The Mourning Cloak

transformation & rebirth

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The Rev. Joshua Gerhard Paetkau, M.Div, Rector of the Parishes of New Carlisle and Chaleur Bay in the Anglican Diocese of Quebec.

  • In response to my apathy.

    This is a post my friend Jeff tried to leave in the comments section under my piece on voting. For some reason the comments section on this blog is not working, so I have re-posted this below: 

    Well, now it has been a few months, and I am curious on how well your experiment has turned out. As Gillian Rose points out, “we need to take the risk of identity without the security of identity,” which is, I believe, what your existential protest was a form of. Yet what remains after the risk has been taken? Is there anything left after logic and argumentation – after theoretical abstraction? I would like to see a phenomenology of your abstinence. In return I offer one of my own:
    I spent a week during my summer with some – albeit, a little queeny – Franciscans. After falling asleep reading Kierkegaard’s Work of Love, I was awoken to some yelling downstairs and a priest knocking at my door, inquiring if I knew any bee sting remedies. I came down to find one of the brothers had been stung after accidently disturbing a wasp nest next to a door. I suggested (rather ignorantly) that they should perhaps try to use some mud to cool the sting. I was somewhat surprised by the over-reaction of frantic Franciscan. He was very shrill and panicked, even for someone who had never been stung by a wasp before. However, amidst his cries, I discerned that the panic was not induce by the physical pain, but the mental: he had no health insurance, and he was afraid he might be allergic to bees. You see I was in the United States, where health care is not as universally offered as it is in Canada. Not having coverage, if the swelling on his arm didn’t stop, it would mean personal bankruptcy, or his death. Luckily it did. 
    Perhaps it was the mud, or the mustard that the priest mixed into the mud (a home remedy I gathered). Either way I learned a fact that day which had never occurred to me before: how you react to a bee sting might depend on where you were born. Or, said differently, in what political community you find yourself in.
    I tell this story to point to what I see as the limitations of your logic. You choose the passivity of not voting (or so I understood) because you wanted to express your discontent with a system you believe has failed, by refusing to recognize it. While I do not disagree with your concern about the limitations of parliamentary democracy, I cannot help but wonder if your alternative expression, your risk, might have been a right step in the wrong direction. 
    It turns on the question of identity and law. The laws of the political community in which you find yourself have been structured in a way that results in injustice, and indeed, was structured by injustice. You feel alienated by the laws of the political community which you did not make and so you protest it by refusing to negotiate yourself with those laws, by withdrawing yourself from them, and refusing to recognize them. But as Socrates noted, the laws are what give you birth, what develop your agency. Your very ability to reject the laws is predicated upon the existence of the laws in the first place. In other words, and to invoke Rose again, I fail to see how your response is not a form of “despairing rationalism without reason.” 
    Criticism of parliamentary democracy and its role in liberal capitalism is not a bad thing and is very much in need. But that criticism cannot be based out of a refusal to negotiate one’s identity with the law – that is just an attempt to grope towards a New Jerusalem which doesn’t actually exist and cannot be brought into being.
    Its also one sided. As Hegel might have pointed out, the cornerstone of the social and economic laws which structure our society are founded not on parliamentary democracy, but bourgeois property ownership. A radical rejection of the liberal capitalist system would begin in renouncing one’s private property, not merely refusing to mark a ballot; that doesn’t actually cost you anything. However, as we both know, this requires a kind of political commitment which challenges most us far too deeply, so we leave that for the Franciscans.
    And as that Franciscan, who had radically renounced his private property (including health insurance) might have realized, not being faced with a decision between bankruptcy and death because of a bee sting – a social, economic, and political luxury that only came about through the hard work of negotiating with the laws – is a reality we in Canada can take for granted. 
    Just because change in which political party happens to be ruling will feel marginal at best, does not make it true.

  • Magical Voluntarism.

    You can achieve anything if you try hard enough. Anything. 
    – Capitalist platitude. 
    I just came across a wonderful term on Jodi Dean’s blog to describe the place of the individual from the perspective of capitalist realism. Magical voluntarism. Anything can be achieved by the Herculean effort of the individual will. Anything at all. This in contrast to the fatalist doctrine of a politics which will never change. Here is an excerpt of that post, which is in fact taken from another blogger. Recycle Recycle: 

    What characterises capitalist realism is fatalism at the level of politics (where nothing much can ever change, except to move further in the direction of neoliberalisation) and magical voluntarism at the level of the individual: you can achieve anything, if you only you do more training courses, listen to Mary Portas or Kirsty Alsop, try harder. Magical voluntarism, naturally, also drives the tabloid culture of individual blame (resign, resign!) in which the tabloids themselves are now caught up, although, as Zone Styx noted, News International clearly expects far more from public service managers like Sharon Shoemith than it does from its own executives.) Individualise, individualise, insists capitalist ideology. Note the way in which the media sought to reduce the Lulsec story to Ryan Cleary, or the way in which the clueless Peter Preston finds the idea of a collective entity such as DSG unfathomable. – k-punk cited on
    Magical voluntarism. I think this really captures the spirit of our times, if it can be called a spirit. The global paralysis of politics and collective action coupled with an absurd pressure on the individual to perform, to succeed. Competition drags on, pressure builds and the world becomes more and more incoherent as humanity is shuffled into atomized parcels and pitted against itself.

    One last note, as I read this I was reminded of a scene in China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station where Yagharek the geruda explains the nature of a crime he has committed to the book’s protagonist Isaac. Yagharek comes from a society which emphasizes individual choice as the highest good. The society is, therefore, a communist one because this allows for the greatest possibility of individual choice. Yagharek, whose crime is described as choice-theft has been cast out from the group as an abstract individual, as opposed to a concrete individual.
    To be abstract is to ignore context, to ignore the reality of relationship as formative of individuality. Inseperable from it. Human reality, at base, is formed not by an aggregate of self-contained I’s but is always embedded in an I-you relationship. To treat the individual as an abstract entity is, therefore, a violence upon reality a de-realization. There is no individual as such, only individuals who are in constant relationship with others. Who become individuals only in and through their particular relationships and responsibilities. I bring this up only to point out that one of the important failings of capitalism, and particulary of the neoliberal agenda, is not an overemphasis on individuality. It is actually a failure to coherently articulate a notion of the individual at all. 

  • War and Revolution

    Neoliberalism is a war. A World War. It is, says Subcomandante Marcos of the Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional, the Fourth World War. The Third was the Cold War, a war fought in a global arena between two superpowers, but not directly by them. It was a war at the peripheries. We know it was a war because of the obsession with armaments, armaments for war. Speed is the essence of war said Sun Tzu, but he was wrong. To build for destruction is the essence of war, its only manifesto. We know it was a World War, also, because of the myriad satellite conflicts, destruction at the periphery. The destruction of those at the margins, power games in a new economic-global configuration. Still a war. A recognizable war whose shape is easily discernible as such.

    The Fourth World War is different. The inauguration of this war, says Marcos, coincides with the victory of the US over the USSR. It is different because there is no immediate rival. There are no two superpowers apparently competing for dominion. There is only the monolith. The steamroller of a global techno-village. The homogenization of the world and the hegemony of the market. This is the new religion. This is neoliberalism. The erasure of difference. The trampling of ways of being. Destroying in order to rebuild.

    Destroying. Throwing all into the melding pot to build a flash image. A shopping mall in the desert. Let them eat IPADs the financial wizards of the federal reserve seem to say in the face of rising food prices. Cake, at least, is edible. Financial wizardry, this occultation of the material, subservience to the abstractions of Capital. This is neoliberalism. This is the new religion. This is war.

    Like other wars this is a war about territory. About redrawing the map. It is about slavery and subservience. It is a new colonialism, that seeks to expand not only its territory and its resources but also its market. It is about a conflagration of war and business. War and business have always gone hand in hand but now, it seems, they are inseparable. There is not, there cannot be, not any longer, a clear sense of victory, of winning the war. Even winning the local conflicts, the peripheral wars, that are a part of this global destruction seems to be an absurd notion of yesteryear. Conflict is interminable. Why? Because it is a part of the process. It is the manner of the world. Flaring up at any time, war is never gone. The interminable, inexorable destruction of the planet, its resources, its people, its cultures drives on. It is, says Marcos, a total war. A war in which the categories of civilian and neutral have become obsolete. Either we ally with the hegemony of Capital, the total war waged by neoliberalism on humanity, or we become its disparate enemies.

    This is a much more stringent, more demanding Either/Or than the facile and stupid Jihad vs McWorld paradigm that has of late appealed to factions within the Western and the Islamic world. The Arab vs American religous contra secular ideologues who mockingly deride reality. Ignoring the destruction that their power games wreak on the world. On the poor and impoverished, the outcast.

    It is not Jihad vs McWorld. Either we die, or we live. Either we kill all that we have known in our short existence on this world, or we learn to nurture life. We accept the absurd monstrosities of financial magicians who teach us the importance of banking, of credit, of gaudy deception or we turn to those who know how to nurture trees, which plants can be used for food and medicine. Turn to those who know how to listen to a suffering heart, how to find beauty in the world.
    It is simple. It is hard. Could revolution be anything less?

  • Apathy versus Pathos: Reflections on Political Abstinence.

    I meant to publish something about this around the time of the Canadian federal elections but never got around to it. For some reason I thought of it today, and so without further ado I will mount my defense of apathy.

    I did not vote. I do not read the news (except sometimes I do.) I do not want to make too much of this. While both of these passivities are in part political decisions and existential expressions the regimes in which they take place, representational democracy and global media, really do not allow for a great leeway of decision or meaning in the action of their participants, including the decision not to act
    . It is, therefore, a null question whether one votes or does not vote, since the abstract and superficial quality of our current situation has rendered all these decisions apolitical. That being said, with a stubborn insistence, I determined, on the basis of voluntarism, to imbue my own decision of political abstinence with as much significance as I could muster. The absurdity speaks for itself. In a small way I can hope to realize the unreality of the actual. Just because something happens to exist does not make it true.
    In fact, one can see, from the effects of our current global politico-economic situation, that the governing apparatuses, nationally and internationally, are insubstantial and chaotic aggregates. They have not moved forward to address the reality of growing inequality and environmental depravity. Our current parliamentary system appears largely to foreclude transparency and empowerment of people at the local level and is wedded problematically to aggressive corporate interests. And yes I do believe that this is largely a systemic problem, and therefore change in which political party happens to be ruling will be marginal at best. So, to those who think that the last Canadian election has created a more clearly defined political spectrum with stark opposition, I would urge caution. Even the most radical left governments in Latin America have been largely unable to shake the neoliberal legacy. I would certainly maintain that our own election in no way qualifies as a political event.
    Well, that’s all I really have for now. I will try to explain my studied indifference, with relation to news media, at another time perhaps. Suffice to say that at times reading the news makes me feel like an emotional/informational cannibal.

  • Closing Time in the Gardens of the West

    The place I love best is a sweet memory 
    It’s a new path that we trod
    They say low wages are reality 
    If we want to compete abroad. – Bob Dylan 
    A word about the title of this blog. Evening Haze, as you may be aware, is a reference to the song “Working Man’s Blues # 2 from Bob Dylan’s Modern Times album. “There’s an evening haze settling over town..” It also  refers to the vision of the sun setting in the hazy sky caused by distant forest fires, a troubling sense of beauty. The opacity of the sky in subdued glory bearing witness to the burning earth. Finally it is meant to reflect the mood or sensibility of the dying West. Under the watchful eye of Captain Derrida the ship of modernity is sinking into the sea of mourning and insanity. 
    The bright day is over. The glory and ambition of the modern epoch have long faded and with it, in some ways, we have become dulled to the edge of its raw horrors and violence. Now we are left with its nostalgic memory, presented to us in soft colours against the backdrop of a burning world. 
    Sweet memories are, of course, a little comfort against the onslaught of death. The sun of evening is a time for reflection of memories sweetened and softened by the passage of time. It is a bittersweet passage, however, and, as Dylan Thomas reminds us, at times demands a more vigorous passion than the complacency of sentiment:
    Do not go gentle into that good night 
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage,rage against the dying of the light. 
    So it is that the close of the day brings us not only the sweet sadness of closure, but with it an anger that burns anew. Our days have not all been good and we have not always lived well. All the more reason that we should be angry at their passing. Optimism has no place in us. We have lived too raw and violent and have become too dull and callous for serene acceptance to be open to us. All we can do now is despair, rage, repent and hope violently for a new path and a renewed humanity. 
    As we approach the end of the day, the closing time of the West, we are afforded a certain distance to reflect on its good and bad, its pain and its glory. Yet we cannot become trapped within the bittersweet comfort of the past, for the world is now as raw and real as it ever was and demands to be lived in. 

  • The Hiddenness of Time

    The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was.
    It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot 
    in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it 
    paid the outrage of ontology no mind. 
    – China Mieville Iron Council 
    By some strange happenstance or mystic wisdom I had the pleasure of reading China Mieville’s Iron Council, while I was enrolled in a course on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More specifically I read Iron Council as I was working through Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. The effect was electric and unsettling, particularly in the way both these authors engaged with themes of time,existence, and hiddenness. 
    Everpresent in Bonhoeffer’s theological project is the underlying theme of an “epistemology yielded on the basis of revelation,” an idea he discusses explicitly in his post-doctoral work Act and Being. The world is known, in other words, not through empirical observation nor through a process of ratiocination, rather it is known only as it is revealed. In The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer addresses this theme around the binary of revelation/hiddenness. The true disciple of Christ knows only what is revealed to her or him through Jesus Christ, there is no unmediated relationship with the world, with others, or even with oneself. The reverse of this, therefore, is that much is left hidden. Revelation has its own rhythm, its own timing, over which the subject of knowledge has no control. It is given, by the spirit, in the moment it is needed. 
    This is a mystery, yet not a mystical fusion of the I with the Oneness of Being. Precisely in its momentous character revelation is a matter of existence, and in existence there are always others. Indeed, for Bonhoeffer becoming a person is only possible through the other. He writes, “the individual becomes a person ever and again through the other, in the moment.” (Sanctorum Communio). 
    In Mieville’s story there is a monk who, out of the pantheon of gods in the world of Iron Council, worships the God of the Moment. This God reveals knowledge to the monk at the necessary times. Yet the discipleship of the monk is not without cost, indeed it is at the cost of the monk’s very self-knowledge that the revealing comes. Without giving too much away, as the tale progresses the monk, who has joined with a band of rebels and political outcasts in search of their comrades, loses more and more of her (or his) self-knowing as she seeks the revelation needed to make important decisions. 
    Bonhoeffer and Mieville inhabit very different worlds. One a theologian, the other a writer of science fiction. Yet the mysteries of existence, and of time are strongly present. Discipleship, for both, is a costly endeavour, and yet in the end proves the very grace of life. 
    It is grace, it is violence, it is passion. The Christian sense of time is not one of linear accumulation. Nor yet of circulation within an ontologically fixed field. The event of Christ is singularity, forever affixed existence within which existence can take place. 
    This too is the mystery of the church, the presence of Christ on earth, already fulfilled and yet waiting. Hidden yet revealed. Perhaps the Church too, like Mieville’s time golem” is a clot in diachrony, who with the dumb arrogance of its existence pays the outrage of ontology no mind. 
    Or perhaps it should be so. 

  • Omnia Sunt Communia

    Omnia sunt communia 
    – Thomas Muntzer (1488-1525)
    All things are in common. It was this confession that led to the beheading of Thomas Muntzer, theologian and revolutionary. Muntzer’s severed head and body was intended as a warning against heresy, and served to enshrine Muntzer an ambiguous role in history. Beloved more of future generations of radicals and revolutionaries than of the church, Muntzer continues to live in the shadows of theological and political discourse. Now, with talk of “the commons” and community increasingly permeating socio-cultural discourse, this ghostly figure haunts us once more – violently condemning our complacency. 
    Violently, but not very loudly. From his original manifestation as a powerful theological voice in the turmoil of the Reformation and an inspiring visionary and leader in the Peasant’s War, Muntzer next prefigures as a minor analogical character for the Marxist revolutionaries of the 19th century. In our own epoch Muntzer’s embodiment is a literary one, in the novel Q published by an anonymous group of Italian authors under the pseudonym Luther Blisset. 
    Under the banner of this novel, and some others, protestors took to the streets in Italy last November, marching against Berlusconi’s proposed education reforms. The authors of the book, along with a number of other Italian writers, have also been subjected to a proposed blacklisting and banning of their books from library shelves in Italy. Muntzer continues to haunt the political powers of the world, then, not only through the content of works like this but also in the form its production and dissemination whereby the authors endeavour to make their works publicly accessible through free online downloading. 
    But all is not well. For in the very aspect of “Creative Commons” and various “free” and “open” Internet organizations and technology we are faced with a farcical notion of commonality that has to blind itself to the economic contexts and realities in which it is implicated, and in some ways perpetuates a much more noxious and undoubtedly more precarious version of capitalist consumption. 
    The group of authors above, who are known collectively as Wu Ming, are a case in point. Upon entering their website one is greeted with the options of downloading one of their books for free, and possibly giving a donation through the PayPal technology, or purchasing a physical copy of the book through Amazon.com. One of the concerns here, of course, is the replacement of more localized forms of exchange that for all their inequality do contain a certain level of trust, reflexivity, and responsibility on behalf of all parties involved – these forms are replaced by a megalithic enterprise that opens up a space of virtual freedom, a “commons” from which it alone profits. 

  • Hooked Into Machine

    Everything’s provided 
    Consummate Consumer 
    Part of worldly taking 
    Apart from worldly troubles 
    Living in your prewar apartment 
    Soon to be your postwar apartment 
    And you lived in the future 
    And the future 
    It’s here 
    It’s bright 
    It’s now 
    – Regina Spektor “Hooked Into Machine” 

    From time to time the tool-making capacities of the human animal become so entrenched and explosive as to strip-mine the social psyche of entire populations. Bereft of its irony, would the quote above not perfectly exemplify a kind of organicist technologism which we find embodied not only in works of science fiction but much more trenchantly in particular historical episodes. A monstrous, or  robotic, re-organizing of society so as to absorb all the quirks, failings, and conflicts into the cold unity and efficiency of the machine; the calculations of light reverberating sonorously in the untroubled spaces we reside in. Nor should we even properly call them spaces, since, while it is true that the vision is a subspecies of organicism, it lacks the contours of a geography. Properly speaking we could perhaps say that a certain virtual landscape is proposed here, a folding in of time so as to create an instantaneous constancy – “the future is here.” 

    To call such a vision monstrous is misleading, hence the caveat of robotic, which also does not quite express what this particular vision entails. A monster, at least, is still a form of ethical being. Take, for example, the case of Adolph Hitler, who has become the typological case of a monster in the social imaginary of modern history. Precisely as a monster Hitler remains embedded within the framework of ethical imagination – as an embodiment of horror, which is to say of fascination. Thus Hitler even now continues to perpetuate a fascist logic, because fascination -with a “pure” and unified society, body etc. – is precisely, and etymologically, the domain of fascism. Hence the wisdom of Hannah Arendt in drawing out the banality of the evil present in the figures of the Holocaust. How else to undo the potent mythos of those idolaters? 


    The central question, however, has yet to be addressed. The fascination with pure bodies, and therefore the creation of imaginary monsters -to continue with our test subject these would be, for Hitler/National Socialism, the figures of Jews, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals etc. – this fascination amounts to a paranoia which, although it is horrific, disturbing, and distorted, is not altogether new. Moreover these imagined monsters had to be affixed identities which corresponded to actual people. Identity being a rather fluid and “subjective” exercise this can take place, on a small scale, when people within certain geographical bounds are seen as different, marked in some way by gender, skin colour, behavioural patterns, economic status etc., and thereby persecuted by another group who defines the former as somehow a threat to their existence. What we begin to see emerging, then, as the National Socialist dream unfolds is the solidification of forms of identity precisely as new technologies emerge which are able to translate the idolatries of fascist identity politics into a computational regime. Thus, as Edwin Black analyzes in his book IBM and the Holocaust, the asset confiscation, deportation, ghettoization, enslaved labour, and ultimately the murder of millions of Jews was first a matter of identifying people as Jews – a task which required a quick and efficient way of entering and compiling data. This exercise in computation was made possible through IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology. Thus begins the fascist politics of computation, thereby furthering and facilitating the pathology of the Nazi’s and the German people. As it becomes technologized the horrors of identitarian politics become embedded as computational facts. Instances of data. 


    So we must introduce another monster, and this one much more the robotic monster, though history has not regarded him as such. I am speaking, of course, of Thomas J. Watson the CEO of IBM. Watson, as head of the International Business Machines corporation, was instrumental in bringing the tabulation technology employed by the Nazis. Watson was even awarded a medal by the German government for his efforts (although he may have believed it to be a recognition for his efforts towards global commerce and international peace). At any rate Watson, an astute businessman, returned the medal in 1940. The end result of this was a tense relationship between Watson and the German IBM operation, which ended when Germany and the US went to war and the German IBM chapter was seized by the Third Reich. Watson went on to produce technology for the United States military effort, and went so far as to institute a policy that IBM receive only 1% of profits from military technology.  The question which remains, of course, is this: Why call Watson a monster – even a robotic one- wasn’t he just a businessman who made a mistake, and didn’t he pay for it with his war efforts? 


    Right away, however, it becomes apparent that the choice between condemning Watson as a monster for his technological contributions to the Third Reich or exculpating him for his technological assistance to the American War effort is a null question . Watson was neither a fascist nor a politician  but a capitalist businessman and as such could never be considered a monster in the way Hitler is often considered one. It is precisely at this point that Watson is in some ways a more problematic figure. The locus of this problematic is that Watson, in fact, represents an incoherent modality of being. Where Hitler remains, in a negative way, a figure for ethics, Watson does not – having made the break with fascism, and therefore disoccupying the centre of political meaning.  What remains represented by Watson, however, is a digitized unit. That is, Watson symbolizes the cognitarian activation of the flow of technologized data-power. 
    Watson, much more fully than Hitler, therefore fulfills the vision described in Regina Spektor’s work. Elsewhere in the song she describes “herself” as part of a composite correspondence which is synthesized by the mighty power of the machine. The inconsistencies and incoherence of life – the fact that one can orient their business and technological innovations to political visions as diverse and conflicting as Hitler’s German fascism or the American Democratic party’s politics- have no import since they can be synthesized into an artificial reproduction of life. What we must not forget, however, is that someone, or some world, invariably pays the price for these bright futures. It could be the Jews and the Roma of Europe, or it could be, as now, the miners of the Congo who pay with their blood for the continued production of the glut of cellphone and digital technologies which we have now come to rely on as the bright and instant future. 



  • Parish: A Village in the City

    In reference to the insatiable thrust of Capital running rampant over livelihoods, and of the political directorates continued subservience to financial interests (in this case the European Union, but just as well America or Canada) the Italian philosopher and media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has this to say:

    “Peaceful demonstrations will not suffice to change the course of things and violent explosions will be too easily exploited by racists and criminals. A deep change in social perception and social lifestyle will compel a growing part of society to withdraw from the economic field, from the game of work and consumption. These people will abandon individual consumption to create new, enhanced forms of co-habitation, a village economy within the metropolis.”   

    Bifo charts the devastating strain of overwork, particularly in its more cognitive forms under late capitalism or as he likes to put it “semiocapitalism,” not only on the individual psyches of capitalism’s cognitive employees – those workers engaged in the constant accessing and organizing of the seemingly endless pieces of information – but also on the “social brain”, that is, the space of collective consciousness where all these bits of information interact creating the symbolic backdrop for our lives together as human organisms.

    The result of this immense emotional and cognitive strain, suggests Bifo, is the increasing potential of exhaustion as a, not so much revolutionary, force that nonetheless engenders an incredible passivity (beyond passivity?) that points the way forward past the impasse of liberalism.

    While Bifo’s thought on this last point is slightly weak, it is not entirely clear how exhaustion can provide an organizing force for a different type of life, there is still some incredibly poignant insights into the nature of the farce we sometime call “reality.” To suggest that we need a radical re-envisioning and restructuring of the ways in which we produce, consume, and just generally organize ourselves as humans in communities and in the world is no more than needs to be said.

    One final note: Can we not find, in Bifo’s imagery of the village economy within the city, a powerful restatement of the Christian parish? A gathering of people, not disparate in place from others who participate in games of power and the incessant feeding of the flesh, and yet a people who are peculiar in the way they perceive the world, in how they live and how they consume. It is instructive that the people in Bifo’s village in the city withdraw not from society but from the economic field, which is to say, that they have found a God to serve other than Mammon.

  • An Intellectual Magpie: Food for Thought

    We believe we think with our brain, but I think with my feet. 
    It is only there that I come up against something hard. 
    Sometimes, I think with the muscles of my forehead when I bump into something. 
    I have seen enough electro-encephalograms to know there is no shadow of a thought. 
    -Jacques Lacan 
    Sufficiently obscure to enrage Noam Chomsky, this was the answer Lacan proffered to the problem of thought at a conference at MIT. 
    Chomsky decreed Lacan a madman. Richard Webster, who famously critiqued Freud as an unscientific fraud who merely perpetuated the Judeo-Christian legacy in a cryptic form,  hypothesized that Lacanian wisdom was akin to a diet of stones which his insanity caused him to believe to be food and to persuade others to eat. Webster states that Lacan’s rejection of God caused him to set himself up as a God saying that Lacan preyed upon the human propensity to be moved by mystery, particularly when bound up with points of sexual reference, rather than rational explanations. Could we say, as Webster seems to, that Lacan, unlike the Christ, falls prey to the devil in the desert? A diet of rocks, even when by some divine magic we are given the illusion of bread, is still a diet of rocks.

    Transubstantion is precisely how one may avoid eating stones. The distinction between stones and bread is a properly ancient discussion, perhaps as old as philosophy itself. Even in his trenchant critique of the powerful factions of his time Christ would not stoop to accusing his opponents of giving stones to their children when asked for bread. The accusation of a stone-eating magician, then, is only in part a critique of insanity or devious showmanship. As, in fact, the construct of insanity (or the life of the mind more generally) in our time is partially accurate diagnosis and partially a hasty construct borne out of fear because all is not right and when we are reminded of this we would hastily exclude those reminders.
    It is precisely these boundaries, these false constructions that carried a trace of fear and complacency, at which Lacan pushed.

    Thus the criticisms of madman, charlatan, or intellectual magpie all reveal a partial truth, and yet at the same time hasten us towards an unnecessary confusion and caution us not to deliberate and search for wisdom, since our initial posture of failing to comprehend is undoubtedly the proper one.

    Lorenzo Chiesa  in Subjectivity and Otherness, a brilliant examination of Lacan as a systematic thinker, notes that discussion around Lacan is all too often comprised of either a flat out rejection of Lacan as too obscure and stylistically inappropriate, or else a near hypnotic recitation of Lacan as a cultic figure, when in actual matter of fact Lacan may be considered a difficult but systematic thinker, whose unusual style forces his students to be unable to adopt a merely pedagogical approach to thought.

    This is in keeping with a particular French tradition, though it finds common ground with Hegel and Marx among others, that is unsatisfied with the kind of reified position offered by a positivist approach to science, which as a matter of course does consider the universe to be comprised of stones (i.e. abstract facts) that are to be considered from the external god-like position of the scientific mind.

    The ingestion of knowledge, then, is the only appropriate metaphor for a human species. And humans are much more like magpies than we are inclined to consider.