ANGEL APPLICANT, 1939
Writing in his journal in the late 1920s, Max Horkheimer, painfully aware of the violence that had been tearing German apart for a decade, stubbornly retained his pacifist disposition, though haunted by its evident limitations.
LETHAL HARMONY AT THE HOTEL EDEN
At roughly the same time, far to the south of Germany in the Transvaal, Mahatma Gandhi proposed a way out of this impasse through the idea of satyagraha, “soul force, pure and simple”. He writes:
An op-ed scribed by the Brazilian novelist Vanessa Barbera and published in the pages of the New York Times alerted us to the existence of the Mad Cow Retaliation Plan, hatched (untethered?) so as to turn invasive NSA data strip mines into pastures of steaming cow pies.
Ms. Barbera writes:
We propose that DP readers, in the spirit of Vaca Louca, first click on the below song link, and then read aloud the subsequent string of seven mad cow sentences, as generated by the Motherboard verbal dung machine. In doing so, you will be making far more sense than Mr. James Clapper, who suffered an attack of severe bovine flatulence while testifying before congress, though he later insisted that the methane cloud obscuring the chamber was in fact the very essence of a rose.
WHAT’S THAT PLOP?
Now comes Judge Brian A. Jackson, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, with a ruling that overturns Herman Wallace’s conviction for the 1974 murder of a prison guard, granting him full habeas relief based on the systematic exclusion of women from the Grand Jury, in violation of the 14th Amendment. Judge Jackson also orders that “the State immediately release Mr. Wallace from custody.”
Mr. Wallace, who has long maintained his innocence consistent with abundant evidence, is dying of liver cancer. He has been held in solitary confinement for forty one years, inside the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
In 2001, Wallace received a letter from artist Jackie Sumell. After two years of correspondence, Sumell asked the question that would initiate their extraordinary collaboration, “what kind of house does a man whose been in solitary confinement for 30 years dream of?”. Though Wallace was at first reluctant to engage — he had no such dreams — he finally wrote, “let’s do the project baby, you done gone way out there in that water, let’s see how we do together”.
In 2003, the prisoner and the artist began designing Mr. Wallace’s “dream” house through detailed inside/outside dialogue. In time, the project became the subject of a major traveling exhibition, a book, and a 2012 documentary film, all of which in turn brought both heat and light to the dense thicket of legal and racial injustices suffered by Wallace during the time of his incarceration:
MODEL OF THE SPACE OF CONFINEMENT
DIALOGUE AND DIALECTIC
GUESTS WILL SMILE AS THEY WALK THROUGH THE FLOWERS
Mr. Wallace:
Ms. Sumell:
UPDATE FROM JACKIE SUMELL, OCTOBER 4, 2013:
AN INVITATION TO REPOSE
While climbing along the spine of the Green Mountains towards the Canadian border, we had several opportunities to experience the blissful reverie of a campfire. Having struggled to recall the subtleties of Gaston Bachelard’s pyropoetics as expressed in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, we shall blame an excess of lactic acid burning through the body. Upon return to the safety of the DP library, we reached for the slim volume on an upper shelf and turned to the second chapter, excerpted below:
ELEMENTAL THOUGHT
LOVE AND STRIFE
Enter Empedocles, philosopher of Love and Strife, and his reputed leap into the flames:
HERCULES AND POETIC DESTINY
~~~~~~
From Hölderin’s unfinished Empedocles:
In rough DP translation:
~~~~~~
Our struggles to recollect Bachelard from the flames were soon forgotten, with the rising of a full moon over the distant mountains, taking the imagination away from the beckoning pyre, and towards a different sort of reverie.
MOMENTS BEFORE A RAID OF THE UNSPEAKABLE
A DP correspondent has reminded us of the fearless researches and reflections of Jim Douglass, above all his meticulous review of evidence regarding the Kennedy assassination, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, in which he identifies the deep (unspeakably deep) national security reasons why Kennedy had to be eliminated, thereby making way for the more pliable and bellicose Johnson.
Opening a lengthy presentation given at a conference in Dallas, Douglass referred to his work as a hopeful experiment in truth, performed in the service of nonviolent transformation.
Here is Gandhi’s own description of his use of the tern “satyagraha”:
Jim Douglass identifies Thomas Merton’s Raids of the Unspeakable as the major inspiration for his own experiments in truth :
Douglass again, elsewhere:
Finally, excerpts from Merton’s powerful prologue:
FROZEN STIFF
THE WHOLE WORLD IS SECRETLY ON FIRE
As the USA gears up for another undeclared war in search of inescapable ungraspables, we offer a trio of texts for a dog day meditation. First, from Maurice Blanchot’s Space of Literature:
Next we join Zarathustra, roaming the footpaths somewhere out in the überengadin:
And finally, the last three stanzas from Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening:
PHILOSOPHICAL LEAK
Günther Anders’ “philosophy of discrepancy” centers around his lucid insight that our Promethean ability to create weapons, tools and productive networks far exceeds our capacity to absorb their implications into thought. As he writes in The Atomic Menace:
How do “inverted Utopians” behave? Unimaginably — with an instinctive drive towards disappearance. From his essay The Term:
In Visit to Hades, an analysis of the extermination camps as a form of productive labor, Anders notes historically overlapping modes of obliteration. One way or another, the future belongs to mass murder.
UNTHINKABLE DISAPPEARANCE FABRIK
Since the age of the Inverted Utopian is far from over, Anders’ philosophy of discrepancy remains strikingly relevant. We continue to devise tools, techniques and networked systems, with ethical and ecological implications that we are unable to fathom, whether in neurobiology, financial algorithms or energy extraction.
Anders would likely be surprised that the species is still around in the year 2013. And surely he could not have imagined that there would eventually exist such an occult ecstasy within the lethal discrepancy, namely among those infatuated with the coming (yearned for) “singularity” between human bodies and artificial intelligence.
In fulfillment of the inverted utopian maxim, a world without us will be such a crowning achievement for the species; let’s be sure not to leave any loose ends.
ENDPUNKT
During our recent rediscovery of the work of Günther Anders, guided by Harold Marcuse, we became aware of the pioneering essay, The World As Phantom and As Matrix, an excursion into the philosophical consequences of electronic media, particularly television and radio. The ideas in the essay now seem so familiar as to have become banal, yet look at the publication date: 1956!
At that time, a young Germanist named Jean Baudrillard was teaching in a Lycée while doing a bit of translation on the side (Weiss, Brecht). He also performed occasional editorial tasks for Le Seuil. Baudrillard would undoubtedly have been a reader of the influential German journal Merkur, where Anders’ essay first appeared; he appears to have taken careful notes.
Below, slightly reformatted for readability, and with our own DP headings, a few excerpts from the Anders phantom matrix:
THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE HOME-OWNER
DINNER TIME
ELEMENTS FOR A NEW SYNTAX
PORTRAIT OF THE IDEALIST AS A YOUNG MAN
FAUST IS DEAD
To commemorate the 68th anniversary for the bombing of Hiroshima, we have been slowly working our way through Günther Anders’ remarkable Reflections on the H Bomb, which can be read here in its entirety, courtesy of Harold Marcuse.
Anders begins his reflections with a passage titled The modern infinite. Faust is dead:
Further along, beneath the heading Our incapacity for fear marks the freezing point of human freedom, Anders identifies the nascent radical unfreedom of our own time, as we stumble along, well past the freezing point, deep into the numbness of the black ice:
AFGHAN CHILDREN KILLED BY OUR FREEZING POINT
YES WE CAN
We note the open letter written a few days ago by Snowden family attorney Bruce Fein to a lamentably unscrupulous Hollow Man:
The entire letter is worth a careful reading, yet the reference to Civil Disobedience prompts us to digress elsewhere within Thoreau’s essay, based in his own experience of refusing to pay a poll tax.
Counter friction represents the energy of the autonomous conscience set against unjust laws:
We further note that there has not been a single attempt by anyone representing the Obama administration to engage either Mr. Snowden or his attorney in dialogue regarding the counter-frictive substance of their moral and philosophical claims; rather, all public pronouncements are framed by the eristic drive to restrain, silence, imprison and punish.
Yet Mr. Snowden continues to breathe after his own fashion, while the scarecrows twist and wriggle.
Thoreau takes pity on his jailers, who had no idea who he was, or why he was there, anticipating the depraved indifference exhibited towards Pfc. Bradley Manning:
Anticipating the general public’s apathetic trance, as our formerly proud constitutional republic mutates into a feckless oligarchy, Thoreau writes:
SUMMER WEATHER FRIENDS
In the end, Thoreau finds solace among the children of his beloved Concord, hunting for huckleberries; nowadays, his every picked berry would no doubt be recorded as metadata.
A few months after his death in 1862, Emerson published a eulogy that we hope need never be applied to Edward Snowden, nor to any of the other prisoners of conscience unjustly incarcerated by the hollow men, the stuffed men; agents of metadata, agents of the machine.
As for those straw folk and their senseless antics, well you know how it goes:
Desperado Philosophy 