File deleuze-guattari/deleuze-guattari.0508, message 15


Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2005 04:49:29 -0400
From: NZ <pretzelworld-AT-gmail.com>
To: deleuze-guattari-driftline.org-AT-lists.driftline.org
Subject: Re: [D-G] Awakening from the Nightmare of History


James is such a poet. yes, It IS like intermingling tree-structures.
If only we could have Yggdrasil to explain our situation and guide us
thru, but those are old-fashioned mythologies. Where is that old
rhebus(!?), indeed, D-G seem to provide fragments of it. But, here is
some more nightmare-sleep-fantasy...

"In Norse mythology the Einherjar or Einheriar, were spirits of
warriors who had died bravely in battle every day. In the morning,
they are woken by Gullinkambi, a rooster, and march out to the great
field of Idavoll in the heart of Asgard to fight against each other in
merry (and mortal) combat. At dusk, when they are all cut to pieces,
save perchance a few, they are miraculously healed, and march back
into Valhalla, where Andhr=EDmnir, the cook of the gods, has prepared a
meal for them from the pork of S=E6hr=EDmnir, a pig that is reborn every
day, and the mead milked from Hei=F0r=FAn, a goat feeding on the leaves of
Yggdrasil. [...] A tree whose leaves and twigs reach down to the roof
of Valhalla and provide food for the goat Hei=F0r=FAn and the stag
Eiktyrnir that both live on the roof.)"
-there's more at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einherjar
-------------------
If Stanislaw Lem says so, I am, truely dreaming or sleep-living
(rather than just plain "dead" like  Tollund Man (300.b.c)), then i
must necessarily have a concept (no matter how bad) of The Absolute
through which I can interact with the realworld. For Tollund Man it
could very likely be the Goat, Hei=F0r=FAn which connects us as Einherjar
to Yggdrasil. I am sure Bill Moyers could deconstruct the whole
"Goat-thing" in western civilization better than me, but the part I
like is imagining "us as the Einherjar, subsisting off hamburgers and
beer served to us by the fine babes at Hooters BBQ, playing the
endgame with Duchamp during the day." No thanks. As our reality takes
on the literal aspects of our abstract cultural myths, we too often
loose the context for that original myth.  Through time those
mythic-cultures become "re-territorialized" as products sold back to
us.  (don't marketers have their own imagination to rape?) Even as
paradoxs of market psychology these myths fulfill a latent economy of
meaning that indeed leaves an imprint on historical consciousness (but
that is not real even if the imprint is). So why then are we still
sucking ass all day? A concept of absolute allows for that economy to
be governed consciously, but without a concept of absolute that
economy is subject to virtually any BwO whether or not it is conscious
or not. Hitler targeted the Thrall suckers. One problem I have (which
is why I am not an anarchist) that a capitalist BwO is most likely not
conscious either.... and  yet we, who are "becoming", must absorb that
excess economy and redistribute it ourselves, it is a cruel act.

Coming back to NYC from Poland & germany last week, made me realize
how few Americans have a sense of identity outside of culture-industry
(or their insular Satre-groups). It isn't an identity-crash, there was
no soaring identity, its a calm calculated identity-landing, with
Herve Vilechaize greeting me. I mean, the county is made by people who
could not work out their problems back home and needed an imaginary
blank slate on which to begin, that makes a perfect target. Like
Rawls'  original position, it reflects an impoverished moral
conception of the person. In what scenario would I want my concept of
identity to compete with my concept of justice? None, thanks to my
persona-culture those are mutually exclusive for me, so it is the
nightmare of such a scenario that makes me paranoid. Heracletus saw
the absolute as fire, chaotic but adaptable (it can only be, so long
as it is there), plato saw it divided by the knowable (that being
known+unknown) and "nothing", as did Anaxagoras. Xeno easily showed
how difficult it is to move forward without a concept of absolute. And
since then, Plato's "nothing" has been filled by twinkies, electron
microscopes and bikini wax, and promptly transfered into the
"knowable". Without a concept of the Absolute, then that economy of
transfer (from nothing to unknown-knowable, and then to
known-knowable) is taking place in an unconscious realm of our
identity, which leaves it vulnerable to virtually any logic,
especially Xeno's. Culture was not always in the unconscious realm.
Ideas like the rhebus and the kenning allowed it to have meaning. I am
starting to think that fact that English lost its genderized nouns
also fits into this.
"a martini is made with dry vermouth, so your soul can't get wet."
Heraclitus the Bartender
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