| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
Will Emmons
Moderator
47 Posts |
 Posted - Oct 11 2010 : 1:16:31 PM
|
The following fictional narrative may be a bit startling. What is even more terrifying is just how similar this state of affairs is to what has gone on elsewhere...
Foster had lived what we might call a "sheltered" life. He had been brought up by a family wrought with paranoia. His family believed that nearly everything that happened had a function, that written into almost every event was a purpose, and that for some strange reason, they alone were able to see this. They figured that somehow everybody and everything was in on it. They often speculated about who might be responsible, but this amounted to no more than a vast collection of conspiracy theories. Whenever others invited them in for dinner they abruptly skipped town. Whenever they caught wind of a gathering to which they were uninvited, they showed up unannounced. They privately engaged in nearly every activity prohibited by the local authorities. Activities that they too found worthy of prohibition they assumed were prohibited simply to throw them off the trail, to convince the members of the family that prohibition and censorship were in their best interest. The members of this family only engaged in prescribed activities when failing to do so would put them at risk of exposing their paranoia, or when doing so seemed to place them at an advantage -- another red herring, they believed, which was used to reinforce fashionable myths concerning the positive worth of locally issued prescriptions. If neighbors rewarded their behavior, they became suspicious. If neighbors reprimanded their behavior, they became suspicious. This suspicion, they believed, was in keeping with being put at a disadvantage--which they thought was what motivated their neighbors' offerings of praise and blame.
They had long been unable to find a place to live where they could be free from encounters that gave rise to these sorts of suspicions, and they decided to live as privately as possible and to consume nothing that was produced outside of the family without first looking it over meticulously, many times, combing it over for even the faintest sign of contamination. Foster grew to the age at which questions are asked if a child is not found attending school. They enrolled him in school and did their best to prepare him for his encounters with others and to arm him with the best tools they had for avoiding detection as one who was not fooled.
Foster had very few problems avoiding being detected during his early years in school. In fact, he was considerably less troubled by having to keep quiet than were the others in his family. But this worried his folks terribly as they thought it made him especially susceptible to corruption. Impurity, what the family feared most, needed to be guarded against over all else. If the regulative agency got to their son, they thought, then he could work as a rat, as a source of information about the family for the agency. In order to avoid having the agency keep tabs on them, they felt they had to keep tabs on their son's encounters and stay close enough at all times that if need be they could intervene to protect him and keep themselves from being infiltrated.
Foster's folks wore themselves out tracking their son throughout the day and needed to find a way to liberate themselves from all their micromanaging. What they needed, they thought, was a way to keep their son secure without having to be near. After various false starts, Foster's folks came up with something ingenious. They would convince him that what was wanted first and foremost by the regulative agency was twofold: 1.) for Foster to keep things from his parents, and 2.) for Foster to discuss his familial issues honestly with the extra-familial world. Since they had already established paranoia to some extent in Foster, it was a small matter for him to choose not to give the regulative agency what it demanded. Over a number of weeks Foster learned to report nearly everything about his daily encounters to his folks, and together they would all discuss what they stood to lose if they behaved in certain ways and what they stood to gain by behaving differently. In this way, Foster's folks turned him into a sensing device they could use to monitor extra-familial activities. Further, if Foster did behaved in a way which could conceivably put the extra-familial at an advantage, his folks would offer instruction on how to turn it to their advantage -- usually by way of an elaborate display that served to convince the extra-familial of its successes. This worked not just for Foster's encounters at school, but also for his encounters at the market, the local festivals and harvests, at town meetings, and at nearby diners and cafes.
At college, Foster was alarmed to unearth a most gruesome state of affairs. The university, it seemed to Foster, had done to its faculty and students something akin to what Foster's parents had done to him. Extra-familial folks were trained to distinguish between the sane and the insane. If one questioned the legitimacy of the sanity-insanity distinction, one was pronounced insane. If one questioned the values traditionally attributed to sanity and insanity, one was pronounced insane. If one questioned the justification of pronouncements of sanity and insanity, one was pronounced insane. All of the extra-familial were taught to value sanity over insanity and so none questioned the legitimacy of the distinction, the values traditionally ascribed to sanity and insanity, or the justifications of those pronouncements. And so the world, the totality of the extra-familial, did its best to appear sane. Further, faculty and students were recruited to go out and make observations of others. If they encountered anyone who showed signs of insanity, they were to report back to the officials. The insane were then collected, transported, admitted to an asylum, and cognitive engineering ensued. Those who did not spend the rest of their days in quarantine we released back into the public sphere and given an opportunity to demonstrate their sanity. Failure to demonstrate their sanity landed them back in the asylum.
Terrified, Foster returned his course materials and hopped on the first train back home. When he arrived he was surprised to find that his folks were not at home. He waited for several hours, and at last they returned. They embraced and then his folks asked him why he had returned. He explained the extra-familial plot against him, his family, and the insane. Foster told his folks that the family was not alone, that there were others who knew about the plot. He told them how people were being praised and honored as heroes for turning in suspected persons for treatment. He told them how this process of cognitive-behavioral cleansing had in a few short decades spanned the globe. All of the so-called "insane," he told them, would be wiped out via physiological engineering and turned into the sane. Then, he continued, the extra-familial could be extended to include everyone. Psychiatry, he warned, was a field that aimed at the extermination of a people....
Just then Foster's mother laughed, and told him not to worry. She said that she and Foster's father had had lunch with a neighbor a while back, and that this wonderful woman had told them that they did not have to continue to suffer with delusions about their neighbors as they had been doing, and that treatment options were available. His mother told him that she and Foster's father had taken the neighbor up on her treatment offer and had been attending sessions with a counselor, once a week, for the last month. She told Foster that their counselor had given them a promising new medication that was thought to help patients think more clearly about their neighbors. "And it works!" she exclaimed. His mother told Foster not to bother keeping tabs on the extra-familial anymore. "We're all one big family!," Foster's parents chanted in unison. "We got some for you too, son," they said as they handed him a light-tight bottle, half filled with large, white tablets, each inscribed with the letter "F"....
[Very lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
Edited by - Will Emmons on Oct 11 2010 9:14:53 PM |
|
|
Matt Carrico
Apprentice
29 Posts |
Posted - Oct 19 2010 : 01:17:15 AM
|
That was a neat little narrative. I'm not exactlly sure what to make of it. It seems to have some relation to education being good/evil.
Will, could you please clear up what was going on with the paranoia / insane / psychology? I'm not sure I get the meaning behind this thread. |
 |
|
|
Will Emmons
Moderator
47 Posts |
Posted - Oct 22 2010 : 1:24:11 PM
|
The meaning behind this thread? I am not at all sure how to respond to this question.
At first blush, this piece might seem to embody a critique of medicine, in particular modern psychiatry. Pharmacological intervention, or cognitive-behavioral engineering, is a form of cleansing, not unlike racial cleansing--this is a genocidal technology. With this apparatus, certain types of people, identified by way of enduring patterns of conduct and belief, are to be exterminated entirely. Where I talk of exterminating a people or peoples, clinicians speak of "extinguishing dysfunctional or abnormal behaviors." These behavioral exterminators work for the state and their work is the modus operandi par excellence for the state. Extermination camps are obsolete; they can be replaced by present-day state hospitals. Not only does this technology allow for the preservation of the state; it cultivates mass desire for the state, for it facilitates the appointment of the state as necessary for human life--as if human life and the state could ever co-exist!
Secondly, the above narrative may be taken as a critique of Christianity, or religiosity, to the extent that such a position involves belief in and honor of something beyond or external to this world. Now some of the imagery might hint more at Catholicism (I am thinking about the extent to which Foster is brought to share his daily encounters with his folks), but I think that this is beside the point, since what is basically at issue here is the belief in some miraculous, unknown force at work behind everything, for or against the existence of which no support can be discovered empirically. A denial of what is experienced reigns throughout the piece, and mistrust for praise, blame, rewards, and punishments is also obvious. As such, religiosity is likened to a sort of paranoia regarding the validity, order, meaning, and value of life.
Thirdly, I intended to offer a critique of academia, taken as thoroughly Platonic in form. It would seem that in a certain sense, being handed the light-tight bottle of pills at the end of the piece is a moment, for Foster, just prior to the great "turn" that takes place in Plato's allegory of the cave. In my piece, in a certain sense, the forms rest in the cave, and the shadows are cast from without. The imagery of Plato's cave is simply reversed. Rather than ascending from the cave out into the sun-lit world, Foster descends from the illuminated world to the darkness of an underground cavern. Only this is still described in terms of the former, namely in terms of going up and out of the cave of familial solipsism into the realm of sanity. However, there is no meaningful difference between the two! Truth is hidden from one and one is convinced that what is hidden is not truth, but falsity, and that what is present is not falsity, but timeless truth.
Fourth, "turns" in general are brought into question. Theses, antitheses, and sublimation each embody a sort of turning away from and turning toward. Taking something up, putting something down, elevating and transforming--this is all overcoming--and going under. Each turn is itself a manifestation of will to power. Turning, or crossing over, is becoming. Being is becoming what one is--that is to say, crossing over. A turn is always a triumph and a defeat, a health and an illness, a power and an impotence, a rise and a fall, an ebb and a flood--flux and disruption of flux. Turning is a flickering, a shifting of intensities, seasonal exchange--pulsation. The above narrative suggests otherwise out of the spirit of a gesture toward this characterization of turning.
I will have to think about the last of my remarks here a bit more before I can determine exactly where to go next. What are your thoughts so far?
[Very lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
Edited by - Will Emmons on Oct 22 2010 5:38:56 PM |
|
|
|
Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Oct 24 2010 : 06:56:42 AM
|
| It's the last of those remarks that particularly interests me -- the remark about turning in your next-to-last paragraph. As you say, your narrative suggests something different, and the idea that it suggests that something different out of the spirit of a gesture toward that characterization of turning strikes me as really intriguing. Can we say that your narrative, then, has something of the character of a reductio? Do parody and satire always have something of the character of a reductio? I suppose they do, but this is something that's never occurred to me before. And what of laughter in general? Is laughter at bottom always connected with the sort of insight we associate with this movement of thought? What light does this shed on the spirit of gravity? Is all great seriousness an expression of cognitive confidence--or as we might also say, unquestioning belief? |
|
|
|
Will Emmons
Moderator
47 Posts |
Posted - Nov 11 2010 : 12:50:47 PM
|
I think we can say that the above narrative has the quality of something like a reductio ad absurdum.
Parody and satire seem to me to involve the sort of movement peculiar to a reductio. Laughter, it seems to me, is something like the movement, the elevation, that takes places in spite of the spirit of gravity. But laughter arises through the pointing back into, toward, and against itself, peculiar to a successful reductio and to humorous satire, or parody. Gravity, it would seem, rests on the side of what is picked up or put down, while laughter, it would seem, is not an upward movement, but rather weightlessness itself, which rests on the side of what is sublimated. The sublimated, if put down or picked up, is subjected to a breed of violence as it is subjected to gravity: one takes weightlessness, humor, or irony seriously!
In a way, one must overcome gravity over and over again, since one is so often tempted by the spirit of gravity to ground what grants levity, to set it down or pick it up and to put it to work; as if standing firmly upon the surface of the earth is anything like flight or as if aerial movement can be understood as a standing firmly, a taking of a position, or a being stationed above!
[Very lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
Edited by - Will Emmons on Nov 11 2010 12:51:57 PM |
|
|
|
Manny Castillo
Fledgling
7 Posts |
Posted - Dec 09 2010 : 10:37:11 PM
|
Hey, this may be slightly off topic, but I'm interested to see what Will (or anyone  ) has to say about this:
When I read the passage below, I couldn't help considering drug addiction, which I regard as a "vice," and wondering whether it might be equated with "instinct." What I want to know is this: would it be appropriate to equate drug addiction with the "instincts" that Nietzsche defends? Granted that an instinct is generally an innate characteristic and drug addiction is in most cases not, both operate against our will, or at least without it, and must be moderated on a conscious and rational level.
Nietzsche defends the things that had been deemed vices and instincts with his Dionysian enthusiasm. I can't think of anything redeeming about drug addiction apart from the fact that it makes you appreciate sobriety (presumably). But what about Nietzsche? What would Nietzsche say?
Here is the passage I'm talking about from Twilight of the Idols:quote:
When one finds it necessary to turn reason into a tyrant, as Socrates did, the danger cannot be slight that something else will play the tyrant. Rationality was then hit upon as the savior; neither Socrates nor his "patients" had any choice about being rational: it was de rigeur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or -- to be absurdly rational. The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato on is pathologically conditioned; so is their esteem of dialectics. Reason-virtue-happiness, that means merely that one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent daylight -- the daylight of reason. One must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward. (TI "The Problem of Socrates" Section 10)
|
|
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
A Familial Breed of Solipsism
