The Answer is Y

         The mind turned against the mind in the previous post. My ideas grew wearisome to me and seemed out of touch with my private being, in a manner that was not at all therapeutic or helpful. The only thing it revealed was that the mind is too simplistic to offer any revolutions to personal issues which, on reflection, seem incomprehensible in logical terms, and purely emotional, or as we said many times before, the product of a dream-logic which can only developed through artistic means. The previous post completely kicked the shit out of me personally, and now I feel I've dusted myself off and am ready to ask some very challenging questions of myself, since apparently my mind cannot help but roam on. Or, rather, the challenging question was what the previous post asked, and now we are prepared to even make a stab at answering it. 

        The problem occurring to me now is the merger of science and religion found in Jung. It seems like science wins out, for it establishes a science as causative over spiritual thought, in the sense that entire religions can be assessed, like Christianity and Buddhism, as centered on a "self-symbol," an archetype, which completely overlooks the differences between Christ and Buddha. The theory asks more questions than it answers, and ultimately threatens what I am willing to proclaim: Jung's ascription to the symbolic images as being irrational, beyond rationality, permits him to gentrify the religious images, to establish them in rational psychology. It is much in the same manner as Deleuze and Guattari accuse Freud of desexualizing reality through establishing sexuality within a rational economy. There would seem to be no way to maintain the persona of a scientist, and not carry all these images and transformations within one's own authority, within one's own system of rationality. There is no difference between Freud's "interpretation of dreams," and Jung's "interpretation of religions." Interpretations become more real than what they interpret, and not in the sense of Kaballah, for the Kaballah occurs within a religious mode; Jung carries religions inside what, in the end, is science and science alone, is the presumption to understand what is forever mysterious. 

        Nevertheless, I admit Jung is a complex and hypocritical, not malignant, figure. He despises the destruction of what he contributes to destroying, by placing in a prison cell of psychotherapy. He is the archetype of the good bourgeois doctor who gets into the New Age. And thus, to attack him becomes a complex and unpleasant exercise, for one attacks someone who defends and gaslights your values. But he is nothing; he is just a sign of the times. In reacting to him we must react to what he himself is reacting to, and what he himself is a part of. For we live in a scientific age, an age where a rejection of the superstitions and false idols of the past have been eradicated in favor of an idolization of science, an idolization which Jung plays into with his analysis of the alchemists, as the original spiritual scientists. Science is not just a process for discovering information, it is an ethos, a religion, a materialist, normalizing conviction about the nature of a weird universe. It is a contradiction of a lifeless patriarchal religion for the name of a new lifeless patriarchal religion; weak promises traded for no promises, and the power of smarmy heroes endures. 

        All of that is a well-oiled machine of rhetoric I'm exhausted by at this point of my life, how "scientific" we are and how "spiritual" is the East or the indigenous cultures. That may be true, but the sad fact is that nothing will change, and it will get worse before it gets better. We can look back at whatever ideal past we choose, indigenous tribal religions, the 1960's counter-culture, the alchemists, the Gnostics, the kabbalists, the gypsies, and then we open our eyes and look at a world that has alienated us from the positive virtues any of these groups may represent. I do not believe science's turning a benevolent, indulgent eye upon the mystics in any form, be it Jung or some quantum physics stuff, is the kind of game that will end up with mysticism as the winner. We cannot depend on this hand-out, but must instead take over the house. Dogmatic religion has been substituted for dogmatic science, and perhaps all that is, is the original malignancy of the power-systems religions enforced coming into a stronger, more confident form of domination. 

        If my previous post is an indication of anything, it's that I see the cognitive mind itself as the cause of this situation, the belief in the mind, the belief in rationality, the abandonment of a looser and more poetic interpretation of life that would seem more adaptive to its ambiguity-- that would treat the world not as definite, but as ambiguous, before we even look under a microscope at the missing electrons. Art represents this ambiguity, this beauty, but speaks more to the unconscious than the conscious mind, and the ideas rage on, paving paradise and putting up a parking lot even while they protest the very same thing in the words they are saying. 

        So, I have realized, contrary to what I wrote before, a spiritual desire in myself that I neglected to honor, that I myself placed at the mercy of my ideology, which has me look more sympathetically at religion today. Sympathetically but not with much interest, at least right now, for I still despise the dogmatic element. But science now seems twice-over evil, the dogmatism of religion mixed with the utilitarianism of corporate civilization. Through science, "economics" becomes reasonable, not the mathematics of slavery. As I have said before, I believe we have philosopher-kings, and it is awful. So I have found that I despise my mind, I despise its knowledge and its training.

        But what is science? What does it mean to "do" science? I have thought so much on this subject and yet the answer does not spring to my lips. I will do two actions: what makes this action the doing of "art," and this action the doing of "science"? What makes everything I did before on this blog science, and how can I stop doing that thing? Science would seem to be the question: what is science? This question is like saying "what is the question?" And then we will analyze the nature of the question, to give the answer to what the question is. If we did so would we in so doing answer all questions, a priori? Of course not, but this is the kind of notion that is very philosophical, with that slight charge of mystical innuendo and ultimately rigid allegiance to the maintenance of the question. 

        Religion offers an answer. Science asks a question. Art offers a question and an answer in one, as does the world. 

        But science is not just the question, but the inquiry, which is the question and the answering of the question. Religion proclaims; science asks. Art just is.

        So what is the fundamental part of our thought that makes it scientific, and where does it come from? If I have personal problems, I want to make an inquiry into them, I want to solve them. How do I fix this? How do I get over this feeling? Do I need some food? Oh, this went such-and-such a way, maybe I'll do this instead. That, in essence, seems like the everyday origin of science. But those are very narrow, everyday, harmless examples of problem-solving. When you start a new document in your word processor, and lay down on the paper the results of hours of thinking and reading of culturally-approved authorities on high and mighty subjects, however, when you proclaim the theory of relativity, psychological types, the will to power, and so on, you've offered a solution to a problem not just for yourself, but as a fact of nature, as something authorized and true for everyone. The philosopher is essentially a religious figure, an archetypal patriarch. Because you begin to proclaim the truth for everyone, the methods to the high holy law, the way and the truth and the light. You start preaching, and the difference is, today, with Richard Dawkins or somebody, the preacher is authorized not because they uncovered tablets or spoke to spirits but because they went to MIT, published a paper, and so on. Is there as much of a difference as it seems?

        The prophet and the scientist both take from nature, just the aperture of discovery is different, and then they deliver the wisdom to the herd, as a patriarch. To complicate this further, you know, maybe one or the other of them is actually delivering something valuable to the herd, which is in the herd's best interests, and maybe the prophet and the scientist could be the same person. But perhaps it is this stopgap disaster of a paradigm, in which the medium ends up being the message, the good thing that is brought is undercut by the social system it enforces. An activism that even if anti-authoritarian cannot evade the authoritarianism implicit in the action.

        So-- this is what science is. It is the universalization of the particular, the solution to a personal problem becoming the dictate to the masses, becoming projected upon the masses. When I work on myself I am problem-solving. When I preach to you about how to solve a general, social problem, I am conducting science. If I share in conversation and friendship the results of my problem-solving, in response to another's problem-solving, that's not in any way problematic. But if I draft the results of the conversation into a tome, and put it out there in the world, something has been declared, and this is what officiates the techniques drafted therein as science. Science is public recommendation, is education, is didacticism. 

        We cannot get around the fact that we think logically and practically and nor would we want to. The fact that we wish to get around is what is called on us to do as public intellectuals, as social beings, which is to make advisements and prescriptions, to weigh in on a subject based on our research and data, when even the most rigorous science seems to have a shelf-life of a century, and perhaps less and less as time goes on, the paradigm ever-widening, science celebrating itself in the same terms which it rejects itself, by awarding the latest discoverers the laurel crown, who have trampled on the theories of earlier discoverers. For all the competitiveness in the arts, there is nothing like the malice of the latest science for the earlier science, the idiots of antiquity, and the radiance of the present logic-gurus, being a status quo that never changed and will never change, inasmuch as science is never a final draft. Art is a final draft. Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, this is fucking set in stone. We can have whatever stance on the classic literature, but we can't disprove them, or claim our view of art-- not the world-- is so much wider in such a way that it negates their own view of art. We can't look at a cave-painting and say, "Picasso has disproved this."

        Basically, our mind establishes authority over local solutions, because it can put two and two together, and then we speak this aloud, what we have solved for ourselves, and everybody is like, oh great! What a great answer! What a useful paradigm that has changed my view of everything! Chomsky idealizes science because in his view, theorists like Deleuze just pull shit out of their ass, whereas scientists are subject to collaboration and scrutiny. But reading Deleuze, it's very obvious that no serious, non-humanities-oriented organization is going to take this seriously. You can't get any more contradictory than being an anarchist who works at MIT, a leading authority on political evil and linguistics; Chomsky is very much the scientist-atheist-materialist liberal hero extraordinaire, and in truth he does say great stuff, about philosophy and politics. But to act as if his cultural position furthers the cause of anarchism seems highly, highly dubious, to use one of his favorite words. I would place more money on Deleuze, Derrida, and Lacan, all of whom take a playful attitude to their work which seems to piss Americans off; real Pere Ubus do not like Pere Ubu plays, they have Claudius's response to the Mousetrap, frighted by false fire. What they reveal is that they deeply desire an authoritarian, patriarchal system, because they cannot identify let alone enjoy a joke in the place of scientific authority. The world will fall apart.

        "Speaking out." Many people do that, and nothing changes. Or, too little, too late. The same rifts and dichotomies play out in the world socially. Choirs and preachers become more and more entrenched; Christian Nationalism versus Secular Humanism. The science of liberals marches on, pearls ever cast before swine, while the Christ-shaped pieties inculcated in the poor and uneducated since their birth are played to ever more fervently, in the name of greater and greater insults to true Christian morality, greater and greater Roman conquest. And even I myself, perhaps, made the recommendation: just do some hard thinking and then the problem will fix itself. The hard thinking, the facts of the matter, just do not even matter to what the emotional origin of our political situation is. The social divides and resentments, the economic squalor, the conditioning, these cannot be overcome by the power of reason. As I've often said, it's not good enough to be right. So, go ahead, live up to your responsibility and "speak out." Everybody's doing it these days and nothing critical about our civilization is changing. Advertisers market to millennial morality; you have pictures of plus-sized women at Target, combatting body fascism. Hey, nice development; but Target's still shafting and making a killing enslaving the working-class. They're still a completely unreachably wealthy corporation which you can give your whole body and soul to and barely afford the rent. But whatever way they may exploit you that does not offend your sensibilities, which advertises themselves as reflecting your own sensibilities so can take your money and your time away from you, that has always been their mission. Their ears are to the ground, but they will never respond to you speaking out about their money and power, only stuff like race and gender and body-image issues. And whatever you contribute to the world of "science" -- like Chomskyian linguistics -- will only become roped back into the machine if it is of any use to corporate interests. Make the human mind more powerful, more knowledgable, and you have assisted the ruling-class machine. Invent a therapy method that has a proven track record, invent a rocket, and you'll get a personality questionnaire on your job application, and only CBT will be covered by company health insurance, and the rocket will be dropped on countries. Do anything to further the interest of science, that noble ideal, and you have made civilization stronger. Great discoveries make great products and further devices of control and surveillance. 

        If civilization is a country and the individual is their own country, and we are not on good terms, why would I share my personal science with them? The US does not broadcast all the technologies it has to China or Russia, and vice versa. In competitive environments, people ask for help with their work, and rivals try to sabotage you by feeding you bad intel. It would be nice if we had the kind of "Tribe" we liked to be in, and wanted to help with our discoveries, but we don't. So preaching can only do harm. Preaching assumes the choir is on your side, or can be taught the songs of the choir. Just act like whatever you directly say to civilization will become appropriated into its shitty, bourgeois expansion. The very statement, "Here is My Great Message" presupposes tacit agreement with the discourse in which it participates. We want to go to the very molecule of language, of the statement, to solve this issue, to devise our "poetics."

        "The Answer is X." (Where the answer is truly X.) This is the statement of the truth, delivered within the discourse of a mind with which it has a positive relationship. This is how I state the answer to myself. Why would I make this statement to my enemy? If "The Answer is X" meant the intimidation and/or contradiction of an enemy's point of view or will. But here is the problem: our enemy does not have a point of view, our enemy is not invested in a disagreement or a situation of being shown-up. This implies all of what constitutes our enemy is its ideology, different from ours. But our enemy is what will use, fluidly, any ideology or science placed before it in its own interest. Perhaps you are now in the minority in contending The Answer is X. But eventually, if you are in the majority, the enemy will agree with you and make of your position the official position, to maintain their power, their authority, for this is all that they are invested in. Right now you complain about this-or-that social point-of-view being marginalized. Enough people agree with you and eventually it has become the mainstream, and power allies it to itself. For this is how pure power and authority behaves; it has no point-of-view, no care for anything but the maintenance of its own authority. To this principle, authority is totally pure and faithful, needing no mystifications or mythologies, only the position of supremacy. The masses fight with one another, and whatever characterizes the majority when the dust settles becomes too the position of "power." 

        Power is empty of spirituality, of science, of art, of any talent or interest in the world. Its face is only the reflection of what advantages itself in a given situation. And if this very reflection were to be given back to itself, power would seize upon the moment to make the accuser seem the guilty one, to distinguish itself from its reflection, to deflect attacks upon power's enemy, truth. And this would be part an overall strategy of projection upon one's enemies of one's own power-seeking, whether they attack power or not. Power's only vulnerability is also the source of its tyranny, that is has no comfort other than domination, that it cares nothing for anything but being placed above others, that it is empty, that it is a fetish. But this vulnerability, this purity, is exactly what makes power so persistent, so dauntless, impossible to appeal to on the grounds of rationality, guilt, conscience. Anything presented before power becomes a tool for its propagation. Because anything a human will may invent that serves a good purpose to one another, may also serve a good purpose in cloaking the intentions of power. The best science in our world therefore is the most useless. 

        But I got off on very political issues here, and I didn't intend to. I wanted to explore something-- well, actually what I wanted to explore is a bit political. It is the notion that-- as I wrote to someone-- art and self-development are two sides of the same coin. Because in art, we perform the other, such to trigger the self in our audience, and in self-development, we view our selves as a performing other, we work on ourselves as if we were externalized. And what this made me think of was alchemical projection, as perhaps not quite like either art or spiritual development, but archetype of pure science and domination. Jung tries to root his psychology in the spiritual practice of alchemy, and what this does is make an unpleasant implication: that the patients of his practice are materials of his own self-development. Just as in, the scientist ceases to be a private problem-solver and begins to project their solution upon the world. And organizational chapters of Jungianism, theosophy, Scientology, begin popping up. Perhaps it is projection itself, this apparently productive process of projecting psyche on materiality, to see it change and mutate-- which I have been told is what I do with my art-- which instead is what science does to the world. Perhaps science is power, advisements of control, which eradicate spiritual faith, which centralize ego, and in the end is the philosopher's stone, the world converted to material the philosopher may use as an extension of their will--GOLD. If any Marxist critics cared enough about Jung, they'd have a field day with that. The scientist's laboratory becomes the whole world, which they detach from such to study it, in the hopes that they will soon announce their findings to the world, which right or wrong, or partially right and someday partially wrong, will, if they can defeat earlier theories, become the new worldview. How is not the scientific theory the tyrant of the world, the rex mundi? Not one of them will undo the essentially agnostic nature of reality as it presents itself to us without intellectualization. They will simply push out the royalty that preceded them on a basis of a bureaucratic error like any succession; and they will invent a reality that has some basis in fact, they will rule on the basis of some mandate; and the world will go on being what it always was, something uncontrollable and mysterious. But the intellectuals in the court will go on praising the new monarch until they are unseated by someone who carries the unknowable sum to the next decimal point. 

        Now I have said that when I make a joke, I make a psychologically inconceivable union of things that involves the conjunction of two psychologically conceivable things, when seen separately. But the joke breaks loose with a kind of preverbal message, a laugh, a rejection of that psychologically inconceivable combination as impossible, unlikely, absurd. And I have said that there is an affirmative unconscious, a statement that might make even more sense if I conclude that consciousness is incapable of being affirmative, only doing so in exclusions, in breakdowns, our language being such that despite everything I have said above about science participating in the drama of authority and power, this science rages on. Basically I am saying that we can only feel what we want and what would be good, but when we get involved in a system of thoughts we enter the possibility of frustrating ourselves like I just did in the previous post, of getting involved with ideologies and systems. My idea is that dream-interpretation is extremely questionable; but laughter-interpretation is very clear to me. If someone laughs at something, they have thrown it out, defined it as inconceivable, ridiculous, abnormal, unlike to what lies within. Is it possible that we only give ourselves away in our minds when we laugh? And through exclusion?

        Or is it so that this is all horseshit, I'm just confused some more. Because it comes back to art being the conscious expression of the affirmative unconscious, of science like to comedy being a waste of time, of art making no bones about what it wants and who is wanting it. Of poetry being the dream-logic of everyday life, and its main affirmation. Why should I read outside the lines of what I laugh at? When I am capable of hearing what I am in my poems and songs? I think I am just seeking permission from myself to deliver jokes when science is asked of me, and poems and songs go ignored. Like basically if you want the science, here's a joke. Go blow yourself up. I had better things to offer.