Phaedrus (Part Three)

Posted on May 20th, 2008 by The Captain.
Categories: Phaedrus, Philosophy, The Pharmakon.

  Part Three:  Our Prescription 

Dear Reader,

Poison and medicine.  As I mentioned in my first letter, the word pharmakon means both.  Not either/or, but both poison and medicine at the same time.  The same way that we have seen the text itself is both composed and decomposed (see “Phaedrus 1” in September’s issue), the same way that my writing is both a straying and hunting (“Phaedrus 2” in January’s issue), the pharmakon is that which both heals and kills. 

It makes sense: in the logic of the supplement (the pharmakon), whatever comes from without cannot be entirely beneficial, nor can it be entirely harmful.  It remains simply “different.”  Every encounter with the supplement is new and it contains both healing and destructive power. An ambiguous experience, an encounter with the pharmakon never proves to be entirely one-sided . What you get is more like a subtle description of the whole.

Descriptions: mythic and metaphorical hints.  This is what the pharmakon offers us.  It requires a bit of meditation and imagination to fully digest this ambiguous metaphorical supplement.  This poison, this medicine, this pharmakon is something that comes from the outside and conjures up reactions in whoever encounters it.  It is just like the written word, which conjures up a number of different image and ideas in the reader.  Remember how in ancient Greece, the word pharmakon referred to writing…

Now, look at The Pharmakon periodical.  Our little written supplement is also like poison and medicine.  Full of hints and descriptions of art and activism, it has both a constructive and deconstructive effect on Sonoma County.  Merely the presence of a monthly publication has created plenty of positive and negative effect.  People have been pleased and people have been upset, all from a little mixture of writing… just scribbles… like a wolf paw scratching… What The Pharmakon represents is the ambiguous power that an inscribed message has on reader and writer alike.

“Really?” you may think, “but why all of these articles on art and activism?  Isn’t there some great political scheme behind this?”  I think not.  The Pharmakon, though not outside of politics, should not be misunderstood as logical political discourse.  There is a political world that we live in, but our writings are more like artifacts left over from that world. Our writing is a magic bag of tricks and inspiration, it is not meant to be a definitive commentary.  The Pharmakon does not work in a logical way.  It is more physical than that, working on many levels at once.  A collection of scribbles, it sails through our community, effecting us in a variety of unpredictable ways.

So, what are we hoping you get out of The Pharmakon?  What is this supplement supposed to do?  That is a difficult question to answer, since The Pharmakon can be read in many ways.  It is not meant to tell you anything in particular.  It is more of a strange invitation.  A prescription.  To accept it is to let the poison and the medicine take their effects.  It is to join in the creation and discovery.  It is to paint your world with an intimate and artistic vision.  To compose and decompose.  To stray and to hunt at the same time.  This inscription is our prescription.  This script… this script… this script… 

Yours in Service, 

Phaedrus  

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Phaedrus (Part Two)

Posted on January 18th, 2008 by The Captain.
Categories: Phaedrus, Philosophy, The Pharmakon.

Part Two: The Journey of a Myth

Dear Reader,

My name is Phaedrus and I am on a journey to discover what The Pharmakon is all about. In the previous installment of my letter (in issue 4), I looked at the meaning of the word “pharmakon” and proposed what it may suggest about the nature of this periodical. I have remarked that the word is ambiguous, signifying both poison and medicine simultaneously. This revelation led me to introduce the concept that this ‘zine is an ambiguous zone in itself, containing many contradictory aspects. Now, in this letter I continue in the same vein, asking what method of writing goes into the creation of this strange kind of work.

I have said earlier that the text of The Pharmakon is a kind of half-living and half-dead document. Each issue is like a supplement of fact, fiction, words, and images that serves to bring together and take apart the community at the same time. I have introduced the idea that The Pharmakon is a new way of dealing with reality in a manner that tolerates and presents ambiguity. I want to look at this claim and point out that it places the periodical into the realm of the half-true and the half-false. It places The Pharmakon into the realm of the myth.

As we create The Pharmakon, what are we presenting and where are we going with it? Are we following a path of logic and categorization? The answer is simply, no. We are straying into the realm of myth quite a bit as we write and we are often patching together seemingly unrelated articles and media to create this little pamphlet you now hold in your hand. There may be sections featuring logical language and there may even be a manifesto, but the artists and writers who assemble The Pharmakon are certainly not aiming for a grand framework. Each scribble is inspired and each writer is not trying to do anything more than put down stories on paper.

No, as a writer for The Pharmakon, I am on a mythic hunter’s journey. For a hunter, the real path goes off the beaten road and into the bushes. A hunter must follow the scent and not the roadmap. In a sense, we are straying from common sense and common discourse, but we also remain on the path of our respective subjects and stories. This is the work of the writers and artists of The Pharmakon. This is the mythic journey.

In fact even the writers of this periodical are unusually clad in myth and pseudonym. Take myself, for example: who am I, Phaedrus? This is not really my name. “Phaedrus” is actually the Greek word for wolf. That is not me. I am a scribbler in wolf’s clothing. But this name suits my story. In the logic of the supplement, all that matters is that the myth is told. Now, the text lies in your hands for you to do with it what you will. And I continue writing and writing…

In the logic of the supplement and The Pharmakon, meaning is always in a state of creation. Our subjects and stories are trails that are being blazed, always in a state of becoming and being made by the work of active writers and active readers. So, in writing (this newsletter, this article, this sentence…) we are each on our own path with the text, straying as we hunt.

At this point I have looked at what The Pharmakon is (in my first letter) and what it means to write it (this current letter). Still, I wish to write a bit more on what The Pharmakon is meant to do with its readers. I will be writing about this soon. Like the wolf, I am hot on the trail of our subject. I’m off the path with the scent of words and media thick in my nostrils. I hunt on.

Yours in Service,

Phaedrus

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Phaedrus (Part One)

Posted on September 25th, 2007 by The Captain.
Categories: Phaedrus, Philosophy, The Pharmakon.

PHAEDRUS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PHARMAKON 

Part One:  Compose/ Decompose

Dear Reader,     

In the midst of all of this art and activism, a bit of philosophy is demanded.  Allow me to introduce myself:  I am Phaedrus.  As a philosopher and a lover of words,  I search for the meanings and the interplay of opposites between each turn of phrase.  I use writing as a tool to dissect and critique my subjects and now I am again at my desk typing away; this time to inquire about the newsletter you are holding.  You may have asked these same questions yourself: What is The Pharmakon?  What is it all about, anyway?       

First, I will address the meaning of the word itself.  Pharmakon is a word found often in ancient Greek texts.  It was the word used to signify things like “paint” and “makeup.”  The word had a theatricality about it and a sense of unreality and simulation.  It was a word that was used for concepts that were not pure, for concepts that were seen as additions to normalcy.  Pharmakon was invoked by people in reference to “poison” as well as in reference to “medicine” because both of these concepts were seen as outside forces that change the normal body.  Coming from without, poison, medicine, and the pharmakon all must have side-affects Something is always lost for what is gained, and vice-versa.  The closest word we may use in English is “supplement.”       

A supplement that both builds a body and takes away from it.  Indeed, “composing” and “decomposing” simultaneously is the nature of the pharmakon.  In fact, now that we bring up composing, the concept of “writing” itself is also referred to as pharmakon in ancient Greece because the written word was seen as a kind of supplement to thought and speech.  The Greeks saw the word as a living creature that received its life from the voice of the speaker.  The written word was a kind of zombie, composed and given life and then abandoned by its creator on a dead page of paper.  This written word, this undead creature was called the pharmakon.     

And now, thousands of years later, we are printing a periodical called The Pharmakon.  “The Supplement.”    Perhaps, being a written document, it is the same kind of pharmakon the Greeks wrote of: the half alive and half dead written word.  Picture the articles and the announcements wandering the streets of Sonoma County, separated from their origin of Bite the Hand Studios and searching for brains.   The document we call The Pharmakon is loose upon us as soon as it is printed, and nothing short of book burning can stop it.  This living dead, this decomposing composition.     

To clarify: composing means “to put together.”  Well, The Pharmakon is definitely a composed thing.  It is bound and printed.  In fact, it even composes the events of the county into an order of sorts.     

Ah… but what is happening with this order?  Are things really any more composed?  In this newsletter, our subjects at times don’t seem composed at all, but muddy and worn, with unkempt hair and missing buttons.  This is the dirty, do-it-yourself activism.  For all of the community organizing that goes down in these pages, for all the composition, this newsletter is also decomposing the community and fostering the mold of change.  So, here we may have the ethos of The Pharmakon: To put together is to take apart.  So there. 

Now, this is not normal.  We are hardly dealing with reality as we have been raised to see it.  We are encountering some activist zombie myth between fact and fiction and this demands some new philosophical questions:  Why and how does one write this?  What does it mean to read this?  To be sure, dear reader, you will hear from me again.

Yours in Service,

Phaedrus

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