my tongue", this condition is not merely the desire for a thought, it is the Gestalt form of a definite thought. It is a definite thought, distinguishable from other preconscious thought, and able to recognize appropriate predicates (words, communicable images, and so forth). It is a universal with respect to all the predicates which might properly be attached to it. It is the interplay of two or more preconscious Gestalts which selects predicates determined by their conjunction, their interplay - an interplay which is also a Gestalt.
This configuration leads to orders of such Gestalts, orders which are in correspondence to George Cantor's notion of transfinites.
It is the reality and power of preconscious thought, that conscious thought is merely the ordering of communicable images of communication and other practice by preconscious thought, which makes the preconscious processes empirically recognizable as the "self", the inner mind. It is the preconscious processes of mind which define the ambiguity and agreement of the terms "mind" and "soul".
There are, however, three qualities of "souls", as Plato's Socrates, in particular insists. In the doctrine of "Phoenician lies", the lowest order of souls are "iron souls", the next higher order, "silver or bronze souls", the next higher order "golden souls". Poetry is the language of "golden souls". But that is to disguise the truth of the matter by "Phoenician lies".
The three qualities of souls - lies put aside - are the infantile or Dionysian, the adolescent or Apollonian, and the adult-human or Promethean. These are otherwise expressed respectively by irrationalism-Sophism-Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and Platonism-Neoplatonism. In Poe's satire against the traitor Martin Van Buren, Mellonta Tauta, the three qualities of soul are respectively characterized by the method of crawling (Baconian Hoggishness, or inductive method), by the method of creeping (Aries Tottle, or deductive method), and by the method of soaring (Platonic method, or reason).
The Platonic method - the method embedded in the Platonic dialogue - is a rigorous method for evoking creative mental activity to act upon the preconscious processes to the effect of transforming the infantile mind into the adolescent mind into the adult-human mind, to transform the sense of personal identity and world outlook from the existentialist to the Kantian to the Platonic-Neoplatonic, to the condition of reason.
Reason is nothing but the creative mental process (preconscious creative activity) deliberately conscious of itself. Those are no mere words, represent no mere construct. That is an empirically demonstrable actuality. That is the subject of poetry.
Preconscious processes in one person do not communicate preconscious conceptions directly to the preconscious processes of another person. They communicate indirectly; their communication is mediated. Words, communicable images are the forms of the mediation. Poetry and musical composition ordered by Platonic-Neoplatonic principles are the fundamental modes of intensified communication our species has developed for achieving the relatively most immediate kind of mediated communication among the preconscious processes of persons. PP-LL-8,9&10
In other words, a society characterized by zero technological growth as a policy of general practice is a dying society, a form of society morally unfit to continue existing. Repetition of modes of production and related cultural practice inherited from fathers, grandfathers, and so on, is the distinguishing policy of a dying society. For this and related reasons, all economic analysis and policy-shaping premised on systems of simultaneous linear equations, such as those proposed by the late John von Neumann and others, are worse than absurd.
Conversely, a successful form of society is characterized by technological progress. Such progress is the characteristic feature of the total activity of the labor force of that society. Technological progress is the precondition even for merely maintaining a fixed constant value of potential relative population density.
However, to overcome absolutely the apparent limits to growth associated with the "natural resources" of a fixed range of technology, there must be technological revolutions periodically, through which leaps in potential relative population density occur. Moreover, technological progress always tends to cause a net increase in the required social division of total labor, which in turn signifies an increase of population - and therefore of population density. Thus increase of potential relative population density is the irreducible datum required. It is human activity integral to effecting that increase of potential which is the irreducible definition of human activity.
It is that specific, irreducible datum of human activity which correlates directly with those qualities of the human mind which distinguish humanity absolutely from the beasts.
This "economic" form of human activity is mapped to the activity of the human mind by aid of Plato's conception of the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. From the standpoint of hypothesis (e.g., rational problem-solving activity of the mind), the human mind has three distinguishing possible states: (1) Simple Hypothesis, (2) Higher Hypothesis, and (3) Hypothesis of the Higher Hypothesis. These are summarily defined as follows, using modern language.
Simple Hypothesis. On the lowest level of human problem-solving (rational) activity, we attempt to comprehend a problem by aid of the assumption that prevailing opinion is broadly correct. We seek to describe the problem considered in a manner which is credible and acceptable to either prevailing assumptions of general opinion, or the body of opinion associated with some chosen professional or other peer group of reference. This is what is sometimes described as an "other-directed" state of mind, which limits one's self-approved thoughts to such thoughts one imagines to be approved among neighbors, family, prevailing authorities, and so forth.
In scientific work, the peer group of reference is one's old university professors (who awarded one the social, professional status of a scientific degree), one's professional peers (as typified by co-workers and referees of professional publications), current or prospective employers, and so forth. The prevailing (e.g., textbook) lattice-work of algebraic formulations, and the axiomatic assumptions directly or implicitly underlying such lattice-works, are accepted as broadly inalterable, and similar assumptions are made bearing on prevailing professional opinion in the specialized domain of experimental practice in which the problem treated is assumed to lie. The formulation of the simple hypothesis seeks consistency with such lattice-works.
Persons in this state of mind will never discover anything of useful importance bearing upon fundamental issues of scientific knowledge. Worse, they will be hostile to creative discoveries, no matter how exhaustively, conclusively demonstrated, and will have enormous difficulty in attempting to master such discoveries. If obliged by pressures of practical circumstance to employ such a discovery, they will attempt to explain the discovery away, to reject the method by which the discovery was actually formulated.
Higher Hypothesis. In this approach to problem-solving, the thinker rejects the "other-directedness" of simple hypothesis. He is interested chiefly in those kinds of experiments which test one or more of the underlying, axiomatic assumptions of prevailing opinion, and expects to be able sooner or later to overturn one or more of such assumptions through a "crucial" experimental demonstration. This creative thinker is inherently an "iconoclast" in the eyes of his "other-directed" fellow professionals, and they "philistines" in his eyes, as such were in the eyes of Plato's Socrates. He is "inner-directed"; he must prove everything for himself, especially those features of the logical lattice-work of established opinion which are underlying, axiomatic.
The formulation of the higher hypothesis is best accomplished by a thorough education in the internal history of ideas, especially scientific ideas, with reliance upon the original sources of the present and past. This historical approach to contemporary scientific work emphasizes those kinds of axiomatic assumptions which are ontological, which bear directly on identifying which aspects of the universe as a whole are properly treated as efficiently substantial, and also how such ontological assumptions implicitly determine the method of adducing the lawful principles governing action in the universe. From such an historically-informed vantage point, the thinker is able to recognize that the elaborated logical lattice-work of the algebraic formulations associated with some branch of scientific inquiry is a kind of "hereditary" elaboration of the axiomatic ontological-methodological assumptions which underlie those constructed edifices of algebraic formulations. From this vantage point, the thinker is enabled to recognize that certain classes of experimental problems put an entire edifice of that sort into question, that certain classes of experimental problems, properly defined in that light, have implicitly a "crucial", or "revolutionary" significance for scientific knowledge in general.
So, the formulation of a higher form of experimental hypothesis is addressed to some selection of empirical evidence, evidence which is appropriate to prove whether or not certain prevailing assumptions of scientific work must now be overturned in order that scientific (and, technological) progress might continue. If this experiment is successful, a greater or less scientific revolution - or, the equivalent in some other aspect of knowledge - results. If this occurs, the entire edifice of mathematical knowledge resting hereditarily upon flawed assumptions collapses, and a new, replacement edifice must be constructed according to the hereditary implications of the newly proven principle.
In the final analysis, the question whether such experimental proof of a new principle is valid or not, is determined: does this discovery implicitly lead to an increase of the potential relative population density of society? Does the discovery effect an increase in mankind's per capita power over nature as a whole?
There are many false discoveries which purport to be of this form. Everywhere, this or that anarchist whose ego has been inflated by a little professional learning, prankishly deludes himself that iconoclasm for its own sake, merely being eccentrically different, constitutes valid discovery. The case of so-called modernism in art today, or nineteenth-century romanticism, is illustrative. Fellows who have never mastered Albertian perspective, to say nothing of Leonardo's system of convex-spherical mirror projection, delude themselves that childish smears, echoing infantile smearing of feces on walls, constitutes an expression of "creative freedom". In music, those who have no comprehension of the principles of coherent contrapuntal development (such as that of the post-1782 Mozart or Beethoven), delude themselves to surpass the classical masters by the anarchistic chromatic imbecilities of a Liszt or Wagner or the irrationalist nihilism of Webern and Schoenberg. In scientific work, such feces-smearing artistic productions would be regarded as the bungling of illiterate tinkerers.
In significant degree, the toleration of such artistic and social sciences frauds by society today echoes a breakdown in primary and secondary education. If students today were educated at standards of classical education associated with the eighteenth-century French-Italian Oratorians, the leading schools of the young United States, or the Humboldt program in Germany, the graduates of secondary institutions would already possess a much higher degree of education in fundamentals than is commanded by more than a tiny minority of professionals holding terminal degrees today. The steeping of the student in the original classics, beginning with Greek classics, is not unnecessary exposure of the student to dead languages and "outdated" opinions. It is affording the student both a familiarity with the past 2,500 years of development of the ideas of Western civilization, and the power to think of ideas in terms of universality and historicity. Out of such education emerges a sense of rigorous thinking, the power to discriminate between new eruptions of what has been proven trivial nonsense many times in the past, and genuinely new solutions to problems left unresolved from the entirety of whole spans of work of mankind up to the present.
For example, all fundamental accomplishments in modern European mathematical physics over the recent five hundred years are derived most directly (hereditarily) from the work of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. Cusa's adolescent training was under the Brothers of the Common Life, education based on rigorous reworking of the classics prior to mid-adolescence. Cusa's principal discoveries in science centered around his thorough reworking of the writings of Archimedes, most emphatically Cusa's rediscovery of the isoperimetric principle of topology as a superior approach to that of Archimedes in treatment of the problem of quadrature of the circle. The genius of Karl Gauss, the greatest thinker of the past two centuries, is typified by and centered in his thorough reworking of the work of Kepler. In Georg Cantor's Grundlagen, in which Cantor summarizes the solution to comprehension of transfinite manifolds, Cantor devotes much of the writing to reviewing the preceding centuries' work in that same direction.
The work of formulating valid higher hypothesis is not less rigorous than that of formulating simple hypothesis; it is far more rigorous, more demanding upon the historical education in depth and concentration span of the investigator.
Once one has worked through one such discovery (as the author experienced this in the culmination of five years of work in 1952, in his fundamental discovery in economic science), one has broken through into the inside of the matter of method, and from that vantage point, to descend once more into the lower realm of simple hypothesis is like eating bad dishwater for soup. The term, "genius", for persons associated with fundamental scientific discoveries, is an unfortunately mystical, and therefore wickedly misleading choice of term. "Genius" is learned, as a development of a potential inherent in every newborn (biologically undamaged mental apparatus) human individual. Depth and width of development of that potential, strongly motivated "inner-directedness", and the experience of one good, worked-through true discovery, are all that is required to bring forth such potentialities in almost any human being.
From this vantage point, we must view as criminal the educational policies associated with John Dewey, and the more radical steps in the same direction fostered by the National Education Association under influence of the National Training Laboratories during the more recent decades. Where proper education might have produced legions of true "geniuses", we permit our children to be encouraged in irrational infantilism, to "protect them" from the "oppression" of rigorous development of their creative potentials in depth and breadth of classical and pre-science education, and to deny them the development of that rational maturity indispensable to survive psychologically as adults.
Hypothesis of the Higher Hypothesis. The fact that successions of higher hypothesis (scientific-technological revolutions) prompt increase of potential relative population density of society, implies that such a succession of scientific revolutions has an ordered character. In other words, the succession of higher hypotheses subsuming such an ordered succession of scientific-technological revolutions has an ordered character. This defines a new experimental problem for hypothesis, the experiment which isolates the consistent feature of successive scientific revolutions, the common principle of discovery uniting revolutions which are otherwise different. This defines an hypothesis of the higher hypothesis.
Just as no experimental hypothesis can be the last word in human knowledge, the same is true for successful hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. It cannot be perfect, and it need not be perfect. It is required that the successive improvements in this hypothesis successfully direct man to the needed next step upward through scientific revolutions.
It is in this latter activity, successful testing of the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis, that true human scientific creativity lies. This is the irreducible feature of human mental activity which distinguishes man from the beast, the irreducible datum of a science of the human mind. SM-LL-6,7&8
First, let us consider the issue in terms of a purely formal problem.
Either the whole of musical development represents a coherent domain, and this coherent lawfulness is therefore the primary reality of music, or the notes of the twelve-tone scale are the self-evidently "atomic" sensualities of music. If the former, then the notes are determined in value by the requirements of a system which is coherent with respect to all of the lawfully ordered development within music. If the latter, then the values of the notes, as self-evident "atoms" of sensuality, can be determined by any variously arbitrary or consistent standards apart from music. In the latter case, music is axiomatically degraded to a matter of sensual effects.
The former standpoint is the Platonic (or, Neoplatonic) epistemological standpoint, as exemplified by Plato's Timaeus. The latter standpoint is that of Aristotle and his successors, and coincides with the classical arguments of the British Secret Intelligence Service in adopting Rameau as its prophet during the British monarchy's attempted inquisition against J. S. Bach during Bach's period at Leipzig.
The Aristotelian standpoint was also the common standpoint of Goethe, Mendelssohn, and Richard Wagner, among others, in those persons' philippics against the line of development of musical composition exemplified by Beethoven. The same issue was reflected, although in an often confused form, in both of the principal Wagner controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, between Wagnerians and Brahmsians, in the once case, and Wagnerians and Verdians in another. Although both Brahms and Verdi reflected the depressing influence of the romantic decay of nineteenth century musical (and other) aspects of European culture, relative to the Wagnerians they were the sane currents, and represented to that extent a continuation of the thrust of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, et al.
From the Platonic standpoint, the notes of the well-tempered system are ephemerals. The student must not be left misguided on the significance of that term. "Ephemeral" is not equivalent to "sloppy", "arbitrary", "illusory". Indeed, individual life is an ephemeral in the whole development of humanity, yet an individual person is not only definite, but what he or she may do to secure a meaningful place in the process of human development as a whole is also a definite matter. The notes within a well-tempered system have a determined, exact value as notes. There is no caprice, no margin for indifference within the range of audible discriminations, or within a tolerable range of beats produced by the variation between produced tones of the same nominal set of values.
When we insist that the values of notes are ephemerals, we are merely insisting that the values of musical notes are not determined a priori, independently of music. We are merely insisting that the principles of lawful development necessary to effect beauty within musical composition rigorously determine the values of notes, with no obligation to any aprioristic assumption of what those sensual values must be independently of beautiful music.
From the standpoint of the Aristotelian and irrationalist (empiricist-positivist) schools - such as the Frankfurt School's protege Arnold Schoenberg, downward through Webern into Stockhausen and John Cage - the values of the notes are either properly determined as if they were self-evident atoms, prior to any musical consideration, or purely arbitrary valuations might be given to them. IG-LL-9
Themes in music are as lines to a poet. They are musical ideas, even on the level of primitive culture's comprehension of music. A theme must "parse", it must have the preconscious form of a musical-idea utterance, such that the mind seizes that utterance as a gestalt, something corresponding to a musical-idea statement in and for itself. The process of composition then presents the mind with an ambivalence. Each of the musical-idea statements subsumed in the developmental process is at first glance an ordinary musical-idea statement. Yet it is also essentially something else, a mere predicate of the developmental process whose meaning is essentially the latter. It is the polemical struggle within the mind between the two kinds of meaning which is the musical experience of the audience.
However, to put the composition together as a unity, the mind must subordinate the theme-by-theme hearing to hearing the developmental process. The simple statement corresponds to ordinary knowledge, the developmental process in a great musical composition corresponds at best to the higher hypothesis of Plato. Hence, the difference between the master of existing musical knowledge, Johannes Brahms, and the creator of new musical knowledge, Beethoven. Brahms is satisfying as a composer because he achieves lawful creative processes of musical development; he is uninspiring, relative to Beethoven, because Brahms's mastery of music seldom touches those processes which correspond to the higher hypothesis. Brahms is to Beethoven as Immanuel Kant stands as a poet with respect to Friedrich Schiller.
This sort of use of predicated objects to force the mind to a higher-order process-conception is identical with the notion of higher hypothesis in Riemann's great habilitation paper and the notion of transfinite in Cantor's work. Process-conceptions occur as distinct mental notions in terms of transfinites, as Cantor defines transfinites. The higher hypothesis of Plato is the highest-order transfinite possible in Cantor's implicit schema. Conversely, examining the lawful ordering of Bach's well-tempered system from the standpoint of both Beethoven and Cantor's notion of transfinite orderings, we have a more advantageous standpoint from which to comprehend both the general principle of the well-tempered system and contrapuntal methods generally.
What defines the well-tempered system for al-Farabi and his European followers through Beethoven is not the matter of agreement of tones as such. The well-tempered system is defined by the process of musical composition under contrapuntal rules. Counterpoint within any lawful ordering within modes leads inevitably to juxtapositions which are paradoxical: they contradict the apparent law and yet they arise through the realization of the law under contrapuntal conditions. These paradoxes are dissonances - lawful dissonances, or singularities within the domain of law. These cease to be unlawful if they are properly developed as transitions to other modes. Hence, the system of law within composition is not conserved except by allowing for the implicit, concurrent existence of every other mode within each mode. The well-tempering principle is determined by this principle of necessary agreement. The values of tonalities are those which admit of coherent lawfulness within the process of musical composition as a whole.
Music is not located in the physiology of a human ear, or the neurophysiology of the acoustico-lateral lobe; music is located in the creative-mental processes peculiar to the human being. It is as music is defined accordingly that the distinction between the human and the bestial in various proferrings of so-called music is determined. This was understood by Plato, by al-Farabi, by ibn-Sina, and by their European continuators.
The distinguishing feature of rock, of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and other aspects of the guitar-strumming "modern folk-song" cults is that they combine monotony with arbitrary dissonances. The "modern folk-song" side of this overall spectrum is the most boring sort of monodic strumming, relieved scantily by occasional transpositions. The addition of the arbitrary dissonance, sometimes merely whining or cacophonous bellowing into a microphone, is the element of "personal style" - irrational idiosyncrasy - added on the tensible pretext of relieving the internal monotony of the rest.
There is no doubt that a gifted chimpanzee could replicate every cognitive aspect of this sort of performance. In a chimpanzee, the spectacle would represent - in brief, occasional zoo exhibitions - a certain kind of achievement, at least to the purpose of clarifying the cognitive levels of an Elvis Presley, a Bob Dylan, or of any one of a large accumulation of grunters, strummers, and squirmers - of bedrockers. CM-LL-23
The higher formal ordering of joking, as we identified it above, is suggestive of the principles of creative genius. By being made conscious of lawfulness in the use of a good joke to bring forth important conceptions simultaneously in the minds of a substantial portion of a definite audience, the person experiencing that awareness is made conscious of lawfulness in the ordering processes of his or her own judgment.
Thus, a poor joke - or poorer joke - is one which simply plays upon the ambiguities of simple consciousness, without structuring the experience to bring into play a forced reflection on a process of a lawful ordering of insight.
What is required is a truly great joke: art. This must be a quality of joking one qualitative level higher than the evoking of self-consciousness by good joking. Instead of being merely conscious of the lawful ordering of one's preconscious processes, one must have a great joke which prompts one to be aware of a lawful principle for transforming those preconscious processes.
This achievement brings forth the laughter of great, fundamental scientific discovery. This brings to consciousness a knowledge of the lawfulness of those mental processes by which one may willfully effect a qualitative advancement in one's mental-creative powers. PC-LL-20
By wide-ranging observations and measurements, Leonardo da Vinci and his physicist collaborator Luca Pacioli, demonstrated that the morphological patterns of living processes were harmonically ordered according to convergence upon the principle of the Golden Section. Leonardo applied this knowledge to his design of machine technologies, where the principle of the Golden Section and self-similar spiral rotation is used to concentrate the power and increase the energy-flux density of the machine, thus accomplishing work. Leonardo recognized that the same principle of negentropy governs the lawful development of the physical universe and the human mind. SM-LL-5
Formal algebra, like syllogistic systems, is based on the function of the middle term. This middle term has the associated significance of stating such things as "equal to", "identical with", "not part of", "part of", "greater than", "lesser than", and so forth. The objective of formal mathematics of this sort is to assemble all knowledge, or at least a great part of it, into one gigantic, continuous syllogism, such that one might trace one's way from the subject of a single syllogism, by way of middle terms, through every syllogism in that entire part of human knowledge. In other words, a syllogistic lattice-work.
All knowledge, or purported knowledge, of this syllogistic form, is either anarchistic nominalism, such as the irrationalism of William of Ockham, or is formal nominalism, like that of the neo-Aristotelian scholastics. The one is Dionysian, the other Apollonian; both are pure nominalism, noun-ism.
The practical issue is posed by stating that the nominalist approach chooses nouns as the data of experimental inquiry, whereas the negentropic approach chooses data of the form of verbs.
In the latter method, the verb "to be" adopts the self-reflexive transitive form of itself: "to cause itself to become". This is another way of stating the verb "to create", or to "cause to exist". Wherever the verb "to cause" is employed, the meaning of that verb is referenced "hereditarily" to the verb "to create", "to cause to exist", and to the ultimate verb, "to cause itself to become". All verbs, at least as they are employed to define data of scientific thought, must be defined by the hereditary principle of connection to "to cause itself to become".
Insofar as this pertains to the work of classical philologists, we leave the rest of that aspect of the discussion to them, to report how these principles may be located within Sanskrit writings, or at least some among them, and the form of classical Greek used by Plato. Having identified this aspect of the point, we proceed onward. SM-LL-24
The relevance of the subject of well-tempered scales to our general sub-topic here is that the author and his collaborators have demonstrated that the discovery of the well-tempered principle depends upon the point of departure of a conception equivalent to the isoperimetric principle, and is determined precisely by projection of a self-similar conic spiral onto the circular base of the cone. The implication of this demonstration is that such notions arise "naturally" from applying the verb "to create" to a rigorous study of astronomical evidence. Although we can merely infer, if rigorously so, that ideas in this direction were implicit in the pre-Vedic arctic culture, we have more precise indications to related effect from the interaction of the Egyptian temple of Ammon with classical Greek culture, as well as leading internal features of Mosaic Judaism. The specific kind of monotheism of both the temple of Ammon and Moses converges, at least, upon the consubstantial doctrine of monotheism of Plato's Timaeus. The essential part which the notion of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis performs in the Timaeus, and the interdependence of that with geometrical notions rooted in a version of the isoperimetric principle is rigorously demonstrated.
It is only necessary, if we are to make such argument conclusive, to show that in Plato's classical Greek, for example, the verb "to be" is sometimes employed in the self-reflexive form of "It causes itself to become". If physical geometry is defined by a notion equivalent to the isoperimetric principle, and if the evidence so ordered is defined as data from the standpoint of the verbal, rather than the nominative form, the rigorous development of astronomy for aid of wide-ranging navigation is adequate empirical basis for discovering the existence of a monotheism like Plato's from the evidence of nature.
This is not to project such an advanced form of monotheism upon the pre-Vedic arctic civilization of interest to Tilak. It is only to indicate that such an urban maritime culture was on the track leading toward such advanced notions. Otherwise, it indicates the reasons why the development of the well-tempered system in music tends to reflect the course of development in such directions.
In the same vein, we must compare the degraded conception of man and nature embedded in the writing of Hesiod with the heroic conception of man of the Iliad and Odyssey, the latter conception better, more clearly defined by Aeschylus. Aeschylus's Prometheus rejects the evil gods of Hesiod's pantheon as usurpers, and references a higher power, implicitly the Composer of Plato's Timaeus. It is provocative to read what Diodorus Siculus reports the ancient Atlas people to say of the Hesiodic pantheon, that all these supposed gods were nothing more than a principally rascally collection of fellows whose civil strife destroyed the culture of the urban maritime colonization of their region. As corroborated by Manetho's king lists for Egypt, the victorious scalawags of that ancient Moroccan strife employed their maritime culture to colonize regions of the Mediterranean, imposing the worship of their ancestors and associated mythologies upon the credulous subjects of these colonies.
The Hesiodic pantheon was evil enough. The substratum upon which that pantheon is superimposed embodies the essential evil, the anti-Logos principle. This substratum is the Chaldean-Philistine system associated with worship of the earth goddess (Shakti, Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, Cybele) and her phallic-symbol son (Siva, Osiris, Satan, Dionysos) and also with a third male figure (Horus, Lucifer, Apollo, etc.). This substratum is the irrationalistic, hedonistic doctrine of "blood and soil". Together, the Hesiodic sort of pantheon and the substratum, define the characteristic theology of oligarchical culture. The Hesiodic pantheon symbolizes the capricious tyrannies of a degraded, squabbling collection of families of an ancient "jet set". The philosophical world outlook congruent with such ordering of society is the degraded belief-structure exemplified by the cult of Isis-Osiris-Horus.
The contrast between the Promethean man of Judeo-Christian monotheism and the degraded man in the alternating images of Apollo and Dionysos, is paradigmatic for the deeper study of cultures. The first approximates a culture based on the principle of the Good, the latter cultures based on the principle of Evil. The development of mankind according to the ordering principle provided by the first coincides with the cited injunction of the Book of Genesis: mankind must "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it". The fulfillment of this injunction is measured as increase of potential relative population density. The study of advances in technology, by means of which this injunction is fulfilled, compels us to probe the principles of discovery common to successive advances in technology. This obliges us to advance toward discovery and mastery of the notion of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis.
Good is the principle of beauty and love, akin to the joy of a child in discovering new knowledge to replace earlier beliefs. Joy and beauty are a world of such surprises, a world of ironies which are beautiful because they are lawful. This beauty is a sense of freedom. Not freedom to violate the law, but freedom to discover the limitless advancement of human knowledge and of the human condition available to mankind through mastery of the law.
Evil is the principle of the wicked child's rage against the parents who threaten to "interfere" with the impulses of infantile, irrationalistic hedonism. Evil is therefore essentially hateful against Reason and all that Reason implies; it is the dionysian terrorist's hatred against Reason and against the urban culture which destroys the bestial freedom of fang and claw of the wilderness. Evil is Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Good in culture is the rule of prometheans over the apollonians and dionysians. Good in the individual is the subjugation of the evil of infantilism within himself - the enslavement of the Apollo and Dionysos within himself. On this account, the Good culture is "authoritarian" in the hate-filled eyes of the Nazi follower of Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, "authoritarian" because it represents Reason's "suppression" of infantile bestiality, irrationalism, by Reason. To all good men, a society according to the model of Sparta - the freedom of the beast unleashed in the form of man - is an evil tyranny, from which mankind must be liberated. So evil modern men, like Nietzsche, hate Friedrich Schiller, hate Socrates, and are determined to eradicate from culture the image of Jesus Christ, as Adolf Hitler was so determined.
Human culture is primarily the struggle of Good to eradicate Evil from this world. It is not a Manichean struggle, to be foreseen as alternate periods of rule by Apollo and Dionysos over endless eras. It is a struggle to eradicate Evil from culture, and to eradicate therefore cultures which are evil. It is at the same time, a struggle to define the process by which the evil of the newborn infant, that infant's irrationalistic hedonism, is brought under the control of and ultimately destroyed by the spark of the divine, the potential for Reason in that same infant.
It is in that latter respect that the principles of culture, as we have thus far described those principles, determine what is more or less conventionally identified by the term culture in scholarly opinion. Culture is the elaboration of a principle, which principle is more or less Good or Evil, to shape both the education of the infant, child, and adolescent in society, and to shape also the body of ideas of practice which the adults employ to educate the young. Culture is essentially the development of the potentialities of the new individual, essentially through his or her sixteenth to eighteenth birthday, as Wilhelm von Humboldt's program for primary and secondary education addresses this principle. Otherwise, culture is the developing body of ruling ideas, according to this principle, which governs the aggregate practice of a society composed of individuals whose potentials have been developed in that way.
The general approach required for a science of culture applies the conceptions we have thus far developed to the outline afforded by Dante's Commedia, together with other writings focussed upon the same issues. What culture is, is measured first by finding the place on the "ladder" of the Commedia on which that culture is located, and at the same time, determining whether the motion of that culture is up or down the ladder. SM-LL-42,43&44
A fixed culture is at once characterized by codes of conduct which are on relatively higher or lower rungs of the ladder as codes of conduct by the group within society, such that a group within the lower rungs of "Purgatory" of this sort is to be preferred to such a group on the rungs of the "Inferno". Yet, the relatively moral grouping of such fixedness is at best deceptively moral; it is incapable of true love, as a cultural type, and is moral only by means of negativity - Kant's negation of the negation - and is therefore a society which often uses its morality as a license for great, immoral acts of cruelty in the name of punishing offenders who breach the code. It is a society which keeps order by keeping its members in pigpens, moral pigstys called "homes" usually. It is either a dionysian society, as a society of Raskolniki (Old Believers of Russia) must be, or an apollonian society of bestial Cadmuses wearing their Sunday clothes on way to church meeting. It is English Victorian society, which butchers and loots entire colonial nations, but which renders outcast a woman who shows an ankle in public, or a man who speaks publicly of the fact that ladies also walk on legs. It is like the society of Lady Chatterly, a respectable British lady with certain habits which are not made public by gentlemen. It is an apollonian sort of Victorian society whose characteristic collective productions are the sodomic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, theosophical Lucifer-worshipping cults, John Stuart Mill's doctrine of irrationalist hedonism (utilitarianism), and the dionysiac Fabian Society of philosophical mass-murderers H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and so forth.
The divine spark of humanity is development congruent with the principle of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. The moral potential so expressed, moral as it is adopted as the central principle of social identity by societies, by cultural currents within society, or by individuals, is the characteristic feature of the sense of personal identity - to greater or lesser degree. It is the absence, or suppression of that spark which is evil.
The individual's moral conflict with his peers presents us, in the extreme, with two opposite moral types, the potential martyr and the criminal personality. An individual who rises morally above the potential of an "infernal" or lower rung "purgatorian" society or peer group, is much like the legendary "ugly duckling", as if a creature of a higher moral species than those among whom he or she is immediately situated, an "eccentric", whose supposed "eccentricity" is feared as an alien thing among the peers. Without a social mooring in a peer group appropriate to his or her moral nature, the "ugly duckling" will become "eccentric" in fact; lacking a peer group of reference, corresponding to his or her moral sense of identity, the "ugly duckling" will tend to construct an arbitrary culture as an individual, a culture which is for the "ugly duckling" the establishment of a culture superior to that of the immediate peers. The individual dionysian - the anarchist or existentialist personality - will also tend to create a "sub-culture" with reference to the peer group, by negating the authority of whatever morality happily characterizes the peer group; he acts against morality because it is morality, out of rage and hatred.
The second principal class of conflicts between individual and peer group are of the form of conflicts between the individual's family household and society. This may be rooted in the differentiated morality among the households of a social stratum which otherwise participates in a common ethic. The most notable problematic features of such conflict are those rooted in the infantile personality's attachment to the "oedipal" image of the mother, either an actual mother or a transference of the idea of "mother" to an adopted surrogate, assigning this surrogate value either to a personality or a mere fantasy construct. To the infantile mind, "mother" protects the infantile ego from the obligation to be weaned socially. As long as the individual's sense of identity is "I am my mother's child", the authority of the infantile ego, the rejection of the social responsibilities of the weaned adult, is sustained. Most psychotic and neurotic behavior has, of course, this characteristic pathogenic core. This latter is the root of anarchism, existentialism, and so forth, as the autobiographical writings of the late Jean-Paul Sartre rather obscenely illustrate the point of connection. The pathological droolings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, or of Voltaire, exhibit the same pathology most shamelessly. The reek of incest in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky, is also illustrative.
A special case of this pathological influence of the idea of family is provided by the oligarchical family's rearing of its offspring. The idea that such families are "the best people", destined to rule over their inferiors, and the placing of the capricious will of such family as a matter of imagined right over society, is nakedly Hesiodic. This applies not only to nominally aristocratic families of such dispositions, but also large strata of the U.S. rentier-financier patrician class, the so-called blue bloods.
The republican principle, that all persons qualified to be citizens are politically equal as persons, members of the highest social rank tolerated in society, is not a "democratic" principle, but a political principle rooted in the harshest requirements of morality. Granted, societies require elites, but this only to the degree that someone must take efficiently leading responsibility for uplifting the majority of society not only to the moral qualifications of true citizens, but to assume the rights and responsibilities of true citizens. The republican elite never considers itself biologically superior to the rest of society, but only as the most dedicated servants of the betterment of society as a whole. In the families of such republican elites, the rearing of the child is directed toward successful weanings, as John Adams prudently entrusted the adolescent education of his son, John Quincy Adams, to the greatest republican figure of that time, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, this to the great benefit of the United States at a later point. By contrast, the oligarchical individual is a permanently infantile individual, by virtue of the idea associated with the "family". The similarities of the typical oligarchical mind to the criminal mind are functionally determined. SM-LL-47&48
Over the past four centuries, reductionist natural science has been mobilized on the side of political reaction at each moment of revolutionary social upheaval: Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century against the English Revolution, Buffon et al. against the French Revolution in the 18th century, Malthus against the rising British proletariat in the first half of the 19th century, Darwin and the social Darwinians in the second half of the 19th century against the First International and the Paris Commune, German-Italian fascist science in the first half of the 20th century against the Russian Revolution and upsurge in the advanced sector, Rockefeller-fostered "Zero Population Growth" in the last decade against the imminent potential for world revolution.
In each instance of conjunctural crisis, the underlying terror that there is "no way out", i.e., the absence of a conception of man's creative potential to determine "progress" beyond the crisis point through scientific breakthroughs and social organization on a higher level, expresses itself in the political motif of "Every man for himself". Science as it exists for the mind of the empiricist, the mind which denies its own coherency, at such moments exposes its underlying vicious ideological prejudices by "coming out" of the laboratory - onto the side of reaction. SB-WH-13
The key is the measurement of usable energy available per square kilometer. The level of biological reproduction potential is determined by the minimum value reached by a continuous supply of usable energy per capita. In what aspect of food gathering culture at the most primitive level is the supply of usable energy for human existence sufficiently concentrated to permit qualitative increase in population density? The answer is fishing, especially fishing near the mouths of important river systems.
The sequence of human development commonly given by anthropologists is: (1) hunting and gathering society (primitive society), (2) animal husbandry, (3) small garden patches supplementing animal husbandry, (4) agricultural revolution, (5) "hydraulic" society - urban culture based on water management near the mouths of large river systems. The Diodorus account and other evidence already cited give a different sequence: (1) fishing, (2) maritime culture leading into fixed urban settlements based on development of navigation through aid of astronomy, (3) development of the agricultural revolution by urbanized maritime society, (4) collapse of wide-ranging maritime culture shifting the center of culture to a culturally lower level based on development of "hydraulic" societies around colonies of the collapsed maritime culture. SM-LL-41
The same sort of paranoid games apply to most forms of popular dramatic entertainments: novels, movies, plays, TV dramas, and - most emphatically - "soap operas". The ordinary "formula" or "Plotto" sort of dramatic entertainment so popular on TV is a half-way case between paranoid-schizophrenia and the ordinary neurotic perception of events. Their value for the neurotic is both catharsis and, equally important, suggesting new fantasy-material to the observer. Literary, drama, and TV critics may be regarded as the Duncan Hines's of the masturbation circuits.
The best qualified CIA "covert operations" planning executives are to be found among hack paperback novelists and TV dramatists. The credulous neurotic projects reality onto the banal stage and TV screen "productions" because of his strong desire to believe that the combination of painted backgrounds, papier-mache, costume, and montage has such reality. There is no way in which to conceal repeated "covert operations" unless the public wishes to be credulous. Give that public a fantasy of the sort to which it is susceptible, and no amount of mere fact will easily dissuade the majority of such persons from believing in whatever illusion the covert operation is designed to create. The application of the calculated deception of the successful hack novelist and dramatist to the so-called "documentary film" and "non-fiction expose" is the connecting link between outright pornography-writing and the techniques for designing a CIA-type "covert operations" scenario. (If, by chance, a covert operation is "blown", the CIA's obvious remedy is to prompt one of its subsidiaries or sister-agencies to whip up a fresh expose of the CIA! Give the credulous public a "believable" expose scenario and the expose provides a deeper cover than the original plot itself.)
It is not accidental therefore that the leaders in all branches of psychological warfare have included leading dramatists, novelists and newspapermen. The accumulation of "organic" knowledge of what will effectively induce the public to deceive itself - the normal practice of the successful fiction-writer and journalist - represents a developed talent out of which both "white" and "black" propaganda can be shaped, and from which can be developed the scripts in which news media and "covert operations" specialists combine their roles to create an artificial reality for the gullible. All Anglo-American psychological warfare operates as the peddling of paranoia. The artisans of this craft often have no real knowledge of the mental processes on which they are operating; they merely have certain talents which have been shown to be workable. RF-LL-59&60
Having now established that Woodward's Veil is an artful blending of fact and fiction, I come to the main purpose of this book review. Woodward employs the "Fleming effect" to accomplish more than to simply falsify particular U.S. covert operations. The selection and arraying of facts in the book as a whole, is a gross misrepresentation of the way in which intelligence operations work.
I concede that many of Woodward's facts about U.S. operations are true, like an artist's colors used to produce a painting. It is the painting produced with those colors, which is false. I also not only concede, but stress, that the false picture painted is only partially the result of Woodward's conniving. On one level, the lower level, Casey did understand the detailed side of covert operations; on the higher level, professional Casey was the bungling amateur we recognize him to have been in reviewing the net result of his reign as CIA director. Woodward deliberately misrepresents only those mechanics of covert intelligence operations which Casey understood very well. On the higher level, Woodward's misrepresentation is a reflection of his own self-confident ignorance.
The postwar U.S. intelligence community, like that of Britain, has been a parody of the mythical gods of Olympos. The intelligence community as a whole is run by invisible men and women, chiefly men and women who hold no official position inside government. Advisory committees, such as the old "Forty Committee", Reagan's PFIAB-IOB, and so forth, are merely reflections of the overall direction by an establishment which exists independently of the control of elected government.
This establishment is a pastiche, somewhat like the late Meyer Lansky's corporate form of direction over U.S. organized crime, of various factional elements among "the gods of Olympos". The establishment reaches decisions which determine the fate of individuals, governments, and nations. The official intelligence community merely executes the collective decisions reached within this establishment.
The resulting situation properly reminds us of Aeschylos' Prometheus Bound, and also of one of Goethe's most successful poems, his Prometheus. In Aeschylos, Prometheus warns the gods of Olympos, that there is a real God, and that the Creator's world has embedded within it laws which shape the ultimate doom of whoever sets himself up as an Olympos in defiance of the Creator and His laws.... So, under the establishment's rule, intelligence functions on three levels: 1) the choices of policy-directions by the higher echelons of the establishment itself, from which a man on Casey's 1981-87 level is absolutely excluded; 2) the shaping of the implementation of establishment policy directives by committee-like formations composed of the designated representatives of sundry factions of the establishment, into which Casey was integrated; 3) the shaping of implementation by somewhat free-wheeling intelligence "barons" at the level of Casey and below.
A Casey would receive directions from the highest level, which he could not challenge. He could participate in the shaping of policy on the second level, and would carry out the choice of implementation of policy which was adopted at that level. Within the limits of that decision, a man at Casey's level had wide latitude to do almost anything he could get by with, within understood guidelines.
Woodward's book addresses only the third, lowest, of these three levels, and generally runs to the underside of that level.... On the lowest level, most current U.S. intelligence operations are pure "psy-ops" (psychological-warfare operations). On this level, the lower-ranking people, such as liberal news media journalists or entertainment media people, carry out the psy-ops, while the higher-ranking circles on this operational level plan and coordinate the psy-ops operations. ER-LL-29,30&31
The peril this nation is imminently confronted with, in fact the peril to the whole human species, is nothing less than complete elimination of what mankind has historically regarded as its soul. Our brainwashers are proposing the complete extirpation of mankind's inner sense of identity, and the placement, in the vacant space, of an artificial, synthetic pseudo-soul.
Before you howl "incredible!" you ought to review the technical study that was prepared in May 1974 by the Stanford Research Institute, whose contents were later used in popularized form in Marilyn Ferguson's book.
The study is entitled Changing Images of Man, Contract Number URH(489)-2150, Policy Research Report No.4/4.74, prepared by SRI Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, Director. Dr. Harmon later personally coached Marilyn Ferguson in writing her popularized version, The Aquarian Conspiracy. The 319-page mimeographed SRI report was prepared by a team of 14 researchers and supervised by a supervisory panel of 23 controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence and others.
The study begins with the argument that the fundamental self-conception of mankind, the "image" that mankind has of itself, determines the behavior of mankind. To change mankind's behavior from industrial progress to "spiritualism", one must first force a change in mankind's "self image".... The report asserts that in our present society, the "image of industrial and technological man" is obsolete and must be "discarded".... The image of man appropriate to that new era must be sought, synthesized and then wired into mankind's brains. The SRI report conducts a summary review of the "dominant images of humankind throughout history" from 250,000 B.C. to the present. It identifies 19 "images of man" that dominated in various epochs. From each one of those it extracts such features as are useful in replacing the "industrial-technological image". Totemism and identification with animals in the Upper Paleolithic era is reported useful today; the "farmer son of Goddess earth" of the neolithic era is useful; the Sumerian image of submission to ruling elites must be retained in the postindustrial image; the Old Testament image of man having "dominion over nature" is dangerous and must be dropped; the Zoroastrian image needs to "be worked on"; the Indian image of yogi is good, will contribute to the "self-realization ethic"; the Chinese Confucius image will contribute to the "ecological ethic" of our future society; the Greek dionysian/mystical image can contribute to deemphasize material overconsumption; the Greek apollonian image can help combat the "technological ethic"; the Christian image of the New Testament must be reworked; the Christian image of the Gnostic Gospels can contribute a new "self-realization ethic"; but, the image that emerged from the Italian Renaissance, the "economic man", individualist, rationalist, materialist, seeking objective knowledge, this is inappropriate and must be discarded. AC-CFL-11&12
Now, re-examine the same historical connection from the vantage-point of our earlier discussion of curvatures of physical space-time. Let us recognize thus, that the approximate simultaneity of the collapse of the Anglo-American and Muscovite economic systems shows the convergence of effects of the two systems sharing in common certain among the most flawed axiomatic assumptions implicit in each.
The history of European civilization, including the post-1492 Americas, is essentially, as Schiller portrays this, the struggle of republicanism (such as Solon's reforms in Athens) against the barbaric heritage of ancient Mesopotamia, usury-ridden oligarchism. British philosophical liberalism, the root of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mills, and Smith's "moral philosophy", and of eighteenth-century British (Haileybury) political-economy, is in all essential features, a utopian pantheistic ethical dogma, modeled chiefly upon pagan imperial Rome, but also upon the ancient, pantheistic Delphic cult of Gaia, Python-Dionysus, and Apollo. The principal forerunners of Delphic oligarchism in Ancient Greece, is the so-called "Babylonian" model of ancient Mesopotamia and Canaan.
To adduce the relevant common axioms implicit in the collapses of the British and communist political-economies, it is perhaps sufficient to compare British and communist dogmas of national and super-national economic practice with the following reference-points in ancient and Renaissance history. We begin with the succession of usury-caused collapses of the ancient Mesopotamian "bow-tenure" system of agriculture. We include reference to the circumstances of Solon's anti-usury reforms in Athens. We examine the crucial, related issues associated, successively, with the Flammarian and Gracchi reforms of pre-imperial Rome. We include the process of collapse inhering in the axiomatic features of the pagan imperial Rome of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, and Diocletian.
We examine the reasons for the upsurge of economic power generated by the Golden Renaissance, and view this with a reflection upon the great enterprises set into motion by Charlemagne earlier.
Two opposing features of these cases are emphasized: the role of usury, and the issue of increase of the per capita productive powers of labor, scientific and technological progress.
The forms in which usury's systematic taking of unearned income (i.e., "theft") occurs may be reduced to three general sub-classifications. First, there is simple usury : payment taken on account of debt, whether the original principal amount of that nominal debt may have been created in payment of money or real value advanced, or simply imposed upon the debtor either by fiat, or kindred means. Second, there is the role of monopolies (e.g., the international grain cartel), in exacting usuriously unearned income from both producers and consumers of some essential commodity. Third, there are the sundry guises of ground-rent usury. We include among these the evolution in the modern British model of central banking, and related forms of public indebtedness, from roots in ancient (e.g., Mesopotamian) tax-farming.
We counterpose earned profit of physically productive enterprise to the merely nominally "earned" profit and interest of usurious activities. We explain the necessity and functional basis for this distinction. SC-LL-37
The problem of scientific development in the setting of mathematical physics is a useful point of reference.
The most wretched fallacy which might be introduced into creative scientific work is the notion that platoons of scientists working according to predetermined specific objectives are the "most efficient" mode for progress. In fact, such procedures or bureaucratic measures to similar effect, are the most certain means for minimizing the gains of progress so undertaken.
The process of conceptualization by which new scientific achievements are generated is an individual activity. Not only must the thinker be afforded the opportunity to think without interruptions or other interference for protracted periods, but he must have means for "toying with" experimental approaches as certain features of his individualized creative activities demand. (Demand that he delay this until his duly-elaborated proposal has been approved, and the progress of fundamental scientific work virtually ends until such a silly bureaucratic control practice ceases.) To all immediate practical intents, the processes of creativity are contained within the person of the thinker and cannot be reduced to an externalizable "division of supervised labor" form without destroying their integrity.
This is not the complete picture. To the extent that self-consciousness is developed in creative personalities, there is a fruitful increase in the degree of communicability between the creative aspects of the mental processes of all involved. This is not a dissolution of several creative intellects into one larger mass, but represents a more frequent intersection - through which the partial progress of one collaborator stimulates new directions of mental activities among the others.
The particular creative discovery is, in every case, the private impassioned agony of the individual working in some degree of isolation. The activity of synthesis which every relatively negentropic Gestalt represents is uniquely coextensive with the individual's cognitive processes, which cannot be directly merged in their primary form with the similar processes of other individuals. "Interruption" and "distraction" are terms which traditionally express the destructive effects of intrusion into the necessary privacy of the creative process.
The creative individual's effort in any new undertaking begins with tugs at a few elusive clues of incommunicable prescience. The thinker seldom begins with any better assurance of a definite kind of success than the certainty that the effort will be fruitful if pursued long enough with sufficient intensity of concentration. Creative discovery is in this sense a process of exploration of unknown territory, for which a sense of direction, broad training and resourcefulness are the essential prerequisites. At the beginning, there can be no maps in existence of that which is to be explored, nor can one establish any meaningful schedules concerning one's intended arrival at definite new discoveries in particular.
During the ensuing process, the thinker's initial partial successes do not appear as definite solutions to a preestablished problem, but only as new ways of considering a problem, or the importance of a certain detour, or a new overview of the entire nature of the problem to be solved, or solutions to problems which had not been considered relevant to the original undertaking, and so on. In between each moment of articulable progress in this experience, the ongoing process assumes forms which are indispensable to accomplishment, but are not susceptible of direct social expression.
Although creative work is uniquely individual in those repects, it is the most social of all activities. The development of the mental processes in preparation for creative work is entirely social. Not only are the actions impinging upon the individual's development social, but the content of this influence reflects the internal geometry of society. In fact, it is to the extent that the individual apprehends his experience in just such terms that he is orienting the results of his experience for fruitful creative efforts. Similarly, the definition of problems requiring solution is determined by social criteria, as social criteria on the broadest scale of reference determine which hypotheses represent probable insight-solutions to these problems.
The distinctive outlook of the creative thinker is associated with the extent of its scope of reference in respect to the much greater breadth of its current relevance and its historical setting. The conceptions and principles of scientific work are the accumulated accomplishment of approximately six centuries of European progress since the early period of the Renaissance. They have been evolved under the impact of changes in technology as such and changes in the social relations through which technology is realized. The characteristic interchangeable terms of creative effort are "universal", "fundamental", and "revolutionary". RF-LL-85&86
With that said, let's turn our memories to March 23, 1989, when two of the world's leading authorities in electrochemistry, Professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, issued the shattering announcement that they had achieved nuclear fusion of hydrogen isotope deuterium in a room-temperature environment by means of an experimental apparatus which might fit upon a kitchen table-top. After a few stunned outcries of admiration and curiosity from some circles, the subject of cold fusion and the hundreds of cold fusion scientists, have been subjected over the past two-odd years to one of the nastiest political witch-hunts in recent history.
Today, nearly 30 months after the first cold fusion announcement, the findings of approximately 600 scientists working in various parts of the world, is that the essential original claims of Professors Fleischmann and Pons are validated. Whatever the cold fusion experiments lead us to discover in the end, it is clear now, that the cold fusion experiment is what science calls a crucial or unique quality of discovery. It is the kind of discovery which will force much of the physics textbooks to be rewritten sooner or later. EI-LL-59
The point so illustrated, is that the idea is not contained within the explicit communication. Rather, the communication is a more or less reliable guide, as a key to a locked compartment, to the secret of the message. The receiving mind does not "decode" the message. Rather, the receiving mind relives - "unlocks", in a sense - the sequence of mental actions prescribed as the explicit message (geometric construction is an example of this). It is the interior of the creative processes of mind, in response to the stimulus represented by the message, which regenerates more or less faithfully the concept which prompted the sender to compose the selected set of instructions which are aggregately the relevant working-content of the message itself.
To oversimplify, without doubt, the relevant features of the process of communication are aggregately devised, by the sender, to set up the receiver's state of mind in such-and-such a combination of ways. Thus, respecting the essential idea to be regenerated in the mind of the receiver, the message is not the medium. SC-LL-56
THOMPSON
In a planetary village of contemplatives, nature could be great, the machines tiny, and man in just proportion between the two. No longer need there be economies of scale in which massive amounts of fossil fuel are used to grow wheat in vast acreages so that huge trucks can burn gasoline to take flour into the enormous cities where great factories can make Ritz Crackers that can then be trucked again to the airports so that jumbo jets can fly them down to Venezuela where multinational forms of advertising can convince the peasants to abandon their locally made tortillas in favor of the creations of Nabisco. No longer would Madison Avenue heat up the economy so that shoddily built goods with built-in obsolescence could destroy nonrenewable resources and produce disastrous pollution. In industrial society, you are what you own. In contemplative cultures, your being is the source of your identity. Contemplatives need less, consume less, and therefore can produce less. No man need labor eight hours a day at the same dreary task of putting a door on a Cadillac. In industrial culture, poverty is a disgrace; in contemplative culture, poverty is the elegance of simplicity. As long as we continue to live in industrial culture, we will need an authoritarian government to control unemployment, create jobs, subsidize the auto industry, and strip-mine the Dakotas so that America can become one continental Los Angeles. If we have a spiritual transformation and create a meta-industrial culture, the drastic solutions of mass government will be unnecessary. EW-WT-99
When God created the world He divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. The human body is a recapitulation of this principle of order, for the body itself is the firmament which divides the waters of the brain from the waters of the genitals. Because of the sacred numinosity of the waters, all the fluids of the human body - saliva, sweat, semen, and blood - are sacred and mysterious substances. If Onians has dug up an ancient image of the body in which head and genitals intercommunicate through the spinal column, we do not have to wonder what such a system of meaning could have been like, for that ancient physiology still survives in Tantra yoga.
In Tantric practice the yogi silently intones a special mantram while he focuses his attention upon his "third eye". After several years of this practice, the yogi reaches a state in meditation where the vibration in his brain reverberates (note the literal meaning of this as a vibrating word) in his spinal column and begins to stimulate a sympathetic resonance at the base of his spine. The spinal column then begins to feel like a rod in which there are two strong magnetic poles at the extreme ends. As the vibration at the base of the spine responds to the vibration intoned with the mantram in the brain, the genitals become flooded with another feeling of vibration, the penis becomes erect, and the vibration within the brain becomes light, intensely energetic, and ecstatic. In Tantra, the Fall into the body is reversed and human consciousness is able to escape its entrapment in matter. In the religious traditions of Tantra, "loss of semen is loss of soul", and so the yogi is counseled to keep himself free of women so that the seminal flow may reverse itself to move up into the brain in the awakening of kundalini. In the ancient Jewish tradition, the seminal flow of men was also emphasized. In other stories of the midrashim, Adam, in penance for his fall, abstains from sexuality for 130 years, but he is not able to control his nocturnal emissions; in his dream state female spirits, the succubae, come and have intercourse with him, and with Adam's seed they give birth to demons. The succubus lying on top of the man in his sleep and stealing his semen away is, of course, another image of Lilith, the female being who refuses to stay in her "proper place".
The physiology of Tantra yoga focuses on the magical numinosity of the male semen, but the experience of the awakening of kundalini is not an exclusively male phenomenon. With women, however, it is the menstrual blood which is seen as the sacred carrier of power, and it is the womb which is its sacred vessel. The spinal polarity in women is not between the genitals and the brain, but between the heart and the womb. In the intense religious practices of yoginis or nuns, the menstrual period can stop altogether. When the energy (prana) associated with lunar menstruation is stopped, time stops and the woman is taken up into eternity. She gives birth to herself. By withdrawing into celibacy, the woman no longer generates karma (relatedness and relatives in time); instead she gives birth to the divine child. At this stage the nun may have visions of the baby Jesus nursing at her own breast. Now, whereas the experience of the awakening of kundalini in man floods the genitals and causes spontaneous erection in meditation, the equivalent experience in the woman causes an ecstatic rapture that can be described as "an orgasm in the heart", or "giving birth in the heart". The sudden opening of the heart, chakra, causes an ecstatic experience of illumination; the heart of the woman becomes at the heart of the universe. The Sufi image of this experience is the winged heart. It is for good reason that the sculptor Bernini pictured St. Teresa in ecstasy as a woman in orgasm with an angel opening her heart with an arrow.
In the etheric body of a yogini in meditation, the polarity is, therefore, not between the brain and the genitals, the second and sixth chakras, but between the inner sexuality of the womb and the heart. Some Marxist feminists who have never practiced yoga become exercised at what they imagine is a sexist doctrine that locates man's consciousness in his brain, but woman's consciousness in her heart. In fact, consciousness is not, as Whitehead would say, "simply located" in the brain; the consciousness is suffused throughout the subtle bodies, and after a yogi has opened certain centers in the brain, he is counseled to center his being in the heart, not the head. Thus the place where yogi and yogini alike end up on the path of Illumination is the heart, to experience "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle " (the love that moves the sun and other stars). TF-WT-18,19&20
It is absurd to give a lecture in five minutes, so I'm going to be even more absurd to try to give a mini-lecture on one end of history to the other in 4-1/2 minutes. The geologists who spoke before me have tried to give us a sense of where we are as a way of gaining a sense of where we are going, so I want to talk about history by talking about cultural change, about six great cultural transformations: the Hominization of the primates, Symbolization and the origins of notation and art in the Upper Paleolithic, Agriculturalization in 9000 B.C., Civilization in 3500 B.C., Industrialization in the eighteenth century A.D., and the cultural transformation we are in now, Planetization.
The first one, the Hominization of the primates, should be called the feminization of the primates, because it all started when we got kicked out of the forest in the Pliocene, and we became so scared, being out in the open, subject to predation, that the females unconsciously lured the males around them by abandoning the old estrus system and becoming open to sexuality at all times. So the males left palling around with their buddies in the old male pair-bonding pattern and clustered around the females. Next thing you know, there is a whole new set up, with the males scrounging and the females gathering: that created the basic division of labor between male and female.
So, the origins of human culture come from women, and so, Thank You, since I'm a cultural historian that's important to me. The women did it again in the next big change, Symbolization. When language began to emerge it really split consciousness by creating the unconscious and the conscious. Like an island rising out of the sea, language was a piece of the old ocean floor held up to new light, and the symbol, like a piece of coral or a rock, could help to relate the one to the other. One seemingly small thing which helped relate the one to the other was menstruation, for it established the first observable periodicities between the phases of the moon and the internal life of the womb, with ovulation at the full and menstruation at the dark of the moon. In observing this synchronicity between their bodies and nature, and in keeping track of the ten lunar months of pregnancy on the lunar tally sticks of the midwife, woman was the first to establish the system of notation and symbolism upon which all later calendrical systems are based. So, the roots of science, contra Marshack, are with women; it's the story of the Great Mother holding up the lunar calendar incised on the crescent of the bison's horn (the well-known Venus of Laussel), and not the story of the Great Father with his phallic wand.
The third basic change came again from women when, through gathering wild cereals, they discovered that they could collect enough food in three weeks to last an entire year. Women and children could collect more food than man the hunter could ever kill. But the food required storage and heavy grinding bins, and so they began to settle down to create agriculture and the neolithic village. Unfortunately, agriculture gave us enough of a surplus that men had some time on their hands. Since they now had "property" which could be taken away, the men found that trading and raiding could be as exciting as the old days of the hunt, and so warfare came into being.
After the domestication of plants and animals in Agriculturalization came the next big change, the domestication of women, or Civilization. Warfare enabled the old custom-bound, religious, matrilineal society of the neolithic village to grow into the great city with its patriarchal structure, its great male gods, its religiously controlled economic surplus, and its standing armies. Small wonder that the Sumerian goddess, Inanna, comes to the great male god, Enki, and says: "I, the woman, why did you treat differently; where are my prerogatives?" Enki responds by saying, "Enki perfected greatly that which was woman's task." A woman as a cook is a mere housewife, but a man is a chef. Woman may have invented the lunar tally stick, but man takes it over to create writing, the measurement of wealth in the temple storehouse.
From 3500 B.C. to the eighteenth century A.D., all the civilizations of the world are agrarian, but then in Great Britain another big change comes along and we get the next transformation, Industrialization. Industrialization is really an intensification of Civilization, and so through science and technology the culture becomes even more patriarchal and militaristic than its Sumerian ancestor. In Hominization, the old forest home had been absorbed into the clump of trees, the new home base for the hominids. In Symbolization the animals were absorbed into artistic images on stones and cave walls.
In Agriculturalization the plants were absorbed, and in Civilization women were absorbed. In each case of cultural absorption there was an attendant process of miniaturization: first the forest had been miniaturized in the clump of trees of the home-base, then the animals had been miniaturized into an artistic image and time was miniaturized in a lunar tally stick; then plants were miniaturized in a garden, and finally women and neolithic matrilineal culture were miniaturized in the patriarchal household. In the eighteenth century all nature was surrounded and miniaturized by culture. The wrought iron and glass structure of the Great Exhibition of 1851 surrounded the trees and fountains of Hyde Park and proclaimed for all the world to see that in the Crystal Palace of industrial technology, wild nature had been turned into a potted plant. (Small wonder that most Victorian drawing rooms became civilized jungles of potted ferns.) We historians now see all this, of course, with 20-20 hindsight. Then people thought they were returning to nature in romanticism, and the Great Exhibition featured such camouflage of industrialization as Sherwood Forest Robin Hood Chairs, Gothic sewing scissors, and rose-decorated sewing machines. Through the Medieval Court in the Crystal Palace, everyone grooved on nostalgia, with cute little vines engraved on the legs of the machines. You can see it all in the world's first Whole Earth Catalog, the catalog for the Great Exhibition itself.
What was true of Industrialization is true of Planetization. A nostalgic and false consciousness tried to camouflage the structure with a romantic content. All the artifacts and cultures of the world were miniaturized in Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and although people grooved on wood stoves and fantasies of self-sufficiency, the catalog itself was absorbing everything into its giant collage. All culture was now being absorbed and miniaturized as the preparation for stuffing it into one of Stewart's beloved space colonies. Just as the Victorians had once grooved on rose-decorated sewing machines, so people now grooved on wood stoves, windmills, and solar collectors, but the folksy nostalgia merely camouflaged the technological collectivization. When the CoEvolution Quarterly later openly came out in favor of Herman Kahn and O'Neill's space colonies, it showed the true skull and bones under the costume: all nature was to be turned into a potted plant in a tin can, and all culture was to be trashed into a television-sensibility collage.
But the Whole Earth Catalog and the CoEvolution Quarterly do not express the full dimensions of Planetization. In what Sri Aurobindo would call "the descent of the supra-mental", there is a new level of human consciousness which is now surrounding, absorbing, and miniaturizing the old civilized and technological consciousness. As the Supramental surrounds the old mental level, the mind becomes an artifact, and intellection becomes a mind-dance. Ratio becomes logos once again and the central icon of the econometric state, the dollar sign $ falls on its side and the bars that cross it melt and turn it into a sign for infinity. CQ-WT-106&107
Politics unbound from the nation-state is the world that's after us, taking hold of our poetic imaginations in this century, but making claim to our political allegiances in the next. No escape except annihilation can protect us from this ancient Greek necessity, for all our efforts to avoid changing only seem to have thrust changes upon us.
It will not be in the rational forms of the Enlightenment that world political leaders will come together in some Planetary Constitutional Convention, for such conscious, volitional activity would require a relaxed openness to the future, and in the late 1970s humanity everywhere willed to reject transformation and reassert a new and more hysterical form of the fundamentalism of the past, from the Islamic fundamentalism of the Shiites to the industrial fundamentalism of the Reaganites. And so humanity has precipitated its collective unconscious into the world as the part of itself it sees as "other" and calls the environment. Of necessity, then, it will be in the form of a globally damaged ecology that the new world body politic will experience itself: not as the legalistic creation of patriarchal states, but as the unconscious manifestation of the planet; not the reactionary involutions of Ouranos that seek to abort all change, but the creative evolution of Gaia that emasculates old gods with new and subtle technologies. (In an earlier version of this book, published as a pamphlet by the Findhorn Foundation in 1982, I did rather naively imagine that some sort of Planetary Constitutional Convention was a possibility for the future. That pamphlet version was based upon lectures I gave at Findhorn in December of 1979, and so I focused on such current events as Jerry Brown's campaign for the American presidency and Zbigniew Brzezinski's leadership of the Trilateral Commission. In entirely rewriting From Nation to Emanation and doubling the length of the manuscript, I have changed my mind as I have watched the rise of Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms. I can see now that a Planetary Constitutional Convention is too ethnocentric a projection, too derivative from Western Enlightenment values. I have tried to darken my excessively bright New Age projections to bring the perspective more in line with the world of Khomeini's Iran, Thatcher's Great Britain, and Reagan's United States of America. I have also taken out some esoteric material that, in pamphlet form, was intended only for the specific context of the Findhorn Foundation's interest in the Western esoteric tradition.) PS-WT-1,2&32
Everybody looks at the King's Road in London and they see these punks, these people that are irresponsible, vulgar, living on the dole, parasites on the industrial system. Everybody looks at Concords and nuclear power and says this is a positive investment in developing the national or the European economy. Look at all the money that's put into products like Concords and nuclear power. If you really believe in nuclear power, hock your spouse and your mortgage and your house and take everything you've got and buy shares in Wilco. You'll have it coming to you in what you'll get from that kind of capitalism. But now look at what these funny teenagers have done: They have created a music industry, a magazine industry, a fashion industry, and a music video industry. Add up all the informational transactions from that planetary culture of information and divide it by the dole and you'll see an incredible return on investment. But we don't look at these kids as the J.P. Morgans and captains of industry of the modern world. We look at them as parasites, aliens, predators, and the rest of it. That's because we can't see punk as the working class transformed into an art form. These kids are smarter than Maggie Thatcher. They know no one needs them. They're not needed as slaves in the old system. They're not needed as serfs in the medieval system and they're not needed as proletariat in the industrial system. Nobody needs them. What have they done? They've created a role for themselves in the planetary culture by doing for industrialism what the circus did for pre-industrialism. IB-WT-29
If one takes all of the five future transforms together, they form a pattern, a slight aikido move that is necessary to transform the militarism of Reagan into a new populist liberalism for a transformed Democratic Party in the nineties. If the Democratic Party remains the party of the industrial past, of labor unions and ethnic blocs, it will, like Mondale, become a fossil. And if the Democratic Party tries to become identical to Reagan's party and to woo the same constituency, it will only prove itself to be shallow, thought-less, opportunistic, and completely lacking in credibility as well as power. If, on the other hand, a new American ecological party were to try to make it on its own, such a movement on the Left would generate its mirror-opposite on the far Right, and Lyndon LaRouche's thermonuclear fusionists would probably match the Greens vote for vote, with each party taking about 15 percent of the electorate. It would be far better for the Democratic Party to take the best of the ecological party and the best of American Big Science, to move the new ethnic majority in defeat of the white suburban affluent constituency that supports Reagan. Paradoxically, it is this new Latin and Asian America that is more truly expressive of the California culture that first put Reagan into power.
I doubt if the Democratic Party will adopt Gaian politics in 1988; most likely it will try to copy the Republicans with someone like Iacocca, and our politics will be the typical American cultural situation of Avis and Hertz, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Burger King. But history is full of surprises like Chernobyl, so I would imagine that by 1992 this awful generation of the fifties, these hideous reruns of the anti-intellectual McCarthy era, will have spent themselves. Just as the sixties introduced a quantum leap in consciousness for the whole human race, so will the nineties take us up one more step. It won't take a national charismatic leader to effect such a cultural shift, for by the nineties the generation of the sixties will be spread throughout the establishment as corporate presidents, as politicians, as popular musicians and video artists, as university leaders. As they look around and see themselves in position, they will remember, and those camp-followers who now celebrate their neoconservative orthodoxy will change spots and drag out their old sixties credentials and begin to boast about how many demonstrations, love-ins, and rock festivals they took part in. Once again, it will be fashionable to be idealistic, and patriotic, not simply for Springsteen's U.S.A., but the entire planet. Such is the fantasy of one who came of age in the sixties, and such is my fantasy of a new Gaian form of politics for the nineties. GP-WT-15
So the loss of American hegemony is one thing, but there's another quality coming on at the same time. It does like it's sort of a return of the Middle Ages in the sense that nationalism is not as important as it used to be, but class, in a Marxist sense, has not gone away. In many ways, one's access to education, whether one goes to Harvard or not, seems to be now a function of family. And the society is beginning to take on very medieval characteristics. There is a ruling class at the top that communicates through oral means, face-to-face. Then there's a scientific/technical class which would be like the "informational knights"; these are the equivalents of the lords and the knights of the Middle Ages, and they communicate through electronic, scientific, and technical means. And then there's a kind of artisanal class, and at the bottom there's an underclass. So it's almost like a return of the Vedic four-fold caste system: mouth, eye, hand, and rump. The oral class has the right accent, and has wealth; the class of the eye reads and studies, and has science and art; the class of the hand works; and the bottom is on its ass. So things are becoming extremely hierarchical as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the smaller ruling class just rules the masses through pageantry and illusion. So television is the means of disseminating and creating this electronic state of entertainment, but the people who are outside are, by definition, not part of the "electro-peasantry". Television really is the means that defines whether you are a knight of information or an electro-peasant. CC-WT-31
The recognition of this civilizational unconscious, this hidden cultural reality, is the end of a process that began intellectually in the early 20th century. Freud began with the instinctive unconscious. Jung followed him and reflected the instinctive life into consciousness as it was created in the collective unconscious and reflected in patterns of imagery that would occur in science or poetry or dreams or the rest of it. It wasn't instinct. It was instinct reflected in imagery creating consciousness. The third wave came in Paris with people like Levi Strauss and Foucault who studied the intellectual unconscious. Foucault looked at the epoch from the 17th century to now, and said there is a hidden framework that unites economics, linguistic theory, art and philosophy, yet no one in the 17th century was really aware of these hidden correspondences. So Foucault, in a sense, discovered the intellectual unconscious. Levi Strauss went off to the Amazon, and showed how if you look at all of the mythologies of South America, there are these hidden patterns and hidden structures that the people telling the stories don't see. It's only the ethnographer writing the mythologie who can show you the intellectual unconscious.
Now in the later 60's, following the work of the French thinkers, Gregory Bateson using cybernetics showed that there is actually a civilizational unconscious, that mind is not separate from nature, that mind is in nature, and that in many ways the ecology is the unconscious of the societal system. So what we have in pollution, for example, is a real expression of the being of humanity in this moment of time. What we have in our conscious structures - our institutions - are the Disneyland movie sets. IB-WT-28&29
When one moves from the academies of philosophy into mind jazz, one can never tell who is going to play in a way that makes a jam session possible. Some people's books are great, but the people themselves are so autistic that they cannot listen to anyone else to shift their own tunes in response or in exploration of new implications of their old patterns of thinking. They have been so isolated in life by their own gifts, and never having found colleagues, they become shaped by adversity into cosmic soloists; but because their gifts are respected, they are not tagged as insane and are accepted as gurus. Both Bucky Fuller and Marshall McLuhan suffered from this kind of cosmic autism and ended up, through multiple recitals of their ideas, becoming holographic tape recordings of themselves. Messiahs to the electronic media, they became its sacrificial victims and showed how the United States dulls bright minds with spotlights. People like Ralph Abraham, Jim Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco Varela seemed much more open to a kind of intellectual chamber music in which we all learned and changed from playing with one another.
So as the New Age movement began to define the new as paleolithic shamanism, neolithic feminism, pharoahonic architecture, and medieval Islamic geometry, I moved away to stand next to the instrumentalists who were playing new tunes, or new and interesting variations of old ones. It didn't happen all at once, and for a while I was stuck between two stations and was picking up a lot of noise. I was no longer tuned to the MIT of the 1960s, and I was no longer tuned to the holymen and gurus of the 1970s, but I had not yet met the scientists with whom I would work in the 1980s. IS-WT-xv&xvi
We are, again, at one of those exciting times when the creative imagination of an entire civilization is undergoing a transformation of its basic mentality in the shift from one geometry to another. It appears to me that there have been three of these mentalities in Western civilization and that we have now entered the fourth. The first mentality was the arithmetic, the line of counting goods in space and generations in time. This is the mentality of Hesiod's Theogony and of Genesis. The second mentality is the geometric and it expresses the intellectual revolution wrought by Pythagoras and Plato. For these ancients, motion was imperfect and sinful, and only the unmoving geometry of the perfect spheres in the ideal realm was a true expression of the Good. The third mentality was the dynamic mentality of modernism, the mentality of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, in which motion and falling bodies became the focus of attention. Now we are moving out of this modernist science with its narratives of linear equations into a postmodernist science of which Chaos Dynamics is one important visual expression. From my external point of view in the humanities, the behavior of these aperiodic phenomena is neither chaotic nor dynamic, and I argued with Ralph Abraham in Los Angeles that these patterns would have been more appropriately called "processual morphologies", and this is the term that I used in Pacific Shift. Because I had cut my philosophical teeth in high school on the process cosmology of A. N. Whitehead, I felt that these patterns were only chaotic to a mind restricted to the linear reductionism of scientific materialism, but Chaos Dynamics is the term the scientists have chosen, so the decision has been made and this infant science has been named. Like the Foucault pendulum following its basin and attractor, we do seem to swing from extremes - from technological materialism to New Age psychism, or from a modernist obsession with systems of control to a postmodernist fascination with chaos. IS-WT-xviii&xix
In Culture the ego was diffuse; in Society the ego became articulated and defined in the mystery school of death; in Civilization the ego became discrete, a literately defined center with a sharply defined periphery; in Industrialization the ego became a turbulent flow, a chaotic attractor with the power of a Cosimo di Medici, a Descartes, a Beethoven, and a Napoleon to break through boundaries and definitions to amass the glory, and power, and wealth that it felt was its proper destiny; now in Planetization the ego is no longer diffuse, certainly no longer articulate, unable any longer to be discrete in the privacy of its civilized study, and no longer able to expect the biosphere to sustain the amassing of its glory and wealth. The diachronic flow of the ego has come to its end, and now the synchronic dimensions of the spiritual Daimon is beginning to infold itself into temporal consciousness. Multidimensionality begins to be experienced as the personal field of consciousness, the interrelatedness of all sentient beings in "the innumerable universes that are suspended from the tip of Buddha's hair". Lacking the appropriate and futuristic image to "imagine" this, so very much like a cultural historian, I fall back upon the past and envision the Sephiroth, the Tree of Life from the Judaic Kabbalah, but I see this flat rendering on a two-dimensional page transformed into a multidimensional crystal in which the lattice is a recursive one in which the "ego" is the foundation, but all the other nodes are also part of the architecture of an individual, but enlightened consciousness.
Between the angelic heights of the macrocosm of the Gaian atmosphere and the elemental depths of the microcosm of the bacterial earth lies the middle way of the Mind, and it is in this imaginary landscape of the middle way, whether we call it the Madhyamika of Buddhism or the Christ of Steiner or the Da at of the Kabbalah, that we humans take our life and come to know our world as the dark horizon that illuminates our hidden center. IS-WT-168&169
The rise of paranoia, from right-wing fulminations against the world conspiracy of the Trilateral Commission to Lyndon LaRouche's hatred of the British Secret Service, is an important signal that the literate, rational citizen of the post-Enlightenment era is being replaced by the subject in a shift from identity through logical definition to identity through participation and performance. In one form of consciousness, identity is seen through similar logical predicates; but in paranoia, identity is seen metaphorically as the participation mystique of common subjects. Looking at the erosion of good pietist values from electronic evangelical broadcasting, and looking at rock festivals, we can see that democracy is in for some hard times. PS-WT-134&135
History is rarely a happy place, so there is always the danger that the end of the Cold War could bring a racial convergence in which a new European civilization proposed to the Russians by Gore Vidal, one that stretches westward from Vladivostok to Vancouver, will try to stand off "the yellow peril" of a rich Japan and a prodigious China. If the cultural bifurcation of the world continues along these lines, then zones of cultural entropy in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, will so terrify entities such as Israel and South Africa that they will never surrender to forces of liberal tolerance but will become entrenched, technological fortresses in which the Great White Race makes its last stand.
But persuaded by my years of living in Toronto and partaking of the insights of the Torontonian school of Innis and McLuhan, I do not think that the formations of nineteenth-century empires can now reassert themselves, for they were built on print, bureaucracies, and the center-periphery dynamics of railways and shipping lines. In a global ecology of mind that is polycentric and electronic, I think that the nativistic movements of premodernist Islam and modernist Europe are both bound to fail, just as the Ghost Dance and Louis Riel's rising of the Metis failed in North America. Precisely in order to avoid a world organized along lines of racial hatred, my allegiances are to such universal forms of human association as are expressed in Varela's Western science and Eastern Buddhism. IS-WT-164
The world of electronics is Top and Pop culture; it is an energizing of opposites: the elitist science of Stanford, Cal Tech, and the Silicon Valley, and the media and musical reproductions of Hollywood. GK-WT-195
What is making the process move more rapidly is not just global television, but global mysticism. Individuals less centered in their egos are discovering the patterns of convergence and synchronicity in their lives and the life of the new culture. It almost seems as if the consciousness of a racial, planetary Being were surrounding civilization, compressing it, and turning it into a miniaturized artifact of the past. The artist caught inside civilization feels the pressure and is demoralized because he is holding on tight to his civilizational identity; witness the mythologizing of the ego in the work of Norman Mailer. It is the work of the artist to reinterpret the world, but since the civilized artist cannot understand this new world, he has chosen to perish with the old.
With the death of the art of civilization, the art of planetization is born. Once the romantic artist, like Yeats, made the emerging nation, like Ireland, conscious of its national identity; now the planetary artists are trying to make the races conscious of their emerging planetary identity. The old artist sculpted with stone, painted on canvas, or told stories about a day in the life, but whether it is conceptual art, nonfiction, or the music of Stockhausen, the new medium is information itself. The place where information is densest is the university; and that is why many of the new artists have come out of that setting, not as artists in residence or professors of creative writing, for those are civilized roles, but as jugglers of information. Where the expert is enthroned, there the fool is forced to say "uncle", but masks his subversion by crying "nuncle".
To understand contemporary culture, you have to be willing to move beyond intellectual definitions and academic disciplines. You have to be willing to throw your net out widely and be willing to take in science, politics, and art, and science fiction, the occult, and pornography. To catch a sense of the whole in pattern recognition, you have to leap across the synapse and follow the rapid movement of informational bits. You treat in a paragraph what you know could take up a whole academic monograph, but jugglers are too restless for that: the object of the game is to grasp the object quickly, and then give it up in a flash to the brighter air. EW-WT-77&78
We slay with technology and save the victim with art. IS-WT-146
KROKER
The Postmodern Scene evokes, and then secretes, the fin-de-millenium mood of contemporary culture. It is a panic book: panic sex, panic art, panic ideology, panic bodies, panic noise, and panic theory.
Indeed, the text itself should be read as immanently postmodern. Thus, for example, while Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in response to the outbreak of the fascist mind, The Postmodern Scene is written in response to the outbreak again of the dialectic of enlightenment. In an age where computers reify the meaning of memory and panic sex is the language of the postmodern body, then it may still be salutary to meditate anew on historical remembrance as the basis of politics. The Postmodern Scene, while thriving in the detrital scenes of cultural amnesia, is also a market of remembrance. Decay/ecstasy, hyper-pessimism/hyper-optimism, memory/amnesia: these are the double signs under which this text has been written. If this sounds paradoxical, ambivalent and contradictory, this just means that like the quantum age which it seeks to describe, The Postmodern Scene is a quantum, that is to say postmodern, sign of its times.
For who can now speak with confidence of the future of a postmodern scene when what is truly fascinating is the thrill of catastrophe, and where what drives onward economy, politics, culture, sex, and even eating is not the will to accumulation or the search for lost coherencies, but just the opposite - the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into excess, waste, and disaccumulation. When technology of the quantum order produces human beings who are part-metal and part-flesh; when robo-beings constitute the growing majority of a western culture which fulfills, then exceeds, Weber's grim prophecy of the coming age of "specialists without spirit"; and when chip technology finally makes possible the fateful fusion of molecular biology and technique: then ours is genuinely a postmodern condition marked by the deepest and most pathological symptoms of nihilism. Not just science as the will to power, but also medicine as an empty will to knowledge (of the lascerated body), penology as a grisly will to surveillance of the body politic, and ethics itself as enucleated within the dynamic language of instrumental activism. The Postmodern Scene is, therefore, a catastrophe theory for a hyper-modern culture and society which is imploding into the seductive simulacra of its own dark, and negative, sign.
Consequently, a deep (panic) thematic runs through the text. It explores the passive and suicidal nihilism of contemporary culture from the shifting perspectives of popular culture (Sunshine Reports), classicism (Sign Crimes), poststructuralist philosophy (Sliding Signifiers), and art (Ultramodernism). Whether viewing the postmodern scene from the perspective of its first theorist (Augustine), its philosophical precursors (Nietzsche and Bataille), its artists (Fischl, Chirico, Magritte, and Woodman), or its key social theorists (Baudrillard, Serres, Foucault), it is the same thing, just speeded up a bit. Thus, if the writing moves at hyper-speed to the point of trying to achieve escape velocity from the language of positivist sociology and conventional ideological discourse, that is because The Postmodern Scene also seeks to evoke a certain literary mood - panic reading - as a way of participating directly in the ruins within and without of late twentieth-century experience.
Refusing (with Nietzsche) the pragmatic compromise which only seeks to preserve, The Postmodern Scene can recommend so enthusiastically panic reading because it seeks to relieve the gathering darkness by a new, and more local, cultural strategy. That is, to theorise with such hyper-intensity that the simulacrum is forced finally to implode into the dark density of its own detritus, and to write so faithfully under the schizoid signs of Nietzsche and Bataille that burnout, discharge, and waste as the characteristic qualities of the postmodern condition are compelled to reveal their lingering traces on the after-images of (our) bodies, politics, sexuality, and economy. Hyper-theory, therefore, for the end of the world. PM-AKDC-i&ii
What is postmodernism? It is what is playing at your local theatre, TV studio, office tower, doctor's office, or sex outlet. Not the beginning of anything new or the end of anything old, but the catastrophic, because fun, implosion of contemporary culture into a whole series of panic scenes at the fin-de-millenium. And so, some panic theses as a seismograph of the postmodern mood.
Panic Politics. It's fun time under the big top when the portable politicians of the postmodern parade come to the parodic dome. The clones are out, wired to the computer consoles; electronic waves piercing the body politic agitating the crowd to glee with each melodramatic surge. Hurray! Hurray! To that age of reversals, an age as Nietzsche describes it that "wants publicity and that great actors' hubbub, that great drum banging that appeals to its funfare tastes". It's time to get on the merry-go-round as quantum politics begins its spin under the barrage of particle beams from the repeating cannons of the cathode rays.
Postmodern politics begins with Mark Gertler's Merry-go-round (1916). The soldiers, sailors and business men mount up on the automated carrousel of hysteria. Each cloned in magical threes, mirrored imaged, breasts protruding, backs curved in the ellipsoid arc ready for the high speed chase. The horses are genetically pure, beyond mutation, beyond the cancerous errors of nature poised for the visciousness of the war to come - a ready automated machine. Yet what is this, the protruding buttocks, rounded open and fleshly white? The solar anus open to the culture of fun/fear ready to receive consummation as the carrousel picks up speed.
Politics becomes the flashing anus of promises of the better world constantly present as the carrousel becomes the succession of white strobe-like flashes and as the waste system runs into the now of party time. The cries of the paraders poised on the edge of aggression and terror, unable to dismount, caught in the imploding vortex of the fashion swirl. Tunics pressed, hats in place, mouths open ready for the distortion of the cyclorama.
It is just this world of Gertler run now at hyper-speed which, through the distorted images of the carrousel, creates the holograms that characterize the political. The path of Presidents, or Prime Ministers, trace/race after images across the nation. Cameras with open shutters hopeful that the celluloid will inscribe the sunny soul of the nation from the black hole of paranoid politics. Just as the video camera in the President's office oversees Red Square equally well as surveying the latest troop movements. Instant on, instant politics, instant off.
Panic Money. Advanced capitalist economies now face the severest liquidity crisis ever as the economy itself begins to liquidate. Capital begins to disappear. Nowhere is this crisis more apparent than in the shattering of its chief icon - money. The money illusion has become real as the economy reverses itself. No longer does one find relevance in the wrangle over monetary policy, supply side economics, Laffer curves, revealed preferences or unrevealed preferences, but rather in the self-liquidation of value itself. Money is caught in the grand cancellation of the sign of political economy. It finds itself homeless and constantly put to flight. It is abandoning the "worthless" world of contemporary capitalism.
Money was saved from ruination by Marx who realized the shift from pre-modern production turned, finally, on breathing life (once again) into money as universal exchange-value. Hence money was given an extended life in its role as the externalization of the nineteenth-century self. Money could do things the body couldn't as it travelled about the social in high style hidden from view by the fetishism of commodities. But the bodies in the twentieth-century have been invaded, and blown apart. The fetishes have grown up. Consumption has regained the primitive ritual of symbolic exchange in its abolition of the modern.
Facing the onslaught of the cancellation of the referent, money finds itself circulating faster, and more violently, to maintain itself as the universal clinamen. But in the age of superconductors the chilling effect is immense as everything approaches the end of Einstein's world at the speed of light. In this world the parasitism of money begins to slow the process. This pushes money into even longer hours with the advent of twenty-four hour exchange. Yet, the "red-shift" in the velocity of circulation only hastens the disappearance of money from the planet prefigured in the vast sums for star wars.
Already money has given place to its opposite, credit, in the creation ex nihilo which marks all contemporary advances from insider trading to take-over bids. Just how far the game is up becomes evident in the repudiation of the debts of the large corporations, or of the working class. Everything is owned, possessed by the other so that the economy can only run "on empty". Money becomes the spent fuel of an over-heated reactor. Nobody knows what to do with it, yet all know it must be expended.
Money as value only appears at the vanishing-point of its afterimage. It is no longer one's filthy lucre, only that of the sanitized electronic display of the computer monitor. For money always moves on in its role as the chief vagrant of the collapsing capitalist economy.
Panic Noise. If the Newtonian law of gravity could postulate a real body whose objectivity is established by its mass, the (quantum) law of postmodernity eclipses this body by flipping suddenly from mass to energy. We now live in a hyper-modern world where panic noise (the electronic soundtrack of TV, rock music in the age of advanced capitalism, white sound in all the "futureshops") appears a kind of affective hologram providing a veneer of coherency for the reality of an imploding culture.
When mass disappears into energy, then the body too becomes the focus and secretion of all of the vibrations of the culture of panic noise. Indeed, the postmodern body is, at first, a hum, then a "good vibration", and, finally, the afterimage of the hologram of panic noise. Invaded, lascerated, and punctured by vibrations (the quantum physics of noise), the body simultaneously implodes into its own senses, and then explodes as its central nervous system is splayed across the sensorium of the technoscape. No longer a material entity, the postmodern body becomes an infinitely permeable and spatialized field whose boundaries are freely pierced by subatomic particles in the microphysics of power. Once the veil of materiality/subjectivity has been transgressed (and abandoned), then the body as something real vanishes into the spectre of hyperrealism. Now, it is the postmodern body as space, linked together by force fields and capable of being represented finally only as a fractal entity. The postmodern self, then, as a fractal subject - a minute temporal ordering midst the chaotic entropy of a contemporary culture which is winding down, but moving all the while at greater and greater speeds.
Similarly, the social as mass vanishes now into the fictive world of the media of hypercommunication. Caught only by all the violent signs of mobility and permeability, the social is already only the after-glow of the disappearance of the famous reality-principle. This world may have lost its message and all the grand recits - power, money, sex, the unconscious - may also be abandoned, except as recycled signs in the frenzied world of the social catalysts, but what is finally fascinating is only the social as burnout. The world of Hobbes has come full circle when the (postmodern) self is endlessly reproduced as a vibrating set of particles, and when the social is seductive only on its negative side: the dark side of sumptuary excess and decline.
Thus, power from the bounded, reserved and inert flips now into its opposite sign: the domain of the unbounded, spent and violent. And what better examplar of the unreal world of the social in this condition than music. Music/vibration as servo-mechanism enters directly into the postmodern body and passes through it without a trace, leaving only an altered energy state. Everywhere music creates the mood, the energy level, of the postmodern scene. Never seen but equally never shut out, music as panic vibrations secretes through the body of the social. Always ready to enter, it is also always ready to circulate. Being itself possessed, it does money one better by creating social relations which require no possessions. It may be "born in the U.S.A.", but it has become universal. Always in time, it (finally) prepares for the abandonment of history. Music, then, with no past, no future, no (determinate) meaning, but perfectly defining, perfectly energizing, perfectly postmodern. The liberal burnout of contemporary culture as taking the spectral forms, therefore, of fractal subjects, fun vibrations, and panic noise.
Panic Waiting. Alex Colville's painting, Woman in Bathtub, is a powerful evocation of the postmodern mood. Here, everything is a matter of cancelled identities (the background figure has no head, the woman's gaze is averted), silence (broken only by the ocular sounds of surveillance), and waiting with no expectation of relief. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche spoke eloquently and prophetically of a new dark age which would be typified by passive nihilists, driven by despair over their own botched and bungled instincts towards predatory styles of behavior, and by suicidal nihilists, who would always prefer to will nothingness rather than not will at all.
Following Nietzsche, Woman in Bathtub is a haunting image both of the postmodern self as a catastrophe site and of the meaning of paradox as the deepest language of postmodernism. In this artistic production, an aesthetics of seduction (the muted colours of cool art) counterpoints the presence of inner decay; and the promise of human companionship as reciprocity is immediately cancelled by the reality of communication as radical isolation.
Panic Questions. To the question posed by one American reader: "Is The Postmodern Scene sadistic?", we respond that sado-masochism, in the postmodern condition, is not what it used to be. The Postmodern Scene works also to show that sado-masochism is now a little sign-slide between the ecstasy of catastrophe and the terror of the simulacrum as a (disappearing) sign of the times. Anyway, what is sadism in the age of the hyperreal but the sense of living today on the edge between violence and seduction, between ecstasy and decay? And why not? The postmodern mood can alternate so quickly between hermeticism and schizophrenia, between the celebration of artifice and nostalgic appeals for the recovery of nature, because the self is now like what the quantum physicists call a "world strip", across which run indifferent rivulets of experience. Neither fully mediated nor entirely localized, the self is an empty sign: colonized from within by technologies for the body immune; seduced from without by all of the fashion tattoos; and energized by a novel psychological condition - the schizoid state of postmodern selves who are (simultaneously) predators and parasites.
And to question: Must The Postmodern Scene be so pessimistic? We would respond that hyper-pessimism today is the only realistic basis for a raging will to political action. This in a double sense. First, cultural pessimism is the only sharpening of the will which permits us to break forever with all of the liberal compromises which seek only to save the appearances at the dying days of modernism: the desperate search now for the recuperation of the subject (in the age of the disappearing self); the valorization anew of value itself (at a time when value is the deepest language of the technological will to the mastery of social and non-social nature); the turning back to the critique of the commodity-form (in the age of panic money); and the triumphant return of the new historicism (when history has already imploded into the Baudrillardian scene of a smooth and transparent surface of hypercommunication). And second, pessimism is a deliberate intellectual strategy for breaking beyond the cyberspace of telemetried bodies and culture. We seek to create a theoretical manoeuvre in which hypermodernism implodes into the detritus of its own panic scenes. Why? It is our conviction that the catastrophe has already happened, and that we are living in a waiting period, a dead space, which will be marked by increasing and random outbursts of political violence, schizoid behaviors, and the implosion of all the signs of communication as western culture runs down towards the brilliant illumination of a final burnout. PM-AKDC-ii>vii
To dismiss McLuhan as a technological determinist is to miss entirely the point of his intellectual contribution. McLuhan's value as a theorist of culture and technology began just when he went over the hill to the side of the alien and surrealistic world of mass communications: the "real world" of technology where the nervous system is exteriorised and everyone is videoated daily like sitting screens for television. Just because McLuhan sought to see the real world of technology, and even to celebrate technological reason as freedom, he could provide such superb, first-hand accounts of the new society of electronic technologies. McLuhan was fated to be trapped in the deterministic world of technology, indeed to become one of the intellectual servomechanisms of the machine-world, because his Catholicism failed to provide him with an adequate cultural theory by which to escape the hegemony of the abstract media systems that he had sought to explore. Paradoxically, however, it was just when McLuhan became most cynical and most deterministic, when he became fully aware of the nightmarish quality of the "medium as massage", that his thought becomes most important as an entirely creative account of the great paradigm-shift now going on in twentieth-century experience. McLuhan was then, in the end, trapped in the "figure" of his own making. His discourse could provide a brilliant understanding of the inner functioning of the technological media; but no illumination concerning how "creative freedom" might be won through in the "age of anxiety, and dread". In a fully tragic sense, McLuhan's final legacy was this: he was the playful perpetrator, and then victim, of a sign-crime. TC-AK-85&86
Nietzsche is, then, the limit and possibility of the postmodern condition. He is the limit of postmodernism because, as a thinker who was so deeply fixated by the death of the grand referent of God, Nietzsche was the last and best of all the modernists. In The Will to Power, the postmodernist critique of representation achieves its most searing expression and, in Nietzsche's understanding of the will as a "perspectival simulation", the fate of postmodernity as a melancholy descent into the violence of the death of the social is anticipated. And Nietzsche is the possibility of the postmodern scene because the double-reversal which is everywhere in his thought and nowhere more so than in his vision of artistic practice as the release of the "dancing star" of the body as a solar system is, from the beginning of time, the negative cue, the "expanding field" of the postmodern condition.
Nietzsche's legacy for the fin-de-millenium mood of the postmodern scene is that we are living on the violent edge between ecstasy and decay; between the melancholy lament of postmodernism over the death of the grand signifiers of modernity - consciousness, truth, sex, capital, power - and the ecstatic nihilism of ultramodernism; between the body as a torture-chamber and pleasure-palace; between fascination and lament. But this is to say that postmodernism comes directly out of the bleeding tissues of the body - out of the body's fateful oscillation between the finality of "time's it was" (the body as death trap) and the possibility of experiencing the body (au-dela of Nietzsche) as a "solar system" - a dancing star yes, but also a black hole - which is the source of the hyper-nihilism of the flesh of the postmodern kind. PM-AKDC-9&10
What is the Panic Encyclopedia? It's a frenzied scene of post-facts for the fin-de-millenium. Here, even the alphabet implodes under the twin pressures of the ecstasy of catastrophe and the anxiety of fear. From panic art, panic astronomy, panic babies and panic (shopping) malls to panic sex, panic perfect faces and panic victims, that is the postmodern alphabet. Not then an alphabetic listing of empirical facts about the modern condition, but a post-alphabetic description of the actual dissolution of facts into the flash of thermonuclear cultural "events" in the postmodern situation.
As the dark, reverse and imploding side of all the modernist encyclopedias, Panic Encyclopedia begins with the fateful discovery in contemporary physics that ninety percent of the natural universe is missing matter, just disappeared and no one knows where it has gone (physicists most of all). Panic Encyclopedia argues that with the triumph of science and technology as the real language of power in postmodern culture, that ninety percent of contemporary society is also missing matter, just vanished and that no one knows where it is gone (sociologists most of all).
Indeed, since we are probably already living in post-millenial consciousness on the other side of the Year 2000 (calendar time is already too slow: Jean Baudrillard was correct when he said recently in the French newspaper, Liberation, that we should take a vote to jump immediately to the Year 2000 and thus end the interminable and boring wait for the millenium), we are the first human beings to live in the dead zone of a fatal attraction between postmodern science and popular culture. More than we may suspect, panic science is now the deepest language of consumption, entertainment, politics, and information technology just as much as the oscillating fin-de-millenium mood of deep euphoria and deep despair of contemporary culture is the ruling ideology of postmodern science.
Between ecstasy and fear, between delirium and anxiety, between the triumph of cyber-punk and the political reality of cultural exhaustion: that is the emotional mood-line of Panic Encyclopedia. Here, in fact, panic has the reverse meaning of its classical sense. In antiquity, the appearance of the god Pan meant a moment of arrest, a sudden calm, a rupture-point between frenzy and reflection. Not though in the postmodern condition. Just like the reversal of classical kynicism (philosophy from below) into postmodern cynicism (for the ruling elites) before it, the classical meaning of panic has now disappeared into its opposite sense. In the postmodern scene, panic signifies a twofold free-fall: the disappearance of external standards of public conduct when the social itself becomes the transparent field of a cynical power; and the dissolution of the internal foundations of identity (the disappearing ego as the victory sign of postmodernism) when the self is transformed into an empty screen of an exhausted, but hyper-technical, culture. Panic? That is the dominant psychology of the fully technological self, living at that vanishing-point where postmodern science and culture interpellate as reverse mirror-images in a common power field. If the hyper-technological self is also "falling, falling without limits", this may indicate that it, too, is already a post-fact in the post-millenial alphabet, with one final (literary) existence as an entry in the Panic Encyclopedia.
Consequently, the Panic Encyclopedia is all about a double complicity. Postmodern science as the social physics of a fading cultural scene, and postmodern culture as the sure and certain source of the ideological theorems of contemporary science. We understand panic science as postmodern political theory in the intensive, but disguised, form of a theory of a fading nature at the fin-de-millenium; and we read postmodern culture - from panic Hollywood, panic viral computers and panic finance to panic urine - as explicit materializations of the catastrophic, but hyperreal, formulations of postmodern science at the levels of fashion, money, liquid TV, and sex. PE-AKMKDC-15,16&17
Panic Zombies (Carson and Letterman). If advertisements are the truth-sayers of the TV programs, which are their media vehicles, then Alpo Dog Food names the Johnny Carson show correctly. Johnny and Ed are America's favorite pets. The show occurs between prime time and sleepy time, with all of the nocturnal pleasure of a regular bowel movement.
The Carson Show is, anyway, a real panic scene. Not, however, panic of the frenzied type, but the reverse: panic inertia. An unchanging format for a static submass, which has disappeared into the white suburban Bantus, and taken to Carson as its nightly excremental habit. As Carson likes to insist, it's just entertainment: he's the parasite; the audience, the bored voyeur; and the guests, changing particles in promotional culture.
And David Letterman? He is the Johnny Carson of the Reagan youth generation. A little cynicism, a little humor for a generation that the American political philosopher, Michael Weinstein, has described as distinguished by a "strong sense of self, but a weak ego".
As a graduate of Ball State University in the middle of Indiana, Letterman has moved his Hoosier personality from the regions into the center of New York media culture. With Letterman, the dinner party runs its course from hospitality to hostility to the hospital. Letterman is, in fact, the perfect predator: of his audience (his popularity rests with denigrating the audience); of his guests (celebrities are brought out as living targets); of himself (as a supposedly unlikely talk show host); and of TV (Tonight with David Letterman parodies the medium of talk shows).
While the secret of Johnny Carson's success is as a cultural parasite; Letterman is a media predator. Here, America at night finds its final destiny as a Hoosier predator, alternating between envy and resentment. PE-AKMKDC-261&262
What is generally taken as "extremism" in the U.S., is the opposite of the collective state of political apathy that is maintained by those in positions of power. There are two ways of understanding the phenomenon. First, the relative quiescence and political ignorance of the American population represents an opportunity, a field of action, for "activists". The lack of political consciousness is fertile ground for manipulation based upon the most exaggerated claims. In this sense, apathy tends to encourage "extremism". Second, the presence of "extremists" works to the benefit of those in positions of power and authority who are quick to explain that any deviation from the political orthodoxy of the moment will degenerate into "irrationality" and violence. Social criticism is thus a sign of irresponsibility. In other words, the myth of "consensus" implies the creation of scapegoats. Over the past twenty years individuals like Joseph McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, etc. have succeeded in imposing themselves upon the public by profiting from the civil apathy and political ignorance of the North-American population through the process of scapegoating. Products of the myth of "consensus", these men have also contributed to its destruction. TL-LP-34
The myths of communism and capitalism, then, as floating signs - degree zero-points - for the cancellation and imminent reversibility of all the polarities: the mutation of the (socialist) struggle for justice into cynical power; and the materialist dream of the (liberal) flight from politics into the triumph of cynical ideology. Like "strange attractors" in astrophysics which can exercise such a deadly fascination because of their ability to alternate energy fields instantly, the myths of state capitalism and state communism are alternating sides of the rationalist eschatology: the symptomatic signs of the appearance of the bimodern condition.
Bimodernism? That is the contemporary historical situation in which the great referential polarities instantly reverse fields, changing signs in a dizzying display of political repolarization. A violent metastasis in which all the referential finalities of the political code of the twentieth century - capitalism and communism most of all - begin to slide into one another, actually mutating into their opposites as they undergo a fatal reversal of meaning. No longer justice versus the acquisitive instinct, power versus ideology, (socialist) history versus (consumer) simulation, or (economic) liberalism versus (political) democracy, but now the instant reversibility of all the referents. A fatal eclipse of the empire of the sign in which capitalism and communism do a big historical flip. Not just the myth of capitalism in desperate need of the communist "other" to sustain itself or communism as a barrier against the universalization of the commodity-form, but now communism aping the economic form of primitive capitalism, and capitalism taking on the political form of the command economy of late communism. The capitalist societies, then, as the forward frontier of the communist valorization of power; and communist societies as the last and best of all the primitive capitalisms. In one, the inspiring faith in commercial accumulation and the resuscitation of law of value of the production machine; and in the other, the radical depoliticization of the population, its actual body invasion, by a totalitarian image-reservoir under the control of a cynical political mandarinate. In one, the recuperation of the productivist myth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a policy of economic reconstruction; and in the other, the Leninist use of all the mass organs of media manipulation as a way of coordinating private opinion with the war machine. IP-AKMK-ix&x
DOBBS
Stairway to Heathen tape side 1 has some good "surf and play jazz" parts
-also George's 22 stuff.
(This tape primarily deals with U of T - Kelly, etc.)
HOT BOB TAPE SIDE ONE (says '2' on the tape box)
-some good 22 updates, ie: Aryan Rockets>VOA&RM/George
(1st 1/4 of tape deals with the) "old dialectic of visual space vs. acoustic space is now thrown out, it's been superseded in the 20th century by Kinetic and Tactile space. TV brought in tactile space, that reigned for 10-15 years in the 50' & 60's. Once the planet extended itself with the Sputnik environment: the satellite environment; you were then faced with a situation of tribal replay of the archetypes: technological themselves. So, tactile space, pushed to its extreme, flips into kinetic space. The dialogue between kinetic space and tactile space since 1950 is the hidden ground of what's been going on. We only talk about this in terms of visual space and acoustic space to give a subgenius novice an acquaintance with the sensory dynamics involved, and just to master the effects of the alphabet and printing - which is visual space - is the task that takes a while. Especially when you're born into an environment that is kinetic and tactile: its basic ground. So, we go back, we educate about visual space, then people begin to realize the acoustic-space effect under electric conditions via radio and telegraph - So, when Irving Layton discusses poetry moving into the movie form, the filmmaker as a new poetics, he is just beginning to realize that the oral tradition was superseded by the kinetic tradition since the Twist." ----should we?------
RAP MUSIC - "The basic ground of the oral tradition mixed with the tactile space of television creates a preference for the kinetic tradition. Now, in the rap tradition...why that's surfacing now as a major mood-mud that people can dance to is symptomatic of (edit) how we have retrieved human scale.....because the distinctive feature of rap is the emphasis on words again. A kind of - ironically (why is it ironic?) - hard-edged verbiage, as more dominant than the rhythm part. Human scale is a return to words. Words were the tribal environment/ground centuries and millennia ago."
*n.b. MM Counterblast "...The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP."
-------------(Also resonates with low tech 60's activity marking human scale emphasis and it's reemergence in the later 70's as the punk democratization of acoustic preference and involvement in making and participating on a corporate level previously reserved for Genesis, Led Zeppelin and ELO. Presently, prepaired percept previous artifacts/archetypes are acoustically sculpted including James Brown's humanly executed and looped to mark it's cyclical resonance in the new time zone pre- and post-immortal funky drummer, ghetto budgets, street knowledge, attitude, mud, human scale rebellion simultaneous subsumed or cancelled out effect indeed, etc.) ----------------------
Caller: "I need some advice - lesbian roommate, what should I do?"
Bob: "You mean, you can't accept her lesbian habits."
(weird Yoko SFX)
Bob: "Nice."
Caller: "I'd like to readjust your threshold of pain."
Bob: "Thank you."
------this part suggests its own answer call rhythm. There's similar stuff later on the tapes that use a similar structure, check notes, and experiment with edits-----------
Call 1/3rd through side one hot bob tape :::Kid cheering frantically, then kicks into stuff Bob really digs....----use as transition to 50's style song?-----
------can you find "No Place to Play" quote?-----end the song maybe with the follow up part: Bob: "I apologize for hijacking the airwaves, Myke, that is my stuff...it's not over yet."
Satellites....Bob: "That's like when the Challenger blew up, that proved the earlier Challengers were blown up as Dr. Beter said, and finally it showed up for us right in the regular mainstream of kinetic retrieval." ('mainstream of kinetic retrieval'??)
CBC TAPE CBC TAPE CBC TAPE CBC TAPE CBC TAPE CBC TAPE
side one (using Alpage cassette counter)
32 - Brent Bambury: "And still ahead tonight, J. R. Bob Dobbs."
155 - Bob: "I run the solar government. Just give me access to satellite hookups and the whole planet can share the space - the discarnate interval with me...."
187 - "It's not that I'm a bureaucrat and you have to match with my state of mind. It's through understanding."
*196 - "The problem is we're going to have to shut you down - CBC - and all media - including CKLN - temporarily, as a media fast to set up the artform of our intended goal and agenda which is media ecology.....OK...too many words? Too many words?......
Brent: "No, no, the words are fine, the ideas are a bit thick."
208 - David Lynch - crackily crack
218 - Bob: "Tetrad: to manage the turbulent times we're going through."
---------let's arrange a 'song' that can readily teach the public tetrads - or at least give them a damn good percept -and
their tactile bias of sculpting, arranging and understanding visual/acoustic/kinetic space effects,. And we'll also be presenting it through an acoustic form bias-------
222 - Brent: "What about the 'Exists'? (Bob that's brilliant language fascism by the way) Where did they land and what is their significance?"
Bob: "Aaah, the Xists are from Bootes, a constellation out there, pretty close, but check your maps for the actual location of Bootes."
331 - "Many people know I'm a woman, we have female girls and male girls, those are our callers - so, I'm not preaching to men, are we not men? - man is the tactile interval of a post-conventional male/female split - so, in the tactile interval we don't know what we are, we're something new."
480 - "The post-tactile, post-electronic mood is what we call eco-fascism as a pink reflex. But, really what we want to deal with is that since the television, radio, computer and satellite environments have merged into a mixed corporate-media, discarnate collective water; then we brought in VCR's, remote control, satellite (hookup) therefore having personal electronic interaction with the electric content in the electric water; we've had that for ten years. And all the political and cultural images reflected that we now are exhausted with because every, say, 12 months under electric conditions we go at least 2,200 years - so, this can exhaust our preference. Human beings are sensory and they will get tired of a similar constant kind of stimulation. So, we now have an anxiety or a need, phantom pain for something that's beyond the electric environment, but we can't do it. You can't have it. We can look at all these rearview mirror archetypal retrievals and try and live in them. The only way to get around it, to meet this new post tactile need, is to turn off - at least the tactile mesh of television and computers - temporarily."
CBC Tape Side two
59 - Bob: "The only thing that shocks me is the success of my operation."
Brent: "How successfull are You?"
Bob: "Well, listen......(silence).......(laughter)........"
BOB FEB 22ND TAPE BOB FEB 22ND TAPE BOB FEB 22ND TAPE
Side A
199 - Garrett: "Bobby, bobby, bobby, who can take even one word you say, and understand it?" (some good laughter)
229 - Garrett: "I better go before I faint."
254 - Garrett: "Make a recording of it, Bobby, and play it to me one Christmas Eve, when the children are talking about when they were children, and the mothers are talking about when they had lovers, and the farms are talkin'bout when they had their fields. Play it back to me someday, will you?"
Bob: "We have made a recording of it."
Garrett: "Alright, OK. Bobby, Bobby, Bobby...."
311 - Caller: "Marshall McLuhan thought privately the electric environment had something to do with the Anti-Christ?"
Bob: "Yeah....Lyndon LaRouche says (tells bckgrd. re:Larouche,
which holy office: logic, etc. re:technology)...No, Bob Marshall interviewed him. He (LaRouche) wouldn't agree with Marshall McLuhan."
---------------use LaRouche interview there maybe---------
"....... you decide if MM or LL is correct. I suggest you follow both of them at the same time."
335 - Bob: "Simultaneous, comprehensive mythmaking"
432 "I'm different when I'm on the air than when you meet me in person..."
Caller: "...Ooohhh..."
Bob: "That's a different context."
441 - "These offices are used in different contexts, different grounds and they're also subsumed into the discarnate state, which actually we use the figure of Marshall McLuhan to talk about that, but that's not the only side, or point of view, or pattern of looking at it. Just because you talk about the discarnate state doesn't mean you know what it is./ You've got to apply it."
----------------(could go to "Bob's talk show famous phone call" ending in laughter seagoing to Garrett's laughter?)-----------------------
"That's why our jobs become our hobbies, and our hobbies become our jobs."
MM:- "Where involvement is high, work is low." Counterblast 1969
450 - Bob: "Savings and Loans banks: 22 of them to funnel money to Contras."
495 - "We've gone from global theatre to solar theatre with this dimension."
Sean: "OK, now, who's orchestrating in the solar theatre? Is it the Xists?"
503 - Bob: "The Xists are part of our future, and they are a result of my Perfect Pitch chart that's in High Weirdness by Mail (page 147). You can see that even the universe, and before that, the solar system, is subsumed into the electronic, discarnate state, so the aliens are corporate media that come here to act out as actors like other media on the stage, they're showing up as actors, therefore they are controlled by the master playwright: myself, right? Yeah, OK."
--------------could we add dabblings of Reese's peanut butter cup circle sightings campaign?-------------------
526 - "Well, the point of media ecology - and that's what you do in a solar gov't position - is you orchestrate the grammars of all the media - not just print or alphabetic media - I would never read a Margaret Atwood novel, etc..................I study the effects on different audiences. I don't read the content of books. But as a hobby I will read the book and content. I prefer Finnegans Wake for private novelistic reading."
550 - "....No time for narrative stories, because my narrative, my own verbalized drama is the most incredible narrative and retracing of the processes of cognition - and cathartic at the same time."
557 - "That's media ecology. You study the audience; HCE in Finnegans Wake stands for 'Here Comes Everybody': the audience as archetype."
617 - (2nd phase of evolution.....man's extension of himself,
re-creation - the creation of new time and space zones (daily) check written notes for quote)
MM:- "We must invent a NEW METAPHOR, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature." Counterblast
652 - "Now we get into Barbara's question: about human scale. What's the difference between living at the speed of light and human scale? Human scale is that point when we flip beyond electric autonomy - and that's really hard to talk about." --------maybe add as comment re: explaining human scale in the mood mud cylical-- 60's punk rap-----------------------------
661 - Bob laughs - click - "OK .....Ok, let's go back to Sean, I'm sure Sean just loved what I just said, he probably has something to input on that, go ahead Sean, what do you say about what I just said? I wasn't listening. Why not? 'Cause I'm not supposed to."
FEB 22nd/90 BOB Side B FEB 22nd/90 BOB Side B FEB 22nd/90
42 - Edward: "A man who lives in an infernal region which is a parody of our world - noxious chemical plants, christmas turkeys that leak 10w40 on the table as we watch in fascination." (talking about Eraserhead)
75 - "......risen above the industrial pollution, how could you do that?" Bob: "Through the electric discarnate state. The idea of the singer is just referring to the song of acoustic space and tactility."
172 - (Bell rings) "Aaah, my time is up." - click - "OK, we're going to go on to Heaven? I know this alarm clock isn't popular........"
258 - "Do you know that not one psychic or one occultist or anybody predicted that Germany would be unified within '89-90 other than me? Do you realize that I predicted it in an interview in Los Angeles, it's on the record. I am one of the - I am the only person on the planet who predicted it. Now there's one psychic group that did, the Xists, but they did it a month after I did. So, let's realize that you're correct in saying I know what's going to happen because...."
Caller: "Praise Bob!!"
Bob: "Yeah, let's have some testimonials here, we'll get into some new knowledge."
322 - "The 4th Reich is operating out of North America, the territory of the 4th Reich is shrinking, and now it's shrinking in Europe, hoping to build opposition to Gorby. The answer is gd. times are coming - they'll still operate out of North America - Germany is more considerate of Gorby than the 4th Reich. They're going to have to do some media ecological news management.
The matter was settled seven years ago, Germany doesn't exist anymore. The obligation for the power structure, before '82 - already got involved and made their deal with Gorby, you're just seeing an acting out of images; this is the theatre, these are the archetypes that you can study if you know the - (garbled or hidden by alarm and caller)-(hidden ground) as secret battle."
Caller: "Slack, you're great."
359 - Bob: "This is the Church of the SubGenius, we are over our hour, yee hoo, I get to stay on and rule some more."
394 - NASA re: Gorbachov - solar level.
"So, don't worry about the involvements and ramifications of cultural archetypes merging and separating on the planet; that's the stage, that's the theatre. We're talking about what's happening in the universe on a solar gov't level for bureaucratic control; that's what Gorby controls, that's why he's let it all go because he doesn't need this area of control. He's operating from the satellite zone. That's what they won in 1977: the Battle of the Harvest Moon."
407 - Dublin: "People can't live in space long without medical bad effects."
Bob: "There's no problem. Stay on the planet and supersede space by being discarnate. The electric experience goes beyond Newtonian space. The space program is essentially Newtonian, we're post-Euclidian here in the discarnate state, we have access to the whole universe. We can stay on the planet and travel faster and farther than anyone who's stuck in a capsule, he's like an old version of the angel; he can go anywhere he wants, but he's only at that point when he's there. When you're discarnate, you're everywhere at the same time, you're not limited to one body. Just by watching TV or listening to the radio electric environments, that's where it's at, that's where we get our slack. I'm not going out to space on the pink program."
474 - "That's right, rampant narcissism. Narcissism?! Collective narcissism, that's why you should never buy another album, never buy another CD, don't go to another club, do not apply for another grant, do not take a job, find out how to get slack in that prison situation....." Bob O'Leery
555 - "OK, yes, you're on."
Caller: "Whoa, whoa -woo who who - real radio - what's this with the reverb and taped interfaced. It's like a cross between John Cage and Pink Floyd - yeah, yeah, it's resonating - ooooow Heaven."
BOB DOBBS MAR 15/90 SIDE ONE BOB DOBBS MAR 15/90 SIDE ONE
410 - Bob: "A lot of this was arranged ten years ago. We're just seeing the appendages of the media archetypes as figures such as Gorbachov and Bush acting out the script of the effects of the interplay of the media archetypes. And what you're seeing here is the retrieval of human scale."
420 - "Came in the 60's, it was the main conceptual framework for the counter-culture, human scale came in when the satellite went around the major media archetypes: book, telegraph, movie, radio and television; then we have human scale. Problem is that it was an environmentally created situation of human scale."
MM:- "We must invent a NEW METAPHOR, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature." Counterblast
(Bob goes into history of tactility in 20th century, quite detailed, refer to tape.)
--------question of how can we elaborate and sculpt an illustration of the history of tactility in the 20th century-------------------------------------
*444 - "Tactility is the interplay of all the senses."
485 - "Bob returns to human scale: increased accessibility at CKLN."---------------------------maybe cut to Brent Bamberry saying "My, you're accessible">---------------check for this on CBC tape, I think side b---------------------
(Start of this tape, and 1/2 through 'hot bob' tape is same stuff)
Sean calls.
Bob: "A lot of this happened ten years ago. We're just seeing the appendages of the media archetypes, figures such as Gorb and Bush acting out the script of the effects of the interplay of the media archetypes. What you're seeing here is a retrieval of human scale. You know, Sean, human scale came in the 60's. It was the main conceptual framework for the counter-culture. Human scale came in when the satellites went around the major media archetypes - book, telegraph, movie, radio and television. But, it as an environmentally created situation of human scale."
Cool form to Hot form Cool medium pushed flips to hot form.
Ed Sullivan vs. Heraldo
Low tech vs. Hi tech
"The musical complement to that was the Punk Movement, the retrieval of, futile - but, the retrieval of the low-tech, human scale effort of the 60's."
Hi tech is opposite of cool - Punk is retrieval of low tech.
Hot baroque mood of mixed corporate-media: Punk as an anti-environment.
532 - "You have the atmosphere that Gorby set by going into street situations and talking one-on-one with people. He'd taken the advice from me that the Russian people would never believe the major media, trusted slightly the Samizdat, the Russian underground, but I told Gorby if he brings in human scale figure-mood atmosphere by the middle 80's, then he would surface as a barometer of our times and be very popular. So, the human scale manifested lately by Gorbachov threatening to resign in January. That's human scale. That's someone you could have access to and who'll listen to your grievances - but on the larger corporate-media effect, he does have to be President for a larger span of time. Why? President is a top-down position, and you have to be part of the solar gov't to be President. The popular reflection of that is to have come out of the intelligence agencies which both he and Bush did. Bush is trying to play catch up ball, trying to offer a gentler, kindler nation; that's human scale." 550
(2/3rds through 'hot bob' tape says how Bush relates top-down dilemma into human scale for the global audience. The hot media of top-down control is now advocating - via the United Nations - neo-fascism and world gov't)
595 - "The world gov't will be retrieved as an archetype and agenda for fake action by the hot media, which is what Bush and Gorby represent and recommend. The figures are just appendages of media archetype actors. The main circuit river of the mood-and-effect archetypal interplays is Advertising."
611 - Advertising as blood
"Any activity is a mere surface species spume; an appendage of the larger effect of these archetypal environments. Small reflections like that on the surface of the bloodstream aren't the area of advertising. Advertising is the form of communication between these huge environments. The hard sell of the hot world before 1950 - in the cooler 60's:- soft sell happened."
650's - discussion re: Futurist manifesto in the 20's leads into "period after WWII - cliches made new; that's our job - nothing's new under the sun, nothing old under the sun now." 661
689 - Caller: "He's Bob, but he's a little pink around the edges."
Bob (laughing):
"That's the human scale Bob, see we're no longer polarized in the old pink/subgenius dialectic - that's why I'm the biggest pink around. This Bob you're talking about is holding the fort - not ready to merge with the pink in himself. Bob on human scale has a pink aura." 694
696 - "What d'ya make of what I just talked about? I'd never said that before, it's pretty amazing, isn't it? It's big talk."
Caller: "It's big talk, it's big talk."
BOB DOBBS MAR15/90 SIDE .2....................................................
29 - Myke: "We, ah, OK? Anybody fall asleep yet? No....."
More on advertising as blood. Polstergeists. Consume/subsume/interplay does each media with other existing ones............(important Marshall point)
172 - Bob: ".... since the mixed-media corporate version are the actors and their archetypes; then, what do we call the artist? The entertainment figure would have to be an appendage of those effects. If mixed media effects are the corporate actors in the global solar theatre; the prominent artist would mix and mime the subtleties, the nuances between the interplay of these media. For example, here's what I propose: this is an update of what I said a year ago. You take Frank Zappa as specialist form of artist. He sculpts kinetic and acoustic space effects via visual space bias. They have to be proficient and charismatic in all media involved in order to have any staying/lasting power."
302 - "OK, if you think of the kinetic environment as movie and car, the acoustic as radio and speech, the visual as book, photo, newspaper, geometry. And the computer and television as tactile; let's try Burroughs. Burroughs visualizes kinetic and acoustic and old tactile space effects."
Dublin: "Old pieces of newspapers cut up and rearranged."
Bob: "That's the visualizing of the American and radio, occult and extra sensory ESP groups which I'd call the old tactile, not the new electric tactile."
318 - "Notice I don't say sculptures, 'cause he visualizes, he uses print media."
320 - "Captain Beefheart: he sculptures visual and acoustic space, poetry and music via old tactile space bias. The Paleolithic ESP, pre-Agrarian, pre-civilized modality." (Dublin triggered into dinosaur/fossil recollection by the word, "Paleolithic".)
350 - "You take LaRouche, he sculptures - 'cause he's political - kinetic and visual space, the American environment and book and geometry effects via acoustic space bias. More like the radio image - part of the hot media spiral retrieval that Reagan was - and acoustic is the perceptual bias of his trying to articulate process in geometry and geometric form." (? is this whole segment entirely correct?)
358 - "I then would say, the supreme artist would be McLuhan, because he sculptures kinetic, acoustic and visual space effects via a tactile space bias. In other words, he's the one who's more accurately the appendage of television."
404 - "This could be something to follow in the future; how the Irish deal with this new atmosphere of human scale."
----------------Hidden Agenda comes out nine months later, talk about the birth of universe theatre archetypes manifesting under the top isn't just down apparently auspices and kineticizms of Bob's particularbeam vision, yo baby yo, surfin' jazz with my top down, bottom's up, since having fun seems like an appropriate task when job's become hobbies--------------------
523 - "They're using concepts and not percepts; but, that's jargon, right?"
530 - Edward compliments show, having fun, then does an amusing mind theatre abrupt sign off.....
590 - Bob: "That's why the electric age is creating so much diversity, because you can hoick up 200,000 people under electric conditions since you have access to billions of people, every person can access, as a kind of cult artform - cult as artform; have access to a couple hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, whatever."
620 - "It means that you have the time to put a lot of emotional and intellectual energy into your hobbies - edit - you are daily involved in a massive work of making sense. Everybody in the global theatre is making sense, and that's a very taxing and demanding activity, no matter what role you play you're contributing as much as everybody else, including the cancel-out factors of you cancelling the work, counter-work, that's being done by someone else."
648 - "It's the narcissism of the body. Hoping to last forever. And that is the visual-space, Greek form of the body bounded by a line on a bag of chemicals."
Listener: "I lost you."
Myke: "That's OK, we're going."
Bob: "You're putting me to sleep, caller. I don't think I can go on."
-------Nature; an invention of the Greeks ?---------
-------deep freeze or biological immortality?---------
-------ah, never mind.------
BOB DOBBS MARCH 28TH 1990 side one BOB DOBBS MAR 28/90
SIDE 1
54 - Taped message from caller: "Ooooh Bob, I'm merging with your fragments. I am loving every minute of it, it's so wonderful. It goes over and over and over in my tape deck all the time in the car and I love it. I keep turning it on and turning it off. It's Sue in Halifactsfaxedfaxedfastmediaartstrikecognizingmediaecologybutasanunsurgicalshutdownasopposedtomorecarefulmanagementmodesproposed. And thank you for sending me that wonderful tape."
126 - Bob: "Bob's going to be covered in the major media pretty shortly and we have a member of the global theatrical brain police here tonight monitoring and giggling, knowing he's got a monopoly on the situation at this point. He can be the fulcrum of the Esperanto for awhile - therefore, he's here to study the show and monitor. This means difficult days ahead, but I've been to the mountain top."
What's the fulcrum of global collective consciousness? Is there such a thing, or is this a product of visual space sculpted with a tactile bias? Thus as a previous visual-mechnical bias of having a point on which something is raised? Both.
280 - Women - surveillance software - re: Godfather - doesn't get the Godmother - Connie as hidden ground - Tribal societies mafia-ridden - electric/preliterate mafia-ridden.
Bob: "Now the major media archetypes are the mafia effects. Big Brother had to go inside, so he's busy fighting himself like the legs of an octopus confusing each other. Therefore, they keep arresting and freeing each other. Because they're not the hidden ground. The hidden ground is the mafia of the media archetypes - that's Ma."
Sean: "And the emphasis is on Ma - fia, it's not Dad - fia, is it?"
Bob: "Good one, Sean, you're hot tonight."
Sean: "Yeah, the eyes are blind, they always look with their eyes instead of listening or touching..."
Bob: "Yeah, FBI Eye, CIA eye yi yi, they're private."
(Visual space enhances surveillance, as does electricity which also changes the time space force of surveillance making it inclusive, hence paranoia and brain police effects)
327 - "It took us, what? 2500 years to get out of visual space. Now we're into acoustic space - of course, we're not using those terms anymore - we've moved into kinetic and tactile. 'Telekinetic' is another term for tactile vs. kinetic. So, we're well beyond the categories for men and women, right now. We're just superhuman, discarnate things. Right now. That's why Women's Lib rose up as an objection to being assimilated into the old categories. They don't apply anymore. They just wanted role mobility like man thought he had, but he's not very good at it. So, women are going to dominate from here on in." (clapping in background)
"By surpassing writing, we have regained our sensorial WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural plane, but on a cosmic plane. We have evoked a super-civilized sub-primitive man. NOBODY yet knows the languages inherent in the new technological culture; we are all technological idiots in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present. We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth."
MM Counterblast 1969
354 - Bob: "What was I talking about, Sean?
Sean: "TVO."
Bob: "Just before that?"
Sean: "The New Age."
Bob: "I'm moving fast here, I'm moving fast, Sean; I'm resonating fast, I don't want to say that I'm moving. We're not moving anywhere, just dancing on the spot here, swimming on the spot. Bobbing Bobbing, when you swim, you bob...Bobbing............The New Age is : they're trying to conceptualize the basic telekinetic percept and they try to fit it into the old archetypal retrievals of Blavatsky to ? to Cherokee tradition, to who's before that...Atlantis, and they go out to be alone and inside to be social, no actually they go out to Sirius? and head out - the solar system as a garbage dump."
Sean: "They're heading back to Atlantis 'cause it's a choral society."
Bob: "Did ya get that, Myke? A choral society, not an oral society...Yet, it was a study that they sang, they sang and they had great ecological sense which we hope to mime, but we can't use their concepts for our new media ecology. Man, I'm hot tonight with this brain police monitoring me, I'm just flowing with the concepts and percepts. Sean, you hogged the show two weeks ago, call back Sean, 'cause you know your stuff, and you can get me going. OK."
418 - "Colour is a tactile medium, but, that's a visual expression of tactility, whereas white, black and white, dull greys are abstract, visual space, alphabetic effects of colour. ----could implement into 'history of tactility' section----
I'm tactility, which would mean I would include all media."
430 - Re: Bob escapes monitoring throughout 60's and 70's by ordering surveillance of independent left groups and journalists as a protective cover for his own unhampered operations.
442 - "There's a movement in Vancouver maybe, I know Wayne Morris had a guy on who represents a group that have an art strike on-----maybe put in silence ... to cbc part re:BB: 'I didn't hear anything'>-----The Art Strike strike. But, I do it on a solar level in the form of media ecology....Where we shift and , ah, respond, and turn on and off the collective environment, the archetypes, the mythic images."
550 - "Information is a perceptual threat to your anthropomorphism, which is pinkness." (Bob's response to reaction to Dr.Beter's Robotoid pronouncements)
688 - "You were thinking something they brought up? I thought that I told them that? Well, in this situation, where we are subsumed in this collective Finnegans awake; these collective archetypes dreaming awake, therefore they're hallucinating. We can naturally, as a by-product, have telepathy, therefore anybody can take credit for anything, that's the global Esperanto......Let's go to the phones."
720's - "Not just your body or mind, but the interval between the two."
_________________MAR 28/90 SIDE 2 MAR 28/90 SIDE 2
2 - Bob: "Follow your own rhythm, drummer beat."
22 - "All the media have become private, interactive. The telephone with the answering machine - that meant you could have your own private bubble; still interactive efficiently with the telephone environment, but not have to respond immediately as if a drum beat was imposed on you. Then you had VCR - tape shows and watch at own pace. Remote zapper: bypass advertising. Tape deck, satellite dish, PC, etc. brought back the sensation of interactive and demand media, like cable. All these things came in from the middle 70's and that's when the 'Me Decade' and the neo-conservative retrieval of the 18th century - chafing at the bit to get back to the original autonomy of the original ideals in the American constitution, whether liberal or conservative. The 18th century concepts had been retrieved as an icon; as an effect of the retrieval of the human scale, the human scale meaning that these monster media don't impose their drumbeat on you anymore." ------this is a relational variation applying the idea of human scale. Is man striving for it by tendency?-------
64 "We're now beyond the bureaucratic structures as solutions."
-----could be restated more clearly on tape---if need be to use it-----
Caller: "We're free."
Bob: "That's right, we're free to suffer at our own rate, and of course, suffering always flips into ecstasy..."
-----cut to 'the march/campaign goes on for Bobby's 30's/Jimmy Stewart kinetic persevering???---------------
America's Home Videos
78 - "We have another caller...."
SFX of kids playing (over phone) ----keep in mind a mary day----
"So, is this an example of taking Bob's show to human scale? I mean is there a hijacking going on here, with people using their own cassette operations and mixing them with telephone and radio? Therefore, becoming private broadcasters and generators of their own church syndrome?" (edit)
Myke: "I think it's just people wanking off."
Bob: "That's very important. They say that masturbation is the thinking man's television. Now, think of that."
118 - Caller: "Listen, I really enjoy your show, but I've got one question."
Bob: "What's the 'but' for? You imply that having a question takes away your enjoyment."
------Bob's tactile sculpting/rhetorical mastering of a visual indicator of a faulty conclusion into a charming probe ephemeral under new time-space energy percepts probe yet lasting in the moment it lasted: Percept. You had to be there--------
158 - "The only source of top-down information relevant for the post '79 period is Dr. Beter. He was part of the hidden gov't, so he was the only person who could know it. Mae Brussell was a housewife working through the major pink press; it was an excellent job what she did, but she didn't have access to vast changes that happened as we got into the final turn, which happened from '79 to '82."
168 - "You get, for basic education, you study the holy offices of Mae Brussell, then you escalate from that to Lyndon LaRouche and then you move into a little Sherman Skolnick and then Dr. Beter. Always as you're doing that, studying Marshall McLuhan , because he knew that, but figured out as a member of the Establishment how to talk about it. How to talk about it without naming names."
202 - "Iran-Contragate had no effect, it was entertainment. It was a nostalgia for the feeling that Big Brother still was doing some dirty work behind the scenes. We've gone well beyond the control of Big Brother. It's now a solar gov't level. They don't need to deal in dope, that's left for spinoffs from unemployed intelligence agents. Because intelligence is obsolete too, information is obsolete; you've gotta start lookin' on the solar gov't level, and that's Dr. Beter's stuff. That's why Iran-Contra had no effect in the way the regular researchers thought that it would upset the Reagan Presidency. This is stuff that's irrelevant from this point on, but it's necessary for young people or old people or slow people to study this stuff just to get their basic mathematics. That's why Mae Brussell is the holy office of mathematics. You're counting, you're numbering figures. But, you have to study McLuhan to understand the ground. The macromyths. Alright. So, that's a mouthful, I expect you to understand that."
Caller: "Yeah, I'm with you on most of it, I think."
Bob: "Yeah, you should be."
Caller: "OK, well thank you very much."
Bob: "Spread the Gemstone File around."
Caller: "I have been actually."
Bob: "Are you a high school teacher?"
Caller: "Well, I'm going to teacher's college right now."
Bob: "OK, well put that stuff on your course when you get a job, give those kids in grade six a little taste of the past."
Caller: "Romanticism."
Bob: "They'll love it, they'll wanna read again."
277 - "That's the new."
Dublin: "Didn't you hear the 'the the the'."
Bob: "Yeah."
280 Dublin: "It's beautiful to listen to a child babbling....."
Bob: "It's miming, dreaming away, it's trying to use language to see."
327 - "Every new child, every new being, every new pink, subgenius has to look at the world through the other, that way forms their own identity, so, they have to absorb the other. That's the macromyth, that's the historical heritage."
310 - "What's a metaphor? Well, when man's or woman's or its reach exceeds its grasp."
355 - "When we die our body weight does not change, yet 20 yrs. ago people thought it did change. They measured it and there was a change in weight, but then they found out it was some chemical in the body. So, the mind is weightless....soul is weightless, so, it doesn't exist in physical terms, but it's not outside the physical, it is in-between, like an X-ray, it interpenetrates metaphor and the brain. That thing you can't locate is carving out the metaphor."
366 - Dublin: "Well, it's interesting because...."
Bob: "It's not interesting."
Dublin: (laughter).
375 - Bob: "Look at the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. That's what metaphors are: artificial intelligence. Language is an artificial intelligence. It gives us a grasp of the world, it gives us a way of looking at the world, but is not the whole of intelligence."
386 - "To exceed your grasp is what we do when we speak because, you can't pin it down what you're talking about in the essential bit, yet, you're talking and using it. So, we are making something out of nothing , and so that makes Jesus possible. There was a possibility of 'virgin birth'. That would be within the laws of the universe: that something could come out of nothing. So, I think I converted a hundred people tonight."
437 - "The Women's Lib shows up in the electric age when the electric environment can't be bought, sold or stolen. So, they will take over as a false myth, but you won't have any control, because you can't at this time, and that's perfect for them 'cause they don't want to control it."
477 - "That's what we do here, we make sense, we don't match with some standard, we make sense, we make it up, but it's important, it's miming what's going on in the world. We're basing the world on illusion right now."
514 - Sean: "Hello Bob."
Bob: "Ooooh, oh Sean's back, yeah Seannigan, we're making big progress. Oh yeah, it's a great show, this is a great show, you taping it? Yeah, yeah, it's gonna take weeks to digest what we're grasping, right?"
535 - "Women want role mobility, men want role mobility, everybody wants to be everybody, everybody wants to wear everybody else. It's like you said two weeks ago: all cultures are trying to get under each other's skin. All media are trying to get under each other's skin, all human beings are trying to get under each typology of skin, right?....So, what is the cause of that? The need comes from the hidden ground, and it's the electric discarnate state."
567 - "We put on the kinetic as a costume, as ghostlike costume, while we deal with the telekinetic effects - which is total obliteration."
580 - "Burroughs just visualizes kinetic and acoustic and tactile space effects, visualized into the novel form. That's nowhere near what McLuhan does; he sculptures kinetic, acoustic and visual effects via tactile space bias. Burroughs just visualizes it."
598 - "Now we're in a situation where human scale's come back. So, you see the Nazis start getting gentler and kindler.....we're going to have a Utopia here that's going to drive us crazy."
627 - "How are we gonna wake up to the fact that Finnegan's awake? Our mixed corporate-media are dreaming awake, how we gonna wake 'em up. We can imitate them by falling asleep. That's why Reagan falling asleep at the wheel was the perfect expression of media ecology."
(Marshall didn't believe the medium was the message.) ----should we play the 'tape' testifying to this ?--------
656 - "We can say anything - dogma changes every 15 seconds here."
APRIL 18/90 SIDE ONE
185 - Bob: "A tetrad on the microphone - that's us. What does the microphone enhance? It enhances the torch singer who whispers in everybody's ear. OK? that's the microphone. It enhances the inflated persona for everyone to wear. Hey, that sounds like me: Bob. The inflated persona for everyone to wear. The private individual voice, the intimacy of Bob. What does it obsolesce? Private space and privacy, it obsolesces the big band, the old-fashioned orator - or the big-mouth. Retrieves the close group, the tribal mode; that's the Church, right? And it retrieves intimacy, the cozy nightclub. When pushed to its extreme, it flips into the closed, collective space, the wrap-around sound-bubble. I'll cuckold the cockeyed woild."
Tape goes into Robotoids with Dr. Beter
484 - " The cliches come back as new archetypes. The old comes back anew."
--------maybe play the signature 'pump up the jam' matrix sample>>mix to musical excerpt of Jolly Giant somewhere in the middle where the music's hipper-------
648 - backwards swedish acoustic space speech sounds on phone line.
Bob: "...That was on my message machine."
Myke: "We've heard this before (Myke hangs up). No need to hear it again."
Bob laughs at Myke's powerful hit: "Just hang up the phone and disconnect thousands of people."
BEEHIVE TAPE JANUARY 9/91 SIDE A
304 - Bob: CBC New Year's address.
393 - Brent Bambury: "That was J. R. Bob Dobbs of the Church of the SubGenius, and you're listening to Brave New Waves on CBC Stereo, the CBC that was formerly a tool of the left-wing counter-capitalist movement, but now, a mere cog in the homeopathic revolution of the Church of the SubGenius - Praise Bob - now, more music from Big Pink."
415 - Bob: "Touche´, Tom....you've been leaking secret info."
Tom Touche´: "You're so washed up, Bob, that I can talk to you."
518 - Caller: "I want more info. re: conspiracy to wipe socialism off the map and replace it with Christianity."
Bob: "Are you a socialist?"
Caller: "Yes."
Bob: "Top-down or bottom-up? Top-down plays catch up with the bottom-up effect. Socialism was wiped out by TV. Not the content, medium itself. TV brings in New Left/New Right. Neither effective in the long run. Decentralization means you're free, you don't need an external gov't to control your situation. You're free! Of course, that means everyone else is free to run amuck over you. So, you've got to be paranoid."
560 ---bob dobbs > bob marshall 580 berlin wall Gehlen - hijacking ...of "characters with heart JFK, MLK, etc." ----cut out most of caller's stuff - too slow------
584 - "Difference between capitalism and communism?"
(Now, watch ladies and gentlemen how McLuhan's very applicable at a John Birch Society or This Magazine meeting, or one with Henry Kissinger, whoever is figure for some human form you lations carefree owing to Bob's or Marshall's rhetorical tactile mastery and sense a rhyee interplay with the mythic audience in any particular given situation, though from a top-down recognition you still might get replaced by a nasty paramilliontary shadows reveal more or less than light refracting kinetic fascist film production smoking pistol lightening man high impact close-ups and alarming haunting sus spensory rear stage shadows eliciting sudden acceleration car movie effects silent movie set in motion eventual computer environment says Marshall back to cigarette torch singer hot medium that's detached pounding leather boots that 'landed where the hand of man never set foot." , Fascism archetype/mood tremoringly filter resonates - as other mythic proportions can within many discarnate space biases - like the soul between the mind and body
The new media are not
be -bridges- tween man and nature: they are nature Counterblast MM 1969 our nature inn our image
that recreated ethereal archetypes inside the mythic hardware of aryan beauty in perfume and designer genes ads were the sepiotones that so covered the dream artifacts of experience in hot kinetic ground mythic residue in the later tactile soupzone from the soupies, a decade you probably haven't heard of in my mix because it was covered up by other stuff, but since it's of mythic proportions nowadays new decades can be offered as probes into the history of the new time-space energy nature linked to man. Whatever one's to make of this can reside in the almost certainty that everything's approaching everything eventually though they may never meet...now bobby, this theme of yours using the 4th reich and kinetic space as a ghostlike costume in the transformed ground more approximating the present technihilogical splatters dust gets in your eyes and also mood mud them into bobby marshall, sounds perfectly hectic. And what the heck did. Percept. Including Bob's documented 4 nanosecond one in March of 90 according to Stanford researchers/spoke as a persons but in the end certainly hoicked up their bodies as a shared medium of human scale or grounding zone for discarnate man, therefore the propaganda didn't matter from the onset. Dreaming awake can't merely be transformed by shutting off the TV. We can hardly designate the ramifications of turning it on and recreating time and space and developing an infrastruct around it but now inside it as figure for the ground around it, like the soul interpenetrating the mind and body. Maybe.)
584 - "Difference between capitalism and communism? No difference, both by-products of the newspaper age 1830 and before - filtered through cultural bias. We're living in a world of mythic stage now, where you take your mythic social pattern and run amuck, you play hardball with it, you don't dialogue. So, the capitalists were able to hardball the electric autonomy mood that rose in the 80's under satellite, VCR, remote control conditions. You know, the cocoon of electric software addiction that most people are involved in."
(Myke has some classical music playing in bgrd.) Post-TV age
608 - "The golfers are not fighting in the Gulf; they're fighting with their satellites on the solar structure level."
617 (sounds neat with Myke's music, use it as a canvas for our own sounds)
Caller: "The CIA and the Pentagon had actually had this machine in their possession through some sort of ...I don't know how they got it....."
Bob: "I think Tom Touche´ gave it to them."
Caller: "....It had a weird effect on people like R. Nixon and J. Carter, who had more brains than Nixon."
Bob: "Are you sure about that?"
Caller: "I don't know."
Bob: "Then, that's a myth you bought into, mighty assumption you're using in your own thought processes."
651 - "Capitalism didn't win...I mean Bush is collapsing too as much as the Soviet Union, Britain and Canada...and note who isn't collapsing: Germany and Japan. Why?"
Caller: "'Cause they lost WW11?"
Bob: "Yeah, there's no way of -----gd. example of bottom-up response to a usually top-down topical consideratorium-----succeeding other than through failure. (chuckle) That's true, you stoop to conquer."
Caller: "That's right, I guess so."
Bob: "You now know. Take this percept...now go from there, don't run back into your confusion."
Caller: "Praise Bob. Thank you."
Bob: "Conversion right there."
--------should we musically bring in something 40's? A lot of these quotes end with reference to music--reoccuring motif's mood sewn/sculpted with instrumentation depicting various time zones, particularly the 20th century--seems quite appropriate--I'm sure no one on the committee Will Object-----------
**link to other sections employing this idea>> 689 - Caller: "You didn't sound at all like yourself on the CBC New Year's broadcast."
Bob: "Oh no, that's another part of Bob Dobbs; that's the serious Bob, the Secret-Council-of-Ten Bob. You've never heard me talk about employment figures or this - ---definite zone to bring up gold story wash---a bunch of nonsense, but when they tell me, I merge with the medium, play off the particular media of CBC."
696 - Caller: "I'm doing artwork, yes."
Bob: "You wanna make any album covers?"
Caller: "No, ah, do I?? Ah, yeah sure."
Bob: "Ok."
Caller: (laughter).........."Room 222 is back on air at 2:30."
Myke: "Bad prints, pubic hair caught in the lens...." (laughter)
Caller: "They replay it for the number 22."
Bob: "It's 22 weeks since Saddam attacked Kuwait, now they're having a summit...---initiated war against Iran Sept 22/80?---- Cycles of history are based on these numbers, 19 and 22. What's your address?"
Caller: "Well, 592."
Bob: "592, that's 5+9=14, that's 14. Well, you're part of the new pattern, 14's the new number coming up...Gimme the last four digits of your phone#."
Caller: "Uhhh, 3298."
Bob: "3+2+9+8 = 22.....You're a 22 also. Case closed."
Caller: "That's marvellous!!!" - (cut)
BEEHIVE TAPE SIDE 2 BEEHIVE TAPE SIDE TWO BEEHIVE TAPE side B
185 - Vladimir phones in the Kabbalistic meaning of 22. 22 letters in the 'mystic' Hebrew alphabet...we can't use this part anyway cause Myke's getting silly with the "where were you on Nov 22/91?" quote.
308 - Bob: (Bob explains Myke's purpose) "We have a dialectic here. We have me who involves everybody. I'm Bob, I'm everybody. I contain multitudes in the discarnate state. We have to have a knowable level of the discarnate state by using words, so, I have to have a person who believes in the English language; will use it when you bark it at him. --edit--So, if I say the English language, he'll think I'm talking to him and I can use that as a red herring while I'm communicating discarnately. Well, Heather, you have a great knack of pushing the percepts beyond what I've said before."
Heather: "Oh, that's good."
Bob: "Anything more?"
Heather: "Not really."
Bob: "C'mon, c'mon, you guys can have multiple orgasms...c'mon."
Heather: "Oh, let me just think."
Bob: "Yeah, let's rest for a second."
Heather: "Don't want to waste airtime while I come up with something."
326 - Caller: "I'm not up on LaRouche..."
337 - Bob: "LaRouche didn't do anything, he's one of the nicest people, the most moral person of the 20th century. Just because he inspires dupes and useful fools to run around at airports - he's made breakthroughs in the intellectual territory and in conceptual space. And his effects he's not totally responsible for."
343 - Caller: "What are some of the bad things about Mr. LaRouche?"
Bob: "He doesn't understand Marshall McLuhan or too many of the other holy offices. He doesn't have complete comprehensive awareness which I'm the only person that has, so, I wouldn't knock him for not having that, nobody else on the planet has it....(Myke: "Bob is Good.")....You can develop that if you stay regular in your taxi cab. What's your licence#?"
Caller: "P.O. Box 1324."
Bob: "You're a 22 cabby, way to be."
Caller: "Well, there's a little more to life than just that, don't you think?"
Bob: "Not much."
Caller: "Not much?"
Bob: "There's no life before death anymore."
Caller: "Oh, OK..."
*550 - Bob: "The ad maker, the wordsmith, doesn't have a point of view. Marshall McLuhan would have talked to Kissinger, even though he called him the Kissinger of Death. He would have related to him, just like LaRouche has to relate to the Mafia and the Gehlen-Nazi network. When you're involved in an imploded zone, you can't use value judgements."
568 - Re: leasing our eyes and ears to private corporations.
Bob: "That's why we shouldn't talk about rights. What should we talk about? -----Cosmic Awareness quote from one of the first two issues of Perfect Pitch?-----What's a strategy, a form of protest, so that we don't fall into the trap of obsolete issues? How can we protest?"
Tom Rich: "I think the way to protest is to shut 'em off."
Bob: "Yeah, we refuse to buy the Toronto Star, refuse to do the CBC."
Tom Rich: "It's not the Toronto Star, the newspapers. It's CNN."
Bob: "Mulroney's on the right track by taking the budget away from CBC. Next, turn off the media coverage of him."
592 - "'Media Ecology' is the slogan, and what it is, it's not just private, say, boycotting of your own TV; it's demanding your politician to deal with this one issue. It's becoming monomaniacal about Media Ecology, not about nature, oil, high prices. Ignore everything, get the public to engage in that level of sloganeering."
611 - breakdown as breakthrough
Bob: "War and peace. Bypass concepts of war and peace because it's man vs. his inventions, it's not war or peace.........I just want to stop 'cause I know there's other callers."
Tom Rich: "Do you?" (laughter).
* Any comments not in quotation marks and any underlinings were made by David Newfeld, my studio butler.
MEMO TO PRINCE CHARLES
June 4, 1990
As I sit here dictating this memo to you and watching Connie dancing with herself hugging the letter in her arms, you might hear the tears running down my face (that's You're Still the One in the background). Pardon me, but I can't believe how we got here, 22,000 miles above the earth, and I'm drifting back- they just mentioned Zareski again on the radio- back to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in the summer of 1966 when we watched little Bobby Dean and tiny Carolyn Wheeler go on their separate little adventures never to be seen again. Oh, they would be "seen" again but everyone knew they weren't the same. That fall, their last year in high school, Bobby was famous for having hitchhiked to California and back again with only five dollars given to him by some kind of Taco Bell franchiser who had driven him for about 1000 miles. Carolyn had spent the summer in Sherbrooke, Quebec where she checked out the transformative powers of French kissing. It worked. She was very popular that first Darteen dance in September. That hadn't happened before. She was different. And indeed they both were! These facts served just perfectly as "covers" for what had really happened. The truth of the matter was that they were victims of Walk-ins - namely, me and Connie!
What a year that was for us! There we were, both 44 years old and veterans of Mata Hari/James Bond scenarios since World War Two, pretending we were teenagers in a little town on the Eastern rim of the North American plate. But, as usual, such was our luck that it was the best time to be a teen - or rather, to pretend to be youth. Actually everyone in the world was trying to act young and wild! However, for us it was an assignment and the stakes were very high. But, Charles, right now as Connie and I float in the arms of victory I see those faces drift by and I wonder what the citizens of Dartmouth will think when these memos are published. Of course, the majority will hardly even remember who Bobby Dean and Carolyn Wheeler were except for a couple of vague rumours. In 22 years from now they will be the ones who will build the tourist monuments. Still, those who knew and shared our local schemes will now have many questions answered. Perhaps they will feel it was all not in vain and even a little significant.
Take Steve, for example. He suddenly found Bobby sitting next to him in A-5 (a Grade 12 division in Dartmouth High School), a not very academically inclined class (Steve was in there because he was too smart to study), after Bobby had been "streamed" through the advanced class with Mike and Karen and Phil and Don and Christine (now a politician with a Minister's portfolio sometimes) and Peter (rumoured to be a doctor in Annapolis Valley) and Terry (later murdered in the '80's) for five years. By shrewdly dropping chemistry, biology, German and picking up Social Problems I arranged for Bobby to be put in Steve's class so he would have a very light homework load giving me much free time for our real assignment. Phil and Don would later refer to this period as the time when Bobby "died". But Steve can now understand why Bobby suddenly became obsessed with his FREAK OUT album by the Mothers of Invention. Bobby was going to be a physicist, couldn't even hear music and back in '65 wanted to form a band with Steve and Alan Billard and call it The Valets. The Valets!!! Steve was outraged. Understandable because Steve was studying guitar by listening to Paul Butterfield records. But Bobby was a good dancer (he had learned from his childhood buddy Butch Lucas) and was often mistaken for a "coloured" person at the Banook Canoe Club dances. But suddenly Bobby couldn't stop requesting to hear Frank Zappa's music whenever he was at Steve's house. Then there was that moment in February, 1967 when the substitute teacher for Paul Kutner's physics class (a Beatnik) gave a copy of McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage to Steve and Bobby. Why did he pick them out? For the first time (if anybody had cared to notice) Bobby was distracted from doing his homework. This went on for a couple of weeks and the consequences were felt for years after by his close friends. The next catastrophic change that actually affected Steve personally was Bobby's announcement to him that he would not be travelling around the world with Steve when they graduated from high school. He was going to go to college with Carolyn. This seriously disrupted the intended path for Steve's life but I couldn't tell him why then. That would have to wait another year.
Meanwhile, back to Connie's and my mission. The echoes of the kids' relationship started to be felt around the world. On October 9, 1966 John Lennon and Yoko Ono first met in that gallery in London - the very day Bobby declared his designs on Carolyn to his hockey buddy Phil. Oh, that reminds me of an echo when Bobby was in California the summer of '66 when I made my initial "possession" of him. It was Friday night, July 29, 1966 - the night of Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident and the first advertised Mothers' Freak Out! (Dave Walley might argue with you on that point but not with me because he doesn't know how to reach me.) Bobby wasn't at the dance that night but he was in Los Angeles. He had just made the first "radical" move in his tiny, tiny life. He, two draft evaders, a gambler, and a Mexican had just quit lemon-picking at a camp in Carpinteria. They probably had 75 dollars between them. That night was an extremely resonant echo. Another important echo which became more significant in the later '70's was the case of Walter Bowart's 40-day long pure Sandoz acid journey during the fall of '66. Walter, you remember, was the founder with Ishmael Reed of the East Village Other in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Bobby tried to get his driver's license that wonderful autumn but failed miserably because I had not mastered my "control" of his ambidextrous functions (check with Colin May on that embarrassment). But the Luck Plane was slanted our way because events escalated rapidly as Rhyee returned to the Plane of Essence (notice it was completed in Feb. '67 when Bobby was given McLuhan's paperback) and during that intense time Connie and I needed to be alone to attend to our intelligence activities without being distracted by high school football games and parties. Having no transportation gave us an alibi. Also, we had the alibi of Bobby's rapidly deteriorating interest in hockey and subsequent dropping from the team roster even though he was the assistant captain. Incidents such as having Bobby fire the puck at his own coach when he had a breakaway probably hastened the coach's decision. Still, it was a drastic personality change from his friends' point of view attributed no doubt to the fact he was either getting laid or he wasn't getting laid. These new tendencies of seeming rebellion culminated in Bobby being expelled in the last month of his high school career in May of '67. Of course, this was necessary for Connie and I to do some scarey stuff during the hyper-serious Arab-Israeli War in the first week of June. Few people know how close we came to Armageddon that time. On the other hand, Connie did not need the sultry "rebellious" cover since her job was to monitor the satellite reconnaissance set-up in her bedroom. Her long hours alone in her room was understood by Carolyn's parents as her preparation for the Provincial Examinations. And Carolyn was even able to have time to finish out the Vice-Presidential term on the Student's Council after Joey Blades ran off to Greenwich Village wearing an earring. Oh yeah, there was a big scandal that spring when some students stole the provincial exams. Bobby was never caught but Norman could verify Bobby's role.
In the fall of '67 Connie and I had to get Bobby and Carolyn away from their parents. We arranged for them to register at Mount Allison University in the marshy little town of Sackville, New Brunswick. Nobody would notice them there. However, one mistake was made. Bobby's roomate, Paul Brison, was "rural" enough to notice something was very strange about Bobby and Carolyn's relationship. So we "inspired" two sophomores, Barry Ellis and Ben Harnish, to form the Mental Mutants "anarchist" club as a cover for our intelligence work. Some of their rantings were even printed in the student paper (check out the Feb.13, '68 issue). And the editor of the paper was so intoxicated by the Mutants' work he offered Bobby the editorship for the next year! But, alas, we would not be staying in Sackville for long.
One of the echoes of that interim was the longest brain surgery in history done in New York City on Nov. 25, 1967 - Marshall McLuhan - under the knife for 22 hours.
Back in Dartmouth for the summer of '68, Connie and I schemed on how to set up a new "cover" to explain our increasing need for a more far-ranging mobility. The college fake would no longer do. We had to use the "dropout" scam. We decided to float the story that we were going to Montreal. That seemed plausible since Leonard Cohen's hit Suzanne had raised the profile of that city for the counterculture. But we needed some kind of tribal group - a commune. So we recruited some local high school kids with the help of Steve. Of course, this meant I had to let him in on our little secrets, or at least some of them. You know, a "need to know" basis. Well, you can imagine the rumours flew that summer about Eddie, David, Tommy, Ingrid, Nolan and Chris. Steve's mother, a very shrewd and perceptive Conservative, went so far as to call Bobby the Anti-Christ and banned him from their home. She knew something awesome and disturbing was brewing in her tiny, tiny town. But it worked and Bobby and Carolyn got to Montreal with no trouble except for a little resistance from their parents. There were some hard feelings but our work had to be done and we knew the benefits of it would be realized later.
Once in Montreal, with the semi-comprehending assistance of Barry and Drapkin (from Mount Allison) and Steve and Shirley (from Dartmouth) we established contact with Dean Latimer, Allan Katzman, David Walley and Lita Eliscu at the East Village Other in Manhattan; with David Worcester and Vern Christenson and Cosmic Awareness in Seattle; with Joe Dun Sloan and the D-cell in Los Angeles; and with Don McBrearty and the film industry in London and later Toronto. From '68 on through the Seventies and into the early Eighties these friends provided safe houses for key periods of crisis in the unfolding of history/evitable fate. But during that particular autumn in Montreal, Barry played a very important role as a liaison with Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque. Drapkin was an important conduit to the pharmaceutical industry. Oh, that reminds me, a curious side-effect of my "control" over Bobby was that he would sometimes lose the basic essentials of his identity rooted in his childhood memories. This would require establishing personal contact with some early close childhood friend where obscure details of their mutual past would be dragged out for major scrutiny in the intensity of their reunion. Montreal reminds me of this because it was there that Randy House had moved in 1964 from Dartmouth and he was periodically visited by us so Bobby could be "reoriented". I'm sure Randy will remember these sessions when he reads this but will marvel at how many years have passed since he last had one (it was 1975, Randy). Excuse me, Charles, while I clear something up and give Randy a particularly cute memory that only he would fully appreciate. Remember, Randy, when in the heat of one of these nostalgic laughing debates that fall of '68, you, Bobby and Carolyn dropped in on Cathy Bowes at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal where she was a nurse and left your names at the front desk because she was not available. None of you guys were really very close to her so she must have been puzzled. Well, Cathy, wherever you are (though Steve told me last summer that he talked to Charlotte Hutchinson and he thinks she mentioned that Cathy Bowes married a doctor and is living in Arizona, but Steve's not sure because he never knew either Charlotte or Cathy) now you know why their names appeared in your life at that time. They were drunk on memory so Bobby could remember who he felt like he was.
For the next few years Connie and I criss-crossed all over the northern Western Hemisphere using the above-mentioned refuges for Solar Government debriefings from the Secret Council of Ten. More on that later. Meanwhile, we found that Montreal was increasingly inhospitable after the FLQ Crisis of Oct. '70 so we decided we could safely relocate in Dartmouth and later Halifax. Steve had long left Montreal and returned home mainly because of exhaustion, and Barry, searching for autonomy, went back to his family farm on P. E. I. to work the land for potatoes. Their responsibilities in our mission were largely superseded by archetypes merging/fragmenting at the speed of light so a rest was well-deserved. Once back in Nova Scotia I had to deal with the karmic fallout from the previous cover of the "commune". The original members plus new hangers-on had fallen into lives of complete disarray.
The subsequent counselling sessions with this Dartmouth gang unexpectedly brought out a new role for Carolyn which we realized would create a great new cover for Connie. If Carolyn became a medical student then we would have the next ten years, at least, taken care of. We knew the management of the solar government was settling in for the long haul after the rapid changes of the Sixties and Connie's satellite surveillance work would be relatively stable. A medical role would be perfect. I still had much travelling to do in my work but Connie could be free to join me around the world during the summers. One important person from Bobby's past, Charles, was a character named Flaps who was one of the original Troika- Steve, Bobby, and Flaps. You see, Bobby always had a healthy streak of megalomania that he kept to himself. That's why I picked him. And Flaps was the one friend he could rehearse this with. Bobby first made contact with Flaps on this level in 1964 when they both agreed they could see "Butch the Electron" - their name for those little spots in the air. Also, Flaps had a similar bent of mind for nostalgic details - even obscure ones that he could hilariously mimic. But as for the megalomania trait, Flaps also was sure that either he or Bobby or Steve was the Second Coming of Jesus the Christ. So this required hours of humorous debate and subtle probing between he and Bobby. Flaps even dropped all his other courses at St. Mary's University in Halifax after his freshman year and began taking Theology classes (about 20 of them) over the next five years. Little did he realize that he actually was teasing and philosophizing with me, Bob Dobbs, all that time. Flaps also provided some great opportunities for he and Bobby's major fetish - ball hockey! This allowed me to do some fine, superfine thinking whenever I was in Nova Scotia. While Bobby was trying to win the scoring title and beat the Seagulls (consistently the best team) for five years (until 1977 - the year of a cosmic power shift when we finally left Halifax and moved to Dallas, Texas), I made some of my greatest perceptual breakthroughs under the alchemical effects of such disciplined physical exertion. Thanks, Flaps. During this period in Halifax, when I could spare the time, I also studied Dennis Young, Vickie Cameron and Eric Fischl (his favorite film at that time was Greaser's Palace) at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
By the way, for the record, the dates for significant first encounters between 1968 and 1977 are:
September 25, 1969 - David E. Worcester
March 1, 1970 - Frank Zappa
March 2, 1970 - Joe Dun Sloan
March 1, 1971 - Marshall McLuhan
July 12, 1971 - Captain Beefheart
October 8, 1971 - Garrett Deane
October 22, 1973 - Harry Whittier
January 10, 1974 - Edgar Z. Friedenberg
May 1, 1975 - Andy Warhol
May 7, 1975 - Paul Krassner and Ken Kesey
May 12, 1975 - Cecil Taylor
February 27, 1976 - Allen Ginsberg
August 8, 1976 - Charles Bukowski
And I forgot July 22, 1970 - Sun Ra - while Bobby and Carolyn were having their honeymoon in New York City (Steve was there, too.)
According to Rev. Stang's Book of the SubGenius (1983), I introduced myself to Philo Drummond in 1978. This is correct. Connie and I had set up headquarters in Dallas after we left Halifax in '77 where I had kept a very low profile whenever I was there - not one of Carolyn's fellow medical students at Dalhousie can say they ever met her husband. The move to Dallas was necessary after the Battle of the Harvest Moon on Sept. 27, 1977 which caused a major change in the structure of the solar government. Most of the scenarios that unfolded in the early Eighties were orchestrated out of Texas (remember J. R., Dallas, Dynasty, and Bush - Lorimar Productions) so that was where I was stationed until '83. Connie would continue Carolyn's medical cover in Toronto where she set up a phenomenally successful nutritional medicine practice that had the same impact on the medical game in Canada as Wayne Gretzky had on hockey. At that time Toronto was a branch plant of the shenanigans in Texas (for details of that fact see Robert O'Driscoll's "action" poem, NATO and the Warsaw Pact Are One) and Connie was assigned to that city until I could join her permanently for more public performances in '84 after Dr. Beter and I had triumphantly interrupted the Bolsheviks' attempt to start Nuclear War One with a First Strike against the Soviet Union on Sept. 17, 1982. For followers of Stang's scene this explanation should clear up the mystery of why the Reverend staged my assassination on Jan. 21, 1984. Because I had left Dallas after Dr. Beter and I put a hold on nuclear annihilation in '82, Stang had nothing left to do but market what he could salvage from my files. But how could he explain my absence? It's obvious what he and Puzzling Evidence were forced to fake.
What did those files contain? Well, again, for the record, here are the dates for significant encounters of Phase Two from 1978 to1984:
March 20, 1978 - Charles Bukowski
April 20, 1979 - Marshall McLuhan
December 2, 1979 - Walter Bowart
April 28, 1980 - Joe Dun Sloan
July 29, 1980 - Mae Brussell
August 8, 1981 - Sherman Skolnick
November 18, 1981 - Ian Arlett
April 3, 1982 - Paul Shockley
April 22, 1982 - Dr. Beter
June 23, 1982 - Barrington Nevitt
June 15, 1983 - Nelson Thall
September 10, 1983 - David E. Worcester
December 29, 1983 - Garrett Deane
August 14, 1984 - Frank Zappa
On August 28, 1984 Bob Marshall made his first broadcast of the International Connection on CKLN-FM, 88.1 in Toronto. This was the beginning of Phase 3. Connie and I privately referred to this act as WHO'S FORGOTTEN FURRY LINT? "Bob Marshall" was Bobby Dean's new role as a journalist and broadcaster. For the next three years Marshall was the figure to prepare the ground for the unveiling of me and my awesome mission - Phase 4. Bobby Dean, with the assistance of his friend Art McKay, had quietly rehearsed this new public visibility by giving a lecture on the work of Marshall McLuhan to a small class at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax on January 6, 1984.
As you well know, Charles, in January of 1987 I met with your representatives in London to arrange your purchase of a large quantity of gold bullion. After that we were ready. We duped Adam Vaughan, the manager of CKLN at the time, by having Bob Marshall replay some audio tapes by Dr. Beter (which Vaughan had forbidden). Bob Marshall was fired. Myke Dyer was upset. Myke invited Bob onto his show at the same station. LO!! I now had a discarnate forum to stage my campaign for chairmanship of the Secret Council of Ten. It was June 17, 1987 - in the middle of the Iran- Contra hearings and two months to the day before the Harmonic Bobvirgins. The world began to feel the effects of decades of planning as momentous changes became obvious to everybody.
A footnote: to illustrate how the forgotten details in peoples' lives resonate and often are prophetic, consider these facts:-
1. Carolyn Wheeler had a boyfriend before she met Bobby Dean. His name was Bob Dyer.
2. Bobby Dean had a girlfriend before he met Carolyn Wheeler. Her name was Carroll Dyer.
3. Bob Dyer, Carroll Dyer and Myke Dyer were not related and never knew each other.
Oh, Gotta Go,
Let Me Know,
Bob
INDEX
AC LaRouche, Citizens For. "Stamp Out the Aquarian Conspiracy".
Published by Citizens for LaRouche, June, 1980.
BP LaRouche, Lyndon. "Beyond Psychoanalysis". The Campaigner,
September/October, 1973.
CA McLuhan, Marshall, and Watson, Wilfred. From Cliche´ to
Archetype. New York: Viking Press, 1970.
CB McLuhan, Marshall, and Parker, Harley (via George Thompson).
Counterblast. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1969.
CC Thompson, William Irwin. "Culture, Chaos, and Planetary
Transformation". The Quest, Vol. 4, No. 1
(Spring, 1991).
CM LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Cantor Transfinite in Music and Poetry".
The Campaigner, December, 1979.
CN McLuhan, Marshall. "The Future of Banking".
Canadian National Bank (Montreal) 100th
Annual Report Publication, December, 1974.
CO McLuhan, Marshall. Culture Is Our Business. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1970.
CQ Thompson, William Irwin. "William Irwin Thompson".
The CoEvolution Quarterly, Issue No. 20
(Winter, 1978/79).
CT LaRouche, Lyndon. "Physics and Economics".
The Campaigner, January/February, 1976.
DE McLuhan, Marshall. "Vertical Suburbs are Hi-Rise Slums".
The McLuhan DEW-Line Newsletter,
Vol. 1, No. 7 (January, 1969).
EI LaRouche, Lyndon. "Aristotle Is the Root of the Evil We Confront
Today". Executive Intelligence Review,
Vol. 18, No. 35, September 13, 1991.
ER LaRouche, Lyndon. "Woodward's Book on Casey: A Blend of
Fact and Fiction". Executive Intelligence Review,
Vol. 14, No. 41, October 16, 1987.
EW Thompson, William Irwin. Evil and World Order. New York:
Harper & Row, 1977.
GG McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. New York: Mentor Books, 1962.
GK Thompson, William Irwin. "Gaia and the Politics of Life." In Gaia:
A Way of Knowing - Political Implications of the
New Biology. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Press,
1987.
GP Thompson, William Irwin. "A Gaian Politics".
Whole Earth Review, Issue No. 53
(Winter, 1986/87).
GR McLuhan, Marshall. "The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, Planets
in the Age of Spaceship Earth". University
of Toronto Graduate, Spring, 1971.
GV McLuhan, Marshall, and Powers, Bruce. The Global Village:
Transformations in World Life and Media in the
21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.
HC McLuhan, Marshall. McLuhan: Hot & Cool - A Critical Symposium.
Edited by Gerald Stearn. New York: Dial Press,
1967.
IB Thompson, William Irwin. "It's Already Begun".
In Context, Winter, 1985/86.
IC McLuhan, Marshall. "The Implications of Cultural Uniformity".
In Superculture: American Popular Culture and
Europe. Edited by C.W.E. Bigsby.
Bowling Green: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1975.
IG LaRouche, Lyndon. "How to Introduce Beethoven to American
Laymen". The Campaigner, September, 1979.
IL McLuhan, Marshall. The Interior Landscape: The Literary
Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962.
Selected by Eugene McNamara. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1969.
IP Kroker, Arthur, and Kroker, Marilouise, eds. Ideology and Power
in the age of Lenin in Ruins. Montreal: New World
Perspectives, 1991.
IS Thompson, William Irwin. Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds
of Myth and Science. New York: St. Martin's Press,
1989.
JC McLuhan, Marshall, and Powers, Bruce. "Ma Bell Minus the
Nantucket Gam: Or the Impact of High-Speed
Data Transmission". Journal of Communication,
Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer, 1981).
JQ McLuhan, Marshall. "Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process".
Renascence, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1951.
KP Nevitt, Barrington. Keeping Ahead of Economic Panic.
Montreal: Gamma Institute Press, 1985.
LT McLuhan, Marshall. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Edited by
Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and
William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1987.
MI McLuhan, Marshall, and Nevitt, Barrington. "A Media Approach
to Inflation". The New York Times,
September 21, 1974.
MR McLuhan, Marshall, and Kern, Gary. "An Interview:
McLuhan on Russia". The McLuhan DEW-Line
Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 6 (May/June, 1970).
MY McLuhan, Marshall. "Myth and Mass Media".
Daedalus, Vol. 88, No. 2 (Spring, 1959).
PC LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Principles of Composition".
The Campaigner, September, 1979.
PE Kroker, Arthur, and Kroker, Marilouise, and Cook, David.
Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide
to the Postmodern Scene. Montreal: New
World Perspectives, 1989.
PL McLuhan, Marshall, and Norden, Eric. "Playboy Interview:
Marshall McLuhan". Playboy, Vol. 16, No. 3
(March, 1969).
PM Kroker, Arthur, and Cook, David. The Postmodern Scene:
Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics.
Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1986.
PP LaRouche, Lyndon. "Poe's Conception of Poetry".
The Campaigner, August, 1978.
PR McLuhan, Marshall. "Prospect". Canadian Art,
Vol. 19, September/October, 1962.
PS Thompson, William Irwin. Pacific Shift. San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1985.
PT McLuhan, Marshall. Letter in Playboy, February or March, 1970.
PY McLuhan, Marshall. "Psychopathology of 'Time' and 'Life'".
In Scene Before You: A New Approach to
American Culture. New York: Rinehart, 1955.
(First published in Neurotica 5, 1949).
RE McLuhan, Marshall. "Phase Two". Renascence,
Vol. 14, Summer, 1962.
RF LaRouche, Lyndon. "Rockefeller's 'Fascism with a Democratic
Face'". The Campaigner, November/December,
1974.
SB Hamerman, Warren. "The Self-Development of the Biosphere".
The Campaigner, January/February, 1975.
SC LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Science of Christian Economy".
Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 18, No. 22,
June 7, 1991.
SE LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites".
The Campaigner, May/June, 1978.
SI LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican
Socialist Party". The Campaigner, November,
1973.
SM LaRouche, Lyndon. "The Science of the Human Mind: A Treatise
on Fundamentals". The Campaigner, February,
1984.
TC Kroker, Arthur. Technology and the Canadian Mind:
Innis/McLuhan/Grant. Montreal: New World
Perspectives, 1984.
TF Thompson, William Irwin. The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light:
Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.
TL Portis, Larry. "On the Rise and Decline of Totalitarian
Liberalism: Schlesinger, Bell, LaRouche".
Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory, Vol. XII, No. 3 (Fall, 1988).
TT McLuhan, Marshall, and Nevitt, Barrington. Take Today:
The Executive as Dropout. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
UM McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
New York: Mentor Books, 1964.
VP McLuhan, Marshall, and Parker, Harley. Through the Vanishing
Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York:
Harper & Row, 1968.
VV McLuhan, Marshall. Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations: Studies
In Culture and Communications. New York:
Something Else Press, 1957.
WP McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quentin. War and Peace in the
Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the
Current Spastic Situations That Could Be
Eliminated by More Feedforward. New York:
Bantam Books, 1968.
ZZ McLuhan, Marshall. Whispered to me during a late-night
telephone conversation in 1971.
** Note: Due to technical difficulties, the following words in this
book do not have graves and/or acutes :
au-dela, cliches, deja vu, expose, Metis, recits, Theleme
When you come across them while reading, please imagine
they do.
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