ELL: Incoherence I

[Mike Lawrence]

Yes Mike, it is about incoherence, ambiguity. What is
being shown is the schizoid nature of late capitalism,
especially in the West. We will analyze this machine,
performing, necessarily, a type of curretage. No
chance of it going mad, it was from the beginning.
With sprouts of capitalism during the Ming, after
feudalism, it really got started with the Corinthian
Tyranny.

Here we have the discovery of a mammoth. Someone
wanting to know more about mammoths, mastodons, well,
the theft is preaccomplished if they happen to be a
certain genre of Eskimo. What the system gives with
one hand, it takes away with the other. Now, any
Inupiaq dictionary should have the term for mastodon.
Anyone who has followed works such as Howard Zinn's
People's History of the United States, knows of this
curious ahistoricism, particular to the American
rhizome.

Examples abound. Ahistoricism dismisses Freud.
American psychologists argue for introduction of
psychology in the elementray school curriculum(New
York). This was a few years ago. A few years before
that, Derrida in France was arguing for the
introduction of philosophy into the elementary
schools. Derrida knew that if 'psychological
ill-being' so akin to ortganized religion, got started
at that stage in the educational system, it would be
no time before psychoanalysis was forgotten.

Yea even Freud's beautiful passages on the death
drive, which most people don't understand, gets
mutatilated in the rampant capitalist cartoon. This is
much like present capitalism: with the fall of
communism, there is now nothing to oppose the delire.
Not that communism offers anything better. Erasure,
replacement. This is fundamental to the system, one
that is compelled to advantage its assasins.

Erasure: reading Krashinnikov's Explorartions in
Kamchatka(the Russian version), one notices that with
the English trans.(Oregon Historical Society), one
will find deletions about the use of the Queen Mother
of poisons, aconitum, in whaling. Was this a mistake?
In listing the names for men, one of them is left out.
Is this a mistake too? The name in Kamchadal means 'he
returned.'

Perhaps this was a threatening name, considering the
island of Yezo is not far away, And an enterprising
scholar might go further and find that a Chiinese
christ already happened(120 B.C.), or that there is a
constellation in the ancient Chinese sky called Jizo,
'a groups of soldiers.' Or maybe that there are still
little statues of Jizo along the roads in Japan. Under
each succeeding layer, there's always more.

So, one wants to contribute to opposing language
ehndangerment. They arive in Yezo or Kamchatka, and
haven't a clue as to the difference between crowfoot
and aconitum, nor whether or not those were really
Latin inscriptions on harpoon heads, or if that was
not just a rumor. Ahistoricism never heard of nature,
except that in its profound illiteracy, it knows that
it should oppose it.

Go to Winslow, Arizona. Set your backpack down and
accept a drink from the Indians.  Learn that some of
them are Viet Nam vets, get your clothes dirty setting
on the sidewalk, and one may have a better chance to
see that there is a spontaneity that they understand
apart from the premeditated vibration that white-eyes
exudes. And not even a program, a schedule. After two
hours, I was allowed(a key word) access to their
feelings about things.

'The history of man has been a long sequence of the
misunderstanding of the signs. To oppose it is a
duty.'
(Paul Valery)

>From the indigenous point of view, they know of this
duty, yet their attempts at it have been debauched,
ignored, sabotaged, betrayed.

Without too much difficulty, one could retun to the
idea of chalk, writing, speech. Kamassian is an
extinct language. We know how Kamassian grammar has an
intimate connection to the cuttlefish. Does chalk come
from cuttlefish? Regardless, cuttlefish perform
camouflage, just as those with tenure stay camouflaged
while their assistants with too many hormones
drenching their idealism(Nazi Youth groups?)and not
enough experience in controlling them, ply this fear
of not belonging onto the socius.

Welcome campus evangelization, for the more that are
kept in the dark about themselves, the more that are
kept within the infantilism of a relgious melting-pot
paradise, forgoing the pain of individuation, the
bonds of tenure remain strong. The weak religious
expression in the the American rhizome, though, only
has a tendency toward democracy, yet never quite
reaching it. At this point, it's up to the individual
to decide which religious group will eventually
discover who and what is mentioned in your will.
Miscegenation? Never heard of it. Marriage as
legalized prostitution? That's absurd, 'I can find the
right girl and get married in a courthouse.'

At one time I thought it rude when two or more would
speak another language in the elevator. How does a
female, whose mother happens to speak Lo-lo fluently,
convince herself and her daughter that their languqage
should be used outside of the home? Do we who care
about speech diversity have to make it 'cool' to speak
another language, while at the same time begin to
defuse the resentment of those who use English? There
is a built-in betrayal concerning the English language
too, yet those on hormones and materialism will likely
not begin to notice it until on the threshold of the
mid-life crisis. Don't try to explain that too soon.

I will shortly write about the Kamassian Cuttlefish.
In so doing, I am not concerned about kitsch. This is
the beauty of it: right here one has the opportunity
to oppose kitsch in the most profound way. Kitsch does
not want to take the time to do scholarship. This is
its weakness, its one-book weakness, and it is right
here that the opportunity lies. This opposes the idea
of earasure, that's the sensitive part of the 'guy in
the elevator.' Knowledge envy.

The Kamassian Cuttlefish will point to the erasure
effect, for example, when Buddhism enterd China, as
shamans found it increasingly difficult to make a
living. One can see how christianity would welcome
buddhism to America, no problem. Except that one
scholar has already done much preliminary work of
opposition for us. Joseph Needham's, Science and
Civilization in China will be a key text as we take a
look at an extinct language that, paradoxically
enough, when studied, comes to life again. We wish to
explicitly focus on the shaman, because he is this
psychopath, the star of the show, who dissolves the
kitsch of the colonizer and the colonizer's illusion
of plagiarism. A matter of style, that is why
medicinal gardens were locked from the public in the
Middle Ages. There is something special about plants
that were cared for by a practitioner rather than
mass-grown, pun intended.

Finally, indigens may not want the proctoscope, the
Doc. Fine, yet don't expect us to ignore your
language, it being a part of the world; it's fair game
for our own brand of copy-catism. But some of us are
studying, using these languages because we know that
if we don't do it here in America, America could turn
into a pressure cooker, a cultivator of fascism. Not
concerned about eco-tourism, no cringing desire to
visit. How is it possible to withold indigenous
language once its published? Would not other, less
ethical missionaries use it against the indigene?

Using other languages in America, right out in the
open, does run the risk of maledictions, projections.
Nevertheless, a project to defuse the paranoia would
include the finesse required to explain the benefits
of learning a few words in German, French, Naskapi,
Zulu, etc. The end result in my opinion, is that it
would tend to counter the built-in betrayal in all
languages.

For whales, see
http:lists.nbr.org/japanforum/showMessage.asp?ID=4701
I have the full report from Shimonoseki, May 24, 2002
if one cannot find it easily elsewhere. Ironically, it
seems that Eyak Chief Mary Smith spoke somewhere else
just the day after this report. Eyak is a challenging
language, all those stops and such. Rewarding to study
a bit of it, because there are some parallels in
Siberian Udihe, which in turn have strong parallels in
Uralic.

For an interesting text by which to study the effects
of late capitalism, see The Psychology of the Adaption
to Absurdity. For reasons why there are Indians
stacked in shelters like cordwood in the winter, see
The Politics of Time, Rutz(ed.) American
Anthropological Association, Wash. D.C.

If connecting Yaqui, Zulu and Manchu shamanism,
mnastodons, whales, vines and berries, seems
incoherent, it does seem to postpone illiteracy for a
few precious hours.

*kia'ne pa' ?aku sa' kobal sewa' me kia ne to' iyo oi'
cibela hai' ki' mne wiwilo
I am only distant type of melon which is flowering. I
am only sending out vines in all directions.

For delirium that oozes in all directions, see
http:amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-1-9604/msg00025.html

On one of America's most monetarily prolific campuses,
when philosophy arrives, they lock their doors from
the stanger in themselves; invoking insularity,
solidarity. Having  betrayed this stranger, they get
precisely the reality that their truer homelessness
deserves: exposure.

See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, and Slavoj
Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom.


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