finnagain

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*j*
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Now I am thoroughly disgusted.
GBU. snafu.
New York rubber rooms:
Rubber Hobo Economies, R.H.E.,U.S.A.:
Today my face is the Good the Bad the Ugly,
with 51 percentz lezz guudz ….
The Diet (of amplification)
of Juvenile Automata ….

HeisenHower: the prophecy of MICocracy:
the millenary idiom-dusty compress:
head-test traumaturgy:
the statement was already *quaint*
when it was made …. once upon a time:
bedtime story: “the news”: since that phase
of the metastasis of weapons-prod had begun
during the 1930s: German Japanese Tempires:
“fuses” set to explode: armor: tanks: radar:
V2 rocket:
ME 262 jet-aircraft: Fat Man Little Boy:
The Super:
these
were accomplished: *fait accompli*
when the HeisenHower spoked. A spook.
The factories had been operational for more
than a decade. HH, some ghost memorial out
of Shookspeer, Spookmerde.
Savant, Sirrpants,
of Pobolick Uppiniun.

My perceptions now correspond with Buñuel.
I cannot regard the *hiccup* the *halitosis*
proper to politic: the law: as something
other than Alibi, Hypnosis, Amnesia.
AHA.
Ubu roi.

Franz Kafka: the trial: the castle: the alibi.
I do not regard the texts as satires of “20th-
century bureaucracy”: the texts examine the
absurd consistency (Kurt Gödel) of the crazy
quilt of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: AHE:
“a family saga”: “tree”: minus “the family”:
*holy* family: the law exists *passively:* as in
the illusion: “time passes”: the law accumulates
(constipation of the cloud) and absorbs:
its function is intestinal: the apparition:
“the doom” of all who “enter” and “serve” it:
it performs no active intelligence, no perception:
it borrows “everything” “it has”:
Poe: The Conqueror Worm:

The famous *blindness* of Oedipus: exists *intestinally:*
labyrinth: blind intestine:
sphincter: riddle of the sphinx:
payment: prepare to receive: the word:
awe: the key: substrate of law:

to fast: to cleanse the ambient atmospheric body
of vain intestinal combats:

Roland Barthes: *I am sick of images* [image: as
blind accumulation: identity: (commercial) brand:]
The reporter in Antonioni’s *Passsenger:*
he knows disgust: he loathes: the image:
which imprisons him: society: social propriety:
the succubus:
metallurgy: bullets armors:
weapons sold within the church:

Joyce: hit upon it:
*Finnagain:*
to spell “correctly”:
is to cooperate: with succubistic law:

Enjoy the hills, the rills ….

A

Les Chronophages

The need for criticism to include the framework for a new, alternate pathway to travel upon shows up when I find myself focusing too much on circumscribing the problems. This is the same as opposition politics that gets too mired in opposition (doh!) and forgetting that an alternative vision is necessary as well. How to find autonomous spaces when on the road, moving along the lines of power drawn by the dominant social system? How to find or facilitate interstitial spaces that are not under the control of that system. Do these spaces have a set of characteristics that makes them immediately identifiable? Or are they only identified by the precise instances of (uncontrolled) energy flow that occur within them? (chicken-and-egg situation!) For every unit of human-controlled flow of energy, there are countless flows of energy of many orders greater magnitude that are not controlled. Humans are capable of controlling a certain, very limited range of flows. This range has increased in time from those expressions of embodied reach to those far beyond the direct impact of that body. By collecting the energy of many bodies, humans are able to express and project the reach of their control over vast regions. Ultimately, this reach is limited by the number of bodies at the disposal of the regime and the efficiency with which that granular energy is harnessed (through those controlled pathways).

Ran across a couple (excerpted) essays by Ivan Illich, a radical critic of techno-social consumerist systems.

The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed. — Ivan Illich, Silence is a Commons

The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly. This rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services in over-all production. Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. — Ivan illich, Tools for Conviviality

quick observations

tea and concrete in the morning and off for a full day of meetings and paperwork, prepping for teaching and research.

a visit to the library is disappointing, many books are in terrible condition, shabby, out-dated. hmmmm. what’s with that? evidence of zealous and active use? or small library budgets. in the technology section, so many were completely outdated and should have been consigned to basement stacks long ago.

profiling. black clad, stylishly-coiffed young Asian students with thick-rimmed Dior specs dominate the downtown city streets that I’ve frequented so far. haven’t gotten to the regular business district and will likely not unless there is a compelling reason.

bureaucracy. and catch-22’s loom out of the composition of days spent meeting people. technological infrastructure is problematic as well. regular network access simply does not work, and the help desk could not help. yet I can access a new WPA network constructed for iPhones and such.

detritus

not-yet-dried blood in a drippy pool in the tram. thick fog from the south. warm weather comes from the south and west, chill from the north and east. Sunday morning. draining myself to work, molasses uphill in the winter? how about a contemporary image — something like, well, how about “like downloading Star Wars part 9 on a 14.4 baud modem”? pretentious language, it seems.

and no, a trip to the tax office to find out that I need to supply them with receipts. another reason to go to Iceland. spending more money to maybe save money, but possibly to be f**ked raw by another bureaucracy. gettin’ near to giving up totally on this living style. trippin’.

tenure

Faculty meeting. First day of the Critical Thinking class. It seems that the bureaucracy at CU has become much more convoluted. The freshman class is massive and evidently there are not enough real places to put all the bodies. Funding for the university as a whole seems to have contracted, squeezing the administration into a preservation state and the faculty between hard stones. How it goes and goes. I retain the status of observer, comparing notes with other systems, other times, and other places. Life in Amurika seems hard and getting harder. Not measured by wealth, although that seems to be a complicating factor for many people. Hard to see where it ends or changes or evolves — de-evolution is the most obvious solvent. Lies and repeated introspection.