User:Kul/Essay

Grade 7 (b+)

Steve notes:

a) A high grade, despite no bibliography or notation.... if they are not appropriate for this text some consideration could be given to the appropriate form or carrier for this text. How best to present it?

b) I think it is impossible to give advice on funny, sorry…

c) carry on with these forms, they make sense in relation to the work you (don’t) make, but they deserve some higher ambition than a wiki page for internal use.

These are the grades: 

DISTINCTION 10 (A+) MERIT 9 (A) VERY GOOD PASS 8 (A-) GOOD PASS 7 (B+) PASS 6 (B) NEAR PASS 5 (C) FAIL 4 (D)

Go and steal the invisible!

In this essay I will develop the argument about the unexpected virtue of larceny. I will try to convince my respectable reader that the act of stealing as much as natural to all human beings, is also social, culturally and, by all means, economically necessary to keep this planet rolling. To support my moral blessing to this apparently amoral behavior I will drag my reader through some historical, political and scientific examples of thievery. The theoretical insights of Kenneth Goldsmith, and Eric Havelock, with the subtle touch of my personal, yet totally academic, life experience will frame and hopefully integrate my argument. The main motivation standing behind writing this essay is to undertake the task of justifying and explaining the symbolic and moral beauty of the thieving act due the painful national stereotype I am baring on my Polish shoulders; namely that Polish people obsessively steal from other nations, mostly Germans. Although, Poles take delight in old Volkswagens, I will try to convince my reader that there are more elegant and rather immaterial objects asking to be stolen without the risk of imprisonment. I will conclude with the statement that stealing is “good” for everyone: communists, capitalists, intellectuals, philosophers, and Christians. It is only morally blurry for the thieves themselves.

Every reliable author would start this essay by recalling the image of a naked female’s arm reaching slowly for an apple not minding reptile’s spit dropping on the fruit. Yet, as an unreliable author taking in to account brutal gender discrimination standing behind this image, I wont even bother to unfold the meaning of this dogmatic matter. I will only use this image to point out that from the very begin every child, especially if a child, just like me, was unhappy enough to submit own childhood under indoctrinating wings of the catholic church, is introduced to the idea that the human nature rests and grows on a convulsive inclination to steal. The instinct of the newborn pushes it to recklessly suck out the last drop of milk from the mother’s breast as well as rob the surrounding (and entire universe) out of any signs of independency. Every child sooner or later recognizes itself as a plunderer and consequently wastes the rest of the civilized life trying to deny this pervasive attraction. Michel Serres in his book “The Parasite” uses the conceptual figure of the parasite to describe the asymmetry of universal life. Serres describes how the exchange of energy between organisms is never wholly equal, but always involves a parasite stealing energy and surplus from another organism. According to prof. Alekseenko form the Arizona Institute of Thermophysics, the abusive behavior of just a few chaotic fractals of all matter in the universe constitutes the perfect entropic condition to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity. I would extend his thought and risk the statement that any kind of political or social system created by parasites for other parasites’ good cannot operate without some, officially condemned yet intuitively embraced, secretive acts of swindle. Most often the time, the practice of forgery possesses a purely linguistic nature yet, as we all know, stealing the language means stealing power, and power usually brings measurable material satisfaction to its holders.

Let us then restart the story of the humankind's tendency towards larceny there where the gentle breeze strokes the cypress trees, the Olympian gods steal cows, females, flames, and, occasionally, some musical instruments, and people are happy because they don’t know how to write and read. Following Eric Havelock ‘s studies on the growth of the early Greek mind, we might learn that this happy society maintained its culture on the entirely oral basis and managed to establish a form of the intellectual communism until about 700B.C. By simple fact of repeating and learning by heart from the previous generations and fellow citizens they shaped the system of the blessed knowledge larceny. Without any hesitation they plagiarized each other’s ideas and opinions ignoring the fact that someone had build up this intellectual capital beforehand. At that time, the wisdom of the single repeated thought had belonged to the lips that pronounced it. Views and ideas tended to slide on the discursive timeline, changing and loosing the meaning of its own origin. That is preciously, how Kenneth Goldsmith, the American writer, educator, and the founding editor of UbuWeb, imagines the present-day creative practice that should be though at the university to the young adepts of the literary art. In his book “Uncreative writing”, he states that today being a writer is more about constructing, conceptualizing, maintaining and appropriating moving information. The act of writing is moving language from one place to another: the context is the new content. He introduces the notion of the unoriginal genius – the writer’s method of “word processing, data-basing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name but a few” that emerged in the contemporary literature together with the development of new technology and the internet. Jonathan Lethem’s in his pro-plagiarism essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: Plagiarism” (where nearly very word and idea was borrowed from somewhere else) confirms Goldsmith’s view on how historically the ideas in literature have been always shared, reused, swiped, stolen, quoted, duplicated, and mimicked. Considering how the open source culture and public commons had changed the concept of originality, every writer should be cautious proclaiming creative originality of a personal thought since it may be unconsciously borrowed from someone else (most likely from Google). Just like early Greeks contemporary thinkers tends to weave together other people’s words into tonally coherent whole. Yet, they still pretend to cherish such qualities as being authentic, sincere and personal. Goldsmith’s advice is to overcome this mental illusion of ownership and march proudly onward aware of this malicious practice. Surprisingly, the methodology of stealing brings better artistic effects then the clichés of ego’ emphasizing, demonstrating one’s unique imagination, and applying the first person narration. In deed, that sounds like heaven to my ears! In this heaven Trotsky and Lenin sit and sing together the remix version of the Internationale! But as a child of a communistic regime I shell remain distrustful.

According to the Freudian ‘psychological’ critique of communism, the abolition of “the private” will never remove the root of the problem due to an aggressiveness innate to human beings: homo homini lupus, the Latin saying goes, ‘man is a wolf to man’. “The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well disposed to his neighbor; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have altered anything in its nature.” Thank you, Sigmund. The nature cannot be changed. In the era of Polish communism the Soviet man used to steal everything he could possibly transit and squeeze into his small few-meters apartments; Soviet teachers used to steal school material, furniture, and often plants from the educational institutions; Soviet mineworkers used to steal hard coal from the mines despite the fact of having an electric heating system at homes; Soviet shipyard workers used to steal everything, including random pieces of old pipes and asphalt. The nature cannot be changed. Yet, the human pleasure in stealing can be truly satisfied only when one knows from whom one steels. Polish people under the communism used to steal chaotically and without any rational cause in order to rebel against the oppressive system. They were robbing “the system” in protest. By manifesting this kind of civil delusional insubordination Soviet people were happier and, paradoxically, more obedient. That enabled the system to remain in equilibrium, precisely because it had been founded on delusional economical regulations and human perversity.

Early Greeks could not carry on with their happiness because, simply, they didn’t know from whom they had been stealing for approximately eight centuries B.C. The same sort of confusion pushed Poles, as many different nations, to switch to capitalism in early 90’. There is no pleasure in crime when it is collectively approved. Sabotage of the dominant code is effective only when it gains outcomes. Havelock’s investigation shows that the development of signs and the written language caused Greek some serious problems with ordering their own reservoir of knowledge. Collectively they had faced the turmoil of assigning the authorship to particular views and philosophical ideas. By the act of entering the oral circulating ideas in the books, Plato with the great help of Aristotle managed to adopt the terminology of many other philosophers living before them. From Plato’s Apology we can learn about Socrates’ views and his vicious subversive personality but how sure can we be that Plato hadn’t used Socrates’ lips to convey a fictitious dialogs in accordance to his own taste and political needs. Plato, to a large degree, managed to create the first source code of the oral Greek intellectual capital. He had become the first administrator of the past both, by codifying and framing other philosopher’s words, and undermining the educational virtue of the poetry. Probably that is why we, the contemporary amateurs of philosophy, are now dealing with his names more frequently than with any other pre-platonic name. Plato in that sense was the first real intellectual capitalist! He had stolen his first million and successfully continued with his business of the Academia. Plato teaches us that “the invisible” is the most fundamental and powerful. That goes in agreement with good-old Marks’ idea that the class, which is ruling the intellectual force of society, is at the same time ruling the material force. If one is up for stealing it is better to steal ideas rather than their material “reflections”. And so Plato did! He took over “the language” of early Greece, which brought him intellectual and ideological leadership. Probably he was strongly informed by the Lacanian solution to take ideology first and foremost as a language.

Soviet people, instead of shearing, used to steal out of pure quixotism. Capitalist society is much more professional and serious about it. In order for the capitalistic system to endlessly grow and expend the system’s users must constantly steal from one other. Capitalism dictates that one must steal the surplus value from the next one who sits a bit lower on the collective ladder of production. Someone at the very end of this chain of dependencies might, and for sure will, die as a result of so-called natural selection. Yet, for the purpose of this, cheerful after all, analyses I will forget about those sad incidents taking place somewhere in faraway Asia, where roofs are falling down on working kids (or historically faraway Greece, where some philosophers died without any recognition and glory.) The point here to be made is that most of dominant social, political, and economic systems are simply asking their users to take the rank-and-file initiative in stealing. However, one aspect of larceny remains underestimated; the fact that, in most forgery cases, the dark side of the human nature isn’t fully recognized and honestly cherished. “Between the authoritarian repression of ‘evil’ and the liberal belief in ‘goodness’, only an acknowledgement of the dark side of the multitude can establish a true ‘radicalism’ against state”, to quote from the insignificant author who is fine with being robbed.

I also have the solution for these among my readers (Steve!) who, just like me, feel not entirely happy with the system they found themselves in: go and steal!! Dick Hebdige reminds us that all aspects of culture possess semiotic value. The most taken-for-granted phenomena can function as sign. Whenever the sign is presented, the ideology is presented too. As Lefebvre wrote, we live in a society where ‘. . . objects in practice become signs and signs objects and a second nature takes the place of the first – the initial layer of perceptible reality. These ‘humble objects’ can be magically appropriated; ‘stolen’ by subordinate groups and made to carry ‘secret’ meanings: meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their continued subordination. In Papua-New Guinea the indigenous distinct tribe of Pukuli developed the ritual of “the stolen finger”. Once a year, during the night of the solstice, all members of the tribe, regardless of their hieratical status within the community, are free to steal the attributes of power from one another. These attributes are nothing else but the bitten-off index fingers of the elected head-chief and the most elite warriors. The happy owner of the additional finger would attach it to his own index finger and mimic the gestures of the chief or other tribe’s elite member whenever they would neglect their responsibilities or abuse the power. Therefore, go and steal! No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you've come from (quote by Madonna) recycle, appropriate, and plagiarize the finger that is pointing at you! Intentionally and magically! Stealing means negotiating the value. Negotiating value means negating the norm.