What might be necessary is an exegesis of my life. it's far from over, however there arises a need to communicate a granule of an idea to someone, anyone else, in the hopes that it tempts them to either follow their observed tracings of my footsteps or affirm their own path through the parallel moments between each other. I think it is in this spirit that I have written the following, I hope it merely entices a flow of thought.
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In the heat of two pseuds battling, all phrases, rhetoric and rebuttals are drawn from a well of contemporary understanding of any topic. No one can argue something with any authority (in the straight, dreary scientific sense) that has yet to have been uncovered through academic work then later handed out as weapons with which to thrust or reposit in pseudointellectual battlegrounds. The debate is a nexus of dead concepts. Much as the wooden handle of a mace is taken from a living tree and carved into shape, the conceptual bludgeons of debates are stripped of any vitality and designed to kill outright. Knockdown arguments. Attacking the core of a point. Outlining a defence. Launching offensives on arguments from the flank. Oh, how intellectuals love to present themselves as muscle bound knights, attacking or repelling in glorious formation!
Once a standing army has been made so, erected into a stable and mobile force, it can only fulfil a limited series of purposes; its options are limited by its own militaristic structure and imagination. While this may include rending aid or building structures dedicated to health, all tasks a standard military force engages in are reactionary and solely dedicated to maintaining the order of things that allows for the perpetuation of the army and the various organs within civilisation that feed it. Only in extreme circumstances to we witness a suicidal military institution, either in inevitable defeat or under the revolutionary circumstance in which its constituent parts realise its self-abolition. Dogmatic intellectual traditions share traits with this, very rarely does a body of thought seek its own destruction. Rather intellectual traditions are more akin to roving bands of barbarians than orderly institutions of pure truth telling, marching ever onward seeking justification upon justification for their own existence and perpetuation. And while Thomas Khun has regaled the inner civil wars that occur within intellectual fields, their so-called paradigm shifts, these hardly often produce affections that could threaten the overall structure of a field. Rather what topples sections of intellectual study is instead the disinterested gaze of financiers who seek greener pastures to plant their coin, especially given the continuous declining rate of profit.
I speak in general terms because I am too afraid to begin researching specifics, however this is exactly what I set out to argue: that what truly constitutes the humane part of the humanities is not the spectacles of intellectual entertainment that arise from the instrumentalization of concepts into grand arguments, but rather the moments of peace, of quite study, of the gathering of fragments and collaboration. Perhaps the most risking and daring act of an academic is in the moment when a researcher begins but then decides better of it for one reason or another. The willing self-abolition, the realisation that time could be better spent with a cat or friends, or maybe even on another topic. Withdrawing from the field of battle, retreating from the endless march ever expanding human knowledge is seen as the highest form of treason. ‘Where is your backbone?! Do you not have the guts to see an argument through! You will be vanquished by your peers, stabbed in the back as you turn to gaze upon greener pastures, such cowardice!’
As institutions grow in size, one can often observe how inertia becomes a driving force as opposed to the active willing of those within such a body. The image of the spirit Sen or No Face from Spirited Away comes to mind. At first in an ethereal state, voiceless and practising a perceived asceticism, they trespass their way into the hot springs, gorge themselves on food and drink, on the fruits of labour from those working in the bathhouse, and in return its now black bulbous mass shits out chunks of pure gold to the residents of the bathhouse who have become its new worshipers, eager for an easy paycheque. No Face’s body loses its ghostly form that allowed it to pass seamlessly through material and becomes made of gooey flab, weighed down by excess. Regardless of the fact that its new physical form has the tendency to consume its worshipers whole, people continue to offer it sustenance now out of fear instead of the chance for glory. In the apex of this section of the film, Sen rejects the temptations of No Face and feeds them medicine that induces vomiting. Cascades of all that was previously enveloped by the expanding mass of No Face escape, and they slowly return to their ethereal form.
Interestingly enough, Sen and No Face share a common origin. The bathhouse resides in a realm where spirits are made flesh, Both Sen and No Face are the reverse, mortals who were trapped by transgressing a threshold they mistakenly stumbled upon, their own world turned on its head. A realm that slowly eats away at that which does not belong. Sen begins to lose her body as it slowly fades into the same black ethereal substance as No Face. Although juxtaposed in the film, Sen and No face oppose each other through a failure of recognition. Though conjoined by their history as mortals in a foreign land, each represents the eternally separated parts of a self that gazes upon itself in utter alienation despite once sharing the same origin; a self that throughout the film, confronts itself, urges it to take a bite of a fruit that tastes like poison to its withered and punished pallet, a remedy that calls for the reflective act of self-abolition.
This negation of a state of affairs is hardly the end of the line for both characters, or even the apex of the film. After No Face has been purged of all they had previously enveloped, staked as its own, they become a ghostly figure once again. Upon leaving the profit generating structure of the bathhouse, they enter the rural home of an old woman and take up the humble art of working a spinning wheel. After coming down from the highs of excess, of domination and subjugation of people for money, of becoming an organ of an institution powered by the circuits of capital consumption and generation, the spirit sees meaning in the monotonous daily tasks of life instead of blind consumption, which was also paradoxically the reason No Face consumed the medicine Sen provided in the first place.
What glory is there in the battleground of academia? The same grounds in America and its vassals that have become the propagation sites of what Ursula de Leeuw described as the tragicomedy of cancellation[1]. This isn’t to borrow the pathetic old rightoid talking point, that liberal universities are hives of doublespeak and thoughtcrimes, a position that De Leeuw equally denounces as similarly “…fundamentally boring…” and in cahoots with the lame culture of virtue signalling leftoids, both existing in their own ecosystems vampirically syphoning off each other, death spiralling symbiotically. Rather what is perhaps the most attractive perk of academia, and many of its aspirants' understated goals, is the rare and coveted ability to exist within a space that can become one’s home, or rather a space that was always waiting for you to arrive and simply exist. This is the human within the humanities, or within any field of study, even within many fields of more ‘regular’ work. Of course, this cushy life today is hardly possible, but it is the libidinal hunch that animates nearly all intellectual life, whether it be rolling in royalties for the rest of one’s life or living out the life that Socrates demanded from the citizens of Athens[2]. Though we might struggle through university flaunting our rhetorical chops, raising armies, conscripting from history the resting dead, putting worn out, undying concepts to work in new monstrous lines of argumentation, it is done with the aim of landing that cushy teaching job at the end, to finally demobilise and rest, which is a noble goal. In some way or another, we all become captured within the structures that enable and reward the mere continuation of a system over its actual contribution to human life in practice.
We ask our old friend Nietzsche, the friend of artists, where is the will-to-power trying to end up? What exactly does the ever-expanding need of beings to further expand their power aim to do? I say it is to have the power to sit lazily in an office, pouring over tombs of human joy and suffering. To harness the ability of a leisurely weekend with friends and family, to go about one’s day with no mind to the trivialities of the workweek[3], without regard to the occulted tendrils connecting us to the great Allied Master computer of capital and its own drive for monetary circulation. To have accumulated the amazing reserves of courage and thunderous strength to retire under a sprawling tree and bask in the evening sun.
[1] https://min2.report/ursula-de-leeuw/the-smiling-face-without-laughter#fn:3
[2] During the second vote in his trail, Socrates is said to have remarked that instead of graciously rewarding him with a reduced sentence for his crimes, that the people of Athens should rather be rewarding him with a permanent pension and a villa on a hill for his efforts in the community. It is after this remark that Socrates is sentenced to death, with many of those who voted against punishment changing sides.
[3] Which should be in turn, minimized to maximize time spent not working or taking part in the fruits of our communal labors.
yeah good