The last thread should read, i careri, not i carcere. Le carcere, i carceri, as my Italian professor would say in class...
This morning after going over some Deleuze and Lyotard and re-reading some things on the shelves and then on wiki, I found something in Lyotard I'd like to apply to understanding the recent history of the US, namely the broad scale of reaction by the public and government to 9/11. The concept comes from two sources, Kant and Lyotard's interpretation and critique. The concept is The Sublime. Below is the relevant discussion on what Kant and Lyotard mean by the idea of the sublime.
``Lyotard found particularly interesting the explanation of the sublime offered by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (sometimes Critique of the Power of Judgment). In this book Kant explains this mixture of anxiety and pleasure in the following terms: there are two kinds of 'sublime' experience. In the 'mathematically' sublime, an object strikes the mind in such a way that we find ourselves unable to take it in as a whole. More precisely, we experience a clash between our reason (which tells us that all objects are finite) and the imagination (the aspect of the mind that organises what we see, and which sees an object incalculably larger than ourselves, and feels infinite). In the 'dynamically' sublime, the mind recoils at an object so immeasurably more powerful than we, whose weight, force, scale could crush us without the remotest hope of our being able to resist it. (Kant stresses that if we are in actual danger, our feeling of anxiety is very different from that of a sublime feeling. The sublime is an aesthetic experience, not a practical feeling of personal danger.) This explains the feeling of anxiety.
The feeling of pleasure comes when human reason asserts itself. What is deeply unsettling about the mathematically sublime is that the mental faculties that present visual perceptions to the mind are inadequate to the concept corresponding to it; in other words, what we are able to make ourselves see cannot fully match up to what we know is there. We know it's a mountain but we cannot take the whole thing into our perception. What this does, ironically, is to compel our awareness of the supremacy of the human reason. Our sensibility is incapable of coping with such sights, but our reason can assert the finitude of the presentation. With the dynamically sublime, our sense of physical danger should prompt an awareness that we are not just physical material beings, but moral and (in Kant's terms) noumenal beings as well. The body may be dwarfed by its power but our reason need not be. This explains, in both cases, why the sublime is an experience of pleasure as well as pain.
Lyotard is fascinated by this admission, from one of the philosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mind cannot always organise the world rationally. Some objects are simply incapable of being brought neatly under concepts. For Lyotard, in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, but drawing on his argument in The Differend, this is a good thing. Such generalities as 'concepts' fail to pay proper attention to the particularity of things. What happens in the sublime is a crisis where we realise the inadequacy of the imagination and reason to each other. What we are witnessing, says Lyotard, is actually the differend; the straining of the mind at the edges of itself and at the edges of its conceptuality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-François_Lyotard
So I thought of applying these dual ideations of the sublime to both the public and government mind. I thought of this because those dual interpretations covered my very first and instantaneous reaction that morning. I was in awe. There was an utterly riveting beauty there I could not take my eyes off --- glued to the tube. I thought this puts the real challenge to Hollywood special effects. I had the internal feeling of giddiness, almost joy. That had nothing to do with the ethical thought of what happened. It had to do with my own experience from childhood, and much later in demonstrations, street battles, and then again in rock climbing. All these experiences conditioned me in a strange way to sometimes experience joy and elation rather than what is more commonly experienced as dread, anxiety, and fear in the face of the sublime.
I have no idea what I would have felt if I had been physically present anywhere near the events. Guessing from former experience before awesome and sublime power, I have no idea which would have kicked in, flight or attraction. Fighting was out of the question. There was nothing to fight. The professional emergency crews knew how to do what fighting there was. I may have summoned up the nerve to join other bystanders in assisting EMTs and fire evacuation crews. I never know about those decisions and actions until I am confronted with them. In any case that's not the point. I want to ground the concept of sublime in concrete experience first and than use the idea to describe some aspects of what has happened since.
I think my reaction to 9/11 was sublime. I think many, maybe even most the world who watched it on tv had something very similar to a sublime reaction. I think Al-Qaeda must have also had a sublime moment, probably falling over themselves in joy, incredulous laughter, very much like the tv coverage of various cities and various groups of people in the Muslim and Arab world. The guys who planned this could not have ever imagined it would be so stunning, such a sublime moment.
A few hours after and when the immediate sublimity of the events wore off a little, I felt something like an earthquake after shock, which was a much less intense sublimity reaction. I thought oh, no, oh, shit. This is going to get bad, really, really bad. This has given the Bush administration something to die for, a reason to live. Several days or about week later when it was apparent the federal government help was minimal, stalled, covered in bullshit reasons why this or that couldn't be done, I realized these bastards (Bush et al) don't give a shit about NYC, the people killed or effected. They have moved on to make this the entire center of foreign and domestic policy. Maybe they thought this through, or maybe they just reacted. I think they just reacted, with little or no thought about what they were doing or why. It was only about how. The only issue was how to fight this awesome sublimity they felt, and crudely tried to pin on some target, out there, somewhere in the Muslim and Arab world.
Of course the administration found the concrete suspects. The most obvious and rational policy at that point was to assemble the necessary mostly covert military and police, set up an international group with the EU and the Arab allies and go get these guys. That didn't happen. So the question is why?
Like all strong reactions to the sublime, there are various secondary reactions, or reaction complexes. One of this cluster is the flight or fight, fear or rage system. The Bush administration went on a the fear-rage system. So that their reactions and policies had to be in proportioned to their own experience with the sublimity of 9/11. They decided to create a system of overwhelming force to match the overwhelming sublime, the emotional scale they thought needed to pay back in kind. In this system of mostly irrational thought, it didn't occur to them that places like Afghanistan are much larger and more complex in reality than the fevered eye of US war rage could comprehend.
There is a larger dimension to the subjective concept of the sublime, namely the various cultural uses made of these experiences. The arts for example attempt in various ways to either evoke it or represent it and give the sublime some form. In the secular western tradition, the sublime was developed as a replacement of sorts for the medieval and mostly over rationalized concept of the God and the divine. You can see this most clearly in Moby Dick and some of the better American landscape painting of the 19thC. There are also French and German varieties that are associated with their romantic literature schools, and philosophy of course. All these works can be viewed as a cultural process to convert the sublime from a religious based concept into a secular idea and feeling. Love of nature, rather than love of God.
But this process can also be reversed. The sublime is a psychological emotional state so it is fluid and can be captured in numerous ways, and then interpreted differently by different people. It can be constructed in different ways. So then in the Bush crew, this fluidity took on a religious fervor, and turned on the blood and soil switches of their own and the public's imagination. The media of course was intimately folded into the mix, mixing and stirring and fomenting like a bitches brew, all at the same time.
What rational analysis thought was a ridiculous interpretation, the clash of civilizations, was in fact just that, and with all the religious overtones thrown in. We were in a holy war, if you understand that to characterize the experienced state of mind in the Islamic and Western worlds. Since traditional religions have created a vast and quite comprehensive mythological system with which to experience, interpret, and act in the world, it was easy to get those who practice religions and believe them, to make a holy war out of the event, the reactions, and the real wars to follow.
The religious turn brought an entire system of thought, policy, action into play as motivation, propaganda, and justification. In fact, I think the religious turn was so strong because the underlying psycho-social systems of the western sublime are as well developed as its historically previous incarnation as God. And in a similar fashion the locations, the landscapes and the religious systems of thought and practice that adhere to them are equally strong, compelling, captivating. Afghanistan for example, looks a lot like the US western landscape. Since that landscape has provided me with almost all I know of the sublime, I can easily understand the people who live and work in the mountains of Afghanistan, Pakistan, all the high ranges and plateaus, and the deep valleys below. Since I used to hike and climb in that kind of terrain I have discovered a great deal, that is not very commonly experienced and understood, except by fellow travelers and the cultures that have developed in such places.
Remember the saying don't fuck with mother nature? Well, it's corellary is don't fuck with the people who live with her either. There standing for anywhere the sense of the sublime is strong. is where I am speaking about. I suspect Native Americans with some traditional interests, ties and experiences with the western desert and mountains will know the kind of thing I am trying to get at. The landscape is so fierce that if you are able to deal with it, live there and be happy there, you will mostly likely become, what I call a fierce hearted person. Passionate, but with a strange kind of control order. This system of passion education and control is so strong, that many climbers turn to weed or alcohol, just to de-tune, calm down, relax, and feel `normal' again. The first thing I wanted getting off an exhilarating climb, back at camp or the park benches was a cigarette and a big deep cup of wine. Then I wanted to talk about the climb, analyze it, rank it with other climbs, check what others thought who had been up there.
Many religions, cultures and people form their concepts of the world around the environmental terrain they inhabit. However, the landscape usually doesn't conform to the supposedly rational judicial state borders. Cultures tend to follow the terrain. Our rationalized judicial nation state cultures follow lines on the map. As an immediate consequence of the cultural mind set of mountainous/desert central asia and the lines on the map as well as the national state power systems that have developed, creat un-resolvable conflicts of law, custom, religion, and even the conceptual grasp of these matters.
You can see these conflicts here, immediately in the Mexico US border. That border cuts meaninglessly across the landscape from the Gulf to the Pacific. It has nothing to do with the organic history of the people who lived there and the many who still do. Yugoslavia is obviously another example. Tibet, and a lot of South America, Chile, Peru, Bolivia. As I am thinking about these places many are some of the most sublime in the world. They all have famous climbing areas, nature preserves and the like. And then there is Africa ... Just the name alone raises the sublime to the level of the mystical in my imagination. Afrique Centrale, and Triste Tropigue work like fundament archetypes on my mind.
Another interesting location for the sublime is the ocean. I don't do ocean sublime so good. I found this out fishing off the Pacific coast. Undergoing the lessons of the ocean are just as hard and long as those in the mountains and deserts, but of a very different sort. Fear, elation and control work differently at sea in a small underpowered boat in the middle of nowhere. Conrad, Melville, Hemingway all come to mind. I used to watch John C work the boat and figure out the day then handle surprises. He had sailed since he was a kid in Cardiff. He was in his late 60s when we went fishing. He didn't really go for the fish. He went for the ocean. He was in his element as they say. I discovered all this watching him take us back through the Potato Patch on a bad day when the swells had risen to small craft advisories while we were outside the gate. We were alone, me and him. Great adventure. He was leader, I was firm moral support, something like leading and following a climb. That's the mode I took.
While the US systems of 9/11 sublimity I am trying to describe remains in operation, the wars will continue. Whatever mythologically defined goals and assessments attached by the US-EU will fail partly because they have nothing to do with a well reasoned empirical reality and partly because they have nothing to do with understanding the sublime induced mythological realities at workr. What we are in. is some kind of hybrid world between the mythic and the real, the empirical and the fantastic. We are trying to work out the logic of these conflicts through the logic of the religious sublime mythos and all that is entirely in conflict with the secular rational system of law and ethics we have created and usually try to follow.
CG