The sterile electronic system of variable time has steadily eroded the value of the human being in an illusion of knowledge.
"Know yourself" said Bruce Lee and, instead of the neutral head attached to electronic modes of knowledge, we instead have bodily expression. Pick-up a broom and it becomes a javelin to throw. One steadily gets a feeling for Greek culture - see discus scene in Le Mepris 1/2 Essay 2.
Hence the modern confusion. Instead of honing instincts that promote a classical standard of understanding, we are lost in byways of bizarre information divulged by acolyte heads, from Musk down.
With the standard of classical understanding intact, Man is able to adopt a complementary social order of small-scale feuding and the frisson between individuals. The rhythms of desire and personal reaction are allowed freedom within this classical order of feuding (city-states, neighbourhoods.)
The differences between individuals promote a psychic affinity of strength (P11). Instead of allowing for differences, modernity promotes a similarity that confuses everything for a neutral state of affairs.
Words lose their meaning, and one can't even abuse hebes or dikes. Where everything is equivalent, there is no standard in sexuality or race. The upshot is everyone is more-or-less white, but whiteness loses its definition. Gay boys are just as likely to be macho, there is so much confusion.
In Weekend, Godard relates a neutral or anal sexuality to the equivalence of objects in capital. This becomes more obvious in the sterility of an electronic system of detached heads.
In Goodbye to Language, the scatological scene of the guy on the toilet seat could be taken as a reference to the way the detached head operates in a neutral zone in modernity (of numerical compulsion, see Grace Slick quote.)
The rhythms of rebellion have a standard of physical pursuits that are increasingly unknown. Instead of feuding and Walt Witmanesque obscenity, the neutral head tends to be highly socialised.
Bodily expression is freedom and, in the highly socialised state, this freedom increasingly does not exist. The only freedom left is actually order (militia), which is the other confusion the US has about the use of firearms (see prev.)
Classical, bodily freedom is also a type of order; the two are connected by proportion. The rebellious time of the 60s was quite well represented in comics. In Iron Man #42 Gerry Conway has this quote.
So it happens for a man who's life is based on fact, whose parameters of existence lie on more than realistic foundations - is particularly vulnerable to the unreal.. Such is the curse of the scientist. Such is the doom of modern man..
'Facts' of the detached head that is unrelated to bodily proportion and the dynamics of movement. "Don't think, just move." (Conway's quote is really on Stark. Iron Man may be electronically enhanced, but it's a dynamic system that motivates the body to action.)
What is fantasy, what is real, in a universe of electronic reflections (convincing illusions)?
A decapitated head can be bad taste (as in EC comics), but that doesn't alter its essential reality, and the understanding thereof. Living things die and decay, and capitalism is just a sterile illusion that may take-in the detached head, as opposed to the activated and rebellious body of people (government vs 'the people', another theme of the story.)
