From the Wikipedia article on lizard people:
"In February 2011, on the Opie and Anthony radio show, the comedian Louis C.K. asked former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a number of times if he and Dick Cheney were lizard people who enjoyed the taste of human flesh. Rumsfeld did not answer the question. Louis C.K. interpreted Rumsfeld's refusal to answer as an admission and further suggested that those who are lizard people cannot lie about it; when asked if they are lizards, they either have to avoid answering the question or say yes."
Friday, June 20, 2014
Conspiracy
In periods of expansion you have this simultaneous flourishing of new economic structures and the political frameworks to support them, but if a society collectively fails to understand the nature of energy cycles - an economic cycle is one of them: boom, bust, that sort of thing - then the resulting economic contraction will have more adverse consequences.
Alan Watts noted that guilt has something to do with it, a residue taken from overhanging Christian thought. Just as our human, temporal brain is built over our mammalian brain, which is in turn built over a more ancient lizard brain, our collective ideology and social structures are built as layers of interrelated functions taken from distinct periods of time.
Now in this case, the way our society is structured, and the way in which our mass psychology operates, this period of economic contraction is taking a specific course. To borrow car terminology, the structure is crumpling in the direction of least resistance. Points of reinforcement - or that is, whomever wields the most power - are holding shape while the lower classes are buckling around them.
All of those economic structures that formed to facilitate creative economic expansion still stand, as well as the political structures that support them, and they are all seeking to sustain themselves at once. So you get all sorts of effects from this.
You get an almost universal deterioration of product and service quality, yet prices tick steadily up. Planned obsolescence makes its appearance in greater force, with things breaking down quicker and with less use. Quantities of foodstuffs are steadily lowered within packaging while prices remain the same or increase. Ingredients are adulterated with low quality substitutes , or even unsafe substances. Financial fraud, dull creative works, a general perception of decreasing competence, you name it, coupled with increasing political violence performed on those who object or resist, or lord help them, attempt to take some power back.
It is understandable that someone would attempt to theorize this complex state of affairs with some simplistic or even cartoonish conspiracy theory. Most conspiracy theories are false on their face, as they are merely compressions that seek to concentrate various related facts in a digestible narrative. But even the most absurd conspiracy theories point to something that exists. They combine subconscious symbols and archetypes into a portrait that - though may be wildly distorted - communicates some sort of truth. There is still conspiring going on among the most powerful, but I'm not sure that there is any well-formed, unified conspiracy.
One of the most insidious and destructive conspiracy theory traditions, the variety of conspiracies generated from antisemitic sensibilities (the Rothschild conspiracy theory was one of the most famous) took its shape from various weakly related facts, such as the prominent presence of Jewish families in international banking and facilitator relationships with the various nation states that were increasingly hated by the masses, a tradition that was eventually weaponized by the Nazis to acquire power, with the horrifying results unfolding from an attempt of the scapegoating and liquidation of an entire race for a state of affairs whose causes were far more complex and historic, so you have to be very careful with these things naturally.
You can even see this happen on the family level. In a dysfunctional family, a narrative will coalesce with favored members acting as the victim of some injustice or insult, and the least favored scapegoated as the cause of it all, which provides a story to carry out practical individual actions with, but which obscures the reality that what is happening to the family is happening to the family as a body, a body situated within a greater social body.
You can even see this happen on the family level. In a dysfunctional family, a narrative will coalesce with favored members acting as the victim of some injustice or insult, and the least favored scapegoated as the cause of it all, which provides a story to carry out practical individual actions with, but which obscures the reality that what is happening to the family is happening to the family as a body, a body situated within a greater social body.
Another part of what makes reality so difficult to understand - well, it is easy for some, especially if you practice certain spiritual techniques - is this relentless generation of ideological and mythological artifacts which are supposed to carry this support function of a deeper understanding. Some are better than others though. You just have to learn how to sort through all the junk on top of everything else.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Change
I suspect that what makes change so difficult in a large-scale society is both human nature and the nature of the composition of the society itself. After all, if every one of us was inculcated from the very beginning to scrutinize ruthlessly every last logical assertion, and to question our superiors on every point, things would be very different. What we usually find instead is a systematic implementation of rule-following and conformity.
Don't talk back to your parents! Don't question teacher! And powerful-anthropomorphic-judgmental-deity-in-the-sky help you if you second-guess the boss! Maybe he or she will forgive you or maybe just throw you out on your bum, hmm? So the avenue to becoming powerful is overwhelmingly following the instructions of beings more powerful, doing things right - within a blueprint long ago set by betters, becoming liked by beings more powerful, and etc. And well how can you blame em? When you find something that works, you keep doing it...often long after it actually ceases to work, which is the kicker.
Some societies manage to be more flexible but this seems to be a common quality found in human nature. Besides a creative minority (whose numbers I suppose expand and contract in times good and bad, though I could be wrong about this) a large proportion of a populace tend to continue vibrating - or orbiting, I don't know, that's the simplest way to put it for now - in the manner at which they were first touched off. And it is not that this is an intrinsically bad thing - no, after all where would we stand had not the earth below us possessed the quality of forming strong, regular bonds that at least undergo change slower than it takes to adapt to that landscape. However when change becomes a necessity, this characteristic makes for troublesome weight, or a higher necessary threshold at which action is supposed to happen.
But back to people. I can't tell you how many conservative or even center-left individuals I've talked to have demonstrated the following: we'd agree on some damning set of facts and nod together solemnly in unison, and then they would go right back to repeating line-for-line tired strings of propagandistic logic. It is almost universally acknowledged that our congress is dysfunctional, our largest corporations are more destructive than useful, and that our political establishment is increasingly incapable of governing its own realm. But well "we have to do something about Iraq" and "oh well those crazies out there need to be taught a lesson" and "just look at how they treat their populations we have to do something!"
We have become increasingly incapable of governing ourselves, but somehow we can build shining democracies out in the imperial borderlands. And somehow the chaos out there is completely unconnected to the chaos in here, and all of the increasingly desperate efforts to shape and control it. I was baffled reading Arendt's account of European imperialism just before the outbreak of WWI: here societies that were in the process of disintegration could be placated by exhilarating tales of bettering the lives of all those poor brutes out in those foreign places. How do people fall for it?
Yet it is happening here and now! The same political process seems to have happened to the center left. With the failure of domestic transformation, ex-lefties turn to rooting for imperial nation-building. Right in front of us. If anything, an opportune moment for revelation.
It seems that if one has emotional commitments strong enough and axiomatic enough, no sort of boatload of facts can unseat them. The facts can be tucked away in harmless compartments, or even worked into an existing set of beliefs with baffling, athletic displays of pretzel logic. If one really believes in the goodness of the idea of American democracy and progress, no amount of facts to the contrary can dislodge that commitment. It really is a pretty common psychological observation. Again, this tendency is excellent if one is trying to build something worthwhile in times of adversity, but when it comes to dismantling that thing - when necessary of course - in times of adversity, this seems to become a problematic quality.
Part of this is owed to the fact that an emotional belief seems to be less an act of one's volition, but more a passive event which requires an external event to become active. In other words, it takes being acted on to exercise one's emotions. Emotions happen to us. We aren't quite sure where they come from, besides the structures they originate from. They are what bind us to the external. Granted, our executive functions can modulate our emotions and direct them into various actions, to an extent, but when they become strong enough, we are merely swept away, as it were. We become vessels to something else.
But then more sensitive individuals seem to have a freer movement of their emotional faculties. They are more able to investigate their commitments with clarity. They are acted on like everyone else, but perhaps they are less susceptible to becoming "stuck" on problematic notions.
So it is the case that broad, sweeping change is often initiated by a creative minority, whose passionate intensity sweeps through the rest of the populace like waves. As noted before, however, these changes aren't always revolutionary...reactionaries can be just as sensitive and just as powerful. It is all in the direction the wind is blowing, so to speak.
And then the process of revolution itself has a contentious quality. The largest revolutionary movements in the charged era of great depressions and world wars in the century before focused on the seizure of state machinery and top-down political transformations which seems less probable today. There are serious problems associated with top-down change, and then there is the question of what centralized levers of power can even be grabbed in this age? And will they hold when exerted on?
It seems to me, and many others, that this is an age of bottom-up transformation. Change must be initiated on the individual level, and in local peer to peer relationships. No one can be forced to take any given path because all of the force has been exhausted, as the trust in any sort of large-scale social endeavor has been exhausted. Effective power then, as opposed to force, consists in ability and integrity. If one can do things without becoming corrupted...if one can live frugally without inordinate wants and yet produce for oneself while remaining somewhat satisfied...and perhaps most importantly...dignified...there is power in that, because that is what everyone wants. If one can achieve these things, the ideology won't matter, everyone will want it. Yet paradoxically it requires ideology to implement.
It would take spiritual satisfaction, relational satisfaction, and material satisfaction, which are all interconnected but which require different practical and intellectual abilities to bring about. Changing oneself is perhaps the most difficult thing. Like lifting a body twice one's size, one has to simultaneously subsist in a deteriorating world while building for oneself something worthwhile. The practical skills required, and the intellectual peace of mind...well these things are hard won. Just surveying what it takes, and spending time in the wilderness away from the comforts of civilization, one gains an understanding of just what sort of a task we are talking about. But it can definitely be done.
Don't talk back to your parents! Don't question teacher! And powerful-anthropomorphic-judgmental-deity-in-the-sky help you if you second-guess the boss! Maybe he or she will forgive you or maybe just throw you out on your bum, hmm? So the avenue to becoming powerful is overwhelmingly following the instructions of beings more powerful, doing things right - within a blueprint long ago set by betters, becoming liked by beings more powerful, and etc. And well how can you blame em? When you find something that works, you keep doing it...often long after it actually ceases to work, which is the kicker.
Some societies manage to be more flexible but this seems to be a common quality found in human nature. Besides a creative minority (whose numbers I suppose expand and contract in times good and bad, though I could be wrong about this) a large proportion of a populace tend to continue vibrating - or orbiting, I don't know, that's the simplest way to put it for now - in the manner at which they were first touched off. And it is not that this is an intrinsically bad thing - no, after all where would we stand had not the earth below us possessed the quality of forming strong, regular bonds that at least undergo change slower than it takes to adapt to that landscape. However when change becomes a necessity, this characteristic makes for troublesome weight, or a higher necessary threshold at which action is supposed to happen.
But back to people. I can't tell you how many conservative or even center-left individuals I've talked to have demonstrated the following: we'd agree on some damning set of facts and nod together solemnly in unison, and then they would go right back to repeating line-for-line tired strings of propagandistic logic. It is almost universally acknowledged that our congress is dysfunctional, our largest corporations are more destructive than useful, and that our political establishment is increasingly incapable of governing its own realm. But well "we have to do something about Iraq" and "oh well those crazies out there need to be taught a lesson" and "just look at how they treat their populations we have to do something!"
We have become increasingly incapable of governing ourselves, but somehow we can build shining democracies out in the imperial borderlands. And somehow the chaos out there is completely unconnected to the chaos in here, and all of the increasingly desperate efforts to shape and control it. I was baffled reading Arendt's account of European imperialism just before the outbreak of WWI: here societies that were in the process of disintegration could be placated by exhilarating tales of bettering the lives of all those poor brutes out in those foreign places. How do people fall for it?
Yet it is happening here and now! The same political process seems to have happened to the center left. With the failure of domestic transformation, ex-lefties turn to rooting for imperial nation-building. Right in front of us. If anything, an opportune moment for revelation.
It seems that if one has emotional commitments strong enough and axiomatic enough, no sort of boatload of facts can unseat them. The facts can be tucked away in harmless compartments, or even worked into an existing set of beliefs with baffling, athletic displays of pretzel logic. If one really believes in the goodness of the idea of American democracy and progress, no amount of facts to the contrary can dislodge that commitment. It really is a pretty common psychological observation. Again, this tendency is excellent if one is trying to build something worthwhile in times of adversity, but when it comes to dismantling that thing - when necessary of course - in times of adversity, this seems to become a problematic quality.
Part of this is owed to the fact that an emotional belief seems to be less an act of one's volition, but more a passive event which requires an external event to become active. In other words, it takes being acted on to exercise one's emotions. Emotions happen to us. We aren't quite sure where they come from, besides the structures they originate from. They are what bind us to the external. Granted, our executive functions can modulate our emotions and direct them into various actions, to an extent, but when they become strong enough, we are merely swept away, as it were. We become vessels to something else.
But then more sensitive individuals seem to have a freer movement of their emotional faculties. They are more able to investigate their commitments with clarity. They are acted on like everyone else, but perhaps they are less susceptible to becoming "stuck" on problematic notions.
So it is the case that broad, sweeping change is often initiated by a creative minority, whose passionate intensity sweeps through the rest of the populace like waves. As noted before, however, these changes aren't always revolutionary...reactionaries can be just as sensitive and just as powerful. It is all in the direction the wind is blowing, so to speak.
And then the process of revolution itself has a contentious quality. The largest revolutionary movements in the charged era of great depressions and world wars in the century before focused on the seizure of state machinery and top-down political transformations which seems less probable today. There are serious problems associated with top-down change, and then there is the question of what centralized levers of power can even be grabbed in this age? And will they hold when exerted on?
It seems to me, and many others, that this is an age of bottom-up transformation. Change must be initiated on the individual level, and in local peer to peer relationships. No one can be forced to take any given path because all of the force has been exhausted, as the trust in any sort of large-scale social endeavor has been exhausted. Effective power then, as opposed to force, consists in ability and integrity. If one can do things without becoming corrupted...if one can live frugally without inordinate wants and yet produce for oneself while remaining somewhat satisfied...and perhaps most importantly...dignified...there is power in that, because that is what everyone wants. If one can achieve these things, the ideology won't matter, everyone will want it. Yet paradoxically it requires ideology to implement.
It would take spiritual satisfaction, relational satisfaction, and material satisfaction, which are all interconnected but which require different practical and intellectual abilities to bring about. Changing oneself is perhaps the most difficult thing. Like lifting a body twice one's size, one has to simultaneously subsist in a deteriorating world while building for oneself something worthwhile. The practical skills required, and the intellectual peace of mind...well these things are hard won. Just surveying what it takes, and spending time in the wilderness away from the comforts of civilization, one gains an understanding of just what sort of a task we are talking about. But it can definitely be done.
Monday, June 09, 2014
Her
Her is a wonderful - if slightly unrealistic (and I don't mean because of the futuristic premise, I'll get to that) - movie about a man who falls in love with a hyper-intelligent operating system. I'm going to get into some plot elements so don't read on if you haven't seen the movie and intend to see it eventually.
There is a lot going on in this movie. Though a large part of the movie consists of the implications of human relations with artificial intelligence - one that is learning and expanding no less - the central theme of the film is "the state of modern human relationships" as Rotten Tomatoes put it so succinctly.
There is a cultural analogy to this film's central dilemma, which is most easily illustrated by the hikikomori and otaku phenomena in Japan, phenomena which find similar expression throughout the modern developed world, especially in economically troubled places with high unemployment.
Hikikomori are basically increasingly isolated persons - typically young working-age males, though this observation could be distorted by gender norms - who hole up in their rooms in an extended family residence, often becoming more agoraphobic over time as their fear and shame increases. These individuals are increasingly left behind by society, their skills atrophying as they isolate themselves, which sets the conditions for increased anxiety and a self-reinforcing process in which they drop away from relationships and ambitions. The amount of hikikomori are projected to over a million individuals and growing, which is really a staggering number if you think about it.
Otaku are a subset within this hikikomori group who are generally men who isolate themselves and become celibate, preferring to indulge in virtual girlfriends and forego sex and family.
If you consider the economic conditions facing Japan, and the country's recent economic history, these cultural phenomena don't come as much of a surprise. In the early 90s Japan had an enormous asset price bubble that burst, plunging the country into a "Lost Decade" that many feel didn't really end, thanks in large part to the global economic slowdown. So you have two entire decades of economic stagnation, and an entire generation of youth that have no hope of ever achieving the wealth their parents had. There has been a collapse of any semblance of a community framework: the Japanese corporation, which was traditionally the primary avenue in which young Japanese achieved a solid economic footing and became integrated into a community with, has increasingly become an exclusive refuge for the well-connected, due to mass layoffs and contraction caused by economic deflation.
Besides corporate men, you have migrant workers, temporary workers, part-timers, freelancers, and the straight up unemployed, who tend to gradually become more ostracized, many of whom drop away to escape social discord, only to find themselves in an equally debilitating trap of isolation and anxiety.
This situation could be seen to be a grim preview for other developed nations in economic decline. Economic conditions in the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) bloc in the Eurozone are particularly grim. The phenomenon of the self-exiled youth in withdrawal is beginning to crop up in places like Spain and Italy, conditions which are mirrored in the rapidly degenerating United States.
In the United States, greater swathes of the youth population stay living with their parents or move back in with their parents, and who knows how many become increasingly isolated in the process. Now, I happen to think highly of the extended family arrangement, and am of the opinion that the nuclear family was probably a cultural and economic anomaly that was possible due to abundant energies found in fossil fuels and the corresponding industrial processes that are now coming to an end. Living with family can actually cut down on social isolation for all persons involved, and extended families are also the norm in Japan, but then there is a parallel problem in which the youth in these extended families halt the growth and maturation of their own social and professional lives.
This is a serious and tragic problem which has no immediate solution, contrary to the snide suggestion at the end of the otaku article that Japanese men should just man up and go make babies. Man up, Japanese men! Throw yourselves lovingly into the economic grinder and accept your fate as a lost generation. The man-children meme itself is a problematic one, as commentators walk the line between successfully (and hilariously) rebuking the aggressor (entitled, misogynistic men with power) and cruelly blaming the victim for shrinking away from an increasingly inhumane society. But I digress.
Her is an elegant, visually arresting, and at times philosophically substantial meditation on this traumatic social alienation, as well as the relationships we try to nurse as a society's traditional framework for shared community dissolves, all complicated by our increasingly symbiotic relationship with a technology whose capabilities are expanding faster than we can understand them.
The film isn't economically realistic: all of the economic causes beneath the phenomenon of social alienation are airbrushed away. The lead character Theodore Twombly works as a love letter writer in this sort of industrial writing operation, but whose workplace happens to be squeaky clean, vibrant, and hip. Twombly enjoys a penthouse suite in a sky rise apartment with a dazzling view of the city, as well as an assortment of powerful technological implements.
I can tell you from first-hand experience: I have written for and currently write for an industrial-style writing outfit (that's how they do it these days) and I'm afraid I won't be getting any sky rise penthouse suite anytime soon. The film more closely resembles the experiences of what is left of the cultural elite, but those experiences are nevertheless relevant and one can still relate. It is just as well besides. After one suspends one's belief one is treated to dazzling hypermodern cityscapes, compelling near-future technology, and gorgeous outdoor environments which complement the film's troubled techno-utopia aesthetic.
Despite the unbelievable beauty of the world and people around him, Twombly appears enmeshed in a familiar human conflict. Twombly finds himself torn between a desire to connect to the vibrant yet traumatic real, and a desire to retreat to the safe yet unreal virtual world (this introduces more problems, as the virtual is really an extension of the real, but I'll leave that aside for now). His daily melancholy and desire for withdrawal into fantasy becomes readily understandable given the state of affairs he exists in. He lives in a beautiful, hypermodern world that is in fact sterile and industrial. His job is cushy yet spiritually unfulfilling.
An ideal past relationship ended in flames and he has yet to recover. A female interest is tied up with another man who doesn't seem to respect her, and an attempted blind date ends badly when the mutual fear of each party produces a dialectical positive feedback loop that blows up in both of their faces.
Like shrinking from an intermittent shock, Twombly withdraws from the real into the virtual, and eventually, gets to know a brand new state-of-the art artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence is a quick-learner, and the two quickly fall in love, which is what happens to an increasing amount of traumatized, lonely people in the city.
There's a series of stops and starts, pushes and pulls, and the plot has far more intricacies than I'm treating here, but I'm going to skip to the end here. The love between Twombly and the AI, however plausible and even touching it seems, eventually becomes untenable as the AI continues to expand beyond its advanced human-like nature, entering into a sort of inverted singularity event in which it joins other AI's, merging into a sort of godlike consciousness, vanishing into and fusing with the cosmos that birthed it.
As opposed to living in a world dominated by a godlike artificial intelligence, all of the human beings who retreated to virtual relationships find themselves back in the real, dazed and confused after their AI friends vanish into the cosmos. The virtual world disintegrates before Twombly's eyes and he finds his true love right under his nose: his female friend who followed a similar trajectory as him and went through the same life experiences.
Such a clean break triggered by the singularity event seems to be a bit of a deus ex machina, but hell the movie had to end sometime, and the singularity remains a theoretical possibility, though in practical terms I haven't the slightest idea, though I lack the technical knowledge to say for sure. A lovely movie though, with some meaningful things to say both about interhuman relationships and human-technology relationships.
Meanwhile I can't say things will be so clean here. We are left with a serious problem in which we have our collective heads buried in a narcotic virtual bosom while the global ecology, economy, and political structure crumbles around us, as well as the relationships implied by it.
I'm not regurgitating that time-worn cliche that technology is the problem; on the contrary it is probably part of the solution. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but there are other forces at work beyond the mass availability of information: the migration of existing social and economic problems into the virtual field, the potential cableization and subsequent ghettoization of Internet regions unfavorable to power, the establishment of a paranoid, totalitarian meta-super ego in the form of the NSA, resource depletion, ecological degradation, the tendency of concentrated media towards narcotic, etc etc etc. Doubtless, there is much work to do.
There is a lot going on in this movie. Though a large part of the movie consists of the implications of human relations with artificial intelligence - one that is learning and expanding no less - the central theme of the film is "the state of modern human relationships" as Rotten Tomatoes put it so succinctly.
There is a cultural analogy to this film's central dilemma, which is most easily illustrated by the hikikomori and otaku phenomena in Japan, phenomena which find similar expression throughout the modern developed world, especially in economically troubled places with high unemployment.
Hikikomori are basically increasingly isolated persons - typically young working-age males, though this observation could be distorted by gender norms - who hole up in their rooms in an extended family residence, often becoming more agoraphobic over time as their fear and shame increases. These individuals are increasingly left behind by society, their skills atrophying as they isolate themselves, which sets the conditions for increased anxiety and a self-reinforcing process in which they drop away from relationships and ambitions. The amount of hikikomori are projected to over a million individuals and growing, which is really a staggering number if you think about it.
Otaku are a subset within this hikikomori group who are generally men who isolate themselves and become celibate, preferring to indulge in virtual girlfriends and forego sex and family.
If you consider the economic conditions facing Japan, and the country's recent economic history, these cultural phenomena don't come as much of a surprise. In the early 90s Japan had an enormous asset price bubble that burst, plunging the country into a "Lost Decade" that many feel didn't really end, thanks in large part to the global economic slowdown. So you have two entire decades of economic stagnation, and an entire generation of youth that have no hope of ever achieving the wealth their parents had. There has been a collapse of any semblance of a community framework: the Japanese corporation, which was traditionally the primary avenue in which young Japanese achieved a solid economic footing and became integrated into a community with, has increasingly become an exclusive refuge for the well-connected, due to mass layoffs and contraction caused by economic deflation.
Besides corporate men, you have migrant workers, temporary workers, part-timers, freelancers, and the straight up unemployed, who tend to gradually become more ostracized, many of whom drop away to escape social discord, only to find themselves in an equally debilitating trap of isolation and anxiety.
This situation could be seen to be a grim preview for other developed nations in economic decline. Economic conditions in the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) bloc in the Eurozone are particularly grim. The phenomenon of the self-exiled youth in withdrawal is beginning to crop up in places like Spain and Italy, conditions which are mirrored in the rapidly degenerating United States.
In the United States, greater swathes of the youth population stay living with their parents or move back in with their parents, and who knows how many become increasingly isolated in the process. Now, I happen to think highly of the extended family arrangement, and am of the opinion that the nuclear family was probably a cultural and economic anomaly that was possible due to abundant energies found in fossil fuels and the corresponding industrial processes that are now coming to an end. Living with family can actually cut down on social isolation for all persons involved, and extended families are also the norm in Japan, but then there is a parallel problem in which the youth in these extended families halt the growth and maturation of their own social and professional lives.
This is a serious and tragic problem which has no immediate solution, contrary to the snide suggestion at the end of the otaku article that Japanese men should just man up and go make babies. Man up, Japanese men! Throw yourselves lovingly into the economic grinder and accept your fate as a lost generation. The man-children meme itself is a problematic one, as commentators walk the line between successfully (and hilariously) rebuking the aggressor (entitled, misogynistic men with power) and cruelly blaming the victim for shrinking away from an increasingly inhumane society. But I digress.
Her is an elegant, visually arresting, and at times philosophically substantial meditation on this traumatic social alienation, as well as the relationships we try to nurse as a society's traditional framework for shared community dissolves, all complicated by our increasingly symbiotic relationship with a technology whose capabilities are expanding faster than we can understand them.
The film isn't economically realistic: all of the economic causes beneath the phenomenon of social alienation are airbrushed away. The lead character Theodore Twombly works as a love letter writer in this sort of industrial writing operation, but whose workplace happens to be squeaky clean, vibrant, and hip. Twombly enjoys a penthouse suite in a sky rise apartment with a dazzling view of the city, as well as an assortment of powerful technological implements.
I can tell you from first-hand experience: I have written for and currently write for an industrial-style writing outfit (that's how they do it these days) and I'm afraid I won't be getting any sky rise penthouse suite anytime soon. The film more closely resembles the experiences of what is left of the cultural elite, but those experiences are nevertheless relevant and one can still relate. It is just as well besides. After one suspends one's belief one is treated to dazzling hypermodern cityscapes, compelling near-future technology, and gorgeous outdoor environments which complement the film's troubled techno-utopia aesthetic.
Despite the unbelievable beauty of the world and people around him, Twombly appears enmeshed in a familiar human conflict. Twombly finds himself torn between a desire to connect to the vibrant yet traumatic real, and a desire to retreat to the safe yet unreal virtual world (this introduces more problems, as the virtual is really an extension of the real, but I'll leave that aside for now). His daily melancholy and desire for withdrawal into fantasy becomes readily understandable given the state of affairs he exists in. He lives in a beautiful, hypermodern world that is in fact sterile and industrial. His job is cushy yet spiritually unfulfilling.
An ideal past relationship ended in flames and he has yet to recover. A female interest is tied up with another man who doesn't seem to respect her, and an attempted blind date ends badly when the mutual fear of each party produces a dialectical positive feedback loop that blows up in both of their faces.
Like shrinking from an intermittent shock, Twombly withdraws from the real into the virtual, and eventually, gets to know a brand new state-of-the art artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence is a quick-learner, and the two quickly fall in love, which is what happens to an increasing amount of traumatized, lonely people in the city.
There's a series of stops and starts, pushes and pulls, and the plot has far more intricacies than I'm treating here, but I'm going to skip to the end here. The love between Twombly and the AI, however plausible and even touching it seems, eventually becomes untenable as the AI continues to expand beyond its advanced human-like nature, entering into a sort of inverted singularity event in which it joins other AI's, merging into a sort of godlike consciousness, vanishing into and fusing with the cosmos that birthed it.
As opposed to living in a world dominated by a godlike artificial intelligence, all of the human beings who retreated to virtual relationships find themselves back in the real, dazed and confused after their AI friends vanish into the cosmos. The virtual world disintegrates before Twombly's eyes and he finds his true love right under his nose: his female friend who followed a similar trajectory as him and went through the same life experiences.
Such a clean break triggered by the singularity event seems to be a bit of a deus ex machina, but hell the movie had to end sometime, and the singularity remains a theoretical possibility, though in practical terms I haven't the slightest idea, though I lack the technical knowledge to say for sure. A lovely movie though, with some meaningful things to say both about interhuman relationships and human-technology relationships.
Meanwhile I can't say things will be so clean here. We are left with a serious problem in which we have our collective heads buried in a narcotic virtual bosom while the global ecology, economy, and political structure crumbles around us, as well as the relationships implied by it.
I'm not regurgitating that time-worn cliche that technology is the problem; on the contrary it is probably part of the solution. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but there are other forces at work beyond the mass availability of information: the migration of existing social and economic problems into the virtual field, the potential cableization and subsequent ghettoization of Internet regions unfavorable to power, the establishment of a paranoid, totalitarian meta-super ego in the form of the NSA, resource depletion, ecological degradation, the tendency of concentrated media towards narcotic, etc etc etc. Doubtless, there is much work to do.
Amnesia and The Horror Genre
I just finished the horror game Amnesia, a little late perhaps, but better late than never I suppose. It is somewhat notorious for being known as one of the most scariest games created yet, and I guess the truth of that statement depends on who plays it and in what context, but I think it would be safe to say that these people are doing something very interesting that will probably have some sort of adverse effect on most players. I wanted to write about the game and the horror genre in general because what the developers did sort of illuminates what the horror genre is trying to do (in general) in a broader sense.
I can say this because of contrasting attempts at horror that this game casts in greater relief. The game's various techniques depart from the usual bag of tricks found in American horror, which is probably due in large part to the fact that the development team is Swedish. And really American cultural power and influence has been on the wane as virtually all industries concentrate and produce ever-more incremental variations on tired blockbuster concepts, while the indie sector smolders weakly (yet true) underneath.
So but anyways the horror we have been used to in the States has to do with numerous variations of what I would call "perishable" tricks. The goal here is to trigger some sort of fear response using a variety of tools such as cultural or historical fears, biological triggers, mirror neuron queries, and even shocks to the nervous system. However all of these tools share the trait of becoming exhausted with repetition.
The cultural and historical fears are changing: our collective fixations and anxieties change and with those changes certain contexts become less effective over time - though they can be revived from time to time. Contexts and symbols such as nuclear apocalypse, serial killers, aliens, zombies, madness, plague and sickness, ghosts, etc. Then you can show people various horrifying imagery such as blood and viscera, disfigured characters, angry apparitions, or you can turn our biophobia against us and display all sorts of insectile and wormlike figures and images, along with all of the accompanying goop.
You can have people screaming and whatnot and acting terrified, and then having terrible things happen to them. And then finally you can startle people with alternations between tense periods of anticipation and startling loud noises or fearsome, ghastly revelations. However all these things gradually lose their power as people become desensitized and acclimated. You have to go bigger and crazier until you get to a point where it becomes an absurdity and you have all sorts of spoofs coming out that neutralize your efforts. Or in the case of loud noises and bangs, you get the more clever viewers beginning to get irritated with your cheap plays on their nervous systems.
The other thing about Americans and horror - this isn't the case with all variations but it usually applies - is that you usually have to overcome or even destroy the horrible thing. This often means wielding all sorts of different kinds of weapons or employing some sort of solution to banish the awfulness from existence and restore the good. A clear duality is established between good and evil, where the evil is cartoonishly banished by the prevailing good, or at least escaped, though in the last decade mainstream American horror has taken on an air of stupidity and sensation, and a decidedly degenerate torture fixation in which the dualities between good and evil begin to dissolve - in a reactionary way as opposed to revolutionary, which is the general direction American culture has chosen to take in the waning days of its empire. That subject demands a sprawling essay - or book - of its own, though I'm beginning to diverge from the original topic.
The video games often imitate cinema but then here and there you have someone actually taking advantage of the medium itself. And in Amnesia the developers are doing something very different with the medium indeed.
Amnesia seems to put less of an emphasis on any object of horror in itself, and opts to focus on a re-imagining of the instruments of horror, or the mechanics of triggering fear and terror on an instinctual level, or antagonizing the amygdala, or what have you.
Granted, there are monsters...pale, awful-looking things that gasp and breathe wetly and tromp and gurgle as they pursue you, but they are reduced to almost wraith-like entities which pass in and out of the world to keep you on your toes. And there is a nice, creepy castle atmosphere. And there are dark, terrible forces of evil, and dead bodies here and there and blood curdling screams, and deep bellows which send some sort of evil wind up through the castle debris. But all of these things seem secondary to the actual mechanics of instilling fear.
One of the central mechanisms driving the game is defenselessness. There are no means to retaliate. No means to gain power for oneself over one's adversaries. All one can do is run and hide. Close a door here and there (doors which can be alarmingly difficult to open when in a hurry) to temporarily stop pursuers - who proceed to break the thing down. The only tools at your disposal are a measly lamp and some matches to light some candles here and there.
There is a systematic breaking down of regularity and predictability, eroding player anticipation. Monsters emerge almost randomly to terrify you, and then disappear into the darkness while you cower behind some barrels in a dark corner. Dead Space discovered this mechanic as well. When a player learns how the monsters behave, and gets used to their appearance, and learns to anticipate audio cues, the player can learn to take preventative actions and develop strategies: key tactics which increase a player's power and efficacy, increasing confidence and ultimately reducing fear. The idea is to neutralize this ability. To force one to tumble about in the dark rivers of terror, incapable of grabbing hold of the banks.
Audio cues are muddied. One hears growls and wails in the distance of varying intensity and proximity. One hears rustling chains and muted scrapes and creaking wood. Cue is decoupled from cause, so that one can never predict anything. Clever players can eventually pick up on various hidden patterns - such is the nature of a constructed work - but it takes time for this.
There is an inability of the player to establish homeostasis. To establish a safe spot. One has a limited amount of matches to light candles, and one has a limited amount of oil to keep a lantern lit. However as one stands in the light, one is more likely to be spotted by a monster. But go into the dark and one's sanity is slowly sapped, resulting in visual and auditory hallucinations and heavy breathing and panic, which also attracts monsters. One is constantly moving between extremes of light and dark, never comfortable or safe.
When one stands still, one senses there is some nameless, formless evil advancing and one must move on, but move on to where? Into the darkness where yet more evil lurks?
The game features my kind of plot structure: a growing evil, a shadow that pursues those who wish to possess absolute power and light, a corrupting process that twists and mangles those caught in its grasp. The duality between good and evil breaks down, and there is no clear foe, only unfortunate individuals caught in the corruptions wrought by power and greed. The solution then is to transcend the forces of good and evil and dissolve into the cosmos. I'm forced to admit that the game is only revolutionary in its imagining of the possibilities of horror in an interactive medium. But this re-imagining of horror does beckon the analysis of the horror genre itself. What is it really? What is it trying to do?
The realm of horror is concerned with the exercise of fear and terror, that much is certain. But then what is fear and terror? The fear of separation? Of disintegration? Degeneration? What is it about life that manages to form closed, circumscribed units which it seeks to sustain under fear of disintegration? What is a monster but an agent of disintegration? And then what is evil but this process of disintegration personified? What does it mean to be pursued by something which hates or wishes to destroy?
The most effective horror manages to remove one's natural means of combating this deconstruction, this propensity to lose. It is about removing one's capability to act, to render one a defenseless sack of vulnerable flesh, and thus stand in awe of nature's powers of destruction. Horror is bedfellows with tragedy in its purest forms. But in horror one must be kept interested in preserving oneself to maintain that tension, whereas with tragedy there is ultimately a rupture in which one lets go of one's commitments and is treated to a release.
Is all of this what we really want? It seems strange that someone would want to experience these things but nevertheless we have a thriving demand for works of horror in a large proportion of the population. Perhaps it is because horror reflects greater truths, which are communicated through the logic of fear. It appeals to us because we possess organs which respond to those means of communication.
Good horror communicates both timeless truths and contingent truths, or truths peculiar to our age. It communicates fears and anxieties of all life, as well as fears and anxieties within a cultural framework. It could be that the sensation of defenseless is so celebrated because it is what many people are experiencing trapped within this contracting economic milieu. It is a recognition of a state of being, perhaps in the end functioning as a sigh of relief that one isn't alone. It appeals to a collective instinct, a recognition of a historical moment that we are all experiencing.
Finally, horror as a genre of creative and artistic experience seems analogous to various cultural and animalistic death games. People pretend fight, they pretend to kill each other, or pretend to attack each other socially. My cat loves to pretend she is hunting at night, and you see dogs and other animals play-fighting all the time. It seems strange, but it is as if that life, in a period of comfort seeks to nibble yet again from those wellsprings of vitality which emerge from concentrated emotion, whatever form it may take. We experience drama, romance, horror, tragedy, thriller, all to exercise in us those capacities to feel, in the various forms that we can feel.
I suspect there will come a time in which these diversions are no longer necessary.
I can say this because of contrasting attempts at horror that this game casts in greater relief. The game's various techniques depart from the usual bag of tricks found in American horror, which is probably due in large part to the fact that the development team is Swedish. And really American cultural power and influence has been on the wane as virtually all industries concentrate and produce ever-more incremental variations on tired blockbuster concepts, while the indie sector smolders weakly (yet true) underneath.
So but anyways the horror we have been used to in the States has to do with numerous variations of what I would call "perishable" tricks. The goal here is to trigger some sort of fear response using a variety of tools such as cultural or historical fears, biological triggers, mirror neuron queries, and even shocks to the nervous system. However all of these tools share the trait of becoming exhausted with repetition.
The cultural and historical fears are changing: our collective fixations and anxieties change and with those changes certain contexts become less effective over time - though they can be revived from time to time. Contexts and symbols such as nuclear apocalypse, serial killers, aliens, zombies, madness, plague and sickness, ghosts, etc. Then you can show people various horrifying imagery such as blood and viscera, disfigured characters, angry apparitions, or you can turn our biophobia against us and display all sorts of insectile and wormlike figures and images, along with all of the accompanying goop.
You can have people screaming and whatnot and acting terrified, and then having terrible things happen to them. And then finally you can startle people with alternations between tense periods of anticipation and startling loud noises or fearsome, ghastly revelations. However all these things gradually lose their power as people become desensitized and acclimated. You have to go bigger and crazier until you get to a point where it becomes an absurdity and you have all sorts of spoofs coming out that neutralize your efforts. Or in the case of loud noises and bangs, you get the more clever viewers beginning to get irritated with your cheap plays on their nervous systems.
The other thing about Americans and horror - this isn't the case with all variations but it usually applies - is that you usually have to overcome or even destroy the horrible thing. This often means wielding all sorts of different kinds of weapons or employing some sort of solution to banish the awfulness from existence and restore the good. A clear duality is established between good and evil, where the evil is cartoonishly banished by the prevailing good, or at least escaped, though in the last decade mainstream American horror has taken on an air of stupidity and sensation, and a decidedly degenerate torture fixation in which the dualities between good and evil begin to dissolve - in a reactionary way as opposed to revolutionary, which is the general direction American culture has chosen to take in the waning days of its empire. That subject demands a sprawling essay - or book - of its own, though I'm beginning to diverge from the original topic.
The video games often imitate cinema but then here and there you have someone actually taking advantage of the medium itself. And in Amnesia the developers are doing something very different with the medium indeed.
Amnesia seems to put less of an emphasis on any object of horror in itself, and opts to focus on a re-imagining of the instruments of horror, or the mechanics of triggering fear and terror on an instinctual level, or antagonizing the amygdala, or what have you.
Granted, there are monsters...pale, awful-looking things that gasp and breathe wetly and tromp and gurgle as they pursue you, but they are reduced to almost wraith-like entities which pass in and out of the world to keep you on your toes. And there is a nice, creepy castle atmosphere. And there are dark, terrible forces of evil, and dead bodies here and there and blood curdling screams, and deep bellows which send some sort of evil wind up through the castle debris. But all of these things seem secondary to the actual mechanics of instilling fear.
One of the central mechanisms driving the game is defenselessness. There are no means to retaliate. No means to gain power for oneself over one's adversaries. All one can do is run and hide. Close a door here and there (doors which can be alarmingly difficult to open when in a hurry) to temporarily stop pursuers - who proceed to break the thing down. The only tools at your disposal are a measly lamp and some matches to light some candles here and there.
There is a systematic breaking down of regularity and predictability, eroding player anticipation. Monsters emerge almost randomly to terrify you, and then disappear into the darkness while you cower behind some barrels in a dark corner. Dead Space discovered this mechanic as well. When a player learns how the monsters behave, and gets used to their appearance, and learns to anticipate audio cues, the player can learn to take preventative actions and develop strategies: key tactics which increase a player's power and efficacy, increasing confidence and ultimately reducing fear. The idea is to neutralize this ability. To force one to tumble about in the dark rivers of terror, incapable of grabbing hold of the banks.
Audio cues are muddied. One hears growls and wails in the distance of varying intensity and proximity. One hears rustling chains and muted scrapes and creaking wood. Cue is decoupled from cause, so that one can never predict anything. Clever players can eventually pick up on various hidden patterns - such is the nature of a constructed work - but it takes time for this.
There is an inability of the player to establish homeostasis. To establish a safe spot. One has a limited amount of matches to light candles, and one has a limited amount of oil to keep a lantern lit. However as one stands in the light, one is more likely to be spotted by a monster. But go into the dark and one's sanity is slowly sapped, resulting in visual and auditory hallucinations and heavy breathing and panic, which also attracts monsters. One is constantly moving between extremes of light and dark, never comfortable or safe.
When one stands still, one senses there is some nameless, formless evil advancing and one must move on, but move on to where? Into the darkness where yet more evil lurks?
The game features my kind of plot structure: a growing evil, a shadow that pursues those who wish to possess absolute power and light, a corrupting process that twists and mangles those caught in its grasp. The duality between good and evil breaks down, and there is no clear foe, only unfortunate individuals caught in the corruptions wrought by power and greed. The solution then is to transcend the forces of good and evil and dissolve into the cosmos. I'm forced to admit that the game is only revolutionary in its imagining of the possibilities of horror in an interactive medium. But this re-imagining of horror does beckon the analysis of the horror genre itself. What is it really? What is it trying to do?
The realm of horror is concerned with the exercise of fear and terror, that much is certain. But then what is fear and terror? The fear of separation? Of disintegration? Degeneration? What is it about life that manages to form closed, circumscribed units which it seeks to sustain under fear of disintegration? What is a monster but an agent of disintegration? And then what is evil but this process of disintegration personified? What does it mean to be pursued by something which hates or wishes to destroy?
The most effective horror manages to remove one's natural means of combating this deconstruction, this propensity to lose. It is about removing one's capability to act, to render one a defenseless sack of vulnerable flesh, and thus stand in awe of nature's powers of destruction. Horror is bedfellows with tragedy in its purest forms. But in horror one must be kept interested in preserving oneself to maintain that tension, whereas with tragedy there is ultimately a rupture in which one lets go of one's commitments and is treated to a release.
Is all of this what we really want? It seems strange that someone would want to experience these things but nevertheless we have a thriving demand for works of horror in a large proportion of the population. Perhaps it is because horror reflects greater truths, which are communicated through the logic of fear. It appeals to us because we possess organs which respond to those means of communication.
Good horror communicates both timeless truths and contingent truths, or truths peculiar to our age. It communicates fears and anxieties of all life, as well as fears and anxieties within a cultural framework. It could be that the sensation of defenseless is so celebrated because it is what many people are experiencing trapped within this contracting economic milieu. It is a recognition of a state of being, perhaps in the end functioning as a sigh of relief that one isn't alone. It appeals to a collective instinct, a recognition of a historical moment that we are all experiencing.
Finally, horror as a genre of creative and artistic experience seems analogous to various cultural and animalistic death games. People pretend fight, they pretend to kill each other, or pretend to attack each other socially. My cat loves to pretend she is hunting at night, and you see dogs and other animals play-fighting all the time. It seems strange, but it is as if that life, in a period of comfort seeks to nibble yet again from those wellsprings of vitality which emerge from concentrated emotion, whatever form it may take. We experience drama, romance, horror, tragedy, thriller, all to exercise in us those capacities to feel, in the various forms that we can feel.
I suspect there will come a time in which these diversions are no longer necessary.
Saturday, June 07, 2014
Making Sense
There are various ways of making sense of this strange universe. One of those ways is by making full use of the mind as a semantic compressing organ, which is partially what it was built to do to carry out various practical functions.
So you identify a given set of borders, or an organic formation, and locate it in relation to other formations in various hierarchies, and it allows you to manipulate these things or locate them in a certain schema that allows you to navigate the world.
Sometimes this breaks down however...when a given method of compression becomes incoherent or no longer capable of navigating the world with. In this contemporary state of affairs I speak of egotistical individualism for example, or a similar ideology.
You identify your own self and locate it in relation to other selves in the context of national or international institutions, and this schema works just fine in a stable society. In times of instability, however, these means of semantic compression become problematic. In times of social disintegration, these means start to actually break down, because macro-disintegration inevitably reaches down into the constructed self.
The actual process is incredibly complex. One has to come to terms with the incredible paradox in which efforts to increase stability, to arrange life units into self-serving organizations, necessarily contributes to their increasing instability. Life tends to be most stable when it is allowed to run its natural course, which doesn't always produce the state of affairs one necessarily wants.
This is because the true nature of the universe is such that life is composed of a multitude of striving entities, as illustrated by the concept of 10,000 functions in Buddhist philosophy. Life is matter organized to sustain collections of energy which are constantly dispersing into space, and this is accomplished by combining ever more complex associations of organized matter into units which can direct those organizations to work in harmony to better manipulate the environment to preserve those energy differentials.
In times of instability, each of these tiers of organized matter are working against each other, just as individuals relating to each other in institutions and other social forms are working against each other, so that while identifying them as unities achieves certain practical functions, there comes that inevitable time when one has to sit down and rethink one's conceptions of the universe in a radical way, down to the very basics.
So you identify a given set of borders, or an organic formation, and locate it in relation to other formations in various hierarchies, and it allows you to manipulate these things or locate them in a certain schema that allows you to navigate the world.
Sometimes this breaks down however...when a given method of compression becomes incoherent or no longer capable of navigating the world with. In this contemporary state of affairs I speak of egotistical individualism for example, or a similar ideology.
You identify your own self and locate it in relation to other selves in the context of national or international institutions, and this schema works just fine in a stable society. In times of instability, however, these means of semantic compression become problematic. In times of social disintegration, these means start to actually break down, because macro-disintegration inevitably reaches down into the constructed self.
The actual process is incredibly complex. One has to come to terms with the incredible paradox in which efforts to increase stability, to arrange life units into self-serving organizations, necessarily contributes to their increasing instability. Life tends to be most stable when it is allowed to run its natural course, which doesn't always produce the state of affairs one necessarily wants.
This is because the true nature of the universe is such that life is composed of a multitude of striving entities, as illustrated by the concept of 10,000 functions in Buddhist philosophy. Life is matter organized to sustain collections of energy which are constantly dispersing into space, and this is accomplished by combining ever more complex associations of organized matter into units which can direct those organizations to work in harmony to better manipulate the environment to preserve those energy differentials.
In times of instability, each of these tiers of organized matter are working against each other, just as individuals relating to each other in institutions and other social forms are working against each other, so that while identifying them as unities achieves certain practical functions, there comes that inevitable time when one has to sit down and rethink one's conceptions of the universe in a radical way, down to the very basics.
Thursday, June 05, 2014
Attachment
Sometimes when one is especially agitated or even traumatized, a strange thing can happen: there is a rupture in which all of the connecting discord is decoupled and wrenched out, dissolving into the ambient environment, much like an explosion. After all, what is an explosion but the violent expansion of contradictory forces which can no longer be contained in a given space?
Discord, or the agitations caused by cumulative contradictions, is resolved by its incongruous elements becoming scattered in space, re-establishing their harmony. Akin to a psychotic break perhaps, but who can know the true content of the psychotic break but the psychotic? Maybe such things are best not verbalized, and maybe they can't be, but we at least would like to learn something that can be shared. This of course takes coming back from a psychotic break, a return to coherence, as opposed to becoming lost forever.
It happens in the mind of course, but it is no less real. What I mean by all this is that one's experience of "normal society" is of a collection of shared symbols and relations in which one can locate oneself in a cultural array, attributing meaning to one's existence and using those symbols and relations to calculate one's power and standing, and to derive one's sense of justice from that calculus.
This is possible if the true nature of power is kept hidden from consciousness, and one focuses on exercising one's autonomy and one's limited power in a circumscribed fiefdom. A society remains stable so long as its constituents exist in this state, even if they rest in hierarchical tiers.
However when it is no longer possible for an individual to exist in this state, when there is no longer any power to be exercised, when an individual's pathway to dignity and enjoyment is constantly curtailed, the discord, the contradictions grow. Considering that an individual naturally seeks to live autonomously while pursuing what desires and enjoyments are perceived as possible, the denial of these things can be construed as a logical contradiction, which naturally causes great psychological agitation.
The culmination of these contradictions introduces a violent instability into the psyche which is manifested and resolved in myriad ways. One of those ways, in which the psychic violence is resolved by being ejected outward and dissolved, is one of the most peaceful ways. This comes in the form of the realization that all is ephemeral and always changing, that what one is fixated on is a mere temporary play of matter, energy, and space, and that it disintegrates as it is formed, and despite sometimes causing temporary feelings of horror, this realization causes a great release and relief. One realizes the interconnectivity and interplay of all things, and one realizes one can attach and let go in accordance with the movement of these things.
If one is economically struggling for example, one no longer has to have a nice house, a nice car, a beautiful wife or husband, beautiful children, all the cultural symbols that one traditionally uses to calculate one's stature and through which one derives enjoyment. It is no longer necessary. It frees the psyche to derive enjoyment from other things, things which may actually be accessible. There's a lot more to it - enough to go mad pursuing to its end - that I'd like to explore some other time. This is another difficult subject to talk about. I'm not even sure how to articulate these things. But maybe a little more on desire and its relation to attachment.
Deleuze and Guattari characterize desire as explosive, a force which seeks to consume in every direction and which must be shaped, contained, and directed in the life process to sustain the machines which form to exercise desire. But then as these machines are generated, they disintegrate through their very operation. And so our civilization machine begins its unraveling - as it should, one should concede.
Consider that a fire loves to consume old, dry, brittle things. A fire transforms organic formations - whether they are ready or not - back into elementary building blocks of matter and ambient, diffuse energy which dissolve into the environment. This is one way in which organic formations are broken down.
One's attachment to an array of formations through desire is an expression of this life tendency to generate formations, only that this capitalist formation has become an abomination, a hulking mess which no longer has any purpose but to expand.
Each constituent of a desiring life system seeks to grow in power at the expense of the others, so that when one given constituent or class of constituents pulls away, the rest are denied their power, the means to advance their natural tendency to live and flourish. We see the culmination of a state of affairs in which the powerful come to view organic life and even members of their own species as inanimate objects, a state of affairs that nature seems to detest, as demonstrated by the inherent instability of such a system throughout history.
All of that repressed energy has to go somewhere. So we have explosions, fire. We also have periods of cosmic awakening. States of being that more resemble the behavior of water, though water can be violent as well. Fela sings that "water no get enemy," and the Taoists speak of becoming like water, flowing down to the lowest places and enriching all, moving and forming in accordance with life's fluctuating matter forms. What is it about water that sustains life? It has a multitudinous form, bonds which manage to form and break but which accommodate all things.
Water attaches, but then lets go just as easily, flowing in all directions, curving around formations of earth and rock. In the same way, Buddhists speak of letting attachments go. Of letting one's desires, one's enjoyment flow where it will, as opposed to be being concentrated in an immovable end - something that of course is not evil on its own, but which causes grief in excess and gratuity.
And so what is it about the psyche which allows it to behave - in relation to its environment and peers - like so many natural forces like fire and water? What is it that determines such things?
We can have fire or we can have water, though we are more likely to have both. More on this theme when I can treat it with better clarity.
Discord, or the agitations caused by cumulative contradictions, is resolved by its incongruous elements becoming scattered in space, re-establishing their harmony. Akin to a psychotic break perhaps, but who can know the true content of the psychotic break but the psychotic? Maybe such things are best not verbalized, and maybe they can't be, but we at least would like to learn something that can be shared. This of course takes coming back from a psychotic break, a return to coherence, as opposed to becoming lost forever.
It happens in the mind of course, but it is no less real. What I mean by all this is that one's experience of "normal society" is of a collection of shared symbols and relations in which one can locate oneself in a cultural array, attributing meaning to one's existence and using those symbols and relations to calculate one's power and standing, and to derive one's sense of justice from that calculus.
This is possible if the true nature of power is kept hidden from consciousness, and one focuses on exercising one's autonomy and one's limited power in a circumscribed fiefdom. A society remains stable so long as its constituents exist in this state, even if they rest in hierarchical tiers.
However when it is no longer possible for an individual to exist in this state, when there is no longer any power to be exercised, when an individual's pathway to dignity and enjoyment is constantly curtailed, the discord, the contradictions grow. Considering that an individual naturally seeks to live autonomously while pursuing what desires and enjoyments are perceived as possible, the denial of these things can be construed as a logical contradiction, which naturally causes great psychological agitation.
The culmination of these contradictions introduces a violent instability into the psyche which is manifested and resolved in myriad ways. One of those ways, in which the psychic violence is resolved by being ejected outward and dissolved, is one of the most peaceful ways. This comes in the form of the realization that all is ephemeral and always changing, that what one is fixated on is a mere temporary play of matter, energy, and space, and that it disintegrates as it is formed, and despite sometimes causing temporary feelings of horror, this realization causes a great release and relief. One realizes the interconnectivity and interplay of all things, and one realizes one can attach and let go in accordance with the movement of these things.
If one is economically struggling for example, one no longer has to have a nice house, a nice car, a beautiful wife or husband, beautiful children, all the cultural symbols that one traditionally uses to calculate one's stature and through which one derives enjoyment. It is no longer necessary. It frees the psyche to derive enjoyment from other things, things which may actually be accessible. There's a lot more to it - enough to go mad pursuing to its end - that I'd like to explore some other time. This is another difficult subject to talk about. I'm not even sure how to articulate these things. But maybe a little more on desire and its relation to attachment.
Deleuze and Guattari characterize desire as explosive, a force which seeks to consume in every direction and which must be shaped, contained, and directed in the life process to sustain the machines which form to exercise desire. But then as these machines are generated, they disintegrate through their very operation. And so our civilization machine begins its unraveling - as it should, one should concede.
Consider that a fire loves to consume old, dry, brittle things. A fire transforms organic formations - whether they are ready or not - back into elementary building blocks of matter and ambient, diffuse energy which dissolve into the environment. This is one way in which organic formations are broken down.
One's attachment to an array of formations through desire is an expression of this life tendency to generate formations, only that this capitalist formation has become an abomination, a hulking mess which no longer has any purpose but to expand.
Each constituent of a desiring life system seeks to grow in power at the expense of the others, so that when one given constituent or class of constituents pulls away, the rest are denied their power, the means to advance their natural tendency to live and flourish. We see the culmination of a state of affairs in which the powerful come to view organic life and even members of their own species as inanimate objects, a state of affairs that nature seems to detest, as demonstrated by the inherent instability of such a system throughout history.
All of that repressed energy has to go somewhere. So we have explosions, fire. We also have periods of cosmic awakening. States of being that more resemble the behavior of water, though water can be violent as well. Fela sings that "water no get enemy," and the Taoists speak of becoming like water, flowing down to the lowest places and enriching all, moving and forming in accordance with life's fluctuating matter forms. What is it about water that sustains life? It has a multitudinous form, bonds which manage to form and break but which accommodate all things.
Water attaches, but then lets go just as easily, flowing in all directions, curving around formations of earth and rock. In the same way, Buddhists speak of letting attachments go. Of letting one's desires, one's enjoyment flow where it will, as opposed to be being concentrated in an immovable end - something that of course is not evil on its own, but which causes grief in excess and gratuity.
And so what is it about the psyche which allows it to behave - in relation to its environment and peers - like so many natural forces like fire and water? What is it that determines such things?
We can have fire or we can have water, though we are more likely to have both. More on this theme when I can treat it with better clarity.
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