<eyebeam><blast> Mystery Schools

[organon@mail.ggg.net]

>My project combines a number of different arts/sciences together within
>an interactive, self-creating, virtual environment in order that the
>correct neurological responses are enduced to bring about this evolving
>shift in consciousness of the "user".
---

Carla,

I think you are on the right track, but I don't know what you mean by
"correct" responses.

"Since simulation is the attribute of being itself, it also becomes the
very prinicple of knowledge. Like every impulse that interprets its
phantasms as a 'condition of existence' (that is to say, as a means of
dominating, of appropriating for itself a power over what resist it),
science itself, when it comes into contact with a given phenomenon, is
interpreting its own phantasms."

Pierre Klossowski

Consider the "subject" an assemblage of impulses and forces giving birth
to a continual stream of "phantasms" which it translates into ideas,
images, words, actions, etc.

Out of "chaos" or the "real" - of which we can know nothing - a kind of
unconscious fantasy or image(inary) forms itself within us which we
attempt to translate into the symbolic. Rituals and teachings of the
past were meant to initiate the subject into a practice of translation
or mimesis. We never do anything but mime our phantasms as "simulacra."
We hallucinate. But if we do it "correctly", the energy of the
impulse-phantasm is born through the simulacra as a "will to power." A
few poet-philosophers are still able to do this, but the majority of
subjects experience the alienation of the dead weight of signifiers (as
opposed to dancing flowing powerful simulacra) which falsify our
impulse-phantasms in the name of truth, objectivity, representation.

Nietzsche who was the first to diagnose this condition in humanity only
finds its empirical cases in Freud's psychoanalysis and more
specifically in Lacan's mapping of the real-imaginary-symbolic knot of
the contemporary subject. Unfortunately, it took a century for analysis
to describe clearly what Nietzsche already knew, and even Lacan offered
little in the way of solutions.

"'Nihilism (in the passive sense) manifests itself as soon as the
ability to invent new fictions and interpret them is
exhausted'(Nietzsche).This is how the contemporary moral situation
appeared to Nietzsche as he considered the role of the
philosopher-impostor, the mind that knows how to derive conclusions from
the processes of cultures and societies. The moralities that produce the
criteria of knowledge as well as of behaviour (and these criteria in
turn engender new moralities), depend exclusively on the interpretation
of humanity at a determinate level of his psyche; the phantasm of the
latter are externalized in simulacra. In the absence of new simulacra,
while the existing simulacra lie dying, the intellect and the phantasm
of the impulses find themselves in a desperate face-off."

Pierre Klossowski

The key is to invent a new set of practices along the lines of
initiatory mystery schools but appropriate to the possibilities of the
future.

The "death" of philosophy and the "birth" of psychoanalysis are no
coincidence, but the whole event will be missed unless we can unveil a
very mysterious line of practices incorporating the
Nietzsche-Freud-Bataille-Klossowski-Lacan-Foucault-Deleuze-Guattari
nexus.

The medium - cyberspace, neighborhood ecology, therapeutic practice,
organic medicine - is not the issue so much as the "analytically"
informed approach.

My books, my works of art, my private practice, and what I teach at my
institute are all devoted to this project.

Will


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