A Paradigm Toolkit in Three Parts
I.
Capital Alpha
“I do not invent my best thoughts. I find them.”
-Aldous Huxley
“I am an artist,” declares a man, and we all snicker at his pretentiousness, or lose ourselves in one-dimensional romanticism. “In the Tradition, I carry the torch of Virgil, Dante, Parler.” Yet all artists cannot carry the same torch. A painter paints, an architect builds, a novelist constructs characters and weaves plots, a poet rhymes and finds the music in things. This childish simplification of art occurs because modern Western post-Industrial Revolution society and the hard-nosed “no nonsense” settlers of America have divorced art from life – the ideals and motivations of art are considered to be separate from everyday, common existence. We have capitalized Art yet maintain a semi-Christian modesty about ourselves and our abilities and so we (lower case “w”) have little or nothing to do with Art (capital “A”) and those that do, in our estimation, have truck with the mystical realms of Art are revered while those that only pretend to have access to those lofty spheres but in whom we do not detect the higher influence in are considered pretentious.
Yet consider the following: Have you ever been served by a truly excellent waiter? His every word, gesture, movements appeal to the situation and context as well as to our sense of aesthetics. When he performs his role – not a terrible complex one at that, and one which we are all familiar with and so we know what to expect (several acts performed in a predetermined sequence, ending with dessert, coffee, and perhaps an apéritif), yet he brings a certain grace and elegance to the performance. Regardless of the specific motif of the restaurant (French, Mexican, Hungarian, Cambodian) and the specific décor and ambience of the room, we find ourselves transported beyond the specifics of the moment to mental states that extend much further back in time – to the almost archetypal role of being served.
We think of English Lords and Ladies, the French Aristocracy of the Sun King, Imperial Japan, the wealthy millionaires of F. Scott Fitzgerald, movie stars, film directors, opera divas, and the heads of various states throughout the eras reaching back even to the kings and pharaohs of Ancient Egypt and perhaps further back still, to previous epochs now only speculated about in legend, myth, and poetry. For a brief period of time, say two or three hours, we are transported out of our lives, jobs, marriages, conflicts, allegiances, and join the ranks of those who have been waited upon, served.
As we sit in the comfortable chairs, cloth napkins folded in our laps or on the table, as is our individual custom, perhaps our minds then turn to the details around us – the wood of the table, the heaviness of the cutlery, the gleaming porcelain dishes, the soft light, the string and piano concerto in the background, the white trellis covered in creeping vines, the light, playful sound of water trickling in a fountain just out of our line of sight, the soft bubbling of dozens of contented conversations around us. Perhaps we reflect that here are others enjoying the same experience, an experience once reserved for Queens and Warlords and Kings who carried the blood of the gods in their veins (so they said), and we consider how our modern world really has, despite all the troubles, taken great steps towards the democratic ideals we all take for granted. Then we look at the people in our own party – our friends, lovers, children, rivals. We come back to our specific life again but now we see it from other angles for, despite the fact that I work 45 hours a week on the 23rd floor of a glass and steel skyscraper shuffling appears around, I participate in something much larger and longer than my day-to-day existence; I return refreshed with new appreciations for all the myriad details that constitute my life. And I am sharing that experience with my dining companions, though their thoughts at the moment may be different than mine; I see them also from this fresh perspective and appreciate them more as well.
Additionally, I participate in this experience. I, perhaps with a little guidance from my excellent waiter, shape the meal’s content – what appetizer, what salad, what main course; could you recommend a good wine that will not only compliment but add to the meal? Coffee or tea, sir? The food and drink are physical and I sense them first visually, then through smell, then taste, and finally through their effects on my body. My body comfortable and stimulated, the chambers of my mind unlock, and I submit to fancy.
Let us say that I am enjoying French cuisine. My mind and perhaps my conversation touches upon aspects of French history, culture, geography, culture, language, politics, climate, art, music, literature. My companions and I compare this meal to others we have had in the past and to meals we hope to enjoy in the future.
So, we come back to ourselves, having traveled from the beginnings of history to this particular day in this individual room at this specific table with these certain people. We sit back, content and fully within our context; we see couples entering and being seated and we smile at the delights we know they are about to enjoy; we share conspiratorial glances with fellow diners who have had the same dish, or wine, or waiter that we have sampled; we plan the rest of the evening’s entertainment, and life, as ever, goes on.
Is this not, then, art? Is this experience not the exact function of art?
So it is with a good waiter at a fine restaurant serving excellent food (three different arts combining into one experience), so it is with all things we experience in our lives.
An excellent plumber can evoke a similar response, as can a perfect walk in the park, or a glorious sunset, or a resplendent mother with her children. For wherever there is excellence – be it of form, content, or performance – there is art.
We are all artists at something. Capitalizing and thus separating “art” from life, from the common lower case nouns of our existence, cuts us off from the sources of art and deludes us into thinking our lives humdrum and gray. If we eliminate the capital A, we can begin to recognize each other as artists.
We have defined art too narrowly and then perversely cut ourselves off from it. Art IS life – the combining together of elements in order to take the viewer or participant out of themselves and into something larger, to give commentary on aspects of human existence and to exalt that thing inside of each of us that some choose to call God.
A life well lived refreshes those around us. Art is not selfish. This is why the modern idea of art-for-profit is wholly at odds with the impulses that engender art in the first place. And yet, even there, in that commercialized realm, there are artists….
“It must be abstract, it must change, it must give pleasure.”
-Wallace Stevens
II.
Toward An Integrative Philosophy: Some Basic Assumptions
1. The Universe is made up of energy, constantly flowing in various patterns, cycles, and systems. Matter is a configuration and/or manifestation of energy, and is part order and part chaos.
2. All chaotic systems are subject to periods of order-based intermittency, and all ordered systems are subject to periods of chaotic intermittency. Intermittency occurs spontaneously.
3. Life is an autopoetic network in a far-from-equilibrium state*, existing within a Universal Network (a set yet flexible structure).
4. Human consciousness is a Life Network that reflects thought on thought, language on language, and so on (terms: “thoughting”, “languaging”, etc.)
5. Humans create models that interact with an outside world that consists of probability fields.
6. Humans must interact with their environment or become deadened to it.
7. Humans receive and send energy through various methods of focusing and attention, as well as transmute energy.
8. Humans are generally unaware that energy exists in great abundance – perhaps because they are unaware of their own transmutative qualities. This causes them to steal energy from one another through various games of attention.
9. Within the Universal and Life Networks, there exists an evolutionary “push” towards some end.
10. This “push” seems to exist/is perceptible to humans because of human perception of linear time and/or because of inherent structures within language and language systems, and the things that engender them.
11. So-called Western culture is involved in struggling through Leary’s Circuit IV dramas – morality and sexuality, and is moving towards a more Circuit V consciousness – psyche-somatic consciousness/identification
12. The Tree of Life in Kabbalah is a useful Transmission – a fairly accurate map and structuring tool for the general human model of the “objective” world.
13. All human political/economic/social systems derive from religions, which in turn derive from Revelation. Revelation is “God” (the ultimate Other) punching through a modeling network to reveal new information, called Truth. A “Transmission” is an initial attempt by a human at coding Revelatory Truth (both a guidebook and a map).
Systems can be broken down into opposite and opposing components, and these opposite components can themselves be broken down and isolates re-combined to form a third, new synthesis that is a unity of the previous structures but with the addition of conscious cognitive intent (reproduction: “be fruitful and multiply.”). This process is finalized** by the act of Naming. In Genesis, Man names all things that have the Breath of Life – the RUACH.
“He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.”
* This definition comes from complexity theory:
· - autopoetic means that a system has the following properties: it has boundaries, it uses these boundaries as part of its energy/fuel needs, it maintains its general shape despite constant energy input from outside sources – that is, it returns to homeostasis [the metaphor is that of the whirlpool created when the plug is removed from the bathtub: The whirlpool takes is energy from outside itself (the water in the tub) and yet also uses its own boundaries in the process of energy transmutation, and though it may suffer small perturbations, it returns to its basic homeostatic shape rather quickly];
· network means that it is not a single thing but a series of interconnected nodes, much like the physical structure of the brain; subject state cycles and other behaviors of network systems;
· a far-from-equilibrium state means that it exists in the realm of order, but just barely – it is very close to or even at the phase transition between the ordered and the chaotic realms.
** That is: made digestible to human-based modeling systems.
III.
TAZMania
Renegade artist Hakim Bey has developed the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) as an answer to the seemingly all-pervasive and invasive culture of the State, especially important since the “closing of the map” (the final mapping of the surface of the earth – today there is nowhere that is unseen, where cartographers may write “Here There Be Tygyrs”). Previous incarnations of the TAZ include the “intentional communities” of the 18th century corsairs, such as the story of Captain Mission and the founding of Libertatia on Madagascar, and the Buccaneer “utopia” on Tortuga in the Caribbean1, as well as many of the early settlements on the American Continent – the most famous one perhaps being the mystery of Roanoke[2], which was not really a TAZ, but at least a rejection of a certain way of life and an alternate solution[3]. One can also include many 20th century TAZ-like systems, including the communes of the 1960’s, D’Annunzio’s Fiume Republic, the Zone in post-WWII Vienna and so on.
The main idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone is this: in an increasingly pervasive culture such as the American one, and with the technological advances in surveillance and tracking, more and more of the world is partitioned and bits of it doled out according to a certain set of rules. If you want freedom, then you have to “earn” it or buy it. Yet as the “System” (a vague term to be sure, but you know what I mean) covers a larger area, there are small areas here and there where the System is not watching. I am reminded of a story about on of the first truly large computers back in the 1950’s. The darned thing just broke down one day, and the technicians had to go in and take it apart – no small task since this was in the days of vacuum tubes – and finally they found the problem. A moth had somehow gotten in there and had been wandering around for who knows how long and then it finally died in one of the tubes and then its body had gotten sucked into some circuitry and shorted it out. But the System – in this case, the users of the computer – had not noticed that the moth was in there until something went wrong. And considering the size of the computer (several floors of a building) it must have been in there for days before it was “detected.”
The idea of the TAZ is similar – to intentionally create a configuration of people and ideas that is specifically located at a certain place and a certain time, yet is known to be temporary in nature. Someday, maybe soon, this little stolen area of freedom is going to attract attention and then it must be disbanded, dissolved, to be resurrected another place and at another time with perhaps some of the same people and perhaps not. It is similar to a revolution, except that revolutions attempt to create a permanent state of things. The TAZ does not. It is actually closer to an uprising, but a secret one – one in which the goal is to have some freedom from the systems and roles we have been trapped in, to change things locally and for a temporary time.
For those that desire freedom as they themselves define it, fighting the State head-on can only result in martyrdom or another revolution, which doesn’t really change all that much in the long run. Instead freedom-seekers can create a TAZ so as to taste freedom without fighting a losing battle against the State. The TAZ liberates an area of land, or time, or imagination for a while. When it is over, it dissolves before it can be destroyed.
Hakim Bey argues that the State is concerned with Simulation and Spectacle rather than substance, and the TAZ can “occupy” areas within the margin of error, the gap between what is and what is purported to be. It’s very strength lies in its invisibility and the moment it is named/represented/mediated it must vanish and resurface in a new forum that cannot be defined within terms of the Spectacle.
Mr. Bey says the Realism demands that we not only give up waiting for the Revolution, but that we give up wanting it at all. Instead, the best and most radical tactic is to refuse to engage in the spectacles of violence, media, politics and withdraw from the area of simulation. He argues that only the human mind is sufficiently complex to accurately model the real. He calls the mapping of the real by means of the human mind interacting with the real psychotopography.
No map can ever be truly accurate unless it is drawn at a 1:1 scale (like in that Borges story). Psychotopography is the only means with which to draw a 1:1 map. Psychotopography can be seen as the art of dowsing for potential TAZ’s.
In a TAZ, the primary grouping would be that of the band, rather than the family or the corporation. In modern life we already participate in many bands – groups of our friends, ex-lovers and -spouses, co-workers, affinity groups, mailing lists, email groups, and so on. The band stays together, not out of obligation, but by choice.
The TAZ is a festival, similar to Stephen Pearl Andrews’ image of anarchist society as a dinner party[4]. Some examples to use as models include the “tribal gatherings” and Happenings of the 1960’s, the Harlem rent parties of the 1920’s, and the neo-pagan Beltane gatherings. These are spontaneous, face-to-face – a group of people pooling their efforts to realize their mutual desires.
The TAZ includes the concept of psychic nomadism (or as it is may be jokingly called, “rootless cosmopolitanism”). Rather than being tied to one particular methodology or way of thinking, the TAZ advocates that people allow themselves to pick through all aspects of cultures past and present, charting their courses by “strange stars” if they so wish, according to a flexible, open mindset, never settling into one particular single perspective and the inevitable attendant stagnation. It is a method as well as a tactic. “Lay down a map of the land – over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net and counter-Net[5]…and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises.”[6]
The TAZ can only emerge when we achieve psychological liberation. We realize (make real) the moments and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual. We must see the ways we are self-repressed or stuck in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us - mental addictions to “ideals” and alienation are the two greatest obstacles to the TAZ. The main idea of the TAZ is to avoid the mediation of experience, and to experience existence as immediate. We must, as Nietzsche put it, “self-overcome.”
Be here now.
APPENDIX
Pirate Rant
Captain Bellamy
Daniel Defoe, writing under the pen name of Captain Charles Johnson, wrote what became the standard historical text on pirates, A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE ROBBERIES AND MURDERS OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS PIRATES. Apparently pirate recruitment was most successful among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and transported criminals. On the high seas, previous class distinctions evaporated. Defoe relates a pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had taken as a prize. The merchant vessel captain had just declined an invitation to join the pirates.
“I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I am scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?… (B)ut there is no arguing with such sniveling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.”
The Dinner Party
S. Pearl Andrews, The Science of Society
“The highest type of human society in the existing social order is found in the parlor. In the elegant and refined reunions of the aristocratic classes there is none of the impertinent interference of legislation. The Individuality of each is fully admitted. Intercourse, therefore, is perfectly free. Conversation is continuous, brilliant, and varied.
Groups are formed according to attraction. They are continuously broken up, and re-formed through the operation of the same subtile and all-pervading influence. Mutual deference pervades all classes, and the most perfect harmony, ever yet attained, in complex human relations, prevails under precisely those circumstances which Legislators and Statesmen dread as the conditions of inevitable anarchy and confusion. If there are laws of etiquette at all, they are mere suggestions of principles admitted into and judged of for himself or herself, by each individual mind.
Is it conceivable that in all the future progress of humanity, with all the innumerable elements of development which the present age is unfolding, society generally, and in all its relations, will not attain as high a grade of perfection as certain portions of society, in certain special relations, have already attained?
Suppose the intercourse of the parlor to be regulated by specific legislation. Let the time when each gentleman shall be allowed to speak to each lady be fixed by law; the position in which they should sit or stand be precisely regulated; the subjects which they shall be allowed to speak of, and the tone of voice and accompanying gestures with which each may be treated, carefully defined, all under pretext of preventing disorder and encroachment upon each other’s privileges and rights, then can any thing be conceived better calculated or more certain to convert social intercourse into intolerable slavery and hopeless confusion?”
1 The main points of the colony at Tortuga are summarized as follows by Mr. Bey: “Fleeing from the hideous ‘benefits’ of Imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism, and intolerance, from the tortures of impressment and the living death of the plantations, the Buccaneers adopted Indian ways, intermarried with Caribs, accepted blacks and Spaniards as equals, rejected all nationality, elected their captains democratically, and reverted to the ‘state of Nature.’ Having declared themselves ‘at war with all the world,’ they sailed forth to plunder under mutual contracts called ‘Articles’ which were so egalitarian that every member received a full share and the Captain usually only 1 ¼ to 1 ½ shares. Flogging and punishments were forbidden – quarrels were settled by vote or by the code duello.” [see Appendix]
[2] While history books often teach that the Roanoke colony “failed,” more recent evidence paints a different picture. The story goes that the entire colony simply got up one day and vanished. There were no signs of struggle, nothing had been packed, toys were still lying about, food was even left on some of the tables – it was as if the entire colony had been there one moment and the next had simply disappeared. The only clue of any sort was a single word found carved in a tree at the perimeter of the settlement: CROTOAN. What had happened remained a mystery, and made the circuit of “In Search Of” and the like.
Yet legends of “gray-eyed Indians” kept cropping up in the area and it turns out that not only are there indeed gray-eyed Indians inland from the coast of the old Roanoke colony today, and they still refer to themselves as “Crotoan.” It seems that, for whatever reasons, the whole colony just got up, left it all behind, and assimilated with neighboring Indian tribes.
[3] History abounds with stories of differently ordered societies, or “intentional communities.” One which achieved a certain amount of notoriety, wealth, and influence was the Order of Assassins, founded by Hassan I Sabbah in the mountains of present-day Turkmenistan.
[4] See Appendix
[5] Bey uses 3 terms for aspects of the noosphere – Net, Web, and counter-Net. The Web refers to the sort of alternative uses of the Net, the horizontal open non-hierarchical structure of information-exchange, and the term counter-Net for clandestine illegal and rebellious uses of the Net and Web.
[6] all quotes from Hakim Bey, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone”
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