| My Turn |
MY T U R N
It has occurred to me lately that if revolutionary measures are to be taken at any time, and in any way, then one must resign oneself from all assumptions, sever the tie with history, with reason, civilization.
Artaud's inflammatory proclamations, and Andre Breton's and Friedrich Nietzche's, have been disregarded throughout the history of the West except by free radicals who are antithetical to power as it exists. In thinking about language over the past few weeks, there is one event that sticks out in my mind above the others.
I was sitting in the stall of a favorite bathroom. It was early, and I was all alone, admiring the profanity scrawled all over the partitions. Having graduated from college with a minor in scatology, I was particularly entranced by the unique combinations of profane thoughts and suggestions surrounding me somewhat above head level, someone had euphemistically scrawled the word for fecal matter; another eloquent gentleman left his phone number and a genuine promise of what many would consider a night's entertainment. I realized with joy that the bathroom was the only refuge of the societal renegade.
I was so taken with the verbal iniquity surrounding me that I decided, in homage to the criminal intellects and vandals who had come before me, I would break a law here myself so I began to smoke uproariously.
No sooner had I begun to smoke than an individual assumed a thinker's posture in the stall beside me. Another philosopher? I mused. I puffed happily at my devotion to cancer, when I began to notice the aforementioned thinker coughing and wheezing pathetically.
"Sir," he whined, "there is no smoking in this lavatory."
"Ah, sir," I replied, "you are mistaken. At the moment, there is, in fact, smoking in this lavatory."
I had scored the first jab of wit at my fellow thinker. Making such an assertion as he did, he must be an exemplary logician.
"Please sir," he groped, possibly under a Kantian influence, "be reasonable!"
"R E A S O N A B L E?" I shrieked. This man was ignorantly setting himself up as the butt of my anarcho-surrealist humor. He had touched a nerve with his deep intellect. "Sir, your antediluvian concept of logic is outmoded and absurd. It is reason that is to blame for the sorry state of the judicial system in this world, and it is your reason I accuse of making Western thought neo-classical, wooden and neurotic."
"I ... uh ..."
"My lad, do not falter in doubting that for one moment. In the past 20 years, there have been innumerable thinkers who have debased your concepts of logic and degraded your absurd and conformist system of thought. Let us begin with Aristotle," I spat. "Should you pursue your accusation of my smoking, your logic becomes a trap. As Aristotle pointed out in his logical writings, the basis of all argument is the assumption. But not merely one assumption, but an infinite digression of assumptions, which at some point must break down."
"Ummm ..."
"But not only that, reason is based upon an assumption of causality, which is invalid and unproveable. In Nietzche, for example, is criticized your absurd idea of order by this same principle what, my friend, caused causality, eh? Tell me that?"
"Er ..."
"Then there's Derrida! What about deconstruction, eh? How can you defend Russell's doctrine of ambiguity without considering deconstruction?"
"Deconstruction is a tautological argument!"
"Fiend!" I shrieked. "You'll learn post-structuralism and like it!"
My anger piqued, I stopped what I was doing namely scrawling "PHENOMENOLOGY SUCKS" on the wall, and with my Cross fountain pen, impaled my neighbor.
He had me there, and the dialectic culminated in a fistfight. Thus, I am convinced of one thing; the chief source of knowledge is not the intellect, but the body. We know all we need to know from the time we are able to walk until the time we die. I knew that my unlikely partner in Socratic exchange knew this, too, as he caught me with a crafty uppercut while I buttoned my trousers.
"Neo-platonic troll!" I yelled, slamming his forehead into the wall with a resounding thud. My neighbor muttered, "postmodern spirochete!" under his breath as he collapsed.
My long day of philosophizing, I decided, was at an end. --Shawn Ramsey |