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Title: Boundary Violations Author: Hakim Bey Date: 1994 Language: en Topics: protectionism Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/boundary Notes: References: For the text of the APA report, The Lower East Side Rose (vol. 2, no. 12 [51], April 1, 1994); Paul Feyerabend’s definitive Farewell to Reason (Verso, 1987); and J. Wafer’s excellent Bakhtinian study of “Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomblé”, The Taste of Blood (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
There exist historians of the 18^(th) century who refuse to deal with
freemasonry. Their “reasoning” seems to run as follows: – “The Masons
believed in mumbojumbo. I do not believe in mumbojumbo. Therefore the
Masons are unimportant – indeed, virtually nonexistent.” The eye in the
pyramid stares out of everyone’s pocket – and yet still these historians
refuse to admit that masonry has any historical significance. Nowadays,
thousands are afflicted with alien encounters, UFO sexual molestations
by the 100’s; countless others are afflicted with memories of Satanic
Abuse. But according to serious science, neither Satan nor UFO’s exist.
“Therefore” the abduction hysteria has no historical significance and
can scarcely be said to exist. Right? No, wro ng. Obviously UFO’s and
UFO-hysteria can be considered as two different things, lacking all
ontological co-dependency. That is, UFO’s may or may not “exist”, but
they need not exist (except perhaps as an “archetype”) in order to
arouse the interest of historians in the hysteria and induce them to
attempt to interpret it. The hysteria is real and important, “history in
the making” as the newsreels used to squawk – but its significance
remains buried because “science” has mistaken the content of the hys
teria for its inner structure.
Now that Freud has been defenestrated – along with the Unconscious –
modern psychotherapy can offer an all-purpose etiology for all
UFO/Satanic “memories”: – child abuse. In a recent statement on the
subject the APA cautioned that the falsity of certain “memories” should
not be used as an excuse to ignore the underlying trauma – or deep inner
structure of the “memory” – which is assumed to be “real” abuse. The
idea that repressed sexuality in childhood might cause false memories to
arise as defense mechanisms in later life has been junked; the
“seduction theory” has been revived, and transformed into the “abuse
theory.” This theory presupposes the non-existence of “infant and
childhood sexuality” (in Freudian terms), and in a broader sense, the
non-existence of childhood desire. A tendency arises to regard the child
as an erotic blank, incapable of any authentic con-sensuality. Therefore
all points of contiguity between the concept “childhood” and the concept
“sexuality” can be subsumed into one new and exhaustive concept: –
“abuse”.
The APA offers an interesting paraphrase of the abuse-concept when it
mentions “conditions that are associated with boundary violations in
[the patient’s] past.” New professional jargon always provides the
semanticist/sociologist a golden opportunity to unpack hidden political
and psychological content from tell-tale words and phrases – and
boundary violation is a veritable trick suitcase – a richness of
embarrassments. We’d need a whole monograph to dump all the items jammed
into this little portmanteau. The metaphor of nationalism springs to
mind first of all – boundaries are borders, violations are invasions.
The individual is hypostatized not as a sovereign monarch (who might
after all mingle and mate with other monarchs) but as a closed-off area
ssurroundedby an abstract grid of map-lines, political separations,
exclusions. A border-crossing here is a violation, not an act of trade,
or love, or harmonial association. The border is not a skin which can be
caressed, it is a barrier. In relation to the inviolate body, all
“others” are simply potential wetbacks, illegal immigrants, terrorists
traveling on forged documents.
The next obvious metaphor is the immune system. In fact, we can mix
metaphors already here, like the Iranian scholar M. Rahnema (quoted by
P. Feyerabend in Farewell to Reason, p. 298) who “has compared the
effects of developmental aid with the effect of the illness Aids.” The
meddling of Capital in the “third” world has a viral effect – it breaks
down immune systems made up of traditionally-scaled economics and
values, and replaces them only with diseased “growth”. This is true –
but the use of the metaphor is interesting, giving an air of hysteria
and hopelessness to the argument. After all, there’s a cure for
Capitalism, but it doesn’t involve non-contact among peoples; on the
contrary. In a sense, Capitalism creates separation – a vicious parody,
if you like, or grotesque exaggeration of the “natural” immune systems
of peoples and cultures. It imposes uniformity but denies contact. The
other, the “different”, is perceived as viral and threatening. The cure
for this “condition” might well be to deny uniformity but to make
contact. Ultimately it’s not the “immune system” which is at stake, but
life itself.
The metaphor of AIDS has been a godsend to crypto-ideologues like the
APA, who can make use of its semantic effluvia in terms like “boundary
violation” to hint obliquely at the underlying agenda of their
therapeutic control paradigm – i.e., to erase the concept “childhood
desire” and replace it with the concept “abuse”. If all sex is dirty and
causes death, then everyone must be “protected”. Children here serve as
metaphors for “everyone”. To “protect children” is to protect the
spiritual values of civilization itself against the threat of desire,
the otherness of the body. No doubt the APA remains unconscious of these
meanings; but then the APA has jettisoned the unconscious, so it’s only
appropriate that they should be among the first to fall vvictimto its
surreptitious return. The unconscious – banished safely to the realms of
advertising and disinformation, or so we fondly imagined – has come back
to haunt us with Godzilla-like vengeance – raped by aliens and
satanists! Our boundaries are being invaded, and we are urged to
“believe the victim.” The APA warns us that “abusers come from all walks
of life. There is no uniform ‘profile’ ... ,” etc. Anyone may be an
abuser, just as anyone may have been abused. Abuse is universal. There i
s only abuse. Of course the APA doesn’t believe in UFO’s – but it does
believe, quite clearly, that pleasure is evil.
Some extremists in the “Deep” Ecology movements joined certain Xtian
bigots in hailing AIDS as God’s plan (for overpopulation, not
immorality), and went on to suggest building a wall between the US and
Mexico to keep out the teeming billions of the angry South. Cut down to
a few million healthy hetero’s America could restore its “wilderness” –
which the Deep Ecolo’s seem to envision as something like the Ayatollah
Khomeini’s idea of heaven: – clean, pure, aryan ... well, maybe more
like the SS’s ide a of heaven. Ethnic cleansing is yet another panic
reaction to the sensation of “boundary violation”. Abusers are, above
all, aliens – even though (as the APA palpitatingly insinuates) they
might look like .... you and me! The other is the locus of all forbidden
desire which we ourselves must deny and hence project onto the unknown.
But of course, that’s Freudianism – or even Reichianism! We have no
desires. We are the victims of abuse. Q.E.D.
j The new catchphrase “multiculturalism” simply hides a form of ethnic
cultural cleansing under a semantic mask of liberal pluralism.
Multiculturalism is a means of separating one culture from another, for
avoiding all possibility of cross-cultural synergy or mutuality or
communicativeness. At best multiculturalism provides the Consensus with
an excuse to commit a bit of cultural pillaging – “appropriation” – to
add some sanitized version of otherness to its own dreary uniform
boredom – through tourism , or vapid academic curricula based on
“respect and dignity”. But the underlying deep structure of
multiculturalism is fear of penetration, of infection, of mutation, of
inextricable involvement with otherness – of becoming the other. Again,
there’s a cure for tourism – but it doesn’t involve everyone staying
home and watching TV. It necessitates a simultaneous attack on
uniformity, and a breaking down of borders – it demands both a genuine
pluralism and a genuine camaraderie or solidarity – it demands
conviviality.
Knowledge itself can be seen as a kind of virus. On the psychological
level this perception manifested recently as a panic about “computer
viruses”, and more generally about computer hacking – boundary
violations in cyberspace, so to speak. The government wants access to
all computer cypher-codes in order to control the “Net”, the InterNet,
which might otherwise spread everywhere, transmitting secrets, even
secrets about “abuse” and kiddy porn – as if the Net were a disease,
rather than simply a free exchange of information. America’s immune
system can’t take “too much knowing” (or whatever T.S. Eliot’s lame-ass
phrase was); America must be “protected” from penetration by foreign
chaos cabals of evil hackers (who might look just like you and me) – b
orders must be imposed.
Cyberspace itself however involves a curious form of disembodiment in
which each participant becomes a perceptual monad, a concept rather than
a physical presence. Cyberspace parodies the gnostic demand for
transcendence of the body, which is literally “ left behind” like a
prison of meat as one enters the pleroma of conceptual space. Ultimately
one wishes to “download the consciousness” and achieve purity,
cleanliness, immortality. Cyberspace proposes that life is not “in” the
body, but in the Spirit. And the spirit is ... inviolate.
A preview of this paradise can be attained through phone-sex.
Video-phones were never “invented” because too many people hate their
own faces (i.e., bodies) and don’t want others to see them (too much
boundary violation). So, until cybersex is perfected , the uv-cyberspace
of telephone-land – a soundscape of bodiless voices – must be invested
with all the sexuality we cannot share with other bodies, or with
“real-time” persons with real personalities and desires. The deep
purpose of phone-sex is probably not really the client’s masturbation or
his credit card number, but the actual ectoplasmic meeting of two ghosts
in the “other” world of sheer nothingness – a poor parodic rendering of
the phone company’s slogan, “Reach out and touch someone!” – which is so
sadly so finally what we cannot do in cyberspace.
Of course the phone company, and everyone else, knows very well that you
cannot reach out and touch someone over a phone. What the slogan really
says is: – Don’t reach out and touch someone – that’s a boundary
violation! – pay us instead to mediate between you and the very sense of
touch itself. The phone will save you from being touched.
Why then use the slogan, “Reach out and touch”? Ah, there’s the secret
of desire, Benjamin’s “Utopian trace” still embedded in the commodity.
We want to reach out and touch, but we also fear the invasion of
sensation it would entail; by using the phone we scratch an itch that we
secretly know will never heal. We’ll never be “satisfied” by all this
spookiness – but at least we shall be .... distracted.
Protectionism becomes the one true philosophy of any culture based on
mass anxiety about border violation; “safely” and “survival” become its
shibboleths and highest values. The “security state” emerges like an
abstract constellation figured against a random patterning of stars –
each star representing a threatened job, “dysfunctional” family,
“crime-ridden” neighborhood, black hole of boredom .... Power in the
security state emerges out of fear, and depends on fear for its rule. In
the society of Safety, all jobs are threatened, all families are
dysfunctional, crime is universal, and boredom is god. You may read the
signs of this power not only in the texts of the media which define it,
but even more clearly in the very landscape which “embodies” it. The
PoMo architecture of paranoid urbanism complements the
already-picturesque decay of the Modern, the haunted emptiness of
industrial ruins and abandoned farms. The aesthetic history of
Capitalism maps out a process of retreat, a withdrawal into t he psychic
fortress, the “drug-free-zone”, the Mall, the planned community, the
electronic highway. We design for a life without immunity, believing
that only Capital can save us from infection. As we watch “History”
unfold for us in the media, iincluding the media of cultural and
political representation, we become voluntary trance-victims of
“terrorism” (the secret inner structure of “protectionism”); – in
consequence, our political acts (such as architecture) can express no
higher vision than fear. The design of private space is based on the
easiest antidote to fear, which is boredom.
Ideally, Capital would like to discorporate entirely and retreat into
the cyberspace of electronic wealth (and electronics as wealth) – of
pure speed, pure representation. The infinite “growth” which is
Capital’s concept of immortality will indeed exceed all limits once
economics becomes a matter of digitized data, or spiritualized
knowledge, or “gnosis”. Not long ago, the glaciers of Capital covered
the whole landscape – now the “ice” (William Gibson’s SciFi slang for
“data”) is withdrawing from physical space and retreating toward the
pole, the mathematical point of abstraction, where a new and
spiritualized topology of pure informational space will open up for us,
like that “heaven of glass” with which the Gnostic Demiurge attempted to
con the An gels of the Lord. And we shall be saved – safe at last –
beyond all corruption – gone beyond.
Of course, as you know, very few will actually be taken up in this
Rapture. Actually, you’ve probably already been disqualified. As Capital
withdraws (like an army fleeing from phantoms, or phantoms fleeing an
army), a great deal of social triage will have to be practised. As the
No Go Zones are created and the wounded are left behind, entire new
populations of outsiders will be created. Too bad you’ll have to miss
that last helicopter out of town. “Homelessness” constitutes such a
Zone, a kind of anti-architecture, a shell from which all services and
utilities have been withdrawn, leaving only a television blaring in a
bare and empty room, broadcasting cop-shows and messages of
multiculturalism an d dignity. That is, the spectacle of Power remains,
while the “advantages” of control have been disappeared. Any overt
symptoms of autonomy amongst the “victims” can be crushed by the last
interface between Power and nothingness: – Robocop, M. de Landa’s
“artificial intelligence” or war-automaton, the violence of a society
turned against itself.
As the map is infolded, certain privileged zones vanish into the
“higher” topology of virtual reality, while certain other spaces are
sacrificed to the world of decay, P. K. Dick’s Ubik, the universal
greyness of social and biological melt-down. In such a scenario how can
we play any role other than victim? We’ve already lost, because we’ve
defined ourselves in relation to a situation of loss, and to a space of
disappearance. In our fear of all boundary invasions we discover that we
ourselves have been reclassified and categorized as viral. This time the
Abuser/Terrorist doesn’t just look like you and me – it is you and me.
The “homeless are criminal”; those who are not “taken up” have clearly
“sinned”.
Of course, it remains entirely within our power to construct an
altogether different interpretation of “homelessness” and the No Go
Zone. We could use terms like psychic nomadism and even nomadosophy to
fortify ourselves for a revaluation of values in which our chances of
autonomy would seem to increase in proportion to the actual withdrawal
of Power into the Simulo-Spectacle of too-Late Capitalism. We could try
to envision situations in which the “value” of homelessness would mutate
into the value of “ aimless wandering” (as Chuang Tzu expressed it) –
situations in which we could organize everyday life into a de facto
field of struggle for “empirical” freedoms, palpable pleasures, festal
arrangements.
For the “utopian socialist” Charles Fourier, “God is the enemy of
Uniformity.” The true blight of Civilization is uniformity – not union.
The individual is realized not as the mass-produced monad of
Civilization’s alienating social atomism, but as a living star in a
constellation of sexualized stars. In fact, the Planansterian orgy is –
for Fourier – the ultimate emblem of the social, its heraldic device, so
to speak, as well as its clearest manifestation. Think of those
pornographic 18^(th) century engravings showing dozens and dozens of
naked randy aristo’s, a bit of flagellation, a bowl of flaming punch, an
aesthetic dance of multiple and ambiguous copulations – this is
Fourier’s political programe, template for the ideal society – Harmonial
Association. The body has not disappeared, nor has it become the body
without organs. But it has become the infinitely penetrable body.
Physicist Nick Herbert likes to point out that for life here in the
mesosphere (i.e. between stars and quarks), here where we actually live,
juice and slime play an indispensable biospheric morphic role. Juice and
slime are the ultimate freeform connective and penetrative tissues of
living systems. Life clearly has no interest in the antibiotic hermetism
implied in such phrases as “boundary violations”. Life uses borders and
life violates borders and life constructs media of its own to fill up
the extra spaces. The amoeba and the fertilized egg are both sacs of
juice and slime – one grows by splitting itself, the other by being
split. Viral-like DNA is “freely exchanged” in gushes of juice and slime
– liquid with paradoxical form – the very liminality of form itself –
secret secretions – the viscous slippery in-betweeness of the organic –
the placental wetness of becoming.
The appropriate architectural form for a society based on radical
conviviality might best be characterized as grotesque – that is, in the
original sense of the word: – the cave. Since the Paleolithic, ritual
space has always been envisioned as a hollow earth – and in Mao Shan
Taoism, for example, heaven itself is honeycombed with countless grottos
of faeries and Immortals, dripping with cinnabar and sprouting with
magic mushrooms. As an aesthetic term grotesque refers to the
organic-looking forms of stalactites and stalagmites, to the curving
spiralling line of flesh and vegetation, which re-appears underground
and is transformed into the crystal of architectural space – without
losing its snaky flowery curviness, or even it matrix-like slick
wetness, or even its colors. For the Gothic and the Baroque, “grotesque”
serves as a term of aesthetic appreciation; for the Neo-Classical and
the proto-Industrial with their mania for straight lines, “grotesque”
becomes an insult.
The grotto serves to house the “grotesque body”, as Bakhtin calls it.
“In his writings on carnival, Bakhtin maintains that one of its most
salient characteristics is its use of imagery involving what he calls
the “grotesque body.”
Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the
rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished,
outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on
those parts of the body that are open t o the outside world, that is,
the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or
through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means
that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various
ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the
breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its
essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in
copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating,
drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating
body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly
speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each
other.”
This describes what has been called Bakhtin’s “principle of permeable
boundaries.”
Folklore is permeated with the carnivalesque/grotesque, with the
Rabelaisian/utopian landscape of Rock Candy Mountains, houses of cream
and bacon, seas of lemonade – a geography of excess which found its
theorist in Fourier (who actually predicted that t he oceans would turn
to “something like lemonade” once humanity had converted itself into
Passional Series) as well as in Rabelais, who drew more directly on the
folkloric sea of story. But folklore itself appears as a phenomenon of
permeable boundaries. Stories go everywhere, arriving long before anyone
“notices” them, and embed themselves at a level of culture which –
perhaps more than any other human project – represents the possibility
of unity without uniformity. The Omnivorous Ogre and the Giant’s Bride
exercise an almost universal “archetypal” appeal because they express
certain basics of the body – and the social body. But in each culture
the Dragon-slayer and the Ash-girl find new names, costumes, dialects –
even different meanings – without losing their recognizable selves and
invariable fates. The worldwide dispersion of folklore is the most
striking accomplishment of the grotesque social body and its principle
of permeable boundaries: – the creation of a carnivalesque narrative
which resonates in every land, uniting humanity on the level of shared
pleasure even while it expresses the infinitude of archetypal
variations. The motifs of folklore act in a sense as memes and bundles
of memes, which in turn, have been compared with viruses – they carry
meanings from one society to another. The transportation of a folktale
is a movement of meaning – but the meaning is never assigned (by an
author[ity] or “tradition”) – the meaning is given and received.
Imagination here acquires the function of morphogenetic mutuality, or
social “co-creation”. This definition serves us better than the term
virus with its connotations of disease and terror. But let’s be clear: –
If we’re forced to choose between “the viral” and the civilization of
safety, we’ll choose the viral. If we must be crude about it, we’ll have
to declare in favor of “boundary violations.” We’re not just describing
the “grotesque social body” – we’re buying it.
Invariably however this rather existentialist commitment involves a
caveat: – that the proposal here is not directed by some sort of “high
risk” nihilism or armageddonism. The real Doom-sayers are the proponents
of Order and Progress, whose worldview reduces them to a hystereisis of
rigidity and body-slander. But the proponents of a Feyerabendian “chaos”
(an anti-theory) are in fact the true biophiles, the party of
celebration. We suggest that the grotesque body is at one and the same
time the magic al individual, the freespirit, the fully realized self of
the fairytale’s denouement – and also the infinitely permeable body, the
body of Fourier’s “Museum Orgy” – the body which is desired. This
paradox can only be resolved in the festal body; thus it is the festival
(with its ZeroWork and “promiscuity”) that functions as the crucial
insurrectionary praxis or principle of social mutability – the creation
of festal space, the creation of carnival to fill the festal space – the
creation of the temporary autonomous zone within the NoGo Zone –
festival as resistance and as uprising, perhaps in a single form, in a
single hour of pleasure – festival as the very meaning or deep inner
structure of our autonomy.
Who will give us an architecture based on the slime mold, the bedouin
tent, the baroque grotto, and the street festival of (say) an
Afro-Brazilian spirit-cult? The answer is: – no one but ourselves. The
Supreme Architect is dead; long live architecture. The Border Artists
have already begun to assemble – the bricoleurs, DPs, smugglers and
Poetic Terrorists of the permeable interface – drawn to the borders,
where monoliths rub and creak against each other, whole continents
adrift, scraping, shooting sparks, filling the air with ozone and
orgone, shifting with millennial dreams, hot, tropically hot, and
notoriously unhygienic. This is the region of boundary violations –
border raids – penetrations – some pleasurable, others catastrophic – of
cross-cultural synergies, ritual brawls, everyday life raised
(“sublimed”) to a degree of intensity approaching full presence, full
embodiment – and yet still indistinct, romantic as a reverie, an erotic
dream of a utopian landscape – at once a wilderness and a “pleasaunce”,
a chaos and a ritual space – the democracy of the mingling of bodily
fluids, of divine invasions, of polymorphous sensuality – sharing the
break-down of boundaries – – the infinitude of Passion – the shaping
power of desire.