Wish I could be around for this. The video gives me chills.
As it happens, Adam Curtis is an excellent film maker. The Century of the Self, The Trap and The Power of Nightmares are all particularly prescient documentaries if you have the time. Everything else he does is good too.
As for Massive Attack, well. Everyone loves Massive Attack.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Inner Emancipation, as Well as Outer Pt. 2
Disclaimer: I suppose I flew off the handle in the previous post. Of course the entire array of behavior that a civilization engages in doesn't have to necessarily be traced to the mere twin impulses of material progress and conservative calcification. Such a picture is incredibly simplistic. But then posts on this blog are going to be highly stylized...I wish to work out certain ideas while having a bit of fun and literary flexibility so to speak. Hopefully sometime soon I'll get off my lazy ass and systematize these ideas into a cohesive body and make a book of it or something like that. I'll just keep telling myself that anyways. Meanwhile I can have my cake and eat it too. Good then!
So I asked before, whence comes this inner turmoil? Life systems are pretty resilient. They can undergo quite a bit of abuse and continue to function relatively well. Industrial civilization has seen its share of environmental degradation, worker abuse and outright war and yet it still manages to hobble along, and even reinvent itself at times.
The Roman Empire was pretty resilient: it went through a series of crises and civil wars, reinventing itself with the rise of reformers and innovative strongmen at critical junctures. There must have been several key moments along the way when members of the population thought, "Oh here it goes, this is the end," only to have the republic reconstitute itself and shamble on. It finally did collapse though.
Among various circles there's a sense today that we've reached a sort of a dead end. At least that's what I've seen. Granted, our imaginations are still blown wide open and there's plenty of information out there; lots of innovative ideas circulating at the moment. There's still a sense of material exhaustion however. There's a frustration that there is so much we can be doing, but then so little our leaders actually do. It is remarkable how those with so much power can be so myopic and self-interested. You know what they say about power.
The almost universal distaste of work is telling as well. What's happening there exactly? Why are so many people dissatisfied with the daily tasks that go towards sustaining a society? Possibly because of how badly many workers are treated? How the shopkeeper's ideology of capitalism no longer holds the sway it used to? How divorced workers are from the fruits of their labor?
Why are there so many renters now? Why so much debt? Where's the ownership? The instruments of debt have been turned into weapons to assault an entire population, but one wouldn't know it just abiding by the surface symbols. One is told one owes a certain amount of money and that seems fair enough, but upon greater scrutiny, the justification for amounts owed breaks down. Money is manipulated every day. Financial institutions cause great social instability and then pay themselves incredible amounts for it. Governments cover for said institutions.
It seems many of us have become increasingly unmoored from the collective purpose. It increasingly takes bad education, propaganda and the propagation of the national security and police state to hold everything together. There is a widespread distrust of institutions in the populace now, for good reason. Economic institutions further consolidate and become more monolithic and opaque everyday, while simultaneously attempting to extract more value from the working and consuming population. State institutions increasingly view their populations as threats.
It is hard to tell whether these effects are due to a declining rate of profit caused in part by monopolization and economic stagnation, or the increasing strain between perpetually climbing resource demands and resource stores. Perhaps it is both; whatever the case, such effects cause unfavorable changes in the population. Shit rolls downhill as they say, and the most rich and powerful are least likely to give up their lifestyles if they can help it.
Now at this point to say that the lower and middle classes are being reduced to slaves might be a little bit of an exaggeration, and a distortion of the meaning of the actual institution and all of the horrors that it entailed. But it isn't much of a stretch to say that we are seeing a new geopolitical phase in which industrial first world societies are beginning to treat most of their population like the vulnerable third world populations they have been exploiting since the colonial ages. The really curious thing is that this is happening everywhere. Consider that as the Roman Empire declined, the middle classes and other groups lower in the power ladder that weren't slaves became increasingly indebted to the moneyed classes, losing properties, becoming eviscerated by taxes and eventually becoming tied to the land they could previously migrate from to search for a better life.
Again, because of the rise of global oligarchy, financial institutions and the related monopolies? Shared global elite ideology? Or because of the increasingly fragile environment and energy loss that entails? Or both? Yes, the rise and fall of civilizations is a strange and complex thing.
It is important to remember that these phenomena are all tied together within a great historical event that is really beyond anyone's control. But we attempt to control our environment anyways, which isn't entirely irrational, since each of us does have a limited locus of control in the immediate environment, and the aggregate of those loci amount to what eventually manifests as the shape of our society. However, asshole bosses running around trying to bully their subordinates into being productive are only contributing to a more rapid rate of social disintegration in the long run, though their behavior is scoring short term spikes in productivity and profit for their masters. Such microcosms express truths throughout deflating empire. Such behavior multiplied and repeated throughout modern society accounts for the vast gulfs in communication, distrust and meanness present in the population, which is often directly and indirectly expressed in mainstream media and in the behavior of celebrities and the powerful. It would be nice if we were mature enough as a collective to step away for a moment and examine our trajectory, perhaps considering the changing of paths at some point down the road.
We as a species have these incredibly powerful computing machines in our heads, but we are constantly victim to the relentless valuation of world phenomena and the ensuing hierarchies and schisms this creates. Our valuations become part of our identities and we attach to them out of pride, oftentimes riding them even to our destruction. We ignore value-less organic cyclic change and the cosmic phenomena we are part of. Unfortunately valuation is a highly useful application, but it must be done right to be effective. Done wrong and it can be catastrophic.
For example, fundamentalist conservatives, in their tangible material suffering, look to the wrong valuations to affix themselves too. They mistake the various victories for LGBT and women's rights as particular causes of societal disintegration, specifically causing the breakdown of the family unit, a constitutive building block to their stable society, while in essence these changes are due in large part to the disintegration of a larger cultural hegemony, which can no longer suppress the interests of such groups. This is actually one of the good things about fragmentation. There will necessarily be the weakening of certain mechanisms of oppression, along with the strengthening of others.
Efforts to curtail disintegration by restoring a former archaic order by force may seem rather brutish and absurd, but it sounds pretty damn good to the regressives. And try changing their minds! So much of the rending forces that our society is experiencing right now are due in part to a multitude of competing fragmented ideologies; everyone is becoming increasingly desperate to fix things and everyone has a different idea how to do so. Hell I'm not even sure what I'm doing.
It is very easy to become confused about the nature of causation. Perhaps it is better to come to terms with the fact that we only know how it works approximately. We can trace out limited causal chains, with the proximal effects to one's locus of control easier to understand than distant ones. David Hume understood this centuries ago.
Ah but now I'm getting ahead of myself. So we have a crude outline of the cosmic nature of our current state of affairs, as well as a rough sketch of some of the subjective and political problems that arise in the winter phase of a civilization's lifespan, or the coalescing and eventual deflation of empire, including the material process of a majority population becoming virtual slaves to a minority population.
Next we shall brush some of this negativity aside and contemplate the virtues of constructing a new positive ideology and talk about the mechanics and implications of a greater project of inner and outer emancipation.
So I asked before, whence comes this inner turmoil? Life systems are pretty resilient. They can undergo quite a bit of abuse and continue to function relatively well. Industrial civilization has seen its share of environmental degradation, worker abuse and outright war and yet it still manages to hobble along, and even reinvent itself at times.
The Roman Empire was pretty resilient: it went through a series of crises and civil wars, reinventing itself with the rise of reformers and innovative strongmen at critical junctures. There must have been several key moments along the way when members of the population thought, "Oh here it goes, this is the end," only to have the republic reconstitute itself and shamble on. It finally did collapse though.
Among various circles there's a sense today that we've reached a sort of a dead end. At least that's what I've seen. Granted, our imaginations are still blown wide open and there's plenty of information out there; lots of innovative ideas circulating at the moment. There's still a sense of material exhaustion however. There's a frustration that there is so much we can be doing, but then so little our leaders actually do. It is remarkable how those with so much power can be so myopic and self-interested. You know what they say about power.
The almost universal distaste of work is telling as well. What's happening there exactly? Why are so many people dissatisfied with the daily tasks that go towards sustaining a society? Possibly because of how badly many workers are treated? How the shopkeeper's ideology of capitalism no longer holds the sway it used to? How divorced workers are from the fruits of their labor?
Why are there so many renters now? Why so much debt? Where's the ownership? The instruments of debt have been turned into weapons to assault an entire population, but one wouldn't know it just abiding by the surface symbols. One is told one owes a certain amount of money and that seems fair enough, but upon greater scrutiny, the justification for amounts owed breaks down. Money is manipulated every day. Financial institutions cause great social instability and then pay themselves incredible amounts for it. Governments cover for said institutions.
It seems many of us have become increasingly unmoored from the collective purpose. It increasingly takes bad education, propaganda and the propagation of the national security and police state to hold everything together. There is a widespread distrust of institutions in the populace now, for good reason. Economic institutions further consolidate and become more monolithic and opaque everyday, while simultaneously attempting to extract more value from the working and consuming population. State institutions increasingly view their populations as threats.
It is hard to tell whether these effects are due to a declining rate of profit caused in part by monopolization and economic stagnation, or the increasing strain between perpetually climbing resource demands and resource stores. Perhaps it is both; whatever the case, such effects cause unfavorable changes in the population. Shit rolls downhill as they say, and the most rich and powerful are least likely to give up their lifestyles if they can help it.
Now at this point to say that the lower and middle classes are being reduced to slaves might be a little bit of an exaggeration, and a distortion of the meaning of the actual institution and all of the horrors that it entailed. But it isn't much of a stretch to say that we are seeing a new geopolitical phase in which industrial first world societies are beginning to treat most of their population like the vulnerable third world populations they have been exploiting since the colonial ages. The really curious thing is that this is happening everywhere. Consider that as the Roman Empire declined, the middle classes and other groups lower in the power ladder that weren't slaves became increasingly indebted to the moneyed classes, losing properties, becoming eviscerated by taxes and eventually becoming tied to the land they could previously migrate from to search for a better life.
Again, because of the rise of global oligarchy, financial institutions and the related monopolies? Shared global elite ideology? Or because of the increasingly fragile environment and energy loss that entails? Or both? Yes, the rise and fall of civilizations is a strange and complex thing.
It is important to remember that these phenomena are all tied together within a great historical event that is really beyond anyone's control. But we attempt to control our environment anyways, which isn't entirely irrational, since each of us does have a limited locus of control in the immediate environment, and the aggregate of those loci amount to what eventually manifests as the shape of our society. However, asshole bosses running around trying to bully their subordinates into being productive are only contributing to a more rapid rate of social disintegration in the long run, though their behavior is scoring short term spikes in productivity and profit for their masters. Such microcosms express truths throughout deflating empire. Such behavior multiplied and repeated throughout modern society accounts for the vast gulfs in communication, distrust and meanness present in the population, which is often directly and indirectly expressed in mainstream media and in the behavior of celebrities and the powerful. It would be nice if we were mature enough as a collective to step away for a moment and examine our trajectory, perhaps considering the changing of paths at some point down the road.
We as a species have these incredibly powerful computing machines in our heads, but we are constantly victim to the relentless valuation of world phenomena and the ensuing hierarchies and schisms this creates. Our valuations become part of our identities and we attach to them out of pride, oftentimes riding them even to our destruction. We ignore value-less organic cyclic change and the cosmic phenomena we are part of. Unfortunately valuation is a highly useful application, but it must be done right to be effective. Done wrong and it can be catastrophic.
For example, fundamentalist conservatives, in their tangible material suffering, look to the wrong valuations to affix themselves too. They mistake the various victories for LGBT and women's rights as particular causes of societal disintegration, specifically causing the breakdown of the family unit, a constitutive building block to their stable society, while in essence these changes are due in large part to the disintegration of a larger cultural hegemony, which can no longer suppress the interests of such groups. This is actually one of the good things about fragmentation. There will necessarily be the weakening of certain mechanisms of oppression, along with the strengthening of others.
Efforts to curtail disintegration by restoring a former archaic order by force may seem rather brutish and absurd, but it sounds pretty damn good to the regressives. And try changing their minds! So much of the rending forces that our society is experiencing right now are due in part to a multitude of competing fragmented ideologies; everyone is becoming increasingly desperate to fix things and everyone has a different idea how to do so. Hell I'm not even sure what I'm doing.
It is very easy to become confused about the nature of causation. Perhaps it is better to come to terms with the fact that we only know how it works approximately. We can trace out limited causal chains, with the proximal effects to one's locus of control easier to understand than distant ones. David Hume understood this centuries ago.
Ah but now I'm getting ahead of myself. So we have a crude outline of the cosmic nature of our current state of affairs, as well as a rough sketch of some of the subjective and political problems that arise in the winter phase of a civilization's lifespan, or the coalescing and eventual deflation of empire, including the material process of a majority population becoming virtual slaves to a minority population.
Next we shall brush some of this negativity aside and contemplate the virtues of constructing a new positive ideology and talk about the mechanics and implications of a greater project of inner and outer emancipation.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Inner Emancipation, as Well as Outer Pt. 1
I suppose I've let this one sit for a while.
This is going to be a biggie, so I'll divide it up into parts. It is also going to be a freakin' mess because I've let it sit so long and my workflow has been disrupted, so I'm going to have to pull a few things together haphazardly. And also I've had a bit of tequila to get things moving again and ah jeez here it goes. Apologies in advance.
So then, how does one emancipate oneself from inner, or mental slavery? What sort of condition is this in the first place? What does it mean to be a slave? Is one necessarily a slave if one is genuinely happy in a subservient position? What characterizes subservience? Who has the standing to make such a judgement? Is such a judgment possible?
This endless question-begging could go on no doubt. Like a drill you can go digging down through what is solid until you break through into open space and continue on with a free fall into the void, spinning about and perhaps screaming every so often. Despite the dreadful connotations, I highly recommend tumbling around in existential terror for a while; it is very constructive. So long as you come back out right side up. But maybe now is not the time.
Of course it is never a good idea to barrel into matters such as this and begin pronouncing groundless judgments either, so hopefully we can steer a middle ground and ask some serious questions without becoming too unhinged, however welcome that may be in some cases.
Maybe we could start with the macro, and in so doing, you know, answer some of those more fundamental questions and then carefully zoom our way in to the micro and talk about practical action.
So then what are we doing here? Whence comes this pain, this inner turmoil? Why even ask questions like these?
Let's pull back even further. We have this vast universe that stretches before us, yet we occupy such a small portion of it. There seems to be these limited pockets of space in which environmental conditions allow for the flourishing of life. And on Earth itself, we have this incredible expanse of land, and considering the capacity of our imagination, we could be doing just about anything anywhere. So why do we walk on these strange sidewalks and drive on these strange streets...these slabs of concrete and asphalt that block the very circulation of life?
Yes, it seems strange, these slabs we lay down in greater and greater sprawls that essentially curtail any hope of any organic life to subsist on it, save our own. And even then, you can imagine our living on a total concrete planet, and well, we wouldn't last very long would we? And at this period of time we have created these urban sprawls, these foliage and food deserts, and considering that we are systematically destroying what stretches of arable land we have left, it seems that we have put ourselves in quite the difficult position.
But then a generation or two ago this state of affairs seemed like paradise to most. Well and it all sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. You can try to control the flow of organic life, keep those pesky bushes out of the way, keep the land from deforming due to erosion or plant-life invasion or etc by laying down these perfectly flat, cohesive bodies of rock and tar and what have you. Even these things break up over time but they definitely expand that timeframe. Then it is impossible to sustain other pesky tiers of life such as animals and insects which could be bothersome to the human population. Of course many of these forms of life can subsist on concrete surfaces; you see ants on sidewalks and squirrels running across streets all the time. I'm mainly talking about the more general logic of separating ourselves from the environment with artificially manipulated substances of our own creation, while encapsulating and enclosing all of our open spaces and then purging the interior of these spaces of any foreign organic matter that doesn't agree with us or isn't controlled by us.
On such surfaces we can expect incredible transportation, housing, subsistence, comforts, all carefully crafted in accordance with human knowledge and our use of various technologies to manipulate the world around us. Within such an environment we could experience and contemplate the finer points of existence with our highly evolved consciousness.
You could imagine that theoretically such a mode of control is possible. With our scientific knowledge we could ascertain which parts of the environment we should be cultivating and which parts it is okay to manipulate and impose our will on. This knowledge is out there now as it happens. Everything we need to know to continue subsisting as an industrial society is available in the form of information and probably possible.
Now, today our society could look very different. Arcology, or the concept of combining architecture with an understanding of deep ecology, is a concept that has been around for some time. We don't have to be stuck with these huge wasteful suburban sprawls. We don't have to still be using dirty energies like oil and coal. There are plenty of promising types of renewable energy that we could have been transitioning to decades ago. We could be directing oceans of resources towards research and development, eventually producing efficiencies and lowered costs. But then the political dimension comes in.
Politics can be mostly reduced down to the fact that there are varying types of people all with their own personal histories, intellectual capacities, emotional constitutions and etc and that to have cooperation on a mass scale you have to take into account the dynamics of such a diversity. Now unfortunately there are several natural human tendencies that manifest themselves in every culture. There are people out there that are only interested in the sensation of being superior to another, having power in other words, while seeking to enjoy the various sensory pleasures available to these complex bodies of ours, and seeking ever greater heights in this superiority and pleasurable sensation. And for these reasons these are the people that usually come into possession of a greater proportion of material power, possession of the reigns of the state, of the monopoly on violence, of powerful economic entities and etc.
So we've chosen as a society (well not all of us, a few have chosen) to maintain urban sprawl because it necessitates the consumption of petroleum products, automobiles and the countless other objects produced to facilitate such an environment. We continue to rely on petroleum and other related products mentioned above because it benefits those who control such resources. This choice in turn necessitates all sorts of political mechanisms to manage those left out of the picture: imperial wars intended to sustain the asymmetrical flow of resources to empire, prison systems to contain the superfluous populations (superfluous to the imperial plan anyways), walls, gates, laws, weapons, etc. etc. So it seems that a great cultural idea (and the material civilization that flourishes around it) has a certain inertia, which manifests in the relentless production of conventional individuals, orbiting in the same well-worn pathways of administration.
This social and ideological conventionality crops up in every society across time. It seems that the people that become the most exquisitely aware of the nature of things and the correct way to live and of good ethics on their own without it being taught by some authority are people that have become dislodged in some way from the conventional structure itself, which happens as a consequence of greater processes of what are probably processes of deterioration over time.This is part of what we are. It is how the matter that we are part of behaves.
And the fact is that of all the possible modes of existence we could be exercising, we have chosen to live in this one, this absurd civilization of shopkeepers powered by dirty energy whose processes undermine the very environment it is housed in. Ah but to be fair, such things happen. Maybe we didn't completely choose.
So on a cosmic level, we've reached this point of history by a principle of least resistance. Life grew out of necessity from where it could, and like water flows down a mountain, we've flowed as a species to this point, evolving to solve various problems and escape problems internal to the systems we've evolved to solve the problems, perhaps hardening along the way in this great stream in an attempt to freeze our new-found gains, only to crumble in time and flow on.
However, as comforting as the cosmic explanation is and how it relieves us of the burden of historical responsibility, we are still interested in the human subjective experience of such a process, no? What can we say about what we are experiencing as individuals now? And how to move forward from this point?
In the next parts, on to the subjective and political aspects of this state of affairs, as well as the consideration of the practical work behind emancipation, accompanied by a bucketful of caveats and alternative considerations, as is the custom.
Note: I've mainly described U.S. empire at this point. There's plenty more complexity to this issue, as infrastructure has taken different shapes around the world, but some of the more general characteristics of industrial society as it exists globally apply.
This is going to be a biggie, so I'll divide it up into parts. It is also going to be a freakin' mess because I've let it sit so long and my workflow has been disrupted, so I'm going to have to pull a few things together haphazardly. And also I've had a bit of tequila to get things moving again and ah jeez here it goes. Apologies in advance.
So then, how does one emancipate oneself from inner, or mental slavery? What sort of condition is this in the first place? What does it mean to be a slave? Is one necessarily a slave if one is genuinely happy in a subservient position? What characterizes subservience? Who has the standing to make such a judgement? Is such a judgment possible?
This endless question-begging could go on no doubt. Like a drill you can go digging down through what is solid until you break through into open space and continue on with a free fall into the void, spinning about and perhaps screaming every so often. Despite the dreadful connotations, I highly recommend tumbling around in existential terror for a while; it is very constructive. So long as you come back out right side up. But maybe now is not the time.
Of course it is never a good idea to barrel into matters such as this and begin pronouncing groundless judgments either, so hopefully we can steer a middle ground and ask some serious questions without becoming too unhinged, however welcome that may be in some cases.
Maybe we could start with the macro, and in so doing, you know, answer some of those more fundamental questions and then carefully zoom our way in to the micro and talk about practical action.
So then what are we doing here? Whence comes this pain, this inner turmoil? Why even ask questions like these?
Let's pull back even further. We have this vast universe that stretches before us, yet we occupy such a small portion of it. There seems to be these limited pockets of space in which environmental conditions allow for the flourishing of life. And on Earth itself, we have this incredible expanse of land, and considering the capacity of our imagination, we could be doing just about anything anywhere. So why do we walk on these strange sidewalks and drive on these strange streets...these slabs of concrete and asphalt that block the very circulation of life?
Yes, it seems strange, these slabs we lay down in greater and greater sprawls that essentially curtail any hope of any organic life to subsist on it, save our own. And even then, you can imagine our living on a total concrete planet, and well, we wouldn't last very long would we? And at this period of time we have created these urban sprawls, these foliage and food deserts, and considering that we are systematically destroying what stretches of arable land we have left, it seems that we have put ourselves in quite the difficult position.
But then a generation or two ago this state of affairs seemed like paradise to most. Well and it all sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. You can try to control the flow of organic life, keep those pesky bushes out of the way, keep the land from deforming due to erosion or plant-life invasion or etc by laying down these perfectly flat, cohesive bodies of rock and tar and what have you. Even these things break up over time but they definitely expand that timeframe. Then it is impossible to sustain other pesky tiers of life such as animals and insects which could be bothersome to the human population. Of course many of these forms of life can subsist on concrete surfaces; you see ants on sidewalks and squirrels running across streets all the time. I'm mainly talking about the more general logic of separating ourselves from the environment with artificially manipulated substances of our own creation, while encapsulating and enclosing all of our open spaces and then purging the interior of these spaces of any foreign organic matter that doesn't agree with us or isn't controlled by us.
On such surfaces we can expect incredible transportation, housing, subsistence, comforts, all carefully crafted in accordance with human knowledge and our use of various technologies to manipulate the world around us. Within such an environment we could experience and contemplate the finer points of existence with our highly evolved consciousness.
You could imagine that theoretically such a mode of control is possible. With our scientific knowledge we could ascertain which parts of the environment we should be cultivating and which parts it is okay to manipulate and impose our will on. This knowledge is out there now as it happens. Everything we need to know to continue subsisting as an industrial society is available in the form of information and probably possible.
Now, today our society could look very different. Arcology, or the concept of combining architecture with an understanding of deep ecology, is a concept that has been around for some time. We don't have to be stuck with these huge wasteful suburban sprawls. We don't have to still be using dirty energies like oil and coal. There are plenty of promising types of renewable energy that we could have been transitioning to decades ago. We could be directing oceans of resources towards research and development, eventually producing efficiencies and lowered costs. But then the political dimension comes in.
Politics can be mostly reduced down to the fact that there are varying types of people all with their own personal histories, intellectual capacities, emotional constitutions and etc and that to have cooperation on a mass scale you have to take into account the dynamics of such a diversity. Now unfortunately there are several natural human tendencies that manifest themselves in every culture. There are people out there that are only interested in the sensation of being superior to another, having power in other words, while seeking to enjoy the various sensory pleasures available to these complex bodies of ours, and seeking ever greater heights in this superiority and pleasurable sensation. And for these reasons these are the people that usually come into possession of a greater proportion of material power, possession of the reigns of the state, of the monopoly on violence, of powerful economic entities and etc.
So we've chosen as a society (well not all of us, a few have chosen) to maintain urban sprawl because it necessitates the consumption of petroleum products, automobiles and the countless other objects produced to facilitate such an environment. We continue to rely on petroleum and other related products mentioned above because it benefits those who control such resources. This choice in turn necessitates all sorts of political mechanisms to manage those left out of the picture: imperial wars intended to sustain the asymmetrical flow of resources to empire, prison systems to contain the superfluous populations (superfluous to the imperial plan anyways), walls, gates, laws, weapons, etc. etc. So it seems that a great cultural idea (and the material civilization that flourishes around it) has a certain inertia, which manifests in the relentless production of conventional individuals, orbiting in the same well-worn pathways of administration.
This social and ideological conventionality crops up in every society across time. It seems that the people that become the most exquisitely aware of the nature of things and the correct way to live and of good ethics on their own without it being taught by some authority are people that have become dislodged in some way from the conventional structure itself, which happens as a consequence of greater processes of what are probably processes of deterioration over time.This is part of what we are. It is how the matter that we are part of behaves.
And the fact is that of all the possible modes of existence we could be exercising, we have chosen to live in this one, this absurd civilization of shopkeepers powered by dirty energy whose processes undermine the very environment it is housed in. Ah but to be fair, such things happen. Maybe we didn't completely choose.
So on a cosmic level, we've reached this point of history by a principle of least resistance. Life grew out of necessity from where it could, and like water flows down a mountain, we've flowed as a species to this point, evolving to solve various problems and escape problems internal to the systems we've evolved to solve the problems, perhaps hardening along the way in this great stream in an attempt to freeze our new-found gains, only to crumble in time and flow on.
However, as comforting as the cosmic explanation is and how it relieves us of the burden of historical responsibility, we are still interested in the human subjective experience of such a process, no? What can we say about what we are experiencing as individuals now? And how to move forward from this point?
In the next parts, on to the subjective and political aspects of this state of affairs, as well as the consideration of the practical work behind emancipation, accompanied by a bucketful of caveats and alternative considerations, as is the custom.
Note: I've mainly described U.S. empire at this point. There's plenty more complexity to this issue, as infrastructure has taken different shapes around the world, but some of the more general characteristics of industrial society as it exists globally apply.
Checked Out?
Work sucks.
Haha, "roaming the halls spreading discontent"! That's one of the funniest things I've heard in a while.
I suppose its not really a laughing matter. Grim situation to be sure. Though I'm not entirely sure discontent needs to be spread at this point.
Supplemental.
Haha, "roaming the halls spreading discontent"! That's one of the funniest things I've heard in a while.
I suppose its not really a laughing matter. Grim situation to be sure. Though I'm not entirely sure discontent needs to be spread at this point.
Supplemental.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Phew
I'm working on a fairly large piece that requires quite a bit of exertion to get it all through. Unfortunately I'm at a point where I'm pretty scattered and intellectually and emotionally fatigued and I really want to finish the piece but I can't at the moment.
It is like I'm trying to do one more push-up, but I can't seem to pivot up past my locked elbows; my quivering muscles won't allow me to.
I get to these points occasionally. The best thing to do is rest and pursue other ends until the energy comes back...from where I have no idea. It is a bit frustrating though. One wants to defecate or get off the pot, to paraphrase an oft repeated phrase.
I'm also a bit frustrated with these self-absorbed posts. They get a little tiring and boring. We have serious problems to solve! We must understand the nature of things! Enough about me! But I am part of the nature of things I suppose. Oh well.
It is like I'm trying to do one more push-up, but I can't seem to pivot up past my locked elbows; my quivering muscles won't allow me to.
I get to these points occasionally. The best thing to do is rest and pursue other ends until the energy comes back...from where I have no idea. It is a bit frustrating though. One wants to defecate or get off the pot, to paraphrase an oft repeated phrase.
I'm also a bit frustrated with these self-absorbed posts. They get a little tiring and boring. We have serious problems to solve! We must understand the nature of things! Enough about me! But I am part of the nature of things I suppose. Oh well.
Dogs
Dogs are pretty social for the most part. If they smell traces of another dog on you they become quite enamored pretty quickly. You run with their kind and that must be alright. I also suspect that when they are sniffing around for a place to shit, they are looking for scents of other dogs that have done business there before, so as to be certain they are shitting in the right place and won't be scolded by the master. Just a guess. There's probably literature on the behavior but I haven't seen it myself.
Many of them develop pretty co-dependent relationships with their masters, as if the territory circumscribed by house and yard is a sort of nation onto itself, and that even members of their own species are highly suspect if trespassing on said territory. I've always found it strange that such a pampered, safe and comfortable animal finds the need to viciously protect its shelter from the most innocuous of potential threats. Must be an instinctual carry-over that must express itself in such an alien environment.
Master. Heh, these ape-gods we must be to them. These hulking creatures that magically produce their food, water and shelter, as well as bless them with all sorts of affection and prestige. It must be strange to be a dog, placing the extent of its trust in this towering creature that could easily destroy it. Of course there are breeds tough enough to reverse the balance of power physically. I'm thinking of something like a Pit Bull. But there are plenty of other breeds that remain relatively docile.
It is sort of an authoritarian relationship. Not that the dogs care. I try to reverse the power relations a little. I spoil the dogs and attempt to listen to them and demonstrate an increased sensitivity to their wishes. Gets me in trouble.
Many of them develop pretty co-dependent relationships with their masters, as if the territory circumscribed by house and yard is a sort of nation onto itself, and that even members of their own species are highly suspect if trespassing on said territory. I've always found it strange that such a pampered, safe and comfortable animal finds the need to viciously protect its shelter from the most innocuous of potential threats. Must be an instinctual carry-over that must express itself in such an alien environment.
Master. Heh, these ape-gods we must be to them. These hulking creatures that magically produce their food, water and shelter, as well as bless them with all sorts of affection and prestige. It must be strange to be a dog, placing the extent of its trust in this towering creature that could easily destroy it. Of course there are breeds tough enough to reverse the balance of power physically. I'm thinking of something like a Pit Bull. But there are plenty of other breeds that remain relatively docile.
It is sort of an authoritarian relationship. Not that the dogs care. I try to reverse the power relations a little. I spoil the dogs and attempt to listen to them and demonstrate an increased sensitivity to their wishes. Gets me in trouble.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Pop Music and Fast Food
What music seems to be is a sonic expression of those elemental forces that move us. A musical idea takes its shape from the intention of the musician, whether to communicate an emotion such as love, anger, despair or what have you, share a form of meditation, express movement and vitality and etc. The idea also takes its shape in accordance with the people relations that are necessary to make a collective musical piece. Music is not only an act of communication between the artist and the audience, but an act of communication between the artists themselves; of course this only holds if the power relations are relatively even.
It takes time to assemble a musical idea. At first there is chaos. Not only is each individual trying to find their voice, but each individual is striving to establish a musical connection to the other individuals involved in the musical group, as well as a connection to the aggregation of these connections which becomes something beyond the sum of its parts.
Over time as a music genre matures, the actual process of arriving at a coherent musical idea within the genre becomes more and more truncated, due to the repetitive reproduction of the rhythms, structures and aesthetics that have been found to work together. The process of assembling a given musical idea is then mastered and refined, allowing for careful work on the actual composition and architecture of the musical idea, as opposed to trying to perfect the process of assembling it.
Pop music (today's meaning of the word anyways) then is the deliberate assembly of a collection of musical elements that are found to be favorable for a large proportion of the consuming population. It is the complete short circuit of the organic music-making process, an artificial extraction and re-assembly of musical units, not unlike the production of fast food or the conducting of modern agriculture. Like processed food, some pop music is irresistible due to superficial sensations alone, and then some of it is pretty good, and then most of the rest of it is pretty bad; most of it is rarely nutritious.
It takes time to relearn the actual art of making music after the hyperconcentration and corruption of assembled music necessitates a return to the fundamentals.
It takes time to assemble a musical idea. At first there is chaos. Not only is each individual trying to find their voice, but each individual is striving to establish a musical connection to the other individuals involved in the musical group, as well as a connection to the aggregation of these connections which becomes something beyond the sum of its parts.
Over time as a music genre matures, the actual process of arriving at a coherent musical idea within the genre becomes more and more truncated, due to the repetitive reproduction of the rhythms, structures and aesthetics that have been found to work together. The process of assembling a given musical idea is then mastered and refined, allowing for careful work on the actual composition and architecture of the musical idea, as opposed to trying to perfect the process of assembling it.
Pop music (today's meaning of the word anyways) then is the deliberate assembly of a collection of musical elements that are found to be favorable for a large proportion of the consuming population. It is the complete short circuit of the organic music-making process, an artificial extraction and re-assembly of musical units, not unlike the production of fast food or the conducting of modern agriculture. Like processed food, some pop music is irresistible due to superficial sensations alone, and then some of it is pretty good, and then most of the rest of it is pretty bad; most of it is rarely nutritious.
It takes time to relearn the actual art of making music after the hyperconcentration and corruption of assembled music necessitates a return to the fundamentals.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Intermission?
Sort of tapped out on the writing at the moment. Been moving around a lot. Becoming intoxicated here and there and then the rest of the next day I spend in a bit of a fuzz. Some ideas floating around but nothing has crystallized yet. I guess I'm taking a break until it is ready to come out again.
Definitely not a bad thing. Been focusing on music and it has been really good. Sometimes it is nice to take a break from all those interlocked structures of thought that begin to arise upon deep reading and thinking. It always comes back faithfully if you let it drop for a while. And then when it comes back, perhaps some of the previous confusions are dusted away and one can resume on a fresh page.
Definitely not a bad thing. Been focusing on music and it has been really good. Sometimes it is nice to take a break from all those interlocked structures of thought that begin to arise upon deep reading and thinking. It always comes back faithfully if you let it drop for a while. And then when it comes back, perhaps some of the previous confusions are dusted away and one can resume on a fresh page.
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