"This is verifiable.
People have been telling us about this for thousands of years.
The Tibetans have been telling us about this.
The Mesopotamians have been telling us about this.
And why has it been made ‘occult’?
People have been telling us about this for thousands of years.
The Tibetans have been telling us about this.
The Mesopotamians have been telling us about this.
And why has it been made ‘occult’?
Because: Coca-Cola have got the secret.
What you do is you create a sigil.
Coca-Cola is a sigil.
The McDonalds “M” is a sigil.
The McDonalds “M” is a sigil.
These people are basically turning the world into themselves, using sigils.
And if we don’t reverse that process, and turn the world into us using sigils, we’re going to be living in fucking McDonalds.
But McDonalds have no more power than us, apart from the fact – like what Doug [Rushkoff] said earlier – they’ve got some money.
Fuck it; who cares?
At the top levels of this stuff, no one’s using money anyway."
The Bardic Tradition of Magick
The Spear-Shaker, the Golem of Avon, he who shakes his spear of truth in the face of ignorance, is known universally as
"The Bard."
Shakes-Spear is written as rhythmic verse, in Iambic Pentameter;
It is chanted, or entoned, like a mass or Gregorian prayers.
That which is chanted, must also be enchanted.
Like Logopolitan mathematics.
DOCTOR:
As a matter of fact, they don't use computers, they use word of mouth.
ADRIC:
Is that another expression?
DOCTOR:
No.
ADRIC:
They speak it?
DOCTOR:
Mutter. Entone.
ADRIC:
Entone the computations?
DOCTOR:
Yes.
ADRIC:
Why?
DOCTOR:
[Pause]
I've wondered that myself....
I never quite had the nerve to ask them...
"The connection of speech and reason is the organizing principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renaissance. The theater of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different form.
We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung aloud."
" In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and other objects."
"The entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" (Of Grammatology, p. 9).
"The connection of speech and reason is the organizing principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renaissance. The theater of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different form.
We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung aloud."
" In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and other objects."
"The destruction of reason with deconstruction thus revealed as a slyly disguised
form of destruction , the next question is to determine what
is to be destroyed. Derrida wants the destruction of reason,
the deconstruction of the logos, which he identifies as the
central point of the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition.
That tradition is what the deconstructionists are attacking
when they rail against "western metaphysics." Derrida is
anti-western because he regards the line of development from
Socrates and Plato through Gottfried Leibniz as "ethnocentric"
and racist. When he attacks "metaphysics," he means
human reason itself.
Derrida writes:
"The 'rationality' -but perhaps that word should be
abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this
sentence-which governs a writing is thus enlarged and radicalized
, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates
the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation,
the de-construction, of all the significations that have their
source in that of the logos . Particularly the signification of
truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even
the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger
reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from
the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the
lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in
the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of
God ' s infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense,
in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense" (OfGrammatology,
pp . 1 0- 1 1 ) .
And again: "This absolute logos was
an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology: The
intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word
and the face of God" (OfGrammatology, p. 13).
How then can reason and the logos be destroyed?
Heidegger
had already given the example of attempt this by mystifying
the concepts having to do with language: ''Thinking
collects language into simple speaking . Language is therefore
the language of being , just as the clouds are the clouds
of the heavens . In speaking , thinking plows simple furrows
into language . These furrows are even simpler than those
plowed with slow steps by the farmer. "
'The death of civilization of the book'
For Derrida, using a terminology that is borrowed from
the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , language is at first the
realm of "sign" and "signified . " "The difference between
sign and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of
metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically
articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism
and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of
Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible;
one cannot retain . . . the scientific truth . . . without
also bringing with it all its metaphysico-theological
roots" (Of Grammatology, p. 13).
In other words, Platonic
Christianity is the basis for modem science, and that is the
enemy Derrida seeks to liquidate by destroying language.
The scientific tradition "begins its era in the form of Platonism,
it ends in infinitist metaphysics . " (Here Derrida is probably
targeting Georg Cantor and the transfinite numbers.) Derrida
is fully conscious that the exhaustion of language will
bring with it nothing less than the "death of speech" and the
"death of the civilization of the book" (Of Grammatology,
p . 8).
Again following his Nazi guru Heidegger, Derrida focuses
his destructive attention on the "metaphysics of presence"
as this relates to language . The "presence" amounts to a
solid grounding for certain knowledge, for the certitude that
something exists . Derrida is at pains to point out that "presence"
of this kind is required as a pre-condition for the conceptual
apparatus of western philosophy from the time of the
Greeks on down: "It could be shown that all names related
to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always
designated an invariable presence-eidos [action], arche
[principle or first cause], telos [purpose], energeia, ousia
(essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, [truth]
transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth"
("Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences," pp. 279-280). In language, "the metaphysics of
presence" is equated with a "transcendental signified" or "ultimate
referent," which would function as the ultimate guarantee
of meaning.
We see that for Derrida, all western languages
are "metaphysical," since their key words and
concepts are permeated by Christian Platonism. They are
also metaphysical, he thinks, because the only way to be
sure of the meaning of "Send over a pizza," presupposes
the Christian Platonic foundations of the whole civilization.
Derrida therefore sets out to destroy Platonism by destroying
language, while hoping to destroy the civilization along with
both.
Reason and speech
Derrida asserts that the western languages are "logocentric,"
that they are based on reason in this way. Logos can
mean reason, but also lawfulness or ordering principle, but
also word, discourse, argument, and speech. "With this
logos," says Derrida, "the original and essential link to the
phone [sound] has never been broken." In other words, human
reason and human speech are inextricably bound up
together. The connection of speech and reason is the organizing
principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renaissance.
The theater of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller
represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different
form. We must also recall that the classical poetry of
Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung
aloud.
If "the scar on the paper," were to replace all this,
colossal cultural damage would of course be the result.
Western language is therefore not only logocentric, but
also phonocentric: that is to say, western language recognizes
the primacy of the spoken language over the written language.
"The system of language associated with phoneticalphabetic
writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics,
determining the sense of being as presence, has been
produced" (OfGrammatology, p. 43).
Derrida obviously cannot deny that spoken language
"came first." He also cannot escape the fact that while the
spoken word (parole) is a sign, the written word (mot) is the
sign of a sign. He tries to go back to a mythical form of
writing in general that might have existed before Socrates
and Plato came on the scene, calling this arche-ecriture ,
(arch-writing) but this is plainly nothing but a crude deus ex
machina hauled in to substantiate a thesis that has nothing
going for it.
In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language
under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals
and other objects. But Derrida is hell-bent on reducing everything
to writing and texts as the only sense data the individual
gets from the world.
Black marks on white paper
In order to attack the logos and reason through the spoken
word, Derrida sets against them his notion of writing: l' ecriture
. Derrida explains that what he means by writing is "a
text already! written, black on white" (Dissemination ,
p. 203). That means a text already written, black on white.
Black marks on white paper, plus excruciating attention to
spaces, numbers, margins, paragraphs, typefaces, colophons,
copyright notices, plus patterns, groups, repetitions
of all of the above and so on in endless fetishism. Since it is
probably clear by now that Derrida, posing as the destroyer
of western metaphysics, is only spinning out very bad metaphysics
in the process, we can feel free to say that Derrida
attempts to establish the ontological priority of writing over
language and speech. Nothing in the way of proof is offered
in favor of this absurd idea: The argument proceeds through
a "we say" and ends by lamely hinting that the computer
revolution will also help reduce all spoken words to black
marks on the page:
"The entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" (Of Grammatology, p. 9).
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