Be Cause…

This turns out will become one of my pet peeves… The game of "be cause". The game we play (no, some people play) when inventing a cause for something. Not so much inventing, as stating, setting in stone, the ultimate cause of some effect. The way it works is this: the player of "be cause" starts thinking about a certain idea, reality and so on, and (very often, polemically, that is, trying to call others' games of "be cause" incomplete, or wrong) stumbles upon a so-called more primordial cause, more explanatory, wider, deeper, whatever. This game has been played to death, and I stumble upon it everywhere I turn, it seems. The particular event that prompted these lines is a re-encounter, after so many years, with the Marxist pseudo-scientific pseudo-philosophy, with its assumption that everything in the (human) world happens for a reason, and the reason is (drum rolls ….) to make the capitalists rich… As games of "be cause" go, this is one of the more short sighted ones out there, neglecting such basic notions as: who are these capitalists (extraterrestrial beings? Gods?) and what makes them want to get rich and from here on, again all the way down to brain chemical imbalances and properties of chemical and physical elements is such a long way that if I met someone who told me this is the ultimate cause (and I didn't read about it in books written by well-educated people) I would think that someone is working (not very hard either) at pulling my leg.

If I had more time, I would wax philosophic on the meaning of the insertion of a blank space between "be" and "cause", the sense of that vacuity, and what it is supposed to hide in a black hole kinda sorta way. Derrida writes pages upon pages about/starting from the letter "a", perhaps I can do the same about the " "? The emptiness that hides being, through whose emergence into the space of the écriture the ultimate ontology is postulated, the self-made ontology, the God-like "(let there) be light". "Be light" of course still some sort of "be cause" game, but, again, just a game.

And yet, is it justified, I always ask myself this, is it justified to jump boats from one discipline to another? Is it ok to say that the cause of the Chinese cultural revolution has ultimately to do with physical properties of the universe (oh, just watch physis return through the backdoor, no, through the window because it is through the window that you make the illicit entries or exits, Faulkner says) than with the wild-eyed, crazed dreams of some deluded individuals combined with the will for power of others? (Replace "Chinese cultural revolution" with any similar Marxist-induced state of body politic coma. Results will not vary.)

(And if it is through the windows that we make our illicit exits and entries, what does it mean that the world's computing population spends their time in front of virtual windows, ™ or not ™?)

I am on a roll. Daylight, Scheherazade.