The Oglala Holy Man Black Elk wanted to understand how the Wasichus
operated, to see if he could learn something that would help the Sioux to
survive in the new order of the 19th century. When he went back East he
saw more people than he imagined possible and streets lit by electricity.
When he found out that this light was made from the power of thunder he
knew the situation of his civilization was even more serious than he had
supposed, since his own divinities were of thunder.
A subject still conceiving of its identity as an individual,
autonomous SELF, who has something to say out of its conscious being, a
private insight critically derived, that could be delivered or not--in
short, a literate subject--is like Black Elk in New York (a subject from
one apparatus inhabiting the space of a different apparatus).
The Ghost Dance does not address literacy. Critique does not address
electracy. The Ghost Dancers were crushed. The individual critics an
equivalent fate. In fact, Ghost Dancing returns (virtually) or is coming
soon. What is to be done?
It is that thinking goes on outside inside: the infrastructure is
thinking for me but not without me within. At one time thinking seemed to
take place in the chest; later it seemed to be coming from the head.
Before either of those spaces in the body its source was certainly the
wind. Thinking now? Can you feel it? It is not in my body or the wind.
I may reason or dance, but those are not sites of thinking (in the
emergent general economy).
For the emerAgency
Greg Ulmer
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