The Stygian Wholesto

In Stars, On Whales

2010-05-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

Reporting from the field (somewhere in Fiji):

I have not seen the language of the water yet. In a way, the prepositions would be too slippery. Too ready to not do their jobs. It's unconscionable... the feathery feeling of what's actually going on here.

I know Gnothin agrees with me. He doesn't approve of my using the Stygian as a tissue, but he knows I speak the truth. (Itself a lie... for one cannot speak with text.) When I read his recent posts, I became filled with a sense of panic. I could not control the language where it was positioned on the page. Is this the end for me? I don't seem to recognize where my past has been lately.

And where the fuck is that ass-clown Gibson? His mind must've tuned out & dropped off... another castaway... ex-property of the Stygian Wholesto. I will not allow myself to go the same cowardly route. I'll hang on for sacred life.

D'you hear me, Gibson?!?

Gnothin, you tell that scumbag I'm not listening to his absence any more.

Social Networks Round out Psychoanalytic Supplementation

2010-05-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

To not “friend” someone in a social network space in 2010, when both parties are cognizant that these digital identities occupy the same virtual space, has become a deplorable act bound with a frenzied social-electric current that is ten-fold worse than any party-snub involving real contact. In sum, digital space becomes the hyper-real, a false-reality superseded by an impetus that reinforces and doubles social regulation and conformity. Today, you can know someone and never contact them by any means. You can know them and see them on a regular basis. You can know them, see them in a social space, and pay them no attention, and that’s fine. But, on no grounds, can you know them, even on a regular, informed basis, and not be attached to them in the virtual public space. Even if you communicate with a person for eighty-percent of your real, inferential time, you must also be interconnected in the world of make-believe with them or your real association may become strained via the unreal and unrealized association. We can draw upon the NY schools to really sense this derivable, overextended, monopolistic woe which homesteads on the nature of virtual reality. Postwar massification taught us that from our education circles we cannot abandon any cooption which does not render less enthusiastic reductions of resistance. There is no widespread reduction that forms a signified truth that bends around American “intelligentsia.” To prod a little longer with old theory for a moment, we learn that our own identities at an early age are not from the Lockean empiricisms that gesture us as neither associated sensory data nor the Kantian active consciousnesses. We realize we are subject and object and are mutually implicated as an emergent & shifting consciousness devoid of categorizing. The virtual space suspends the shifting consciousness of the real, bankrupts the credit that dwells within the intersubjectivity of intimacy. It becomes relationship in the monolithic form, which then, hardens its monolithic values back onto the real. It’s the one place where a real-world friendship can be severed without any change to the inherent friendship by merely shifting reality spheres. The real friendship with an imperceptible governing body that is always subjective, like the real personalities from which they emanate, become cold, analytical, (monolithic), and ultimately tyrannical.

Gibson Silverburst & Social Totality

2010-04-29T21:36:00.000-07:00

This time it’s Bones, a pseudo-crime drama that tentatively adheres to logic, rationality and common sense. Dr. Bones is hot on a homicide case that points towards a pair of guitar “shredders” in the loosest of terms. Perhaps the forensic anthropologist hits better on human anatomy, but the blaring and insulting misses on guitar anatomy, guitar techniques, and American guitar heritage could have been reduced by at least seventy-five percent by executing a forty-five second Google search. But belittling those shortcomings would be useless and distanced from any philosophical or hermeneutic one-to-one correspondence the Stygian endeavors. The crime is when the great Dr. Bones and staff offhandedly begins when a character remarked the value of the murder weapon, the Silverburst Les Paul Gibson, as close to $250,000 based solely on the “music board,” “hardware,” and “wood type.” To follow up this magical thinking, the guitar is then shown being played at a speed, intonation & scale arrangement that was not physically possible by what the player had suggested with his half-ass impression. This grave misunderstanding, as laughable as it sounds, remains not the butt of joke. The joke remains with the viewer next to me at the bar who found the scene completely believable and accepted it as truth, as a complete confirmation of a reality that denied the thing being watched from all its utilitarian function. The scare here is that pop culture has not dwindled into where we thought it would go, not enthroned into a useless and mummified false art. It has become the opposite. Pop culture, particularly night-time drama has become pure deflection which changes and ultimately transforms any reality in its unmanned craft with wild, aimless guns.

From here we can only gesture towards a critical teaching that resists interference from intelligent passivity before these most aggressive modern assaults on reality. These subtle forces working the nightshift across living rooms in America have formed an ironical juggernaut unlike any other. The culture escapes into the sub-created world that idolatrizes brilliance in an escapist mood—See “House,” see any “CSI,” see “Bones, see “Criminal Minds,” see “Numbers”—these viewers worship this genius and the dramatized event of it unfolding on the television while the actual practical application of any of the ideas on these shows only yields numbed idiocracy and asinine generalizations. The irony is that while they bathe in the electric light of this pseudo-expertise, the nation, the real America remains complicit in its stupidity, a stupidity in accelerated decline. To question these said “shows” means one is pretentious and snobby, a know-it-all that doesn’t know shit. In the end, it’s a perfect numbing machine. It supports a prejudice over the intellectual, it supports the nation in which vandguardism and nonconformity have become terms of condemnation from mob-mentally inclined irrationals, it supports ideas that have magically converted outside-the-box thinking into inside-the-box thinking teeming with superstition, abstract assumptions and idealistic racisms and sexisms.

So how do we pull the wires on such a self-propagating infection? As a reader-hearer, we can only sadly create revolution by subverting the didactic potentials of resistance. Exuberant and innovative forms of thinking are only borne when time & history are refused. Those are the only positive potentials for transcendence through the application of any existential philosophy. Only through true consciousness of being might the attainment of nothingness become crystallized, and with the right humanitarian catalyst, move into a suffocating consciousness where utopian truths bring forth new forms of existence. In short, the physical has moved completely into the simulacrum of heightened reality chock-full of winners that idolatrize in them but attempt to paralyze those who are appropriate themselves as real winners.

As an end note, sorry for the long hiatus, again. Hassan and ideas of dismemberment have been terrible derailments. We are back for the time being.

Empty Anarchistic Protocol

2008-07-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

Please watch:

We look at these kids with curiosity and reverence for their ability and aspirations considering our own political milieu. Refuse/Resist, the song by the hard-riffing and guttural band, Sepultura, essentially was a praxis on Brazilian discouragements in the fading shadow of a notable Italian family. Closer in touch with ancestral roots (proof is in the next album Roots Bloody Roots), Sepultura fused Amazonian tribal techniques, some African, with American thrash metal with shades of Norwegian black metal. These kids could be Brazilian, and at times in the sub-par recording, we can hear Portuguese splicing. This song is often dubbed over the Tiananmen Square standoff in China, and there is, without a doubt, considering modern Brazil, these children fronting the same revolutionary spirit burning. The Stygian, though, (a probable pessimistic aside), likes to point out the irony of the video. The guitarist/singer, fronts a Pokemon shirt while thrashing to a song that wishes to climb upon the machinery and stand up, to refuse and resist, to say, “I am human and will not blindly adhere to your version of reality.” And as we know, children may want a visual oriented clothing, labels, etc;, but it is the parent who buys it, the parent who likely helped teach these children thrash metal, and the parent who is obviously filming this and has uploaded it to YouTube…

So again we have a faux deliberation, faux sub-culture elitism, a faux punk subversion, a faux anarchistic protocol towards hated moral-literary values. In terms of lubricating the revolution, this video re-assures us of tyranny and its complex intersection of intergazes, watching us all and calling itself the popular arts. We look towards change on our following generations. What we find to be a privileged space for fulfilled projects and a sequence of expressive clarity, of visionary truth without the didactic throes of culture, we only find the common, all too automated, poetic pressure of uniformed and trendy thinking. It is only a small step to imagine a “Go Green” slogan at the end of this video. The essential device of music is a separate metaphorical language full of linguistic elements and negative knowledge. The cover song here refuses and resists a real discursive approach on truth. It poses no explanation and is vacuous in its cause. It disassembles it’s original trajectory, and in turn, glorifies the thing, the machine, it ultimately wishes to destroy. It’s parasitic amateurism. Impersonal, unsound, nonpositional, and is devoid of what we determine as the historcality of consciousness.

Cats Blink When Stuck with Hammers: A Stygian Salute to George Carlin

2008-06-25T21:40:00.000-07:00

Swamp – Wetlands

Medicine – Medication

Theatre – Performing Arts Center

Riot – Civil Disorder

The Dump – The Landfill

Constipation – Occasional Irregularity

Those are only a few of our euphemisms that the late great George Carlin brought to our rarely buoyant attention. George didn’t have heart attack, he had heart complications that resulted in his passing. One headline wrote it that way, so for George, his proof is in the proverbial pudding.

Our restructuring of images is inescapable, which makes George right—we are all diseased. Our linguistic sickness is not analogical despite our growing psychoanalytic and historical curiosity. The proper end of reification encompasses ancient rabbis and church fathers as well as electro-ignitions on the sweeping god-of-media’s frontier. Carlin said, “By and large, language is a tool for concealing truth.” The concealment thickens the more we try to thin. When we approach a text as a locus of fruitful inquiry, we like to primarily dethrone critics, scrutinize the images of women, respond to sexual stereotypes, scoff at fictional characters, and shit, the best we can, all over acts of literary mimesis, mainly, to make someone else smell it, and when that doesn’t work, rub the cultured guano right into the eyes. And this is what we often do, us bibliophiles, us language lovers. My colleagues and I have resisted our concerns with contemporary pedagogy and positioned ourselves within endangered rhetorics of exaggeration, omissions, oblique insertions and unreal orthodoxy. Somewhere in there, we identify with Carlin’s repulsion and antagonism toward the euphemism. The euphemism is not only dead language, but it is the basis for all dehumanized, antiphilosopy of art hostile toward objectivity, realism, truth (both the big T, and little t), politics and the remnants of an industrial society. The euphemism serves as a key moderator between conflations and linguistic corruption, folding the two in on themselves to yield a wolf-in-wolf’s-clothing technique, teeming with propaganda, and covertly ushered into our daily dialects. The euphemism is euthanasia of structural perfection, and lacks any human inclination toward the concrete other. When George said, “Tits always look better in a pink sweater,” he showed us that if we work hard, if we pay close attention to our imaginary activities and comprehensive judgment, we can move beyond our anemic referential and say something clearly. Thank you, George. Talk to you later.

A Heartfelt Return from Boredom

2008-06-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

In a Universe where nothing travels at light speed, the world suffers from infinite boredom. I have uncovered this Universal Truth while doing field research in Montana, the confirmed epicenter of boredom in our world. What does that make it Universally? I'd hate to consider it.

I'd like to thank Gnothin, my colleague and friend, for reviving me from an existence non sequitor. His recent e-mail and forward progress with the blog gave me the blast I needed. I was so immersed in work that I failed to see myself turning into the very substance from which language exists--the quantum foam of words if you will. From my pit of despair, I recognized the death of communication in a plastic bottle. It was none other than the saddest moment of my life, realizing that our hypermediated language has become so overworked that letters themselves have grown weary of operation. One day, staring at a Coca-Cola bottle nestled in prairie moss, I recognized the phrase CA CASH REFUND for the truth therein. The modern day presents such turmoil that words need not be stuttered by operators. Words are stuttering for themselves--evidence of linguistic slippage. I am a finger snap away from abandoning quasi-mitochondriasm as a viable means of literary study. All my research has come crashing down. Do I pick up the pieces?

Don't answer that. I don't know. I can't know. It would be too painful, and my existence of late has been dense with pain. It is tough returning to civilization with my good friend Gibson missing from academic action. Where has he gone? Where have all the good words gone? I am truly sorry. I will pull myself together soon enough... sooner rather than later if the words will let me.

Hiatus over: “A Time for Remyth and Oil for the Great Simulacrum,” or simply, “Waiting on Postmodern Daffodils.”

2008-06-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

During the Stygian hiatus the upsurge in criticisms of the project reached a critical mass, a massification really, many of outright dismissal. The best was a pseudo-glorification, one that celebrated the Stygian for its unintentional exposure of the purpose of academic writing: inflate fragile ideas, obscure the dialectic or any attempt at reason, and ultimately inhibit any perceptible clarity. So it goes…

But before I work to refortify the trajectory of the Stygian, I feel an update on the status of some of the members will provide apologies for the long hiatus for such a provisional beginning. My colleague Gibson was inducted into the coterie of European philosophical phenomenologists, a camp branched from Husserl in many ways. While Gibson’s work in existentialism and the consequent expansion of capitalism remained latent, his surveys of constituted knowledge gain against direct intuition, and the mutually implicated throes within modern language (his forthcoming book) was deeply applauded by the camp. Because of this Gibson has relocated to Malaysia to work closely with some editors and dictates. The workshop is somewhat experimental, and no electronics are allowed, including electricity itself. In short, we have lost contact until further notice.

Stallius, profound in his exploration on the impact of exterior substances (i.e. drugs) on language throughout history, notified me of his want to work independent (in Montana) to dabble with a series of visual arts committed to themes of boredom, death, despair, hate, disillusion, nonbeing and void. I expect an intersection at some point in the future, which I’ve found to be a possible, intriguing chimerical with my present work of post-theory and structuralism after language, its exemplary means, its vehicles, and how to predict our future linguistic fissures.

To rewind, the criticisms sequester some truths into academia and writing, but only as all things sequester some truths. We can remember how deconstruction was described as “new new criticism,” and we can remember the same antagonism and the same late 60s professors calling them philistines on sidewalks. To remain close to the heart of the Stygian project, I will definitely restrain from the abrasive rebuttals from those reminiscent frontier critics, the haters of antimimeticism and anti-intentionalism. But there is no denial that the Stygian, at times, impedes clarity and cohesiveness. “Inflating fragile ideas”…that is ridiculous. Most of our work is an extension of applied linguistic theory on the disjunctive techniques of modern poetry and fiction, or modern language, to broaden. Of course our language may separate from common human experience, from those of undecidability not invested in critical overproduction. Of course we run against the grain to a belief that language is devoid of obscure referentially, of unexplored renunciations, of the foul contagions of prefixes and suffixes. But we still believe language is our hope, our endeavoring, mundane acts which are most memorable, that we have independent readers and listeners, that our system renders infinite possible combinations—and somewhere—within the striated symbologies—everyone can speak, and read, and write, ad infinitum.

Winnie the Pooh: The Stygian Mascot

2007-05-12T22:18:00.000-07:00

Winnie the Pooh continues to teach us all. Recently, I watched an old Pooh episode with my niece which proved to be a closer, and more precise exercise in the dialectic than we have chewed in pompous circles at the universities, chock-full of senseless bravado. In the penultimate spot of the 1977 cartoon, Pooh finds Piglet struggling in the blustery winds of the Hundred Acre Woods; the dialog is as follows:

Pooh: “Where are you going, Piglet?”

Piglet: “That’s what I keep asking myself, where?”

Pooh: “What do you think you will answer yourself?”

Piglet: “Oh, oh, oh, I’m unraveling."

Pooh could not ask a better question. He is beyond an existential role. He asserts upon Piglet with our central question which many stray from—not what you will do, but how you will answer. Pooh should be part of the Stygian. Existentialism has grossly become a cliché in our time, often supplanted by angst filled pseudo-intellects or half-ass TV screen writers as a buzzword for boredom and suburbia idleness. Pooh reinstates dominant traditions in philosophy which foreground the influence of our greatest minds of two hundred years. Pooh, in his simpleton approach, understand human subjectivity, denies determinations, clusters empirical and idealistic emotional projections upon his careful aimed criticism of phenomenological perspectives. Heidegger and Sartre both moved away from an emphasis on knowledge; Pooh affirmed the fostered personal inflection into not answering, but thinking of the question. The question is more than the answer, the question is intersubjective—it’s inebriated, it resists logical discourse and should draw a detailed portrait of consciousness without a clear method. For Pooh, imagination is something intrinsic and is always opposed to utter alienation. The existential is not alienated, but orientated. It is careful in the episode that right after Pooh lets Piglet spiral to the skies on his unraveling sweater that silence follows—our most profound aesthetic. Piglet’s proclamation is an anti-manifesto in itself—“we shall not discuss.” The Stygian sees this, of course, as similar to “‘What is the wind doing?’ Nothing again Nothing”—if we can get away with another Eliot line. Against philosophical judgment, we can funnily find ourselves (albeit satirically) at a sort of realism which defies ratioclination, or even better, attendant reflections towards our historical milieu. Pooh stands the test of time. Pooh’s spatializing and recentralizing of fundamental insecurities, juxtaposed with his temporal and ceaseless experience of ontological necessity is something we can all benefit from touching again. The hope lies within is that kids still love watching Pooh.

Entangled Myth: Our Fabricated Discontinuity

2007-05-05T21:32:00.000-07:00

The Stygian Wholesto apologizes for such a long, unexpected hiatus. Griffin, Stallius, and yours truly have been working feverishly on intellectual projects—as well as Appareo Nihil—the Wholesto’s upcoming manifesto. The ambitious project bogged in its fifth unit regarding the topic of pre-messiahian speculation. Stallius believes without a clear hominid teleological undergirding, we are unable to divorce from our anthrocentric comic view to fully articulate its discourse. Who is the new #2, anyways? But that topic is for another day, and I’m sure Stallius will be hitting this blog soon with all his “unacceptable and dangerous” pleas. For tonight, we discuss the growing concerns about the myths of war, the sensorial reality our panoptic schemas shield us from, and why neither is a worthwhile starting point for a grounded discourse in evaluating conflicts in the middle-east. Chris Hedges, a combat salty New York Times reporter, (a title we are reminded of every other paragraph), said that we basically hyperconform to the myths of war—the empty and hollow heroic mother country, apple pie, remember the Alamo ideals totally severed from any true reality….which he calls the sensorial reality. And Hedges has great validity in all his claims. See Pat Tillman. See the most recent American embarrassment. But the Stygian Wholesto always defers from the political hot bed, and instead, we will discuss the bubbles of myth we live with every day. The modern abstract man, (and I’m using modern as current), seeks communal harmony through unspecified inquiries into his despotic past. This is the whole reason we cannot fully understand mimesis in the first place. Man seeks latent patterns and seeks them when they don’t exist. See our constellations. A knee jerk reaction is that we should stop this madness and hold an ontological priority towards a decoding of feelings and associations. But when faced with war, there is a tendency to form paradoxical logic and implicitly look for interpretive inferences where there are not any. Hedges tells us that though. However, Hedges forgot that the blood and gore is ultimately at odds with structuralistic and hermeneutical empathies. From this, one may say that the sensory could perhaps be the mythic bubble. If the sensory punctured the bubble of myth, there would have not been an American war post Saving Private Ryan. But Hedges would assert there that this proves the addiction. But we can never arrive at our own history. We, sadly, only live in seamless discontinuities, always fabricated. If we say that a dismembered soldier and his close comrades bear witness to the “true” reality, and good reportage of that episode is our only tool to pop the bubble then we are naïve to our operations of rhetoricity. Transmitting the “truth” only becomes the replicator of another myth—the myth of propaganda. As we have gestured at in another blog post: the making of myth only brought into play the notion of myth and lie—and once lie was introduced—all truth was lost. That may lean on postmodernism, but sometimes those freaks have a point. Man is more mythed about reportage and media. So when a myth is punctured; the event moves on through the night. We are entangled in myth. Untying that knot around what we want to call truth requires more than reportage, genocide, and disillusionment. Disillusionment is/was simultaneous to civilization, and looking for a binary approach to problems in the middle east with sensory/mythic falls short…like most modes of privileged rhetoric.

A matrix of God's tricks

2006-12-30T17:08:00.000-08:00

When Nietzsche said, "God is dead," he meant it only in the sense of the constant retrocirculation of life energy. In the words of modern-day literary critic and fellow Stygian contributor Friedrich Kurt Gnothin, "Life feeds on life, which [drives] descriptive needs in the material need for the deprivation of goods which causes social exclusions." Even though God may have died, God has died over and over and over--the feeding of Life on itself. The "unfortunate" outcome of this, however, is that, as Gnothin tells us, this cycle of life creates a sense of Nietzschean isolation. In death and reincarnation, God is always excluded socially. God exists apart from us, the living; therefore, God is, in essence, dead. This binarization drives the Universe. Social exclusions become the social norm--especially for God.

People, on the other hand, rely on the social norm. We are excluded least when we participate in the social norm. We learn from each other by accepting social norms. In quasi-mitochondriastic terms, the energy of life reveals itself through social exclusions. The energy of the churning universe drives itself from within. With no external source, the universe powers itself--the only perpetual motion machine in existence, precisely because it is existence. Within the energetic aether of the universe, our world reveals its own energy through literary works--among other artistic media.

This literary energizing of the text makes us step back from the page and look down at what the author and the universe have both created. Without the universe, there is no author; and without the author, there is no universe to shape. In binarizational terms, neither one is anything. The energy of the universe--evident via the energy of the text--never stops churning, and therefore never has a beginning point for its own retrocirculation. In continuing to be, it has no birth that we know.

Then how do we know it to be? How do we know we are not trapped in some conglomerate nerual network of minds? The Matrix has made us all aware of the possibility that perhaps this reality does not exist. We all question the world as it is--or rather, as we think it is. We can say mostly for certain that this life is not the end-all dimension. Being isolated from us through social exclusions, God is the obvious creator of the universe--most similar to the Architect character in The Matrix. And truly God is an outstanding architect to construct such a clever structure of reality for us to so completely fall into the pitfall of whether or not our reality exists. Still, we feel the energy of our pseudo-reality so strongly at times that, just as God has planned, we trick ourselves into thinking reality is real. So how do we know we are part of some grand computer program?

Because of the constant retrocirculation in the universe, energy is constantly a-flow. Therefore, we should feel this energy at all times. But we do not. By turning to literature, and other mediated arts, we can confirm this fact that only sometimes do we feel the true energy of life come through. As authors of the universe, authors channel the energy of the real existence, but only at occasional moments within the art form does the author so completely translate the energy of the true universe. We feel these moments as inebriations in the text. Of course, without these inebriations, the text would exist only in its standard, God-made state from start to finish. It is these inebriations, these moments where the text makes the reader stagger, that bring to light the energy of the universe.

We are all readers of this life. We read to understand this life, but only by reading with an inebriated eye can we truly understand both this life and its binarization to the one beyond.

Remystification: Lubricants for the Revolution

2006-12-22T21:48:00.000-08:00

Somewhere between the 14th century and present day stagnation, the word ‘mystify’ has moved from a faith based definition to a definition focused on deceit, lies, and conspiracy. Mystification has been deemed as a method of control which explains away what is already obvious. Or, more precisely, as John Berger posits “Mystification is the process of explaining away what might be otherwise evident.” The Stygian Wholesto wishes to remystify logical discourse, literature, and any oral traditions still existing. Remystification, in other words, is an attempt to remystify texts in order reject methodological approaches of meaning, and instead, re-elevate texts to a universal level of ambiguity that extends beyond reader-response. Texts should be inaccessible, in other words, to all. Here is the reason. The reader wishes she could reject the vast area of typical knowledge and dive into the off trodden path of subjectivity and multiplicities of crisscrossing criticism and beliefs in order to gain a sovereign vista. Sounds great, oh boy, let’s go! However, one will soon realize they found only in the end the most beaten path—a literary stabbing in the back, and a sell out notion to the promise of refutations against social attitudes. If this worked we would know who Hamlet was. The methods have failed us, and should be abandoned. We return to the scope of movement without ethics and eventuality. We grab a book and read without fostered various perspectives only revealing false truths like the way a fire chases away shadows in the woods. We should resist the notion of implied readers and context-dominated associations with shifted manifestations of rhetorical communal criteria. The book is a book; the book is not a book. The Stygian Wholesto denudes applicability and views art as unequivocal. Books are crash landings of spacecraft, as alien to us as our own culture, as mystified as confessional inquiry and reliance on institutions or ideological scrutinized analyses of discursive production. The most successful book would have its covers glued, and transparent nouns. Of course, that is radical, but the point is that we should render less meaning towards social or historical systems. Personal views pointing to moral spaces should also be admonished. One should pick up “Notes from the Underground” and say, “this book may be about rules that rendered codes of behavior on the existential arch, but it really only suggest that emotional proclivities only amplify themselves in bitter situations, or situations I cannot fathom because this is only artifice at an artificial spot in the nothingness of the universe.”

The Existential Project Proposal

2006-11-21T21:46:00.000-08:00

God is not dead; the divinity has simply been transplanted into the neoconscious realm of lethargic matter condensed into evanescent vibrations intangible to man’s Formosa. If that is not breaking news, this should be: this strain does not resist recovery—it only secures it by terms of the satanic. But an off the beaten track approach to the idea of satanic must be acknowledged and not hissed upon to conceptualize this strange dichotomy in fairness. Evildoers beware, and non-evildoers beware more honestly, in other words. In Arrubie’s short essay, “The Sepulture of Satan and Post-Modern Exigence,” he claims that the only way to surmount evil is to embrace it at every turn. As radical and often illogical Arrubie’s essay may orientate itself to the reader, there is an inner actual logic regarding the nature of evil, the nature of good, and the lack of a mediating voice of divinity in the post modern atmosphere. The poignant factor in his argument, and one that the Stygian Wholesto moderately vitalizes, is that Satan, or the cultural component of his nature, is the father of deconstructive inquiry and the reoccurring anti-temporality of rational humanism which enlightenment evolution hinges upon. Man must recapture Satan to stand on his shoulders in the Percinian sense. Only then will man reject his consumerism towards ontological arrestment. This, of course, does not mean that the Stygian Wholestian conceit stumbles upon systematic philosophies overlooked by a biased discipline of inquiry. But is does point its antenna in the direction of conquering evil—the fundamental difference between, and ridiculous theory, of meaning and intention transcended from the invisible prime mover. In other words, God is not dead, but merely a hostage of intellectual history which ultimately denies the harbored consciousness of false ethical motivations. A satanic undermining should not be developed in the contemporary sense of man’s creative possibilities, but instead, should be prompted in order to deconstruct existential projects of unmediated knowledge.

Construing Michael Richards

2006-11-21T20:53:00.000-08:00

What did he say? He wants us to brush it off as slippage? Of logical reasons for Richards’ speech acts, they are ambiguous and controversial in terms of how we should receive them. But, there is an ample amount of reason in terms of post logocentrisms rising from social identification in zones of explicit anguish stemming from viewpoints indigenous of hidden world transcripts. As the architect of the Stygian Wholesto, I feel these transcripts of the social discourse of racism should be reflected upon in order to construe the realities of formalism, and the communal realities of resisting the pioneering of polemical vernaculars and economic subtexts. Richards’ backlash to his audience can be read as an attempt at the depersonalization of eugenics in some illogical show stopping production. Furthermore, Richards, a social comic of privileged name only affords himself a marginal certitude by denying the impact of his language amplified by his speech acts; for there is no clear ontological reason for his intention of repelling an illusory assault, and the grave assumptions of his audience. When Richards’ violently swings with “nigger,” his iconic disposition instantly collapses under the weight of an obvious pre-conceived tendency for tropological modes of a prefigurative cultural nature. In other words, Richards’ is quite modern by his non-cryptic methods--impossibly a symptom of slippage--and also permits an interrupted another regardless of satirical, radical, or dominant attempts. So what are we left with? Who will Richards’ be in a cauterized, culturalized mode of popular historicity? My answer is that he is probably no more than another false-generative comical influence of outrageous transactive shaping reflective of his cultural idolatries of racial inclusive messages…no more than the real Kramer, really.

Borat is not Sacha Baron Cohen

2006-11-13T21:32:00.000-08:00

Borat is quite possibly one of the most insightful movies of recent times. For those of you who don’t know, Borat is played by Sacha Noam Baron Cohen, a Jewish British comedian. However, people fail to understand that Borat is just as real as the man playing him. In fact, Borat is more real than the man playing him. Borat has a history and psychology all his own. When Sacha plays him, Sacha is no longer Sacha; he truly is Borat. The mannerisms, the accent, the anti-Semitism, the incest; it is all real. In Borat’s mind he really is a reporter from Kazakhstan. When he speaks Kazak (although it is a mixture of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish) he is truly speaking Kazak; those are just the phonemes used because they are the only ones the mind can access. When we discuss the movie we do not say Sacha Baron Cohen’s film; we say Borat. Discourse has made him real by acknowledging him as an individual, distinct from the man whose body he resides in. What makes this different from schizophrenia? This is quite simple, Borat is not a manifestation of subconscious repression being subverted into a separate personality, nor is he a psychotropic hallucination produced by either foreign substances or chemical instability. Borat is not produced by Sacha at all, rather, we (society), produces Borat. We, the populace, subconsciously project an image of the Middle East that is acceptable: we imagine a non-Arab, anti-Semite, pseudo-liberated communist, post-colonized individual who not only mindlessly accepts us because of all the good he has been told that "we" have done for him, but wants to learn more about us, and become like us in every way. All Sacha has done is channel our desires, and then reassembled the fragmentary images into ideal foreigner---a subject of pleasure and a representation of our superiority. Borat truly exists; he is present in every one of us. He goes beyond the hyperreal to the realm of abstract truth---he is the totality of our subconscious produced by discursive ideological truths; a manifestation of our thoughts and desires. He is not a consensual collective group hallucination; he exists. In fact, his existence is greater than everyones. If Sacha Baron Cohen were unable to continue letting Borat reside within him, Borat would find a new host. Borat is a being independent of Sacha; he will continue to exist 40, 50, even 100 years from now because he is truth. It is in this same regard that Latka Gravas was a real person; the physical manifestation of social discourse on foreigners embodied.

An Arguement for "Meta" Studies

2006-11-10T15:26:00.000-08:00

Recently, some self-proclaimed critics have accused my article “Relational Relativism in the Precession of ‘Isms'” of being nothing more than mere meta-historical-meta-theory. This assertion is the resultant of hypersensitivity – of fetishism towards dialectical responses produced by shifts in discursive theoretical approaches. The tautological nature of analytical discourse has invaginated theory itself. As I explain in my article, every dialectical movement progresses in the same pattern. Each cyclical vestibule of discourse has its conception in the “Ism” itself. Subsequently, the “Ism” can only produce its own negation: the “anti-Ism” or “de-Ism.” This is the locus of true understanding; the indeterminacy of difference between the thing and its negation is where the hole in the text becomes the hole into the text. However, this veritable portal to the nature of inter-dialectical discourse closes rapidly with the movement toward the “post-Ism.” Though this discursive shift obscures the play of difference it still does not solidify the objectivism of terminology. The true cessation of subjectivism revitalizes with the “neo-Ism;” thus, the “Ism” returns. This fetishism of discursive analysis invaginates the theory within its own cyclical movements. The goal of my article was not simply the meta-analysis of theory history. The “meta” nature of the article was indicative of the next step any “Ism” study must take – “meta-Ism;” the antitheticallity of cyclical discursive practices can be circumnavigated by bypassing the intermediate phases of “Ism-ity,” simply analyzing the “Ism-ness” of the “Ism” – “meta-Ism” studies is the only logical result of any new “Ism.” Therefore, once any new “Ism” has been conceived, emerging from the amniotic fluids of theoretical discourse, it has two possible directions of growth: one long and painful, a slow and uneasy maturation through many prefixes, or there is what I proposed – that the newborn “Ism” should be accepted immediately, that its growth should be instantaneous and we should never try to hinder its growth with “antis,” “des,” “posts,” and “neos,” rather we should accepted for what it is and allow the “Ism” to tell of its own “Ism-ness” – that a new “Ism” emerges fully grown, dead in fact and all we can do is mave toward the “meta-Ism,” what means of production were called upon to enable its existence and what means it uses to self-perpetuate.

Babel Film Review: Thanks, Inarritu, but I'll Stay In Rats' Alley

2006-11-09T21:28:00.000-08:00

Recently, I viewed the movie Babel directed by Inarritu—his seemingly third installment of telescoping on the bathetic ethical conundrums perpetuated by the usual biological suspect—humans. While entertaining with its taut dramatic pulse and piercing honesty, a sense of disappointment rolled over me as the film faded to black. I thought—perhaps we are in rats’ alley where the dead men have lost their bones? My disappointment springboards from the loose titular usage of Babel, and then unhinges with the resulting epiphany that perhaps the allusion toward the Tower of Babel is truly a self injected, subconscious diffusion of the confused tongue—or more likely, and more misanthropic, that it is the product of the confused mind and artifice of an aimless didacticism. Of the ill-fated tower, Babel resists any allegorical applicability, save for another Hollywood “castle in the sky.” Dr. Francis Herbert, in his book, America: The Sultan of Things Despotic, alludes to the ill-fated tower of Bāb-ilu, as “that grounded magnificence of Breugel’s enchanted painting…the prime matter of human nature and source of all false reasoning…that Tower on the cursed hill.” With that false reasoning as source of natural human folly, Herbert enjoys building on that estranging to prophesize our “ignored or dreaded future.” At times, this seems to be the other motivation of Inarritu. However, I would like to briefly propose an often unobserved clarification. The Tower as degenerative is a bias long stemmed from the subjectivity of historicity, and the sucker punch of poetical archetypes. In a way, Innaritu typifies this tradition. Language was not confused or babbled by any apocalyptic hermeneutically divined intervention, but only an illusion manifested in the misconstrued logos of the human mind. In other words, the construction of the Tower was never Satanic in a dualistic notion, and the deconstruction of the Tower was never benign by any applied swag of divinity. The inherent consciousness of man, more congruent with binary code than with phonemes and morphemes, is an irreducible eternal discord with a hymnology and phenomenology of uniqueness, and only transmitted through an intangible cultural methodology like the conch of Golding’s plea for social constructivism. And with this observation of how language truly transcends in anthromorphological vectors, the irony of Innaritu’s film is spotlighted—and any modern investigation of the epistemological fallacies of language only result in further fissures of an undermined and referential painful approach to understand philological dissimilarity. So by the end of the film, we remain paralyzed in Prufrockian inertia, and the rats’ only continue to pick at the bones.

A Reply to the Theory Sharks

2006-11-03T23:53:00.000-08:00

Recently, my newest article, “How to be Domestic in a Neonihilistic Nebulous Nation,” has grown much criticism in its validity and applicability, or what was deemed (by critics) as intro-egotistic psycho-babel. First off, my book is not meant to be a pejorative attempt of a careful neo-consideration towards any justice of logical fallacies or rectified reifications resulting in domicile disparity or hopelessness. Instead, the conceit of the article is simple. It’s about doing when there is nothing doing—in the sense of non action—primarily transcended from acting solitary without a notion of communal solidarity. We tend to see life as indifferent, objective, and often without flaw or those ambiguous situations, sexual or psychological, of provisional ineptness and falling into unstable hollow men. More so than Eliot’s modern-man, is the antique, but always relevant Job. Job is an invocation of righteousness, a spellbinder of harmonious entertainment perpetuated by Satan—Lord Lucifer —Prince of Darkness—patron of the babelnish and discreet charm of indoctrination. Wholly, our friend Job was averse to his imagination, but the secret rooms, the biblical invaginations, tell us there is an eternal disposition, and the disposition does not amount to much insight. So what does this have to do with Neonihilism and nations? Easy. Sometimes we may lose a fight, but with practical ways of being, we can confront lonely mortality. We must restart philosophical inquiry, we must create a novel vocabulary, we must undertake criticism to mute the basic ways we ultimately derive the idea that we face these facts and entail an anxious, nebulous distortion of a non dualistic logic which refuses synthesis and dynamic tension between the thing and its other—predicate logic.

A Word does not Word Anything

2006-11-03T23:00:00.000-08:00

Life feeds on life, which feeds, of course, on the role of descriptive needs in the material need for the deprivation of goods which causes social exclusions as Honneth describes as ‘the struggle of recognition.” This relates primarily to the alienation and disenfranchisement of education and living standards which only perpetuates a guaranteed minimum income, or rather, a proposed system of redistribution, resulting in supplementations to government income. This is exemplified with issues in linguistic semiotics representing developing structuralism around the globe when they increase in methodological skepticism while covert real narratives shuttle between patriarchal and sexist phenomenology. Obviously, we see this method as a pejoratively measured description of a seemingly immobile and sclerotic political order. However, it is important to see what we can see, or rather, to know the boundaries of our linguistically assumptions about language. In other words, a word does not word anything. To word as action is to assume an unconscious apathy of the human spirit, to slave morality, and chain paradox—the essence of liberation. Therefore, from the outset, language has been condemnation, damnation of faculty, devoid of meaning and aesthetic value, the ultimate obscuration of objectified, subjectified truth, and discursivity, and similarly to the old bard, words are told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.