Get your own Free Home PageInversions : a study of warped consciousness, by Burt Alpert
2d rev. ed., San Francisco, 1973. 464 p. ill.
LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES, PSYCHOLINGUISTICS,
PHILOSOPHY, MODERN--20TH CENTURY, REALITY.
> aloha, Eldon! > > the book is still available thru eBay used copies, so i guess it might still qualify as a "useful product". Reviews have appeared in "Booklegger Magazine," 1973"; Black Bart," 1973; "100 Flowers Review", 1975; "Liberation", 1976; "Radical Psychiatry", 1975.
A Gathering of Herds.Burt Alpert, 10/9/01
Review in Black Bart Brigade, 1973
Scope
Inversion
Is the transformation of reality
into irreality.
When someone relaxed
is referred to as "lazy."
that is an inversion.
When an easygoing person
is said to be "sloppy,"
a naturally groomed person is called
"dirty,"
someone self-assertive
is criticized for being "uppity,"
or someone affectionate
is called "oversexed"
-- these are inversions.
When a friendly person
is called "disrespectful,"
a spontaneous person "inpulsive,"
someone who enjoys life
"undiciplined,"
someone expressive "loud,"
someone active "wild,"
someone with feeling
"sentimental,"
someone sensitive "touchy,"
someone perceptive "pranoid,"
someone who is flexible
"disorganized,"
a straightforward person "stupid"
-- these are all inversions.
On the other hanb,
it is also an inversion
when conformity is called
"judiciousness,"
repression is called "temperance'"
rigidity is considered "order,"
ritual is referred to as
"etiquette,"
or compulsion is taken to be
"efficiency."
Inversion occurs
when afirmative qualities
are protrayed
disparagingly
-- and repressive traits
are made to seem
desirable, Still,
inverted thoughts
are the twisted shadows
of inverted life.
We sacrifice existence
and invent acceptable
illusions
to account for the betrayal.
Hence our lives
are filled with fantasy
-- created
from the reality of
what we are
but dare not wholly be:
impossible
beliefs, inappropriate values, foolish
prejudices, elaborate
dogmas. Monsters,
ghosts and phantoms populate our thoughts,
and we
go chasing after great white whales, while
unicorns
stand stately in the forests of our minds,
They are the spirit dwellers
in our
uninhabited lives.
Combined
these things are myths. Skillfully
combined they may be considered art.
Categorically combined they can be accepted
as science. Implausibly copmbined
they are accounted as madness.
(Freud's interpretation of the misadventures
of Oedipus takes its place at parity,
Levi-Strauss suggests, alongside
earlier versions og the myth. And he proposes
putting them all on punchcards,
Freud and Sophlocles impartially, to discover
their common terms and functions.)
Inversion is then,
if you will, metaphorically
an abduction of reality; politically
a cooption of reality; in the end,
a destruction of reality.
By way of being inverted, reality
is carried off, promoted and destroyed
to provide
an existence for irreality.
So that, it may be said,
the world
has not so much been lied about -- as that
the truth of it
has been strangely warped.
And we ourselves. This is
A study
of the mechanics and context
of inversions,
and an intimation of
their content and purpose.
from chapter 1:
The Work of the Intellectual in an Era of Total Commitment
Whatever the inconveniences and horrors of his previous existence may have been, the feeling is general that the personal and social life of man is now fast entering a critical state: a massive social psychosis appears to be weaving its way into the fabric of people's lives, leaving no one exempt.
...
A Strategy of Work
While everything seems to have failed, there is oddly enough one major opportunity for change that has scarcely been utilized: work. In spite of the fact that people spend the greater part of their most vital hours at work, no serious effort has been made at resolving the problems of lonliness and deprivation of self by altering the conditions of people's employment.
"We cannot create a Left by abdicating our roles as intellectuals." C. Wright Mills said. "to become working calss agitators or machine politicians, or by play-acting at any other direct political action. We can begin to create a Left by confronting issues as intellectuals in our own work." Neither ignoring his work nor renouncing it, the intellectual, like other workers, can endeavor to make his work his own.
Our work, our own work, the way in which we relate productively to each other and to the world around us, whether within an institution or through the craftsmanship of a commune, is the central experience of our lives. The era of total commitment derives it totalistic character from the fact that we have passed beyond the posibillity of divorcing our play, our missions or our politics from this central experience. The most effective and potentially gratifying occasion for total commitment would seem to be in the work we do. Where it's at is where we're at.
"Only by a craftmanlike style of life," Mills wrote in 1954, "can the split domains of work and leisure become unified." For the intellectual craftsman, Mills held, this style is to be discovered in an everyday "politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality...to find out as much of the truth as he can....This is the role of the mind, of intellect, of reason, of ideas: to define reality adequately and in a publicly relevant way."
By developing a strategy in his work, Mills suggested, the intellectual may be able to generate a relevancy in his life and a degree of satisfaction that neither politics, nor armed struggle nor psychotherapy has been able to provide. The acceptance of a commitment to struggle within the context of one's work would make heroism obsolete and self-immoation inappropriate. The transformation of work in a meaningful and gratifying fasion, through which man might learn to affirm his entire being, drawing together his play-self and his work-self, would have to be a matter not of instant heroics, but of everyday artistry. Being consciously involved in a permanent interchange with reality, the individual is relieved of the obligation, that he might otherwise have felt, to compress his efforts in a few moments of explosive rpotest. By approaching his work in a revolutionary fasion the intellectual may well learn that total commitment is the antithesis of heroism and sacrifice.
If indeed this is the case, if somehow the intellectual should be able to convert his worklife into a true occasion for making contact with the personal and social revolution that has eluded us elsewhere, is is hard to concieve of any way he can do this other than by consciously interposing himself within the system as guerilla.
...
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