I absolutely agree with you here, and it makes me want to look at
Burroughs again! But I was thinking more of Karl Kraus, and frankly more
of the absolute of despair as we approach armageddon.
With or without Buddhism or Native American religions, you might want to
check out Rewilding North America, A Vision for Conservation in the 21st
Century, by David Foreman - something everyone should read. In particular,
the chapter The Pleistocene-Holocene Event: Forty-Thousand Years of
Extinction. No culture, none, is innocent; the devastation is built into
all of us. He documents, for example, the world-wide - not just European
or white etc. - destruction of megafauna, which is all but extinct at this
point...
- Alan
On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Lanny Quarles wrote:
this does alot towards explicating the network of
aporias inherent in the event. so much of the so-called
'political writing' i've seen shys away from the
malthusian tradition, put simplistically:
a 'republican consumer'and a 'democratic consumer'
are both consumers, and the evironmental affect of the human
population's multiplicity is every single moment increasing
the determination away from multiplicity within the
global specie set. Some of the figures you cast point
to a kind of computationalism as metaphysics which i appreciate.
with burroughs we identified the viral aspect of language
but it is through the prosthetic instrumentality of capital/techne'
that the virus of language is able to grow the nodes of teleological
desiring machines ie workers.
the question you really seem to be asking in my mind
is: Can there be 'immanence' within the manifold of humanity,
or is humanity's line of flight the destruction of the earth's
'immanence'.. are we "here to go" as Burroughs said, and if so,
is the earth just some kind of yolk of raw-material we suck dry
before being forced to plunder other worlds just to sustain
our omnivorous organizing principles. If this were indeed the
plan, we might take the time to try to learn as much as we
can from the models already in place here. We destroy more
knowledge every day in the rainforest than we generate every
year or decade perhaps. some figure would be appropriate.
all the themes of the earth's natural immanence are well
coded into buddhism, native american religions, the biological and
ecological sciences, and yet these memes are nothing compared
with the chaotic spell of capital.
There are some hints that capital might be used to heal
the world, but these tiny efforts at enlightened entrepeneurialism
are few and far between instead of the norm.
I feel it will be the combination of liberated capital and population
which will finally do the earth in. It is becoming more evident
every day that we are in the end-times. It may take another thousand
years, but the inertia is visible everywhere you look.
hopefully though techne has its own immanence which may force
new alignments, there seems to be some light with things like
open-source and creative commons etc some groups which are bringing
models of sustainability. I have grave doubts about these projects
though mainly because of the exceptionally far-reaching nature
of human ignorance.
lq
The Certain Truths
_From the viewpoint of the human_: nature is a slaughterhouse.
A certain truth: There is no salvation.
Death is the only arbiter.
Annihilation and meaning are identical.
From one viewpoint, many. From many viewpoints, one.
Good and evil dissolve.
The stases of objects inhabit the wheels of decay and corrosion.
The coming-together is the pulling-asunder.
Chaos rules, dissolves into noise, noise rules.
The number and quality of truth always loses focus.
My culture is your death. My death is your culture.
Nothing survives violence.
Every creature suffers blindly in the guise of its body.
Pain is of no consequence outside the flesh.
The annihilation of the human race would only prolong the
catastrophe.
We live only to destroy in the masquerade of decency.
Other truths evaporate in the face of death.
We live so that we might not die.
We live so that we might die.
I say to you: Your death is my salvation.
Every death is a meal.
Among the humans, the pinnacle of deceit.
Exaltation is a painless death.
There's no end to the end of it.
( URLs/DVDs/CDroms/books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt -
revised 7/05 )
