Parrhesia & Rhetoric: "The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse....Whereas rhetoric provides the speaker with technical devices to help him prevail upon the minds of his audience (regardless of the rhetorician's own opinion concerning what he says), in parrhesia, the parrhesiastes acts on other people's mind by showing them as directly as possible what he actually believes." – Michel Foucault
Actual parrhesia is probably impossible. A benign tumor from psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavior theory suggests an internal running dialogue and commentary as a river, often lacking any sense of systemetized coherence until we are asleep or otherwise deranged, as Messieurs Poe, Artaud and Burroughs discovered. It is in this "stream of consciousness" or rather at times, raging river which swims the imp of the perverse which might equally invite us to jump in for a refreshing swim with questions like "why not?", or ponder stepping off the cliff and falling into the abyss to our certain doom. No prior psychic motivation need be posited – confusing what's inside for out, only a well-trained slave or one without a rudder would explain "the voices made me do it".
One might notice that outside of euclidean space-time, the inside and out are never confused. It's not even an issue in the figurative or poetic interpretation of verses unless as expressing a hyphenated existence. Perhaps this explains why the literalists enjoin so much conflict, if not massacres. Everything's a fight or equivocation between white-water rafting and bouts of smooth sailing, always for the win or nothing's worth playing.
But never mind the barge hauling garbage that's intruding on the view. The bullshit detector also swims this river. A home to many internal voices, they are both the river and Trickster-transformer canoeing like a hyphenated habitat-inhabitant relation or a bobbling and shifting criteria, with or without a hook, line and sinker. The background noise underneath a barely perceptual tinnitus is the cacophony of aquatic bugs endlessly repeating everything, even the unnoticeable, from within and without the environment – the obsessive repetition of "sense data", thought by some to be accessed hypnotically. Though sometimes we become caught in a knotted line and cannot disentangle, it is usually a silent noise of vortexes in the stream. Their elucidation (or perturbation) can produce poetry, psychoanalytic revelation and straight-jackets, if not an urge to adorn some paisley, if only to present the appearance of an inside-out consistency.
Militant regimentation (or should I say education?) dams this river just to generate power. Not to suggest a necessarily malicious intent, teaching language rather than allowing it to blossom makes it so, and in the same fashion that forced hydroponics reduces nutritive content and chemical fertilizer exchanges nutrient for toxin. Either way, questions do not pass unregulated. The free-ranging salmon must now learn to climb ladders; the others live out their lives in a net. Commentary is restricted to habitual categories, running through flow-pipes (the proper channels) activated by power turbines. Language is seen by the militant politician and social scientist only as mutual dam busting and bubble bursting, slinging shit from the towers of opposing fortresses – an interesting metaphor considering that they're standing hip-deep in shit, calling those who do not take such a "political" stand mindless, brain-dead, zombie or sheep which is to say, unhip. Undemocratic radicals "go against the flow". Revolutionaries think with a big enough dam, the river will reverse direction, but mostly it only shifts its progressive course with even more pent up momentum – a self-fulfilling prophet. Progress is only a euphemism for "no change is tolerated".
Without a snorkel or other means of oxygenation together with a flint for sparking some metabolism, the river becomes a violent water-fall killing all the little fishes on the rocks below. Witness: Neitzshe's "corpses in their mouths" and Orwell's "dead metaphors", chants of the plain speakers in the cult of death demanding (with no uncertain terms) one truth (theirs) or nothing at all. Brain-dead may be a misnomer:
Unless the water's vaporised with laser surgery or the like, with priestly vigil, canals are diverted from cerebral flows to what might have been vocal, down the drain which channels all that's excremental. What's left are gargoyles pissing forth the bloody sacramental. The only sacred face that's left is stone-faced sacrificial, but why choose suicide when you can delegate a proxy with a proclamation sounding not like "offal" but "official"? Now it's agreeable to all, the necessity of strife – if not just economical, frantic means that everything's reduced to matters of death and life, and only a dentist can brighten your smile.– Teo Castraphoni, dds.
But when you get down to it, isn't the 'word' both an anchor at rest and a fish-hook on the move? Who knows what you'll have snagged when you reel it back into the boat? If you're a frog, you might catch a log, or then again maybe a sea snake. Rather than have it pull you away, the hook and the leader's designed to be expendable.
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How often do we not know what's on our mind and do not necessarily want to appropriate what's in (or be converted to) another's? If not a motive for reclusion, this might approximate the process of becoming co-mindful, of thoughts (in the sense of ripples or blooms we like to call "names" for "things" as an alternative to what others consider a "stake through the heart" of the matter) unfolding and merging in common dialogue (rather than competitive – aka "economic" – discourse or "political" one-upmanship). Two senses of politeness appear: 1) the trickster-as-optimiser deceives us with honey, disguising the intention to appropriate or proselytise. We may call this "the propagandist art" and is perceived as either parrhesical or rhetorical; 2) The sense of communising/sharing – retaining an openness to make adjustments and coherences, or not as we may see fit – the radical fitness of a well-told story which may live on to be a twice-told tale giving the impression of an improvisational dance against a background of melodic or instrumental harmony and with the proper positioning of fingers and toes, feels somewhat akin to a Vulcan mind meld.
On the other hand, much of reality exists in word only. For example, adorned with the amulet or fetish of christian doves, one might never come to witness the layers of pigeon-shit covering the stack of hay in the barn that is said to amass food for sheep. And for every barn-cat who eats a bird, three are overcome with toxoplasmosis. Christian birds indeed!
Like Mel Brooks' "Standup Philosopher", the secondary trickster is the poet or carrier whose infection eats away at a set of categories (forms) without necessarily systemically infecting with new content, like necroforus (an organism in 'healthy' digestive tracts) on an open wound. It only bores a hole, leaving the newly injured the opportunity to close it or rethink without being put too much on the defensive. "To pick or not to pick it?" is the ultimate question concerning scabs. Bataille might call this an inner war, I'd portray it as finding oneself suddenly naked on a windy day and searching or improvising or being given something with which to cover up, to become comfortable again. The embare-assed politician might say "If that's not a call for carpetbombing the third world, I don't know what is", but not 'til registering in the medical log under Type of Injury: "Denise hurt my feelings". Stoicism or asceticism rarely leads to enlightenment, except to the fact that one finds oneself hungry! As soon as coherence and rigidity set in, bleeding and communication must stop, we've established a picket line, invented the scab and religion! But it's still just a cover-up.
It could be argued that this boring and scabbing is kingly (in the sense of an uninvited "burst bubble"). But come on! Taken literally, where is the authoritarianism with two youngsters sharing a bath and popping bubbles as they emerge from the depths? Did someone mention becoming like unto a child, or is it sufficient to merely like them? If categories are confining or limiting like a pair of shoes two sizes too small, it would lead to mutual (both/and/or) self-liberation (if, that is, one is equipped with a pair of scissors carefully directed away from one's 'I') – with the right question, one bursts one's own bubble but the questioner gets splashed as well. Without another perspective to observe, those bubbles can become ever more rigid, like an iron ball & chain. Try wearing that in novel rivers!
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The accumulation (mining, optimization), justice, truth, exchange and (social) war paradigms are examples of such rigidity, where, with diminishing breathing room or ever-staling air, a gift is only envisioned in terms of a loss and sharing`a compromise – again, a sacrifice of one's "total" (if commercially procured) desire. For a loosening and relaxing, I'm tempted to use Deleuze' term, "deterritorialize". Another would be "extasis" which busts dams between the self and other like wire-cutters to a barbed-wire fence (one might take care it's not electrified as well).
Such is the brain damage witnessed in the extreme amongst patriot wankers who aspire to see some action as smokey-bear mounties, mercenaries or marines whilst the less successful, though still adequately trained oportunistic vultures scavenge what remains. Then there's the privileged money out protecting woods from riding hoods or any sightings of you know who – those kind of people doctors without borders must prevent from access to their gated neighborhoods.
God's boy, Saint Augustine had issued the memo, "we must have or be monsters to deliver us from evil" and then said the prophet, in keping with fashion, "only from Allah might we seek compassion".– Atka Mip
What else should we expect when the ability to posit associations or try on other's shoes, from day one's been blocked at inception by churches and schools so the best in their classes (though sometimes there's exceptions) become killers or fools and incompetent asses?
Like any good insult, iconoclasty puts holes in our reifications or pulls up the stake and plants it elsewhere – certainly an ungrammatical impropriety. A word for a field of familiarity or resemblances (and not platonic essences), a leaky form allows ingress and egress of free, mobile content, transforming old into new forms or shrinking them altogether like a bladder out of practice in its holding patterns some would call "incontinence", others "freedom of expression".
All commentaries and questions posed have this destructive/creative potential. We might ask "are rigid bubbles owned, property to be defended?" If so, then linguistics suggests that resistance to infection produces ill-health to language. We would all be brain-dead, infantile (in the way no infant is), incapable of conversation in the first place. It is said a parrot has such a language, lacking entirely in a semantic component (fortunately the parrot is not mono-lingual – the mindless mimic is just a pretense when engaged with polite or civil company). Rhetoric would have no categories with which to impose and criteria would only point to where you've jammed the stick, that is, the datum and that's contingent or provisional to the poker – always a game of chance.
Like sharing a catch from the local fishing hole, meaningful communication guides clostridial visitors (literally, a clue like a tiny star but figuratively, a tiny bug which can lock jaws) to intestinal tracts where they are welcomed, where they are fit, where they can simultaneously self-actualize, thrive and help us process our mostly digested food prior to a free expulsion of excess. In a wound, they can produce a deadly tetanic seizure somewhat resembling the mountain range in Wyoming and as dangerous as a Welsh Druid's cursed poetry. Nurture may be optimizing, but optimization is not always, in fact, in our world, rarely ever nurturing beyond the lowest levels of significance in a statistical distribution (reliable between .01 and .05). Fortunately or not, many clostridial visitors go by completely unnoticed. Like stocking a stream with gmo salmon, rhetoric, debate and propaganda mimic the colonial behavior of systemic tuberculosis (once called "consumption") – slowly, the fishes will consummate you. But recall this infective invective or brain occupation is always called "nurture" by somebody else.
Unless you can produce an appearance of infinity by your disorder, you will have disorder only without magnificence. – Edmund Burke
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