"'Primitives' may have the most human of heads, the most beautiful and most spiritual, but they have no face and need none.
The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European, what Ezra Pund called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary everyday Erotomaniac (nineteenth century pyschiatrists were right to say that erotomania, unlike nymphomania, often remains pure and chaste; this is because it operates thro8ugh the face and facialization). Not a universal, but 'facies totius universi'. Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions: the function of biunivocalization, or binarization.”
“You don't so much have a face as slide into one.”
“We are neither signified nor signifier. We are stratified.”
"Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. [...] We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. [...] To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves.
A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters... . To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; ... .comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, ... . A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity... . One side of a machine assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism... ; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism. ... What is the body without organs of a book? ... As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a
book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. "We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosised, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. ... We have been criticized for over quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work.
A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. ... in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. .... Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves.”
A Thousand Plateaus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism.
"As breakfast unfolded the following morning, the sixth of March, it became clear that the restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared had been anything but that. From Dennis, still disorganized but expansive, comments emerged that he had, or imagined he had, a very active night. Upon close questioning, it came out that he was completely convinced that sometime during the night he had arisen and dressed and then had a series of nocturnal adventures. These involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the chorro over a mile away, then returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of the mission, then making his way back across the pasture and returning to his hammock, strung among all the others. The thought of him wandering around during the night on those trails, without his glasses, falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy, perhaps howling and otherwise paleolithically comporting himself, was too much for
me. It was a breech of the collective cool. Even though I was 90 percent
certain that it had never really happened, I was determined to eliminate all possibility of such rambles in the future.
Dennis's story was the classic description of a shamanic night journey. He said that he had gone to the chorro and had meditated in the mission cemetery we had visited before. He had begun to return to camp when he confronted a particularly large Inga tree near where the path skirted the edge of the mission. On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point in his ascent, something that he called "the vortex" opened ahead of him—a swirling, enormous doorway into time. He could see the Cyclopean megaliths of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and marble-faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt. And yet farther into the turbulent maw of the vortex, he
saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man—titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering abysses, touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon-consuming time, rushed down upon him. He fainted, and time—who can say how much time—passed by him.
He next found himself in the pasture a few hundred feet from his newly discovered axis mundi. If he fell from the tree, it did not seem to have hurt him. Amazement, exaltation, fear, and confusion were all present in his thoughts. The continuum seemed to be shredding and ripping itself to pieces before his eyes, time and space swirling the artifacts of twenty-thousand years of human striving into a vortex of apocalyptic contradictions. In that state of fear and exultation, at the depth of the revelation of humanity's destiny among the stars, Dennis returned to our camp and noiselessly returned to his hammock, or awakened there from a dream of the same thing."
True Hallucinations, Terence Mckenna ("Around us, the jungle; ahead of us, the Secret....")
-------------------------
"What world is this? What shores of what kingdoms"
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The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European, what Ezra Pund called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary everyday Erotomaniac (nineteenth century pyschiatrists were right to say that erotomania, unlike nymphomania, often remains pure and chaste; this is because it operates thro8ugh the face and facialization). Not a universal, but 'facies totius universi'. Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions: the function of biunivocalization, or binarization.”
“You don't so much have a face as slide into one.”
“We are neither signified nor signifier. We are stratified.”
"Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. [...] We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. [...] To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves.
A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters... . To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; ... .comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, ... . A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity... . One side of a machine assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism... ; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism. ... What is the body without organs of a book? ... As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a
book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. "We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosised, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. ... We have been criticized for over quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work.
A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. ... in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. .... Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves.”
A Thousand Plateaus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism.
"As breakfast unfolded the following morning, the sixth of March, it became clear that the restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared had been anything but that. From Dennis, still disorganized but expansive, comments emerged that he had, or imagined he had, a very active night. Upon close questioning, it came out that he was completely convinced that sometime during the night he had arisen and dressed and then had a series of nocturnal adventures. These involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the chorro over a mile away, then returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of the mission, then making his way back across the pasture and returning to his hammock, strung among all the others. The thought of him wandering around during the night on those trails, without his glasses, falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy, perhaps howling and otherwise paleolithically comporting himself, was too much for
me. It was a breech of the collective cool. Even though I was 90 percent
certain that it had never really happened, I was determined to eliminate all possibility of such rambles in the future.
Dennis's story was the classic description of a shamanic night journey. He said that he had gone to the chorro and had meditated in the mission cemetery we had visited before. He had begun to return to camp when he confronted a particularly large Inga tree near where the path skirted the edge of the mission. On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point in his ascent, something that he called "the vortex" opened ahead of him—a swirling, enormous doorway into time. He could see the Cyclopean megaliths of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and marble-faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt. And yet farther into the turbulent maw of the vortex, he
saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man—titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering abysses, touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon-consuming time, rushed down upon him. He fainted, and time—who can say how much time—passed by him.
He next found himself in the pasture a few hundred feet from his newly discovered axis mundi. If he fell from the tree, it did not seem to have hurt him. Amazement, exaltation, fear, and confusion were all present in his thoughts. The continuum seemed to be shredding and ripping itself to pieces before his eyes, time and space swirling the artifacts of twenty-thousand years of human striving into a vortex of apocalyptic contradictions. In that state of fear and exultation, at the depth of the revelation of humanity's destiny among the stars, Dennis returned to our camp and noiselessly returned to his hammock, or awakened there from a dream of the same thing."
True Hallucinations, Terence Mckenna ("Around us, the jungle; ahead of us, the Secret....")
-------------------------
"What world is this? What shores of what kingdoms"
Start your day with Yahoo!7 and win a Sony Bravia TV. Enter now http://au.docs.yahoo.com/homepageset/?p1=other&p2=au&p3=tagline