"What this means is that": Note on the semantics of bureaucracy and the police state

“What this means is that.” This is a formula for "knowledge.” It is false.

In literary texts of any value ("literature"="scripture": writing), rarely if ever do concepts and statements have a single meaning fixed by a referent that they name. That does not mean that enjoy the glory of a divine infinity, but it means that in art nothing merely “is what it is.” This reflects an ontological condition. Ultimately what is presented in experience rendered as an art work is a relationship of those who encounter it with images of the real (what is happening or has happened) that are, because artificial, a way of being like it without being it. That’s why Oedipus on stage can tear out his eyes night after night, with the audience celebrating this (theater derives from sacrifice) instead of collapsing in terror or horror. Art is what enables people to endure the traumas of being. That is why “therapy,” the real religion of our time, is so false and unsatisfying, in what now is its explicit attempt to re-socialize everyone to understand that there is no possible event before which those subjected to it might be struck by an impotentiality. Trauma is written out of existence, on account of its unacceptable scandal to every kind of management of persons and their experiences. Cognitive therapy and “dialectical behavior therapy” teach people that nothing is catastrophic, you can deal with anything if you are sufficiently like the Buddha or Stoical in your wisdom. Like the absent lyric “I” in Kipling’s poem “If…..”, which addresses itself to “you” as the son of the discourse, who is supposed to suffer misfortunes one after another, but rebound each time, with unperturbable confidence, and the sole satisfaction that this constitutes one as “a man.” Men deal with shit, without letting it get them down or make them assholes. Kipling’s prescription for manhood figures the one addressed hopefully as this man as one who appears to love no one and nothing, to not have staked himself on something contingent that he cares about and his faith in: whether, as in a religious register, a convanental promise or the “messiah,” the one whose coming will announce the world’s completion and perfection, or in a secular register, “the revolution,” or just a better world than the one we have. Better for the stoical voice of imperialism to have the disenchantment of a “maturity” that is content with knowing that all youthful enthusiasms aimed at faith in the hope of a better world are illusions, as the important thing is only to not support evils. Or rather, tolerate them but without oneself contributing to them and so making things worse, through involvement. The good person as witness of evil is, like the Hegelian beautiful soul, uninvolved and untainted. Creation happened long ago, and God today only watches over it, in near-indifference, controlling what happens so that sin is compensated and there are survivors. This reflects the dutiful functionary’s empty faith that renders modern bureaucratic states so puzzlingly indiscernible in attitude between idealism and cynicism. Literature counseling wisdom was always like that, and that is why the Jews and Christians generally did not, like the Romans and Chinese, place wisdom on the same level as justice and holiness. The wise man may know above all just how to stay out of trouble and stave off, which is to say prolong, dying.

The divine is "imaged" in every person in terms of what they can be said to experience, make, or, do. It is there in fragments and without perfection. It is therefore in every meaningful component of every work of art. Indeed, art can be defined this way: it presents "a world" that reveals something worth understanding of "the" world. All such fragments signify in uncertainty and multiplicity. That is why canonical texts ca be and are studied. Otherwise, one imagines the divine as a Boss of It All whose testaments are order-words. All such words can be reduced to iterations of the same demand: Don't think about what is said; just do it. It is at this point perhaps that good and evil begin to become so indiscernible that those thinking rightly (which is not the same as justly, as justice requires judgment, which requires thought if it is not to reduce to mere policing) can only understand the good as the war against evil, and thus as having evil as its sole content. That is the opposite of a democracy that admits an academy; it is a police state. In the police state, meaning is always determinate, and obvious, like common sense; how else could the Being of the state of things, which substitutes for law that is always a question, be enforced? All questions then are answered by a Dictionary, which is a catalog of received ideas dictating how they may be used in statements. This nihilistic world will be beyond good and evil as it relies on the authority of pure administration, which enforces Being, or what is, in the idealism that becomes indiscernible from cynicism. Everything will be known, nothing will be questioned, understood, as nothing will be revealed.