SURFACE TENSION or
WHAT THOUGHT DOES ON ITS SUMMER HOLIDAYS

The aim of this essay is to show how surface tension — such as the tension of the telephone bill and the gas bill, the car and the kids, the eagle and the turkey, etc., which can only be accurately defined by vernacular observation and, in each instance, by adopting the standpoint of a particular idea — can nonetheless be used as elaborations with which to excuse differentiation and allow language to venture forth on holiday.

This ‘standpoint’ is a place of fantasy, the place you would be if you held an idea in your hand(sic). In modern cultural analysis the word ‘idea' is used with increasing frequency & without close consideration to it’s signification. The abuse of this word has led to many serious misconceptions, the history of which is the history of the printed word. The printed word presents for those footnote tendencies in men, a possible if ridiculous image of the anthropomorphic word (appropriate haunted house noises). Ideas stick in printed matter as they stick in the throat (non-vocables) and the indigestible quality of this non-substance is the gas we feel.

‘The proposition is a judgement of objects’, without the facts of the case implanted in discourse. Objects deny judgement by their very nature. We use the idea to hide our nakedness, to protect our innocence, an innocence no longer whole, but torn and bloodied in a futile attempt to, hold the ephemeral measurements in its grip. The word has been passed, execution it is.

The post-philosophic culture, dancing with Dr Dee, as it were, dreams of the possibility of the anthropomorphic word: the dumb idea. It is the bogeyman paradigm; it is the structure of greed; it is the apologetics of simple-mindedness in the easy acceptance of conclusions, solutions, etc. The ticket to success, the masturbatory flight-dream of adolescent imperialism, the tourism of thought constitute Idea’s history. As old Wittgenstein would say “For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” C’mon baby, PROVE IT!

What is the nature of tourism? It is intellectual voyeurism, the disassociation of parts in order to explain things with words. But words are words, the frightened idiot asserts correctly, flying in the face of aristocratic apology. 'Why support impotence?' this same poor man shouts in the street while the printing press pour out the official culture (no direct reference is implied to Reality Film Processing/Kodak/Eastman in Rochester). Why must an identification be explained, in fact, this in smokescreen technique of the apologists: MYSTIFICATION IS BROUGHT ABOUT BY THE EXPLANATION OF AN IDENTIFICATION. The theory of gravity. One explanation, it seems, can be pitted against another in an endless logomachy, which completely obfuscates the initial obvious: the identification.

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When the voyage begins in the search for any identifiable substance one cannot see the forest for the trees. The tree has served as man’s primary tool to carve out an existence, the cause of cultural atrophy. The tree, now in the form of paper, has once again supplanted that which is most necessary to our cultural survival. Lost in a library, shelved in a forest of books, we cannot see the tree for the paper. —STOP— Can’t you feel the ecstasy of the eyes when faced with the thrill of seeing the black marks that explain our most ignoble ideas. What a comfortable survival, we can build a house to live in with the big logs, build a fire with the short dry ones, and warm our toes with the flame, toes being the most important part to keep warm.

Yes, we are to suppose that great ideas fill the pages of the so-called great philosophy books. The combination of ancestor-worship & the authority structure built into this ‘piecemeal merchantry of thought’ have us genuflecting before an idol. The supporting structure for these ridiculous ideas is so weighty & cumbersome, in it’s exhaustive attempt to maintain the front, that one tends to believe in a conspiracy, the mistakes are too humanly obvious & systematic. Yes but oh yes, an illusion always points to itself, by that I mean it reveals itself by it’s own clumsiness. Notice the kitsch-ness of ‘great’ arts Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel with it’s sloppy emotional portrayal of God giving Adam the divine spark of life. God as an old man with a beard, notice the posthumous addition of the cloth covering Adam’s genitals. Does God have genitals? Stupid questions like these arise when kitsch is taken seriously. Are Adam’s genitals behind the cloth? or where are Plato’s ideas? On TV of course. When I think to myself I do not point at myself while ideas fly that are about myself.

The problem I think, is that the idea is barely, if at all, distinguishable from the words spoken: words on a page are viewed the same way. The idea floats transcendent in and out of language, it’s confused with the words, as if it could lead and direct language one minute and the next be dragged screaming and struggling against its will. How does one separate words and ideas when they occur simultaneously? Pointing at ideas is like pointing at a mist, is it there where you think it is, or is it just out of reach, always ready to be taken by some cold draft of air and carried away to haunt some sunny vacation-land.

The veil is rent, the adolescent is caught, penis in hand, shaking violently, awaiting in anxious spasm, the newest thing. Vulgarization is invited as action resembling the return to its origins. An adolescent curiosity like Ham hamming it up in front of his naked drunken father, Noah. Ham was probably a fashionable man, a curse upon his nation. Ham’s time-perversion finds its ultimate expression in the ‘idea’ of evolution. Silly little stories to explain away observations into tidiness: the neat categories of the bureaucrat: FILE FILE FILE FILE FILE. This is its the naked city.

Inevitably this too will cry like all nakedness, to be caressed, stroked, and rubbed coarsely against the genitals. But where is the erection, where is the orgasm? There is none, nor could there ever be one, for it is not me that you strive to suck the life from but this piece of paper. We both become, idea and me, the fetish object you wish to stroke your desire with, but you will seldom hold either of us. You separate, I myself am doing it, and you lose both. But I want to be a fetish, tucked into a roomy bed inside an idea, and held inseparably close against your body.

This is the crunch isn’t it, neither the imposition of theory, like Hegelian rationalization of the ‘present King Of France’, nor the story time inductive method of scientism, can present us with other than Kitsch. The study of social interaction can only be accomplished by praxis. Behind the massive superstructure spewing it’s smelly smokescreens, we see High Culture, caught in the act, as it were; an effusion of sentimentality & nostalgia; we see the lip service to the designated objects & theories; we see dumb ideas... DUMB DUMB IDEAS.