This is a very ugly amalgam of writing samples I intended to use for grad school. Ambiguous and vague, don’t be surprised if terms and principles are thrown in there willy-nilly.
From Work to Play
The history of art sways between subject and object. The proliferation of available technology quickens the swing of this social pendulum. Writing is a mapping of the commons of imagination. These commons are the topos (context) for the revealing of identity. The desire for individuality is the love of metanarrative. This is philosophy. Everyone must construct their own life for themselves; we, the authors, re-present ourselves as the authored. Yet, we persist as something more than a genre-enclosed protagonist. Occupy Wall Street is a reminder of this psychological fact, deferring significations of social categories in order to keep the possibility of this apperception alive. Behind the work of signifying the signified is an inter-subjective communion in jouissance. Let me show you a way to play.
In the last millennium, writing cycled between something essentially old, collective and traditional, and something essentially new, authentic and spontaneous. The activity of writing has always involved a certain reliance on tradition. In the Middle Ages, writing was authoritative if it was a derivation and remediation of older texts and ideas in order to answer the questions of the present. An author made original contributions insofar as he wrote “as part of an enterprise conceived collaboratively” (Woodmansee 2).
The Romantic period witnessed something different. During that time, the notion of the Author was reborn as an originator of works differing qualitatively from the plethora of public writings. But what was wrong with public writings? Isn’t all reading and writing pleasurable? Marquis de Sade, a French author and political activist of the late eighteenth century, described his era as one in which writers felt that “everything seems already to have been written, [and] the sterile imaginations of authors seem incapable of producing anything new” (Sade 114). Writers like Sade felt trapped by the thoroughly uncreative sentiments thoughtlessly rehashed to the point of mendacity. Consequently, the popularity of the Novel took hold. With the rejection of the old scholarly ways of writing, Sade and other writers of his time believed “that ‘tis better to invent, albeit poorly, than to translate or copy. The inventor can lay claim to talent or genius…what claim [to that effect] can the plagiarist make” (Sade 115)? Sade began his Reflections on the Novel with an etymological analysis: Novel, derived from the French Nouvelle (short story) and the Latin Novellus, the diminutive of Novus (new). This form of writing is thus an embodiment of the Enlightenment’s desire to escape the conceptual chains of extant literary works. But the novel is merely one manifestation of this artistic infatuation with authorship.
Samuel Johnson, an English writer of the same era, had the same End, but different means. Throughout his career, he coordinated with several other writers and editors in order to establish a pantheon of great authors whose works differed qualitatively from common writing. Yet, the authorship of this work, of Lives of the Poets, itself intended to raise the notion of Authorship to uniquity, stems from a plurality; paradoxically, the construction of individuality rests on the community.
This ironic project is microcosm to the macrocosm of Johnson’s career. He relinquished authorship as the authored was transformed into capital. Johnson believed that, once published, his works were no longer of him. Woodmansee suggests that Johnson’s distinctly non-proprietary attitude towards collaborative works may have reflected a real uncertainty as to where his intellect left off and those of his cowriters began. This anti-egoic relationship to writing a text is unavoidable when one has little to no proprietary concerns. Why insert oneself, one’s name, into a community, when one can manipulate the society “by orchestrating from behind the scenes” (Woodmansee 2)?
However, going behind the scenes means leaving the stage altogether. Outside the theater of society there is no object. There is nothing. This is subjectivity; the essence of consciousness. Something’s missing. On our way out of the social, we bracket not only society’s media-driven popular belief (doxa), but social objects and causality. In a word, ‘bracketing’ is pedantic austerity. We begin from the beginning, in the imaginary. Upon reflecting experience, consciousness creates an image of an object, which is a manner of that object not being at such a distance. The characteristic of any object is to be intuitive-absent: given as absent to intuition. We try in vain to give rise to the belief that an object really exists by our actions, but this is to react to an image as if it were a perception. If this reaction reoccurs, then the image wraps around us, bringing us full circle in a search for objectivity.
Yet, this vanity and error proliferates socially. Thought affirms various qualities of its object without realizing them on it, but the image aims at producing its object. With language, we direct others to form simulations of our images in their experience; we communicate with symbols. This is because the function of the image is to signify. In order to function in this world, each person must become an unconscious library of symbols, constituting an entire Civilization of Sign. This raises the question regarding who educates, and who is being educated. Since these questions arise together, we must answer them in kind; as one.
The act of self-education, by means of notes and the contemporary hypertext, is a merging of reader and writer. The reader is always already rewriting the text for oneself. The ontological distinction between author and authored has no significance if one writes with a pathos of commentary. By contributing his or her own commentary, the reader narrates the internal experience of perception, or interprets. In describing the originary (or “empirical”) perception, the reader “synthesizes what is experienced as an infinite multiplicity of determinations and possible relations” (Sartre 16). In short, the reader becomes an overt collaborator in an unending process of reading and writing. Johnson participated in this mode of writing. This places the very notion of authorship into question.
There is no sense in claiming proprietary rights on something with a dynamic ontology; a written work means something different for each reader because each reader rewrites the text in their own disparate reading-act. Hence, the distinction between reader and writer becomes contingent, “returning us to something very like the expressively collaborative writing milieu of the Middle Ages and the [early] Renaissance with which we began” (W 5).
By fortuity or folly, the Renaissance succeeded in creating a simulacrum of Plato’s Republic. Even now we can see experience divided into sub-categories; each science is a monument to a particular mode of experience (hypomnesis). The educational systems of Europe and the North America were modified to mimic Prussian military institutions. We of course must ask whether or not altering these categories of experience is beneficial for humanity, but this presupposes the very notion under question.
Individuality, an image engaged in the Civilization of Sign, necessarily affects the notion of Authorship. Writing is the dissolution of the gap between Subject and Object. Thus, how Subjectivity and Objectivity are perceived through time, according to doxa, warps the image of authorship. Foucault’s work with structuralism reveals an anachronism in Modernist doxa, in the notion of the Author. An unconscious historicism, working behind the scenes, suggests something deeper and more real than the ‘reality’ of doxa.
As a manifest product of the imagination, modernist categories of thought pervade experience, often against one’s own will. However, while it is true that the structure of consciousness is predisposed to interpret perceptual phenomena in accordance with the categories instilled by popular belief, the image of an object is something the viewing subject puts there. In this gap, between perception and image, occurs an unconscious act that is potentially conscious. This difference is the submission of will to intentional structure. “To say that there can be an image without will in no way implies that there can be an image without intention” (Sartre 19). Judgment is the act by which the will affirms an intentional structure.
The collective affirmation of the intentional structures of doxa bounds our interpretation of what it is to be an author. But what else are there than various categories of “me” given by experience? We must remember that the ontology of individuality is always already given as not being there in some way. Every recognition of personhood is the genesis of an objectifying field. To what degree originary subjectivity is bestowed on an object is the extent to which the objects of the world are absent. Recognizing something as a consciousness allows the possibility of world-creation, as this thing’s judgments then signify a world in its otherness, negating all other possible worlds.
The Enlightenment represents the recognition of enclosure qua the form of subjectivity, or objectifying field. Those unfortunate enough to present a notion of subjectivity different in kind than the Enlightenment faced misperception and objectification. These peoples’ words were viewed as unreason, and their way of life, madness. This onto-political distinction has manifested in the structures of segregation since the days of the lepers. Confinement moved the venereal, debauched, dissolute, blasphemers, homosexuals, alchemists and libertines out of society, where madness appeared as a sort of subliminated omnipresence, to a place outside of ‘society,’ to a distance that allowed perception of unreason.
Unreason is first and foremost the deep division that lies between the consciousness that believes the mad can be recognized immediately (independent of any discursive knowledge of madness), and a form of knowledge that claims the ability to unfold, along the plane of its virtualities, all forms of madness, complete with all the tell-tale signs that manifest its truth. In this valley is nothing, a void or absence; what madness as a general and concrete form would be, as a real element in which the mad would recognize themselves. “What the fall of Man was to sin, so was madness to unreason…Madness summed up the whole of unreason in a single point-the guilt of day and the innocence of the night” (Foucault 158). No longer are we faced with two clear choices (reason and unreason) in opposition. A continuum of systematic complexity separates prejudice from solipsism. Neurosis and mental disorder are captured and remediated, leaving a new science which has, as its object, the engendering of absence, or modern psychology.
Madness represents the dynamism inherent in any notion of individuality, or the difference concomitant in excluding the horizon of possibility for subjectivity. During the enlightenment, madness was silenced and sent away, left to develop on its own. But when medical science entered therapeutics, madness was forced into the spotlight of scientific analysis for the first time. By the nineteenth century western society recognized that, while the phenomenon may never be truly mastered, madness is still the rightful property of the gaze that dominates it. This analytical consciousness of madness forms the possibility of an objective knowledge of madness.
“Madness measures the distance that exists between foresight and providence, between calculation and finality. And it masks a profound, collective reason that masters time itself” (Foucault 177).
In 1650, many prisons recited the litanies of confinement in their lengthy registers: ‘debauched,’ ‘imbecile,’ prodigal,’ ‘infirm,’ ‘of unsound mind,’ ‘libertine,’ ‘ungrateful son,’ ‘dissolute father,’ ‘prostitute,’ ‘insane,’ et cetera. No attempt was made to discriminate between them, and all were cast into the same abstract dishonor. For the social reproach of the mentally alienated to be carried out, a complete reorganization of the ethical world was necessary.
The experiences divided for banishment or integration revolved around the relationship between sexuality and the organization of the bourgeois family, or libertinage (i.e. the new relations that were beginning to emerge between free thinking and the system of the passions), or around the profanation qua the new conception of the sacred and religious rituals. Each of these had some connection with delirium and madness (e.g. Marquis de Sade’s Justine). Some forms of sexuality were directly linked to unreason and certain types of mental illness. Sexuality is a universal symbol, capable of inculcating every conceptual scheme of life by showing common unconscious roots in Otherness. Classifying various forms of sexuality as mental illness distances society from the experience of unreason. This transforms the modernist systematization of otherness into an ideology of solidarity.
The concept of ‘psychological alienation’ is little more than the anthropological confusion of two experiences of alienation:
i) Those who have fallen under the power of the Other, and are chained to their liberty.
ii) The individual-turned-Other, excluded from the fraternal resemblance between men.
Since the middle ages, there has been an association between madness and a familiar strangeness. At the Enlightenment’s zenith, “metamorphosis into an animal was no longer an indication of the power of the devil, nor a result of the diabolical alchemy of unreason. The animal in man was no longer an indicator of a beyond, but had become in itself his madness, with no reference to anything other than itself” (Foucault 148).
Just as madness evolved to recognize an otherness present in itself, so is the otherness originally sought by art and science now found in the arts and sciences. Nietzsche’s sentiment of the impossibility of enquiry shows exteriority as lack. The philosopher can no longer describe its other without taking account of itself as an Other. Each subject implicitly implies all others. This mediation achieved partial autonomy and grew into a spectacle of civilization, a great monument, constituting an objectified hypomnesis of subjectivity. The term “the world,” masks a premeditated subliminal chain of experience; it is the continuing project of the Enlightenment.
This objectified notion of subjectivity exists today, and re-presents more human activity (praxis) than ever before. The otherness of the institutions at odds with the occupy movement (OM) is signified with increasing degree by abstracting the “ninety-nine percent” from the various social antagonisms they signify. Without taking account of the market-enclosed commons as an experience of otherness, thought attempts to answer more abstract questions about the conditions for economic downturns, why it is that we conceive of “national security” as cause for over-militarization of the state, why it is that the “Other” is perceived as always already antagonistic to us, et al. But this form of analysis only serves to cultivate and reify our unconscious spectacular dependence, or ideology.
Instead of investigating these social antagonisms by increasing the depth of analysis, OM is the exemplar field of play, using bodies on the ground to create a commons allowing a new recognition of zoe (or bare, unqualified life). It refuses the supplement of “reality” prescribed by the market-enclosed commons in favor of an open-source movement. This is how OM recognizes, yet defers, social antagonisms as potentially signified improvements of bios (political, qualified life). There is an ever-present gaze, watching and managing all forms of bios from the inside, perpetually leading human experience away from itself.
Roland Barthes, in From Work to Text, declares the activity of Text to be the true agent of change behind society’s rampant categorizing of works. This isn’t to place Text as some metaphysical cause, nor does this imply that literary genres and works are not real. Consider Lacan’s distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘the real.’ In an analogous way, the work can be seen (e.g. bookshops, catalogues), but the text is a process of demonstration; it is shown. OM’s method for decision-making is called General Assembly (GA). It is based on anarchical consent. One is not capable of understanding it by simply watching. This system is a means of altering the course of the real, of playing with the possibility of reality on a sub-political level, underneath and through extant categories of discourse; GA signifies concrete polis. Analogously, the text doesn’t stop at (good) literature; unlike works, it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, or even a simple division of genres. The text goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc), and tries to place itself just behind the limit of doxa. Barthes argues that doxa is defined by its limits, by its censorship.
The text is signification, and operates via two modes:
(i) It is claimed to be evident and the work is then the subject of literal science, of philology.
(ii) It is secret, ultimate, something to be sought out, and then falls under the scope of hermeneutics, of an interpretation (e.g. Marxist, psychoanalytic).
The Text “practices the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier” (Barthes 3), which must be conceived as the deferred action of the signifier. The field of the signifier is an infinity, a playing. The generation of the perpetual signifier in the field of the text isn’t an organic process of maturation or hermeneutic discourse of deepening investigation, but a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings and varyings.
Like language, the Text is structured but off-centered; a system with neither boundary nor center. The Text isn’t a co-existence of meanings, but a passage, an overcrossing. It answers not to interpretation (not even a liberal one), but a dissemination. It is a stereographic plurality, irreducible. The Text can be only in its difference (not in the sense of being autonomous in an individualistic sense); its reading is semelfactive, rendering any inductive-deductive science of texts illusory (there is no grammar of the Text).
The work is always said to be owned and fathered by the author (droit d’auteur). But the Text reads without the inscription of the Father. Work is an image of an organism which grows by vital expansion; Text is a network: it can be broken (e.g. Holy Scripture, Aristotle). The ‘I’ that writes the Text is a paper ‘I’: a character of fiction that plays the role of guest in his own work. Text requires we attempt to abolish the distance between reading and writing. This is not to be done by the projection of the reader into the writing, but by joining them in a single signifying practice.
Phenomenologically, a transubstantiation of authorship occurs in the activity of Text: Pre-reading, a subject and object (text) have internal and external relations (i.e. writing is not reading). During reading, the text, as pharmakon, leads the subject out of oneself and into the text, as one’s mind becomes interwoven with it, indiscernible from it. The reader becomes the author, yet also the authored. At this point, the ‘is’ between ‘reading is writing’ begins to break down. The practice is not reduced to a passive, inner mimesis; it is bound to jouissance: pleasure without separation. “The Text is the space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate…a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied by a metalinguistic exposition:” (Barthes 7) the calling into doubt of metalanguage is part of the theory itself. The modernist reassurance of an author’s essentially grounded nature, of a cogito to which one could retreat, is thus rendered illusory; there is nothing to hold onto.
“The Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing” (Barthes 7).
There is no escape from this madness. The Text is all-encompassing, integrating the author, as an assemblage of signs, into the signifying activity itself. As the scope of the text extends, dilating, it reverses the ‘author-authored’ relationship. Not only does the Text add signs to the author, it replaces him, effecting a transubstantiation of the subject. This is text as supplement.
From its beginning, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) claimed it wasn’t interested in seeking principles. This pathos engenders a consciousness of Text, in that it continually defers any signifying act. It is not about the Civilization of Sign. Nor is it signifying the deferment of signification. OWS is a dilation of signifying acts in the commons created by the people. The slogan “We are the 99%” has two senses. Explicitly, it signifies autonomy, affirming the existence of the people, the Untermensch, the trampled-over, the would-be-proletariat. Implicitly, it is a dilation of the sign of individuality as such, as a social construct. OM is flooded with paradoxical signs like this. If it supported non-contradictory slogans, it would cease to be a field of play, and fall prey to the market’s forces of privatization. It would become categorized, passed, past; work.
These two senses of the slogan above, when taken together, engender a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between a situation of fact and a situation of right. In this field, the border between zoe and polis blurs, and bare life frees itself from the city, becoming both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order. GA is the practice of anarchical consent; it attempts to create a link between voice and word. This is a means for critiquing the State of Exception; a “complex topological figure, in which the exception, the rule, the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another” (Agumben 28).
But who…or what occupies this space and time, this new commons? In Silvia Federici’s words, Occupy arose out of a desire “to put an end to the separation between the personal and the political, and political activism and the reproduction of everyday life” (RECLAMATIONS BLOG). If this is the pathos of OM, then its desire is the reclamation of zoe (bare, unqualified life), or, in effect, to discover the bios of zoe!
We thus unveil an originary political structure; the politics of “reality” fold back to show the polis of the real. OM rejects the establishment because it is one of re-presentation, or a politics of absence. They counter it by physically inserting themselves into the commons, creating a space for biopolitics, where occupiers face zoe (e.g. what to eat, where to sleep, urinate, et al). They are “exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, inside and outside, become indistinguishable” (Agumben 23). The establishment attempts to reinsert itself in the occupied commons according to a negative dialectic, or a narrative of signification:
Nomos, most noticeable through the regulations of food, health and trespassing laws (created ad hoc). These are biopolitical boundaries inserted between OM and zoe, to halt (or stall) their ability to ground their daily lives in a more liberated bios. In short, the regulations force occupiers to cease deferment of signification of bios, so that they are unable to achieve zoe. This entrapment allows the establishment and the public in media res to question the equality of representation (i.e. is this a young, white movement?).
This leads us to the second means of commons-enclosure: topos, seen as the reification of OM’s signified exteriority (context implied as already being there, before presentation). By doing so, the establishment creates for itself a means of re-presenting OM in public space, distancing the zoe sought and experienced by occupiers from the spectacle of mainstream media. This prohibits OM from being able to represent the people not physically occupying, and enframes non-occupiers as allies of the establishment. From this, antagonistic questions arise that signify the homogeneity of the occupying population with regards to signified political issues (e.g. sexism, racism, ageism, et al). This is Authorship, sneaking into doxa again as a means of discerning a signified notion of authenticity (i.e. is OM truly egalitarian?).
Most importantly, topos pressures occupiers into facing physical enforcement during marches. For instance, the march on Brooklyn Bridge, intended to inform both the one percent and the public in general of the limits of the quality of their lives, was enframed by the media’s propaganda about OM’s perceived roots, perceived, that is, through mainstream media. In other words, whatever biopolitics were occurring in the lives of occupiers, they had little to do with the public opinion of the movement, since those experiences were only reviewed in OM’s own, decentralized commons (e.g. blogs, twitter, etc). This is the establishment entering biopolitics by re-presentation; by pulling the occupiers out of zoe and towards the abstract bios of their signified image in the state. If occupiers show a lack of dependence on the civilization of sign, topos can be deferred.
To deny the existence of OM is to deny its context. Under the purview of the privatized commons, mainstream media initially denounced the movement as disorganized, inconsequential, and un-categorizable. This makes OM appear inaffectual with respect to the “reality” of the political. This media outburst is the image of OM’s collision with a map. The former’s complaint of ‘having no guiding principle’ stems from the same patricidal fear that frightens King Thamus and Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. The logic of pharmakon exhibits an identical irony. Pharmakon, an ancient Greek word, has two senses which must be taken together. It is medicine, and it is poison. It is a drug. Without a singular voice or guiding praxis, OM acts as pharmakon to the masses, drawing critics to the very boundary of doxa, to a point where every signification fails to affirm any marketed topos. In this way, the consciousness of the ‘99%’ is one of the Text.
If OM is pharmakon to the masses, then it is also for the construction of hypomnesis in relation to the masses; it traces a biopolitical constellation, re-presenting the contents of doxa, as viewed from the commons created by the movement. OM’s confrontations with the establishment trace the topos of the one percent folded back. In Chicago, occupiers sketched the activity of the one percent by revealing what the politics of re-presentation dismissed as madness. By resisting bank foreclosures and evictions, the SOPA act, and even hitting the military arm of the establishment, NATO, OM acts as pharmakon to the establishment, fighting fire with fire.
Like the Text, OM dilates signifiers of revolution in order to play with the act of signification, immunizing itself from doxic categories. For example, the hashtag #casualpepperspray, seized by proponents of OWS, was remediated to create various paradoxical images (Know Your Meme). The police officer, casually spraying the protestors, is spliced into other images, showing him as an antagonism to the hippies of the 1960’s, the founding fathers of America, Jesus, and even other memes of the infosphere. At the center of this nomos is the union between two antithetical Greek principles: Bia and Dike; respectively, violence and justice. Each spliced background listed above is another signified time, place, movement, revolution, fad, et al. Memes such as this show that violence can signify any ethical topos. Whenever police brutality is suggested as an antagonism to OM, the movement faces the threat of becoming a work, of becoming logocized into some sort of blind anti-authoritative praxis.
The use of excessive force against demonstrators in New York, Denver, Seattle and other cities reveals the process of forestalling categorization. Concomitant with violent images like the face of an eighty-four year old woman soaked in pepper spray (MEDIAITE) is a chain reaction of antagonisms. These are triggerings of signifiers present in the field of OM. They include economic inequality, corporate hegemony, over-militarization of the State, ecological concerns, et al. With every incursion, the Civilization of Sign forces OM’s hand, as it were, into ceasing its dilation of signs, into no longer deferring signification. To cease deferment is to cease historicization. This would centralize OM’s efforts, reducing their scope from particular incursions of violence to violence as such.
This is the third method of the establishment’s self-insertion, where OM meets the one percent; bia (violence). Violence is used as a wild-card signifier to make OM vulnerable to signification of doxic frames. In short, bia reduces (or abstracts) zoe to dike (justice). Throughout marches, demonstrations, and evictions, OM media never fails to headline police brutality as the number one antagonism. This isn’t the movement showing its true colors, any more than it is the establishment proving its unwillingness to listen. The law manifests in violence not because it commands and prescribes, but because it must create the sphere of its own reference in real life and make that reference regular; in short, it must embody a rule.
The “ninety-nine percent” and supporters of the status quo are vying for control of the civilization of sign in the public eye. While the former desires a greater awareness of the structures responsible for ignorance and the consequential manipulation of “zoe” (qua doxa) by supplementing doxa with a new commons, adding to and replacing the topos of individuality, the latter desires the proliferation of a narrative. Signification of particular social antagonisms will inculcate a more manageable topos into the collective unconscious: neo-liberalism.
At this point, if OWS is logocized, or integrated into the Civilization of Sign, the rejection of neo-liberalism would be its greatest signifier. Neo-liberalism represents corporate boundaries enforced as a determinate buffer between oneself and self-authorship. Instead of freedom-from the privatized commons, the social fact of neo-liberalism limits all to a freedom-to choose a categorized version of oneself, re-presented by the privatized commons.
In the end, violence may kill OM. If the reality of mainstream media and government responses continue to regulate their incursions into the occupied commons in this manner, OM will eventually have no choice but to no longer dilate signifiers of social antagonisms, and regress into an anti-violence protest. From a critique of bios as such to a narrative of zoe liberated, or rather forced away, inwards; from the pursuit of the bios of zoe to a reactionary bios, to protect a hidden zoe – to survive.
This narrative is OM’s greatest threat. If the commons created and occupied by OM become remediated into categories of work, and genres of revolutionary principles, it may go out like punk rock. By dilating the signifier of police brutality, OM avoids subverting itself to a single social antagonism. The threat of logocentric enclosure is averted. So long as it continues to defer exclusive signification of any particular cultural antagonism, it will survive; it will transform the American ideal of self-authorship.
In hopes of engendering a new field of possibility for individuality, of freeing the Commons, the people of OM subvert and cast off their individual authority. They come together to co-author the “author.” Its threat is that of private mythologization, embodied by neo-liberalism. This is how OM, at its core, is a pharmakon, a supplement. OM is poison to itself in its voluntary release of authored categories, and it is poison to the privatized commons, by making its unequivocal dominion over capital and information arbitrary. But how is this done, and why is arbitrariness a threat?
Arbitrariness is not a threat, and neither is OM, because we need subculture. Without subculture, there would be nothing unknown. We would literally be in Plato’s Republic. Society would crumble, and there would be no diversity. The privatized commons, as a resource for the construction of individuality, limits diversity and the notion of authorship as such. OM’s expansion of the commons is the creation of new worlds, of new possibilities for the concept of cogito; it is the communal desire for new myths. That is what this world needs more than anything. A new Myth. Today, we find ourselves in the same position as Sade and his peers; the imagination of humankind has been cut off from expansion. The rapid convergence of media and information has only quickened this social seizure.
OM’s actions are much like Johnson’s in his day. It works behind the scenes, in the shadow of mainstream media and its doxa of privatized commons, in order to manipulate and expand the field of play. Johnson refused proprietary rights on his works, just as Occupy refuses to claim anything but its difference. That there is something else, something more, a desire for something other-than-this shows the dynamism necessary for the future of individuality, for the possibility of authorship.
This truth is dirigible to post-structuralism, in that post-structuralism is the psychological ideal, a notion of the self as the psyche which contains all psyches; a collective unconscious. We all see in other persons a semblance of ourselves; a doppelgänger glance from a ‘you’ of the future. No one is a social outcast. One may not belong to a coveted subculture, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t belong to any subculture.
Marxism is a subculture. But what does it do? Marxism makes me think about money. I don’t have money. But I want to be successful. Success, for me, is applying and being accepted to graduate school, by getting a degree and having the credentials to be who I am, and who I want to be. This will help me by giving me legitimacy. Of course these are social constructs, but one must see how they are applicable to postmodernism, existentialism, and post-structuralism. When I say “see,” I don’t literally mean “SEE.” I am being abstract. “See,” to me, means “FAILURE.” This is because what I see is not literally what I am describing. I am being aesthetic. Pardon my prose, but I’m a student of English, and philosophy is not a pass-time; it is a way of life. I want to be a philosopher, and by going to graduate school, I will fulfill my dreams. Sigmund Freud spoke of dreams, and he wasn’t a psychologist, or a philosopher; he was a neurologist. And this multi-disciplinary approach is exactly what post-structuralism is.
In conclusion, the author stated in my thesis is none other than me. This is irrefutable. Granted, in citing authors read for a class and discussed in lecture, I am only subjectively the author. I claim to be an objectivist. But only social reality is objective. This is Marxism. Now I’m going to roll a cigarette, and show you why taking time to examine my philosophy is more than journalism.
There’s something about being deluded, in the sense of being led away, astray from the average every-day habitual story of your-self. What we’re getting at is that moment, no, the day, or when your ego, as in your ‘society,’ and everyone in it, heists you. You are jacked. YOU are jacked. YOU can’t speak. This is praxis. Human activity, done (as far as you know) for its own sake; you’re working. But there’s always a suspicion that you aren’t alone in there (in your head). I’m not talking about schizophrenia. It’s more ubiquitous than that. All of us, of course, have different voices running us, to chaos, or Ends that we don’t understand. But if we listen to one of them, and then reflect, we start to doubt the meaningfulness, of any, it. IT is “the world,” an ego-synthesis, really, it’s only your own pathos, you, as a pathetic expansion of what you think really matters (or is, potentially) about all of this into the social realm of your friends and family; the bright scary core everyone is rushing to. Or one of them. The pursuit of unreason, reified, is “reason.” But unity becomes plurality, and society comes to it slowly, and usually together. The you that was, the world that it viewed, is sent away, relocated to its distant and unknown destination, lost to the sea of unreasoned and indifferent potential. Homonym is feared, and synonym takes hold. Your inside is cast outside, and a society plants its stake inside of you, claiming your consciousness as a city wall claims the land. A difference is born, in your own mind. You are divided in yourself.
Sub-, infra-, neo- and every other semantic modifier is a trace of an endoxic class, not popular in the factual sense, but textual proof of the resistance or response to endoxa. They signify included middles. This is banal. But isn’t all linguistic morphology? We’re signifying the ever de-pragmatizing of philosophical rhetoric by a movement that claims its purpose to be the improvement of society. Theory as Praxis. This is Post-Structuralism. An autonomously stabilizing Endoxa seems impossible, yet it never fails to find a new mean. And that becomes meaning, remederi. Praxicidal theory is a contradiction. That is, any attempt to destroy praxis is already itself praxis. So we slap a neo- in front of it, to mark it, if only temporarily, for the reader. But the reader is a variable. This is anaphora. He or She must bring their own pathological semantic scope to the terms. Dilation. In this case, any sentence means anything. Another banality. There is art, and there is language, but sometimes both comment on each other, at once, and the boundary between signs disappears. This is Occupation:
Bodies, boding dark dreams of lagging signs into your lacking lap. Lips, ripping and bleeding and dying and kissing. Nameless and without organ they lap up and down, future and past now arbitrary choices, or not, except with respect to “us.” A neo-class becomes class, then crass, as it’s seen once more, in time, or prose. A 99% is also an organless body. Lack, and fear. That is-
And, yet. There are also those who still claim to know nothing. Who want to know. Who want to meet you. They let madness penetrate them, willfully and fully. Curiouser and lovelier, they see their self in a stranger’s eye when you speak with the paper-“I” of tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow. They are the truly nameless nomos. They are the hidden heroes. The past has not passed if you never mix stories. There’s only one Just sovereign, and it does not claim propriety. A habitus of non-membership. An ethos you refuse to engage in. The sovereign must curse himself as homo sacer. No one ever dies. If society banishes you, know that “you” isn’t YOU. Again, let’s not appeal to holistic alternatives. Let’s instead get romantic: let’s talk about nothing. Let’s talk about an abyss. Let’s talk about subjectivity. Let’s look into the darkness, together, into the valley of unreason. As you fall into darkness, you ascend above gender-class. You will be tempted to conflate this with an icy world of pure logic, but don’t. Don’t you dare reduce the pure subject to logic. It’s beyond class, beyond category, and beyond face. It’s the realm of boundaries; the thin social film between society’s “reality” and the unknown real of pure imagination. It won’t bite because it can’t. The REAL you can’t hurt anything. It is the infinite possibility of reconstruction, the lack of self-cultivation, the heroin addict’s dream; the yndi halda of an angel’s eternal rest. Don’t be afraid to dream in the margins, and don’t fear the next, bright, white day. Whatever it takes, whomever you make, you will never be dragged down to his-story. No one need ever know what you’re thinking or feeling. Not even you. That is-
Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. From Work to Text. 1971. Trans. Stephen Heath. 1977. Print.
Woodmansee, Martha and Peter Jaszi. On The Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity. 1994. Print.
Foucault, jkljakdjfkl;a history of madness
Agumben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer….etc
Sade, Marquis de. “Reflections on the Novel.” The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. 1966. New York: Grove Press, 1987. 91-116. Print.
Know Your Meme. Cheezburger, Inc. Web. 24. November 2011.
<http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop/photos?sort=views>
MEDIAITE. Mediaite, LLC. 16. November 2011. Web. 24. November 2011.
George Caffentzis. In the Desert of Cities: Notes on the Occupy Movement in the US.
Reclamations Blog. 27. January 2012. Web. 01. May 2012. <http://www.reclamationsjournal.org/blog/?p=505>
Demonizing Reality 