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"Well you wake up in the mornin´ you hear the work bell ring
And they march you to the table to see the same old thing."
-- Traditional


Dear precious angels, this Midnight Special Day 2000 Issue is a everlovin' light of critical analysis shinin' down on the e-poetics of protest.

In it, legendary shadow-eRepublik gasbag/philosopher Phoenix Quinn begins to provide some urgently needed information exposing the soul of the e-poetics of protest.

His thesis in a nutshell: Historically, the e-poetics of protest are successful only when in a warring position and lose their legitimacy when in power. As part of that dialectic, the aesthetics of e-resistance have become separated from the politics of despair that is attached to such e-poetics in power. The future lies in fully sublating the politics of the e-poetics of protest into their aesthetics.


Today's article introduces this important topic for consideration by the eRepublik group-mind.







A Ceremony of Innocents

As you read this, somewhere in the New World devotees of an e-religion or e-ideology or e-nationalism are performing a balletlike ritual of dancing and ceremonious chest-beating while rhythmically circumambulating the chief cantor of their sect's Appeal.

During these e-poetic Gatherings, many other exciting events usually take place as part of the electronically-induced holy daze. A whole panoply of regular and visting preachers ascend the forum/pulpit and deliver screeds on various social and at times political issues and conclude by mournfully recounting one or another episode of The Same Old Story.

The names and images of the traditional heros and villains fade in and out with those of newer eminent personages, even when the new names are not part of the same Tradition but are instead borrowed from some other Tradition or World.

These names, their heroic adventures and their tragic endings are the dramatis personae of a never-ending cosmic e-opera that has been communally composed by the collective will of a player-base over years of intermutual remembrance, recited ritually, monthly, annually, piously, since e-time immemorial.




Usually it is towards midnight somewhere, when the dramatic story-telling and the preachers' rat-a-tat-chat are over, their social commentaries and political criticisms having been offered up, and the mournful reminiscences of the Good Old Days having been shared out, that the Faithful have a chance to rest and relax.

And suddenly, inevitably, just as the Group is started to relax, there is a commotion in one corner of the chat room or message board, as if a powerfully intriguing aroma has emerged from the e-kitchen. It is the sound of musical instruments, including obscure and mythic ones like: a long unicorn horn; a big brass conical drum, adorned with bits of hemp cloth and scraps of naughahyde, that emits a little puff of electronic video dust every time it is struck; a hugely oversized duet of cymbals; and other musical exotica.

They are played in unison by members of the Community with uneven and at times dubious claims on musicianship, snycopated to the beat of the drum. The Band begins to dance rhythmically as they play, making a complete tour around the vast e-courtyard. The Members and Followers and Noobs and Visitors watch with excitement -- and even with joy -- from the e-rooftops. Then, slowly but surely, as inevitably as e-night following e-day, the spectacle turns from joy into Tears of Rage, an atavistic emotional reply to the light of that ol' midnight train once again passing us by and leaving us all alone in Angola.


It is a feeling we all know, one that was expressed so eloquently by the Great Poet himself:

"We carried you in our arms
On e-Independence Day
And now you'd throw us all aside
And put us on our way
...
Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why am I the one who must be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We're so alone
And e-life is brief"

-- Bob E. Dylan


The conflicting emotions and sentiments we take pleasure in during such moments are a sobering frivolity.

During such e-poetic gatherings we are actually commemorating the e-murder of our heroic origins, the guilt that underwrites the pleasure of such commemorations, and above all the paradox that this colliding confluence of pleasure and guilt entails.




The Roots of Rock and Roll

The sacred aura and ritual sanctity of e-poetic commemorations assume entirely sacerdotal proportions for hardcore devotees of Dio, for unshakeably "far-left" e-socialists, for the most resolute of Captains of Industry, and for both the Devoted Faithful and of course for the Priest/Judge class within any number of such Groupings whose Tradition centers around an e-poetic Lore.


A sidebar: A semantic mot -- I wish to make no distinctions between "secular" and "relgious" e-ideologies and traditions because I find no meaningfully essentialist distinctions between them. Whatever the Tradition, they are all rooted in the same desire for a social/communal dramaturgical mimesis (acting out) of a meaningful e-poetics, which is sometimes expressed as a banal desire for "fun", but is -- as noted below -- atually rooted in a complex of totemic guilt associations.



Depiction of a typical eRepublikan tribal gathering


The systematic mutation of totemic sacrifice and symbolic explorations of the relation of child to parent, in varied forms of totemic gatherings, is at the origin of pretty much all societies, cultures, religions, social movements and civilizations. The New World is no exception. It is in our social DNA for mourning to be followed by demonstrations of festive rejoicing. Festivals, sometimes with an obligatory excess or solemn breach of prohibitions (which, when taken to political extremes, are referred to as "revolutions"), are when we give ourselves the liberty to do what is as a rule prohibited.

Sanctification of shared sacrifices through participation in shared rituals, such as a common meal, is a universal human trait. The sense of guilt is allayed by the solidarity of all the participants.

The figure of the deity/parent/hero becomes the object with whom those who consume the totemic meal become identified. The root of every form of e-poetics of protest is the simultaneous longing for the parent and the e-murder of a primal parent, an act that ultimately failed to satisfy the democratic aspirations of the multiple sons and daughters succeeding the missing parent/s. Thus, in our failure to reap the benefit of the e-patricide/e-matricide we reverse and have a collective sense of remorse and thus, in a never-ending cycle, our longing for the e-murdered parent/s increases.

The totemic constitution of the parent figure is the originary moment of ambivalence, whereby the founding fathers and mothers of a culture are at once murdered, mourned and venerated. As fantastic as this type of language may seem, with such a theory of the primal horde, it is in fact quite easy to envision a band of brothers joined against a possessive and overbearing father, killing and devouring him.

You know I'm right.


The repetition and commemoration of such memorable and criminal deeds is at the e-beginning of so many things, not least of which are: social organization, moral restrictions and, to the point of this commemoration of Day 2000, e-religion and other types of e-poetics.








There are -- to be sure -- several interesting variations on this theme. I am assuredly not saying that "we are all exactly the same". I am only observing that, with respect to the e-poetics of resistance, revolt and protest, we are all "very much the same".

A popular and very interesting example of a variation on the main theme emerges from those e-poetics of protest which tell a story in which a syndrome evolves around the e-murder of the e-child by an evil Other.

An enusing dramaturgical premonition -- and I should note that this type of Tradition often deploys a kind mystical revelatory character -- reveals that the people of the Legendary Community who failed to prevent the e-murder are the simulacrum of the eRepublikan Community at large (across all time and space, and not only the members who share a specific totemic/e-poetic meal), who are likewise ready to e-kill their own son-figure or daughter-figure in lieu of the more standardized and typical e-killing of a parent-figure.

Interestingly, this variation -- the e-child-murder mimesis -- plays on the Shakespearean (and ultimately Hegelian) theme of "There's an e-divinity that shapes our ends." The Hegelian twist is that at the same time that it "hands it over to a higher power", due to the intense self-reflective gaze of this type of kill-the-children Tradition, it also sharply reinflicts upon the Community the pain of vicarious guilt in a particularly intense way: the entire drama converges on the ceremonial re-enactment of and need to atone for having e-wiped-out our own bravest sons and daughters.


To conclude these opening remarks, it is perhaps worthwhile to quote Hamlet's lament to Horatio in Act 5, Scene 2 at slightly more length:

"...Rashly—
And praised be rashness for it: let us know
Our e-indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should teach us
There’s an e-divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will—"

-- Bill E. Shakespeare





Civilizing Guilt

So far, so good.

But. A legit concern can be raised about identifying mutual insights into the working of collective guilt in operationalizing sacred memories. This concern addresses the nodal complexity of the civilizing function of guilt and the revelatory nature of repression.

If you really think about it, such critiques of critical modernity are far less about forgiving a culture for its sins than with the modernizing extension of occasions for forgiveness into much wider domains than any sacred or ideological order can tolerate without breaking. In other words, both transgressive (oppositional) and remissive (forgiving) forces operate within the e-poetics of protest of any e-cultural milieu and in its attitudes towards its own inhibitions.






"In the modern time, when man has reached a dead end in his evolving society, and when the underdeveloped countries are struggling with numerous difficulties and shortcomings, an enlightened soul is one who can generate responsibility and awareness and give intellectual and social direction to the masses. Accordingly, an enlightened person is not necessarily one who has inherited and continues the works of Galileo, Copernicus, Socrates, Aristotle, and Avicenna. Modern scientists such as Einstein and Von Braun complement and continue their achievements. In principle, the responsibility and the rule of contemporary enlightened souls of the world resembles that of the prophets and the founders of the great religions -- revolutionary leaders who promoted fundamental structural changes in the past.

-- Dr. Al E. Shariati



Negotiating a careful and caring balance between moral absolutism (which is dreadful, really) and licentious anarchy (which I find attractive from a socioogical/psycholoigial perspetive but abhor as a self-appointed moral police officer), and as a decidely "rational" and "secular" Westerner, I find myself wanting to recommend something like "a thereapeutic culture". But as soon as I write that, I know it falls too much on the side of a saccharine, sunny-side-up solution to the problem of civiling guilt.

Similarly, but in an even more serious vein, it doesn't even seem to matter what is my opinion on this matter.

The industrial-psychology of eRepublik's game model seems to insist upon a bringing together a vintage modernity (the "psychological player", if you like) and an Enlightenment attitude (the "economic player") in order to break down the fortitude of the "religous" and "political" players. A critique of such "psychologizing" of the New World takes us right onto a slippery slope that involves a critique of modernity generally, meaning rational, captialist, consumerist, agnostic modernity and its culture of remissive (tolerating, if you like) occasions which successively seek to overcome civilizing inhibitions via a standard set of internalized and socialized repressions.

If you pursue such a critique seriously, you will find yourself -- I promise -- delving into positively prophetic, revelatory and aphoristic realms. If you are a college student, this is the year that you will read Nietzche and Kierkegaard closely and together.

And after all of that, I further predict that you will emerge with a psyhoanalysis of guilt which informs a sociology of repression which is still about enabling/disabling of guilt complexes.

It will go something like this: Every order of actual existence, individual and collective, e-character (our avatar-characters) and e-culture (our e-nations, e-parties, e-militias and meta-game-forums), derives from the recurrent splitting and motion by which the master passions are kept at a civiling distance from direct enactment. Repression, therefore, and not sublimation, represents the ruling power of any e-culture, including its e-poetics of protest.






Paradox of Pain and Pleasure

Let's briefy review: We know that the ritual gatherings of eRepubliks' Communities of e-poetic expression reenact their history in the morality plays which recapitulate thier habitual repression of the guilt that has brought them together as an e-people, as an e-culture and so forth.

It is a universe of significant affiliation with the cosmic character of "who we are" by means of a variety of mimetic practices -- such as writing articles in the e-press, commenting on them and promoting them.


What we've observed: Such rituals are paradoxically joyous, mournfully playful, and introverted while being gregarious.


To understand them: We need nothing more than one layer of de-codification from the often heavily codified e-poetic historiographies, into the more archaic manners and modes of guilt-invested occasions of civil, civic, communal and civilizational formations, for which we can discern a possible line of investigation in detecting the manner of deferred obedience that keeps a community of believers on its moral toes.

^ This is the key.


As an example: Dioists certainly did not e-kill Dio Brando, who (interestingly) committed a kind of e-suicide, but they did e-kill any number of his offshoots.

So Dioism as an e-civilizing act begins not with the e-killing of the parent-totem but with the dismissal and dispersion of the inheritors of the Tradition. This is how Dioism begins to make any sense, in a theory of culture that underwrites a psychoanalysis of guilt multiplied by its deferred obedience results in an e-poetics (a dramaturgical mimesis) of a "youthful" e-religion launched against successive generations of fathers/parents/communities for having e-killed/e-widowed/e-widowered their e-sons/e-daughters.



Another sidebar: Although often expressed in masculinist and phallogocentric gendered language, especially in the context of eRepublikan Traditions, in fact this entire line of argument, including the standard terminology, must be corrected via a feminist-critical reading given the fact that mothers and sisters are often, including and especially in e-life, the primary carriers and transmitters of cultures in the contexts and narratives that we are concerned with here.






The paradox of pain and pleasure is most evident in these cases -- like Dioism (but there are others; I would opine that "e-socialism", for example, carries a similar e-child-murder rather than e-parent-murder guilt complex) -- where the theory of deferred obedience does tend to sublate into a state of permanent defiance -- a defiance in the making, a defiance to come.

What the poets and singers of such Traditions have deferred in the aftermath of the tragedy redounding to the disappearance or "fail" of their primordial son or daughter is not obedience -- it is defiance. Such Traditions are quintessentially "youthful"; they are an e-poetics of young revolutionaries defying the patriarchical (and to some extent, matriarchal) order of things.

Even in such cases, however, it would be foolish to disregard the paramount significance of the patristic/matristic generation of preachers/leaders/jurists within such Schools/Forums/Orgs/Subscription Bases.

Typically it is a handful of "old fgts" hunkered down in their medieval fortresses/institutues/forums and writing out the jurisprudential backbone of their e-Faith. Nor do I mean to demean such work; sometimes it occurs under dire and difficult circumstances -- I am thinking of our e-friends in Iran, China, Indonesia and elsewhere who have had to dodge the censor in order to play the game.

But it is also foolish to not place the fact of such "wise old wo/men" next to the enduring revolutionary zeal that essentially produced the exalted works of Dioism, of Socialist Freedom, of Industrial Captainism with e-blood on the battlefields of their combative and collective history. Their Legends, in other words, were writ large in the daily praxis of its partisans throughout e-history; their Doctrine, in these "youthful" cults, tends to flow towards power, where, the further it gets from the Events, the more it loses its e-poetry.
















(To be continued. Please provide your comments in the handy input boxes that follow...)


-- Phoenix "Che" Quinn