We don't want our fantasies realized. Fantasies do not justify one to impose them upon others.

Conditions for life happiness:

Relatively comfortably (affluent/material) life but not too perfect.

Must have another place that serves as an ideal, not too close or real, nor too distant and impossible.

No democracy, which implies collective responsibility and perpetuates guilt in its inevitable failure.

Taking the ruling ideology seriously is the first step towards dissonance. The ruling ideology is dependent upon the lack of belief in its principles, in its own subversion.

Alenka's point: times of desperation/darkness instigate an inverse comedy. Comedy serves to unify us in our alienation, as a fetish which distances us from confronting the truth of reality: that we are slaves. Inherent transgression, or the obscene underside of power: the obscene discord between form & content.

The greatest violence is to censor fantasies, rather than imposing internal discipline.

The lesson of psychoanalysis: Jung= discovering an inner truth, deeper instinctual self. Freud= discover the deep rooted primordial lie, no deeper truth. Lacan= to traverse the fantasy, minimal distance of the true self. Freud discovered that our unconscious is all too rational. Every theory is always already tested through a theory: an inherent bias = merely points of reference to create a context.

All emotions cheat. All affect is a mask.

Again: Deleuze's The Logic of Sense

The true revolution, through the autonomous partial object. Don't beat the enemy, first beat the revolt out of yourself.

Michelle Shion The Voice in Cinema: demonstrates that the truly creative authors knew that the introduction of cinematic soundtrack opens up the possibility of the voice of which no visible reality may be allocated, a spectral anomaly. Speaking is always inherently ventriloquist, some-thing speaking from inside. The voice is never part of the body, always a minimal distance.

How does this pertain to accountability of the speaker? Creates an essentially dissociated model of subject: can't this be rejected, or replaced by a unified/holistic model of self?

The uncanny dimension of the voice- Derrida : voice is illusion of self presence.

Hegel & Lacan is the opposite of hermeneutics: not to consider the whole, but to isolate one feature as a clue towards understanding the parts. Requires a separation. Progress is a reduction. A truly perceptive act is always a violent act of reduction.

It's the voice that holds the potential for true social disruption. Pure language - logos - is a structure/architecture which holds the meaning of affect. Pure language: dissociated from the speaker & manifest in pure song is inherently destructive towards social normalcy/normativity/cohesion. The danger is of madness! For one such as myself - self described hysteric spouting absurdity & madness - this is succinct & highly pertinent. Some implications here:

My work is unethical (already known), potentially violent to the social fabric, harbinger of madness, worlding wild word-worlds. The beginning of the OOFKAUU is the primary/apriori assertion of this potential, this purpose, indeed this responsibility for arts/artists to threaten standardization & normativity.

> Act I: to illustrate the origins of the voice in the body/subject as a primary alienation, essential theatricality: perhaps to describe the way the world currently is (according to Hegel, Lacan, Zizek, philosophy or psychoanalysis in general?), in order to erect CLEARLY the structure which will later be destroyed.

> Act II: description of the failures, terrors, traumas, oppression, "monstrosity", etc., of this model ideological architecture.

> Act III: to struggle to destroy it, the failure to do so, the catastrophe of the end, infinite repetition of apocalypse, war, more than symbolic violence.

> Act IV: silence, stillness, nothingness, catharsis, radical comfort of inhabiting void inside otherness, then immediately shedding away into the articulation of alternatives, the other worlds: never completely a nothing to be out in opposition.

> Act V: NOT an eternal return, of the end or the oppressed or otherwise, not necessarily a new beginning, beginning from where there was before nothing or out of the ruins of the old --- imperative to reject modernist mythologies, postmodern redundancies, & all structures strictures or syntax that inhibits the direct & immediate articulation of this variant fundamental attunement. Of course, the radically deterritorialized & defamilairized cannot be represented, but can be felt, implies, presented in its haptic invisibility, demanding of new sense of senses/sensibilities - in language & perception & fidelity of becomings: incantatory magic.

Brecht: the rise and fall of the city of mahogany

Charles Ledlam: humble, quotational, highly theatrical theater. The Tarot, Irmavap (sp?)

At lunch: a wonderful opportunity to outline my own position on the creation of subjectivity. Why didn't I record it!? ___ brings up some good questions: is the self always enculturated? Can there be a self beyond the accumulations of symbols, archetypes, social impositions? The dilemma is not the inability to access a deep seated inner truth or that in its place is a lie, but of the inherent tautological infinite regress of the process of asking for the "authentically true" self. There is no truth, nor even a multiplicity of truths, but a process of active & activating truthing which is inherently provisional, tentative(?), flux, shimmering, flickering, dynamic. Here's the key point - a statement I made: these models of self/selfing are not mutually exclusive but mutually constructive. We as artist have a responsibility to be flexible, fluid, malleable in mind & body. Not just sieves or filters of the world.

Later, a conversation with ___ wherein she describes the agenda of the AHS program at EGS, a phenomenological psychological technique of consciousness raising. The way she describes it seems very similar to my own struggles within philosophy and the arts, utilizes a similar discourse and even the same models: of the frame, attention, awareness, conflict resolution, a therapy for alleviating trauma. There program is oriented towards producing therapists, co-conspirators or collaborators with the patient, motivated to break down the distance between subjects, to sit with the "client" and conduct a process of relating. It's concerned with relations, articulating models of relating, asking question of who is relating, and how, but never why! This is its strength & weakness perhaps, the parallax/inverse of the philosophical agenda. I ask: does therapy always require an afflicted subject/patient? Does the desire to heal create the conditions for identifying sickness? So many more questions I would have liked to have asked concerning the ethics of such a relation, sense of duty/responsibility, orientation to objective knowledge &/or transferrable wisdoms, the role of intuition, the location of the source, the models for understanding the stratified layers of the topological mental-corporeal substrate.

Back in seminar:

A subject wants to express itself in a signifying chain, but only through the failure to express do we become a subject.

Simulacra and the procession of appearances: what is behind the appearance is nothing, there is only a void behind the appearance, a "nothing" behind the appearance. The fundamental assertion of theology - the zero level - is the realization is that there is something more or beyond reality: that our appearance is not full, there is a gap. Looking at reality is always through a projected lens of meaning, always augmented by the cannon of meaning we carry with us.

Virtual reality brings out (makes visible) that which is already here. Lacan: sex functions only/always at the level of fantasy, imagined (imagistic) reality. Is it possible to masturbate while thinking about nothing (or nothingness)? Masturbation is a fantasory prop with an imagined partner, sex is a fantasy with a real partner.

Steven J Gould

Every ideology creates its own fossils.

We live in animist times: spirit of capital, market, etc.