(this quote is about the way in which social discourses, such as ‘psychopathology’ or ‘economics’, produce themselves and simultaneously produce the subjectivity of the individuals who take part in them)

“In the proposed analysis, instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciative modalities manifest his dispersion.  To the various statuses, the various sites, the various positions that he can occupy or be given when making a discourse.  To the discontinuity of the planes from which he speaks.  And if these planes are linked by a system of relations, this system is not established by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical with itself, dumb and anterior to all speech, but by the specificty of a discursive practice.  I shall abandon any attempt, therefore, to see discourse as a phenomenon of expression — the verbal translation of a previously established synthesis; instead, I shall look for a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity.  Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.  It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed.  I showed earlier that it was neither by ‘words’ nor by ‘things’ that the regulation of the objects proper to a discursive formation should be defined; similary, it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject nor by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined.”

- Michel Foucault, The Formation of Enunciative Modalities, from The Archaeology of Knowledge.

[I realize this may not be a popular post.]

“O you his machine-like teacher, well do you need to suppress his healthy understanding with your school Logic; otherwise he would take your measure, repeat the gobbledygook you took an hour to trot out afterwards naturally but without school-cleverness in three words.  He would despise you!  But woe unto you; from a thousand heads who would have become men only ten will be bold enough to be wise; the rest are choked with school-dust — like the Egyptian midwife.”

–Johann Gottfried von Herder, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of People, 1765.

“It is true that there might be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed.  We look at everything through the human head and cannot cut this head off; while the question remains, What would be left of the world if it had been cut off? This is a purely scientific problem, and one not very likely to trouble mankind; but everything which has hitherto made metaphysical suppositions valuable, terrible, delightful for man, what has produced them, is passion, error, and self-deception; the very worst methods of knowledge, not the best, have taught belief therein.  When these methods have been discovered as the foundation of all existing religions and metaphysics, they have been refuted.  Then there still always remains that possibility; but there is nothing to be done with it, much less is it possible to let happiness, salvation, and life depend on the spider-thread of such a  possibility.  For nothing could be said of the metaphyiscal world but that it would be a different condition, a condition inaccessible and incomprehensible to us; it would be a thing of negative qualities.  Were the existence of such a world ever so well proved, the fact would nevertheless remain that it would be precisely the most irrelevant of all forms of knowledge: more irrelevant than the knowledge of the chemical analysis of water to the sailor in danger in a storm.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, Ch. 1, 9

On craggy coast and yeasty shore
Philosophers have walked the lonely walk before
The deadliest view of the living sound
Primeval slush to the horizon unbound.

Two decades old, no need for a stroller
No need to grow two decades older
The ice plant sucks salt from the rock
The surf, the gulls — a ticking clock.

To the nascent naturalist
She speaks in tongues
With a breath of mystery
She fills his lungs
He coughs up questions and answers.

Salty absurdity as his hammer
To the rock he pins a foundation of lectures
Till he’s built around him four broad walls
A sturdy home of queries, conjectures

With a weary sigh he surveys his tribute
Relishing proudly its perfected angles
Four broad walls and not a window to breathe through
The vine whose roots the branches strangle.

In convoluted sentential tangles
He digs and prays for profound detection
But mystery remains at sea:
“Goodbye, perverted reflection.”

“Hey man…You see that fuckin Doookahtee over there?! I’m a motherfuckin Hell’s Angel prospect man and I hate motherfuckin crotchrockets man mother fucking Hell’s Angels prospect, man… man I hate motherfuckin crotchrockets… but i love fuckin Doookahtees man.”

He repeated the above several times.

We tried to make him go away. But then he wanted to talk about Jesus.

“You know what else I fucking love, man, mother fucking Jesus Christ man. I love Jesus man, Jesus got people like us man. He was one of us man. Jesus Christ… that guy, you know he was hanging out with guys like us man, with whores, and killers… and bikers, man.”

Jesus Christ was hanging out with bikers. This was his message. Jesus was on his side; Jesus was a bad-ass, he subverted the status quo of the Jewish and Roman ruling class, and he did it by shacking up with hustlers, turning water to malt liquor, and cruising on his hog.

At this point the Prospect wanted to show us the way Jesus did things. He slipped his hand under his vest, revealing the belt that held up his dirtbag pants, and caressed what appeared to be the chrome butt of some kind of firearm. He asked, “Do you pray?!” Swaggering, caressing the chrome, he repeated “Do you pray?!”

I said no. My friend said, “Sometimes.” He didn’t like “sometimes.” He wanted to know how often. I jumped in with “Wednesdays and Sundays.” He asked “What do you pray for?” My friend said “My family.” The Prospect said “Why don’t you pray right now?!” I said “Its not Sunday yet,” though it probably was.

Somehow, we eventually got this guy to start laughing and he backed off and we got the fuck out of there. Moral of the story is: Jesus Christ may save your soul, but you’ve got to save your own ass from his followers.

We have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.

and when I see polls that report 53% of Americans say they would not vote for an atheist (10% more than the group that wouldn’t vote for a homosexual!). Maybe Obama knew about these figures when he joined Trinity United Church.

I acknowledge that being atheist is only like being a racial minority to the degree that intelligence is heritable. Regardless, I am starting to feel oppressed to the point that I think we need stronger atheist advocacy groups in this country. And with end times theology increasingly shaping American foreign policy, our safety may depend on it.

All those who feel they need the strongest words and sounds, the most eloquent gestures and postures, in order to be effective at all…talk of “duties,” and actually always of duties that are supposed to be unconditional. Without that they would lack the justification for their great pathos, and they understand this very well. Thus they reach for moral philosophies that preach some categorical imperative, or they ingest a goodly piece of religion….Because they desire the unconditional confidence of others, they need first of all to develop unconditional self-confidence on the basis of some ultimate and indisputable commandment that is inherently sublime, and they want to feel like, and be accepted as, its servants and instruments.

Two years prior, in 1880, Dostoevsky published The Brothers Karamazov, whose famous chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” ruminates on a very similar theme. In this intensely ironic parable in which the Grand Inquisitor addresses Christ, Dostoevsky writes:

In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.

The Grand Inquisitor informs Jesus that the Church has had to perfect his work by adding to it the kind of spiritual bondage that allows people to live untroubled, in service to commandments that are — on the Church’s authority — inherently sublime.

These passages share a subtext, namely this: that religion functions primarily as a means to negate the fundamental freedom that comes with existence, because that freedom is too heavy for most to bare. By its simple imperatives, its categories of good and evil, it lifts from its adherents the burden of being arbiter of their own lives.

I agree that religion so functions, but is that necessarily cause for contempt? The inability of the average human to deal with the complex ambiguities of life is independent of religion; if he had not this mechanism of self-indenture, he would devise another. In light of this, it might be inevitable for there to exist various ways for us to indenture ourselves (indeed there are others besides religion, capitalism for one). But religion goes further. Not only does it enslave, it claims to exalt. It claims to empower as it thrives on subjugation. It demands respect for the ignoble task of making the feeble-minded absolutely certain of truths that do not exist.

I have to side with Nietzsche in contempt of religion; not only does it feed the “will to ignorance,” but it deceitfully claims to do the opposite. If we are going to throw ourselves into bondage out of some profound ennui, we should at least be honest with ourselves about it (cf. Heidegger’s Being & Time). Digging deeper into this honest interpretation of life may lead us to better understand the very condition in which we find ourselves — questions and answers over which religion pretends to have ultimate authority.

Robert Kagan has been all over the media promoting his new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (dun dun dun…!). Based only on hearing him speak, I think I agree with the central thesis of his book, which is totally contra his earlier thought and pronounces a shocking death sentence to neoconservatism. Turns out democracy is NOT the inevitable manifestation of the perfect movement of history. (!) What a hilarious revelation, ironically reached five years after the inevitable movement of history accidentally moved the American military into Iraq! Mr. Kagan has finally realized, after founding the Project for the New American Century with William Kristol and laying various other groundwork for the divine global democratic nirvana that he envisioned after the Cold War, that we’re not living in 1880s Europe and history is not driven by teleological forces. “The End of Dreams” is apt — indeed, history has ended his.

Congratulations to Mr. Kagan for catching up with 1960s social theory. What he thinks of as “The Return of History” is, to me, the end of the return of history. Namely, it is the end of that return to the positivism of the Modern period — called neoconservatism — in which history was considered a science and liberal democracy as a force akin to gravity in the holy evolution of society. While the rest of the neocons continue on in their solipsistic worlds, at least Kagan is a realist enough to see the failure of his experiment in the science of history and accomodate his worldview accordingly.

Obviously, I’m still enthusiastic about Obama, his judicial ability to deal with nuance, and his journalistic ability at self-analysis. As he addressed supporters in St. Paul after the Montana and South Dakota primaries, I was able to envision, for the first time, an Obama administration. I was inspired by the fact that I was inspired to maybe think about applying to work for his government — working for government being something I had never under any other circumstance considered.

I’m fairly confident that Obama will win in November. But not totally confident. However, this match-up of McCain vs. Obama is uninteresting because there’s really no contest. What I’ve said before about the primaries is really true here: this is not a test of Obama or of McCain, it’s a test of the American political system. The correct answer to the question “Who should be the next President?” is so obvious that we don’t even need the teacher’s exam key. Election Day ’08 will not be the day that Obama and McCain find out who did better on the test for the Presidency, it will be the day that we find out if our country passes or fails the test of whether it still functions.

I simply want to congratulate the City of Vallejo. In declaring chapter 9 bankruptcy, it has officially made the road sign that greets Highway 37 motorists as they enter (and mostly pass through) this forlorn municipality one of the world’s most ironic. It reads:

“Welcome to Vallejo: City of Opportunity”

I’ll get a picture next time I’m passing through, unless they’ve taken it down, which they probably should.