Jacques Lacan is all well and good, if you’re into all that Freudian post-structuralism stuff. With his emphatic delivery, the dude really is quite an engaging speaker. I mean, he was Slavoj Žižek’s primary theoretical influence, and from the looks of it, an inspiration for Žižek’s stage presence as well. I guess when you’re lecturing on the limitations of language, you’d better have a little stagecraft to sugar all that theory to keep the punters from dozing off.

As anyone who’s ever been to a speaking event with a public intellectual knows, the best part is not the speakers; the best part is the inevitable interruption by crazies who can’t garner an audience of their own, but never fail to seize the opportunity to preach their wisdom to the unwilling masses assembled to hear someone else! A few minutes in, we see a young (somewhat unsteady) kid approach Lacan’s desk, dunk his hands into a pitcher of… something, pour that something all over Lacan’s materials and then start making grand proclamations in the idiom of The Situationist International, which is like, totally anti-authoritarian and Marxist in context, you guys!

Not content to simply soapbox on Guy Debord, the Situationist wackadude flings the formerly pitcher-bound residue on his hands directly into the face of the much smaller Lacan, apparently in an effort to prove his “authenticity” (if only to himself!). Over 70 years old at this time, Lacan guards himself against potential assault before the Situationist is finally escorted out. Lacan continues talking. And Lacan continues smoking.

Maybe I’m just a common prole, wee-wee’d up on reality tee-vee, but the interaction between the erratic “revolutionary” Situationist and the intense (but accommodating) Lacan is way more entertaining than what either of them have to say. The nonchalance of the crowd in the presence of this philosophical hissy fit is downright golden. Even the chic girl in the hat who tried to corral the interruption doesn’t take the cigarette out of her mouth!
 

 
Some July 4th thoughts on revolution as a process rather than an event from Charles Hugh Smith. His newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It

The next American Revolution will not be an event, it will be a process. We naturally turn to the past for templates of the future, but history has a way of remaining remarkably unpredictable. Indeed, all the conventional long-range forecasts made in 1900, 1928, 1958, 1988 and 2000 missed virtually every key development—not just in the distant future, but just a few years out.

The point is that extrapolating the present into the future fails to capture sea changes and developments that completely disrupt the supposedly unchanging, permanent Status Quo. The idea that the next revolution will take a new form does not occur to conventional forecasters, who readily assume the next transition will follow past critical junctures: armed insurrection against the central authority (The first American Revolution, 1781), civil war (1861) or global war (1941).

I submit that the next American Revolution circa 2021-23 will not repeat or even echo these past transitions. What seems likely to me is the entire project of centralization that characterized the era 1941-2013 will slip into irrelevance as centralization increasingly yields diminishing returns.

Everything centralized, from the Federal Reserve to the Too Big To Fail Banks to Medicare to the National Security State depends on the Federal government being a Savior State that must ceaselessly expand its share of the national income and its raw power lest it implode. All Savior States have one, and only one trajectory—they must ceaselessly expand and concentrate wealth and power or they will fail.

They are like the shark, which dies once it stops moving forward: the Savior State must push forward on its trajectory of expansion or it expires.

Stasis is not possible, nor is contraction; the promises made to the citizenry cannot be withdrawn without political instability, but the promises cannot be kept without fatally disrupting the neofeudal financialized debtocracy.

You see the dilemma: The Savior State cannot stop expanding, but the financial system that generates its revenues can no longer support its vast machinery of debt and phantom collateral. This is why I suggest all the centralized concentrations of wealth and power will either implode or fade into irrelevance.

If all the phantom wealth and collateral vanishes in a market clearing event, the Federal Reserve will simply become irrelevant to the vast majority of people. A handful of nimble speculators may well benefit by picking over the carcass of financialization and centralized omnipotence (i.e. central banking), and perhaps the 1/10th of 1% will still have enough assets influenced by the Fed to care, but the forces of disruption will replace centralization with decentralization.

Here is another example: Medicare may not cease to exist, but it will become increasingly irrelevant to most people because it will not longer function. The remaining doctors willing to treat Medicare patients will be working 13-hour days for sketchy pay, and as each one burns out and leaves the system, the system contracts. Eventually it contracts to the point of irrelevance.

The revolution will be in work and social innovations enabled by technology. The conventional view is that technology will magically enable the permanence of the present; this will be proven incorrect, as what technology enables is not the waste, entitlement and centralization that characterize the present but social innovations, some of which are already visible.

If we sought to summarize the profound transformation ahead in one sentence, it would be this: Wages are no longer an adequate model for distributing the surplus generated by the economy.

The current Savior State model responds to this by increasing taxes on the dwindling minority with fulltime jobs and increasing entitlement payments to all those without government or private-sector jobs. This model will collapse, politically, socially and economically, as no society or economy can squander half or more of its productive labor force while increasing the burden on the dwindling cohort of productively employed. The inevitable result of this dynamic is a destabilizing tyranny of the majority.

Technology is not just disrupting old industries and companies, it is disrupting the entire Savior State/cartel-capitalism model. The disruption has barely begun, but it will pick up speed over the next decade.

I suspect the next American Revolution will begin in the 2015-16 timeframe. A series of interlocking crises will lead to reforms that preserve the Savior State/ cartel-capitalism for another few years, at a lower level of consumption, i.e. burn rate.

But the process of revolution will be far from complete; this initial response of the centralized neofeudal debtocracy will buy time for the Status Quo, and every conventional onlooker will be infused with optimism and hope that the system established in the Great Depression, World War II and its Cold War aftermath—the secular religion of consumerism (i.e. aggregate demand), permanent war footing and the National Security State, and universal dependence on the Savior State and its ceaseless expansion of concentrated wealth and power—will continue.

But this Springtime for the Savior State/cartel-capitalism partnership will be brief, and by 2018-19 all the systemic flaws and disruptive trends will reassert themselves with renewed vigor.

The entire current model of governance, social order and the economy will be revolutionized not by overthrow but by the process of irrelevance. What will become relevant will no longer be in the control of the Savior State or its partner, financialized cartel capitalism.

Those currently holding all the concentrated power and wealth cannot believe they will become irrelevant, but that’s the result of projecting the present as if it is permanent and immutable.

The new system will be better, more humane, more flexible, more transparent, with more opportunity, for it will be everything the current corrupt, sclerotic, parasitic and exploitative system is not.

Previously on Dangerous Minds from Charles Hugh Smith:
Concentrated wealth and power are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature

Global Crisis: The Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka

Will crushing student loan debt and worthless college degrees radicalize the Millennial generation?

Wage Slaves: Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet?

 
Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, doesn’t have much respect for the sesquipedalian bad boy of postmodernist philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, and he doesn’t mince words expressing his disdain, either.

In an excerpt from an interview with Veterans Unplugged in December of 2012, Chomsky was asked about Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Here’s what he said:

What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.

Elsewhere the famed MIT professor and tireless political activist has called followers of postmodernist philosophers like Žižek “cults.”

I got to shake Noam Chomsky’s hand at a lefty fund-raiser in Los Angeles in the early 90s and he had a very “saintly,” very kindly and patient sort of aura to him then. The older Chomsky gets, though, the crankier he gets. I kind of like that. I sincerely hope he writes a book for posthumous publication called Fuck You Assholes: You All Fuckin’ Suck or something like that.

You just know he’s got it in him.
 

 
Via Open Culture

Photo by Chris Saunders
 
David Lynch doesn’t like giving interviews. He has to be coaxed by interviewer Mark Cousins, to give answers to his questions.

Mark Cousins: David Lynch, you don’t like doing interviews, do you?

David Lynch: No I don’t.

Mark Cousins: Why are you sitting on this sofa then?

David Lynch: To do you a great favor.

Lynch certainly does a great favor here, in this fine documentary Scene By Scene, as the cult director goes on to explain his thoughts on films and film-making:

A film is its own thing. And in an ideal world, I think film should be discovered knowing nothing, and nothing should be added to it, and nothing should be subtracted from it.

The usually taciturn Lynch then opens-out about his life; his insecurities (why he once wore three ties); his ideas on the speed of rooms; why he doesn’t follow politics (‘I don’t understand the concept of two sides’); and his response to criticism in his portrayal of women:

..the problem is that somebody sees a woman in a film, and then mistakenly assumes that that is the way the person sees all women, when in actuality it’s just that particular woman within this particular story.

The interview concludes with Cousins asking Lynch about his thoughts on mortality.

Inside, we’re ageless.  And when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same person we were talking to, the same age, when we were little, and it’s the body that’s changing around that ageless center.

Recorded prior to the release of The Straight Story, this fifty-minute documentary, made by BBC Scotland, gives great insight into David Lynch and his method of film-making.

Watch it—before it’s gone!

A full transcript of the interview with David Lynch can be found here.
 

 
Via IndieWire
 

 
Conner Habib is a gay porn star and educator—as well as being an avid student of the occult and, in particular, the works of esoteric thinker Rudolf Steiner.

He’s written for Salon, Out and many others—and is currently making a name for himself with a pro-sexuality, pro-spirituality message. After studying at the University of Massachusetts with evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, Conner left a career in academia and education to set sail on the high seas of adult entertainment—and also as an independent writer and lecturer. His candor and openness as a pro-sexuality advocate are matched by his eloquence as a speaker on the subject of experimental spirituality and magick. In short, he’s the Timothy Leary of gay porn—and the embodiment of Middle America’s worst nightmares.

It might be good, then, that Middle America doesn’t know he exists—yet.

Conner stopped by my Ultraculture podcast to have a chat about magick and the Western Esoteric Tradition—the tradition of scientifically-minded inquiry into the spiritual world which runs throughout Western history and has been represented by thinkers like Steiner, Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley and many, many others.

We had a great conversation not only about spirituality and “higher consciousness” but also about the nature of the self, interconnectedness, meditation, the Gaia Hypothesis and many other avenues of higher consciousness. It was a great chat, enlivened by Conner’s insistence on warmth and compassion.

(Conner is also about to offer an online course through Evolver, “How to Start a (Sexual) Revolution,” featuring guests Samuel Delaney, Duncan Trussell, Buck Angel and Tristan Taormino. Registration is discounted through June 7.)

Check out the podcast at Jason Louv’s Ultraculture!

 
For our readers in London—and there are quite a lot of you, so don’t fuck this one up (and tell all your friends)—next Tuesday at the Southbank Centre’s Hayworth Gallery, visionary artist Paul Laffoley will be giving one of his mind-bending lectures accompanied by a slide show of dozens and dozens of his elaborate paintings and drawings.

Let me state this clearly, London-based DM readers: Next Tuesday, you will have the rare opportunity to meet one of the most fascinating people alive on the planet today. I truly believe that you will be stunned, I repeat, stunned, by what you’ll see there that evening. Paul Laffoley’s a Sci-Fi Leonardo da Vinci, a Bodhisattva reborn as a mild-mannered Harvard-trained architect/artist/inventor.

In short, the man is a dazzling genius and I’m reasonably sure that you, London-based reader, yes, I am talking to YOU, here, don’t have anything better to do that evening. In fact, I know that you don’t.
 

 
From the Southbank Centre’s website:

An opportunity to hear artist Paul Laffoley, whose practice has been defined as ‘the conversion of mysticism into mechanics’.

Paul Laffoley works with texts and images to create new ways of thinking about time and space, dream and mysticism, magic and consciousness. He has also designed a time machine and a prayer gun.

His appearance, to celebrate the opening of The Alternative Guide to the Universe, is a unique chance to hear someone The New York Times recently hailed as ‘one of the most unusual creative minds of our time’.

You hear that? It’s not just me, it’s The New York Times, too… Miss this at your own later regret, truly. The lecture begins at 6:30.

The Alternative Guide to the Universe is curated by Ralph Rugoff and will be exhibited from June 11th to August 26th at Southbank Centre’s Hayworth Gallery.

There’s another major Laffoley exhibit going on at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. That show, Paul Laffoley: Premonitions of the Bauharoque, opened in April and will continue through September 15, 2013.
 

 
Below, an interview that I conducted with Paul Laffoley about his work in 1999 for British television:
 

 
Thank you Douglas Walla of Kent Fine Art in NYC

 
Slavoj Žižek might just be the world’s foremost intellectual prostitute, but it still feels novel to hear him riff on these bulwarks of relatively recent mass culture, not to mention relate “Gangnam Style” (“your first reaction is maybe, ‘fuck them stupid Koreans’”) to his beloved Jacques Lacan.

And who’d have thought he’d seen Kung Fu Panda five times!
 

 
Saul Bellow reads from his novel Henderson the Rain King (“What made me take this trip to Africa?”) before moving on to a question and answer session.

Coming after his breakthrough book The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson confounded critics, who generally gave the book middling praise—at worst being described it as a “failed experiment.” This may have influenced the decision not to award Henderson that year’s Pulitzer Prize, even though the selection committee had recommended it. Listening to the Q&A, it’s interesting to hear Bellow admit that the worst thing he faced as a writer was ‘doubt’ about not being able to finish a project. While the best was either ‘laughing or weeping yourself, and scribbling at that same time. When you’re turned on that way.’

What comes across in this short tape is Bellow’s humanism, diginity and great sense of humor.  When asked if he has ever seen any of his novels on the “bargain table,” Bellow replies:

I have seen my books on the bargain table, and I have been very pleased, because the bargain table is usually where I buy books myself.

He then goes onto say how he usually skips the As and the Bs altogether on the book store shelves, as it makes him uncomfortable—‘uncomfortable because I know I can’t correct the mistakes I know are there.’

If this inspires you, then check out Saul Bellow’s interview with The Paris Review.
 

 
This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. His newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It

The existing social and financial order is crumbling because it is unsustainable on multiple levels. The central state is not the Millennials’ friend, it is their oppressor.

No generation of young people is ever politicized by hunger in distant lands or issues of the elderly. It’s no rap on youth that self-interest defines what issues have the potential to radically transform their political consciousness; the transformative cause must reveal the system is broken for them and that it intends on sacrificing their generation to uphold the status quo.

The Millennial generation, also known as Gen-Y (Gen-Y comes after Gen-X), is generally defined as those born between 1982 and 2004.

The oldest Millennials were children during the first Iraq War in 1991 (Desert Storm) and just coming of age in 2001 (9/11 and the war in Afghanistan) and the start of the second Iraq War (2003).

The Millennials have entered adulthood in a era characterized by permanent low-intensity wars and central-bank/state managed financial bubbles—2001 to the present. In other words, the only experience they have is of centralized state mismanagement on a global scale.

The gross incompetence of the government and central bank—not to mention the endless power grabs by these centralized authorities—has not yet aroused a political consciousness that the system is irrevocably broken, not just for older generations but most especially for them.

Anecdotally, it appears the Millennial generation is still operating on the fantasy that all they need to do to get a secure, good-paying job and a happy life is go to college and enter the status quo machine of government/corporate America.

There are two fatal flaws in this fantasy: the $1+ trillion student loan industry and a transforming economy. The higher education industry in the U.S. operates as a central state-enabled and funded cartel, limiting supply while demand (based on the fantasy that a college degree has critical value) soars. This enables the cartel to keep raising prices even as the value of its product (a diploma) sinks to near-zero.
 

 
Since the Federal government issues and guarantees all student loans, the higher education cartel is (like sickcare, national defense and the mortgage industry) effectively socialized, i.e. funded and managed by the central state.
 

 
If you understand the student loan system is predatory, parasitic and exploitive, you have reached first base of a meaningful political awareness. If you understand the central state (Federal government) funds and enforces this system, you’ve reached second base. If you understand the vast majority of college degrees do little to prepare you to be productively employed in the real economy, you have reached third base.

If you understand the status quo is unsustainable and does not operate according the the fantasy model you’ve been told, congratulations, you’re close to home base.

I have covered all the salient issues repeatedly:

The Fatal Disease of the Status Quo: Diminishing Returns

The Nearly-Free University

The central state is not your friend, it is your oppressor. The loan shark that won’t let you discharge your student loan debt without appealing each ruling against you three times is the government (and its hired-gun proxies).

The oppressor who demands you work your entire life to pay interest on public debt squandered on neocolonial wars and various cartels (sickcare et al.) is your central state.

The entity who demands you pay higher taxes so the generation entering retirement gets all that it was promised, even though the world has changed and the promises are no longer sustainable? The central state.

The oppressor that will devote its enormous resources to investigate and crush you if you actively resist the bankers and financiers who pull the political lackeys’ strings? The central state.

At some point, the Millennial generation will have to awaken to the fact that the only way to change its fate is to grasp political power and redirect the policy and mindset of the nation. Centralization is the black hole that is destroying the nation’s social and economic vigor. Decentralization, transparency, accountability, adaptability, social innovation, a community-based economy—these are the key features of a sustainable social order.

The existing social and financial order is crumbling because it is unsustainable on multiple levels. The status quo will cling to its false promises and corrupt centers of power until the moment the whole thing implodes.

Related links of interest:

Dear Class of ‘13: You’ve been scammed: How the College-Industrial Complex drove tuition so high

My Generation’s Disease

Podcast with Mike Swanson of WallStreetWindow.com on student loan debt and the Nearly Free University: Charles Hugh Smith On the Forces of Centralization and Soaring Education Costs. I always enjoy discussing issues with Mike, a polymath with a wide range of interests and experiences.

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. His newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It
 

 

 
Pier Paolo Pasolini said his first films were inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the founder and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party.

To Pasolini, Gramsci was the ‘greatest Marxist theoretician in all Italy,’ who wanted popular art to be aimed at an “ideal people.”

But by the 1960s, this “ideal people” had been turned by capitalism into consumers—a culture of mass consumption, where works of art and politics had little or no value.

It was then that Pasolini instinctively rejected the idea of making films for mass consumption, and instead opted for a more personal and political film-making.

Based on Montaigne’s idea that ‘one does not really know a person until he has died,’ Philo Bregstein’s documentary Whoever Says The Truth Shall Die—A Film About Pier Paolo Pasolini offers a fascinating look at the life, artistic ambitions and political vision of the poet, writer and controversial film director.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Pier Paolo Pasolini: A rare interview on the set of ‘Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom’