Projection

We speak of the personification of inanimate objects all the time, with various degrees of approval and disapproval attached depending on the instance.

We say that this car looks sad and dejected and beaten down because it hasn't run in a while, and that firing it up implies some glorious reawakening, whereas really we are reading our personal excitement onto the machine. This is easy for an intelligence to do when interacting with objects.

But what of the feelings of the engine housings as they strain to contain the bucking engine? What of the chassis as it struggles to hold the body? What of the engine as it catches aflame? What of the earth as its blood is extracted and lit and dumped into the sky?

One attitude or perception may see to the firing up of the car's engine, and a celebration of such, whereas another attitude or perception could see the metal beasts laid to rest. 

Where the aperture of perception opens and closes, where the awareness of a given constellation of affairs is scaled out or back, and attached with value, the manifestation of the reality changes.

What is it that will become animated? This depends on what one is, what one sees, and what one chooses to do with what one sees.

Dance with Capital

A dance implies a giving and a taking, an exchange of energies.

To get out of capital, one has to get a bit into it, and so on.

To leave capital, one needs energy, which one must take from capital, as it spreads itself total. To take energy from capital, one must be capital, if only a bit.

As more leave capital, whether silently and through non-participation, or through force, or through something in between, capital will change in response.

Deathblow

You can see the seeds of destruction in a complex civilization - or at least in this one - far before the final outstripping of ecological supports, as well as the exhaustion and disintegration of surrounding extraction colonies.

A collective purpose is lost, guiding ideals are shattered, a feeling of innocence or naivete or even righteousness is lost, however misplaced it is, leaving only the pursuit of private power as a guiding impulse, which generates sympathetic impulses wherever it arises, all of which reinforce each other and amplify each other.

And then it is so that this outpouring of fragmented wills set against each other contribute to their mutual instability, causing them to grow tighter in compensation, proceeding to a hypercritical state.

The advent of this outpouring and this unravelling is the true deathblow; ecological collapse, catastrophic conquest, and cannibalization is only the logical end.

Power Fear

In Western culture, there is this instinctual fear that one might lose power if one cedes any power to another, as if one has to clutch one's ration of power for dear life, and that another, upon gaining power, may ride that power up and away, and become one's permanent master.

But the truth of the matter is that someone who is starved for power just wants some power, a bit more than they have had previously, and that giving someone a little power is not tantamount to opening the flood gates. Most human beings will be satisfied with the basic power to live a decent life.

It is the pervasive fear among the powerful, that they may lose their power, and that they refuse to cede any of it, that produces and reproduces the existence of the power starved, who, upon being starved, continue to strive for it, producing a tension which does end up resulting in oscillations of power, as the forced seizure of power must result in an inertia in which power is accumulated once again.

This is because the trauma of perpetual starvation and the seizure of power is such that one wants to always keep power, so that it cannot happen again, so it must be accumulated once again.

And so the refusal of both sides to give - the just refusal of the poor to lie down and be destroyed, and the unjust refusal of the rich to cede power - produces a universal and binding tension, which at its peak, results in a reversal in which some new group takes power and fights tooth and nail to keep it. 

Look Over Here Now

The social energy seems to move away from that which is oversaturated (to the point of a positive reality curdling) to points of high potentiality and promise. 

For example, mass concerns with material and political realities alternate with concerns about spiritual realities as the energy moves. This is better explained here.  

Freedom

We have this conception of the solitary individual as free. She has no obligations to meet. She can move where she pleases, free of the fear of offending another or alienating or denying another. But move where? And how far?

To do anything worthwhile as a human being takes knowledge and skill, and we have only so much time and capacity to learn and execute successfully.

The greater the complexity of the task, the more people you need working together on it.

So there is another freedom: a freedom to associate with others and coordinate one's efforts with others to accomplish greater things.

Capital has tried to convince us that solitude is freedom, and perhaps it is if one is living in the woods on nuts, berries, and meat, all procured by oneself with crude tools, and that is all one wants. Freedom then is the ability to pursue one's desires and satisfy one's expectations.

But in a complex society, solitude is constraint. One can do virtually nothing by oneself, so one must associate. But associate under whom? Under which direction? Here capital is ready to welcome the solitary and the ostensibly free with open arms.

Community Networks

Community networks tend to be graduated, in which a closely packed nucleus of individuals of a certain intensity, and of similar interests and characters form a cohesion which attracts other similar individuals. Slightly different but complementary communities may associate with each other, especially at the points at which their differing characters are contained within single individuals, who then connect with each other across communities, forming bridges.

Closer

The more closer you are to something, the more vivid it is to the senses and the sensibility, the more you sense its contours, and the more you can understand it intuitively. But the more distant you are to something, the more you have to construct abstract categories to attempt to understand it within reasonable parameters of expectation. 

Rural Observations

Living in a rural area forces one to come to terms with various realities which are only grasped vaguely and separately by the various sectors of society which account for our bare survival.

This is due in part to the lower density and isolation of a given rural community. There is less of a dense material of mutual support, a mutual support which is generated by specialized labor operating under a central market. This lack of social density places a greater emphasis on procuring all of one's basic needs for the rural individual.

So you begin to see what it takes to build a house, or produce food, or produce waste, or consume electricity. The global industrial society begins to appear quite incredible - and quite horrible - in this regard.

This realization places the modern stick-built house into stark relief for its wasteful nature. Its design depends on a constant flow of linear waste, as one has to cut various standardized materials to make a certain fit, and then cast the rest away into the dump, and its design is wholly dependent on active methods of heating and cooling, as well as maintenance, all of which require a constant and sustained input of disposable energy. I'm aware this has been observed for some time, just not talked about as much.

The stick-built design then is a product of great social volume, cheap energy, and abundant resources, and the historical conditions of its emergence will make this clear. This design allows for a quick build-out, fed from standardized, factory-produced materials, and then maintained and regulated with a constant flow of cheap energy.

Another consequence of rural living - which is another old observation I'm aware of - is that labor tends to synchronize more tightly with natural cycles, that is if one is not exploiting oneself and one's land to enter the market.

Labor cycles conform to the necessity of work: what does one need, and what is to be done, and how long will it take? These cycles also conform to weather, available light (day and night cycles) and the body's physical capacity.

This results in more haphazard cycles in which a burst of labor in a 12 hour day may shorten to 4 hours the next day due to fatigue, or be cut short by bad weather. These patterns may slowly crystallize with regularity, repetition, and success, but not nearly in the systematic fashion of the industrial machine.

Once again, it is social mass that seems to generate this incredible driving industrial force, a force which takes its direction from the nature of the mass, but which obliterates anything which does not conform to the aggregate-character of the mass.

And so the 8 hour workday is systematized to conform both with human capacity, assisted energy inputs, and constraints introduced by the labor struggle, among others. This is a model born of volume and the expression of an aggregate, but it readily steamrolls over anyone who is unable or unwilling to work such days.

As Marx observed, the discrepancy between this city-based and industrial lifestyle, and the rural lifestyle separated from the market - let's keep in mind the rural lifestyle alone does not decouple one from the market, as capital was born in the countryside -  is due in part to the difference in the social aims of labor: one aim is to sustain oneself and procure one's needs. Another aim is to constantly increase value in competition with other value increasers, which is an aim that owes its shape and its drive to historical and social circumstances.

Catching Up

This is another of those many placeholder posts that I sheepishly put up when my writing habits have gone off the rails for whatever internal or external (or both) reason.

In brief, Oakland and other cities in the bay that are in close proximity to San Francisco or San Jose - and the tech bubble those regions imply - are in a state of simmering turmoil, in which displaced wealth, which can't even compete with the extreme concentrations of wealth in urban areas, is flooding in, and lower income communities are finding themselves severely strained in their own neighborhoods, or otherwise priced out and displaced.

Needless to say, gentrification as a phenomenon has been happening for as long as capitalism has existed, and probably even further back in some form or another. But as a phenomenon it reveals the soft violence of wealth stratification and what it can do to communities.

Forming graduated tiers, wealth and power enjoys a freedom of movement in which it flows to the geographic and social objects of desire and overtakes them, displacing those of limited means in a lower tier. It is the process in which a stratified society settles onto itself as it changes, doing violence to itself.

Much more can be written on this subject, but I only meant to mention it as it is affecting us in the form of higher rents and prices, and a generally strained sense of living which inflames dysfunctional relationships and households. Everywhere we hear of friends and acquaintances in feuds with their landlords, or who are in danger of being evicted or even being evicted, and these are the effects experienced by those who aren't even the least privileged.

These movements of wealth put significant strain on the various strata of society, setting them against each other and provoking them, much like minor earthquakes sending waves of motion which jostle the various materials that set upon each other, making them grind. I suppose it is part of this process which places significant strains on my own self, invoking stress and confusing my mind and disrupting my writing habits. Though of course there are other reasons.

Now we find ourselves outside of Oakland, on a property that is partially off-grid, building, learning, thinking, scheming, among other things. Much to write about given recent events, whether it has to do with gentrification, relationships, further self mastery, shaping one's environment, or whatever else. Hopefully I'll be able to get to the important topics in good time.

Bitcoin

I've been sitting on this one for some time; maybe it is time to hatch it.

The Bitcoin phenomenon brings two particularly interesting subjects into relief with its curious attributes: the nature of money itself, and the nature of revolutions.

On Money

First, it brings the nature of money into relief because of how strange Bitcoin as a phenomenon is. Bitcoin is basically an artificial scarcity generator: it is a sophisticated algorithm that creates a virtual scenario that mimics gold-mining. This also comes coupled with a peer to peer distribution system, and cryptographic security, so as to satisfy the twin needs of distribution and preservation of private property. 

Its currency follows the law of diminishing returns as natural resources do. The easiest coins are found first, and then it takes greater and greater computing power to uncover the remaining coins, creating interest and increasing their value.

Its power comes from ideology: it is so widely believed to be valuable because it represents the idea that problems of distribution - and by implication, many other serious problems - can be solved by computing power and the associated technologies.

And so why would money even work? Bitcoin could be better conceived as a social activity, an emergent phenomenon generated through relation, just as something as functionally useless as gold or printed paper could become such a powerful force through social relation and mutual desire, so long as the flow itself is carefully controlled and regulated.

A currency presupposes and represents a faith in the continuity of a given order, an order which is created either through mutual trust and functionality, or great acts of violence, or all of the above.

A currency tends to obscure the fact that our society is built on war, genocide, and slavery. The currency has to emanate from somewhere.

There was no Marshall plan for the post-colonial countries. Better to keep them weak and underdeveloped, so as to exploit and extract raw materials from them, and this now includes their labor and environmentally reckless manufacturing.

Central markets tend to create uneven patterns of development in which the overriding need to extend and retain market structures and the state mechanisms required to stabilize them is self-reinforcing.

These last couple of points aren't entirely self-evident, and will require additional elaborations that I won't be able to get to right now. Still, worth bringing up to chew on.

On Revolution

Bitcoin is also curious in that it represents a minor revolution - if underdeveloped - which transfers power to the tech sector of capital. I have spoken with people who have worked on Bitcoin, and they have been very conscious of the fact that they are attempting to tear currency creation power from global finance, but that they realize there are still old problems tied with the mechanics of a currency, such as with speculation, manipulation, and hoarding. Still, it is enough to attempt to wrest power from global finance.

Capitalism is very interesting in that given its pure ideological dictates, all power structures should be constantly dissolving under the extreme competitive pressures implied by competing self-interested individuals, which of course assumes each actor possesses relatively equal amounts of power, or at least equal opportunity to pursue their relative self-interest.

We know though that this is horseshit, and that the powerful are in the business of accumulating and sustaining power, and that yes, this free market ideology is conducive to their habits of accumulation, but as soon as they reach a certain critical mass in power, they turn to freeze the mechanisms of competition and accumulation to favor their own dynasties, oftentimes taking advantage of market concentration and compromised state mechanisms to further their schemes.

They willingly create contradictory states of affairs to preserve their own power, which of course is the nature of power and the antagonistic forces it unleashes.

These contradictions are the manifestations of fundamental tensions between growing bodies of power, and the originally creative and egalitarian visions they are built on.

However, there are periods in history when even the powerful can no longer keep frozen their own built up structures, when the contradictions they generate drop their own floors from underneath them, and a minor revolution is allowed within the system, which allows it to transform relatively bloodlessly to relieve the various built up pressures it has generated over time.

You'd think that the powerful would bite, kick, and scratch to keep their power, whatever the case, considering their usual behavior, but then there are times in history when the powerful know enough to let the changing shape of the system settle, establishing a partial new regime.

This can happen if the minor revolution in question is of a nature that is not in too great of tension with the established system. I'm thinking here of the New Deal revolution in the 30s, and also of the counterrevolution that took place from the 60s to the 80s and continues in increments today.

The cultural and economic counterrevolution is often conceived as being heralded in through the Reagan administration in the 80s, but the same thing was happening under the Thatcher administration before that, and even more interesting, this counterrevolution was not a mere restoration of an old guard, but a shift in power from the industrial sector to the finance sector, a shift which gave the Right a material and ideological basis for its resurgence, and which took its shape as early as the 60s in Britain.

It remains to be seen whether Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency revolution will have a lasting impact, though the mere existence of these things definitely raises some interesting questions.

Bitcoin is tolerated because it does not threaten establishment systems enough. Its volatility as a currency makes it gimmicky, and because of this, it tends to be exchanged for dollars. So it is more like a collectible.

When its mechanisms became more autonomous in exchange, such as with black market activity, then those activities were attacked, as seen in the Silk Road incident, but its establishment activity is allowed because it is useful in that it generates interest and desire. It is still a type of commodity, and so it can be owned and controlled, and integrated into the existing system.

Nevertheless Bitcoin represents a minor revolution, but which has become absorbed by capital. Minor revolutions then can delay destruction of a standing system, but not halt it. Why can some revolutions be absorbed and others cause great destruction? Is it the presence or absence of sameness? Of a familiar logic of accumulation versus the feared logic of hierarchical rearrangement? But even disruptive patterns of accumulation can cause hierarchical shifts. Better question: does it threaten one sector of capital, or all of it, in which it can bond together and banish the enemy?

But all revolutions are absorbed by the overarching social system within which they take place, unless they burst apart the social system in the process, and a new one forms with similar problems.

Human history is a series of revolutions, all driven by the need to escape the dying shells of older revolutions.

And so what are we driving at? Why this constant growth and preservation? In this case, the constant growth and preservation of life is death.

What is a revolution to accomplish? What should be the direction of change? The re-animation of modern industrial society? Or its gradual dismantling and localization?

Self Mastery

Self mastery comes just as much without as it does within.

Pre/Post Currency

I say pre because these systems existed before a central state-backed currency, and post because these systems will exist after.

When a central currency isn't working to animate a given social sector, that sector begins to trade directly in favors and resources. It easy to see the need for centralized currency given the demands of the increasing complexity of a centralizing system. This constant trade of favors and resources is quite a bit of work and can be stressful, as it implies maintaining the human relationships themselves.

It is probable that the neural circuitry itself changes. You begin thinking of individuals as extensions of a vessel you are maintaining. It becomes less about what you personally can do or take, and more about what you are putting into this system which you act on, and which acts on you.  

Grants

The public red tape issue also manifests in the content of grants. Increasingly, grants emanating from these foundations and state organizations betray a profound distrust and a desperate need for control. They want to turn the recipients of their funds inside out, to pore over the finest details of recipient operations, while carefully controlling every movement and expression in accordance with the latest image of public efficacy.

Which is just as well considering the dysfunction of the non-profits themselves, which like their profit-seeking brethren, are only shell-structures within which games of extraction and grift occur.

But given the progression of the nature of the grant, the weakest institutions most in need are at a loss to request funds, while the powerful and prepared are able to muster the resources to write appealing grants regardless of whether the practical reality will match the grant's specifications.

The practical reality then continues its course, with the good left to administrate more and more functions with less and less resources, and the bad becoming more and more practically useless, while at the same time accumulating more resources, underneath the ballooning rationalizations and executive briar patches meant to address these pathologies.

Thanks to the control-obsessed and paranoid natures given away by these grant contents, we can come to an alternate view of OCD and paranoia as a form of privatization. Yes, as one comes to trust less and less other intelligences and life systems, one resolves to assemble ever more information and practical power within oneself.

It is much simpler, and it expends much less energy to simply trust an intelligence to uphold both their interest and yours. These towering regulatory structures do indeed hold everything together, but they take incredible amounts of energy, and they alienate through the course of their operation, furthering the need of their expansion.

Hustlers

The really good hustlers are basically out economizing the best methods for satisfying the desires of the poor, desires which are not being fulfilled by the market itself. They're working with those frayed ends, oftentimes within those deserts left behind by capital, bridging those uncoupled connections with repurposed resources that are scattered as detritus, as tissue shedded by a system that constantly needs to regenerate its "newness."

On Mimesis 3

One thing you notice about repression is that it is meant to keep the forces of mimesis at bay, at least the forces that contradict its own mimetic platforms. You see this everywhere. Consider for example the routine parental admonition which insists that if one child gets a special privilege, everyone else is going to want it. Or you see this in the rigorous manner that security suppresses any aberrant behavior, such as someone wandering past some arbitrary gate. Or perhaps the vicious corporate behavior in which a company hires an army of lawyers to descend on even the most innocent act of unsanctioned brand usage.

If a given system of logic places a sanction on a given set of behaviors, then that set of behaviors must be suppressed at any cost, as the more people engage in them, the more the general behavior is expressed through imitation. This is complicated by the fact that this danger can be real or imagined by the powers that be.

The more unstable a system, the more the system is on the verge of expressing a behavior or a constellation of behaviors that are antagonistic to the system, the more there is a presence of fear within the system, the more violent, desperate, and unprovoked the powers of suppression are.

Pendulum

It is important to remember that as this epoch sours, it comes naturally to cast the whole state of affairs in an acrid tone. I know I do it.

But within this horrific system are countless individuals working and sweating and breathing within the framework of the system, laboring to make the system a more humane and dignified place for its inhabitants.

There is a tender side to capital even as it churns and burns. 

One should take care not to exert too much weight on the ideological pendulum - though certainly a good push is required.

The Christians for example witnessed all sorts of hedonistic and sexual perversions taking place within the falling Empire, and instead of locating these perversions within a spatio-temporal set of relations, they placed taboos and curses on the acts themselves, which embedded itself into the ideological code.

And over time you have a whole civilization that grows with a profound alienation to some of life's natural and sublime pleasures, such as intercourse and various other material satisfactions, and of course this creates all sorts of problems.

I think I've mentioned before that Wilhelm Reich has made the case that this ideological sexual repulsion contributed heavily to the explosive character of pre-Fascist Germany. It is entirely possible that this sexual repression also contributed to the explosive growth of industrial empires in general.

And as countless thinkers have found, the more forcefully you repress something, or make forbidden and hidden away from society, the more forcefully it eventually returns, and the more society finds it irresistible, even if it is something natural and generally banal.

Red Tape

Another thing one finds when organizing for change in public or semi-public spaces is the incredible density of red tape, which ultimately neutralizes non-antagonistic movements for change, however minor they are.

If someone wants to put in a couple of barbecue pits in a public park, or hire on a couple of student interns for a gardening program, one has to appeal to an incredible ecosystem of bureaucratic resources and processes, which can take a very long time, and consume serious resources.

At the same time, public governing bodies are afraid of the effects of certain changes on legal arrangements governing a given space, or whether a certain activity will require changes in an insurance policy, which can be fatal for a public organization that is pressed for cash.

What all of this amounts to is a pervasive fear from public officials of any kind of change that implies consequences that are more than superficial, a fear that at its base is a fear of upsetting the dense interconnection of often private interests that pervade our public sphere, which completely paralyses and shuts down the dynamic forces of a self-determining community. 

One finds analogues of this density in our political and economic institutions. The built environment has become so dense, and so full of competing pressures and stimuli, that it has become nearly impossible to assemble a pointed discourse or practical organization for affecting change.

To effectively change something and have its results not only functional but effective, it takes a deep understanding of whatever is being changed. It takes time and energy to build the intellectual and practical understanding required to affect a given system, the demands of which grow with complexity and denseness. More information, density, stimulation, and overall complexity can also be paralyzing in this respect. Where to begin? What to address? One is flitting around from subject to subject, point of leverage to point of leverage, completely impotent and strung out.

To overcome this paralysis, it takes both shedding unnecessary complexity and regaining focus, and actively disobeying the laws, ordinances, and interests governing our public spaces. I say this like it is a solution, but then really these acts come with all sorts of problems of their own. So it goes. 

Community Erosion

I'm not entirely sure what else to call this, as it is a phenomenon that I'm not sure can be articulated clearly, which is a sentiment I tried to communicate in an earlier series of posts. The phenomenon I'd like to discuss this time may be indirectly related, but which has a slightly different frame of reference this time around. Perhaps the previous focus had to do with closed systems. This time, the focus is on the way in which disparate systems cohere, or more specifically, how they don't.

Please note that this was another difficult piece to put together, and will read as such. 

Moving forward, this phenomenon is something to be experienced, and one feels its effects most acutely when one is attempting to organize an event or persistent organization within a community that scales beyond a gathering of family, friends, or neighbors.

That is, when one begins to traverse the social texture beyond the scope of one's selected companions and social settings, one gains a greater sense of the social topographies which are found in a community. One is afforded a greater sample of personality and class markers, and what's more, how all of these things are interacting together.

This is something one has to find out for oneself, as the fragmentation of our cultural, political, and economic landscape conceals its own nature, as we tend to move between isolated systems which appear to be cohesive in their isolation: corporate bodies, commercial spaces, private gatherings, institutional systems, transportation networks, and other systems, though of course one can witness all matter of dysfunction within these isolated systems as well. 

To cut to the chase, one finds a landscape today in which the well-off, well-adjusted, integrated, and absorbed dominate and command a lion's share of resources with rigid objective-based behaviors, various symbolic and technical modes of communication, hierarchical and rigid organization structures, and complex technological systems.

Outside of these contrived, compressed systems exist the poor, the marginalized, the unabsorbed, and un-integrated who persist with their own structures of ad-hoc support, or who are otherwise taken up into the prison-industrial complex. Here we see lower tech and social modes of support. Communication here is becoming oral and immediate. Attention tends to become more diffuse both through lack of nutrition and an over-abundance of irritants and alarms that require attention, which include but are not limited to body pains, pest problems, crime, domestic disputes, anxiety, depression, diseases, financial troubles, and various social humiliations.

Over time, these disparate systems become ever more polarized as each takes on a more definite shape. The wealthy and absorbed attempt to improve with finer detail the functions of the system they have always administrated, while increasing the activity and frequency of these functions to account for economic contraction, labor exclusion, energy adulteration and contraction, cultural and political antagonisms, and crumbling infrastructure among other things, all of which makes the system more rigid and authoritarian.

The poor and unabsorbed on the other hand are left to their own devices, to make do with what they have in increasingly widening "sacrifice zones," deserts of commerce and resources. Their living patterns within these environments grow ever more ingrained as time passes.

It is important to note that there are vast asymmetries between these two groups. Considering that capital seeks to transform all of its surroundings into itself, making its surroundings dependent on itself, the poor and unrepresented cannot be seen to exist as an autonomous unit. And as capital gives up on the industrialization process when its profitability drops, it leaves those transformed communities behind.

The victims of capital still need to function like capital, as they have been deprived of land and community, but then they are denied the resources for doing so, so they must subsist with the resources they have left.

In other words, the over-extension of over-complexity destroys the individuals left outside of its expression, due to the tensions that arise in the social sphere, which are attributable to a centralized sphere of power which monopolizes available energy while attempting to convert surrounding life fields into replicas of itself, without actually tending to those transformed life fields. 

There is a diffusion of social intent, so that it all has to be pulled together with authoritarian compression mechanisms: institutions and economic corporate bodies which situate by force the functions required for their perpetual operation.

It is as a grim tide, which washes over and situates individuals within the economic machine when it is powered, but which then wanes and leaves individuals left out to fend for themselves in their diminished state. 

Within the authoritarian modes of compression themselves, one finds incredible social constituting pressures which are governed by binary categorizations and sorting mechanisms. And so this mode of functioning is constantly clashing with the diffuse social environments outside of it, with its multitudes of oscillating impulses and desires, material disorder, and general economic chaos.

Working within the diffusion, I could not help but think of myself as one of those sad, water-starved tomato plants, attempting its growth in a variety of directions but wilting at all of its limbs, working nevertheless to attempt to bear fruit.

This state of affairs requires both a growing, delimited body which seeks to capture energy flows external to itself, rearranging them to sustain itself, as well as a distinct governing system of logic which regulates the body. Problems of overcomplexity or overburdened bodies should result in the decoupling of said bodies from each other, so that they can exist in accordance with their own logic.

But we have a problem in which the various constituents of a body are not free to leave, and so complexity continues to grow to account for a relationship which is failing with ever-greater frequency. Further, the very mechanisms required for maintaining this relationship are administrated with ever-greater speed to account for growing dysfunction, further advancing the pathologies caused by this process, not to mention the resource usage and output of linear waste.

The fatally contradictory modes of functioning which demarcate the divides between the wealthy and the poor, or better, those absorbed and integrated into the system and those who are not, could be resolved if each party were free to continue functioning with their own set of resources and spaces, if it were not for the parasitic relationship that keeps the rich and absorbed bound to the poor and unabsorbed.

This is not merely a social problem. The effects of the drought throughout the West coast of the United States, which can be attributed to a constellation of interconnected pathologies such as agricultural overproduction, population, mismanagement of resources, and rising temperatures and erratic climate conditions, lays bare the consequences of the totalizing human claim to territory. A human claim whose nature is artificially truncated to that of the capitalist, or the mature expression of this domineering system of compression and circumscription.

I am not even speaking of the fields of fallow crops, dry wells, and the infernos consuming the hillsides - though these things are plenty significant in themselves - but the personal lives of individuals supposedly removed from the worst effects. Perhaps equally worthy of consideration are the distortions in both natural and artificial habitats and the effects these distortions have on the lives of humans and other forms of life.

For example, rats and mice have become omnipresent in many urban environments, including our own space. And the ants have been particularly virulent this summer.

The rats have infested the chicken coop. They are here to stay. We no longer have the energy or resources required to plug the rat holes and reinforce the chicken coop, at least for now. The cat sits and watches the rats, and that is all.

The ants are ever-present, constantly crawling over me throughout the day. I have become used to them, less uneasy about living alongside them day by day. As long as one doesn't leave out meats, sugars, or other energy-rich food stores, the ants generally keep to themselves.

There are ways to mitigate some of these issues, and make life easier on all parties involved, if the energy, time, and resources are available to do so. Or else if one completely can't stand the growing incursions of other forms of life, one is free to dash about various chemical agents every which way and poison one's living space.

In so many words, the powerful are bound to the powerless through the insatiable desire to control and consume all life, a binding together which amplifies the tensions between disparate life systems by attempting to hold all of them together with force. If one is to live in an urban environment for the time being, one is necessarily going to live alongside the various forms of life gathering together around the remaining resources and energy, as they are. At least until one can begin to make the systematic changes necessary to solve these problems at their roots. And alas, time is short.

Listening

Our society would do well to stop and listen to those most oppressed, those places in the body politic which are pressed down upon the most.

Many types of pain responses can indeed be local. But eventually that pain travels. Great enough pain in a given area can lead to more pain in sympathetic areas. And soon enough the body is sweating, the heart is racing, and the breaths are coming harder.

Oh right, it is all connected.

I'll Leapfrog You Then

At the very base of the Western sensibility - which may very well be a foundational component - is the desperate need to surmount or subsume that which exists, especially that which is demonstrating some power, as opposed to merely letting it exist apart from oneself as it is.

Like the wave and trough and their mutual interdependency, this tendency produces increasingly steep oscillations of power, in positive feedback with itself, until it burns itself out. Though of course the waves we tend to think of in nature - waves in liquids for example - aren't often fed by highly concentrated energy sources like the petroleum stores we are fed by, though this limited modeling still doesn't account for the early power formations in early agrarian societies, where our lineage can be traced.

This tendency accounts for countless formations on numerous tiers of relation, such as the formation of institutions, economic entities, cities, communities, families, individuals, and even biochemical patterns within individuals, ecologies, and other systems.

Take your pick of whatever else effect or formation related to the Western master formation: within it you will find this signature. 

Tragic Systems

Here we see glimmers of the godhead within the rational mechanism, which gradually appears through the transition from the heroic myth to the tragedy archetype. Those pillars of heroic myth, by which we stand, begin to topple, and so the tragedy is the gradual release of that standing tension, often punctuated by a liberating catharsis through the final fall. What was once perceived as a timeless reality reveals itself as built and ephemeral, a revelation that allows for a release from a constant exertion which no longer comes naturally and with joy, but with a burden and an overwhelming sense of artificiality.

And so what is the answer for maintaining complex systems within this milieu of comprehension? Well, it is intrinsic to these systems that they eventually fail, and that the best one can do is let life systems maintain these greater complex systems as best as possible. Let life be. Relinquish controls, which, although may have been effective or even essential at lower and earlier stages of complexity, now only serve to extend the gradual unwinding of a system through constant modulation and tuning.

On the Ropes

During the course of the fast and the recovery, my writing tendencies slowed substantially, and since then I've been involved in almost non-stop community activity, some of it good - music and friends - and some of it not so good - helping members of the nearby community center wrangle with shady executives and various social pathologies. A one-two punch if you will.

I need time to sit and be alone with my thoughts, but alas, work is backed up and I am feeling the money chain tugging. When I get the time, the writing will come, as it always does. A fairly large piece on Bitcoin is planned, which I have been sitting on for some time, and I am kicking around various other ideas, which occasionally pass in and out of my attention in a vague manner.

I am very tired, and off balance, but moving.

Nietzsche and Master Morality

Nietzsche admired what he called the "master morality" of the aristocratic class.

But this was a wholly reactionary view. What Nietzsche saw so much beauty in was the crest of the wave just as it was about to break, or perhaps even as it was breaking and returning to the ocean. His despised "slave morality," or Christian morality at the time, was a direct consequence of the overextension and exhaustion of the master morality, a pagan morality which did indeed celebrate the enjoyment of life, and the goodness of the gods, and of strength and power, but which was creating a hell on earth for those left out of the sphere of enjoyment, itself buttressed by the concentration of power.

The weak had no choice but to invert these values.  Nietzsche's noble insistence on an embracing of the universe and an enjoyment of life, with its passionate intensity, forced him to sympathize with the oppressors, as he was only experiencing the growing swell of yet another wave, the crest of which was still out of sight for him, which would begin to break in all its sordid glory in the midst of the present age.

There is a strange twist in the ideological fabric, in which the morality of the strong crashes and becomes the morality of the weak, and the morality of the weak gains power until it is again the morality of the strong. This results in a paradoxical situation in which the oppressed secretly bear the values of the strong, and the powerful drape themselves with the mantle of the weak so as to mask the reality of that power. 

Nietzsche's view is a peculiarity of the era he was living in. His cultural and spiritual critique, as it relates to our time, was all too prescient. He urged us to embrace life and the cosmos, as opposed to shrinking away from it, and break away from Christian morality, which had become corrupt and riddled with inner contradictions.

Though it has been argued that Nietzsche didn't necessarily favor master morality on an absolute scale, but on a relative one as it related to his time, his ultimate judgement was unavoidably reactionary, as to posit the value-generating self, with its will to power, as an isolated entity, was to completely ignore the consequences of its spontaneous action, and deny the life-field outside of its self-interest, paving the way for the rise of a new master/slave relationship: a capitalist order which drapes itself with claims of equality and democracy, while dominating everything within its reach.

What Nietzsche was experiencing was a curdling of the slave morality, which proved revolting to his sensibility, but had temporarily solved the problems of a curdling master morality centuries upon centuries ago.

Perhaps what we experience today is a curdling of the grim union between a master and slave morality that was already curdled to begin with.

This evaluation itself takes its shape from the ideological contours of our era. Was it necessary to experience the total failure of an attempt at self value creation - after previous failures of centralized constellations of values - to come to the realization that the good and the bad, the good and the evil, the strong and the weak, all relate to each other and depend on each other in connection?

On Taboo

To briefly comment on taboos, some of them have their uses, but many of them contain in them statements of power relation.

For example, consider the effects Coke can have on your body. You'll notice the effects of Coke compare to heroin, and the combination of effects of Diet Coke compare to cocaine, yet these substances are freely available; indeed, they are even abundantly available and very cheap.

Or consider that the neurological changes associated with meditation and fasting mirror those of certain psychoactive drugs, only they are not as compressed.

Instead of sitting down and deliberating over the many ways to go about something, and the merits associated with those ways, we generally opt for binaries, buttressed with strong opinions and emotions.

There is much to investigate in order to account for this phenomena, though I just wanted to touch on it for now.

Emphasis

By emphasizing something in your writing, you are drawing it into relief, or bringing shape to it, drawing it out of a complex fabric of interconnection. This brings that thing or subject into your attention, and into the attention of your readers, which results in actual practical changes. When you are aware of something and perceive something, you become affected by it, and you may affect it in turn.

Becoming aware of something, and taking enough interest in it to actively emphasize it and draw attention to it is part of what you are.

Fasting

If meditation functions like a sort of psychic reset switch, and a method of accessing and transforming one's deeper mental functions, fasting seems to function as a physiological reset switch, and a method of experimenting with and exploring physiological reactions to food, and of course, the lack of food.

If you think about it, eating regularly results in an almost constant process of digestion, in which overlapping effects of various foods and liquids are always interacting with each other, and obscuring each other, so that it is difficult to get a handle on what foods are doing exactly what.

And our modern diets can be very complex. We have at our fingertips many different types of foods with many different types of ingredients, undergoing many types of processes, all of which put varying loads and metabolic requirements on our digestive system. And we may consume considerable clusters of these elements in a single sitting.

I spent a week with a partial fast, or subsisting on very little calories, to ease into a week of juice fasting - I'm not sure anymore that juice is a great idea for this - and it was very interesting to feel the effects of an occasional apple, salad, or egg. Various foods have their differing payloads of energy, and differing effects on the digestion system, which can be distinctly felt, depending on where the body's energy is diverted and committed to the various processing organs, and what exactly enters the bloodstream, which of course makes its transit throughout the body, and contributes to certain global effects.

There are of course problems with these self-experiments and observations. The body's stomach contains an ecosystem of its own, which is altered or even reset as the stomach completely empties in the course of a fast, so each subjective observation has to take place within the bounds of a system that is changing, and is either working on convention, slowing down, dormant, or speeding back up, among other possible dynamics, and the totality of these effects work on the mind itself, and enter into a feedback loop with the mind. It will always be difficult to determine exactly what is happening.

It is also possible that during the course of a fast, when energy is being diverted away from the stomach, the body begins using the energy to clean and process unresolved food stores, and expel toxins from the tissue, much like the brain expels toxins during sleep, a hypothesis that could be confirmed with oral and body odors, various discharges, and sudden spurts of energy, clarity, and vigor reported by fasters on the second week and on. Part of  what kills people when they starve is the toxic shock when the body begins its cleansing process. With healthier bodies, and abundant water for the cleansing process, fasters can last as long as 40 days, which is the outer limit for safe fasting. After that it seems the starvation process truly begins, but some human beings have made it past this threshold.

One takeaway from this observation is that our constant exposure to numerous toxins and contradictory elements - which produces the physiological schizophrenia of the modern industrial subject - makes us much more vulnerable to a variety of maladies, despite a preponderance of resources. Though of course we could beg the question of what exactly constitutes a resource, considering that our manufactured goods fall apart out of the box and our industrial agriculture poisons us.

Moving on, when you disrupt your eating habits, it casts into relief just what exactly those habits are. What do you hunger for? What do you reach for? How do you eat? I've found that I constantly overeat, not out of sheer gluttony, but because my OCD compels me to finish everything, and I haven't yet learned to measure out proper portions. A corollary to this is that I eat too fast, so the signal that the stomach is full comes too late, and unsatisfactorily chewed food may make its way through the system only partially processed. There are other factors and tendencies at work as well.

Considering that fasting addresses the mastery of the will over one of our greatest drives, the hunger drive, it is also a good way to build on the faculty of the will in general, which of course has global benefits whenever the will happens to be exercised.

The will is often difficult to modify in isolation. The things that one is compelled to do, such as eat, drink, maintain shelter, and meet social obligations, exercise the will in their own way, so as to bring about the success of these things, but as soon as one attempts to develop some discipline or meet some requirement outside of these pressures, one finds one has to double one's efforts. These requirements grow proportionally to the complexity of one's living environment, and the more one is expelling one's surplus energy in various avenues.

This is because the regular exercise of the will to meet certain recurring bare requirements and obligations begins to carve out pathways for its regular exercise, which allows it to function with greater ease and spontaneity to achieve perpetual success. It generates convention.

To fast is to completely invert the logic that the drives perpetuate. One is beginning to fight against one's drives, and thus, the conventional structure of one's life, unless fasting is a ritualistic component of one's religious social obligation structure. This of course assumes a conceptual model in which the drives are actively shaped and directed by one's society and environment. Perhaps to better explain, the drives are very honest in their desire, but executive functions necessarily develop around one's drives so as to direct them, to repress or amplify them, so that one can move with relative harmony within one's natural and social environment, and these functions have to be taken with the drives in a complex society, perhaps to be understood as overriding drives of their own.

So to bring all of this together, to fast is to modify the executive functions by diverting energy from them, therefore making them more dormant and malleable. It is a way of tampering with one's physiological - and at times psychological - structures of convention and habituation, a desire, a drive which can only be generated through the failure of convention itself, granted that this practice is not already a part of one's habituation.

Further, it seems as though when you fast, energy is first diverted from energy-intensive higher brain functions - which are perhaps not immediately useful to survival - to lower brain brain functions, much like what happens during meditation, or after ingesting psychedelic drugs. The visual and perceptive systems feel especially vibrant and immediate, and visual awareness is sharpened. One's thoughts drift away from abstractions and anticipations to favor one's immediate reality. And supposedly in its advanced stages, intensive fasting can lead to profound spiritual experiences. It becomes more understandable as to why fasting has been so common to various religious traditions for thousands of years.

The practical and health benefits of fasting are still unknown; understandably the practice has not been rigorously researched, though it has been found that about 3 days of fasting can reboot the immune system. The same goes for the experimental opportunities behind fasting, and whether these opportunities can provide genuine physiological and psychological insights, or mere distortions. Still, there is a decent constituency that swears by its spiritual and physiological benefits, and it remains a time-tested tool, to use with other tools, to attempt to shape one's own life.  

On Mimesis 2

Something interesting happens within a corrupt and overly-conformist society: sensitive individuals horrified by the reality they are forced to mimic become disgusted with mimicry, and break away, telling themselves that they can find their own realities.

But we are fundamentally mimics. If we are not mimicking each other, we are mimicking nature (witness the popularity of biomimicry), or some other distant culture or movement which was doing it “right.”

Or else we convince ourselves that we are all alone in generating our own personal meaning, and see nothing but atomized individuals and other living things, multiplied across the landscape, and we become struck with horror over our loneliness.

Artists bang their heads against the wall because of their failure to produce a completely original work, or else produce an original work that no one can understand, and so are left alone and unappreciated, at least until these isolated works find resonance with others who are isolated, and the mimetic process re-emerges and there is again energy being exchanged.

Sometimes it is good to isolate oneself from the mimetic mainline, so as to relieve one’s mind of all of those competing and contradictory ideas. In the quiet, one can listen to and perceive one’s true nature. Sometimes it is even worthwhile to endure the burden of solitude, because no one else is willing to depart from a corrupt regime of conformity.

There is such thing as originality, but it will be familiar as well. One can be original in one’s time, but one is also part of a longer cycle, whose revolutions extend beyond oneself, and one will inevitably find oneself mimicking an earlier revolution in the cycle.Or to explore this further, one is original in the thermodynamic sense that it is highly unlikely there will be a play of energy quite like oneself, at least in an immediately meaningful sense. It could be that our plays of energy could become tesselated and geometrically repeated on a greater scale, but this is not exactly something we will ever have access to, and is more of a speculation.

There is nothing wrong with mimicry in itself. Subsisting in reality is a complex feat which takes more than a single individual, and this is because we are already complex creatures with complex needs. We can’t master it all ourselves, so we mimic others who are mastering what we are weak in, so as to reproduce the beneficial effects of that mastery. One can learn from a master by mimicking her or him, but then to fully develop one's mastery, to fit into it, one must develop the rest of it oneself.

The problem with mimesis that we are always trying to hint at, is that we mimic ideas, images, and practices which are drifting evermore into the past, and which may no longer have much to do with us, or the reality that we find ourselves in. Oftentimes this mimicry is imposed on us, by a central power that benefits from the attitudes and behaviors it is encouraging. Sometimes we are mimicking something that is actively destructive, amplifying its effects.

We could ask the fundamental question: to mimic, or not to mimic? Acts of creation are often spontaneous in that they erupt exactly as they should, as expressions of the movement of energy, regardless of what is being mimicked. But then acts of creation themselves take place within a fabric of individuals in relation to each other, and in relation to a historical flow of events, in relation to an ecology, all of which are acting on each other. To reframe: mimesis is an expression of life as a flow, which on a greater scale can be seen to pour forth, its evolutionary manifestations following a certain logic, a certain path of least resistance of their own, as water flows in accordance with gravity. 

Perhaps a better question to ask is: what are we trying to do, and what crowd are we trying to run with?

Media Ideals

We have this incredibly powerful faculty of ideal formation that allows us to develop ideas of what we want ourselves, or the world to be, what we want to do, and how we wish ourselves and others to act, and then we act - through various sanctions or amplifications administrated by our executive functions - to embody that ideal, at least to an approximation.

Powerful ideas are at the base of great things that humanity has done, and will do.

But there is a dangerous peculiarity to this faculty. While ideas can be developed out of one’s own interaction with the world, in accordance with an application of time-tested knowledge, there is also a tendency for these ideas to be formed and modified by external actors.

As children, we are exposed to many types of ideals and ideas through commercial media, which are carefully groomed and manipulated to achieve certain effects. What marketing has found long ago, through carefully developed psychological insights that share roots with Freudian thought, is that an appeal to the ego is the best way to sell something. This is an insight that has a certain cultural-historical basis, but that is for another time.

So we are offered mythologies and narratives that focus on the individual, in which the more unpleasant attributes of reality are airbrushed away or are externalized to some sort of enemy. We are offered heroes and heroines to identify with, who are steely in their resolve, with minimal personal failings, and with only the challenge of an external enemy to vanquish (who happens to be full of personal failings), or an epic journey to complete. So we are spared that less-than-savory process of trial and error, and the coming to terms with personal weakness and failure that typifies the path to mastery that characterizes the archetypal hero or heroine.

Or else we are offered the image of the match made in heaven: a sultry relationship in which the two lovers suddenly become enraptured with each other, and we are spared the embarrassing and painful string of misunderstandings and emotional conflicts which contribute to the tempering of a genuine relationship.

There are many other scenarios that are dreamed up or recycled as well.

We are offered the irresistible opportunity of identifying with these wondrous images, imagining ourselves as these archetypes, without having to do any of the work, and so of course it sells. It appeals to many. This is not to say that we are lazy and don’t want to work; we do plenty of that too. But the work that we do is repetitious and dull, and after the work day we have little energy for epic journeys of our own, so that it becomes expedient to enjoy one vicariously from the comfort of the couch.

The genuine enemies that we have a grasp on – economic oppression, racism, sexism, classism, imperialism, environmental destruction – can’t seem to be banished, and of course it is easier to turn to a narcotic instead, or a simulated victory in one’s media of choice, than to face this failure.

This is not to say all commercial media is corrupt. There are certainly wonderful works that are embedded within this medium, but here we are talking of aggregates, and the quality of an aggregate can have a particular effect. The more there is of something, the more likely that a greater amount of people are exposed to it, and its repetitious effects are more likely to have a lasting impact. Honest and incisive works can still be expressed on a commercial medium, but a commercial medium, being what it is, is all the more full of nonsense that sells.

The marketers and PR specialists offer empty calories, consumable mass media that tastes delicious, and may very well be addictive, but which lacks nutrition, and of course someone else bears the cost of this exchange long after the transaction is complete. And more fundamentally, the ideas and ideals we are forming to cope with our reality are being taken from the intellectual materials we are consuming the most, and what if the majority of our intellectual diet is coming from these manipulated and dishonest vessels?

The consequence of letting commercial mythology inform our navigating ideals is this: eventually we have to put this idealistic image to the task of navigating our way through reality. And so the challenges and hardships we face become all the more jarring; the setbacks and failures we experience remain unexplained by our heroic models, and appear unnatural. Given the posited individual as the causally efficacious agent in this process, we are forced to blame our failures on either ourselves, or some external scapegoat, and so we fall into despair, or lash out in violence, and learn nothing about the nature of reality. We never learn to move within reality a little easier.

We don’t have to toss it all away of course, but we should be constantly asking ourselves: what are we filling our heads with? Is it good? Is it rubbish? How much is it informing the way we think, feel, and act? 

However, the nature of changing a direction, even with one's ideals, is that it expels much more energy than if one were simply cruising along with one's conventions. Sometimes one needs the narcotic; sometimes one must rest! But then this rest should eventually be put towards future exertions to escape a bad process. 

Capital as Object

Capital functions dispositionally on the scientific tradition - not THE tradition; there are many types of approaches in the sciences - of treating the universe as a collection of objects whose causal properties can be decisively known, so as to be manipulated.

Curiously, various members of the Marxist tradition have pursued this thread as well, which consists of a theoretical project of discovering the causal operations of capital as a natural object to be studied, in order to manipulate and transform it. This generally means the project of understanding value and where value comes from, as well as the social nature of labor that makes this value possible, so as to understand how capital regenerates itself, in hopes of altering this dynamic.

Needless to say, capital completely rejects this project, a project which uses the exact theoretical methodology that capital functions with. This behavior manifests itself in the mainstream economic tradition, where there is a drive to deify the market and render it objective - NOT an object, but a naturalized, almost supernatural entity that has power over everything else - as opposed to having it picked apart and tinkered with as an object of study.

This impulse is similar to the political phenomenon of governments and corporations wishing to know everything possible about the populace, while denying any attempts at an elucidation of themselves in the eyes of the public.

Or you can see this in the behavior of particular individuals who are engaging in hypocritical activities, calling for openness and harmony, but only on terms which are favorable to the individual.

This is a pattern peculiar to the exercise of power. Power wishes to render subjective fields - which may contain entities with wills of their own - into objects with transparent functions, which it can discover and manipulate, while at the same time rendering itself as a continuous subject with a will that manipulates, but which cannot be manipulated itself.

This doesn't have to be the definition of power's exercise. This pattern only characterizes the exercise of power in our time, as when the powerful exercise power, they are seeking to accumulate powers of manipulation and a general expansion of the will, and a denial of the other, which provokes in the other an equal desire to exercise power for the sake of expansion, so as to counteract this invading power.

In other words, we cannot dispose of the concept of power and let capital be, because capital will not let everything else be.

So let's consider an alternate application of power: we are still seeking to manipulate the environment so that it is conducive to our aims, which in this era of the extreme extension of power means actually letting go of it so that it can revert back to its resting state. In a way, we can seek to exercise our power by granting the other power, so as to break the never-ending cycle of oscillating power acquisitions. If one is to study something so as to manipulate it, one can expect to be studied and manipulated in turn, and to banish one's fear of this is to subsume difference.

It is the extreme exercise of power itself which destroys the possibilities for its full expression, as to exercise power against the other - which employs a will of its own - is to antagonize the other into accumulating power of its own, so as to resist a reduction into slavery, or even pulverization. A sustainable exercise of power then would be to exercise it and relinquish it in turn, and let the other exercise it over oneself, under the same conditions, so that it is constantly moving, and paradoxically, stable. 

Here we find ourselves in a bit of a bind. To relinquish power is to end the reign of capital on an individual basis, but at the same time, this exposes oneself to destruction, as capital itself will not relinquish power, nor will its competition. We see a return of the old communist problem: it seems that power-sharing itself requires the exercise of power, against capital's invasions, to sustain itself. This would be the establishment of socialism, or a dictatorship of the proletariat, in more traditional terms.

This also means the running away of this stabilizing process, in which indefinite dictatorships must subsist to constantly fend off antagonized capital.   

But perhaps there is a solution yet. Or at least a pseudo-solution. Because now the problem isn't merely capital, but the total expenditure of energy, and the manipulation of the environment, all of which is implied in this power game.

The basis for capital's existence - the accumulation of powers of manipulation - is contradictory not just to itself, but the entire totality in which it sits. This provides the opening for the real establishment of an alternate political community, so long as the community itself rejects the power dance with capital in fighting over possession of the objects of desire, in this case, material goods and comforts.

Desire is of course not reducible to these things, but if one can procure one's needs outside of the market, while sharing power and allowing the environment and the general other to run its course, one has a shot at a stable political community, which can resist the extreme turbulence that will doubtless be caused by capital's long and arduous fall.

All of this is pretty fun to write and think about, but really how it works out in reality can be summed up by: just keep your head down, be a decent human being, and try to do your community/gardening/energy-shedding thing.

Writerly Works

Indeed!

This is what it is to be a writer, or really anyone creative. To see things in a novel or playful way is oftentimes the result of being left outside of the social circuit, which comes with pain and resent, which necessarily makes up part of the direction of one's work.

And at the same time, one is also producing in accordance with what one is, and what one is necessarily follows from the nature of the society one grew in, for better or worse, and this fact is inescapable.

It is this tension itself, and the resolution of such, that contributes to making a work revolutionary or transformative.

Extended Feeling

When one spends enough time with someone else, and is exposed to their functioning patterns, and their reactions, preferences, and aversions, one begins wiring and refining one's sympathetic sensations and anticipations. One begins to feel as the other person feels, which is oftentimes at least confirmed predictively by various outcomes: this or that thing is going to make this person happy/mad/sad etc. And one begins to feel things as if the other is an extended part of one's person.

One's nature changes in accordance with the other's nature, through repeated contact.

This may very well provide a glimpse into the interconnected nature of things.

Reps

When you repeatedly do something over and over again, it tends toward a certain regularity. Repetitive tasks are usually associated with basic subsistence operations: maintaining food stores, infrastructure, habitations, tools, etc. But repetition also crops up on lower levels of finer disciplines and activities.

Even with something fine, to do it well and successfully requires coordinated mechanical movements or attention, which have to be built up through repetition. 

With repetition comes a dulling of experience and attention that increases over time, so the exercise becomes a process of expediency: how to perfect the repetition process so as to finish it quickly and efficiently?

So the pathways for executing a given operation constrict away from play, away from haphazard wandering, so as to distil the most expedient line, or combination of muscle movements and coordination which produce the quickest, most dependable results, so one can move on quickly. This tends to produce a regularity and a conformity. It produces success, but also boredom.

Further, regularity also arises out of volume, and the necessity of producing a desired object - which is expected to be a specific way - in bulk, which requires a systematizing of the production process. Which comes first? Volume? Successful repetition? Regularity? Or does it all grow together?

All of this is also anthropomorphizing repetition and regularity. More generally, something which is repeated over and over again - because it is useful, or because it is something that is continuously happening - tends to produce regular pathways as part of its perpetual operation, or it is only occurring in the first place because of certain pathways or conjunctions.

A large, complex society tends toward a relegation of its most mechanical and repetitive tasks to the less powerful members of society, or members lower on the social ladder. Much social energy is expended staying above this zone of repetition, jockeying for positions of executive control, play, or creativity.

To clarify with a microcosmic example, this sort of phenomenon happens in music too. One part of improvisational jazz - and other forms of improvisational and communicative music - consists of the basic social requirement that each member plays as an equal, that is, equally willing to produce repetitions and diminish one's importance, but also equally given the opportunity to play, to improvise, to playfully express oneself with an instrument and become seen.

Oftentimes in pop music, a certain style arises which is a refined form of a set of social relations, but which is hardened. The dominant musical members change from outfit to outfit, but oftentimes you have the rhythm section, the drummer and the bassist, relegated to the background, producing highly repetitious rhythms so that the lead guitarist or vocalist can dance about pretty-like, or otherwise these functions are assigned to a computer or drum machine.

There are plenty of outfits in this mold who produce music that I've really enjoyed and have been inspired by, but it is also important to remember this dynamic.

We also attempt to relegate a lot of our regular, mechanical functions to machines themselves, which has saved a lot of human toil and labor, but it seems we continue to increase in complexity, requiring ever more repetitious processes, and so there is always a need for individuals producing repetition. Further, the machines themselves must be built, maintained, and energized with repetition, which oftentimes requires human labor.

It seems to me that there is no escaping repetition. If one wants to escape it, one requires some form of slave, something which can be made to continuously repeat a successful operation, against the tendency of matter and energy to continuously drift. It would be more fair, and sustainable, for each individual to assume their own burden of repetition, and after all, repetition isn't so bad, especially as it puts one in a meditative state, and can produce some wondrous things.

Your Daily Reminder

At the essence of many of our social and cultural problems is this relentless economic logic, whose dictates radiate from the concentrated powers of global capital.

Throughout every social institution, the logic of extraction and accumulation is felt, and which overrides the numerous expressions of desire, and expressions of the will, wherever it makes its presence.

The transmission of cultural mythology, and the distribution of information in media becomes subordinate to profit accumulation. The operation of the political machine, the daily administration of legal functions becomes subordinate to profit accumulation. The production of food, the treatment of waste, the maintenance (or neglect) of infrastructure, the construction of shelter, the administration of transportation, all becomes subordinate to profit accumulation. The daily operations of the family come into direct tension with the landlord, or the landowner, or the state, which in turn come into direct tension with the dictates of debt money.

Like a shard of shrapnel embedded in one's chest, perpetually making its presence felt as one tries to breathe, this economic logic is relentlessly present. And so like a repeating pain signal, it is constantly reminding, directing our attention, or otherwise diffusing it.

Profit accumulation as an animating logic becomes so total in the fundamental operations of banking and currency generation, that the entire fabric of society becomes engaged in an ongoing exploitation of itself, constantly mining itself in order to grow and mine itself greater and more deeply.

If one looks at the flow of currency, and sees it as a store of permitted energy, one sees that the energy bends and attracts toward the accumulation of individual power. And so all powerful individuals are engaged in this accumulation, feeding off of what once were concentrations of power in state, cultural, and economic institutions. We are no longer witnessing a coherent organism which has a purpose to survive, but an inertial force whose coherence and drive is generated by a mutual desire for accumulation, and the sympathetic pressures which are generated by this overriding desire. This makes a collective solution very difficult, or impossible, if one is using collective in the sense of collectively directing this existing civilization through the logic with which it has been subsisting.

What is one to do about it? Well, I've discussed this one obsessively, but it is a good subject to obsess over. There is a collective solution, but it means making the individual choice to drop out and realign oneself with a new body of logic, which forms a new collective through its realignment.

Heavy Lifting

It cracks me up when readers cling tightly to a writer's every word, as if the secrets to the universe are contained in the page, and if only one squints hard enough, with enough concentration, one's skull will be flooded with the Truth. And then if the writer's thought patterns are a little too disorderly, or the writer is using obtuse language, then dammit, to hell with it! One shouldn't have to exert oneself so much for the Truth hmm?

Here I can laugh at myself as well; every once in a while I catch myself indulging in the old habit.

What people sometimes forget is that an intellectual work takes quite a bit of exercise on the part of the writer, and on the part of the reader too. To clearly articulate a given subject, you have to continuously study it, so as to keep its facts and concepts clearly fixed in your mind. Otherwise it begins to fade, and you have to labor much harder to recollect it, or otherwise piece it together in a haphazard fashion.

Further, your concepts for understanding and articulating a given subject strengthen and become more sophisticated over time. Sometimes you have to leave a subject entirely and strengthen your concepts in another sphere, and then come back later with cleared eyes.

Any written work can be seen as a multidisciplinary feat, with various skills, stylistic tendencies, language pools, knowledge structures, and emotional states working together to produce a coherent work that is produced by a human being with strengths and weaknesses, and an incomplete perception of the universe.  

In the same way, the reader must constantly put the work in to build up concepts of her or his own, so as to better understand what the writer is trying to articulate. And at the same time, one will not magically become the writer and understand everything the writer has to say. One has to settle taking away what one finds worthwhile and resonant. Certainly some works have a greater power and a wider resonance than others, but that is another story.

The Truth (or small-t "truths") does not arrive on a silver platter. Well, usually. But this also does not excuse the writer from doing her or his explanatory chin-ups, to extend the exercising metaphor. The writer needs to reach out to the reader, just as the reader must reach out to the writer. If one cannot clearly articulate what one means to a fair amount of people, one should not be surprised when readers begin putting their books down, shaking their heads, and leaving to try something else.

Now You See, Now You Don't

The mastering of something presupposes the understanding of that thing, which presupposes the hiding of other things from view.

Mastering something is to seize upon it and command it in accordance with one's nature, and what is within one's mind.

And to seize on something and command it is to alter it from its original trajectory, an alteration which spreads among what it is connected to.

All of this occurs in the background, whereas the object of mastery resides in the foreground, and the greater one focuses on this object, the more the background recedes.

Little Bangs

It is the confluence of a range of historical processes and flows that produces a distinguishable historical period, which through a coming together produces a little bang of its own, which then proceeds to unravel over time.

Conflict

Much social conflict emerges out of the individual desire to expand and make replicas of itself.

All conflicts have causes that are infinitely complex. But to take two individuals in conflict, both of whom have a certain nature and a certain way of interacting with reality as a consequence of that nature, we can express this conflict by stating that these separate natures are in tension with one another.

An intractable conflict occurs when both individuals have overriding desires to replicate themselves simultaneously, to solve the conflict in their own way, both solutions of which reproduce the conflict.

Double Take on Capital

Maybe it is a bit odd to speak of expansion in this era of contraction. But it is the expansion which makes the contraction so explosive.

If something were simply contracting, it would be shedding matter and energy to resituate itself .

But capital by its nature possesses the overriding need and desire to expand, all the while contracting, so that it places undue pressure on its contracting constituents to expand nevertheless, which is a contradiction that must be resolved in one way or another.

Mountain Thought

I have no difficulty sitting in judgement at a distance, working with abstract representations which are somewhat removed from material phenomena.

But plunged right into the phenomena, I find myself powerless as judge, and am merely swept away as a result.

This is just as well.

Thought and Reality

As we develop ideological thought, we work over and over various interrelated concepts as they are inherited and as they are modified or formed through our interactions with reality.

The boundary between abstract thought and material reality is only an artificial, conceptual one, as the two mutually interact and affect each other. Thought affects reality insofar as it informs the numerous practical actions that are meant to account for the effects of reality, or otherwise attempt to manipulate reality.

Reality affects thought by tempering its many inquiring and oscillating forms, as they come to contradict various material and social realities.

But then a successful ideology entrenches its forms, patterns, and interactions with the real through repetition, and continues to repeat itself even as it continues to change the reality it interacts with, until the contradictions are great enough to cause it to break out of its inertial pattern and unravel.

We really only make this distinction because thoughts are produced by concentrations of energy which are seeking to sustain themselves, and as such produce boundaries.

However, these boundaries do tend to melt away with more ease the less emphasis is placed on distinction by thought.

Be Nice?

Being nice, I am often inclined in a philosophical reflection to encourage nice behavior, nice thought, and various other nice actions and effects. Naturally. One has but a projection of one's own will to work with, as one is all one ever was - at least in rational thought as far as I know. But of course this projection can be modified and influenced by the other.

What I'm trying to say in so many words is that to my disappointment, sometimes being too nice is to be mean in a way, as being nice can encourage dickheads to become bigger dickheads, until the problem becomes so blown up that it could require another dickhead - or perhaps just someone with a violent nature, or an assertive will - to cut down the out of control dickhead.

Or take dealing with various types of animals in a house or even farm. It would be really lovely if we could support all animals and help all of them live pleasant lives forever. But the reality of things is that human beings are a certain type of entity, which is sympathetic to other certain entities, and antagonistic to others.

So mice are very cute, and one sees them and thinks, "oh wouldn't it be nice to feed the little fella?" But then once they make themselves at home and start eating the food and chewing on the wires, and possibly introduce disease with their fleas and feces, then it may come time to remove them in a not-nice way.

So sealing up all of the food, and plugging up all of the holes - they call this exclusion - and possibly putting down peppermint oil and whatnot, so as to make the living space as uninviting as possible for the little things may feel sort of mean, but it is much better for the mice in the long run, as to encourage them and then suddenly turn on them when it gets to be too much is much more mean, and unfair.

This is a little dispiriting, yes. I've had to temper my own pacifism. But it is still possible to maintain a more nuanced pacifist position, which is simply to take into account other modalities of thought and action, so as to encourage and maintain that greater impulse.

What Am I Doing?

The writing process is actually a bit strange (at least for me; not entirely sure what others experience). When one gets to thinking, one seems to be generating visualizations, or these sorts of metaphorical structures of association and parallel causation, which serve as a kind of organizing framework, which often possess a distinct shape which you could call an abstract form. These structures can then be rationally mapped and put into words.

Of course the structures themselves are probably an intermingling of the rational and the visual. One is still generating these limited categorizations which can be compared and contrasted and situated into hierarchies (or broken down from them), but then at the same time, one is associating images with them to organize them, and then part of how one organizes concepts has to do with how one feels about them.

Feeling is particularly important to the causal effects built into a given work. Is something good, and does it feel pleasurable to think about? Emphasize, amplify, preserve, and repeat it. Is something bad and painful to think about? Contradict it and sanction it and see if there is a way around it. Of course this depends on the writer's purpose as well. One may feel inclined to question something that normally feels good, or revisit and re-evaluate something which is painful.

This entire process proceeds through states, with some states invoked by the process itself, and which emerge as a product of what has been set into motion. One word, phrase or image could mushroom into an entire constellation of meaning when one gets going, and then one has to decide how to size this constellation down so that one can share it. 

And again, these experiences could also be very different based on the discipline or the character of the writer. I suppose a more general point I am trying to make is that processes of creation or even communication typically have to pass through multiple regions of the brain which are doing different things, and that pathway differs depending on the activity and the personal history of the subject. But something that only takes a couple of seconds could still be highly refined, and influenced by multiple centers of production, all working to fulfill their own evolved functions, and that any utterance or creation presupposes the complex processes of a living body, which is situated in an environment and a society, all with their own complex processes which are affecting each other, undergoing constant change in historical time. No single artifact, whether audio, visual, or lingual, is just that thing. It implies everything else. 

Boundaries

Life, having the characteristics that it has, seems to have to generate boundaries between itself as it grows. Energy, upon flowing into a given system, concentrates with uneven distribution, with formations growing in disparate regions in time and space.

A living thing then is a concentration of a given flow of energy, and this concentration removes components of matter in various levels of integration, separating them from other energy flows and concentrations, and integrating them into its own body, in order to sustain itself or grow itself.

Life can sustain itself by growing its body, pursuing energy, and coming up against boundaries, can either break them down, or else the old formations curl in on themselves against the boundaries and begin wilting, necessitating the creation of new bodies and boundaries.

There is an art to living then. One should be able to grow to sustain oneself, but to continue to grow is to eclipse the other flows and formations, and ultimately destroy the surrounding energy that contributed to one's growth in the first place. If endless growth and the resultant ecstasy is to be compressed in time, one should expect to meet its mirror image: catastrophic contraction and horror, in due time.

We reach a paradox in which growth and unification of a given entity requires separation, in that the separation of units of energy from other energy flows and formations is required in greater amounts, breaking down and extinguishing those flows. And then at the same time, the respect of boundaries at various life system levels leaves other systems intact, so that multiple interconnected life systems can sustain each other for some time. This is interesting: at what level should one be respecting boundaries, and then at what level should they be broken down? Power becomes important here: a unity which concentrates power above its surroundings should actually break down, whereas lower level unities should be respected and preserved.

Marx has observed that what distinguishes capitalism as a social system is its radical separation of workers from their products, their communities, and their means of production, and at the same time, capitalists are separate from all these things as well, and must coerce their own subsistence out of these processes which are rearranged in various manners of contrivance, just as the workers are forced to sell their own labor to access this subsistence as well, so that a central market must be sustained to procure all these things, which reproduces this state of affairs indefinitely.

A bad dialectical state of affairs: for the body of capital to continue to grow and sustain itself, it must keep everything separate below itself, while incorporating all of these separate elements into itself.

So capital continues to grow, breaking off and separating all of the life flows around it in a radical way, destroying them. What began as an eruption of life is now a growth into death, which as we observe it now, appears to be intent on growing and grinding itself into oblivion.

Understanding this state of affairs is crucial if something is to be done, if this is any longer possible. Marx's work provides a good foundation for this understanding, and a good friend continues this project with his own work.

Still to be understood are the complex historical roots and relationships to this process. Why this endless expansion? How to halt this process, at least apart from the process halting itself by burning itself out? Threads we should continue to pursue.

Capital and Waste

Capital and waste are often so tightly coupled, they should just as well be considered synonymous.

Capital, both through the effects of the extreme pressures it places on the working class, and the extreme competitive and expansionary forces that contribute to its explosive growth (so long as it remains unchecked by energetic and environmental limits), generates incredible material abundance, which, due to the structural peculiarities of this process, must be destroyed or otherwise withdrawn in great proportion.

This is because abundance itself destroys exchange value, the maximization of which is the raison d'etre of capitalist activity. And perhaps more insidiously, abundance destroys worker desperation, which is detrimental to capitalist power, and is to be avoided.

So it is that a grocery store has to dump shelves and shelves of unsold and expired product into the dumpsters, and then guard the dumpsters, the waste, with righteous intensity, at least in areas with active dumpster diving. If everyone could wait around to eat nominally expired food as the grocery store dumped it, who would choose to do so? How would this affect the balance sheets?

For the same reason planned obsolescence has been in effect across virtually every manufacturing industry. We could choose to ignore the material consequences of seizing upon a new iPhone every year, those of us who can afford such things anyways, though of course all of that matter won't simply melt into the air. We should look to certain vulnerable regions in Africa, where containers and containers full of electronic waste are dumped, which are marked "secondhand goods" to pass bureaucratic scrutiny.

Critics are right about the fact that capitalism requires the generation of artificial scarcity to survive, a paradoxical situation considering the common ideological justifications for the social system, one of the most important of which insists that capitalism produces great material abundance and feeds a huge population. But as always we must ask: material abundance for whom, and to what end?

And the nature of artificial scarcity is such that an actual material mass of abundance has to be sized down, and what else would we call this superfluous mass but waste, if it was not going to be used?

Disciplines

This entry was a relatively tough piece to put together, and took some time to think about and assemble various thoughts which may seem to lack continuity or coherence, and which may seem cobbled together. But it was all worth getting down, if anything, to serve as valuable material for later. Bear with me!

Disciplines can correlate with various modes of survival, though their numerous expressions and variations can go far beyond that. Perhaps more generally, disciplines can be seen as expressions of the will, which have a tendency to harmonize surrounding life systems in accordance with the will's nature.

When one is looking to harmonize a life system, one becomes more cognizant of its mechanisms and behaviors through interaction with it. So in a way, discipline allows one to see what was previously hidden to the exerting subject. If one is learning a martial art, one begins to experience sensations all over the body, and grasp the contours of regions one had never thought about. If one is studying music, one becomes more perceptive of musical contours, textures, movements, affects, and other dimensions. If one is studying plants, one begins to see the various types of plants, their appearances, their behaviors, and their uses, depending on what one is trying to do.

And one should beware: there is only so much energy to direct one's attention with, and develop a discipline with. Where one concentrates one's energy and attention, another area may become weak, or in a cosmic sense, hidden.

There are numerous disciplines that can lead to an experience of ecstasy and feelings of unity and satisfaction - commonly referred to as flow if one is to use the modern vocabulary of psychology  - which can lead to spiritual experiences and personal growth. Doubtless this is an old observation.

There is an important concept that is known as "overlearning" in the study of discipline. Overlearning is the point at which the repetition of a given successful process becomes so regular as to become automatic. What becomes overlearned becomes so automatic as to become nearly invisible to the senses, which in a way, is another way for a given region of a life system to become invisible to the subject, which can be dangerous at times. And so, the dangers of failure find their twin affinity in the dangers of success.

Overlearning can happen with lower level, mechanical processes, so as to assist finer, higher level exertions and manipulations. But overlearning can also happen at the higher level, in which a given discipline becomes so successful and regular that the discipline is learned and spread all over, and one begins to forget why one is even doing it.

Being surrounded by and attempting too many disciplines at once, which are all becoming overlearned, and all beckoning with their powers of creation and revelation, one can become blind. One becomes surrounded by too many disciplines, trying to chase each of them superficially to derive their benefits without understanding their roots (as a cargo cult mimics foreign behaviors and practices), but one never reaches that mastery, or perhaps more importantly, one never comes to understand why one is so entranced with a given discipline, and one fails to integrate that discipline in one's life, so as to derive greater contentment on all counts.

To master a given discipline requires a set of interrelated skills and environmental conditions, all of which work together to produce a way of life. This growth and mastery is witnessed by the other, which attracts energy. Others wish to emulate this way of being, or else share in its beneficial effects.

To sustain the joy that comes with mastery and the sharing of that mastery, one must be content, and contentment means harmonizing all of the elements within one's field of awareness. A greater sphere of awareness means a greater amount of elements which must be harmonized or abided by.

For example, if one is to master the guitar, one's surroundings should be conducive to one's craft, which allows a more thorough mastery which can be shared. Of course, one can be miserable and place all of one's energy into a discipline as a means of escape or redemption, but this can cause all sorts of problems down the road. And so disciplines can be seen to be inseparable from the environments and cultures that they arise in.

To master a given discipline, one must be able to grow in the discipline, which sometimes implies growing beyond its apparent bounds. If one is to be a good cook, one should understand also the tools and equipment that goes into this cooking, as well as the gathering or even farming of the ingredients, for example, which all imply various disciplines and exertions of their own.

This growth can be material in nature, with a growing utilization of energy accompanying it, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a growth in understanding, an understanding of how to move about within one's surroundings. So of course this growth depends on context and historical circumstances.

Growth in a discipline implies a trajectory which proceeds from the nature of one's will. One's discipline will take on the shape of what one's nature is. If one is of a violent nature, one's discipline will be violent; if one is of a gentle nature, this discipline will be gentle, and all of those that witness the effects of the discipline will receive a glimpse of one's nature.

Mentors can be useful in the sense that one is being taught what one needs to proceed in a given discipline, and one can proceed with a rapidity and effectiveness that is not present if one simply starts from scratch in an area where one is weak. However, one must proceed in a given discipline to become what one is, not what the master or mentor is.

One can't grow if there is no available space to proceed to expand one's will in the world with one's discipline. Otherwise one is to become a slave to another's will, an automaton, a cog within the machine of another's creation, perhaps slowly wobbling out of orbit, but refused full exercise of the expansion of one's will. The end of growth is stagnation and despair, yet overgrowth of one implies the end of growth of another, a curious predicament.

Where one grows in one area, another area is deprived. Growth then should move, and be in flux, or otherwise be checked at the boundaries of wills of others. The mastery of this meta-discipline itself can bring great joy and satisfaction.

One can build one's own discipline over time, or learn from mentors, or do a little of both.

Disciplines may start from diffuse and chaotic practices, which then coalesce into pure and effective practices and procedures, and then the body of practice may grow diluted, and chaotic over time once again, as it spreads and comes into contact with variations and modifications. But loses power even starting from purity.

Lots of ground covered here of course. Some of it glossed over, some of it elaborated, and then all of it is ripe for more analysis. Worth thinking about anyway.