This article was written for Intermittens 3: Weirdness (edited by Rev. Whats-His-Name). It was a collaborative work by the incomprehensible spags at peedy dotcom.
We found it was challenging to come up with 101 amusing things without resorting to “101 ways to appear mentally unstable”, or “101 ways to make everybody avoid you forever”.
Some were too good not to include though.
A Literary Deconstruction of the PD, undertaken with direction and funding from the Dr Tran Institute of Kicking Your Ass.
What religious narrative in this present day, teaches us such lessons in fabulous morality as the Principia Discordia? Does any other belief system teach that uncertainty and ambiguity trump order and discipline? Or that order and discpline themselves contain an a priori possibility of the state of uncertainty coming into play?
This discourse of order and disorder, from where does it arise, this formidable tradition that includes Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Artaud, Dali, Duchamp, Tazara and Deleuze? Does Discordianism truly belong to this august, if mutuable geneology?
From the outset, the introduction to the Principia introduces ambiguity, foreshadowing Barthe’s Death of the Author. The nature of the author of the tract is purposefully concealed and denied, in an attempt to escape the tyranny of subjectivity, pinning the blame instead of a vast number of culprits, perhaps to show the futility of subjectivity as a starting point for a critique. Yet the authors are nonetheless identified, so does this not make a mockery of their post-structuralist stance?
Not necessarily. For the claimed authors are in fact fictional constructs themselves, as we well know. Furthermore, their approach to their work is detatched, almost bemused by their own interests and obsessions. The irreducibly textual nature of the work is thus reaffirmed, and the simplistic, postivistic attempts to criticize the Principia with simplified versions of its own arguments are easily dismissed.
The apparent eccentricities of the text, such as Wilson’s claims about the time-travelling anthropologist, are often dismissed as harmless as whimsical diversions on the part of a critic who required some form of ‘creative’ escape from the exigencies of high-powered theory. This attitude, typical of Anglo-American criticism, draws a firm line between the discipline of thinking about chaos and the activity of writing which that discipline is supposed to renounce or ignore in its own performance. Criticism as ‘answerable style’ (in Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase) is an idea that cuts right across the deep-grained assumptions of academic discourse. It is, as I shall argue, one of the most unsettling and radical departures of Discordian thought. A properly attentive reading of Wilson brings out the extent to which critical concepts are ceaselessly transformed or undone by the activity of self-conscious writing. His subversive tactics come down to an inordinate fondness for paradox disguising a commitment to order and method.
The interview of Malacypse the Younger by the Greater Poop illustrates not only the need to draw boundaries between meta-fictional philosophical discourses, but also to transgress these boundaries when the cease to have utility for the reader. This boundary was always subject to periodic raids and incursions by the more adventurous Proto-Discordians, especially those poets and novelists among them who felt uneasy with a discipline that drove a doctrinal wedge between the two kinds of writing. The issue was more than a matter of critical technique. What the orthodox Proto-Discordians sought in the language of poetry was a structure somehow transcending human reason and ultimately pointing to a religious sense of values. Thus the autonomic-reflexivity of poetry became not merely an issue in aesthetics but a testing-point of faith in relation to human reason. Behind the Proto-Discordian rhetoric of irony and paradox is a whole metaphysics of language, where poetic and religious claims to truth are bound up together. At the same time there were those who assented in principle to this discipline of thought but found it in practice hard, if not impossible, to live with.
The Greater Poop reporter like Barthes, asserts the critic’s freedom to exploit a style that actively transforms and questions the nature of interpretative thought. In itself this marks a decisive break with the scrupulous decorum of critical language maintained in the Situationist’s wake. This is to argue that theory, in so far as it is valid at all, is strictly a matter of placing some orderly construction upon the ‘immediate’ data of perception. Barthes and Malaclypse totally reject this careful policing of the bounds between literature and theory. Where the post-Situationist’s proposed a disciplined or educating movement of thought from perception to principle, they discovered an endlessly fascinating conflict, the ‘scene’ of which is the text itself in its alternating aspects of knowledge and pleasurable fantasy.
from the Black Iron Prison
Haven’t you had enough yet? Are you getting sick of it all? You should be. Sickness is your way of life. Take this pill, do this job, but we wont give you enough time to cook, so eat this pre-made meal.
Hey, it may kill you…eventually, but think of the poor starving children in Ethiopia. Sure, your apathy over politics helped contribute to the mess, but think of them! Care for this, eat that, watch this, take your crap, drink your beer and stay smiling. We tell you where to go and what to do.
Tired of being bought and sold like cattle? Are you sheep or goat? Do you want to be led by the nose or do you want to headbutt the herders, then perhaps run amok the flock for a while, scaring the bejeezus out of them?
There’s too much of everything nowadays, everything that in a special way is nothing. Keeping up with the neighbors and the fashions while trying to keep up with the bills while having your attention distracted by vacuous twits on the idiot box. It drains you to the point that caring becomes too much of a hassle and the depressives of society become an attractive choice to make.
And that’s exactly how We want it! Tired little sheep kept running by the faithful hounds all day long until they are too tired and submit, they break. Who are We? Nowadays, practically everyone…your boss, your leaders, the media at large, the people responsible for American Idol/X-Factor/fill-in-pointless waste of music reality-TV program here….a huge faceless confederacy constantly trying to sway you this way and that, turn you into a follower of anything.
But you can be free. You can sign your very own Declaration of Independence today, turn the tables on this alliance of idiot leaders who would take you for all you have! How? By ignoring us and taking your own road. Yes, it’s that simple. What has paying them attention ever done, other than distract and depress you? Until you do that, you cannot own yourself, despite having every material need in the world fulfilled. You can live the safe, numbing ‘life’ of a servant or you can live it how it was meant to be, exciting and terrifying but ultimately free.
There was once a young Discordian called Golden Rod. Early in his illumination, he wondered what season his country was in.
Perhaps it was in the season of Discord, on the cusp of Bureaucracy. Surely, Order was rising to noxious levels.
Or perhaps it was already Bureaucracy, on the cusp of Aftermath. Surely, Disorder was rising to obnoxious levels.
So in his quest for An Answer, Golden Rod sought out the Discordian monk Nopants. Nopants dwelled in a basement because it would be obscene for him to go outside. Golden Rod freed himself from his leggings and descended the stairs. Below, Nopants sat on a cushion in a gross lotus position.
“My wise friend Nopants, I have come to ask you a question,” said Golden Rod, “What is Bureaucracy?”
“In India,” said Nopants, “they tie elephants to trees using thin cords. An elephant could easily snap the cord, yet they remain tethered in place. Why do you think this is?”
Golden Rod itched himself and shrugged.
“When the elephant is young,” intoned Nopants, “she is too weak to break the cord. She tries, but eventually she gives up. When the elephant grows up, she does not try to escape her puny bonds because she believes she will fail.”
“So the cord isn’t the thing keeping the elephant in place,” said Golden Rod. He squinted at Nopants, “That’s very interesting, but what does that have to do with Bureaucracy?”
“Bureaucracy,” said Nopants, “is waiting for a red traffic light in the middle of the night when no one is coming.”
Across space and time, a gong sounded.
Golden Rod left the basement and returned to the real world, thoroughly confused. As he drove home, he ran five red lights. His mirth rose with each light. By the end of the voyage he was giggling like a ninny at his newfound freedom.
Years went by and Golden Rod continued drive towards Aftermath. He ignored stop signs, blew through red lights, and opened his moon roof despite danger of falling rocks.
“Sweet Merciful Fuck!” cried out Bung-Fu the Fool as he clawed at the dashboard. “You’re gonna get us both killed!”
“Nonsense! I am self-emancipated from these mundane traffic laws,” cackled Golden Rod. “I am a harbinger of Aftermath!”
“Do you always drive like this?” said Bung-Fu as he buckled his seat belt.
Golden Rod nodded. “Always.”
Meanwhile, the monk Nopants was wheeling his new gong across the street towards his basement. He patiently waited for the light to turn red, then pushed the ponderous percussive instrument upon the pavement.
The collision made the exact sound of enlightenment.
on 