New Anniversary Edition

He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.
Paul-Maud'Dib DUNE

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is a blueprint for destroying capitalism.
Did she know she was advocating the destruction of that which she asserted as the highest economic ideal system?
NO!
This is a Zizekian case of the unknown/known

John Galt knew how to destroy the bureaucracy completely;
That is, he had the real control of it.
By THE STRIKE! The EXIT!

A can destroy B so A has the real control of B. A knows that they can destroy B. (known/known) B can destroy A so B has the real control of A. B does not know that they can destroy A. (unknown/known). C can destroy A so C has real control of A. C knows that they can destroy A. (known/known) C can destroy B so C has real control of B. C knows that they can destroy B (known/known).

How can C destroy B? By refusing to destroy A? Does C wish to destroy A? does C wish to destroy B? Or does C wish to liberate B? Gets dicey eh. A can physically destroy C. The poison pill is that if A does so, A is violating legal precedent. A violation of legal precedent is worse than just destroying C without violating legal precedent (the State) so punishment, imprisonment, death will be additional because the state will have been violated which is much worse than violating a person. This is part of the genealogy of crime and what is a crime.

This takes us into Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Crime was first defined as a "crime against the Sovereign." If someone stole your money, it was not a crime against you, but a crime against the King, the Sovereign. You lost your money but the crime was against the Sovereign so the punishment was severe.

Sometimes death for an insignificant crime

BECAUSE

it was a crime against the Sovereign!

A Genealogy of Crime

By the way this is how the Boston Marathon Bombing became a terrorist event. It became labeled as a crime against the state because the Boston Marathon is an annual event held in Boston. Twist that illogical thinking around in your reasoning will ya.

This thinking is an extension of Ratliff and Hartline's experimental work on Limulus.The eye of Limulus is composed of ommatidium each one separate from all the others but affecting others dependent upon how contingent they are to another. So ommatidium A can affect ommatidium B by suppressing the response of B. If within a certain distance measurable in the experiments. But C can suppress A thus lessening the strength of the stimulus from ommatidium A and therefore suppressing A's suppression of B. In which case B's response is enhanced.

This is called disinhibition.

Can we also liken it to disinformation. Or to distraction, thus lessening the strength / import of news, facts, occurrences, and other stimuli the Government wishes to weaken as it circulates among the citizens

And I can extend it to parental behavior that lessens the will of the child for good or bad. Or to the behavior of any one person in a dyad with another person which has been described as dependent or co-dependent behavior. Does one parent disinhibit the stimuli of the other parent thus increasing the responses of the child that exhibit the will of the child and the actualization of the child, or partner, or or or or........

Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson Debate

Zizek and Peterson Debate

Much can be said and unsaid about this debate. The tickets were expensive and scalped even higher, showing the Brandens were ultimately right and Ayn Rand not. People will pay for philosophy lectures.

The Intro listed the academic credentials beginning with Z who was immediately disgusted. The ritual of the accounting and awards of the institutions of the repressive states that have granted their seals of approval - read BRANDS - for the presence of Z and Peterson on this stage, before this audience, presented for the cameras and manufactured for the prestige and brownie points - gold stars? - that will be received by the producers. Slavoj Zizek of course is being pimped for Peterson, his western supporters and their institutions.

Peterson presents a formidable and fashionable image, carefully trimmed beard, hair, and I bet finger and toenails. A Simulacrum of the early T.S. Eliot Virginia Woolf describes in her diary.

I invited X - sorry forget? - for lunch. Do come. Eliot will be here in his four piece suit. 

And this is how Wyndham Lewis has painted his portrait as a young man in Ezra Pound's salon.

T.S.Eliot Portrait by Windham Lewis

The simulacrum also smacks of the great, brilliant and unwavering man of integrity, charm and charisma, the older Leo Steinberg, who said, "Psychoanalysis saved my life." Those of us who have experienced analysis - experienced is the only valid familiarity that really counts when one is talking, writing, thinking about analysis - have all been saved by it, by Freud, and all those already saved, in order to suffer ordinary normal unhappiness rather than neurotic misery.

The other statement among many Steinberg tossed off was that in art school he graduated with first prizes in all his exhibited senior work. "And I knew then that I would never be great." So he stopped, because anyone who has personally experienced the presence of Steinberg, knew that he wanted to be great. He was superb in seeing what he called the watershed moment - 

The Foucaldian CUT

 -  in a painter's life or in painting in particular. That moment when Jasper Johns first exhibited, Steinberg was disturbed. He didn't like the work but it disturbed him so he went back and he made the Foucauldian CUT that ended Abstract Expressionism with John's breakout work. He tells of this in his book Other Criteria. 

Anyway Peterson mimics the image of those two men: urbane,cultured, educated, an extremely attractive and articulate man of his time. Z is Z, rumpled T-Shirt, roughly groomed and shaved, and wildly gesturing. A man utterly himself, warts and all, who exhibits a mass and mess of thinking that defies all linearity, continuity, persuasive progressions, categorizations and lists. 

Ah those fascist ever present lists that delineate all knowledge for us.

Two Choruses from The Rock-Eliot

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. p. 81

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD,

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

And Foucault:

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not knowing. Knowledge is made for CUTTING

Peterson is a clinical psychologist by training and he sees - saw? - patients. In the part of the debate about ethics and morality he uses the example of the patient that cannot stop wrong actions, but who has also formulated a goal for therapy. To reach his goal in therapy these obstructions to getting to the goal must be confronted. Peterson employs stopping the action of wrongness in one of small seemingly unimportant instances as a point of a beginning, an initial starting place.

A series of wrong actions? A repetition of wrong actions? And Peterson is using Wolpe and Goldstein's Behavior Therapy method of "thought stopping" turned into "action stopping" while Z has quoted Hegel, "To act is always to err," which Peterson seizes on.

The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.- Hegel

Here is where I might have intervened with, "If your patient repeatedly performs the 'wrong' action," reading through Simone Weil here, "What is the value of the opposite, the 'right action' and consider if the patient almost always knows the wrong action, then your patient almost always knows the 'right action' and avoids it. Does the patient know the right action or does your patient know the right action but does not know she knows?"

This is what would interest my knowing in just one of these exchanges lost in the morass of communication - discourse? - between Z and P.

The civilized discussion Peterson feels has taken place has occurred on the surface, yes. Because Zizek has not probed deeper to expose the contradictions, and Peterson's use of The Communist Manifesto - which was written for the workers in the factory - instead of a deep and thorough reading of Capital. The Grundrisse is not even mentioned. And Althusser's unsurpassed reading of Marx in his Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses of Reproduction.

The inadequate scholarship of Peterson, the Western debater, is visible, but only to those who have some grasp of the invisible scholarship here in this debate. The scholarship displayed by a celebrity figure the west has manufactured and produced to be pimped by the incomparable, irreplaceable, anti-xeroxible Slavoj Zizek.

The reader might also remind herself that the USSR employed many therapies, to its dissidents especially. Behavior Therapy based on Pavlov's Conditioned Response and Skinner's Operant Conditioning was especially honored. The only one that was banned, disallowed, punished was psychoanalysis.

So of course, that was the one I wanted most to experience since I was/am a negatively suggestible person. Did I write about Happiness and Capitalism here?

Let’s Dump on Trump Some More-Hey It Rhymes!

Scapegoating On Trump Again

A huge dump of information on Trump's doings in India.

As if no one knew that all big real estate deals involve unbridled corruption and payoffs. And as Foucault said, "Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not knowing." So the long lived zine continues on its path of least resistance, Trump bashing. It is pages long and detailed. And this is what pays the bills for journalists. And not just recently.

It seems few have read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and fully understood her deconstruction of the media - newspapers. Raising the Banner to the level of mediocrity to dominate the minds of the mediocracy (that Ellsworth Toohey has programmed) that read it until they can be told and sold (what happens when reading Nietzsche) on anything you want.

Go on read it again until you get it

The title has an addition: Trump Inc. and the corruption of the American Presidency. Well well that's something NEW? When did it stop? Hearst said, "I don't report the news, I make the news." Isn't that plain enough. What is new about the corrupt media displacing on Trump for corruption?

Got me.

Inside this edition is the article Anti-Intelligence another bashing one on Trump.

Ironically, much of the danger Trump poses can be laid at the feet of Barack Obama. Assuming that past norms would be future norms, Obama created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen.. Over eight years, he spent more than $100 billion on everything from eavesdropping satellites encircling the globe, to a million-square-foot building in the Utah desert for storing massive troves of intercepted data, to secret taps on the hundreds of thousands of miles of undersea cables that carry everything from tweets to Google searches to endless chatter. He also unleashed fleets of killer drones around the world, authorized the assassination of Americans without trial, and jailed more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. (p.17)

Ya still didn't get Snowden didja honey?

While blaming Obama for not seeing consequences - Clintons on student debt,3 strikes, repeal of Glass-Steagall etc - I ask when did the last president ever see the consequences of his actions? I cant remember. Someone tell me please!


Whistleblowers are not whistleblowers. They are PARRHESIASTES and Foucault's genealogy on this term goes back to ancient times.

parrhesia

Obama punished more than all previous administrations combined. 

This indicates fear/hatred or maybe even terror/rage

There is no question that Putin started being agressed against when he gave Snowden asylum. A great humiliation for the Free World eh. An inversion from our giving asylum from the USSR Cold War. Two can play this game.

So now Trump is the evil one for being able to use the evil Obama unleashed on us and the world. Does that just make Obama a dummy? Or does it make Obama evil? I know what I think. Do you? (Ssssshhhhh. How about BOTH?)


Wait a minute. Suppose the consequences are different. The spy industry is institutionalized which means it will continue after a presidential administration is forgotten history. But the danger to wives, husbands, children family are still dangers. They will depend on the spy industry to protect them and "their loved ones" in all the years to come. But what happens if they confront the spy industry? Will they take exceptional precautions for you? 

Trump has his own security detail. He trusts them NOT.

The above paragraph is absolute VIOLENCE! And that is not worse than anything Trump has even imagined so far? Gimme a break! and it is embedded in an article (SO WE PROBABLY WONT NOTICE) with tons more information that is not knowledge  - and knowledge is not knowing.

And we are supposed to respect journalists, even from a well thought of zine like The New Republic? A zine that has accumulated respect for decades, over a hundred years isn't it now? Even good journalists are unable to openly tell the truth and they haven't been ever.

EVER!

Can we please be reminded of Chomsky's 

Manufacturing of Consent

Why a Journalist can NEVER tell us the Truth

All the truthtellers have been manufactured out of their jobs.
You know. They disrupt the discourse, have their own opinions, disagree, argue with the editors and they are weeded out sooner or later and censored before they can do any damage.

Hopefully the resistance that Trump has spawned will make them braver but I haven't seen much evidence of that yet. 

Have you?

PART 3 PIRSIG'S ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE

This is a comment reply to Psybertron Asks

Alterity is a philosophical conceptual construct by Jean Baudrillard. When one experiences a near death experience and survives, the two "selves" continue on a parallel path that gradually continues parting/continuing to diverge through life. The film Another Earth with Britt Marling is a perfect illustration of what Baudrillard means http://moviesandfilm.blogspot.com/2011/09/review-another-earth-at-moxie-in.html  This corresponds to Pirsig's Phaedrus who is electro shocked into alterity as another person as if just being born with no memory before this new moment. 

Irreversibility is Baudrillard's great contribution to philosophy. To fully understand his work one must understand he is Nietzschean in blood and bone. Pirsig never mentions Nietzsche once, yet he breathes through this novel. As of course do Foucault and Baudrillard. It is rare than a Foucauldian thinker moves into Baudrillard (Ayn Rand does but is misread by her disciples). Pirsig is so clear with his continuing binary that he cannot come to terms with easily at all. He is not aware of how Baudrillard has separated the Symbolic Order from the Order of Production (Pirsig's classic and romantic methods of thinking/ reasoning). But there it is, clear as day, the two orders that are separate, the territory and the map as Borges calls it. Or as Jesus does when he overturns the tables of the money changers in the temple, separating the sacred from the worldly. (I am not using profane as that concept has different resonances I don't want to get into.)Two parallel orders that comprise the world. This conceptual construct can be read through Plato of course also, the REAL and the shadows in the cave. The Order of Production is IRREVERSIBLE. From this capitalism metastasizes like cancer cells (Marx). The Symbolic Order is REVERSIBLE and these terms are Baudrillard's great contribution according to Simon Critchley. If you want examples I have blogged many of them so ask if you want more on this and I will link you. DeLillo is especially perceptive on this in Cosmopolis. 

But these two terms are philosophical constructs. In Fountainhead we see Gail Wynand is unable to reverse The Banner as it has become firmly planted in the Order of Production. He cannot use it to turn Roark into a hero, a true artist, because Toohey has taken control in homeopathic doses, substituting the territory of journalism into the map of propagandizing. What is left for him finally is to destroy The Banner completely. And that is Nietzsche, excess is required to end what must be stopped so that it implodes. 

Pirsig's excess on his road journey is also in the Symbolic Order and the Order of Production. The physical trip on the motorcycle and the "trip" in his mind as he pieces his lost fragments of his lost self knitting them together with his present self, his present Alterity. Of course it can be read through the interpretation of Freud's thinking, or even Jung's, but I prefer to stay with Foucault and Baudrillard and not take the swampy, sinking path into interpretation from which it will be impossible to get out of and will force Pirsig back into the Dialectic which he has so brilliantly led us to escape from.

Reading Donald Trump Through Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!#AmericaFirst #Trump2016 https://t.co/42OpVsjXjp

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2016

Look at this image.Trump's wife is in shocking pink upstaging the red of the American flag. Ivanka, his beautiful and intelligent and FEMINIST daughter is in black matching Trump. Neither is adoring him.

MCLUHAN:THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE or FIGURE/GROUND

McLuhan left the "cliche it became" and reframed his thinking into; 

Medium as GROUND and Content as FIGURE

Digressing and Summarizing: The Medium is the Message STATES that the Medium, the Media, the Technology IS THE MESSAGE. Its CONTENT is irrelevant. Print as the Medium most influential for 500 years was the TECHNOLOGY carrying the MESSAGE. Books, newspapers, etc provided the CONTENT. While content was debated, analyzed, critiqued, studied, written about, spoken about, thought about,like angels on the head of a pin in old timey times, the Message was embedding itself in our minds and bodies. This is "The Inscription of the Body" detailed by Nietzsche and elaborated by Foucault, it is invisible. We were unaware for centuries that the MESSAGE carried by the Medium  of PRINT was invisible. THE MEDIUM IS INVISIBLE. The content is visible.The GROUND is INVISIBLE, the FIGURE is VISIBLE. Children have no problem in perceiving Ground, but as adults trained in the linear reading of PRINT the Ground becomes INVISIBLE, the FIGURE - content -dominates the visual and thinking field for us adults.

We can no longer SEE the GROUND. It is INVISIBLE  to us.

?OK so far?

The ICONIC figure: 

MUHAMMAD ALI; MALCOLM, PRINCE, BEATLES, EINSTEIN et al and THE DONALD, TRUMP  are all ICONIC

Ali and The Beatles

What does McLuhan have to say about the ICONIC figure?

THE ICONIC FIGURE merges Figure/Ground in ONE figure. (Merges the Medium and the Message.)The context and the content are ONE.

This is easy to see in MUHAMMAD ALI, THE BEATLES, EINSTEIN because they are DEAD, finished, their works now part of our culture, and so can be seen WHOLLY instead of piecemeal as they emerge for us, when alive. IMO the same is true of great buildings, monuments but NOT as they were being built, only when finished, named, visited and worshiped. Music, art - Picasso, Pollack, Leonardo, et al - the same.

!TRUMP HAS EMERGED IN THIS CAMPAIGN AS A VISIBLE ICONIC FIGURE!

He has merged Figure/Ground - Medium and Content

The Media for the Masses  CONTINUES to focus on CONTENT. 

The MESSAGE of the MEDIA is INVISIBLE! AS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN!

So what is the MESSAGE we are getting about Trump? What is the CONTENT we are getting about Trump?

That's easy too. The CONTENT we are getting is that he is racist,  brutal, inexperienced, a bully, etc. What is the MESSAGE of the MEDIUM we are getting? 

That is the real QUESTION.

What is the INVISIBLE GROUND?

FEAR!

THE POLITICAL DEBORDIAN SPECTACLE

The CAMPAIGN is a SPECTACLE

The PRESIDENTIAL FIGURE is a SPECTACLE

CONGRESS is a SPECTACLE

The AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is a SPECTACLE

VOTING is a SPECTACLE

COUNTING the VOTES is a SPECTACLE

And so it goes as VONNEGUT would say.

The SPECTACLE CONCEALS the REAL - DEBORD;Baudrillard

If you wish to destroy something you MUST carry it to EXCESS - NIETZSCHE, AYN RAND ( The fictional Nietzschean disciple) or as Nietzsche said, "You must be WORSE!"

Donald Trump is WORSE. He is an ICONIC figure. He is the hyper-campaigner, the excessive campaigner, the outrageous campaigner, the campaigner who is WORSE! He cannot be debated in the Dominating Discourse of classical Hegelian opposition, that gray boring prose of the Political Discourse. 

HOW? THE DONALD silences all opposition.

ONE CANNOT ARGUE WITH OUTRAGEOUSNESS AND PARRHESIA

Interspersed with this outrageousness is PARRHESIA - FEARLESS SPEECH - the TRUTH that risks everything for the PARRHESIASTES! Trump has risked it all. WHY?

FOUCAULT

Trump has a deep CONTEMPT for the present charade, corruption, stupidity of the American political process and he is out to destroy it. He has destroyed the GOP which so many of us have been trying to do by our focus on CONTENT which does not and can never work, as it debates on THEIR playing field in an endless game of ping pong, he said, she said.

No one can win on that FIELD of DISCOURSE.

So Trump is playing on a different field. A field that is NOT INVISIBLY VIOLENT concealed by the ACCEPTED Political Discourse

TRUMP IS PUTTING-ON the entire POLITICAL SYSTEM OF MACHINERY

TRUMP IS A PUT-ON and if you are in on his game you can see it and cheer, revel in the downfall of a corrupt and unfixable system. 

What will be next? 

As Plato has said, "All DEMOCRACY leads to TOTALITARIANISM since democratic candidates must always appeal to the lowest common denominator to get elected." 

Trump is following PLATO. 

\

DEFINITELY GOOD COMPANY

Reading Rob Pattinson, Baudrillard and Rand Through Nietzsche

Rob's Early Career

Rob Pattinson's deleted lovely face in Vanity Fair has taken on some legs since first I imagined it into existence. IF that scene with his beautiful 17 year old face had remained in that film, turning everyone else in it into oval oblivion, then clearly his film career would have begun in that moment, and he might never have been Cedric or Art or the cutesy in Bad Mother's Handbook. Can't you just see the stream of studley teen movies they would have put him in, and Rob, who inherently likes to please and be loved, probably would have succumbed for awhile as did Brad Pitt. Yeah I think he would have awakened form his Sleeping Beauty role after awhile. But surely no Edward Cullen would have been considered, nor the Scummit machine tolerated.

This is what Baudrillard calls Nietzsche's revenge when the same happens to him. Baudrillard's reading of Nietzsche is "worse", excessive, too much for the examiners.


This is following Nietzsche through Baudrillard. Rob's beauty in Vanity Fair was more beautiful than beautiful; hyper beautiful; obscenely beautiful as all the others in the scene looked dead; hence, implosion. It was "worse" as Nietzsche might have said. Too  much to be there, to exist there. Crash and burn.

Baudrillard takes his examinations and both the oral and the written are on Nietzsche. Since he has immersed himself in Nietzsche in German, this is a big piece of luck for him. His reading is not agreed with by the examiners and they fail him. He calls this Nietzsche's revenge. At that point in time he stops reading Nietzsche, never to go back to him again until the end of his life. Nietzsche goes underground in Baudrillard's mind, heart and psyche, never to leave, always to be a deep part of him. Forever. This, he acknowledges: (Fragments)

Nietzsche is in me in the mode of the unzeitgemass as he puts it himself, the mode  of the untimely. 

Beautiful I think

Genealogy of Morals

Ayn Rand reads Nietzsche  at University when very young in Russia. Nietzsche is not part of the curriculum so she reads him on the sly, following her heart, already aware of Soviet propaganda and surveillance. This early Rand is even then crossing the boundaries of mainstream. At 21 she comes to the US and she is still reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the first book she buys in English. As a young woman in Hollywood she is still reading Nietzsche. Seriously.  Rand did everything seriously. And all the way up until the 1940's (She was born in 1905) until  she is finished writing The Fountainhead. Each chapter was to be headed by a Nietzsche quote. Fountainhead was published in 1943, on wartime paper, even though it was a very long novel. Egad! No Nietzsche no no no must Bobbs-Merrill have said - so no Nietzsche chapter heads. At that point in her journals she disavows Nietzsche as just an early interest - infatuation?  Her journals have been scrubbed and scrubbed again to get Nietzsche outta Dodge. (Goddess of the Marketplace)Some Nietzsche quotes and thoughts about him  had to stay because everyone knew Howard Roark and especially John Galt were Nietzschean Supermen, so the obvious references and interpretations remained. (These are "floating signs" masking the deep references to Nietzsche.)But the deep underground of Rand's mind, heart and soul belonged to Nietzsche. This is what makes her a post modern philosopher who wrote fiction. Just as a Cronenberg makes films.

Rand Early Hollywood

Both Baudrillard and Rand disavowing Nietzsche during the 1940's? While Hitler is praising him to the skies as Leni Riefenstahl shoots him, Hitler that is, against the blue sky in her film Triumph of the Will; the Superman, the Overman of Nietzsche. Even the great and powerful Foucault, after the war, did not admit the great influence and debt he owed Nietzsche for his genealogy. Only towards the end of his life did he say that he wished he had acknowledged Nietzsche earlier on. And we all know the neverending hits and slurs that Heidegger took, and still takes, for his early pro Nazi sympathies. Not to mention the loss of his lover Hannah Arendt.

Baudrillard and Rand were wise to shut up and Foucault also.

Only now is Nietzsche taking his rightful place in the sun. 

Baudrillard acknowledges Nietzsche's permanent and ongoing influence, but more in the vein of flowing through his blood and guts than in any quotes, said or written. Would it have been any different for Rand who doesn't think in terms of unconscious rivers running deep in her psyche? Denial first, second and third for Rand. But Nietzsche is still there for the discerning reader of Rand, Nietzsche and Baudrillard.

But how to tease it out of Rand. Maybe Nathaniel could tell us. Or myself who, once upon a time, long long ago in a kingdom by the sea, was an Objectivist from 1960-1964. A serious one.