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The Mind of the Terrorist - Jerrold Post

Started off well, with quite a bit of new information I did not know, but ended up doing the weary trail of the history of XYZ terrorist groups (well, a bit more than that.  I'll give him this much, with the PLO, ETA, the IRA, PKK, Tamil Tigers, Red Brigades, Red Army Faction, Shining Path, FARC, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and lesser well known religious terrorists all getting a chapter, he is comprehensive).  Could have been better by focusing on the statements of such organizations, their structure, personalities and group psychology.  History is fun and all, but if you're going to call your book what you called it, well...

Also, David Liss - The Whiskey Rebels

Blurb time.  "Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington's most valued spies, now lives in disgrace, haunting the taverns of Philadelphia. An accusation of treason has long since cost him his reputation and his beloved fiance, Cynthia Pearson, but at his most desperate moment he is recruited for an unlikely task - finding Cynthia's missing husband. To help her, Saunders must serve his old enemy, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who is engaged in a bitter power struggle with political rival Thomas Jefferson over the fragile young nation's first real financial institution: the Bank of the United States.

Meanwhile, Joan Maycott is a young woman married to another Revolutionary War veteran. With the new states unable to support their ex-soldiers, the Maycotts make a desperate gamble: trade the chance of future payment for the hope of a better life on the western Pennsylvania frontier. There, amid hardship and deprivation, they find unlikely friendship and a chance for prosperity with a new method of distilling whiskey. But on an isolated frontier, whiskey is more than a drink; it is currency and power, and the Maycotts' success attracts the brutal attention of men in Hamilton's orbit, men who threaten to destroy all Joan holds dear."

We probably should, yes.

In more important news, my archive of high wierdness is collected and just needs to be assembled into text.  At least now it is on my hard drive, so I can work offline.  With my parents back for the holidays, they'll start getting on their "if you leave the wireless on it will overheat and explode, showering the town in radioactive isotopes" bandwagon.  As if that is somehow undesirable.  Anyway.

Further explanation:

One of Foucault's favoured modes of the affirmation of non-identitarian freedom of potential being against the diagrammatic abduction is the practice of anonymity. If governmental rationalities operate through the nomination and specification of a positive identity through a series of constitutive exclusions, rarefactions and restrictions (Foucault 1981), then the practices of freedom are enabled by withholding the knowledge of oneself, resisting the injunction to a 'confessional' self-expression, declining the incitement to active participation in the governmentally sanctioned discourse. Anonymity may then serve 'to encourage freedom by increasing the scope of actions not susceptible to official observation, records and interpretation' (Hooke 1994, 298). Reversing the clichéd opposition between the impersonal and anonymous modern existence and the authentic project of self-discovery and self-fulfilment, let us venture that it is a certain  de-specification of oneself, a certain self-effacing impersonality that permits the practices of freedom that we have been discussing (see Heiner 2003; Robinson 2003; Huijer 1999). Foucault's own stance and writing style are marked by this elusion of identity, as the following famous passage illustrates:

What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and reform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. (Foucault 1989, 17)

This quest for anonymity, the unwillingness to be confined within even a 'self-chosen' identity, to be pinned down and constrained by what one allegedly is, is a strategy that need not be restricted to the domain of transgressive art or philosophical writing but can be generalised as a mode of 'nonpositive affirmation' of one's existence in the face of the diagrammatic subjection (see Foucault 1977c, 1987). To remain anonymous in the face of the diagram is to enact one's potentiality for being otherwise that is entirely heterogeneous to actually becoming someone else. Instead, a Foucauldian anonymity is closest to Agamben's notions of 'being-thus' or 'being-such', which have nothing to do with remaining in a positively determined mode of existence, but rather refer to the singularity of whatever being, which is irreducibly potential. It would certainly be a misunderstanding to read Agamben's affirmation of the 'irreparable' status of one's being-thus as an injunction to stick to a certain actual identity, to be thus and nothing other. Instead, in Agamben's formulation  the anaphora 'thus' 'no longer refers back to any meaning or any referent, [being an] absolute thus that does not presuppose anything but is completely exposed' (Agamben 1993b, 93). From the diagrammatic perspective, the anonymous subject is that, whose 'being-thus' literally can be anything, can be otherwise in relation to any identity due to the possibility of the infinite proliferation of homonyms that destroys
the ordering function of the name. Anonymity does not seek either to affirm any particular identitarian predicates against the diagram that attempts to efface them or to negate any of the predicates that the diagram attempts to install in the subject, but simply affirms itself as 'neither this nor that, neither thus nor thus, but thus, as it is, with all its predicates (all its predicates is not a predicate). [...] Such a being would be a pure, singular and yet perfectly whatever existence.' (Ibid. Emphasis original.)

Foucault has famously described the linkage between the passion for identity with governmental rationalities in his seminal analysis of the 'confessional technology' of subjectification. According to Foucault, the Christian practice of confession has been deployed in a secularised fashion at a variety of sites (most paradigmatically in psychoanalysis, but also in education, literature, intimate relations, etc.) as the primary 'technique of the self': 'Western man has become a confessing animal.' (Foucault 1990a, 59. See also Foucault 1988b, 1988d, 1988e; Bernauer 2005) What is crucial in this technology for our purposes is less the curious link it makes between sexual behaviour and the truth of one's being than the assumption it makes about this truth as residing within the depths of subjectivity, unbeknownst to the subject in question, always 'in hiding' and in need of extraction by hermeneutic experts. Thus, the path to the discovery and liberation of one's true self lies in active and voluntary participation in discourse, a verbal rendition of experience, which in itself is anticipated to liberate (cf. Giddens 1992).

The inhabitants of Foucault's limbo of non-identity are similarly unaware of their privation. Insofar as one renounces the interest in the authenticity of one's identity and the techniques of its actualisation, the promise of diagrammatic liberation begins to be received with a mild and somewhat uncomprehending amusement. Isn't the very discourse on identity, in all its varieties, beguilingly strange in its promise to deliver to the subject the truth of his individuality by subjecting him to the knowledge that is entirely alien to him or, conversely, tirelessly teaching him what he is presupposed to already know? Isn't there something ludicrous in the effort to extract the truth of being from the depths of subjective interiority by filling these very depths with a plethora of discursive constructions? Isn't the very notion of identity little more than an amusing artefact, which stops being amusing when one's entire existence becomes subjected to it, when it brands and penetrates one's very being?

Heather = SG?

Sorry, just wondering about the context here.  I'm nosy like that.

True, I just like making things easier for such people.

Anway, ideas for topics

Fortean happenings
Quantum mechanics
Strange and interesting people
Rants/writings on wierdness ("the coming weird times" etc)

Anything else?

Really stupid question...we do have the board/website URL somewhere on these, right?  I wasn't paying attention before.

I'm archving Intermittens at discoflux.com under the Books heading (don't have issue #2 fully posted yet). Comments can be made on each magazine page though, which might help spur discussions.

Yeah.  I just wanted to know that, on the off chance people liked it (as with when Manta printed some off) they would know where to go to get more, or, if we got really lucky, wanted to help.

True.  OK, I'll dig out some High Wierdness from the archives.  I've got plenty enough, thats for sure.

Adventure, Weirdness and 2012 will be a nice counterbalance to the last issue, I think, which was somewhat srs and negative.

I'm sold.

So, this is Intermittens #3 then. 

All of them?  I kinda just meant one...

Really stupid question...we do have the board/website URL somewhere on these, right?  I wasn't paying attention before.

Adventure, Weirdness and 2012 will be a nice counterbalance to the last issue, I think, which was somewhat srs and negative.

What are you considering as a theme?

/keyboard at the ready

Routledge are possibly the best book publishing company ever.  I think about half of my favourite non-fiction books have been published by them.

http://www.routledge.com/

/spambot

It occurs to me that someone should go back to that "wee" fellow and rub this in his face.

That and you have both a comma and a period after "Unauthorized reproduction encouraged."

grammatical consistency is for pansies.

Surely "grammatical consistency are for pansies"?

 

I like to think I was edging towards this sort of thinking in this earlier post:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=15054.0

Not anywhere near as complex, but nontheless, getting closer...