Radio Consciousness

Eliot Handelman

A recent article in the Observer, nostalgizing about Beat Generation vs. "the system," notes that "the system" today is too comprehensive & vast to admit of alternatives - nowhere to drop out to, nowhere where "the system" is not. This pervasiveness suggests a reduction of consciousness, which, on the plus side, will facilitate its technological simulation.

Hypertext and the extrusion of consciousness

I somehow got interested in the "beat generation." I was at a party in Sausalito given by T, "the father of hypertext." T told me I reminded him of himself when he first came to California, full of bitterness and "east-coast hostility." He needed two years of therapy and cults before he could get laid. When I returned to the east coast I could see what he meant. But I was not interested in joining therapy cults, nor was I really looking to get laid. T was from New York City and about the right age, so I asked him about beatniks. He thought it over and dictated his answer into a microcassette recorder. It wasn't what I was getting at.

One good turn deserves another

What did come out of this was that I realized I could use a recorder like T's. I got one wholesale from a relative in Miami Beach. I tried it out by dictating into it "Someone is going to steal this recorder." Sure enough, it was stolen a week later in New York City. The next day I bought a second recorder at the regular price.

A Miami Vice

Speaking into the recorder while driving up Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, I realized the transformative power of technology that lets you interact with the "real world." The kick wore off in less than an hour, but that was more than I got from Virtual Reality. I've never used a walkman in public, but I guess it is a related kick.

Seven pillars of extrusion

Walkmen may actually be a greater kick than Virtual Reality. With the right music it might be like being in a movie, where "being in a movie" means having film music externalize your condition, inducing the appreciation of that condition in others. With the right kind of music, characters in movies can seem to be profound. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) seems profound mainly because of the music.

Missing title

I met T again at a party in Malpitas, given by a cult called "The Human Awareness Institute," or some such name. This institute promoted several levels of awareness, which were sexually oriented. There may have been seven levels in all. I had a vague idea what was involved through a friend who had graduated from one of the earlier levels. Standing on the balcony, overlooking the lights of what I guess was Milpitas itself, I made some wisecrack to a Swiss millionaire about California lacking music. Predictably, he did not understand what I meant, nor did he care. He wanted to talk about the transformative power of sensitivity as promoted by the Human Awareness Institute, whereas I wanted to talk about the transformative power of technology that lets you interact with the "real world," maybe like a sexuality that went beyond the institutional pale of human awareness.

More pricks than kicks

Part of the male kick of a cult like this involves the projection of female orgasmic superiority that culminates in her mastery of the "sympathetic orgasmic kick," where you have orgasms by listening to music, etc. A psychiatrist I know does not believe in this projection, claiming that this supposed superiority is really a function of emotionalism. What difference does it make? "Stronger emotion" indicates either stronger physiological correlates of emotion, or more acute perception of bodily states. There is no difference between perceiving and experiencing, so this claim does not make a difference. Still, the real issue has to do with projections of experience vs. phallic kicks.

Don't look - I'm having an emotion

I was jealous when I read William James, so his theory of emotion made sense. It is that emotion was the perception of bodily change, as follows: "see a bear in the woods - run - you are afraid because you run" (not: you run because you are afraid). I could see that my jealousy correlated with a knotting sensation in my stomach. Later on, enraged, I luckily remembered that I wanted to check out the theory. When I attended to the shooting spasms in my chest, my rage went away. It was one of those things that disappears when you try to attend to it, like - I think is Luc Sante's example - the dust on your eyelids. Or maybe, to use a less persuasive example, it's like getting your microcassette recorder stolen because you're thinking too much about it, or, at least, the technological kick wearing off because you're using it (technology). The question is, is this anything like the kind of sensitivity promoted by the Human Awareness Institute? Film music? Is it like the pursuit of unconsciousness? Zen? Perhaps the real point is that expressed projections of consciousness, like emotion as bodily change, are really introjective.

Consciousness a bodily intrusion ??

Wm. James was right about everything else, and besides, a Danish psychologist named Lange independently came up with the same theory at the same time, so his emotion theory is probably true. But it seemed to predict the absence of emotion in paraplegics, which is false. Even if paraplegics experience emotion the way amputees experience phantom limbs, the issue is the reality of the body. Nowadays "facial feedback theory" agrees with James-Lange. It gives evidence that "if you smile, then you feel happy." You could call it method consciousness, after method acting. It is essentially introjective.

Virtual Amputees

If you can feel a limb which isn't there, what about feeling a virtual limb that was never there? When you leave your virtual body, I guess you would experience a phantom limb? Would it hurt? Obviously, you could invent new emotions with new bodies?

Vibes mediate body

If method consciousness is true, then deleterious vibrations could induce moods or states of knowledge by taking charge of the associated bodily correlates of these moods, states of knowledge, or whatever.

Some topics I will not be connecting today

J. W. Goethe wrote somewhere, "we sense the intent, and it jars upon us." Maybe "it" also disappears (viz. walkmen, sexuality, kicks, microcassette recorders). Consciousness, pleasure, death and technology are among some of the topics I will not be connecting today.

What I think I'm writing about

I'm writing about the technological simulation of consciousness.

Beat Iconography

At first I didn't know what interested me about Beatniks. Since everything I knew about them was derived from beatnik iconography, I guessed it did not have much to do with what beatniks really were. The image that came to mind involved berets, sandals, turtleneck sweaters, sunglasses, goatees, marijuana, jazz and espresso. I figured that I was thinking of the period of A. Watts' The way of Zen, or J. Kerouac's Dharma Bums.

Interactive history

I tried to figure out more about beatniks by drawing a comic strip called Manny of the Village. The theory was that if the strip was funny, then it was true. This only works if you are modelling an introjective topic.

Differences between drawing Hollywood Harlots and drawing beatniks

Manny was a complete failure, partly by choice, partly by lack of ability. Beatniks were half-assed intellectuals who wrote half-assed poetry; therefore the strip could only be true if it too were half-assed. The kick wore off in about two weeks. Next, I tried getting it less half-assed and wound up reproducing hookers who advertised their services in an LA newspaper called Hollywood Harlots. There is a reason to draw hookers "well," since I appreciate or understand the eroticism of line in these contexts. But I could not see how to eroticize - this being the chief component of my lineal sensitivity kick - figures whose whole attraction seemed to consist precisely in erotic neglect. So maybe that was it.

New York Jewish Intellectuals vs. shitty beatnik comic strip

I showed Manny to the author of The 40-year old Hippie. He showed me some of his strips, to which I said, "Obviously, you like to draw." "No I don't," he replied. I realized that Podhoretz had been essentially right in equating "The Beat Generation" with anti-intellectualism. The simulation of processes of projection-extrusion-simulation is not productive, a point of honor with even the sloppiest intellectualism.

Field composition

Charles Olson, the Black Mountain poet, made up the main theory of what was to become beatnik poetry, which, he said, was that poetry was supposed to transfer energy (i.e., consciousness) "from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations) by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay." He called the method for creating such poetry "field composition."

Example of beatnik poetry 

	In the beginning was the weapon
		a chinese character
			started the chain reaction

	(Carl Fosberg, Lines on a Tijuana John)

Commentary on example

Consciousness would have been extruded by a "cool jazz" performance during recital of above. The tempo would be Allegro Energico. Some beatniks would have joined in with bongo drums.

Weak orgasms (probably)

Historically, I figure that beatdom's erotic neglect is probably right. Wm. S. Burroughs, who was not beat, said the young "hipsters" were less interested in sex than were, or had been, members of his own generation. N. Mailer, also an enthusiast, said "sexual exhaustion" and "weak orgasms." Psychosocially speaking, this has got to stand for introjective detente, in other words, fucking could not be co-opted to the aims of projective experience.

Never you mind

Behaviorism, the rat-racing psychology of the rat-race, had massive popular support in its profession of no mind . Being caught with a mind - like thinking aloud, or doing arithmetic by tracing figures in the air, or talking philosophy - was being caught in flagrante delicto. You "kept your thoughts to yourself" and if you were lucky your thoughts disappeared altogether, since, in the 50's, thought was essentially soviet. Rejecting this platform did not, therefore, mean becoming political. It meant, for one thing, getting into Zen.

Bodhisattvas we love to hate

I don't know a hell of a lot about Zen, but through A. Schopenhauer a variant of it got to R. Wagner who invented the technological extrusion-simulation of consciousness. The last line of Tristan is: "hoechste Lust - Unbewusst," which means, "highest pleasure - unconsciousness." Through fascism Wagner's technology let you interact with the real world. That this no longer works, with Wagner at least, is what Hans-Juergen Syberberg seems mainly peeved about.

Capacious repressivity = extrudable consciousness

One of my guesses is that the Beatnik's kick derived from his interactions with his popular iconography. The Beatnik wore this iconography like a Walkman, like a transistor radio extruding his consciousness (see extrusion tool). The expediency of this extrusion correlates with the acceptability of the idea that Man has a repressed inner life. The greater the capacity for repression, the easier it is to fake consciousness extrusion. Jackson Pollock's distinctions are optimized for minds that repress nearly everything. Walking around with a transistor radio works in a certain kind of environment, and there are still such environments. I guess it depends on believing that radios are interactive, and there are many such people.

Radio consciousness

So the transistor radio is like, just like , the electronic pickups that, according to a feature on the new science of mind control appearing in Life Magazine around 1963, were going to be implanted in baby's brains making them obedient automatons, or potential "Manchurian Candidates". The interested reader can consult Delgado's Physical control of the mind for more. Radio waves are supposed to afford consciousness (I am thinking of "human ecology"). Walking around with a transistor radio glued to your beatnik ear ("snap, snap, snap") seems to want to be faking this development, which was mainly worked out in B-movies.

Limitations of projective experience

You can't have too many beatniks. The basic reason is interference. Projective-extrusive-field-composed-consciousness is just a set of relatively minor distinctions that only work when there is some background against which they may become operative. Beatniks alone cannot supply this background (see multiple beatnik tool). Result: consciousness-flip, like reverting to introjective sex kick (see introjective sexuality tool).

Manifesto-in-progress

Unconsciousness may be the next big kick.