Demos, Bodies, & Marxists. The Demos over the weekend were totally inspiring, aside from the poor show yet again here in Japan. That so many people would pour out into the streets goes to show the intensity of feeling surrounding this war. Unfortunately, not only has the hawkish American administration gone out of control, but the real differential between the needs of individuals and the drive of government lays bare and very few people are willing to exploit it. What I mean is that these governing bodies (or affiliates of, like the UN) have little regard for what people need or want (by their very nature they never could) and act on one hand as symbols of some god-like battle. America vs. France, the UN vs. America, North Korea vs South Korea. On the other hand, the outcome of these squabbles is very real, and actual death, destruction, and domination result from this monotony of political maneuvering. I think the realization of this is for this reason that people were protesting yesterday. Nevertheless, that what we’re watching is a simulation, a façade of experience, is never taken to what to me seems a logical conclusion: a removal of the façade. Part of the reason I believe is that we continue to live under the domination of the symbols themselves and the resulting confusions, e.g America/ Americans/ George Bush, are tantamount to a continual conceptual misrepresentation of geography with identity. It seems that post-modernists would like us to believe that because we, “live under the domination of symbols” that the subversion of these symbols, the subversion of a language that shapes , would be a kind of answer or counter. This idea can be traced back to the Marxist superstructure and the complex rule it places over, ultimately, consciousness. By placing language at the top of the throne, pomo is also building on the “blank-slate” theory, that we are born tabla rasa and can be filled by language, the environment etc. While I am now entering a subject I admittedly know little about, it seems worthwhile to day that biology is also participating in our responses to the world.. language, in my view, being a response. Thus, subversion of symbols is not all, but a subversion of biology, which is now happening in the fields of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, etc. And on this, I am at an impasse. Nothing will stop these fields from developing, aside from, perhaps, a severely devastating war. And these fields can be used in the acquisition of power.. and as we should know by now, you can’t end power, only have it manifested in different structures.