Conscience, Kultur and the Idiot: Post-Colonial Europe versus one form or another of Incest.

European culture (Kultur) was criticized for being ostensibly colonial: "Eurocentrism." However at this time there is a kind of possibility of Kultur through the Idiot: the example of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, bringing opera to the "suffocation and fornication" of the Amazonian jungle. And was not Herzog in this not projecting his European, romantic dilemma, the suffocation and fornication with the particular itself?

Freud, my friend Oppermann points out, was a pessimist concerning European culture. Nevertheless the postulate of Freud is that culture in Europe is formed round the incest taboo. When we look at the dearth of thought in contemporary bible thumping American culture we see the very real threat of this incest once more taking place: the shadow cast by "fundamentalism" is too enormous: the fundamentalist preacher of necessity is forced to indulge in perversion, or else increasing levels of spiritual avarice. Similar conditions seem to have developed in Islam. This situation is incested. This is where we damn well exclaim, enough already! we need some Kultur!

I am talking about the shabby but foppish intellectual, perhaps someone like Settembrini from Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Someone with some panache and Nietzschean spiritedness to say: "Enough with all this religion that is poisoning you! Enough of mama's sweets! You have become sclerotic from all your fattened 'cheese-burgers! You have gone blind and have a terrible temper from the diabetes inherited from all those sugar-filled sodas! Enough!"

Of course the problem with European Romanticism is that it re-introduces the feminine, all the sweetness of her embrace, even in its stormy passions, still is quite a ride.

James Hillman comments in A Blue Fire a passage I loved to use in my dissertation: A paraphrase: "The spiritual Animus of the west, liberates us at one moment from the valley of our Anima attachments--- and at the same time condemns us with his judgements."

I have examined the nature of this condemnation as a double bind: we are faced with the nausea and the suffocating incest of the particular: a blindingly beautiful, well tanned pair of legs on a seventeen year old young woman. The process of the condemnation is as follows: if one simply is a "cad," a "barbarian" or a "lout" then one pursues the legs and fornicates with them: simultaneously to be strangled by the banality of one's choices. The second alternative is the rout which can be condemned for its "spiritual avarice"-- which implies that the one who holds the spiritual position is somehow better than all the rest (and therefore the appropriate consort?). This second alternative winds up sounding completely repressed, and possibly landing into situations of fairly severe misogynous contention: hatred of the particular for all it is worth. And in one sense it may be worthwhile that a sufficiently placed degree of misogyny may be a medicinal and bracing condition, if it is not taken too literally: its first principle virtue is its lack of political correctness. This misogyny of a Settembrini may be a perfect antidote to part of the problem, yet it lacks one thing: it skirts the bloody mess of particularity.

There is something to be said (once again) for skirting the bloody mess with all these skirts, or what lies beneath them. "Women! they're too dangerous!" The point of this would be once again to acknowledge the danger, rather than live in some high-handed western new-age (ultra-capitalistic and ultra-commodifying) denial of femininity as a notorious danger. (And what is commodification but a reduction to the bottom line, once again skirting the infinite complexity of any one "particular" as a suffocating nexus whose chains of causality bind it and us into a web that extends to the very origins of time? If we can reduce the feminine to a dollar mark then all will be well in the world, no?)

This was just a note and an improvisation on the conversation I was holding with my friend Oppermann. The danger has always been with ideas: and at bottom a lack of conscience that holds sway. Whether we turn things round and think of them one way or turn them and think of them in another is just the pleasurable chat that European Civilization holds dear.

There is something to this being civilized. There is something to being a civilized intellectual here in Los Angeles, California, where the extent of intellectual growth only ammounts to force feeding and regurgitation of facts into students in the "UC" system. Intellectualism here has become nothing more than a barbaric act of bullimia. To raise this (as in cases it may be raised, even in the "UC-System" ---but this is just as likely in our current academic system as in any industry, automotive, entertainment, travel) to the level of thought requires conscience. Conscience either comes from a momentary ex-stasis of thought, or a concomitant gravity that pulls us to some stand-still: a cry of grief or a prayer that in its moment is a "hearing" as well.

Remember the point of this Civilization:
the Indo European root is Kew: it is the root of Shiva, animus figure of the transcendent divinity, destroyer of illusion, it is also the rood of what is held tender and dear, and this too, this tenderness of those who are initiated (and therefore suffering always from the wounds of initiation which are never allowed to heal) is conscience.