Subj: RHIZOME_RAW: A Disjointed Reaction to the Genius 2000 Video
Date: 8/7/99 12:43:49 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: fluxis@MEDIAONE.NET (INFOSLUT 2000)
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Revolution is fought in america no longer by riots
or revolutionaries
but by the individual in daily routines. It is not a
political war and it is not a
violent war. It is a war that achieves very real
success by fighting
with plastic water guns rather than bullets.

You can trace everything in recent American
history to this battle within
the self. The lack of self-confrontation. The
Columbine High School
Students were two boys demanding access in a world
that had given
access only to reebok and car commercials. Monica
Lewinskys lips
were the lips asking for access, and The Kosovo
bombings were
America's collective attempt to pretend its lack of
access was
tolerable.

But meanwhile as a collective the American agenda
will not be
changed by a woodstock riot or a new John F Kennedy
Messiah. The
change takes place in individual cognition. Genius
2000 is not
neccesarily looking for a group of zealots, more or
less it is
demanding that those who are not zealots ask
themselves why not,
and that those who are zealots ask themselves why.
Essentially
Genius 2000 is the derivitive of the classic belief
that the
answers to questions were internal, so long as you
knew the
questions. There is an almost imperceptably audible
click when you
know you've got the right answer or the right idea.
Genius
2000 is the attempt to question the foundations of
those clicks, not
to change the burned out lightbulbs over peoples
heads, but to get
them to realize that they're even there to begin with.

A few things happened after watching the genius2000
video.
I went to a book store and picked up the beginners
guide to Noam
Chomsky.

Was it intentional, all the inclusions of people
stating that y2000
was not important to them, but they believed that the
importance
placed on it by others would make it important?

The importance of yhwh, the idea also of the 27(?)
letter name for
god; the original intent of which was to prove that
god was
unspeakable, creates a mass of zealots who instead
dedicate their
lives to the attempt to pronounce it [an act of
violence against the
ideology of sacredness- which seems to construct a
relative idea
of "location" as an isolated sacred
moment/place/person. Which, in
the wake of postmodernism- which is perhaps the last
movement in
the pagan non-secular religion of art- is to use that
notion of
"seperation" and apply to the whole, to "seperate
everything" as
sacred.]

The idea- "What if the year 2000 is the start of
the world?" is a
compelling one. Because we look at the state of
hopelessness left by
modern culture/religion/media, the idea of being
displaced from the
sublime and meaningful, all the idols smashed.

Perhaps the start of the world, stems from that
hopelessness,
perhaps the start of the world is the recognition of
individual genius.
We are forced not to rebuild a hope but to
hope for the real, vs the intangible "after-death",
paradise. That is
perhaps the year 2000…or the revolution, or the new
messiah,
they are all a metaphor anyway, for "god" as we have
lost him.

The idea of the millenium of paradise after the
apocalypse…we
could claim, spiritually, that the last millenium has
been the first
corruption of christianity [as in the original Jesus;
the smashing of
spectacle, the first true subversion of media [as
Genius 2000 claims it
to be, if we take that for granted- that the
crucifiction was demand
for access, then christianity as in vatican/pope was
the first
commercial declaration of, the first bastardization,
its own
subversion.] Then perhaps we are living the
apocalypse, the
bloodiest millenium the world will see. Perhaps the
destruction of
these false opiates which once provided hope is the
true progress.
The year 2000 holds the destruction of the dead soul
as in the
promise kept after death and the resurrection of the
"living soul."

Perhaps we have lived with the idea of isolated
events as
sacred, certain people as genius, certain ideas as
true, in order to hold
that element of specialness, in order to remember what
specialness
is, and then to forget what, exactly, is special, and
to create an
"isolated everything" phenomenon.

The year 2000 is not the date set for the monolith
to descend on
mankind and elevate them to this state of mind. Rather
its interesting
to see projections of the utopia everyone wishes for
but no one will
work towards, as in, everyone knows what the messiah
is, they just
refuse to construct (or deconstruct?) it for
themselves.

I hope this document spawns some feedback. I
should hope to
extend this dialogue far beyond the genius 2000
sphere- which is
integral for genius 2000 to remain in a state of
becoming. Genius 2000
is not an end all "movement," merely one chapter in
the encyclopedia
that documents the struggle for subtlety in the face
of the obscene.
Thats the schizophrenic nature of America.



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