Nietzsche at the Altar: Situating the Devotee

Daniel White and Gert Hellerich

University of Central Florida
University of Bremen
postmod4u@aol.com

 

Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom

 

— Jacques Derrida, “Différance” (22).

 

 

NARRATOR (in peripatetic mode, a little paranoid about the possibility of being hit by a cabbage flying from the Pit):

 

To do something so peculiar as to place the greatest critic of Christianity at the altar, especially in the electronic age, may require some explanation. To write about a philosopher who rejected traditional philosophical style — argumentative exposition in expository prose — and the epistemology that goes with it in favor of a more aphoristic and staccato mode requires special considerations. How to “understand” a thinker who pointed out that “to understand” means, “to stand under” and so to become a “subject,” a stance which this very “author” rejected? To write about an author who rejected “authority” as a species of “subjectivity” and so of slavery, or mastery, in a hierarchy of underlings and overlords, and in trying to “understand” “him” become “authors” ourselves, borders on the ludicrous — amusingly absurd, comical — requiring the power of play. We have decided, therefore, to be serious only when necessary to keep our textual “play” centered enough to be “understood” by the sane: a questionable act in itself, given the fact that Nietzsche’s preferred persona seemed to be that of a Madman whose language was not particularly ego or otherwise “centric.” “Our” rhetorical strategies (“we” are becoming a little schizoid in honor of our mad teacher) thus include both traditional “exposition” (“laying out” as when one reveals one’s “hand” in poker, a metonym for the five cards one masks from others) and “play.” Our play includes Nietzsche, of course, and some of his recent friends, including ourselves, all chatting about some of the more irksome qualities of Western civilization, epitomized by Christianity and its devotees. Because “we” are part of our own play, the ensuing drama is inevitably recursive — rewriting itself like those M.C. Escher hands — but so is that Nietzschean historical milieu in which we currently live: the postmodern-ecological condition. So, please bear with us.

 

Traditional academic discourse requires a “subject” in more ways than one. The Latin roots sub plus iectum (past participle of iacere), hence subicere — literally “cast under” — suggest the subject’s function. Initially, it seems the discourse must be “about” something, have a theme, which presumably is the underlying substance or substratum, for Aristotle hupokeimenon (literally “an underlying thing”) which serves as the logical “basis” upon which or the “center” around which various other ideas may be predicated. Nietzsche, whose writings on religion are the principal “subject” of this text, was a critical traditionalist, a classicist, who well understood Aristotle’s need to write in terms of clear subjects which were ultimately grounded in “substances” (things) or the metaphysical referents of substantival terms which possess qualities just as linguistic subjects possess predicates:

 

The origin of “things” is wholly the work of that which imagines, thinks, wills, feels.

 

The concept of “thing” itself just as much as all its qualities. — Even “the subject” is such created entity, a “thing” like all others: a simplification with the object of defining the force which posits, invents, thinks, as distinct from all individual positing, inventing, thinking as such. (Will to Power sec. 556)

 

He also resisted a discourse so grounded, preferring to reject a univocal style grounded in a unitary subject in favor of a polyvocal one with constantly shifting subject “matter” as well as a constantly shifting authorial subject. He apparently wrote in this way because he thought that style implied a metaphysic and an epistemology — a theory of reality and of knowledge — and he didn’t like the Western episteme (picture a bust of Aristotle) or its underpinnings (its pedestal). So, to the best of his ability he shattered it, writing in an unorthodox style to which academics typically have to attribute a subject, not to mention an author, in order to “understand” it — subject it to their own modes of discourse.

 

This appropriation of Nietzsche’s writings to traditional Western style, however, ends up making Nietzsche a “subject” of the King of the Academy, Aristotle, whom Nietzsche, the ever-inventive class clown, was inclined to bombard with bubbles, little aphoristic exploding bubbles, like viruses, to bring down the information edifice of Apollonian learning. If Aristotle were head of FBI, he would probably view Nietzsche as the Polybomber.

 

So, how to write in the spirit of Nietzsche, to invoke that recalcitrant shade in the Mode of Information, offer him a modem as a sling, and let him cast stones at the strange new Christian Goliath — a.k.a. Jesse, Jimmie, Pat, Newt — that has supplanted what Nietzsche would think of as the genuine Evangel (who had the guts both to claim he was god and to act like it) with an evangelical capitalist overlord who lives not in heaven but in electronic space? We have tried bundling up little power-packets of our Mentor, along with some spit balls from some of his recent historical friends (Bataille, Bateson, Cixous et al.) and hurling them at the digital statues of power that stand at the intersection of Christianity and Capitalism in Neoimperial America. We are riding in a New Automodem, soon to replace older forms of transportation and prefigured by Darryl Louise’s (DL’s) car in Vineland, “a black ’84 Trans-Am with extra fairings, side pipes, scoops, and coves not on the standard model, plus awesomely important pinstriping by the legendary Ramón La Habra in several motifs, including explosions and serpents” (Pynchon, 105), in which we have been cruising the ruined cities of late modernity, wandering through the strip malls, looking for Event-Scenes (reported by Kroker’s Canadian Gang), and tossing explosive bubbles, as we head for a nine inch nails concert. Accompanied by this estranged yet critically engaged collection of personae — Nietzsche and his friends, our Thought Gang if we may steal the tag from Tibor Fischer’s recent novel parked on our shelves — we find ourselves on a new road.

 

The Mode of Information (Poster, 1990), already an Emerging Super-Highway leading to one more Utopia, the Electropolis just beyond the millennium, provides a main artery from which the contours of our text may be drawn. We understand “information” not in the usual sense, as a noun referring to the digital “bits,” the Boolian shifters, zero and one, out of which logical syntax and hence, subjects and predicates and deductions (the purest form of argument) may be constructed. Instead, we understand in-formation as a verbal noun (a gerund — like différend) depicting a process. The English term “form,” has been widely used to represent the Greek term idea, used by Plato and Aristotle in reference to the fundamental metaphysical principles that organize the world of “nature.” Boethius translated Aristotle’s idea as species, utilizing a Latin term that would stick with the Western tradition down through Darwin and even into the present. But if “information” is understood as having verbal force, then it becomes not the “thing” to be explained or quantified — “How is it that we have a certain range of ‘species’ making up the biosphere and how many of them in what quantities constitute its biomass?” — but rather a process of production of forms: differentiation, morphogenesis. In this sense information becomes isomorphic (insofar as this is possible) with Bateson’s definition of idea (or idea) as a “difference which makes a difference” and Derrida’s différance — “the name we might give to the active, moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces, that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science” (“Différance,” 18). Information taken in this sense becomes the basis of an infodynamics (Salthe, 1993), which does not rely on “subjects” or “substances” independent of the discourse-productive processes of evolution: the play of différance.

 

Our argument, in a nutshell (that infinite space over which Hamlet would have been king if it were not for those embarrassing bubbles of primary process, his dreams — Hamlet II, ii), is that the works of Nietzsche, Bateson, Cixous, Bataille and others provide a cross-disciplinary language which may provide, upon analysis, a “substantive” (apologies to Nietzsche’s critique of our faith in grammar) strategy for cultural politics: critically to situate and creatively to rewrite the combination of Christian devotionalism and capitalism with science that characterizes modernity. An especially formidable dimension of the opposition is in the metaphysics and epistemology of what Salthe calls Baconian/ Cartesian/ Newtonian/ Darwinian/ Comtean (BCNDC) science, which is central to devotional scientism. This Christian-capitalist-industrialist creed is situated within the technological-historical architecture of what Mumford called the Pentagon of Power. Mumford’s Pentagon, like Foucault’s Panopticon, is a metaphor for the imposition of the BCNDC creed via technology on the biosphere, enveloping cultures and other life forms as surely and confidently, with as much moral reflection by court philosophers and poets laureate, as Disney devouring ABC. To engage this monolith, NBCBN writers agree, is vital to the what Mumford called the conduct of life. (NBCBN is an acronym for the next merger of secular and sacred broadcasting, which is, fortunately, made up of Bateson, Cixous and Bataille surrounded by Nietzsche, and indicates our hope for a new discourse.)

 

NBCBN criticism is defined both by what it engages — the forms of what Mumford called Sun Worship in the temples of advanced technocracy — and the kinds of rewriting it suggests. Just as NBCBN critique encircles the Pentagon with incantations — wafting little explosive bubbles that drive the Generals (all played by George C. Scott) ripping mad, and the presidents (all played by Peter Sellars) to the hot line. (That famous phone is now, by the way, connected to the CONTROL CENTER at Epcot in the tourist mecca of America, Disney, that projection of the Neoimperial Imaginary, where all of the presidents gather their virtual presences to plan the take-overs not only of NBCBN but also, if THEY [in Pynchon’s paranoid sense] haven’t already, Washington.) So NBCBN discourse is identifiable by the style of its rewriting: recursively ecological. In the ecological writing of our NBCBN colleagues, polyform, heterogeneous, metaphoric, metonymic strands of discourse intertwine in a mindful web of in-formation that envelops the Disney-Pentagon; it wraps the generals in silk strands, jangling their medals and their jewels, tickling their skin, provoking, for a moment even here, spontaneous laughter. In what Mumford called, in his last section of The Pentagon of Power, “The Flowering of Plants and Men,” this biomorphic diversity provides a living matrix out of which even the reductive strategies, the monological discourses of “normal” subjects are drawn, like cups of water from a bottomless well; it is the language potential of what Bateson calls the Ecological Mind. Its authorship produces not only flowers and trees but language-using organisms, self-designating — recursive — personae called “human beings.” NBCBN writers respect the diversity out of which their ideas grow and to which they contribute; they don’t mind sharing authorship with the biosphere. NBCBN writers agree, moreover, that there is a central illusion of modernity: the subject, heir of the Christian soul turned entrepreneur, conceived as a metaphysical entity who seeks “control” over a world of objects. This subject is “transcendent” because it is not (so its practitioners believe) recursively constructed out of a set of communicative life practices — language, kinesics, paralinguistics, play, mime, metonymy, metaphor. Foucault saw this imago, what Lacan posited as the “self-image” in the Stade du Miroir (“Mirror Stage”), as typifying all those subjects who were subject to, subjected by, Modernity since the Enlightenment.

 

NBCBN criticism and theory therefore require, as an alternative, an infodynamic idea of the “subject,” in all senses of this term: a “human being” constructed out of the multilevel dynamics of play: a mask which may be worn, like your Narrator’s wizard hat, only with the knowledge that it is, after all, an artifact, so that we become, as Haraway says, “cyborgs” (as opposed to, say, robots), the living artifice of the ecological mind. Hence the hilarity with which Nietzsche views the legions of the Serious — those penta-goners, the living dead — who make up what he thinks of as the “herds” of modernity. These are the ones who, like Pynchon’s Thanatoids (Vineland, 170 ff.), have watched too much Disney on ABC (or vice-versa, we anticipate future history here) and have come to believe that the Mouseketeers — like the ones in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and the glossy rock idols of Spin, not to mention (for traditionalists) Castiglione’s The Courtier — are themselves. Laughter, we conclude, provides a dynamical structure analogous with différance which breaks out of the traps of metaphysics, disciplinary reason and imposed personae, opening the possibility of jouissance as cultural practice (White & Hellerich, 1996 [forthcoming]).

 

In a smaller nutshell: postmodern-ecological (NBCBN) discourse provides a critical/creative alternative to its modern (BCNDC) predecessor. The alternative utilizes the polysemic strategies of play, metaphor, and metonym to construct a semiotic technology that envelops and (we hope) transforms the monological pentagon of power that characterizes modern discourse: the language of the dead. By situating the infodynamic production of form — différance, “the difference which makes a difference” — at the interface of entropy and information, the alternative creates a living simulacrum of evolutionary ecology: the language of the living. The alternative, moreover, is sufficiently powerful (in Nietzschean terms) to construct not only sciences, information technologies, literatures and the like but also authors and characters, self-images, personae, including “man” and “god.” Nietzsche’s critique of religion in general and Christianity in particular, opens the way toward a new zen of cultural practice in which these characters, including “self” and “god,” become the poetic constructs of writers — “you” and “me” — whose religious sensibility is best expressed by laughter (White, 1996 [forthcoming]).

 

Being members of a thought gang — taking a critical-theoretical position — in a world circumscribed by messianic entrepreneurs and collapsing ecosystems, leaves us, as the sight of seeing a peasant woman scramble to collect feces dropped from his aristocratic elephant did Aldous Huxley, feeling, in spite of the consolations of philosophy, a bit pensive. Nevertheless, as was Aldous, we are not too glum for laughter at our collective condition, even if “we” — increasingly the “middle” and “working” classes of what Jencks calls the new “cognitariate” and Coupland, perhaps even more appropriately, calls Microserfs — are increasingly the ones scrambling to pick up the manure. This is our materialist interpretation of “trickle down” economics. It’s not so amusing, however, when you are the one scrambling and not riding on high. Academics have more or less been on the elephant for some time, but with the pervasive migrant worker (adjunct) economy emerging in academe, the cognitariate and the proletariate increasingly have a lot to share. It is this materialist political stance in the mode of information — call it a Nietzschean-Marxian inclination to “talk back,” especially via electronic media, to power — combined with the infodynamic confluence of arts and sciences in interdisciplinary critical theory — call it recursive epistemology (Harries-Jones, 1995) — that animates our work. Now, meet some members of the gang.

 

Bataille, the great Nietzschean erotic-demonic rebel, offers a reading of his mentor that aptly engages the merger of Christianism, Capitalism and Statism — the Pentagon in its various forms with all its religious significance — that has contributed so much to the blood feast of modern history. Bataille commented appropriately, as he wrote his Preface to On Nietzsche in 1944, “Gestapo practices now coming to light show how deep the affinities are that unite the underworld and the police. It is people who hold nothing sacred who’re the ones most likely to torture people and cruelly carry out the orders of a coercive apparatus.” Bataille is speaking about “run of the mill doctrines” of anarchy “apologizing for those commonly taken to be criminals” (xxv). This kind of “anarchy” is best represented, ironically, by the devotees who take food from the school children of OTHERS (especially people of color), and wave their yellow ribbons during the National Anthem under God while the bombs fall on OTHER children abroad, all the while vehemently proclaiming that they are PROLIFE: for these folks, only self-aggrandizement is sacred. Bataille’s analysis of the reduction of religious ideas, supposedly transcendental and therefore beyond appropriation for human purposes, to the very temporal goals that they are supposed to transcend, clearly indicates what has happened in the religions of modernity: the quite temporal and material objectives of wealth and power become deified by hoards of believers who imagine that Jesus actually wants them to make money and launch the F15s against the enemies of “our” oil — the “Bombs and Jesus crowd,” as Hunter Thompson calls them, who feel sanctified in the pursuit of profit and military hegemony. This is the most vocal and disturbing strain of Americanism — gleefully resounding in Congress these days — the criticism of, let alone the resistance to, which is branded as demonic. Bataille nicely situates this mythos,revealing its operative logic — its stage mechanics — and so the SELF-serving idolatry that generally passes nowadays for religion in “America.”

 

Unfortunately for all of US, these personae are THEM-selves, identities mass produced and distributed from the Magic Kingdom in consultation with the Command and Control network linking Epcot, Washington and Madison Avenue. Are YOU one of THEM? Are WE? The result is a pervasive cultural coding that inscribes the monologic of subjectivity and correlative objectivity on a population who are increasingly programmed to be Mouseketeers, to wear yellow and cheer and sing songs of Christian devotion as the bombs fall on the Iraqis; or for that matter, since academics wore a lot of yellow during that TV series too, to turn out academic papers on, and by, the usual subjects insuring the trivialization of the American “intellect.” Trivia, of course, brings up the function of Modern academic research within the Pentagon, a point that Bateson — another member of our gang — makes at length in “The Science of Mind an Order” (Steps xvii-xxvi), a key work in the NBCBN corpus. He argues that any discourse not cognizant of the axial difference between entropy and information and their associated fundamentals — namely the BCNDC creed — can tell us little about the evolution of our world or the niches of various communities, social or biotic, within it: hence it is trivial (cf. Salthe, ch. 1). In contrast, it is precisely at the meeting of these two realms — at the difference which makes a difference — that the strategies of life are formed and the significance of signification is created. This interface of entropy and information is none other than the différend — the productive disagreement between Dionysus and Apollo that Nietzsche saw animating Hellenic civilization.

 

Cixous, in whom we see an uncanny resemblance to that radical gangstress of comic book and recent film, Tank Girl, appears here interposed first amidst the text of Derrida contemplating Nietzsche on women (Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles), as the cybernaut who steers the ship of l’écriture feminine on a differential course, riding the whirlpool that forms at the interface of entropy and information, Dionysus and Apollo. Here, where we would situate the différend, is the meeting place of what Bateson called, following the Gnostic Jung, pleroma and creatura: “The pleroma is the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no ‘distinctions.’ Or, as I would say, no ‘differences.’ In the creatura, effects are brought about precisely by difference” (Steps, 462-463; also see Hoeller, ch. 2). In theological terms, we suggest that pleroma and creatura are analogous to what Otto called numina and phenomena: the numinous being the mysterious realm of the “holy” about which “we” can only surmise. “We can study and describe the pleroma, but always the distinctions which we draw are attributed by us to the pleroma” (Bateson, 462). The play of discourse is phenomenal, discursive, yet its force, its power, is numinous. It is precisely the role of the Daimon — Mind, as in Maxwell’s Demon — to produce the differences that constitute living forms. Here we would situate Bateson’s ecological Idea and Derrida’s “différance“: “‘Older’ than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. . . . This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the system” (Derrida, “Différance” 26-27). Cixous’ writing and the daimonic sorceresses and hysterics that inhabit it, we suggest, are the embodiment of this Demon of Difference, which the priests and psychiatrists have long tried to exorcise. Characterized by her mad laughter, she is the template for the cybernetic creatura envisioned by Haraway as for the emergence of new natural-cultural formations — metaphors — in terms of which the dance of life — the tarantella — can be articulated.

 

We situate the Nietzschean post devotee right here, at the whirling interface of pleroma and creatura where Cixous sails: not the course of God but, rather, of the différend out of which gods are created. We situate the Christian capitalist devotee, in the spirit of Reagan and Bush and their heirs, in a box seat on the 50 yard line at the Super Bowl.

 

Returning to nutshells, a narrator friend of OURS, attributed to an “author” named Conrad and a text called Heart of Darkness, but seemingly with a life of his own, once remarked about a yarn spinner, Marlow, situated on the moonlit deck of a sailing ship bound for Africa, on the Thames:

 

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (19-20)

 

So we situate ourselves, your Narrator, and our argument amidst the spectral illumination of our Characters, not presuming to “subject” them to our theories but to let them speak, interposed with our own pronouncements. Hence, now, an intertextual dialogue among our hero-heroines of discourse, who all have appeared, situated miraculously in various forms, with YOURS TRULY, amidst the riotous set of a nine inch nails Concert, during the Gulf War: a perfect setting for the emergence of Nietzsche’s favorite character.

 

Event-Scene I:

 

THE SITUATION: Electric Dionysian Theatre: God comes back to split the Mt. of Olives on CNN: nine inch nails emerge. Filmic time-lapse images, projected on skeins enveloping the band, of a rabbit decomposing, of nuclear explosions and the atomic wind, of corpses hanging by the neck, frozen in the Bosnian winter, of the growth of stems and leaves and the turning spirals of the jet stream, metamorphoses of global and microscopic dimensions, the dance of life and death. “If i could kill you and me i would,” lead singer and writer, Trent Reznor, intones: “the pigs have won tonight/ now they can all sleep soundly/ and everything’s all right.” The skeins fade to reveal the asymmetrical architecture, the broken bombed skyline, of the set, band members perched here and there among vaguely suggested, jagged rooftops, and columns standing at crazy angles to form a fractured cityscape both ancient and modern, under ghostly images of light on fine netting, like the skein of stars that envelops human conduct in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. In the Pit, reveling fans form a living social body, human waves pulsing phosphorescent across its surface toward the thundering stage. Suddenly, a spectre from the electromagnetic spectrum appears on stage left, a philosopher sculpted from light:

 

NIETZSCHE (speaking out of memory, in a resounding voice):

 

The Madman:Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

 

“Whither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers.

 

. . . Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it. There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us — for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history hitherto.”

 

. . . It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang his requiem aeternam deo. Let out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, “What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” (Gay Science, sec. 125)

 

NARRATOR (who appears to be a Nietzsche fan, and whose Wizard hat now glows):

 
In this famous passage from Nietzsche’s later writings, striking images confront us, biblical in tone, apocalyptic in perspective, yet iconoclastic in effect: a madman lighting a lantern in the bright morning to proclaim the death of god, his accusation that we have killed Him, his conjuring of blood rite, baptism, religious festival, his challenge to us to become gods in compensation, his vision of churches as “sepulchers of God,” darkly alluding to and transforming the Gospel story of the empty tomb from which Christ has arisen into a parable about our own reawakening as divinities trapped within the tomb of Christendom. This emergence from the grave brings the devotees into a new, “higher history,” one not circumscribed by the master narrative of Christian eschatology, with beginning middle and end like a good tragedy. Rather, the new history is to be radical, without a metaphysics, without a transcendental aeternitas to provide the reference point against which to measure time and change. This is to be a history of immanent activity not transcendent verities, a cultural mode whose signs and symbols, whose semeiosis, is generated not from a transcendental signifier or signified, in Saussure’s terms, but from communicative practices, the self-writing of a new generation of Übermenschen and Übermädchen (the latter to write a higher “Herstory”) who are not so much “atheists” as the old god reincarnated and pluralized in a diversity of new personae, heralding a new religion of the living instead of, as Nietzsche would say, the traditional worship of the dead.

 

In this regard Nietzsche has turned religion back into theater, or theater into a religion, in which the mask, the constructed persona, is the only persona, in which the theoretical pose, the transcendent gaze, of the philosophical critic too becomes revealed as a mask through the genealogy of criticism, so that both the ultimate Substratum, God, and the human subject who would worship or know Him, become no more than actors on the stage of Europe, the realization of which makes it closing time for the West: the grand play, the force of which required the suspension of disbelief by the audience, is now revealed as a farce with pretence to tragedy, revealed by Nietzsche just as the Wizard of Oz is sniffed out from behind his curtain by Toto. Yet, where could this possibly leave audience and actors who have apparently transcended the play of their civilization, only to find themselves still in the mood for self-transformation? Is there any show left after Nietzsche’s Madman steals the stage? Has the “self-overcoming” that, as Charles E. Scott says, “. . . defines the movement of the ascetic ideal as well as the movement of Nietzsche’s genealogical account of that ideal,” an overcoming that ” . . . is primarily not a theory but a discursive movement that he identifies in Western thought and practice as well as in his own writing,” rendered former devotees of the narrative mere phantoms, as their lack of substance would suggest? Does Nietzsche’s writing, as well as the culture it genealogically deconstructs, finally become “. . . a mask of appearance without reality, a movement that we undergo as we follow his discourse” (226)? What is left amidst the ruins of the civilization that has killed its own ideal, its God? Is it “the omnipresence of power,” as Foucault has it, “not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another” (History of Sexuality, I, 93)? Are we then left with a world in which “politics is war pursued by other means,” or at least in which a “multiplicity of force relations can be coded — in part but never totally — either in the form of war’ or the form of politics,’ . . . a strategic model, rather than a model based on law” (93, 102)?. Yet for Nietzsche as for Foucault, the ultimate aesthetic of power is not one of war but, we think, of love, not the Platonic-Apollonian variety — the love of death, “the separation of the soul from the body,” as Socrates in the Phaedo (64C4-5) defines both the terminus of the philosophical quest and the act of dying — but rather the joyous awakening of soul and body fused in the act of living-as-creating: Dionysian ecstasy.

 

DELEUZE (breaking in):

 
Will to power does not mean that the will wants power. Will to power does not imply any anthropomorphism in its origin, signification of essence. Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will. This is why the will is essentially creative. (85)

 

NARRATOR (trying again):

 
In Bateson’s terms, Nietzschean will is thus “the difference which makes a difference” that proliferates into the mindful patterns of the living world (Steps, 272, 381 ff.); in Derrida’s it is différance, the generative power producing the differentiation of discourse per se. Will to Power, “difference which makes a difference,” différence: at the convergence of these ideas lies a new joyous science, and what we shall call The Philosophy of Laughter. Yet joyous knowledge is heretical, both to the orthodoxy of “modern” science and to its traditional antagonist, the Christian establishment. Could these two team up to form a new Inquisition of “Blue Meanies,” as the forces of enforced Platonism are called in the Beatles’s film Yellow Submarine, whose Heaven looks suspiciously like Disney World and whose Hell is Baghdad?

 

Thus that practitioner of joy, FOUCAULT (arising like a specter from the Underworld below the stage), poses a counter-practice to the Christian worship of Death stemming from the Socratic separation of the soul from the body, as well as to the “ruses” of repressive desublimation, control through sexuality, in a consumer economy:

 

We are often reminded of the countless procedures which Christianity once employed to make us detest the body; but let us ponder all the ruses that were employed for centuries to make us love sex, to make the knowledge of it desirable and everything said about it precious. Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless talk of forcing its secret, of extracting the truest confessions from a shadow. (History of Sexuality, 159)

 

It is between the fanged Scylla of Christian asceticism and the swirling Charybdis of commoditized desire that a Nietzschean fröhliche Wissenschaftmust steer, and the kybernetes (“steersperson,” “cybernaut”) best able to steer her ship through that chasm is Dionysus:

 

NIETZSCHE (wearing a cross in his ear, just like one historic version of Madonna):

 

In contrast to the Pauline crucified Jesus, who exalts death over life — who is close, but not identical, to the Jesus who wanted life without facing death — Dionysus confronts death, certain of the over-fullness of life and his own recreative power. “The desire for destruction, change, becoming, can be the expression of an over-full power pregnant with the future (my term for this, as is known, is Dionysian’)” [Will To Power, sec. 846] (Valadier, 250).

 

NARRATOR (recalling a memorable bout of shopping):

 

The worship of death, disguised as the otherworldly Kingdom in Christianity, has been transformed in the capitalist modern era into the pursuit of deferred gratification, the Foucauldian economy of sexuality, through the fetishization of commodities, the Church of the Consumers, as we have described it in “Nietzsche at the Mall” (White & Hellerich, 1993). For, as Max Weber astutely observed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the protestant work ethic which supplied the basic norms for European capitalist culture was a materialized version of the old medieval quest for salvation. The new ethic became “God helps those who help themselves,” meaning, in effect, that those who work hard and save will eventually achieve the Kingdom, not of the old transcendental heaven above but rather of a materially abundant future attainable through progress. With the advent of consumer capitalism in the twentieth century, the work ethic became conjoined with what might be described as the “pleasure ethic,” the virtually religious pursuit of commodities by nearly everybody. Thus the old monotheistic god is made imminently available in the myriad forms of concretized desire that make up the idols — the brands and shapely surfaces — of the marketplace. Or, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism says, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever” (cited in Fullerton, 11).

 

KRISTEVA (wanders out of a Huge Digital Mirror rolled on stage, dragging along Benveniste as Pozzo drags Lucky in Beckett’s Godot):

 

After reviewing the various etymological interpretations, he [Benveniste] argues that from the beginning credo/ sraddha had both a religious meaning and an economic meaning: the word denotes an “act of confidence implying restitution,” and “to pledge something on faith in the certainty that it will be returned,” religiously and economically. Thus the correspondence between credence and credit is one of “the oldest in the Indo-European vocabulary” (Kristeva, 30).

 

NARRATOR (after a commercial break, rejoins): It is in the context of late nineteenth-century capitalism and industrialism that Nietzsche wrote his famous Madman passage, and it seems clear now that he was more describing the actual religion of Europe than attacking traditional theology (which he of course does elsewhere). He is certainly shattering the illusion of transcendental spirituality that still functions as an ideological justification of capitalist culture: those who are wealthy are so because god has smiled on them for their hard work, and the poor are being punished for their laziness, a sentiment worthy of Ronald Reagan or of his devotee, presidential-hopeful Pat Buchanan. At the same time, however, he is challenging the devotees of the power and progress, and the church of the consumer which would emerge from their faith, to offer an alternative to their alienated idolatry.

 

BATAILLE (enters from the same sub-stage sepulchre as Foucault, humming nine inch nails’ “Closer,” in French; erotic dancing breaks out, along with an extraordinary laser light show, in the audience, which appears in the ghostly light of the beams and skeins, as a complex web of reveling shadows, like so many organelles pulsing to the musical heartbeat; he begins by citing Nietzsche):

 

“The majority of people are a fragmentary, exclusive image of what humanity is; you have to add them up to get humanity. In this sense, whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them . . . .”

 

But what does that fragmentation mean? Or better, what causes it if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? . . . Whoever acts, substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being: in the least specialized cases it is glory of the state or the triumph of a party. Every action specializes insofar as it is limited as action. A plant usually doesn’t act, and isn’t specialized; it’s specialized when gobbling up flies! . . . (On Nietzsche, xxi-xxii)

 

BATESON (appearing instantly projected on a stage skein by the NIN laser light apparatus, raising a Lucky Strike, interjects):

 
Consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical and causal path to get what you next want, which may be dinner; it may be a Beethoven sonata; it may be sex. Above all, it may be money or power. (Steps, 440)

 

NARRATOR (offering him a light):

 
So the operation of what you call “conscious purpose” is akin to the machinations of instrumentalism whose grammar depends on the bifurcation of subjects and objects: the self, the subject, delineating objects which it desires and appropriating — making use of — them technologically to achieve its end?

 

BATAILLE (thumbing a copy of Richard Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime):

 
The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object . . . Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal — what’s normally called living. Similarly, if salvation is the goal. Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. (On Nietzsche, xxvii)

 

BATESON: (Ruminating on Adam and Eve’s discovery of conscious purpose — the linear logic of objectification — and its ecological consequences.):

 
Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excitement. This was the way to do things. Make a plan, ABC and you get D. They then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. In effect, they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own total systemic nature and of its total systemic nature. After they had cast God out of the Garden, they really went to work on this purposive business, and pretty soon the topsoil disappeared . . . (Steps, 441) (stops to take a draw on his Lucky)

 

BATAILLE (aside, to Bateson, “Could I have one of those?”):

 
The use of the word God is deceptive therefore; it results in the distortion of its object, of the sovereign Being, between the sovereignty of an ultimate end, implied in the movement of language, and the servitude of means, on which it is based (this is defined as serving that, and so on . . .). God, the end of things, is caught up in the game that makes each thing the means of another. In other words, God, named as the end, becomes a thing insofar as he is named, a thing, put on the plane with all things. (The Accursed Share, III, 382-383)

 

BATESON (laconically):

 
Be that as it may. Adam went on pursuing his purposes and finally invented the free-enterprise system. Eve was not, for a long time, allowed to participate in this because she was a woman. But she joined a bridge club and there found an outlet for her hate. (Steps, 442)

 

NARRATOR (intoning chorally): Amen.

 

Event-Scene II: Situation: War Rages

 

A neon sign blinks on and off at the rear of the stage, signalling the band’s return after a break:

 

The Neocapitalist Imagology of the Sacred
                   or
  Bush Does Baghdad:  The TV Mini-Series

 

TAYLOR AND SAARINEN ( sound biting their way out of a bubble):

 

Media philosophy rejects analytics in favor of communication. Explosive, outrageous communication is the lifeblood of hope in the world of simulacra, bureaucracy and collapsing ecosystems (Imagologies, 9).

 

NIETZSCHE (glowing demonic red as he prepares his anti-sermon):

 

I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all corruptions. . . . To abolish any stress ran counter to its deepest advantages: it lived on distress, it created distress to eternalize itself . . . .
Parasitism is the only practice of the church; with its ideal of anemia, of “holiness,” draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed — against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul, against life itself.  (The Antichrist, sec. 62)

 

ALSO SPRACH REZNOR (apparently regarding his uncle, Sam):

 

   he sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see
      he tries to tell me what i put inside of me
        he has the answers to ease my curiosity
     he dreamed a god up and called it christianity
           your god is dead and no one cares
         if there is a hell i'll see you there
he flexed his muscles to keep his flock of sheep in line
   he made a virus that would kill off all the swine
   his perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain
   demands devotion atrocities done in his name . . .
     "heresy" (nine inch nails, The Downward Spiral)

 

NARRATOR (feeling uneasily like an academic sheep on the way to the slaughter):

 
The images of Christian sanctimoniousness conjoined with those of capitalism, technological power and American beneficence, abound in the United States today, and do a great deal to shape the imaginations of the public. The more subtle consumer iconography of the mall we have already described, but the explicit imagery of fundamentalist Christianity is worth focusing on, for it is the bastion of perhaps the chief antagonist to creating a culture devoted to life — “conservatism” — the euphemism used to describe the radical brand of corporate empowerment and public impoverishment that is now avidly sweeping the people of the US into that bin of victims and exploitees called the Third World. The spirit of what Nietzsche would see as the religion of death is nowhere more apparent than in George Bush’s orchestration of Christian devotion in support of the TV opera, “The Gulf War,” aptly described by Baudrillard as “pornographic” in a Der Spiegel interview.

 

KELLNER (is led in chains by the Texas Rangers, since he has been associated with a drunken Frenchman speeding through the tumbleweeds and making dubious pronouncements about their beloved America; even though Kellner protests that he is mostly a critic of the mad Frenchman, this distinction is lost on the Rangers, who, in the meantime are suspiciously eying the book, The Persian Gulf TV War, which is almost mistaken for a special issue of TV Guide: then Kellner begins to read aloud):

 

A minister appearing on CNN’s Sonia Frieman show after the war on March 1 [1991] properly said that it was literally blasphemous for Bush to invoke the name of God in favor of his murderous war policies. But Bush continued to play the war and religion theme, telling the annual gathering of the Southern Baptist Convention on June 6, 1991, that he recalled praying at Camp David before ordering the start of the Gulf war. According to the New York Times (June 7, 1991), Bush wiped tears away from his eyes as he described praying before ordering the bombing that began the war against Iraq and the 23,000 delegates roared their approval, stood up and shouted “Amen!” Bush was on a political trip, trying to cement alliances with “conservative, church-oriented Republicans whom he and his advisers see as crucial to his political strength” [NYT A7] (Kellner, 279-280, n. 15).

 

NARRATOR (trying not to make ALL Christians feel like Unabombers):

 
Clearly, not all Christians are worshippers of death, as Nietzsche’s analysis of the Evangel indicates. But the virulent American strain of “conservative church-oriented Republicans” clearly find the death, at least of officially demonized OTHERS, quite appealing. Thus Kellner also details the imagological demonization of Saddam Hussein, as part of Bush’s sanctimonious warmongering, with the full compliance by major media whose function Chomsky appropriately describes in his title, Manufacturing Consent.

 

KELLNER (reads on, in spite of the fact that a burly Ranger from Waco is approaching him with a roll of tape):

 

From the outset of the crisis in the Gulf, the media employed the frame of popular culture that portrays conflict as a battle between good and evil. Saddam Hussein quickly became the villain in this scenario with the media vilifying the Iraqi leader as a madman, a Hitler, while whipping up anti-Iraqi war fever. Saddam was described by Mary McGrory as a “beast” (Washington Post, Aug. 7, 1990) and as a “monster” that “Bush may have to destroy” (Newsweek, Oct. 20, 1990, and Sept. 3, 1990). George Will called Saddam “more virulent” than Mussolini and then increased Hussein’s evil by using the Saddam-as-Hitler metaphor in his syndicated columns. New York Times editorialist A.M. Rosenthal attacked Hussein as “barbarous” and “an evil dreamer of death” (Aug. 9, 1990) . . . The New Republic doctored a Time magazine cover photo on Saddam to make him appear more like Hitler. . . . Saddam’s negative image was forged by a combination of rhetoric, popular culture demonology, and Manichean metaphysics that presented the Gulf crisis as a struggle between good and evil.” (62-63; see Kellner’s note 1, p. 104, on the “Manichean frames of U.S. popular culture.”)

 

SAID (rather tattered and powder burned from an untimely visit to friends in Iraq, though he seems as one used to being stepped on, like that storybook Palestinian Jesus, who had a similar view of Roman power; he arrives smoking a Camel and wearing a placard saying, RIDING ELEPHANTS IS EGOTISTICAL, and reads from his tome, Culture and Imperialism):

 

Historically the American, and perhaps generally the Western, media have been sensory extensions of the main cultural context. Arabs are only an attenuated recent example of Others who have incurred the wrath of a stern White Man, a kind of Puritan superego whose errand into the wilderness knows few boundaries and who will go to great lengths indeed to make his points. Yet of course the word “imperialism” was a conspicuously missing ingredient in American discussions about the Gulf. (295)

 

NARRATOR (who has just bought a virtual pachyderm, which he has ridden confidently on stage, proclaims righteously):

 
The worship of death and the “Christian” obligation to support the blood-feast of massacre, demonstrably felt by Bush’s “conservativechurch-going Republicans,” is the expectable outcome of a cultural persona that is committed to imposing its language-of-self on a world of Others of whom it is Paranoid (another glance to the Pit here) so that it sees its mission as one of Imperial Self-Defense: Orwellian Double Speak par excellence! (Resounding silence, then . . . )

 

BATESON (wanders back on stage from the dark, in flannels and smoking another Lucky, muttering “seventy some years on this fucking planet are enough;” he challenges the audience, still reverberating from The Downward Spiral, to take an “ecological step” and see here the cultural expression of a religion that is projected down to the fundamentals of Western “science” — especially to the Darwinian selection of the “unit of survival” in evolution as “the individual or set of conspecifics” instead of the communicative organism-environment relationship):

 

If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables. (Steps, 468)

 

PLATO (apparently roused from 2,000 or so years of stony sleep by the unbearably earthly tone of Bateson’s remarks, not to mention by the irritation of all the NIN din, arrives from OUTSIDE to offer his longstanding view that mind and body, “god” and “nature” must be kept separate, for the object of the philosophical quest is precisely the separation of the soul from the body):

 

Therefore is death anything other than the separation of the soul from the body? And [is it not so] that death is this, the body becoming separate from the soul and alone by itself, as well as the soul coming to be alone by itself separate from the body? (64C4-8)

 

NARRATOR (trying now to improve on the Ancients, yet disaffected from the Moderns — who may as well be seen as gangs competing for intellectual turf — attempts to explain, from a newly constructed post on the frontier of modernity, simply represented on stage by a soap box):

 
Plato’s language — one which separates soma, “body” from psyche, “soul” indicates etymologically that the religion of death is already here: for, as Snell points out in The Discovery of the Mind, the original meaning of soma, in Homer, is “corpse,” the inert body devoid of life. Psyche, congruently, means “breath,” and hence “life breath,” and is often translated by the Latin anima, at the base of words like “animate” and “animal”: living things (Snell, 16-17). The separation of the one from the other, so that each is alone by itself, is, as we pointed out earlier, the apex of the Socratic-Platonic philosophical quest: to die, to exist as an entity alone by itself. This is the culmination of the Western, ultimately the American Dream, externalized as the Utopian Republic of Disney to which, prophetically, the visionary neoimperial epithet “World” is added. So the NeoChristian Genie of the Living Dead produces a new evolution of Faustian Creatura: synthetic replicants, Event-Scenes, robots, creations without originals, simulacra in ever more fantastic and insidious forms, including in part your Manichean Narrator, programmed to serve their idol: the spectral SELF in its utopian politeia. Nietzsche, as a classical scholar, saw all this clearly, and had the foresight to reveal it genealogically right down to the deep cultural logic of Platonic software.

 

This imageology of the neocapitalist sacred is wrought subtly and insidiously in the realm of information technology, especially artifical intelligence and virtual reality. For as the television mini-series Wild Palms tried to indicate, the image-generating and intelligence-projecting power of these new media may be used for the most diabolical ends: the conjuring of “immortal” “leaders,” “commanders,”a new priesthood that fulfills in the key of high technology the traditional priestly mission as described by Nietzsche. It is the role of the priesthood to maintain themselves, their unilateral, hierarchic power over the populace, particularly by manipulating the imagery of the sacred which is actually a projection of their own egotism, their own acquisitiveness, into the absolute, so making it unassailable. “Religion has debased the concept man,’ Nietzsche writes, “its ultimate consequence is that everything good, great, true is superhuman and bestowed only through the act of grace –” (Will to Power, sec. 136). This “grace” is mediated, dispensed, by the priesthood, in the old Church between god and man, in the new capitalist information order between the mysteries of nature, the genie-like powers unleashed from the electromagnetic spectrum through the architecture of cybernetic minds, into the public sphere as a series of technological breakthroughs, “miracles,” the demonstrated powers of the scientist magicians who work for the priesthood and affirm their power. “Priests are the actors of something superhuman which they have to make easily perceptible, whether it be in the nature of ideals, gods or saviors” Nietzsche continues, “. . . to make everything as believable as possible they have to go as far as possible in posturing and posing,” projecting their personae in the forms of pseudo public officials, epitomized by Ronald Reagan, who read the Word handed down by the priests from a script designed — literally by market research — to be a stimulus for statistically predictable responses from the image-consuming public.

 

Those who doubt this need only watch Bill Moyers’ four-part PBS series: The Public Mind (see especially part 2), where the transformation of the electorate from citizens into consumers is detailed. WHO ARE the alleged priests of the late capitalist information order? One need look no farther, initially, than a Frontline documentary, “The Best Campaign Money Can Buy,” released just before the last US presidential election (October 27, 1992), which deftly shows that both the Democrats and Republicans successfully courted many of THE VERY SAME INTERESTS for campaign funding. The script of the new order is read by Republican or Democrat, yet the play is very similar. The drama of the Christian right, however, threatens to unleash a new LEVEL, even a new QUALITY, of repression “at home,” very similar to that practiced by the US and its sympathizers abroad: a monological game of self-righteously exploiting or destroying the other: from the Iraqis to Nicaraguans to any and every living being that would hinder the manifest destiny of the chosen religion; to ACT — employ American Christian Terrorism — to translate the biosphere into sprawling urban real estate — the suburbs and ghettos of the multinational New Atlantis epitomized in Terry Gilliam’s film, Brazil and, for Übermädchen particularly, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (novel and film). Hence we feel obliged to write the “Acts of the Electronic Apostles,” a book chronicling the sanctimonious behavior of the New Christian Right, in the Techno-Evangelical Scriptures of the new Totalitarian Ordo Saeculorum for Terror and Ecclesiastical Racism through the Orwellian News Ethernet — TESTOSTERONE (Studies in Post Christianity by the Orlando Circle, I, Authors, forthcoming. We are considering — instead of Ordo Saeculorum, which means “order of the Generations” or, as in Rome, of imperial succession, hence suggesting the New World Order — employing the phrase Ordo Saecularium, which would be the Order of the Secular Games as in the Late Empire: we take this to suggest the Super Bowl.)

 

KELLNER (hearing all this talk about the Imperial Games, blurts out, his voice muffled by tape which the Rangers have thoughtfully, if incompetently, put over his mouth — a trick they learned from watching reruns of the Chicago Seven Trial and the taping of Bobby Seal — manages to blurt: “During the Super Bowl weekend of January 25-26 [1991] patriotism, flag waving, and support for the war were encouraged by Bush and the media.” Spitting the tape out altogether, his anger giving him almost the power of the Übermensch, Kellner intones):

 

The football fans at home, in turn, were rooting for the troops while watching the game. One sign said: “Slime Saddam” and a barely verbal fan told the TV cameras that “he’s messin’ with the wrong people,” while fan after fan affirmed his or her support for the troops. One of the teams wore yellow ribbons on their uniforms and the football stars went out of their way to affirm support for the troops and/or the war. Halftime featured mindless patriotic gore, with a young, blonde Aryan boy singing to the troops “you’re my heroes,” while fans waved flags, formed a human flag, and chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”, reminding one of the fascist spectacles programmed by the Nazis to bind the nation into a patriotic community. (258)

 

BAUDRILLARD (driving on stage in his Cadillac with overblown tires, borrowed from Hunter Thompson, with whom he studied in Las Vegas, still a little tipsy from his foray across Texas and on the run not only from the Rangers, who luckily for Baudrillard have got the wrong man, but also from the Moral Majority whose mythic persona has recently been renewed as a kind of halo around Congress, manages to say):

 

We live in a culture which strives to return to each of us full responsibility for his own life. The moral responsibility inherited from the Christian tradition has thus been augmented, with the help of the whole modern apparatus of information and communication, by the requirement that everybody should be answerable for every aspect of their lives. What this amounts to is an expulsion of the other, who has indeed become perfectly useless in the context of a programmed management of life, a regimen where everything conspires to buttress the autarchy of the individual cell. (165)

 

NARRATOR (trying to deflect the attention of the Rangers from one of his (their) favorite post-philosophers, fearing his mouth will be taped shut, raises a question he hopes will resonate in police ears):

 
But are the “captains” of multinational corporations really in control of their dominions — notice that the New Atlantis of Brazil and Handmaid’s Tale is contested by forces of REBELLION — or do they work for new, emerging entities that are truly godlike insofar as they transcend the powers of their priests fully to understand and conceivably to control them?

 

MUMFORD (who is rolled onto stage sitting in the top story of a skyscraper, with barred windows, where he’s been imprisoned by the inquisition of “the priests of the megamachine,” as he calls them, stewards of the emerging powers of cybernetically controlled megatechnology after Word War II; he voices his concerns about the genies of technology):

 

The new megamachine, in the act of being made over on an advanced technological model, also brought into existence the ultimate decision-maker and Divine King, in a transcendent, electronic form: the Central Computer. As the true earthly representative of the Sun God, the computer had first been invented . . . to facilitate astronomical calculations. In the conversion of Babbage’s clumsy half-built model into a fantastically rapid electro-mechanism, whose movable parts are electric charges, celestial electronics replaced celestial mechanics and gave this exquisite device its authentic divine characteristics: omnipresence and invisibility. (Pentagon of Power, 272-273)

 

NARRATOR (helpfully chorusing):

 
The megamachine is nominally run by two classes, the technical specialists or technocrats and the presidents of corporations or Commanders, the magicians and priesthood of celestial electronics.

 

ARTHUR KROKER (of the Canadian gang, arrives in the digital mirror but, like a Poltergeist, from the OTHER SIDE, to recount his recent visit to the research labs of the emerging technology, a euphemism for the Fields of the Dead):

 

To visit these labs is a singularly depressing experience. Singularly astonishing to realize how sophisticated the development of demonic power in the hands of the technocrats has become; and singularly depressing to realize that the technocrats are immensely pleased to abandon their selves, abandon their bodies, abandon any kind of individuation of emotion as quickly as possible. These are really Dead Souls. But at the same time they are dead souls with real missionary zeal — because they equate technology with religion and they call it freedom. (82)

 

NARRATOR:

 
What is even more disturbing is the expansion of religious awe on the part of the public, at least the believers, to the realms not only of the arts, which is understandable in a culture otherwise bereft of meaning, but into politics and science as well.

 

NIETZSCHE:

 

The wealth of religious feeling, swollen to a river, breaks out again and again, and seeks to conquer new realms: but growing enlightenment has shaken the dogmas of religion and generated a thorough mistrust of it; therefore, feeling, forced out of the religious sphere by enlightenment, throws itself into art; in certain instances, into political life, too, indeed, even directly into science. Where one perceives a loftier, darker coloration to human endeavors, one may assume that the fear of spirits, the smell of incense, and the shadow of churches have remained attached to them. (Human, All too Human, sec. 150)

 

NARRATOR:

 
These are the new altars where the new priests stand, their technocrats staging televised, even virtual, miracles, altars outfitted with cellular telefaxes, to get the WORD directly from HEADQUARTERS, and the Artificial Intelligence inside, before whom the CEO’s sit, fused with their terminals, trying to embody the cybernetic spirit of the times.

 

But it’s just possible for hackers armed with Nietzsche to slip a few alternative texts into the “mind” of this cyberbeast, to loose a little creative chaos into its programmatic ideals, liven it up a little, so that the words appearing on the telefax have a different ring, and the priests, the technocrats and, yes, the Herd of devotees in the telechurch will be shocked back into life. As Taylor and Saarinen observe, “Foucault is right when he notes that the western tradition is unusual in its limitation of art works to external physical products that are exhibited in museums. Media philosophy insists that one must take his or her life seriously as being-for-the-other in the space of spectacle. You speak to others and to yourself through the media” (9). So we do NOT suggest spreading computer viruses and other forms of infosabotage–the tools of literal-minded war. We prefer, instead, an electronic Renaissance inspired not by the distanced observer of linear perspective around whom the arts, sciences and religion of Modernity were centered, but rather by the jouissance commensurate with recognizing “ourselves” as participants in the Dionysian-Appolinian creativity of the ecological mind. This Daimon is well played not by God but rather by none other than Nietzsche, just arriving at the electronic Altar.

 

Event-Scene III: The Dionysia

 

          The Devotee of Life or
God Quits Moralizing, Gets a Gender Change
                    and
        Cultivates a Sense of Humor

 

ZEN BUDDHIST: “The miracle is to walk upon the earth.” REZNOR:

 

i want to fuck you like an animal
  my whole existence is flawed
    you get me closer to god
(nine inch nails, "closer", downward spiral)

 

NARRATOR (As the music fades to a faint pulse):

 
The God of the European tradition was an imperious moralizer, looking down on his children below, pointing a threatening finger at sinners, handing down the law, allowing no revisions. The specter of God the Father has haunted European culture like the Ghost of Hamlet Senior, compelling it to violence and retribution in the Oedipal cycle of the patriarchic nuclear family: male struggle for power within hierarchic structure, One king dominates kingdom just as One god rules the cosmos; one father, in heaven as in the family, ruling over his wife and children; a son who must in turn overcome the father to take his own position beside the surrogate mother, his wife or queen, to complete the cycle of the generations. The transformation of social relationships by the deconstructing of traditional oppositions, the rewriting of the cultural text in terms that are immanent and differential instead of hierarchic and classificatory, is precisely Nietzsche’s goal in his critique of religion. It is furthermore to this Oedipal religion that Nietzsche, significantly, counterpoises the genuine evangel:

 

NIETZSCHE:

 

In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin” — any distance separating God and man — is abolished: precisely this is the “glad tidings.” Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality — the rest is a sign with which to speak of it. The consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” that distinguished the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently.

 

The life of the Redeemer was nothing other than this practice — nor was his death anything else. He no longer required any formulas, any rites for his intercourse with God — not even prayer. He broke with the whole Jewish doctrine of repentance and reconciliation; he knows that it is only in the practice of life that one feels “divine” . . . . (The Antichrist, sec. 33)

 

OTTO (Wearing one of those T-shirts with a tuxedo serigraphed on the front, on one lapel of which, in bright green, appears the word “numinous,” and on the other in a comparable hue of pink, appears “pleroma,” and on the cummerbund, bright yellow, lights “predicate,” which from its flashing we take to be an imperative, like “fornicate:” think “pleroma is numinous;” on the back of his T, invisible to the audience and even to one of our personalities, flash “phenomenal” and “creatura,” with a similar imperative):

 

The truly ‘mysterious’ object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently ‘wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb. (28)

 

NARRATOR:

 
This conception of the holy as “wholly other,” as ever “beyond” (epekeina), as it appears in Otto’s analysis, is isomorphic with the Christian notion of a godhead transcending the limits of the human, before which the devotee is stricken with awe, not only with wonder but often with the power and presence of majesty, and so with chill and fear; as Rilke remarks in the Duino Elegies, “Every Angel is Fearsome [schrecklich].”

 

All of this makes Nietzsche’s challenge to traditional theology, to the idea of a transcendent god, of extraneous numina, even more radical. He would, on our reading, deconstruct the “wholly other” of the divine, the semeiotic bifurcation and opposition of devotee and god, soul and almighty, earth and heaven, evil and good, to present the priests — of the Catholic Church as of Multinational Corporation (which includes the varieties of Protestantism, as their ultimate catholic form) — with a startling challenge: “Quit pretending that you are on one side of the semeiotic divide between phenomena and noumena, altar and its divine reference, and god is on the other: realize that you are none other than Him (Her?) pretending not to be! True power is not the use of the holy to wow the congregation but to wake yourselves and them up to the presence of mystery, of unlimited creative power, here and now. ‘You’ and ‘God’ are characters in the play of culture, and now that the secret is out, yes, god IS dead as a separate Entity, so the art of world making, become the art of culture making (Kulturmachen), resides in the communicative activities of “human beings” who are self-designating numina.” This is the meaning of the Zen maxim with which the section begins, “The miracle is to walk upon the earth.” Nietzsche’s visit to the altar brings God, the gods, the angels, crashing down onto the pages of the holy telefax, revealing them as the communicative signs of an extraordinary mind whose been having trouble with alienation for a couple of thousand years, so badly that He went into business and tried to forget His troubles via material gains, and when He failed at that tried to commit suicide by creating industrial civilization, and has been trying to e-mail himself to a heaven conjured by the new Christian Information Network (CIN), but who now may be obliged, with His life flashing before His eyes on the divine video monitor (right next to the holy fax), to wake up.

 

 

BATAILLE (Who, inverting the logic of Clinton, inhales his borrowed Lucky without smoking it):
Fundamentally, an entire human being is simply a being in whom transcendence is abolished, from whom there’s no separating anything now. An entire human being is partly a clown, partly God, partly crazy . . and is transparence. (On Nietzsche, xxix)

 

NARRATOR: An evangel, beyond, including, Good and Evil? God and the Devil in a new, immanent polymorphous savoir.

 

BATAILLE:

 
I’ve already said it: the practice of freedom lies within evil, not beyond it, while the struggle for freedom is a struggle to conquer a good. To the extent that life is entire within me, I can’t distribute it or let it serve the interests of good belonging to someone else, to God or myself. I can’t acquire anything at all: I can only give and give unstintingly, without the gift ever having as its object anyone’s interest. (On Nietzsche, xxvii)

 

NARRATOR: So YOU are the evangel? Hypocrite!

 

BATAILLE (Giving a bow of thanks to the Narrator for this praise of his acting skills):

 
Apparently the moral problem took “shape” in Nietzsche in the following way: for Christianity the good is God, but the converse is true: God is limited to the category of the good that is manifested in man’s utility, but for Nietzsche that which is sovereign is good, but God is dead (His servility killed Him), so man is morally bound to be sovereign. Man is thought (language), and he can be sovereign only through a sovereign thought. (Accursed Share, III, 381).

 

DERRIDA (Appearing as a Cheshire apparition on a skein, croons of Nietzsche on language, truth, art, dissimulation — and women):

 
Here I stand in the midst of the surging of the breakers . . . — from all sides there is howling, threatening, crying, and screaming at me, while in the lowest depths the old earth shaker sings his aria . . . monsters tremble at the sound. Then suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before the portal of this hellish labyrinth, only a few fathoms distant, — a great sailing ship (Segelschiff) gliding silently along like a ghost. Oh, this ghostly beauty! With what enchantment it seizes me! What? Has all the repose and silence in the world embarked here (sich hier eingeschifft)? Does my happiness itself sit in this quiet place, my happier ego, my second immortalized self . . . As a ghost — like, calm, gazing, gliding, sweeping neutral being (Mittelwesen)? Similar to the ship, which, with its white sails, like an immense butterfly, passes over the dark sea. Yes! Pass over existence! (Über das Dasein hinlaufen!) That is it! (Spurs: Nietzsche’s Style, 42-45)

 

NARRATOR (Mock heroic in tone, here, and split into two voices):

 
Who is that at the wheel of Nietzsche’s dissimulating schooner, traversing the Middle Way between creatura and pleroma, self and other, life and death, information and noise, order and chaos, so gracefully on the differential waves of semeiosis? It is none other than the Femme de l’écriture cybernétique, the steerswoman from hell — WHO?

 

CIXOUS (Whose NIN T-shirt now lights with the day glow letters, l’écriture féminine, and when she turns to look astern, lights, in English, with TANK GIRL):

 
“Writing offers the means to overcome separation and death, to give yourself what you would want God-if-he-existed to give you'” (Coming to Writing, 4).

 

DERRIDA (Peering at Cixous’ fluctuating image, and the magnificent ship she commands, remarks): Woman, mistress, Nietzsche’s woman mistress, at times resembles Penthesilea. (Spurs, 53).

 

CIXOUS:

 
And she, Penthesilea, cuts through his [Achilles’ — Nietzsche’s?] armor, and she touches him, she finally takes her shining bird, she loves it mortally, it is not a man that has come into her bare hands, it is more the very body of love than any man, and its voice as well, which she cruelly makes her own . . . She hurls herself wildly toward the end of love; eating Achilles, incorporating him, devouring him with kisses. The space of metaphor has collapsed, fantasies are carried out. Why not? (121)

 

NARRATOR (a little embarrassed by all those devouring kisses, drawls):

 
Sounds like Cixous says of Achilles (Nietzsche?) what Nietzsche says of schooners (women?): “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,” as John Lennon, then wearing a WALRUS SUIT, once remarked.

 

CIXOUS (After a remarkable rendition of “Goo Goo Ga Joob” au français):

 
Yes, all is well, beyond History. Where Achilles is comprehended within Penthesilea, whom he comprehends beyond any calculation. . .

 

(Aside to Nietzsche, and Reznor): How to love a woman without encountering death? A woman who is neither doll nor corpse nor dumb nor weak. But beautiful, lofty, powerful, brilliant?
Without history’s making one feel its law of hatred?
So the betrothed fall back into dust. Vengeance of castration, always at work, and which the wounded poet can surmount only in fiction. (121)

 

REZNOR: . . . my whole existence is flawed.

 

BATAILLE (Apparently commenting both on nine inch nails’ and Cixous’ writing practices):

 
Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I’m leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We’re brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a “questioning” of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death. (Guilty, 109)

 

NARRATOR:

 
Yet, the Woman, like Nietzsche’s Madman, is surrounded by believers in the Almighty’s transcendent Word whose seriousness is unassailable. Nevertheless, as Clément says of the Sorceress & Hysteric who is a template for “the newly born woman:”

 

But she, she who made Satan, who made everything — good and evil, who smiled on so many things, on love, sacrifices, crimes . . . ! What becomes of her? There she is, alone on the empty heath . . . .” And that is when she takes off — laughing. (Newly Born Woman, 32)

 

Event-Scene IV: Encore

 

       The Philosophy of Laughter:
                    or
Adam Flushes Money and Eve Ditches Bridge
            when they discover
                Jouissance

 

BATESON (In a story-teller fashion that he learned both at home and in New Guinea):

 

                    Dunkett's Rat-Trap:

Mr. Dunkett found all his traps fail one after another,
and he was in such despair at the way the corn got eaten
that he resolved to invent a rat-trap.  He began by
putting himself as nearly as possible in the rat's place.

"Is there anything," he asked himself, "in which, if I
were a rat, I should have such complete confidence that
I could not suspect it without suspecting everything in
the world and being unable henceforth to move fearlessly
in any direction?"

"Drain Pipes," [came the answer one night in an
illuminating flash]

Then he saw his way.  To suspect a common drainpipe would
be to cease to be a rat. [So] a spring was to be concealed
inside [of the trap], but . . . the pipe was to be open
at both ends; if the pipe were closed at one end, a rat
would naturally not like going into it, for he would not
feel sure of being able to get out again; on which I
[Butler] interrupted and said:

"Ah, it was just this which stopped me from going into
the Church."

When he [Butler] told me this I [Jones] knew what was
in his mind, and that, if he had not been in such
respectable company, he would have said:  "It was just
this which stopped me from getting married." (Jones,
Samuel Butler: A Memoir, vol. 1; cited in Bateson,
Steps 238)

 

NIETZSCHE (Twirling one end of his, even in Longinian terms “awesome,” moustache):

 
To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth — to do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth, and the most gifted had too little genius for that. Even laughter may yet have a future. I mean, when the proposition “the species is everything, one is always none” has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps only “gay science” (fröliche Wissenschaft) will then be left. (Gay Science, Ch. I, sec. 1)

 

BATAILLE (Looking up from a stage copy of Tank Girl comics):

 
Nonmeaning normally is a simple negation and is said of an object to be canceled. . . But if I say nonmeaning with the opposite intention, in the sense of nonsense, with the intention of searching for an object free of meaning, I don’t deny anything. But I make an affirmation in which all life is clarified in consciousness. Whatever moves toward this consciousness of totality, toward this total friendship of humanness and humanity for itself, is quite correctly held to be lacking a basic seriousness. (On Nietzsche, (xxx).

 

NIETZSCHE (Throwing a spitball at a poster of Hobbes, “. . . that philosopher who, being a real Englishman, tried to bring laughter into ill repute among all thinking men . . . ,” hanging off stage):

 
I should actually risk an order of rank among philosophers depending on the rank of their laughter — all the way up to those capable of golden laughter. (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 295)

 

NARRATOR:

 
It is significant that Umberto Eco, in The Name of The Rose, represents medieval Christendom as being dependent on the suppression of laughter, which would be validified by the discovery of a secret manuscript, the work on comedy written by the ultimate authority of the Gothic Church, Aristotle. If any qualities most distinctly mark Nietzsche’s critique of the Christian cultural text, they are iconoclasm and laughter.

 

Eco aptly describes the subversive power of Aristotle’s lost work on comedy, particularly his remark in the Poetics that the comic mask distorts the features of characters it represents:

 

Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. (491)

 

CLÉMENT (Smiling as she recalls her sorceress-hysteric): “She laughs, and it’s frightening — like Medusa’s laugh — petrifying and shattering constraint” (32).

 

BATAILLE (chuckling, possibly at Tank Girl as a “hysteric” with the nonsense to fight back):

 
To destroy transcendence, there has to be laughter. Just as children left alone with the frightening beyond that is in themselves are suddenly aware of their mother’s playful gentleness and answer her with laughter: in much the same way, as my relaxed innocence perceives trembling as play, I break out laughing, illuminated, laughing all the more from having trembled. (On Nietzsche, 55)

 

NARRATOR (Uncompromisingly serious):

 
If the semeiotics of laughter require that it transform — in Aristotle’s language, “distort,” in Clément’s “shatter” — the truth it represents, how does it accomplish its task? Structurally, laughter is akin to play, and the kinesic sign, “This is laughter” may be compared to the sign, “This is play.” In Gregory Bateson’s language, the latter sentence may be translated, “These actions in which we now engage, do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.” Or, in other words, “These actions do not mean what they would mean if they were serious.” This indicates that “This is play” is a metamessage about communication at a lower level of abstraction, a lower logical type, and that the effect of the metamessage is partly to negate, undermine, “distort,” the meaning of the behavior referred to. So play fighting is not real fighting, the “nip” is not the “bite,” as Bateson remarks, though it uses identifiable aspects of the bite as an abstract sign indicating a metacommunicative bond, an understanding, between the players (Steps, 180). If Bateson is right the paradoxical shift of the messages of literal behavior into those of play, which require the constant oscillation between the literal message suggested by the nip and its negation (the nip is both bite and not-bite) is fundamental to the creation of social life and culture. As Anthony Wilden points out, regarding Lévi-Strauss, the familial roles established by the incest taboo in the development of human society are in fact forms of play in Bateson’s sense: a “brother” is a male who is not a male, a mate, for a “sister,” who is a female who is not a female, a mate, for her brother, and so on (System & Structure, 250-251). So, what about laughter?

 

In “our” (admittedly schizoid and to this degree ecstatically narrative) view, extending Nietzsche’s and Eco’s, and possibly Aristotle’s, representation of the matter, laughter performs a role closely related to that of play: To laugh at the literal behavior of other characters in the social drama, is to change the truth value of what those characters do so as to undermine its seriousness, its claim to veracity, to authority, and so to call it into question. One must not laugh in church, or at the Emperor, for this would undermine its/his claim to power. “Laughter breaks up, breaks out, splashes over . . . ,” says Clément (33). This is why Dunkett’s Rat Trap is taken as a metaphor for the “trap” of metaphysics by Butler: the closed drain pipe of transcendent truth and the indissoluble bonds of “church” and “marriage”; yet the humor evoked by the story disarms the trap. So, also, to laugh at oneself is to undermine one’s own claim to seriousness, one’s claim to know the truth, to be substantial. Yet it is also to become a fabricator, a maker of new forms, in Haraway’s view, to become a Medusan “cyborg.”

 

HARAWAY:

 

Inhabiting my writing are peculiar boundary creatures — simians, cyborgs, and women — all of which have had a destabilizing place in Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives. These boundary creatures are, literally, monsters, a word that shares more than its root with the verb to demonstrate. Monsters signify. . . . the power- differentiated and highly contested modes of being of monsters may be signs of possible worlds — and they are surely signs of worlds for which “we” are responsible. (22)

 

NARRATOR:

 
To laugh at “the truth,” as Nietzsche would have and, what is more, “to laugh out of the whole truth,” is “monstrous,” signifying the shortcomings and the creative possibilities of civilization; it is ultimately to proclaim the indeterminacy, the paradox, the constantly shifting meanings of play, as the condition humaine: to be human is to play; that’s how character and culture are formed. The sudden recognition of this, as in the story of Dunkett, provokes laughter. As Nietzsche says in Human, All too Human, referencing (laughing at/with?) Plato: “Seriousness is play. . . . all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless . . . “(sec. 628; Plato, Republic, 10.604b). To practice this philosophy is to ally wisdom with laughter to produce the unfettered self-writing that Cixous and Clément call jouissance or, in Nietzsche’s terms, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, the “Joyous Science.”

 

This has important implications for the devotee, as well as the philosopher, for laughter is not only to be allied with wisdom as with the holy, but also with “you” and “me.”

 

NIETZSCHE (Straight faced): Zarathustra says,

 

So learn to laugh away over yourselves!  Lift up
your hearts, you good dancers, high, higher!  And
do not forget good laughter.  This crown of him
who laughs, this rose-wreath crown:  to you, my
brothers, I throw this crown.  Laughter I have
pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to laugh!
(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV,
sec. 20.)

 

NARRATOR (Chorus-like in his conclusive tone):

 
And so, when Nietzsche arrives at the altar as bishop or philosopher king, expect him to kneel, remove his crown, and toss it over his shoulder, with a chuckle, directly into your devoted hands. In case you don’t get the message, he might say, Don’t worship god, Play him, but remember, to BREAK the fundamental rule of seriousness, especially with regard to your new self —

 

NIETZSCHE (Breaking in for the last word, to state the rule that must be broken):

 
“There is something at which it is absolutely forbidden to laugh” (Gay Science, I, sec. 1).

 

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