On Folk Logocentrism, Part 2

The true symbologist does not speak of the symbol. The symbol truly speaks when it speaks its own negation.

I believe I am not alone in taking the two foregoing statements as axiomatic. But since I fear I may have alarmed some of my readers, I would like to use the remainder of this column for the purposes of an exegesis and apologia of these declarations.

"Symbology" designates an imaginary knowledge (connaisance) structured by the passage through and overcoming of a delusion of mastery, a process synchronically implicit in the nature of the knowledge itself, since the symbolic mediations in which it pretends to be invested achieve their truth in their abolition and the restoration of a reassuring self-identity. Therefore, the lures of the false itinerary in which the naïve immediacy of identity ultimately resolves itself into itself resembles nothing so much as the circle generated by the serpent swallowing its tail (the ancients were not unaware of this).

The symbologist, qua symbologist, recognizes that the symbol can never be known so long as it is apprehended discursively, that is, so long as it remains an element whose value is dependent upon and determined in relation to the network of elements in which it is at least superficially ensconced. The starting point of the symbological pilgrimage, however, lies nowhere other than the gap generated when any seeker after truth encounters the self-evident, self-identical, self-sufficiency which coquettishly inscribes itself in its own vanishing point, the symbol. The temptation, at this crucial juncture, is to ignore the symbol's invitation to join in the eternally silent indifference to which its constitutive self-cancellation gestures, and mistake its propaedeutic and tentative figuring forth of a knowledge which any substantiality on its part would negate for precisely that: the substantiality proper to an object. Few, if any, do not succumb to this temptation, but precisely for that reason the delineation of its structure serves an essential role in my attempt at a prolegomena.

Let us make no mistake: the symbol bears a relation to an object, and that object is nothing other than the signified which would seem to fix its value in a manner prior to and transcendent in relation to the system of relations on which its value seems to the uninitiated to depend. But since the object remains positioned at precisely the vanishing point where the symbol's work began, that is, outside of and prior to the series of mediations in which the symbol, even if only as a kind of decoy, necessarily takes its place, the object (or "referent") can play no positive role in the journey initiated by the symbol's appearance.

The delusion of which I spoke is therefore that generated by the symbological neophyte's capture in the logos. Qua subject of speech, the symbo-logist may inadvertently tend to insert the symbol precisely in those networks of relations its transcendence of which constituted his initiation and set him on his path. The cruel irony of this predicament, despite the innumerable repetitions to which it has been subject (Akhnaten, Judas, Teabing), appears to be lost on many otherwise well-meaning expositors in our field, who by failing to recognize an inexorability that can proceed only from the very nature of the the hermeneutic situation generated when the symbol is spoken of guarantee its further recapitulation.

In what may initially appear to be a detour, but whose relevance to our attempts to delineate the true subject of symbological knowledge I hope will become evident shortly, I would like to conclude today's discussion by looking to the neglected work of the Araucanic sage Lonko Kilapán, a fragment of which is available at: http://www.heliodromion.gr/e_araoukanoi.htm. In addition to providing remarkable evidence for the Spartan origin of the Araucanic race, Kilapán contributes significantly to the present discussion.

Kilapán advances the remarkable claim that his people, unlike many ancient peoples, developed a unique strategy for avoiding what one of my colleagues has dubbed the "entropy of mythognosis": "Science and History in all the races were in the hands of the higher classes: governors, militiamen and priests who, in the course of time, mixed with the common people and together with them Science and History disappeared, as it is the case of the Mayas, the Incas, the Egyptians, etc. This could never happen in the Araucanic Race, which, having predicted such a thing, has always had three Historians who mustn't know each other."

Why mustn't the three Historians know each other? Clearly, because were their relation to one another and to the common trove of knowledge they possess to manifest itself discursively, that is, were they to gather together and engage in logos regarding the ancestral wisdom of which they are their heirs (in other words, in symbol-logy), they would ultimately occasion the degeneration of this wisdom into something resembling, perhaps, semiotics, or at least the frivolous sort of academic inquiry discussed by Tom Martin in Pyramid. Therefore, they must constitute themselves as a kind of counter-Platonic-academy, defined by: 1) absolute commitment not to engage in dialogue regarding the object of knowledge under any circumstances; 2) an equally stringent commitment to preserve the ancestral wisdom in its inert, self-identical, inarticulate state.

But how, you might ask, can knowledge be preserved and passed on (as it has been for over two millennia among the Araucans) absent some sort of preservation in and by logos? "Each one of [the Historians] ought to have a Team, consisting of all the ages, and it was from this team that the successor Historian came. As far as I am concerned, I have 25 persons, scattered from the north to the south of the country, who no one else knows, and their ages range from 6 to 72 years old. All of them have parapsychological abilities (this is required by law), excellent memory, developed judgement and sense of responsibility in the facing of each hardship. Nobody can narrate a Historical fact accurately." In other words, the Historian assembles (without them being consciously aware of it, or for that matter of each other or of him) a random collection of 25 inarticulate and otherwise undistinguished individuals of all ages who possess an extra-discursive telepathic ability to intuit the facile truisms inherited from the ancients, once again, without being aware they are doing it. Three of these ultimately, by virtue of what we might call their "radical ignorance," ultimately ascend to the rank of Historian. This honor is also fraught with dangers, as is evident in the problematic status of Kilapán himself: by announcing himself publicly as Historian, publishing a series of works detailing the true origins of the Araucans, and forming an Araucan Federation, is he not betraying the symbological already, since presumably he should know, to paraphrase Twinglebrook-Hastings, that "all [the] learning [he seeks to impart to the populace at large] is ultimately pointless in the face of the already known facile wisdom [it] possesses"?

Kilapán provides a possible way out of this Bezumovian impasse when asked: "Are there possibly any other publications or pertinent statements before the publication of your book (in 1974)?": "No, because the release to the public of a part of our History and the handing over of military secrets to the Chilean Army was decided in the Council in 1972. There are only publications of mine in newspapers and magazines, because no one can write about History, as I previously explained" (italics mine). He rather seems to skirt the question by on one hand explaining that only "a part of our History" has been revealed (as the result of a Council decision which we can only assume took place telepathically among its members), while on the other hand proclaiming so crucially that "no one can write about History," an axiom I take to be more or less synonymous with the declarations I made at the outset. The Historian states unequivocally here, it seems to me, that his own publications (qua writing and qua logos) are not History, even though the uninitiated might make the mistake of taking them for such a thing.

Thus, we may understand symbology here and elsewhere as an apophatic discourse: when the symbologist talks about the secret wisdom of the ages, we can only know that everything the symbologist seems to talk about as the true object of knowledge (the Grail, the Benben Stone, the Amakpu) is not its true object. Symbological discourse, or "logos about the symbol/History," in its uncorrupted form, is therefore an exercise that serves only to teach us to recognize its own nullity and return to the obviousnesses we have always assented to intuitively with newfound conviction - something I have referred to elsewhere as indifférance, the uniquely adequate response to what my colleague Benway has referred to as the "strong irrelevance" of the knowledge which composes our field.

Kilapán himself points us in the right direction when asked "What is the purpose of the Araucanic Federation?": "Its purpose is to make the Chileans live the way we do, adopt our Law and control the birth rate, because the overpopulation is the cause of wars worldwide." In other words, the kernel of the secret wisdom passed down from the Bringers of Light to the Spartans via Lycurgus, and later the Araucans, turns out to coincide with the goals of the United Nations as well as most mainstream NGO's.