The Stygian Wholesto

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.