Francis Bacon, born in 1561, was the first man of the technocratic age. In saying this, one may be disputing no less an authority than Immanuel Kant, who said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilization. Perhaps. However, it was Bacon who first saw, pure and serene, the connection between science and the improvement of the human condition. The principal aim of his work was to advance “the happiness of mankind,” and he continually criticized his predecessors for failing to understand that the real, legitimate, and only goal of the sciences is the “endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” He brought science down from the Heavens, including mathematics, which he conceived of as a humble handmaiden to invention. In this utilitarian view of knowledge, Bacon was the chief architect of a new edifice of thought in which resignation was cast out and God assigned to a special room. The name of the building was Progress and Power. Ironically, Bacon was not himself a scientist, or at least not much of one. He did no pioneering work in any field of research. He did not uncover any new law of nature or generate a single fresh hypothesis. He was not even well informed about the scientific investigation of his own time. And though he prided himself on being the creator of a revolutionary advance in scientific method, posterity has not allowed him this presumption. Indeed, his most famous experiment makes its claim on our attention because Bacon died as a result of it. He and his good friend Dr. Witherbone were taking a coach ride on a wintry day when, seeing snow on the ground, Bacon wondered if flesh might not be preserved in snow, as salt. The two decided to find out at once. They bought a hen, removed its innards, and stuffed the body with snow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Poor Bacon never learned the result of his experiment, because he fell immediately ill from the cold, most probably with bronchitis, and died three days later. For this, he is sometimes regarded as a martyr to experimental science. However, experimental science was not where his greatness lay. Although others of his time were impressed by the effects of practical inventions on the conditions of life, Bacon was the first to think deeply and systematically on the matter. He devoted much of his work to educating men to see the links between invention and progress. In Novum Organum he wrote, “It is well to observe the force and effect and consequence of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the World; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these changes.” In this passage, we can detect some of Bacon’s virtues and the source of his great influence. Here is so sleepwalker. He knows full well what technology does to culture and places technological development at the center of his reader’s attention. He writes with conviction and verve. He is, after all, among the World’s great essayists; Bacon was a master propagandist, who knew well the history of science but saw science not as a record of speculative opinion but as the record of what those opinions had enabled man to do. And, if not the World, he was ceaselessly energetic in trying to convey this idea to his countrymen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

In the first two books of Novum Organum, which consists of 182 aphorisms, Bacon sets out nothing less than a philosophy of science based on the axiom that “the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing.” It is in this work that he denounces the infamous four Idols, which have kept man from gaining power over nature: Idols of the Tribe, which lead us to believe our perceptions are the same as nature’s facts; Idols of the Cave, which lead us to mistaken ideas derived from heredity and environment; Idols of the Market-place, which lead us to be deluded by words; and Idols of the Theater, which lead us to the misleading dogmas of the philosophers. To read Bacon today is to be constantly surprised at his modernity. We are never far from the now familiar notion that science is a source of power and progress. In The Advancement of Learning, he even outlines the foundation of a College for Inventors that sounds something like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bacon would have the government provide inventors with allowances for their experiments and for traveling. He would have scholarly journals and international associations. He would encourage full cooperation among, scientists, an idea that would have startled Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, who used some of their genius to devise ways of concealing their work from one another. Bacon also believed that scientists should be paid well to give public lectures, and that information the public of the utility of invention was as important as invention itself. In short, he conceived of the scientific enterprise as it is conceived today—organized, financially secure, public, and mankind’s best weapon in the struggle to improve his condition and to do so continuously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

As I have said, Bacon is the first man of technocracy, but it was some time before he was joined by the multitude. He died in 1626, and it took another 150 years for European culture to pass to the mentality of the modern World—that is, to technocracy. In doing so, people came to believe that knowledge is power, that humanity is capable of progressing, that poverty is great evil, and that life of the average person is as meaningful as any other. It is untrue to say that along the way God died. However, any conception of God’s design certainly lost much of its power and meaning, with that loss went the satisfactions of a culture in which moral and intellectual values were integrated. At the same time, we must remember that in the tool-using culture of the older European World, the vast majority of people were peasants, impoverished and powerless. If they believed their afterlife was filled with unending joy, their lives on Earth were nonetheless “nasty, brutish, and short.” As C.P. Snow remarked, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, which was the fruit of Baconian science, was the only hope for the poor. And if their “true Deity became mechanism,” as Thomas Carlyle said, it is probable that by then most people would not have traded their Earthly existence for life in a Godly integrated tool-using culture. If they would, since there was little use in lamenting the past, it did not matter. The Western World had become a technocracy from which there could be no turning back. Addressing both those who were exhilarated by technocracy and those who were repulsed by it, Stephen Vincent Benet gave the only advice that made any sense. In John Brown’s Body he wrote: “If you at last must have a word to say, say neither, in their way, ‘It is a deadly magic and accursed,’ Nor ‘It is blest,’ but only ‘It is here.’” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

The transfusion of this religious mythmaking or value-positing interpretation of social and political experience into the American bloodstream was in large measure effected by Max Weber’s language. His success here is, I am tempted to say, miraculous. A good example is his invention, the Protestant Ethic. I read his book of that name in my first social-science course at the University of Chicago when I was being initiated into the modern mysteries. This course was a survey of social-science “classics,” among which was also Marx—not only the Communist Manifesto but also goodly chunks of Capital. Of course, neither Locke nor Smith, the official spokesman for “capitalism,” who might very well even be considered its founders, was on the list, because we were dealing with thinkers whom a contemporary social scientist could take seriously. Marx explained the emergence of capitalism as a historical necessity, in no one’s control, the result of class conflict over material property relations. For him Protestantism was just an ideology reflecting capitalist control of the means of production. I did not see, and I am not sure that my teachers saw, that, if Weber was right, Marx—his economics and his revolution, in short, Marxism and the kinds of moral sympathies it inevitably engenders—was finished. Weber purported to demonstrate that there was no such material necessity, that men’s “Worldviews” or “values” determined their history, spirit compelling matter rather than the other way around. This has the effect of restoring the older view that individual men count for something, that there is human freedom and the need for leadership. Weber said it was Calvin’s charisma and the vision allied to it, routinized by his followers, that was decisive for the development of capitalism. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

However, how different Weber’s charismatic leader is from the rational statesmen looked to by Locke, Montesquieu, Smith and the Federalist. They strive for ends grasped by reason and self-evidently grounded in nature. No values, no creative visions are required for them to see what all reasonable men should see—that hard work is required to have sober, secure and prosperous freedom. Marx is arguably closer to the core of their belief in that respect; although men, according to him, are in the grip of the historical process, that process itself is rational and has as its end the rational freedom of man. Man remains, somehow, the rational animal. Weber, on the other hand, denies the rationality of the “values” posited by the Calvinists; they are “decisions,” not “deliberations,” imposed on a chaotic World by powerful personalities, “Worldviews” or “World-interpretations” with no foundation other than the selves of the Protestants. Those “values” made the World what it was for the Protestants. They are acts that are primarily of the will, and constitute the self and the World at the same time. Such acts must be unreasonable; they are based on nothing. In a chaotic Universe, reason is unreasonable because self-contradiction is inevitable. The prophet becomes the pure model of that stateman—with very radical consequences. This was something new in American social science and should have, but did not, make it clear that a new kind of causality—entirely different from that know to natural science—had entered the scene. In spite of this, the Weberian language and the interpretation of the World it brings with it have caught on like wildfire. I have read about the Japanese Protestant ethic, the Jewish Protectant ethic. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

The manifest absurdity of such locutions appears to have struck some, so now “work ethic” is gradually replacing “Protestant ethic,” but this is merely an adjustment and barely disguises the point of view that still remains underneath it. Those interested in the free market do not seem to recognize, when they use this language, that they are admitting that this morality is not itself rational—or at least the choice of it is not rational, as they understand reason. Delay of gratification may make sense for the system as a whole, but it is unarguably good for the individual? Is increase of wealth self-evidently superior to poverty for a Christian? If the work ethic is just one choice among many equally valid choices, then the free-market system itself is also just one choice among many. So proponents of the free market should not be surprised when they see that what was once generally agreed upon no longer compels belief. One had to go back to Locke and Adam Smith in a serious way not just for a set of quotes, to find arguments for the rational moral basis of liberal society. This they no longer do; and because they have lost the habit of reading serious philosophic books or of considering them really essential, they probably could not do so. When the liberal, or what came to be called the utilitarian, teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; and the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplifications—or by nothing. The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance. When the liberal economic thought or way of life was manifestly threatened, its proponents, in order to defend it, took whatever came to hand. A religion must, it seems, be wakened in order to establish it. And religion, contrary to containing capitalism’s propensities, as Tocqueville though it should do, is now intended to encourage them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

It goes without saying that Weber never for a moment considered whether Calvin might actually have had a revelation from God—which would certainly change the looks of things. Weber’s atheism was dogmatic, but he was not interested in proving that Calvin was a charlatan or a madman. He rather preferred to believe in the authenticity of Calvin and other such founding figures as representing peak psychological types who can live and act in the World, who know how to take responsibility, who have an inner sureness or commitment. The religious experience is the thing, not God. The old quarrel between reason and revelation is a matter of indifference, because both sides were wrong, had faulty self-understandings. However, revelation teaches us what man is and needs. Men like Calvin are the value producers and hence the models for action in history. We cannot believe in the ground (God) of experience, but that experience is critical. We are not interested in finding out how they understood themselves but rather in searching in the self for the mysterious substitute for their ground. We cannot have, and do not want to have, their peculiar illusions; but we do not want values and commitments. The result of this atheistic religiosity is the mysterious musings and language of Weber and many others (think of Sartre) about belief and action, which culminate in something very different from what either religious leaders or rational statesmen ever said or did. It fuses the two kinds of men, but with greater weight given to the former, to the necessity of faith and all that goes with it. The intellectual apparatus accompanying this analysis tends to obscure the alternatives to it, particularly the rational alternatives. As a result there is a continuous skewing of historical perspective towards religious explanations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Secularization is the wonderful mechanism by which religion becomes nonreligion. Marxism is secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights. Everything connected with valuing must come from religion. One need not investigate anything else, because Christianity is the necessary and sufficient condition of our history. This makes it impossible to take Hobbes or Locke seriously as causes of that history, because we know that superficial reason cannot found values and that these thinkers were unconsciously transmitting the values of the Protestant ethic. Reason transmits, routinizes, normalizes; it does not create. Philosophy’s claims are ignored; religious claims are revered. Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts. Out of this “Worldview” issues the gaudy religious word “charisma” which has had such fateful political consequences while becoming one of the most tiresome buzzwords in America. In Chicago there is a Charisma Cleaners, and every street gang leader is called “charismatic.” The origins, maintenance, and destruction of the live-and-let-live system of trench warfare are all consistent with the theory of the evolution of cooperation. In addition, there are two very interesting developments within the live-and-let-live system which are new to the theory. These additional developments are the emergence of ethics and ritual. The ethics that developed are illustrated in this incident, related by a British officer recalling his experience while facing a Saxon unit of the German Army. “I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out ‘We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.’” #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

This Saxon apology goes well beyond a merely instrumental effort to prevent retaliation. It reflects moral regret for having violated a situation of trust, and it shows concern that someone might have been hurt. The cooperative exchanges of mutual restraint actually changed the nature of the interaction. They tended to make the two sides care about each other’s welfare. This change can be interpreted in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma by saying that they very experience of sustained mutual cooperation altered the payoffs of the players, making mutual cooperation even more valued than it was before. The converse was also true When the pattern of mutual cooperation deteriorated due to mandatory raiding, a powerful ethic of revenge was evoked. This ethic was not just a question of calmly following a strategy based on reciprocity. It was also a question of doing what seemed moral and proper to fulfill one’s obligation to a fallen comrade. And revenge evoked revenge. Thus both cooperation and defection were self-reinforcing. The self-reinforcement of these mutual behavioral patterns was not only in terms of the interacting strategies of the players, but also in terms of their perceptions of the meaning of the outcomes. In abstract terms, the point is that not only did preferences affect behaviour and outcomes, but behaviour and outcomes also affected preferences. The other addition to the theory suggested by the trench warfare case is the development of ritual. The rituals took the form of perfunctory use of small arms, and deliberately harmless use of artillery. For example, the Germans in one place conducted “their offensive operations with a tactful blend of constant firing and bad shooting, which while it satisfies the Prussians causes no serious inconvenience to Thomas Atkins.” Even more striking was the predictable use of artillery which occurred in many sectors. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

“So regular were they [the Germans] in their choice of targets, ties of shooting, and number of rounds fired, that, after being in the line one or two days, Colonel Jones had discovered their system, and knew to a minute where the next shell would fall. His calculations were very accurate, and he was able to take what seemed to uninitiated Staff Officers big risks, knowing that the shelling would stop before he reached the place being shelled.” The other side did the same thing, as noted by a German soldier commenting on “the evening gun” fired by the British. “At seven it came—so regularly that you could set your watch by it….It always had the same objective, its range was accurate, it never varied laterally or went beyond or fell short of the mark. There were even some inquisitive fellows who crawled out…a little before seven, in order to see it burst.” These rituals of perfunctory and routine firing sent a double message. To the high command they conveyed aggression, but to the enemy they conveyed peace. The men pretended to be implementing an aggressive policy, but were not Ashworth himself explains that these stylized acts were more than a way of avoiding retaliation. “In trench war, a structure of ritualized aggression was a ceremony where antagonists participated in regular, reciprocal discharge of missiles, that is, bombs, bullets and so forth, which symbolized and strengthened, at one and the same time, both sentiments of fellow-feelings, and beliefs that the enemy was a fellow sufferer.” Thus these rituals helped strengthen the moral sanctions which reinforced the evolutionary basis of the live-and-let-live system. The live-and-let-live system that emerged in the bitter trench warfare of World War I demonstrates that friendship is hardly necessary for cooperation based upon reciprocity to get started. Under suitable circumstances, cooperation can develop even between antagonists. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

One thing the soldiers in the trenches had going for them was a fairly clear understanding of the role of reciprocity in the maintenance of the cooperation. However, there are biological examples that demonstrate that the participants are not really necessary for cooperation to emerge and prove stable. The use of force to extract wealth did not end with the age of the steam engine. In the 21th century, violence has been used on a truly grand scale. In placed like the United States of America, millions of Americans and others provide dirt-cheap labour for logging, and mining. These are used to suppress the political opposition to the 2000s revolution of hyperinflation; and they are also a means of solving purely economic tasks. Many people complain of being basically forced into slave labour in most industries in America because the wages are not keeping up with the cost of living and have not been for decades. However, not until the COVID-19 crisis sweep the World and the war in the Ukraine did these cries for help and more become widespread, but they are still not yet being acknowledged because there is no emergency relief, which leaves people feeling like the end of the World is near. All over the World, the COVID-19 Pandemic and now the Monkey Pocks are turning munitions, chemicals—and corpses. And America’s brutal treatment of every class of citizen from homeless and working class, upper middle class and wealth has been a form of labour control based on restrictions of homeless camps, panhandling, taxes, high fuel costs, high houses cost, rising food costs, low wages, truncheons, and tear gas. The history of the labour movement in the United States of America, as in other nations, is steeped in repressive violence and occasional terrorism. From the Molly Maguires, who tried to organize the Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1870s, to the Knights of Labour: from the Haymarket massacre in 1886 at the start of the campaign for an eight-hour workday, to the great textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929 and the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937, employers and police attempted to prevent the organization of unions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

As recently as the late 1930s in the United States of, companies hired strong-arm men to break strikes or to intimidate union organizers and their followers. Harry Bennett and his infamous “goon squads” were routinely called out to bust heads when Ford Motor Company employees asked for raises or threatened to organize. Not infrequently the Mafia helped employers “deal with” militant workers. In South Korea today many companies have set up “Save the Company” squads to break strikes and prevent unionization. At the Motorola plant in Seoul, violence reached the point at which two workers doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire to protect the company’s refusal to recognize a union. Japanese employers in the early postwar period called on the Mafia-life Yakuza to intimidate union activists. And in Japan, even today, despite its advanced stage of economic development, the Yakuza factor has not completely vanished. Yakuza-linked sokaiya—pointy-shoed hooligans and thugs—often to embarrass or to protect the management. In 1987 the first meeting of shareholders following the privatization of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company (NTT) was marked by disruption when a garishly dressed sokaiya accused a director of punching his secretary. Dozens of others leaped to their feet to drag out the discussion. One demanded to know why he had to queue up for the toilets in the building. When an officer apologized, the man asked why an NTT employee had committed an indecent act. To groans from the audience, he hit his stride with questions about missing promissory notes worth a few thousand dollars and about telephone bugging. The sokaiya did not stop this harassment, intended to embarrass rather than reform the company, until suddenly, as though from nowhere, a large number of husky young men surrounded the room—at which point the sokaiya quietly made their exit. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

Not all business crime ends so peacefully, as Japan discovered when Kazuo Kengaku, a well-known investment fund manager with links to the Yakuza, was found encased in concrete in Osaka. The Yakuza are also involved deeply in real estate speculation and supply strong -arm men to frighten residents or small shop-owners reluctant to move out of the way of high-rise developments. So well known are these tactics that they provided the substance for Juzo Itami’s 1989 movie, A taxing Woman’s Return. Valuable real estate also lay behind a recent case in which the collapse of a financial deal led to fraud litigation. An American lawyer in Tokyo, Charles Stevens of Coudert Brothers, representing a U.S. firm, received threatening calls and wound hp keeping a baseball bat at his desk. Violence in the business demimonde takes on bizarre forms on occasion—especially on the fringes of the entertainment business. In South Korea local film distributors have tried to frighten customers away from theaters showing U.S. films by releasing snakes in the theaters. In France, when Saudi Arabian investors, together with the French government, built Mirapolis, a $100 million amusement park, carnival workers, fearing competition, poured sand in the gears of thrill rides. (The park turned out to be a disaster for other reasons.) Similarly, Japanese sarakin, like loan sharks the World over, sometime rely on physical “persuasion” to coerce borrowers in repaying usurious debts—the money from these activities flowing smoothly into major bans and other financial institutions. In the United States of America, as in many other countries, force is sometimes used to shut the mouth of corporate “whistle blowers”—employees who call attention to questionable practices of their bosses. This was the role of Silkwood chose for herself. Silkwood was killed in a car crash after protesting her employer’s handling of nuclear materials, and there are those who still, years after the event, question whether the crash was accidental. They will never stop believing that her company had killed her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Of course, all these cases are dramatic precisely because they are exceptions in the advanced economies. The daily experience of an American executive with a sheaf of printout in hand, the Japanese salaryman on his telephone, or the salesperson spreading a sample on a counter is so remote from any hint of violence that even to mention it is to draw skeptical looks. Yet just because most transactions in business involve no direct violence does not mean that violence had vanished. The reality is that violence has been contained, transmuted into another form—and hidden. Although institutions in Europe, Japan, and other economies are also being shaken by changes in their deep fundamentals, it is the United States of America—precisely because it has advanced farther than other beyond the industrial age—that the need to create a new institutional infrastructure is most pressing. And nowhere, therefore, is there more loose talk of “transformation”—and so little understanding of what it implies. Take the case of education. All recent U.S.A. presidents have wanted to be known as the “education president,” Obama was the only exception—he wanted to known as a rebel and entertainer. The absolute key to any real improvement in education in the United States of America is recognition of the changes required by an economy primarily based on knowledge production and distribution. Education is more than occupational preparation, but it surely cheats students if it seeks to ready them for jobs that will not be there. Yet today’s mass-production schools—out of sync with the real economy—still mainly emphasized rote, repetitive, factory-like learning. The supposedly radical Trump plan, not only emphasized curiosity, thought, creativity, individuality and self-starting entrepreneurialism—traits needed in knowledge-based economies—but it also calls for yet more routine, standardized testing of students, teachers, and schools—tools to make obsolete schools run more efficiently. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

An equally striking example of what might be called fake “transformation” can be found in Washington’s bureaucratic response to the 9/11 attack—the creation of a Department of Homeland Security. This big-budget, cabinet-level department crunched together twenty-two preexisting pyramidal bureaucracies into a single mega-pyramid. Washington, in short, did what it knows how to do best: Construct industrial-style bureaucracies. The resultant institution is massive, vertical and hierarchical, with countless competing units, and is supposed to plug into and support tends of thousands of smaller municipal and state bureaucracies. By contrast, terrorist organizations are designed to run rings around bureaucracies. Comprising tiny, loosely networked cells whose members know the identity of only one or two other people, most can make decision quickly, are trained to hit, run, and vanish—or to blow themselves up. Compared with the Department of Homeland Security, Al Qaeda is flat as a pancake. And its members do not belong to civil-service unions. Sham transformation is not uniquely American. It is widespread in Europe, where companies and public-sector institutions at the national level are being forced to submit to growing, rigidifying constraints imposed by the European Union, itself a prime example of industrial-age bureaucratic organization. In 1965 Nitsch formed the Wiener Akitonismus group in conjunction with Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Much of their work focused on the motifs of self-mutilation and self-sacrifice that were implicit, though not foregrounded, both in Klein’s career and in the OM Theatre performances. Brus, during his performing period (1964-1970), would appear in the performance space dressed in a woman’s black stockings, brassiere, and garter belt, slash himself with scissors till he ran with blood, and perform various acts ordinarily taboo in public settings, such as defecating, eating his own feces, vomiting, and so on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Schwarzkogler’s pieces presented young males as mutilated sacrificial victims, often wounded in the genitals, lying fetally contracted and partially mummy-wrapped as if comatose, in the midst of paraphernalia of violent death such as bullet cartridges and electrical wires. Not only the individual elements of these works, but their patterns of combination—specifically the combination of female imitation self-injury, and the seeking of dishonour though the performance of taboos acts—find striking homologies in shamanic activities. The same motifs reappeared, not necessarily with direct influence from the Viennese, in the works of several America performances artists who have stretched audiences’ sympathies beyond the breaking point Paul McCarthy, a major exponent of the art of the taboo gesture, first heard the calling not from the Viennese but from Klein. As a student at the University of Utah in 1968, he leapt from a second story window in emulation of Klein’s Leap into the Void. By about 1974 his work had found its own distinctive form, developing into a modernized shamanic style so difficult for audiences to bear that the pieces were usually published only as video tapes. These performances, like Schneemann’s, were often developed from dream material, indicating their intimate relation both with shamanic magic and with depth psychology. Like Brus, McCarthy has sometime appeared dressed as aw woman, and has worked, like Schwarzkogler, with the themes of self-mutilation and castration; some pieces have acted out of the basic female imitation of feigning menstruation and parturition (magical pantomimes that are common in primitive initiation rites). In others, McCarthy has cut his hand and mixed the blood with food and water in bowls, clearly echoing various sacramental rites from the Dionysian to the Christian. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

In still others that, like Nitsch’s, have sometimes been shut down by the police, he has acted out the seeking of dishonour as an exploration of the Dionysian-Freudian depths of psychobiological life. In Sailor’s Meat, a videotape from 1975, for example, he appeared in a room in a wino hotel wearing black lace panties smeared with blood and a blonde female wig and lay on the bed having pleasures of the flesh with piled of raw meat and ground hamburger with his male organ painted red and a hot dog shoved up his rear end As Old Man in My Doctor, 1978, he slit a rubber mask over his head to form a female organ—slanted opening on it and from the opening gave birth to a ketchup-covered doll. The piece was a conscious remaking of the myth of the birth of Athena from the cleft brainpan of Zeus, a myth that reverts to the age when male priests and their divinities sought to incorporate the female principle and its powers. In Baby Boy, 1982, McCarthy gave birth to a doll from between his ketchup-covered male thighs as he lay on his back with his feet in the air like a woman in missionary-style pleasures of the flesh. In these and other works self-mutilation, female imitation, and the performance of taboo acts are combined in a structure of roughly parallel to that of Brus’ work, though with a great range of expressiveness. Similar materials recur in the work of Kim Jones. In a performance in Chicago in 1981, Jones appeared naked except for a mask made of woman’s pantyhose, covered himself with mud (as both African and Australian shamans do when performing), and lay naked on the fire escape in the cold to accumulate energy (a shamanic practice knowns Worldwide but most famous from Tibet). Returning to the performance space, he produced a mayonnaise jar filled with his own feces, and smeared himself with it, embraced members of the audience while covered in it, and finally burned sticks and green plants till the smoke drove the remaining audience from the gallery. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

In another piece, Jones cut himself with a razor blade twenty-seven times in a pattern suggesting the body’s circulatory system, then pressed himself against the gallery wall for a self-portrait. Understandably, to audiences habituated to the traditional boundaries of art, to audiences for whom easel painting was still the quintessential art activity, these performances were offensive and even insulting. Of course, the point of such works when they first appeared was in part their seeming to be radically even horrifying, out of context. However, for twenty years they have been part of the art scene, if somewhat peripherally, legitimized by art World context and critical designation again and again. In order to understand the wellsprings of such works, in order to approach them with a degree of sympathy and clarity, it is necessary to frame them somewhat in cultural history, where in fact they have a clear context. Many of the artists discussed here feel that shamanic material and primitive initiation rites are the most relevant cultural parallels to their work. However, most of them feel that the tone of their work arose first, often under Freudian and Jungian influence, and was later confirmed and further shaped by some study of shamanic literature. The question of origins, then—whether from shamanic literature, or from the Jungian collective unconscious, or from the Freudian timeless repository of infantile memory, or from all these sources—though it is worthwhile to state, cannot be answered. In any case it is important in terms of any theory of the function of art that these artists have introduced into the art realm material found elsewhere only in the psychiatric records of disturbed children and in the shamanic thread of the history of religion. Western society, biased toward the objective mental mode of experience, tends to be blind not only to the power of images but also to the fact that we are nearly defenseless against their effect. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Since we are educated and thoughtful, as we like to think, we believe we can choose among the things that will influence us. We accept fact, we reject lies. We go to movies, we watch television, we see photographs, and as the images pour into us, we believe we can choose among those we wish to absorb and those we do not. We assume that our rational processes protect us from implantation, or brainwashing. What we fail to realize is the difference between fact and image. Our objective processes can help us resist only one kind of implantation. There is no rejection of images. Raise your eyes from the page for a moment. Look about your room. Can you reject what you are seeing? In Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, the main character is a visitor from another planet who arrives on Earth and is slowly transformed by what he sees. He becomes transfixed by television. At one point, in a fit of madness, he screams at the TV screen: “Stop it, get out of my mind, go back where you came from.” However, the images do not go bac. They remain. He goes crazy. You are watching Walter Cronkite. He is reporting the news. It is impossible for you to judge the truth of most of what he tells you. He reports events from a thousand miles away. You take his information on faith, or you decide that he is wrong. Then he says the bank you work in was robbed today. “Not true,” you shout, “wrong bank.” You have rejected the news. You could reject it because it came as a fact that you could check. You could halt its entry into you. However, one of the most bizarre things is allowing the news to do its own “fact checking.” They will tell you what they believe to be true, which may be misinterpreted or down right a lie. Meanwhile, however, you have ingested Cronkite. His smile, his hand movements, his tone of voice, the way he holds his head. The images enter your cells. Style is also content. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

If you are watching The Flash, or the president explaining a policy, or Brad Pitt talking to his beautiful women friends, or Fallon Carrington on Dynasty, you are receiving several levels of information at the same time. There is the verbal information and the ideas connected to this. Then there are the images, the way people behave, their movements, mannerisms, forcefulness or peacefulness, their style of emoting, their tone of voice, their way of relating to each other, the kind of people they are, their seriousness, grimness, lightness, joyfulness, heaviness and so on. We absorb these along with the objective news. They are all content. If you see Trump or Cronkite or The Flash, or slaps on the back or kisses or violence—the images of these are not in the realm of correct or incorrect. They just are. There is nothing to disagree with. There is no way to resist them. They flow inward, passing through all discernment processes. Even if you could keep your mind alive while watching—no mean feat—the images would still enter into your unconscious storage area. You have got them. They are yours. You may not believe Jimmy Carter when he speaks. However, you have got Jimmy Carter inside of you. You may believe that Brad Pitt is an actor, and your kinds may believe this too. However, they slowly become like Brad Pitt. They move and walk as he does. You may believe The Flash is fiction, but his image lives within you. If I ask you to, you can bring it to mind. It is part of your image pool. You may draw on it forever. You may watch the television and “know” those are actors performing, but the image of one person stabbing another is in you. You have got it. It is yours. Thinking will not halt its entry into you or into thirty million others. You may watch the actor playing doctor in the commercial, speaking seriously, professionally, authoritatively. You know this is an actor, but you ingest him nonetheless. His authoritativeness becomes yours. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

We all become more like Cronkite, like Carter, like The Flash. We all become more fast or more Bradlike, or display a TV-announcer authority. Once they are in your mind and stored, all images are equally valid. They are real whether they are toothpaste, Walter Cronkite, Kojak, President Carter, Mary Hartman, The Flash, Brad Pitt, Justin Bieber, Pete Rose, a BMW 3 Series, a cougar, Elvis Priestly, Mary Hartman, Anton LaVey, Rhoda, or your mother and father. Once inside your head, they all becomes images that you continue to carry in memory. They become equally real and equally not-real. Our thinking process cannot save us. To the degree that we are thinking as we watch television, a minute degree at most, the images pass right through anyway. They enter our brains. They remain permanently. We cannot tell, for sure, which images are ours and which came from distant planets. Imagination and reality have merged. We have lost control of our images We have lost control of our minds. The man—and with him his woman, who was not created till after the prohibition had been pronounced, but who appears to have become cognizant of it in some peculiar manner whilst still a rib within the body of the man—may give or withhold his obedience, for he is at liberty; they are both at liberty to acceded to their creator or to refuse themselves to Him. Yet their transgression of the prohibition is not reported to us as a decision between good and evil, but as something other, of whose otherness we must take account. The terms of the dialogue with the serpent are already strange enough. It speaks as though it knew very imprecisely what it obviously knows very imprecisely what it obviously knows very precisely. “Indeed, God has said: You shall not eat of every tree of the garden…” it says and breaks off. Now the woman talks, but she too intensifies God’s prohibition and adds to it words which he did not use: “…touch not, else you must die.” “And the chief judge stood before them, and smote them again, and said unto them: If ye have the power of God deliver yourselves from these bands, and then we will believe that the Lord will destroy this people according to your words,” reports Alma 14.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.

Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.

Upstairs in the primary suite, you’ll find two walk-in closets, primary bath options including a freestanding tub and separate shower.

#CresleighHomes

#CresleighRanch