To the End of Ezra Pound

« 1 2 3 4 5 6View All»

by Nicholas A. DeBoer

IV. The Fight

So much, so much to fight for.  The historical period we find ourselves in, is an important one to acknowledge, to see.  Corporate caste systems refuse to recuse themselves from the power and alienation that has come to dominate our individual freedoms.  The infighting of the 1950s government culture, where people were seen as needing to be surveilled has become a mimic by the paranoid and well-rooted protest against, what would be by the 1980s, itself.  Rhetoric has common-worded itself into debate and dialog completed in a full variation on a new semiological system.  It’s this system that needs to be discussed, for it is something that every artist is in league with, fighting for their lives, suffering at the hands of the Situationist coined spectacle.

In relation to my work on Ezra Pound, there is relation to a secret history.  It contains a twofold structure in The Cantos.  “The first under the general rubric of usury; the second is more varied but is always related somehow to natural increase, the sacredness of grain, and the awareness that copulation is good for the crops, that is to say, related to…Eleusis” (Eleusis, 190).  In my work, I have markedly decided to see and imagine the availability of the Eleusian Mysteries as part of my own interest in Chaos Magick and sigilization.  Chaos Magick’s, “basic message…is that, what is fundamental to magic is the actual doing of it – that like sex, no amount of theorizing and intellectualization can substitute for the actual experience” (Hine, 9)  Whereas sigilization, developed by Austin Osman Spare, can be divided into six stages: 1) specifying magickal intention, 2) open pathways available for the intention, 3) link intent to symbolic carrier, 4) intense Gnosis, a ritualized context, altered consciousness 5) fire or projection of the sigil into the void, 6) forget the intent/walk away (Hine, 31-33).

One of the core tenants of Chaos Magick is to create your own system, that, “what symbol systems you wish to employ is a matter of choice, and that the webs of belief which surround them are means to an end, rather than ends in themselves” (Hine, 9).  In this context, I found an interest in the Temple ov Psychick Youth, a magickal network founded in 1981 via Genesis P-Orridge.  This system, “centered around its unique approach to the ‘sigil’ method.  At the same time every month – the 23rd hour of the 23rd day – each active sigilizer would create a ‘Sigil ov Three Liquids.’  After careful deliberation on something truly wanted and needed in life, each sigilier would write in detail what they wanted to happen, thereafter anointing the paper with blood, spit, sexual fluids and a clipping of hair.  After drying, this would be placed in an envelope and mailed to TOPY World Headquarters where it would be filed away anonymously under each sigilizer’s identity number with the Temple” (P-Orridge, 20).  The primary goal of this ritual is discipline, “focusing on and actualizing the life one actually wants to live, regardless of social pressure or constraint” (P-Oridge, 21).

The positivity of the sigilic system will, in part, act as an antidote to my reworked variation on usura, Guy Debord’s concept of the ‘spectacle’.  The building blocks for the ‘spectacle’ are related to the work of the German Jewish philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.  In 1936, Benjamin points that the contradiction between seeing a piece of art to the act of seeing a film is that, “the painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon [themselves] to [their] associations.  Before the movie frame [they] cannot do so.  No sooner has [their] eye grasped a scene that it is already changed.  It cannot be arrested” (Benjamin, 238).   Further, this can be seen in Adorno’s conception of society, in his coined ‘culture industry’, where in 1941 he states that, if he is right, “the advances of technology largely determine the fate of society, then the technicized forms of modern consciousness are also heralds of that fate.  They transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth about the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical” (Adorno, 96).

The production of images has become the main form of mechanical reproduction.  As this increases it begins to turn the imagination into a grouping of disparate images as society, as everyday existence.  The mediation of life through these images is not one veiled in secrecy, in so much, as it is a conversation dominated by media, popular reference and above all, consumption.  This mediation has become a totalizing view of society, an autonomous form of reality ‘objective’ of itself, an inverse of direct experience.  This ‘spectacle’ is an extension of our very own consciousness.

Semiology offers us the signifier, the signified and the sign.  If the signifier is an acoustic/sound image (the saying of the word ‘rose’) and the signfied is the concept, or abstract idea inferred (a flower that is named ‘rose’) than the relationship between them is the sign, that concrete entity.  When this equation is in place, and is then shifted toward a signified whole, one can relate a rose as passion.  Passion represents myth, a semiological system, “which has the pretension of transcending itself into a factual system” (Barthes, 134) … “in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system.  That which is a sign in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second” (Barthes, 114).

Roland Barthes points out that, “in a first system, causality would be, literally, natural…in the second system, causality is artificial, false; but it creeps, so to speak, through the back door of Nature.  Myth is experienced as innocent speech [signs]: not because its intentions are hidden, but because they are naturalized” (Barthes, 114).  In fitting this theory over and onto capitalism, we see a, “pure signifying function as soon as [it was] caught by myth” (Barthes, 114).  This capturing brings about, “…different strands of the economy achiev[ing] unprecedented autonomy … so extensive that financial crises can arise directly from the circulation of money.  The surface of capitalism appears to ‘disintegrate’ into a series of elements all driven toward independence” (Lukacs, 1036).  Or as Guy Debord conceives, the spectacle is, “driven toward a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life” (Debord, 12).

Whereas Barthes says that myth, “transforms history into nature” (Barthes, 129), the spectacle transforms mythical nature into spectacular history.  History that is the consumption of time, “commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life [is really that] the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself at a higher level of intensity.  What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular life” (Debord, 153).  Conceived and seen as a third-order system, the spectacle is experienced as not innocent speech, but natural speech.  “Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule” (Debord, 17).  The non-living exists as an economic order, not an epiphenomena, but an order which has risen from it, a semiological system that appears as unity and division, that is available to have consciousness.  Nothing is real, everything is permitted.

Tension is the building block of history, a process that incites change and an ongoing reordering of society.  The spectacle is a process that keeps the threads far enough away that they will never move enough to encompass change, just suggest it.  If a population is conditioned to view life as a condensation of images, than those images become the encyclopedia and dictionary of life.  When the imagination is no longer full of direct experience to draw from, the spectacle is then given over to gain domination.  The landscape of the imagination is saturated by just this force, a pacemaker, felt but not seen.  Life becomes the contemplation of reality.  As myth becomes a sign in the third system, a naturalizing project improves in strength.  It’s, “essential character reveals itself to be a visible negation of life, a negation that has taken on a visible form” (Debord, 14).

A constancy of change, a permanent revolution that producing alienation and contemplation as its major syncopations.  The exploitative space designated by capitalism weakens people.  The spectacle is a vacancy that has becomes a shifting identity.

Click here to continue reading…

Leave a Reply