Is Sämi Ludwig, the Wunderkind and Genius

going to rescue literary criticism from its current mess?

The following interview was conducted on April 2, 2015 in the rental apartment of Nietzsche-Haus in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, where Nietzsche spent the summers of 1881 and 1883-1888 and where he wrote some of his most famous works.  Based on the transcription by Tennessee Reed, additional thoughts and edits were made in June, 2015.  Part I appears in this issue, and Part II will appear in the following issue.

 

Ishmael Reed, Sämi  Ludwig, Carla Blank and Tennessee Reed, were present during this interview, as Sämi Ludwig had arranged for us to enjoy a few days visiting the Sils Im Engadin region after the Le Multiculturalisme Americain En Contexte Conference at the University of Haute Alsace in Mulhouse, France, where Ishmael Reed was a featured guest. During the conference Ishmael and Tennessee Reed read their poetry accompanied by musicians studying at the Jazz Campus in Basel, Switzerland. As an example of multicultural collaborations between artists, during the opening evening of the conference, Carla Blank presented Richard Rutkowski's film "The Space in Back of You," which was based upon a live performance work by the late great dancer/choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi, the internationally acclaimed, director and designer, Robert Wilson, Rutkowski and Carla Blank. 

 

Ishmael Reed: Okay, what’s post? Give me your argument on post.

Sämi Ludwig: Okay, post means it comes afterwards.

Ishmael Reed: To reject the past?

Sämi Ludwig: Yeah, but post doesn’t necessarily mean rejection, actually. That’s the assumption that we have, but the post theories nowadays are not criticisms but a critique, which means they build on the French idea of critique, which is in the Anglo mind connected to French criticism, which is basically a criticism where you build upon something. When you deconstruct you are not replacing one set of concepts by another, but you are basically taking certain concepts and changing them—your new concept emerges out of the same old Lego pieces. That is the main point here. And the main problem.

Ishmael Reed: So where does this idea of post arise? Because we have post-modernism, post this and that. Nobody knows what it means.

Sämi Ludwig: It’s a twentieth century thing isn’t it? Is there any post-philosophy in the nineteenth century? The Renaissance did not call itself post-medievalism... Which indicates to me that post-movements are connected to formalism … which is Modernism. Modernism started formalism because Modernism, as you know, endorsed non-representational art and aesthetics in the Western tradition, right?  Now, of course we have always had abstract art in ALL cultures. I limit my claim to Western art here, as it developed in the 20th century, because it represents a very interesting shift toward non-perspectivist and even non-representationalist art. This form of Western art was also influenced by metaphysical theory and the formal “beauty” of graphs representing that logic… functioning not only as a sensory experience, but as an aesthetic theory of meaning as well. Phenomenology and semiotics cropped up at the same time. Cubism is my visual translation of phenomenalist logic / phenomenological representation. Modernism is an aesthetic of immediacy, of perceptualism: “Make it new!” as Pound said. It is not interested in history or learning in time—it believes that it can make knowledge directly visible. That’s why I call it, somewhat polemically, “objectified idealism.” It misapplies the empirical gesture to the sign surface only. Think of the dogma of the “verbal icon”! But that is only possible to a certain extent…. The radicalism of being enamored with surface creates a kind of existential separation where experience and knowledge are incompatible.

 In a sense, you could say that Modernist art treats perception like a pictogram—a sign that is already conceptualized, like words. Hence the almost paradoxical connection between an extreme involvement in the sensory (phenomena) and at the same time an imposition of abstraction (logic). The contradictory notion of “phenomenology,” which eclipses any human cognitive involvement in the transition from experience to knowledge seems to be at the heart of this problem for me… The “objectivity” of phenomenologist eidetics implies that we have no brain—all of us humans! As a result, this approach is great if we want to deconstruct the master's truth—so all the poststructuralists have written against any given knowledge: deconstructing masculine knowledge (feminism), white knowledge (postcolonialism), race, elite culture, the Enlightenment, even Humanism (posthumanism). But at the same time, they have also denied the human ability to create any knowledge at all…except for maybe what some smart-aleck theorists have called “strategic essentialism.” In short, the post-critics are throwing out the baby with the bathwater! The use of this kind of critical theory has already shifted to the reactionaries who are questioning science: no vaccination, global warming is a myth (look at this cold winter!), etc. No reflection—“what you see is what you get.” Scopophilia. I call it the WYSIWYG principle—all understanding has to be visualized/phenomenalized. That’s a bad reason why they love film studies so much.

            I have quite a bit of respect for empirical science! My grandfather was an anatomy professor, who tells this anecdote of his own father (also a doctor): in the 19th century there were theories that cats had a metabolism that could not survive above 4000 meters. So my great-grandfather put a kitty in a rucksack and climbed on Piz Bernina (4049m). At the top he let the kitty run around in the snow. It lived. Q.E.D. Even Cotton Mather was able to learn something from experience and believed in inoculation….!

 In the twentieth century and nowadays we still only have these “post” movements and basically they are still formalist. Even though they are more sophisticated. There’s no radical paradigm change, no real break that happened. No criticism that refuses an old model. Only critique, which means, “Let me build on your old model and add to it and make it better.” Anybody who talks about post is pretending the paradigm change but not giving it to you. The post is scam, I think. This is why what we have now … I sometimes call post-structuralism “post-Fascism,” because much of Modernism was deeply involved in Fascism. The Fascists were unfortunately…

Ishmael Reed: Give me some examples. Salvador Dali?

Sämi Ludwig: Of course. Not every Modernist was a Fascist, but every Fascist was a Modernist. So Fascism is a part of Modernism, and if we don’t sort that out and realize what the problem is, they just start making formalism more sophisticated. That doesn’t help us cope with Fascism. I use the term “post-Fascism”: Remember, existentialism goes back to Heidegger, the poster child of high-brow Fascism, a Nazi party member who presided over all the German universities when they fired all the Jewish professors…Yet there are people who are building on Heidegger, you know, trying to say that he was not a Fascist, that he was only a brilliant philosopher. That is a formalist point of view. As if there were no highbrow Fascism. Think about Paul De Man.

Ishmael Reed: The United States government loves abstract painting.

Sämi Ludwig: Of course.

Ishmael Reed: Because it overthrew the political crisis.

Sämi Ludwig: That makes sense—you can do away with referentiality! We were talking about abstract painting, remember? William James talks about vicious intellectualism; there is this problem because abstract means you have no referentiality, which means you are refusing to really address an other, which is reality—which means you are irresponsible. You don’t really have to take care of whatever you represent because it is just an imaginary object, it’s just a phenomenal thing. There is no real contingency, and if you apply that to society or to human beings, nothing stops you from building concentration camps to kill them. All knowledge is simulation. And when you move from such epistemology to referentiality, people don’t exist. I do think there is an ethical problem there somewhere. Also, with all these post-structuralists lionizing Nietzsche; they only lionize this one article, which is about the extra-moral meaning, you know, on “Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense,” the only article by Nietzsche that they read. The proof of that is their citations: instead of listing the Collected Works in their bibliography, volume XXL, they cite from some edited collection of cultural studies theory…

Ishmael Reed: Superman is above the laws that apply to you and me?

Sämi Ludwig: Exactly. That’s why once you prepare the ground having theorized that there is nothing ethical, then you can start committing the big crimes. I still believe that Humanism is something acceptable, you know, Enlightenment, do something triggered by an insight. Kant said, “sapere aude,” which means, “dare to think,” which means you have a brain.

Ishmael Reed: He also said, “Behave as if your behavior would become the general legislation.”

Sämi Ludwig: Yeah, which means responsibility.

Ishmael Reed: Do unto others. It always goes back to Jesus.

Sämi Ludwig: Do unto others, etcetera? If we concentrate on this aspect, we can even get something out of Western culture, but the problem is, you know, that because of European colonialism and some of the church crimes we are starting to simplify things and throwing the good out with the bad.

Ishmael Reed: Why would they call it post-colonialism when colonialism still exists? I mean doesn’t this play into the hand of colonialist governments?

Sämi Ludwig: It also means that you are entitled to look at the old forms of colonialism. They believe that the really interesting thing is still colonialism as it happened two hundred years ago, but the problem is that it has become more complicated and you now have the post-colonial fathers that are betraying their children. Think about all the ethnic dictators all around the world who are ruining the future of their own children. Zimbabwe, Libya, Syria, the Congo, etc.: the young writers are not only “writing back to the Empire” as the old post-colonialism claims…they have a much more recent history to cope with. In that sense, London and Paris are no longer even the negative centers of the postcolonial world. I think we are already a few generations beyond that. Another “post”-oppositionalism that is misleading…

Ishmael Reed: Also Western countries have begun to supplement their natural resources, by grabbing them from poor countries.

Sämi Ludwig: Of course. But nowadays in the post-colonial situation you always need a president whom you can bribe in the third-world country. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to steal all of this, so that the problem is also in these countries; you also need to have a revolution that democratizes society and throws out these totally corrupt people. But democracy cannot be imposed; people always have to liberate themselves.

Ishmael Reed: Yeah but the problem is the multinationals are

Sämi Ludwig: Under pressure.

Ishmael Reed: Multinationals are financing the rebels.

Sämi Ludwig: Yeah, and the rebels sometimes turn into fundamentalists and then things go out of control.

Ishmael Reed: Yeah, like Boko Haram.

Sämi Ludwig: It is a terribly complicated situation. But I do believe that only in the West you have all of these post-colonialist scholars. I went to these conferences in Tunisia, where they wined and dined us with the meager means they had. Lively scholars, active students. But only very few Europeans attended. Even fewer North Americans. Their endowed chairs had run out of travel money. They earn a Western salary and theorize the post-colonial world from afar. And when the American foreign service warned of terrorists—that was their official excuse for not attending. The same people have no qualms going to Mexico—as if Tunisia were not a tourist destination!

Ishmael Reed: But we have post-racism as an example. That’s a good example of it. I mean racism is becoming more extreme, but it’s not noticed.

Sämi Ludwig: But post-race claims that we have overcome racism. If you claim Humanism, you basically say, “We have something in common.” But it doesn’t do the second step and claim that we have solved all of the problems. That would be naïve. Humanism is not a post-movement.

Ishmael Reed: What about post-humanism? You were mentioning about machines and the cyborg…

Sämi Ludwig: Oh, post-humanism. Well basically it’s not only discourse that is determining people but it also means that human beings have an artificial arm, the idea of the cyborg, so they’re looking at the machines replacing the human beings or where you no longer know when to draw the line between natural human beings and artificial human beings and they are making a big fuss about it. In my opinion that is no longer an issue once you believe in something cognitive. Cognition is fundamentally based on extrinsic tools (concepts!), and cognition is the most typical human quality. We are human beings because we can think. Basically, thinking is artificial. We have always already been post-human—influenced by things outside ourselves. Most of the assumptions of the post-humanists are based on the very definitions of the human by linguists, social scientists, human biologists—all except hermeneutic philosophers.

Ishmael Reed: Descartes said, “Animals can’t think,” so that’s why he can slaughter them.

Sämi Ludwig: Well, they cannot think on the same level of complexity. But if you are an honest human being, you attribute life to all animals. It’s easier to bond with animals than with stones… I do respect vegetarians much more than selective meat eaters who base their choice on ethics...

Ishmael Reed: Well the animal rights people say that Descartes started the mass slaughter of animals because he implied that only humans can think.

Sämi Ludwig: Yeah, which was a mistake in his time. Today he would revise this. I don’t know. It’s very odd to make historical accusations from today’s perspective. It’s a bit of a cheap shot… Of course he was not pc from today’s perspective. He was much more than that. Descartes’ point was to claim rationality for humans and attack the ideological fundamentalism of Church and aristocracy. That’s a bad example with the animals. But basically his aim was to empower human beings!

Ishmael Reed: But you’re telling me that literary critics have left literature. And they’re off into theory and using theory to examine other things.

Sämi Ludwig: Yes, yes that’s true. What I want to say is that this whole notion of prosthetic devices, you know, having some artificial limb, is basically what you do in your brain anyway. Language is really an extrinsic tool.

Ishmael Reed: So, Nazism lives on in theory and in politics. Didn’t really die. Wasn’t extinguished with Hitler dying in the bunker.

Sämi Ludwig: That is a bit complicated. That is simplifying, but I believe that there’s clearly a development in philosophy where German idealism has developed, has moved on into phenomenology and the time of Heidegger…

Ishmael Reed: Okay. Explain that.

Sämi Ludwig:…who was definitely a Nazi.

Ishmael Reed: He used to end his lectures with, “Heil Hitler,” right?

Sämi Ludwig: I have no idea.

Ishmael Reed: What’s the link?

Sämi Ludwig: Well the link is that you have teachers and students in German philosophy. They have all had teachers and students and teachers and students, and that’s how German philosophy became more sophisticated and developed “German Idealism.” It’s also this idea of having a genealogy where you basically always say one person has built upon the work of another and made it more sophisticated—in the sense of critique I have mentioned above. Now at one point Adorno, for example, claimed that what happened in philosophy is that the Enlightenment totally failed because of Nazism and blamed this on the Enlightenment itself. But the issue is that Fascism rejected the Enlightenment. It is not, in a sense, the aim and latest development of the Enlightenment, but it is basically oppositional. Fascism was/is precisely a rejection of the Enlightenment.

Ishmael Reed: But the Enlightenment had racist features. Some of the philosophers saw Blacks as subhuman.

Sämi Ludwig: Well the racism was a problem because you had the contradiction of Enlightenment and slavery, and you had to justify slavery in a context of the Enlightenment. That in a sense almost caused racism, in a weird way. I mean it’s a very strange development if you think about it. If all humans are equal by definition and you have to justify slavery, you have to claim that the slaves are not human and necessarily create a theory of racism.

Ishmael Reed: There is little difference between the view of blacks by Enlightenment thinkers like George-Louis Buffon, Charles White, Johann Meckel, Pieter Camper and Diderot and Hitler’s--of the kind of thinking that has entered the American mainstream with the publication of Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve.” For example, Carolus Linnaeus said that blacks are “lazy and careless. Why not call The Enlightenment the post-dark ages? Sämi Ludwig: Yeah, or they contradicted the Enlightenment. I mean the Nazis didn’t think much either of Humanism or the Enlightenment. Definitely not, definitely not. I think the Enlightenment is falsely blamed for this.

Ishmael Reed: The Nazis developed a missile. I mean, isn’t that sort of a science?

Sämi Ludwig: Yes, that is just natural science and technology and everybody did that, but that is not a … ethical, philosophical type of thing, just methodology, hard science and that’s it. Just because Fascism is bad doesn’t mean they’re stupid. After building the Nazi missiles, Wernher von Braun flew the Americans to the moon… That’s why you have his picture in Mumbo Jumbo! An illustration of Petro. Mere instrumentalism—that’s exactly the point!

Ishmael Reed: So how are these ideas passed down to current criticism? You mentioned de Man.

Sämi Ludwig: But for me it was passed on because the Germans after World War II, German philosophy would not touch Heidegger or they stayed away from him because they knew about Fascism. The people who could lionize Heidegger and these ideas were the French, because the French were not Nazis and they could basically look at this stuff and make it sophisticated. Derrida has the perfect credentials: he is of African and Jewish origin—beyond suspicion. But if you read Derrida, he loves Heidegger, he loves phenomenology because the issue is not just that Heidegger was a Nazi, but that modernism and phenomenology have prepared the way for a value-free type of philosophy. Derrida basically puts Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle on a line, offering the semiotics of the sliding signifier. A typical case of critique! Now formalism has no moral values; it’s just form. Nietzsche, who noticed this, wrote about it in his famous essay on the “extra-moral” meaning of language, which is usually the only essay of his that Americans know. They don’t know anything else. As you have seen in this house here [the interview took place in the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria], he has written a lot of very complicated things, but there is only one essay of fifteen pages that every American graduate student has to read, which is the justification for an extra-moral epistemology, blah, blah, blah. 

Ishmael Reed: What is formalism?

Sämi Ludwig: Well, formalism stands for the extra-moral truth. In the extra-moral universe you look at the form; you realize the form is the surface and the beautiful balance of what you see and what has to do with sense impressions connected with phenomenology, which is analyzing surfaces. It is an aestheticized epistemology. These people mix up perception and knowledge. Perception is basically something that you see…

Ishmael Reed: With your five senses.

Sämi Ludwig: With your senses, exactly. Knowledge is something that has to do with representing things—which means it is controlled by your cognition, by your brain, by your thinking, and that’s a different thing. Perception does not involve any thinking. WYSIWYG. You are basically determined by sense impressions of all the things out there. Cognition means you’re processing the information. What people do not understand is that there is a difference between perception and knowledge. Then again there are many feedback loops…knowledge can predetermine what we see because I am going to the train station and I am looking for Ishmael Reed and then I think, “Oh, it is Ishmael Reed,” but it is someone else. I impose that face on the crowd to find you, so knowledge is extremely important; it’s way beyond perception. For instance, if you think about three-dimensional imagination: I know that you have a back of your head, even though I can’t see it. My sense of reality is not only determined by what I see with my eyes, but there’s a lot of knowledge, and after awhile we all assume that human beings have a back of their head even if we only see the front sometimes. Or when we see the back, we know that there must be a front somewhere. There’s more to reality than the phenomenology of “seeing is believing.” That’s just part of knowledge and how we experience these things. Now if you only look at formalism and phenomenology you only look at what hits the eye, which means you become a stupid, non-brained victim of what I have elsewhere called “perceptualism.”

Ishmael Reed: How does that apply to literary criticism?

Sämi Ludwig: Well, basically, it applies in a sense that these people are rejecting criticism. They’re either aestheticized, seeing things you can only look at, and this is an interpretation of the new criticism. You can only look at what’s standing there. You have to ignore all the knowledge or background, etcetera, etcetera, you know, close readings that avoid any knowledge left and right. Another element is this idea of determinism. If you only believe in perception, perception totally determines what you think, what you know, so they believe in determinism and push Naturalism, for example, and they believe anybody who thinks about Realism is an idiot.

Ishmael Reed: What’s the difference between Realism and Naturalism? There’s always confusion. Some people use the terms interchangeably.

Sämi Ludwig: Especially in the United States! American scholars have done a terrible job at that. They have not understood that even though…they always believe the realists are the people who are talking about drinking coffee and tea and that Realism is merely Naturalism lite. They don’t look at the ugly stuff and the Naturalists are looking at the ugly stuff, you know. They’re going deeper, so everybody loves the Naturalists. Everybody loves to be radical. What they do not understand is that the fault line between these two categories is determinism.

Ishmael Reed: Explain.

Sämi Ludwig: A Realist is a person who believes that you can somehow overcome determinism, that people have responsibility. There’s agency, there’re responsibility, and you’re doing something that has an impact. Your decisions matter. A Naturalist believes it’s all determined. The Foucauldian so-called “New Americanist Studies” pick up on that with a post-structuralist twist. So the people who love Naturalists are these French critics who have taken over the German formalism, the phenomenology, the Heideggerism, the hermeneutic circle, which means it’s all in a circle, it’s all a circular argument, you cannot get a new idea in there edgewise. It’s not possible. That’s the worry. Ishmael Reed: A hermeneutic circle.

Sämi Ludwig: Right. It’s Heidegger’s type of existentialism. Heidegger’s the father of existentialism.

Ishmael Reed: Meaning?

Sämi Ludwig: Meaning you just have Being, you know. You cannot move on because it’s determined. Again, conceptually. The problem is that these people are moving into conceptualism because, like I said, they confuse perception and conceptualism. For phenomenologists it’s almost the same thing because they want a conceptualism that is objective, so they say, “We don’t want to have these idealist concepts invented somewhere, but we want to have something real.” So they objectivize idealism and they say nowadays that the ideas are real things, real objects. So Husserl, you know, who was the father of phenomenology, said, “We have to look at ideas. We have to analyze the ideas and what’s really in them.” But the problem is that he’s analyzing ideas. He’s not analyzing the world, so basically his eyes are on the text.

Ishmael Reed: Okay. Now how would a formalist look at Moby Dick and compare that in the old school way, you know when I went to school, when it was all about this guy chasing a whale and that had something to do with destiny and the human condition?

Sämi Ludwig: I haven’t read any formalist analysis of Moby Dick, unfortunately. But basically, you can look at formal things and take the text out of the referential context, you know. The referential context is left out.

Carla Blank: Meaning?

Sämi Ludwig: Meaning you’re ignoring that you are pointing at whales, you’re pointing at blubber, you know, all of this is a lot less important. What’s more important are the parts of the narratology or…

Ishmael Reed: What does “narratology” mean, storytelling?

Sämi Ludwig: Yeah, yeah. There’s an amazing…have you ever read that structuralist piece by Claude Lévi-Strauss, you know, the famous French anthropologist, and Roman Jakobson? They did a structuralist analysis of Baudelaire’s “Les Chats.” Very famous.

Ishmael Reed: He influenced these neo-cons. They always quote him.

Sämi Ludwig: That’s possible, but he basically said, “When you look at anthropology, you have certain formalist patterns, exchanging women from one tribe to another, and he was basically doing these formal structures, which made it possible to compare all of the different ethnic groups, you know, in one system. The bottom line is structure. That’s important.

Ishmael Reed: That’s what you mean by abstraction?

Sämi Ludwig: That’s also what I mean by abstraction, so basically he says, “I talk about real human beings but I no longer need to remember if they are, whatever, you know, Indians or from the Congo or Eskimos, but I just look at some of these structures and I put these ethnographic categories above local examples. That’s very, very important, and it all goes in parallels.

Ishmael Reed: Doesn’t this lead to intellectual laziness?

Sämi Ludwig: Well it leads to theory, you know. It leads to you basing your argument on abstractions. I think that at one point it also connects with comparative literature, which also says, “It doesn’t matter if the guy has a German background or an Italian background, you know, we’re looking at the best of the best.” Then you look at certain motifs you have in World Literature that everybody has and then you can slowly filter out the roots or the origins of this because what is important is…to find categories that everybody has in common, in a sense, and you automatically reach a level of abstraction that can, in my opinion, cause problems.

Ishmael Reed: It seems like a shortcut.

Sämi Ludwig: Exactly, because it turns at one point into a shortcut. The really good scholars, you know, have the background and they are also able to do the shortcut, but some of the followers, they are only doing the shortcuts. They only remember the formal slogans. I recently read a dictionary entry from the Chicago School of Media Theory. They were basically shopping for critical terms in anthologies. Citations from Derrida, Freud, Haraway, Heidegger, etc. all came out of readers and theory collections… only Marx was quoted from the Collected Works.

Carla Reed: You said something before you started recording, which would be good I think if you said again: how scholars were all talking the same text until more recently. Women’s writing, Native American, African American, Asian, you know, the world’s literature has begun to be more seriously investigated and if scholars are making their theories and abstractions based upon a few texts that were not based upon a large vision that is …

Sämi Ludwig: That’s very problematic, isn’t it? But … the canon, you know, and rightly so, has been criticized and expanded. But the problem is, and this is also Ishmael’s problem, that people cannot cope with that because it’s too much work, it’s too difficult, it’s too complicated to read it all. That’s why they always need to limit everything to a few tokens, to a few representative examples. Of course, that simplifies, and in some ways it’s a normal cognitive thing, you know. We have types. We think in types because it simplifies thinking and otherwise, we’d go crazy.

Carla Blank: It applies things at the expense of, perhaps, fatal omissions.

Ishmael Reed: So our…so I think that’s Northeastern thinking, right there. North…tokens. Simplifying things.

Carla Blank: Yes, simplifying things.

Sämi Ludwig: Yeah, yeah, but it is also the result of having to deal with a lot of things. So, you know, some people say I also want to do Black literature and then they read two books and that’s what they teach.

Ishmael Reed: Well yeah, and the books always underwrite their perceptions in the first place.

Sämi Ludwig: Of course because their perception comes first. Their theory comes first. Then you had these guys talking about the linguistic turn, and the linguistic turn meant that language predetermines understanding and perception. This is what the hermeneutic circle, Heidegger, is all about, too, you know: the concept always comes first. When you go in circles you always end up back in the circle. For theorists the only way to get out of what Fredric Jameson has called “the prison house of language” is to deconstruct things. Right? Because language is always…but it basically means the priority, when you look at things, is language. Language predetermines what you understand and you deny the rest. It means you have a worldview where language comes first. But in reality the “signifier” comes first. Now for me, the signifier is not the sign, but the signifier is the sign-maker: the signifying monkey is the human being, who is the signifying animal, and that’s why I am a humanist. I believe humans come first. Bakhtin, for example, when he talks of language, he uses the term “voice”—which means that words originate with the users of words. He doesn’t do grammatology. …an important insight by somebody who lived under Stalin and who was keenly aware of the difference between dialectics (mere grammatical mechanics) and dialogue (human interaction)! Of course there’s a complicated interaction in our brains, you know, because between our experience, our thinking, and the language in our brain…, but the simplifying position that the poststructuralists have…or a formalist…has been to say “language comes first” and it determines everything. Translated into your voodoo paradigm, you know, we’re all possessed by concepts and we’re like puppets on the string or we’re like human beings who are the victims of loas who are just telling us what to do and there’s nothing that we can do about it. As if conjuring wouldn’t exist.

(End of Part One)