divination

by R. Artaud (Telos)

C’est une folie de vivre. On est bête à ne pas savoir que c’est une folie de vivre. C’est un poisson qui nage, qui dort, qui se tait, qui fuit les ciseaux, les boucheries de l’homme et des autres poissons. Mais un poisson ne sait pas. Il ne sait jamais rien. Il y a les poissons qui savent, ceux qui habitent le rocher. Ils savent qu’il ne faut pas nager. Il faut rester immobile, l’un en haut de l’autre, le ventre contre la roche, et attendre la nuit pour se mettre en route. Il y en a d’autres qui vivent au large. Ils sont plus fins, plus lisses, et vont plus vite, ils connaissent le courant. Mais ils vivent toujours en bandes. Seuls les poissons-baleines, les plus seuls des poissons, les plus lourds et les plus tristes, font de longues traversées en solitaire, et, pour gagner de la sagesse, ôtent du temps à la vie, il s’en va des années, et la vie ne compte plus rien.

C’est pareil pour les poissons. C’est pareil pour les hommes. Certains, pour ne pas vivre, fuient les hommes et vivent de manière discrète, en cachette, en groupe. D’autres sont plus finement construits, plus lisses, plus vite. Mais ils vivent en bande. Et ceux qui veulent se soustraire au monde et gagner du temps pour le savoir, les solitaires, ils sont toujours plus tristes que les poissons baleines. Tout ce qu’il faut, c’est d’être poisson baleine : vivre longtemps, et de faire des longues traversées seul, et d’avoir du ventre. La vitesse et le groupe font mal, et la vie ne compte plus rien, mais le savoir vient de la vie, c’est le coût de la vie, le prix du poisson.

Et les hommes ont longtemps cru qu’il leur suffisait de nager pour acquérir du savoir. Ils ont cru que la vitesse faisait le savoir. Ils ont cru que l’aventure du savoir était dans le groupe. Mais les hommes sont mal construits. Le groupe et la vitesse sont mauvaises choses. La vitesse en groupe c’est le plus mauvais des mondes. Il n’y a rien qu’à fuir le monde. La vie n’a de sens que pour le mortel. Seul le mortel, l’individu, l’unique, le singulier peut savoir, car la vie est en lui unique. Ainsi tout ce que vous pouvez savoir, c’est de vous-même, et le savoir seul, et que le temps vous en ait coûté cher, et que ce soit cher pour vous. Que le ventre soit gonflé et lourd, car c’est là que le savoir se tient. Que vous ayez du ventre pour savoir. Vous pouvez dire que c’est une consolation, mais c’est aussi la tragédie. Mais c’est la seule.

Car, s’il en est, il faut se donner de la peine de vivre, et tout ce qu’il faut, c’est d’être en mouvement, d’aller-rambler. Pourquoi ne pas faire de longues traversées ? Si vous êtes jeune, c’est facile, il y a des milliers d’endroits. Si vous êtes vieux, des milliers d’endroits vous attendent encore, si vous l’avez du courage.

C’est une folie de vivre, ce qu’il y a de plus triste, c’est de savoir qu’il y a des poissons plus gros que nous, plus vraiment seuls et plus lourds que nous. Et que, même dans ce qu’on croyait le sol, dans la terre, il y en a qui savent, qui savent qu’il ne faut pas pousser les pieds, qu’il faut rester immobile, et que ceux qui le savent, ceux-là habitent la terre, mais pas dans la terre : c’est comme les poissons du rocher. Et il y a des poissons en plus profondeur, qui savent l’eau ne vaut pas la peine, ils savent que c’est de la vie qu’ils doivent se dépêtrer pour avoir du savoir. Pour gagner le savoir, il faut s’en tirer de la vie. Mais il faut en prendre. Ceux qui le savent, ils vendent leur savoir à ceux qui veulent le prendre. Voilà comment ils en font, les poissons.

Car qu’ils puissent se tromper, ils sont en train de me tromper. C’est la vie, ils se trompent en vivant. Mais ceux qui veulent, ceux qui savent que vivre est une folie, ceux qui sont des poissons-baleines, eux aussi sont en train de se tromper. Car si vous prenez votre vie au sérum, si vous l’embaumez, si vous l’immobilisez en quelque chose qui ne vieillisse plus, c’est que vous en avez pris du savoir, et vous avez vendu votre vie, et votre prix était cher, et vous êtes triste comme eux. Si vous prenez votre savoir pour votre vie, si vous avez l’air vivant mais qu’il ne reste plus rien de la vie que le savoir, c’est que vous l’avez donné pour rien.

Les hommes, ils ont cru qu’ils avaient du savoir sans rien ceder à la vie. Les poissons, ils pensaient qu’ils pouvaient vivre sans savoir. Ils étaient mauvais, tous deux. Les uns, pour avoir du savoir, ont laissé vivre les autres, et les autres, pour ne pas savoir, ont cru qu’ils vivaient.

Mais ce n’est qu’une consolation, et elle est aussi la tragédie. La vie vaut son prix, et la solitude son poids. Des que cela se comprend, on a le droit de savoir. C’est de la solitude que vient le savoir. Il faut savoir qu’on a le droit. Il faut se donner le savoir. La peine qu’on prend à vivre vaut son savoir. C’est ce que cela veut.

In all things, power seeks to assert itself as single and complete, free of contradiction, immune to critique and blind to alternatives. However, power cannot maintain itself in its abstract form; it must manifest itself concretely, in history. It does this through ideology and terror, two halves of one process, each the inverse of the other, and both necessary to the maintenance of its identity.

Ideology is the practice of abstraction in the material world, the pretension that this power, in its actual distribution, is identical to its imaginary form, that there exists a correspondence between what is and what ought to be, such that reality, through ideology, can be made to conform to its proper pattern. But reality, as the real movement of things, is never entirely captive to ideology, and therefore never wholly consistent or rational. Power must compel belief in its rationality by the exercise of naked violence.

Terror, then, is the act by which power ensures that its ideological abstractions will prevail in practice, that things will remain as they are, or change in ways dictated by its necessities. Terror, the attack on the material, is the ideology of power, the confirmation that all things exist to serve the order decreed by the idea. It is also the principal tactic by which that idea ensures its reign by maintaining an ever present threat of annihilation, a threat whose specific targets will always be those who fail to accept or cannot subordinate their own individual power to the abstract structure of authority, those whose energy must either be eliminated or transformed into obedience.

Ideology is the idealist trick by which power binds itself to its reality, the trap of rationalizing its legitimacy, whereas terror is the materialist move, the suppression of the irrational—dissimulation and force, the twin halves of the same politics. Through them the autonomous reality of things, the violence of being, is hijacked for the benefit of the order of the system. In their intersection, terror and ideology guarantee that power can never lose. They guarantee, in short, its schizophrenia—its perpetual blindness to the radical separation of the idea and its concrete conditions.

It is the tragedy of power that it must compel obedience through anguish, that its glory will always be paid for in terror. But it is also the danger of power that it does not see this, that its blindness to its own violence renders it incapable of transcending terror—thereby revealing itself as no better than its enemies, who cannot believe in anything but would gladly trade an ideology of terror for terror itself. In reality, terror has never won out over belief, which is simply the ideology of an earlier period. But terror still prevails in practice, not only because it has yet to discover the incommensurability of being and the system, but because its beneficiaries have even less reason to surrender terror than the violent masses from whom they seize it. Terror still reigns because no power has yet learned to attain fullness through compromise. It is this, then, which must be brought to an end, but in another way, through another means—the absolute independence of being. This is the full sense of schizophrenia, to live as a body separate from the system, without order and without terror, at the intersection of anguish and the bliss of pure reality. It is a problem not of reconciling violence and reason, but of rendering them irrelevant. Only then will there be an end to ideology, a resolution to the insanity of power. Only then will there be an end to the politics of terror and control.

–R. Artaud (Telos)

Understand: we cannot reach God directly, not now, not in our condition. He is a goal to be worked towards, not a starting-point. Our body is the earth and we are lost in it, lost and trapped, and to reach upwards we must work backwards, down the corridors of the past, returning step by step to find the perfection of Adam. To know God you must undo your own history. He is your lost unity and your undiscovered identity. He is your secret, buried in your origin, and to discover him you must uncover yourself. The task of all religion is to return to Eden and the way of all salvation is a regression towards primeval innocence, towards the state of a man at one with all of nature, the source of all knowledge and power.

Your churches are a confusion of mysteries, initiation ceremonies and consecrations because your condition is a complicated one; to remember the beginning you must take many side-paths, retracing all the errings and impostures of history and unlocking the prison-cells of your minds. God is a truth behind you, and you will reach him by undoing all your lies. This is what all prophets have known; the pagans recognized the body as a cage of the soul, which is why their temples are crypts and their rituals rites of passage, ways to journey to another self and emerge cleansed at the other side of the grave. Christianity is unique in making this journey explicit—and we do not forget that even Christ underwent initiation before he began to preach, in the desert with the beast, alone and nameless—yet in its particular development it is obscured, misunderstood and even sabotaged.

So many layers of mystification. God becomes more distant as your minds advance; each higher revelation only locks your spirit more firmly in space and time, each discovery chains you down with more iron. How can the Christ who spoke in parables to the people of his era possibly have intended to authorize a religion in which all human thought is to be arrested at a single point and frozen into dogma, into words without sense?

Religion has gone astray—away from the simplicity of the pagans, away from the silence of Buddhism—because it became intellectual and theological. You cannot find God in your head; if you look there he becomes smaller and smaller until you lose him in a maze of abstract questions whose only answer is silence. You do not need more questions—you already have too many. You need to pull the mind up and out of the game of logic, away from its obsession with death and towards an awareness of the body as a starting-point. Questions only increase separation; there is nothing you need to ask. You are looking in the wrong place, you must abandon ideas, change the object of your desire. You are lost in words, find your way back through them to the flesh from which they came.

Cultivate silence. It is the way of the mystic, the saint and the philosopher. Cultivate emptiness; an absence of thought and self, an indifference to the past, even to the future. Sink into a well of peace that grows bottomless and leaves you floating in space. Dive deep to touch the bedrock of your being and discover once again that your knowledge of yourself is darkness and fear. Find out how to become passive and accept whatever comes to you in this state. Begin to empty yourself, even of the notion of God, and wait.

The answers will come not as ideas but as states, flashes of consciousness which are really flashes of body. You will begin to know, not by adding to your knowledge but by taking away, not by studying God but by learning to ignore everything. As the sage puts it: “I do not know the way; I only know how to wait.” If you take care in your waiting, the way will come to you of its own accord. Your religion should have taught you how to wait, how to be at rest, in joy.

But what can I do to find peace, to find God? You have no need of my instruction: go to your garden and become one with it. Listen to its silence, learn from it, discover your being there. Avoid books, the opinions of others. Shut yourself away in your room for hours with nothing to look at but a single wall, a window on the universe. Raise yourself to a contemplative life. It is a leap upward out of the pit of history and reason, an exalted leap to your authenticity, your innocent past and your origins. I speak as one who has leaped: I no longer accept anything from a priest, I do not accept anything from any human, I take only from the sky, direct. I take direct from matter and nature. I feel its beauty, its secrets, its very indifference. This is how you must take God too: as an original fact. Find the divine outside yourselves, in nature, and by refinding it, refind it inside you.

–R. Artaud (Telos)

There is an extremely painful dilemma that we find ourselves in. One could even argue that it is a tragic one. We live in a time in which the problems that confront us have grown in both their intensity and their scale, but simultaneously we find ourselves becoming increasingly powerless to influence those problems. At one time, it might have been sufficient for us to devote ourselves to being ‘better informed’ or to develop better critical theories. And these activities still have a certain validity. However, it has become clear that no amount of knowledge or critical discernment is adequate to cope with what is really happening. In this sense, what we know has actually become a curse, an unbearable weight that only makes our impotence all the more oppressive.

Our dilemma can be thought of as the conjunction of two major historical tendencies. On the one hand, there is what some people call the ‘paradox of automation,’ in which the very success of technical and social systems in solving some of their problems leads to the emergence of new and more intractable ones (the automobile, for example, creates pollution, congestion, etc., and we cannot simply go ‘back to horses and buggies’). On the other hand, there is what some people call the ‘paradox of freedom’ (a term borrowed from David Hume), in which our efforts to increase liberty lead to increased social complexity, and so to new forms of constraint and domination. Both of these trends contribute to making our world more difficult to live in. Both contribute to what is called ‘social pathology,’ that is to say, a condition of conflict and stress that makes collective life more unendurable. And it is in attempting to manage this social pathology that the power-elite create ever more totalizing structures, including the communications and information system that facilitate the dissemination of what I will call ’non-usable knowledge.’

In attempting to solve their problems, the elites necessarily attempt to control the sources of information, since what is learned by the public must be channelled and selected in such a way as to direct it toward certain ‘solutions’ (usually only those that are convenient for the elite themselves). In this sense, we can see that power resides in the information system, since it is through controlling the flow of information that power is exercised. For example, it is in this way that our financial system directs the popular will toward endless accumulation and consumption, despite the clear signs that this course is leading toward ecological and other forms of disaster. It is in this way that the military-industrial complex maintains support for the arms race (as Lyndon Johnson is supposed to have said, ’the public may not want to fight in Vietnam, but they’ll sure as hell pay for it’). The media function in a similar way to control and direct our attentions and fantasies, directing them toward whatever it is that those who own them want us to do and think. And what we find is that all social systems require such feedback loops that allow them to maintain control and grow ever more complex. In this way, they increasingly dictate the nature of information. In my book, The Simulation of the Future, I explored some of these trends, in terms of the development of what I called ‘directive technologies.’

As we learn more, the elites become more capable of channeling this knowledge, and thus it becomes increasingly non-usable from our point of view. Our sense of powerlessness grows. The concept of ‘usable knowledge’ was first proposed by Bertrand Russell. What he meant was that the science that was available to him during his life was in many cases useless for the kinds of problems that really needed solving. He spoke of the ‘folly’ of thinking that the knowledge available to us would somehow be used to ‘alleviate the common burdens of humanity’ rather than to develop ’new means of slaughtering one another.’ The problem becomes how to bring usable knowledge to bear upon real problems, in ways that the power-elite cannot divert or corrupt. We are forced back to more ‘primitive’ means of organizing, sharing, and disseminating information than the system permits, since our freedom can only lie outside the system. As our knowledge becomes more useful to the elites, it becomes less usable to us. Thus we find the information system itself operating to maintain the structures of domination. This is how Informational Impotence becomes the engine of our servitude. It is not a solution, but a trap.

Of course, even this problem may have a use, and there are some signs that we can redirect our attention to activities that will increase our freedom. But the impotence itself may be necessary to our servitude, and so we cannot necessarily rely on it to evaporate. For now, it is still something to be thought about, the central issue of our time.

–R. Artaud (Telos)

We are awash in a sea of data and information, which - rather than setting us free - shackles us tighter than ever to the wheels of history. It’s not that the mass of humanity is more ignorant now than in any time past; it’s that a small minority (not as small as you might imagine) is possessed of horrendous power and know-how that allows it to rule with impunity. The game has changed. You cannot be truly liberated if you only want to “affect consequential change to these core systems”; that’s how they’ve tricked you into the same game they play. Playing their game, you lose. There’s no point in arguing what is or is not consequential - it’s all one.

A system only functions as long as a majority is at least ambivalent toward it, so even the awareness that it’s oppressive won’t suffice. Think about how long it took for segregation in the United States to fall, despite decades of informing and agitation - you must fundamentally transform those who make up the majority (or a decisive fringe of the majority) away from the ideas that sustain the system you hate, not just tweak their understanding.

Information doesn’t equal power. And freedom is more than having access to a limitless variety of enslaving crap. You must refuse it all. Your impotence is of your own making. If you really want to know what it’s like to live without fear - of oppression, of the night, of terror - start by destroying every network you belong to. Close all your browser windows right now - shut them all down. Start in this room, with the people around you: every human contact must be reforged into direct, honest, unmediated relations. Only that can free you.

Secondly, find ways of defying the institutions you can’t avoid. Strike sparks from the system in creative, joyous ways - like striking a flint. Go outside, lie down in the street, think of nothing, love the sun and the dirt under you - defy them by not being afraid of living, by embracing the pain and joy of being alive. Do not network, do not share - the time of community is over, the time of the individuated, uncommunicating ego has returned. Avoid anything that is automated or has a mass audience - defy their ideas of success and acceptance by seeking your own, separate fulfillment. Be useless, in other words, but always alive. Refuse what they propose, and select what you desire, carefully. You will soon learn that they cannot stop you, because you are small. But they will also learn that you cannot stop them, because they are big. It’s not a question of impotence, but of incommensurability.

You think freedom means having lots of choices. You’re wrong. Freedom is having only one - the choice of walking out the door. Choose that. The rest is terror.

–R. Artaud (Telos)