In Response To

“Anarcho-Primitivism: The Green Scare in Green Political Theory”

I was looking through some of the faces that appeared in the End:Civ documentary I mentioned and came across a man named Michael Becker. He’s a political science professor at an institution in California, but more important to me was his research interest: “philosophical and tactical parallels between the Zapatistas and the Earth Liberation Front, drawing on Deleuze’s conception of the rhizome.” I was immediately drawn to contact him and ask him about his work. He got back to me quickly, and I to him as fast, and then he sent me a paper which can be downloaded at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1580329. Overall, it’s a great paper.

Selections from the paper are composed in italics and taken as is, while my questions and responses follow. As a sidenote, I don’t necessarily expect returned responses. My logic is oft-flawed when compared to the article or the “special” tone of my words aren’t respective. Either way, the discussions cease and I’m left to conjure accusations.

“Cybernetic life dispenses with a basic dialectical tension between civilization and primitive existence that has always appeared in the consciousness of civilized cultures. For AI and genetics engineers, such a split simply does not exist.” I think there’s a cleverer way to defeat those we assume are against our values. Why select engineers as inhumane, when if fact they could be doing some great work outside of their obviously irrational career choice? I’m nitpicking about your selection of techies to criticize because I’m aware of your knowledge of rhizomes and each individual’s potential to supersede conventional judgments.

“Mainstream green political theorists and organizations repudiate attacks against institutions and offer rewards for the capture of radical environmentalists. But it is not so much the tactics that are the target of green political theorists and organizations. Rather, it is the suggestion of a return to the primitive — the healing of the wound that is abstraction, a wound that tears us from the world and tears the world to pieces.” I find inherent fault in the line “healing of the wound that is abstraction”, which suggests civilization is based on intangibility. This isn’t the case, is it? Everything we are afforded via media is available to us if we follow a particular path or are given the option of steps to obtain civilized treasures. The spectacular surround is abstract – advertising, currency, political infrastructure, representative democracy – but the outcome (the relationships you’ve mentioned to me) are very real, albeit dependent upon a classy, faceless, superficial facade of messages. Not siding with green theorists by any means, but green anarchists, and anarchists in general, need abstraction to put the world back together again once we destroy civilization.

“Humans are a biological species belonging to a particular taxonomic order and characterized by certain physiological functions. But humans are the only type of creature that can be characterized as a moral agent because each aspect of our existence–from the general life pattern to specific rules, even to the question of whether to continue to exist as a species or not–is allegedly open to deliberation and choice. Our human existence as a teleological center of life is unique to say the least in that even our continued species existence is open to choice. By contrast, non-human creatures are incapable of choice and thus can only be considered as moral subjects.” This is a pretty heavy transition to make from Paul Taylor’s “free will and autonomy”. How are humans the only type of creature able to be characterized as “moral agent” through deliberation and choice when it’s still unclear the level of deliberation and choice nonhuman animals have? There are many species with the capability to choose, and choose based on social or community thinking, even if their options are limited to what is resourcefully available. We’re in the same circumstance as they in a discussion of choice, but they’re more aware of their resources since they have a firsthand account of obtaining them.

I realize there’s some academic logic of sarcasm you build throughout your paper (such as the paragraph above) which then leads to great critiques in the footnotes (i.e. Mill, Chomsky, Bookchin). I’m curious why your passages on Taylor’s paper can’t be as passionately oppositional as the footnotes and still retain the traditional, academic framework through language and content? I understand the necessary format for academic critique, and while your context and emotion are engaging, the structural expectation journals demand is confusing, unexciting and immature. Why not hit them hard right away instead of waiting until there’s some sort of logical build expectedly inherent in academic writing?

“The hierarchy of humans and nature is duplicated within human cultures. All cultures are equal. But some cultures are more equal than others, an equation solved for by rational and enlightened members of higher cultures. Thus both the lives and natural environments of wild plants and animals and the activities of persons engaging in lower cultural activities must give way to the interests of those engaging in higher level cultural activities. Civ-centrism in Taylor turns out to be the ten thousand year old tradition of the manifest destiny of of a certain type of human existence.” Are higher and lower cultures based on rational and logical distinctions alone? Is this the standard for “most” people who distinguish between cultural groups? Or at least those within such discourse? And fantastic final sentence, which has gotten me thinking about the taxonomy of humanity. Is it possible there are separate Homo species not purely sapiens, evolved to either support Civ or Prim? I know this isn’t a duality, but I offer it as an example. I also know a few thinkers are serious about Homo academicus, Homo novus or Homo economicus, but is it possible to use traditional anthropological taxonomy to honestly and fairly distinguish between modern human groupings? Is this not the direction anarchists aim to go? From a psychological perspective, it seems like the only serious option if a movement toward ending civilization is inevitable – a forced cleaving of basic human interaction into its rightful groupings.

“That ‘nature,’ is socially constructed is evident in its shifting, socially contextualized meanings. In the western tradition nature first relates primarily to religious concerns about a realm of evil, a place of the devil’s snares. As civilization becomes more secularly oriented nature is transformed into a chaotic place as opposed to orderly society and, later still, a reserve of inert ‘resources’ waiting to be tapped, available for the fueling of civilization. Finally, nature becomes a sign within a semiotic system of accelerating and rigidly controlled commodification. Nature is a point of sale with ‘natural’ foods, ‘nature’ adventures, and accompanying ‘outdoor’ products. Advertising for and consuming each product and service contains the slight thrill of experiencing something external, alien, dangerous and forbidden. The continuing theme in each of these iterations of the concept of nature as wilderness is that nature is a threat and its intrusion into civilization a form of deviance. Fantastic description of “nature” and its perceptual steps through human history. Is it possible we’re still in the battle between nature-as-chaos and nature-as-commodity, and the end result will be a choice between the two? Nature-as-evil is on its way out, though USA is a little behind the rest of the world, right? With current geological and meteorological events in New Zealand, Japan and a wintered USA, nature is recruiting chaos consistently (or visa versa, as I prefer it), yet our solution tends to be the next step, semiotic. Unfortunately, I still see nature, chaos and semiotic as signs which we can’t get away from, which is why I’m interested in your living activity.

“Where Taylor and green political theory would like to absorb all understanding and experience into civilization, anarcho-primitivists want to destroy it.” For my own, personal curiosity, is it possible for anarcho-primitivists to absorb all understanding and experience primitively? I mean, we still use Iron, Bronze, Industrial and Information Age tekne readily and hypocritically (that’s why I enjoy Derrick Jensen – he’s self-aware of his hypocrisy). Do you have the confidence and means to survive without the 10,000 years or so of civilized human culture? What is suitable for retention and what is not? Is it truly a matter of judgment? Is that all we have to offer or is there a clear plan of action and use? This is always where I’m held up, looking for those completely autonomous and independent within USA. Seems we envy our past tribal cultures and the few remaining tribal cultures worldwide.

“Rousseau describes the primitive soul as one which “gives itself up to entirely to to the consciousness of its present existence, without any thought of even the nearest futurity.” (Rousseau, 190) By contrast, civilization revolves around planning of the most grandiose ‘futurity’: large scale agriculture, urban planning, military training and expeditions, bureaucratic control of the population, exploration of earth and distant space. Planning, of this magnitude, requires detachment of self from an abstract conception of a potentially transformed space (the conquest of ‘nature’) stretching out over an abstractly configured temporality.” I’m unclear why planning of the magnitude of “large scale agriculture, urban planning, military training…” and so on requires detachment of self from space and time? Does it have to do with conscience, with a self of true, moral authority? I tend to see a direct attachment of the self to abstract conceptions of time and space, for if one was directly engaged in the process of destroying huge swaths of land, uprooting underrepresented groups, murdering civilians, arresting crying housewives, and destroying slugs with each step or dark matter with each rocket-fueled propulsion, they might not actually want to do it. There’s a major disconnect of self between the actual events undertaken and the conceptual planning of those paying others to due such things. Again, this brings me back to finding people who can speak at our level of discourse, but also live as pure examples of that discourse. Not everyone is doing what harms the life we love, right?

And while I like Zerzan, and his and your discussions of Time, a simple understanding of Einstein’s general theory of relativity (albeit, he was a nuclear agent), clarifies time fairly easily.

“Time marks an initial break in consciousness as the literal sense of thinking conjoined with what is thought. Time creates a tear in a mode of thought that had always been one with the field of perception. Memory now can serve a segmented, disembodied field of consciousness that separates perception and perceived and treats the latter as an isolated instance of separate, abstract cognition. Time opens intellectual space for a mode of representative and symbolic thought that can hold the thing represented in a temporal state of suspension. The re- presented image of the ‘thing’ now exists in a cognitively independent space separate from its primal occurrence, the latter being the field in which the perceiver is co-present. It is only in this state of literally suspended animation, a lifeless, soulless state, that the living elements of the primal field can be set up as ‘objects’ by a ‘subject’ who will master them. The decisive aspects of civilization–abstract language including writing, number, art as an attempt at recuperating lost presence, specialization and division of labor–all stem originally from a sort of intellectual killing field, reified time.” Wow! This is some heavy shit, sooo good! First off, how do you make the logical, or psychological transition from Time to Memory? Memory doesn’t necessarily have any relationship to time, being selected experiences rather than linear transitions from then to now. Don’t we tend to remember events, people, places and things based on their importance, their usefulness to another aspect of who we are? So, memory can be recruited to serve perception as its serial accomplice, or in parallel, if we wish or learn it as such. The line before, “Time creates a tear in a mode of thought that had always been one with the field of perception,” is awesomely-stated and reminds me of Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind. He posits that our consciousness prior to civilization consisted of schizophrenic symptoms, whereby we would hear audible voices representing gods of nature – flora, fauna, terra, aqua. As we increased in population and social pressures deemed dependency more central in our lives, order and organization aided in the development of hierarchy, writing, etc. (as you mention in your final sentence above) and those gods or voices of nature became local audibles – kings, lords, family, etc. – until finally it became our own voice. The “intellectual killing field” has been established and our “intellect” is now civilized as “logos”. I’m also a bit alienated by the consideration that my creativity (whether by painting, writing, speaking, crafting, plowing, growing) is reified time, some illusory instance for what action needs to be happening. I know the distinction between “civilized  planning” and “livable planning” is there, but it’s not obvious and could be.

Your transition from the very workable, thoughtful discussion of reified spacetime to agriculture is not clear to me though the semiotic is. I feel there’s a stretch to include agriculture as our divergence from primitive, hunter-gatherer lifestyle because it has been declared so by anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists alike. What’s more fundamental than the need to enclose space and do it to appease our sense of controlled time? What about the simple act of eating? Not everyone was farming, and in fact, there are several cultures who don’t today. They’re hunters, fishers and gatherers, maybe grazers. Could it be agriculture is the bane, the intellectual slip up we resort to when finding the canary in a dark place, post-destruction? How are we going to support the new order of humanity when civilization has crashed and millions, hundreds of millions, have perished?

“Throughout his writing Derek [Derrick] Jensen has noted the similarity between the abusive parent and the abuse of nature. Since the violence of civilization is inevitable we desensitize ourselves to the suffering of the plant and animal world just as the child shuts down his natural emotional response to the incidents of child abuse. The horror is too vivid to acknowledge and confront.” I’d have to go back and read his excerpts, but could we look at it from the parent’s perspective; something so loved as a child should also be synonymous to that of nonhuman organisms, yet we can beat a child into submission and hence, can beat everything which supports our physical survival into submission as well, stating it’s for their own good and our continued existence as “dad”.

“From the moment of the first agri-culture forward those who have mastered agricultural knowledge become similarly separated from the human, animate tools employed in the drudgery of tilling. Domestication and the process of selective breeding immediately appears among humans.” Do you have evidence for selective breeding coming from those mastering “agricultural knowledge? I see Ur is the default culture, but is there no prior evidence of lineage, either matrilineal or patrilineal, being of importance to either early civilized or primitive cultures and selective breeding being the form with which to conserve genes or family?

“Primitive cultures are rooted in myths. Civilizations are based on lies.” Aren’t they both fabrications?

I loved this paper because it had me on high alert and flexed my ability to think about levels of radical, activist thinking I don’t often consider. I produce obvious retort, as opposed to scholarly vocabulary and academic embattlement, opting to express immediate feelings about the dense, unnecessary lingo defaulted to. There’s an expectation I’m supposed to see a person of stature – a person with a doctorate – as an expert and immediately support and honor their standing as one who has also experienced the false hierarchy we’re all made to survive. Maybe I should be nice, maybe I should kiss some ass, but I’m getting pretty tired of having to do that in order to make some distanced relationship work to my advantage. Lethargy within the frame of academic writing and discourse has always been the problem. Select the small thinker and step on the toes of those above. If they’re known and seen, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I wait for an honest exchange and I’m still waiting. Someone gets to know what’s happening.

Mr. Bicameral’s Socks

Forgetting That He Felt Alone

Sitting in bed one fine, sunny day, One decided he wanted to talk to Two but didn’t want just any conversation. One, a more passionate, impulsive type, wanted some answers from Two, the calm, charismatic rationalist.

“Ya know, this is what it feels like to not have what ya want,” said One, trying to pry open his own mouth but unable to because of a slight bind.

“Not having doesn’t feel like anything, in particular. Or at least I can’t place my finger on just one thing,” said Two, trying to poke one finger into the air.

“I’ll try to describe mine, just to give ya an idea. I know sometimes it can be wordless cuz it usually feels more than it thinks,” said One.

“That’s right. That feeling is inside of me, too. Not outside. Everything beyond my skin – hell, everything beyond my senses is better than fine these days. But the feeling doesn’t exist that far outside of me,” said Two, still poking and reaching but only grabbing air.

“Well, I have a feeling of inadequacy inside of me. I know I’m not as good as other people, but the word ‘good’ don’t describe it. It seems everyone I know has found what they wanna do, at least for today. If I say that talking to ya is what I chose to do, I’d say that’s incorrect. I didn’t choose to do this as much as I was forced to or left with it as an only option,” said One.

“You mean you were bored and this was the only thing you could think to do, and doing it is not satisfying, or at least satisfying the urge to find?” said Two, trying to see the white walls on either side of One’s head.

“Sumpin’ like that,” said One, indenting his head. “In all honesty, my home life is beyond great. I’ve a partner who’s happy to take care of my needs, and I’m more than willing to do my part to make ‘em happy. I don’t have any extravagance, and aren’t bored. Being in my head, exploring the world with what’s behind my eyes is just as satisfying as seeing all the wonders of the physical world. Sure, I’d like to see more of my friends and family, talk about their lives and their knowledge, but they have different agendas which keep ‘em tooth-to-tooth in gear,” said One, moving his head in a circular motion, from up to right to down to left.

“Could it be that you’re trying to search out a final peace?” asked Two.

“What do ya mean by ‘final peace’?” asked One.

“I don’t want to say death but wouldn’t that be just fine?” asked Two, again.

“I ain’t ready to die though. I feel like there’s something I can contribute,” said One, opening his hand, as if to give Two a piece of his inner wealth.

“Isn’t that feeling what keeps you inadequate? Knowing you must contribute just like everyone else,” said Two.

“Yes. That’s it!” said One, exasperated, eyes widened by an arriving epiphany found in Two’s words.

“Well, let me tell you something, you don’t have to contribute to humanity just because human nature says so. That means you don’t have to save lives daily, make people smile all the time or feed the hungry. Most of the people that do those kinds of things have so much material and personal wealth, they can’t understand what it means to be in the poor’s position, even if they once were. They just feel pity toward these people, mixed with an eight-ball of guilt, blame and mercy. Instead, you can contribute to other energies most people don’t understand. It all works out in the end,” said Two.

“Aren’t ya forgetting who judges ya and where ya live – in reality?” asked One.

“Well, judgment is the first problem of yours. And second, reality as defined by you, or any other person is not the reality of other living and non-living things. And no, I don’t remember either. I do understand your concern to connect to other people, but you’re a person, right? Doesn’t that mean you have the only connection you’ll ever need? What are you really trying to accomplish here?” asked Two, raising his forehead into little wrinkles.

“Don’t be so concerned. I hear what ya have to say, but what I’m trying to accomplish is a life – one I can call my own but that’s everyone’s. How the hell am I supposed to do that?” asked One, in a listless tone that kept Two’s forehead wrinkled.

“It isn’t as hard as you think it is. And I know I can’t say ‘don’t think about it,’ because that’s always a cop out. We all think, or at least that’s what we call whatever it means to be a part of the same thing. I guess, let go of what you know. Let go of what you think is supposed to keep you living. Be the kind, understanding and caring person you are and life will take care of you. Along the way you’re bound to get something out of it, even if it’s no longer what you’re searching for,” said Two.

“It all sounds so easy coming from ya. How do ya keep positive and restrained in times of tumultuous mishap? I mean, the world is heating up, powerful people getting more powerful, sick people fucking dying daily, and nature being replaced by the goddamn stairs. There ain’t no longer room for the body in the wooooorrrld of minds!” said One, yelling loud enough that Two had to move back, toward a window which overlooked green grass, green trees and green chairs with “MMH” block-letter insignia written on the backs.

“Hey, calm down there, pal,” said Two, cowering a little more and taking heed from behind a pillow.

“DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!” said One, growling.

“Ok, Ok. But one thing: none of your problems are going to be fixed right now, especially by screaming the rest of your smell out at me. You know, I think I’ve figured out your problem. You’re a human being, raised on your civilized idiosyncrasies and hypocritical lifestyles. Don’t blame yourself for the parts of life you didn’t create on your own, and probably don’t even contribute to now. Most other people don’t feel what you feel, so just chill out pal,” said Two as he tried to approach, albeit cautiously.

“I’m sorry but their words and thoughts and feeling possess my mind. I ain’t never gonna forget their faces. Memories have cursed me,” said One, trying to grab his head, but noticing his hands were indisposed.

“I’m right there with you on that. Why do you think I get along so well? I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning, much less what I said to you a few minutes ago. I must’ve not offended you though, because you are still here,” said Two, giggling a little.

“Oh, very funny. So the soothsayer has turned into the jester, huh?” said One.

“Sarcasm won’t get you very far in life, pal. Except it brings you to the doors of other sarcastic people,” said Two, pointing toward the large, yellow fake wood door. Every time when shut, it crashed like the closing of a prison cell gate.

“Sorry, again. So, what do ya think I should do about my dilemma?” asked One.

“Forget about it. What dilemma was that again?” asked Two, really forgetting but smirking.

“Yea, yea. I guess I really don’t have a choice, do I? Life will be, I’ll be me a little while longer and people’ll never quite understand another person if they don’t try on their own. Cut out the middle man, right?” said One.

“Sure. Keep it between you, and, well, you,” said Two, giving One a little rub on the head, being all that he could do.

“But I don’t want me!” said One, sniveling and jumping around on the bed like a madman.

Then a woman in a white dress carrying a yellow particle-splintered tray with about 20 tiny cups on it, walked into the room and announced, “Hello, boys. I have one for you and two for you. Now, who’s who?”

One, pointing to Two, said, “He’s sad and I’m forgetful,” though he was only trying to be sneaky with her.

The woman turned to Two and asked, “Is that right, sir?”

“I don’t know, I can’t remember. Maybe you should ask him,” said Two, pointing to One.

“Sir, are you sure you’re forgetful and he’s sad?” the nurse asked again of One.

“Dammit, just give him the goddamn pill. I’m sure he’ll remember what he is after he takes it,” said One, bobbing his head like a goofy marionette with an amateur puppet master behind the strings.

“Sure, I will. I think he’ll remember as well,” said Two, pointing to One again and laughing.

“Ok, jokers, here you go. I leave it up to the two of you to figure it out. Now play nice, ok?” said the woman calmly, giving the pills away, one to One and two to Two and watching them being swallowed. When she left she closed the door behind her, startling both One and Two who scrambled to hide from the echo underneath a knitted, white blanket.

As she began down the hall, a man in a white coat with a little black name tag stopped her and asked, “So, nurse, how is Mr. Bicameral doing today?”

“Well, doctor, he pulled out the sock puppets again,” said the nurse, smiling.

“Is he frotteurism and bipolar again?” asked the doctor.

“No, I actually think he is affective and AD. Just ask sock ‘Two’ because sock ‘One’ was being a little testy with me.”

“Well, at least he decided to change it up. Good for him.” said the doctor, as they parted ways, walking in opposite directions down the corridor of the second floor of the Metropolitan Mental Hospital.

Actio Potentialis Compos Mentis

Are you able to do and have full control of your mind?

Transition Points Are Hard To Find

An Evolution from Sadness to Anger

My pain is more easily expressed by others because I often think I have no words to express myself.

Today, I hurt because the world doesn’t seem fair. People would tell me, the world isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair. I want to tell them, “That’s not the fair I’m talking about.” I can play your game, be a part of your life, but I’m not the same in mind as you see in body.

Of course, they won’t understand what I’m saying. Or, they won’t want to because it would get too complicated. I would insist I could simplify it, but they would insist they know more and enough. They’ll say they know what’s right for everyone and I would walk away thinking as I did before: I don’t want to be a part of the lives of those who know more.

Even though I try to get beyond the question – what am I? – it pounds at my mind. It draws tears from my eyes, rips open my throat, and it’s too raw to explain. Every time I hear someone scream about the same hopelessness, I want to scream with them. But they can’t hear – they sang it to me, read it to me, made me watch it, and all from a distance, never hand in hand or arm in arm.

I think about death as being one answer, but there’s more hope inside of me than anyone can understand, including myself. My hope is one person will catch on to my feelings, one person who can save me and I can save them, and we’ll never have to worry about fitting in to another person’s schema.

I know I’ll spend my entire life searching. If it isn’t a question of what am I now, it’ll be another in seven years and then 14 years and then 49 years. At that point death will be my friend, or at least a place to feel no other choices. Right now I have life to keep me busy but I’m not a person to bow down to it or manipulate it. Can I be cunning enough to weave in and out of the many levels, places, dimensions and values other people place in life?

I fear the inevitable answer is no. The power of society gets to you at some point, as it already has with me. I may not be strong enough to get away, but I feel I could create happiness my way. I’m not curious enough to detach from the world that has comforted me until now.

There is a common bond here. The search is for people who feel the same, separating who they are inside and what they emit outside. We’re so afraid. I’m so scared, but of what I don’t know. I’m afraid to leap, to really throw who I am out to the people who don’t appear to care. I’m afraid of being harmed by the people who want to keep the best part of life under wraps or else the whole world would not cater to their manipulations.

The revolutionary’s goal has been to bring down the elite just to create new elite over again. I want to be elite in myself. The only control is what I can’t do and I want to be sure I’ll be fine and be supported by others – not just financially, but thoughtfully.

It has come to the point where I don’t have anywhere else to turn, except to myself. Even worse than this feeling is the fact, the fucking fact, many people also think this way. They’re like me – unsure they can be different. I’m walking sincere now, not talking like the convincers, the persuasive states, officials, bosses, pushers, and insecure and hungry cash-mongers.

They’re so obvious.

Let’s find the ones who have a voice but can’t be heard because they fear their talents and passions. Let’s forget the ones who hide behind the doors of security, accumulating wealth and false knowledge while pretending to escape from the walls built around them because of their money. These walls are an infection of lethargy spread around the world and worse than what so many call “slacking”, which I call living.

Where are these people who cannot speak? Where are the people trying to find the ones who are underground cultural luminaries? They made it there by living the cause, but are they gone? Have they been swallowed by autonomous fame and let their listeners cater to our needs?

I’m curious how a state of utter despair, fear and sadness at a lost community has turned into anger toward its disappearance. I started alone and now I can fight again. We can fight with words, fists and ideas, never playing into violence and only being confrontational with a truth other than our own.

Talking as myself is never creative enough if I’m not trendy about it. My research and fact aren’t methodologically similar to those passed from ibn al-Haytham to Galileo to Bacon to Locke, so my words won’t be trusted and accepted. The feelings of the past aren’t factual, aren’t real anymore. The feelings are what happens right now and are the impulses to live how we want without anymore hesitation. Who can I find to help me? It has to be someone who wants help.

I’m curious if a person of older age than me will say, “Just wait, you will come out of it, you will become calmer, more at peace.” I say, I know I may, but only because I give in, because I feel my mind and body, and the support systems around me, will not hold out, just as you haven’t.

I know my answer to what am I? I am me, micah. I’m the person who is writing these thoughts, moving passed them and searching for a new way to get the point across. Frames of reference, point coordinates and that physical mumbo jumbo only make understanding more difficult and make unity a much more distant goal. Specializations aren’t survival, they’re destructive forces of togetherness, of everyone being different but feeling the same feeling. It’s easy to get tired of asking and settle on what makes life simple, but for some of us life isn’t simple. The more I tell you, the more you will embrace or avoid me. Then we’ll know where we stand; not together as individuals, but together as individuals of someone else’s wasteful cause.

Inner Liberation Through Anarchy III

Coherent Epistemological Archetypes

Episteme is knowledge or science.

Archetype is an original model.

Truth, belief, justification, internality and externality are synecdoche.

The most convoluted, complex and condescending weapon toward liberated consciousness is the very topic at hand. Not only is there a loaded and continual cycle of re-generative semiotics, there is a dilution of human experience and egotistical indulgence in the terminology of knowledge, origin, interpretation and observation, much of which is metonymously counter-intuitive. I feel Bey is addressing telos on predicate, an intellectual expectation forced upon anyone achieving a higher sense of human mentalism. There is an inert rationale of complication, teeming with endless inquiries into “truth”, “belief”, “justification”, “internalization” and “externalization” which can never and have never been appropriated with clarity. We’re asking for too much indoctrination and post-less thought if we enter the realm of meta-rational antimony.

Rather than dissect origins of Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic linguistics in the conceptualization of symbolic learning, it is important to ask why. Though why is also endless, we can ask what for?. What is epistemology for? What are archetypes for? What is hermeneutics for? What is phenomenology for? Many have made a career out of answering such questions, delicately and rambunctiously fitting and slamming divergent explanans into the tedious and eloquent activities of every day. For our epistemological ratiocination, we’ll simply and briefly state the who and what.

Epistemology is the word of knowledge, or the original attempt at developing a mentality of scientific thoroughness. While the term was amalgamated in the 18th century, the need or innate drive and potentiality for communicable truth, belief and justification overwhelmed conversations in ancient Greece. To assume this age as the origin for such discourse neglects the internality-externality inherent in experiencing and reintroducing through transference, of which must have developed in Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Far Eastern cultures and traditional mythical structures hundreds and thousands of years prior. Once a challenge to purely external mind-before-matter functionality occurred – due to both empirically-deduced and rationally-induced causation in human micro-evolution – all subsequent cultural regeneration induced the act of knowing, taking a purely mental endeavor into the realm of praxis.

From such a point emerged a raison d’etre within the thinker’s existenz. Knowing became telos itself, as demonstrated by a personal interpretation of Bey’s ordination, and diverged across many noospheric landscapes. Taking on Babylonian and Roman conquests, Indian and Persian spiritual Empire, disease and seafaring revenge in middle European voyage, and rooted industrial production during the dominance of Western technical allegiance, each ancient and relative epoch clearly influenced the social and individual expectation of fact and fiction via episteme, offering scaffolding and proximation within singular spacetime. Much of the conserved knowledge isn’t useful or vital to a continued conjectural status, but the information intended survival over declarative suppositions. Yet, we’ve taken the inertially-framed verbal spats further than necessary, with their manipulative outcomes usurping clever and witty natural and mental principles. The archetypes are time-tested beyond personal actualities and our minds have been made up for us.

Meaning in Hermeneutic Phenomenology

Phenomena is that which appears, is observable, or is conscious.

Hermeneutics is the messenger, translator or interpreter.

Noema is associated intentionally as the ideal act.

Noesis is associated purposefully as the real act.

During this spatiotemporal process of uncontrollable mental configuration, representational confluence – or conceptual convergence if preferred – of a continual collective thought process was actually wrought with inter-subjective retrieval. Once entered into the person’s sensory-perceptive systems – albeit those with multitudinally-magnified and conserved morphology – experiences of personal and social pliability contextually altered inert symbolism conceptually and neuroanatomically. In this instance, the course of archetypal knowledge developing through phenomena and epi-phenomena became subject to a knowledge underdetermined unless hermeneutically-dissected. Hence we develop such new ideas as those filtered throughout above (existenz, telos…), Husserl’s noema and noesis, and strains of intentionality, Bentham, ontology and a varied argument on the nature of being, of which is the easiest to encounter throughout traditional Western, scholastic philosophy and education. The micro-evolution of human thought crescendoed during the Enlightenment and Victorian eras, only to become materialistically rehearsed in the industrial, technological, information and beta movements we use to interpretatively alienate Now.

It no longer takes a discussion of philosophy to uncover a meaningful epistemological citation for how anarchy can awaken a dreamer’s caustic mirage of utopia. To know, believe, trust or justify in a newly formed conscious-less space takes understanding how much of each comes from thoughtless, feel-fueled self-exposition. One cannot trust another’s symbolism, much less believe archaic, archetypal congruency as a methodology for getting through a day, when the hierarchical nature of personal interactions – much less the strenuous path from birth to cognitive awareness and on to vision-logic – is distantly discordant. We’re so unattached to this level of communicative lexicon as common talk, it’s become irrelevant to minute renderings of anarchic magic and the meta-rationality of achieving rebellion, revolution or reintegrative teleological consideration. One can talk the talk, but walking tends to develop first.

Why there is no anarchy in practice beyond the retro-fitted synonyms of a neoteric industrial and sustainable economy is simply because the comfort level of lifestyle and learning is tangential. There is no talk of hierarchical denigration cast with exploitative memetic for fear of self-deluded grandeur. We cannot delineate between noema and noesis because we simply don’t understand the difference between purpose and intention. Both seek the future rather than letting the experience come to us. Our dilemma in developing a cultural awareness of the need for anarchy and liberated consciousness still lies in the simple pleasures of avoiding pain and loss physically and mentally. We will interpret and observe, standing at a distance while reading a book before we include a potential for being subjective and phenomenal selves. ‘Look from one side to the other but never submit yourself to slur’, as the koan and kudos go.

Next: Teaching Sexual Awareness and Using Pleasure Liberation

Seagull and the Sullen Will

I’ve lost my will. The world has crushed me. People have abandoned truth. I’m soon to abandon truth because it makes no difference to know it. How defeated I feel! To be silent is…but it wasn’t supposed to occur until older ages. I’m too young for this separation from the grandeur of life, of people’s actions, passions, events and desires. I see it in all walks of life, and those walks I don’t see are already where I’m headed.

The intensity I was born and raised with still lingers and surmounts so often, but in forms that hurt the closest to me. I haven’t yet found a channel to express such brutality and if the sight is lost, I may continue to denigrate the beauty of said closeness.

I can no longer join a group unless it is in the name of generativity. I was told I can’t relax and must always be doing something. Something becomes neurotic. It becomes addiction and repetition if there is not creation or upkeep involved in the action. It stresses me out to not have order in my life so that I may see the chaos around. If I am disordered personally I cannot accept chasmic significance in a transcendental foray.

I watched a seagull die today. I was walking on the beach with the dogs and in the distance were two seagulls standing in the sand. The more animalistic of the two ran over, missing the larger one which had taken to the air, but able to catch the smaller one, who never really got off the ground. I wasn’t sure if it was already damaged, but the animal took care of any final moments. I sprinted about 50 yards to get to the bird, as the dogs were a little uncertain about the situation, slowly going away from the avian. As I got there I saw the struggle to survive. A broken leg, wings which would not lift the body, and a nodding head that would occasionally signal death by ceasing movement. I can’t say if it was beautiful, but I hadn’t experienced a natural death in years. I made the dogs watch. It was so close to a sign of personal loss. I’m lost.

I realized why I take down these moments and feelings. There is little more spiritual than what I offer myself here. I am selfish to think what I compose can be sold or published for more eyes to see. I hinged a reality on this very internal process, hoping to use myself as a career. I refuse to let that happen and can’t really say when I can release all this dangerous gorgeousness. It won’t make life easier or affluent and will truly alienate the depth of my freedom. I want too badly for people to hear and feel this deep passionate emotion, just as they do a crafted piece of tonality from a talented musician.

I don’t tell a story as a writer should. I live moments and write down observations and feelings. I don’t have themes behind the words, don’t have images to drive imagination, and aren’t forcing anything through repetition. I’m pure of heart and effort but fight the loneliness and desperation of absent viewers. I know rI’m cared about but it’s never human. The sun shines for me when I’m most genuinely sad and warms internal organs, not a body without organs.

I want to wail with the ones who wail, but then it won’t be desertion. It will be revolution, marching toward the finish line of justice, love, liberty, revenge, or annihilation. The sound of heartache is convoluted by purpose and planning what must come next; boots and sandals walking side by side to mend the melting pot that is leaking alchemy’s gold falsity. There is pretense in epic proportion when the piece by piece is subtler than integrative factions of forever. And now I have begun to fight and leave my sullen grace behind. The shift is so quick and vital with unconsciousness. The beat drives from within and only increases so slightly to take my suffering away. I have to control it though doing so is against my longing for silence and my loss of free will.

Creeping into the verbiage is better than writing about a creepy character destined to exonerate blackness and contempt into the shadows of animate souls. I can see the decrepit farce of a mortal figure, gray skin, no facial hair, pointed teeth, and scars from encounters with every frightful observer. As immediately as the fearsome phantasm forms, a precarious monster sings with sweet voice. She only appears intimidating on surface, but underneath the layers of grotesqueness is a dear friend, one that will unconditionally love hatred and superficiality. She understands what is missing and when an amount of time won’t exist to prevent a comfortable life. The pattern is not starting over, it’s disappearing. And it’s ok.

Just be patient and calm. A twitch travels through my nerves, wanting to force my hand toward a different parable. I cannot hear what they have to say. I care less for the line they travel, as my flight died with the seagull. I can be situated in seat, hardened to the vision that vacuums itself into a tube of tangles. It is ok to be here, doing this, and not caring for anyone other than me. Me is better than I. Me is better than you. Me is what this is. Me is love.

And when no one is here to express a mutual love, self love is never enough. The absence it what causes the hysteria behind insecurity. Some have a grasp on what it means to live and die alone, while others look into your eyes and beg for forgiveness and salvation. Please save me! is what they want to scream into your eyes. I can’t hear you when I look over you. I listen to what she asks and not how I intervene on what she has done to you. It is a cosmic precedent that supersedes even her. And she is special.

Liberation Teleology

Death is not an end we consider now…

Inner Liberation Through Anarchy

According to Hakim Bey in “TAZ”, there are seven “magical weapons” anarchy lacks in order to be as effective as “inner liberation”. They are as follows:

1. A sense of the meta-rational; ways to go into smooth, nomadic or chaotic thinking and perception
2. An actual definition of self-realized or liberated consciousness and how to approach it
3. A coherent archetypal view of epistemology using hermeneutic phenomenology to uncover meaning
4. A teaching of sexuality and pleasure used for awareness and liberation
5. An attitude of celebration; relieving psychic debt through generosity
6. A language to communicate the first five steps of cognition: sense/perception, consciousness, knowledge/meaning, sexuality, happiness
7. silence

A Sense of the Meta-Rational

Hakim Bey intentions a narrative with natural transitions easing an understanding for the power and fluency of anarchy as a model and actuated lifestyle. The first quizzical conundrum of developing a sense of the meta-rational lies in what it means to sense forms of cognition, such as rationality or meta-rationality. To experience a paradigmatic shift of worldview from ration to meta-ration is not a simple task for most people, especially those whose mentalities are dominated by overt doing, reaction or physicality. There is not only personal reason for the individual to overcome, but social pressure from affiliation disallowing “smooth”, “nomadic” and especially “chaotic” thinking.

Smooth thinking tends to result in a posture of natural balance, where one works with identity, relationships, roles and meta-physicality until workless is awareness and comfort in the consistent state. The difficulty of smooth thinking leading to meta-rationality is the perception higher cognitive states can’t be achieved in actualized circumstances. Rationality in the scholastic sense applies a level of technical and intellectual burden to everyday life, rather than the sophomoric, anti-teknics insinuated within Bey’s meta-rationality – organically calculating amounting to fluidly instinctive! Though meta-rationality tends toward primitive nomadism, smooth thinking as a contributing sense means accepting forces others naively support as common thought within a dilettante, philosophical framework. With fateless, conscious adaptation to life-as-known, smoothly-living-unknown is effortless.

As for nomadic thinking, Homo and especially USAn are far from the terrestrial vagabonding never quite adopted by colonizers. To have a sense of meta-rationality through nomadism, it is imperative for those unaccustomed to attend to Native American and indigenous ideologies and spirituality. The sheer generality and wander! of naturalism neurologically patterned in the native cosmic systems are hardly attainable through postpartum learning. Yet, even the modern native has been coerced into rational representation, albeit a settled restraint to the Rez. There are neoteric forms of nomadism developing in small, mostly anarchic groups and communities; those who roam with what fits into a pack, on a bike or in a car, never to be stable for more than what’s acceptable to minute mind and brief body. They are syndicated on mutuality, anarchy without adjectives, and co-operation morphing survival into living, caring and loving the needs and abilities of one another. But the struggle for arrogating such nomadic thinking lies in the denial of identity alteration and acceptance, with lifestyles rarely catering to the social individual, while the individualist is instead forced to flex compliance and brief conformity during a struggle to retain meta-rational motivation.

Chaotic thinking is the most deliberate and personally harmful, yet when a social shift of mass proportion meta-enlightens the horde, those prepared in chaos! are fully advantageous. To meta-rationalize in non-linearity produces constant opposition, for the majority of humans take chaos as either disorder or survive and thrive on artificial ordination. With such a civil expectation traversing from hierarchical plateaus as well as the very intimates intending to love and care unconditionally for one another, there are deep-seated burdens which no chasmic cloud, tide, leaf or nervous system can fill. Chaotic thinking and eco-logic threaten love, allegiance, consideration and respect, teetering on pagan and Satanic eros- and thanatos-driven psychoanalytic drivel if not rudimentarily perceived in smooth and nomadic terms. A sacrosanct, introverted investment in chaos does not lead to negative attitudes or uniquely human destructive behaviors, but it will alienate the meta-rationality of transcendentalism, which tends to be at the root of anarchy in affluency. Chaos existed in a primal form before this, and to begin there is to end now.

Smooth, Nomadic and Chaotic Ways

What are the “ways” to enter smooth, nomadic and chaotic thinking? There is only one way, though there are steps in the meantime, spaces and location for times to pass until attention is accrued by the thinking type itself.

Smooth thinking is the least adverse to common human goals. Most people want simplicity, balance, ease and self-control. Synonymous doctrines for smoothness can be found everywhere, as the denier cri for all ideological searches. By using smooth thinking cooperatively with rationality, we can absolve differentiation through plural identification – find it in everything literal. With one objective superseding flagrant esotericism, the mind becomes underwhelmed and less trained by abject repetition. Take the depths and shallows of philosophical, economic, political, pornographic, or scientific literature and art and peel away layer after layer to uncover understanding, well-being, respect, intimacy, and wonder – all possessing similar senses of meta-rationality. Inherit an obtund sensitivity for judgment and analysis, instead pummeling the actionable breadth of smoothness from all options into awesome activity!

Nomadic thinking is the most sincerely active of the three, unifying transiency and novelty to experiences guided toward sustainability and genuine livelihood. There are many examples of communities, group thoughts, cultures and civilizations developed in the rights of natural and organic inclusion, whereby humanity and wilderness are the same along a rhizomatic spectrum. With the ability to interweave in and out of social circumstances entitling base-need satisfaction, the nomad adopts habits and movements enabling just integration and transcendent individuation. The flexibility of the nomad feeds directly off of the “smoothness transition”, an inevitable outcome from searching and finding apt plurality in self-conscious sense and perception. It is a subliminal diversion representing covert injections! of anarchic magic into ordained social and psychological adaptations.

The necromantic fate of chaotic thinking simply suggests that who and what we are right now! is gone. The sensation and perception of traditionalism is predestined to collapse (Think of Greek, Enlightenment and Victorian hermeneutics and semiotics to never happen – no! Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, de Saussure, Husserl, Mach, Fechner, Weber, Bregman and on and on and no and.. No! representation through conceptualization.) The structural functions of atomic positivism faintly retained in recollected hindsight and collective memory is heedless to the personable objections made at linear objectification. In such objections, a path will be untraced, smoothed out, trampled on by travelers and transients with no ends, endpoints or need for eschatological end of days in mind, body or backpack. The indeterminancy of chaotically-adaptive thinking remains as such until it provides determined use, hence the proscriptive rationality and advent of meta-rational shifts in what we assume to be obviously logical yet truly, insanely protological.

Next: A Definition of Liberated Consciousness