Smecker - Night of the world: traversing the ideology of objectivity

In which the premises will eventually come out

In that minor text of Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and OtherCannibals, the author addresses the Cree notion of Wtiko, a term that denotes the cannibal, or, to be more precise, diabolical wickedness or cannibalism.from ourselves tooour inner-worlds are alien, they insist beyond just mere bodily existence, to the point of exceeding physical limits: For how is it that, the stuff of mind, thought itself, can elude physical measurement while yet, it controls our physical bodiesespecially when anything that is able to budge something physical is itself supposed to be physical, too? No less important, our thoughts are always about something other than the empty framework of thought itself, our desires often the desire of (the Others) Desire.

And what of the occurrence of thought itselfthought without any external object, an experience of radical self-withdrawalsubjective alienation; the human reduced solely to the abyssal point of thinking, a purely formal emptiness as such? According to that medial figure in the development of German Idealism, Friedrich Schelling, before becoming the rational medium of the world the subject is, at its very basis, an infinite lack of being (unendliche Mangel an Sein). This interminable, immutable lack of being, a withdrawal from the world itself by which the existence of reality is suspended to mere illusion, describes what is known well in psychoanalysis as psychotic withdrawal. In his essay The Three Events of Philosophy, iek raises an excellent point: Does this withdrawal-into-self, a madness as such, not also bespeak of the humans departure from its natural environmentthereby designating the end of the animal self and thus marking the emergence of humanization?

Madness, then, as iek puts it, is that inevitable vanishing mediator, a repressed element that is crucial for the advent of a new, symbolic, framework: can we not suppose, then, that the

We are ideological beings, each and every one of us estranged from the material reality of our own specious universes.

There is no overcoming of this alienation, no escape from this horrific disjunction, this original cleft in nature. There is only acceptance. Ideology is, in a way, the creative result of our immutable attempts at developing this radical imbalance into expressions of how to be in the world. As such, ideology represents to us and for us our unconscious fantasies, which are reflected back to us in our lived realities in the guise of an objective reality; reflected in our conscious experiences /perceptions of the world as such. Wtiko should therefore be likened not so much to a sickness synonymous with drive, and certainly not something endemic only to Western culture and/or civilization, but rather, it should be likened precisely to the violence that inevitably ensues from a disgust at life, a disgust at drive at its purest; thus Wtiko should be likened to the violence that ensues from the attempt to abolish the radical imbalances around which drive incessantly circulates.

Perhaps then, Wtiko should be likened to the socio-ideological metaphor of garden, for the typical garden that comes to most peoples minds is the one that, by its very nature, demands for the destructive removal of those insufferable weeds, ensuring the suppression of their fullest growth and appearance for the sake of the perfect garden. Does this tyranny of cultivation, so to speak, an ideology of diabolical wickedness if there ever was one, not arise from the very aspiration to abolish the radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature?

In other words, there is no organic harmony, no natural balance we must strive to return to; belief in this ecological ideology only follows the same old logic of tyrannyIs it not the case that the worlds most horrific atrocities, holocausts and mass murders were carried out in the name of harmonious being and claims to virtue? And what of those exceptions to the harmonious whole, those intolerable, excessive weeds that just wont