Addiction
- Thread starter baboon2004
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This thread has gone crazy...
I don't know if Burroughs would accept the idea of a "true" nature of things... at least, there could be no image of what this true nature might be. "Image" is a way of consuming reality, but "Image" is also part of reality... this is a war universe, Burroughs says somewhere, war and games, that is its nature. The games and the war do not disappear with the critique of the image, but become somehow more malleable. It is about cutting-up the images, rather than consuming them... the question is really one of the relation to image, with addiction offering one relation.
I don't know if Burroughs would accept the idea of a "true" nature of things... at least, there could be no image of what this true nature might be. "Image" is a way of consuming reality, but "Image" is also part of reality... this is a war universe, Burroughs says somewhere, war and games, that is its nature. The games and the war do not disappear with the critique of the image, but become somehow more malleable. It is about cutting-up the images, rather than consuming them... the question is really one of the relation to image, with addiction offering one relation.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
how do you mean - in terms of self-aggrandisment, fame/praise-seeking?
Yes, absolutely - yourself in all its flawed eccentricity. And also politics in some sense against yourself, beyond yourself... politics in speaking in your own name.
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He certainly did believe that there was a reality to things though that is obscured by regular conventions of thought (obviously, language, most especially). If this "Image" is junk, but is also a way of consuming "reality" (which I am to assume is in the problematic way), but it is also a part of this same reality, then Naked Lunch - the book where we are meant to all see what is on the end of our forks - becomes very complicated indeed.
Though I'm far from a Burroughs scholar, having not read any of his later work, and I'm sure he's addressed this somewhere down the line.
This is fantastic, and very useful to current research, thanks.
"Naked Lunch - the book where we are meant to all see what is on the end of our forks - becomes very complicated indeed."
Good point. What did Burroughs mean by this? It is a strange image for truth... it is an image of what we are all consuming.
Public Movement are fantastic, yes. I just spent five days with them in Warsaw. One of the best five days of my life.
Good point. What did Burroughs mean by this? It is a strange image for truth... it is an image of what we are all consuming.
Public Movement are fantastic, yes. I just spent five days with them in Warsaw. One of the best five days of my life.
craner
Beast of Burden
The family thing. (Welcome back, zhao!)
I was an only child raised by an exceptional woman who instilled strong principles in me, and was therefore voraciously hostile to the nuclear family concept and all State attempts to penalise single parent families financially and ideologically, and yet, and yet...
You know, at the age of 31 I'm starting to realise that the family structure is not a fiction or pernicious imposition, it makes some sense. Most of my personal flaws I can now belatedly trace back to my disfuctional family background. I don't blame my parents, they had to get divorced for real and serious reasons, and probably spared me a miserable childhood by doing so.
By I missed a father figure, a totem of authority, and it's starting to show.
I don't think it's wise to junk the nuclear family structure. I used to think it was irrelevant, but it's not. It makes sense, it works. Forget Engels.
I was an only child raised by an exceptional woman who instilled strong principles in me, and was therefore voraciously hostile to the nuclear family concept and all State attempts to penalise single parent families financially and ideologically, and yet, and yet...
You know, at the age of 31 I'm starting to realise that the family structure is not a fiction or pernicious imposition, it makes some sense. Most of my personal flaws I can now belatedly trace back to my disfuctional family background. I don't blame my parents, they had to get divorced for real and serious reasons, and probably spared me a miserable childhood by doing so.
By I missed a father figure, a totem of authority, and it's starting to show.
I don't think it's wise to junk the nuclear family structure. I used to think it was irrelevant, but it's not. It makes sense, it works. Forget Engels.
But perhaps also, some of your strengths?
IdleRich
IdleRich
This is pretty much how I feel I think. It seems to me that if people want to watch porn and other people want to make it and be in it and so on then there should be no problem - but I'm pretty sure that there is a problem although it's hard to say what it is. Maybe it's just another example of the way that everything seems to get more extreme, I don't know. Maybe it's an effect of something else and the problem lies deeper - actually, I'm sure that's the case but that doesn't mean that porn in and of itself can't be a problem too.
Tentative Andy
I'm in the Meal Deal
I'm not sure it's about claiming that the nuclear family doesn't work, or can't work. Like everything it has its advantages and its problems, but clearly it can provide a positive environment when certain factors connect up.
It's more about insisting that other family models can work as well. If that makes me sound like a flabby liberal relativist then so be it (though I think it can be put in a more robust way, might try that later when I have more time to think on it). Also, I reckon that seeing it in terms of nuclear family versus single parenting is far too limiting a binary for considering families in general.
Safe for discussing your own background though - don't mean that to be patronising, I am very much in favour of openness of this kind.
craner
Beast of Burden
Fine, it's a case-by-case issue, and I used to buy that. But is it true? Think about it. Yes people are fucked up, individually, but, then again we give birth to children, and have to raise them.The best way, ideally, is with a strong mix of masculine and feminine influence, and a stable background. It's ideal, and hard to instill and maintain, but I think it's been generally proved to work. All children from broken homes miss it. I mean, weirdly, I don't wish my parents had remained married, but I also miss the family, who barely exist in my case. Really, I just wanted an older sister, a key to my psychology.
You should see what happens though to children of the "perfect" model of the nuclear family, the middle-upper class families in the suburbs. Especially Boomer parents. They have this naive, enlightened way of raising children to believe they are special, that everything is achievable, and the entire world is essentially their oyster. This is not a good form of parenting: it fills the child's head with acceptable conceit but takes away from their motivation to achieve, since achievement is seen as a given, a birthright.
I was raised in this economic bracket, although my parents were certainly not on this tip, as they weren't born into their wealth and had to work for it. The only thing I've inherited is being terrible with money (not really knowing a true value of it - I don't have much personally, but at all times I am basically protected from destitution should something go wrong), and occasionally finding it hard to relate to real suffering. This is more to do with the environment of the suburbs than my parents.
The effects of coddled parenting in the burbs was all around me though growing up. I know a great deal of people whose parents have rendered them pathologically self-obsessed, emotionally confused underachievers pawing blindly through a cold, dark world in search of the promises they were told it held as infants.
Basically it produces people like Asher Roth.
I was raised in this economic bracket, although my parents were certainly not on this tip, as they weren't born into their wealth and had to work for it. The only thing I've inherited is being terrible with money (not really knowing a true value of it - I don't have much personally, but at all times I am basically protected from destitution should something go wrong), and occasionally finding it hard to relate to real suffering. This is more to do with the environment of the suburbs than my parents.
The effects of coddled parenting in the burbs was all around me though growing up. I know a great deal of people whose parents have rendered them pathologically self-obsessed, emotionally confused underachievers pawing blindly through a cold, dark world in search of the promises they were told it held as infants.
Basically it produces people like Asher Roth.
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Tentative Andy
I'm in the Meal Deal
Craner, there are a whole load of thing I want to say in response to that, but sadly I don't have the time to concentrate on it right this minute. I will, however, have a response up to it by the end of the night.
(I know I've said things like this on the board before, and then have managed to forget/avoid actually doing them, but this time I will. Promise!
).well i wasn't comparing single parent to nuclear... i was saying that an extended, bigger family is likely the most healthy environment to bring up children, where they are intimate with and learn from an entire group of adults and have many other children in the group who live and grow up with them, instead of seeing other kids at school and then come home to 2 adults... monkeys live like this.
and... i didn't go anywhere? have been consistently around for quite a while... thanks to boring design jobs
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Tell me about it...not me personally, thankfully, but some of the kids I've tutored over the past couple of years. Some of whom were kids of seriously go-getting, arse-kicking, high-flying moneymoney career people (you get the idea). Like this one girl of 10 or so whose mum obviously just wanted the best for her, you could tell she really did, but so many times I had to bite my lip and say "You know, you're really not going about this the right way, if I may say so...". So much expectation, it can just end up having the opposite effect by making the kid feel like nothing they ever do is going to be good enough.
What really brought it home was the times the girl and I would be doing a long maths lesson and the mum would bring in some snacks for us - meticulously nutritionally correct snacks - which is great, of course, in and of itself - fruit, dry-cured ham, I mean I was happy as Larry, bring it on - but for her, there was also a little pile of pills. Not drugs or anything sinister like that, but vitamin and mineral supplements, no doubt to encourage not just growth but also learning. And I wanted to say "For heaven's sake lady, this is your daughter here, not a pedigree racehorse". It's like this woman was obsessed with getting the maximum possible performance out of her daughter (who was her only child, it goes without saying).
I dunno - it's probably not so terrible when you compare it to parents who simply couldn't give a shit about their kids; whatever iniquities this girl suffered, at least she wasn't Shannon Matthews. But you can definitely take things too far the other way...
Craner, wanted to ask you, if it's not too personal (if it is just ignore): what do you gather are the discernable qualities and character traits you have as an adult which come from your single parent, father and father-figure less childhood?
from things i've read i have a general idea that boys without fathers can go in the direction of wild lawlessness and adopt aggressive behavior patterns... don't know how true that is?
and i bet a different dynamic happens with girls brought up by single moms. an ex of mine was like this, and she told me she HATED all the men her mom dated SO FUCKING MUCH as a kid...
your comparison is from a typical materialist point of view, which is of course also the POV of this woman.
to neglect a child's feelings in trying to shape him is just another way of "simply couldn't give a shit", the effects of which can be just as disastrous as other kinds of neglect and abuse.
see this is the thing: both my parents were physicists, and were through and through materialist, heartless robots. emotions are unimportant, annoying things to be CONTROLLED (and if sometimes they can not be? well we won't speak about those times and pretend they never happened). and "soul" or the "spiritual dimension"? well that's just a bunch of superstitious bullshit.
and after a life of suffering from inner, unresolved conflicts, and externalizing those conflicts on the world, making those around them suffer tremendously (specifically my father), he/they still do not recognize that the inner world shapes the outer world, and that it is consciousness which precedes materiality.
Carl Jung:
nobel prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli:
my uncle, the brilliant astronomer who discovered a star, author of many important books, died at the age of 42, from a kidney stone -- in a nut shell, killed by unresolved inner conflicts. i remember the shouting matches that would sometimes turn to blows between him and my father... i remember him going fucking BERSERK like some viking on speed, face turning purple from pure rage... and i remember being beaten by my father until there were no more tears, until my voice was completely gone, and being mute for days after.
(this is ultimate materialism: humans are simply bodies to be shaped through reward and punishment - and it's always the punishment part which gets more play: misery loves company, and loves to breed misery. and of course the next logical step: if no purposes are being served anymore, and these bodies are no longer wanted, we have a very efficient final solution... )
the scariest thing is that this monster is also in me (the rage, passed down). i know not only from deductive reasoning but because it has come out before. but simply being conscious of it and reading these books and trying to work through these emotions instead of denial... even though some real therapy would be good, i don't think i'm going to do TOO much harm to myself or any to people around me. still scared shitless of having my own child though...
haha maybe you have a slightly better idea now?
from things i've read i have a general idea that boys without fathers can go in the direction of wild lawlessness and adopt aggressive behavior patterns... don't know how true that is?
and i bet a different dynamic happens with girls brought up by single moms. an ex of mine was like this, and she told me she HATED all the men her mom dated SO FUCKING MUCH as a kid...
your comparison is from a typical materialist point of view, which is of course also the POV of this woman.
to neglect a child's feelings in trying to shape him is just another way of "simply couldn't give a shit", the effects of which can be just as disastrous as other kinds of neglect and abuse.
see this is the thing: both my parents were physicists, and were through and through materialist, heartless robots. emotions are unimportant, annoying things to be CONTROLLED (and if sometimes they can not be? well we won't speak about those times and pretend they never happened). and "soul" or the "spiritual dimension"? well that's just a bunch of superstitious bullshit.
and after a life of suffering from inner, unresolved conflicts, and externalizing those conflicts on the world, making those around them suffer tremendously (specifically my father), he/they still do not recognize that the inner world shapes the outer world, and that it is consciousness which precedes materiality.
Carl Jung:
nobel prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli:
my uncle, the brilliant astronomer who discovered a star, author of many important books, died at the age of 42, from a kidney stone -- in a nut shell, killed by unresolved inner conflicts. i remember the shouting matches that would sometimes turn to blows between him and my father... i remember him going fucking BERSERK like some viking on speed, face turning purple from pure rage... and i remember being beaten by my father until there were no more tears, until my voice was completely gone, and being mute for days after.
(this is ultimate materialism: humans are simply bodies to be shaped through reward and punishment - and it's always the punishment part which gets more play: misery loves company, and loves to breed misery. and of course the next logical step: if no purposes are being served anymore, and these bodies are no longer wanted, we have a very efficient final solution... )
the scariest thing is that this monster is also in me (the rage, passed down). i know not only from deductive reasoning but because it has come out before. but simply being conscious of it and reading these books and trying to work through these emotions instead of denial... even though some real therapy would be good, i don't think i'm going to do TOO much harm to myself or any to people around me. still scared shitless of having my own child though...
haha maybe you have a slightly better idea now?
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