Foreword

Max Cafard became legendary when “The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto” first appeared in Exquisite Corpse in 1990. The question “Who is Max Cafard?” is still being asked with some regularity at our offices. Max Cafard became one of the “surregions” of his own generative imagination when his insurgent writing gave our readers the sudden frisson that they were in the presence of something new. One never forgets that frisson when first encountering Nietzsche, Cioran, Derrida, or Deleuze. Imagine the lucky contemporaries of those thinkers who were first on the scene when that writing appeared! The frisson is renewed by each encounter, but the original feeling of the discovery is unequalled. This was precisely my epiphany on encountering Max Cafard’s manifesto: I am in a new place.

What kind of place this is will be debated and delved into with all the voluptuousness attendant on every reader’s discovery. What I know is that the best philosophers create an appetite and by the size of their appetite you shall know them. The hunger Max Cafard’s writing creates is enormous, a hunger made bigger by a tradition that thrives on appetite and discovery from the Dao onwards. Max Cafard has “roots” in recognizable traditions, anarchism and surrealism among them, but these are floating, walking roots that can show up unexpectedly in the most remote (or familiar) regions. The rhizomatic attention of Cafard’s roots is doubled by their insouciance.

Welcome to Cafardia, a region that works both by approfondir (deepening) and by espacialisation (wing-spreading). This is globalite against globalisation, globulity against globalism, providentialism against provincialism.

Andrei Codrescu

Instead of a Preface

One looks to a preface to find the “original face” (the pre-face) of a work. The author has presumably read the book to the end, and is seemingly in a fairly good position to fill the reader in on what to expect. The preface thus bears a slightly absurd relationship to the work. It claims to face what is to come, but inevitably looks back to what is already completed. So the book begins in bad faith, shamelessly tricking the reader. And perhaps also the writer. This is one reason why Laozi, the anti-foundationalist founder of Daoism plays such an important role in what “follows.” He begins his own little book by saying that the words cannot really be written and the lines cannot be followed. The beginning is at the same time a non-beginning. There is no first word because there is no last word. If you follow the lines, or the lines of argument, they lead you off the page, into the cosmos and chaos that gave birth to these words, these lines, and the followers of this path. So there is no “original face.” Or there is, and one cannot find it here.

As Laozi’s successor Zhuangzi (who may well have preceded him) stated so succinctly: “Embody to the fullest what has no end and wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all that you have received from Heaven but do not think that you have gotten anything. Be empty, that is all.”

If you follow the path of this book (some of which is actually in this book), you’ll find that we inhabit many regions, and regions within regions. These regions form the background for our existence and also pervade our very being. In a sense, we discover ourselves as strangely self-conscious, strangely empty regionalities.

One background region for this small surre(gion)al undertaking is the Empire, and a certain branch of Empire that I call Vespucciland or the United States of Amnesia. It’s the part of the Empire that happens to occupy the bioregion, the region of life, in which I live. Always implicit and sometimes explicit in surre(gion)alism is a critique of region as regime, of region as domination, possession and accumulation, and thus of Empire and its Vespuccian expression. In this, many will notice the ways in which surre(gion)alism carries on certain traditions that have confronted the two faces of Leviathan: the Megamachine and the Spectacle. Yet it carries on with a difference.

A half century ago, the Situationists imagined their most fantastical project of détournement: they would dye the Seine red, steal bodies from the Paris morgue, and float them in a river of blood. What a spectacular anti-spectacular event that would have been! But today the petrochemical industry dyes rivers, lakes and a multitude of other bodies of water red. And not only red, but a entire spectrum of unnatural hues, in addition to covering them with the most eerily theatrical of noxious vapors. Moreover, an ever-increasing number of bodies find their way into the waterways. The nightmares of the Situationists become business as usual. One might say that in the areas of both dyeing and dying, post-modern capitalist reality overflows (déborde).

* * *

May I indulge myself in one brief account of Vespuccian reality? From the daily newspaper. Dateline: Hauppauge, N.Y. “Woman who thought she was running down Mickey Mouse gets 5 to 15.” The woman in question killed her husband by repeatedly running over him with her car. She explained that she thought, not that he was actually Mickey, but that he had been possessed by the legendary Mouse. The case raises important practical and metaphysical questions. One is why the court in its wisdom did not find her innocent by reason of insanity. Perhaps in our Vespuccian Fantasy Land the Spirit of Mickey is so powerful that the idea of someone being possessed by it seems not unreasonable, in fact quite sane.

Another intriguing question is why she would feel compelled to flatten her husband even if he had been possessed by Mickey. While there are news stories almost every day of crazed fundamentalists killing their children for allegedly being possessed by Satan, this case initially seems more perplexing. Nevertheless we may be able to discover a logic of psychosis here. Perhaps this particular demon-slayer stumbled on an apt new symbol of ultimate evil in our media-driven consumer society.

Though she may also have been Hell on Wheels, is she not also the Judge Schreber of post-modernity, the mad messenger of terrifying truths? Did she not during her psychotic death drive run into a profound truth? Mickey, as symbol of the consumptionist universe, is a Demon whose powers of possession, domination and destruction put poor old Satan to shame. It is this Demon that haunts the pages of this book.

* * *

But surre(gion)alism is much more than critique, and is ultimately more about restoring our experience of and rediscovering our rootedness in the regions of being and non-being that lie beyond the bounds of domination and possession. Frida Kahlo once said that she was not a surrealist because she didn’t paint her dreams, but rather reality. Whether or not her reality was a surreality, she certainly did venture into surre(gion)ality, for her work explored the interplay of psychoregion, mythoregion, ethnoregion, socioregion, technoregion. In these regionalities “dream,” “nightmare” and “reality” lose their fixed boundaries. Kahlo was perhaps indicating that some surrealisms place certain limits on the wandering of the imagination. Granted, it takes a considerable quantity of psychic energy to float one’s favorite fruit or vegetable in thin air. But even a floating vegetable requires a certain minimum of roots. Surre(gion)alism goes to these roots, and is willing to follow them wherever they lead. The dominant tradition has never escaped from abstractionism, from disembodied reality, from the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (which leads in practice to the fallacy of misplaced concrete). Surre(gion)alism on the other hand is always embodied regionalism, and its body is ultimately the flesh of all being.

A friend suggested to me that this book’s dedication is needlessly and perhaps willfully obscure. Mea culpa! Tara is the Buddhist goddess of compassion, and is also an earth goddess. “Tierra y Libertad!” is an anarchist revolutionary slogan meaning “Land — or Earth — and Liberty!”

Works of Nietzsche Cited

A

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Penguin, 1976).

BGE

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968).

CW

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968).

GM

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968).

GS

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).

TI

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Penguin, 1976).

TL

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Penguin, 1976).

WP

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage, 1968).

Z

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Penguin, 1976).

The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto

Dedication

Here we cast anchor in rich earth.

— Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto (1918) “Just as the turtle cannot separate itself from its shell, neither can we separate ourselves from what we do to the earth.” Ted Andrews

For our Mother the Earth, we set sail on Celestial Ships. Anchored in Erda, we ride the wind. For Gaia, we take flight, spreading terrifying Cafardic wings. No longer trembling at the emasculating, defeminizing sound: the Name of the Father. We re-member Mama. Papa dismembered Mama. We now re-call the suppressed Names of the Mother. Anamnesis for anonymous Inanna. A surre(gion)al celebration, a Manifestival for Mama Earth. This is dedicated to the One we love. For the One Big Mother, in her thousand forms, here it is: the Mama Manifesto (1989).

Principia Logica

Breton said “we are still living under the reign of logic.”

Today this is true more than ever. Indeed, we are now living under the Acid Rain of Logic.

There are Logics and there are Logics. Eco-Logics, Geo-Logics, Psycho-Logics, Mytho-Logics, Ethno-Logics, Socio-Logics, Astro-Logics, Cosmo-Logics, Onto-Logics, Physio-Logics, Bio-Logics, Zoö-Logics, et cetera.

Yet all of these are transformed into subsets of the one universal Techno-Logic. Techno- Logic, the death of Truth. Techno-Logic, the enshrinement of Truth. The burying of Truth under a crushing burden — under a Wealth of Knowledge.

Authentic knowing requires the “search for Truth,” the pursuit of Truth, the chasing after Truth, the hunger and thirst for Truth, the following of Truth along all her devious paths of Logic, through her labyrinths of the Logics. It means climbing logical mountains, plunging to logical ocean bottoms, traversing an infinitude of unparalleled planes. The search for Truth means always allowing her escape.

Scrambling the Cosmic Egg

“The Region regions” said Heidegger the Egg-Hider, hiding his eggs. Edelweiss und Eselscheisse! Scion of a Scheisse-ridden race! Shyster Lawyer of Being! The “Region” does not “region.” It’s exactly the reverse. (For the Time Being).

Where is the Region, anyway? For every Logic there is a Region. To mention some of particular importance to us, the Surre(gion)alists: Ecoregions, Georegions, Psychoregions, Mythoregions, Ethnoregions, Socioregions, and Bioregions.

This is no joke! We are Bioregionalists only if we are Regionalists. And once we begin to think Regions, we discover a vast multiplicity. Of Regionalisms and Regions, of Regions within Regions, and Regionalisms within Regionalisms. Thus, Surre(gion)alism.

Regions are inclusive. They have no borders, no boundaries, no frontiers, no State Lines. Though Regionalists are marginal, Regions have no margins. Regions are traversed by a multitude of lines, folds, ridges, seams, pleats. But all lines are included, none exclude. Regions are bodies. Interpenetrating bodies. Interpenetrating bodies in semi-simultaneous spaces. (Like Strangers in the Night).

Region is origin. It is our place of origin. Where all continues to originate. Origination is perpetual motion. Reinhabitation means reorigination. We return to our roots for nourishment. Without that return, we wither and die. We follow our roots and find them to extend ever deeper, and ever outward. They form an infinite web, so all-encompassing that uprooting becomes impossible and unthinkable, deracination irrational.

Regions are multiple and arbitrary. Techno-regionalism says, in a Techno-Rational rage for definition, that when less than 90% of the species of one defined area are present in another defined area, then each is a separate Bioregion. How Techno-Logical! How Scientific! Or so it sounds. For such a definition is entirely self-annihilating, and absurd in its very technicality. This is, of course, its beauty. It is entirely valid, if taken as part of the Science and Logic of the Absurd. An infinite number of Regions can be defined by such criteria. Occasionally the Region will run after a stray organism (calculator in hand). This is a hallucinogenic Logic. (Though it is seldom taken in this way — even in small doses).

The Region always suffers the danger of capture by Techno-Logic. But Science can also be captured by the Aesthetic. Thales, the first metaphysician and scientist, said “All is Water,” and thus became the first humorist, also. And Technics can also be captured by Erotics. Fourier proposed a “New Amorous Order” in his Phalansteries, based on tactics of Utopian Technique

Off Center

The Region is the end of Centrism.

Centrism is an obsession. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with obsessions, as long as we know that we’re obsessed. Take, for example, Mr. Alan Fairweather, whose entire life revolves around his obsession with, study of, and consumption of potatoes. In Mr. Fairweather’s words: “I suppose you could say I have a potato-centric view of the world.” (Newsweek, 5/30/88.) But centrists are seldom so healthy.

Anthropo-centrism has been our world-champion Centrism. It’s come close to K.O.ing the Earth (a T.K.O. — a Technical Knock-Out). But it’s long been on the ropes. Astro-Logic knocked Anthropos off Cosmic center. Bio-Logic knocked him off Planetary center.

Psycho-Logic even knocked him off Ego center. And Techno-Logic itself melts him into air. We hardly need any post-structuralist Post-Logic to “de-center” the vapor that remains.

But do we need a new Centrism to replace the moribund one? Some suggest “Biocentrism.” This one will surely win if beetles and algae are given the vote. In a Bio-centric world, the undisputed center of “North America” is somewhere in the Achafalaya Basin. Probably in Grosse Tête (day gone gat a beeg had don dare, yeah!). A magnificent idea, and absolutely true in its own unique way. Strangely, Bio-centrism is the ecological counter-image of capitalist rationality. Quantity and accumulation are what count. But Biomass instead of Bucks.

Ecocentrism, which may be the the ultimate Centrism, has strange, surre(gion)al implications of its own. On being asked the meaning of the term, a prominent ecocentrist replied that it means that “everything is central.” The final truth of Centrism: all is central and thus nothing is central. The ecocentrist definitely has surre(gion)alist potential!

Decentering is inevitable today. But there are many species of decentering, some regionalist, others profoundly anti-regionalist. Some creative, others nihilistic and conservative (preserving the civilized path of Progress: annihilation, dissolution, evisceration, evacuation).

Capitalism abolishes Centrism. A European travels to some anti-center of Late Capitalism — perhaps Houston or Los Angeles. Accustomed to town squares, cathedrals, remnants of city walls, historical sites, signs indicating the geomythical center (Centre Ville, Centro Ciudad, etc.), this voyager asks, “Which way is the center?” What answer is possible? The hapless explorer is offered a myriad of decentered centers — every mall and shopping center in the vast urban sprawl. The Megalopolis is the economistic triumph of decentering. Its reality flows — not like a river, but like Capital. It seeks, monster-like, hydra-like, only to grow, and never to return to its source. To grow and to consume, endlessly.

Regionalist anti-centrism is of a different quality. We surre(gion)alists proclaim an end to Centrism, but we seek to create and recreate a multitude of centers. Because there is no one Center (the Patriarchal God, the Authoritarian State, the Ineluctable Bottom Line), imaginative centers can proliferate. The human spirit has always found the center of the universe in places of significance. Indeed, any place can be the center. Such centers are centers of spiritual intensity, foci for the convergence of realities: The Altar. The Hearth. The Communal fire. The Town Square. The Sacred Mountain. The Clock at Holmes. (Note for extra-Mesechabeans: On the Clock, see J. K. Toole, A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES).

Only someone really desperate, or, perhaps, inordinately hurried, would suggest as the center of the universe la Gare de Perpignan. Or was there a hidden, anti-subversive Grand Central Station in the Dalian mind?

Beyond Civilization

For the Region, there is no State and there are no State lines. The State is a parasitical growth on the Region, something exterior, hostile, threatening. It has no life of its own, but drains vitality from the living Community. It has rightly been called the “cold monster” that steals even our words, and claims to speak for us. The State is inherently genocidal. It murders all that it cannot assimilate. What is left after this Pyric and Vampiric act is only a State apparatus, the State Machine. (Even the old “political machine” had to die — for not being mechanical enough, and perhaps for being too political, too Regional, for the age of “total administration.”) The State is the March of the God of Power on Earth, its History, the Cunning of Instrumental Reason. Regional politics do not take place in Washington, Moscow and other “seats of power.” Regional power does not “sit”; it flows everywhere. Through watersheds and bloodstreams. Through nervous systems and food chains. The Regions are everywhere & nowhere. We are all illegals. We are natives and we are restless. We have no country; we live in the country. We are off the Inter-State. The Region is against the Regime — any Regime. Regions are anarchic.

For the Region, there is no Church. There is no upper-case R Religion, because there are as many religions as there are Regions. Heresy is the norm. There is no monopoly on the holy. There is no spiritual capital or spiritual Capitol. All Regions are spiritual, and for regionalism all realms are sacred. Regionalism abolishes both Theism and Atheism. Theism: the Idea that there is only one God — the God of Power, and that all must believe in Him. Atheism: the equal and opposite absurdity that this same God is the only One truly worthy of disbelief. Civilization’s imaginary has been bound to monotheisms, and substitutes for monotheisms. Regionalism breaks the bonds and erases the line between the sacred and the profane. All busses go to Grace Land. Nothing is beyond the pale. Regions are of the land: pagan, paysan. The Regions give birth to a multitude of rites and rituals, a sacral of sites and cycles. The spirit of the Region is inspired, enlightened. By feu follet, Will o’ the Wisp. By inner lights and outer. The spirit of the Region is the Free Spirit. To be in touch with the Spirits of the Place, the local Gods, is to have Tongues of Fire, to regain the stolen power of speech.

For the Region, there is no Race. Miscegenation is the rule. The Ten Thousand Races were born from the Ten Thousand Places, and they have multiplied to ten thousand times ten thousand. Those of us raised in a racial caste system were taught as children how to treat people of “the opposite race.” But now the die is cast; the castes have died. Now we know there are no opposite sexes, much less opposite races. Nature just passes and repasses. It’s all Mardi Gras. Under the mask, a mask. Ethnicity, like ethos, thrives on the play of difference. Enjoy the play! For the ideology of race, the play’s a dismal tragedy. All is reduced to dull sameness and demonic otherness. True, paranoia has its own peculiar excitements, but misses the stimulation of subtle variation, texture, multiplicity, quality. Ethnoregionality. The topography of culture. The Carnival of Culture.

For the Region, there is no Patriarchy. The Region is certainly feminine. And at the same time, androgynous. The One gave birth to the Two, and the Two to the Ten Thousand Things. The Mother is both Mother and Father. As GENESIS explains, quite clearly, our Primal Ancestor was an androgynous being, who was later divided into male and female. For the Region, there remain no clear lines: paternity is not established. The family is extended, the tribe all-inclusive. The Region, like the Dao, is vague. Mountains and valleys flow into one another. Streams and rivers flow into one another. The maternal blood flows through the Region. But sometimes the blood boils. As modern “Man” is beginning to learn: it’s not nice to rape Mother Nature! The kindly Maiden Aunt Nature of the Audubon Society, the jelly-breasted, nonjudgmental Momma Nature of the New Age, transforms herself into the Badass Goddess, the Angry Warrior Woman Nature, Vagina Dentata, the electrifying Shakti. Just when you think you’ve had her, Man — she gets you where it hurts!

For the Region, there is no Capital. There is no bottom line. All is recycled. Everything returns to the top, recirculates, and the bottom falls out. Life is uneconomical, inefficient. All economic rationality is ecological irrationality. The nature of nature is to waste, to spend foolishly, to squander. Capital requires scarce resources, but the Region is superabundance and has no resources. Only sources and the return to sources. Regions bankrupt the economic, they rupture, they break the bank, they overflow their banks. Regions are in balance, and need no balance sheets. Capital has already rendered its judgment on the Earth: the rich abundance of Life-the Bio-Logical, Ethno-Logical, and Psycho-Logical Wealth that is the legacy of eons of evolution-is not cost effective.

For the Earth to live, Capital must die.

Anti-Theses on Regionalism

Regions are wild. For State and Capital, wilderness means wasteland. They look upon the wild with a cruel and rapacious eye. They hunger to rape and plunder the wild. They yearn to subdue, control, exploit and kill all that lives freely. The antithesis of the wild is the domesticated — controlled for the ends of power. The same forces that seek to destroy wild nature, destroy wild mind. (See Gary Snyder’s “Good, Wild, Sacred”). Out of ancient forests and ancient communities, they produce tree farms & suburbia (tree farms, the suburbia of trees; suburbia, the tree farm of humanity).

“The antithesis of the wild is the domesticated — controlled for the ends of power.”

The Region, like the Dao, is vague. The “obscure object of desire.” The object of desire is always obscure. Buñuel’s famed object may be obscure in a special sense, but all objects of desire are vague, ambiguous, obscure. The system of domination attempts to make them more definite, more definable. By identifying objects of domination. By subordinating desire to an authoritarian code. By seeking to capture desire and then to direct and channel it in accordance with the demands of Power. Our challenge: to get beyond our bondage to this Desire Project. To reach the Elysian Fields of the liberated imagination. Where there are (contrary to rumor) no Poles, but only a meeting of the Antipodes.

Regionalists inhabit Regions. They are, in fact, creatures of habit, unpredictable though their habits may be. They are what they do, and they do it in that familiar, indefinable place: their Region. Regionalists almost dwell in Regions, and in fact, once did completely, until dwelling became so heavily laden with layers of mystique that their dwellings sank out of sight. (Especially true of swampy regions like the Mesechabe Delta). Regions are not systems. Systems are dead, mechanistic, and manipulable. Systems thinking is only the most advanced, and most mystified variety of instrumental rationality. Regions are incomprehensible and priceless. They are not systematic. They are not systemic. They are living and imaginary, and therefore surpass all system. Some Regions have systems, as persons have systems, but they cannot be reduced to one or more of those systems.

Regions are not World Class. The Political Insect (apologies to all authentic insects) can think of no greater compliment to the community than to call it World Class. It becomes World Class when it is filled with World Class Attractions: when all its living local and regional realities are murdered and replaced by World Class plastic imitations, to attract swarms of World Class Economic Insects who occasionally venture out from their sterile World Class Hotels and Convention Centers and dispense World Class Dollars to the embalmed natives. Regions are not World Class. The Bomb is World Class.

McDonald’s is World Class. Henry Kissinger is World Class. Global Warming is World Class. Auschwitz is World Class. The Capitalist Class is World Class. Regions are not World Class.

Regions follow Geo-Logic, and move in Geo-Logical time. Regions are served on plates. They are flowing, floating islands upon islands. (Follow my Drift?) Occasionally the Earth reminds us that from its point of view Geology is Destiny. That mountains and valleys are like waves on the sea. The restoration of Geo-Logic relativizes the pseudo-politics and pseudoeconomics of all systems of Power. True Eco-Logic and Eco-Nomics cannot be upset by even the most powerful earthquake. But the myth that nature can be dominated lives on. Still the Army Corps of Engineers battles to control the course of the Mesechabe. But in a few years the Great River will have its way — with a vengeance. Still the power companies build their nuclear plants along the River. They forget that a century ago the earth shook violently, the Mesechabe flowed North, and that a small Mesechabean Atlantis still lies beneath the waters.

The Waste Land

What hath civilization wrought? Vespucciland has already made the Mighty Mesechabe its sewer (Capitalist Sewer-regionalism), it has sent us garbage barges, and now it sends its wastes to the Delta in trains! Post-modern politics becomes auto-critique. Never before has there been a political cause célèbre like the “Poo-Poo Choo-Choo” presently incensing Mesechabean citizens. Indeed, the Mesechabeans would like to cast some aspersions on our 6 bene-factors (doers of their noble duty), who seek to transform our Mesechabe Delta, the Ravine of the World, into a veritable Sierra Merdre.

Outside the Region, all is excrement, all is waste, all is garbage. Capital and State are outside the cycles, outside the self-renewing Whole. Their Logic is accumulation, the Eternal Non-Return, the non-returnable bottleneck of being. They have accumulated much, and alas, it’s all Poo Poo.

Where is Reality today? When the corporate polluters spew poison into rivers and streams, direct actionists seal the pipes. The reality police are called out: the poisoners are protected; the protectors imprisoned. “This is not poison ... This is not a pipe ... “ When reality is the Waste Land, we must just say no to Reality. Surre(gion)al surreality is elsewhere.

“Is There a Pataphysician in the House?”

Regionalists are Pataphysicians. Jarry, the founder of the Sublime Science of Pataphysics, made an inestimable contribution to regionalist thinking in his invention/discovery of Pataphysics.

Pataphysics, he says “will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be — and perhaps should be — envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws that are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, but in any case accidental data which, reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue of originality.” (SELECTED WORKS OF ALFRED JARRY, ed. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 192–193.)

Pataphysics helps us recollect the oft-forgotten Truth that the Universe is itself the Great Exception — to the everyday ordinary course of Non-Being. Regions are, of course, entirely exceptional — exceptions even to themselves. Regionalists are exceptional people and should therefore, like Regions, be treated entirely differently. Heraclitus discovered 2500 years ago that Reality is always what it is not, and that it is always strange. As he put it, “if one does not expect the unexpected, one will not find it out, since it is not to be searched out, and difficult to compass.” (FRAGMENT 18) Regions are where the unexpected always takes place. However mightily one struggles not to think some troubling thought, it is impossible to keep it out of consciousness — out of one’s Psychoregion. Thoughts such as: “The Marquise was out for the Count”; or “He rode off into the sunset on his pet pony, Trotsky.”

Green Politics: Militants Vs. Mirlitons

We need a Green Politics that is a Politics of the Regions, and thus, a Politics of the Imagination. The old politics is dead — the politics of the State, of bureaucracy, of economism, of technocracy. It is overwhelmingly powerful, but it is dead. Burying it is another matter. It buries us. Poor old Krushchev said to the Capitalists: we will bury you. They are burying him and everyone else instead — in garbage. The old politics is a politics of plastic on asphalt. The politics of the inorganic, of disorientation, of placelessness, of necrophilia.

The Wobblies, the most radical of American labor movements (the only labor movement to appeal to hobos and surrealists) said it was “creating the new world within the shell of the old.” Today, the old one is an even more dried-out shell than ever. It’s time to begin growing a new world! This is the meaning of “Green Politics.” But sometimes it seems that what passes for “Green Politics” follows the slogan: “creating the new world by boring from within.” True, the old world must die, but we certainly cannot bore it to death.

Green Politics must become the Politics of the Regions — all the Regions, from the celestial to the subterranean. Let the next Gathering of the Greens conduct all its business in poetry. This will foreshadow the day when America will be Green. Even better, the day when for a small fee we do an international name exchange and America becomes a large frozen island, while Green Land extends from sea to shining sea. The day when Green Politics rules. The day when the President pantomimes the Inaugural Address and sings the State of the Union in falsetto. The day when the Supreme Court sits naked in powdered wigs and hands down rulings in Pig Latin. The day when the Congress throws a multi-party and dances all the Laws out of existence.

Our symbol — one of the thousand symbols of our polysymbolica — is the Sacred Mirliton. The Chayote. Chayotli. Sechium edule. The Mirliton (regional pronunciation: “Mellatawn”): in the subtropics, the regionalist plant par excellence. Spreading everywhere, covering all, trespassing all boundaries, respecting no lines of property. Greening promiscuously, abundantly, indiscriminantly. Equally green on either side of the fence. Offering its fruit to all, in limitless profusion. Green Politics, the Politics of the Mirliton. The Mirliton against the militant, the mechanical person. The Mirliton against the military-industrial complex, the mechanical State. Green vs. Machine. (No accident that the word “Mirliton” also refers to that most populistic and anarchic of all musical instruments, the Kazoo.)

Green Politics is the Politics of Lagniappe. “Lagniappe” for us Mesechabeans signifies something extra, neither bought nor sold, freely given, weighed only on the human scale, a symbolic exchange, a tangible expression of the intangible, of the non-instrumental, of the nonfungible, of the communal, of the common wealth. A vague memory of the Gift. A token of the backwardness, the peripherality, the atavism of certain strange and remote ethnoregions — such as the Mesechabe Delta. Green Politics is the Politics of Lagniappe: it “decrees the End of Money.” It looks to the day when we are no longer held symbolic hostages by the Signs of the Dollar. To the day when All is Lagniappe. And to the Night also!

It is of the nature of the Louisianian to create Order through Anarchy:

This is the lesson of Gumbo; this is the lesson of Jazz. — Lafcadio Bocage, CAHIERS DU MOUVEMENT ANARCHISTE CREOLE (trans., M. Cafard)

What is true in our mysterious Delta region can, in its own way, be true anywhere. Let us never forget the words of the wise Mesechabean!

Ghosts Along the Mesechabe

A phantom is haunting Europa. Breton stated it well, with all the power of inadvertency: “The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost.” What Breton consciously missed but unconsciously betrayed was the greatness of this impression. For what makes more impression on us than does a ghost — and is so resolutely evaded, except in our dreams?

We are like ghosts, Ghosts along the Mesechabe. Haunted by the Earth. When we are nowhere, existence is elsewhere.

The Region is the elsewhere of civilization.

The Politics of the Imagination

The Imagination in Power

The General Strike of May 1968 in Paris was a landmark in radical history. It is known in large part for the fact that it diverged from the expected. It is also known for its inspiring slogans: “Take your desires for realities”; “It is forbidden to forbid”; “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” Most of these slogans seem little more than radical nostalgia a generation later. But I would argue that one of these slogans has been realized-totally and absolutely-in the decades since the revolt.

The one successful aspiration of May ’68: “L’imagination au pouvoir!” — “Power to the imagination!”

For the imagination is indeed in power today. Though, sad to say, it is not the one that the visionaries of ’68 hoped for. Instead, it is the consumptionist imaginary that dominates contemporary culture. Our world is far from the one in which imaginative radicals inspire demassified masses to revolt against the dictates of dour reactionaries. Rather, we inhabit a world in which the most exciting sources of inspiration for the vast majority are the elements of the consumptionist system. A world in which we take their desires for our realities. In which “Coke is It” (Id). A world in which it is not only permitted to permit, but in which demanding the impossible is a way of life — and is great for the GNP!

It is the consumptionist imaginary that dominates contemporary culture.

The old world of hard work and production is not dead. The machine grinds on, and any serious threats to it are dealt with in a suitably productivist manner. Even as maddening echos of “Don’t worry! Be happy!” torment our brains, we find that three-quarters of a million inhabitants of the Land of the Free are in prison, while the State proposes to double this carceral capacity. George Bush recently presented some ominous proposals concerning crime. He said he was going to reduce the crime rate and build more prisons. I have nighmares about all those big, empty prisons. Political dissidents beware!

But the consumptionist/productionist system maintains its power not primarily through guns and repression, but rather through ideological control. If we are interested in critical practice and social transformation, it is important that we understand the consumptionist imaginary and its central place in the system of power. Ironically, this centrality consists precisely in its decenteredness — its dispersion throughout the culture. What is our relation to the dominant system — the system of consumptionism/productivism? Some members of the Green movement seem to suggest that our function is to make that system less ecologically destructive, more humane, more democratic, less violent, etc. We might call this project “toward a more sustainable system of domination.” Or, inspired by the image of Bush and Thatcher as “environmentalists,” we might call it “be realistic, demand the inevitable. What’s Left?

Some Greens have proposed that we adopt the slogan “neither left nor right, but in front.” This would be equivalent to adopting the slogan, “neither left nor right, but totally confused.” Throughout the modern period, enemies of the established system of domination have always been called “the left,” while its defenders have constituted “the right.” It is no secret that factions from “the left” have often gained power and then reinstituted systems of domination. But those who have then opposed these regimes in the name of freedom and justice have in turn become “the left,” or even the “ultra-left,” in relation to the new systems of oppression.

Why this fear of identification with the left — a fear almost unique to American Greens? The lame excuse is that it might puzzle the poor ignorant masses who will confuse the Greens with authoritarian Leninists. In other words, that the Greens should help perpetuate the lie that the left consists only of Godless, atheistic Communists who are agents of a foreign power. Submitting to this kind of thought control is equivalent to tolerating the related lies of the system of domination: that Blacks are lazy and unintelligent, that feminists are frustrated man-haters, that gays are child-molesters, and so forth. But we can accept none of these outrageous lies, so why accept an equally ludicrous one?

A slight digression on the ideology of language: Have you ever looked up the term “public enemy” (listed under “ENEMY”) in ROGET’S THESAURUS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE? If you check it, you’ll find the following:

public enemy, enemy to society; anarchist, Red or red, terrorist, revolutionary, revolutionist; seditionist, traitor, traitress (fem.).

A veritable reactionary stream of consciousness! No wonder that there is a fear of being branded as “left” in a society that speaks such a terrifying and terrified language. Who wants to be thought a “traitor”? Or, even worse, a “traitress”? The difficult truth is that acceptance of the label “left” means acceptance of our oppositional relationship to the dominant culture. But face the facts, fellow dissidents: calling for a “new paradigm” means having a leftist relationship to the “old paradigm”!

So much for “neither left nor right.” And when the world’s going to Hell, who wants to be in front?

I propose to organize a new politico-spiritual tendency within the Greens! I am issuing a “call” on behalf of the “Left Daoist Network.” We Left Daoists have lacked nothing but a slogan, and this sad state of affairs is about to end. We considered calling ourselves “The Left Wing of the Right Brain.” But this will not do, since we Daoists, believing in the Yin and Yang of all things, cannot choose one brain over another, or even one piece of a brain over another piece. Thus, the slogan of the Left Daoists: “Neither Left Brain nor Right Brain, but A Head!”

Does Money Grow on Trees?

At the last National Greens Conference, a delegate told me that he couldn’t understand all this talk about being against capitalism. “How could anyone be against capitalism?” he asked. “You have to make a living somehow!” The delegate, an intelligent person and a graduate of a major university (no necessary connection implied), had never encountered the idea that capitalism could perhaps be a historical phenomenon, or that any other mode of economic organization might be possible.

Another delegate, perhaps trying to absolve us from any lingering guilt-feelings about, as they say, “buying-in” to the prevailing system, assured us that “Money is Green.” “Novus Ordo Seclorum” Motto on the Dollar Bill: “New Order of the Ages”

“Money is Green”! A revolutionary slogan for our times!

There are, of course, other views. One prominent political philosopher, paraphrasing another prominent playright, called money “the visible divinity — the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and overturning of things, it makes brothers of impossibilities. It is the common whore, the common pimp of peoples and nations.”

But today, “Money is Green.” Consider the implications. Money is green. Like skin is white. Like flags are red, white, and blue. Money is green and everybody drives a car.

We are badly in need of the radical imagination. We are sorely in need of utopian thinking. When a system of power has taken hold of the imagination, it is a totalitarian power. It can only be fought on its own ground — imaginary ground. The Politics of the Imagination

The modern project of domination has been based on both the repression of imagination and the “harnessing” of the imagination. Ideologically, the first stage of this project was a general war against imagination. (An undertaking which was itself a great feat of the imagination!) In fact, the true goal was the restriction and restructuring of imagination, and its channeling on behalf of the emerging systems of power: the modern nation-state, the developing system of capital, and individualized patriarchy.

The stridency and severity of the early modern attack on imagination is striking. For example, Descartes, the patriarch of modern rationalism, while exalting “pure intellection,” remarks that “this power of imagination ... is in no wise a necessary element in my nature, or in my essence, that is to say, in the essence of my mind, for although I did not possess it I should doubtless ever remain the same as I now am ... “2 The true fear, of course, is that with the imagination “in his nature,” he would ever remain different. That is, the unity of the imperious Cartesian intellect/ego would be shattered, and its transcendental purity irreversibly defiled.

Hume, the towering figure of empiricism, the other major branch of modern Western philosophy, showed no less hostility to the imagination. He urges “the limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding.” He notes that the “imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects, which custom has rendered too familiar to it.” Sounds rather appealing — but Hume’s point is to recommend the ordinary over the extraordinary, to counsel walking in preference to running, and to propose a strategy of thought control, ironically consigning the objects of imagination, if not to the flames, “to the embellishments of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians.”

Even Rousseau, the Father of Romanticism and a bit of a dissident in relation to the tradition, gives stern warnings concerning the dangers of imagination. “The real world has its limits: the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born the pains which make us truly unhappy.” Granted, there is some wisdom in this approach, particularly if we apply it to the grotesque consumptionist imaginary of late capitalist society. But for Rousseau, the danger was in the imagination per se. If he did not share fully in the general enthusiasm for light of the thinkers of the Siècle des Lumières, he exceeded his rivals in his extraordinary fear of the Dark, that mysterious source of troubling images.

But from the beginning, the imagination has had its defenders. Perhaps the most radical critic of the splitting off of imagination from the self was Blake, who perceived, at a relatively early date, the importance of the control of imagination to the system of repression and domination:

The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated

From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio

Of the Things of Memory, It thence frames Law & Moralities

To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms

& Wars

This revolutionary defense of the imagination has continued. In 1968 the French and Czech surrealist groups stated in the “Platform of Prague” that: “The repressive system monopolizes language, to return it to the people only after it has been reduced to its utilitarian function or turned towards ends of mere distraction. Thus, people are deprived of the real power of their own thoughts; they are forced ... to rely on cultural agents who provide them with patterns of thinking which naturally conform to the good and efficient functioning of the system ... With such a vacuous language, people cannot formulate the ardent images that make the satisfaction of their real desires absolutely imperative ... “

Long before, the Surrealists had read Freud. Not to find out that they should adapt to what Freud took for “reality” — capitalism, the state, patriarchy — but to find out that reality is “elsewhere.” Freud, despite himself, showed that the deadening world of commerce, of bureaucracy, of the endless repetition of the same, is not the world of the highest, or deepest, reality. The reason that Freud inspired the surrealists was that his analysis of dreams revealed that all of us — the clerk, the machine operator, the sign painter, even the political activist or the academic drudge — are poets, creators, masters of the image, the symbol, and language. We are all dreamers and all revolutionaries. A phantom haunts civilization, and it is not the working class. It is the imagination at play. The Phantom of Liberty.

In a Bad Place

The highest aspirations of the imagination are called utopia. But utopia is just as much the enemy of the imagination, and is our own Nemesis. We live in the shadow of a terrifying utopia. And we must search the shadows for those other utopias that have been eclipsed.

Civilization has its feet firmly planted in the reality of domination, and its head firmly planted in the utopian imaginary. We must pull up both by their roots. The dominant utopia is the utopia of Progress, of the conquest of nature, of the rationalization of society. It is a utopia of infinite powers of production and infinite desires for consumption. It has taken on a multitude of forms, and inspires both of the systems of Super Power that threaten to destroy the earth: it is essential both to the Socialism of the Rich in the West and the Capitalism of the State in the East. Infinite desires for consumption.

The Mind of the Megamachine thinks Utopia.

Utopia in this sense is an abstract idea, a closed system, a weapon to use against the unenlightened or evil forces of resistance. Vaclav Havel wrote eloquently about such authoritarian utopianism, which (in rather uncharacteristically anarchistic phrasing) he describes as a reaction against “life’s outrageous chaos and mysterious fecundity.” Those who are “tragically oppressed by the terror of nothingness and fear of their own being” are led “compulsively to construct and impose various projects directed toward a rationally ordered common good,” thereby “putting an end to all the infuriating uncertainty of history.” The result is what he calls, borrowing a term from Beloradsky, the “eschatology of the impersonal,” in which a monstrous automatic machine develops that is beyond the control even of its creators. In his view, there is a direct path from the utopia of denial to totalitarianism and concentration camps. As a Czech, he cannot but think, of course, of the progression from the productivist utopia of Marxism-Leninism to the Gulag of Stalinism.

But Havel is perceptive enough to see that the utopianism of the corporate capitalist West leads in a similar historical direction.

A rationally ordered common good

“Soviet totalitarianism was only an extreme manifestation ... of a deep-seated problem that also finds expression in advanced Western society” in which there is also “a trend towards impersonal power and rule by mega-machines or Colossi that escape human control.” It is the “juggernauts of impersonal power,” whether these be “large-scale enterprises or faceless governments,” that “represent the greatest threat to our present-day world.”

This Utopia of domination is utopia as escapism. This danger is especially real for those utopians who have been frustrated in their efforts to realize their dreams, or who do not even reach the level of praxis. Utopia as escapism remains in the vacuous realm of what Hegel called the Beautiful Soul, of those Dreamers of Moral Perfection who are unable to cope with the ugliness and ambiguity of the world, and therefore cling to a bloodless Ideal.

The utopia of escape has its satisfactions. We believe because belief fulfills needs and satisfies desires. Utopia can be an escape from the imperfections of the world and their reflection within our own selves. It can be an escape from the exigencies of the real, from history and its unavoidable tragedies. It can be an escape from the minutiae of the everyday. It can offer an imaginary compensation for being denied real power or having real efficacy. If we can’t escape from the Bowels of the Beast, we can lose ourselves in the Bowels of the Movement.

In this sense, utopia is neurosis, a defense mechanism, a convulsive reaction against self and world. It is the imaginary domination of reality, rather than the imaginative transformation of reality. It is thought’s revenge against a recalcitrant reality.

Seize the Daydream!

In opposition to the utopianism of domination and escape is a utopianism which is a critique of domination and a vision of a reality beyond it. Ricoeur has said that the “deinstitutionalization of the main human relationships is ... the kernel of all utopias,” and that though it “may be an escape, ... it is also the arm of critique.” He has also noted that “utopia has two alternatives: to be ruled by good rulers — either ascetic or ethical — or to be ruled by no rulers.”

The latter possibility is what Marie Louise Berneiri calls, in JOURNEY THROUGH UTOPIA, the libertarian utopia. The libertarian utopians “oppose to the conception of the centralized state, that of a federation of free communities, where the individual can express his [or her] personality without being submitted to the censure of an artificial code, where freedom is not an abstract word, but manifests itself concretely ... “ Indeed, as in the utopias of Fourier and Morris, the division between work and play dissolves.

For Fourier, the new society is to be founded on a harmony of the passions, which, rather than being repressed, will be expressed in socially complementary ways. This, he says, is not only his own theory, but that of God, the Cosmic Utopian himself:

Passions so much downgraded by philosophers, are the most sublime work of God, the one to which He applied the most profound calculus. Only one kind of harmony can be seen in other branches of movement; but all are united in the mechanics of passions. This is an immense orchestra arranged for five billion instruments or characters which will inhabit our planet — not counting the animals, vegetables, aromas, and minerals all of which enter into the framework of harmony of passions, the harmony with which everything is coordinated. This will be difficult to believe, but it will be demonstrated that God knew how to apply his theory of the harmony of passions the means through which each one of the five billion individuals will be useful for the happiness of all the others.

For the radical utopian tradition, society has always been seen as “a work of art.” Nietzsche knew it was music, though for him (like anarchist utopian Godwin) the music is primarily played solo. Fourier imagined it as an ecstatic communal symphony. Creole utopians in the Delta of Dionysius know that it’s jazz.

While Berneri discusses a variety of libertarian utopian conceptions in literature, Ronald Creagh, in his study LABORATOIRES DE L’UTOPIE, has given abundant evidence that the quest for such utopian community has a rich history in the multitude of experiments in libertarian communalism carried out across the North American continent, from the Owenite and Fourierist experiments of the early 19th century to libertarian countercultural communes of the 1960’s.

So it would be a disastrous error to look to utopian thinking only for visions of the future — no matter how libertarian, just, peaceful, ecological, or virtuous in any other way that future may be. For utopianism is above all about the present. The most utopian of utopianisms is also the most practical. It demands Heaven on Earth. It demands Paradise, not hereafter, but Now. Utopianism affirms the presence of the eternal, the sublime, the marvelous — in the present. As Erazim Kohak has phrased it, “Perhaps real success is not that time is transformed in its flux but that, in each moment, value ingresses in it, that each moment humans glimpse the glory of the true, the good, the beautiful, the holy ...”

Utopianism finds these ultimates, not in some higher realm or some indefinite future, but in the depths of our being and the heights of our experience. Indeed, it finds them even in the false, the evil, the ugly, and the profane. Utopia is present in the all the creative play of energies, in spiritual and material voyages of discovery, and, of course, in everything touched by the transformative imagination. Utopia is already present or it is a fraud.

At it’s deepest surre(gion)al level, utopianism is merely a fully awakened topianism.

Words from Green Lips

We sometimes look to the past for hints of what this awakening might mean. For example, we discover that in 1871 the people of Paris awoke to a rather radically utopian idea. They decided to abolish capitalism and the state. They undertook the creation of a free municipality, which they called the Paris Commune. The Commune is one of the most numinous episodes in the history of revolution, and in the history of the imagination. In its few short weeks of existence, it opened up possibilities that remain an inspiration well over a century later: possibilities of freedom, of justice, of popular participation, of social creation. While this experiment was brutally crushed by the forces of reaction, it lives on in the radical imagination.

I can hardly mention the Commune without remarking that as I was first writing these words Chinese students were in the process of carrying on the tradition of the radical imagination, fashioning images of a Goddess of Democracy, and creating what Premier Li Peng called “an anarchic state.” My reaction at the time was to remark as follows: “The American news media harp on the fact that the students are demanding ‘democracy.’ Unfortunately, in the context of American ideological discourse, ‘demand for democracy’ is immediately translated into ‘Big Mac Attack.’ Though the media have shown students demonstrating for democracy, they have never, so far as I know, identified the song that these democratic students sing endlessly. It’s called the ‘Internationale’ — and it is not about Big Macs. Actually, its more likely that their nasty leaders, rather than the students, will usher in the invasion of Big Macs — though they’ll probably rename them something like Deng-Burgers. (Hold the Mao.)”

Their singing of the “Internationale” now takes on a greater significance. That great anthem, written in the week following the crushing of the Commune, commemorates its triumph and tragedy. Thus the students sang of their ideals of freedom and justice, and at the same time foreshadowed their own fate. Their rulers saw the need for a military invasion to protect the long-term economistic one on which their power depends.

The Commune lives on in many senses.

One of the most remarkable figures associated with the Commune was a young poet named Arthur Rimbaud, whose work (all of which he completed between the ages of 16 and 19) was a truly astounding expression of the revolutionary imagination. In one of his most delirious poems he ironically juxtaposes the banal rhetoric of advertising, the yearnings of desire, and the ekstasis of utopian imagination:

For sale-

Priceless bodies, beyond race or world or sex

or lineage!

Riches in ubiquitous flood!

Unrestricted

sale of diamonds! For sale —

Anarchy for the masses;

Wild satisfaction for knowing amateurs;

Atrocious death for the faithful and for lovers! For sale —

Homesteads and migrations, sports,

Enchantment and perfect comfort, and the noise,

the movement and the future they entail.

Forgive me for the prosaic translation, but he’s saying that Coke is not the Real Thing, and what is you won’t get with money. Echoes of Rimbaud can be heard in the words of all the movements of the revolutionary utopian imagination over the past century. In the surrealists, the situationists, and even in the most radical of the post-structuralists today. Whom or what will we echo? (Or are we capable only of videotaping and xeroxing?) Rimbaud is reported to have written a revolutionary constitution inspired by the Commune, proposing a system of direct self-rule, reminiscent of the Athenian polis, in which free and equal citizens would gather to deliberate and determine democratically the fate of the community. He thus wished to recreate the public space of the Polis, but to populate it not with rational Greek citizens but with mad Parisian anarchists.

I mention Rimbaud, this “great anarchist,” as he was called by Walter Benjamin, for his fusing of the revolutionary imagination with revolutionary politics. I also mention him and the Commune because it allows me to close with an excerpt from a poem about that Commune. A poem that brings us back to our topic of “Green” and the politics of the imagination. I quote from Vermersch’s “Les Incendiaires” (1871):

Today, in Paris, on the cobblestones They trample our dead underfoot; The fathers machine-gunned, the mothers disappeared, In their blood-stained cradles, The orphans, reaching out their hands, Plead for mercy From the triumphant assassins! What threat for the future is held In the hands of those little children; What words will some day be spoken through the green lips Of those bloodied corpses ...

This is our question. In this noisy world, how will they speak, the green lips of these bloodied corpses?

The Dao of Capitalism or “Going with the (Cash-) Flow”

The Dao of Capitalism, or, “Going with the (Cash)-Flow”

Laozi was the mythic “Old Sage” of ancient China. We’re not sure whether he actually existed but we do know that he founded Daoist philosophy. His legendary DAODEJING, the “Classic of the Way and its Power,” is a subtle treatise that radically challenges our views of everything — including ourselves, nature and the world around us. I like to call it “The Anarchist Prince,” for just as Machiavelli’s Prince is a manual for rulers who wish to master the art of ruling, Laozi’s classic is written for rulers who want to learn precisely how not to rule.

The Dao means literally the “way” or “path.” It is at once the origin of all things and the way — the “natural path” — of the entire universe. It is also the unique way of each being, including the human kind of being. So it’s something that each of us must discover personally, in our own lives. For Laozi, the way is not clearly marked, and finding it must be part of the journey. “The Dao that can be told of is not the eternal Dao.” We foolish human beings usually assume we know the way ahead of time. We follow society’s blind prejudices and our own rigid, self-centered ideas. As a result, we miss the interconnection of things, the bigger picture and the deeper truths.

As Laozi puts it, we overlook the dynamic balance of yin and yang, the opposites that are really complements, the world’s underlying unity in difference. He also teaches the importance of fu, return or recurrence, a concept that challenges civilization’s naive ideas of linear progress, of conquest and domination, of infinite accumulation. And he speaks of wuwei, “doing without doing,” which includes “ruling without ruling,” or anarchic ruling. This means acting through ziran or spontaneity, thus not forcing the world to fit our expectations; in fact not even forcing ourselves to conform to our preconceptions of what we ought to be. Laozi shocked his own patriarchal, authoritarian society by taking as his models for the anarchic sage-ruler the child, who experiences life as play and who acts spontaneously, and the female, “the ravine of the world,” who nurtures and cares without dominating or taking possession.

In short, Laozi’s Dao is the absolute antithesis of all forms of domination — including concentrated economic power, the centralized state, patriarchy and the exploitation of nature. So it came as a bit of a shock to me when I began to find the world’s first philosophical anarchist invoked in defense of right-wing ideology and capitalist economics. Right Wing Yin Yang

Ronald Reagan seems to have started this trend in his 1988 State of the Union Address. Reagan lumped together such “great ideas” as individual initiative, free-market economics, and Laozi’s advice to “govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish; do not overdo it.” While Laozi didn’t explain precisely how one should cook a small fish, Reagan had no difficulty concluding that the Old Sage must obviously have been advocating laissez-faire capitalism.

James A. Dorn, Vice President of the right-wing Cato Institute, outdid Reagan, discoursing with a straight face on topics such as “the Dao of Adam Smith,” and injecting the poor corpse of Laozi with a strong dose of the entrepreneurial spirit. In a speech entitled “China’s Future: Market Socialism or Market Daoism,” he exhorted the wise leaders of China to go back to their own Daoist roots and “rediscover the principle of spontaneous order — the central principle of a true market system.”

Of course, anyone vaguely familiar with the rulers of China — a gang of corrupt and amoral bureaucrats capable of brutal repression and even massive genocide — would think it highly unlikely that they would become converts to Laozi’s anarchic path of “spontaneous order.” However, they just might be open to the idea that capitalism could offer them (just like the bureaucrats-turned-capitalists of Eastern Europe) a new means of plundering their country. And with a good dose of Daoism thrown in, it would all be so spiritual and happen so spontaneously!

A more ambitious attempt to marry Daoism and the marketplace is presented in the book REAL POWER: BUSINESS LESSONS FROM THE DAODEJING, in which quotations from Stephen Mitchell’s feel-good, New Agey paraphrase of Laozi are coupled with commentary by business writer and consultant James A. Autry. Autry cites the DAODEJING extensively but very selectively (often cutting off a citation just before Laozi gets to an embarrassingly anarchistic point).

In fact, he cooks up his “Daoism” much the way Ronald Reagan would cook a small fish — and the result is fishy indeed. The Way of the Jaguar

To begin with, Autry completely ignores Laozi’s harsh condemnation of the materialistic society. Autry advises his manager to “go ahead and celebrate the abundance, all the perceived symbols of success, everything from a luxury car to a condo in some vacation spot. But don’t get hung up on whether you have this stuff or not, and never lament what you don’t have.” Sounds very tempting, doesn’t it? “Go ahead, trade that BMW in for that Jaguar you’ve been looking at. It won’t really mean anything to you anyway. Hey, you’re a really spiritual kind of guy.” The question is: who’s talking, Laozi or Mephistopheles?

The Old Sage himself sees the accumulation and concentration of wealth as being, far from any cause for “celebration,” a fatal snare to be avoided at all costs. He warns that “to have little is to possess” while “to have plenty is to be perplexed.” And he is positively scathing in his judgment of the social consequences of luxury and economic inequality: “Elegant clothes are worn, sharp weapons are carried, foods and drinks are enjoyed beyond limit, and wealth and treasures are accumulated in excess. This is robbery and extravagance, this is indeed not Dao.” Elsewhere he advises: “Abandon skill and discard profit; then will there be no thieves or robbers” and suggests that we should “have few desires,” a dictum in absolute contradiction to the society of consumption, which is hell-bent on inflaming infinite desires for the unattainable. Autry wisely decides not to touch this chapter at all!

In fact, one of the most pervasive themes of the DAODEJING is the danger of certain desires — and particularly the desire for material accumulation — out of control. Autry quotes an entire chapter of the DAODEJING with the notable exception of this embarrassing passage: “Do not value rare treasures, so that the people will not steal. Do not display objects of desire, so that the people’s hearts shall not be disturbed.” The market Daoists ignore the fact that the enterprises managed by their presumably incorruptible and virtuous managers have the goal of arousing in the consumer just such disturbing, destructive impulses.

The Means Justifies the End Previous

For Autry’s manager, “the acceptance of non-control is the only way to manage things.” “Non-control” (a variation on wuwei) is a concept dear to Laozi, the enemy of all conventional ideas of ruling. His anarchic “ruling-without-ruling” means that we should influence the world through our way of living and our personal example, rather than through hierarchical authority and coercion.

But such “non-control” is the antithesis of the role of today’s corporate manager, who is obviously an authority-figure in the corporate power structure, and whose job it is to make decisions for others. Laozi’s sage-ruler is one “whose existence is (merely) known by the people — or perhaps even “not known by the people” (depending on which ancient manuscript we follow). You can be sure that in any corporation the employees will know precisely who the bosses are and where they rank in the corporate hierarchy. And most will be intelligent enough to be very careful around any manager who claims to practice “non-control”!

Whereas Laozi teaches that each must find his or her own way, Autry’s mellow, New Age manager (a bit like Plato’s Old Age Philosopher-King) arranges things to “assure that all employees are assigned [my emphasis] to do what they do best, in the interest of all.” Is it possible that the bottom line might dictate that some are assigned to do things they don’t do best? Is it possible that the company needs their help in producing something that isn’t “in the interest of all”? If Autry’s Daoist manager actually tried to “assure” anything other than what serves corporate goals, that perennial optimist would soon be assuring him or herself that, as Autry puts it, getting fired may sometimes be “one of the greatest gifts” one can receive.

So let’s face it. Autrey’s managers will control — by controlling. But ironically, there is a grain of truth in his idea of the manager who is “not in control.” Enlightened managers should indeed consider themselves to lack such control, but not primarily because it discourages obnoxious managerial styles and evokes better compliance, as Autry says between the lines. It is rather because something else really is in ultimate control. In the typical business enterprise what ultimately controls are the structural constraints of operating in a competitive, corporate-dominated market economy, and the imperious necessity to maximize profit and economic efficiency.

This points out the biggest problem with market Daoism: its complete failure to confront the issue of means and ends. It is pervaded by bad faith and self-deception. Unless we want to lapse into some sort of ideological dream world, we must ask a question that Autrey and the market Daoists scrupulously avoid: what ends are served by the “real power” of managers? Let’s be realistic about this. The goal is to offer to consumers precisely those objects of desire that captivate their imaginations and win their hearts, to produce those very “rare treasures” that underlie the social hierarchy, economic status and prestige that Laozi condemns so scathingly.

This is what the Dao of the Bottom Line demands.

Zen and the Art of Union-Busting

We eagerly await Autry’s forthcoming work on this topic, but he has already given us some pointers. He optimistically informs his New Age managerial readers that “[u]nions form not primarily to increase pay and benefits; they arise in situations where employees feel denigrated.” It’s an old story: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your wounded pride!” He suggests that horrifying disasters such as unionization can be avoided if employees such as “mail sorters” are not given the outrageously mistaken impression they are mere “little people” in the corporation, since this would “distort [sic] organizational hierarchy into a social class system within companies.” Since class for Autry is all in the mind, the idea that a hierarchy of power, status and wealth within an organization might actually be a social class system is entirely incomprehensible to him.

Autry criticizes such dismal corporate tendencies as “downsizing” and “outsourcing,” and optimistically concludes that they are not really in the company’s long-term interest. He fails to consider the not-obviously-impossible case in which a company manages to benefit economically from doing both, or the even more troubling instance in which a company shuts down a plant completely and moves to a location with cheaper labor, no annoying unions, and a conveniently authoritarian state. His most relevant bit of advice to managers for such an occasion is to express the enormous, heartfelt respect that the corporation has for the laid-off employees (perhaps a perverse variation on the ancient tribal custom of expressing gratitude to an animal before killing and eating it).

For Autry, the role of the “wise leader” is to assure that the employees “understand how their individual jobs connect with the greater purpose of the business.” But what such a noble leader must systematically ignore is how that purpose connects to, or fails to connect to, the “greater purposes” of the Dao: how it might trample on the way of each person, devastate the way of the community, and lay waste to the way of nature. Will The Real Laozi Please Stand Up?

True, Laozi says that “the Dao is vague.” But that doesn’t mean that it’s no more than putty in one’s ideological hands.

The deeply revolutionary message of the DAODEJING is perhaps best expressed in the “three treasures” that Laozi advises us to “guard and keep”: compassion, simplicity and humility. The Old Sage would never recommend that these treasures be tacked on to a job description and ignored in the larger picture of our lives, society, and nature. He would be appalled at the idea of managing in an amiable, frugal, and self-effacing way an irresponsible, destructive enterprise that promotes material accumulation, waste and pollution, social inequality, and status-seeking.

Laozi remarks in a crucial passage that “the Way of Heaven reduces whatever is excessive and supplements whatever is insufficient. The way of man is different. It reduces the insufficient to offer to the excessive.” This early diagnosis of civilization is an apt assessment of the social and ecological consequences of the contemporary globalized market economy.

Elsewhere, Laozi states the related harsh truth that “Heaven and earth are not humane. They regard all things as straw dogs.” Straw dogs were insignificant objects thrown into the fire in ritual celebrations. Laozi warns us that in the case of reality, we can’t “have it our way” (the metaphysical Fallacy of the Whopper), though we certainly should try to find our way. If we continue to follow the distorted, destructive “way of man” (and “economic man” in particular), we will suffer the inevitable fate of those who live a life out of balance. We’ll find out what it’s like to be a straw dog that thinks it’s top dog.

To put it another way, global capitalism looks increasingly like a very big fish spewing poisonous filth in its small and delicate pond. Alas, you would-be Managers of Dao. Your fish is cooked!

“AnarChapters: Zhuangzi’s Crazy Wisdom & Da(o) Da(o) Spirituality”

No Way

Wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all that you have received from Heaven, but do not think that you have gotten anything. Be empty, that is all. — Zhuangzi Try to be empty and to fill your brain cells haphazardly. Go on destroying what you have in you. Indiscriminately. You could understand a lot of things, then. — Tristan Tzara

As Zen Master Wu-men takes us through the “Gateless Gate,” the Daoist Sages Laozi and Zhuangzi take us along the Wayless Way, the Pathless Path. A contemporary pathless pathfinder tells us that “[t]here are paths that can be followed, and there is a path that cannot ... it is the wilderness.” The Pathless Path of Zhuangzi takes us into that wilderness, exploring the wildness of the world and wildness of the spirit. We find this path in the Inner Chapters, the sections of the ancient “Zhuangzi” writings that are thought to come from Zhuangzi himself (or selves). The Inner Chapters, we will discover, are the AnarChapters. They are chapters on wildness, freedom, spontaneity — in short, on Anarchy.

Those looking for “mysticism” in Zhuangzi may be disappointed — unless they’re looking for the mysticism of discovering what’s right before their eyes. In Zhuangzi you’ll find strange, altered states of consciousness. Clarity of mind. Attentiveness to the things of the world. Vividness of imagination. Zhuangzi’s mysticism is less about merging the Self into the Quietude of the One than about scattering selfhood into the Maelstrom of Multiplicity and watching, and taking part in, the Whirl of the Real.

Is this a form of Daoist “spirituality”? The term “spirituality” inevitably has undertones of the vaporous, the vapid, or even the vacuous. But if Zhuangzi has a “spirituality,” it’s the quality of having a lightness of spirit (as in French, spirituel means “witty”), while at the same time being a fully embodied spirit. What usually passes for “Nature Spirituality” or “Earth Spirituality” (check it out at your local book chains) is vastly more transcendentalist than Zhuangzi could ever be. It’s usually fixated on an Idea of the Earth or Nature — almost inevitably a romanticized, sentimentalized, sanitized, or nostalgic Idea. Zhuangzi’s spirituality has the smell of the Earth. It reeks of the Real and will no doubt offend those with excessively delicate aesthetic — and ontological — sensibilities. Watch out! You may be getting into deep Dada.

Yes, the radical spontaneity of Daoism links it to Dadaism. Daodao is Dada and vice versa. Tristan Tzara in fact said that Zhuangzi “was as dada as we are.” Daoist spirituality is Dada spirituality. Zhuangzi’s Daoism, like Dada, breaks down all the barriers, wanders off the path, and crosses all the boundaries. It takes us into wild, uncharted regions of nature, culture, and psyche. It’s a surre(gion)al spirituality.

Just Do It — Without Doing It

The AnarChapters are all about non-domination or anarchy. Daoists call this wuwei, doing without doing, doing without dominating. It’s a concept that many know from its influence on Ch’an and Zen Buddhism. What’s often called “Zen mind” has deep roots in Daoist wuwei. And so does Dada mind, as Tzara indirectly points out: “Dada isn’t at all modern, it’s rather a return to a quasi-buddhist religion of indifference.” He might have said “it’s a return to a Daoist spirituality of wuwei” since that’s where we find the Pre-Ancientist origins of the spontaneity, non-egoism, non-duality and non-domination of experience that he has in mind when he says “indifference.”

One of Zhuangzi’s most intriguing tales is his anecdote of Prince Wen Hui’s cook, Ding, who could carve an ox without his knife ever touching a bone. Cook Ding explains that “the blade of the knife has no thickness. That which has no thickness has plenty of space to pass through these spaces. Therefore after nineteen years my blade is as sharp as ever.” This story gives a prime example of wuwei. Cook Ding’s skillful action is so natural that it is effortless, without striving, without resistance from an alien world that must be dominated or forced into submission.

Cook Ding’s knife can also be seen as the sharp blade of ruthless analytical and intuitive consciousness. Daoist mind grasps (without grasping) the moment of unity of all things, but also the particularity and “thusness” of every phenomenon. In a sense, it can “cut through” things naturally without hacking them apart.

And finally, notice that the character in the story is a cook, someone who combines ingredients into a synthesis of creative expression, not a mere butcher who slices things into parts. The Daoist cook, rather than “murdering to dissect,” dissects to make whole. Cooks are familiar figures in both Daoist and Zen stories, often showing insight that learned monks and renowned scholars embarrassingly lack. Their skill expresses wuwei. Their art requires a sense of spontaneity and creativity. And they work in a realm par excellence in which spirituality and materiality converge: no wonder that the breaking of bread has been the center of both social and spiritual ritual.

“Discard wisdom!” says Laozi. (Don’t be a do-nothing know-it-all.) “Get cooking!” says Zhuangzi. (Just do it — without doing it.)

In another of his stories, Zhuangzi writes of Liezi, who was renowned for possessing the skill of riding on the wind. The literal-minded may dismiss this claim as ancient superstition. But Zhuangzi was not referring to a literal feat that can now easily be surpassed by businessmen and tourists on 707’s, but rather to an experience that even the most frequent flyers seldom have. This is the Daoist experience of being attuned to the way and knowing the effortlessness and ease of “doing without doing.” Tzara also uses the wind as a symbol of Dadaist spontaneity. Dada, he says, “mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation.” So Liezi was a Master of this (non-) practice of wuwei. But the merciless dialectician Zhuangzi cannot allow even the great Liezi to get away with anything. True, that sage “escaped the trouble of walking, but he still had to depend on something to get around.” Instead he should have “mounted on the truth of Heaven and Earth, ridden on the changes of the six breaths, and thus wandered through the boundless.” Ultimately, we must depend on Nothing at All, or we will soon fall flat.

But Zhuangzi has more to say about that creative wind. He tells us that it blows through everything and makes “the music of heaven.” It rushes through each thing, plays each thing like a musical instrument, so that each thing makes its own unique sounds, and sings its own song. He asks us whether we can hear this Music of All Beings, in all its harmonic and discordant multiplicity. What’s most astounding is that this Music of Heaven plays all around us and even in and through us! “Joy and anger, sorrow and happiness, hope and fear, indecision and strength, humility and willfulness, enthusiasm and insolence, like music sounding from an empty reed or mushrooms rising from the warm dark earth, continually appear before us day and night. No one knows from whence they come. Don’t worry about them. Let them be!” Who ever decides, “Now I’ll be angry,” or “Now I’ll be joyful”? And even if one did, would one ever first decide, “Now I’ll decide to be angry,” or “Now I’ll decide to be joyful”? No, the wind merely blows through our reed and that of others; the music plays through us and all around us. Just as at times some exotic species of mushroom springs up within us.

Zhuangzi helps us discover an anarchistic epistemology and sensibility. He describes a state in which “you are open to everything you see and hear, and allow this to act through you.” Part of wuwei, doing without doing, is “knowing without knowing,” knowing as being open to the things known, rather than conquering and possessing the objects of knowledge. This means not imposing our prejudices (whether our own personal ones, our culture’s, or those built into the human mind) on the Ten Thousand Things.

Anarchy Rules

Zhuangzi, like Laozi, is a Pre-Ancientist Anarchist. He looks back to the non-existent, more than real, yet historically-rooted Dynasty of the Yellow Emperor, the Era of the Uncarved Block. The age prior to the rise of domination — before the ascendancy of the State, Patriarchy, Class and the Megamachine. The establishment of this Many-Headed Monster was a huge historical mistake, a serious but also a laughable one. At once Theater of Cruelty and Comedy of Errors. Napoleon (who laid siege to nations and murdered multitudes in order to become Emperor of a small island) once said, “La Force n’est jamais ridicule.” For Zhuangzi, all attempts to dominate reality and to force one’s way are not only ridiculous but indeed absurd. Even the long saga of domination is at once both tragedy and farce.

A propos the absurdity of the State, Zhuangzi quotes Xu Yu as saying: “You want to govern the world and the world is already well governed.” The history of the State is the history of replacing good rule by evil. For over 99 percent of human history and 99.9998 percent of earth history, the planet was governed quite well. Then came the Many-Headed Monster. Zhuangzi, who lived in the Period of the Warring States (alias “interesting times”), recounts the opening act of this World Historical Tragicomedy, while we’re fortunate enough to have front-row seats for the dénouement.

For Zhuangzi, there is an alternative to this Tragicomedy: the Play of Anarchy. Anarchy, the anti-political politics of wuwei. The anarchic ruler rules without ruling. “No one is aware of him, but he brings happiness to every man. He stands on that which is not known and wanders in the land of nowhere.” This is nothing like Bakunin’s anarchist Invisible Dictatorship that guides the Masses strategically from behind the scenes. A Dictatorship that is “without insignia, titles, titles or official rights, and all the stronger for having none of the paraphernalia of power.” Zhuangzi’s ruler renounces all kinds of manipulation and even the subtlest forms of domination. Zhuangzi agrees with Laozi that “the Empire is a spiritual thing.” And the Spirit of the Empire is the Spirit of Anarchy.

What could such an anarchic ruler be like? For an example, Zhuangzi looks back to the ancient sage (traditionally called “The True Man of Old”) who “did not forget his beginning and did not seek his end. He accepted what he was given with delight and, and when it was gone he gave it no more thought.” This sage was in many ways merely the ordinary person of a prior age before the Uncarved Block was chopped up, before the integrity of nature and humanity were shattered by the violence of the State.

In that world, both human society and nature were gift economies. People practiced primal “economics,” the nomos of the oikos: “home rule”! This was “economics” in the sense of the extravagant and automatic self-allocation of abundant non-resources. Before the rise of regimented agriculture, scarcity and exploitation, and Imperial Barbarism and social domination, human beings could still experience the rich generosity of nature, the overflowing of being. The Daoist sage preserves this Spirit of the Gift in a world gone insane with acquisitiveness and possessiveness.

If we fall under Zhuangzi’s spell (if we’re wooed by his way!), are we naively yearning for the permanent reality of a mere Temporary Autochthonous Zone of the imagination? Or are we lapsing into radical nostalgia for a romanticized distant past? As enjoyable as utopian fantasy and radical nostalgia may be, neither is required in this case. Zhuangzi was looking back to real history, as mythologized and poeticized as this history has been. Eden and all its variations have actual historical roots in gathering and hunting societies, and in the village communities of the late Neolithic. But more crucially, Zhuangzi is describing a living world that anyone can enter in the present, through a wuweian practice that undoes the psychic mechanisms of domination and allows us to open ourselves up to experience — to the absolute gratuity of all that appears. After all, that’s the way reality actually is, beyond the illusions of all reality “principles.” When everything is a gift, the only appropriate attitude to life is gratitude and joy at receiving completely undeserved largesse. Everything is lagniappe!

So maybe the only Emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream (Quick. It’s melting!). Zhuangzi says or hints at a great deal about the qualities of this anarchic ruler (that is, just anybody who wanders along the Wayless Way). Scattered through the AnarChapters we find traits such as these: Calmness and equanimity. Intensity and spontaneity of feelings and passions. Skepticism about her own knowledge. Lack of concern for praise or blame. Freedom from guilt. Refusal to conform to the expectations of others. Rejection of all subservience and subordination. Humility. Creativity of thinking. Openness to every point of view. Love of solitude. Compassion for all beings. Absence of meanness, rancor and resentment. Lack of self-importance, egotism and arrogance. Reasonableness and fairness. Self(less)-confidence. Disdain for traditions and institutions. Fierce loyalty to the truth of experience and of things themselves.

Is this ruler-sage then a good example for others? Zhuangzi says that people tell him that the good ruler does what is right, promotes law and order, and makes sure that people are “never tempted to break the law.” Doesn’t it sound fantastic? It seems much like some people’s idea of anarchy — everybody does what’s right not because of coercion, but because they follow the good example of others. But for Zhuangzi this isn’t nearly anarchistic enough. The problem is that it “subverts virtue,” by which he means that it undermines the creative power of each person to act rightly and skillfully in a given situation. Establishing such a system of rule is like “making a mosquito carry a mountain on its back.” Zhuangzi would undoubtedly be nauseated by all the talk of “role models” that we hear in schools and mass media today. His own advice is for all of us to keep our own minds clear, follow our own way, impose it on no one, do what we can, and be satisfied. We should watch out for rulers, including the best of all rulers (maybe especially the best of all rulers), and avoid trying to be a good example.

The problem is the intrusion of the ego. One of Zhuangzi’s persistent themes — the very secret of wise (non-)rule — is, “Get rid of self-obsession!” Paradoxically, “the perfect man has no self, the holy man has no merit, the sage has no reputation.” “No more gurus!” teaches Zhuangzi. And get rid of that inner guru! The more we think of our self, the more everything appears imperfect, unacceptable, and completely inadequate — including our own beloved self. The more we claim credit and recognition, the less we deserve it. And the less reason anyone would have to give it to us. The more we try to become heroic, self-asserting “individuals” the more we become pitiful puppets playing a ridiculous role.

Being Good for Nothing

Zhuangzi was a radical relativist and perspectivist. Not in the nihilistic Post-Mortemist sense of losing all sense of materiality and rootedness in the real, but rather in the Pre-Ancientist sense of openness to both the radical uniqueness and the natural commonality of all beings. Openness to both their absolute emptiness and their dense physicality. According to Zhuangzi, we miss both the uniqueness of others and our commonality with them because “we cling to our own point of view, as if everything depended on it.” We can’t shift our perspective. We can’t see the perspective of the other person, the other tree, the other fish.

Zhuangzi’s relativism seems to go to wild extremes. He might seem crazy for saying that “No one has lived longer than a dead child,” and that Peng Zu (who lasted a not negligible seven-hundred years) “died young.” Yet any of us, like Zhuangzi, can pick up a piece of stone that is a billion years old. What’s the usual life span for us — insects of a day that we are — compared to that? Should we congratulate each other on every second that we manage to survive? And whatever the length of one’s life, it equals precisely one life. Peng Zu “alone is famous today for having lived a long time, and everybody tries to ape him. Isn’t it pitiful?” Zhuangzi says that we’d be better off if we weren’t so pitiful and self-pitying. A shocking thought! Maybe the length of my life is suited precisely to someone like me.

We aren’t very good at “thinking like a mountain,” but most of us live as if we think we have the lifespan of a mountain.

Zhuangzi’s works are full of stories about the relativity of all things, and the human tendency to ignore the perspective, and the way, of other beings. He points out that a human who sleeps in a wet place will get aches and pains, but it’s a perfect resting place for an eel. A human who lives up a tall tree will be anxiety-ridden, but a monkey takes it in stride. He mentions two famous women who were thought to be the most beautiful in all of China. Yet fish, on seeing them, dive to the bottom of the water, birds fly away in horror, and deer run away terrified. Who is the true judge of beauty?

In one story, Zhuangzi is crossing a bridge with Huizi, points to the fish swimming around in a steam and remarks on how happy they are. Huizi replies, “You’re crazy! How can you know what it’s like to be a fish? You’re not a fish!” Zhuangzi replies, “How do you know I don’t know what it’s like to be fish. You’re not me!” In this tale, two profound truths hide behind one apparent sophistry. We can fail to recognize the experience of the other, and we can fail to recognize the otherness of the other.

And then there’s the story of the huge old tree that is no good for lumber. A carpenter dismisses it as completely useless, since he can’t use it. But its very uselessness has been useful to it in keeping it alive until it towers above all the other living things. In the story, the tree says to the carpenter, “You and I are both things. How can one thing judge another thing?” An excellent question! Indeed, how can one being have the gall to impose its concept of value on every other of many billion times billions of beings in the universe?

One of the most famous of Zhuangzi’s stories is “Three in the morning.” He tells of a monkey trainer who decides to give the monkeys three acorns in the morning and four in the afternoon. The monkeys are infuriated. So the trainer says, “OK, you get four in the morning and three in the afternoon!” And the monkeys are all delighted.

A common reaction to this story is, “What stupid monkeys and what a brilliant trainer!” Those who jump to this conclusion put themselves in the place of the trainer, but they may be a bit slower than the monkeys they laugh at. I can imagine Zhuangzi telling these dull-witted primates that the monkeys are the best judges of whether they’re hungrier in the morning or in the afternoon! And he might point out that the trainer was not necessarily any genius either. He was just smart enough to figure out what the monkeys were rather obviously trying to communicate. And as for the monkeys — they got exactly what they wanted.

Beyond making monkeys out of certain overeducated Third Chimpanzees, Zhuangzi may be saying that we tend to hang on to our precious acorn distribution systems (what Wilhelm Reich called “character armor”) for no good reason. We try to control other beings (monkeys, people, the things of the world) in completely irrational ways, not realizing that there’s really nothing at stake.

According to this interpretation, Zhuangzi is putting us in the place of the trainer and then showing what a ludicrous figure he is. But on a deeper level Zhuangzi may be also be asking us to put ourselves in the place of the monkeys. In this case, the trainer is the devious ruler who dominates us through the absurdities of politics and economics. We are the kind of monkeys who can’t catch on to the fact that the alternatives offered by our masters all come to the same thing. We are just delighted if the powers that be give us 4+3 acorns instead of 3+4 acorns! After all, isn’t that what the Free World is all about?

Considering Zhuangzi’s radical perspectivism, it wouldn’t be surprising if he would challenge us to put ourselves in the place of both the trainer and the monkeys. In fact, maybe we should even look at the situation from the point of view of the acorn. For he might have added that if the world stopped wasting its time on systems of monkey-training, a few more acorns might grow into magnificent oak trees!

Throughout all these tales of many life forms, Zhuangzi develops a certain concept of value: what we would now call a non-anthropocentric one. He says: “You were born in a human form, and you find joy in it. Yet there are ten thousand other forms endlessly transforming that are equally good, and the joy of these is untold.” By reducing everything to a narrow, monolithic standard of value — economic value, instrumental value, or even use value — we destroy these myriad modes of enjoyment, and finally make our own lives less than enjoyable as we survey a devastated landscape of domination. The Daoist rejects this sad, absurd reductionism and affirms the incomparable value of all the diverse forms of life and the manifold expressions of natural and human creativity. Johannes Baader said much the same of Dada: “A Dadaist is someone who loves life in all its uncountable forms, who knows and says that, ‘Life is not here alone, but also there, there, there (da, da, da).’”

Both Daoism and Dadaism take a stand for all that is devalued according to the nihistic calculus of civilization and domination. Zhuangzi comments ironically that “[a]ll men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!” And Tzara echoes the irony in his remark that “Dada is as useless as everything else in life.”

Becoming a Bug’s Arm

Zuangzi says that when Laozi died, Chin Shih went to the funeral, “yelled three times, and left.” The mourners were shocked and thought this was a disgrace. Zhuangzi, on the other hand, saw it as a quite reasonable response. Maybe Chin Shih was giving three cheers for old Laozi. Or maybe he was just getting his mourning over with quickly. Either way it makes perfect sense. The alternative is to hang on to what can’t be caught. “The Master came because it was time. He left because he followed the natural flow.” Zhuangzi was a rebel against all that is stupid, unimaginative, cruel, and oppressive, but he never saw the point in rebelling against our own nature and the nature of nature. For Zhuangzi, following the Dao means achieving “freedom from bondage,” exactly as Spinoza said almost two millennia later in his ETHICS. Zhuangzi concludes his funeral story in the spirit of his great pre-Ancientist predecessor Heraclitus: “The wood is consumed but the fire burns on.” We shouldn’t be surprised that when we try to hold on to the wood we end up with a handful of ashes. And what kind of buffoon would to try to hold on to fire?

Zhuangzi’s spirituality of death is a refusal to fall into the death neuroses of civilization. His approach to death seems weird, shocking, and abnormal because it is neither safely tragic nor safely romantic. It seems unnatural because of its stark naturalism. He is actually willing to approach the unapproachable. He befriends the corpse. Old, dependable Death. “Brother Death, please mind the store.” He also avoids death psychosis, civilization’s poisoned legacy from ancient barbarism. The delusion that death is neither tragic nor romantic because its just not there. He announces loudly that the grinning corpse cannot be evaded. Grin back! Zhuangzi recounts the words of Master Li to the dying Master Lai: “How marvelous the Creator is!

What is he going to make of you next? Where is he going to send you? Will he make you into a rat’s liver? Will he make you into a bug’s arm?”

In confronting the reality of death, Zhuangzi confronts the reality of life. To him, the idea that everything just changes form, so there is really no death, is a fraud. “One may say, ‘There is no death.’ What good does that do? When the body decays, so does the mind. Is this not a great sorrow? Is life really this absurd? Am I the only one who sees the absurdity?” Apparently there was some New Age ideology floating around in the Ancient World, and Zhuangzi didn’t buy it. Death is real, so life is irreducibly absurd. But we have no good reason to flee from this absurdity. Rather we need to embrace it — as part of life. The question is whether we are capable of embracing life itself, rather than clinging to our own ghostly phantasms of life.

Zhuangzi’s affirmation of the laughable, sometimes outrageous, sometimes grotesque absurdity of real life runs throughout his stories and aphorisms. In this he was a precursor of the Carnivalesque. Bakhtin explains that the laughter of Carnival is an affirmation of our place in the Cosmos and Chaos of Nature. It “does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, ever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness.” Carnival is “the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal” and is “hostile to all that was immortalized and complete.” In Carnival, people participate in “the wholeness of the world,” and affirm the fact that “they too are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed.”

Zhuangzi is a Pre-Ancientist rather than a Post-Mortemist precisely because he faces both life and death.

Don’t Fall for It

For Zhuangzi, like Laozi, the Dao declined when everything was given a name, and when people began to make distinctions between right and wrong. “Then came men who distinguished between things ... Later they labeled them ... When right and wrong appeared, Dao declined. With the fall of Dao, desire arose.” Nature and society were ruthlessly torn apart, dismembered into bits and pieces that could be labeled, judged, measured, dominated, controlled, and possessed. We are fallen along with everything we have dragged down with us.

Neo-Daoist Dadaism similarly attacks both the reduction of living realities to lifeless names, and the dualistic division of right and wrong. Tz