Sexy Prescience - Fiasco Press: Journal of Swarm Scholarship

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship
Fiasco Press: Journal of Swarm Scholarship

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Issue #1
Sexy Prescience
Rendering Realities by Nauman Humayun
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Fiasco Press is a journal of swarm scholarship - the literary product of non-linear self-organization. Having no barriers to entry, access, or success, Fiasco Press will publish any (thoughtful) text, image, or interview you submit. After submitting, Fiasco Press will publish your work online so your peers can review it. We use a yay or nay voting system to determine which selections go to print. The top 11 entries will go through post publication peer review before print-on-demand begins on 11.11.2011. If you would like to contribute or just find out more about Fiasco Press publishing opportunities, please email support@fiascopress.org. We look forward to hearing from you!
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Dedicated to Mom, Dad, and Popop.
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Contents:
A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson - Interview by Jesse Hicks On Vortex Particles - A Knot Theory by David Saint John Celestial Events - Flash Fiction by Andrew Winegrad Cracking the Oyster / Shaza - Swahili Poem by Ahmed Sheikh Nabahani translated by Richard Prins Composing the Sacred - A Fiction of Philosophy by Alex Broudy Reply - Poem by Zalie Troumpec The Enzensberger-Baudrillard Mass Media Debate Reexamined: Temporal Models and the Dialectic - Philosophical Critique by Jack Kredell On Green - Poem by Sheila Squillante Platos Dialogical Structure and Socrates as the Physician of the Soul Philosophy of Medicine by Jafar Al-Mondhiry An ensemble of Inter-Galactic Techno-Tribal Saltimbanques - Art Critique by Nauman Humayun The Soft-Boiled Egg - Short Story by Katrina Voss Party - Flash Fiction by Peter Matyskiela Shadows Out Of Time and Space: The European Avant-Garde and the Future of the Blues Musical Critique by Shuja Haider We Are Become Death: Cultural Shockwaves Of Hiroshima - Philosophical War Critique by Devin William Daniels The Phenomenology of Dissolution / Disillusionment - Poem by Shafni Awam Painting with Illegible Title - Painting by William S. Burroughs
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A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson

Interview by Jesse Hicks
The Illuminatus! Trilogy seems to keep finding new generations of fans since its publication. How would you describe it to someone who's yet to read it, and what do you think explains its enduring appeal? I like to call it guerilla ontology. If people look blank, I explain that it's a Zen riddle in the form of a detective story. In other words, a mystery without a solution. What keeps it in print? I imagine that every generation a few clear-thinking people discover that the governments that rule us just do not make sense rationally. And then they hear about this weird book that knocks down every attempt at a reasonable explanation of how this planet operates and proves 1001 ways that only insanity does explain it. Incidentally, as if to prove this, sales have improved every year since George Bush got appointed president. Sanity cannot fathom such a sinister joke, but Illuminatus buffs can.
How does the world of Illuminatus! compare to the "real" world these days? Much of the book satirized politics on The Planet of the Apes; lately you seem less oblique about the state of American politics, calling Dubya "exactly the ideal president for this time in history. Most of the public is made up of C-students who are incurious and uninformed. What Bush says makes sense to them because they don't know any more about the world
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than he does." Do we live in a Wilsonian satire? I'd like to think so. The only alternative would hold that we live in a Kafka allegory. Since my "paranoia" contains more humor than his, I appeal to a less morbid audience.
Kafka's "There is hope, but not for us," definitely appeals to a darker sense of humor. How do you maintain a sense of optimism? Pessimism seems to me a luxury I can't afford. For instance, at age four, I became crippled with polio for the first time, and got cured, or mostly cured, by the Kenny method. Pessimism just would not have helped at any stage in my therapy. We don't walk on our legs but on our will, as the Sufis say. At 69, the damaged muscles quit on me and I got crippled a second time. Once again, pessimism and whining would not have helped. My second partial cure proceeded nicely for four years --until last month, when I suddenly landed on the floor and stayed there conscious but unable to move a muscle, for 30 hours before my daughter found me and called an ambulance. Pessimism has great value if you want the praise of New York intellectuals, but I prefer to fight my battles rather than whine about them. I'll probably never get reviewed in the bon ton literary journals, but I might get into the Guiness Book of World Records as the first man to learn to walk four times.
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You mentioned the Kenny Method for polio treatment. How did your early encounter with an "unorthodox" cure lead you to question "orthodoxy"? Well, I grew up with hard evidence -- every step I took -- that the Kenny method worked, while all the Experts continued to denounce her as a quack and a charlatan. That did not encourage ardent faith in Experts....
And did that lead into Maybe Logic? Partially, but it could have led to a single heresy -- the Kenny method -- in a brain otherwise still confined to dogmatism. I know many people like that-- they believe in one unorthodox idea, but remain stuck in either/or logic. Maybe Logic came from reading some scientific radicals [John von Neumann, Anatole Rapoport and Alfred Korzybski], plus some Buddhists. That includes von Neumann's three-valued logic [true, false, maybe], Rappoport's fourvalued logic [true, false, indeterminate, meaningless], Korzybski's multi-valued logic [degrees of probability] and also Mahayana Buddhist paradoxical logic [it "is" A; it "is" not A; it "is" both A and not A; it "is" neither A nor not A]. But, as an extraordinarily stupid fellow, I can't use such systems until I reduce them to terms a simple mind like mine can handle, so I just preach that we'd all think and act more sanely if we had to use "maybe" a lot more often. Can you imagine a world with Jerry Falwell hollering "Maybe Jesus 'was' the son of God and maybe he hates Gay people as much as I do" -- or every tower in Islam resounding with "There 'is' no God except
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maybe Allah and maybe Mohammed is his prophet"?
How does Quantum Psychology offer a counter-viewpoint to that kind of anxious grasping at what you've called "fictional certainties"? Quantum Psyche offers a variety of linguistic reforms that condition the mind against premature closure. Some of these techniques come from General Semantics, some from NueroLinguistic Programming, and some from Buddhism. These techniques used consistently over a period of fifty years have made me, I dare say, a lot less stupid and a lot less frightened than my condition in the 1950s. Those not as dumb as me can learn even faster.
What do you think explains the current resurgence of "faith-based" worldviews? The robber barons imported "cheap labor" from Europe in the late 19th Century. In other words, they flooded us with an ocean of ignorant and superstitious people, who could not understand research-based organizations but formed an ideal market for faith-based con artists.
Do you see any deeper explanation behind it, other than faith-based worldviews being the dominant mode of thinking for those currently in power? The acceleration factor in information systems [documented by Korzybski and Shannon] means that social changes happen faster and faster every generation. People not trained in Maybe Logic feel more and more confused, which leads to anxiety, which means they'll swallow any
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line of hogwash if it promises some certitude in a world they can't understand.
Does it seem to you that other countries have more fully embraced ideas present in Quantum Psychology than has America? I would not claim that, but the civilized world in general has shown much less hostility to research-based groups and has no Bush-style revival of faith-based groups.
How does the Guns and Dope Party fit in to American politics? Our platform has 3 major planks: Free access to guns for those who want them; no guns forced on those who don't want them [Quakers,Amish, pacifists etc.] Free access to drugs for those who want them; no drugs forced on those who don't want them [Christian Scientists, homeopaths, Natural hygienists etc.] Equal rights for ostriches. For further details see http://www.gunsanddope.com/ What do you see for the future, in the short term? In the long term? In the short term, more power by faith-based organizations. In the long term, the eventual triumph of research-based organizations. Inquisitions, whether by popes or presidents, only slow progress in limited areas. They never stop it. Stem-cell research, for instance, still moves along rapidly, overseas in the civilized world.
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In Reality is What You Can Get Away With, you wrote, "The right wing will have nightmares in the late '90s that will make the 62 Satanism panics of 1982-1993 seem sedate by comparison." How much of the current political environment would you attribute to the inevitable right-wing response to that nightmare, and how much to "Future Shock" in general? "Future shock" started with the first stone axe, but due to the acceleration factor, it discombobulates more people every decade. When the civilized world, where research-based organizations will soon start curing everything with stem cells, our faith-based organizations will want the U.S. to declare war on damn near everybody.
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On Vortex Particles
David Saint John
"In short, we can reach the final unified theory -- which we symbolically place at the top of Motion Mountain -only if we are not burdened with ideological or emotional baggage. The goal we have set requires extreme thinking, i.e., thinking up to the limits. After all, unification is the precise description of all motion. Therefore, unification is a riddle. The search is a pastime. Any riddle is best approached with the lightness that is intrinsic to playing. Life is short: we should play whenever we can." -Christoph Schiller, Motion Mountain, Volume 6
The following text is an attempt to reconsider the Victorian-era vortex model of the atom in a modern context, with an emphasis on the phenomenology of particles as experienced experimentally. This involves a departure from certain currently accepted traditional constructs of physics, but remains a synthesis of several ideas which have been floating around in some form or another for many years. It should be considered a remix of what has already been developed previously by various scientists and natural philosophers, with a view toward our current state of scientific endeavours at the level of subatomic phenomena.
The initial stimulus for this work lies in the relative mystery of isotopic stability as a function of protons and neurons, along with the haunting staircase structure of this stability often described over-simply as being due to magic numbers. Figure 1 illustrates this stability
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staircase, wherein the shallow steps of the lighter nuclei eventually give way to a more regular staircase (from Oxygen16 to Argon36), with a more complex set of stairs and stable isotope islands up until one reaches the island of stability. The standard model is silent in regard to this behavior of isotopic stability - having applicability to primarily sub-nuclear phenomena, it gives little insight into the distinctions between protons and neutrons. But before treating this isotope issue, we will first explore the idea of knots as particles, and see if we can work our way back to isotopes.
One form of an isotope stability table showing the staircase of stability, from Wikipedia. Notice the step like patterns which stable isotopes trace out - perhaps suggesting an underlying mechanism for nuclear stability. A more
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useful chart for the isotopic explorer can be found here: http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/pdf/chart.pdf
Before our attempt at re-contextualizing this vortex knot model (VKM), it is worth tracing back its recent incarnations in brief. A thorough historical account has been made by others, in particular by Helge Kraigh, and so the descriptions here should by no means be considered authoritative. Most scholarly discussions of vortex atom models trace the idea to William Thompson (Lord Kelvin), who developed his VKM after being inspired by the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, who first developed the mathematics of vortex motion in an incompressible fluid. Thompson found the model of Lucretius atoms - their individual atomic properties being extant for their own sake without recourse to any mechanism - as ontologically repulsive, while the idea of knotted vortex atoms satisfied his urge for some descriptive mechanism which seemed powerfully evident to Kelvin when observing the interactions of vortex rings moving through the air.
This idea of Kelvins, that atoms were composed of some sort of ethereal knots, had many proponents in a time when the very existence of atoms was questioned by those with a panache for the continuous and/or a distaste for the discrete. One of Kelvins contemporaries, Peter Guthrie Tait, went on to classify knots of up to 9 crossings, developing what would come to be known as the Prime Knots. Prime knots are analogous to prime numbers, in that they represent irreducible topological structures while prime numbers are irreducible in terms of their lack of divisors. As such, prime knots cannot be represented as a knot sum of other knots but are fundamental to modern knot theory as prime numbers are in number theory.
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What really seems to have killed Kelvins vortex knot model of the atom was the profound success of the periodic table, along with the total inability to massage any sort of 8-fold periodicity from the prime knots. With the success of the periodic table, predicting elements previously undiscovered and unexpected, the vortex knot model languished. Kelvin himself is said to have discarded it late in his life, but one of his primary assumptions can now, through the lens of a nuclear era, be considered to have new legs: Kelvin believed atoms to be fundamental as small a particle as one needed to consider. We now know this to be false; atomic systems contain protons and neutrons in the nucleus, electrons occupying energetic states around these nuclei and their neighbors with photons participating in the transitions between energy states (to say nothing of the massive zoo of unstable particles discovered as the Big Machines of particle accelerator technologies developed and evolved). If one suspects some value in Kelvins
intuitions and reapply them in light of this different understanding, one might find that the vortex knot model might be applied to something more fundamental in physical space than the atom, which now appears as a collective of sub-atomic particles, rather than a fundamental construct.
It is worth noting that this desire to connect knots to physical phenomena has not abated with the passing of Kelvins work. Knots have been found useful in the context of light (as in the work of Mark Dennis, at the University of Bristol), DNA and chemistry writ large (http://www.math.vt.edu/people/linnell/4994/knot.pdf), magnetohydrodynamic plasmas, and __. The series of books entitled Knots and Everything, currently at 45 volumes, regularly contains works which relate knots to extant scientific phenomena, including volume one; Knots and
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Physics.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giant_smoke_ring.jpg
Here we should take a moment to rehearse Kelvins experience of observing smoke rings travel and bounce off of each other in Taits lecture room, as this was part of the imaginative channel through which this idea became embodied in his case*. In Kelvins mind, this magnificent display is made of a collection of smoke particles and gaseous atomic species exhibiting similar vortical forms as those that the atoms themselves might be dancing in - as
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above in the air, so below in the atoms. Kelvin begins his paper On Vortex Atoms in the proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (available here):
After noticing Helmholtzs admirable discovery of the law of vortex motion in a perfect liquidthat is, in a fluid perfectly destitute of viscosity (or fluid friction)the author said that this discovery inevitably suggests the idea that Helmholtzs rings are the only true atoms. For the only pretext seeming to justify the monstrous assumption of infinitely strong and infinitely rigid pieces of matter, the existence of which is asserted as a probable hypothesis by some of the greatest modern chemists in their rashly-worded introductory statements, is that urged by Lucretius and adopted by Newtonthat it seems necessary to account for the unalterable distinguishing qualities of different kinds of matter. But Helmholtz has provided an absolutely unalterable quality in the motion of any portion of a perfect liquid in which the peculiar motion which he calls Wirbelbewegung has been once created. Thus any portion of a perfect liquid which has Wirbelbewegung has one recommendation of Lucretiuss atomsinfinitely perennial specific quality. To generate or to destroy Wirbelbewegung in a perfect fluid can only be an act of creative power. Lucretiuss atom does not explain any of the properties of matter without attributing them to the atom itself.
The air was an imperfect fluid (having viscosity and fluid friction) while the ether was the prefect fluid lying underneath, alongside (or as) the electromagnetic fields themselves. These thoughts require subtle modification in light of our current knowledge. Atoms are no longer the simplest stable observable particles, that position being taken by photons, electrons, protons, neutrons, and neutrinos in addition to many inferred particles (quarks, gluons, etc.) In addition to new distinctions about particle character, there must be some alterations to the ether in which Kelvin placed his knots.
When considering what a vacuum really represents, this historically often involves a
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specialized chamber along with various types of apparatus which are employed to remove atmospheric atoms and molecules from the interior of the vacuum chamber. While there are inevitably some species remaining in an evacuated chamber, what is obtained through these pumping processes is a rough approximation of empty space. The ability of photons to travel through vacuum led some to believe (especially when thinking of light as a wave) that some sort of elastic medium was required for these light waves to propagate. The name commonly ascribed to this medium is ether and while this term as fallen out of favor (see Michelson and Morley), the original descriptive paradigm of the ether has been maintained in a sense through the concept of the electromagnetic field, which is considered to pass through all space while bearing some responsibility for photon propagation in vacuum. It is within this context of electromagnetic ether in which we place ourselves, for the time being.
The idea of knots in the electromagnetic ether was appealing enough to drive many to find a way to merge these ideas with scientific consensus, especially in the work of Tait, who classified prime knots for the sake of the periodic table. If one were to proceed like Tait, and attempt to find a link between this vortex knot model and real physical science, one must determine then at which level of particle identity the VKM should be applied. For reasons that should become evident later, it seems prudent to stick to observable particles rather than inferred ones.
An issue arises when one considers the details of current knot theory with an eye toward physical application. Most study of knot topology can be done, or at any rate has been
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done, often by using simple string or yarn. This allows one to create simple and useful models while keeping research overhead low. While most of these rope-knots share some characteristics with our electromagnetic vortex knots, research into knots in the context of plasma physics seems to suggest that certain types of helicity are not conserved under a classic knot theory operation known as the first Reidemeister move. When modified slightly, the modified Reidemeister I captures an intricacy previously missing from topological knot theory, suggesting a minor revision to what might constitute an electromagnetic prime knot. There is some literature to support this line of reasoning (see Yongnian, H. & Weidong, S. Topological structures of vortex and helicity analysis. Acta Mechanica Sinica 14, 208-214(1998)., and Bouzarth, E.L. & Pfister, H. Helicity conservation under Reidemeister moves. Am. J. Phys. 74, 141-144(2006). ) Currently, a standard table of prime knots begins with the following:
These symbols illustrate the Unknot, Trefoil knot, and Figure 8 knot, with 0, 3 and 4 crossings respectively - no 1 or 2 crossing knots exist in this scheme. With a modified take on Reidemeister I, an additional construct appears, with characteristics that suggest it be described as a sort of mobius knot, with only one crossing.
We will return to this mobius knot and the other prime knot constructs after considering the advances in knowledge which precipitated abandonment of vortex knot theories in the 1900s. The state of scientific understanding at that time was complicated by re-
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representation of certain particles in different contexts. Gamma rays, X-rays and other photons were classified differently, probably due to the differences in their sources and interactions with matter. By the late 1940s, the cast of characters on the atomic stage had shifted from nuclear radiation (alpha, beta, gamma), X-rays, atomic elements and wave-like light into photons, electrons, protons, neutrons and neutrinos, along with an assortment of other unstable particles. At that point, the actors were limited by the energies obtainable by the particle accelerators in use, and these simplified characters remain fundamental to nuclei composition to this day.**
A model having protons and neutrons as billiard balls in an nucleic bag, surrounded by the electron orbitals, is an understanding of the atom that has been dynamic enough to afford ongoing advances in technological development over the last 70 years - be it nuclear, molecular, biological or otherwise. A similar Ball in the bag paradigm was ultimately applied to the inner structure of the protons and neutrons as well as the classification of the less stable zoo particles. The standard model may be crudely approximated by this balls in a bag description, where quarks are the balls of various flavour, held in a metaphorical bag by the gluons (Perhaps even a gluonic bag?). It is useful to consider the experimental phenomenology that helped legitimize this model. In collision experiments wherein protons were smashed together, an inner structure began to become apparent. Prior to the use of quark, the word parton was proposed to describe these inner structures seemingly within protons and other particle species. The excruciating paradox was that if enough energy was applied to extract a parton/quark, new particles were generated in the process, without observation of any internal structure in isolation. Thus the often repeated assertion that no quark has been observed in isolation, but that they
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nonetheless constitute an internal mechanism which distinguishes protons, neutrons, and other (non-leptonic) zoo particles.
If one considers all particle collision experiments, there is an element of projection to them, whereby a three dimensional construct is reduced to a two dimensional one. While prior collision experiments often focus on small numbers of participants, this phenomena is observed with an ensemble of particle collisions in transmission electron microscopy (TEM), whereby accelerated electrons interact with a thin sample to produce an image. When tomographic techniques are not applied, analysis of TEM images requires some care due to this very problem of projection - the 3D sample is often only captured through a 2D image. A similar problem likely applies when colliding protons and nuclei, while the collisions are often concieved of as between seemingly point like particles, their inner structure must have some 3D character to it which is sampled in a particular way through the relative orientation of the participants of the collision interaction.
The study of knots has also dealt with the projection issue, as 3D loops and knots of string are often drawn or laid out such that special attention is given to the places where two strands cross. Instead of simply making an X, which makes the intended structure ambiguious, a natural convention has been established, perhaps by cavemen or doodling students, wherein a certain kind of ternary logic manifests:
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These symbols, marked + and -, are often described as crossings and illustrate some of the most simple features of any knot. Any illustration of a knot maintains its information about the knot through the use of these crossings. Prime knots, like the few shown above, are often ordered or classified in terms of the fewest crossings required to create a projection of some knot which maintains its basic topological information. In some very real sense, crossings and quarks are very analogous in behavior. As quarks cannot be removed without breaking the particle and spawning new ones using available energy, a crossing cannot be removed from a prime knot without cutting the thread and destroying the knot construct. All prime knots are in some sense, Gordian.
As quarks are to non-leptonic particles, so are crossings to knots in a sense (as we return to the goal of attempting to relate the two as Kelvin might). If one assumes that the mass of a particle is somehow related to its tangled-ness, or the number of crossings, we still seek to account for particle charge. To this end, knots have properties other than their crossing number,
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particularly their writhe. Some knots, like the unknot and figure 8 knot, have no writhe. Other knots, like the trefoil knot, have some writhe which has an associated sign. If one is willing to associate charge with writhe, then we obtain a mechanism for positive, negative and neutral charges associated with knot constructs, along with a viable route toward a description of antimatter. Here is a loose outline of how one might attempt this series of analogies:
Photons ~ Unknots/loops. Chargeless / Writhe-less. No mass / no self crossings. Polarization already seems to exhibit behavior which could be mapped from electromagnetic ripples persisting on a ring-like topology.
Electrons ~ Mobius knots. Charged / writhe dependant on sign. Gives some insight into the possibility of electron spin. This sort of idea was proposed before, see "Is the Electron a photon with toroidal topology?" by J.G. Williamson and M.B. van der Mark (1997) Annals of the
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Louis de Broglie Foundation 22 (2) 133.
Protons ~ Trefoil knots. With three crossings (3 quarks), greater mass than electrons, and charge / writhe, the quark/crossing interrelationship seems most clear in this example, when considering the similarity of the phenomenology of each.
Neutrons ~ Figure 8 knots. Without charge/writhe, but with more mass/crossings than a proton/trefoil, these constructs are their own mirror image, suggesting that it does not have an anti-particle (with apologies to Bruce Cork). As neutrons are unstable outside of the nucleus, one would expect that more complex knots would also be of limited stability in comparison to electrons and protons.
Neutrinos* ~ linked photons might be an explanation for neutrino phenomena, being chargeless and of very low, but not quite zero, mass. There is much variety in linked loop configurations, which may be ascribed to different types of neutrinos - should they be distinguished conclusively from one another.
Consider the mechanism of beta decay, in which a neutron decays into a proton, electron and (anti-?)neutrino. Or: n p + e + might be conceived as: Visualized through vortex knots, the process
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All of this is oversimplified - it gives little consideration to the underlying electromagnetic vibrations which would constitute the strings or filaments of the vortex knots described above. Additionally this is not a topologically sound proof, as any knot theorist might attest. With a similar disregard for rigor, consider the annihilation of an electron and positron pair:
In this case, the mirror particles match each other and have some predilection for unknotting each other, producing photons/unknots in the process.
If, despite the absence of theoretical calculations, the reader maintains some interest or willing suspension of disbelief, the remainder of this work will detail some of the inconsistencies and heresy associated with fusing this reasoning to the current state of the Standard Model. It must be considered tentative speculation at best. If one begins to consider this electromagnetic vortex knot model as having potential merit, it immediately wreaks taxonomic havoc on the familial designations applied by the standard model, in addition to the obviously radical reinterpretation of quarks. While quarks are a convenient accounting system (made even more flexible through the use of anti-quarks) they are re-envisioned through a knot model as a misinterpretation of the admittedly murky and complex experimental data about internal particle structure that was expanded as needed to accommodate the increasingly energetic zoo particles created throughout the evolution and enhancement of accelerators/ colliders /high energy physics technology. This model served its purpose in giving a framework to the experimentalists doing the observations.
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The lepton-hadron family structure is seen to be somewhat unnecessary (as would become the distinction between mesons and baryons). All known particle phenomena could conceivably be unified under a single conceptual form. The characterization of particles as being bosons or fermions can be interpreted as a misunderstanding about what it means to exhibit certain types of statistical behavior in different contexts. Bosons exhibit bosicity, a certain type of statistical behavior, in that they are best described by Bose-Einstein statistics. This retains the utility of the distinction without allocating unnecessary reverence toward their statistical behavior, and could provide a re-interpretation of superconductivty in the BCS model. If youre not enslaved to the idea of fermions and bosons, you may interpret what invokes fermicity or bosicity in a particle as a context-dependant process, rather than an inherent property of the particle.
Another heretical development from this thought-experiment deals with reformation of what makes up the strong and weak forces. For example, if your fundamental particles (the term fundamental being somewhat disputed) are not conceived as balls but as electromagnetic knots, it may be possible that their interaction and decay can be mediated without recourse to additional forces. With regard to the nuclear force, these knot constructs give some alternative possibilities (One will be proposed here, though others can be imagined).
If one assumes that the proton and neutron are identified with the previously described knots, a certain kind of geometry develops for the nuclear structure which would otherwise have no apparent source: Imagine that these two knots (trefoil, figure 8) can be approximated by a
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geometric shape derived from the symmetry of their respective knot (triangle, tetrahedron), whose surfaces are decorated to exhibit the respective charge of the particle. For protons, each face (top and bottom) would be of +1/2 charge, with the entire particle charge integrating to +1. For neutrons, the four faces of the tetrahedra would be mixed, with 2 faces appearing as +1/2 and two faces appearing as -1/2, with the entire particle charge integrating to a net charge of 0. If one uses tetrahedral dice (D4) to construct these nuclear models, accounting for the positive and negative faces according to the proscribed numbers of protons and neutrons which yield stable isotopes, this seems to yield a viable system for describing nuclear structures.
Within this model of nuclear attachment, localized charge approximations give a mechanism for nuclear bonding, with the standard rule of charge: opposites attract, like charges repel. Two protons cannot coexist in a nucleus as a lone pair, as there are no negative faces for their positive faces to attach to. Deuterium would be considered stable, as its single proton could attach to either of the two negative faces of its neutron. Similarly with Helium 3 - though no more protons can be added from that point, without the addition of more neutrons. To this point, no more rules are required, but the instability of Tritium (Hydrogen 3) requires some thought but can be rationalized in this way: if a neutron is unstable in free space, and even in certain nuclear settings, there must be something about its natural configuration which leads to instability. In terms of this toy model, the rule might be described as the exhibition of two negative faces by a single neutron - something which is guaranteed with a lone neutron, or in neutron-rich isotopes. Within this model, it is easy to imagine two configurations of tritium in which this neutron condition is either satisfied or not satisfied, with relative stability or instability as a function of
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the given configuration. Sandwiching the proton between the two tetrahedral neutrons would (n~p~n) would be stable as each neutron exhibits only one negative face, while a configuration in which the proton decorates one of the two neutrons would have stability dependent on which neutron was being decorated. In this scheme, an asymmetry is introduced by connecting two neutrons to each other directly - one must donate a + face, one must donate a - face. The result is that one neutron keeps both of its negative faces, while the other only has one. As the proton in the tritium nucleus must attach to one of the exposed negative faces, the neutron stability condition will either be met (p~n+~n-, where the sign of the neutron denotes the sign of the face contributed in their bond), or one neutron will be in a condition where two negative faces are exposed, similar to that of a neutron in free space (p~n-~n+). This neutron instability (beta decay) rule helps set the upper limit on the number of neutrons which can be added to a nucleus before decay becomes possible, and then increasingly probable. One might imagine that neutrons on the surface of a nucleus have some flexibility in terms of their position, provided that there is a nearby face of appropriate sign for them to switch to, and that this neutron migration on the surface has something to do with statistical probability of decay.
To continue onward with this, Helium 4 would exhibit only one negative face in any configuration, and would be considered to be particularly stable, though perhaps prone to being ejected from heavier isotopes (alpha decay). When considering this system, both Deuterium and Helium 4 are useful constructs, as they each are the simplest configurations which exhibit only one negative face. This becomes useful when considering that the process of connection of neutrons and the addition of protons has a tendency to eat up the negative faces exhibited by the
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nucleus. To move from one isotopic structure to another, having these base units (along with protons and neutrons) is of great use, in that they can be attached to light isotopes to make heavier isotopes without breaking any previously defined rules provided that a simple connection is made in which only one face of the base unit (p,n,D,He4) is in contact with the lighter isotope to construct the heavier isotope.
This model has been applied with some rigor up to isotopes of Argon and seems to hold with some notable exceptions. Helium 3, with no negative faces remaining exposed, seems to be an exception rather than a rule, with other isotopes seeming to prefer to keep at least one negative face exposed on their surfaces. It is expected that certain local arrangements may allow more than one negative face to be shown, provided that no single neutron exhibits both of them at the same time (this was touched on with Tritium, and also seems to apply to Lithium 7). If one models Beryllium 8, it becomes clear why this might prefer fissure into two Helium 4 nuclei while Lithium 7 and Beryllium 9 do not. Using home-made dice models, gedanken experiments have yielded fruitful descriptions of the simpler isotopes, and these efforts imply that a full attempt at applying this model to the entire isotope map might best be done with the assistance of computers. Assistance from interested parties is welcomed, as the idea is easier to form than to test rigorously.
Leaving this hypothetical nuclear model (derived from a hypothetical vortex knot model) aside, it is worth remembering that some similar ideas have been floating around online which propose to merge these string/knot/vortex concepts in various ways. Several theories have
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been proposed which seem to weave the knot metaphor into a conceptualization of fundamental particles through some mechanism or another. Christoph Schiller has developed his strand model, which describes particles as crossings or tangles of cosmic strands. This shares some similarity with the ideas above in that they describe perceived particles as string-like interactions, much as quarks are re-interpreted above as a projection-like, string-crossing phenomenon (see Motion Mountain). Clifford Ellgen is possessed by a very similar sort of thoughts, as is everyone else listed on M. Erk Durgans page (http://www.unitytheory.info/ similar_theories.html) Mr. Durgan himself having a related thread of thought. (sorry)
These models tend to build on the standard model as practiced currently, without much development regarding reinterpretations of what quarks are in light of a new knot model. But a certain amount of scepticism and critique has been evoked over the years, often simply by examining the drastically evolving states of the standard model over the course of its development. Three quarks became four, then five, then six. The number of quarks seems to trend with our accelerator and detectector capability, in as much as they describe anything about the universe (or so one might argue). There is a physics poem, rare among journal submissions, which is tacked onto the end of the paper by H. J. Simon, D. E. Mitchell, and J. G. Watson, Surface plasmons in silver films---a novel undergraduate experiment, (Am. J. Phys. 43, 630-636 (1975) [doi:10.1119/1.9764)]. This poem reads:
J or psi (A physicists four-footed sonnet) Where is the thing beneath the thing?
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When can we say we have found it all? Is there an end or just a string That dangles down like an endless fall? Molecules, yes, and atoms, to, Electrons we know, and nuclei; Neutrons, protons, the particle zoo, And now enter now the J or psi. Can we not try to knot the same string, To start from a bottom and see what grows? Plant us a seed and see what we get When unity doubles and does its thing And triples, quadrubles, quintuples. Who knows What patterns will show? What world is there yet? - Roger E. Clapp
The J/Psi particle was the impetus for acceptance of the addition of a fourth quark to the standard model to account for another particle, and apparently also the impetus for Roger E. Clapps poem*** above. Consider the degree of technical and scientific capability before quarks were king: the development of molecular analysis and synthesis (organic and inorganic), isotope separation, and beam handling (electrons, ions or otherwise) did not require quark models nor, for that matter, do any of our current electronic or photonic technologies. In some sense, the utility of the standard model and the quark metaphor has been limited to projecting descriptions onto the smallest known constructs with no real impact in terms of atomic applications and no clear macroscopic comparison. Perhaps this is the true dread secret of the high energy physicist.
But all hope is not lost, beam-line workers! This re-envisioning of Kelvins Vortex knot model, if taken seriously, could provide a powerfully simple re-interpretation of the Standard Model of fundamental particles. As no mathematics has been employed to give rigor,
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there is plenty of room for additional thought here, with a possibility that the desired equations may already be known through prior mathematical labors. In an ideal future, this might simplify fundamental physics to a level accessible to savvy school children, as nuclear structures and elementary spectroscopy have been to be for some time. The nuclear structure model proposed here requires more development, but might provide a similar level of educational accessibility. Any serious effort to develop such a model would surely motivate dozens of graduate theses even if it was eventually considered no more useful than string theory and cast aside as fruitless. With this in mind, the elaboration of mathematical models for the vortex knot idea and subsequent invocations of heresy toward the standard model are left as an exercise for the reader.
The nature of infinity is this : That every thing has its Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro' Eternity Has passed that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind His path, into a globe itself infolding, like a sun, Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty, While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth, Or like a human form, a friend with whom he liv'd benevolent. As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing Its vortex: and the north & south, with all their starry host: Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square. Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent To the weak traveller confin'd beneath the moony shade. Thus is the heaven a vortex pass'd already, and the earth A vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity.
Excerpted from Milton by William Blake
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Footnotes:
*Vortex rings are exploited currently in certain toys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Vortex_ring_toys), and used occasionally by dolphins in a similarly playful fashion (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_ring).
**We must also eventually consider the nature of kaons, J/Psi particles, and other particle characters with less prominent roles than the more readily observed photons, electrons, protons, neutrons, and neutrinos.
*** Clapp seems particularly sceptical of the quark idea, as one can read in his Nonlocal Structures: Bilocal Photon paper, though his own explanation for particle behavior is fairly dissimilar to that of the knot/string/strand/tangle models described/referenced here.
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Celestial Events
By Andrew Winegrad
Nobody plays the news anymore, but we all heard one way or another. InSystem Media reported that the explosion would be "vaguely" visible, its proximity to the Sun hampering the vision of those within sighting distance. Most likely just a slight change in spacial brightness to the naked eye, occurring for only a few hours beginning at 9:45am Agreed Solar Time. I borrowed a pair of UltraV specs from Nick next door anyway. He said he'd be using them himself if he hadn't burned his retinas examining solar flares for longer than recommended. It's too bad for him.
I've never been to Earth. Neither has anybody I know. I've seen pictures of course, from back when it was still inhabitable, but it's hard to relate those to the gray dot that passes by the window every couple of days. They say some people still live down there, in small national clusters outside of government sphere of influence, or interest. Most are pretty hostile. Several missionaries were killed in the last attempt to make contact before they were all recalled. They called the situation "hopeless." The Earthlings are "savages," hell-bent on their archaic livelihoods of agriculture and husbandry. I get a little queasy myself thinking about it, food straight from the ground, from live animals. Difficult to imagine.
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It does seem a little cruel, going about it like this. I mean they are still people, aren't they? They live there, not like you or me, but they do live, somehow. But maybe that's just some kind of genetic nostalgia. Just because our species originated there doesn't make it our home. And the shipping routes between Venus and the outer colonies have to be maintained with efficiency, or else the entire economy will falter, both systemically and intersystemically. Unemployment on Triton is almost 8%, and it's even worse on the deeper moons. It took authorities over 72 hours to quell the Martian Pole riots, and there's no guarantee there won't be more upheaval if we don't regain a surplus of Venusian sulfur and bolster their refinery markets.
I'd feel better if there were a way to adjust the orbit or renavigate the lanes around it, but what do I know about physics? They say there's no way to reach the necessary efficiency with a planet disrupting the cycles every few weeks, and the sheer number of warheads necessary to alter its orbit would evaporate whatever water remains on the surface anyway, with no guarantee of success. Still, I don't know...
They say debris is probably going to interrupt some communications between satellite communities for the next couple of months, but the actual interference should be minimal. Asteroid patrols are going to be doubled, even tripled in some of the closer sectors, and that's good for jobs, too, at least temporarily. And the government has ordered all magnetic shields at full for the next month. At least we don't have to worry about the old moon. I've heard that pieces of it still turn up in the outlying colonies, but I doubt anyone ever bothers to prove that it's the real thing. What for? Collectors, maybe. I wonder what a piece of Earth will be worth once the
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initial wave is over.
I can't imagine what it would be like to be there when it happens. To stand on the surface of an exploding planet, feeling the ground give way and then push up and out with all of the heat and light. It couldn't last more than half of a second, but damn. That would be something. But I can't say I'm sorry to be several million miles away. It's almost a little funny. No, funny's not the word. Ironic, I guess. All of the known life in this system, and every other colonized system for that matter. It all started there. On that gray dot. And then blink. It's nothing. Even with Nick's specs it wasn't much more than a pin prick, like a tiny spot of blood welling up, wiped away and then clotted, gone. Nothing spectacular.
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Cracking the Oyster

Translated by Richard Prins
Deep sea divers, from waves and surf who plummet through the undertow stroking bellydown, swelling your joints, Ill sell you my silence. What will my netting get? I know you swimming sages, you cant resist my riddle, unstringing every hint, one by one like beads. Every iron-beater must get himself a hammer. Ive tangled it up in my hand. Maybe you experts can open it up, or enlighten me: The sky has a cloud (may its rain explore the world) windflown down the coast and dripping wet pebbles that plunge so deep, rippling apart the surface to penetrate the ocean and its yawning folds like threading the eye of a needle, a single silky string through the lip of the oyster shell, shutting in the pearl. So dear, this gem, unrivalled yet engulfed. The oyster shell will hang from a tree on the bottom of the ocean which receives no light in its long submergence with branches invisible to the world, no matter how they multiply. But this is no miracle tree. It can take root in any earth. Once the pearl is finally perfected its encasement cracks apart. It crawls from its nest poured through a chute of waves until mooring on some beach dragging behind seaweeds, a glistered tail of glory. Luminescent sunlight! Everywhere glows! Anyone who passes, they must be transfixed
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and whoever gets it, let them seal it in a chest. For many men, this is their silver, their gold. So back to you geniuses. I am releasing a cluster of kites into the sky. Have a shot now at their tangles. Ill weigh them on a scale. The reward is quite dear. Im returning to my station and dropping my anchors, one off the stern and one off the prow. Your captain has been Nabahani, whos known the sea and fears no wave, nor any of its baleful associates.
Shaza
Ahmed Sheikh Nabahani
Wazami wa uziwani, wa mawimbi na miuya Muzamao zizimbwini, mahodari wa koweya Kwa kuwama na kwa tani, kubenuwa zenu ziya Nauza changu kimiya, kichatiya chashikani Nayuwa siwatanizi, hamugagwi yaweleya Yafumbuweni wayuzi, mutongowe moyamoya Kula aliye mfuzi, na nyundo huitumiya Kibafute natatiya, tatuwani watatuzi Welevu kitatuweni, munambiye nielewe Kuna kiwingu yangani, mvua itandaziwe Pepo husukuma pwani, nyunyu ni kama zijiwe Kwa kasi zitandushiwe, na kushukiya maini Hupenya ndani kwa ndani, ya uketo wa bahari Kama uzi sindanoni, upote pota hariri Yakashukiya shazani, na kufuma lulu duri Hapitwi na johari, nda kuu mno thamani Shaza lengetwe mtini, zizimbwini mwa nyongoza Haupo kitalaleni, haupati muwangaza
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Tandu hazionekani, yapokuwa zatepuza Si miti ya miujiza, yenezee duniyani Lulu ikikamilika, yuu la mti shazani Dondole hukeketuka, ikatoka kiotoni Wimbini huisumbika, ikegesha ufuoni Yafumapo mkwambani, kitoche humemetuka Mianaza na miandi, eneo hungengezuka Huvuta kila mwenendi, kijopo hukusanyika Aipatao ni kandi, kashani akiiweka Wengi wametajirika, kwa ngandu na tu chandi Tatazi zingatatiya, mafundi zitatuweni Rajai naregezeya, kishada changu bwagani Nitawapa mwingi mwiya, fundo hili funguwani Niwapimiye kwa mani, tuzo tunu na hidaya Narejea kituoni, nanga zangu nazitiya Moya tezi na omoni, sambo ipate tuliya Nahudha ni Nabahani, bahari alozoweya Hachi shuu na miuya, wala wimbi uziwani
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Quotidiana Is My Homestead
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A Fiction of Philosophy by Alex Broudy

I. Yesterday I made Aliyah, today will bring me home. -Aldo
It wasnt until fortune struck chance that glee could have ever renewed my soul within me. Nesting within what I thought I was without, my Land of Milk and Honey nourished Her gentry on the spirit of needlessness. And from this brewed a magnificence I could not have seen.
As brilliance of the self radiates unto others dissolutely, ones selfhood is tarnished as jealousy sets in on the behalf of the admirer - its affect concealed beneath an exterior image. And so, I was uniquely envious of those religious ones I also hated.
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II. The present is big with the future. - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Yesterday I embarked on a backwards journey. In search of my spiritual innards I moved in palintropes, rolling back fixed philosophies one by one .1 See gloss (below) now!
Moved to feel I tried to explain what was beyond meaning, This backwards journey seems to walk the same walk that elliptical thinking does. Afterthought snapped, Are you off your rocker, or has the poet got your tongue? I paused, No, lather up that idea some more If ellipses were to walk, how might their innards travel? This was the pulp of a new frontier. Gloss
1. Imagine something hypothetical: If mind and body were physically separated such that each was contained in its own glass jar, how would shattering one jar affect the other? Now: shake your head so your brain rattles. Really startle yourself.
Done? Good, so what was it you were thinking immediately after your brain settled? Try to elucidate this thought by re-reading and repeating the paragraphs instructions.
Whatever you conclude is arbitrary. The significant thing is that you went back to the beginning and began again. This is a semblance of palintropic thinking, an especially deconstructive method for stepping back, remarking and remixing into the future. You may now resume your journey.
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III. And, no matter how fleeting the imagery, I remain steadfast that last night I glimpsed beyond, I saw the unseeable. -Noam
I spent lifetimes in meditation untangling that knotted mix, my selfdom. Seldom did I not feel. Experience found me, urging a new vocabulary to surface along with a new context for lifes cynical wonder. Hate is a word I have since dispelled from my vocabulary.
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IV. Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. -Jorge Lus Borges
Later I pondered something remarkable about elliptical thoughts walking, This remix is an anecdote for my religious mix-up. Unsure of my own construction, I decided to dive its strange depths.
My primary attempts to reach into hindsight appeared defunct. Enshrouded by thick murk, I could only envisage hindsights exterior shell. My worn recollective memory made it appear as if everything was wrapped in some self-obfuscating blanket.2
Little by little I began to taste the inner-fruit of reflection. It was succulent, savory. And while I could never fully see inside my wobbly walking thoughts, I could imagine. Wonder displaced confusion, passion grew from nothing I was reflecting my way towards the answer. Gloss
2. What was your first recollective memory - a memory so indelible that you can manifestly feel, taste, smell, hear, see right now? Try to transport your self to this scene, grip it and hold on.
When I did this I saw my 1st-person self (from the 3rd-person perspective) acting goofy. When I (1st person) imagined myself acting this way, I laughed. Now I can recollect laughing about being goofy from either perspective. The process is wonderfully elliptical, quickening at times while in slow motion for others. Can you imagine peeling back each layer of your recollective memory in order to retrieve a transitory thought?
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V. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. -Saul Bellow
I, man, was trying to explain the soul away. Whats worse, I did it as a justified raison d'tre. How could I wade in daftness at such costs?
For an unknown period there had been a bystander gazing on this, a personal conflict. All at once her presence belittled and aggrandized my sense of self. More than anything it perplexed: how could she have read my mind?
Non impensabile, she responded, lei pensa a voce alta. Questo normale per tutti gli italiani; inanzitutto, di noi chi non siamo pazzi!3 Gloss
3. It is not unfathomable, sir; you think aloud. This is normal for all Italians; at least, for those of us who arent crazy!
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VI. Fate: A lusus so brutish it stirred and confused us. Creed: A line so straight it timed my fate. -Aldo
With swift words she caught my heart and yanked out my tongue. I was muted by exactitude. On the precipice of achieving clarity, my minds own Sisyphus buckled. I would have to start the ascent again.4
I felt compelled to crack Sisyphuss spell. Since far finer acuity would be needed, I administered a hearty dose of rigorous self-honesty.
Splicing certainty with curiosity spun me round, down, up and through many older abstractions. Each was necessary to pontificate, but few conclusions were on point. I asked, In death, do we lose that 1st person consciousness we possess in life? If so, is there an omniscient view we can attain in life, perhaps through study and intense introspection? Would this view ultimately lead to happiness? Is any happiness sustainable? What is infinite perspective?
Forse. S. Forse. Solo un po - non pu averlo pur sempre. Non lo so, una fantasia? said the onlooker.5
She answered each question with a certain surgical exactness. The little Italian girl, this
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peeper of my spoken thoughts, observed my quandary with clairvoyance beyond my own. Gloss
4. Lets play connect the dots. Suppose you are gazing from your beach chair far off into the Mediterranean Sea. Where sea meets sky lays the horizon, a place you can only jump to in theory. Jump to it and look straight up. Now raise yourself to a point just slightly above the final telic height of your last glance; shift your gaze downward. Congratulations, youve theoretically peered beyond the horizon.
This game in perception represents more than just navel gazing; it also illustrates the type of mental exercise needed to press past the precipice when thinking palintropically. We can see beyond conceptual horizons when we apply this model to our own thought processes.
5. Reader, again I will translate to save time: Maybe. Yes. Maybe. Only a bit you cannot have it forever. I dont know, a fantasy?
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VII. Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead. -James Joyce
Between her small hands stretched a small book. Taught as it was and pointing downward I could hardly catch sight of the title. Even still, I could make out its English lettering. Curious, I engaged.
You know, switching between languages like that is quite the talent; how did you come about polyglottery with such youth? English! His tongues are vast! she said with great snark. I took you for confused and babbling, not American! What brings you to Jerusalem?
Bedazzled, flabbergasted, I tilted my gaze upward. As if there were someone up there going to feed me the answer. Alas, glint caught my pupils; swelling like sponges to water they twisted and turned and Alas, foiled. Damn you, Sisyphus!!.
I inflected, Turning points that reveal something new are transient overall, but What blasphemous jazz, what fecund garbage I tell you! What dastard made me think such sinful thought? What will will lead me rightly.
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VIII. Preserve your memories, theyre all thats left you. -Simon and Garfunkel
As the questions bubbled up through and out of my skull - soaring skyward - something popped. Aha!
Che sucesso? Aldo, tutto bene? ForseALDO! Can you hear me?, she asked out of concern but her questions were so piercing I could cry.
Yes, yes. Can you lower your voice? My head split just then. Like another cleft tool is your voice to my ears right now. I was internally garbled, mixing and mincing.
This is the story of calm, Aldo; see if you can remember. It wasnt long ago that you first told me this tale; in fact, it was only several months back. Do you remember where we were?
No, is it relevant? Because I just dont see how it could be at this moment, my head is splitting and
Nonsense. Listen good.
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And then there was calm. This little girl, my precious daughter, was singing the rich notes of seraphim. Hearing her voice assuaged me, and my fits of second guessing, overthinking, and under-appreciating dissipated. Quotidiana became my homestead, a benevolent place of perennial synchronicity, a grateful place where today I continue to dwell.
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Reply
Zalie Troumpec
Reply-To: "The proprietary use of a book_" (Power) Book/ The poem is our encounter with the procedure used to seize messages. Jos = = = A 9 = A 2 =
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The Enzensberger-Baudrillard Mass Media Debate Reexamined: Temporal Models and the Dialectic
Jack Kredell
Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Constituents of a Theory of the Media, originally published in 1970 in the New Left Review, is an ambitious and urgent attempt to patch existing Marxist media theory with a Leninist social strategy of the new media. Enzensberger describes the emergent category of mass media as a consciousness industry, one that infiltrates into all other sectors of production, takes over more and more directional and control functions, and determines the standard of the prevailing technology (Enzensberger 261). Collectively the various technological and cultural manifestations of new media constitute a new and interconnected universal system.
The voice of the essay is that of the traditional vanguard intellectual urging socialist strategy to recognize the emergence of electronic new media as the prevailing locus of contradiction within the system of post-industrial monopoly capitalism. Prophetically, Enzensberger exhorts the open secret of the emancipatory capacity of new media, which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come to be recognized for its inherent power to mobilize. In contrast to the bygone forms of social mobilization such as the protest march, which, for the radical left at the time, carried the stigma of the Stalinist parade-as-clockwork, the new organizational paradigm will make men as free as dancers, as aware as football players, surprising as guerrillas (Enzensberger 261).
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The notion that the mobilizing potential of electronic media will usher us into a more favorable spatial, kinetic and temporal orientation to political life is preordained by a progressive view of history. Gracing the present moment with a greater freedom of movement than ever before, mass media becomes the socio-cultural kindling that sparks the present moments ontological disposition to revolution. What is really being said, however, is that new media offers a new and improved version of mobilization, one that it is not constrained by the planned, linear determinations of marching and parading. Thus, the newness of new media is the degree to which it enables us to transcend the image of the past as the failure to mobilize. Regardless of the structural influence of Ezensbergers progressive critical paradigm, there is something innately magical, almost subversive even, about electronic medias ability to make us as free as dancers even prior to its strategic, emancipatory use.
With the resolute air of a positivist, Enzensberger asserts that the revolutionary potential of electronic media is concretized in an egalitarian structure which permits a new relationship between the means and the forces of production: For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves (Enzensberger 262). Here an unlikely comparison can be drawn between Enzenberger and McLuhan based on the idea of technological immanence. In Enzensberger, what might be called the massness of the mass media, the totalizing degree of its enclosure of receivers and transmitters, superficially resembles Marshall McLuhans notion technological immanence, the audio-tactile ether in which the
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famous global village subsists. In actuality the two couldnt be more antithetical: Enznensbergers mass media is a hyper-egalitarian structure viewed within the framework of socialist discourse, one that enables greater individual participation and freedom of movement; by contrast, McLuhan champions a spatio-temporal immanence that permits interconnectivity and interdependence as opposed to independence (or individuals for that matter).
McLuhan, as befitting his unlucky fate in American academia, will play only cameo roles in the work of the theorists discussed. In Enzensberger, he appears, briefly, as a kind of intellectual extremist of the apolitical avant-garde whose work immodestly exhibits a lack conceptual stringency and historical responsibility. This somewhat unusual, given that Enzensbergers essay is pardonable of avant-garde delinquency owing to its premature futurity; it is literally trying to express itself in terms which have not yet been invented. Though Dadaism teemed with barbarisms, it possessed an historical and prognostic value that for Enzensberger was nonintrinsic to work itself, since it was...attempting to achieve those effects which the public today seeks in film with the means of painting (Enzensberger 275). For McLuhans vangaurdism, however, there is only hostility.
The conflict between Enzensbergers responsible socialist left and representatives of the apolitical such as McLuhan is really a territorial dispute over the theoretical colonization of the new productive forces. Innocents writes Enzensbrger, have put themselves in the forefront of the new productive forces on the basis of mere institutions with which communism-to its detriment-has not wished to concern itself (Enzensberger 271). Which is one way of saying
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that innocents of the apolitical avant-garde have often made greater strides than Marxists in the radicalization of new media owing to their willingness to embrace the new productive forces of the time. The popularity of the charlatan McLuhan is directly related to communisms belated evaluation of electronic media. What is significant about the configuration of the McLuhan galaxy, regardless of its own temporal model of the present, is that it is perceived as a threat to the linear and progressive interpretive model of the dialectical materialism espoused by Ezensbeger. Thus while we are asked to laugh at the provocative idiocy of regressing to prehistoric tribal existence, the reason for McLuhans appearance at all is that such a regression, if true, would undermine the theoretical foundations of the Enlightenment.
In Enzensbergers scant and patronizing treatment of McLuhans thought, isolated in the famous the medium is the message, the figure of McLuhan becomes as a kind of metonymic effigy for the mystique of the media which dissolves all problems in smoke (Enzensberger 270). What this depoliticizing mystique reinforces is the mistaken notion, according to Enzensberger, that media are neutral instruments by which any messages ones pleases can be transmitted without regard for their structure or the structure of the medium. McLuhans irony here goes unnoticed: the saying the medium is the message does in fact have a tautological structure, as Enzensbrger notes, but the point is the very opposite of neutrality: there is no message outside its medium. The expression refers specifically to the pre-foreclosure of neutrality through technological mediation. It is from the positions of this theoretical crux, first articulated by McLuhan, that Baudrillard will critique Enzensbergers strategy of reappropriating the media as a mobilizing tool for being practically and theoretically unlikely.
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In 1972 Baudrillard published a response to Enzenbergers dialectical approach in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. In the exchange between Enzensberger and Baudrillard, which is fundamentally a debate about the future Marxist theory, the work of McLuhan assumes an important yet ambiguous role.
However, I want to stress that the true object of Baudrillards critique of Enzensbergers socialist strategy and the structure of mass media is the status of the dialectic itself. If Baudrillards requiem for the dialectic holds true in the era of mass media and globalization, then his association with McLuhan constitutes an important theoretical allegiance as well as challenge that demands further development by the Left. Building on McLuhans criticism of Marxist materialism for circumscribing itself to the analysis of material production alone, and incorporating the frameworks of communication theory and cybernetics, Baudrillard locates the terminal deficiency of the dialectic in its artificial and internally mediated union of content. The impasse of the dialectic, and, analogously, of the mass media, is that the structure is coded in such a way as to prevent real exchange or reciprocity. Enzensbergers practical solution of transforming the media from a medium of manipulation to one of communication is misguided since media ideology functions at the level of form, at the level of the separation it establishes, which is a social division (Baudrillard 280).
This direct application of McLuhan is noteworthy in that it forms the theoretical basis for Baudrillards own solution to radicalizing the media. According to Baudrillard, The mass
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media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication-this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange) (Baudrillard 280). What Baudrilliard denotes as reciprocal space, understood in a global and abstract sense, is ultimately where McLuhan and Baudrillard will depart. However, for our purposes, Baudrillards theory of mass mediation as being anti-mediatory opens a contested and fraught perspective from which we can view the dialectic and its extensions of critical discourse afresh.
Baudrillards theory of the media comes out of the work of Marcel Mauss, especially the latters theory of symbolic exchange: To understand the term response properly, we must take it in an emphatic sense, by referring to an equivalent in primitive societies: power belongs to the one who can give and cannot be repaid (Baudrillard 281). For Baudrillard the media is a monopolized system of exchange in which the response is articulated in such as a way as to prevent antagonistic reciprocity. Thus our only hope of radicalizing the mass media consists in restoring this possibility of response at the level of form. No other theory or strategy is possible, writes Baudrillard. But if that doesnt sound like a cataclysmic endeavor, Baudrillard extends his analysis to the socio-cultural sphere as well, noting that the the consumption of products and messages is the abstract social relation that they establish, the ban raised against all forms of response and reciprocity (281). Baudrillards analysis of the media is directed at empiricism: So the functionalized object, like all messages functionalized by the media, like the operation of a referendum, controls rupture, the emergence of meaning, and
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censorship (281). Thus what the empirical transparency and immediacy of the mass media openly conceals is a semiotic worm, which, colonizing and hollowing out every last trace of meaning, leaves us in a lushly textured desert of appearances. A desert Baudrillard set out to explore in his later works.
A strange line of analogy can be drawn from the function of the law in Kafkas The Trial to Baudrillards schema of mass media in that the real labor of the law, like the mass media, is not in the exchange of content, but in the mediation of exchange itself. In Kafka, the omnipotent discourse of the law interpellates the individual as an individual and then negates individuality per se. The law, famously, receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go. Likewise, transgression and subversion never get on on the air without being subtly negated as they are: transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated on their meaning (Baudrillard 282).
In Baudrillards estimation, McLuhan gets close to the real structure of the mass media when he asserts the primacy of technological structure, the underlying a priori code that administers the form of the exchange: Furthermore, it has changed status with the extension of the mass media: from a parallel category (descended from almanacs and popular chronicles), it has evolved into a total system of mythological interpretation, a closed system of models of signification from which no event escapes (Baudrillard 283).
For Baudrillard, our only hope of violating the system of structured communication is through
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a return to the symbolic exchange relation, that is, an unknown relation in which response is not predetermined by the ideological and hierarchical categories of transmitter and receiver, or, for that matter, the Marxist categories of consumer and producer. The relation consists of an unknown (x) in that the symbolic gesture has no concrete existence outside its unprincipled, multivalent, and spontaneous appearance. Thus it becomes inherently useless in the era of electronic mass media to strategize, let alone orientate oneself, politically. In its radical oath of transgression aimed at univocality, message, code, modeletc, the project of restoring symbolic exchange is the inverse, as well as reverse, of any rationalist tradition of political thought.
As an instance of such a response Baudrillard cites the graffiti of May 68, which is transgressive because it responds, there, on the spot, and breaches the fundamental role of nonresponse enunciated by all the media (Baudrillard 287). But here we are faced with a kind of paradox of critical discourse; on the one hand, the discourse of the critic preserves itself by first enumerating and then fashioning theoretical models and histories based on instances of response or rupture; and on the other, critical discourse renounces its own imagined etiological bond with the transgressive component of its speech-a vanity-and lapses into silence. Weary but unperturbed by this kind of structural auto-da-fe, Baudrillard writes, But what does this subversive reading actually amount to? Is it still a reading, that is, a deciphering, a disengaging of a univocal meaningOr is it yet another controlling scheme of interpretation, rising from the ashes of the previous one? (287) By this logic nothing could be said without unintentionally reinstating some form of the dominant code. Ideally, the code of the last code, if it were
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perfect, would destroy the message and restore the ambivalence of meaning once and for all. But it cannot; we are forced into a position, the coordinates different each time, of repeated transgression: What is strategic in this sense is only what radically checkmates the dominant form (287). Yet each response is insufficient; it is always check and never mate. By virtue of our absolute adherence to transgression, perhaps an effect of the paranoia of manipulation (or worse, becoming manipulators, by instituting a new ideological code), we end up preserving the original integrity of the ruling form.
This grand schism articulated in Baudrillards critical discourse is what the leftist theory of the time identified as the post-modern condition. Confronted by a monolithic self-regulating socioeconomic code, modernity, and its cultural logic of capitalism, Leftist theory responds by colonizing the theoretical-historical vantage point of after modernity and theorizing itself from the outside, as if from the mere condition of being post-modern. More than a semiotic model of McLuhans dictum of the medium as the message, the paradigm of mass media doubles as an historical model of modernity.
What Baudrillards versions of Enzensberger and McLuhan show us, in a way that neither capable of, is that the dialectical attempt to invert the structure of mass media by repositioning it the hands of the receiver is impossibly flawed because it mistakes the ideological category of the receiver for an ontological one. Thus no strategic action or intervention can maintain its own semantic cohesion and force without, in Baudrillards lyrical schadenfreude, becoming subtly negated as they are: transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated of their
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meaning (282). More than just the defeat of the Lefts most amenable and prolific of methodologies, the dialectic, we are witness to the expiration of all rationalist methodologies issuing from the Enlightenment.
However, keeping Baudrillard in mind, this collapse is not the result of succession; replacing the old ideology with new ideological models or master narratives as such, but of their reduction by a ubiquitous system of mediation into nullifying social feedback. Ultimately Baudrillards critique unconsciously reproduces a model of temporality as impasse: the production of linearity or progress is undercut by action of eternal recurrence of symbolic exchange. Thus Requiem of the Mass Media operates through the assumption that historical progress ceases after modernity. The end result of Baudrillards critique of the sign and its omnipresent mediation is a kind a theoretical Babel in which linearity or progress and static symbiotically coexist; internally, at the level of form, the mass media is a closed ideological system; externally, at the level of content, which is also the discrete or individual level, the media presents itself an open, reversible, and transparent agent of social progress. Good grief! said Charlie Brown.
Works Cited: Baudrillard, Jean. For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 164-184. Trans. Charles Levin. Saint Louis, MO.: Telos Press, 1981. Reprinted in The New Media Reader, Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: The MIT Press, 2003. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. New Left Review (64)13-36. Nov/Dec 1970. Reprinted in Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, The Consciousness Industry, trans. Stuart Hood. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Reprinted in The New Media Reader, Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: The MIT Press, 2003.
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On Green
Sheila Squillante
Then green is a breach, a rupture in the scrub; is pyramids or triangles waving in a fronded surfeit. Green breathes. Against sky, green wings, preening; against clear panes, perfect squares, a green-gold sheen; a meeting. Of blue and green and what we wrongly call brown, but is really, just look at it, weathered grey-green. The tallest reaches above green, reaches out and all around. Green, then, exceeds. Shivers like coins on a dancers skirt, green silvers between. (Greens a she. Dream, then, pleat color and light, divide green each from each...) Green weeps here, displeased, on the needlestrewn ground, a thousand green needs flowering about. A full field of green, what some might call teeming, what to some might seem a sea.
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Platos Dialogical Structure and Socrates as the Physician of the Soul

Jafar Al-Mondhiry
I. INTRODUCTION Health, broadly considered, provides one with the vigor to pursue life. Our precarious hold on health is one of the central human struggles, and in many important ways the pursuit and maintenance of health is an indispensable condition for human flourishing. One view of Platos dialogues takes philosophy to be the care of the soul; that philosophy has as its goal the sustenance and guidance of the soul to a state of virtue and moral health. Through this lens, philosophical activity can be identified as the turning of souls toward the Good in a way that is gradual, cooperative, and particular to the individual engaged. Through dialogical interaction with a philosopher and philosophy in general, the soul can be examined, critiqued, and advanced by a transformative relationship to the Good. Similarly, medicine and healthcare professionals treat patients and steward the sick through a unique process of recovery that rehabilitates and reorients the body back towards a state of health.
It is the task of this paper to explore the similarities between the methods, attitudes, and goals at work in medicine and this kind philosophical care of the soul as it is variously demonstrated in the Platonic dialogues. Specific attention to the ways medicine and the task of the physician are referenced within the wider action of the dialogues will serve to explain what
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significance, if any, this comparison has for Platos portrayal of the philosophical life, the way it is taught and shared, and to what end. This paper takes as a guiding principle the sentiments expressed widely across the dialogues, but perhaps most succinctly by Socrates in Alcibiades 2, that the state or soul that is to live aright must hold fast to this knowledge [of the Good], exactly as a sick man does to a doctor.
Exploring the implications of this model first demands an interrogation of the form of the dialogues themselves, with an attempt at understanding why Plato chose to illustrate philosophy in this way. It is my contention that an analogous understanding of the health of the body and the health of the soul philosophy characterized by a concern for the latter lends itself to a sensitive understanding of the structure and movement of the dialogues and, more importantly, the characters within them. In particular, an overarching concern with philosophical health and healing may better frame the way Socrates engages his interlocutors in a process of probing criticism and exhortation. To this extent, I will try to show that what Plato depicts are scenes of moral diagnosis and treatment in dialogues such as the Gorgias and the Protagoras, amongst others. The care of the soul in these encounters requires a personal relationship between the philosopher and the interlocutor that models itself after the physician-patient relationship, as the insights of the former work to redirect and rectify the maladies of the latter. Success in this engagement is variably determined by the dimensions of just such a relationship. Finally, the unique and complex features of moral and physical health, in their related but distinct understandings, will allow the limits and value of this analogy to take shape.
At base, what this paper means to address is the bare fact that Plato did not simply espouse his beliefs as a direct and consistent set of propositions, either in his own voice or by
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way of Socrates. Instead, the bulk of what we are given are dramatic dialogues: scenes of conversation and engagement, movement and change between characters, topics, values and beliefs. What we need to interrogate, then, is the manifest and latent content of these encounters, and what kinds of patterns and themes emerge. Taken this way, we would already be justified in questioning the persistent references to medicine that occur and recur in almost every dialogue. A major Plato scholar of the early 20th Century, Werner Jaeger, was one of the first to describe the significance of such references in a way that frames and introduces this discussion:
Plato speaks of doctors and medicine in such high terms that, even if the early medical literature of Greece were entirely lost, we should need no further evidence to infer that, during the last fifth and the fourth centuries before Christ, the social and intellectual prestige of the Greek medical profession was very high indeed. Plato thinks of the doctor as the representative of a highly specialized and refined department of knowledge; and also the embodiment of a professional code which is rigorous enough to be a perfect model of the proper relation between knowledge and its purpose in practical conduct It is no exaggeration to say that Socrates doctrine of ethical knowledge, on which so many of the arguments in Platos dialogues turn, would be unthinkable without that model of medical science, to which he so often refers. Of all the branches of human knowledge then existing (including mathematics and natural science) medicine is the most closely akin to the ethical science of Socrates.
It remains an open question whether Plato actually develops just such a coherent and rigorous doctrine of ethical science through the dialogues. Indeed, any reading which distills and systematizes what the dialogues show cannot unequivocally be said to represent Platos view or the intentions of the dialogues as a whole. Such attempts necessarily move past the very content dialogues, and fail to address the work on its terms or the authors. What little writing we do have from Plato directly through the Letters does not prima facie eliminate the esoteric quality of these works or explain any ethical system or philosophical doctrines that underlie the writing. Certain attention to key passages written in the Seventh Letter, however, I believe shows that the dialogues were animated by a particular conception of the philosophy that may
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illuminate both their structure and guiding concern.
II. DIALOGICAL STRUCTURE, THE SEVENTH LETTER AND CARE OF THE SOUL The Proto-Essay View To reiterate the question posed above, it seems we are forced to ask (as a preliminary to any conscientious reading of Plato) why he chose to write in dialogues rather than simply announce his views in some other form. While debate, discussion and puzzlement remains and will remain in the scholarship, it is worth noting some prominent conceptions that bear upon this topic. In a close reading of some of the late dialogues where the significance of the dialogical form is less apparent, Kenneth Sayre summarizes what he calls the popularized proto-essay view of Platos writings. This understanding of the dialogues (which he opposes to his own), takes Platos guiding intention in writing to be the construction of rigorously tested philosophical arguments, supported by explanations of effective methods for procuring philosophical conclusions. From this perspective, the dialogical form was not itself significant for the transmission of the philosophical ideas articulated. Instead, the dialogues operated as a literary device for the convenience of its Greek audience accustomed to such dramatic forms. Or perhaps they were simply an imaginative failing on Platos part to reformulate transcriptions of the dialogues with his late teacher, the later dialogues like the Timaeus and Critias showing a progression to a more overtly essay-type form. The final conclusion following these assumptions of the proto-essay view is then that the philosophical ideas prominent within the dialogues represent Platos own beliefs, from which we can construct his philosophical system.
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Aside from the unavoidable problems of speculation in understanding the text this way, there are several concrete elements in the dialogues which point to problems with the protoessay view. First, if Plato meant to espouse a set of stable philosophical assertions, we are left to wonder why so many of the dialogues end in apparent aporia, or at least without a clean conclusion. In the Protagoras, for example, we are given an elaborate exchange between Socrates and the famous sophist of the dialogues namesake that ends with each speaker coming to contradict their earlier positions, Socrates himself calling the affair a hopeless mess (361c) and calling for more discussion before any true understanding can be reached. Likewise, examples from both the early dialogues (e.g., in the Laches where a definition of courage is pursued) and the late dialogues (e.g., the Theaetetus and the definition of knowledge) show Socrates questioning his interlocutors through a series of definitions that are proposed and corrected many times over without a satisfactory conclusion.
Second, and on a related note, Socrates seems to say different things in different dialogues about the same philosophical issues. To use the Protagoras again, much of Socrates late exchange with Protagoras involves a working definition of the Good that Socrates explicitly equates with the pleasurable.In the Gorgias (a dialogue written chronologically close to the Protagoras), however, Socrates takes a strong issue with this same definition when it comes out in his arguments with Polus and Callicles. The nuances and motivations between these definitions set aside, more explicit examples abound between other dialogues. In the Republic, for instance, Socrates claims that the soul is tripartite, while in the Phaedo he claims it has no parts, but that the soul is simple and whole. The difficulties in constructing a clear view of Platos opinions on these cannot easily be dismissed, and at the very least confounds the position that he used the dialogues as a vehicle for simply asserting his philosophical ideas as the proto-
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essay view states. The Seventh Letter If the dialogues do not give themselves over to a clear and coherent philosophical system as some might suggest, some clarification of Platos intentions might be found in the only works that bear his voice directly. In particular, the Seventh Letter provides a commentary that reaches over the whole of Platos writings in a way that radically influences our reading of them: One statement at any rate I can make in regard to all who have written or who may write with a claim to knowledge of the subjects to which I devote myselfno matter how they pretend to have acquired it Such writers can in my opinion have no real acquaintance with the subject. I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies.
While some writers contest whether Plato genuinely authored this work, Kenneth Sayre (amongst others) defends the legitimacy of this writing on the grounds that even a forgery shows great familiarity with and fidelity to Platos style and works that show, in his words, whatever motives might have underlain forgery would have ruled out disclosure in the form of gross misrepresentation. At the very least, one cannot escape the fact that a very similar sentiment is expressed in the Phaedrus in Socrates recounting of the Egyptian myth of King Theuth: He would be a very simple person who should suppose that he had left his 'Art' in writings or who should accept such an inheritance in the hope that the written word would give anything intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing could be any more than a reminder to one who already knows the subject.
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This seems to be a rather jarring statement to receive from such a prodigious author. The rejection expressed in the Seventh Letter would perhaps not be so radical if it were simply a call against writing, but instead it calls into question any linguistic formulation of philosophy, Plato stating that no intelligent person will ever risk putting what he really understands into language. Names, descriptions, mathematical formulations, scientific knowledge (episteme), and all discursive practices are thus all deemed insufficient for the genuine grasp of philosophy, which further undercuts the notion that Plato had something simple or direct to articulate through the dialogues. Rather, only a deeper sense of understanding approximates the sense of true being that is not caught up in linguistic concepts or sense experience. Plato provides a provocative explanation of the experience further in the letter: Acquaintance with it [philosophy] must come rather after frequent conversations with a master about the subject itself and living with it, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining.
Several important ideas contained in this passage guide the rest of this project. The first is that philosophy is not an abstract set of principles or propositions to be discovered and subordinated to, but a feeling generated in the soul of the individual akin to a mental state or visiona profound inner change within the soul of the young philosopher. Sayre expresses this change in a way that suggests a reorientation of the way philosophy is shared: Given the view that philosophic understanding is a kind of intellectual discernment that cannot be adequately expressed in language, the goal of philosophic instruction would be to bring about this state of mind in the student. This relates to the second point: that this state of the mind and soul doesnt come about on its own, but that only through frequent conversations with a master is it able to generate the spark that brings it to illumination. Thus, philosophy is not to be constructed
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immutably and silently, but brought into the world through the awakening of souls who participate in a community of dialogue. The relationship between the philosophical master and student defines how the soul can be brought up to this place of philosophical vigor.
Finally, because philosophy is not a coherent and universal system that one can simply dispassionately enter into, this state of the soul needs to be cultivated through a rigorous immersion in philosophical subjects, a living with it that demands a constant process of reconstruction and correction in order to be self-sustaining. Plato likens the austerity of such a process to a change in the whole order of ones life: As for those, however, who are not genuine converts to philosophyas soon as they see how many subjects there are to study, how much hard work they involve, and how indispensable it is for the project to adopt a well-ordered scheme of living [diata], they decide that the plan is difficult if not impossible for them, and so they really do not prove capable of practicing philosophy. The philosophical life is one which demands an intellectual regimen in order to be sustained, and the dialogues themselves might be read as just such an exercise of the mind for both the interlocutors and the reader. The Health of the Soul An integration of these insights seems to point to a particular conception of the dialogues as a whole; namely, that they show a concern for the health of the soul. I liken the experience described in the Seventh Letter to be something akin to the theory of recollection proposed in the Meno, in that it represents the potential within every soul to recover a higher state of functioning defined by its natural propensities. This sentiment is articulated well in this dialogue when Socrates claims that virtue, like health, has the same ideal for men, women, children and the elderly, and the best state of the soul is analogous to the best state of the body; i.e., there is a
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general norm for the state of the soul which we can appeal to in the pursuit of the virtuous life. Moreover, the health of the soul is something which, like the health of body, is advanced or restored by the knowledge and expertise of a healer, who is able through a sustained relationship to affect and reorient the soul of student/patient towards the Good. The dramatic figure of Socrates, as he is cast across many of the dialogues in his interactions with different interlocutors, would thus be what he refers to in the opening strokes of the Protagoras as a physician of the soul, understanding what kinds of words and logos can affect the souls health.
Finally, I take note of the well-ordered living scheme recommended in the previous passage as a nod to the idea that cultivating ones philosophical health is a matter of creating healthy life habitsthe Greek term diata more often referring to a physical as opposed to an intellectual regimen, usually in a medical context. Philosophy, in its emancipation from strict propositions and writing, would be concerned with the ideas and words which stir and invigorate the souls health. An excellent description of this appears in the Phaedrus, where Socrates and Phaedrus call for the intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows with whom to speak and with whom to be silent the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image. To be engaged with philosophy as Socrates engages his interlocutors is thus an organic, dynamic affair of the soul that responds differently in different situations and is not limited by the propositions and ideas it produces in this engagement. Similarly, the dramatic Socrates (and we might also rightfully include the Plato which stands behind him) does not rest content with the conclusions produced by his conversations, but always exhorts his listeners to continue the pursuit beyond the fragile instability of the theses continually produced and discarded.
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If the previous arguments have sufficed to give a nuanced view of the dialogues, such that their overall concern (as dictated primarily by the Seventh Letter) seems to rest on this conception of philosophy as a care and cultivation of the health of the soul, it remains to be seen what implications the metaphor to medicine has in this context. While it is readily obvious that a vocabulary of health and healing brings up medical imagery, a deeper exploration of what this parallel understanding offers will better illustrate some key concepts and bring attention to the prominence of this analogy in the dialogues.
III. THE MEDICAL ANALOGY OF THE DIALOGUES The Philosopher-Interlocutor/Physician-Patient Relationship
A substantive correlation between Socrates activities in the dialogues and the task of the physician suggests that Socrates himself is subject to or embodies some form of medical ethics, in the most basic sense that he takes as his guiding principle the care of his interlocutor as the physician takes care of the ill. Acting on this principle entails a fundamental sense of trust that Plato himself seems to recognize both for the physician and for himself:
One who advises a sick man, living in a way to injure his health, must first effect a reform in his way of living, must he not? And if the patient consents to such a reform, then he may admonish him on other points? If, however, the patient refuses, in my opinion it would be the act of a real man and a good physician to keep clear of advising such a man This being my firm conviction, whenever anyone asks my advice about any of the most important concerns of his life, such as the acquisition of wealth, or the proper regime for body or soul, then, in case I think that his daily life is fairly well regulated, or that when I give him advice on the matter about which he consults me, he will consent to follow it, under these circumstances I do counsel him with all my heart and do not stop at a mere formal compliance.
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It is the first priority of a physician to know how to engage to the sick individual so as to understand in what capacity help can be afforded. Just as the ill cannot be moved to take prescriptions unless they feel to be in trust with the doctor, so also the interlocutor cannot be successfully engaged unless there is an opening of souls between the interlocutor and the philosopher. A line from Socrates in the Charmides captures this understanding in both contexts: And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soulthat is the first and essential thing. And the cure of the soul, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words. Thus, the philosophers task (and the physicians, for that matter) demands the use of words and, I venture further, the open process of dialogue in order to engage the soul of the interlocutor.
Here, again, Plato makes ample use of the physician as the appropriate model for just such an engagement. Significantly, certain passages in the Laws create a vision of the medical practice which goes far beyond what Jaeger described as Platos reverence for the physician as the representative of a highly specialized and refined department of knowledge. For Plato, medicine entails a certain kind of relationship that indicates both the physician and the patient in a process of healing that promises to be transformative for both parties. Plato demonstrates this in his distinction between slave doctor and the free practitioner in Book IV of Laws:
A physician of this [slave] kind never gives a servant any account of his complaint, nor asks him for any; he gives him some empirical injunction with an air of finished knowledge, in the brusque fashion of a dictator The free practitioner, who, for the most part, attends free men, treats their diseases by going into things thoroughly from the beginning and takes the patient and his family into his confidence. Thus he learns something from the sufferers, and at the same time instructs the invalid to the best of his powers. He does not give his prescriptions until he has won the patients support, and when he has done so, he steadily aims at producing complete restoration to healthy by persuading the sufferer into compliance.
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The contrast highlighted here also bears upon the previous distinction made between a philosophy which produces a profound inner change in the soul of the interlocutor and a philosophy that establishes immutable principles that one must comport to, in the same sense as the slave doctor who makes prescriptions in the brusque fashion of a dictator. To inspire true virtue and a sense of the philosophical life, the philosopher must establish a rapport with his listener such that his words enter into the soul and inspire changes to the interlocutors life. It is only by establishing that living word spoken of in the Phaedrus that the philosopher can promote the sense of the philosophical which is self-sustaining and compelling for the individual. Socrates must convince his listeners to adopt the well-ordered scheme of living that genuine philosophical rigor demands, in the same capacity the physician exhorts his patient into a similar diata or physical regimen.
Moreover, Socrates encourages his interlocutors to the best of his powers. If we take this to mean the best of the interlocutors or patients powers, then we get a picture of the very individualized treatment process that Socrates mobilizes differently in different settings with different listeners. We are not consigned to think that Socrates contradicts himself across the dialogues or that one view of the soul or the virtues is the dominant position for him or Plato. Rather, we can see each occasion for philosophical healing as a moment that allows him to learn something from the sufferer and adapt his methods. Even while he didnt write much on the topic himself, Charles Griswold recognized this theme as well, describing the many dialogues as medicinal to the extent that they vary the treatment with the patient, and, more provocatively, that [t]he medicine is conservatively applied by Plato; philosophy [being] not beneficial for each and every person.
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While Griswold mentions these words only in passing, I think they develop an important point of caution for the medical model of philosophical care. The proper exercise of medicine means that it is employed in the care of the sick, and the entire nature of physician-patient / philosopher-interlocutor relationship depends on the dimensions of the illness itself. As Socrates points out in the Lysias: a body which is in health has no need whatever of the medical art or of any assistance, for it is sufficient in itself. And therefore no one in health is friendly with a physician on account of his health But the sick man is, I imagine, on account of his sickness. More importantly, Socrates goes on to point out that it is for the sake of health that the medical art has received the friendship. Likewise, I take it as a motivating value in the dialogues that Socrates receives the company of his interlocutors and attends to the health of their soul for the sake of the Good. Thus, the entire concept of a philosophical friendship based on the care of anothers soul relies on this orientation towards the Good in the way medicine is oriented towards health. Socrates continues: All such value as this is set not on those things which are procured for the sake of another thing, but on that for the sake of which all such things are procured.
This theme is developed in greater detail in the Gorgias, where Socrates discussion of the differences between real and apparent goods takes shape. He does this by way of comparison between medicine and pastry-baking on the one hand, and justice and rhetoric on the other, the former which always take caresome of the body, the others of the soulin accord with what is best, while the latter only guesses at the pleasant without the best. Simply giving an account of the thing which the physician or the philosopher works toward with the encountered individual (health and the Good, respectively) is insufficient. Their task must be actively
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transformed by this correspondence or accord between practices and values. On a level which speaks closer to the nature of the relationship between the physician and the patient, Book I of the Republic also sheds some light on the selflessness inherent to the healing event, that no physician, insofar as he is a physician, considers his own good in what he prescribes, but the good of the patient,. In his task, the healers concern is not the study or advancement of medical knowledge or philosophy as such (although this may come in fact as a consequence), but always to the subject which he has undertaken to direct; to that he looks, and in everything which he says and does. Socrates uses this example in the Republic to construct a view of the ideal relationship between the rulers and the polis, and despite the troubling paternalistic and eugenic overtones that come out later, I think these passages prefigure in an important way the values and attitudes employed in contemporary biomedical ethics.
The exact dimensions of this philosophical or medical friendship, however, are not defined in reference to some abstract ethical principles but with close attention to the illness or malady at hand. Another analogy to medicine from Socrates in the Laches illustrates this idea: When a person considers about applying a medicine to the eyes, would you say that he is consulting about the medicine or about the eyes? And in a word, when he considers anything for the sake of another thing, he thinks of the end and not of the means? We should be cautious here not to simply delimit philosophy to a pursuit of instrumental value in caring for the soul. The point taken is that the methods of philosophy in and of themselves do not constitute some independent, wholly abstract value, but more so with regard to how they inspire the philosophical life. The modern diagnostic imaging techniques of our times (X-Ray, MRI, CT scans) all certainly take on their own value in the way they have revolutionized and advanced knowledge in many disciplines, but their force would not have been nearly as dramatic if it were
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not for the health of the lives they have improved and the initial call for aid which motivated their discovery.
By this, I only mean to put emphasis on the fact that it is the personal relationship between the physician of the soul and the interlocutor with reference to some characterological or moral malady that determines the tools used in any particular engagement. Although we might be able to construct a kind of generalized medicine for the soul that Socrates develops with his different methods for engaging his listeners, it is for their particular care that these methods take shape at all. And this understanding of how to care for the individual comes about through an understanding of the Good or health that can dictate the specifics of the case. Socrates develops this idea in the Phaedrus when he states that the simple techniques of medicine (knowing how to induce warmth, make a patient vomit, use a particular drug) do not suffice to make one a physician. It is the ability to understand who to apply such a treatment to, why one should do it (through an account of what the treatment affects in the body), and, as Ludwig Edelstein suggests, when the right moment (kairos) has come to act. This concept of knowing when the right kairos to intervene or desist with his interlocutors is an especially important element of the dramatic form as it is displayed in the dialogues, and some suggest it plays a particularly significant role in the movements of the Protagoras, a play bookended by references to the hora or fitting time. The general point is that the physicians task, as well as the philosophers in the dialogue, is to have an understanding of the others soul such that the appropriate and timely intervention may be made. Access to the soul of the interlocutor, which defines in no small part the quality of the relationship able to be built, depends on the open process of dialogue previously mentioned, as well as the techniques that Plato has Socrates employ to generate such a healing dialogue. An exploration of the way this engagement models
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itself on the techniques employed in the physician-patient interaction will further illustrate the force of this medical analogy. The Questioning of the Patient/Interlocutors Soul As any physician would readily admit, the patient interview is one of the most fundamental and indispensable tools for diagnosis, and the ancient Hippocratic writings contemporary to Plato reflected this. For them, the way the sick received the questions and prescriptions from the physician was another crucial dimension in sealing a trust between the two that would result in the patients confidence and compliance: But it is particularly necessary, in my opinion, for one who discusses this [medicine] to discuss things familiar to ordinary folk But if you miss being understood by laymen, and fail to put your hearer in this condition, you will miss reality. For the physician of laymen, or for the philosopher with any interlocutor under her care, adapting the right form of speech allows for words to inspire the condition necessary for self-healing and personal growth. This implies that the patient/interlocutor receive her words in such a way that they can genuinely respond and be indicated as a full participant in the process.
For the care of the soul, this task takes added importance. Because the soul does not have the many brute, physical, macroscopic parts that the body has for simple examination, in order to care for the soul of his interlocutor, Socrates must get them to open and bear it for scrutiny and treatment. Mark Moes provides a helpful explanation of Socrates ability to identify the sicknesses within his interlocutors soul through his engagement with them:
An important theoretical presupposition of the practice of philosophy as Plato
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understands it seems to be that it is possible to diagnose ways in which a persons soul has departed from the norm of health by attending to that persons beliefs and desires In many of the dialogues, Socrates tests his interlocutors responses to questions, suggestions, speeches, myths, and the like, in a way similar to the way physicians test their patients responses to various pokes, prods, and other diagnostic tests.
An important conclusion to note from this understanding of Socrates diagnostic efforts is that they can only be effective when his interlocutors share their true beliefs and attitudes, and thus their true soul. Socrates commitment to getting at the true soul of his interlocutor is demonstrated perhaps most dramatically in the Protagoras when he insists that the sophist drop his elusive character and confront their conversation forthrightly and respond in a way that would make him accountable for his words: Ive got no interest in investigating in this if you like and if thats what you want kind of way; its the real you and me I want to test. The way Socrates indicates both Protagoras and himself reveals his own vulnerability and accountability as much as the sophists, and reiterates the previous passage from the Laws that points out the potential for transformation by both physician and interlocutor.
Many parts of this dialogue, in fact, are motivated by this concern for understanding the real Protagoras. The very first lines exchanged between Socrates and the famous sophist make it clear: it is you we have come to see. Later, as their discussion progresses and Socrates makes several pleas for brevity, the breakdown of the dialogue shows a breakdown in Protagoras ability to answer in his own voice rather than in speeches. Protagoras understood the conversation as a performance of words, and not as an opportunity for he and Socrates to meet and examine each others souls: I saw that he was dissatisfied with his own performance in the answers he had given, and would not of his own free will continue in the role of answerer, and it seemed to me that it was not my business to remain any longer in the discussions. Without Protagoras
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willingness to submit his soul for open critique and understanding, Socrates has nothing to offer him as a healer concerned for the health of his soul. Again, as the previous passages from the Seventh Letter and the Laws have noted, it is the physicians practical wisdom to know if she can offer any genuine help to her patients, i.e., whether they will open their soul to the process of healing.
This concern for the true soul of the interlocutor is likewise an animating element in the Gorgias. Within the first few pages of the dialogue, Socrates mentions not only an interest what Gorgias art is and what he teaches, but he tells Chaerephon to ask the obvious question: who is he? This concern comes out again later in the dialogue in the heat of his discussion with Polus about the difference between doing and suffering injustice. Socrates holds Polus to the their discussion in the hope that it will test his true beliefs and thus his true character, in a way that again reminds us of the medical backdrop that motivates Socrates care for the soul of his interlocutor: Submit nobly to the argument as you would to a doctor, and say either yes or no to my question.
It is also worth noting that prior to this passage there are many instances where Socrates attempts to redirect his engagement with these different rhetoricians back towards a true dialogue. At 448d-e, Socrates rebukes Polus for using rhetoric rather than answering the question asked of him; at 451d-e, he claims Gorgias is being unclear and giving debatable answers; and at 466a-b, he cuts Polus off from beginning a speech and asks him to stick to a single question. Perhaps most significantly, the dialogue begins with Callicles expectation that Socrates and Chaerephon had come to listen to Gorgias speech, but Socrates is quick to shift this assumption in a way that seems to frame the whole dialogue: What you say is good, Callicles.
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But then, would he [Gorgias] be willing to talk [dialegesthai] with us?
The emphasis on true and excellent political dialogue becomes one of the defining themes of this work, and Socrates interactions with the different interlocutors in this work attempt to model the excellences of dialogue as a true meeting between open souls. His efforts are thwarted (to a greater or lesser extent) in each encounter, and his ability to affect the souls of each of the three interlocutors in their turn seems to be determined to a great extent by the quality of the dialogue they share. Gorgias, the great rhetorician himself, ends up the most amicable of the three, but the final encounter between Callicles and Socrates bears a caustic bitterness that leaves the two at odds through the very end of the dialogue. The significant aspect of their encounter is Socrates failure to build the open philosophical friendship that allows for the possibility of change in either party. Despite Socrates claims to friendship early on in their discussion, his inability to get Callicles to commit to a single, coherent view leads to a nearbreakdown in the dialogue in a way very similar to that in the Protagoras:
Oh! Oh! Callicles, how all-cunning you are at one time claiming that things are this way, and at another time that the same things are otherwise, deceiving me! And yet I did not think at the beginning that I was to be deceived by you voluntarily, since you were my friend. But now I have been played false, and it looks like its necessary for me to make do with what is present and to accept from you this that is given.
Without a clear view of what beliefs are truly at stake for Callicles, Socrates is helpless to create an effective diagnosis or treatment for the deformities in his soul. Socrates enterprise rested on the assumption of friendship and forthrightness between them, and when this was manifestly destroyed by the harsh rebukes and irascible temperament Callicles demonstrated, the dialogue stopped being a potentially healing, transformative relationship. As if to salvage the matter,
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Socrates turns his arguments towards the rest of his listeners who have variously shown promise for improvement, while admitting his failure to Callicles directly: Truly, Callicles, you compelled me to engage in popular speaking, by not being willing to answer. Although Callicles is not given a chance to respond to the last speech Socrates offers, his final answer makes it clear that he is unwilling to see beyond a politics of gratification. In this final question to Callicles, however, Socrates implicitly proves his commitment to working for the sake of the Good. Explicitly aligning his view with the medical metaphor argued in this paper, he aspires to be the type of politician who would not simply gratify the polis, but [fight] with the Athenians so that they will be as good as possible, as a doctor would do.
IV. CONCLUSION In this paper, I have tried to stress the importance of Platos dialogical form, as well as certain key passages in the Seventh Letter which point to a different conception of philosophy than that provided by the proto-essay view. Plato seems to conceive of philosophy in such a way that it even defies the very form in which we carry his tradition, that is, in writing. Philosophy is to be taken as a profound personal change affected by rigorous immersion in the philosophical life and the guidance of a master. To the extent that it demands a well-ordered scheme of living, it seems to point to a certain health of the soul and the many regimens and restorative measures necessary for its maintenance. Given the esoteric quality and considerable differences between the views espoused across the many dialogues, it was my contention that Platos intentions in the dialogues be recast as a concern and care for the health of the soul.
Through this lens, the dramatic Socrates engagement with his interlocutors could be modeled after the physician-patient relationship. Such a relationship demands a basic sense of
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trust and fidelity, an openness and vulnerability to be changed by the pressures of dialogue and healing, and an orientation towards the Good which recognizes the individual in their concrete situation and problems. I have used the Protagoras and the Gorgias to demonstrate the difficulties and obstacles endemic to creating the model healing relationship advocated by the medical metaphor. The breakdowns in these dialogues occur precisely because Socrates interlocutors close themselves off from the open process of dialogue that would allow him to examine their soul and affect a treatment. In spite of this, Socrates commitment to the healing task to take in his interlocutors as a physician of the soul and struggle with them for their welfare still provides a novel and illuminating reading of the dialogues, and could serve as an invigorating reorientation for other philosophical traditions.
Bibliography On Ancient Medicine. Hippocrates, Volume 1. Translated by W. Jones. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1956. Brumbaugh, Robert. Digressions and Dialogue: The Seventh Letter and Platos Literary Form Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pg. 84-92. Print. Edelstein, Ludwig. Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein. Ed. O. Temkin Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Pg. 109 Griswold, Charles. Self-Knowledge in Platos Phaedrus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Pg 221 Jeager, Werner. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture.Vol. III. Translated by G. Highet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1967. Pg. 3 King, Lester S. Platos Concepts of Medicine.(Journal of the History of Medicine. January (1954): 38-48 Long, Christopher. Lecture on Platos Protagoras. The Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2009, PHIL553: Ancient Philosophy Seminar
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Moes, Mark. Platos Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2000 Plato. Alcibiades 2. Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 8. Translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1955. -------. Charmides. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition. -------. Laches. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition -------. Laws. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by A.E. Taylor. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition -------. Letter VII. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by L.A. Post. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition. ------. Lysias. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by J. Wright. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition -------. Meno. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition -------. Phaedo. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition. -------. Phaedrus. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by R. Hackforth. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition. -------. Protagoras. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition
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-------. Republic. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by Paul Shorey. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition. -------. Gorgias. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998 -------. Protagoras and Meno. Translated by Adam Beresfprd. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 331c; my emphasis Sayre, Kenneth M. A Maieutic View of Five Late Dialogues. Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Ed. James Klagge and Nicholas Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pg. 221-243 Sayre, Kenneth M. "Plato's Writings in Light of the Seventh Letter." Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pg. 93-109. Print.
Plato. Alcibiades 2. Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 8. Translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1955. 146e; my emphasis Jeager, Werner. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture.Vol. III. Translated by G. Highet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1967. Pg. 3 Sayre, Kenneth M. A Maieutic View of Five Late Dialogues. Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Ed. James Klagge and Nicholas Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pg. 221-243 Cf. Plato. Protagoras. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. 361c Cf. Ibid., 358b Cf. Plato. Gorgias. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 475a; 492a ff Cf. Plato. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. 435d-444a Cf. Plato. Phaedo. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. 78b-84b Plato. Letter VII. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Translated by L.A. Post. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. 1963. Electronic Edition. 341c-d; My emphasis Note: all citations from the dialogues not listing a volume or book should be assumed to come from this source. Cf. Brumbaugh, Robert. Digressions and Dialogue: The Seventh Letter and Platos Literary Form Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pg. 84-92. Print. Sayre, Kenneth M. "Plato's Writings in Light of the Seventh Letter." Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Ed. Charles L. Griswold. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pg. 93-109. Print. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by R. Hackforth. 275c-d; my emphasis Plato. Letter VII. Translated by L.A. Post. 343a Ibid.,341d Translated by L.A. Post with minor alterations to the italicized words by Mark Moes. [Moes translation found in Platos Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul (New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2000. Pg. 45-46), to which I am indebted for much of the inspiration for this paper. Sayre, Kenneth M. "Plato's Writings in Light of the Seventh Letter." Pg. 103 Plato. Letter VII. Translated by L.A. Post. 340d-e; my emphasis Plato. Meno. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. 72d-e Plato. Protagoras. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. 313e Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by R. Hackforth. 276a-b; my emphasis Plato. Letter VII. Translated by L.A. Post. 330d-331d Plato. Charmides. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. 157a See Gorgias, 450a: medicine too, as it seems, is about speeches Plato. Laws. Translated by A.E. Taylor. 720b-d; my emphasis
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Griswold, Charles. Self-Knowledge in Platos Phaedrus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Pg 221 Plato. Lysias. Translated by J. Wright. 217a Ibid., 219a; my emphasis Ibid., 219a Plato. Gorgias. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. 464c; my emphasis Ibid. 465a Plato. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. 342d Ibid. 342e-343a See Lester S. Kings article Platos Concepts of Medicine.( Journal of the History of Medicine. January (1954): 38-48) for an overview and discussion of the radical paternalism and eugenics arguments developed in the Republic Interestingly, shortly before these passages about the physicians overriding concern for the patient, he differentiates the physician from the money-maker (341c), claiming the former cannot have fee-earning as a necessary component of his art. Such selflessness that was ostensibly obvious in Platos time could provide a sharp corrective to our own. Plato. Laches. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. 185c-d Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by R. Hackforth. 268a-c Edelstein, Ludwig. Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein. Ed. O. Temkin Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Pg. 109 I give full credit to Christopher Long for developing and sharing these ideas in a class-based discussion of this work (Long, Christopher. Lecture on Platos Protagoras. The Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2009, PHIL553: Ancient Philosophy Seminar) On Ancient Medicine. Hippocrates, Volume 1. Translated by W. Jones. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1956. Pg. 2; my emphasis Moes, Mark. Platos Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2000 Plato. Protagoras and Meno. Translated by Adam Beresfprd. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 331c; my emphasis Plato, Protagoras. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. 316b Ibid., 335a-b; my emphasis Plato. Gorgias. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. 447b-d Ibid., 475d-e Ibid., 447b-c Ibid., 487c-e Ibid., 499b-c Ibid., 519d Ibid., 521a; my emphasis
PAGEXXX
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An ensemble of Inter-Galactic Techno-Tribal Saltimbanques

Nauman Humayun
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Whereas Ever After, an exhibition currently up at Jack Shainman gallery, finds Nick Caves more minimal, mystical side of the creative endeavor, the artist engages in a more effulgent and imaginary realm in his concurrent show at Mary Boone gallery, entitled For Now, (in collaboration with Jack Shainman gallery), where he reveals himself as a veteran voodoomixologist, pulling together a rich variety of media, including mannequins, found objects, fabric, animal toys, buttons, beads, and brewing a splendid psychedelic cocktail of swarming colorful alien beings that are visually inebriating to the eye.Whereas Ever After, concurrently up at Jack Shainman gallery, finds Nick Caves more minimal, mystical side of the creative endeavor, the artist, for now, indulges in a more effulgent imaginary realm in For Now, at Mary Boone gallery, where he reveals himself as a veteran voodoo-mixologist, pulling together a rich variety of media, found objects, upholstery, fabric, sweaters, animal toys, buttons and beads, and brewing a splendid psychedelic cocktail of colorful alien beings that are visually inebriating to the eye.
Who or what are these creatures? I say creatures because at first glance they appear very organic, jello and funky, like something out of Parliamant-Funkadelic; they are inter-dimensional flavored beings, I tell myself, as I amusingly try to comprehend other ontological scenarios for these oversized, popsicle-shaped alien acrobatics, or very likely, some configuration of their soulful fruity hard-ons. Then, I remind myself, they are meant to be Soundsuits, as intended by the artist; suits that express and encompass the realm of sound in one form or another, and link its elemental properties to the body, the being, the presence, the spectacle, and ultimately, to the invigorating theatricality of a Techno-Tribal carnival. The Soundsuits may also function as
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noise-proof encasings: talismanic defense encapsulations camouflaging the creatures (the alien) body, race, gender, class, and embellishing a shield around the body, ensuring a protective barrier to conceal inner fragility and repel cultural typecasts and labels.
Cave proclaims his congregation of wacky personalities as a psychedelic, functified freak show that is an accumulation of the decades from the perspective of voodoo woo-loo. Voodoo magic and Shamanic ritual conjuration a concocted exposition of tribal-visual incantation: these are themes central to the show, and in a strong way draw us back to our ancient past, nearer to some sort of an imaginary re-actualization of the primitive, an archaic revival, where ritual and magic played an important part in Cromagnon ceremonial festivities. The work of the artist welcomes a return to the ancient notion and practice of magic, ritual and spirit, and especially of the need for re-linking and re-integrating some aspect of it in contemporary technotronic life.
Caves performers are not demure by any means, but radiate the rococo, the ornate, and are unabashedly resplendent and unrestrained; one hardly misses the ancient megalithic connection here as well, with regard to the elongated shape and arrangement of the figures (think of the Stonehenge, the Callanish Stones, the statues on Easter Island). However, the artist reaestheticizes his own version of the ancient tribalesque relic through a full palette of color, sound and radiance a spectralized, organismic libidinal splendor; a turbo-charged visual cacophony of psychedelic-relic glossolalia: These chromatic tribalesque relics are engaged on stage in a ritualistic, linguistic-symphony of sense and non-sense, voodoo chants and other supernatural
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utterances through an elaborate visual display of color, form and pattern. While scanning the stage where these suits are assembled, I am funnily reminded of Terence McKennas description of the Self-Transforming Machine Elves rumored by the legendary psychedelic explorer as alien inter-dimensional beings that appear in the psychonauts inner perceptual field during hyperreal DMT flashes of otherworldly proportions. These elves, or let us call them a band of nomadic peregrinate acrobats, are fond of random encampments, planting their tents pretty much anywhere in the stretch of a vast surreal dreamscape, and from time to time as a gesture of compassion, love and joviality, putting on a carnivalesque display of florid bright colors, song and dance. This is the artists affirmation, realization and celebration of a modern Dionysian utopia.
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Photographs by Nauman Humayun For Now is up at Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24 Street, and will continue through 22 October 2011. For further information, contact www.maryboonegallery.com
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The Soft-Boiled Egg

Katrina Voss
All at once, there was the splattering sound of the gravel. I'd been waiting for it. I stayed in the gazebo but I stopped reading. The print got smaller, too small to read. Too distant. I no longer felt the pages or smelled the grass or heard the rocking of my chair. I closed my eyes and listened. I wanted it to begin at that moment so I would always remember it. So I would remember when it started and what started it: The opening and closing of a car door and someone treading across the gravel. My mother opening the front door to greet him. Her voice. The man's voice. I went inside through the back door and passed the kitchen where Valentina was preparing the silver coffee set. She turned and half smiled at me, her hands on the apron of her uniform and her chin up. The light from the kitchen lit up her white blond hair. Only her breast moved as though her breath might be quick. I moved close enough for her to take my hand. "They're going in the library. Go on. Get a look at him." I crossed the hall and stood by the library door. My mother and the man sat opposite each other. She wore a white cotton dress. She smiled and pressed her palms together. Her hair was pulled back and her face moved as she spoke, her cheeks pinkish and stretching into smiles. I liked her terribly at that moment. My father sat at my mother's left. He smoked his pipe and nodded to my mother's words.
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About the man's drive and the heat. About the pollen in the air. About when lunch would be served. The man wore a yellow suit and a held a Panama hat on one knee. I was not struck, as I had imagined, with the first sight of him. The thought, knowing, this one. Rather I thought of cartoon cats in yellow suits and started to laugh. They heard and they all turned to look at me. "Eve," my mother said. "This is Mr. Lee." Mr. Lee stood and put out his left hand. I put my right hand into it and he accepted it, fingers first. His palm, warm and damp with fresh sweat, curled around it. With the other hand, he pushed away some of the black curls around his face. A plain, handsome face. "How do you do?" he said. Then to my mother, "She's even prettier than in the picture you sent." He extended his arm to his left, offering me a place to sit on the sofa next to him. I sat and pulled my skirt over my knees. He was a big, muscular man and, as he sat, the sofa caved in, causing me to slide against him. "Oh, excuse me," I said. Valentina came in with the coffee and lemon biscuits. She served us and never looked at me. She only looked at him, but carefully as she might look at any guest. She put out the cream and sugar and left. Mr. Lee bit into a biscuit. "Umm," he said to my mother. She smiled and took one herself. "Valentina made them. She's been with us since Eve was three years old. A jewel. A second mother to my dear Eve. Why, sometimes I get jealous." She laughed and adjusted a pin in her hair. My father blew smoke in the air and stared into his coffee. My mother stirred her coffee and said to my father, "Dear, why don't you have a biscuit?
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You haven't eaten anything all morning." My father either grunted or cleared his throat. "May I have another, ma'am?" asked Mr. Lee. "Oh, please. As many as you like. This is no time for watching calories. We want you to have your strength for this big day." She hunched her shoulders and winked at him. He took another lemon biscuit. The cushion was slowly sinking. My hip touched his thigh, as hard as frozen meat. I could hear the biscuit in his mouth. I looked at his head, the way the temples pulsed. Beads of sweat crept out of his hairline and hovered around his forehead. His head had a shelf-like projection so the sweat stayed like glass marbles. My mother had stopped talking. He and my father were assessing each other as men do. "Well, you seem like a charming young man," said my mother. He and my father looked at her. "And handsome too," she added. "Mr. Lee, I must say, you have a most attractive head of hair. Look at his hair, Eve." I looked at it. "Eve's hair color is so ho hum. I mean, what color is this?" She leaned forward and took a clump of my hair in her palm. Mr. Lee leaned in to look, to be polite. "And it has always been so terribly limp," she continued and dropped the hair. "Valentina and I used to try and try to put some curl in it. God forbid, can you imagine if she had a child with someone who had hair like hers? I must admit, Mr. Lee, I liked you initially for your hair." She giggled. "Really, darling," said my father. "There are more important factors than limp hair. He's a smart, healthy young man. That's why we've...."
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"Let's not quarrel. This is our daughter's big day." She shrugged and said to Mr. Lee, "At least we agreed. It's hard enough for us to arrive at the same decision. Why harp about which factors we each found most important?" My sundress was damp on my back. Mr. Lee took up most of the sofa and I felt myself sinking into it and into him. I stood and opened the French doors to let the air in. I stood there breathing, letting the fabric peel itself off my skin. I heard Mr. Lee shift behind me. "That's better," he sighed. I looked back at him. He had taken off his coat. He was eating another lemon biscuit. I kept my back to them. The smell of lemon was thickening. The air moved my dress around my calves. My mother was talking again, but I did not hear it. Only the voice as if it were too far away to be words. Ahead, the gazebo. The chair where I had left my book, the pages switching about as the occasional gust shot through. There were no other houses for miles. Only scattered trees, lakes, and, distantly, the highway. From the porch on the other end of the house, the water was barely visible. But from the garden, the land seemed endless in all directions. "I'm sorry you had to come on a Sunday," my mother was saying. "But today is the day. Oh, it's going to be lovely! My little girl! She's all grown up." I looked back at my mother. The barrette pulling her hair back, flattening it over the curve of her skull. I looked out the door again towards the highway. "Valentina will serve lunch soon," my mother said. "Very well," my father said and made the throat noise again. I felt Mr. Lee come up behind me, the expanse of him like an invisible weight. "What's
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for lunch, anyway?" I heard him ask. "Soft-boiled eggs," said my mother. Soft-boiled eggs again. My mother believed eggs were the perfect food. The source of life. Protein. DNA. Where the beginning of life resides. All my life, we had eaten three eggs a week. I had always feared the white, sticky slime, the slippery yolk, the smell of eggs, the idea of eggs: not plant, not quite animal. Somehow, a soft-boiled egg was not as scary as an uncooked egg. Soft-boiled eggs are only half cooked. The eggness is still there. The yolk stays wet and fluid. But the white hardens and sticks to the shell. The mysterious amusement of eating an egg from an eggcup: the egg stays in place. Breaking the top and seeing into it like a cavern of warm white and yellow. The depth. The strong primal smell. I turned around. Mr. Lee was wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Valentina came in the library to clear the coffee. "Valentina, is lunch almost ready?" my mother asked. She took Valentina aside and whispered, "And the dining room? Don't forget the fresh flowers. And Eve's nails. After all, this is a day to celebrate." Valentina nodded and started to leave. "When are the guests arriving?" my mother said to her back. "Not until 2:00," said Valentina. My mother looked at my father, "Well, of course," she said. "It is Sunday." Valentina and I smiled at each other. Her eyes glazed and her lips tightened. She swiftly left with the tray. At noon Valentina served us lunch. My father at the head of the table. My mother to his left. Mr. Lee at the other end of the table in front of the window. The sweat had disappeared and his hair was smoother. The light filtered through the half opened curtains and fell across the stark
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linen tablecloth in changing, circular designs. The fresh flowers. A small basket of white bread. A salad of sun dried tomatoes, endive lettuce, and olives. Soft-boiled eggs served in white china eggcups, each rim shaped like a curling flower, its petals beginning to open and separate. I had always admired the way my mother cut the shell in one sharp smooth line around the upper quarter of the egg. Somehow it never seemed to burn her fingers. She turned the knife around it and lifted off the top in one swift incision. I looked down at my imperfect egg. My shattered egg. The yellow and pulpy white that sticks to the cut off lid. After lunch I bathed and dressed upstairs. Valentina did my hair, my nails, and helped me with my dress. "Don't be nervous," she said. "The worst thing you can do is tense up. Just relax and soon it will be over with." I saw her behind me in the mirror, her sweet face and her mouth tightening with the advent of tears. I turned and put my arms around her. "Oh, Valentina! Why do things have to change?" The guests arrived at 2:00. Valentina had made champagne cocktails. When I came downstairs my parents were entertaining the guests in the parlor. My mother wore her yellow dress with the petal embroidery. My father had a flower in his lapel. In one hand his glass of champagne was beginning to tilt. His lips were wet and he was smiling more. He always came alive with guests to whom he could show something off. They were passing around the file, smiling over it and slowly sipping champagne. It was an outstanding genetic profile, so complimentary to mine. "This genetic material," my father had told me, "provides a perfect infusion into our genetic line. You'll thank me for this someday." My stomach ached, the softboiled egg in it like a weight. I remembered doctors. The touching and looking. They had said it must be today.
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My mother was at my father's ear saying, "Now don't be cocky, dear." I looked at him with his glass in the air. $5,000. A small price to pay for the future. And then Mr. Lee would get into his car, and with the second crack of the gravel, be gone from our lives forever. They insisted we not drink champagne. I knew when it was time. Mr. Lee and I climbed the steps to my bedroom. The window was closed but the open curtain let the sunlight fall through it and cover the sheets with glistening white points of light. The sound of the guests, their clapping, their voices, faded. I heard it like a low murmur, like a memory of sound. My hands were useless. Cold. He closed the door. His hands were on my waist, my back. The dress fell like a piece of dead skin. His hands moved to my waist. My stomach. The free skin damp and bristling. His skin like a hide. He pressed me onto the bed and his shadow moved over me, covering the window and the afternoon sunlight. My legs collapsed. A cold pain spiraled from my stomach to my throat. My fingers curled like petals against the sheet. The different parts of him were like instruments, each with its purpose. He never kissed me but I could feel his breath on my neck and cheek.
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Party
Peter Matyskiela
We get to the party around 10:30 and its on the corner of this really shady street that I cant remember the name of I just know that its about 6 blocks and Im feeling kind of pissed that Mike made us walk out this far for such a shitty house. Theres a kid sitting on the front stoop in a grey hooded sweatshirt with this self assured look on his face and he says Five dollars bro, real calm like, and I hand him the money. I look around the party and I cant see anyone I know and Mike is already out dancing with some girl and Im just standing here with plastic cup in hand and I start to feel anxious. I find the nearest keg and wait for what seems like 10 minutes till I can fill my cup and then I go back to look for Mike.
There are all these people around, laughing and talking, and when I walk by them they all sort of glance up at me and shift out of the way like Im interrupting them. I hear my name called and I look around and I see Glenn over by the window with beads around his neck and sunglasses pushed halfway down his nose. Glenn is a kid I knew from high school, but since we didnt really know anyone when we got to college, we ended up hanging out a lot more, but Im not really sure if I would call us friends. I make my way through the crowd and hes with this girl who keeps looking back and forth from me to him, smiling. This is Melissa, he tells me.
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Hi, Melissa, I say. Melissa has coke, says Glenn. He smiles. Wanna do a couple lines? she asks with an innocent schoolgirl look. Sure, I say.
We make our way to an upstairs bedroom and close the door and Melissa cuts three lines out on a mirror and we each do one. I gag a little from the drip and Glenn stretches and says, Hey man did you hear about George?
George who?
You know, George. He had real dark hair; I think he was in our physics class? Shit, what was his last name? I look at him and shrug. Well anyway he died man. Isnt that fucked up? Cancer or something. Makes you think.
I wonder who George is and then Melissa offers us more lines. Glenn says no he has to go meet some people and leaves, so Melissa says, More for us, and splits his coke into two lines.
After that were both pretty high and Melissa starts asking me all these questions about what I like to do and what my plans are for the future. I give vague answers, but it doesnt really matter. It seems like every time I try to answer she interrupts with a new question. She sits closer
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to me and starts to massage my shoulders, but her eyes look bloodshot and I feel weird so I say, Thanks for the coke, and It was nice meeting you, and I head back downstairs to the main floor. I look around for Mike and I dont see him so I decide to check for him in the basement.
The door to the basement is in the kitchen, and in the kitchen theyre selling shots for a dollar. As Im weaving my way through people to the basement door, some random guy grabs me and says, We should totally do some shots. Im still very high from the coke and not sure what to say, so we each give out two dollars and do two shots of vodka . Alright bro, he says and he slaps me hard on the back. I smile and head into the basement.
Its dark and the music is blaring and the only light is from a strobe above the DJ and some black lights hanging from the ceiling. Down in the basement I see a few more people that I know, all of them from high school, but I dont feel any less relaxed and start looking around for Mike before I get noticed. I dont see him, but this girl Amy sees me. She was thin in high school and I notice she is looking even thinner now, almost sickly. She walks up smiling with a camera in her hand and puts her arm around me and takes a picture of us. How you been love?
Alright, you?
Im great, just great. Hey, oh my God, did you hear about George? He ODd. I just look at her and she lights up a joint and offers it to me. We smoke that for awhile and she talks about how bad she feels for Georges family. As were smoking, I can hear this really loud shriek and I
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look up and see a girl sitting on the floor by the stairs and shes crying her eyes out. No one seems to know why or, at least, if they do, they dont act like it. She keeps looking up at everyone, but people just look away and try to distance themselves from her. She sees me staring and she gives me this look like Im the one responsible for her crying, as if I should do something about it. I wonder if I know her from somewhere, but Im pretty sure I dont. I take a long hard hit as Im looking at her and, as I blow the smoke out, she buries her head in her hands again. Amy takes one more hit and then flicks the roach to the floor. Then she walks away to talk to someone else she knows and I look around I still dont see Mike.
I run into more people I know and I ask them if theyve seen Mike; they havent maybe hes in the back by the keg. One girl asks if Ill dance with her if she buys me a jell-o shot. Shes a little bit shorter than me and has dirty blonde hair and a pretty cute face, so I say yes. A rap song is playing, but its so loud and distorted I cant tell what it is or who its by. The girl is dancing pretty close to me and were both sweating in the middle of a crowd of people. The lights keep flashing and I wonder if the joint was laced. The room feels like its tilting and the girl asks me if I heard about Georges car crash. I tell her I dont know who George is and Im sweating so much and I feel like yelling. The room is spinning and there are all these people around me dancing and howling like animals. Its so loud that I can feel the vibrations from the music blasting through my skin and reverberating in my body. Everyones voices are mixed and I can feel the blood pumping through my veins. I hear someone calling me. Looking around, I find no one. I hear the voice call out again, George! it says. What? I stop dancing. Why did I think they were calling me? My name isnt George, is it? I feel sick and push the girl away; I tell her
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sorry, but I have to go. No no, of course not. That isnt my name. Whose name is it? I see Glenn and tell him that if he sees Mike he should tell him I left early. He tells me I dont look so good and I leave the party.
As Im walking back I see a homeless man sitting on the street next to a pile of rags and I just know he is going to beg for money. My head still throbs with the beat of the party and I just cannot deal with that right now. I cross the street to get away from him and a kid on a bike flies by me. Laughing, he throws a rock at the homeless man. His head tilts forward slightly, but he remains inert - as if he didnt even know what had happened. I wonder if he is still alive and how long he had been there. I shudder, zip up my jacket and hurry down the road.
When I get back the house Mike is sitting on the couch and watching TV. Wow youre back early, I say.
Yeah I just wasnt feeling it. That party was too crowded. Yeah. Hey did you hear about George? Who? George. A confused look is Mikes only response, He had dark hair? Never heard of him. Oh, I say. You dont look too good, Mike says. I shrug, head upstairs and lay on my bed - staring at the ceiling.
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Shadows Out Of Time and Space: The European AvantGarde and the Future of the Blues
Shuja Haider
Part 1 1. In his 1975 text Blues and the Poetic Spirit, Paul Garon attempts an analysis of AfricanAmerican blues music using a Surrealist methodology, one that properly incorporates the psychoanalytic theory integral to that movement, and does not assume bourgeois definitions of notions like politics or, indeed, "poetry." For Garon, it is essential to reconceive poetry in a manner informed by the practice of Surrealism, and developed most of all in the writing of Andre Breton. Garon says in his introduction, Hopefully the concept of poetry which, as an activity of mind, has been totally ignored by the same criticsso preoccupied have they been with outmoded theories of meter, rhyme, and the retrograde doltish sniveling of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and their ilkhopefully everything having to do with poetry, in the most vital and active sense as the revolt of the spirit, will be clarified in the discussions that follow. (Garon 6) Garon finds surrealism in the blues, conceiving of surrealism as a discursive method rather than an historical period. His materialist approach is indebted to an idea Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky expressed in their Manifesto Toward a Revolutionary Art,
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which insisted that we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity takes place; nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws which govern intellectual creation (What Is Surrealism? 243). As Breton himself acknowledged elsewhere, the things most surrealists had in common were a petty-bourgeois background and an inclination toward plastic arts and literature (WIS 153). Garons aim is to start out under different intellectual conditions and locate what we might call a surrealist impulse, to invert a phrase coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1966 essay R&B and the Changing Samethe blues impulse (Baraka 180). This is not a tidy equivalence, but in considering either respective practice as impulse rather than category, the walls of dominant ideological categories like nation, class, genre, and so on weaken and crumble. Ironically, it is this imperative that Garon loses sight of, and it becomes the glaring aporia in his study. While Garon is undeniably fluent with the plurality of Surrealist thought, with its incorporation of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other component parts, his conception of the blues falls victim to the same reification and superficiality he decries in the introduction. Framing the statement-of-purpose he begins with is a desperate lament for dearly departed blues. Occasional glimmers of hope that the trend of blues revivalism will bring the insight and revolutionary character of the form back to American culture confirm the point: the blues once was, and is no more (Garon vii). Any rigor in the remainder of the text is compromised with expressions of Garons distaste for any African-American music besides blues and jazz, at one point condemning Junior Wells and Buddy Guy for sounding too much like James Brown, even sniping at the supposed poetic deficit in the Godfathers words (Garon 29). The short-sighted pessimism of Garons treatment of black music is unfortunate in
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light of the complexity and precision of his analysis of the blues. However, Garon refuses to complement his notion of a surrealist impulse with the blues impulse identified by Baraka, resulting in infidelity to his own dialectical, historical commitment. To break open the boundaries erected by Garon requires a willingness to look in the wrong places, taking to heart Franklin Rosemonts identification of an accursed tradition in popular culture, illuminated by surrealism, that is emblazoned by the colors of the future (Garon 224-5). Music, mostly ignored by the Surrealist movement, provides a necessary point of departure for futures of the European avant-garde's spirit of revolt. Paul Garons work can help point the way, albeit in between the lines. 2. Looking in the wrong placesthe basis of a form like collageis no doubt a crucial avantgardist habit. It also is what was happening when Andre Breton, who boasted he never went to concerts, nonetheless made it a point to attend jazz performances during his exile in New York, and when European avant-gardists collected and danced to jazz records (WIS 348).# It was also a willingness to look in unexpected directions that led Andre Breton to write, in 1946, a careful examination of music, taking positions contrary to the disdain for music that had been second nature for many surrealists. In that essay, Silence is Golden, Breton acknowledges a general antagonism that presents itself for writers between music and language (WIS 349). Admitting that his ability to speak on the subject is marred by his lack of musical knowledge, he nonetheless suggests that, like all the antimonies presented by modern thought, this antagonism should not be fruitlessly deplored but, on the contrary, should be interpreted as an indication of the necessity for a recasting of certain principles of the two arts (350). He compares this possibility to one he had already seen in the plastic arts:
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The painter will fail in his human mission if he continues to widen the gulf separating representation and perception instead of working towards their reconciliation, their synthesis. In the same way, on the auditive plane, I believe that music and poetry have everything to lose by not recognizing a common origin and a common end in song, by letting the mouth of Orpheus get farther every day from the lyre of Thrace. (351) Ironically, as the musical avant-garde of the time largely eschewed narrative both textual and melodic, Breton called for a return to the tradition of song. In the end, though, parallels between music and painting or music and literature cannot hold too securely, as Garon inadvertently demonstrates in his reluctance to engage with music proper, focusing solely on blues lyrics instead. From the outset, he writes in his introduction, we must emphasize our irritation at the lack of understanding we have of the specific emotional meaning of music (Garon 9). Music does, in a sense, seem to fall outside of Bretons definition of surrealism: to expressverbally, by means of the written word, or in any other mannerthe actual functioning of thought (Breton Manifestoes 26). Can music correspond to a typology of art limited to representation and perception? It is equally arguable that music causes certain functioning of thought rather than expresses itthough it would be the greatest mistake to argue it is merely one or the other. Breton and Garons focus on the fusion of words and music dodges the issue of how music as such affects the mind. Though Garon quotes psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut as claiming that in speech tone communicates more than words (which are related to psychoanalytic secondary processes), he does not engage with how this presents
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itself in the musical form of the blues, focusing instead on a model of identificationa relationship between listener and performer based on a linguistic model of representation (Garon 13;16). There is certainly a representative aspect of music. Taken to its extreme it would leave a Looney Tunes model of sound/image correspondence (Tchaikovskys Romeo and Juliet means love, Wagners Flight of the Valkyries means fear, descending augmented fifths are equivalent to embarrassment, brass bands playing major chords embody triumph, etc.). This is hardly a satisfactory understanding of the form. Perhaps music would be better thought of as a singular variation of the profane illumination Walter Benjamin credits surrealism with exposing, the experience of which brings new thoughts, emotions, and instincts to the surface of the psycheas productive rather than merely representative (Benjamin 209). 3. Garons avoidance of the aural is one reason he cannot surmount the limitations inherent to a generic definition of the blues. He rebukes the constant resorting to vague criteria like funky and soul, as evidence that we are still incapable of describing, in secondary process terms (words), the nature of our primary process response to the blues (Garon 13). This is vital to his dismissal of later R&B and soul music, the most explicit symptom of his linguistic bias. He goes as far as to equate the very concept of soul, not to mention the genre, with bourgeois values and in opposition to the nastiness of the blues (as described by a middle-class AfricanAmerican informant in an anthropological study) (Garon 27; 32). Garons strange conclusions become mere presumption, because he refuses to ask a necessary question. What is soul? No less authority than George Clinton, conceptualizer of the avant-gardist musical organization Parliament-Funkadelic, explored this line of inquiry five years before the
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publication of Garons book, in a song that takes the form of a classic call-and-response blues chant. In response to the call what is soul, Clintons various answers include: Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes. Soul is the ring around your bathtub. Soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper. Soul is rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps. Soul is chitlins foo yung. Soul is you. He goes on to make the claim that all that is good is nasty (Mommy, Whats a Funkadelic?). Without even examining the surreality of Clintons poetry, it becomes clear that to at least one African-American soul and funk musician indebted to the blues (celebrated on the same album, Funkadelics eponymous debut, in Good Old Music and Music for My Mother), soul signifies the very material of black proletarian life, often by its proud, incongruous presence within bourgeois society. The concept later developed by Clinton of funkentelechy, the expressive materialization of a resistant unconscious element immanent to those conditions, is not far from psychic autonomism, without that notions problematic Cartesianism (Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome). One need not even go as far as the deliberately surrealistic disposition of George Clinton to release the blues impulse; casually dismissed in Poetic Spirit, James Brown used the blues form as the foundation of his most revolutionary single, Papas Got a Brand New Bag, and was steadfast in his refusal to whitewash the Black vernacular with which he spoke, sung, and otherwise vocally produced noise.
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The example of Brand New Bag, as well as Funkadelic, brings to light another particularly counterintuitive oversight in Garons analysis. It is a safe assumumption that most if not all of the blues compositions that Garon discusses were, like the aforementioned pop records, commercially released in the commodity form of the seven or twelve-inch vinyl record. This is hardly a small matter; the approach taken by thinkers like Andre Breton and Walter Benjamin led them to understand the emergence of the commodity forms of the novel, the photograph, and film, due to both the nature of their experience and their reproducibility, as significant historical shifts. Mass-produced records are sonic equivalents, and the relationship of recorded blues to the oral tradition of blues is far too complex to be overlooked, subsumed in a naive faith in the integrity of representation. Just as Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst and others made the nature of the presence itself of text (or image) on a page an aspect of surrealist literature, revolutionary musical forms in an age when mechanical reproduction was a given would explore the particularities of the form of their artwork-commodity. 4. A charge consistently made against popular culture, by Adorno and others, is that its form mirrors its industrial means of production; the repetitive structures and formulaic patterns are nothing less than the presence within the artwork of the regimented rhythm of the assembly line. This reductive analysis, made by those who do not listen closely, cannot locate any subversive core within the blues, a genre in which nearly every song has the same poetic and harmonic structure (three lines, three chords), both of which not only repeat, but are made up of a series of repetitions. Paul Garon, however, approaches the issue with far more subtlety: Considering the part played by repetition in our psychic life and above all its manifestations in creative activity, it is likely that one
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determinant of the evolution of [the AAB] verse structureis the psychological tendency toward repetition, whether it relates to mastery of unpleasant undischarged affects, repetition of what is pleasurable in itself, or a more all-encompassing repetition compulsion in the sense in which Freud posited it. (Garon 165) That repetition is present not only within individual instances of the blues form but is also intertextual is certainly due in part to the production of blues by a subaltern community of former slaves. In a context with a dominant cultural norm of progress, repetition of certain elements including repetition itselfstarkly declares cultural difference and autonomy. This, however, is due to the blues basis in oral folk culture rather than its later pop cultural connotation. It is worthwhile to reconsider cultural repetition and formula in a context that does not permit refuge in the same guilt-free proletarian sanctuary. One passage in Louis Aragons surrealist novel Paris Peasant finds the author in the audience of burlesque striptease performance. He celebrates this performanceonly partially ironicallyas the model of the sort of erotic, spontaneously lyrical drama that might profitably be pondered upon by all our aesthetes laboring painfully to produce something avant-garde. Like any art, it possesses its conventions and its audacities, its disciplines and its contrasts, within a pornographic, functional formula (Aragon 108). Though Aragons unreservedly masculine viewpoint complicates the matter, his focus on a sexualized event leads to an unavoidable connotation of repetition: its relation to the body. Garon quotes Austrian Surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen, in a discussion of the rhythms of cubism, making the connection to music explicit.
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Jazz has its roots in the African tom-tom. A tom-tom that I once thought I heard in a lecture-hall where a documentary film on X-rays was being shown. What I confused with the beating of the ageless drum was in actuality the proportionately amplified sound of a greatly magnified human heart. And the beating of the heart-drum is found again in the plastic cadence of the axe blows which liberated the powerful cubes of Negro sculpture that inspired the beating of cubist space. Against a contemporary intellectuality given over to its pretension of being the accountant of the universe, it was the beating of revolt of a new cosmic sense. (qtd. in Garon 214) Paalen is certainly guilty of homogenizing and romanticizing a primitive African continent, but there remains insight in his account. Indeed, if we take seriously psychoanalysiss call to consider what is primitive not in terms of racialized inferiority, but in reference to unalientated libidinal expression, the notion becomes liberated from ideological orientalism and presents itself as a quality present in radical art as suchModern European, traditional West African, contemporary American (Garon 12). Aragon even finds the very spirit of the primitive theatre, in a natural communion between audience and performers at the striptease, in the role of the audience to laugh, shout, dance, and so on (Aragon 109). It is, however, arguably Aragons particular identity that makes this interpretation possibleperhaps the strippers were not quite as thrilled. To identify a self-reflexive, deliberately revolutionary movement that achieves Aragon's natural communion, it may become necessary to travel farther in time and space. Part 2
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5. In a French television documentary on the music of Detroit, Michigan, composer and performer Derrick May directs the camera to a place he considers metonymic of Detroit as a whole: the former Michigan Theater. He describes its history: Techno city, folksat its best. Welcome home. Inside this building was a theater. And they tore out the theater, and they made a carpark. But they kept the actual theater. So youre parking your car in a theater. Its fucking scary. Look at it, man. Cant you feel it? Cant you see it? Look at these archestheyve been broken off, totally destroyed. At one time, where were standing was air. People were dancing, singing in this place at one time. This was amazing! This was music, this was life. (Universal Techno) May echoes Louis Aragons lament in Paris Peasant, which chronicles how the Parisian Boulevard Haussmann, with its large department stores, came to replace the small shops and stalls found before in the arcades. The effect of the Boulevard Haussmann is echoed even now in the boulevards of the culture industry, with the vehicles of profit ceaselessly steamrolling over passing forms, exploiting marginal movements in constant rotation. Derrick May was one of the earliest creators of what is now called techno music. The producers of techno (and the related forms of hip-hop, house, and electro), in defiance of the circulation of mass culture and the false autonomy and authoritarian originality that circulates in high art museums, based their craft in thrift stores, garage sales, and pawn shops. Cheap, obsolete, synthesizers, that when tweaked and rewired adapted like living organisms, producing otherworldly noises, dismantling traditional composition and proposing new
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methods to their human co-composers. Records no one had played for decades, their contents transformed by samplers into subatomic particles of sound, resynthesized into nuclear bomb beats. Sequencing machines designed for real musicians to practice with that no real musician had tolerated, repeating loops that transformed themselves, fingers turning knobs, knobs turning minds. These reanimated scraps formed the basis of a new musical style. The techno rebels, as they called themselves, shared an insight that Walter Benjamin credited to the surrealists, who, he wrote, were the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. (Benjamin 210) Like these producer/composers exploring the anti-museums of urban commercial districts, Aragon had spent much of his wanderings sifting through decades of material in unmarked crates: This handkerchief saleswoman, this little sugar bowl which I will describe to you if you dont behave yourself, are interior boundaries of myself, ideal views I have of my laws, of my ways of thought, and may I be strung up by the neck if this passage is anything else but a method of freeing myself of certain inhibitions, a means of obtaining access to a hitherto forbidden realm that lies beyond my human energies. (Aragon 88)
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The profane illumination experienced in these Paris drives proved to Aragon the possibility that future mysteries will arise from the ruins of todays, just as they would half a century later in Detroit (Aragon 15). It is collage that transforms the experience of the consumer under capitalism from internal, affective reflection into expressive practice. As defined by Max Ernst, collage is an alchemical composition of two or more heterogenous elements, resulting from their unexpected reconciliation (qtd. in Lippard 12). Ernst could not have known it, but he had described the performance model later used by producers and DJs of postmodern African-American music. While for Ernst, these elements were reconciled through their relative flatness and their coexistence on a canvas or page, a DJs canvas is the eternal beat, the repetitive pulse that never wavers, remaining intangible and contingent. Like the canvas, it produces reconciliation, but it never takes the form of an object. It can never acquire the aura of a Great Work that Ernsts collages or even Duchamps urinal enjoy today. As Derrick May explains it, a DJ operates from the philosophy of how to make records speak to each other, how to make them sing to each otherhow to make music out of music (Universal Techno). A record made by a producer in Berlin using a machine from Japan that samples a rapper from New York might by played by a DJ from Detroit in a warehouse in England, coexisting rhythmically with a record from Brazil recorded years ago in imitation of an African-American funk musician from Georgia. This hypothetical juxtaposition is only one possible instance of the subversion of the commodity fetish inherent in the medium of the twelve-inch record into a means of pluralistic universalism, an alchemical transmutation of two slabs of mere vinyl into an ethereal third record that shines across a dancefloor like solid gold.
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6. Night Drive (Time Space Transmat) is a 1985 recording by technos founder and namer, the author of its earliest manifestos, Juan Atkins. Since techno music rejects the bourgeois individualism of authorship through the constant adoption of synonyms, the label credits the composition to "Model 500." The song, with an insistent synthesizer vamp based on the blues scale, describes a drive down the I-94, a search for shadows out of time and space. It is not unlike a trip described by Louis Aragon in the second half of Paris Peasant, a late-night drive with Andre Breton and Marcel Noll through a garden. Both Atkins and Aragon fixate on the mystery of night, personifying it as a mysterious and dangerous woman. The night of the Twenties is a vast sheet-metal monster pierced by countless knivesNight bears tattoos, shifting patterns of tattoos upon her breast. Her hair curlers are sparks, and where the smoke trails have just died men are straddling falling stars (Aragon 141). The night of the Eighties wears a black leather micro mini skirt, high heels, and mirrored sunglasses in which the observers image is terrifyingly distorted. She looks over the Detroit skyline contemplating contemptuously the inferior designs...and the outmoded, underpowered and otherwise obsolete lifeforms. Night is both a source for despair and an opening, a loosening of the social restrictions imposed by the suna recurrent archetype in the blues as understood by Garon. Likewise, blues themes of transcendental homelessness and the animalism of humans and machines (Atkinss car is likened to a snake) are resurgent in Night Drive. Certainly there are marked differences between the lives of Parisian surrealists or Mississippi blues musicians in the early 20th Century, and that of Atkins and May during a decade of trickle-down economics and virtual reality. Night Drives refrain, TIME. SPACE.
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TRANSMAT. invokes the idea of teleportation as metaphor for his excursion down the highway; a science-fiction fantasy. As in textual or filmic science fiction, the deferral to the future cannot be misconstrued as escapism; it is an opening of a rhetorical space in which the highest flights of imagination can become expressions of a radical call for social transformation. Atkins's rhetoric tele-transmutes the marvelous and utopian elements of European avant-gardism into another world, one which includes aliens, time travel, robotsall of which signify on the presence of technology in everyday life and the uncanny strangeness of modern science, incorporating them into a critique of social control and ideology, while ultimately arriving at a proposal for resistance. The idea of techno as a nexus of the blues tradition and 20th century avant-gardism is metaphorical, but it is not merely figurative. Lacking the particular European bourgeois/literaryartistic background of Breton and his fellow surrealists, Detroit techno musicians were immersed in George Clinton rather than Lautreamont, based in the desolate postindustrial metropolis of Detroit rather than the French capital of modernity. As Derrick May explains: Industry is the principal focus of just about anybody who lives here. At one point or another, just about everyone has a family member who works for the industry. So the effect is indirectly there, but its not a positive effectits a very unaffectionate, cold effect. A machine has no love, nor any feeling. And sometimes the people who work for it end up having no feeling and no love, because theyre working relentless hours, theyre putting in total commitment to something that is giving nothing back. We tended to find the idea of
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making music subconsciously. [] All these sounds subconsciouslycame from the idea of industry, of mechanics, of machines, of electronics. (Universal Techno) The minds of these artists demonstrate an outlet for the surrealist/blues impulse in drastically different intellectual conditions, unconscious minds formed by different factors that necessarily express themselves differently. The revolutionary tendency in techno is not merely latent and unrecognized. Something like the European avant-garde, techno went through an original aesthetic, idealist phase, in which the music and its contexts for production were developed. The revolutionary content was matched to practice later, when younger musicians like the Underground Resistance collective and Carl Craig began spreading their music through avenues outside of and defiant toward the music industry, adopting deliberately militant political and intellectual stances. In the notes to his album More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, Carl Craig prints a short manifesto. Revolutionary art is not determined by itsformat of technical trickery, its interpretation of reality, or its verisimilitude, but rather by how much it revolutionizes our thinking and imagination; overturning our preconceptions, bias and prejudice and inspiring us to change ourselves and the world. (Craig 1997) It is not unrealistic to consider this cultural movement as a further step toward what Walter Benjamin called for in his essay on Surrealism, The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia:
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Only when in technology, body and image space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. (Benjamin 218) Breton also emphasized this revolutionary potential in culture, writing that if through Surrealism, we reject unhesitatingly the notion of the sole possibility of the things which are, and if we ourselves declare that by a path which is, a path which we can show and help people to follow, one can arrive at what people claimed was not (Manifestoes 128). Or in other words: They say there is no hope They say no U.F.O.s Why is no head held high? Maybe well see them fly. Juan Atkins (Model 500, No U.F.O.s)
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Works Cited Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Atkins, Juan. 20 Years Metroplex. Tresor, 2005. Baraka, Amiri. Black Music. New York: Da Capo, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. _____. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978. Craig, Carl. More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art. Planet E, 1997. Deleuze, Dominique. Universal Techno. Arte. Strasbourg. Sept. 1996. Funkadelic. Funkadelic. Westbound, 1970. Garon, Paul. Blues and the Poetic Spirit. New York: City Lights, 1996. Lippard, Lucy. Max Ernst: Passed and Pressing Tensions. Art Jounral. 33, (Autumn 1973): 1217. Parliament. Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome. Casablanca, 1978.
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We Are Become Death: Cultural Shockwaves Of Hiroshima

Devin William Daniels
Abstract
This thesis, We Are Become Death: Cultural Shockwaves of Hiroshima, aims to achieve a greater understanding of what the atomic bomb means and what it can teach contemporary society, rather than to investigate the debates of policy and morality which tend to surround it. Towards this end, I briefly examine contemporary reactions to the bomb and classically postapocalyptic works, revealing that of chief issue behind the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a restrictive and arbitrary idea of what life was that did not properly include the Japanese people. Further, the disturbing and nostalgic means through which the bomb is understood, the death view, is explicated and rejected. In search of a superior means of understanding the post-nuclear world, I turn to William S. Burroughs and his word virus theory, which I demonstrate to be explicitly linked to nuclear weaponry and discourse in The Ticket That Exploded, which brands the bomb as a symptom of the word virus, resulting in the provocative idea that the post-nuclear world existed before the bomb and created it, rather than the opposite. Burroughs depicts this world as a reality studio in which the films, representing prior thought formations, must be destroyed. Chief among these prior thought formations is the idea of one god essentialism. Burroughss culminating work The Western Lands is then investigated, in which the philosophy of silence is carried out in the form
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of a pilgrimage to the Ancient Egyptians place of immortality. Burroughs means to move us beyond the death view so that we might recognize the arbitrary nature of our languages, our innate ideas, and our fear of death. In doing so, an empowering and positive reading of the nuclear bomb is proposed, albeit one which makes the event itself all the more horrifying: the nuclear bomb serves as an event so immense and undeniable it might wake us up from our slumber, force us to recognize the issues of the word virus and lead us towards the Western Lands. i Table of Contents Introduction: The Friendliest Place on Earth.................................................................................... 1 The Birth of the Death View in the Classical Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland......................................3 The Word Virus of William S. Burroughs......................................................................................12 The Word That Exploded: The Linguistic Structure of the Bomb..................................................19 The Reality Studio in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands.......................................30 We Are Beyond Death: The Journey Towards the Western Lands.................................................44 A Long Way Down: Parting Shots from the End of the World.......................................................53 CODA 1: Nuclear Film and the Fear of Machine Life....................................................................56 CODA 2: The Fukushima I Accidents............................................................................................58 CODA 3: An Experiment in Installing We Are Become Death..................................................59 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................
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62 ii Introduction: The Friendliest Place on Earth* On July 15, 1945, the Manhattan Project, headed by nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, culminated in the worlds first artificial nuclear explosion: the so-called Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico (ironically, a city self-described as the Friendliest Place on Earth). Oppenheimers oft-quoted reaction to the explosion has become a cultural paradigm, though sources disagree on precisely what was said. Oppenheimer himself recalled the reaction in a filmed interview in 1965: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. (Atomic) Less than a month later, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred fifty thousand people, with untold others suffering and dying due to the effects of radiation exposure. The rest of the world was left wondering what it all meant. Those bombings stand among the major events of human history as truly undeniable. Their
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horror, devastation, and pure power were so great as to not only elicit but, indeed, to demand a response, and society surely responded. The bomb has spawned novels, films, political movements, and even entire genres, yet, in spite of its ubiquitous presence in post-World War II art and culture, there is good reason to think that our society is still struggling to know the bombs meaning or, even worse, that we think we know but have in fact misread it. Thus, while it
* For recommended musical accompaniment to the reading of this thesis please see CODA 3: An Experiment in Installing We Are Become Death. 1 might sound overly vague or simplistic, a question as fundamental as What does the bomb mean? is actually incredibly important and often ignored due to this deceptive simplicity. By examining the cultural shockwaves of Hiroshima, we can uncover new ways of answering this question. By a cultural shockwave, I refer to the ways in which such a significant cultural moment as the events of Hiroshima pervades our society and comes to define the perspectives of our culture, in particular our art. A shockwave moves at a velocity greater than the local speed of sound, and a cultural shockwave often works analogously. By this, I mean that tracing the cultural shockwaves of a moment is often much more complicated than, say, looking up which books are written about post-nuclear wastelands and atomic warfare. Often the most revealing of works will rarely mention the nuclear bomb specifically at all (see: Pynchon), or at least, as in the case is Burroughs, seem to be talking about a much broader theme, but they approach the
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world from a perspective that has been undeniably changed by it. The American reactions to the bomb, particularly as expressed in mass media and traditional post-apocalyptic genre fiction, have provided a dominant and quite pessimistic answer, based on a particular reading of Oppenheimers famous quotation steeped in a fear for the annihilation of consciousness and the birth of absolute nothingness, in the strongest and most literal sense of those terms. In opposition, various post-war authors, usually operating from the postmodernist tradition, have provided alternative readings of this phrase. Chief among them is William Seward Burroughs ironically an alumnus of the Los Alamos Ranch School, Oppenheimers inspiration for placing the Manhattan Project headquarters in the New Mexican desert (Morgan 44; Rhodes 450). While operating in a much less obviously nuclear model (though his atomic references are nonetheless frequent), Burroughs provides a theoretical basis for interpreting the bomb, its implications, and the hypothetical post-nuclear apocalypse in new ways, 2 repositioning the atomic bomb not as a transforming event but, rather, as an alarm clock, an undeniable moment that forces us to wake up and recognize the arbitrary and problematic restrictions that linguistic man has placed on the definition and understanding of life, a flaw that Burroughs, in The Western Lands, traces all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians. The Birth of the Death View in the Classical Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland Any meaning that the bomb has for humanity, of course, is through its relationship to humanity itself and life as we know it, so the question comes to be, what does it mean to be alive in the
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post-nuclear world? Such a question, in turn, is but a variation of the general inquiries into the definition or meaning of life that have dominated both the humanities and the sciences in different ways. The horrifying spectacle of the nuclear bomb blew a hole in our perceptions of what life was, fundamentally changing the game and challenging our definitions. The end of the world, the apocalypse, is not a post-nuclear idea by any means, but prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such devastation could only be imagined, not witnessed. Throughout history, humankind has demonstrated an affinity for thinking it is living in the end of days, but such an end required the power of gods to be realized, or, at the worst, cosmic coincidences that humans had no control over (e.g. meteoric devastation or the death of the sun). Upon viewing for the first time a level of destruction so total and so directly attributable to the actions of humanity, we are naturally led to the same conclusion as Oppenheimer: we have become Death. William S. Burroughs famously remixed Oppenheimers quote as such in The Place of Dead Roads, but Burroughs is picking up on a general cultural reading of the phrase. We have become Death is understood to mean we are all going to die, that life ends with us and nothing will remain afterwards; furthermore, that death is attributable to a very specific instance of technology, the atomic bomb. 3 Such a reaction, which I will term the death view, became the primary cultural reading of the nuclear bombings, and is reflected in the classic post-nuclear wastelands depicted in the books and film of the Cold War period. There are several issues with such a reading of the bomb, and Burroughs offers an alternative
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view that builds a more enlightened understanding of the bomb, but before their rejection of the death view makes sense, we must understand how it developed. The initial reaction to the bomb was quite distinct from the death view, in fact, because the cultural context of World War II and 1940s America presented a definition of life, particularly as understood by the cultural media of the time, that resisted the humanity of the Japanese people who had been subjected to the bombs horrors. John Dower notes the intense dehumanization of Japanese people during World War II, whom were portrayed as a nameless mass of vermin, writing that [i]ncinerating Japanese in caves with flamethrowers was referred to as clearing out the rats nest. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the prospect of exterminating the Japanese vermin in their nest at home was widely applauded. The most popular float in a day-long victory parade in New York in mid-1942 was titled Tokyo: We Are Coming, and depicted bombs falling on a frantic pack of yellow rats (231). Arthur N. Feraru, writing in the Far Eastern Survey, notes that, in 1944, 13% of polled U.S. citizens advocated the complete extermination (or killing off, as the poll itself phrased it) of all Japanese men, women, and children (101). If the truth behind the atomic bomb is that it demonstrates the intimate connection between humanity and the machines we create, as I find displayed in Burroughs, one can imagine the difficulties in such a view being accepted when we struggle to expand our definitions of life to even encompass all of our fellow humans. It is in this context that one of the first post-nuclear films was produced but, interestingly enough, it was never shown. Produced by Lieutenant Daniel McGovern of the U.S. Strategic 4 Bombing Survey, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki utilizes
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confiscated Japanese-filmed footage of the devastation, which McGovern attempted to salvage for public consumption, though his plans were frustrated and the film was suppressed and forgotten. The documentary, capturing various horrid images, was never shown until a print was discovered two decades later, the original negative having been lost. Ab Mark Nornes describes the documentarys status as perhaps the first post-apocalyptic horror film: From a certain perspective, this is a mind-numbingly boring science film; from another, it is a horror film that leaves one speechless and trembling. Most filmmakers trying to represent events as extreme as the holocaust or the atomic bombings run up against the specter of the unprepresentable [sic]. The strange thing about this film is that the filmmakers never make this effort to begin with. They simply describe the two events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the dry language of hard science. Nothing could be more unnerving. The Effects of the Atomic Bombs thus represents possibly the first step away from the initial, enthusiastic reactions to the bomb (though it clearly lacked much empathic connection to its subject) and towards the notion that the bombs existence symbolized death and destruction, rather than power and supremacy. It zoomed in the camera towards the mushroom cloud, revealing the shocking images behind its veil. However, its suppression kept the post-apocalyptic genre from developing in a direction focused on the Japanese victims themselves. Without a film like The Effects of the Atomic Bombs to educate the public, and with other such footage expressing the more inhuman aspects of the bombings hidden from view, American society was left with only the photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the footage of the postWorld War II nuclear test at Bikini Atoll. These photographs of the devastation (at least the ones
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that reached the public), taken by an aircraft named, of all things, Necessary Evil, were mostly limited to shots of the mushroom clouds. Silent, they expressed their impressive power through sheer visual might while the voices of the Japanese victims remained unheard. The Bikini Atoll footage 5 provided a particularly perverse sort of star vehicle, with Rita Hayworths likeness placed across the bombshell (the pun was certainly intended). These images of explosions and mushroom clouds expressed triumph and power to a public who were able to ignore the untold horrors experienced by the Japanese people, as the American media edited the graphic images of the attack (Trinity; Boyer 239). Eventually, the fervor of the initial reactions was quelled, and the bomb became subject to moral debate. However, these moral debates seem to largely miss the point. Such debates amount to, ultimately, a perverse comparison of the lives of Japanese civilians and Japanese and American troops, in which figures calculated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff assuming 1.78 fatalities per 1,000 man-days (resulting in 380,000 American dead) are balanced against the impact of the atomic bombings on civilian lives (Frank 135-7). Such debates fail to address the question of utmost importance: beyond whether or not the bomb should have been dropped, what has its dropping done to humanity as a whole, and American civilization, the most responsible, in particular? (Of course, the Japanese perspective is at least as important, and probably more so, as the American, but a true and dedicated examination of that perspective is beyond the scope of this project.) To determine the answer, we must return to the original and most effective means
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through which the bomb was transmitted, in spite of the shameful awe it inspired in 1940s America: film. In a way, the first nuclear film may have been the bomb itself a film that destroys its audience but did it destroy the survivors as well, its audience from afar? Was Oppenheimer right that the surviving world has, indeed, become death? The classic and quintessential post-apocalyptic genre films suggest he was. Typified by desert landscapes, rampant death and desolation, and a few wandering survivors who persist but ultimately give in to their inevitable fate, these films mark a disturbing trend in nuclear cinema that 6 might have been quelled had a film like The Effects of the Atomic Bombs been more widely viewed. Rather than reflecting regret and sympathy towards the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their consequentialist plots seem less disturbed by the initial (read: non-fictional) attacks on Japan and more concerned with how they might result in attacks on or contamination of the American landscape on which the films almost universally take place. Regardless, it seems clear that the glory of the 1940s has substantially faded (or, at least, moved into the background) by the time a film like The Day After, which depicts a full scale nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union, is released in 1983, and certainly by the time of Fallout 3, a 2008 video game based in an alternate future in which America, and specifically Washington D.C., has been completely devastated by nuclear exchange, leaving behind a Western-themed world inhabited by wanderers, mutants, and mercenaries.
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The two works are extremely different in their general approaches; The Day After combines ostensible realism, cheesy if classically post-apocalyptic special effects, and a plot depressing to the point of exploitation, whereas Fallout 3 places itself squarely in the science-fiction genre, combining a realistic (if decimated) D.C. setting with oversized weaponry, radioactive giants known as Super Mutants, and an ever-present sense of irony and humor. Both works nonetheless share theoretical similarities. They are both marked by their desert landscapes, wandering characters, and fetishization of the nuclear bomb, but even more importantly, both operate under nuclear ideologies informed by Oppenheimers reading of the Bhagavad Gita that is, the death view. The desolate landscapes of the works, located in Kansas City, Missouri and Washington, D.C. respectively, fill the viewer with an overriding sense of absence and emptiness: specifically an absence of life. There is no plant-life, no rushing water, with the color green only evoking the 7 glow of radiation. The Day After depicts many scenes in which characters walk across this landscape for many miles (often in search of medical aid), just as the nameless main character of Fallout 3, who becomes known simply as the Lone Wanderer, does. Combined with the desertlike settings, this recalls the great American Westerns and lends an almost comforting aspect to the post-apocalyptic world, especially in Fallout, which features many explicit Western parallels mercenaries, ghost towns, shoot outs, and general lawlessness. Thus, the post-apocalyptic world is not just an end, but a return to a nostalgic time.
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The works also show that the glorified qualities of a nuclear explosion have not entirely left us. Fallout 3 does this in its entire basis, but one detail of particular note is an extremely powerful weapon in the game known as the Fat Man (which was the codename of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki), a missile launcher that fires small nuclear bombs, leaving behind miniature mushroom clouds. The Day After, meanwhile, depicts its nuclear devastation in a three minute scene filled with more mushroom clouds, explosions, desperate screams, and skeletons than perhaps any other three minute segment in film history, lending an air of distastefulness and snuff that is stretched across the films narrative, which mostly consists of people slowly but surely succumbing to radiation sickness. Indeed, the survivors in the film are not particularly successful at all; their survival largely being portrayed as being worse than death. Even in the world of Fallout 3, where life persists relatively successfully (as it must due to the mechanics of a sandbox-style video game with no strict end time), it seems the world is no longer designed for life. Life persists in spite of it, but ultimately will succumb to the nothingness. The ideology of the survival is worse than death plotlines present the troubling proposition that the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the fictional bombings were the lucky ones, with center stage being given to the depicted American survivors who must contend with the nuclear power they unleashed upon the world, eventually 8 giving into death. (Such an ideology regretfully ignores the Japanese survivors who seemingly have been so ignored since the repression of The Effects of the Atomic Bombs.) Dr. Oakes, the main character of The Day After, wanders back to his Kansas City home at the end of the film to
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gaze upon his houses remains one last time before his death. The Lone Wanderer of Fallout sacrifices his own life so that the struggling lives of the Capital Wasteland might continue a little bit longer. In so giving into death, however, the survivors are empowered and comforted in that they are able to end their lives on their own terms, just as human life as a whole, in an act of seeming and perverse honor, ends on its own terms. These films thus demonstrate how the nuclear apocalypse is profoundly different from the floods and Ragnarks of cultures past. Steven Kull observes that the post-nuclear mindset is marked by the impression that there is an unidentified moving force impelling people toward a fate that no one wishes, something he connects to a long history of human desire for world destruction, but whereas the various images of deity and of the world itself that have been developed in different cultures often depict such an impersonal force that moves toward the destruction of the world, nuclear destruction is directly attributed to man, who in becoming death, as Oppenheimer prophesized, elevates to a status previously reserved for the gods (571). Thus, while horrifying and somber, The Day After and Fallout 3 depict a certain longing for the apocalypse. Their images evoke the ecstasy of the nuclear explosion, its awe-inspiring characteristics, and the quintessentially American Western film, lending an air of romanticism to the wasteland. In fact, the response of awe is in line with the public reaction to the first nuclear films: the (macro) footage of the actual bombings themselves, to which awe was the overriding, often exclusive response of the American public. It is only when confronted with the micro-image the bombs real effects on its casualties and survivors that the true horror slips in, the idea that 9
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we have become the destroyer of worlds. The initial response to the bombs fantastic qualities are thus quelled by a dread for its real world effects although the fantastic never completely goes away, as evidenced by our insistence on (some might call it an addiction to or fascination with) capturing the explosion itself on film, over and over again. This phenomenon forms an uneasy tension that is laced throughout these post-apocalyptic films: the tug of war between the bang and the whimper. The bang ignites glory, the whimper ignites shame and horror, but both result in the end. Film proves to be the perfect medium through which we express our obsession with the end, due to the bombs nature as a profoundly visual weapon. It is the fear, transmitted through sheer visual might, that the bomb places in the rest of the world that makes it so effective, that allows it to end World War II. It puts humanity in a new role as witnesses of the power of the apocalypse, as an audience for the end not merely imaginers of it. Post-apocalyptic film and visual media continue the story started in New Mexico in 1945, depicting the post-nuclear world as one in which life is snuffed out and death and desolation take its place, forcing humanity into the role of witness and audience member to the spectacle. The worlds of The Day After and Fallout 3 seem to be symptomatic of a culture unable to come to terms with the immensity of the nuclear bombings. Mushroom clouds that once instilled national pride now instill horror and shame, the apparent inevitability of a world without life seems harder and harder to deny, yet this postapocalyptic mindset might yet be faulty. By returning to the place where it all started July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico we find reason for questioning the death view, for developing a new perspective on the post-apocalyptic world in which life does not merely cease,
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but changes. A closer examination of the Bhagavad Gita verses, which popped into Oppenheimers 10 head upon viewing the spectacle of that first nuclear explosion, reveal another side to what it means to live in a post-apocalyptic world, what life means in a post-apocalyptic world. As he worked towards the development of a means of planetary annihilation, Oppenheimer went to the Gita, one of his favorite books, and found in it a justification for his actions and encouragement that steadied him in his work, for the Gita told Oppenheimer, as he interpreted it, that he had a particular duty, that of a nuclear physicist, and it was his job to pursue the bomb for that reason only, not because he was intent on obtaining any particular result (Hijiya 125). Speaking to the workers of Los Alamos, some months after the bombings of Japan, Oppenheimer stated, If you are a scientist, you cannot stop such a thing... If you are a scientist you believe... that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values (Hijiya 137). Yet, Oppenheimers citation of the Gita is incomplete and even inaccurate, for he confuses Krishna with Vishnu. Indeed, while Krishna becomes death, this can also be translated as time, and both of these are just singular aspects of what is truly an all-encompassing entity. As the Gita continues, Arjuna praises Krishna, saying: You are the original Personality of Godhead, the oldest, the ultimate sanctuary of this manifested cosmic world. You are the knower of everything, and You are all that is knowable. You are the
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supreme refuge, above the material modes. O limitless form! . . . You are air, and You are the supreme controller! You are fire, You are water, and You are the moon! You are Brahma, the first living creature (Gita) Thus, a fuller sampling of the Gita presents us an image not just of an all-encompassing being but of a profoundly vital and life-based being existing as the representational hub of a world of profound interconnectedness. Such a reading of the Gita would suggest a post-apocalyptic world which is far from doomed, wherein life can persist in limitless form. Of course, the future may not be controlled by the Hindu scriptures, but just as Oppenheimers interpretation of the Gita 11 informed his actions and reflected the post-apocalyptic mindset and culture he helped unleash, an interconnected reading of the Gita demonstrates a new possibility for looking at the postapocalyptic world. This interconnectedness, though, requires that we abandon much of the fundamental logic found in the variety of post-apocalyptic media we have examined. As noted, films like The Day After are primarily concerned with the singular status of its survivors, their loneliness, their disconnect from (and jealousy of) the dead. They fail to recognize the dynamic nature of the connection between the survivors, the dead, the original victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the bomb itself. They seek to temper their survivors horrid lot with tragic romanticism and nostalgia. In the end, they portray futures of death, but the future of life is not death, it is evolution. The ultimate struggle of the post-nuclear world is not determining how we are going to die, but determining what it means to live in a world in which such an undeniable
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event, which we are all connected to, has happened. Of course, such a mission might find the answer to be even more terrifying than the desolate wastelands of the apocalypse and their comforting finality. The Word Virus of William S. Burroughs William S. Burroughs, like other post-war, postmodern authors, proposes a reading of the nuclear age that looks towards a human society without individuals as the real problem behind the bomb. In other words, the bomb is not a virus which infects society with the disease of apocalyptic fear; rather, it is a symptom of a disease already present in society prior to the bombs droppings. Burroughs distinguishes himself, however, by taking it one step further: the bomb is not just a symptom of the postmodernist, post-industrial, bureaucratic age which Pynchons Slothrop attempts to understand at the sacrifice of his individuality the bomb is a symptom of a virus that 12 has infected humanity for as far back as history stretches: language itself. Burroughss conception of language as a disease the so-called word virus is one of his most famous and pervasive theories. The word virus permeates all of Burroughss work, but in his novel The Ticket That Exploded he goes into particular depth to explain both the word virus itself and its connection to the atomic bomb, which, while lurking in the background of the entire Burroughss corpus, is made explicit and undeniable here. For Burroughs, the bomb did not, in fact, change anything, at least fundamentally, for he positions it as a natural consequence of
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language and the restrictive life definitions inherent to our understanding of language. Burroughss plots are often inscrutable, and his villains, such as the Nova Mob who dominate The Ticket That Exploded, exist in a strange space between being mere concepts and actual characters. In spite of such confusions, that resist traditional literary analysis, Burroughs makes his atomic position relatively clear. A close examination of The Ticket That Explodeds moments of philosophical lucidity and clarity makes the workings of the word virus and its connection to the nuclear age undeniable, providing the basis for atomic readings of Burroughss later novels, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, which seek to further understand and combat the nuclear issue by introducing the problematic concept of machine life, which helps to break down the strict definitions and categories that fuel the word virus and thus free humanity from its infection. The chief characteristics applied to language in the word virus theory are its arbitrariness (i.e. its unessential connection to humanity) and its debilitating effect. The arbitrary qualities of linguistic systems have a long history, but perhaps the most iconic figures of that history are the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the seminal philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who addressed such issues in his early work. Saussure conceived of language as a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous 13 presence of the others, rendering the idea of inherent meaning naive, if not absurd (969). For example, there is no particularly reason to refer to a tree as a tree, as evidenced by the fact that different languages have different, unrelated words for a tree. We refer to it as such out of,
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essentially, habit and convenience. Nietzsche takes this a step further by saying that the idea of thinking of all trees as possessing some sort of tree-ness that categorizes them together is really just an illusion a metaphor that we have forgotten is a metaphor. The things we call trees have no true connection; we are engaging in the metaphorical operation of relating them based on perceived similarities, but, having forgotten about this process, think of the objects as inherently related. Nietzsche refers to this process as making equivalent that which is nonequivalent, and through this process not only are the specific instances of language arbitrary, but the idea of language itself is arbitrary; the concept of a linguistic system is likewise a metaphor we have forgotten is a metaphor (877). Burroughss word virus concept is highly influenced by these ideas of linguistic arbitrariness but with a heightened sense of nefariousness (on the part of the words). Burroughs captures these two qualities in The Ticket That Exploded during a passage of extensive exposition on the word virus concept calling it the Other Half, implying languages role as a separate, parasitic, and unessential: The Other Half is the word. The Other Half is an organism. Word is an organism. . . yes quite an angle it is the Other Half worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. . . It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. (49) The idea that language originally operated symbiotically reflects the arbitrary but convenient
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logic 14 of Saussures linguistic theory. For Burroughs, humans are not inherently linguistic beings, but they developed their symbiotic relationship with language, described as a unique organism with a mind of its own, due to the great benefit for society of linguistic communication. However, language quickly stops being one of multiple communication tools, one of multiple means of understanding the world, and takes over the human mind to the point where non-linguistic communication, or even thought, seems impossible. Languages transition from symbiosis to parasitism captures the utter domination of language over our thought processes through the virus metaphor. The common, often subconscious, misconception that there is a substantive, nonarbitrary relationship between our words and our meanings (or, in Saussures terms, between the signifier and the signified) is this virus main symptom, and, devilishly, its nature prevents us from realizing we are infected. Having forgotten, as Nietzsche realized, that all of language is composed of metaphors, and, indeed, that the very idea of language as a word-structuring system is metaphorical, we open ourselves up to the manipulation of the word virus. Language forces [us] to talk and makes it virtually impossible to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence, without the internal linguistic voice shouting out from within us. We do not recognize this phenomenon as a problem because we assume the linguistic inner voice is inherent and necessary, that it is impossible to think without language, but Burroughs, convinced that language is a parasite, recognizes that language cannot be without us, but that we can certainly exist outside of language, even if we have forgotten how.
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Burroughss recognition of the word viruss manipulative qualities help to explain his preoccupation with all systems and methods of (mind) control. The intense study of addiction found in Junky, the manipulative brain surgeries of Naked Lunch, and the secret government crime agencies and invading alien crime organizations of the trilogies suggest a similar world of 15 complex, de-individualizing associations to the paranoid universe of Gravity s Rainbow, in which humanity is in constant danger of being manipulated and destroyed by forces much more substantive than the word virus. Unlike Pynchon, however, Burroughs has little interest in the paranoid approach to such a reality: the obsession of understanding the multitudinous conspiracy that connects everything. Given the fate of both Slothrop and the reader of Gravity s Rainbow to be completely subsumed by the conspiracy they attempt to understand, one can understand Burroughss reasons. He seeks no end to be discovered in such a task because, in fact, control can never be a means to any practical end . . . It can never be a means to anything but more control (Naked 137). Whereas Pynchons characters attempt to understand the systems of control, Burroughss attempt to undermine them. As much as his novels present a world overwhelmed by control systems, the most understandable passages, which become even more emphasized to the reader through their juxtaposition with chaos via the cut-up method, often consist of rather direct instructions for undermining those systems, as well as organizations, such as the Nova Police of the Nova Trilogy and the Johnson Family of the Red Night Trilogy, who embrace randomness and uncertainty against organizations based around regimented control and precise definitions
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essentially creating a battle between the arbitrary and the non-arbitrary (or, more accurately, the recognizably arbitrary and that which thinks it is not arbitrary). Burroughs introduces both the types of organization to the reader at the same time as The Ticket That Explodeds central character Inspector Lee, writing, In this organization, Mr Lee, we do not encourage togetherness, espirit de corps. We do not give our agents the impression of belonging. As you know most existing organizations stress such primitive reactions as unquestioning obedience. Their agents become addicted to orders (Ticket 9). Burroughs notes of their methods that [t]here are worse things than 16 death Mr Lee for example to live under the conditions your enemies will endeavor to impose, and this resistance to destruction, in favor of manipulation, reflects the control societys origins in and associations with language (9). Their aim of unquestioned obedience is mirrored in their very structure and nature, which are based around a control as rigid as that which they would impose on humanity; their agents addiction to orders, in this sense, reflects humanitys addiction to language, the most successful control system of all. Ironically, Burroughs uses writing as his chosen means of bringing the words viral nature to humanitys attention. His entire literary philosophy consists of methods of forcing the reader to recognize the fact that the novel he or she reads exists within an arbitrary universe which is at the mercy of the words used to describe it. Burroughs does not imagine worlds which he then struggles to put into the right words. Rather, he actively constructs worlds that, in spite of their verging on the nonsensical, mean to bring the constructed nature of the actual world to the
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readers attention. Chief among these techniques is the cut-up method. By introducing random elements into his writing that not even he has any say over, Burroughs counteracts the control of the word virus, which even has influence of his own mind. This randomness, combined with his general avoidance of traditional plot structure and character development, creates a defamiliarizing effect on the reader, forcing them to closely examine the text, conscious of its status as text, rather than simply absorb it passively (which would be playing into the word viruss hands). The organizations within Burroughss novels which attempt to compete with the control systems thus, mirroring his literary methodology, must, beyond having opposing aspirations, adhere to a fundamentally different logic from the controlling organizations, as do the Nova Police, in their eschewing of belonging, togetherness, espirit de corps, and even certainty: There is no certainty. Those who need certainty are of no interest to this department. This is in point of 17 fact a non-organization the aim of which is to immunize our agents against fear despair and death. We intend to break the birth-death cycle (Ticket 10). Burroughs thus presents a philosophy that is not just opposed to the obvious control segments of society (to which we might point to a variety of culprits: governments, corporations, police forces, drug enforcement agencies, educational institutions, etc.) but is, in fact, opposed to the basic concept of organization itself, which is an outgrowth or symptom of the word virus, as well as the very ideas of order and truth which must be assumed in a non-arbitrary linguistic philosophy which forgets it is a metaphor. One might interpret Burroughss philosophy as clamoring for a dark,
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anarchic world, and an even darker and more anarchic literature, in which nothing means anything, and thus classify his philosophy as negative or even destructive; however, it is actually very positive and liberating in its aims to break the birth-death cycle. By reducing death and life to linguistic categories without inherent meanings, Burroughss philosophy allows for a true and complete defeat of the death view of post-nuclear life. In this sense Burroughs presents a much more revolutionary, and one might say optimistic, reading of the post-nuclear, systematized universe than Oppenheimer and his contemporaries. Rather than a world at the brink of annihilation in which the only possible responses are resignation to ones fate and hope for or obsession with a life after death, this is a world in which the fate branded on humanity by the atomic bomb can be defeated, a world in which [a] camera and two tape recorders can cut the lines laid down by a fully equipped film studio (Ticket 111). 18 The Word That Exploded: The Linguistic Structure of the Bomb While Burroughss interests in the word virus and control society (which he, importantly, depicted as a reality studio) are clear enough, one might reasonably request justification for the subsequent idea that the nuclear bomb is a consequence of language. Such a claim is not as controversial as it first seems, however, when broken down into parts. The idea that control society develops as a result of the word virus is not only clearly present in Burroughss writing, as shown above, but is in many ways the quintessential Burroughsian claim. The control society flaunts the same parasitic, essentialist qualities as language and inherits from it an ambition for
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absolute, inescapable determination and limitation of humanity. A sterilized reading of Burroughs might propose that his plots, laden with assassins guilds, nefarious CIA analogues, and parasitic alien beings (such as the Nova Mob of The Ticket That Exploded, whom will be analyzed in greater detail below) consist of mere metaphorical or allegorical representations of his word virus philosophy, which stands as the ultimate positive claim of the Burroughs corpus. Another, equally sterilized reading, might propose the opposite: that the conception of language as a virus is the metaphor, that Burroughs is using viral imagery and linguistic terms in order to create (rather than recognize or discover) a word virus which we may use as a means for understanding the actual methods of control that exist (i.e. the control society is now the positive claim). Both of these readings should be rejected, for both the control society and the word virus are, in Burroughss philosophy, very substantial things. Positive evidence for such a claim may seem weak, for while Burroughs consistently states his positions in a very direct and literal manner (e.g. Word is an organism), the nature of metaphor makes it so we can never adequately prove that Burroughs is actually being literal (Ticket 49). However, I would suggest that sufficient evidence for a literal understanding of Burroughs (both in general 19 and in regards to the realness of the word virus and the control society themselves) can be obtained through the combination of his unforgiving, straight writing style, his resistance to traditional literary models and modes (which, we could presume, include resistance to traditional literary methods of interpretation), and the lack of evidence for why we should read Burroughs metaphorically, other than the fact that it makes his work more palatable. While it can be useful
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to utilize Burroughss theories metaphorically, to extrapolate them towards making larger cultural claims, which is something I myself will engage in (e.g. the idea that Burroughss machine life concept can serve as a metaphor for American cultures resistance to admitting the humanity of African, Japanese, etc. peoples), let it not be lost that Burroughss means for his theories to be taken, at the same time, very literally (e.g. that the idea that machines could and may be alive, in a way that causes us to reevaluate our understanding of the term, is a very real issue). Having thus established the corporeality of the control society in Burroughs (as well as of the word virus), we can recognize that the nuclear bomb is obviously a product of that control society. It is relatively uncontroversial, or at least less controversial than we might think, to accept Burroughss claim that the word virus spawns the control society, but the idea that the nuclear bomb results from the control society seems even less difficult. In fact, various other writers have maintained such a position, most notably Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity s Rainbow presents a vision of control society as all-encompassing, incommensurable, and ultimately destructive to both individuals-in-themselves and the very concept of individual in general. Pynchons main character, Slothrop, attempts to understand the conspiracy that underlies the war and manipulation his world is subjected to, and he, more importantly, tries to comprehend his place in it all. The control society, however, views Slothrop only as a tool, an information-transporting device akin to a sentient, two-legged flashdrive. Slothrops sexual conquests correlate to the locations of V-2 20
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bombings, but there is nothing about Slothrop himself that is of interest to the various acronymbranded organizations that seek him out and attempt to manipulate his actions. Slothrop is only useful to the control society in that his actions can be mapped literally as in the map he keeps at his desk chronicling the women he has slept with. The control society wishes to take an individual like Slothrop, in all his eccentricity and familial history, and reduce him to a map, to a graph, to information, to completely reduce his individuality to nameless statistics. Burroughss picture of the world as a reality studio, which I will examine in greater detail below, imagines reality as equal to the process of transforming singularities into information (on the medium of film). Slothrops privileged position as Gravitys Rainbows protagonist would normally offer him a degree of protection from such a fate, for even if the control society defeats Slothrop in the literal happenings of the plot, the novel will nonetheless irrevocably remain Slothrops story: his defeat will always be understood, by the reader, as happening to him in some way that no death, imprisonment, or any other fate could take away; Slothrops worst case scenario seems to be one of martyrdom for the cause of the individual. However, Pynchon quickly and cruelly demonstrates that Gravitys Rainbow is not Slothrops story at all: it is the story of the control society. Slothrop completely disappears from the final sections of the narrative without comment or explanation. He has been completely subsumed by the conspiracy in his attempt to reduce it to understandable terms. Pynchon thus forces us to recognize that our assumption that Slothrop was the subject of Gravity s Rainbow was faulty. He was merely the object of the novel, but in his ultimate fate, Slothrop no longer exists even as a cog in the conspiratory machine; all evidence of
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his existence merely evaporates into the confused narrative. The new object of Gravity s Rainbow is then the reader his or herself, and when Pynchon ends his novel with the cry Now everybody he 21 presents a vision of the future in which the control society subsumes all individuals as it has subsumed Slothrop (776). The ultimate result of such a process is a world in which the very idea of the individual no longer exists, in which a single person is nothing and can accomplish nothing. Under such constrictions, the individual sees little hope in rebelling against the control society, for the control society offers no recognition of his rebellion. Rebellion in such a deindividualized world exists only in hushed tones and wordless disappearances. This is the world that produces the nuclear bomb. Indeed, Pynchons great contribution in Gravitys Rainbow is demonstrating this production, for his narrative takes place in an explicitly pre-nuclear universe. The great weapon of Gravitys Rainbow is the V-2 rocket, not the bomb, and the victim is England, not Japan, yet Gravity s Rainbow is being written and read in a post-nuclear universe, in which it is impossible to read a World War II-based novel revolving around weapons that scream across the sky without making explicitly nuclear associations. Pynchon must recognize this, and is, indeed, writing about the nuclear bomb (or, in other words, the post-nuclear world) without writing about the nuclear bomb. Through his examination of the death of the individual in a pre-nuclear universe, he demonstrates that the nuclear bombs dropping did not kill the individual; rather, the individual had to die in order to create the kind of society in which a nuclear bomb would be produced. He
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also demonstrates that there is no inherent connection between the problems that create the bomb (which we might call the nuclear worldview or discourse) and the specific technology that is the bomb itself. Getting rid of a specific technology will not help us, because the nuclear worldview will simply manifest itself through a different technology, as it does through the V-2 rocket in Gravity s Rainbow (under different circumstances we could just as easily be living in a postVergeltungswaffe world). 22 Burroughs established that the control society results from the word virus, and Pynchon has provided us with ample evidence to conclude that the nuclear bomb is a result of this control society. Thus, a simple application of the transitive property leads us to the claim that at first glance seemed so difficult and controversial: the word virus created the nuclear bomb, which is merely a symptom of its disease. In spite of the acceptability of its parts (a = b and b = c), however, we might still have trouble accepting such a seemingly incongruous result (a = c) that a weapon of divine destruction resulted from mere words. Indeed, perhaps it is worth questioning whether mathematical logic should be applied to an author who is trying to blast a whole in our common assumptions, to point out the falseness in the inherent truths of our language-enslaved perspective. Burroughs, however, makes the connection between the word virus and the nuclear virus (as I might recast the death view in Burroughsian terminology) explicit and undeniable in The Ticket That Exploded through the nature and methodology of its villainous alien characters and organizations. Burroughs introduces a Venusian invasion, a common motif of his novels, under the codename
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Operation Other Half, recalling the previously dissected passage in which the word virus is branded with the same alias; these invaders are noted as being [a]rmed with nuclear weapons (Ticket 51). Language is thus described not only as a virus but also as an alien invasion armed with atomic bombs; the plot of Burroughss novels, to the degree a plot is discernible, is often motivated by a few individuals struggling against such invasions. Equally strong evidence of the word-nuclear connection is provided by a District Supervisor figure, whom this passage focuses on. Burroughs describes his struggling with how to deal with the nuclear-armed 5th Colonists as he writes, The D.S. was contemplating the risky expedient of a miracle and the miracle he contemplated was silence (Ticket 51). In this sentence, Burroughs reinforces the 23 connection between nuclear and lingual viruses while simultaneously prescribing a treatment. The D.S., facing off against nuclear-armed adversaries, recognizes that the only effective response is one of silence, one coming from outside language. Burroughss belief that nuclear arms must be dealt with non-linguistically clearly suggests that nuclear arms are but a symptom and aspect of the larger word virus problem. His recommended countermeasure, the blast of silence, attempts to call to our attention the intrinsic connection between both the nuclear armed and the nuclear devastated. Such a truth is difficult to transmit from within language due to the fact that the discourse of the nuclear bomb, which one is thus forced to operate in, establishes as a matter of course the inherent difference between these two, but Burroughs maintains that if we are to take a forward step it must be made in silence, and we must thus detach ourselves
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from word forms (Interview). Burroughs rejects a political or diplomatic response, which would be entrenched in those very word forms, when he tells us that his advice for politicians is for them to [t]ell the truth for once and for all and shut up forever (Interview). Like language, the logic of the bomb, and indeed of all weaponry, resolves around ideas of separation, even at the most basic levels of functionality. Almost all forms of weaponry are based on the physical principle that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time. This begins obviously with melee weapons such as swords and axes, swordplay being a task in forcing ones blade into the same location as the enemys vital organs. This same principle applies to projectile weapons, which present a safer and more distanced means of achieving the same result. Defense systems such as armor and bulletproof vests, meanwhile, with the goal of preventing a blade or bullet from occupying the same space as the wearer, operate under the logic as well. Thus, while the nuclear bomb, at first glance, might seem to be a completely different sort of weapon from a pistol, a bow and arrow, or a lance, all merely use different functional methods to achieve the same 24 goal. Additionally, the functionality of Little Boy, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, is actually much more gun-like than one might think. Known as a gun-type fission weapon, Little Boy essentially contains a hollow bullet of uranium within it which, when fired towards the solid piece of uranium in the bombs tip, results in a nuclear chain reaction (Glasstone). The bomb thus seems inherently linguistic in its character, for both language and nuclear
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weaponry are systems of separation, the basic idea of language being one of dividing the world in to different things which are then given particular names and definitions which erroneously are seen as their natural boundaries. Returning to the nuclear standoff of The Ticket That Exploded, we see Burroughs painting not just the bomb and the word in separation terms, but also sex, when he writes, all human sex is this unsanitary arrangement whereby two entities attempt to occupy the same three-dimensional coordinate points giving rise to the sordid latrine brawls which have characterized a planet based on the Word, that is, on separate flesh engaged in endless sexual conflict (52). Even an idea as seemingly uncontroversial as the separate flesh of our planets inhabitants is attributed to the word virus. Sex, as an attempt to force two beings into the same space in opposition to fundamental physical principles, serves as a sort of perverse rebellion against the Venusian-imposed concept of flesh (and word) separation. In response, the character Johnny Yen, one of the Nova Mob, who is described as errand boy from the death trauma and leader of the Venusian Boy-Girls, takes control over the Other Half, imposing a sexual blockade on the planet, illustrating the disturbing nature of the sex act to the Venusians and establishing its rebellious character (Ticket 52-3). Of course, under the same place, same time principle, a truly successful sex act (i.e. one in which two entities [occupied] the same three-dimensional coordinate points) would be akin to suicide, but Burroughs asks for us to leave such linear and essentialist life models behind when he writes, Death is orgasm is rebirth is death in orgasm is 25 their unsanitary Venusian gimmick is the whole birth death cycle of action You got it? Now
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do you understand who Johnny Yen is? (Ticket 53). True orgasm may be akin to death, but the very concepts of death and orgasm are themselves mere effects of the unsanitary Venusian gimmick that is language; the entire birth/death narrative is a constructed one; death in orgasm is as much a rebirth as it is an end, as Burroughs shall fully realize in The Western Lands, itself a journey through (the linguistic category of) death towards immortality. Burroughss question of Johnny Yens identity, though, remains unanswered, but it seems clear to the reader, by this point, that Johnny Yen, like all of the Nova Mob, is a personification of the word virus, the Other Half. Burroughs answers his own question with a variety of titles which reflect Yens nature as a linguistic, viral being: The Boy-Girl Other Half strip tease God of sexual frustration Errand boy from the death trauma His immortality depends on the mortality of others The same is true of all addicts... His life line is the human junky The life line of control addicts is the control word That is these so-called Gods can only live without three-dimensional coordinate points by forcing threedimensional bodies on others Their existence is pure vampirism (Ticket 53) In this passage, Burroughs utilizes the word viruss own weapon (language) against itself. As a writer, he is able to manipulate the words that a being like Johnny Yen relies on to control humanity and in doing so gains a measure of power and determination over Yens identity, akin to Yen and the Nova Mobs power and determination over the definitions of life, death, and orgasm. Thus is the danger of language as a control system and what enables it to be co-opted by writers like Burroughs towards revolutionary, anti-establishment ends. In using language to limit the agency of a population, those in charge of the control society become subjected to its
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limitations as much as the population. The best possible reading for the control society is that they are willingly operating under languages rules, which makes them perhaps as susceptible to control as the 26 populace but at least conscious of their predicament, yet it seems more likely that the control society has utilized language to separate and subsequently forgotten the separating act, convincing itself that its own machinations are in fact natural. Burroughs, and Nietzsche before him, give the sense that such issues of amnesia are an aspect of the nature of language itself, and thus par for the course. Nietzsche sees the first step towards the acquisition of... truth as occurring when a way of designating things is invented which has the same validity and force everywhere, that is, when language enters the arena, drawing firm lines in the sand between truth and falsehood, yet due to their constructed nature, Nietzsche is convinced that [o]nly through forgetfulness could human beings ever entertain the illusion that they possess truth (876). This forgetfulness underlies the entire process of language formation, for in order to form a concept like the word leaf, which encapsulates many different objects-in-themselves with many different particular characteristics, one must [drop] these individuals differences arbitrarily... so that the concept then gives rise to the notion that something other than leaves exists in nature, something which would be leaf, a primal form, say, from which all leaves were woven (877). The control society thus must necessarily be forgetting the constructed nature of their arbitrary distinctions as they construct them. For a writer like Burroughs, who is so conscious of the control society, this is a very liberating
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and empowering fact. Burroughs will utilize his chosen weapon to much more effective and less pessimistic ends than a writer like Pynchon does in conspiracy narratives such as Gravity s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 because, rather than using language to understand and map out the control society, which is ultimately incommensurable and leads only to the assimilation of the conspiracy theorist into the conspiracy, essentially rendering them castrated and lobotomized as potential revolutionary agents, Burroughs will be using language to fight back. 27 In branding Johnny Yen the [e]rrand boy from the death trauma, he defines Yen and the other Nova Mob members as slaves of the very categories they claim to be utilizing as methods of control. Yen thinks death-as-category is his weapon, but in reality Yen is nothing but a byproduct of death-as-category, a Burroughsian phantasm, linguistic death conjured in physical form so it can be destroyed. Having so conjured him, Burroughs is able reformulate Yen in terms of the drug addict, a life Burroughs has lived and explored to great depth in his first novel Junky, showing that those behind the control society are actually addicted to their control, and thus as dependent on it as a junky is on heroin. The personified gods of language live outside of the spatial constraints of man constraints, as seen above, that often lead to his death but can only do so thanks to their parasitic and vampiric control over human bodies. Burroughs thus shows that while language may control us, it is likewise dependent on us we are in the true position of power. By rejecting our mortality, that is, our enslavement to the death category (and, by the same token, the death view of the post-nuclear world), we deny the immortality of the control society; The Western Lands will see this journey fully realized.
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Into this scene thus enters the previously introduced Inspector J. Lee, now a full-fledged member of the Nova Police and a clear representative of (or stand-in for) Burroughs himself, summoned to properly deal with the now manifested Nova Mob. Lee outlines the criminals technique for achieving nova, the conflicts that lead to the explosion of a planet (i.e. supernova, the explosive destruction of the planet, which is a clear reference to the potential nuclear demise that was so feared during the time of Burroughss writing), on the worlds they target (Ticket 55). The nova technique, on its most basic level, aims to create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts This is done by dumping on the same planet life forms with incompatible conditions of existence (Ticket 55). The Nova Mob seek to enhance and 28 aggravate the concept of difference (or separation) that is so fundamental to the control society, as has been shown. Of course, the differing life forms of the planet, such as American and Japanese people (who at the time, as shown above, were depicted and approached in strongly non- or subhuman terms by the American population), are not inherently opposed, as we might think, for [t]here is nothing wrong about any given life form since wrong only has reference to conflicts with other life forms (Ticket 55). The idea that there can be wrong (or, by the same token, right) versions of life is formed by language. Burroughs would have us realize the arbitrariness of these distinctions and our essential connection to all forms of life, abandoning our established life definitions, which will always inherently exclude other possible forms of life as unnatural (Africans, Japanese, homosexuals, machines, etc.) and thus be incompatible in present time form, yet the Nova Mob of The Ticket That Exploded acts in opposition, seeking
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that our differences remain in present time form, allowing for the global manipulation of the control society which feeds back nuclear war and nova (Ticket 55). Here Burroughs again explicitly ties his villainous controllers to nuclear weaponry while also depicting nuclear war as an outgrowth of essentialist life definitions. Further, the fact that nova criminals are not threedimensional organisms...but they need three-dimensional human agents to operate and that the criminal controllers operate in very much the same manner as a virus makes it undeniably clear that the Nova Mob, bringers of nuclear war, are the word virus. Quite literally, language is the ticket that exploded. 29 The Reality Studio in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands Burroughs thus provides the backdrop for a reading of the atomic bomb that permeates his later novels The Place of Dead Roads and, especially, The Western Lands. In them, Burroughs will expand on Pynchons theory of individual death by showing that the death of the individual as an event occurred long before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; its origins are traced back as far as Ancient Egypt and even further to the origins of the word virus itself. His solution, this blasting of a whole in the linguistic sphere that (traps and) contains us, paradoxically restores the individual by demonstrating his or her connection to all things. He will dare to propose a positive reading of the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which these events, while terrible, teach us just how connected everything is. That which creates the separations within the whole is ultimately a matter of categorization, a
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habit based on a need for terms and narratives that is purely lingual. The word virus, in order to function, must reduce something that is strictly irreducible into individual subjects and objects, which results in categories like life which seem essential but are, of course as Saussure and Nietzsche would concur arbitrary and never quite true or correct. For example, it seems an essential thing that I, the writer, am a unique existence irrevocably distinct from you, the reader, but ultimately my and your Is (the most potent aspect of the word virus) are resting on rather shaky foundations: a physical body that, in a handful of years, consists of entirely new cells; a memory that is easily distorted, forgotten, manipulated and reconstructed; a personal selfconsciousness or self-conception that feels entirely different and distinct from its ten years past form. Any one thing connecting that which we call me with true philosophical force, beyond social and linguistic convention, remains elusive. Burroughs thus might seem on a mission to kill the individual himself, the same goal as Pynchons version of the control society, if his 30 philosophy so leads us towards recognizing the arbitrariness of individualization, yet the process of rendering the individual arbitrary also lends great power to the individual, paradoxically. Without any inherent meaning, the individual can rebirth itself under its own rules, resisting the rhetoric of death that has previously been imposed upon it by the control society. Thus Burroughs, in The Western Lands, depicts a pilgrimage beyond death and towards immorality, providing an ultimate vision that verges on utopia, a post-nuclear world that is truly post-nuclear, that is, a world which, while not abandoning language, has recognized its status as a tool and learned to resist its fundamentalist tendencies, such as a strict, essentialist definition of life in
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which Japanese people do not count as alive, making their extinction, regardless of the technological means, an acceptable endgame. If we are to journey beyond death, to the Western Lands, we must abandon the idea that we know what life is at all and recognize that it may contain much wilder beings than we might imagine, even a machine, even a dead man. The groundwork for The Western Lands, however, is first laid in Burroughss 1983 novel The Place of Dead Roads, in which Burroughs, appropriately, returns to the nostalgic locale of the Old West, just as the traditional post-apocalyptic tales, The Day After (also in 1983) and Fallout 3 (in 2008), do. Burroughss use of this setting, however, does not reflect a romanticization or fetishization of human extinction. Burroughs, rather, returns to the Old West for its liberating qualities; before industrialization, postmodernization, and globalization, it was a place in which one man, usually a subversive, antisocial, countercultural figure (i.e. the kind Burroughs has traditionally sympathized with and lionized), could truly make a difference at least we like to remember it that way. In the novels preamble, Burroughs recalls this nostalgia by explaining the books original title, The Johnson Family, writing, The Johnson family was a turn-of-thecentury expression to designate good bums and thieves... a code of conduct (Place). 31 Burroughs thus longs for an idealized past when criminals possessed a now lost sense of honor (a charge found frequently in other works of American art, from The Godfather to The Dark Knight, to the point where we might question whether or not such a past ever actually existed, but regardless of this point, such a past serves as a model for Burroughss very real response to
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the word and nuclear viruses). Throughout Burroughss writings one detects a certain privileging of space over time, which is viewed as a pure construction. The Old West, with its open settings and lack of rigid societal structure, thus seems the perfect model for a space-based future to Burroughs, who continues his preamble by stating that [t]he only thing that could unite the planet is a united space program... The planetary space station will give all participants an opportunity to function (Place). The Place of Dead Roads will attempt to actualize such a world, one in which all participants are truly welcome, and in doing so calls for an expansion to the rigid life definitions that seem at the core of nuclear discourse (importantly one of the key players in this actualization, Joe the Dead, which is not just a cute nickname, persists in spite of an actual death in a form closer to machine than man, representing the concept of machine life, a challenge to those life definitions more radical than any national or racial boundary). Burroughs seems potentially skeptical of a harmonious joining of disparate forms of life in the sense we might think (read: the disparate groups of society joining hands and singing around a campfire), however, given Inspector Lees assertion in The Ticket That Exploded that our planet is populated by life forms with incompatible conditions of existence (55). Burroughss precise position in Lees statement could be debated with great nuance, but either way his proposed solution is clear: creating enough space so that everyone has an opportunity to function and making the achievement of this into a unifying principle. When paired with an abandonment (or at least a demotion) of the external, constructed 32
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time, space might approach infinity, true and unadulterated. The character who will helm the quest towards space and beyond death (death being intrinsically related to time and ultimately its byproduct), Kim Carsons, stands as a unique, and quintessentially Burroughsian, sort of post-apocalyptic hero. The traditional post-apocalyptic hero, such as the father in Cormac McCarthys The Road, is as much a remnant of his time and culture as the dilapidated skyscrapers and abandoned streets which surround him; he is a last man standing, attempting to keep his particular and accepted definition of life (that is, human life) preserved in a world that no longer makes sense to him, as McCarthys unnamed father stands as the last bastion for such exalted human qualities as devotion to ones children (the means through which life and life definitions are continued and spread), in opposition to a world of cannibals and slavers which has completely abandoned its principles. The post-apocalyptic hero is not designed for the world he now inhabits, but he perseveres in spite of his environment. Kim Carsons, meanwhile, is quite well suited for such an environment and for a role as a rebellious, anti-viral figure, as opposed to a mere remnant struggling for only survival. As an Old West-style shootist, Kim is particularly adapted towards the post-apocalyptic desert world he will journey through to reach the Western Lands in the novel of the same name. He is likewise particularly adapted towards undermining language, strict categories, and the hegemony of the dominant American culture that Burroughs relates to the control society. Kim is a man of slippery and bending identity; the moment we are introduced to him, in the newspaper article that chronicles his death, it is not even as Kim Carsons, but as William Seward Hall, sixty-five, a real-estate speculator, a man who wrote western stories under the pen name of Kim
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Carsons (Place 3). What first seems to be a simple matter of a pseudonym, of course, proves much more complicated over the course of The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, in which Kim is shown to exist in many bodies, 33 under many names, in many different times, with no real attempt given by Burroughs to explain these overlapping existences chronologically (e.g. Kims story begins in the Old West, continues into a science fiction future following Kims death, and culminates thousands of years earlier in Ancient Egypt, alongside 11th century figure Hassan i. Sabbah). Kim thus seems to exist outside of strict identity and time itself, making him an ideal figure for subverting the word virus and the control society. Kims possession of unessential identities and his ability to so bend them can be ascribed to his status as a writer, William Seward Hall, who we are clearly meant to relate to Burroughs himself (whose middle initial stands for Seward). Kim, Hall, and even Inspector Lee of The Ticket That Exploded thus all seem to connect with and reflect each other as aspects of the same identity, ultimately to Burroughs himself, who as a writer is able to use language, that which ascribes identity to him, against itself, gifting himself with a plethora of identities. This identity-bending quality is itself an aspect of Kims larger social deviance, most apparent in his promiscuous and unapologetic homosexuality, but also in his status as a roaming criminal, free of societal obligations and responsibilities, and an artist. Kim thus seems a horrible choice for a post-apocalyptic hero; he does not represent fading human virtue particularly well (at least as it would be understood by the central culture he subverts) and is, indeed, no survivor at all, in the sense of avoiding a physical death: from the moment we are introduced to Kim we already
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know he is going to die. Kims death, however, will prove to be the ultimate liberation which allows him to journey beyond death and towards the immortality of the Western Lands. Of course, the dream for a spatial, non-temporal world to counteract the post-apocalyptic is much more than a mere physical journey or charge of locale, and Kim and Burroughs thus recognize the need for basic biologic alterations, like the switch from water to land. There has to be the air-breathing potential first. And what is the medium corresponding to air that we must learn 34 to breath in? The answer came to Kim in a silver flash. . . . Silence (Place 40). This is a similar realization to the one made by the District Supervisor in The Ticket That Exploded; that is, if we are to properly move beyond the control society, and the nuclear issues that it has created (a connection Ticket made clear), we must achieve true silence, the seemingly impossible, and move beyond language. Only then can our life definitions truly change, can we evolve into beings not dependent on the word virus. Such an evolution would lead, Burroughs suggests, to true immorality, something Kim considers... the only goal worth striving for, but finds absent from Christianity and other religions, particularly the Ancient Egyptians, whose immorality discourses are arbitrary, precarious, and bureaucratic (Place 42-43). The Egyptians thought they had achieved immortality, at least that those rich enough to have themselves mummified had, but your continued immortality in the Western Lands was entirely dependent on the continued existence of your mummy (Place 43). The Egyptians fail to achieve true immorality in Kim/Burroughss eyes, thus, because a true immorality would have abandoned
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such viral ideas as an inherent and necessary connection to the physical body. Burroughs, writing, your mummy isnt even safe in a museum. Air-raid sirens, its the blitz! notes how easily the physical remnant is destroyed (Place 44). Particularly in world of nuclear weapons and incendiary bombs, it seems we should be seeking to move beyond our physical ties, which might be atomized at any moment. The Egyptians immortality is intrinsically tied to the physical world and thus very weak, easily subverted by grave robbers and time, which will ultimately wins out over even the most effective of preservation methods. Burroughss plan for a united space program necessarily calls for the abandonment of all ties, particularly the Egyptians dependence on the barren, mummified carcass. Burroughs is not merely critiquing the Egyptian system, however, for we shall see that his ultimate culprit, on whom he squarely pins the blame for 35 the nuclear problem, is one god essentialism in any and all forms, particularly Western Christianity. Burroughs introduces his own version of J. Robert Oppenheimer as a twisted, film screen villain, a director persona representing the death view, the control society, and the one god essentialism that Burroughs brands as the ultimate nuclear culprit. Oppenheimers introduction is prefaced with mediation on mortality that strikes a particularly nuclear chord. Burroughs relates Kims viewing of a photograph of his friend Toms, writing, the Indians and the one white are all related, by location: the end of the line. Like the last Tasmanians, the Patagonians, the hairy Ainu, the passenger pigeon, they cast no shadow, because there will never be any more. This picture is the end. The mold is broken (Place 87). There is a post-nuclear mindset to these
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thoughts in general, for they contemplate the extinction of past species and people, and thus the capacity for human extinction always a possibility (usually through invocation [or solicitation] of divine forces), but certainly of particular note in the post-nuclear world, in which instant and total annihilation based on nothing but mere human folly is a constant threat. The moment seems to be even more specifically nuclear, however, if we focus on the words, they cast no shadow, because there will never be any more. This line recalls the famously eerie and terrifying shadows of Hiroshima, spots where incinerated victims left shadow-esque marks on the steps and sides of buildings as the sole, vague marks of their existence. These victims do not cast any shadow for they have been obliterated to a point of becoming their shadows, mere simulacrum in a twisted version of Platos cave. Any attempt to immortalize or commemorate the victims of Hiroshima, the Patagonians, or the passenger pigeons is in vain, for Burroughs continues, This final desolate knowledge impelled them to place phalluses... on male graves. The markers are scattered and broken. Only the picture remains (Place 88). The shadows are all that remains; any tangible 36 object we might hold onto as proof of their existence is gone, exposing the irrelevance of the ideological attachment to the body as a means of immortality. Burroughs quickly confirms the suspicion that this passage is to be read in nuclear terms when he writes, Spelling out . . . August 6, 1945: Hiroshima. Oppenheimer on screen: We have become Death, Destroyer of Worlds, literally spelling out his own metaphors for us, plainly stating what was previously only implied. Having brought on this sense of atomic doom, Oppenheimer
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appears as Burroughss arch nemesis, declaring that not just he, but we, have become death, imposing the previously discussed death view upon us (Place 88). Appropriately, he does not appear to us directly, but rather as a projected image on a screen. This mimics the power and nature of the bomb itself, which, with the exception of tests like Trinity and Bikini Atoll, cannot be witnessed by anyone who would actually survive it outside of the film medium. Rather, the bomb is transmitted to us through the photographs of its devastation on Japan and the films of the mushroom cloud (as perhaps definitively, if ironically, captured in the ending sequence of Dr. Strangelove). When the atomic vision cuts out, Kim notes that [h]e is looking forward to moving film, suggesting Burroughs has plans for its appropriation just as he did with language, so we might look back to The Ticket That Exploded for Burroughss advice on how to handle the film form (Place 88). Further into The Ticket That Exploded than was previously examined, Burroughs presents his conception of the word virus, the control society, and the post-nuclear death view mentality as a reality studio, i.e. in particularly cinematic vocabulary. Reality-as-film is depicted as ultimately worthless, a series of signifiers without any signified to lend them positive content; [t]he film stock issued now isnt worth the celluloid its [sic] printed on. There is nothing to back it up. The film bank is empty (Ticket 151). However, just as the arbitrariness of Saussurean 37 linguistics makes language more difficult to change (i.e. if there is no reason to call a tree-initself by the signifier tree than there is no argument for why we should call it something else; the status quo is simply more convenient), the emptiness of the reality studio (which we might
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read as language itself anyway, though it also encompasses the control society and the particularly visual nature of the bomb more directly than the word virus concept does by itself) makes resistance that much more difficult, for in order to prevent the disclosure of that emptiness, the reality studio will resort to any and all means to prevent the creation of alternative realities (e.g. an expansion of or challenge to life definitions, as Burroughs will introduce): The full weight of the film is directed against anyone who calls the film in question with particular attention to writers and artists. Work for the reality studio or else. Or else you will find out how it feels to be outside the film. I mean literally without film left to get yourself from here to the corner (Ticket 151). It is clear we are supposed to be equating film with the control society and the bomb (Burroughs, throughout The Ticket That Exploded, describes explosions as burst[s] of nitrous film smoke and similar language), but also with language and the basic organizing structures of our understanding of the universe (104). Thus, the threat of a life outside of the reality studio, a life essentially without structure, is a terrifying one. We must recall, however, that escaping the essentialist constraints of the reality studio is exactly what Burroughs is calling for us to do. The threat of control society is more than null and void, it is welcomed. Burroughs makes his plans for the reality studio even more clear when he depicts the studios destruction at the hands of a character named Ali, who reemerges during the latter parts of The Western Lands (possibly as one of Kim Carsonss many personas). Burroughs describes the scene as such: Yes, you have a doorway Ali blew the smoke and waved his hands Abracadabra distant events in green neon you the smoke...
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38 old mirror bent over a chair... luminous grey flakes falling... Impressions suddenly collapse to a heap... Film set goes up in red nitrous smoke Remember show price? Know who I am? Yes talking to you board members . . I dont talk often and I dont talk long . . You smell Hiroshima? (Ticket 155) Burroughs laces the scene with magical imagery: smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, and the magic word Abracadabra. Ali thus seems to destroy the reality studio through an act of magic, beyond the capacity of Burroughss audience, but Alis magic words are ultimately just words, ones that have been endowed with particular meaning by society; he creates a doorway out of the reality studio and leaves its remnants aflame through the power of linguistic play the same variety of linguistic play that defines Burroughss writing style. Appropriately, the burning film stock gives off the stench of Hiroshima, for within the studios reels lie the prior thought formations that restrict human discourse and language, resulting in the nuclear catastrophe, just as the Nova Mob had planned. Their success is denied, however, by the destruction of the films not the bombs themselves or the individuals behind them. The bombs power lies in the films of the bomb, in its image; there is no difference between the signified and the signifier. Burroughs thus makes it clear that the confusing, inscrutable nature of his novels are not merely cases of playful subversion and literary tricksterism: it is a true call for downright destruction, countering the destructive force of the bomb with an equally destructive force aimed at the prior thought formations. The Western Lands will aid in this by identifying the thought formations that need to be destroyed and providing an image of life outside of the reality studio.
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The thought formations that need to be destroyed are, of course, the restrictive life definitions of the control society, and their ultimate source, one god essentialism, or the One God Universe, to use Burroughss terminology. Appropriately, J. Robert Oppenheimer (or at least his projected image) is presented as the ultimate culprit behind the One God Universe, reflecting its 39 relation to the nuclear issue, alongside the Venusians that pervade the entire Burroughs corpus, but Oppenheimer and the other villainous figures are ultimately a stand-in for or representative of the issue rather than its originators. The Venusian invasion, which represented the control society in The Ticket That Exploded, is revealed in The Western Lands to be even more nefarious: The Venusian invasion is a takeover of the souls (Western 6). Oppenheimer provides their ultimate weapon, the atom bomb, which Burroughs reveals secretly functions as a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut (Western 7). Burroughss understanding of the soul is much more complex than a traditional Western/Christian perspective, however, in which a soul would be seen as a single, irreducible being. Burroughs utilizes an Egyptian model (gleaned from Norman Mailers Ancient Evenings) in which the soul actually consists of seven souls which can separate from each other and die independent deaths. The concept of death in general is thus much more murky under such a system, for various of the seven souls can be dead while others are still alive. The first three souls, which are eternal and merely transfer to new vessels upon death, consist of Ren, the Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death; Sekem, Energy Power, Light, described as a Technician; and Khu, the Guardian Angel (Western 4). The remaining souls are Ba, the Heart; Ka, the Double and only reliable guided
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through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands; Khaibit, the Shadow or Memory; and Sekhu, the Remains (Western 5). Shortly after outlining the Egyptian souls, Oppenheimer is introduced for the first time in The Western Lands, again through a screen, as in The Place of Dead Roads. It is clear from the passage that follows that Oppenheimer is meant to be interpreted in terms of the Egyptian soul system: Ruins of Hiroshima on screen. Pull back to show the Technician at a switchboard. Behind him, Robert Oppenheimer flanked by three middle-aged men in dark suits, with the cold dead look of heavy power. 40 The Technician twiddles his knobs. He gives the O.K. sign. All clear. Are you sure? The Technician shrugs. The instruments say so. Oppy says: Thank God it wasnt a dud. Oh, uh, hurry with those printouts, Joe. Yes, sir. He looked after them sourly, thinking: Thank Joe it wasnt a dud. God doesnt know what buttons to push. (Western 8) Oppenheimer is the ultimate man in control of the nuclear operation he is even compared to God but he doesnt know what buttons to push. He is completely reliant on a Technician to
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realize his aims and vision. The capitalization of Technician makes it clear that this Joe figure it meant to represent the Sekem aspect of the soul, the aspect which actually gets things done. Oppenheimer then is clearly in the position of the Director or Ren, appropriate given his official title at Los Alamos, scientific director, and the cinematic connotations he is always paired with. Oppenheimer may be seen as the Ren aspect of the soul that is the entire novels universe. He is the nefarious figure directing all the action from behind a screen without directly participating. He lacks the capacity for creation and can only achieve his power through the manipulation of already existing control systems. This seems a somewhat exaggeratedly Machiavellian position for a man who, in spite of his fame and his folly, was but one of many cogs in the machine that produced Little Boy and Fat Man and dropped them on Japan. However, this is not Oppenheimer the man, it is Oppenheimer the idea, as human incarnate of the atomic, the man who became larger than life, a destroy of worlds, an avatar for that entire horrible machine. In spite of his power he is at the mercy of his Technician Joe, clearly Joe the Dead, a machine life character who, along with Kim Carsons, will help to undermine the control society in The Western Lands. Ultimately, however, Oppenheimer is a stand-in for something much bigger than the nuclear bomb or the control society; he personifies the One God Universe (which Burroughs, and thus myself, will abbreviate 41 OGU) and moreover God Himself. The ultimate culprit or villain behind The Western Lands and thus the entire nuclear age is much more than some exaggerated Oppenheimer figure, it is God. Burroughs will define the
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prior thought formations, the films, that have to be destroyed to liberate humanity as those espousing the OGU, which seems predominantly Christian but also encapsulates Islam and presumably all monotheistic religions. The Venusian conspiracy, of which Oppenheimer is a chief architect (given the Venusians plans basis in nuclear weapons or Soul Killers) is described as antimagical, authoritarian, dogmatic... The universe they are imposing is controlled, predictable, dead, combining the traditional control discourse with particularly religious terminology like antimagical and dogmatic (Western 59). However, the One God is quickly exposed in much more direct fashion, Burroughs claiming he, backed by secular power, is forced on the masses in the name of Islam, Christianity, the State, for all secular leaders want to be the One. To be intelligent or observant under such a blanket of oppression is to be subversive (Western 111). Burroughs thus clearly positions the One God at the head of his control society while simultaneously positioning himself as the enlightened writer and observer who can subvert that control. Burroughs continues by identifying the One God directly with time, which is of course in direct opposition to Burroughss space-based ideals, writing, The One God is Time. And in Time, any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die like an old joke (Western 111). If we are to realize Burroughss vision, it is clear the One God, Time, and Oppenheimer all have to go. Oppenheimers allegiance to the OGU makes sense, given his famous misreading of the Bhagavad-Gita, in which he confuses Krishna and Vishnu, reflective of a man from a culture doused in one god essentialism (the death view is thus entirely based in this anti-Burroughsian mindset, as is the use of nuclear bombs in the first place, as Oppenheimers misreading serves as
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42 his justification for his actions). Oppenheimer is far more than just an ally to the OGU, though: he is a personification of God himself. In a strange way, Burroughs ties the nuclear bomb, the first non-divine means of apocalypse, back to divinity, though not in any traditional sense. The evidence for Oppenheimer-as-God is circumstantial but powerful, and it illuminates the nature of Burroughss text in fascinating ways. Burroughs describes the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as an obvious lie... a shameless swindler, casting him in a similar light to the pathetic and manipulative Oppenheimer simulacrum (Western 70). Burroughs continues, does this Christian God stand with his worshippers? He does not. Like a cowardly officer, he keeps himself well out of the war zone, bathed in the sniveling prayers of his groveling, shit-eating worshippers his dogs (Western 70). Burroughs paints his One God with the same exact imagery with which he paints his Director Oppenheimer. Both hover outside of wars they themselves created, unwilling to put themselves in harms way. As Oppenheimers immortality is guaranteed, being a Ren soul, so is the One Gods, both perfectly content to utilize the lesser moral souls for their experiments and battles. Both act as commanding officers, not directly involving themselves in their work, and both are ultimately being blamed for the same things: nuclear warfare, linguistic imprisonment, and flawed immortality. Like Oppenheimer, the One God, in spite of all of his power, does not know what buttons to push, Because He can do everything, He can do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition... He cant go anywhere, since He is already fucking everywhere, like cowshit in Calcutta (Western 113). In fact, this reveals that when Burroughs wrote, God doesnt know what buttons to push, he was
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not merely reflecting the Technicians attitude towards his superior but, rather, hiding the correlation in plain sight. The most direct correlation is found in their ultimate nature as film in the Burroughsian reality studio, however. The fact that Oppenheimer only ever appears on screen suggests he himself is nothing but a recording, a film, and if 43 Oppenheimer is a stand-in for God, this would imply that Burroughs is claiming that God is just another recording to be discarded. We do not need to rely on this supposition because Burroughs provides us with a direct proclamation of this fact, and it is perhaps the most damning evidence that we should be reading Oppenheimer and One God as a single entity: The OGU is a prerecorded universe of which He is the recorder (Western 113). The film is not simply Gods message, but God is the medium for the film, for the recorded universe, itself. The barrier between signifier and signified once again collapses. Thus, the prior thought formations Burroughs calls for us to destroy, and shows Ali destroying in The Ticket That Exploded, are not merely ideas of language, of essentialism, of monotheism and restrictive life definitions; the red nitrous smoke smelling of Hiroshima is the stench of the One God Himself being burned. The Ticket That Exploded is a how-to manual for the destruction of the One God Universe, and The Western Lands is its fruition. We Are Beyond Death: The Journey Towards the Western Lands The now clear mission of The Western Lands is realized through a series of complex, and not necessarily commensurable, plots. The mission begins with the united space program first
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conceived of by Kim Carsons in the pages of The Place of Dead Roads, which is foiled by the intervention of Joe the Dead, who is revealed to be Kims murderer (in the shootout described at the beginning and end of The Place of Dead Roads). I will use this intervention as an opportunity to examine the ways in which Joe the Dead, as an example of machine life, helps to undermine the restrictive life definitions that are core to OGU and nuclear discourse, as has been discussed throughout this work. Finally, The Western Lands culminates in Kims pilgrimage towards the novels titular locale, representing the destruction of prior thought formations, leading to 44 ambiguous results, as Kim, transubstantiated into an old writer character who clearly represents Burroughs himself, completes his mission to unclear ends. I will argue for an optimistic and empowering reading of this ending, one that affirms the reader to take the same pilgrimage beyond death, to a truly post-nuclear world, not the one which gave birth to the bomb that we have erroneously dubbed with the name. We are reintroduced to Kims planned space program fairly early in The Western Lands; it is conceived as a secret service without a country called Margaras Unlimited or MU (an acronym which Burroughs also uses for Magical Universe, his term for a universe of many gods in opposition to the OGU) (Western 24). By blackmailing Interpol, MU is able to gain access to the wealth of files and information possessed by the worlds intelligence organizations, a literal coopting of the control society, iconically represented throughout literary history as an alphabet soup of shady organizations, towards Burroughsian, space-based ends. Kim and MU state, Our policy is SPACE. Anything that favors or enhances space programs, space exploration,
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simulation of space conditions, exploration of inner space, expanding awareness, we will support (Western 25). Such rhetoric continues directly from where Burroughs and Kim left off in the previous novel, seeking to abandon time for space whilst saving and unifying humanity. Unfortunately, the space program is derailed before it even gets off the ground, for on the very next page of the novel, the first of its second chapter, Burroughs returns us to the scene of Kims murder, revealing Joe the Dead, Kims once ally, as the killer. Kims death was not merely an unfortunate incident, however, and Burroughs will demonstrate that his death was actually profoundly necessary in order for the space program to succeed. First, the novel shifts its focus to the character of Joe the Dead, who, while not engaging in the same pilgrimage as Kim/Neferti/the old writer/Burroughs, subverts the dominant structures of 45 the OGU in interesting ways due to his status as a half-machine/half-man hybrid, who uses his particular abilities and knowledge to defy death in ways that frustrate the control society. Burroughs describes Joe in terms that are decidedly robotic and inhuman, writing that [h]e feels [grief] in the plates in his skull, in his artificial arms, in his artificial eye, in every wire and circuit of the tiny computer chips, down into his atoms and photons (Western 40). Burroughss description focuses on Joes artificiality almost to the point of absurdity: the nouns are all either electronic components or described with the adjective artificial directly, and this artificiality is stated to exist as such down to the atomic level, in such a way that any hope for life within Joes machine seems impossible. However, everything about Burroughss intentionally mechanistic description of Joe the Dead is undone in his characterization, his possession of a
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grief so deep it pervades every wire, chip, and proton of his existence. This juxtaposition of the natural and the mechanistic is unsettling, but it makes it clear that, for Burroughs, Joe the Dead is an example of machine life, in the long tradition of such speculations in science-fiction history. Burroughs further characterizes Joe in terms of his Egyptian soul system. When Burroughs writes that, Joe is the Tinkerer, the Smith, the Masters of Keys and Locks, of Time and Fire, the Master of Light and Sound, the Technician, he obviously identifies Joe with the Sekem, the second soul, directly underneath the Ren (Western 28). The Sekem is the soul that knows how to push the buttons, and we might recall that Oppenheimers Technician is referred to as Joe. Joe is formally subservient to Oppenheimer/Ren/One God, but in practice subverts him. Joe the Dead is described as a member of a select breed of outlaws known as the NOs, natural outlaws dedicated to breaking the so-called natural laws of the universe foisted upon us by physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists and, above all, the monumental fraud of cause and effect, to be replaced by the more pregnant concept of synchronicity (Western 30). Joes entire existence is 46 based around undermining the directions of the Director God, on which the neat order of his One God Universe depends, and his contradictory, category-rejecting nature as an example of machine life makes this inevitable. Joe uses a variety of methods to counteract traditional evolution, breeding, and death by dealing in advanced hybridization, transplant surgery, and even cancer treatment, in which his antagonistic nature to Ren is made explicit, while Rens
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connection to the nuclear is further reinforced: Cancer seems as immutably real and exempt from intervention as a nuclear blast. The explosive replication of cells? Once it starts, it is like an atom bomb that has already detonated. Death is an end product of purpose, of destiny. Something to be done in a certain time, and once it is done there is no point in staying around. Like a bullfight. Destiny = Ren. (Western 60) The connection between the atom bomb and cancer reflects larger connection being made between death in general as a category and the One God Universe. Joe the Dead, as living dead and living machine, undermines the category of death in a way that frustrates the One Gods system. He is in many ways doing the work of the Burroughsian revolutionary, breaking down and expanding categories that present themselves as essential. Joe is not completely sympathetic to the cause of the Burroughsian human rebel, however, given his advocacy of a complete evolution beyond the human race, believing [t]he human problem cannot be solved in human terms. Only a basic change in the board and the chessmen could offer a chance of survival (Western 27). This idea of being replaced, of being rendered obsolete, is arguably the true terror behind a post-apocalyptic world, as evidenced by more recent postapocalyptic works of art moving away from the traditional last humans standing plots of works like The Day After or Nevil Shutes On the Beach and towards the machine-dominated, and by no means less apocalyptic and nuclear, futures of Philip K. Dicks Do Androids Dream of 47 Electric Sheep? and films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day and even The Matrix. Joe the Dead
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presents a reading of we are become death that equates to the birth of the machine. In our attempts to maintain primacy over the definition of life, we are actually part of a long tradition that Burroughs traces back to the Egyptians. Joe the Dead challenges the idea that there can be one type of life in the same way that Burroughs challenges the idea that there can be one type of god. Joes character suggests an entire reading of post-nuclear, machine-based art, particularly film, through the Burroughsian lens. Such a project is beyond the limits of this work, but the first of the three codas which follow the work proper will suggest a potential schema for a reading of Burroughsian machine life in atomic cinema. Kim Carsons reenters the scene of The Western Lands as a dead man summoned by, of all people, the District Supervisor whom was encountered in The Ticket That Exploded, the man whom first prescribed the miracle of silence as the cure for the Venusian invasion which has clearly taken on new life in the Red Night Trilogy. Provocatively, upon seeing the District Supervisor, Kim is incredulous, recalling his shared identity with Burroughs himself, as previously described, in asking, So how come Im not the Supervisor? After all, I wrote the Supervisor, but the D.S. himself clarifies that Kim, like all writers, does not actually write, but merely reads and transcribes the already written, that which Kim reads is conveyed through his spokesman, the Supervisor. The Imam. The Old Man (Western 74). This Old Man is the Old Man in the Mountain, more commonly referred to as Hassan i. Sabbah (commonly abbreviated as HIS by Burroughs), the Islamic assassin figure who will accompany Kim, who at this point will be mostly seen under the Neferti identity, on his soon to be ordered pilgrimage. The D.S.s dialogue, however, suggest HIS is to be identified with both Kim and Burroughs themselves, and
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thus the old writer figure who appears at the novels bookends. Burroughss insistence on not merely 48 changing his and his characters identities at will, but in splitting a single identity across several simultaneously existences of ambiguous relation, suggests the true commitment to a nonessential, non-lingual, silent world that must be made in order to make it to the Western Lands. Any man who is arrogant enough to assume his entire personage is a single, irreducible being is doomed for disappointment and failure. Regardless, the D.S. informs Kim of his mission to find the Western Lands. Appropriately this is an act of a character from The Ticket That Exploded, which I have argued is a manual for Burroughsian methodology, instructing a character in The Western Lands to act the theory out in practice. Kims mission for a unified space program is thus sidelined because first death has to be over come via the discovery of the Western Lands and the immorality that lies within them. We might thus consider back to Kims first plans for the space program in The Place of Dead Roads, when he noted the need for certain biologic alterations before the program could be enacted successfully. It thus seems clear that the pilgrimage is the biologic alteration in question, and there is a reason the space program had to be so quickly interrupted by Kims death. Joe the Dead, seemingly taking a villainous and traitorous action (and he is, of course, by no means a fully redeemable character), actually helps to fulfill Kims and the D.S.s plans, for they now know that the answer much come from silence, from a land beyond death. Only when the
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pilgrimage to the Western Lands has been made can the space program be a viable option. The novel thus chronicles Burroughss various self-extensions of Kim Carsons, Hassan i. Sabbah, and Neferti journeying though the profoundly strange, mystical, and polytheistic world of the Land of the Dead towards the Western Lands. The details of this journey, from the presence of gigantic, radiated centipedes to nuclear bomb jet packs, are laden with various potential metaphorical significances, but a full analysis of such details is not of chief interest to us here and 49 ultimately critically superfluous: the point is that the pilgrimage is made. Thus, a brief overview will suffice for my purposes. The characters journey through Waghdas, City of Knowledge, a particularly post-apocalyptic city, adorned with stick people frozen on the wall, like the shadows of human figures left on the walls of Hiroshima (Western 129). Waghdas is a city of not just knowledge, but nuclear knowledge, and all of its knowledge must be abandoned if the pilgrimage is to be successful. The pilgrims thus proceed to the town of Last Chance, a town of duelists, some who ride in with atomic bullets to take out the target and immediate environs like a saloon or half a hotel (Western 142). Such tactics are dishonorable by the code of the Old West which Kim Carsons stands as a remnant of. In opposition to this atomic weaponry, Kim engages in his duel with the character Zed with handguns, which he only uses after Zed misses in an attempt to shoot Kim in the back while he urinates. Kim then, tracking Zed down, approaches him from the front, gives him an opportunity to defend himself and, after Zed misses again, disintegrates him with one shot that takes out a wall of the store (Western 149). Surrounded by
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dishonorable tactics and weaponry, Kim Carsons perhaps returns a measure of honor to weaponry (Burroughs, of course, being quite fond of handguns) in an age in which such honor has been lost. Finally, they must pass through the Duad, a river of excrement, for [t]o transcend life you must transcend the conditions of life, the shit and farts and piss and sweat and snot of life (Western 155). Neferti, noted to have particular trouble with the Duad due to his past experiences with the deadly poison of Christianity, finally succeeds in crossing by dropping his Ego, his Me, completely eliminating any sense that he is any way truly distinct from those around him, upon which he realizes that [t]here is nothing here to protect himself from, and grime of life is none the less as arbitrary as its splendors (Western 158). The pilgrimage is far from an isolated journey, as well. Burroughs describes leagues of 50 awakened pilgrims, finding [t]he great mushroom-shaped cloud always closer, that is, attempting to move beyond the pessimistic death view of their post-nuclear existences, take a step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land. That step is from word into silence. From Time into Space (Western 115). This is the path Burroughs has been laying out for us throughout his corpus, but only now is the mass pilgrimage actually beginning, a successful trip will give access to the gift that supersedes all other gifts: Immortality, an immortality free of the lies and trickery of the One God Universe and the physical entanglements of the Egyptians (Western 124). Will the pilgrims truly live forever? The answer is a substantive yes but not a literal one. The immortality Burroughs offers is outside of the realm of language and therefore cannot be understood in the normal sense of the term. Death
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will still occur in the terms of linguistic, categorical death, but the true pilgrimage is the recognition that this death is nothing but a category. Life need not be obsessed with maintaining its own status quo, with maintaining its consciousness in the terms it has come to understand indicate being alive. Burroughss truths are hard to fathom because we attempt to fathom it linguistically; his pilgrimage truly necessitates that [o]nly those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape (Western 116). Doing so provides the ultimate repellent to the restricting and controlling forces of nuclear weaponry, control society, and one god essentialism. Ultimately, it is the practice of Burroughs himself, more directly captured in the old writer (who, as the last man standing, seems to be the whole which has emerged from the Western Lands following the various characters successful entrance) of the novels final pages than any of his other personas, moving beyond death and abandoning the prior thought formations he has spent so long calling our attention to. It is a strangely utopian message, breaking through our frameworks of thought to save us. 51 Burroughs leaves us with the figure of the old writer, seeming to represent a reconstitution of Burroughs himself, who, following the pilgrimage, couldnt write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words (Western 258). Frederick M. Dolan, in The Poetics of Postmodern Subversion: The Politics of Writing in William S. Burroughss The Western Lands, chooses to read this moment as a meditation on the limits and failures of writing, on Burroughss own failure to accurately sublimate the word virus, which Dolan frames as an Aristotelian construct, writing:
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the problem with the Aristotelian construct, fundamentally, is its inaccuracy. Reality just is synchronous and unpredictable, whereas the declarative sentence moving ahead determinably through time makes it appear as if one event follows another in an orderly manner. Burroughs might attempt to write in ways that undermine the Aristotelian construct, but not without declaring something, and finally, as we have seen, not without becoming inveigled in this constructs seductive images of lucidity, order, control, and a plenitude beyond mere writing as fiction. (549) I reject Dolans reading of this moment, for while Burroughs is required to engage in some level of declaration, this is not in itself a ruination of his linguistic philosophy. Burroughs notes the word virus, not a parasite, originated as a symbiotic relationship. It is a tool for structuring and interpreting reality. Thus, while Burroughs will produce declarations that engage in Dolans Aristotelian construct, his hyperconsciousness of languages arbitrary nature saves him from falling back into the same slumber from which he has attempted to awaken us through the use of language. Burroughss lament that he has reached the end of words is in fact a joyous cry of success: he has exhausted the word viruss tricks and reduced it to a symbiont. He has undermined post-nuclear terror, one god essentialism, and the word virus as much as he can for us with his words. His job is done. As readers, it is now upon us to move on from language ourselves, to follow Burroughs on his pilgrimage to the Western Lands. If there is a lament at the end of The
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52 Western Lands, it is not for Burroughs himself, it is for the reader who might not follow him. Burroughs asks us, [h]ow long can one hang on in Gibraltar... clinging always to less and less (Western 258). Throughout his entire literary corpus, Burroughs has encouraged us to abandon the prior thought formations that limit our perspective on the world, that allow us to be controlled by language and society, that lead to determinations that a homosexual or a Japanese citizen is not truly alive, yet still many cling to their Gibraltar, the last vestige of a once great Empire of language, God, and bombs. When he, closing the novel, quotes T.S. Eliot, who conceived of a post-apocalyptic wasteland long before J. Robert Oppenheimer made it a terrifyingly possible reality, writing, Hurry up, please. Its time, he does not mean time is running out; rather, Time is running after us. He cautions us to follow him, to move onto the Space of the Western Lands before Time catches us for good. A Long Way Down: Parting Shots from the End of the World J. Robert Oppenheimers famous words upon witnessing the first nuclear explosion helped convince the world that it had or would profoundly change in a post-nuclear apocalypse in which annihilation would be sudden, absolute, and the work of humanity. Traditional post-apocalyptic works lamented humanitys lot while simultaneously romanticizing its status as the last men standing. Meanwhile, no one seemed to realize the true horrors that had led to the nuclear bomb in the first place: exclusive and limiting definitions of life that viewed the Japanese people as a vermin to be killed off, a society that would rather see the candle of life in the universe completely snuffed out than be replaced by life that defied that definition. The post-nuclear
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world existed before the bomb; it created the bomb, not the other way around. William S. Burroughs traces the bomb as a discourse to its very basic assumptions, its implicit logics of control, 53 manipulation, one god essentialism, and viral language. This is the true mark of a nuclear apocalypse, not a headcount of warheads and power plants. Destroying the specific instances of technology does not stop anything if the underlying logic continues. We need to approach the bomb as a discourse, from the bottom up (and the bottom is a long way down), if we are to truly understand it. Ultimately though, humanity tells us less about the bomb than the bomb tells us about humanity. If nothing else, let this work have taken the normally inaccessible work of William S. Burroughs and shown the complex cultural analyses within. Burroughs shows us that the ultimate culprit behind the bomb is the word virus and the One God Universe, but he also shows us that Burroughss declaration that we have become death need not be a permanent fate. By moving beyond death, through the Western Lands, we can achieve the immortality that only comes from the recognition of the connection of all things. Even if the literal language of such a statement strikes as too strong, even if everything is not actually and substantively connected, things are significantly and closely connected, and approaching the world as if the connection is substantial proves to be a useful theoretical framework. Perhaps, though, the nuclear bomb can be the historical moment through which we come to recognize the profound literalness of this connection, the shockwave through which we place ourselves in the moment of impact. Such an
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admission makes the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even more horrifying, but it might also prevent such tragedies from happening again. 54 55 CODA 1: Nuclear Film and the Fear of Machine Life The limits of space and time did not allow for a true analysis of nuclear film, particularly as it might be understood through the Burroughsian lens, which lends its propensity for connecting the bomb to other discourses that are not explicitly nuclear, with an eye towards the concept of machine life, a concept that has come to dominate post-apocalyptic film, particular since the 1990s. Such an analysis would do well to examine the 90s post-apocalyptic action films Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Matrix. Terminator 2s nuclear connection seems obvious enough, given its subtitle and its explicitly nuclear imagery (e.g. the famous playground scene). Interestingly, however, the object of central interest, and ultimate doom, to the universe of the film is not a nuclear weapon, nor even a battle android, but the computer chip within the wrecked Terminators arm. The characters desperately attempt to destroy this chip, which sends man on the trajectory towards inventing the chip itself. Even the good Terminator himself is chiefly interested in eliminating his own existence. In spite of this, the end of the film, by which point the Terminator has established a strong, fatherly relationship with the boy, paradoxically suggests that an emotional reconciliation between human and machine is possible, that machine life just might be alive, while simultaneously doing everything to suggest the technological progress that
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will destroy mankind is entirely inevitable. The film remains optimistic in the personal moment while famously bleak in its big picture narrative, as continued in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a film mostly notable for its ending sequence only, unfortunately. The connections between nuclear devastation and a computer chip in Terminator 2 do well to set up an analysis of The Matrix, which reverts to an almost entirely negative view of machine life (and not a particularly positive one of human life either). Indeed, The Matrix depicts a world, darkened by the use of weaponry of a probably nuclear nature, in which all life in the real world 56 is exceedingly bleak. The machines, e.g. Agent Smith, are not content within the Matrix either, suggesting complete ignorance is the only method towards anything resembling happiness. It also suggests a machine life that is, well, not very alive, but just as alive as its pathetic human counterparts, who are not particularly alive themselves in their reliance on literally preprogrammed religious sequences of uprising and sacrifice for anything resembling a purpose. The most pivotal point to be taken from The Matrix, however, is its shocking, but profoundly true, equation of the computer (and more specifically the Internet) with the nuclear bomb. The two technologies developed alongside each other, with figures such as Vannevar Bush being central to both, and in the future of The Matrix it takes computers, networks, and nuclear missiles to build the lethal cocktail that induces the bleak dystopia shared by humans and machines in mutual dissatisfaction. The specific technology means nothing; sometimes it takes a
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large number of them in a very particular combination, but in the end, the end is a discourse. Finally, such a film analysis might look at Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (known only as Innocence in Japan), an anime film proposing an unessentialist view of life, inclusive of human, machine, and hybrid, that strikes as oddly enlightened (appropriate that it would come from Japan) and even Burroughsian. An extensive analysis of the roles of machine life and the nuclear bomb in post-apocalyptic art might look to a great many other works (Blade Runner and its source material, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, come to mind particularly), but this schema might be an interesting and non-traditional starting point for a nuclear film analysis. 57 CODA 2: The Fukushima I Accidents As this thesis neared its completion, Japan was hit by the Thoku earthquake and tsunami, triggering various equipment failures and radioactive releases at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. The news media has subsequently been flooded with debates as to the safety of nuclear power, sensationalist reports of radiation waves crossing the Pacific into the United States, and frequent parallels between the events of Hiroshima and Fukushima. With my thesis of this nature, I feel obligated to acknowledge the Fukushima incident, but only to caution those who seek to draw such parallels to Hiroshima too readily. These are two entirely different historical events happening within entirely different historical frameworks. We do not want the death view to resurface and keep us from helping the many victims of the natural disasters due to our fears
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of nuclear incidents. A conceptual sketch of a potential installation of We Are Become Death: Cultural Shockwaves of Hiroshima
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58 CODA 3: An Experiment in Installing We Are Become Death If any reader should be inspired to display this thesis as an art installation, may they first be welcome to do so. Secondly, may I offer my humble suggestions, which I include here mostly out of a sense of obligation to return Burroughs to the chaos from which he emerged. My explication of his theories above both emboldens and unsettles me. I feel that I have gone into Burroughss home and straightened up all of his things without asking, and I have a duty to return the mess the way I found it. Firstly, having so engaged with the word virus through this piece, I feel it is necessary to let it know who is boss. I recommend two to four large printers set up to be constantly printing the thesis from the first to last page in sequence. The printers will be arranged so that pages, upon their completion, fall into a furnace in the center of them. The thesis proper should be cut-up in Burroughsian style and displayed as a massive tile puzzle, which visitors are strongly encouraged to distort, ensuring surprising and new reading experiences for all. A wall of monitors soundlessly play a variety of nuclear-related clips, each in random sequence: footage of mushroom clouds, scenes from The Day After, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Terminator 2, and other nuclear films, and perhaps, occasionally, the entire Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last. Once per day at some time of significance (which I leave to the exhibitors), however, the exhibit goes into shutdown. Air raid sirens wail, introducing J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose head takes over the wall of monitors, now acting as a
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single screen. He delivers his famous I am become death performance as the furnace ignites. During all times other than Oppenheimers guest appearances, the following songs shall play in random sequence in the background of the exhibit: --- Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls by Godspeed You! Black Emperor --- Mourning Doves by The Hourglass Orchestra 59 --- We Will All Go Together When We Go by Tom Lehrer --- The End of the World by Skeeter Davis --- In the Year 2525 by Zager & Evans --- Enola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark --- I Melt With You by Modern English --- Well Meet Again by Vera Lynn 60 multimedia associated with this project may be viewed at wearebecomedeath.tumblr.com 61 Bibliography Atomic Archive. J. Robert Oppenheimer Now I Am Become Death... Atomic Archive. AJ Software & Multimedia, 2011. Web. 27 March 2011. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Warner Bros., 1982. Boyer, Paul. Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory. The American Experience in World War II: The
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Atomic Bomb in History and Memory. Ed. Walter L. Hixson. New York: Routledge, 2003. 237-259. Print. Burroughs, William S. Interview with Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. The Journal for the Protection of All Beings. San Francisco: City Lights, 1961. Print. Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1959. Print Burroughs, William S. The Place of Dead Roads. New York: Picador, 1983. Print. Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove, 1967. Print. Burroughs, William S. The Western Lands. New York: Penguin, 1987. Print. The Day After. Dir. Nicholas Meyer. ABC, 1983. Film. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Del Rey, 1968. Print. Dolan, Frederick M. The Poetics of Postmodern Subversion: The Politics of Writing in William S. Burroughss The Western Lands. Contemporary Lierature, Vol. 32, No. 4 (1991): 535-551. Print. Dower, John. Race, Language, and War in Two Cultures: World War II in Asia. The World War Two Reader. Ed. Gordon Martel. New York: Routledge, 2004. 226-249. Print. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Columbia, 1964. Film. Fallout 3. Bethesda Softworks, 2008. Video Game. Feraru, Arthur N. Public Opinion Polls on Japan. Far Eastern Survey, Vol. 19, No. 10 (1950): 101-103. Print. Frank, Richard B. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. Toho, 2004. Film. The Gita: Chapter 11. The Bhagavad Gita: The Divine Song of God. Web. 27 March 2011. < http://www.bhagavad-gita.us/categories/The-Gita:-Chapter-11/?Page=2> Glasstone, Samuel and Philip J. Dolan. Chapter I: General Principles of Nuclear Explosions. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. The Trinity Atomic Website. Web. 27 March 2011. 62 Hijiya, James A. The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 2 (2000): 123-167. Print. Kull, Steven. Nuclear Arms and the Desire for World Destruction. Political Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1983): 563-591. Print. The Matrix. Dirs. Andy and Larry Wachwoski. Warner Bros., 1999. Film. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print. Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Avon,
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1988. Print. Nietzche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 874-84. Print. Nornes, Ab Mark. Production Materials from The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. CJS Publications. Centre for Japanese Studies Publications. Web. 27 March 2011. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravitys Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973. Print. Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Touchstone, 1986. Print. Saussure, Ferdinand de. From Course in General Linguistics. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 960-977. Print. Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. New York: Ballantine, 1957. Print. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Dir. James Cameron. TriStar, 1991. Film. Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. Dir. Peter Kuran. VCE, 1995. 63
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The Phenomenology of Dissolution / Disillusionment

Shafni Awam
Affectation is effective. Rivers run amuck, perpetually crumbling levees separating reality and illusion. Hyper aware. (Consciousness), its derivative I observe(s) (its) myself transition into sleep. The levees are crumbling, seams undone thru interweaving. Perceptions seem more intense, hypereal I suppose. Estranged. Starring at the mirror Looking into eyes, seemingly foreign eyes, (I) Touch (my) body, I felt myself feeling, I guess this is my body. For a moment it seemed like I embodied the negative space that connected the reflection with its source. Seamless I guess. When becoming unconscious,
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www.fiascopress.org the loci of Imagination seem to be independent of odinary conscious input, transforming into a Temporary Autonomous Zone Of sorts. A visceral shift from the imaginary to the imaginal realm.
When becoming unconscious, becoming = whizzing thru swirling tunnels of sensations, all of them, fracturing, colliding, multiplying and dividing seamlessly. A hybrid of (sexual reproduction) X (binary fission), birthing a synesthetic orgy of mutating sensations. Events: (past) - (future), cant delineate. It is not that I am losing consciousness, forced to wormhole into a dream state rather, a theater of shattered sensations interweaving, highly absurd and intensely meaningful. Elephants succumbing to an icy corridor, the army, a blur of skin, hide, fur, Metal, wood and body odor. Pelted into clay stoned hushness by a swarm of sparrows, fodder, half chewed, moaning, orchid icicles, splattering, splintering into the dusty earth. Honeying light dissipating, rock cold air, unsettling the gloom.
I feel cold, sweaty, eyes squinty, palms clammy, mouth dry, heart racing, for a moment,
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the world seemed alien, what, where, who am I or was I? Yes All this seems strangely familiar Back to my old self again, (whatever that means) Thou art that. That is what eludes me, Art discloses that perhaps, Maybe not, who knows? Not me. "Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness." Haruki Murakami
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Swarm Scholarship Project

Challenge #1: Fiasco Press is seeking your guesswork, research, and personal knowledge to help identify the title and attribution of an original William S. Burroughs painting featured on the following page. *Please post all comments publicly so your peers can participate in this exercise of swarm scholarship. Thanks!
Photographed by Alex Broudy Title, attribution, and signature found on the back of the original William S. Burroughs painting featured on the following page.
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Painting with Illegible Title by William S. Burroughs Photographed by Alex Broudy
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202

Sexy Prescience - Fiasco Press: Journal of Swarm Scholarship

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Rendering Realities by Nauman Humayun

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Dedicated to Mom, Dad, and Popop.

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A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson

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maybe Allah and maybe Mohammed is his prophet"?

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line of hogwash if it promises some certitude in a world they can't understand.

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Louis de Broglie Foundation 22 (2) 133.

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Excerpted from Milton by William Blake

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initial wave is over.

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Cracking the Oyster

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A Fiction of Philosophy by Alex Broudy

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Nonsense. Listen good.

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