Matthew T Grant

Below is the text of a proposal I submitted to a conference entitled “Critical Speculations: Future Worlds, Perilous Histories, and Walter Benjamin Unbound” which will be held at SUNY Albany September 28-29, 2012

At the very end of his much-cited—and frequently misunderstood—essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Walter Benajmin wrote, “Humanity, which once upon a time in Homer served as an object of fascination for the gods, has now become one for itself.”

As with much of that essay, this sentence is more true now than when it was written. While one need look no further than the ubiquity of reality television to appreciate this, it is actually in social media, and especially on Twitter, that this process achieves its mass apotheosis. Indeed, Twitter is the contemporary, virtual manifestation of the Parisian Arcades that Benjamin spent the last years of his life studying.

For Benjamin, the Arcades served as an allegorical crystallization of the far-reaching and irreversible changes wrought by the accelerated rise of modernity. The same must be said of Twitter with regard to the post-modern, post-industrial, hyper-mediated present. Indeed, like a living, electronic reef, Twitter is composed of the accreted micro-sentiments of mankind. As such, it provides a protean, hyperdimensional portrait of contemporary subjectivity in all its most trivial, absurd and sublime glory.

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Angels and demons are states of mind, perspectives.

We conjure God through chanting, trance, meditation and prayer.

While these technologies take different forms, they all operate on the same material: a self-aware nervous system.

As Dr. Leary once said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is inside you, literally, inside your body.”

Or some words to that effect.

I told my wife the other night that she was more “integrated” than I was as a person. She asked what I meant, so I explained.

Every one of us has different aspects to our personality: who we are at home; who we are with friends; who we are at work; who we are when we’re sick; who we are when we’re sad; who we are when we’re  having sex; who are we when a cop pulls us over; who we are when we’re grumpy; etc.

For most people, these various aspects are not that far apart from each other. Who one is when melancholy isn’t that different from who one is when excited, etc. I’m not saying that these states don’t feel different, just that who we are when we are in these states remains more or less constant. If we think of the self as a hand, the fingers are never far from each other.

For others, myself included, however, there can be a real divergence amongst our selves. This divergence expresses itself most clearly when we regret what we do in certain states—the thing we say or do in anger; self-destructive coping behaviors when depressed, and so on. The fingers, in this case, seem to belong to different hands.

I once described enlightenment as “being the same person to everyone we meet.” Such enlightenment is the fruit of integration. We attain this integration through integrative behaviors, behaviors in which we are one with what we’re doing as when we are engaged in physical exercise, meditating, immersed in a meaningful task, or reflecting on ourselves and speaking honestly.

We undermine this integration when we engage in dis-integrative behaviors—when we dissemble, when we cultivate secrets and scheme, when we indulge and hide our addictions.

For some, achieving the integration of which I speak seems effortless, a simple and organic aspect of their nature. For others, it requires hard-won self-awareness and ongoing effort. However easy or difficult it may be, I firmly believe that it is one important goal of human being.

The other night I saw Bad Brains at the Paradise.

“These guys were gods to us,” I told my friend Ken. He and I had played together in a band that was inspired by the Bad Brains and even had one song, “Our Savage God,” which was very much “in the style of.” I’d been listening to them since ’88—my kid brother saw them some years before that, so I’d heard of them way before that—but had never seen them ever.

A pit started jumping as soon as they fell into “Rights Brigade” and I was getting crushed against the people in front of me. I did find it was easier to deal with the moshers when I was aggressive, shoving them backwards en masse (I’m big-ish), but I soon tired of this (being old and frail as well), eventually drifting back to the other side of the pit where I could see and deflect what was coming at me (admittedly, with some remorse and self-criticism that I had chosen not to endure the up front intensity as my more stalwart friend did).

Before the show, my assumption was that the band (Dr. Know, guitar; Darryl Jenifer, bass; Earl Hudson, drums) was still going to rock—which they unequivocally did—but that HR might not be all there. The last time I had seen him was in Ithaca in 1993. He was touring with his reggae band but by the time he showed up at The Haunt that night, the band had quit. He had the club play his latest album over the PA and sang along and I left.

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Where Does Information Come From?

I was following the #Resist44 hashtag on Twitter (which was an anti-Obama response to the #Gen44 hashtag) when I noticed an avatar that read, “WAR ON MARXIST THUGS.” Since I follow at least one other person who has declared a similar war, I clicked on the avi to learn more!

The bio pointed to a website called Resist the Lies, which curates rightist content. The curated article from March 18, 2012 was “Liberal Illiberalism” by the historian Victor Davis Hanson (whose book Culture and Carnage I found illuminating and  highly recommend), a piece that sets out to show that certain elements of the liberal agenda as Hanson sees it—radical environmentalism, multiculturalism, affirmative action, illegal immigration (which I’m not sure any liberals advocate but, whatever)—are not just impractical, but “immoral.”

Reading Hanson’s essay, one thing that jumped out at me was a comment in the section devoted to the “unkind dogma” of multiculturalism, here defined as “the very notion that all cultures are professed equal, and those in the West often have a particular obligation to elevate illiberal and intolerant systems above their own in recompense for their supposedly ill-gotten prosperity and success.” Specifically, Hanson derides the press for failing to report that, “Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia — not a minor voice in the world of Islam — announced that he wished, according to his reading of Koranic-inspired statute, that all the churches in the Gulf region be destroyed.”

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To a satirist

The court jester may speak truth to power, cloaked, of course, in jest.

And while there is power in this, the jester, alas, may not hold power.

Power is serious, and who can take a jester seriously?

Power rests with the master, and the court jester serves at his leave.

The master may, of course, also unleash the jester, like a dog, on his enemies, who die laughing.

Very interesting video featuring Major TJ O’Connor, 10th Special Forces Group (A) S-6 (from 20:45 – 33:35). I watched it because The Jester said it would explain why he took downs WikiLeaks back in 2010.

Two specific statements made by Major O’Connor jumped out at me:

“It was absolutely enthralling and entertaining to watch as I would destroy [He’s talking about playing Command and Conquer. – MTG] General Schwarzkopf wannabes with one single soldier. They were totally upset that their strategy and tactics that they had trained were completely ineffective against my no strategy at all. That’s where we’re at in cyber today. It’s a completely asymmetric platform that favors the adversary; it favors the individual…. An asymmetric platform requires an asymmetric defense.” (24:21)

and

“Our individuals that are defending our networks have to be attackers first, otherwise, they have no understanding of how to defend this.” (26:35)

Major O’Connor cites the Jester as the type of individual necessary for this type of role and this type of conflict, but also points out that there is no clear career path for such an individual in the modern US military.

There are some obvious implications here (ie, “we need to be hackers”) and some more subtle (“we need to create an asymmetric military”), and some I’ll only think of later.

http://youtu.be/buY3I4PkK98?t=20m45s

I heard someone on the radio yesterday say, “That’s the scientific bias: If you don’t know what causes something, then it doesn’t exist.”

That is not the scientific bias. The scientific bias says no more and no less than, “If you don’t know why something is happening, then you should develop a hypothesis about why it’s happening and devise controlled experiments to test your hypothesis.”

This is not a bias; it is a model for separating plausible hypotheses from their opposite.

The unscientific bias, by contrast, says, “If I can’t clearly articulate my hypothesis, or testing my hypothesis would be difficult or impossible (because it depends on the existence of immaterial beings that cannot be detected by our senses or any instruments we may possess), then science must be wrong.”

You don’t have to be “scientific” or apply the scientific method to the problem you are hoping to solve.

Choosing not to follow this approach, however, does not vindicate your belief or highlight the shortcomings of a method you implicitly subscribe to every time you start your car, boot up your computer, or turn on your microwave.

It only shows that you have decided to eschew the truly scientific bias: rigor.

When you read these posts, you may say to yourself, “What the hell is this stuff? What’s he getting at? How can anyone take this seriously?”

These posts may be meaningless, absurd, and frivolous to you.

But maybe I’m not talking to you.

Think about a time you heard a song that you found horrible, or a movie that was ridiculously sentimental or preposterously plotted.

Maybe it just wasn’t meant for you.

As writers, it behooves us to think clearly about our audience. For whom are we writing?

As readers, it behooves us to think about ourselves and, when confronted with something that does not speak to us, or even disturbs and insults us, to consider that other possible self for whom it would be soothing, inspiring or enjoyable.

Enlightenment lies on the path between this person (this person, right here) and that person.

Addendum: On Twitter I follow a number of people with whom I disagree. Every time they post something appalling, I think about unfollowing them. I don’t, because I don’t want to close the door on the otherness they embody; I don’t want to live in world that is merely a painstakingly constructed reflection of myself, my biases, and my dreams.

Jerry Garcia once said something like, “You have to remember that we live in a world without a Grateful Dead.”

It’s an interesting perspective. When you are the Grateful Dead, you are known to millions and adored by many. You are an object in the world of your fans and followers.

But in your own world, there is no corresponding object.

The eye that sees cannot see the eye that sees (or something like that).

Whenever you are having a hard time dealing with someone, remember that may themselves have a hard time understanding how their actions, their words, their appearance are perceived. Being inside everything they do, they are unaware of what it looks like from the outside. They live in a world in which they do not exist.

Same goes for you.