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+\chapter{}
+
+Why raise these questions? To challenge
+an obsessional mode of thought which annunciates itself as new and seems to become
+more rational every day, but which is a
+capital intensive, ghost-haunted complex,
+stealing thought and memory away to hoard
+it. To attack a long and endless, even boring
+set of preoccupations; theme and variation
+on a few original musical phrases; a casting
+out, an obliteration of cacaphonies. But do
+the original themes tell us anything of real
+social behavior of the message-senders, the
+people who generated them? Can we really
+seperate passion from ideas? Even the ambition to succeed can distort ideas. After all,
+how do the preoccupations and passions (to
+say nothing of the confrontation with, or the
+bowing to power) enter the idea-stream?
+After all, people have killed one another to
+preserve their ideas.
+
+What would happen if we altered the
+memory-references to, say, the ancient Greeks,
+and their culture
+(sculpture, philosophy, logic, myth, history)? What if we
+included the practical, day-to-day thought
+and considerations of power? This disruption of the sequence, described as a progressive and ascendant evolutionary movement
+from the simple to the complex would ripple
+back up again to the present, causing glitches
+and noise in the pipelines.
+
+When Marx said that the philosophers
+had only talked, never done anything, he
+was wrong. They indeed did something, for
+the propagation of messages requires a climate of belief which they generated. Marx
+himself refused to let go of any of this past, merely rewriting the perspective.
+
+Consider: Socrates never answers Thrasymachus satisfactorily, in that order-obsessed
+schema, \booktitle{The Republic}. If philosophy is a
+sequence, each succeeder building on each
+preceder, then philosophy never got off the
+ground. We still wait for a response to that
+question: power is justice. What followed is
+nonsense. On the other hand, the merchants
+and politicians, the soldiers listened carefully to Thrasymachus.
+
+And does it mean anything at all that the
+great themes sounded by the Athenian playwrights and philsophers, and upon which
+the great symphony of western thought is
+composed, were all homosexuals, but nevertheless required to mate with women and
+replicate? Is there a hidden content, a secret
+sexual message in philosophy, a movement
+toward body-purified thought? This has
+bearing on the question of heterosexual reproduction, the desire to escape the tyranny
+of Grand Design-serving matings. A homosexual population generally doesn't replicate; it must recruit. Will it put artificial
+reproduction on the agenda? Do dreams of
+non-heterosexual reproduction lead to designs for immortality and eternal youth...a
+longing for transcendance, a covert desire to
+escape the decayable body?
+
+In both \booktitle{The Divine Comedy} and \booktitle{Faust}
+there is a seeking to find a route to escape the
+bodily and heterosexual mode of reproduction, to seperate the erotic from the reproductive, which begins to lead to algeny.
+Faust turns his back on earthly marriage and
+love, to mate with a \enquote{female} principle in
+heaven, seeking and using knowledge and
+deeds in his journey. Dante glimpses Paradiso, seeing shining intelligence and bodiless love. As light\slash love\slash intelligence radiates into space, it sinks into the blackness of
+body, matter and sin. Divine love and knowledge are a metaphor sent down the ages.
+Alchemical wisdom. But in the past, there
+were no major idea-and-body-replicating
+devices to carry down the notions of hermeticists, gnostics, Kaballists, magicians.
+Heterosexuality was necessary. How to escape this trap? Later, John Von Neuman
+dreams of machines, gathering knowledge,
+becoming autonomous, reproducing.
+
+To understand the present one must look
+over this long series of \emph{regularized} events,
+saying in each case, \textquote{this time is like that
+time} or \textquote{this time is not like that time.} To
+regularize events is to force similarities on
+these happenings. This is possible only if
+time-segments are everywhen the same. It is
+disconcerting to think that each individual
+in history was unique, singular, unrepeated
+and unrepeatable. How can you retrieve
+their thought? How can you resurrect?
+
+Modern, rational thought requires even
+greater precision, since we think, and replicate thought through this \emph{capital-intensive}
+mode, one which cannot handle true singularities. Order, repeatability, similarity, pattern, structure,
+identity is introduced into past sequences, otherwise how can there be
+such a thing as a series? Consider the search
+for missing links (a medieval, logical technique left over from the invention of the
+Great Chain of Being) in order to smooth out
+the series of evolution, to eliminate great and
+cataclysmic jumps. If we allow these ruptures, we leave room for the reintroduction
+of the divine, the inexplicable, wild and truly random chance. Evolutionary frauds,
+counterfeit artifacts, faked documents are
+manufactured and inserted in the attempt to
+create legitimizing historical series where
+there were none before, or at least no record
+of any. How much easier this is to do with
+the computer as it projects, constructs, simulates to fill the unfillable gaps. If we cannot
+think without the aid of the computer, then
+thought itself is capitalized.
+
+There are several kinds of capital (or value) here. One involves the accretion of
+knowledge. Another can be likened to the
+yet-to-be-valued good will of an ongoing
+enterprise. Good will is an intangible, but it
+can be quantified and entered into the account books of an enterprise, then bought
+and sold. A third kind is more mundane:
+energy ingathered and stored up as wealth,
+credit, money, which is information. A
+fourth kind is the good antecedants,
+the precedants, the legitimizing \enquote{genes.} A fifth
+kind is structure; the orderly arrangement of
+timed events into a sequence of inevitability:
+critical-path operations, program evaluation
+and review technique, scheduling ... one
+kind of chronology as against other and
+disruptive chronologies. All together, they
+constitute the strategic program for running
+the modern enterprise, the extended \booktitle{Talmud}
+of western civilization.
+
+Whatever really happened in \booktitle{Oedipus} and
+in the Joseph story is suppressed. The making of the sequence requires rewriting the
+elements long after the facts, if there were
+any. These tales are supposed to be exemplary, instructional, fragments of an algorithm. The enterprise must be saved from
+disruptive thought, from noise, and requires,
+first and foremost,
+the storage of a transmittable message. It is in that sense that this
+sampling of literary\slash mythic works mentioned
+here are an intrinsic part of the good will of
+this capital-intensive enterprise called Western Civilization.
+
+Now, the chief operating executive in
+Thebes, a subsidiary of a diversified banking
+and religious consortium called Delphi (also
+a data bank and intelligence-gathering operation) was called a king. Oedipus. The
+king has broken the rules; he's an anamoly.
+In order to prevent the enterprise's demise,
+Oedipus must be deposed, the management
+changed to demonstrate that the enterprise
+continues under the aegis of fate (what \enquote{appears} to be an inevitable series) rather than
+individuls. The board of directors meets at
+the shrine of Delphi; it is they who plan
+Oedipus's deposal, implying retroactively
+that not only was it fated, but the cause of the
+crisis lay in Oedipus's very genes (as later
+Eliot will re-sound this theme, using the key
+word, \enquote{Tiresias,} to express the barrenness
+and sterility of modern life). The board are
+kingmakers. At the same time, this ruling
+elite, in order to restructure the trajectory,
+also plan a meta-demise, a long-range, exemplary message which will be transmitted
+down the ages, a program-scenario for the
+sacrifice of kings, managers, chief executive
+officers to maintain order and sequence.
+This is to be celebrated thousands of times.
+
+What if \emph{all} the characters in \booktitle{Oedipus} were
+disgusting, then why bother to preserve that
+memory? But in fact, that's what they were:
+greedy, grasping, selfish, monstrous, in \emph{no}
+way noble, and in that sense archetypical.
+
+If we are dealing with no more than a
+revisionist, mythic history of a political
+struggle, then the classical Freudian interpretation --- indeed the whole Freudian industry, which needs one interpretation and not others --- loses this stored-up good will.
+The credibility of one of the foundations of
+our enterprise goes down the drain. In one
+version, Oedipus is a hero; Jocasta is not his
+mother. In another we see the story of a coup
+against Oedipus. In a third, it is Jocasta who
+ordered Laius slain. In a fourth we see that
+indiscriminate sexual behavior, including
+casual incest, is everyday behavior in royal
+families. In a fifth we see the play as the
+celebration of the coup from the point of
+view of Athens; the defeat of Delphi and the
+assumption of control by Athens as it struggles to establish hegemony. Ina sixth, we see
+Oedipus trying to replicate himself through
+incest. If Oedipus is not exemplary, then
+good will is devalued. Oedipus could just as
+soon be Boss Tweed.
+
+One could make a communications flowchart of these paramemories, trace how this
+good will was transmitted down through the
+ages by humans who acted as recievers, repeaters, relays, enhancers, gates, transformers, noise-eliminators, interpolaters, adders,
+switches, coders and decoders, error-correctors. They recieved
+and sent these stories
+down by voice, in writing, or by use of rites,
+chants, liturgies, ceremonies, dramas, storing them in any variety of devices. From
+time to time they were retrieved to be used as
+guidelines to correct present and future behavior.
+At the same time, humans themselves, as biological creatures, also transmitted a different kind of information and
+memory: genetic messages. Alongside these two
+streams, treasures, credit, good will, capital was sent. The memory of a memory:
+one, events; the second, biology; the third,
+capital. Built in was an adjustable, timesequencing rescheduler for calender reform.
+None of the tracks can exist without the
+other.
+
+All forms of knowledge intertwine to pass
+down a climate of opinion, a meta-environment, which becomes part of the present
+percieved \emph{physical} environment. Indeed, as
+futurists --- equipment-sellers all --- talk about
+the next evolutionary step into the information age --- which is also a whole environment --- and annunciate this adaptation to this new climate, \emph{property} seems to become
+less physical and more ephemeral. The
+burden of our argument becomes clearer:
+inheritance.
+
+(For example: the one subject, the true,
+corporate --- or embodied --- \enquote{hero} of all of
+Dickens's works is Inheritance. His characters are always involved with claims on
+Inheritance. Inheritance as meta-genetics,
+manifests itself into shells called humans, or
+characters. The role of Dickensian characters
+is to move Inheritance through history. Each
+one of Dickens's novels involves a search for
+a programming error, which, when corrected,
+allows for the continuity of inheritance outside of the fates of the characters involved.
+To use inheritance self-indulgently is to
+descend into sin.)
+
+The newest version of these old inheritance stories is sociobiology, a kind of biodeterministic Calvinism. Into the observation of nature are inserted these birth-mythologies and breeding-and-replication logics
+of ancient Israel, Greece, Egypt, Rome, and
+the consanguinity-obsessed Middle Ages.
+The carrying down of these treasures, saved
+from the ruins of shattered civilizations,
+finds its way into modern myths of adaptability and evolution, even within the present
+twenty year span. To this theme is added
+inevitable causality.
+
+As an asset to Western Civilization, what
+kinds of valuation can be placed on these
+long gone events? How can they be calculated into the asset picture? One must begin
+by reviewing, assessing, quantifying and
+valuing these intangibles, these pools of
+good will. How do these carry-forwards contribute to the development of rational calculation in its newest, computer-assisted modes,
+translated into assets and liabilities? What
+distortions, mythologies, religious superstitions have crept in and how did they get
+there? Or, since everything can be informationalized (if specified) and assigned a currency value, does it matter?
+