Metastatic article of the day

Sex-changes, marriage and metastatic revolt, all in one short article.

Reactionary quote of the day

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one…avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Metastatic quote of the day

Bear with the length (Background reading here and here if you haven’t heard about this Yale senior who tried to impregnate herself, induce abortions, and use the blood in an art project).

As an intervention into our normative understanding of “the real” and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are “meant” to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are “natural” (while all the other potential functions are “unnatural”) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives

Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child.

When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth — the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.

-Aliza Shvarts, in the Yale Daily News

To the average person this probably seems a bloviating morass of self-indulgent pap, but to the metastatic thinker the meaning is clear and inspiring. We do not, Shvarts declares, live in a cosmos (which is to say, an ordered existence) in which we must attune ourselves to the divine order of being. Rather, existence is corrupted. God must be murdered and the world remade–the order of being must be destroyed. This is what the railing against the normative means, that nothing outside the self is to be allowed any value or significance. External order must be swept away. All norms must be smashed and transgressed, all constraints must be broken so that humans may ascend to the role of creators, that our throne may be established on the grave of God (for it is intolerable that there should be a God other than myself).

Metastatic quote of the day

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?”

-Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Metastatic quote of the day

“In all matters constraint and compulsion are unbearable to me.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions

A word from the metastatic overlords

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

-Barack Obama

The Supreme Metastatic Overlord’s recent statement has been causing a ruckus, and therefore all agents of change are reminded to choose their words carefully, as the proles are apparently too caught in their false consciousness to recognize it as such.

Metastatic quote of the day

“Whatever engagements or promises any one made for himself, he is under the obligation of them, but cannot by any compact whatsoever bind his children or posterity. For his son, when a man being altogether as free as his father, any act of the father can no more give away the liberty of the son than it can of anybody else.”

-John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Metastatic political ad of the day

Divided We Fail, an AARP front group/spinoff, is enhancing its “bipartisan” bona fides by running ads in the (generally) reactionary National Review. The text of their back page ad in the current issue is a fine example of metastatic political thought.

Imagine a world where our elected officials work as one.

Now replace “imagine” with “demand.”

That’s exactly what we intend to do — demand that our politicians work together to fix the health care and financial security crisis in this country.

We’re all hearing the campaign promises about how the candidates pledge to “work together” and how we need “change.” So what’s different this time? Divided We Fail is going to hold them to those promises.

We’ll be watching after the election, holding our elected leaders accountable and demanding that they work together to end the gridlock standing in the way of affordable health care and financial security for all.

As we all know, only faction and the ensuing gridlock stand in the way of “affordable health care and financial security for all.”

The gay penguins will return

The reactionaries are already making use of this story about the withdrawal of pro-homosexual materials from British schools due to the protests of Muslim parents.  Why, they ask, do we cater so to Muslim sensibilities while we would never countenance such objections from Christians?  All they can see is the unfairness of it, and the apparent contradiction of our logic.

But strategically and dialectically it makes perfect sense.  The metastatic project requires that what society was be destroyed.  The use of premodern means here suits postmodern ends.  Indeed, it is all the better for the contradictions.  Let the Christians sputter about consistency; they will merely realize their powerlessness all the more as they are replaced even in their role of reaction.  They’ll betake themselves to the catacombs long before we bother to consign them there.  As for our tools, they will be broken when he have no further need for them.  They have tasks yet, though, among them making piety repulsive.

Reactionary quote of the day

“The friendship of man and wife seems to be natural; for human beings are by nature more apt to join together in couples than to form civil societies, inasmuch as the family is prior in time to the state and more indispensable, and the propagation of the species a more fundamental characteristic of animal existence.  The other animals associate for this purpose alone, but man and wife live together not merely for the begetting of children, but also to satisfy the needs of their life: for the functions of the man and the woman are clearly divided and distinct the one from the other.”

-Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics