Life in America

It is a country, like so many others, ruled by fear. Precisely how the fear is distributed, and in what forms, is, however, different; as different as the order of desire it both contours and supports. The people dare not revolt; this much is clear. But this appears to have as much to do with political indifference and a total absence of context for such action. In any event, they have nowhere to go and nothing to promote by way of fundamental difference. They are, accordingly, a not; so not the people, except as the excuse for some others, who always rule in their name. They should, of course, be the engine for change: the advanced proletariat of the post-modern world; the avenging sword of justice, etc. But they are, instead, only lonely consumers who disabuse anyone, including themselves, of all rights to object in any meaningful manner. Obviously, then, the people are divided against themselves in such an order. The people are part of a myth concerning The People. They are both the ones who oppress and the ones who are oppressed; ruled rulers of a highly limited and totally distracted sort. But it is already here that the difficulties, like the lies, begin to pile up. The people are, again, not in charge; that is, the vast majority of them. And, indeed, what has just been said about them seems on closer inspection to apply only to some of them, both as the rulers and the ruled. Again, then, only certain people are in charge. This time, however, those, who always rule in the name of all the others, only do so by ruling in the name of a particular group; and this, whatever the intention of the more general rhetoric employed. Here one can break off and look for a way to ground the assertions. For instance and as an appealing rhetorical device of some use beyond that of the institutes for propaganda it should always be noted that We the People began as 50 members of the Puritan Rump Parliament who abolished the House of Lords and summarily chopped off the head of Charles I in 1649 or thereabouts, depending on the calendar in use. It was this heavily reduced excluding and secluding Rump Parliament that proclaimed and Resolved: That the People are, under God, the Original of all just Power and that the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by, and representing the People, have the supreme Power in this Nation. But this interesting historical point, which does little but push back the dates for the famous documents proclaiming the liberation of the middle class in the name of everyone else, from July 4, 1776 to January 4, 1649, will not resolve or solve now a single issue. It will not even dent the ignorance of the educated class of just this new middle class. It will put no new class analysis in place in the classless society of the rich and the poor. Again, it will do nothing, because and therein lies the old problem because of what? But just this causal demand is a bit too much for our people. Indeed, our people, now in every respect, rich to poor, are just not interested in causes. Rather they are all interested in agents and results. The poor need money; the rich need more money. And somebody is always stopping somebody else from getting what they need, so want. It is all so terribly simple in the U.S. Like the name, all that is needed, so wanted, is an abbreviation. Analysis, meaning, history, -1-

symbolic order, exchange, language, now in the mode of something called information, are one and all just forms of money, the universal signifier as signified. But what, again, is it the sign of or for? Again, all so clever and would-be meaningful: signs break down into signifiers and signifieds, but not in a balanced manner. This is an act of reflective reasoning of the dialectical sort. Signifiers and signifieds never exist without signs to embody them there are, for instance, no pure signifieds with no way to point to them, despite the boatloads of ignorant scientists who keep pointing at nature without noticing that they are always the ones doing the pointing while signs and signifiers seem strangely related, or, at the very least, more closely related to one another than to signifieds. Yet they are only related by a logic of the signified, whether inherent or imposed in some other manner. Or, what is the same, signifiers only exist as the elements of a rational system, a conventional system, a language, or a language of commodities in motion, even a mythology, such as the mythology of capitalism. And it is just such an objective conventional system that makes signs possible at all, by way of organizing patterns of signification. It is only that this particular sign system the one in which everything exists as moneyfied, rather than, like Barthes roses, as passionified is killing people by the bushel, both at home and abroad. It is only that we have Presidents and Congressmen and Senators, who seek endlessly to do the bidding of Bankers and Financiers, the Executives of Oil and Insurance Companies, etc. It is only that all of this is held in place from top to bottom by the institutional system of money and its attendant regimen of desire; and by what no one anywhere wants to admit: that business as usual is just a way of killing people at home and abroad.; that business is always just that which contains a certain order of presupposition, namely, the way of harming so as not to be harmed, of having so others have not of living so others must die, of let us put it in more absolute terms fit for reasoning and a dialectical analysis of being by way of not-being: my being by way of your not-being. But, again, it is so easy to move far away from the extant and pressing order of the problem. Here one needs to hit harder than words are wont to hit. Moreover, who has even noticed the shift from mere signification to meaning?

So let us look at the regimen of fear that organizes the United States by way of the grand shield of an apparently universal indifference. Let us, that is me, give the abbreviation a little more substance by way of its name. Not yet the whole name by any means; but then not yet the whole story by any means either.

Sixty million of two-hundred and fifty million already on medicaid, not medicare; and here I discount many of the children and other resident aliens in both figures. But this means that one quarter of the population is below the official poverty level. And this simply because you cant be on medicaid in most places unless you have virtually nothing. Indeed, in many states, even having nothing, you cant be on or stay on, or some version of both. Then there is the other related fact, namely, that people are always cycling on and off. So, many more are actually impoverished and living on margins. And if one were somehow to add up the people on medicaid and the people on medicare, that is, the ones who are poor, what actual figure, never -2-

announced in the news reports about health-care reform, would one arrive at? Moreover, what would it mean mean to whom? Who is there even to see it? Or consider it? Like this piece of writing: No One, the magnificent! Or, again, just the lame abstraction, The People.

This is just a little bit of a beginning: a beginning in numbers and other signs. Numbers, of course, are also of the order of money. Indeed, numbers and money have grown up together in Western Civilization as it became World Civilization. Does it matter that we use Arabic Numerals? Perhaps, but not as much as that we do not use archaic Arabic financing. For double-entry bookkeeping we have to look to certain religious orders of the mediaeval world. And while these may well have borrowed some of this from the Arabian scholars, this hardly explains who gave us the creative financing of Wall Street and the current banking establishment. Still, we should all know something about the power and meaning of numbers. Signs and symbols again; this time, however, there is a real question as to what is signified and what does the signifying. But again, here no one seems to know anything; and, again, no one seems even to want to know; least of all mathematicians. Know what? Know about knowing and what gets known and by what means it gets known. We are, after all, Americans, another abbreviation of note. We dont need to know or want to know anything other than how to make money. But it is so easy: one prints it or coins it; that is how one makes money. Everything else is lost in the metaphor. Strange thing: the meaning of making money. But then there are other financial instruments that only use money as a measure and means. There is a lot of paper out there. So is it possible that the financiers have penetrated the code of the metaphor? Have they figured out that you make money by printing it up and moving it around in some way as at the direction of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury while you go on to empower all of this by means of some other system of making investments, which system relies on the first making as a mere support and sometimes a simple tool? Perhaps, but they need a whole world of contracts, of business and banking establishments. And they need the police power of the State to do their bidding as well, always, both here and abroad here, the police, there, the Military: the Army, Navy, Air Force; corporate mercenaries one and all. Even a general once said that. Always, however, off target. What is interesting for the mind is precisely what hides that which is more abhorrent by way of what the senses are delivering to it from time to time. Does anyone really want to know what is going on in The United States of America.? full name and full stop.

Let us say that one third of the culture at large is more or less fully impoverished. That leaves two thirds that require even more by way of ear wax and blinders. And here we begin to encounter the actual order of power as it moves beyond the sheer force orchestrated more directly by police and other administrative agencies. Fear is still here of course: For everyone must seemingly fear, lest they end up like the third of the country that is already reduced to rubble, while the rubble has a host of other forces to fear along with the police, so the gangs and each other, etc. Still, for the more ordinary among Us, you cant tell your boss to go Fuck -3-

Himself or you get fired. But there is progress: So now you cant tell the boss to go Fuck Herself as well. Cant even tell the people in charge in the government, male or female, what is going on in the government. Because you get fired just as well. But more interestingly, this seems to define a vast pyramid of organized relations, since everybody seems to be employed ultimately by somebody else. So most of the bosses even have bosses. But, again, something seems amiss even in this. The pyramid only defines the corporate model, with middle management scrambling always to survive and thrive Social Darwinism in a nutshell. Still, it takes in all manner of other employees on one extreme, especially all those others who are always in danger of being disposed of under the same paradigm of organic labor relations. And the form of the corporation seems to function in small business as well. What is more, even the owners of many businesses turn out to be employees paid by the company. Strange how you can pay yourself and so oppress yourself. More than strange, structurally important to the system as a whole and almost as strange as Rousseaus theory of constructive alienation in the affairs of state. Can you tell yourself to go Fuck Yourself? Only under a certain logic of the General Will. No member of the old House of Lords ever thought like this, that is, in terms of this fabricated kind of representation: For who else or what else would they represent but themselves and their own interests? Give me air; I need a lot of air! And room to breathe it ; ergo, America. There is something here that goes along with sheer external constraint what the ancients used to call necessity. But what goes along with necessity in modernity is called freedom. I am still going somewhere, but I am way off track. What no one wants to hear is not even coming to print is not appearing, even by way of this strangely twisted metaphor for being spoken so as to be heard with the eyes; and this in the age of screens and computers rather than presses and the movies. Still, here in whatever form we can use to summon it up and bring it to a presentation (Darstellung not Vorstellung ) we have the misery of people thrown out after a lifetime of being bought off, together with the fabric of guilt that is necessary to hold everything together; this and the lack of desire to move against the order, as conjoined with, even perhaps following from, the knowledge that only one thing is certain: namely, that everything will come to no good end, that all will be subverted or, from a more secure vantage point somewhere in the upper-third of the machine that goes by the name of a culture, that everything takes time: Women had to get the vote. Black people had to get the vote, even after they got the vote. So in the end it will all come out all right. As all right as history can make it. But then what about all those Chinese and India-Indians who are suffering, even dying, while making cheap blue jeans for the ex-rebels of the 1960's, whenever they want to change out of their designer suits? Well, it is just a prerequisite: a matter of a little pain, so they can move forward to the more advanced level of learning how to oppress and exploit themselves and everyone else in the mode of a meaningful representative democracy. Does this mean a democracy of representatives or something that represents a democracy? And is there a difference? But these people all around the world are not living in 1890 anymore than are we; they have cell phones, even computers. Again, something here seems to be important. But just this something is getting in the way of even a partially adequate description of what is actually going on. -4-

When they turn the lights out because you cant pay the bill; when the heat goes off and its 27 below zero; when the police come to evict; when the order of the so-called middle class begins to crumble; it has all been long enough prepared as something your own fault. In America short form it is always your own fault. Here all we uphold is the possibility of making good. The rest is up to you. Make good or die! So it is ordained by nature and New Hampshire, even if not necessarily by Aristotle. But then did not Aristotle have something to say about possibility? And even more to say about that other notable invention of the Greeks, Nature? As for New Hampshire, its status as a viable subject remains in question.

Now, every you who still has the heat on and the lights on and money in the bank in some form, which is to say, who has access to credit or money in the mode of potential (dynamis or possibility in Aristotle-speak) as debt to be realized (energeia, again in Aristotle-speak), either your own or somebody elses, has reason to fear some other you that is somehow lost to the order of the middle class. For the most part these others dont want to have anything to say. They dont want to know, anymore than you do, even if for other reasons or on other grounds. Perhaps, they are afraid, even afraid of you. But you remain afraid of them at some level as well; afraid that somebody, somewhere, usually by way of the government, can take something from you, to give to them, those other non-deserving people who have no heat and, often enough now, no food to count on, especially if they are trying to keep the heat on. And certainly, as we hear so often, you have some stake in believing that things are better here than everywhere else; something somehow supported by your various fears. That things are not always better here, is only a problem, on the one hand, for a certain group of people who are freezing or boiling, hungry or worn out, and, on the other, for another group who recognize such plight and who actually know something about Europe or some other place. But this latter point is just a side-line: Imagine believing that the Europeans are not somehow living off of the misery of people around the world, even if more equitably with respect to certain concentrations of their own population! And even in Europe, in a recent cold snap, 25 people (read 250) just froze to death. No heat on. No place to be. Etc. Lots of cheap labor in the old East Bloc. And then there is Serbia and Bosnia and Albania, where everybody started killing everybody else on cue and along ethnic lines when private property arrived with a bang: 1630 all over again. And what else? After capitalism arrived to save Russia, life expectancy went down, not up. A lot of people got saved to death. But now they have a democracy like everywhere else, a democracy of the dead for the sake of the rich. And strangest of strange, the life expectancy just went down in America the Beautiful as well. But this line of reasoning also provokes a defense mechanism. For, indeed, a culture, any culture, must always defend itself from anything that might cause it trouble in its endless ways of proceeding and perpetuating itself. In this particular culture, relating to this particular piece of writing and anything like it, this means that no one, now of a certain order of education, a certain standing and station, so of a certain position and place in the said middle-class order of money, property, and jobs, can afford to be bothered by what they already know, or, at least, already -5-

suspect. Why bother to read on, or read at all, since it is really better to stay away away from what? It is like riding through the ghetto: one simply doesnt; or if one must, go fast and keep the windows up and the doors locked. But the American ghetto is considerably broader and more variegated. Whole regions of the country, even unto the people next door, might just be disappearing or going under or on the way down and out. And for this reason one must learn not to ask and not to notice. Asking wouldnt work anyway since the middle class has this one fear among others, namely, that it be found out that one no longer belongs. Again, nobody wants to be poor, especially those whose image of themselves says that they are supposed to be well off, content, happy. But, then, eventually one must get to some understanding of just this thing here at the middle of the classless society. One must get to an understanding of the ubiquitous middle class. But is this the middle third of the population? Or is it more of the order of the middle part of the upper third? In what sense is it then a middle? Is it numbers again, or something else, that is here in the way? Everything spoken about, shown, projected, all government, all business, is a matter of a consolidated presentation of something to itself in its own mode. So even if one doesnt belong to the projected middle class in fact, one still belongs in fantasy and in terms of all known image production. Even the presentation of the so-called underclass is always from the point of view of somebody else, somebody, in every respect not them: not the underclass but the middle class; but, then, not, strictly speaking, as a creation of the middle either, rather only of and from its privation as such, turned against itself and reflected, so doubled and reversed; and this so much so that nobody the notorious is never but always at home as the whence of all such projection. The middle class, you see, is something not even of its own creation; but neither is it the creation of that which it names as the others, especially not those others as the poor. But even so, the democracy is only for this middle class, whatever it is and isnt. So it is never a matter of some them as the down-trodden. It is rather where somebody else from somewhere else follow the yellow-brick road takes some cognizance of the poor as the poor and then proclaims that something must be done for them. Indeed, something must be done, but never by them. The only thing they can do is become something else, so that they can participate more fully in the image, the dream-scape of commercial capitalism, spread out before everyone in the mode of the malls and movies and the endless order of computerized images. Again, all advertising, all news-casting, all presentation, is the construct of, and so preminently for, the middle class. The middle class is, next to God All Mighty, the most powerful fiction ever created and projected. America is the middle class: Two abbreviations for the same one divided non-thing. We, wherever there is such a we, should not ask too much further into this constructed fiction. Indeed, fiction itself is just one of its historical products. Libraries are full of books, all from and about the middle class. Indeed, they are never even about the poor, as anything more than what an about demands as an object, whenever they are constructed by people who decide to take a look at everything else not them from their own mystically evacuated -6-

framework or perspective. And, of course, they are equally only about the rich as well, in something of the same way; since, at least in our world, the rich dont write anything of note when they write anything at all; they only profit somehow from all the other writing, even when it might be said to be their own. Who, for instance, would bother to read Warren Buffet or Mr. Microsoft? And why would they bother to write anything but office memos? What could they possibly have to say in their own name and by way of something called thought or thinking in relation to everything else humanly meaningful? By what authority beyond that of money would they speak so as to be heard, write so as to be read? So there is only a view from this fabricated middle in these United States of America. No one even knows any longer what another view might be, so look like: Would it be a wail, a lament, a groan of resignation? No, and not only because these are sounds rather than looks, but because this is just what is projected from the middle to its underside edge. Would it accord with the indifference of the Bankers and Stock-Brokers, the Chief Executive Officers and a host of Lawyers and Tricksters with salaries in the 6 and 7 figures? Again, no, because these people, too, know nothing about themselves, save what is projected for them to know from some strange place that is no place; Utopia, too, has come true in America. These people are certainly not an Aristocracy of some Nietzschean order, in that they define nothing themselves. They buy cars and jet planes, yachts and houses; but so can anyone who gets some money. This is all just a matter of quantity. Where does the qualitative shift take place? Where does the car become a rich mans car? At the factory? Where, indeed, if not always and already in some middle? New York one still suspects to be the absolute modern city. This does not mean that it is all that new, just that it is populated by people who believe in a particular kind of fiction: In New York one finds masses of the poor who think like the rich, in that they cant think at all, save in terms of money. But from the middle that is constructed by and through this quite real state of affairs, one must resist this logic of reduction: There must be a difference between the rich sons-of-bitches who kill everybody and the poor sons-of-bitches who get killed or do the killing. Indeed, there must be a difference; but it is only across a middle that such a difference can be constituted and maintained. So, as well, there just must be a difference between the Investment Bankers on Wall Street and the Drug Runners and Gang Bosses who launder their funds in the Hedge-Fund accounts along with the other Corporate Executives. And that difference has to take shape by way of separation and diremption in and as some miiddle. And very much, indeed, must go on in this middle. In the middle, for instance, there are no daughters of bitches only sons of bitches. Moreover, without the middle, who would call the rich rich and the poor poor? Would the poor name themselves as more than merely the not-rich? Would the rich call themselves the not-poor? Perhaps, if we still lived in Constantinople in the 7th century, but not today in New York, read London, Hong Kong or Berlin. Without the middle, who would vote for this son-of-a-bitch instead of that one? Who would watch the news? Who would write the news shows? Who would talk endlessly about the rich and the poor; about the fact that the rich are getter richer and the poor poorer? Who would do anything that does not belong to the fiction called America? Except, of course, out of fear of having the lights go out and so of becoming one of the poor to be set off against the rich in somebody elses discourse.

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And so this is as far as it goes in this line: No grand analysis; no presentation that will right some wrong or fix the world. Nothing but fear that the lights will soon go out; that the bastards are coming to take you to the farm, the old-folks home, where you can lie in your own sweat and urine until they decide it is no longer cost-effective to cycle you on and off drugs. Eventually you just wear out and give in or up. Cant be much trouble, if you can neither talk nor write. And who cares if you talk or write anyway?

And dont think that the rich dont know just this as well, both your truth and this fear; know it in their bones and fear both you and it more than the plague. But your own truth will do. No need to bother with the rest.

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II

Is five pages enough and seven already too many? Is a more complex analysis in order? Do we need to endeavour further, and so enquire further, perhaps, into the nature and meaning of Justice ?

One should appear just, but be unjust this in accordance with the condition for the original social contract. The condition here : one desires to harm, but not to be harmed. Given such a condition, justice grows up in the midst of people who fear only not being able to escape being harmed, especially if and when they harm: a social religion of clever cowards or prudent people. But, of course, this is a pleasant fiction, since it is more the case that one learns early enough in any such system of laws and property relations that one must be adroit, or at least adequate, in mastering the order of appearances. This, again, is a matter of seeming rather than being what is intoned or thought to be something else, so just. But what basis is there for this something else? this thing called justice?

Take a line; now divide it somewhere in the middle, but unequally. Next, divide each part in the same ratio as the initial division of the whole. Now proceed to look into the order of divisions. It turns out that the middle two sections will be equal in length, no matter what the other lengths involved in the initial division; so whether these be ever so apparently equal or unequal. So no matter what the initial division, always now at the center, there will be a division of some middle in-half, where the two central abutting or contiguous sections are exactly equal. If we speak of three major sections, then the two extremes are set in opposition to one another across a middle section that is itself always divided into two equal sections. In this, three sections are in relation to the initial four sections by way of an equally divided center section. I wonder if this might have something to do with a class divided against itself in the middle? In any event, it has something to do with syllogisms and analogies.

This peculiar image in words appears in the middle offset by one-half of a projected third of the Platonic text that proceeds by way of a complex rebuttal to that other accounting just mentioned; the one having to do with the contractual or conventional view of justice, which is, itself, first projected for us right here in the early going of our, now universal, Western Civilization. In this contractual view, as already noted, one should take some care to appear just. But, as for getting ahead in accordance with an assumed ground intention or nature, one should use this appearance to hide the fact that one is actually attempting to be unjust, whenever one can get away with it. Again, however, there is a problem in this use of the meaning of justice. If justice is only established by way of a conventional agreement not to harm others, then it would seem to have no other meaning than that which this conventional -9-

construction permits. And, again, this is produced out of fear of being harmed, either by someone or some group, even if one supposedly starts off seeking to harm. In the system of argumentation that introduces and prefigures all of this, that from the opening book of Platos Republic, this results in considerable confusion as regards the meaning of justice. On such a basis, it is always being shown that justice turns into injustice that terms reverse meaning or that justice always seems to turn out to have a hidden meaning of what is normally called injustice. But then this is how we arrive at the grand presupposition of Book II, and the social compact or contract of later-day Hobbsean fame, that deal or inherent agreement at the center of conventional theories of justice. And we should never forget that this whole discussion is set by Plato in the house of a resident-alien businessman, named nothing less than Capital, in Greek, Kephalaus, Head or Principal. But in the text, this problem with justice comes initially to the fore by way of another term, the term virtue. Injustice, not justice, turns out to be consistent with very many ordinary views of virtuous action; or so it is claimed in association with various accounts, most notably those that remind us of the Homeric Odysseus Mr. Ulysses of a later more civil fame. And it is this problem which Plato, by way of Socrates, sets out to bring back into line with a more normal linguistic understanding of the terms in play: one in which justice is the basis for injustice, by way of privation or some pattern of negation. But how make the point?

Again, on the basis of the Line Image, as this appears later in the same text: Let us assume that a line is unequally divided. Then, let us say further that each part is divided in the same ratio as that defined by the initial division. It turns out that we end up with a middle that is constituted in the mode of an equal division. Now appearing just but being unjust seems to have something to do with being unequally divided but admitting of equality of division; but there is a kind of inversion or reversal involved, as well as a shift in terminology. The inversion, as well as the shift, has something to do with appearances.

If we return again to the initial presentation of the contractual theory, then we see that the whole presentation is also used to set up a contest between two images: the image of the perfectly unjust man and life and that of the perfectly just man and life. This later image turns out, not too strangely, to give us the presentation of the fate of the perfectly good man of Christianity, the Christ, complete with crucifixion or the even more gruesome and much more unseemly impaling, along with the recognition that he has been forsaken, that is, should have never sought to be perfectly just, but to have only wished to seem or appear so. But the Platonic presentation, in accordance with the famous devils advocate argument that advances on the basis of the presupposition that man by nature seeks first to harm and then not to be harmed (is evil by nature in the later Christian jargon of the neo-Platonic Augustine), measures or produces the image of the perfectly just man only by way of simple reversal and negation of the paradigm of the initial presentation of the life and fate of the perfectly unjust man. And in the common account, everything apparently good goes to such a bad or unjust man: power, wealth, sexual concourse with whomever, etc.; whence that earlier confusion as regards the meaning of -10-

virtue in the same general cultural accounting. So here we have the presentation that one should appear just but be unjust measuring the opposite to appear unjust but be just. And here we also have something of the movement toward the form of the later image of equality and inequality from the end of Book VI. In other words, appearing unequally divided, but being equally divided, the equal division reappearing now in the central segments by way of the symmetrical use of the initial distortion of an unequal division. But there is in all of this a sophisticated subtrefuge that can only be removed by knowing something else in advance, knowing by way of reflectively remembering. Where and why is there some initial distortion? Why divide the line unequally to start with? And how even manage this division without some measure and some knowledge of a given length and what would somehow constitute equality in the way of division in the first place? Indeed, not knowing or recognizing this measure in some way, one could even make a significant mistake by way of division. Now what about justice and injustice? Let us say next that we have an actually equally divided line. But for some reason this equal division appears to us to be unequal. This is the same as saying, in the context of the question of justice, that justice is actually the original state or condition and that it only appears to mean injustice for some reason of conventional behavior and instituted, whence habituated, patterns of existence. Now in the case of the line as divided, but under the auspices or the sign of this now given equal division, the subsequent divisions would still yield a proportionally generated equality of central sections. So the question becomes insofar as one might wish to pursue the nature of the image as given in the text what would make such an initial equal division appear unequal? For, again, this is like asking why justice should appear to be injustice? In the case of the Line Image from Republic VI, the problem has something to do with the conditions for perceptual appearances in general. In fact, the two central segments, which turn out on any presentation to be of equal length though this finding is never announced in the textual presentation as such, but left to the reader or hearer to work out, either provisionally by careful measuring or more properly by the laws of geometric and arithmetic ratios so just these central but equal sections are said to put into relation a realm of invisible but thinkable principles, supporting some system of deductions belonging to a world of rational understanding, and another realm, as that other equal but abutting central segment, the world of perceivable things in the ordinary sphere of vision. One might say, these sections establish the understood order of perception itself, as that order of the world of things associated with the realm of the physical sciences ever since the Greeks. The central field of the image thus makes out a kind of unified but divided field for the operation of the sciences in relation to the perceptual world of things, in which the principles are taken to be the laws governing the appearances of the things as such, both how they are seen and this in relation to what they are as things; this being the governing demand of the natural sciences to this day. And so this is the dense center of the image which involves a certain peculiar equality; a center which also invites a comparison with the more modern imagery of understanding belonging to the wizard of the system of subjective idealism, the modern Plato, mathematician and moralist, Immanuel Kant. But there is another field in play in the image as developed by Plato, indeed, something else that must also be rebuilt by Kant: For we also have the realm of images as such, understood in relation to reflections and -11-

shadows, as well as what appears in dreams. And this so-called bottom section of the four-fold division of this, itself variously imaged and analogously divided line, is measured off against the so-called top section, the world of nosis proper, pure knowing or pure reason, and its insights at the level of true causes as ideas. It is then these two spheres that are divided from one another by way of the equally divided center section of principled understanding pertaining to the perceptual experience of things in the world of the senses. But, if we assume further that the conditions for ordinary perception involve us in patterns of deception as distortion, then we advance to another recognition: Take a straight stick and divide it by marking its point of division into two apparently equal sections. Push the stick into a pool of clear, still-standing water, to the point of equal division. Now note how the part that is underwater bends off from the point at which the stick breaks the plane of the water, and so appears shorter, so of a different length. This affective vision is produced, as an effect, by way of light moving through and between two different media, water and air, while being seen here in relation to a single whole, connected/divided, line or stick, by the eye-ball that is activated by the light coming from the sky-ball or sun this latter word-play coming from the image of the Sun that immediately precedes the image of the Divided Line at the end of Book VI of Republic. So the optics of sense experience explains the distortion on the basis of certain principles of understanding that pertain to the physical world of vision and the visible. In this case, the optics involved refers us to the principles employed to produce the Platonic image of the Divided Line itself. It is, after all, an image in the mode of the patterns of understanding located within it and referring beyond or through the geometrical presentation to the perceived world as if visual; whence the stick in the water and its mode of actually appearing to the eye in the presence of sunlight, that I have just added to the tale or the account of the other more principled aspects of the presentation as given in the text at the level of the affective interest, called dianoia, our understanding. But there is something else: If one knows the principles in play, then it becomes possible to divide the stick in advance unequally, but such that when inserted into the water, it appears that these first two segments, the one under the water and the one above it in the open air, are equal in the appearance. That is, one can produce the illusion that what is unequal in fact is equal in appearance. And so, returning to the presentation of the problem of justice, we note that one could, with a certain knowledge of principles, pertaining now to cultural appearances rather than merely physical appearances, produce an image of injustice that would appear to be a matter of justice. One could, in other words, produce a kind of necessitated distortion of sorts, that would yield the problems from which the arguments of the text proceed back in Book II: appearing just but being unjust . But what finally does this mean? For Plato, of course, the power to use figurative language and the other trappings of office in the framework of a newly developed political rhetoric of the democracy counts for the ability to deceive at the level of another famous image in words from that same Book II of Republic in which the conventional or contractual view of justice is presented: there the Ring of Gyges Ancestor, the ring of the invisibility of intentions that refers us to, as it were, the father and -12-

mother of all tyranny; Gyges being a fabled version of such a tyrannical figure from Lydia; also the place of origin for coinage and retail trade, and close on to the somewhat more mythical kingdom of Midas, just over the hill. But, again, with Plato, and so with respect to Athens rather than Lydia, we have this Ring, as the web spun by clever speech and proper attire and gesture, so as the instrument of power for a constitutional tyranny as organized within the conventional structures of the democracy; all of which can be updated by way of control of media and all patterns of language, now as information, as well as all forms of interest and desire in relation to all modes of understanding and knowledge, pertaining to all modes of appearance. And with this we could move on to the grand image of the Cave as well, that image which follows upon the presentation of the Divided Line and its own prefiguration at the level of a sense-image of the Sun, while initiating a kind of return to the total field of the text and the broader problems of the relations between knowledge and justice, in the soul and the city-state. But more important for the present, what is asserted in the image of the Line is that there is a certain inherent order of deception that belongs to any pattern of physical existence, whence moral existence by analogy. It is this which naturally traps us before there is even the developed trap of some intentional order of rhetoric or some system of produced images. Whatever the nature of this trap in social affairs, rather than merely in those visual affairs where we engage the affective power of trust or belief in the things as perceived and here I suggest that it must have something to do with the move to position seeking to harm prior to seeking not to be harmed, rather than the other way around; and here as well one might think of Rousseau by way of his rebuilding of the Hobbsean framework with greater concern for the Platonic system of presuppositions and ends it is this which functions like the problem of encountering different media for vision as well as other modes of distortion in appearances. And it is knowledge the same knowledge that is involved in both the rhetoric and the production of images which finally delivers us from the trap, but only by way of an understanding of the necessity of the distortion and the laws governing such. In Platos terms, we are given, in the case of the necessity of appearances, the unequally divided line of the equally divided stick thrust into water; but by application of reason to the same plane of appearances, we are given this as shifted to an order of geometrical constructions, wherein we remain tied, even so, to the visual world by way of the image that we can reproduce variously. And in this way we now produce a second set of divisions, wherein we discover the other order of equality preserved within the distortion as such. By way of our own systems of injustice, we uncover the laws of justice itself, which are there from the first, but distorted in advance by the conditions of an existence, which is like a complex system of appearances in vision. But justice, like equality, we can only uncover by use of a second order system of divisions. We must divide the parts of the line again, using the same ratio of division Indeed, we need this second order system of divisions, to produce equality itself, kathauto, in the lengths of the interior segments of the Line-Image. Without some such construction technique, we can only rely on the senses to deliver us to the similar or the same in length related to our root term for seem rather than the absolutely known and knowable equality of the divided segments at the center of the constructed four-part geometrical image. Unless, of course, we somehow know that the line is equally divided to start with; in which case we are only pursuing the meaning of distortion from a more secure footing in true being or as idea. But how exactly would we know that, without having seen it already? -13-

And idea means quite literally having seen in the most perfected form of the verb to see, oida woida wide or video. But again, no set of equal division in an order of actual vision and the visible is as perfect as the re-cognized equality of central segments that follows from the proportional second-order division of the otherwise divided lengths, whether more originally equal or not. What is provisionally equal only becomes absolutely equal by way of thought. Those who do not hold to reasoning, cannot hold to justice: For at base justice is a matter of the play of equality within a social field; but equality is a rational, not a perceived or sensible, quality, even if adumbrated variously in the sensible field of similarities and differences. And, again, justice depends somehow on this understanding of equality. And so now perhaps we also begin to see and know why the Academy of Plato, located only a relatively short way from that governmental center of the Athenian democracy (so off-center by a significant distance away from the demos) had an inscription over its door to the effect that no one should enter, who was not acquainted with geometry. But, again, and to return to the world of the image, what is perceived is always the similar or the like, not isos, the equal. Thus, the central, even if not the most prosaic or expansive, image of the Platonic work on justice, is the image of the Divided Line: the image in the mode of knowledge as understanding, entailing a split center that immediately connects reasoning by way of understanding with what it is divided from as so connected in perceptual experience and the everyday world of the senses directed at practical affairs. But, of course, there is in this a significant distortion; and this beyond that of the asserted adumbration of equality in the appearance of sameness . Understanding, itself, or dianoia, like the order of geometry employed in the image, does not understand itself adequately in its own terms, especially in its relations to all other things and interests, without the addition of something else called nosis or knowing most proper. And to get to this or to pursue this, we need dialektik. What is more, this order of the known in knowing is the inverted, reflected/reflecting, double of the world of images, shadows and dreams, or the mimetic but projectional world of eikasia or imagination. So this so-called world of pure reason or der reinen Vernunft, as intuitive intellection or insight, is the reflected double of the world of fantasy as a product of imagination.

What all of these peculiar insights might then pertain to in the more ordinary system of justice and injustice is never perfectly clear, either here for us as inter-reflected yet again by Kantian philosophy, or in Republic. But it seems there that this more original system of justice is itself taken to be a political intermediary for another order of insights concerning such topics as virtue and knowledge, that have more properly to do with the Platonic psych or soul: For the last element as expressed in the Line Image runs out a line of reference from the subjectmatter of the various segments of the Line to corresponding pathmata en ti psych, middlevoiced affections in the soul. It may, however, be the other way around, by the same logic of this middle-voice order of affects: All of knowledge and virtue is here cut in the image of justice and the just dikdikaios; which terms seem to come, as Aristotle suggests, from some concept or root term associated with division and apportioning; so also the relation to krine, whence our critical, out of the arch kritik or juridical field of judgement and the aesthetic field of discernment, whence taste. Justice is then the produced equality which preserves the -14-

good in the midst of its inadequate modes of presentation, both natural and cultural. But it might just be something more: that very equality itself, that which measures all else by running between and connecting all else, when such is not taken only as a matter of the image-system of understanding as the world of geometry, which, in turn, uses the picture world of lines as drawn in the sand or sketched on paper to deal with things which can only be thought through such devices before being re-cognized or remembered as more properly known. It would, however, take more than a Platonic pattern of reasoning to reason away the patterns of radical inequality and radical injustice which now belong constitutionally to this our culture at this time in history. No ordering of inequalities can now preserve the inherent quality of justice that belongs with the old idea of justice as this falls out of the ancient Greek discourse of the good in the context of the political city par excellence. The balancing act of the Greek democracies, that of somehow equating the many and the poor with the few and the rich, always across some dividing and divided middle, has now been overmastered to such a degree that the proportional equalities have all broken down. So without even addressing the issue of slavery or the oppression of women in both the ancient and the come-again modern world of the democracy, we can say that the Aristotelian elements of the Madisonian and Jeffersonian conception of the new nation and its Constitution, its form and formal structure, as its politeia also the Greek name of Platos book, called by us in Ciceronian Roman mode, Republic failed even in their inception; assuming, in fact, that they were ever so adequately conceived as they had been by both Plato and his most famous student in his Ethics and Politics. The advances of the market system of trade and commerce, along with the birth of the European nation-state, had already rendered all of this inadequate beyond even its Roman perversions, save as an ideology of sorts: here life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for Lockes more direct, life, liberty and the pursuit of property. So on what basis can one still reason about justice from within such a system of radical distortion? Our lines now run on to infinity and so admit of no adequate division at all; at least none by way of the old geometry of divided centers, diameters, radii, and the like. And even if we were to attempt to preserve the image as given, the inequality of the initial division in length would be such as to render the analogy with perception and its refraction patterns all but instrumentally imperceptible and so useless to the untrained eye of the ordinary citizen. We would begin by pushing a stick into water, divided such that one segment reaches out to Jupiter and the other is the length of my big toe. What does seven trillion dollars look like anyways? That is roughly how much the banks and other financial institutes just extorted from The People by way of their government, in order to save their financial system. My big toe, on the other hand, is the size of the normal bank account; where and when one still has a bank account or still has one that is not running in negative numbers something still unknown to the old Greeks and much the more dangerous and oppressive for the new ones. In this respect, then, people have now nowhere to go. Their world will not carry them forward. The reductions are too extreme. All is a matter of wealth and the new financial systems. All is a matter of money and its inordinately unequal distribution. But money only has power by way of institutional existence. Even as regards the corporations, without the apparatus of the -15-

State, these are powerless to prey at will on the population at large. They require, as already stated, police power and military power, to back up the courts; and even more, an interior ideological power, integral to the form of society itself, to keep things under control in the first place. Even in Plato, we have the myth of metals the stuff money, as well as spear points, swords and armor, was once made of.

But what, then, exists between Money, a near purely rational entity, and the State, a near purely institutional entity? In what realm is the division now centered?

It is here that we encounter the most curious of institutions the institution of private property. Normally when one speaks of institutions, one speaks of people organized and housed in a certain way, as with marriage and the family. What does private property have to do with this? What, in fact, is it that one is speaking of here? Whatever it is, one thing alone is clear from the outset: The United States of America again, full title, full stop is dedicated to, and founded upon and by, the institution of private property. It is as if we were dealing with some set of boundary lines of connection/division, inhabited now by the relative and quite real infinity of money as number. One might then also note that it is precisely this not just this apparent infinitude of number as money, but the new institution of ownership and control that relies on it and is determined by means of it that Plato moved to challenge, even in its inception and appearance in the Greek world of the first democracies. But then Plato still had the tribes under him and his world; we on the other hand, especially as Americans, seem only to have these Greeks and the Romans; now, however, always by way of the English and the Dutch.

This form of property relations is, then, something that comes to us again from the ancient world. So, like money, like knowledge, like democracy, we find the beginnings of ourselves, as radically privatized owners of things as well as our own and other peoples labor power, in the ancient world of the Greeks. Platos Republic is, as noted before, set in the house of Cephalus, in the private house of privately owned, merchant Capital. And, again, Cephalus, like his son Polemarchus, War Maker or War-Leader, who is used at first to push forward the discourse, is not a citizen proper of Athens, rather a resident alien of sorts; as if a rich Englishman living in New York or vice versa birds of a feather. So this is no Athenian thing alone, this new order of private wealth, the private family, and private property in its initial appearance in the history of the world. But the Athenian empire seems to make much of it. And the long standing question here is whether this strange institution of the private in economic affairs made the democracy as well, along with the tyrants and the oligarchs, the philosophers and first scientists. But we will only answer this question by answering to a much more extreme set of developments, those pertaining to the modern Dutch and the English. For insofar as we know anything about the institution of private property, it comes to us from the world of northwestern Europe at the time of the inception of America the Beautiful and our own more modern world. Like New York City, it is Dutch and then English. Indeed, insofar as anyone in -16-

the world now knows anything at all about all of this and its social and political importance , it seems to be a matter of a development out of England, carried even further by way of the American Empire than the British; all of which first eclipses and then envelops the world of the Dutch and the other reformed Protestant cities and states of Europe. The United States, then, has no medieval and communal system at all existing under it or still contiguous with it, even as a mere remnant of a remnant, as in these other places. And, accordingly, here, in the land of the free, everything is and must be private, including the government. We say it is a government of laws not men; but these laws only serve men of property, then as now; and this whether the men are women or not. And the property is all conceived even what is called public under the form of what can be owned and controlled as private. This is not Ancient Rome, with its Public Space of the Republic, to say nothing of ancient Athens, with its frightfully shifting and decisively dangerous Political Space, the erstwhile and quite original Democracy. The question, then, might be put indeed, has been put in just these terms: Can there be justice where there is no equal distribution of property, even as a theoretical possibility? And under the current version of the market system of capitalism, there is no theoretical possibility of any such equality; and this is precisely where it differs as a model from the theoretical configuration of the now defunct world of communism and the more general framework of some order of socialism. But without such a theoretical possibility, as well as something to which it might pertain in fact, what is there to generate the need for a check on the given system of economic relations, as such, as these ground the vast inequalities in the field of real power in social and political affairs? Why, in other words, should people who remain rational animals, despite the best efforts of the current capitalist establishment credit any such system of meaningful checks on property relations and the accumulation of wealth? Granted, then, that we live in a world of radical inequalities in the economic sphere of property and control in the mode of property relations radical precisely, again, in that such is claimed to be not only natural but absolutely necessary why bother with the idea of justice at all in either social or political affairs? And how bother? especially if such elaborate means, as those here presented, are required? Perhaps, however, there are still grounds and means to the argument. This time, however, what seems to be required is a certain more than theoretical awareness of a distortion by way of appearances: What is required is now the production of the distortion itself, that we might know it as our own, rather than only as that which would follow by way of an analogy with the natural world of perceptual appearance. Where it cannot be naturally encountered and who in our world bothers to study sticks thrust into water in the context of refraction patterns and reflections as a way of approaching the topic of justice on the basis of the concept of equality it must be produced differently. But precisely how? Is this the meaning of private property beyond its use value for the rich in commerce, trade, and affairs of state? Is this what Marx was after when he noted its absolute centrality to the modern systems of bourgeois economics and government? And what about us and our world? Or perhaps this has already been delivered as the meaning of Kantian philosophy that was grasped and developed by Hegel and Marx, and a host of subsequent European thinkers.

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Of course, here, all our good democrats, liberal and conservative alike, will suddenly run to affirm the necessity of difference; by which they mean somehow to convert difference by way of inequality into injustice as natural. After all, it is still part and parcel of the dominant pattern of religious consciousness and its general aftermath. This might, in fact, be a way to a quick presentation of the movement of the new patterns of market-driven liberalism to go with the old patterns of such and the old order of Protestant determinism. Surely the poor will always be with us, just as we are all evil by nature and only to be saved by Grace. So why not make the best of it on this or some other ground. But the best ground remains the first one, the ground of nature as necessary. But this culture is not built on nature; rather it is built on money and the system of private property, all of which is purely conventional and then reflected in our various fields and views of nature and the natural. And private property is precisely that concept of property that has now been entirely penetrated and redefined in terms of monetary value: here land is real-estate; goods and labor, like all materials, are commodities. So let us cease talking endlessly about natural differences, as if a ground for conventional systems. The transition was problematic even at the time of Plato and Aristotle, who were considerably closer to nature and the natural than we are; especially since they pretty much codified the terms and set the usage, might even have invented a good deal here on the basis of the more indefinite beginnings of the first so-called physicists, the physiologoi, the speakers and account givers about something called physis or nature. But does one today seriously believe that certain people are designed, ti physi or by nature, to be CEOs, the way Plato believed that certain people were naturally given to being or becoming farmers or soldiers? Perhaps, of course, CEOs and a host of their want-a-be followers might believe this; but even this is unlikely to be the case, save where one is now dealing with a form of cultural cretinism to undergird the louder discourse of Social Darwinism.

But now we are coming to the problem: There is no ground for the patterns of radical injustice that inhabit our world. They are just there by institutional force and in accordance with certain patterns of habituation and cultural inertia: ethos-ethiz, whence ethika, wrote Aristotle; privatized and curiously redirected, custom, following upon becoming accustomed through an individualized but still habituated pattern of human understanding, wrote Hume. So while justice remains intelligible in its relation with equality, something about the necessity of distortion seems to be in question. What kind of distortion could and should remain necessary for reasoning to approach the meaning of justice in the framework of equality? And what does the privatized property system and the order of money have to do with this?

Surely there is an answer to such a question and not just for Marx, 150 years ago now, but for us. And indeed one suspects that it has very much to do, not just with the view of Marx, but, as just insinuated, with the views of Kant; again, that modern Plato as subjective moral idealist, where subjective is a good deal more than Humes order of what you might think by way of feeling and habituation. But what seems now always to belong to such an answer in advance is the understanding that such would make no difference. And it is just -18-

this, rather than any actual or otherwise adequate answer of a Marxist or Kantian kind, that must come into play in any form of analysis that hopes to challenge the extant version of the capital system as it now controls this country and most of the world. Again, people are not interested in such answers and such questions. They stopped being interested when they stopped being able to conceive of a political control of the economy, rather than an economic control of politics. And this I still count in terms of my own lifetime by way of reference to a significant date: 1968; and such despite the other obvious references to Marx and the 19th century attack on the political ideology of 18th century patterns of Enlightenment Democracy. So whatever the present or past status of democracy and democratic patterns of government, today people just want to survive and get ahead as best as possible; and this, whether in Brazil, with its expanding, socalled middle class, or China, or South Africa, or India, and all the rest. Indeed, the only people who might still care about such questions and answers belong to the remnants of the erstwhile political culture of questions and answers: so a few northern Europeans and their more immediate descendants. Others might still be able to understand all this even better; but would they care about just this understanding in something other than a practical, whence economic framework? And it is apparently just this other kind of understanding that is required even to understand Marx and the problems that run themselves out in his name under the erstwhile determinations of communism and socialism. Still, there are also the remnants of the tribes and the other high civilizations to consider. And once or twice upon a time, even capitalism was at least partially useful for more than economics. Feudalism did fall apart, even if we have now our own corporate remake, with troops of lawyers as retainers in the livery of Exxon-Mobil and the Banking Industry. Moreover, we can even count and measure well enough now to figure out the distance to the moon. Even shoot something at it and hit it. But then, so could the old Commies.

However, today, especially in the United States, all such understanding has been replaced by functional procedures for the advancement of humanity. Everything that I have said here save, perhaps, the way of saying and some elements of the analysis of Platonic theory and what might be derived from this in the light of certain patterns of modern idealism is well enough known already by thousands of people in hundreds of research institutes. It is, in fact, only because I am not housed in one of these that I have to worry about the universal trash-heap of the poor. Everyone else, in the middle reaches of that already alluded to upper third of the otherwise mystical middle class, has health insurance and a good or adequate credit rating. So what more is there to offer? What more in line with that little bit extra that comes from reading Plato and Kant, while being more at risk than those who love the supposed system of risk? And, again, to whom is such to be offered?

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III

It is precisely this personal material that is not supposed to enter into the discussion of matters of more universal meaning. The fates of individual people, to say nothing of their particular interests, have nothing to do with universal meaning, even universal human meaning, and whatever is constituted by way of an interest in its name.. Everything here is objective and scientific, that is, everything that is not insane, religiously driven, or fabricated for rightwing consumption by the clever backers of the religiously driven. One might even be able to say that it is the non-integrateable quality of the personal that remains in play as a problem for all objective analysis on the Left. The Right has everything, including the sciences, whenever it needs them: For the people here always have progress to call upon in a non-critical manner, while running forward on personal patterns of hatred and abuse as well. The Left, on the other hand, can neither oppose the sciences, nor agree with them: Agreeing with them, people become virtually meaningless at anything but the species level and one does finally get tired of hearing endlessly about only the planet and what our children will inherit opposing them, leaves one on the margins along with all manner of California religious consciousness. And even Marxist analysis often has an air of false or forced objectivity in this regard: Too much science; by which is meant, knowing in the mode of business as ususal and technology. The position of the individual is, then, that which is always at stake without being immediately associable with any specific person. Outside of lyric poetry and religious tracts in some mode of revelation, the individual is presented as conceptualized or as objective. The I disappears in writing about the I; indeed, especially in writing about the I. In a more important context, as Brecht once put it: eigenes Leiden glaubt Einem Keiner. Ones own suffering is of no interest to anyone, is literally that which no one believes in or to so better to make it up rather than portray it as it is, as the skit makes perfectly clear in the Three-Penney Opera. Yet, as Brecht was well enough aware in his manner of irony, there is only ones own suffering as personal suffering as that which can never be presented without some act of substitution. What is more, systems do not suffer at all, only specific people, by way of other people housed in and acting on behalf of such systems. Even the God of Christianity, as that transformed order of the Good, now holding together the physical and moral universe of Platonic philosophy, had to become a single human being, in order to be said to suffer at all. And Aristotles God, didnt even have call to speak, to say nothing of suffering. So, of course, suffering becomes an abstraction of sorts for thought and thoughtful presentation, precisely because it is something only real in the most concrete particular case. It is like labor in the market system. And as such just this abstract suffering becomes a commodity for sale in the American market of sentiment and media display; here, in the now famous Culture Industry of Horkheimer and Adorno. But is there a way to move against such a system by way of just such personalized insight? Can suffering, even projected suffering, become something, as it were, in print? And if so, to what end, if not that of the Right-Wing Talk Shows?

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In fact, one needs here to get between the suffering and the presentation in some way that unhinges the present control of the cultural system; and this need is all the more acute if the suffering is really ones own. Again, however, this middle ground is now the playground for a thoroughly colonized American art of presentation. In writing, as in speech, it is, accordingly, all but meaningless. But it might still drive a line of reasoning to go along with a kind of theatrical presentation. But here, my paragraphs become shorter and shorter. Again, drive what line of reasoning? Hasnt everything already been said? Havent I already given necessary expression to my own personal suffering and my attendant hatred of my culture? What more of the affective field of my I is needed? And what use the old Greek theater in a world of movies gone to video on demand as streamed?

The speed with which the I exhausts itself in the realm of content today is breathtaking. This leads one to suspect that the whole of modern philosophy, as the philosophy of this I, the ego cogito, das Ich, the Subject, was really about something else. It was all about the Object. It was about the world, Theatrum Mundi. It was about the culture or the state or the economy. Indeed, everything that is not nature, and even nature as well in the mode of what it is not. And when it finally became about the so-called self, it could barely sustain itself without a discourse of the other as another self, even if one that wanted to be or was different. But there was also psychology; in which case it was all about the soul. The soul, in this sense, however, is just the self as other or object to itself. It started this way and finished this way. Now the soul, like the subject or the self, is on the shelf, aufgehoben als aufgelagert, so canned and out of gas, like the planet itself, the original place to work or plant. And so all that remains is the personal realm, the realm without an expressible meaning for objective analysis. This and the universal dispersion of free speech into the aether of the erstwhile airways. Again, however, this personal world would seem to be or pertain to the world of affect and sentiment, of poetry and the novel. But all of this has run itself out as well; run itself out into an almost endless stream of the meaninglessness of the personal realm as that something suited now to computer chatter and the breakdown of diction, grammar, the paragraph, and finally even the sentence: Life at the end of predication, where all is mute pigeon predicate-speak.

So I come again to an apparent end without having advanced much at all: Life in America remains bad, whether for reason of being radically unjust or just plain stupid beyond reason. But now all I can say is that it is bad for me, whereas for someone else, it may well be good as gold. Should we then count up the goods and bads and become pragmatic and utilitarian about the whole assessment? This, after all, is the way that Plato ended up having already, I should add, warned against it with that image of the perfectly just and good man; again, that image which then served to power the civilization for two thousand years in the mode of Chrstianity; minus the recognition and the critique, of course. And in this one at least begins -21-

to see the danger, if not the meaninglessness of certain tendencies. But it is precisely this meaninglessness that robs all of the ability, as well as the required tools, to fight such a system. To have rendered reflective thinking so ultimately useless, this is the final pro-active defense of Corporate America. They always some they first bought-up and then founded a lot of universities and institutes to just this end. But, again, this is too much even for one whole set of quotes. Corporate America requires no defense from such an attack: Only the demented few would assert that It somehow moved against the I. It is better to assume that It was and is the I; just not mine. In fact, I no longer have an I, since this was emptied out over the last 50 years, as a result of the last 250 years of aggressively progressive civilization. This is precisely why I am not Descartes, nor even Kant or Fichte; why, as well, I exhaust the content of my I so quickly without recourse to some objective register. The inner world is all but gone, save as misery or suffering; so, again, something to be transmuted into the material for that endless array of babble that now propagates itself at the God-Awe-Full speed of light. And, indeed, now we are told that there is perhaps something even faster than light; no doubt something also in the analogous order of the culturally awful. But as for me and my own, that I am still able to maintain a stance in language at all is something of a greater mystery. But is it a mystery that threatens still to make anything better, either in the world of thought or the world at large?

There is something curious about the rise of sophisticated patterns of reasoning: They require a doubled system piled on top of a world already doubled; so a world of appearances beyond appearance and a world of intelligble forms beyond perceivable shapes. Even Democritus, of old, was using the principle of negation beyond the parameters of the analogies with finite shapes. And so it is for reason of the absence of such complex doubling that the contemporary or technological sciences are in no way satisfactory to anyone who thinks seriously even about only their asserted subject-matter of nature: for now these profess to deal with a world doubled only once. In antiquity, however, there does not always seem to be a substantial difference between the perceptual realm and the appearance of the things. But even here it is the manner in which they coincide that opens up on a seam of sorts that permits all to be opposed by some view of hidden structures, either material or non-material, some order of shapes and movements, forms or numbers. And whatever the asserted or assumed nature of this seam or space, always, of course, a seam in the order of thinking itself, it was big enough to hold the Platonic soul and the order of forms, to say nothing of the principle of negation just mentioned and the logical forms of inference first investigated by Aristotle in relation to ordinary speech and then turned to use in the extra-ordinary theories of the categorical determinations of what is or being. In modernity, this world of appearances is set more firmly between the structures of thought and the things in their more ordinary appearance. There is no simple version of this middle ground of appearances, even to the degree to which the ancient view might seem, as just noted, to admit of one. But now we note as well that our things, as if some set of matters always already at hand, are simply just as they appear; so all bad, all the time. Either they remain constructed in some way as the interface of a set of natural processes pertaining both to -22-

the things and the mental apprehension of such by way of sensation in various forms, in which case we notably have nothing at all to say about a moral order of human affairs, or they are constructed by an even more devious procedure by which structures themselves, referring both to conceptual frameworks of meaning and frameworks of possible experience, face off against a realm of totally unknown and unknowable entities that must be projected as real in some manner in accordance with the inference structure made possible by the patterns of thought, themselves caught up in the framework of possible experience, but at a yet more abstract level. In this, one can sense that today people can hardly even conceive the density of this second or Kantian field of consciousness. For here we have a self that is producing not just an awareness of itself, but the entire fabric of possible experience, along with the framework of reasoning that passes beyond this to project a moral universe as the ground of the physical one; and then moving on to legislate for the more immediate customary or ethical framework of society by way of principles that are inadequately reflected in the mere principles of the physical sciences and the experiential context to which these belong, the realm of nature. Indeed, the more complex has become our rather straightforwardly projected understanding of nature, the more impoverished has become the inner world of experience in relation to the moral universe. We got more of note from the imagery of the old-fashioned clock in and as the mechanistic universe than from the present imagery of the computer and its digital universe of operating systems and software. At least the old universe seemed ingeniously constructed. But such impoverishment does not take place simply because of a change in philosophic understanding and the position of the physical sciences. Rather, the whole is filtered through a cultural order. A peasant at the time of Kant had more at his disposal by way of a differentiated institutional universe than any modern businessman. Church was not yet State, was not yet the Army; nor was everything everything else by way of money and the money system.

The fulcrum in this problem bears on a single piece of knowledge that continues to escape the general patterns of American consciousness, even when generally recognized in some form. For it is the institutional order of the society that is reflected in the framework of thought and the conception of the self. The people at large, in so far as such a term and its designated grouping might be connected with some mode of university or even high school training, are, however, kept away from the most basic understanding of this view, by being kept away from the daemonic world of Hegelian philosophy. This, of course, is also the way to Marx from the more subjectively dense order of Kantian philosophy mentioned above. But precisely why this position is considered to belong to the devil incarnate of the world of theory by the keepers of the universe of orderly American thought, is very much harder to understand than might become clear by referring the whole to a slippery-slope image of theory itself, sliding away to Marxism, communism, and social theory in a hundred forms of European thought and reasoning. What one finds most difficult to understand is that the same people who actively embrace Zen Buddhism, as a practice suited to businessmen of every ilk, cannot tolerate even the beginnings of an understanding that would force a culturally invested response to the problem that what goes on in your head is not just a mode of brain chemistry complicated by some grid of formal logic. In America it is as if the word intersubjectivity has only the meaning of the internet. Is it -23-

possible that the framework of American Academic Philosophy and Social Science is itself only an ideology suited to keeping people fittingly stupid? stupid enough to put up with the American way of life, the universities and other economic institutions, taken together with the State at large? Indeed, it is more than merely possible, since it is just this stupidity that pays the bills, if one is a practicing analys/zt in any number of related disciplines. And pays even better when one moves over into administration, i.e., management. But this is hardly even a problem worth addressing, unless, of course, you happen to be in constant danger of starving, or freezing, or are in failing health, or subject to some other danger by way of a hundred modes of cultural assault, all as more immediately owing to the aggressive resistance of this world of professional thinkers to something that might just implicate them by way of it in the control functions of the culture machine itself. But, again, even this is of little concern as a general problem of the culture; for the culture at large is virtually illiterate at a theoretical level, beyond the play versions of the sciences as modern cosmology or some mode of technological advance in reading and writing codes, DNA or computer software. And so even the old topic of educating the educators has really already passed by the boards of any meaningful concern beyond the personal. But then it seems that this is precisely the point: only the non-permitted personal field will allow for the necessary push to the perusal of such other material. What is required, then, is an Intellectual Talk-Show, complete with a newly fitted out group of people who would inhabit such. It is a joke, which is, of course, quite serious. There is no way to break into the extraordinarily well contoured and well defined, ruling order of ignorance. It seems there has been no effective way to break in since Socrates. And even what advance was made there, was simply, or not so simply but still intractably, turned into religion. And how many people has Christianity already managed to kill, especially of late in the name of peace, justice and the American way? And yet this very thing is now again where the problem lies: America the Beautiful is a religious order of business and commerce. It is, then, precisely what becomes of Socrates what even beyond Plato and Kant that is now at stake everywhere.

Here, of course, we have the original song and dance man of thinking. Standing stockstill for hours on end, as if in a trance, while supposedly thinking his way through some line of questions and answers, only to start up again suddenly on his way to some all-night drinking fest, we get the genesis of no order of Buddhist mysticism; rather, by way of Plato, operating in the shadow of the supercharged institutional framework of the always failing Athenian democracy and the new order of property, trade and commerce, we end up with the entire subsequent order of science and religion. We have, as it were, no idea at all of what was really going on back there; just what it all came to mean. Imagine, again, walking down a street with an erect penis as the directional marker, pointing the way to the theater where one might see Oidipous Tyrannos or Eumenides. But enough of this. It is only the problem of the inability of thinking to turn the order of the culture, without simultaneously being turned by it, that is most immediately at issue here. -24-

But, and also again, with this I have not gotten anywhere, either by way of my I or by way of the culture. Is it then possible that the two are the same, even if not quite equally so? so off-center by just such a significant difference as to constitute meaning and language, and even knowledge of equality itself ? This was just a question; it came from nowhere or everywhere or from the self that is the culture. Things like this pop up all the time. They get us going; keep us treading water and waiting, like some old-fashioned poet running through stock-phrases, while grappling with some other kind of constitution to come. But in the present case, nothing comes but more of the oldfashioned poetry itself. A war of words against a culture-machine that has everything at its disposal from words to tanks; and ever so many pictures and modes of amusement or discourse as entertainment. And oh how humans do love pictures! knowing, by way of the pleasure taken in sight. Mr. Aristotle again. But this discourse, too, tires me. I have no desire to go again at this new world of images and media generally. Indeed, I would need a rebuilt discourse of the will to oppose and augment the more recent discourse of desire that belongs with the present order of fear and trembling, in order to get anywhere in such a struggle; and the will, double quotes quoted the machine wont even let me write it is a too formidable topic for an exhausted I of mere single quotes. Once upon a time perhaps, but not now. So, as usual, there is nothing left after a brief flurry of active thinking. Nothing and the problem that, aside from the fact that soon enough I may not be able to eat or pay the bills again, this capitalist world of mine is just not interesting enough, even in its near continuous horror show, to keep me thinking for more than a few pages of selfreflective imaged print. Sorry, but it is true: America the Beautiful, no quotes at all, might well kill me and a host of others, but it is become boring beyond words out of potential, out of gas; just a realm of habits collected up and set off in motion day after day to the tune of talk-show radio and the olds. What I want is something on a scale of sufficient grandeur to justify a universal Winnebago convention to be held somewhere out there under Kants starry heavens. But where out there is there anything now of human, rather than merely natural, interest? Herodotus, History, Book IV, 26 f. (David Green translation): Here are some of the customs that are said to obtain among the Issedones. When a mans father dies, the relatives all bring sheep and goats, and, having killed these, they chop up the flesh and cut up too the flesh of their hosts father and, mixing all together, serve up a feast. The dead mans head they lay bare, and clean out, and gild and afterwards use it as a sacred image, offering great yearly sacrifices in its honor. Each son does so by his father, just as the Greeks celebrate anniversary feasts of the dead. Otherwise these people, too, are said to observe rules of justice strictly, and among them men and women have equal power. In this case again we have actual knowledge; but from here onward it is the Issedones who say that there are men with one eye and griffins that guard gold. -25-

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Introduction

Life in America is likely to be too much for many and not enough for some; but in any event, it is all that I can manage at the moment.

The Author, Ticonderoga, NY May-July, 2011

Note: This piece was written immediately prior to the onset of the Occupy-Wall- Street Movement. The clear indication is that another middle class from the one detailed here has begun to make its presence felt. This other middle class is more of the order of the actual middle third of the country as a whole. It is also generationally distinct in that it draws its strength from those communications-savvy young people, who no longer bear the same trademarks of race and gender politics that have marked the culture for so long; or, at least, no longer bear them in the same way. Problems remain in this regard, but not of the same order. As with all things human, time itself has now taken a hand, and in this case has entered the fray on the side of universalization and dissent. The bottom third and the middle third of the culture are beginning to draw together. The ruling faction of the upper third is finally under attack. Indeed, it is down to something more like one fifth, the retainers or everyone in the corporate livery of ownership and the House of Capital. And so the question seems to have returned, as always now: To whom does the democracy belong? Who, and how many, should rule?

Life in America

An Essay on Justice and its Absence

by

Paul R. Dixon, Jr.

Copyright, 2012