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CounterPunch
February
8, 2003
A Postliberal Theory of Consciousness
for the Starbucks Habitué
By ANIS SHIVANI
--"The freedom that one may take
to say more extensively in a book what one may not say before
a live audience is founded on many sound reasons."--Pierre
Bayle, "Clarification: On Obscenities."
--Nothing works, everything's dysfunctional.
We are now all peasants of the third world, dressed in Nikes
and driving Beemers. Is there a brain drain for laid-off dot-com
workers with Wesleyan history degrees to somewhere? History
spins in cycles, never letting us get anything done before noon.
--One manifestation of the Golden Age:
California in the seventies when therapists were still a minority
among social workers. Today: the meritocracy of the Ivy League
bubble that doesn't let you opt out altogether without a crushing
sense of guilt.
--Politics as the highest form of
art today. The only art. Because not translatable.
--But if we would shut up government
within the narrowest practical limits, we must beware how we
let it loose in the field of opinion. Opinion is the castle,
or rather the temple, of human nature; and, if it be polluted,
there is no longer anything sacred or venerable in sublunary
existence. --William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice.
--Every calamity outside us frightens.
Why should it?
--If we all agree to disagree, then the
tyrants take over with guns and bombs. If we all really disagree,
then we all become tyrants. In any event, the age of innocence
can only be captured in ornate books.
--One hopes to be found dead at the
end of the holocaust and not one among the survivors.
--A Man is allowed sufficient Freedom
of Thought, provided he knows how to chuse his Subject properly.
You may criticize freely upon the Chinese Constitution,
and observe with as much Severity as you please upon the Absurd
Tricks, or destructive Bigotry of the Bonzees. But the
Scene is changed as you come homeward, and Atheism or Treason
may be the Names given in Britain, to what would be Reason
and Truth if asserted of China. --Edmund Burke, A Vindication
of Natural Society.
--When now I march to feel like I have
a stake in the watersheds of history, I leave behind doubt and
certainty in equal measure: I can only carry on when I suspend
belief in what it means to be human. Afterwards, at home, empty
and alone, I calculate the hours lost.
--In Monterey in 1969 there used to be
a retired professor of philosophy with a thing for skinning cats
alive. His neighbors trusted him without stint. His VW Bug
had anticipated counterculture by a good half-decade.
--Despite abstractions to the contrary,
it is not true that dying alone happens all the time.
--Printing presses shall be subject to
no other restraint than liableness to legal prosecution for false
facts printed and published. --Thomas Jefferson, Proposed
Constitution for Virginia (June 1783).
--Countless hours of reading. Afterwards,
crying in my pillow to make the point to myself that I can still
feel. Writing copiously in the margins of books, pretending
that someday I'll go back and review the classics for obscure
literary journals. Fearing the greatest fear of never being
able to say anything new. Catching myself in mid-flow.
--We used to get sunburned after too
much surfing, and we laughed at each other's corny jokes over
milkshakes. That was the high point of our lives.
--If you know you've blundered, don't
talk it all out.
--When a nation changes its opinion and
habits of thinking, it is no longer to be governed as before;
but it would not only be wrong, but bad policy, to attempt by
force what ought to be accomplished by reason. --Thomas Paine,
Rights of Man.
--Forster said, Only connect. How?
It presumes commonality of interest and we live in an age of
false self-sufficiency, the worst of all worlds. I'd rather
hang out my sins for the world to see, and hope to be called
one so callous as to be unforgivable. Hence, the invisible pursuit
of art (invisible, that is, to those who persist in seeing in
me a reflection of themselves).
--Even the oceans look and smell different
after years of absence.
--Like water in a stream when it's
almost dried out, there is a time in our lives when we can still
yearn for youth without feeling shame.
--Freedom embodies a twofold determination.
The first concerns the content of freedom, its objectivity--i.e.,
the thing itself; the second concerns the form of freedom, in
which the subject knows itself as active; for the requirement
of freedom is that the subject should know that it possesses
it and is playing its part, for it is in the subject's own interest
that the thing itself should be realized. --G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures
on the Philosophy of History.
--If I don't answer mail, I feel ashamed.
If I don't pick up the phone when it rings, I get scared. If
I don't read the paper in the morning, I feel adrift. If I lack
the right degree of responsiveness and sensitivity to my lover's
night-time leanings, I question my human status.
--A quantity of guns lies embedded in
the collective unconscious of the average suburban teenager.
And I have known some of them myself.
--Leave the question of peace among
peoples alone, after cursory investigation.
--In a population where the indispensable
cooperation of individuals in public order can no longer be achieved
by the voluntary and moral assent accorded by each to a common
social doctrine, there remains no other expedient for maintaining
any kind of harmony than the sad choice between force and corruption.
Auguste Comte, Considerations on the Spiritual Power.
--I'm afraid of the time when the gap
between my public and private personas may be completely bridged.
At that point I shall know whether the lies people told about
me behind my back were really flattering or humiliating. I shall
not need a sixth sense about these things.
--Justice consists of equal distribution
of pleasant feelings--we grew up together and recognize each
other now by the slant of sunlight on our fading hair.
--Please obey the authorities only
after you've made sure to notify your next of kin.
--If in observing the course of history
one detaches the beliefs of a ruling class from the ruling class
itself; if one renders them independent; if one is persuaded
that in a certain epoch these and those thoughts have dominated,
without concerning oneself with the conditions of production
and with the producers of these thoughts; if, in short, one leaves
out of consideration the individuals and the world conditions
that underlie these thoughts, then one can say, e.g. that under
the rule of the aristocracy the concepts of honor, loyalty, etc.
dominated, while under the rule of the bourgeoisie it is the
concepts of freedom, equality, etc. Usually the dominant class
persuades itself of this. --Karl Marx, The German Ideology.
--If I met Thomas Pynchon on the street--perhaps
vacationing in Maine, perhaps window-shopping in London--I wouldn't
know what to say to him. I wouldn't know him. I wouldn't know
that I had seen him but hadn't known him. I wouldn't know the
depths of my own ignorance after twenty years of auto-didacticism.
For it is not true that the writer is separate from his biography.
--We learned to skateboard dangerously,
ferociously, and we're glad we injured ourselves when it only
meant a thrill.
--We have allowed ourselves the merest
pause of a moment to gather our thoughts.
--Hence, the paralysis induced by thinking
is twofold: it is inherent in the stop and think, the interruption
of all other activities--psychologically, one may indeed define
a "problem" as a "situation which for some reason
appreciably holds up an organism in its effort to reach a goal"--and
it also may have a dazing after-effect, when you come out of
it, feeling unsure of what seemed to you beyond doubt while you
were unthinkingly engaged in whatever you were doing.--Hannah
Arendt, The Life of the Mind.
--Resistance is a word I deeply censure;
it can occur as an occasional rebuke to my own lassitude, but
that's as far as it can go. I often don't fully cooperate with
my need to define others aesthetically, even in the trivial details
of their person.
--We yearned for evacuations, school
shutdowns, epidemics, mass hysteria.
--Can we ask forgiveness of anyone
but the most irrelevant?
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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