Hintergrund: Die Gedanken dürfen das Herz nicht verfinstern

Susann Witt-Stahl asks the AMM (Ben Watson, Andy Wilson, Keith Fisher) some questions on behalf of Hintergrund magazine, Feb 2012... (an English translation will be posted when it's done)

Go to Hintergrund >>

Derek Bailey: On the Edge

Programs in the Chanel 4 series, On the Edge, by Derek Bailey, about improvisation. Broadcast in 1992, On The Edge was a 4-part miniseries about improvisational music in all of its forms. Written by Bailey and based on his book 'Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music', the program admirably includes everything from traditional Korean music to French Catholic liturgical organ performance to downtown New York free jazz.

Letter from America

I was going to write you an essay on dreams, but I've been awfully restless lately. Reality has a way of insinuating itself round these parts like, for instance, Hubert Selby, or a brick wall.

So far as I can tell, the next big business booms are for bankers doubling as real estate agents, & prisons doubling as slave labour contractors.

The banks here now have more equity in houses than do human homeowners—nearly 29% of mortgages in the States are 'underwater', which is bankers' post-Katrina jargon for 'fucked but we own them'. The majority of the houses owned by banks, moreover, aren't listed for sale or rent: they're empty & mostly deteriorating, out of circulation as a means of artificially keeping housing prices from dropping.

The current estimate memeing about is that 1 in every 7 houses in America is empty, while 1 in every 402 Americans is homeless. The former figure is hard to confirm because of the 'shadow inventory' banks are allowed to keep (in Miami alone there are 30,000 properties on the market while over 200,000 are owned by banks, empty but not on the market, 'waiting it out'). The homeless figure is also nearly impossible to confirm, given the fact that it's counting people without an address, but we know for instance that around one million are in shelters, about two million have been evicted in the last five years, & nearly five million houses are at some stage of foreclosure. Add to that the fact that both the unemployment rate & the American population living in poverty hovers around 15%, plus the steadily eroding work opportunities, the decline in public assistance & affordable housing over the last 30 years, plus the pathetic value of minimum wage in this country¹, & you begin to wonder whether the figure of 1 in every 402 Americans homeless might not actually be way too optimistic.

As for always-reliable statistics, give or take a few 'disappearances', there's the incarceration rate in the States: as of 2009, 7,225,800 adults were under 'correctional supervision', which works out to 3.1% of the total population—the highest incarceration rate in the world. That's around 1 in every 31 adults². The poor are, as the sociologists say, overrepresented: more than half of the jail population consists of the homeless, the unemployed or people paid poverty wages. Non-whites get the brunt of the punishment: though whitey comprises nearly three-quarters of U.S. Americans, 70% of the prison population is non-white. &, while 1 in every 27 Latinos is behind bars compared to 1 in every 45 whites, by far the ethnicity hardest hit by the prison industry remains African American. As 12.6% of the U.S. population, they comprise almost 40% of incarcerated Americans. Nearly 1 in every 10 African Americans is under 'correctional control'—around three million people. To give some perspective, in 1860 there were 3.5 million enslaved African Americans living in the United States.

Oh I'm sorry, did I say slavery? Is it really fair to discuss contemporary incarceration in America using such inflammatory language? In a word, yes. Read the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the official outlawing of slavery eight months after the close of the Civil War: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction". Which meant forced labour could continue, & did, for anyone judged a criminal, from the chain gang jails of 'Reconstruction' to the for-profit prison corporations of today, with their lucrative contracts in manufacturing, construction, agriculture, & even customer service³. These human beings literally locked in to their jobs are deducted the cost of their own incarceration—to the tune of earning a whopping 17 cents per hour. A growth industry!⁴

Meanwhile, on the Outside Now, they've kept on using this term 'recession' for the last 5 years, as tho to tilt the axis of the chart slightly could keep from revealing the downward spiral. Let me ask you, Do you wake up every day feeling recessed? I rest my case.

As hard as the Pentagon lackey pundits push the Iranian agenda, shoving stock images of women in burkas up against the screen while stirringly debating whether to repeal a woman's right to contraception, the monitor goes quiet on the half dozen other fronts where America remains a mercenary charge in progress. Does your cable service provide that channel? I can't seem to find anything from inside the factories either, or jails, or on the streets below the counter. Instead there's an endless parade of pretty apple pies, eternally 20 or 30, whose liberated clothing & accessories require virgin sacrifice abroad.

Weirdly enough, war no longer means work for all—the contracts are all sealed up before the war's even declared. For the Things there's contracting firms which make no thing: Halliburton, for instance, in charge of tanks & rations tho Halliburton makes no weapons, vehicles or food products. That's the logic of the iPhone factory building safety nets for suicides: if the contractors are the true employees, there's no responsibility to provide for anyone so needy & so messy as labourers. Then for the Triggerfingers, there's mercenaries: Blackwater, for instance⁵. Cheeper than an army or the politics of conscription, because it avoids having to deal with that old pesky byproduct, veterans. Mercenaries you get thru contractors & 'consultants', so again, no embarrassing responsibility for any Abu Ghraibs or civilian collateral damage. The arms manufacturing is in constant production—$800 billion each year, domestic & abroad, with a current home supply of 5,113 nuclear warheads & counting. Then there's the military bases, well over 1000 worldwide, tho exact figures are notoriously slippery. Plus the costs of maintaining the FBI, CIA, secret service, Homeland Security; given such an indefinite 'recession', it's no surprise the Department of Defense has begun programs for high school students to build drone technology for free⁶.

Anyway, the taxes going to weapons budgets all end up as corporate profits—the real money made in war today is in oil & in water, because if you own those you don't even need to colonise. In Libya, the U.S. & U.K. got the oil contracts & France got the water; Gaddafi signed his own death warrant when he built the pipeline to freely distribute potable water to the region. France controls more than 40% of the global fresh-water market, & not only do they get to oversee (i.e. privatise) Libya's water after the war, they're also in charge of repairs to the pipeline after they destroy it.⁷

For the rest of us the conveyor belt keeps crank-crank-cranking along. The only production jobs left in America outside the clink are factory line affairs, from Walmart to McDonald's to Hollywood sequels & remakes, & as Taylor & Ford advised from the start, better education means less efficient workers for dumb, repetitive tasks. To keep the workers easily replaceable, the job must require the bare minimum of training, & our education system is more than happy to accommodate. No Child Left Behind: Test until they pass or drop out! The teachers & librarians keep coming up in the crosshairs whenever Congress cuts another budget—how dare these intellectuals get pensions or healthcare worthy of bureaucrats!

& speaking of healthcare, remember Obama's gift from God to the HMOs? Oddly enough, one-fifth of all American citizens still have no healthcare at all. That's 60 million people, not counting the illegal people of course. I'm one of those can't-get-sick Americans, incidentally, but I'm not too worried about it—because even among the Americans bankrupted by medical bills, 75% actually have health insurance. So I'd say my odds are probably better for survival without it!

Then again, with talk this loose I might end up NDAAleted off the face of the earth, where health care becomes an oxymoron. Isn't it better we should ignore such gauche & depressing conspiracy theory topics as military partnerships with prison corporations? I know, let's talk about something safe & entertaining, like radical poetry, or French philosophy, or airhockey! The best way to Escape from L.A. is not to wind up there in the first place, so if you want to avoid getting peeping tom'd by a bunch of crewcut security perverts, just eat this letter & forget I said anything.

America's wonderful. When are you coming?

xxxo,
~~~
SassQuatsch

ps Why haven't you heard of Fred Ho yet? Are we not Musical Marxists? Don't just Kill Ugly Radio—Boycott shitty media!

pps If you do actually come here, willingly or otherwise, remember;

• your well-worn copy of the Handbook to Practical Disaster Preparedness for the Family (2nd ed.)
• how to douche out the pepper spray, since even the cops have been macing themselves lately⁸
• a good pair of those They Live sunglasses
• HISTORY⁹, innit?

Notes

1. Federal law: $7.25 per hour; for employees receiving tips of more than $30 per month: $2.13 per hour.
2. Tho only 100,000 kids at any given time—1 poor bastard in every 843.
3. That's right: call centre operators. Prisoners. Credit card transactions. Remember all the racist media fuss about call centre jobs being farmed out to India? Where's that flag waving now?
4. For more on that, including a list of companies employing slave labour Made in the U.S.A., see this—a largely correct assessment, unfortunately marred by the same ridiculous masculinist bias of the website it's featured on. While there are approximately 9 times more men than women in incarceration in America, female prisoners are indeed subject to the same penal exploitation as men, as well as much higher rates of sexual assault from prison staff & a host of other injustices. See, for instance, this, which accurately describes women in American prisons forced to work at a pay rate of $10.63 per month. Incidentally, can anyone find out what percentage of products made in the U.S.A. are produced or assembled in prisons? Or how much prison labour accounts for GDP? Given the rise of the for-profit prison corporations, & their entry into public trading on the New York Stock Exchange, there must be some hard economic data charted over the last several years somewhere, no? Please email me if you find it…
5. Renamed first 'Xe Services', & now 'Academi'.
6. anyone remember the movie Toys, the room full of kids playing 'video games'?
7 They even bombed the factory that builds pipes to repair any damage, because, after all, who needs competition.
8. cf. afieryflyingroule.tumblr.com, particularly roule 21.
9. Ever since Rolling Stock, Howard Zinn & Franklin Rosemont bit the dust, & until Obama waterboards Julian Assange Falluja-Megaupload-style, there's Greenwald, Blum, Chomsky, Pilger, Zangana, Cockburn, AK Press, PM Press, Autonomedia, Penelope Rosemont, Charles H. Kerr, David Simon & ZNet (& aaaaarg, while it lasts...).

25 Minutes with Ape Shit

In May 2008, at Jim MacDougall's request, Ben Watson selected 25 minutes from Ape Shit's massive 9 CD discography (all recorded at Core Arts) for an LP to be split with Ceramic Hobs, the Mad Pride rascals from Blackpool (big in Latvia). There's a five second silence for Pete Shaughnessy, the charismatic founder of Mad Pride who flung himself under a train just before Christmas 2002, and finishes with the closing benediction "I Like You" delivered by Ape Shit (Jim MacDougall had leapt off the stage, plastic bag in hand) at the Mad Pride Bull & Gate show on 19-xi-2002.

25 Minutes with Ape Shit

Or download it from archive.org >>

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Marco Maurizi: Apes From Utopia

Being a reply to Ben Watson's polemics on animals, politics and philosophy.

Includes:

Echos of Regyptian Evolution
Zizek vs. Vegetarians
A punk intermezzo
"Animals ain't matter" (Union of Marxist Musicians)
Fragments of an unsent letter (1)
"Please" (Marco The Pelvis Maurizi)
Fragments of an unsent letter (2)
Kant vs. Vulgar Materialism
"Unwanted Papers" (Union of Marxist Musicians)
But Despair?
What exploited filipino workers do for a living
Coda

Union of Marxist Musicians:

Marco Maurizi, voice, guitar
Michele Dal Lago, guitar

Other music used (stolen, sorry guys!) in this recording:

Lendormin (drums, guitar, electronics)
THF Drenching (dictaphone)
Sonic Pleasure (bricks)
Luca Miti (piano)
Renato Ciunfrini (sax)

REGYPTIAN EVOLUTION

…

Voice: They’re all vegetarians

Slavoj Zizek: Degenerates! Degenerates! They’re turning to monkeys!

ANIMALS AIN’T MATTER
(Unions of Marxist Musicians)

Personnel:

Marco Maurizi, voice

Michele dal Lago, guitar

Animals ain't matter
that's why they really matter you know
and if you don't get this
sure you've got a long way to go

Mr. Bongo is a just put on
better get a real hard on
and if you can't get a fucker
go ahead with your Cosmic jargon

You talk of animality
your animals ain’t real
no violence no pain
or you would lose your cheap appeal

Animals ain't matter
that's why they really matter you know
and if you don't get this
sure you've got a long way to go

Don’t be a flower Punk baby
Doctor Reich took you too far back
so do yourself a favor
shake that fake monkey off your back

You love civilization
But not its discontents
you dream of running wild and
take your cloths off when you dance

Animals ain't matter
that's why they really matter you know
and if you don't get this
sure you've got a long way to go

You know dialectics is the real thing
but you can't get it right
so you've got your teenage-Marxism
to give you cheap thrills when you write

You’re craving for immediacy
It’s just a pass-partout
For making no connection
Each time you know you should

Animals ain't matter

that's why they really matter you know
and if you don't get this
sure you've got a long way to go

So get your lesson learned
and bring me back Karl Marx' brain
that's what Nietzsche wouldn't teach ya
'cause Marx was never insane

John Bellamy’s a wanker
His nature doesn’t jive
You better read Adorno
And yell that nature is alive!

So I’m ready
Ready ready Teddie ready Teddie
I’m ready ready Teddie ready Teddie
I’m ready ready ready Teddie
Ready Teddie to rock ‘n’ roll

Permanent Revolution in the Arab World

Poster for next University of Liverpool- Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS) meeting: 'Permanent Revolution in the Arab World', Tues 21st Feb, 5pm, meet in The Courtyard, LGOS.

Ben Watson: Zappa: Hegel, or, Not Again (Again)

Ben Watson at The Yellow Snow Festival, Larvik, 11-ii-2012

The Yellow Snow Festival has been going for three years, the brainchild of the Po-Jama People, Norway's Frank Zappa fan club. It takes place in Larvik, Norway, the birthplace of Thor Heyerdahl (rogue anthropologist) and Arne Nordheim (rogue composer). It welcomes in Frank Zappa fans for a weekend of music and beer-drinking, and takes place in a glitteringly new glass venue named Bolgen (it caught the sun and winked at me as I flew out courtesy Ryanair), a Kulturhus constructed at the foot of a fjord with breathtaking views of sea, snow and mountains. This is the text I read from the concert stage between sets by Bongo Fury, a Swedish power trio who negotiated the intricacies of 'Echidna's Arf (of You)' with jaw-dropping aplomb. Later on, we heard the Muffin Men demonstrate that Liverpool remains the font of true rock (they played 'I Am the Walrus', credited by Roddie Muffin — of course — to Gerry & the Pacemakers [how very droll - TGE]). Despite the 'language barrier', I got laughs and cheers and all-round encouragement during this lecture, quite a contrast to my last attempt to take Poodle Play to Cambridge University …

Preamble

The title of my lecture this afternoon is Zappa: Hegel, or, Not Again (Again). When the Po-Jama People contacted me about this talk in November last year, they asked me if I'd repeat my lecture from 2003 at the Kamp Theater in Bad Doberan at Zappanale #14. That one was called 'The Phenomenology of One Size Fits All: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Frank Zappa'. Now, according to Heraclitus, the first dialectical thinker in the Western tradition, repetition is strictly impossible: no man steps into the same river twice. That is why James Joyce began Finnegans Wake with the word "riverrun"; and why in Frank Zappa's oeuvre repetition signifies claustrophobia, repression and death. In Ruben & the Jets, the harmonic restrictions and rhythmic repetitions of 50s pop music culminate in 'Stuff Up the Cracks', a song of teenage suicide: "Stuff up the cracks, turn on the gas / I'm going to take my life". In Zoot Allures, corporate pop strategies culminate in 'Disco Boy', a portrait of a victim of the culture industry (disco department). Despite punters who think a 'real' rock show should sound just like the album, repetition never successfully recreates the living totality of something. Rather, repetition locks the present in a prison-cell derived from the past. Real life — in contrast — is contingent, accident-prone and improvised. So it would be completely wrong to repeat my lecture from 2003 here at the Yellow Snow Festival! We've all changed, what we've said to each other in the intervening years has changed us, nothing remains the same.

Let it Grow

However, I've not stopped thinking about either Hegel or Zappa, so I suppose I could update my talk from 2003, maybe let it grow a bit: "The vines streak upward, large grotesque pods grow under the leaves and flop off on the ground near the big switches and into the canyon." That was the final sentence of Zappa's science-fiction story in the booklet accompanying Uncle Meat (1969), by the way. After I'd delivered my lecture on One Size Fits All at Zappanale #14, Errol Slick — drummer with the Paul Green School of Rock and descendent of West Coast rock royalty — came up to me and said, He'd got what I was saying about the moment in 'Andy' at 3:17 when the tectonic plates of the counter-rhythms slip and you stare into an infinite abyss of rattling bones, ourselves viewed as we now view the dinosaurs, but no-one else in the class had. So, since my original talk wasn't perhaps so easy to understand back then, maybe I should summarise it for you: a whizz version, like playing Elvis Presley's 'Heartbreak Hotel' at 78rpm.

The reason I'd originally decided to talk about Hegel at Zappanale #14 in the first place was this: in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807, § 486) Hegel says that Enlightenment upsets Religion by bringing into the "the household of Faith" the "tools and utensils of this world". Suddenly I understood Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa and their dadaistic play with vacuum cleaners and vegetables and other household objects — not to mention the cosmic floating sofa on the cover of One Size Fits All. I mean, I'd always liked these 'bizarre' aspects of Beefheart and Zappa, and found them funny and somehow 'correct'. Now I knew why: by using household items to destroy the otherworldly romanticism of commercial pop, they were staging their own budget Enlightenment!

But this Freak Enlightenment has a dialectic, it's arrived at through invention, spontaneity and play. It's not the imposition of a single law, of a rationality emanating from a single source, like light from the sun or a Gold Standard for national currencies. It doesn't destroy the fun, or reduce variety to a monotone. Quite the opposite, in fact. For commercial reasons, Zappa ended up centering his production on himself, using his own face and moustache as a logo. Nevertheless, his oeuvre is a mesh of other people, dehusked from inhibition by the zappological process, thrown into extreme states, whisked into unheard omelettes. Of all these dehusked people the most crucial was Captain Beefheart. As teenagers, Beefheart and Zappa listened to black R&B together. They decided R&B was a blueprint, a plan, a manifesto for total social transformation: a merging of life and art so vital and compulsive, it made the claims of the high-art avantgarde to "supersede the gap between life and art" look pale and unreal. Beefheart and Zappa emerged from a common experience, a common response to R&B, but the beauty of their relationship was based on a knowing antagonism. They competed with each other and in the early 70s dissed each other in interviews, but they were working out two poles of a single dialectic.

Zappa loved to shock music-press interviewers by talking about his devotion to 'duty' and 'work', taboo concepts for the flower-power mindset. Beefheart argued the opposite. His creative impulse sprang from 'play', not work. Beefheart and Zappa disagreed about work and play, love and marketing, time and song-length — everything. On Unconditionally Guaranteed in 1972, Beefheart sang:

She said, Baby, how long is your song?
I said, Baby, as long as you want it to be

On Overnite Sensation in 1973, as if replying, Ricky Lancelotti sang:

I have take your time
I have sung you my song
Ain't no great revelation
But it wasn't too long

Lancelotti opens 'Fifty-Fifty' with:

Ain't gonna sing you no love song

whereas Beefheart's track was actually named 'Happy Love Song'.

Having bad-mouthed each other in the music press throughout 1974, a sound commercial ploy for attracting attention, Beefheart and Zappa went on tour together and cut an album: Bongo Fury, which Vaclav Havel told Zappa was his "favourite". Havel's enthusiasm contrasts with Bongo Fury's reception in America and England: Rolling Stone and New Musical Express panned it. It wasn't as good as Trout Mask Replica, the pair had run out of steam, the record was boring and self-indulgent. Actually, the opposing personalities of Beefheart and Zappa created a vortex: Bongo Fury is a lesson in the dialectical unity of opposites. Captain Beefheart's beat-poet sincerity and abjection run in the opposite direction to Zappa's control-freak cartoonery. This crash-course of opposites also occurs on the LP cover. At first, the cover image looks quite straightforward, especially in comparison to the elaborate artwork Cal Schenkel concocted for One Size Fits All. Bongo Fury's cover shows a snapshot of Zappa and Beefheart in a sordid diner, evoking the sorry picture of America outlined in '200 Years Old'. But look again.

In 2010, Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag in Berlin published a massive book by Frank Wonneberg called Grand Zappa: Internationale Frank Zappa Discology. It's a work of adoration, scholarship and fan-obsession bordering on madness. Here you will find photographs of the covers and inner labels and vinyl grooves of every Frank Zappa LP release on the terrestrial globe: the Argentinian Hot Rats, the Israeli Sleep Dirt, the Czechoslovakian Broadway the Hard Way. Wonneberg is a designer, so the book is a tour-de-force of data presentation. On top of that, he writes fascinating notes on the albums because he looks them as 'designed objects' rather than emanations of some presumed 'Zappa' in the sky. The information Wonneberg supplies about Bongo Fury is especially pertinent.

In the German release of Bongo Fury, the cover photo wasn't cropped quite so closely along the upper edge as it was in other countries. We can therefore read some words printed on a mirror on the wall of the diner: "chocolate sundae". But they are reversed, in 'mirror', what Wonneberg calls "spiegelbildlich verwendet". The cover used a reverse-print of the photographic negative - what we call a 'flip horizontal' in image processing. I showed a copy of Bongo Fury to Simon Prentis, who visited Zappa regularly in his last ten years. "Anything strange about this photo?" I asked. He stared at it. "Is the photo reversed?" he asked, "Frank's face doesn't look quite right".


If the photo hadn't been reversed, Befheart would have been on the left and Zappa on the right. He would have been the 'first' figure you looked at, assuming you read a picture like Latin alphabetic text, left to write. So it's as if Zappa had the transparency reversed in order to place himself before his rival. If you look at the cover of We're Only In It for the Money, you'll see that when re-enacting the innerfold band photograph of Sgnt. Pepper, Zappa placed himself far left. This means he's not actually on the cover, he's on the back. Since Jimmy Carl Black was the only Mother with a 'Zappa moustache' on the cover which faces you in a record shop, many new fans assumed he was Zappa. But when it comes to listing the Mothers in the sleeve notes ('left to right'), Zappa's position on the far left means he's listed first.

On the cover of Bongo Fury, switching left and right means Zappa, right-handed, is holding his ice cream in his left hand whereas Beefheart, who had been holding his drink in his left hand, is now holding it with his right. Beefheart's face is hidden beneath his hat brim, and he casts a shadow on the wall; Zappa is staring straight at the camera. Zappa is the sun, Beefheart is the moon. A purely single-source, solar Enlightenment is not enough; the Dialectic of Enlightenment requires reflected light, a moon. Once you see that the negative transparency was reversed, you twirl the photo around a central axis in your mind; the pair are now whirled together, dark and light in a single vortex. This is how their opposite yet complimentary arts should be conceived. The real world as a confabulation of direct and reflected light, which it is. (We're not dualists, though. Even though we don't think direct light can be understood except through its reflection off non-illuming bodies, we don't see "darkness" as a principle.)

So, to Hegel, who more than anyone in the western tradition took seriously the dark/light lore of Oriental philosophy. Any more news from him? Well, yes. My worthy constituent, Kjeld-Willy from the Po-Jama People, declares that he prefers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Hegel. Well, I haven't come this far North to dismiss the amazing contribution Northern Individualism has made to world philosophy, and how its insistence on interior truth begs all kinds of questions about a false religion, society or totality, howsoever you care to name the big drool of bothersome bonkers boredom which Zappa fans have to deal with every day comin' at them down the mas-media chute, or at least on the days we don't spend at the Zappanale or here at the Yellow Snow Festival.

But, pace such pertinent Protestant individualism, Frank Zappa — and James Joyce before him — are fundamentally Catholic artists, recognising reality as social before it is individual; but they are also rebel Catholics, in other words they established new churches, towering edifices of technocratic artstuff from which to view the clash of ignorant armies in the easy valleys of preconception. After all, the Catholic/Protestant difference on society and individual is really just a matter of emphasis, articulating contradictions in the capitalist order, which is proved by the fact that they have become competing explanations of identical societies. Hegel, on the other hand, is neither Catholic or Protestant, Christian or Buddhist: his recovery of the dialectic allows him to explain stuff, even to Zappa fans.

Near the beginning of the shorter Logic Hegel wrote in 1830 as an introduction to his Encyclopedia (§12), Hegel says "thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately before us". I am currently embroiled in a debate with Zappologist and guitarist Marco Maurizi. The ostensible debate is about animals and Marxism, but one bone of contention is that I like to quote something Marco said ages ago: "Modern art is the interruption of mediation by immediacy". Unfortunately, Marco's now elevated himself above such crudeness and calls me a "vulgar materialist" for reminding him of his statement. I liked Marco's earlier work, his contribution to Academy Zappa and his I Was a Teenage Critical Theorist, a treatment of mass-culture 'trash': The X-Files; Go Nagai's animations for children's TV (Mazinger Z, Grendizer and Devilman); the Zombie films of George Romero; and Frank Zappa's music. Marco appears to have moved on from Zappology to Adornoism, seeking to spin an animal liberation politics out of the fine strands of Dialectic of Enlightenment. He's now a 'political animal': "Please read this," he said, responding to an attempt at dialogue by emailing me an academic paper, "It is my personal contribution to a proper (i.e. political) understanding of the ‘animal’ question." I remain unmoved by either 'proper politics' or the politics of property. Why? I'm a trash hound!

Why am I a trash hound? Because the 'thinking' Hegel called for has been fully absorbed into an institutionalised racket where its one requirement is not truth or scholarship or logic, but remaining incomprehensible to non-professionals. For this obfuscation, the wackier your politics the better: Marco's 'animal liberation + Frankfurt School' is perfect. With Zappa, I encounter dialectical statements anyone can understand: not by 'dumbing down' philosophical concepts, but by rending the very materials of mass culture, so that they speak awkward and scandalous truths. Mass media have ensured that we live in a tissue of mediations: it's the duty of a properly political art — oh fuck that, I mean any decent response! — to tear into this tissue, and give us a sober view of ourselves and our relations to our kind. When Hegel talks of denying what is immediately in front of us, he was talking of a relatively unmediated world of tables and chairs and carts and horses, in which the arrival of a newspaper was perhaps a wonderful thing. Now, we are forced to live in a newspaper world, moulded by ideological experts. You can't lift a carrot and sniff it to see if it's worth eating, you must read the packaging's claims about organic and ethical farming, learn about some celebrity's decision to 'create' a range of pickled onions. Visit a supermarket, and your head reels: as Captain Beefheart used to say, You've had too much to think.

Zappa fights back the thought police by making us look at what's immediately in front of us. "Where do you get all the great ideas for his songs?" asked an especially inane TV interviewer. "From the autocue, where you get them," Zappa replied, answering her question by exposing what was immediately in front of them. Zappa's 'bizarre' song titles do not drop down from some groovy surreal heaven, they stem by noticing what's immediately in front of us: 'Crush All Boxes', 'While You Were Out', 'Poofters Froth, Wyoming' - these signs were all out there in the mundane world. We only realised how bizarre and suggestive they were after Zappa cut these phrases out of everyday reality and framed them in pop songs.

Real thinking does not occur in the smooth gear-changes of academic philosophy, Marco, which rehearses a known vocabulary in order to remove the bumps and warts which bespot the rugged classics. Real thinking is like a Zappa tune, and plummets you into unexpected zones, ruins your cool, shrivels your professionalism, powders your pre-prepared responses into dust. A Zappa tune is thinking, but thinking with the whole body rather than with the specialised 0.05% they call the 'conscious mind' and which sorts and reorders concepts like checkers on a board.

Conclusion

In conclusion I'm going to say a few words about two sons of Larvik, and why they make it most appropriate to hold a Frank Zappa Festival here: Thor Heyerdahl and Arne Nordheim. Two originals! Heyerdahl's trip across the Pacific in the Kon-Tiki made him world famous, but I want to talk about another incident. Ever keen to practically demonstrate a possibility, Heyerdahl built a reed boat called the Tigris to demonstrate that trade and the migration of peoples could have linked Ancient Mesopotamia with the Indus Valley Civilization in what is now modern-day Pakistan. It was built in Iraq at the end of 1977, named after the Tigris River and sailed with its international crew through the Persian Gulf. In April 1978, the boat was still sea-worthy, yet Heyerdahl burnt it in Djibouti. The reason? To protest the wars raging on every side of the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. He explained his reasons in an Open Letter to the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim

Today we burn our proud ship... to protest against inhuman elements in the world of 1978... Now we are forced to stop at the entrance to the Red Sea. Surrounded by military airplanes and warships from the world's most civilized and developed nations, we have been denied permission by friendly governments, for reasons of security, to land anywhere, but in the tiny, and still neutral, Republic of Djibouti. Elsewhere around us, brothers and neighbors are engaged in homicide with means made available to them by those who lead humanity on our joint road into the third millennium. To the innocent masses in all industrialized countries, we direct our appeal. We must wake up to the insane reality of our time.... We are all irresponsible, unless we demand from the responsible decision makers that modern armaments must no longer be made available.

Thor Heyerdahl's theories have not always been acceptable in anthropology, but his basic premise - that civilization is created by trade and migration and the mixing of peoples - was progressive. And it was shared by Zappa. When the Chieftains and the Tuvan throat singers were playing together in Zappa's basement towards the end of his life, Paddy Moloney wondered how it could be that a Tuvan melody was identical to an old Irish jig. "Sailors!" whispered Zappa and everyone laughed. But this is a genuine cultural politics, and it works against the petty nationalisms stoked by the imperial powers and their arms sellers. If you took a trip along the Mediterranean coast, you'd find the folk music you hear in port bars and the way people live their lives is a continuum. The national and religious 'divisions' mean little. I don't need to be saying this in Larvik, of course, since Norway has a long maritime history.

Like Heyerdahl, Arne Nordheim was a fearless and independent thinker and his music - bright, flowing and beautiful - had a big influence on Zappa in the Roxy and Elsewhere period. They met in Denmark and became friends, and Zappa always visited him on his Norwegian tours. Nordheim's internationalist politics would have appealed to Zappa too. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lilhammer, Nordheim proposed a vast concerto mondiale for musicians on each of the Olympic continents linked by satellite relays. "For a time," he said, "the world would have stopped hating and killing, to make and listen to music". That's Zappa: music as a force for good in the world. I think I'll stop there.

Post-note 15-ii-2012

Talk to a Frank Zappa Festival audience while the beer is flowing, and you'll garner passionate but maybe incomplete responses. One member of the audience came up to me afterwards, outraged I'd talked about Heyerdahl: Didn't I know he ended up in Siberia looking for Woden, the guy was out of his mind? You're at a Zappa Festival and being out of your mind is a bad thing?? On reflection, I think the outrage was probably because Heyerdahl's Nordic madness was being understood as a premonition of Breivik's massacre (I got a similar response in Hamburg when I declared myself a follower of Asger Jorn: his theories of the Nordic condemn him as a Nazi, apparently). But that is precisely where the AMM stands: if all questioning of liberal logic (following Pashukanis, we see liberal logic as commodity-based) is dismissed as fascist, that's because the very idea of workers' revolution has been unthought, reforgotten, cancelled. We are for a brave and unblinking look at our 'mad' impulses and desires; a Left for once not outrun by religious, commercial or fascist myths and propaganda. You with us? Then join us!!

Adorno: Untruth for the Untrue

Apropos of Unkant: "Dialectics that is no longer 'affixed' to identity either provokes the criticism that it is baseless... or else that it is giddy-making. Behind the anxiety about where to take hold of a philosophy there lies for the most part nothing more than aggression, the desire to seize hold of it in the way in which historically schools used to devour one another. The equivalent of guilt and penance has been transposed to the sequence of thoughts. It is precisely this assimilation of mind to the ruling principle that philosophical reflection must see through. Traditional thought and the habits of common-sense thinking that it left behind it after its demise as philosophy call for a frame of reference in which everything has its place. Not too much importance is attached to the intelligibility of the frame of reference - it can even be formulated in dogmatic axioms - as long as it gives shelter to ever reflection while barring the way to every unframed thought. A dialectics that has discarded its fixation with Hegel can satisfy us only if it abandons itself heedlessly to the objects a fonds perdu; the vertigo that this induces is an index veri. What is so giddy-making is the shock of the open, the negativity as which it necessarily appears in the framed and never-changing realm: untruth for the untrue." 

Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics #19

Scott Thompson: From Rausch to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's On Hashish and the Aesthetic Dimensions of Prohibitionist Realism

From 'Rausch'* to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's On Hashish and the Aesthetic Dimensions of Prohibitionist Realism

An introductory essay by Scott J. Thompson

[This essay was originally posted by the Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate,  and is reproduced here without permission [note to Scott Thompson - the contact email address you provide on the site doesn't work]



"The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk"
----G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

The following essay on Walter Benjamin's writings and experimental protocols on hashish, opium and mescaline forms a kind of preamble to a series of articles on some of the aesthetic presuppositions of the War on Drugs in the United States and one of its precursors, Hitler's War on Drugs:

Rauschgiftbekämpfung [The Fight Against Drugs] in the Third Reich, itself a long-forgotten importation of American Prohibition wedded to Nazi racial hygiene and a police state apparatus ever-ready to invoke the 'wholesome popular sentiment' expressed in the National Socialist-realist aesthetic to legitimize and enforce the performance principle of German fascism.

Introduction: Realism's Abhorrence of 'Rausch': Thomas Mann and Georg Lukács

Writing to his friend Ida Herz on March 21, 1954, one of 20th century Germany's great men of letters, Thomas Mann, pronounced the following judgment on The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, an erstwhile acquaintance to whom he had once referred as "one of the finest flowerings of Western intellectualism, especially in his essays."¹

DEAR IDA,
Thank you very much for THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, though the book does not excite me with the enthusiasm which it has you. It presents the latest, and, I might add, most audacious form of Huxley's escapism, which I could never appreciate in this author. Mysticism as a means to that escapism was, nonetheless, reasonably honorable. But that he now has arrived at drugs I find rather scandalous. I already have a bad conscience as it is, since I take a bit of Seconal or Phanodorn at night in order to sleep better. But to put myself in such a state during the day, where everything human becomes a matter of indifference to me and I lapse into conscienceless aesthetic self-indulgence would be loathsome to me. But this is what he recommends to everyone in the world, because their lot in life is said to be "at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous." What a use of 'best' and 'worst'! His mystics should have taught him that 'suffering is the fleetest of the beasts leading to perfection' ---which one cannot say of doping; and the reverie found in a chair as a miracle of existence and in sundry captivating delusions of color has more to do with monotony than he thinks.

The Hamburg doctor Frederking has warned that the excited state of mescaline-rausch, psychotherapeutically speaking, is only suitable for very experienced individuals. (And Huxley is not such a person, but rather a dilettante.) The suggested treatment would have to be strict and restricted. Nor could it in any way be predicted that the outcome of a mescaline-experiment would be at all worthwhile. . . .
Now, encouraged by the persuasive recommendation of the famous author, many English and American youth (especially) will try the experiment. The book comes to a rather abrupt end. But it is a thoroughly --- I don't want to say immoral --- but one must say an irresponsible book, which can only contribute to the stupefaction of the world and to its instability in meeting the extremely serious questions of the time with intelligence....[trans. --SJT]²

While reading Huxley's book the previous week, Mann had written in his diary: "Occupied with Huxley's mescaline glorifications. I don't like it and I don't like him."³ Twelve days later Mann was still disparaging Huxley in a letter to an acquaintance who had sent him a journal featuring an article on mind-altering substances.

It [Huxley's book] is an aesthetic praise of the mescaline-rausch. It struck me as somewhat dubious, not least of all as an encouragement to the youth of America to engage in 'doping,' which they do not at all need. Otherwise I must confess that the expression of the aforesaid test subject is rather ridiculous. Earlier I once wrote about 'occult episodes' and certified that in such matters I stood rather far to the 'left', though apart from those sessions with Schrenk-Notzing, I have no personal experience with these things. [trans. --SJT ]⁴

Mann's friend, the Hungarian Marxist literary critic and social theorist Georg (György) Lukács (on whom Mann based the character 'Naphta' in The Magic Mountain ), along with some of his epigones, reiterated their socialist realist disapproval of altered reality during a conversation recorded in 1967, in which Huxley was criticized for creating "a mythology of salvation of a purely subjective kind, a salvation forced and mediated by narcotics," the employment of which were merely "magical forms of orgiastic ecstasy for the solution of modern human problems." "[A]ngry young people of the left" attending the "convulsive phenomena of the Beatles performances" were then encouraged to give up "abstruse utopia" in favor of a struggle for socialism "without realism being abandoned."⁵


The photo frontispiece accompanying the German edition of Gespräche mit Lukács [Conversations with Lukács] shows the grinning commissar and his apparatchiks seated around a table covered with ashtrays full of cigarettes, demitasses of espresso, liqueur and wine glasses: the officially sanctioned Genussmittell [stimulants, luxury foods] of the realist aesthetician.

When Mann and Lukács criticized Huxley for "glorifying" his mescaline experiences to the world, they were sincerely convinced that their positions represented Reason and the responsibility of intellectuals in the face of neo-fascist mind-control and late capitalist chemical escapism, or 'doping' as Mann put it. What they failed to acknowledge was that they were repeating some of the same rhetoric and logic of the propaganda machine which had functioned quite well under the very Nazis whose irrationality Mann and Lukács were taking their rationalist stance against.

Called "Rauschgiftbekaempfung," The Combatting of Drugs, the term also acquired a more popular meaning closer to 'War on Dope.'⁶ This extremely cruel and often arbitrary prohibitionist campaign of National Socialist racial hygiene can be viewed as a precursor to the U.S. War on Drugs, which is itself busily mobilizing the entire police state to root out the demonized forces of foreign 'narco-terrorism' threatening the performance principle of Late Capital's global sweat shop.

Mann and Lukács, whose undeniably weighty contributions to 20th century world literature and social theory continue to exert a powerful influence within the academic circles of the humanities and the social sciences (whether directly or through the indirect channels of the Frankfurt School), express an attitude toward the subjective experience of the 'irrational' based on the aesthetic biases of bourgeois realism so indicative of the burgher class.

Antecedents of their anti-inebriant prejudices can be located in the aesthetic debates on other kinds of visionary experience that threatened bourgeois realism, namely expressionism and surrealism, particularly those interchanges between Lukács, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch (who himself was once a 'proband' in a Weimar-period hashish experiment).⁷ These literary parries and counter-thrusts during the era of Stalin and Hitler coincided with the Nazi's immensely popular exhibit of "Degenerate Art," [Entartete Kunst]⁸ which sealed the fate for modernist artists and writers in the Third Reich. For Hitler and his 'Reich Plenipotentiaries for Artistic Formulation' the modernist aesthetic expressed "the sickly excrescences of lunatics or degenerate people, which since the turn of the century we have learned to know under the collective conception of cubism or dadaism".⁹ Lukács similarly dismissed the writings of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, William Faulkner and others as a 'flight into psychopathology' indicative of what he considered decadent bourgeois culture and the inability of the 'Subject' in such a culture to coherently grasp its socio-economic 'totality' and reflect it in the artwork.¹⁰

The socialist realist critic Lukács and the 'critical realist' novelist Thomas Mann, whose writings Lukács championed, represent that "grandeur in repose" of neoclassicism, so predictably horrified by displays of passion. Visionary inebriants evidently threatened their "masks of composure."

Walter Benjamin & 'Profane Illumination'

The writings on hashish, opium and mescaline by critic, philosopher and aesthetician Walter Benjamin provide an antidote to the cognitive straightjacket placed on aesthetic experience by Lukács. On the other hand, Benjamin considered his visionary experiments as a utopian prelude to a worldwide messianic upheaval.

Now widely regarded as one of the leading and most philosophical of literary critics and aestheticians in the 20th Century, Walter Benjamin studied philosophy in Freiburg, Munich, Berlin and Bern. Earning a degree with his Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1919), he was unsuccessful in his attempt to become a university professor. His Habilitationsschrift, On the Origins of the German Trauerspiel (published in 1928), was rejected by Frankfurt University only to become a canonized classic of 20th Century literary criticism.

Benjamin made his living as a free-lance author and translator in Berlin, where he also took part in progressive German psychopharmacological research with experimental psychopathologists Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel. A prolific critic, he was forced into exile by the Nazis in 1933. Emigrating to France, he became a member of the Institute of Social Research (which included Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, Friedrich Pollack, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Karl Wittvogel and others). Benjamin made an attempt to join the Institute when it emigrated from Paris to New York. In flight from the Gestapo he took his own life with an overdose of morphine in the Spanish border-town of Port Bou on September 27,1940. Some of his most important publications include: "Goethe's Elective Affinities,"One-way Street, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Berlin Childhood around 1900 and the monumental Paris Arcades Project, just published in English translation by Harvard University.

It was precisely to jar the post-industrial self loose from its de-humanized and well-adjusted mask that Walter Benjamin advocated rescuing the energies of the cosmic-rausch of the ancient world for the proletarian revolution. While Benjamin's concept of "Profane Illumination" [ProfaneErleuchtung] stands in marked contrast to Huxley's semi-theosophical "Mind-at-Large," there are indeed some striking similarities in their observations while under the influence of psychopharmaka.

Had Benjamin been successful in his flight to the U.S, it is quite likely that he would have joined writer-actress Salka Viertel's salon in Los Angeles along with his associates Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno. There he would have also come into contact with Thomas Mann (who was consulting Adorno on musical questions related to Doctor Faustus ) and Aldous Huxley, to whom he could have communicated his own mescaline experiment on May 22, 1934¹¹ --almost two decades before Huxley's own mescaline experience. To add the finishing touch to the intricate irony, he would have discovered, had he not already known, that Salka Viertel's personal physician in Berlin had been none other than Dr. Ernst Joel, the psychopathologist who had initiated Benjamin into the world of hashish on December 18, 1927.¹²

If one compares Huxley's comments on the folds in draperies depicted in classical western artworks ("draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being") with Benjamin's comments on the delicate dance of fringe hanging from an awning ("Hashish in Marseilles") or "the ornamental" in his Crocknotizen [Crock Notes],¹³one discovers enough similarity and correspondence to make for an interesting and constructive dialogue.

"Es ist höchst eigentümlich, daß die Phantasie dem Raucher Objekte - und zumal besonders kleine - gern serienweise vorstellt. Die endlosen Reihen, in denen da vor ihm immer wieder die gleichen Utensilien, Tierchen oder Pflanzenformen auftauchen, stellen gewissermaßen ungestalte, kaum geformte Entwürfe eines primitiven Ornaments dar."
Trans.: "It is highly characteristic of the reverie that it tends to present before the smoker [i.e. opium-smoker] objects - particularly small ones - in series. The endless successions, in which the same contrivances, little animals or plant forms suddenly surface in front of the person over and over again, depict, so to speak, misshapen, barely formed sketches of a primitive ornament."¹⁴

The Concept of 'Experience'


Both Huxley and Benjamin were attempting to recover a concept of experience which had become entirely alien to the neoclassicist thinkers of the Enlightenment. Benjamin's early treatise "On the Program of the Coming Philosophy" (1917/1918)¹⁵ was an attempt to rework the concept of experience from within the Kantian system. While praising Kant for his insistence that knowledge justify itself in the quest for certainty and lasting knowledge within an ephemeral world, Benjamin called the reality of Newtonian physics upon which Kant based his certainty "a low, perhaps the lowest order." Benjamin perceived the metaphysical and religious presuppositions underlying the moral imperative to justify knowledge, but as a metaphysics he considered the Kantian "mythology" of a "pure epistemological (transcendental) consciousness" "different in kind from any empirical consciousness" to be "only a modern one, and religiously speaking, a particularly infertile one." In contrast to the caffeinated clockwork-metaphysics of nascent Protestant capitalism, Benjamin sought "the intoxication of cosmic experience."¹⁶ Experience in the truest philosophical conception of the word, according to Benjamin, would have to account for other mythologies as well, and those he names betray his reading of Ludwig Klages.¹⁷

We know of primitive peoples of the so-called preanimistic stage who identify themselves with sacred animals and plants and name themselves after them; we know of insane people who likewise identify themselves in part with objects of their perception, which are thus no longer objecta, "placed before" them; we know of sick people who relate the sensations of their bodies not to themselves but rather to other creatures, and clairvoyants who at least claim to be able to feel the sensations of others as their own. The commonly shared notion of sensuous (and intellectual) knowledge in our epoch, as well as in the Kantian and the pre-Kantian epochs, is very much a mythology like those mentioned.¹⁸

Joël's Critique of Psychopharmacology



Benjamin's critique of the Kantian concept of experience found its parallel in Dr. Ernst Joel's critique of Kraepelinian psychopharmacology. Emil Kraepelin (1855-1926), father of modern psychopharmacology and "discoverer" of "dementia praecox" (later called "schizophrenia" by Jung's teacher, Bleuler) had advanced the technical capabilities of psychology by treating it as a physical science. Rather than treating a human personality, the Kraepelinian method artificially severed partial functions of psychic life, altered them with psychopharmaka and subjected them to testing. A cursory scan of German monographs on mescaline written during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich reveals this method in a great number of monograph titles, e.g., "Meskalinwirkung auf das Phantomglied" (Mescaline-effect upon the phantom limb) or "Meskalinwirkung bei Stoerungen des optischen Systems" (Mescaline-effect in disturbances of the optic system).¹⁹ It is not at all surprising that such titles predominate the research during the Third Reich, for the humanity lacking in the Kraepelinian paradigm was easily steered in the direction of mind-control and chemical-biological warfare. Under the Nazis mescaline research continued, but laboratories like the Dachau concentration camp were the preferred setting. Humanistic and therapeutic research with psychopharmaka was forbidden under the pretext of "Rauschgiftbekaempfung,"a component of the racist ideology which perceived a threat to the "performance principle" in the exotic inebriants coming into Germany from the "racially inferior" peoples of Asia and Latin America (the introduction to Reko's Magische Gifte written in 1938 spells it out quite clearly).²⁰

Ernst Joel proposed the alternative of "experimental psychopathology." Substances which were thought to be "psychotomimetic" would be used to arbitrarily engender "rausch-states" in specially selected test subjects outside the clinical laboratory setting. It was under this very loose "supervision" that Walter Benjamin agreed to participate as a "Versuchsperson" [test subject or proband] in Ernst Joel and Fritz Fraenkel's hashish experiments in Berlin, for as Theodor W. Adorno described it, it was Benjamin's philosophical intention "to render accessible by rational means that range of experience that announces itself in schizophrenia."²¹

Psychopathology in the Weimar Republic



Of the hundreds of books, articles, essays, monographs and dissertations on Benjamin (over 3000 exist), only a handful discuss the writings on hashish and opium and the Drogenversuchen [drug experiments] and none of them situate the experiments within a historical context. When Benjamin became a "test subject," he also became part of a long-forgotten community, the Weimar Republic's psychonautic avant-garde, which included Benjamin's friend, Ernst Bloch, his cousin Egon Wissing and Egon's wife, Gert. With the synthesis of mescaline from peyote by Arthur Heffter in 1896-1897, Germany became the leader in psychopharmacological research. The year Benjamin began his experiments (1927), Louis Lewin published his second edition of Phantastica in Berlin, which appears on the list of books which Benjamin read from cover to cover.²² This book alone would have supplied Benjamin with a library of information about psychopharmaka.

Hermann Schweppenhaeuser's claim that Benjamin's writings on hashish, opium and mescaline are among the most genuine ever put to paper can only be evaluated against the context of Weimar experimentation with psychopharmaka. Kurt Beringer's amazing monograph on mescaline,Der Meskalin-Rausch was also published in 1927, and remains the greatest work ever written on the subject. Beringer's book contains over 200 pages of protocols from 60 experiments in Heidelberg among doctors, medical students, natural scientists, and philosophers, all of whom demonstrate remarkable articulateness. Only within the full context of this research, which produced literally hundreds of monographs on peyote, mescaline, cannabis, opiates, ayahuasca and cocaine, can we really begin to evaluate Benjamin's writings and experiments, in which he participated not merely as test subject, but at times as supervisor. In the third one of the published protocols Benjamin wrote the protocol of Joel's own hashish experiment.

What does make Benjamin's contribution to this research unique is summarized quite concisely by Scholem in his essay, "Walter Benjamin and his Angel": to rescue the intoxication of cosmic experience that the human being of antiquity possessed for the proletariat in their coming seizure of power. This attempt to wed 'rausch' and 'rebellion' in a "profane illumination" should come as no surprise to anyone who came into majority during the late 1960s. It is hard to imagine the anti-war demonstrations becoming as large as they did if they had not been partially fueled by marijuana and LSD, and this is precisely what the moribund left in the U.S. seems to have forgotten. Nor should we forget that the rites of Dionysos were seen by the Roman Senate at the time of the Republic as a dangerous rebellion against the state.

Benjamin scholars have more often than not misinterpreted "profane illumination" as an awakening 'from' rausch. Hermann Schweppenhaeuser, Peter Demetz, Richard Sieburth, John McCole, Margaret Cohen, Susan Buck-Morss and other Benjamin scholars continually repeat the refrain that Benjamin considered the most important aspect of his experiments to be the crystallized intellectual yield gleaned after the rausch had subsided. In Schweppenhaeuser's depiction, it is as if Benjamin were heroically running some painful gauntlet in order to capture the pearl from the rausch-dragons of obscurantism. But 'profane illumination' can take place within the inebriated voyage itself. If rausch is analogous to being adrift in a turbulent sea, then 'profane illumination' is like suddenly awakening in the midst of a dream, seizing the helm, and becoming the pilot of one's inner voyage. Norbert Bolz understood this perfectly well in his essay "Vorschule der profanen Erleuchtung," [Propadeutics of Profane Illumination] and he has prefaced his essay with the following quote:

"'Man kann nicht immer im Rausch leben.' Kann man es nicht? Man muß ihn nur richtig orientieren." [Trans.:"'One can't always be high.' Oh no? One only has to properly orient oneself."²³

The autoworkers who smoked pot, dropped acid, and instead of 'tuning out' SHUT DOWN auto-factories in wildcat strikes, understood what Walter Benjamin was describing whether they had read him or not.

Herbert Marcuse seemed to be coming to a similar idea in his Essay on Liberation which postulated a "new sensibility" as a biological necessity for revolution. Discussing this new sensibility in 1969, Marcuse wrote:

Today's rebels want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception. The 'trip' involves the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society - an artificial and short-lived duration. But the artificial and "private" liberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an exigency of the social liberation: the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment. Awareness of the need for such a revolution in perception, for a new sensorium, is perhaps the kernel of truth in the psychedelic search.²⁴

The drawback to this search, according to Marcuse, was the "narcotic character" of the artificial paradise, which all-too-often tended to free one from concern for social liberation. For Marcuse, like Benjamin, the voyage into the secret garden had to be a messianic voyage, and the psychonaut was duty-bound to articulate his perceptions and discoveries to the entire community. Marcuse, however, did not seem to realize that 'psychedelics' were not narcotic. The reproach that the narcotic may give one the idea of liberation while at the same time depriving one of the will to liberate cannot be leveled at psychopharmaka like mescaline, psilocybe mushrooms, LSD or related compounds. Marcuse did realize, however, that the late capitalist state would be willing to mobilize its entire army and police forces into an all-out effort to eradicate self-induced euphoria once and for all.²⁵
Conclusion


At the end of his book, One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse quoted Benjamin's famous dictum: "It is for those without hope that hope is given to us." Those of us fortunate enough to have hope owe it to our fellows to become articulate in our ecstasy. Meeting in October 1996 in San Francisco for an international conference on Entheobotany, 800 psychonautic researchers came together for a progress report. My own inconclusive discussion is best summed up by the concluding remarks of Spanish philosopher Antonio Escohotado, who delivered a brilliant paper on "Inebriation as Experience of the Spirit."

The crusade against drugs, in fact a war against self-induced euphoria, is an enterprise born in the U.S.A. and exported by this country at the very same rhythm in which it became the world's superpower. The effect of this American crusade is identical to the effect of crusades in general, and especially to the crusade against witchcraft, that is, aggravating to unheard-of extremes a hypothetical evil to justify the destruction and plundering of countless persons, the ill-gotten wealth of corrupt inquisitors, and a prosperous black market in all the forbidden items, which in the 17th Century were sorcerors concoctions, and today are heroin and crack. We will not break the crusade's vicious circle unless the standards of barbaric obscurantism are replaced by principles of enlightenment focused on the spreading of knowledge among people. Drugs have always been around and they will certainly ever remain. To pretend that both users and non-users will be better protected because some drugs are impure and very expensive and sold by criminals, who by the way are indistinguishable from undercover policeman and plain businessmen, is simply ridiculous. And yet more so when the street supply grows year after year. The obvious result is a growing output of crimes committed by illiterate youngsters, who use the illicit substances, partly as an adult initiation rite and partly as an alibi: declaring oneself irresponsible, unfree, a victim - a very comfortable position by the way - at such a critical moment of life when they should learn responsibility and the abnegation practiced by their elders. So the true option is not vice as opposed to law and order, the real choice is between irrational consumption of adulterated products or an informed use of pure drugs. Demonizing them has only made us more helpless, more cruel towards our fellows, and more "idiotic" in the original sense of the word, for "idiotes" in classical Greek means a person who blindly deligates the things of his own to the public care of others. Not only our well-being, but the well-being of our sons and grandsons depends on disseminating patterns of "sobriae ebrietas" (sober inebriation), which reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs as a moral and aesthetic challenge, essentially related to the adventures of knowledge, and as palliatives for difficult parts of our lives, and for very bitter lives. In other words, we should dignify what is now being debased in order to cope with the generalized delusion and abuse created by the prohibitionist experiment.

Postscript: Mann's Appeal to Reason


We have good reason to question Mann's representation of his medical source, Dr. Frederking.

To those conversant with the literature in English and German on early psychedelic and psychotomimetic therapy, Dr. Walter Frederking is a familiar name. His article "Intoxicant Drugs (Mescaline and LSD-25) in Psychotherapy" appeared in the Journal for Nervous Mental Diseases (121:262-266,1953).

There is nothing in Frederking's article to support Mann's position, but there is a great deal in it which lends support to the opinion that Frederking himself would have applauded Huxley's effort. In the introduction to his article, for example, Frederking writes:

In an effort to save the patient time and money, many and varied attempts have been made to shorten the course of psychoanalysis. Only those procedures which are within the realm of depth psychology deserve consideration. Among these are: 1) Steckel's method of active psychoanalysis, 2) Frank's psychocatharsis, and 3)narco-analysis. A few years ago I described another method, 'deep relaxation with free ideation.' This procedure makes it possible to induce in the fully awake and conscious patient, during intrview in the physician's office, physical and visual experiences which may be interpreted as genuine dreams. Such experiences can take the place of true dreams or can supplement incomplete or sketchy dreams. This procedure, however, cannot be used with sufficient reliable results in every patient in whom it would appear indicated. In such cases we make use of certain drug-induced dream-like states. These are particularly effective since the patient's critical consciousness is not impaired during these states or at least remains at all times ready to intervene.

Under the heading, "The Drug," Frederking mentions that "I have had personal experiences with mescaline for more than seventeen years," "As for LSD-25, I have been using it for nearly three years in my psychiatric practice." Under the heading, "Differentiation between Mescaline-induced and LSD-25-induced Intoxication," the following important sentences are to be found:

Indications for these drugs should be decided upon as soon as familiarity has been acquired with the nature of the intoxicative state. The therapist must be familiar with this from his own personal experience so that he may be able to cope with the frequently somewhat difficult emotional situations arising under the influence of these drugs; he must also have experience in psychotherapy. Such experience serves to exercise caution in the case of patients afflicted with schizophrenia or endogenous depressions, thus reducing risks in such cases. I have, incidentally, never experienced any dangers of addiction.

Nor is there anything in Frederking's Summary to support Mann's conclusions:

The writer has made use of drug-induced states of intoxication as an aid in psychotherapy. To attain the states of intoxication, he has used mescaline and LSD-25. Mescaline was used in a dosage from 0.3 to 0.5 gm. intramuscularly and LSD-25, 30 to 60 mic. administered orally. These led to states of a dream-like nature with experiences that were clearly remembered afterwards. The procedure is indicted when it is desirable to shorten a course of therapy, reactivate a stalled treatment of a neurosis, and for the purpose of breaking down affect or memory blocks. A psychocathartic effect is almost uniformly produced. Mescaline has a more intensive effect than LSD-25 and should be preferred to the latter in cases where it is desired to obtain the strongest possible emotions. On the other hand, LSD-25 seems to have a broader spectrum; it frequently causes the patient to relive scenes from his earlier personal life and it can also have lasting influences on organic-neurotic states. In the hands of the experienced psychotherapist, and after appropriate experimentation on oneself, and provided the indication is prudently selected, the effects of both mescaline and LSD-25 may constitute very valuable therapeutic aids.

Mann took Frederking's phrase: "in the hands of an experienced psychotherapist" out of context, saying:

The Hamburg doctor Frederking has warned us that the excited state of a mescaline-rausch, psychotherapeutically speaking, is only suitable for very experienced individuals. (And Huxley is not such a person, but rather a dilettante.) The suggested treatment would have be strict and restricted. Nor could it in any way be predicted that the outcome of a mescaline-experiment would be at all worthwhile.

Mann thereby falsifies everything Frederking said in his article. None of the persons cited in Frederking's 'Case Histories' section were 'very experienced' individuals. Moreover, in the section, 'Effect on Normals', Frederking says that he has experimented with said substances "on myself as well as friends outside my medical practice." It was precisely this kind of experimentation which Huxley reported in his Doors of Perception.

Sleeping off his bad conscience by taking 'a bit of Seconal,' Thomas Mann wags his finger at Huxley for writing his 'irresponsible book' which can 'only contribute to the stupefaction of the world.' I respectfully submit that 'stupefaction' is not an accurate description of the state mescaline is considered to engender, but that it more accurately describes the narcotized state induced by Seconal and other barbiturates.

Endnotes


* John McCole has concisely defined the German word 'Rausch' and its usage in his Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition: "Rausch is far more suggestive than the English equivalent 'intoxication': it quite naturally bears the connotations of such overwhelming feelings as exhilaration, ecstasy, euphoria, rapture, and passion; its onomatopoetic qualities have an equivalent in the slang term 'rush.' 'Intoxication' is the only real option for rendering 'Rausch' in English, but its strong associations with alcohol and toxicity can be misleading. Benjamin uses it to refer to various states of transport, providing a bridge to Klages' theories of dream consciousness and 'cosmogonic eros'." [Cornell Univ. Press, 1993, p. 225].

[1.] Cited by David King Dunaway in his Huxley in Hollywood, NY, Harper & Row Publishers, 1989, p. 90.
[2.] Thomas Mann, "Brief an Ida Herz," 21. March 1954, in Neue Rundschau, 76. Jahrgang, 2. Heft, S. 179-180. The letter is also contained in Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1953 - 1955, hrsg. v. Inge Jens, Frankfurt a.M., S. Fischer Verlag, 1995, S. 583. An excerpted paragraph translated into English can also be found in Dunaway, op. cit., p. 302.
[3.] Diary entry "Erlenbach, Montag den 15. III. 54," Tagebücher 1953 - 1955, ed. Inge Jens, Frankfurt a.M., S. Fischer Verlag, 1995, p. 196.
[4.] Letter to Peter Ringer, 27. März 1954, op.cit., p.584.
[5.] See Gespräche mit Georg Lukács, Hans Heinz Holz, Leo Kofler, Wolfgang Abendroth, hrsg. Theo Pinkus, Hamburg, Rowohlt Verlag, 1967, S.46-53. In English this has been translated as Conversations with Lukács, Hans Heinz Holz, Leo Kofler, Wolfgang Abendroth, ed. Theo Pinkus, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1975, pp. 60-68. The phrases quoted above from this passage were actually spoken by Leo Kofler, though Lukács agreed with him and used his remarks as touchstones for longer-winded expositions.
[6.] The War on Drugs during the Third Reich, Rauschgiftbekämpfung, was a policy coordinated by the Reich Health Service within the Ministry of the Interior. It was part of the same bureaucratic labyrinth that included the departments of hereditary science and racial hygiene, and much of its policy-making was conducted by Nazi physicians. An unholy alliance of Nazi eugenics and American prohibition, Rauschgiftbekämpfung unsuccessfully attempted to undo centuries of traditional social behaviour.
[7.] See the "Highlights of the Second Hashish Impression" [by Walter Benjamin & Ernst Bloch:15.Jan. 1928]. This has been translated by Rodney Livingstone as "Main Features of My Second Impression of Hashish" in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. II: 1927-1934, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999, pp. 85-90. An on-line translation by Scott J. Thompson can be found here.
[8.] See Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991. The chapter on "Art" in Richard Grunberger's The 12-Year Reich, NY, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971, pp. 421-434 is also quite useful. The corresponding socialist literary arguments are documented in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. ed. R. Taylor, with afterword by Fredric Jameson, London & New York, Verso Press, 1977. The most pertinent essays are Ernst Bloch, "Discussing Expressionism" (16-27), Georg Lukács, "Realism in the Balance" (28-59) and Theodor W. Adorno, "Reconciliation Under Duress" (151-176).
[9.] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939, p.353
[10.] Lukács' most succinct diatribe against modern literature is his "The Ideology of Modernism" (1958) in his Realism in Our Time, trans. John & Necke Mander, New York, Harper & Row, 1964, pp. 17-46.
[11.] A translation of this protocol by Scott J. Thompson can be read on-line here.
[12.] Benjamin had expressed interest in trying hashish as early as September 19, 1919, when he wrote to his friend Ernst Schoen: "I have also read Baudelaire's Artificial Paradise. It is an extremely reticient and nonoriented attempt to monitor the 'psychological' phenomena that manifest themselves in hashish or opium highs for whatever they have to teach us philosophically. It will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently of this book." [The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, ed. & annotated by Gershom Scholem & Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson & Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 148.
[13.]Walter Benjamin, "Hashish in Marseilles," in Selected Writings, Vol. II: 1927-1934, op. cit., pp. 673-679. An earlier draft of 'Hashish in Marseilles' entitled 'Protocol IV: Walter Benjamin: 29 September 1928. Saturday. Marseilles." has been translated by Scott J. Thompson and can be found on-line here. A translation of "Crock Notes" by Scott J. Thompson can be found on-line here.
[14.] op.cit. The German can be found in Walter Benjamin, Über Haschisch, ed. T. Rexroth, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, pp. 57-58.
[15.]Walter Benjamin, "On the Program of the Coming Philosophy" in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 1-12.
[16.] Gershom Scholem, "Walter Benjamin and His Angel," in On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991, pp. 51-89.
[17.] Ludwig Klages, "Vom Traumbewusstsein," ZEITSCHRIFT FUER PATHOPSYCHOLOGIE, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1919, pp. 1-38; and Vom Kosmogonischen Eros, Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1926. Benjamin had been introduced to the culture of the Aztecs and Bernard de Sahagun's writings on ancient Mexican uses of peyotl and nanacatl as early as 1916 while studying with the Americanist professor Walter Lehmann in Munich. He was also familiar with the writings of the German anthropologist Preuß, who had done extensive fieldwork in Mexico.
[18.] Walter Benjamin, "On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,"op. cit., p.4.
[19.] See the Bibliography, "German Psychopharmacological Research Before 1945" compiled by Scott J. Thompson at: .
[20.] Viktor Reko, Magische Gifte: Rausch- und Betaeubungsmittel der neuen Welt, Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1938, p. ix. [Magic Poisons: Inebriating and Narcotic Substances of the New World]. Viktor Reko was merely a journalist and Nazi sympathizer who scammed a Phd in Mexico by plagiarizing the work of his cousin, Blas Pablo Reko, also a Nazi sympathizer but nonetheless a meticulous botanist. The fallacious nature of Viktor Reko's book is exemplified in his dictum, "Die größte Giftwirkung entfalten stets die landesfremden, die rassefremden Berauschungsmittel." [Trans.: "The greatest toxic potency is always demonstrated by those intoxicating agents which are nationally and racially alien."] Such racist claptrap, which is easily refuted by any study of the history of the nightshades in Germany, was repeated with approving solemnity by the National Socialist doctor Friedrich Panse in his paper, "Grundlagen, Ausbreitung und Bekämpfung des Opiat- und Schlafmittelmißbrauch in Deutschland" [Foundations, Dissemination and Combatting of Opiate and Barbiturate Abuse in Germany] in Gegen die Rauschgifte! Vorträge des 1. Konferenz für Rauschgiftbekämpfung des Deutschen Guttemplerordens, Berlin, Neuland-Verlag, 1936, p. 20. [Against Rauschgift: Lectures of the 1st Conference for Rauschgiftbekämpfung of the German Good Templars Order]. Information in English on Viktor and Blas Pablo Reko can be found in Richard Evans Schultes, "Evolution of the Identification of the Sacred Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of Mexico" in Jonathon Ott & Jeremy Bigwood's Teonanácatl: Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of North America, Seattle, Madrona Publishers, Inc., 1978, pp. 33-34.
[21.] Theodor W. Adorno, "Benjamin the Letter-Writer," in On Walter Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 329-330.
[22.] Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften[Collected Works] VII/1:460,#1085.
[23.] Norbert Bolz, "Vorschule der profanen Erleuchtung," in Walter Benjamin:: Profane Erleuchtung und rettende Kritik, ed. Norbert Bolz & Richard Faber, Koenigshausen & Neumann, 1985, pp. 190-222.
[24.] Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969, p. 37.
[25.] A 15-billion dollar War on Drugs package for Latin America was discussed in the Feb. 1997 issue of The Progressive magazine.