The Tower Falls into the Horizon

 It's been a while since I've added to this blog, and my thoughts have traveled far afield from the April 12th most recent post, Jokes vs. Satirical Art . But lately a principle has emerged that has announced itself--perhaps very appropriately with respect to the significance of the blog itself--as something worthy of this blog, something that should be pushed along with my writings on this blog.  What I was struggling with before seems to be the Lucifer versus Satan problem, which I am viewing as my poetry vs. comedy problem, and trying to find a dialectical synthesis, to be beyond the Luciferic vanity of the artist and simultaneously beyond the Satanic sadism of the comedian. I find this heroic element in satirical art, which is the poetic art which also has a critical stance, not a self-congratulation. In general I am even more strongly opposed to a dialectical completion to a problem than I apparently was then, and opposed to the ideology of balance. My last paragraph had it, "The vulnerability of effacement permits social satirists to feel themselves above the fray of the pretentious and deluded, and the vulnerability of sincerity permits intellectuals and artists to feel themselves above the fray of the cynical and cheap. Both forms of vulnerability grant some sense of power, but they are vulnerable to the other's attack if both vulnerabilities are not combined." A sincere effacement, one which is emotional and critical, not critical and cold (like the bully comedian), or emotional and cold (like the vain poet). Satire is the hidden third, aha. And this kept in place my philosophical idea of JOKE SCIENCE, which has since been shed away.

I'm doing a bit of a synopsis of the previous post's gist as I can briefly ascertain it, because it's been half-a-year since then, and I'm curious to see how it connects to the new thought that gets me typing into this. A major intellectual realization transpired in between then and now which was not in any way alluded to by this blog, which was my re-form of the principle of individuation as that of "identification" and my re-form of the principle of transcendence as that of "disassociation," and my full rejection of dialectical solutions, of balance between opposites. Instead, what I did then was phrase the dialectic as but one effort within a choice, that of unification, which separation, or individuation, opposes, and that the dialectic is irresolvable, because any choice between unification and individuation is another individuation, the choice, the will, is by nature representational and individuating, choice-making, successive. So I basically went all the way into succession, succession as the movement of all consciousness, denying as I did that it was ever possible to unify things, that the choice of unification was always the choice, and hence the individuating movement. Jung's collective unconscious was a collective individuation, my idea was 'objective componency,' God as a fragment of God, and the "Self" being the "Identity"--and the core problem being that between identity and relation, that relation without identity was interdependence, whereas identity, never without self-relation, was independence, which was however not 'individual,' but collective.  Without fully getting the picture, at this time I talked about identity progressing in terms of self-relation, and the identification process being the 'individuation' process, which is all integrative progression, rather than successive progression, but I didn't get the idea of integration into there yet. My emphasis in late August was on the need for independence, to break out of interdependence, out of useless 'integration,' unification with the rejected. Also, I critiqued the God-human relationship, religious, in conjunction with the nature-human relationship, scientific, as essentially dialogic, negative forms of connection between subject and object, and spoke of the necessity of an empathic, positive form of connection between subject and object, in which one is the God or nature, in which connections occur through empathic lines of independence. I have since found other writers, Alice Miller and Arno Gruen, the outsider psychoanalysts, who stress the same ideas, the same linkage between autonomy and empathy I was making then. In their view the breakdown of empathy in child abuse cases, the weakening of unconditional love during the helplessness of childhood, this challenges the autonomy of the child, and makes them dependent on others, a superego, an abusive parent who must be appeased. We are trained as children to 'earn our love' on the basis of following rules, whether explicitly set in place by the parents or implicitly as methods to avoid being abused, and in so doing become dependent on them in our moment of helplessness, which continues the dynamic into adulthood. An empathic connection would have given us our own autonomy, because we would not be enforcing the separation, we would be treated as an independent unit like the parents--Gruen, with similar echos in Miller's view of Nietzsche, critiques power as the psychology which emerges from the childhood helplessness, and abuse, received from the world--the will to power is another form of pleasing the parent by becoming the parent, by becoming the abuser and not the abused. The helpless child flees into the persona of the abusive parent on their road of appeasement, their revenge continues a cycle of violence. 

My inspiration for the previous paragraph's list of observations, its system of concepts, was pushing back against post-Jungian ideology in the graduate program I was in. Principally what bothered me was the emphasis on nostalgia, on antediluvian thinking, the bourgeois attack on experimental and surrealist art, the mystical concealment of sexual motives-- in short the bourgeois religious hypocrite in Jung and in his followers. The attack on my art was the one I could not under any circumstances weather or tolerate happily, since I had received another, more politically motivated attack on my art, and it was stupid then, and it was stupid at Pacifica. And whereas political power always claims itself altruistic and moral, the religious claim to the same, contra-art, is somehow both more seductive and more maddening, since the grotesque motives towards sex, ego, and power are made more grotesque by their denial in the sublimity of religion. Jung's idea of transcendence is a dialectic between conscious and unconscious, between persona and God, the adaptation to the world and the adaptation to the soul. Hillman's work was merely about living in archetypal fantasy, about enchanting everything, maybe basically the same thing-- but the movement is a little different. Jung is more subversive, whereas Hillman is more commanding--making the world into the mystical playground he wants, whereas Jung accepts the world as the prison it is but finds a way to stand in his place as a mystic while behaving like a doctor in the 'ordinary world.'  Jung speaks to the Germanic intellectual of the turn of the century, whereas Hillman speaks to the sophisticated American reader, more gregariously, and poetically, more insistent on a religious, neo-Greek mythological fantasy, essentially a more insistent academic religion than Jung created in the first place. What all this mythology and mystification accomplished for me personally, what I saw it doing, was concealing the motives of others, the dark, Freudian motives which were allowed to personify themselves as sublime. Jung's entire work seemed to be the manifestation of a persona for a Freudian unconscious of sex and violence, in which we drift in metaphysical images, the true cosmic forces of our nature. Obviously this is powerfully dangerous-- idealize the self, idealize the world, either one tells you to ignore what's right in the front of your face. The "shadow" cannot be seen without Freud, because he dealt with sex and violence in a frank, nuts-and-bolts way, even if we depart from his theories. 

This framed the religious viewpoint and the scientific viewpoint which both live in Jung as both essentially Faustian, and anti-magical. What they do, and what Freud accused Jung of doing, is diluting the tough message, of providing an opportunity to muddy the waters, of letting people deceive themselves, and I saw that in action. Essentially a romantic viewpoint; not a comic view, but a romantic view. Yet simultaneously elements of Jung's philosophy, like the inward self versus the id, are valuable. But how does the scientific message dilute the tough message, if that's Freud's idea? It is the otherization of the self through the otherization of the world, the 'reality principle' as submissive, self-rejective-- in other words we don't talk to the world unless we empathize, unless our own self is seen in it, unless there is an integrative movement. So the self-objectification of psychoanalysis, the transfer of the self away from the id being dictated to by the superego counselor, is very, very dangerous, and is where the real problem actually originates. So while Freud with one hand has us face our dark side, with the other he actually disassociates himself from it, in favor of scientific self-consciousness, the reality principle. The "unconscious" is this beastly, infantile maelstrom of dark desires, and we have to sublime the animal evil into human goodness, and relieve the traumas that emerge in the consequence of repression. Back in Jungian school, somasynthesis was the alternative I designed to psychoanalysis, a way of identifying with the psyche rather than being 'objective' about the psyche, speaking about it in the third person, which Jung still does, but rather than nature, it is God, the ego in a subservient relation to the God within. This is yet another reality principle, just a metaphysical reality principle. Somasynthesis was the action of creation, of willing, not of understanding, of choosing on the basis of value. And this was another big place where my thought was parting ways--the school was into arts-based research which I see as code for the construction of the reality-principle. I was coming out strongly on the side of value, not fact. On our depths of consciousness being emotional and evaluative and relational, rather than symbolic or metaphysical, and my own study of my musical work seems to very much confirm this structure, that our true depth is purely visceral and emotional, Freudian, whereas the metaphysical and imaginary register is the go-between standing between our feelings and our thoughts/communications. This 'imaging' really is what functionally is placed between mind and emotion, what converts feelings to thoughts or thoughts into feelings. So I was using 'evaluation' to break away from the concept of exploring the depths of secret consciousness, of prophecy, and to break away from prophecy and science in one go. What we had inside was evaluation, was a measure of value, which should be primary, rather than the idea, subscribed to by Jungian ABR, Arts-Based Research, of the accrual of knowledge being any kind of goal, not to rend it taboo, but to make very clear that the accrual of knowledge is not an end in itself. But the fact that it becomes an end-in-itself in this world, that knowledge is power, is only another reinforcement of the Succession Principle, which, along with the Integrative Principle, make up the real current subject of this post. Research succeeds Art in the Arts-Based Research circuit, art is made valuable and purposeful by virtue of its participation in Research; as a passionate artist, this made me furious, as well as the drubbing I was forced to indulge from pompous, indigenous practitioner wannabes. Artists were on some high horse, even though my life was fucking miserable, and why was I paying this school to be insulted? To be constantly put down as #2 to indigenous traditions or scientists? Rather I continually fought such to say that the artist was the modern shaman and you could shove your tribal posturing, you were but modern versions of chieftains.  So I dropped out of the school and applied to two film schools, which I'm currently waiting to hear from; but my artistic philosophizing continues, albeit, having gone to something like sleep for a while as my formulations lost the energy they had from being forged in resistance to my surroundings, which were no longer surrounding me. In the idea of 'independence' I had the main salvo I needed from that encounter, the anti-dialectical, anti-dialogic, anti-religious, anti-science principle that every movement was an exceptional movement, that we had an 'exceptional imperative' not a 'categorical imperative.' A need to value the best and highest, to continue choosing anew and towards bigger and better things.

The problem with this characterization that has emerged, somewhat happily, since this authors a philosophy of continuous separation, of the continuous elevation, or succession, of the exception over the rule, and finds relationships between exceptions, between nodes of empathic independence, is that all my own movements towards bigger and better things, recently, and perhaps as a general rule to some extent, have always been movements backwards in some way also. My rhetoric was that of a surrealist artist, wanting something fresh, new, revolutionary-- nostalgia always brings us back to the time when we were infants, and the world was new, therefore what we are really nostalgic for is the experience of discovery which came easier back then, since everything was new, I said. In the same collaborative project with other students, I was pushing back on the idea of success espoused as a positive, ego-supporting principle by another student-- who had us list our successful moments-- our moments of self-celebration. In my list of successful moments, I listed the great love of my life amidst the things I had earned in the system, great grades, an Ivy League degree, creative accomplishments out the wazoo, and I bitterly protested-- saying that the love story was the exception to the rule, that these other things you could take from me, I probably only pushed myself towards them so that love story could be real. Then my pitch for this presentation-- just as this student was going to ask everyone to list their successful moments, I was going to ask everyone to list their exceptional moments, their moments which were unexpected, weird, disturbing, challenging to the whole structure of our lives, ways in which our ways of thinking were just out the window and we were in a brave new world, reorienting ourselves in chaos. This suited what had happened between me and this same other student in another presentation, when a scene I acted out with them went off-script and I, and everyone else, had to improvise. Yet perhaps our worlds were overlapped, appropriately-- succession and exception have a related process. (I also recently referred, in speaking to this other student, suggesting the idea of doing an improvised play, and spoke of the idea of a prewritten play as contrived, as preconceived -- more later on why I'm italicizing that -- and that it would be 'artistically regressive' to return to the play since we had that breakthrough to the glories of improvisation, something more artistically interesting was born.) 

During that play we improvised, I spoke about my work with the play as essentially counter-Freudian-- a reversal-- The Dream of Interpretation being what the play was called-- trying to return the psychoanalyst to the world of the theater, rather than have the psychoanalyst pull the theater out of art into research. So I did The Dream of Interpretation and the idea of Research-Based Art, of art not as a sublimation or a window, a perception, or an understanding, but as an action with the basis of understanding. And this seemed to hasten my whole structural, intellectual agon with the school to an explosive climax. And at the time it was lending me the operation of reversal, through these intellectual responses to what I didn't care for-- the conversion of a work of theater into the psychological complex theory, Freud's Arts-Based Research, the domination of the pleasure principle by the reality principle. Yet as far as I can make this actually sensible, without those victorian mystifications of Freud's, the pseudoscientific talk of instincts and drives, and so on, the reality principle is just the mental understanding, the interpretability of all presentations to the understanding, and really leaves out "action" itself as a principle. Strangely the same thinking in Schopenhauer can make the pleasure principle into the reality principle, into the detached contemplation from the will, which makes for aesthetic pleasure, since the will, action, is nothing but pain, nothing but the agonistic individuation principle. This pleasure, Freud would say, is what is afforded by repression, by compliance. Yet that is a thorny interaction of ideas I don't want to go off on. The reversal idea was emerging in my life spontaneously outside of these two tendentious works of intellectual and creative artistry, Research Based Art and the Dream of Interpretation, which spun both post-Jungian thought and Freud backwards.  I found myself returning to things, going on a road trip cross-country that was the reverse of the trip I made in 2007, making all the same stops, in reverse, and filming them. I did something similar musically, returning to the first piece of music I ever recorded, which was called Severence (sic) and which featured a backwards tape playing Weezer's My Name is Jonas. I since worked on a new version of this track called Reverence, which reversed the sample of Weezer, as a sort of key gesture of how I was treating the original music, how I was translating it into a new version-- how I was fashioning an exception out of a rule, through reversing the sequence. 

In the larger scheme of my music, the music I made while at Pacifica, which went so far as to make pieces of music based on a central text we were reading and based on the writings of all my fellow students, and then proceeded to return to covers of old songs of mine from the very beginning of my music career before petering out, continued the music I made post-Naropa, which was all dedicated to "returning" to the language of the exception, to my work Delusional Adam in the Garden of Irrelevance, what was Residents-inspired, which was old work also, but work which came after the very early stuff which was all grunge rock I recorded on my computer or a 4-track, creating a rock organization that then broadened into avant-garde surrealism and left a lasting principle on me. Something in me which would rankle against Jung's trashing of Joyce. But Delusional Adam had a major philosophical idea which has become a lasting concept, preconception violation, the idea that nature continually violates our dramas and schemas, that the advancement of consciousness or the artist is through a serious of self-rejections. I said "I am the soul who is always learning how is he is wrong" and then did a work called Death of a Rock n' Roller, pointing to a brave new future, an exception ... which is also a succession. The exception to the rule being the ruler, the King in succession. What I'm getting at is that my work returned to one layer of my past, the layer of succession, where the idea of "Severence" became the organizing idea of an artist's hunt for new and exciting climes, for individuation. And then at Pacifica, went back to an even further layer, to what was succeeded, the rock n' roll before it died. And everything about this landscape of sound I'm working with is founded in what was revolutionary before. My pre-Pacifica work which gestured towards The Residents and Delusional Adam, and my post-Pacifica work which gestured towards The Pixies and For Everyone, my first truly strong album of rock songs as a kid. So the very "movement" of reversal goes back to the true origin of my music, the very first track of music I made and put on an album, and finds in it a reversal, something that is now reversed and plays the right way, no longer Severence but Reverence. No longer withdraw but embrace. Adam in the Garden of Eden is something integrated, whereas Delusional Adam is the reality-principle, the LSD I took when designing that project but "consciousness expansion," the world of a hippie seeker, a religious and scientific viewpoint. 

So in returning to the origin, one finds original sin, something reversed from its natural order, which sponsors musical creativity--yet also the reversal of the song itself carries the song towards its own origin, its problem signifies its solution. And this is true of Severance as well, for this is the self-rejective process, the process of withdrawing from milieus-- I am always the soul that is learning how he is wrong-- while also sounding like a product of superego abuse, is also a disparagement on past associations, a transcendence through disassociation. The Succession Principle and the Integrative Principle are both animalistic-- the instinct to withdraw and the instinct to embrace being my post-Freudian dichotomy. But here is the problem, and the problem with individuation. Individuation does not integrate the personality, but fragments the personality. Sure it creates the personality, but it also creates sub-personalities, the Jungian transcendent function would appear, rather than finding a magical hidden third upon which to land, to maintain an inward division between conscious and unconscious, to insist on a inner world and an outer world as two things, a persona maintained, and an archetypal depth maintained. So too does the 'compensatory function' insist on division, rather than balance. But the issue here is what the problem with unification was which had me favor individuation so strongly, why I ran from "collectivity," and disparaged the common good, the categorical imperative, and stressed Nietzschean points-- the exception, value, independence. My argument against Jung was always -- why would you live in a balance of opposites, you want to eat food mixed with human shit? Purgatory is as high as heaven climbs? I used the same example to make fun of synergy, to say I didn't need to chop vegetables in the bathroom, so the all-in-one mentality vis a vis technology was really stupid, my asshole does not want to be next to my mouth, that isn't transcendent, it's destructive. Withdrawal was a good thing sometimes, and unification was a good thing other times, and our society seems really more behold to the pleasure principle, as a social Eros, in a way, because what it cannot stand is the idea of withdrawal, the idea of separation-- the all-in-one mentality is all about conformity, maintaining social Eros, commonality and interdependence versus independence and identity. 

This identity principle really had to assert itself against the bullshit I was fighting at school. But since then I am seeing how this assertion of the identity principle itself--as an exception, really went against the Succession Principle and engaged the Integrative Principle. For much like my surrealist emphasis on experiment and exception, on difference rather than repetition, the refinement of this to the "identity," to the "personal choice," "personal value" not "social fact or value," this also pushed me further backward into my own past, to the conjuration of the defiant egoism of my teenage years. The Dream of Interpretation a bit like the "successor" to Cap'n Pete, a raucous success. Satirical art. What I mean to say is that even though my philosophy is all about, let's press on the vanishing point, let's be new, new, new, forget archetypes, forget religions, forget myths, let's talk about Joyce and Burroughs and Pynchon, let's talk about Kandinsky, not Roerich. Forget representation, forget symbols, let's talk about creating something that hasn't been seen before. And out of this too I design a symbol which has become the symbol of Codebook Spectrum, a modified sun-cross, which is in both directions asymmetrical yet enclosed by a circle--an asymmetrical sun-cross, fulfilling another idea I had--oblique, not depth psychology, the idea of something coming from the strange, from off-the-grid, from the chaos, not from the predictable depths of archetype, religion, tradition, cultural heritage. Embracing chance and chaos, much like Retallack contra Bachelard in the Psychopoetics paper I did for Naropa, Retallack's praise of John Cage, of the transcendental horizon beyond history. I essentially spoke for Jung, through Bachelard, against Naropa, and then spoke for Retallack, through Deleuze, against Pacifica. I played both sides against each other. I spoke at Pacifica about "forgetting," the value of forgetting, of moving on-- again the ideology of someone who is defending the right to defend themselves, to pull away from something stupid and toxic. And really there is a lot of withdrawal going on -- I withdrew from school, seeing at the time that I had disassociated from Jungianism fully, I had evolved beyond the entire paradigm, converted it into my own concepts which were thinking more in the Deleuzeian way, as I'd say these very thoughts feel more cut from the cloth of Deleuze's enthusiastic pages than Jung's dry scholarship. I had pushed forward out of Jung to some new advanced precipice, broken out of early 20th century to the 1960's stuff, the progress of time and revolution, negation is our succession, 'late capitalism'---the dream that succession will succeed itself. And indeed it does. But it is important to understand why, and how this works, and how the capitalist ideal of domination is very closely linked to the revolutionary impulse, reason why perhaps it is so accommodating to that impulse, why it reifies it inside its cage so well.

The revolutionary is somewhat similar to the heir, to Hamlet. Hamlet is both heir and revolutionary. Revolutions are staged by usurpers and rightful heirs. Claudius is revolutionary, as is Hamlet. But for Hamlet the revolution is integrative, because he is the rightful heir. Claudius represents the Successive Principle, which must be mirrored in order to achieve the Integration. Succession is succeeded. In the revisions of Hamlet I did both in my music album H. which set scenes from Hamlet to music, with a new non-revenge ending, and in The Dream of Interpretation which reprised the same moral lesson, which my version of Horatio delivers to Hamlet-- which hinged on valuation, on what was good or not being more important than "to be or not to be." The kingdom was poisoned, but why revenge one's self on that kingdom, why settle the score? My new Hamlet fused with Horatio to become H, who simply took off from the nightmare castle, in a metaphysical way which pushed them outside of the theatrical representation, which made them a Dionysian singer, which pushed in an integrative movement, downwards, towards the pure poem, the pure music, out of which Shakespeare's characters and stories emerge. The same thing happened in the Dream of Interpretation, as plotted-- my character was completely wronged and disillusioned and on the edge of deranged vengeance, which thankfully his own therapist is able to put a stop to, having him surrender the aggression-- being told "this is a part someone wrote for you," that he has been the victim of a projection-- a point I made during the play being that theater was all about projections, and that by maintaining the theater, we maintain a space to witness that habit of projection, which the psychotherapeutic roles of analyst-analysand do not stand outside-- they are inside the theater of "roles." So my character, heroic, the one martyred by this dance of role play, emerges as the musician, playing the poem, and what happens then is that I am joined by the other actors, at least 2 of them. So the roles are taken inside the theater, and then left behind, the masks are shed. But inside that theater was left psychoanalysis. Reversal. Psychoanalysis creates the theater; psychoanalysis does not 'succeed' the theater. 

So this particular form of exceptionalism, this is not success but nor is it failure. It is not an advancement, but an integration which is backward-looking. Backwards-looking, reversing the flow of time. Like Hillman it goes back to the time of the Greeks, but not to build a secular mythos, but back to Greek theater, to the creative vocation, to the dramatic situation. Hillman would agree with me a bit here, but he'd lay more stress on the enchantment of these deities, bringing up Orpheus, Narcissus, and Dionysus. I couldn't care less--what's in a name?--about these arcane systems as things-in-themselves, and they tire me. But I'm with Hillman on this theatrical, dramatic emphasis. So it is not theater which is broken down in the play, but psychoanalysis which is re-carried into the play, the reality principle into the pleasure principle, the dream of interpretation, in the reverse movement of "progress." So in the end Bachelard got our vote, because I'm living out really his idea in the Poetics of Reverie more than Jung's, even though he's fairly Jungian-- the idea of the well of being being childhood, as well-being, the return to earliest moments, to origins, which again, I believe I bristled at initially. But I found myself in a weird time machine I think artistically, where I had to go "Back to the Future." In which my work had gone into manifesting a collective past, a raw instinctual nature, a visceral humanity, an animal, after which, if I talk about surrealist experiment or the independence of the identity as positive exceptionalism, I am returning backwards in my own personal timeline.  So I was preaching something like Retallack because I was fucking furious with their traditionalism in Jung-land, and bored by people who only love their own brand of mysticism that relates to their racial identity, and just, wasn't going to wield Christianity against them, was always going to speak for art, and not for my race. The paradox of the indigenous traditions twaddle is that it is so conservative, traditionalist, and reactionary, and yet it passes itself off as liberalism, as some kind of multiculturalism.   I stand outside the stage, as an exception, to the rule of what is represented within the theater, the artist is neither analyst or analysand--the artist is the non-dialectical integrative force. And because it is backwards-looking in its own way, but sheds religion, doesn't dig back from science to religion like Jung did, but digs backwards from science to art, it changes the Golem of Severence to the Golem of Reverence. 

But we really need to understand this backwards-looking and how it is not regressive, how it does not actually return us where we began. It is not the unification of where we began with where we ended up. It is the transformation of where we began into where we ended up. The route towards where we began is not circular. The end does not bring us right to the start. Movement in time is either forwards or backwards, successive or integrative. And what would be regressive, would only be so through something more like the Succession Principle, because the Succession principle involves Loss, Transcendence. The integrative principle is more Immanent. Regression means this to me--all those layers which have been mounted up are knocked down and we hit rock-bottom, a house of cards falls to the ground, the Jenga tower collapses--the Tarot card of The Tower I believe is Regression. An edifice gets boiled down to its wild, animal, infantile interior, a persona dies. Essentially I'm moving towards a concept that Succession itself, The Tower which adds a layer, then another layer, then another layer, keeps repressing itself in a self-rejective manner. An unsustainable process, a tower that will eventually exceed the balance it has between top and bottom. Top-heavy, fall of capitalism, the vertical becomes the horizontal.  That succession invents its own integrative opposite, this is what I'm getting at, its own enantiodromia as Jung says, we keep going up, we will eventually fall down, since this process keeps fragmenting itself. Succession creates Integration. This might be compared to the sequence between The Tower and The Star in the Major Arcana, Succession into Integration. 

The whole idea of "returning where we began" continues the notion of succession, of a surrendering movement, which takes us from where we ended up, and drops us back off at the beginning, in a circular journey. Keep going we'll just keep eternally recurring from beginning to middle to end and over again. Nothing breaks down this sequence: beginning, middle, end, ABC. The beginning follows the end, and that's the only twist. What I describe as integrative is the movement from the end to the beginning through the middle. So it is anti-cyclical, it is reversal.  It breaks the cycle by just refusing it, by going backward, and even in its going-backward it is not surrendering the end, the present, the place where it is standing. It is drawing the resources of the past into the present, and does so in successive stages, but reversed, reversing the operation of withdrawal and separation into the operation of embrace, Severence into Reverence. The beginning is not the end until we go backwards, there's no loop coming up. THE LOOP IS THE COLLAPSE OF THE TOWER, yet the Tower does not fall from end to beginning, but from end, to middle, to beginning, like an elastic spring, another example I used to question dialectic. The problem with the Tower as a structure is that it is the Successive Principle, the discrete units in a differential which are laid out from A to Z, and then when we get to Z we only have one letter to use in our language. Z returns to A backwards through the integration with the whole alphabet. The arithmetic count "adds one." It does not withdraw one. It counts, but then all of these are subsumed by the originator, which is not A so much as it is "A to Z." Not the first, or the last, beyond priority and recency, but demonstrating the whole discrete series which is counted is not successive, but an inventory. That the withdrawals, spawned from animal defensiveness, we make, the apostasies, the divorces, the exceptions rising above their common mob of rules, the survivals of the fittest, the successions, are in truth a process which is not progressive. A is not counted out to Z to announce the triumph of Z over A, or the reverse. Our first moments that the integrative process leads to do not become the new old Gospel, they are just integrated into an overall system. There is the appearance of Succession as we count from A to Z, individuating the alphabet, because to count each new letter, we must forget the letter that came before. (History is perhaps too much a tale told like this, like many stories, moments in a sequence that keeps getting better, which keeps improving upon what Marcuse might consider the performance principle, a principle that cannot be betrayed in arguing how it could work better with a new reality principle outside of performance as he does.) 

Rather if we viewed history like an alphabet, which is counted from A to Z, where Z is always the most recent moment and A is the earliest, then the communicative faculty of our consciousness would be robbed without a fluency with history, not with its chronology, its sequence, but with the integration of A to Z in the alphabet, as equal discrete units, which compound into a larger interactive matrix, out of which things can be drawn and shaped, much like notes on a piano are not played in a scale except for practice, the composer jumps up, down, and all around, they familiarize themselves with the scale like kids do with the alphabet, a history which is learned only to jump every which way inside of history, to make the moment of the present the movement across all times that have come before, all previous stages of succession no longer stages of succession but elements in an integrative whole, in a system of expression, a language. The choosing I had in my final Pacifica papers, the search for new, new, new which actually repeated an old idea from Delusional Adam, rock n' roll is preconception violation--the problem which emerged then the same as now--what happens when preconception violation is a preconception? One then recapitulates. The avant-garde of avant-garde is traditional--yet it is not.

The threshold of thresholds, the success of successes. By this phrasing we say, the exception of the exceptions, the superior of the superiors--the best, the greatest, the absolute of what the included term measures. What is higher of the higher ones. Yet by this phrasing we also draw a solipsism, a self-reflexivity, an elasticity. Relative to all thresholds, this is a threshold, relative to all successes, this is a success. This succeeds succeeds, this threshold is what leaves behind all other thresholds. This height is what negates the movement higher, because it is an absolute height, a limit. Of all these greater things, this is the greatest--an absolute limit, a place which refuses the going-greater because there is no greater. The absolute summit is reached (I am reflecting how the Tower of Babel was an extremely vital image to my departure from Pacifica) by way of returning the going-higher operation upon the going-higher operation-- in essence by succeeding succession. The Tower of Babel had this meaning in my final Pacifica paper, Psycho-Babel-- that God at the top of the tower was omnipoesis, so the individuation of the languages of those who reached the top was actually an expression of God, not God throwing us aside. It is the image of reaching the collective unconscious, and finding naught but pure individuation as the allness. The ego does not resist the collective consciousness and unconscious, in a dialectical double negation, the ego is created out of the collective will which is omnipoetic. "Integrating" further with the collective unconscious results in further withdrawal, separation, independence, and therefore independence is the only grounds upon which we know communion. Society exists between independent units, not between interdependent dommes and subs. This was the gist, which created omnipoetics, the emphasis on chaos, a chromatic music, juxtaposition, improvisation, individuality, an anarchist God. (The 1st rev definition of the joke in Joke Science: equalization of juxtaposed entities. The second rev definition: a psychologically inconceivable equalization of juxtaposed entities. This second revision may preserve the equalization of juxtaposed entities in a sequence, as integrative, not farcical, and also cast shade on dialectic as a joke.) We know God through our individuality, not through our conformity, through our independence with empathizes with collective individuality, the Self, the identity (existence/nature/God/self/all that is). 

So what I did not grapple with at that point was the issue of the Tower as succession, as stories which are mounted higher and higher. Instead in a way I viewed succession as positive, as further exceptionalism, on the up and up, towards greater novelty and creation, individuation as selection, natural selection, personal choice, personal value. But The Tower collapses and becomes a Horizon. And creation proceeds in a dynamic dance within the horizon. The chromatic music however and the way I shifted individuation over to identification showed The Tower Falls into the Horizon. Because with the chromatic music, and with the Tower of Babel metaphor, I was showing the Codebook Spectrum, the infinite Borgesian library of the alphabet, aleph and beta being neither dom or sub in the succession game, but integrated in a system of expression, the horizontal building. (Very different from storytelling, from the succession of events in time. This is the negative valence of time, succession, the destroyer of the world. All the events are compiled into one time, A to Z, omnipoesis, and out of the whole history music is drawn, poems are drawn, in this 'timeless' way, because of being integrative, reversed time.) Alpha and Beta are first and second, what comes first being what wins the race, perhaps, but what comes second being the successor who throws over the old order. Both Alpha and Beta can mean successor. "Survival of the fittest" -- the survival term is the withdrawal-term, the success-against in the evolutionary agon, and the "fittest" is actually the embrace-term, the integrative term, things becoming fit, becoming condensed, economized. And it is economy which organizes our biases I have inventoried-- towards locality, love, simplicity, and self-- which slant our mind towards the justification of ourselves and our surroundings, towards the maintenance even of a destructive, abusive social Eros. It requires more exertion, more energy, more strenuous activity to resist, to push against what we are in and to make it "what came before," what we are succeeding. So succession or success is not really what we are driven towards, and in my contention the reality-principle is not the repressive will, as augmentative, but the pleasure-principle is. There is a resistance against the self-as-social-being in any act of severance or departure, and yes, this creates a repression, but this is not the fundamental meaning of this withdrawal. 

This repression the reality-principle as a succession, an individuation, a fragmentation of the self achieves is really by virtue of traumatic association. The self is not de facto rejected by the 'self-rejection,' what is rejected is the self in conjunction with its social milieu, the connection is rejected. Yet it is not clear in this withdrawal where the self ends and where the social milieu begins--they are connected, and so to denature the connection is effectively to begin sorting that out, but what happens is that the elements of the self, the letter of the alphabet of the self that was uttered in contact with that social milieu, are distanced from, and instead the focus is on the next alphabetical letter, the next social milieu, and in so much as that can be found it is the salvation of the self, in a new self which pronounces the full judgment on what was before departed from. This repression that occurs is the withdrawal of energy from an aspect of the self which emerged out of social contact that is suspended, yet what it moves onto is a new aspect of the self which is discovered through this process. And this gives it the flavor of succession, of severance, of bigger and better, of the soul who is always learning how he is wrong, when actually it is the soul who is always learning how they are wrong.  To return to original moments, hardly arguing with Marcuse or Freud here, there is a unity of self and other, the social Eros. The self emerges from the fluidity of social being, which in Freud's view is also union with the mother, and the self establishes itself in independence from that interdependent origin. Yet what happens in that process is that the self is left behind in part. A part of an independent self already existed in that interdependent relation, and so something like the circularity or cyclical nature of this does transpire at the enantiodromia point, because this sustains itself until the independent origin is otherized, until it reprises interdependence in a sense because a portion of our self now fully belongs to the other psychologically. To go further into withdrawal and succession as such is impossible because now we are withdrawing from our self-as-an-other, and from the other-as-a-self. So in the movement of succession which is the withdrawal from the interdependence of our youth to the independence of the adult psyche, we invoke the paradox, because we divorce ourselves from what autonomy was originally there. The self fragments itself against itself, and eventually is an other to itself, and the only solution is integration, the reversal, the backwards-movement against temporal succession. Yet in this integration, there is no reprise of the origin, of the interdependent sequence. The origin is repossessed, and repossessed as part of an subsumed 'sequence' that now is history in one moment, a tower which is now horizon, a time which is now space. If the origin were 'reprised,' then the sequence would begin again, a la eternal recurrence. Any such origins, revisited, seem to recapitulate their original consequentiality. Preconception and violation spin on an endless axis, and this is consequentiality, boiled down to the simplest, circular formula. The tradition becomes the revolution, and the revolution becomes the tradition, and on and on.  Succession is the movement of both, the hidden third of transcendence, which only makes for pain, not relief. It is Against Becoming, as I wrote at Pacifica, towards Being, that I stand, but really it is not just Being as Existence ... but Integrating, but truly accruing, not shedding what came before as we do ...