Uang
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Uang dalam ilmu ekonomi tradisional didefinisikan sebagai setiap alat tukar yang dapat diterima secara umum. Alat tukar itu dapat berupa benda apapun yang dapat diterima oleh setiap orang di masyarakat dalam proses pertukaran barang dan jasa. Dalam ilmu ekonomi modern, uang didefinisikan sebagai sesuatu yang tersedia dan secara umum diterima sebagai alat pembayaran bagi pembelian barang-barang dan jasa-jasa serta kekayaan berharga lainnya serta untuk pembayaran utang.[1] Beberapa ahli juga menyebutkan fungsi uang sebagai alat penunda pembayaran.[2]

Keberadaan uang menyediakan alternatif transaksi yang lebih mudah daripada barter yang lebih kompleks, tidak efesien, dan kurang cocok digunakan dalam sistem ekonomi modern karena membutuhkan orang yang memiliki keinginan yang sama untuk melakukan pertukaran dan juga kesulitan dalam penentuan nilai. Efesiensi yang didapatkan dengan menggunakan uang pada akhirnya akan mendorong perdagangan dan pembagian tenaga kerja yang kemudian akan meningkatkan produktifitas dan kemakmuran.

Pada awalnya di Indonesia, uang —dalam hal ini uang kartal— diterbitkan oleh pemerintah Republik Indonesia. Namun sejak dikeluarkannya UU No. 13 tahun 1968 pasal 26 ayat 1, hak pemerintah untuk mencetak uang dicabut. Pemerintah kemudian menetapkan Bank Sentral, Bank Indonesia, sebagai satu-satunya lembaga yang berhak menciptakan uang kartal. Hak untuk menciptakan uang itu disebut dengan hak oktroi.

Sejarah

Uang yang kita kenal sekarang ini telah mengalami proses perkembangan yang panjang. Pada mulanya, masyarakat belum mengenal pertukaran karena setiap orang berusaha memenuhi kebutuhannnya dengan usaha sendiri. Manusia berburu jika ia lapar, membuat pakaian sendiri dari bahan-bahan yang sederhana, mencari buah-buahan untuk konsumsi sendiri; singkatnya, apa yang diperolehnya itulah yang dimanfaatkan untuk memenuhi kebutuhannya.

Perkembangan selanjutnya mengahadapkan manusia pada kenyataan bahwa apa yang diproduksi sendiri ternyata tidak cukup untuk memenuhui seluruh kebutuhannya. Untuk memperoleh barang-barang yang tidak dapat dihasilkan sendiri, mereka mencari orang yang mau menukarkan barang yang dimiliki dengan barang lain yang dibutuhkan olehnya. Akibatnya muncullah sistem barter’, yaitu barang yang ditukar dengan barang.

Namun pada akhirnya, banyak kesulitan-kesulitan yang dirasakan dengan sistem ini. Di antaranya adalah kesulitan untuk menemukan orang yang mempunyai barang yang diinginkan dan juga mau menukarkan barang yang dimilikinya serta kesulitan untuk memperoleh barang yang dapat dipertukarkan satu sama lainnya dengan nilai pertukaran yang seimbang atau hampir sama nilainya. Untuk mengatasinya, mulailah timbul pikiran-pikiran untuk menggunakan benda-benda tertentu untuk digunakan sebagai alat tukar. Benda-benda yang ditetapkan sebagai alat pertukaran itu adalah benda-benda yang diterima oleh umum (generally accepted), benda-benda yang dipilih bernilai tinggi (sukar diperoleh atau memiliki nilai magis dan mistik), atau benda-benda yang merupakan kebutuhan primer sehari-hari; misalnya garam yang oleh orang Romawi digunakan sebagai alat tukar maupun sebagai alat pembayaran upah. Pengaruh orang Romawi tersebut masih terlihat sampai sekarang; orang Inggris menyebut upah sebagai salary yang berasal dari bahasa Latin salarium yang berarti garam.
Barang-barang yang dianggap indah dan bernilai, seperti kerang ini, pernah dijadikan sebagai alat tukar sebelum manusia menemukan uang logam.

Meskipun alat tukar sudah ada, kesulitan dalam pertukaran tetap ada. Kesulitan-kesulitan itu antara lain karena benda-benda yang dijadikan alat tukar belum mempunyai pecahan sehingga penentuan nilai uang, penyimpanan (storage), dan pengangkutan (transportation) menjadi sulit dilakukan serta timbul pula kesulitan akibat kurangnya daya tahan benda-benda tersebut sehingga mudah hancur atau tidak tahan lama.

Kemudian muncul apa yang dinamakan dengan uang logam. Logam dipilih sebagai alat tukar karena memiliki nilai yang tinggi sehingga digemari umum, tahan lama dan tidak mudah rusak, mudah dipecah tanpa mengurangi nilai, dan mudah dipindah-pindahkan. Logam yang dijadikan alat tukar karena memenuhi syarat-syarat tersebut adalah emas dan perak. Uang logam emas dan perak juga disebut sebagai uang penuh (full bodied money). Artinya, nilai intrinsik (nilai bahan) uang sama dengan nilai nominalnya (nilai yang tercantum pada mata uang tersebut). Pada saat itu, setiap orang berhak menempa uang, melebur, menjual atau memakainya, dan mempunyai hak tidak terbatas dalam menyimpan uang logam.

Sejalan dengan perkembangan perekonomian, timbul kesulitan ketika perkembangan tukar-menukar yang harus dilayani dengan uang logam bertambah sementara jumlah logam mulia (emas dan perak) sangat terbatas.[rujukan?] Penggunaan uang logam juga sulit dilakukan untuk transaksi dalam jumlah besar sehingga diciptakanlah uang kertas

Mula-mula uang kertas yang beredar merupakan bukti-bukti pemilikan emas dan perak sebagai alat/perantara untuk melakukan transaksi. Dengan kata lain, uang kertas yang beredar pada saat itu merupakan uang yang dijamin 100% dengan emas atau perak yang disimpan di pandai emas atau perak dan sewaktu-waktu dapat ditukarkan penuh dengan jaminannya. Pada perkembangan selanjutnya, masyarakat tidak lagi menggunakan emas (secara langsung) sebagai alat pertukaran. Sebagai gantinya, mereka menjadikan ‘kertas-bukti’ tersebut sebagai alat tukar.

Fungsi

Secara umum, uang memiliki fungsi sebagai perantara untuk pertukaran barang dengan barang, juga untuk menghidarkan perdagangan dengan cara barter. Secara lebih rinci, fungsi uang dibedalan menjadi dua: fungsi asli dan fungsi turunan.

Fungsi asli uang ada tiga, yaitu sebagai alat tukar, sebagai satuan hitung, dan sebagai penyimpan nilai.

Uang berfungsi sebagai alat tukar atau medium of exchange yang dapat mempermudah pertukaran. Orang yang akan melakukan pertukaran tidak perlu menukarkan dengan barang, tetapi cukup menggunakan uang sebagai alat tukar. Kesulitan-kesulitan pertukaran dengan cara barter dapat diatasi dengan pertukaran uang.

Uang juga berfungsi sebagai satuan hitung (unit of account) karena uang dapat digunakan untuk menunjukan nilai berbagai macam barang/jasa yang diperjualbelikan, menunjukkan besarnya kekayaan, dan menghitung besar kecilnya pinjaman. Uang juga dipakai untuk menentukan harga barang/jasa (alat penunjuk harga). Sebagai alat satuan hitung, uang berperan untuk memperlancar pertukaran.

Selain itu, uang berfungsi sebagai alat penyimpan nilai (valuta) karena dapat digunakan untuk mengalihkan daya beli dari masa sekarang ke masa mendatang. Ketika seorang penjual saat ini menerima sejumlah uang sebagai pembayaran atas barang dan jasa yang dijualnya, maka ia dapat menyimpan uang tersebut untuk digunakan membeli barang dan jasa di masa mendatang.

Selain ketiga hal di atas, uang juga memiliki fungsi lain yang disebut sebagai fungsi turunan. Fungsi turunan itu antara lain uang sebagai alat pembayaran, sebagai alat pembayaran utang, sebagai alat penimbun atau pemindah kekayaan (modal), dan alat untuk meningkatkan status sosial.

Syarat-syarat

Suatu benda dapat dijadikan sebagai “uang” jika benda tersebut telah memenuhi syarat-syarat tertentu. Pertama, benda itu harus diterima secara umum (acceptability). Agar dapat diakui sebagai alat tukar umum suatu benda harus memiliki nilai tinggi atau —setidaknya— dijamin keberadaannya oleh pemerintah yang berkuasa. Bahan yang dijadikan uang juga harus tahan lama (durability), kualitasnya cenderung sama (uniformity), jumlahnya dapat memenuhi kebutuhan masyarakat serta tidak mudah dipalsukan (scarcity).

Uang juga harus mudah dibawa, portable, dan mudah dibagi tanpa mengurangi nilai (divisibility), serta memiliki nilai yang cenderung stabil dari waktu ke waktu (stability of value).

Jenis

Uang yang beredar dalam masyarakat dapat dibedakan dalam dua jenis, yaitu uang kartal (sering pula disebut sebagai common money) dan uang giral. Uang kartal adalah alat bayar yang sah dan wajib digunakan oleh masyarakat dalam melakukan transaksi jual-beli sehari-hari. Sedangkan yang dimaksud dengan uang giral adalah uang yang dimiliki masyarakat dalam bentuk simpanan (deposito) yang dapat ditarik sesuai kebutuhan. Uang ini hanya beredar di kalangan tertentu saja, sehingga masyarakat mempunyai hak untuk menolak jika ia tidak mau barang atau jasa yang diberikannya dibayar dengan uang ini. Untuk menarik uang giral, orang menggunakan cek.

Menurut bahan pembuatannya
Dinar dan Dirham, dua contoh mata uang logam.

Uang menurut bahan pembuatannya terbagi menjadi dua, yaitu uang logam dan uang kertas.

Uang logam adalah uang yang terbuat dari logam; biasanya dari emas atau perak karena kedua logam itu memiliki nilai yang cenderung tinggi dan stabil, bentuknya mudah dikenali, sifatnya yang tidak mudah hancur, tahan lama, dan dapat dibagi menjadi satuan yang lebih kecil tanpa mengurangi nilai.

Uang logam memiliki tiga macam nilai:

1. Nilai intrinsik, yaitu nilai bahan untuk membuat mata uang, misalnya berapa nilai emas dan perak yang digunakan untuk mata uang.
2. Nilai nominal, yaitu nilai yang tercantum pada mata uang atau cap harga yang tertera pada mata uang. Misalnya seratus rupiah (Rp. 100,00), atau lima ratus rupiah (Rp. 500,00).
3. Nilai tukar, nilai tukar adalah kemampuan uang untuk dapat ditukarkan dengan suatu barang (daya beli uang). Misalnya uang Rp. 500,00 hanya dapat ditukarkan dengan sebuah permen, sedangkan Rp. 10.000,00 dapat ditukarkan dengan semangkuk bakso).

Ketika pertama kali digunakan, uang emas dan uang perak dinilai berdasarkan nilai intrinsiknya, yaitu kadar dan berat logam yang terkandung di dalamnya; semakin besar kandungan emas atau perak di dalamnya, semakin tinggi nilainya. Tapi saat ini, uang logam tidak dinilai dari berat emasnya, namun dari nilai nominalnya. Nilai nominal adalah nilai yang tercantum atau tertulis di mata uang tersebut.

Sementara itu, yang dimaksud dengan “uang kertas” adalah uang yang terbuat dari kertas dengan gambar dan cap tertentu dan merupakan alat pembayaran yang sah. Menurut penjelasan UU No. 23 tahun 1999 tentang Bank Indonesia, yang dimaksud dengan uang kertas adalah uang dalam bentuk lembaran yang terbuat dari bahan kertas atau bahan lainnya (yang menyerupai kertas).

Menurut nilainya

Menurut nilainya, uang dibedakan menjadi uang penuh (full bodied money) dan uang tanda (token money)

Nilai uang dikatakan sebagai uang penuh apabila nilai yang tertera di atas uang tersebut sama nilainya dengan bahan yang digunakan. Dengan kata lain, nilai nominal yang tercantum sama dengan nilai intrinsik yang terkandung dalam uang tersebut. Jika uang itu terbuat dari emas, maka nilai uang itu sama dengan nilai emas yang dikandungnya.

Sedangkan yang dimaksud dengan uang tanda adalah apabila nilai yang tertera diatas uang lebih tinggi dari nilai bahan yang digunakan untuk membuat uang atau dengan kata lain nilai nominal lebih besar dari nilai intrinsik uang tersebut. Misalnya, untuk membuat uang Rp1.000,00 pemerintah mengeluarkan biaya Rp750,00.

Teori nilai uang

Teori nilai uang membahas masalah-masalah keuangan yang berkaitan dengan nilai uang. Nilai uang menjadi perhatian para ekonom, karena tinggi atau rendahnya nilai uang sangat berpengaruh terhadap kegiatan ekonomi. Hal ini terbukti dengan banyaknya teori uang yang disampaikan oleh beberapa ahli.

Teori uang terdiri atas dua teori, yaitu teori uang statis dan teori uang dinamis.

Teori uang statis

Teori Uang Statis atau disebut juga “teori kualitatif statis” bertujuan untuk menjawab pertanyaan: apakah sebenarnya uang? Dan mengapa uang itu ada harganya? Mengapa uang itu sampai beredar? Teori ini disebut statis karena tidak mempersoalkan perubahan nilai yang diakibatkan oleh perkembangan ekonomi.

Yang termasuk teori uang statis adalah:

* Teori Metalisme (Intrinsik) oleh KMAPP

Uang bersifat seperti barang, nilainya tidak dibuat-buat, melainkan sama dengan nilai logam yang dijadikan uang itu, contoh: uang emas dan uang perak.

* Teori Konvensi (Perjanjian) oleh Devanzati dan Montanari

Teori ini menyatakan bahwa uang dibentuk atas dasar pemufakatan masyarakat untuk mempermudah pertukaran.

* Teori Nominalisme

Uang diterima berdasarkan nilai daya belinya.

* Teori Negara

Asal mula uang karena negara, apabila negara menetapkan apa yang menjadi alat tukar dan alat bayar maka timbullah uang. Jadi uang bernilai karena adanya kepastian dari negara berupa undang-undang pembayaran yang disahkan.
[sunting] Teori uang dinamis

Teori ini mempersoalkan sebab terjadinya perubahan dalam nilai uang. Teori dinamis antara lain:

* Teori Kuantitas dari David Ricardo

Teori ini menyatakan bahwa kuat atau lemahnya nilai uang sangat tergantung pada jumlah uang yang beredar. Apabila jumlah uang berubah menjadi dua kali lipat, maka nilai uang akan menurun menjadi setengah dari semula, dan juga sebaliknya.

* Teori Kuantitas dari Irving Fisher

Teori yang telah dikemukakan David Ricardo disempurnakan lagi oleh Irving Fisher dengan memasukan unsur kecepatan peredaran uang, barang dan jasa sebagai faktor yang mempengaruhi nilai uang.

* Teori Persediaan Kas

Teori ini dilihat dari jumlah uang yang tidak dibelikan barang-barang.

* Teori Ongkos Produksi

Teori ini menyatakan nilai uang dalam peredaran yang berasal dari logam dan uang itu dapat dipandang sebagai barang.
[sunting] Uang dalam ekonomi

Uang adalah salah satu topik utama dalam pembelajaran ekonomi dan finansial. Monetarisme adalah sebuah teori ekonomi yang kebanyakan membahas tentang permintaan dan penawaran uang. Sebelum tahun 80-an, masalah stabilitas permintaan uang menjadi bahasan utama karya-karya Milton Friedman, Anna Schwartz, David Laidler, dan lainnya.

Kebijakan moneter bertujuan untuk mengatur persediaan uang, inflasi, dan bunga yang kemudian akan mempengaruhi output dan ketenagakerjaan. Inflasi adalah turunnya nilai sebuah mata uang dalam jangka waktu tertentu dan dapat menyebabkan bertambahnya persediaan uang secara berlebihan. Interest rate, biaya yang timbul ketika meminjam uang, adalah salah satu alat penting untuk mengontrol inflasi dan pertumbuhan ekonomi. Bank sentral seringkali diberi tanggung jawab untuk mengawasi dan mengontrol persediaan uang, interest rate, dan perbankan.

Krisis moneter dapat menyebabkan efek yang besar terhadap perekonomian, terutama jika krisis tersebut menyebabkan kegagalan moneter dan turunnya nilai mata uang secara berlebihan yang menyebabkan orang lebih memilih barter sebagai cara bertransaksi. Ini pernah terjadi di Rusia, sebagai contoh, pada masa keruntuhan Uni Soviet.

Pada tanggal 21 Juni 2008 jam 7:06 ,16 Jumadilakhir 1941 Tahun JIMAWAL Windu KUNTARA, di RSB Lombok 22,Sby
lahir buah hatiku….dengan berat 2,08 kg…meski usia kandungan mamamu belum 9 bulan tapi kamu dan pengin keluar ya nak…….berbagai obat anti
kontraksi tidak mampu mencegahmu untuk segera menemani ayahmu nonton final euro 2008…dan benar tepat sehari menjelang final euro kamu diperbolehkan pulang dari rumah sakit…waktu kamu di RS ayahmu ini bikin para suster jengkel…tiap menit ayahmu ini turun dan menjengukmu…melihatmu…meski tidak bisa menyentuhmu karena kamu berada dalam inkubator
….waaa tangismu keras sekali….membuat ayahmu bangga nak…meski saat kamu lahir ada kejadian yang membuat hati ayahmu trenyuh karena sesuatu hal yang melibatkan ayahmu dg salah satu anggota keluarga ayah….tp ketika melihatmu semua perasaan itu hilang…satu sikap yang
harus selalu kita punyai adalah pemaaf nak…Ini ada fotomu yang lucu sekali…melonggok dibalik kerudung oxigen…
tp aku dah bisa menguap, gitu katamu ya nak….
kalo menguap gitu kamu mirip ayah nak…menguap terus tiap hari…wakakaka! ciri orang bijaksana mmg suka menguap nak…santai saja…wakakakaka! anakku sayang…..cepat besar ya nak… (ditulis pada blog widijanto.wordpress.com pada Juli 11, 2008 )

Tulisan diatas adalah ungkapan hatiku ketika anaku lahir. Pertama kali melihatnya, campur aduk perasaanku. Antara senang dan cemas. Senang karena akhirnya lahir juga anakku, melalui perjuangan istriku yang harus opname 2 kali. Cemas karena anakku lahir premature melalui operasi cesar di RSB Lombok 22.

Pertama melihatnya aku berpikir, waduh kecil banget anak ini. memang saat itu berat anaku cuma 2,08 kg. Kurang dari 3 Kg. Anakku juga harus melalui proses inkubator selama seminggu. Selama seminggu itu aku harus hilir mudik ke RS. Melihatnya dalam inkubator.

Waktu menjemput untuk pulang-pun ibu mertua tak berani mengendongnya. Karena bayi yang mungil sekali itu. Tp akhirnya dengan menggumplkan keberanian ibu mertua menggendong anakku pulang.

Sampai rumah aku dan istri juga kebingungan. Bagaimana cara merawat bayi yang mungil ini. Memandikan kami berdua juga takut. Akhirnya si bayi hanya kami seka dengan air hangat. Masalah lain muncul ketika harus mengganti perban tali pusat. Istriku gak berani melakukan. Aku sendiri juga heran sebenarnya.Barang apaan pula ini. Aku harus mengganti dengan perban yang sudah ada alhokolnya. Aku bingung. Tapi karena harus diganti maka aku beranikan untuk mengganti dengan terlebih dahulu menelpon RSB Lombok 22, minta dibimbing cara melakukannya.

Lalu masalah lain muncul. Bayiku kuning. Terus bayiku aku bawa ke dokter anak langganan saudara-saudaraku di Kebraon. Dokternya asli surabaya. Pinter dan lucu orangnya. Dibawah penanganan dokter tersebut kondisi anakku semakin baik dan sehat. Untuk susu bayi, berdasarkan saran dari tante istriku yang seorang dokter anak di Bandung, susu bayi diganti dari nutrillon preamture ke neosure punya abbott. Memang susu ini bagus sekali karena dengan cepat badan anakku menjadi besar.

Setelah 8 bulan kami akhirnya baru sepakat tentang nama buat anakku. Aku pinginnya ada nama sansekerta dan jawa dalam nama anakku. Istriku pengin ada nama arab-nya. Setelah baca buku ini itu, termasuk juga kamus bahasa jawa kuno dan sansekerta pinjaman dari Prof. Sudjito, Guru Besar Basa Jawa Universitas Negeri Malang, aku dan istri memberi anakku nama: Pranaya Razzaq Yudanto. Pranaya yang dalam bahasa sanskerta berarti pemimpin bijaksana (karena aku ingin anak ini kelak jika menjadi pemimpin maka akan menjadi pemimpin bijaksana bukan pemimpin yang otoriter yang kata dan tindakannya dikeluarkan tanpa dipikir).Kata paranaya terdapat juga dalam salah satu syair Ronggowarsito. Razzaq berarti rezeki (dimana rezeki itu ada dua macam. Pertama, rezeki lahir berupa makanan untuk tubuh. Kedua, rezeki batin berupa ilmu pengetahuan dan mukasyafah untuk kalbu. Yang kedua ini merupakan jenis rezeki yang paling mulia, sebab buahnya adalah kehidupan yang abadi) aku berharap anak ini selalu dilimpahi rezeki oleh Allah SWT baik berupa bathin maupun lahir. Lalu nama Yudanto adalah bahasa Jawa yang berarti tidak gampang putus asa. Jadi secara umum aku ingin anakku kelak menjadi pemimpin yang bijaksana juga murah rezeki dan tidak mudah berputus asa/sabar jika menghadapi cobaan dalam hidupnya.

Nah sekarang anakku yang aku panggil Naya telah berumur 1,8 bulan dengan berat +/- 16 Kg. Lucu-lucunya. Sukanya muterin mainan. Aktif bergerak. Kata istriku kayak perilakunya waktu didalam perut. Suka bergerak kesana kemari. Suka main dikasur dengan gerakan seperti orang “mancal” sepeda. Gerakannya cepat sekali. Kayaknya memang Naya mahir dalam hal ini. Bahkan mata kamera pun tak sanggup merekan gerakannya. Wakakaka!

Sukannya juga lihat film baby einstein. Suka joget kalau mendengar lagu-lagu yang riang dari video baby eistein.

Waktu memang berjalan dengan sangat cepat. Dari bayi yang mungil sekali sekarang menjadi balita yang lucu dan menggemaskan (“chubby”kalau kata teman-teman).

Naya juga sudah bisa melafalkan beberapa kata seperti mama-mama. Selain kata “berrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” jika dia mendengar ada pesawat melintas. Cepat besar ya nak…….

 

(Aku membaca tulisan ini menjelang akan skripsi. Tetap menarik untuk di baca ulang, meski Mbak Kathy sendiri sudah almarhum beberapa tahun yang lalu karena kanker. Feminist radikal….)

I got married when I was very young. I did not know my husband…

The day after our wedding, I had a dream about the world:

At the entrance to the world, I was about to have an abortion.

I had had abortions before this.

I had to decide whether or not I wanted an anaesthetic. I guess that the doctor had asked me, but I don’t remember that anyone was there. Thinking, I asked how much the abortion was going to hurt me. The doctor replied, “Oh, there’ll be pain…” in a voice that was trying to dismiss such pain. Since I knew that that type of voice meant that there would be a lot of pain, I chickened out. The blanket that was lying on top of me was yellow. I hate pain. I decided on anaesthetic.

All through the abortion, I was kind of conscious. While I was in this consciousness, a pillow, which was around my ass, inflated and I floated three feet up above the cot.

After the abortion, my body was OK, so I left the hospital.

This was the scene of my marriage.

Then, I entered the real world (as opposed to that of the hospital). In a car. The car reached the end of the dirt road that lay beneath it: the main road began. At this spot, the man who was in the car with me informed me that I could drive.

But I had never driven a car. I began driving the black Bentley. To begin, I had to turn the car, but I had no idea how. Turning must have something to do with steering.

I was half-way into the turn and I couldn’t see what was behind me.

“Don’t worry about seeing:” my new husband said, “I’ll do the looking.”

I guess that he did because we, or I, successfully negotiated the huge Bentley onto a dirt road that led to our home.

Home was an army barracks.

There, in woods which, here and there, had been cleared, stood a number of cabin-like, but larger, buildings. My husband and I had to clear out of the one which had been relegated to us. Larry…is this my husband?…I don’t think that I know my husband well…likes to keep his guinea pigs outside the cabin, in the forest’s damp.

My guinea pigs are always safe and warm.

After we had abandoned that part of the army that had once been our home, I entered a cabin named School. An older man in a uniform, who was sitting behind a desk which was the only furniture in that large, wooden room, turned around toward me and spoke German. An unknown language.

My husband answered him in German that the files were Japanese.

From this exchange, I learned, primarily, that we had to evacuate because the Germans were coming.

I knew that there weren’t any Jap files in the school, therefore, that my husband was trying to fool the German. I wondered whether he had succeeded.

After that dream, my husband drove by the hotel in which we would spend our honeymoon. We hadn’t known it at that time. Everything just happened by chance.

For we had been planning to go to England by train, then by boat, but the train had derailed. We had had to spend the night in Ostend.

We had had to wait through the night.

In Ostend, wherever that was, or at the end of the world, we found a hotel. It was rising out of the decay. The name of the hotel was “Etoile Rouge”.

“It’s rather dead this time of year,” my husband said.

The insides were luxurious: in a lobby, a wide red- carpeted staircase, which resembled a slide, descended into Persian rug upon Persian rug. A fat clerk seemed to be the only person. He handed us the keys to the royal suite as if we mattered. Perhaps we did, for we were the only people here, in this area which the sun no longer visited.

The first time my husband had fucked me, I had grabbed for the beam which was above my head.

Afterwards I asked him whether he loved me.

He was falling into sleep. “No.”

For the first time, he turned to me. “Do you love me?”

I didn’t know what to answer because of how he had answered. “Of course I do.”

He replied that everything is good: “I don’t love you, you don’t love me, therefore we were made for each other.”

That night I dreamed, as if this hole was in a dream, that there was a magnificent family house open on every side to lawns which were rising upward.

I was given the room in which, from now on, I would be safe. For I was part of the family.

Nevertheless the evil people penetrated the house. In order to evade them, I climbed out a window.

Instead of reaching the outside where I would be safe, I found myself in a section of the grounds which had been closed-off into a parking lot.

I had to escape this parking lot so that the evil ones wouldn’t get me.

The lot around which I was still wandering was either made out of dirt or sand. Either case, off-white. Lying some distance from the house, it retained its oval shape.

No grass grew within this space.

While I neither slowly nor quickly was climbing over the lot’s fence, the evil ones grabbed me.

Now, inside this enclosure, people, the ones who had been living in the house, and the evil ones played baseball. Played baseball because they had religion. I joined their game, though I couldn’t play well, and while I was in the outfield, I looked for a way, a hole through which I could escape.

I couldn’t find any whole.

Next, in the enclosure which was a hole, the original inhabitants of the mansion, none of whom were Christian, were being tortured in ways that reminded me visually of the last scene in Salo.

I have been captured as if were a beast.

I wanted to run away from my husband.

The next morning turned blue, then red.

Afterwards, I descended into the hotel’s lobby.

There was still no one there except for the clerk, Wrinkles had almost closed his eyes. I wandered over to one of the corners by the huge windows, away from the Persian carpets.

The emptiness of this lobby reminded me of animals. Though I adore them, I don’t own any because I wouldn’t remember to feed them.

Two women who seemed non-human walked into the hotel. The older was stunning, her hair absolutely white, dressed in black; after her, a boy who was actually a girl.

Whispering to the clerk who was shaking visibly, I asked who they were.

They are together.

Later that night, before I was able to meet them, I heard them talking to each other through the walls of their room.

“Let me go. Please. Let me go away.” I knew that this was the younger voice.

“I’ll never let you go, Kata.”

The name was Kata.

“I’m going to leave you anyway.”

“Not again.” She was bored. The beautiful one.

“I’m going now.”

“Kata, you don’t have the ability to leave me.”

“But you don’t want me any more. You want that American girl who’s in this hotel.”

“And you need me.”

I hadn’t yet heard this conversation. To me, the white- haired woman in her black seemed to a jaguar, a jaguar inside a snake whose skin is three types of black.

It was as if she had once wrapped her scarf-belt around his monstrous head and in response, the cat, closing his eyes and placing the monstrous head in one of her hands, turned tame.

I felt as if the older woman was kissing me on the lips and I was very frightened.

I went upstairs, back to my husband, who had planned to visit Bruges where a number of murders had just taken place.

As usual he wore his sunglasses. We travelled through Bruges’ labyrinths of canals until a dog started barking and sirens passed us by. We followed these sirens, away from the canal, to a mass of townspeople gathered around a white car.

A stretcher was leaving the vehicle.

A policeman muttered to my husband. “Oh monsieur, it is horrible…terrible…the fourth this week…young girls, all of them. Beautiful, too. This one has been lying here four days. Mutilated, like the rest…not a drop of blood.”

My husband’s blind eyes stared at no one.

For he was vulnerable. “I don’t understand.” To this policeman.

“None of us understands,” the policeman said.

The stretcher was returning, on it a body which was invisible, a red blanket over the body.

It must be a girl like me.

They took it away in the white car.

As we travelled away from the city, in a wide bus, I confided in my husband that I was scared.

I informed him that I was scared of him. “Oh yes, Steven, you were pleased. You felt pleasure seeing the dead girl’s body.”

“You’re pleased saying this. We’re getting to know each other.”

I let my head rest on his shoulder while one of my hands slowly undid his belt.

He didn’t want me to touch him there.

On that bus, I fell into sleep and dreamed that I escaped Steven:

I had always known the city I was in, this city of murders, because it was my childhood. Narrow, filthy, dark streets, whose buildings are the same. Doors have decayed into walls.

It was the city in which I owned an apartment. Either I used to live here or I had never. The apartment, its insides, were decomposing like everything else. Three rooms, each the size of a piece of furniture. One-third of the bathroom was a shower stall, half rubble, without a bottom.

This tiny city part was bottomless.

I was now renting the apartment either to a punk or to a punk couple. If a punk and if I had lived in the apartment prior to my renting it, I lived with him. He had abandoned me. I feared that the filthy punk or punks were in the process of demolishing this architectural hole which was my cunt.

When I looked directly into my fear, I found it groundless. I fixed my apartment up and rented it to someone else for a hundred dollars a month above the mortgage payment.

I left the city in order to go into the country.

The first thing that I saw was a naked woman tossing a naked baby joyfully into the air. This, I thought, is how the people in Paradise live.

This country into which I had come, whose name was Marin, was like a country-club. A mosquito stung me. The swelling quickly metamorphosed into a tremendous wart. Since I didn’t belong in paradise, I ran to a group of students who right then were climbing over a mountain and into view.

Though I recognized one of them, Dale, I couldn’t stay with him because his cock was soft.

I had nowhere to go and no one to be. Then, I remembered that I owned this apartment where everything’s falling apart. That was safety.

After I had dreamed, I no longer wanted to leave my husband.

We returned to the hotel at the end of the world.

Before we had left, the woman who had white hair had invited my husband and I to have dinner with her and her young friend.

“Let us put unpleasant things out of our minds…”

A policeman had just left the room.

“…Let us resume the conversation we were having before we were interrupted,” she said. “Steve; you don’t mind me calling you Steven, do you?”

I noticed that my husband was staring at the girl who looked like a boy. I saw he wanted her.

“Steven, I was just explaining to your wife about the Bathorys. Three hundred years ago…

“Klara Bathory had married four husbands in succession. She had murdered the first two. Afterwards, she took a lover who was much younger than her…”

Steven returned.

“She smothered the boy in castles. Then, a pasha captured him; while the former was skewering and roasting him on a spit, the entire garrison raped Klara. They cut through the throat of the woman who was still living.

“It is a violent society.

“Klara’s niece was Ezebeth Bathory, more well known as The Scarlet Witch.”

“She murdered almost 610 young women,” her secretary added.

“Yes, she kidnapped young girls in order to get their blood.”

“No.”

“She hung them up by their wrists, then whipped them until their tortured flesh was torn to shreds.” My husband spoke for the first time.

He, the Countess, and her friend were sitting together on a small sofa. I was perching on an armchair.

“Oh yes, and she clipped their fingers off with shears,” ? the Countess.

“Pierced their nipples with needles, yes, then tore out the tips with silver pincers,” ? my husband.

“Because human blood is an elixir,” ? the Countess.

“…she bit them everywhere and pushed red hot pokers right into their faces…” ? my husband.

“No!”

“And with the curses of witches…,” said the young girl,

“And with the curses of witches, especially the sorceress Darvulia Anna, cut off pieces of their flesh, grilled them, then made them eat parts of their own bodies,”

“Go on go on go on.” ? the girl.

“Kissed their veins with rusty nails,” ? the woman whom I had desired.

“Go on go on go on,” ? her lover

“…and when the young girls parted their lips in order to screech, she plunged the flaming rod into the caverns of the throats…” my husband began taking over…

“No!”

“Your wife is very much in love with you, isn’t she?” the countess asked him.

“How does the story end?” my husband replied.

I ran into one of the room’s corners. I shivered because I didn’t want to hear any more, but I couldn’t stop.

“The cops walled her up in her room. Day after day and night after night, her beautiful, pale hands were held against each other as if in prayer…

“It was her as a child: As was the custom of the country in those days, her husband-to-be’s mother had taken her away, at age eleven, from her wealthy fashionable world, when she was still gay, still full of hope, and placed her in the room of Protestantism where she was locked up, locked in, forbidden to see to hear to touch anything or anybody. From now on, her mother-in-law announced, your life is only to be Christianity and your husband. As soon as she could, this once-wealthy child reacted violently.

“One day, a mysterious woman disguised as a boy visited Ezebeth. Together they began torturing women whom Ezebeth loved…”

“…the lost dream…” ? the girl.

“How does the story end?” ? Steven.

“I don’t want sexuality:” I yelled before this end had come, “I don’t want to become diseased.”…

I have run away from everyone.

But I can’t bear no sex, no human communication.

I’ve begun a journey to make sex live, to find the relation between language and the body rather than this sexuality that’s presented by society as diseased.

My body seems to reject ordinary language.

If I can find the language of the body, I can find where sex is lying.

While I masturbate, I’ll try to hear the language that’s there.

Masturbation Journal.

DAY 1.

(This might not make any sense.)

the movement in my clit is like going, {this
a movement, {is still
in a wave >>> my expectation {description

I haven’t gone anywhere, to the realm, yet.

“strap” >>> it begins

There is nothing: it is here that language enters:

1. To calm the irritation. Just calm the irritation. Where is the opening, the door that opens?

Irritation is happy to be touched, but if it turns too expectant or excited without relaxing, it will become rigid.

The arising is a single, growing clit;

2. lose myself (beginning to lose myself)

3. becoming music. The more I become it, the more I trust it, hold on, just hold on, follow, don’t have to do anything else.

4. purely holding on. Now, the more, the better. I’m there, I’m there, (have made the transfer to another person which is music)

going over.

DAY 2.

It starts with bodily irritation, but then one has to forget the body, leave the body, leave the body until the body quivers uncontrollably.

messages will reach me from the lost sailor.

Entering the room, the dust.

Room after room like levels of the body. Here is no dialectic.

In this room, everything hangs out: nipples scrape against air; buttocks thrust out so that the asshole is open, and all that was inside is now outside

now it starts. it: actual touching. This is the beginning of feeling.

DAY 3.

It happened very fast and I couldn’t stop it (in order) to write. First, relaxing so that the ground, the body had become ground, was able to feel sensation. To do nothing else. Then, my clit was alive.

(Here’s the problem with coming: One enters the territory whose threshold is coming and wants to stay there forever. While crossing the threshold, language is forbidden; having crossed, it’s possible to have language.)

As soon as my body relaxed into only being receiver, I entered into music or began a journey that was rhythmic, wave-like, in time. For waves in time = music. Each time a wave falls, I’m able to feel more sensation. Why? Something to do with breathing. When a wave falls, I exhale. Then, at the bottom of exhalation, the physical sensation has to be (already allowable allowed) strong enough and wanting or desiring enough for the whole to turn into physical sensation; at this point, still desiring where there’s no body left to become desire, at this point failure, the whole turns over into something else.

I have described the entrance into the other world where all is a kind of ease. This other world is also the world within dream.

Now I am going to go to the ball.

Here’s a speech or dream about going to the ball:

In the beginning, I was sleeping with two women.

At first I didn’t understand fucking with women. But the second time I fucked with one of them, I began to like the sex a lot.

One day, Rodney, a friend who’s a drag-queen, invited me to a drag-queen ball. We were in a one-story beach house which was divided in three parts. I decided (though now I don’t know why) to go to this ball as Patti Page. I said Patti Page, but I bet that meant Doris Day. (When I had been growing up, Doris Day in Pillow Talk was the most repulsive female there was.)

“Oh,” said Rodney, “everyone’s going to the ball.”

To be Patti Page, I had to have the right wig.

My girlfriend returned to my bedroom which overlooked the ocean. When we made love, I sat on her and ground my cunt into hers. Afterwards, I travelled into the city because I had to go to the bank and to re-register. But I was too late in that location where the stars sit in darkness to accomplish any of these tasks on account of which I had decided to come…here…

And so I returned home…

Within the section of the tri-part building that was simultaneously walled and wall-less, the part next to the beach, my motorcycle was sinking into sands now more water than substance. The whole room was flooding as if from a cunt.

There the girl whom I despise most in this world, a skinny blonde, was putting clothes on. She told me she was going to the ball. But I still wanted to go. This ex-junky whose name was Kathy was attending the ball with her roommate.

Who was I going to go to the ball with? I remembered that I hated my loneliness.

If I’m going really to be Patti Page, I have to have a handbag just like my grandmother used to carry. Where am I going to find this kind of bag?

As I was looking for a bag, Rodney walked into the room. It was the large room that bordered both on the flooded room and on the beach. This room, unlike the other, possessed walls.

I hadn’t known that Rodney was still in this house.

“Why don’t you come with me?”

Suddenly, I had my period. This blood was brown and smelly. Actually it looked like shit. I was holding a tampax that was full of the stuff. Some had smeared itself over my left upper leg. I solved all these problems by plugging the hole up with a clean tampax.

Rodney told an old cleaning-lady who was now standing in the room that I was smelly. I was. Yuck. I wandered back, while I was beginning to wonder what dress I would wear, into the walled room and found deodorant Kotexes in a plastic garbage pail. They don’t hurt the way that tampaxes do.

Now that I no longer smell, I can decide what I am going to wear. I have learned from Rodney to do what I want: I will dress in full formal.

And Rodney will be waiting for me, in the office located in the night at the end of the street, beyond a door marked by a black O.

——————————————

Kathy Acker is a leading American writer. Among others, her books include Empire of the Senseless, Don Quixote, and Blood and Guts in High School. Her most recent book is entitled My Mother: Demonology.

The Language of the Body by Kathy Acker is reprinted by permission of the William Morris Agency, on behalf of the author. Copyright 1992 by Kathy Acker. All Rights Reserved.

Sinom
1. Mangkya darajating praja
Kawuryan wus sunyaturi
Rurah pangrehing ukara
Karana tanpa palupi
Atilar silastuti
Sujana sarjana kelu
Kalulun kala tida
Tidhem tandhaning dumadi
Ardayengrat dene karoban rubeda

2. Ratune ratu utama
Patihe patih linuwih
Pra nayaka tyas raharja
Panekare becik-becik
Paranedene tan dadi
Paliyasing Kala Bendu
Mandar mangkin andadra
Rubeda angrebedi
Beda-beda ardaning wong saknegara

 

3.Katetangi tangisira
Sira sang paramengkawi
Kawileting tyas duhkita
Katamen ing ren wirangi
Dening upaya sandi
Sumaruna angrawung
Mangimur manuhara
Met pamrih melik pakolih
Temah suka ing karsa tanpa wiweka

4.Dasar karoban pawarta
Bebaratun ujar lamis
Pinudya dadya pangarsa
Wekasan malah kawuri
Yan pinikir sayekti
Mundhak apa aneng ngayun
Andhedher kaluputan
Siniraman banyu lali
Lamun tuwuh dadi kekembanging beka

5. Ujaring panitisastra
Awewarah asung peling
Ing jaman keneng musibat
Wong ambeg jatmika kontit
Mengkono yen niteni
Pedah apa amituhu
Pawarta lolawara
Mundhuk angreranta ati
Angurbaya angiket cariteng kuna

6. Keni kinarta darsana
Panglimbang ala lan becik
Sayekti akeh kewala
Lelakon kang dadi tamsil
Masalahing ngaurip
Wahaninira tinemu
Temahan anarima
Mupus pepesthening takdir
Puluh-Puluh anglakoni kaelokan

7. Amenangi jaman edan
Ewuh aya ing pambudi
Milu edan nora tahan
Yen tan milu anglakoni
Boya kaduman melik
Kaliren wekasanipun
Ndilalah karsa Allah
Begja-begjane kang lali
Luwih begja kang eling lawan waspada

8. Semono iku bebasan
Padu-padune kepengin
Enggih mekoten man Doblang
Bener ingkang angarani
Nanging sajroning batin
Sejatine nyamut-nyamut
Wis tuwa arep apa
Muhung mahas ing asepi
Supayantuk pangaksamaning Hyang Suksma

9.Beda lan kang wus santosa
Kinarilah ing Hyang Widhi
Satiba malanganeya
Tan susah ngupaya kasil
Saking mangunah prapti
Pangeran paring pitulung
Marga samaning titah
Rupa sabarang pakolih
Parandene maksih taberi ikhtiyar

10. Sakadare linakonan
Mung tumindak mara ati
Angger tan dadi prakara
Karana riwayat muni
Ikhtiyar iku yekti
Pamilihing reh rahayu
Sinambi budidaya
Kanthi awas lawan eling
Kanti kaesthi antuka parmaning Suksma

11. Ya Allah ya Rasulullah
Kang sipat murah lan asih
Mugi-mugi aparinga
Pitulung ingkang martani
Ing alam awal akhir
Dumununging gesang ulun
Mangkya sampun awredha
Ing wekasan kadi pundi
Mula mugi wontena pitulung Tuwan

12. Sageda sabar santosa
Mati sajroning ngaurip
Kalis ing reh aruraha
Murka angkara sumingkir
Tarlen meleng malat sih
Sanityaseng tyas mematuh
Badharing sapudhendha
Antuk mayar sawetawis
BoRONG angGA saWARga meSI marTAya

Kemarin asyik “berselancar” dan tidak sengaja menemukan audiobook berjudul Infidel: The Story of My Enlightenment. Ini merupakan otobiografinya feminis kelahiran Somali Ayaan Hirsi Ali yang mengaku meninggalkan Islam dan menjadi atheist setelah membaca buku karangan profesor filsafat Universitas Utrecht Herman Philipse “Atheistisch manifest & De onredelijkheid van religie (1995)”.

 

Hirsi Ali awalnya imigran yang mencari suaka di negeri Belanda. Menjadi tukang sapu, kemudian penerjemah belanda bagi imigran asal somalia. Dia mengaku sebagai korban ketidakadilan Islam terhadap kaum perempuan (mengaku dipaksa menikah dst), karena itu kemudian dia menjadi tukang kritik paling vokal mengenai kehidupan kaum perempuan di dunia islam. Karena kevokalannya itulah yang mengantar dirinya menjadi anggota parlemen Belanda. Tapi hanya berlangsung setahun karena terbongkarnya kebohongan atas dirinya yang menyangkut alasan meminta suaka sampa dengan nama aslinya. Kemudian dia pindah ke amerika.

Hisri Ali menjadi sangat terkenal diseluruh dunia karena dia bekerja sama dengan sutradara Theo van Gogh (masih kerabat dengan pelukis Belanda terkenal Vincent van Gogh) dalam memproduksi film yg diberi judul Submission. Film ini mendahului film Fitna yang sama2 kontroversial itu. Cuma bedanya, sang sutradara Fitna, politikus Geert Wilder, masih hidup sementara Theo van Gogh dibunuh (oleh imigran asal Maroko , Mohammed Bouyeri dengan ditikam dan ditembak sebanyak 7 kali pada tgl 2 November 2004) setelah beberapa bulan film Submission di rilis.

Pembunuhan itu sendiri memicu sentimen anti Islam yang meluas di Belanda. Masjid dibakar dan sekolah Islam di ledakan.Hisri Ali sendiri akhirnya harus meninggalkan Belanda dan bermukin di Amerika untuk cari selamat.

Film Submission ternyata ada di Youtube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CakuoaCf4). Film sangat kontroversial karena menggambarkan seorang perempuan muslim (yang memerankan 4 karakter) yang sedang sholat tp dengan memakai pakaian tipis tembus pandang, sehingga tampak tubuh telanjangnya (tapi masih memakai celana dalam…wheew!) dan pada tubuhnya dituliskan ayat2 dalam Al-Qur’an.Ayat-ayat itu adalah An-Nur:2, An Nisaa’:34, Al Baqarah:222. Berikut adalah kutipan dari ayat-ayat tersebut:

Perempuan yang berzina dan laki-laki yang berzina, maka deralah tiap-tiap seorang dari keduanya seratus dali dera, dan janganlah belas kasihan kepada keduanya mencegah kamu untuk (menjalankan) agama Allah, jika kamu beriman kepada Allah, dan hari akhirat, dan hendaklah (pelaksanaan) hukuman mereka disaksikan oleh sekumpulan orang-orang yang beriman (An-Nur:2)

Kaum laki-laki itu adalah pemimpin bagi kaum wanita, oleh karena Allah telah melebihkan sebahagian mereka (laki-laki) atas sebahagian yang lain (wanita), dan karena mereka (laki-laki) telah menafkahkan sebagian dari harta mereka. Sebab itu maka wanita yang saleh, ialah yang taat kepada Allah lagi memelihara diri ketika suaminya tidak ada, oleh karena Allah telah memelihara (mereka). Wanita-wanita yang kamu khawatirkan nusyuznya, maka nasehatilah mereka dan pisahkanlah mereka di tempat tidur mereka, dan pukullah mereka. Kemudian jika mereka mentaatimu, maka janganlah kamu mencari-cari jalan untuk menyusahkannya. Sesungguhnya Allah Maha Tinggi lagi Maha Besar. (An Nisaa’:34)

Mereka bertanya kepadamu tentang haidh. Katakanlah: “Haidh itu adalah suatu kotoran.” Oleh sebab itu hendaklah kamu menjauhkan diri dari wanita di waktu haidh; dan janganlah kamu mendekati mereka, sebelum mereka suci. Apabila mereka telah suci, maka campurilah mereka itu di tempat yang diperintahkan Allah kepadamu. Sesungguhnya Allah menyukai orang-orang yang bertaubat dan menyukai orang-orang yang mensucikan diri. (Al Baqarah:222)

Bagi Theo Van Gogh dan Hirsi Ali, ayat2 tersebut merupakan alasan yang memperbolehkan laki-laki muslim memperlakukan istrinya dengan buruk (pendapat yang salah tentu saja). Hirsi Ali maupun Van Gogh tampaknya membuat gambaran yang sederhana tentang Islam dengan mengambil dan menafsiran satu ayat. Dalam catatan ini saya tidak bermaksud membuat analisa ayat per ayat atau melakukan suatu analisis secara theologi. Saya hanya berpikir secara common senses saja.

Melihat sosok Hirsi Ali mengingatkan saya pada bukunya Franz Fanon “Black Skin, White Mask”. Buku ini berpengaruh dikalangan post-kolonialis. Dalam buku itu dengan mengunakan pendekatan Freudian, Fanon membuat analisa mengenai perasaan inferior orang kulit hitam ketika mereka berada pada kultur masyarakat eropa (kulit putih). Dalam konteks tersebut, Hirsi Ali seperti anjing pavlov, begitu mendengar feminis yang diutarakan orang eropa di tempat asalnya, langsung terbit air liurnya. Kemudian menjadi atheist karenanya. Menunjukan sikap inferior. Satu hal lagi yang terbilang fatal adalah dalam klaim2nya Hirsi Ali mencampurkan antara agama dan budaya. Budaya patriarki yang kuat sering ditampilkan dalam hubungan yang tidak seimbang antara laki dan perempuan. Perempuan sering disiksa suami adalah hal lumrah. Tapi dalam masyarakat muslim dimana budaya patriarki tidak begitu kuat, akan jarang ditemui suami menyiksa istri. Di Turki misalnya (atau di Indonesia, jawa, jawa timur, Surabaya, atau tepatnya di Karah Tama Asri 1/7 Surabaya…disitu ada suami yang perhatian sekali thd istrinya). Jadi Hirsi Ali membawa pengalaman budaya-nya (dr Somalia, yang juga terkenal dengan budaya kekerasannya lewat kisah perompak laut ..bukan ala one piece tentu saja) dalam kritik2nya tentang Islam. Jadi pendapat-pendapat Hirsi Ali kadang bahkan menjadi tertawaan karena dianggap bukan sesuatu yang nyata terjadi di banyak negara dengan mayoritas penduduknya yang memeluk islam.

Masyarakat barat sendiri sangat menyukai isu-isu yang diutarakan Hirsi Ali. Mereka juga lupa bahwa barat juga pernah mengalami tradisi dimana perempuan dinistakan.Sikap Belanda terhadap negara-negara jajahannya juga sangat buruk.

 

 

Seorang teman yang sdg menempuh studi S2 di UGM beberapa jam yang lalu menanyakan pada saya mengenai buku yang berkaitan dengan teori DBO. DBO adalah kependekan dari Desires-Beliefs-Opportunities . Ketika mendengar kata desire dalam bayangan saya mungkin teori ini mengadopsi pandangan-pandangan psikoanalisis lacanian atau sejenisnya.

Terus terang saya baru dengar ada teori sosial seperti itu.Bahkan pertama mendengar yang terlintas di benak saya justru penyakit demam berdarah (karena ada kata DB-nya). Kata teman ini teori mutakhir dalam ilmu sosial (mungkin ini pentingnya kenapa update pengetahuan harus melalui pendidikan formal dengan kata lain sekolah lagi). Karena penasaran saya akhirnya mencari buku yang berkaitan dengan teori DBO.

Nah buku yang saya dapatkan adalah seperti dibawah ini. DBO theory pertama diungkapkan oleh Peter Hedstrom, sosiolog dari Universitas Oxford. Buku ini memberi banyak penjelasan apa itu DBO theory berserta contoh bagaimana mengaplikasikannya.

DBO theory sendiri dimaksudkan oleh Prof. Hedstrom sebagai teori sosiologi yang mempunyai kekuatan untuk menjelaskan sekaligus mempunyai presisi dalam memberi informasi atas riset sosiologi dan pemahamannya.

Komponen utama DBO theory adalah sbb:

Lingkup yang mendasari komponen-komponen DBO adalah aksi dan interaksi. Dengan kata lain DBO theory adalah penjelasan baru mengenai aksi dan interaksi. Konsep aksi merujuk pada tindakan yang telah “diniatkan” dilakukan. Seperti gbr diatas aksi atau tindakan aktor i, dipengaruhi oleh desires,beliefs maupun opportunities aktor i. Desire adalah keinginan atau kehendak. Belief adalah preposisi mengenai keyakinan yang dipegang sebagai benar.Sementara Opportunities digambarkan sebagai “menu” bagi alternatif tindakan yang tersedia bagi aktor. Baik desire maupun belief adalah fenomena mental yang bisa dikatakan sebagai alasan mengapa aktor melakukan suatu tindakan. Misalnya: mengapa orang (dalam gbr diatas disebut actor i ) bisa tanpa malu menuntut barang yang bukan hak-nya (karena jelas barang tersebut keberadaanya bukan melalui pegadaan rutin khusus untuk dia, tp melalui hibah murni untuk kemajuan suatu unit), bisa dijelaskan melalui unit DBO-nya. Desire -nya bisa jadi dia ingin punya barang tersebut tidak peduli darimana asalnya; Beliefs keiinginan tersebut didasarkan pada keyakinannya bahwa barang yang dia gunakan sekarang kalah canggih dengan barang hibah tersebut; opportunities, karena unit tersebut tidak berada dibawahnya maka kontrol atas unit tersebut tidak dapat dia lakukan, dengan kata lain barang2 tersebut diluar kontrolnya. Berdasarkan kemungkinan unit DBO tersebut maka actor i akan melakukan tindakan mulai rasa iri yang dinyatakan maupun yang tidak sampai pada penyebaran gossip.

Teori DBO bisa bersifat dyadic. Ini terjadi ketika tindakan dari aktor melibatkan aktor yang lain.

“The Death of the Author”

by Roland Barthes (from Image, Music, Text, 1977)

In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’ Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon, however, has varied; in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ — the mastery of the narrative code —may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’. The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism,

French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers have long since attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’. Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader). Valery, encumbered by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme’s theory but, his taste for classicism leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it were, ‘hazardous’ nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works he militated in favour of the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to the writer’s interiority seemed to him pure superstition. Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological character of what are called his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write (the young man in the novel — but, in fact, how old is he and who is he? — wants to write but cannot; the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou — in his anecdotal, historical reality — is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Lastly, to go no further than this prehistory of modernity, Surrealism, though unable to accord language a supreme place (language being system and the aim of the movement being, romantically, a direct subversion of codes—itself moreover illusory: a code cannot be destroyed, only ‘played off’), contributed to the desacrilization of the image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expectations of meaning (the famous surrealist ‘jolt’), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of several people writing together. Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really becoming invalid), linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by show ing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors. Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable ‘distancing’, the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text (or — which is the same thing —the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent). The temporality is different. The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered—something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely ‘polish’ his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in order to translate absolutely modern ideas and images into that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis Artificiels), ‘created for himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes’. Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined, along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would bebetter from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.

Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no ‘person’, says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading. Another—very precise— example will help to make this clear: recent research (J.-P. Vernant) has demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from words with double meanings that each character understands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the ‘tragic’); there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him—this someone being precisely the reader (or here, the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader’s rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Punishment for Pride

In that marvelous time in which Theology
Flourished with the greatest energy and vigor,
It is said that one day a most learned doctor
— After winning by force the indifferent hearts,
Having stirred them in the dark depths of their being;
After crossing on the way to celestial glory,
Singular and strange roads, even to him unknown,
Which only pure Spirits, perhaps, had reached, —
Panic-stricken, like one who has clambered too high,
He cried, carried away by a satanic pride:
“Jesus, little jesus! I raised you very high!
But had I wished to attack you through the defect
In your armor, your shame would equal your glory,
And you would be no more than a despised fetus!”

At that very moment his reason departed.
A crape of mourning veiled the brilliance of that sun;
Complete chaos rolled in and filled that intellect,
A temple once alive, ordered and opulent,
Within whose walls so much pomp had glittered.
Silence and darkness took possession of it
Like a cellar to which the key is lost.

Henceforth he was like the beasts in the street,
And when he went along, seeing nothing, across
The fields, distinguishing nor summer nor winter,
Dirty, useless, ugly, like a discarded thing,
He was the laughing-stock, the joke, of the children.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Hymn to Beauty

Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss,
Beauty? Your gaze, divine and infernal,
Pours out confusedly benevolence and crime,
And one may for that, compare you to wine.

You contain in your eyes the sunset and the dawn;
You scatter perfumes like a stormy night;
Your kisses are a philtre, your mouth an amphora,
Which make the hero weak and the child courageous.

Do you come from the stars or rise from the black pit?
Destiny, bewitched, follows your skirts like a dog;
You sow at random joy and disaster,
And you govern all things but answer for nothing.

You walk upon corpses which you mock, O Beauty!
Of your jewels Horror is not the least charming,
And Murder, among your dearest trinkets,
Dances amorously upon your proud belly.

The dazzled moth flies toward you, O candle!
Crepitates, flames and says: “Blessed be this flambeau!”
The panting lover bending o’er his fair one
Looks like a dying man caressing his own tomb,

Whether you come from heaven or from hell, who cares,
O Beauty! Huge, fearful, ingenuous monster!
If your regard, your smile, your foot, open for me
An Infinite I love but have not ever known?

From God or Satan, who cares? Angel or Siren,
Who cares, if you make, — fay with the velvet eyes,
Rhythm, perfume, glimmer; my one and only queen!
The world less hideous, the minutes less leaden?

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Teman di kantor ada yg putus cinta..setelah putus cinta tiba2 dia bertanya bisa tdk tuhan menciptakan batu besar yang tuhan dendiri tidak bisa mengangkatnya…ternyata itu pertanyaan yg sejak dulu ditanyakan….ini ada artikel dr wikipedia…

 

 

The omnipotence paradox is a family of related paradoxes addressing the question of what is possible for an omnipotent being to do. The paradox states that if the being can perform such actions, then it can limit its own ability to perform actions and hence it cannot perform all actions, yet, on the other hand, if it cannot limit its own actions, then that is something it cannot do.

One version of the omnipotence paradox is the so-called paradox of the stone: “Could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that even that being could not lift it?” If so, then it seems that the being could cease to be omnipotent; if not, it seems that the being was not omnipotent to begin with.[2] One common response points out that this question makes implicit assertions that are inconsistent and self-contradictory. The phrase omnipotent being implicitly states that the phrase “a stone too heavy for him to lift” is meaningless.[3]

Thomas Aquinas asserts that the paradox arises from a misunderstanding of omnipotence. He maintains that inherent contradictions and logical impossibilities does not fall under the omnipotence of God.[4] J. L Cowan sees this paradox as a reason to reject the concept of absolute omnipotence,[5] while others, such as Descartes, argue that God is absolutely omnipotent, despite the problem.[6]
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[edit] Overview

A common modern version of the omnipotence paradox is expressed in the question: “Can an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that it cannot lift it?” This question generates a dilemma. The being can either create a stone which it cannot lift, or it cannot create a stone which it cannot lift. If the being can create a stone that it cannot lift, then it seems that it can cease to be omnipotent. If the being cannot create a stone which it cannot lift, then it seems it is already not omnipotent.

The problem is similar to another classic paradox, the irresistible force paradox: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? One response to this paradox is that if a force is irresistible, then by definition there is no truly immovable object; conversely, if an immovable object were to exist, then no force could be defined as being truly irresistible. But this way out is not possible in the omnipotence case, because the purpose is to ask if the being’s omnipotence makes its own omnipotence impossible.

J.L. Cowan attempts to resolve the paradox in “The Paradox of Omnipotence Revisited.” He proposes the following:

1. Either God can create a stone which he cannot lift, or he cannot create a stone which he cannot lift.
2. If God can create a stone which he cannot lift, then he is not omnipotent (since he cannot lift the stone in question).
3. If God cannot create a stone which he cannot lift, then he is not omnipotent (since he cannot create the stone in question).
4. Therefore God is not omnipotent.

C.S. Lewis in his book “The Problem of Pain” holds that the nature of the paradox is internal to the statement. To quote: “This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combination of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them two other words ‘God can’” (p. 18). In the end, “not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God”. (p. 18)[7]
[edit] Types of omnipotence
Main article: Omnipotence

Peter Geach describes and rejects four levels of omnipotence. He also defines and defends a lesser notion of the “almightiness” of God.

1. Y is absolutely omnipotent means that Y “can do everything absolutely. Everything that can be expressed in a string of words even if it can be shown to be self-contradictory,” Y “is not bound in action, as we are in thought by the laws of logic.”[8] This position is advanced by Descartes. It has the theological advantage of making God prior to the laws of logic, but the theological disadvantage of making God’s promises suspect. On this account, the omnipotence paradox is a genuine paradox, but genuine paradoxes might nonetheless be so.
2. Y is omnipotent means “Y can do X” is true if and only if X is a logically consistent description of a state of affairs. This position was once advocated by Thomas Aquinas.[9] This definition of omnipotence solves some of the paradoxes associated with omnipotence, but some modern formulations of the paradox still work against this definition. Let X = “to make something that its maker cannot lift”. As Mavrodes points out there is nothing logically contradictory about this; a man could, for example, make a boat which he could not lift.[10] It would be strange if humans could accomplish this feat, but an omnipotent being could not. Additionally, this definition has problems when X is morally or physically untenable for a being like God.
3. Y is omnipotent means “Y can do X” is true if and only if “Y does X” is logically consistent. Here the idea is to exclude actions which would be inconsistent for Y to do but might be consistent for others. Again sometimes it looks as if Aquinas takes this position.[11] Here Mavrodes’ worry about X= “to make something its maker cannot lift” will no longer be a problem because “God does X” is not logically consistent. However, this account may still have problems with moral issues like X = “tells a lie” or temporal issues like X = “brings it about that Rome was never founded.”[8]
4. Y is omnipotent means whenever “Y will bring about X” is logically possible, then “Y can bring about X” is true. This sense, also does not allow the paradox of omnipotence to arise, and unlike definition #3 avoids any temporal worries about whether or not an omnipotent being could change the past. However, Geach criticizes even this sense of omnipotence as misunderstanding the nature of God’s promises.[8]
5. Y is almighty means that Y is not just more powerful than any creature; no creature can compete with Y in power, even unsuccessfully.[8] In this account nothing like the omnipotence paradox arises, but perhaps that is because God is not taken to be in any sense omnipotent. On the other hand, Anselm of Canterbury seems to think that almightiness is one of the things that makes God count as omnipotent.[12]

The question, though, is whether these are really all just distinctions without a difference, at least a difference with respect to whether it really makes sense to say that a being is omnipotent, or all-powerful. It may sound good, particularly because it has been said so often, over so many centuries, but could there actually be a power of this sort?

The notion of omnipotence can also be applied to an entity in different ways. An essentially omnipotent being is an entity that is necessarily omnipotent. In contrast, an accidentally omnipotent being is an entity that can be omnipotent for a temporary period of time, and then becomes non-omnipotent. The omnipotence paradox can be applied differently to each type of being.[13]

Some Philosophers, such as René Descartes, argue that God is absolutely omnipotent.[6] In addition, some philosophers have considered the assumption that a being is either omnipotent or non-omnipotent to be a false dilemma, as it neglects the possibility of varying degrees of omnipotence.[14] Some modern approaches to the problem have involved semantic debates over whether language—and therefore philosophy—can meaningfully address the concept of omnipotence itself.[15]
[edit] Philosophical answers

Asking God to create a stone which he cannot lift requires two things—an ability, and also a weakness: The ability to create the stone and the inability or weakness of not being able to lift it. The paradox essentially implies that God is not omnipotent because he has a weakness, when the definition of omnipotence is not having a weakness[citation needed].

If God can do absolutely anything, then God can remove his own omnipotence. If God can remove his own omnipotence, then God can create an enormous stone, remove his own omnipotence, then not be able to lift the stone. This preserves the belief that God is omnipotent because this means that God can create a stone so large that God can’t even lift it. However there is a problem with this theory which is that if God were to remove his omnipotence he would not be able to restore it as he would not be omnipotent anymore. Therefore in this theory he would not be omnipotent after not being able to lift the stone.

One can attempt to resolve the paradox by asserting a kind of omnipotence that does not demand that a being must be able to do all things at all times. According to this line of reasoning, the being can create a stone which it cannot lift at the moment of creation. Being omnipotent, however, the being can always alter the stone later so that it can lift it. Therefore the being is still, perhaps, in some sense omnipotent.

This is roughly the view espoused by Matthew Harrison Brady, a character in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind loosely based upon William Jennings Bryan. In the climactic scene of the 1960 movie version, Brady argues, “Natural law was born in the mind of the Creator. He can change it — cancel it — use it as he pleases!” But this solution merely pushes the problem back a step; one may ask whether an omnipotent being can create a stone so immutable that the being itself cannot later alter it. But a similar response can be offered to respond to this and any further steps.

In a 1955 article published in the philosophy journal Mind, J. L. Mackie attempted to resolve the paradox by distinguishing between first-order omnipotence (unlimited power to act) and second-order omnipotence (unlimited power to determine what powers to act things shall have).[16] An omnipotent being with both first and second-order omnipotence at a particular time might restrict its own power to act and, henceforth, cease to be omnipotent in either sense. There has been considerable philosophical dispute since Mackie, as to the best way to formulate the paradox of omnipotence in formal logic.[17]

Another common response to the omnipotence paradox is to try to define omnipotence to mean something weaker than absolute omnipotence, such as definition 3 or 4 above. The paradox can be resolved by simply stipulating that omnipotence does not require the being to have abilities which are logically impossible, but only to be able to do anything which conforms to the laws of logic. A good example of a modern defender of this line of reasoning is George Mavrodes.[10] Essentially Mavrodes argues that it is no limitation on a being’s omnipotence to say that it cannot make a round square. Such a “task” is inherently nonsense. But not so, making a stone bigger than you can lift.

If a being is accidentally omnipotent, then it can resolve the paradox by creating a stone which it cannot lift and thereby becoming non-omnipotent. Unlike essentially omnipotent entities, it is possible for an accidentally omnipotent being to be non-omnipotent. This raises the question, however, of whether or not the being was ever truly omnipotent, or just capable of great power.[13] On the other hand, the ability to voluntarily give up great power is often thought of as central to the notion of the Christian Incarnation.[18]

If a being is essentially omnipotent, then it can also resolve the paradox (as long as we take omnipotence not to require absolute omnipotence). The omnipotent being is essentially omnipotent, and therefore it is impossible for it to be non-omnipotent. Further, the omnipotent being cannot do what is logically impossible. The creation of a stone which the omnipotent being cannot lift would be an impossibility, and therefore the omnipotent being is not required to do such a thing. The omnipotent being cannot create such a stone, but nevertheless retains its omnipotence. This solution works even with definition 2, as long as we also know the being is essentially omnipotent rather than accidentally so.

This was essentially the position taken by Augustine of Hippo in his The City of God:
“ For He is called omnipotent on account of His doing what He wills, not on account of His suffering what He wills not; for if that should befall Him, He would by no means be omnipotent. Wherefore, He cannot do some things for the very reason that He is omnipotent.[19] ”

Thus Augustine argued that God could not do anything or create any situation that would in effect make God not God.

Some philosophers maintain that the paradox can be resolved if the definition of omnipotence includes Descartes’ view that an omnipotent being can do the logically impossible. In this scenario, the omnipotent being could create a stone which it cannot lift, but could also then lift the stone anyway. Presumably, such a being could also make the sum 2 + 2 = 5 become mathematically possible or create a square triangle. This attempt to resolve the paradox is problematic in that the definition itself forgoes logical consistency. The paradox may be solved, but at the expense of making the logic a paraconsistent logic. This might not seem like a problem if one is already committed to dialetheism or some other form of logical transcendence.

Others[who?] have argued that (alluding to C.S. Lewis’ argument; see scholastic definition of omnipotence), that when talking about omnipotence, referencing “a rock so heavy that God cannot lift it” is nonsense just as much as referencing “a square circle.” So asking “Can God create a rock so heavy that even he cannot lift it?” is just as much nonsense as asking “Can God draw a square circle?” Therefore the question (and therefore the perceived paradox) is meaningless.
[edit] Language and omnipotence

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is often interpreted as arguing that language is not up to the task of describing the kind of power an omnipotent being would have. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he stays generally within the realm of logical positivism, until claim 6.4, but at 6.41 and following the succeeding propositions argue that ethics and several other issues are “transcendental” subjects which we cannot examine with language. Wittgenstein also mentions the will, life after death, and God; arguing that “When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words”.[20]

Wittgenstein’s work makes the omnipotence paradox a problem in semantics, the study of how symbols are given meaning. (The retort “That’s only semantics” is a way of saying that a statement only concerns the definitions of words, instead of anything important in the physical world.) According to the Tractatus, then, even attempting to formulate the omnipotence paradox is futile, since language cannot refer to the entities the paradox considers. The final proposition of the Tractatus gives Wittgenstein’s dictum for these circumstances: “What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.”[21] Wittgenstein’s approach to these problems is influential among other 20th century religious thinkers such as D. Z. Phillips.[22]

But in his later years, Wittgenstein wrote works which are often interpreted as conflicting with his positions in the Tractatus,[23] and indeed the later Wittgenstein is mainly seen as the leading critic of the early Wittgenstein.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems offers a mathematical response to the omnipotence paradox. The set of things that an omnipotent being can do is defined as ‘all actions’. The paradox then attempts to address something outside of the set leading to a situation where the set is attempting to be consistent, complete and self referential at the same time. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems states that this is the problem, not the paradox. If the paradox is logically redundant, there is no need to address it.
[edit] Other versions of the paradox

In the 6th century, Pseudo-Dionysius claims that a version of the omnipotence paradox constituted the dispute between St. Paul and Elmyas the Magician mentioned in Acts 13:8, but it is phrased in terms of a debate as to whether or not God can “deny himself” ala 2 Tim 2:13.[24] In the 11th century, St. Anselm argues that there are many things that God cannot do, but that nonetheless he counts as Omnipotent.[25]
A triangle on the Euclidean plane with sides, angles and vertices labeled; the sum ? + ? + ? must equal 180 degrees.

Thomas Aquinas advanced a version of the omnipotence paradox by asking whether God could create a triangle with internal angles that did not add up to 180 degrees. As Aquinas put it in Summa contra Gentiles:
“ Since the principles of certain sciences, such as logic, geometry and arithmetic are taken only from the formal principles of things, on which the essence of the thing depends, it follows that God could not make things contrary to these principles. For example, that a genus was not predicable of the species, or that lines drawn from the centre to the circumference were not equal, or that a triangle did not have three angles equal to two right angles.[26] ”

This can be done on a sphere, and not on a flat surface. The later invention of non-Euclidean geometry does not resolve this question; for one might as well ask, “If given the axioms of Riemannian geometry, can an omnipotent being create a triangle whose angles do not add up to more than 180 degrees?” In either case, the real question is whether or not an omnipotent being would have the ability to evade the consequences which follow logically from a system of axioms that the being created.[original research?]

A version of the paradox can also be seen in non-theological contexts. A similar problem occurs when accessing legislative or parliamentary sovereignty, which holds a specific legal institution to be omnipotent in legal power, and in particular such an institution’s ability to regulate itself.[27]

In a sense, the classic statement of the omnipotence paradox — a rock so heavy that its omnipotent creator cannot lift it — is grounded in Aristotelian science. After all, if one considers the stone’s position relative to the sun around which the planet orbits, one could hold that the stone is constantly being lifted — strained though that interpretation would be in the present context. Modern physics indicates that the choice of phrasing about lifting stones should relate to acceleration; however, this does not in itself of course invalidate the fundamental concept of the generalized omnipotence paradox. However, one could easily modify the classic statement as follows: “An omnipotent being creates a universe which follows the laws of Aristotelian physics. Within this universe, can the omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that the being cannot lift it?”

Ethan Allen’s Reason addresses the topics of original sin, theodicy and several others in classic Enlightenment fashion.[28] In Chapter 3, section IV, he notes that “omnipotence itself” could not exempt animal life from mortality, since change and death are defining attributes of such life. He argues, “the one cannot be without the other, any more than there could be a compact number of mountains without valleys, or that I could exist and not exist at the same time, or that God should effect any other contradiction in nature.” Labeled by his friends a Deist, Allen accepted the notion of a divine being, though throughout Reason he argues that even a divine being must be circumscribed by logic.

In Principles of Philosophy, Descartes tried refuting the existence of atoms with a variation of this argument, claiming God could not create things so indivisible that he could not divide them.