The Unmarked Space

This scene

“The horror . . . the horror . . .”

“Doctor Lecter . . . Doctor Lecter . . .”

Frederick Chilton:

I stole this graphic from the Buzzfeed show Unsolved. I find it quite intriguing. Famous heads on pikes on the gatehouse of London Bridge. The hierarchies of modern society are largely invisible or unmarked one could say…

“There is no solution, because there is no problem.”

My old review of this great non-fiction book by Thomas Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (How science fiction conquered the world). I started thinking about this again after some interactions with somewhat fanatical self-published (‘indie’) authors on X (formerly Twitter) and so have to put this up here. Disch has a way of writing that captures meaning but in a lucid and non-fanatical way that appeals to the reasonable and the rational, which as he points out in this book, appears to be an outlier for science fiction writers that include the likes of Robert Anton Wilson…

“A certain class of reader values bizarre and paranoid theories precisely because they are bizarre and paranoid. In the late ‘70s the SF writer Robert Anton Wilson brought out a series of books under the umbrella title of Illuminatus! that aspired to be a Summa of all conspiracy, occult, and UFO theories. Some of the books were offered as fiction, some as nonfiction. For Wilson and his fans, veridity was never an issue. I saw him once, after a book signing in Los Angeles, gravely romancing a would-be true believer, throwing out dark hints, then lapsing into winks and giggles. Did he experience cognitive dissonance? I wondered at the time.” (p. 29)

It is this personal touch, the feeling that Disch can discuss the sins of science fiction with an insider’s perspective, that carries much power here. I particularly enjoyed how he gets at the idea of cultish religiosity inspired and practiced by the charismatic leaders of the aesthetic:

“I admit that I never was face to face with those reputed to be the flakiest—L. Ron Hubbard himself or A. E. van Vogt—but I have had Jacob-and-the-angel sessions with Theodore Sturgeon, Philip Dick, and the film director Alexander ‘El Topo’ Jodorowski, all of whom were experts in the art of spiritual arm wrestling and quite unwilling to accept anything less than unconditional surrender. What each of these writers had in common . . . was a deeply rooted conviction of his or her own genius—not simply in a literary sense but as a direct psychic connection to some Higher Wisdom.” (p. 139)

His take down of Star Trek is also brutal but effective:

“Dress everyone in suits instead of pajamas, and it’s clear that the Starship Enterprise is actually an office disguised as the Future. . . . Star Trek is offering its viewers essentially the same parables of success-through-team-effort that can be found on such later workplace-centered sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show . . .” (p. 101)

My old review below:

I took a picture of the above student artwork at a show of which my daughter also was a part. (I include this without permission I admit because I like the piece but if the artist objects I’ll take it down - email me at [email protected]) -

My piece of writing below concerns the Joker too and was originally published on a compliance blog that is now kaput, so I’m reposting below. I also just got a Joker Fuggler and I recalled this piece from that connection. I think like many malcontents I have some sympathy for this underdog even if abhorring such a murderous response to outsider status. What does this have to do with horror? It’s also a review of the Joker film newly released at the time of this writing, so popular around a certain segment but distressing to the tastemakers, and in the wake of some global unrest that saw street agitators using the Joker as their symbol of rebellion. If you see the unmarked space or unspoken side of communication, the suppressed opposition or the repressed horror, as a piece of this modern puzzle, the Joker fits in that empty space. I initially had the tagline ‘What does the Joker have to do with corruption? Quite a lot’ but the editor helped develop the title below which I do like, here …

The Joker, an unlikely compliance hero

Cultural gatekeepers of all types, including several film critics, were alarmed that the film Joker could incite violence. Yet, along with wild rumors about the possibility of a sequel, the film is headed towards $1 billion at the box office. Most strikingly, the Joker has been adopted as a symbol of rebellion against perceived corrupt power structures worldwide. If one makes the leap to understanding global protest movements as a systemic response to perceived institutional corruption, then it is not so far to see the connection.

It has been said that only the jester can poke fun at the king, which in our modern times can be viewed as the gatekeeper, the decision-maker, or any person of gravitas within a possibly corrupt organizational system. Arthur Fleck aka Joker stands in opposition as the ultimate nobody, the exemplar of the downtrodden or oppressed, as one Lebanese street artist explained to CNN recently about his own Joker mural.

Historically, the Saturnalian fool or clown gave the downtrodden of society at least a limited license to lampoon their masters. The Venice Film Festival with perhaps its much longer Continental memory of aristocracy and noblesse oblige awarded Joker its prestigious Golden Lion award. Yet some North American critics have been, one might say, disturbed to the point of arguing the film is simply not worth discussing. One might observe this as the predictable management response to many whistleblowers, but please do not think that I would equate this murderous character on anything other than the level of meaning. Though obviously nonviolent, whistleblowers do nevertheless operate as critics of a social system.

Joker as social criticism is disturbing certainly but not, as some seem to suggest, because it is merely a competent yet ultimately mediocre film that is nonetheless popular. Any number of commentators it seems could care less until a superhero film pretends at being serious art.

No, the really disturbing thing about Joker is that the story is told from the perspective of the downtrodden, rather than from the perspective of the clerisy, the management or the decision-makers of society – who share the perspective of Batman, a hero distinguished largely by the privilege of his available choices: playboy or crimefighter, aristocratic buffoon or anti-corruption crusader. Batman stands apart from ordinary prosecutors, vigilantes, or even revolutionaries, because he is “not wearing hockey pads” as they say. The less fortunate sons of Gotham are not so lucky.

This reversal of perspective works effectively in the film and one could call it the reason that the Joker mask is being donned by protesters across the globe. Ultimately, as shocking as the violence in Joker is, the film’s depiction of Bruce Wayne’s father as anything other than a generous philanthropist with nothing but goodness in his heart is the film’s true subversion.

“The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”

All these pseudo-intel dudes look like David Cross. I have a love hate relationship with Mr. Cross. I heckled him once about how he said he hates anyone who drinks his own urine so I shouted “you hate Gandhi?” and he finished the bit but added at the end “no I don’t hate Gandhi.” This was one time I was in Athens, Georgia. I suppose I have to admit Mr. Cross is talented so I suppose I’m a bit envious. I too daydreamed about being a stand up comic. I unfortunately don’t have the greatest sense of humor. I went through a period of time where I would try to work a reference to David Cross into all my movie reviews, though I admit I was never consistent with that bit. Now I suppose I just miss the 90s. How is this related to horror? The only connection I can think of is slapstick. I’ll have to think more about it.

"'Weel, you see, sir, I says to them, 'It will be lang afore the deil intermeddle wi' as serious a professor, and as fervent a prayer as my master . . . Lucky Shaw . . . answered me, . . . 'Ye silly, sauchless, Cameronian cuif!' quo she, 'is that a' that ye ken about the wiles and doings o' the Prince o' the Air, that rules an' works in the bairns of disobedience? Gin ever he observes a proud professor, who has mae than ordinary pretensions to a divine calling . . . that's the man Auld Simmie fixes on to mak a dishclout o'. . . . Oh! it is a grand prize for him, an' a proud Deil he is, when he gangs hame to his ain ha', wi' a batch o' the souls o' sic strenuous professors on his back. . . . Satan wad strodge into Hell with a packlaid o' the souls o' proud professors on his braid shoulders. Ha, ha, ha! . . . For a' their prayers an' their praises, their aumuses, an' their penances, their whinings, their howlings, their rantings , an' their ravings, here they come at last! Behold the end!'"

-James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Please forgive the James Hogg quote above which, yes I admit, is a bit excessive for modern sensibilities, but I could not resist. I’m sure Sutcliffe’s book here about the new ‘New Age’ was written with the best of intentions, and though there is some excellent research within, to my mind Sutcliffe spins mostly a ‘scholarly tourist’s travel guide to the New Age’. (I will sometimes dispense with the quotes around ‘New Age’ but you can assume I understand all social labels are observer- or system-dependent and may be contested.) I will add that Sutcliffe’s fieldwork and research did not expose him to the apparently anti-Semitic writings of David Icke at the time this work was completed and published, but even assuming ignorance, in that context this work still seems dated or naive. I took this review down for awhile. I did exchange some emails with Sutcliffe and he seems like a nice enough guy. I have this feeling that many scholars would like to be the next big ticket item like a Foucault or even a Jameson. Most don’t hit the mark. As a writer myself I understand that feeling. I’m not really saying anything about Sutcliffe but myself. In reposting this I understand it is a merely an echo of nothing, as I am not even a professional scholar, but only an amateur. (I will add at this time my credentials in case anyone is curious -undergrad Univ. of Pennsylvania BA in Communication 1992, Juris Doctor Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law 2012; I have one published paper in sociology in the journal Soziale Systeme.)

As far as whether ‘New Age’ is a ‘movement’, I think the question is fairly irrelevant, along the lines of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. From the perspective of social systems theory, I would argue a social identifier such as ‘New Age’, similar in many ways to such multiaccentual terms as ‘serial killer’, ‘terrorist’ or ‘UFO’ (all of which one might see as ‘nexus points’ of structural couplings in society), can function among individual observers, smaller groups or larger organizations, yet still function within various social (communicative) operations that can be grouped together as a single program even while amplifying social contingency.

I will confess that I was a bit disappointed after realizing there is not much information about the UFO connection to ‘New Age’ here. Yes Prof. Sutcliffe does mention it but mostly in passing as part of his fairly dry (yes, ‘academic’) history of Findhorn. There is little talk of the ‘supernatural’ or ‘paranormal’ either. (Despite how prevalent these claims seem to abound in other popular or ‘folk’ sources.) I would have liked more attention to this side of these social operations, and again this aspect of ‘New Age’ feels ‘glossed over’ almost as one might avoid mention of a guilty pleasure. I had heard the rumors that the founders of Findhorn personally met Pan for example, but perhaps this is merely creative license (see for example, the film My Dinner With Andre- it is true additional research revealed the character of the Scottish mathematician Robert Ogilvie Crombie aka “ROC”) Sutcliffe seems (and I admit this may be my own biased impression) to want to avoid discussion of the early (and presently perhaps unfashionable) extremes of the practice, including the ‘space brothers’ who were part of the ‘apocalyptic’ side of the early days. More recently the Heaven’s Gate cult gave a bad name to UFOs. We can see in this contingency, along the lines of David Icke’s anti-Semitism, a hint of the darker path taken by some such as Aum Shinrikyo, the Buddhist sect that justified or rationalized its nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subways via the doctrine of Phowa or ‘instant enlightenment’. Though I would agree that Sutcliffe’s idea of ‘New Age’ is only indirectly coupled with these extremes, nonetheless my own fairly ‘emic’ impression is that he is trying too hard here to avoid any suggestion that the disorganized character of the new ‘New Age’ has a darker side. Many of Charles Manson’s followers after all met the definition of ‘seeker’ presented in these pages (and recent popular art/entertainment accounts have described them in this way). Along these lines I would have preferred that Sutcliffe had delved deeper into such critical moments as when his small group at Findhorn specifically does not debate such ‘seeker’ sentiments (voiced in a small group session) in regards to ‘little children starving . . . I know it’s their karma’. (p. 167) Sutcliffe expresses his own discomfort with such a statement, but the group does not discuss it further and overall this critical moment passes without further comment. This type of description suggests such rather socially contentious views are being downplayed or ignored within Sutcliffe's account. To point out another example, if you look at the website for the Lucis Trust, there is (at the time of this writing) a page offering apologetics for Lucifer aka ‘the Light Bearer’ (‘the Prince o' the Air’ as described by James Hogg above) as one of the ‘solar angels’ who through the fall brought intellect to humanity. Forgive me for invoking C. S. Lewis in this context, but I would agree with him that credit for our conscious (at times even rational) mind goes to God. The contrary ‘New Age’ or esoteric view, dare I say it, from the more centrist (or ‘organized’) perspective of society at least, is quite ‘heretical’. One could of course use the perhaps more scientific (‘etic’) term ‘alternative’, but that choice (selection) sidesteps the very real and socially contentious character of ‘New Age’. Perhaps this is in the interest of scientific objectivity, and this is not to say that I’m asking an academic in this context to make specific moral judgements, but the style of description leaves one fairly cold, and ignores the very real reasons (from a sociological view) as to why the ‘New Age’ might provoke controversy.

Sutcliffe appears simply uninterested in exploring such conflicting social operations about the ‘New Age’ much beyond mentioning that the label itself is sometimes used pejoratively in popular culture. One would imagine the blissful and childlike ‘seekers’ have done nothing at all to provoke such a reaction. Such social conflict goes largely unexplored and unmentioned except as the project of ‘evangelicals’. (p. 10) My own theoretical stance suggests ‘alternative’ as a possible modern evolution of the term ‘heretical’ (or even ‘revolutionary’) and I found Sutcliffe’s book illustrates fairly well the shift in ‘New Age’ from the literal heresies of esotericism to a watered-down but ‘juiced-up’ program of attitude adjustment easily defended as ‘self-help’ - this previously heretical but now mostly ‘alternative’ idea that one’s will alone is sufficient to change not only the mind, but also reality or ‘the World’.

[This article or ‘realist manifesto’ as I now see it was written a number of years ago and the legal analysis may be somewhat out of date. I have a JD but I am not a practicing attorney and the below should not be read as any type of legal advice, either intended or accidental.]

THE SECRET THEATER:

AVANT GARDE SHOCK, ENHANCED INTERROGATION, and CORPORATE SOCIETY

William N. Weaver

The avant-garde, in whatever form it finally takes, is inevitably conceived as an “interrogation” of modern society. (See, The Avant-Garde, A Short Introduction) Terror must always be staged in a public theater, arguably of war, but a theater nonetheless. Karlheinz Stockhausen was quick to point out the thin line separating the September 11th attacks from avant-garde performance art, lack of consent on the part of the audience being all that made the former act a crime. Most art, even great art, falls short of actual consummation, even if it does leap "out of everyday life[,]” to borrow Stockhausen’s words. (see, http://today.duke.edu/showcase/mmedia/features/911site/groundzeroland.html) Enhanced interrogation, like performance art, flirts with consummation, but instead seeks to contain its own terror within performance, a secret theater shown only to the intended audience. Consent notwithstanding, when enhanced interrogation becomes torture, it has broken the fourth wall.

Certainly cruel and inhumane treatment is a relevant distinction, but human rights advocates, perhaps in a performance of their own, never chose the lesser term to primarily illuminate these transgressions. Certainly, the key to performance is an evocation of social chaos, or unchained emotion, or some other response from the audience, such as laughter, expressed through a depiction of conflict or disorder that does exist, both on stage and off; the other side of this distinction real/performance is that performance is enacted without fear of actual consummation, while disorder in life often leads to such. Truly great theater might approach a “limit experience,” as Foucault would call it. Along these same lines, Antonin Artaud sought to create an improvisational theater free of the text, where audience and performer merged in space to achieve a transformative, spiritual or metaphysical experience. Yet he describes the church as a “barn” or “hanger” wherein the spectacle is to take place.

One might imagine this type of room or space as a CIA black site. The list of acceptable forms of enhanced interrogation from the Rumsfeld memo reads almost like a series of acting exercises: “Pride and Ego Down: Attacking or insulting the ego . . . Futility: Invoking the feeling of futility . . . We Know All: Convincing the detainee [or audience] that the interrogator [or performer] knows the answer to questions he asks . . . Repetition Approach: Continuously repeating the same question . . . [etc.]” Even Mise en Scene is covered: “Change of Scenery Up: Removing . . . from the standard . . . setting . . . to a location more pleasant, but no worse [or] . . . Change of Scenery Down . . .” Bob Dylan, for example, was especially good at evoking the feeling in his audience that he knew the answer to all questions they might ask...

We can go on from here, but the approach envelopes the sentiments of Artaud, when he harangues the bourgeois theater “with the spectacle on one side and the audience on the other . . . [where] the masses are no longer shown anything but the mirror image of what they are.” (Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, p. 254) Here we get to the distinction of consummation/performance inside the enhanced interrogation space, wherein the detainee is shown a mirror image of terror, but at the same time, is made a part of the performance as no audience ever has been. Simultaneously, the state actor creates a secret space, wherein the “masses” are protected from the “spectacle” of enhanced interrogation. Only the detainee is permitted to see the scope of the actor’s cruelty.

As the interrogator might seek to cure the detainee of returning to the battlefield, so Artaud’s theater seeks to cure “the violence of thought . . . [and the desire of] the spectator to indulge outside the theater in ideas of war, rioting, or random murders.” (Selected Writings, pp. 258-59)

Ultimately, despite his seeming aversion to such acts, Artaud cannot help but frame his theatrical metaphor as “dreams . . . bloody and inhuman[.]” (Selected Writings, p. 245): “The secret is to exacerbate . . . like a musculature that is being flayed. The rest is achieved by screams.” (Selected Writings, p. 266) Only in this way can a “direct communication . . . be reestablished between the spectator [the detainee] and the spectacle [terror], between the actor [the interrogator] and the spectator [the detainee], because the spectator, by being placed in the middle of the action, is enveloped by it and caught in its cross fire.” (Selected Writings, p. 248)

In the war on terror, “interrogation standards were relaxed . . . only for a brief period, for ‘unlawful combatants’ seized shortly after September 11.” (Dick Jackson, The Law of Counterterrorism: Detention and Interrogation, published by the American Bar Association, p. 115) This narrow window hangs like a strange curio, shedding its light only within the unconscious/unseen space of America.

“Pain [is] only a word.” (Selected Writings, p. 294) “The purpose of all interviews and interrogations is to get the most information from a detainee with the least intrusive method, always applied in a humane and lawful manner with sufficient oversight by trained investigators or interrogators.” (Rumsfeld memo, p. 5) By the seventies in the U.S., at the very least, sex had become “a taste . . . on its way to becoming a self-conscious form of theater, which is what sadomasochism is about: a form of gratification that is both violent and indirect, very mental.” (Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, p. 105) The parallels between modern forms of theatrical excess and the temptations of Abu Ghraib run through American society like “blasphemous rites.” (quoting Sontag, p. 105, without expressing her exact sentiment) Some might excuse urination on enemy corpses as just a human reaction to battle, at least during polite dinner conversation, yet nonetheless, the legal apparatus must protect the ever fragile law of war.

“Without rules . . . the text would disappear.” (James A. Machin, Jr., Community Over Chaos, p. 20) Perhaps this was what Artaud was aiming at. In discussing the drafting of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT), Bybee notes that “the parties could not reach a consensus about the meaning of ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.’” (Bybee memo, p. 21) The rules against torture, and the lack of consensus about cruel and inhumane treatment expressed here, would seem to invite transgression, as in the case of genocide, arguably worse, on the relative scale of atrocities, than mere torture:

“Norms make possible deviant behavior, as well as compliance. This insight is as old as Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans: ‘Law came in, to increase the trespass.’ It is simply not clear that the establishment of a legal norm prohibiting genocide—the clearest example of a legal rule protecting human rights—has led to less, rather than to more, genocide. If the explicit norm was established at Nuremberg, how do we explain Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia—not to speak of Indonesia and Guatemala? The list, of course, goes on.” (The Cultural Study of Law, Kahn, p. 111)

Indeed, Artaud’s “absence of a stage” mirrors the disintegration of the distinction between the roles of combatant and noncombatant in postmodern warfare, certainly blasphemous from the standpoint of “human rights” and “international law,” yet nonetheless a reality. This “absence . . . [allows] the action to spread out to the four corners of the room.” (Selected Writings, p. 248)

Even during the Middle Ages, emerging complexity had begun to erase the practical distinction between combatants and non-combatants. (See, e.g., Christopher Allmand, War and the Non-Combatant, Medieval Warfare A History 261-63 (Maurice Keen ed., Oxford University Press 1999) (“It must be recognized that the good of the non-combatant and his property in wartime was increasingly linked to his developing participatory role in war, to the strategies adopted by the leaders of states at war and, to a certain extent, to the effects of new weaponry now becoming available.” Id. at 261). By the time of World War II, strategic bombing of civilians was customary practice, and not prohibited by any positive law at the time; the lack of any prosecution for such at Nuremberg speaks candidly to this fact. “[T]he idea of popular sovereignty” suggests that any military campaign, no matter how far removed as spectacle, expresses the will “of the entire population.” (See generally, Major Jeanne M. Meyer, Tearing Down the Facade: A Critical Look at the Current Law on Targeting the Will of the Enemy and Air Force Doctrine, 51 A.F. L. Rev. 143, 156 (2001) (citing James Turner Johnson, Can Modern War Be Just? 130 (1984); Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force 1907-1960 75-76 (1989); John F. Shiner, From Air Service to Air Corps: The Era of Billy Mitchell, Winged Shield, Winged Sword: A History of the USAF 71, 75 (1997); Oji Umozurike, Protection of the Victims of Armed Conflicts: Civilian Population, International Dimensions of Humanitarian Law 187, 187 (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ed., 1988))) Artaud, in discussing the primary misunderstanding of his work, says that it does not mean “blood” as so many have said, but rather “a theater that is . . . cruel first of all for myself.” (Selected Writings, p. 256)

Of course, all communication is about control, to one degree or another, according to the theory of cybernetics; thus, all of society, if we can imagine such a beast, is a control mechanism. Society, if it exists at all, is a “self” writ large. Society is a system of rules for itself, a system of control, or a culture, as one might phrase it. The legal system is certainly a part of this. The legal system is a set of rules not unlike a type of personality, or an aspect of personality, the ego perhaps of a society.

The avant-garde is a small system, society’s id, perhaps the opposite of law. How can it exercise control? The classical avant-garde, nearly from its inception, sought an “interrogation” of modernity and its progeny, both the media spawned by its technology and the bourgeois audience created by its affluence. (See, The Avant-Garde: A Short Introduction) There is this element of the “elite” consensus of the avant-garde. The avant-garde smashes through distinctions of high/low culture. The avant-garde, inherently since the first use of the term in 1825, (See, Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues, "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist” (1825)) has sought to break down the fourth wall between society and itself. Yet at the same time, the avant-garde protects itself from the “control” of society by disavowing any effort at popular / self control or communication or will; the avant-garde had origins in the theory of anarchism developed towards the close of the nineteenth century. (See, The Avant-Garde, A Short Introduction) If the avant-garde ever did obtain control over the larger society within which it seeks to dominate, it would destroy itself. Thus, the avant-garde is a type of intellectual suicide, the ultimate reduction of complexity, the end of the living organism or system, projected upon itself, revealing itself to an audience of the larger society that is largely indifferent. Various other subsystems, such as fashion, popular music, etc., may borrow from the avant-garde, but the map of this territory is forever incomplete.

The avant-garde is ever-changing. Marx saw this aspect of bourgeois culture, the insatiable hunger for the new. (I believe this point has been made by numerous Marxist scholars and at the moment I cannot recall which reading brought me to this point; please forgive, cite to be added later if possible.) The avant-garde overlaps numerous other subsystems within society, as just mentioned. The avant-garde is like a mystery cult from ancient Rome, in that its members must undergo curious and sometimes extreme rites to gain entry. The avant-garde is also like a cult, in that it can absorb its members and their individual personalities. The cult includes Artaud’s notion of a rejection of the masterpiece, which in extreme form no doubt shares something with such fascist notions as “burning the libraries, ransacking the museums.” (Schechner, The Conservative Avant Garde, p. 900). Fascism and the avant-garde were certainly both the mutant offspring of modernism. We hardly need to burn the libraries. No one reads anymore. (Did you notice that?)

The avant-garde aims at the “dark side” (Schechner, The Conservative Avant Garde, p. 902) and well it should, as “[t]here is nothing outside the corporation.” (Id. at 896). In other words, “The attacks are often in bad faith because the attackers appeal to the very governments, rich individuals, corporations, and foundations they attack. Avant-gardists—like stand-up comics (and some are standup comics)— seek acceptance and money from those they mock.” (Id. at 902). Indeed, judging by the (now of course mostly outdated) abstract art hanging in hallways and lobbies of corporate America, the avant-garde has a solid patron.

It is difficult to discern whether this undeniable fact is the ultimate triumph of modernism, or the ultimate disintegration foretold by the postmoderns. Perhaps, as some of the Greek philosophers advocated, there is simply no change. According to some recent theories, “the now” never existed, so why society? (See, Community Over Chaos) Perhaps society never existed.

Even in places where the term “society” is used in this text, this should not be taken as an endorsement of such an illusory entity. Society is an idea that cannot be proven any more than God. Society is the secret watchman, Marx’s deity, carried inside each psychic system, but unique to each, and imagined equally by each such system, the entity itself has no real existence. The policeman exists in the mind alone, and is often kept a secret, especially from those minds, or psychic systems, under its watch.

Any secret is a type of double information, a double surprise. The secret is like Artaud’s audience, held up to itself by the performer (the interrogator). The secret is twice the information content, with one part being the actual information which comprises the secret, and the other part being the “surprise” of the secret itself, the “why” of the secret - why is this secret necessary? What is so secret in the first place? Why must this secret be kept? This forms an element of the secret which is separate from the content, but which is no less a source of information to be sought. Here, the secret may be kept to permit those engaged in acts of transgression to escape punishment. Or, as in the case of Edward Snowden, the secret cache (of documents) may be kept to allow the revelator of secrets to escape justice.

The body of the terrorist, or detainee, is the medium through which this art / communication / control is worked. Foucault expresses this idea most clearly in his discussions about the sovereign’s expressions through the body of the condemned. The visible mutilations carried out were a public communication of the sovereign’s right to use military force against his or her enemies. The secret theater of enhanced interrogation is nonetheless public knowledge. Is it really even a secret? Any more than drone warfare, the other quite public secret whispered in the corridors of power and broadcast as a media refrain of plausible deniability.

During the late nineties and early aughts, certain tech subcultures would often joke about the NSA listening in to emails. So is this fact a "secret" only to the culturally and technologically naive? Complexity, as they say, is subjective. That's how lawyers make their living, after all.

In this context of a transparent society, but nonetheless hiding from itself, it appears quite understandable that transgressors of Abu Ghriab took photos of their handiwork. Almost as if they wanted a record, to share their secret with the world. Similarly, the avant garde would like to share this secret with its audience. But if its audience becomes too large, the secret disappears, and so does the avant-garde. The ultimate form of the avant-garde is the ravings of the insane, evidenced by the life of Artaud. And if an entire society is insane, who is left to judge? This idea, in many ways discredited now, achieved its apex in the seventies, with the notion that mental illness was a product of social arrangements, rather than individual neurological disease. (See Sontag)

Nonetheless, bleeding edge social theory, and the rules of textual and scholarly analysis perhaps, would like to do away with the individual entirely. See Niklas Luhmann and others ofhis ilk. Of course, Luhmann does not do away with psychic systems entirely, but his disciples may well succeed. Though this is on the opposite side of political analysis if one knows Luhmann more completely, it touches the possibility of totalitarianisms such as Marx, Pol Pot, Stalin, Rousseau (with his blind adoration of nature and his “social contract” above all), etc. But nonetheless, as noted, “[t]here is nothing outside the corporation.”

Notions of the individual, the concept of the individual: how shallow is the bourgeois concept of the individual, the modern concept of the individual, the “freedom” of the individual confined to the body, sexuality, the genital chakra, the avant-garde as a means of shackling man’s soul to the body, a means of social control, shocking, setting “limits” setting “boundaries” of transgression which then become codified as “avant-garde” ... eh ... the true inheritor of Hobbes’s mantle of social control, THE CORPORATION, renders humanism obsolete, finally and completely?

In this way, one can conclude that present law with regards to torture “prohibits only the most extreme acts[.]” (Bybee, pp. 1-2) We are not judging here. Who are we? Are we the moderns upholding a universal standard of international law that transcends all time and standards relative to history? Or are we the postmoderns who disintegrate at the notion of truth? How can these same relativists of culture and human nature condemn anything at all?

To explore this boundary becomes the province of the specialist, who may be shielded by a narrow definition of “specific intent,” though a jury may “infer” this narrow intent based on factual circumstances of the case. (Bybee) One might conclude that torture under law is defined only as conduct “associated with . . . [possible] death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions[.]” “[P]osttraumatic stress disorder, which can last months or even years . . . might satisfy the prolonged harm requirement [defining ‘mental harm’ as torture.]” However, Bybee noted that “the phrase ‘prolonged mental harm’ appears nowhere else in the U.S. Code nor does it appear in relevant medical literature or international human rights reports.” (Bybee, p. 7) Again, we see the argument that something cannot be torture if one subjects one’s own troops to the same effect. And let us not forget the “good faith” defense to torture... “such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts, or reviewing evidence gained from past experience.” (Bybee, p. 8 - citation omitted) One reads the words and one can sense how reasonable they are. Torture is, in its plain meaning, encompassing of only extreme acts.

In discussing the drafting of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT), Bybee notes that “the parties could not reach a consensus about the meaning of ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.’” (Bybee, p. 21) It is “[d]ifficult to pick out specific acts from court records with regards to the Torture Victims Protection Act (‘TVPA’) but it can hardly be argued against that the following acts would constitute torture: ‘(1) severe beatings using instruments such as iron barks, truncheons, and clubs; (2) threats of imminent death, such as mock executions; (3) threats of removing extremities; (4) burning, especially burning with cigarettes; (5) electric shocks to genitalia or threats to do so; (6) rape or sexual assault, or injury to an individual’s sexual organs, or threatening to do any of these sorts of acts; and (7) forcing the prisoner to watch the torture of others.” (Bybee, p. 24)

Reading the Rumsfeld memo, one cannot help but feel that if only the transgressors had followed the correct directives from on high, no “torture” would ever have taken place. At the bare minimum, mere “inhumane or degrading treatment.” This is something that can be argued over, endlessly, until a court makes a decision. However, “the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms . . . prohibits torture, though it offers no definition of it. It also prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. By barring both types of acts, the European Convention implicitly distinguishes between them and further suggests that torture is a grave act beyond cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”

How far removed from this is ...

Baudelaire’s “shock” ala Walter Benjamin (in the Sontag article about Artaud)

Dada’s “playful, sadistic assault on the audience” (Sontag intro...Selected Writings)

The metaphor is a cubical, nested within a series of cubicles, a string of gray, interlocking, and indistinct boxes, but (unlike the intestine) an endless procession, within which sit human occupants engaged in any number of tasks along the information assembly line. According to Foucault they are trying to take your soul, more or less. Chained up to a machine for the rest of your life, or something close to it. Yet perhaps this is how society must function. Still we have networks of control, expressed as communications, which interact in order to keep people on this electronic assembly line, or to keep people doing whatever it is that the network commands, such as planting a pressure cooker bomb next to the Boston Marathon. In essence, no direct connection between persons is necessary anymore, when you are speaking of a network of communications. One of the most important networks of course is economic. Money is one of the primary ordering systems of communication available to us in the present age. But please do not imagine that I am a Marxist. I am a realist.

The stress of a high information environment…

Just wander off into the urban wasteland… nothing left of you but a shadow from the streetlights…

I can’t follow so many emails… I imagine them evaporating… Gmail running out of space…

The wild man, a look of savagery

I’m reading Ghost Story by Peter Straub… enjoying it greatly though I keep comparing it to the movie which I would watch sometimes on HBO as a kid…

Sometimes in this high information environment I do feel so disorganized that I’d like to abandon society… this is like that brief moment of joy in the apocalypse movies, like Dawn of the Dead the original when they first find the mall and clear out all the ghouls, when it feels like a sleepover as a kid, or camping at the state park, the adventure of survival without all the rules…

I think I might not even be able to finish all the unread books in my library let alone all the books I want to read before I die.

Once my father discussing my mother’s collection of magazine articles, stacks and stacks up in the quilting room told me he thought this was some delusion on her part that she would ever have enough time before she died to read or reread all those articles … he treated her as if collecting magazine articles is somehow delusional… because of death he seemed to think we must abandon any semblance of holding onto information or memories or any small scrap of our own interests…now I think of this discussion as evidence of my father’s narcissism… his cruelty…

Above: “A cascade of system failures cause people to abandon society”

[An old poem about 10 years ago constructed from my notes]

The brain of john wayne gacy sits preserved in a basement in Illinois.

Fave author

Half Otherhalf

Relaxation

Tea fruit tea

Candle

Poem

Soap

Lotion

Lavender cucumber melon

Ocean breeze

Surprise

FinTECH

A computer AI ship with DNA database to build human colony.

Paper about three movies and their Wizard of Oz ref: Zardoz, Wild At Heart and Eyes Wide Shut.

Conspiracy... the role of the Witch... illusion... magic... power ... the law as oppressive

Iona Yakir

Anthropology paper lawyers and CLE participant observer

A long dormant egg hatches something unknown.

A tiny office with a desk two chairs with bare red rug and a vacuum cleaner leaning in the corner. From the sounds of the radio he could hear air traffic control from the local space port.

International center for the study of radicalization and political violence

Gatestone Institute

The Viscountess Bearsted

Idea: global terror as a necessary component in the developing global (legal) system

The Risk Advisory Group

He goes with Blake for tea and white rice with Blue and the Professor.

A relic from site of the atrocity

He keeps a relic from the site of the atrocity in his pocket.

A new descriptor for PTSD

Alan Becker

Screen time

Multitasking

Public and permanent

Second family values

Values.com

Autocorrect prince Ea

Sexting?

Talk about cars

02 - 07 body style landcruiser Lexis

Git a 03 truck

mywifeiscool4sure

Scene wher active shooter escapes by pretending to be a fleeing bystander

If terrorism decreases complexity then terrorist violence might be seen as a human reaction to the increasing complexity of the modernist state.

Out on the streets, the sewers are overflowing and the stench of excrement fills the air.

In the same way that lawyers allow comm uh nication btwn criminals and the legal system, terrorists might be said to force communication between the political system and the excluded.

Double invoicing

The city by the swamp is full of nobles masquerading as the unclaimed.

Annuity... aml... income stream

Credit unions

More cash transactions

More services = more risk

If communication evolution is unpredictable how is ISIS or more extreme form predictable or expected?

Un 2000 / palermo convention ... conversion or transfer of property to conceal or disguise...knowing it is derived from criminal offense.

Credit finance.... flipping card

Ctc .... un sec counsel 1373...

Correspondent bank is the Center of all the respondent banks

Collective knowledge

Cash collateralized loan

Caribbean FATF... BVI etc

Batch transfer wires

Basel CDD

Small Beer press

Lady Churchills wristlet

Wheatlan press polyphony

"I've got a limited liability company and I'm not afraid to use it!"

Undervalue exports is most popular

A kind of human sacrifice story about the starship that requires a human psychic ("the dreamer") to run the tapezohedron jump drive... they have a ship's psychiatrist for the depressed dreamer... something...

Cars floating away in the parking lot

Found naked wandering in a parking deck close to university city

The zombie drug allows compartmentalization of mental functions so the worker can perform automated job functions whike enjoying othee recreational activities

Love sadie

Thank amy

Be grateful - leo

Forgive john k

Forget sean

Admire luhmann

Micro structuring ... $900 each...

Coocoo smurfing... money moved through third party unaware ... requires insider ...

Private banking

Concentration accounts

Payable through accounts

PTAs

Sub-account holders

The respondant bank is the foreign bank

Shit Trousers 2: The Reckoning

Ignacio Ratch is back as Cube Drone XJXJX!

The excluded it could be that in a differentiated or modern system of communications in society you inevitably have excluded or disenfranchised people who will feel the need to create structural coupling two systems which they want to influence and that's what resort to terrorism. So perhaps terrorism is inevitable feature of differentiated or modern

Put a bid in there about the shadow of post modern s_m being a pre modern innocence post -0 is very conservative notion because it advocates preserving traditional cultures which may be washed away in the sea of modern modern dernism

Scene in this light duchamps toilet can beat you to the condo for tri city can see art system a war crimes against the art system in a series of escalation crimes committed in order to a cheese communication in increasingly crowded field

If one views the differentiated subsystems of communication as being in conflict with each other then it appears only logical that evolution of communications systems would lead to greater and greater garish attempts to breach the boundaries of communication

yard waste on the front porch take it out

Dead baby pug with black sauce

Tar sauce

The crucifixion of rod a story called the crucifixion of rod by the near to welding rod who gets crucified by the cops and then denied by his disciples.

Disruption

Venmo

Early adopters arr out

Not the same as traditional MSB

Calubrate account use based on comfort level

Blockchain.info

Create new wallet for each transaction

Address has no user ID

Wallet address is separate from ID of user in the blockchain

Veeify cellphone... but phone may used by someone else!

Virtual currency

Most bus models are money transmission

Msb is administrators or exchangers

Lib reserve was admin

Exchanger allows buy sell btwn vierual and real world

Mining and transfer

Only if you sell

State money transmission level is case by case

What about NC?

NY Issue btt license

Virtual currency transaction report

Banks are not supposed to be de facto regulators for MSB.... but what's the reality?

Brian: Extreme differentiation. Pick one type of MSB and only build a program for that type. Sell the regulators that you know the customer.

The conflict between individuality and the group, the subject and society, the employee and the corporation

A mint green jag s type

Cruisin the roadway

Salt and pepper hair

Smoking a cigarillo

Kerfuffle Jenkins waites on the streetcorner. A handsome lad with his stick full a jangle. He swoons for a bit of the red groovy. His latest project, a twelve tone atonal rock band, Erwartung. "All notes are equal," he says and runs a hand through his long golden locks.

Lord byron is the tale of an unsuccessful artist who only finds success through crime...

A heavily fortified compound on the outskirts of town, surrounded by abandoned construction sites and crumbling condominiums

Knight Commander of the Temple - the old knightly worship of truth - no profession of an opinion not his own

The Schiller Institute, the new dark age by michael minnicino

cult of Astarte

So eventually things start leading towards an initial public offering an IPO IPO for the globe seer. Byron has got to fire some people to pump up the stock price.

The Information Wars

So much easier to ignore someone online.

Perhaps much of this is competition between rival systems of communication, law versus religion, art versus religion, law versus politics, etc. Does Luhmann really address this? Or would he merely dismiss this idea as a postmodern description?

Pull a Gauguin

Just skip town get on disability and live in a slum

Get drunk every night and every morning cure the hangover with poetry

The David Foster Wallace movie is telling me to commit suicide

Strange that he killes himself at 46

I'm 45 years old and

I suppose not by every measure but by career I am in the desert of my mind

I will not surrender, no matter how many times I fail to win your love

I'll wade through bullets, bimbos, barbed wire, poison gas and blood to get to you my dear

Find you naked and muddy in the trench on the other side

Gently pull apart your lips with my bayonet

And you whisper in my ear

"Nothing ever ends."

Finish you there but I forgot the flag, the flag for my country (Andre)

You made the flag for me, but I left it back on the other side of no man's land, so forgetful am I, day dreaming of the land of nonesuch, and all my thought demons run free

Martyrdom as religious communication

The first thing you should know is that there is no man behind the curtain. Bayern gets taken for an interview with the artificially intelligent Bob. So there's a machine behind a curtain? Is there a ghost in the machine? I'm not sure about that says Bob. I'm not equipped to answer metaphysical questions.

John Holmes and the Horror of the Real

The universe wants me to finish this book

Charlotte is like the beach without the ocean

Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation

I found your article interesting on many levels. Silos v. Convergence

Banks could be doing predictive work as you describe but the current regulatory structure does not encourage this. Banks have a baseline of activity to monitor within reasonable limits and they have no incentive to improve alert systems so long as costs are minimized in terms of human bodies on the line.

FATF policy analyst

WN Weaver

Dark Lantern

Black Lantern

Emits darkness

How privatized banking really works free pdf

http://consultingbyrpm.com/how-privatized-banking-really-works

Dongle

USA

Angel

Bill Williamsburg

Adrian pride

Her name is melody

Hallucunation psychedelic pop

Wea vault

Kult no home tonight

A perfumed garden vol 2

Gatestone Institute

Red Cell Intelligence Group

Fake cross burning at Amherst colege

Syllogism

Categorical imperative

Aristotle Lincoln-Douglass

Don't want to talk about your global society I just want to talk about your frontal lobotomy

Powtoon.com

Little shop of horrors

Nypirg call center

Artificial maturity

The digital invasion

casetext.com

Free law search tool?

Boris Groys the total art of Stalinism

How can Luhmann assume understanding without including psychic systems in his analysis? Could two lunatics babbling nonsense constitute a closed system?

Hp lovecraft modernist supreme

Premodern is actually the truth but underneath is a modernist notion of universality - humanity adrift in the mindless sea of the cosmos. The gods are either malevolent alien creatutes at best I indifferent like narure. Magic is science. But how does this explain the dreamlands? Perhaps he was more of a mystic than we give him credit for.

"Perfect security is a pine box six feet underground." - anonymous CIA official

By the strict terms of the ritual the party's holding hostages are supposed to be neutral but of course in practice it doesn't always work that way. The Leggetts or the factors of the two opposing sides sometimes have to renegotiate the terms as the ritual drags on and if the negotiations fail or the contract is breached open war will be the result.

After the festivities, a story teller. He tells a story of the ancient ritual of ________, wherein two rival houses engage in psychic warfare culminating in ritual cannibal sacrifice of the head of the losing family.

Stratus tells Byron that he has to speak cryptically because the device blisters his mind if he were to touch on any topics of a sensitive nature.

So in the New World Byron tries to destroy the globe seer. he takes a gun from the bodyguards and shoots at it but the bullets just ricochet off and then he takes the globe and puts it in the trunk of the cab still waiting outside on Brad’s corporate tab. He imagines he catches a glimpse of Brad screaming in the mirrored surface before slams the trunk lid. He rides back to the city thinking he can try to destroy it by throwing it in a river or something and they go move slowly through a crowd of bleeding flaggalents.

Niklas Luhmann by Christian Borch

Habermas: Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

Socrates was the ultimate postmodernist. He denied that even life itself was a master narrative.

The Sacrifice of the New Originalism by Thomas Colby

Being a human these days it feels like you have to suppress who you are just to exist. These days there is an incongruity between the individual and society. Perhaps the incongruity is a deliberate effect or not. Exploited by capitalists through advertising, the incongruity becomes a hole in the psyche that can only be filled with consumption. Or perhaps this is just human nature. Being social creatures, we'll likely never know.

The United States is the antihero in the world theater show, and fortunately the playwrite keeps propping us up with villains far worse.

At the heart of every corporate entity, no matter how enlightened, is an ugly concrete stairwell.

The dissident used to be a reality fanatic. But he reformed his ways and now he believes in multiple realities. The globe seer is the Nexus of all realities. The Greeks called it Omphalos, the navel of the world.

The Law of Governance Risk Management and Compliance by Geoffrey P. Miller

120 or so $ on barnes & noble - $45 gift card = $75 + tax

Distributed virtual environment DVE

So candelmo essentially admitted that the bank is like the turkey thinks that every meal he gets before Thanksgiving is leading ti greator prosperity (Talebs Black Swan) in the same way he said that the banks that were fined that suffered serious regulatory penalties they had successful exams prior to that it wasn't a series of that exam that finally led to the penalty it was a series of good or moderately good exams and then ultimately they reach the cliff of a tail end event that led to the penalty. So compliance and risk is it the same a risk of groupthink as any other human endeavor and should take steps to mitigate groupthink

Corporations want a criticless society. No criticism or thought, just endless consumption of the product.

Boba Fett as the shadow side of Han Solo. Boba Fett as symbolic of the corporate mercenary. Essay about Star Wars as cultural myth concerning the modern corporate state. George Lucas started his career as the rebels and has ended it as the Empire. Started as Luke Skywalker and finishes as Darth Vader. A tale of redemption for the successful artist in the modern corporate state. Darth Vader as successful corporate artist.

Song ideas

Every job is like mcdonalds, faster fastr, put on your mask and go to work, she's talkin bout her baby daddy un the cube next to mine, every job is the same unless you’re lone wolf mcqyade, McDonald's ... manager is pissed cuz you took an extra mcnugget and he does nt give a damn if the time had expired...

DEATH'S KISS

Information cannot be predicted, because information is by definition a surprise. If information could be predicted, it would be redundancy. Paradoxically, information does not exist without redundancy, yet once known, information itself can quickly become redundant, like a decaying isotope. What is the half life of a secret revealed? Since one man's information is another's redundancy, information cannot exist without an observer or psychic system to register the surprise of redundancy's violation. Thus, complexity of a system increases the difficulty in distinguishing information from redundancy. One might imagine being seduced only to be rejected on the doorstep. Death's kiss reduces all complexity to either zero or infinity, and this is the information that only death can provide, as death paradoxically contains the ultimate secret of life, the divine surprise one might call it, the information (or lack thereof) from the great beyond, the zero or the infinite.

I never knew I would feel such pressure to conform. such pressure to make money. To be a "success." I thought I could escape it by being an artist. But my lack of success as an artist led me to a new career which feels almost like a medieval guild…

So the fantasy Byron it was all a scam the lady was setting him up. It's all part of their plan to lure in to find the globe see her which they desire a powerful artifact. So eventually they bring them back they tell him they hold withhold from him the serum write the serum the blood Devil's blood and he goes through withdrawal symptoms and then she feeds it to him lovingly and he realizes he is their creature.

Brad represents a private group of investors

He gets greedy

He gets sucked into the orb

The reality fanatics vs the Masters of chaos

Approaches to text mining arguments from legal cases

Text mining legal opinions

World Legal Information Institute

Jason &Nicole

Leafblower

The queen vs the king. The king has fallen from his horse. Mother Nature is immune to any amount of electric shocks it seems.