What's Happening

The language and the conceptualization here is almost more interesting than the content itself, though the content is certainly of significance.

There is interesting language here that is reflecting a shift in consciousness: we move from a pinpointed awareness of self and of humankind as an agent of causation, which is unidirectional in its effects, versus a shifting awareness of the efficacy of external forces, of the earth and the universe in general, which wash back on to humanity and act on it, causing humanity to act in turn.

Of course, the extreme polar ends of these causal concepts never quite disappear, remaining dormant on the fringes until their expressions grow numerous enough so as to affect material, practical change, and so oscillate in strength of expression through time.

To clarify with an example, it is theorized that more ancient cultures saw a continuous, dialectic (or unidirectional?) exchange between the material and spiritual world, in which the agents of causal efficacy moved conceptually from external sources to the self and back, a view that eventually broke down under severe social, political, economic, and ecological stress, resulting in a division between the material, human world and the spiritual world. Soon enough these dividing fissures would produce the mythology of the efficacious self through further divisions, until the divisions reached the self.

It could be that the final breakdown of the self, as a causally efficacious agent within a productive body, produces these holistic visions of causation, a necessary conceptual progression that allows the individual to form a new political-economic body. Again, a theory, a narrative, yet...

This conceptual evolution and its dance with material reality serves as a reasonable explanation for the reality we are faced with today. How else to explain what is happening? We are faced with these corporate behemoths, which, embedded within a regime of competitive expansion and social disintegration, cause all individuals caught within their gravitational orbit to act against their own interests as human beings, even as members of an ecology.

We look on at these organs of production, which relentlessly seek out pockets of oil, and connected to the organs of energy production, extract and send out the oil to be burned or manipulated, which in turn further heats or degrades the ecology and environment that houses all possible productive activity, and we are at a loss to comprehend.

The corporate organs themselves are reproducing their own gradual destruction. Here the endless propaganda and rationalization proves useless in understanding the incomprehensible driving power of these organs. We are forced to temporarily discard our model of human causal efficacy, and understand this state of affairs as something which is animated by external forces. So the oil burns us. Or, the nature of its concentrated energy unlocks in an organism an endless expansion, so long as the organism possesses the means to exploit it.

Humanity itself, lacking effective limits to its own growth, could only violently expand with the concentrated energy it came into contact with. The violence and energy with which this process unfolds is owed in equal part to the internal state of the human organism itself, what with its rational-technological methods of universal exploitation and manipulation, which was noted as early as Heidegger in a wonderful essay, and certainly the thread goes back further.

It takes both the formation of a new spiritual ideology, and the political and economic ideologies which come with it, as well as the final burning out of the most accessible stores of petroleum energy (implying the collapse of the burning process), to put an end to this process. Paradoxically enough, as the formation of a new ideology - or the cyclical return to an ancient ideological conception, transformed in a different era, as a point in a spiral - seeks to mend divisions, a tense dividing wall is put up against the solipsistic worship of self which animates the end stages of the burning process.

Under this vision, individuals become the many licking fingers of the burning process. At the same time, the causal chain is perceived to extend conceptually into infinity, an ideological position that induces uncertainty and inaction, which of course is sometimes the best course of action.

However, under this enlarged aperture of perception, one can still act in accordance with the nature of the material world, as well as with the dictates of restoring life's ecological equilibria, however an impossible task it may seem to the individual. To locate a cause in a given historical thread, institution, political-economic system, or even an individual, is to perform a political act which has material consequences.

One may advocate switching out individuals like one switches out batteries - an attitude that is more prevalent in our individualistic, bourgeois thought, but not exclusive to it - or one may advocate rebuilding the entire mechanism within which the batteries act, such as an economic or political structure, or one may advocate departing entirely from a particular type of mechanism building altogether, which is to depart from a certain cultural or social form or mode of production. Each of these political acts has consequences both for the targets of their action, and the life structures connected to those targets, oftentimes with nonlinear and multiplying consequences.

Well, the process will wind down as it will, and generate its ideological reactions all along the spectrum in turn, which means a cascading and multitudinous array of human behavior, which all depends on what each individual is. There are many directions this incredibly complex system will take, though the one thing it won't do is continue on in the direction it has been going.

The Center

Consider this description of a recent NYT article:

 "The white officer, Michael Brelo, climbed onto the hood of the car and fired repeatedly at an unarmed black couple. His trial played out amid broader questions about how the police interact with African-Americans."

Now this language, considering the circumstances, appears to me very odd. Here we have a scene of tremendous absurdity, both for its savagery and its injustice. A white officer leaps onto the hood of a car, like some twisted action hero, like a Dirty Harry without granting even the cartoonish categories of action movie good and evil, firing his weapon repeatedly into an unarmed couple.

And all we can cough out is: "Well this all played out amid broader questions about how police interact with African-Americans."

So we're just having a calm dialogue about how the police are supposed to interact with a group of people. And if you start shouting and waving your hands, well you're just not being very serious. 

The tension here is exquisite. The people administrating the Center are completely mortified of betraying any sort of preference, at least which extends too far past its conditioned boundary lines. But these conditioned boundary lines of debate are specified by the very system that is producing these absurd events.

This is why - to paraphrase Yeats - the center cannot hold. Because there is nothing in the center. There is no moral content, no direction. The center is attempting to hold in place too many conflicting pressures, while refusing to cede control.

If the center refuses to reconstitute itself as a moral entity with purpose, to compensate for the evils that it has inflicted, then it will have to break apart. 

This would lead to the establishment of multiple centers of decentralized power, which upon solving various existing problems, would produce other problems of its own, namely the coordination of complex activity, and the check on the expansion of groups with conflicting interests.

The powerful made their bed then, or feathered the nest, or what have you.

War and Peace (?)

Times of war are often associated with heroism and passion, especially by those comfortable and removed from war, and who still have ideological sympathies with the apparatus of war and the society it is embedded in.

Yet worshippers of said heroic wars are alarmed to find self-interest and corruption radiating from all corners as aftereffects of the war, long after its fires have died. The idealizers and romanticizers of the heroic condemn the outpouring of these irreverent self-interested actors, as if these impurities are spoiling their romantic drama.

But to look at wartime not as some romantic drama, but a violent, cascading process of mass, circulating trauma, it could be seen that these two states of being - the warlike and the self-interested atomization - oscillate and dance with each other, what with the mass grinding trauma producing generations of radicalized, self-interested "survivalists," behaviors which can be seen in trauma survivors.

And that self-interest, though producing regimes of abundance for some time, lacks its shutoff switch, and proceeds in constant positive feedback with itself, until it hits geo-political or ecological limits, or both, resulting in another era of cascading traumas.

This is an idea that requires great caution, as warfare and trauma in smaller, less complex societies may cause bonding effects among its survivors, but what if this too is a kernel of greater expansion and future calamity?

Part of the problem is the gaps in language and knowledge across time, coupled with the fact that the constitution of a society - and other societies external to it - is always changing. It may be that a past war truly did cement a society and spark its creative powers, but that this state, as worshipped by idealizers of the past, is no longer possible, as the society has progressed further into a state of fragmentation, and that more war will only make this state more acute.

Still, it is worth repeating that these are dangerous judgements to sit upon, considering the stakes. But they are worth working over in the mind, if not to induce some uncertainty, as sometimes inaction is better than misinformed action.  

Oscillations of Analytical and Continental Philosophy

These two categories I'm going to use as loose designations for a range of phenomena I'm trying to describe.

There seem to be historic shifts from the development of an analytical system with carefully defined terms and definitions, to an intuitive system of looser usage, and then back again, which seems to happen within the cultural milieu at the time. 

It is curious to see many philosophers, especially in the 60s and 70s, very carefully defining their terms and developing a stable, systematized explanatory framework, a sign of underlying ontological stability. Whereas I really have no idea entirely what I'm doing; indeed I feel as if I'm flailing in the dark, that definitions are slippery and amorphous, and this is just as well. These are signs of an unstable ontology, and if you look around, perhaps you can forgive me for such.

I am inclined to label these stable systems of rigorous definitions as exercises in analytical philosophy, whereas continental philosophy has a more intuitive and almost literary quality to it. The blurry lines and shifting, amorphous quality of the continental analytical structure indicates the gradual formation, or at least articulation of a new ontological reality. And then with analytical philosophy, you have a sharpening and clarifying of this reality.

Doubtless these are broad categories, and there are all sorts of things happening within their umbrella. Marx for example is referred to as a continental philosopher, as well as Kant, who were both very rigorous and systematic in their approach, whereas Nietzsche was famous for growing impatient in his writings for being asked to systematize and recall, though he did do it.

This could be owed to the fact that continental philosophy was coined to describe philosophers doing work on the European continent, in contrast to the analytic schools which were popular in Britain at the time. And of course slowly over time a given category begins to take on the character of its aggregate, but which slowly drifts apart again as time passes. And then of course there is the simple insufficiency of my own definitions and characterizations. 

Personal Morality, Public Morality, and Power

Personal morality appears to the perception - and this is always only a portion of the story - as so many little switches, ons and offs which prescribe a certain behavior in each node or individual in reaction to miniscule shifts in power, in order to preserve a certain equilibrium (or equilibria) of power relations, as specified by public morality, which, formalized and systematized, could be categorized as an ethics, though there is certainly always traffic between the two. 

Power generates artificial equilibria through mythology, so as to maintain its graduated tiers of asymmetry. This mythology, or this story, demonstrates a coded history of exchanges, achievements, and slights, the aggregate of which produces a stable balance of power, justly composed, almost as a tree whose roots extend into history.

These conditions can change, sometimes very quickly, often as subterranean movements of human relations underneath the constellation of symbols, which, finally ever-present and immutable, forces a re-aligning of the symbolic system whose harmonic forces make the state of affairs ever more so.

And what power discharges so much of its energy preventing is the conscious awareness that these deeper relations are shifting beneath the institutional, formal symbolic structures, whose regulatory and built natures cause them to be perpetually maintained and persisted, as they take on a life of their own.

This is because individuals, as desiring entities, exert their power in all different directions. A public morality can absorb many of these aberrances, and the more offending discharges can be simply ignored or even criminalized as distinct, isolated events. But the truth is that as enough shocks hit the system, the entire consistency of human relations is altered, even as the static institutional systems persist, resulting in the alienation of the individuals within the system. 

One of two things tends to happen to a node, or individual which is alienated, or has failed to become absorbed in this system (this is not exhaustive): either the individual adopts a radicalized personal morality that only considers itself in the moral calculus, or its radicalized personal morality is exploded to take into account all of perceivable existence into the moral calculus.

With enough of these individuals forming a critical mass, this event forces a shift in the system of ethics that governs them, that either becomes held at tension with the dominant system, is subsumed by it, or which replaces it as the dominant ethical system, whose effects spread geometrically to each individual caught within the matrix.

I Say

A lot of my negative pieces are akin to some act of psychic surgery, poking and prodding at some element of pain or discomfort, until it achieves an approximate objectivity, and one becomes okay with it, as opposed to fighting against it or reacting to it.

When a cause reaches oneself, one reacts to it. But if one traces that cause back through analysis and finds that the cause is not aimed at oneself in particular, but is merely some ripple that is passing over, and which is actually quite impersonal, though its proximal cause can seem personal. One is quieted and relieved a bit. One's reactive systems calm down.

This happens to be similar to how one comes to terms with pain through meditation. One observes it, traces its contours, objectifies it, shutting off the mechanisms of reaction, and mysteriously it dissolves.

And so obsessive analysis can be seen as a form of meditation. A form which can lead to madness if one isn't careful, but it can also lead to peace and reconciliation, which has a discernable effect on the emotional state, which is a global process - global in the closed system of one's mind - and whose effects cascade into actions and relations.

The exorcism carried out by the negative piece leads to psychic peace, and it clears the way for exercises in positive philosophy, or prescriptions for eventual healing action.

Cruise Ships

To someone who has their disbelief suspended, who can passively enjoy life's many pleasures, a cruise ship is paradise. To someone cursed - I know, I know, and blessed - with a relentless faculty of analysis, which compares and contrasts inner systems with the connected outer systems, cruise ships appear incredibly weird.

A cruise ship appears weird like a classic American suburb appears weird, or Disneyland, which is to say, that it is not intrinsically weird - of course these things are nice ideas on their own, with the suspension of disbelief and a light-hearted air of play - but weird in the sense of it persisting as a constructed experience that is existing simultaneously embedded within a rapidly degenerating outer system, which by its juxtoposition makes a mockery of said construction, so that underneath the carefully constructed and groomed fantasy imagery, there is a wide range of unfortunate human behaviors which directly contradict - and functionally explode - the constructed image.

For all practical purposes, cruise ships exist as extreme spatial concentrations of power, cleanly broken off, to share with the wealthier middle class, a state of affairs that, unsurprisingly, perfectly reproduces the power imbalances of global society in miniature.

As floating cities they accomplish this with their nature as isolated entities which travel and accumulate a labor force from all over the world. As entities of extreme concentrated wealth, they can attract workers from lands of extreme impoverishment, and retain them, feeding them steady trickles of wealth that are vast in comparison to what they are used to. This is what capital has been accomplishing for some time, with its free trade agreements and its offshore manufacturing, but with a cruise ship, you get to see it in person, concentrated in space.

There is even a caste system that develops on the ship itself, which relegates lighter-skinned, relatively richer-country crew to officer and executive positions, while darker-skinned crew members, and crew members from stressed countries occupy serving and cleaning positions, which often depend on tips, as they are below minimum wage in many lines. 

Apologists for this imbalance are quick to seize on some incredibly "kind" thing that the cruise line does for the servers, or that the servers' lives are better than what they would be if the cruise line never took them on. Superficially this is true: servers get to see the world on their breaks - which are not nearly numerous or long enough - and they are paid more than they would be at home, which they can bring back to their families. This same line of logic is often extended to sweatshop workers.

But let's ask the question: can these servers afford the same caliber of cruise themselves, as well as the time off without gaining an income, so as to reverse the power relationship, at least temporarily? What does their home look like? What do their families and friends experience? Their communities? 

And what does it mean to temporarily put one's life on hold for months on end, and resign oneself to living within a virtual dictatorship, what with its carefully constructed mythology, and its Morlock-like concealment of the crew, relegating them to cramped bunks in the rumbling belly of the ship.

Discipline is rigidly enforced with constant customer feedback and game theory-inspired punishment systems that play different members of the crew against each other, while the fear of losing one of the better jobs possible in one's country does the rest of the work, contributing to an internalization of the rigid rules of conduct. 

Also consider the dimensions of the crew quarters, people who are paid, as opposed to the quarters of the customers, the people who pay. This is a perfectly designed and executed mechanic marvel, all of it imagined for taking, extracting human energy.

David Foster Wallace had it all covered some time ago in a superb essay on the subject. 

As Wallace hilariously but painfully noted briefly with his example of the luggage handler, there is a brutal double bind located in the exchange between customer and worker, expressed in the twin dictums of the customer being able to do whatever the customer wants, and the workers' necessity of making the ship and customer experience as comfortable and pleasant as possible, which often means overriding the customer's sphere of autonomy. There is the existence of an over-pampering which breaches this double bind, and considering the primacy of the customer in the power relation, results in the crushing of the worker. This would be hideous enough if it happened merely once, but as it happens, this occurs perpetually all over the ship. As Wallace put it, it results in despair for the sensitive person. And who knows what it results in for the worker?

One wants to relate to these people on a human level, but one is constantly reminded that they are forced to smile - indeed their lives depend on it. Nevertheless, there are wonderful human moments, and many of these people go about their lives with an impressive degree of dignity and grace, but if one breaches that precarious customer-server relationship, they must recoil in fear. One is not to join them as one interacts in a community, one is to play a role, a role which implies greater power over the other, so that two entire cultures are held in constant tension to each other, which inflicts profound psychic violence daily and systematically, its distorting effects disfiguring both worker and customer alike. 

That is before one gets to the absurd expenditures of energy and resources for generating this experience. As Wallace put it, the engines are basically the size of bank branches, and there is a fast ocean of fuel sloshing within the ship's belly; an ocean sloshing within an ocean, one could note. This hulk must be manufactured, as well as all of its supporting equipment and infastructure. This particular ship had lawns right there on the deck that had to be watered...a feature that nearly had me burst into laughter every time I passed it. And the food...buffets are open daily that have platters of platters of food, which uneaten are dumped into the trash by servers who could very well hail from food insecure communities.

And one of the stranger things about these ships is that they are manically cleaned day and night. There is always someone cleaning. Every surface. They even paint these things mid-cruise. 

There's always much more to say and comment on, but I'll leave it at that. Wallace's essay paints an excellent picture itself.

Physical Beauty

It is easy enough to slip into a single-dimensional conception of beauty, what with all of these glossy images of a certain type of beauty, constantly being shaped and constructed for us, thrust in front of us and pressed into our noses, a not-so-subtle suggestion to follow, strive for, and desire this teleological image of perfect beauty – oh and this here product can help you get there, I have just the thing in stock.

This impoverished conception of beauty acts as a delimiting filter, cutting out so much information. Everyone is so busy chasing pretty faces, pretty bodies – well, pretty in a constructed sense, which does have a biological basis, but which is also manipulated – oblivious of the living reality underneath. Albert Camus, cutting through our superficial intuitions about beauty, remarks, “Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”

Statements like this give us pause. It is often the painful and personal reckoning with the perpetual birth and death of reality's many forms, which shatters the artificial and static image, causing a recursive examination of the fragments in order to reconstitute the image. Upon closer examination the concept of beauty can go some interesting ways, and reveal some interesting things.

Yes, beauty as we conceive of it, say classically beautiful human features – which are also made beautiful on account of being symbols of power – or sleek, smooth, and colorful forms of artificial beauty, are constantly aging and disintegrating, both as exciting objects of perception and as physical materials.

It seems a matter of chance that an individual can bond with a beautiful person, especially in this modern society in which bonds are made and broken with such rapidity and abandon, yet one is so drawn to them! And that some beautiful people, acting as bug lights, zap those that come close, entranced by the bright dazzle of their beauty. And it is a wonder that these people are doing the zapping, what, being pestered constantly by those uninterested in the divinity of their person, and much more interested in the divinity of their own narrow conceptions of beauty and the pleasures it will bring.

The beauty is teleological in the sense that it prescribes an action, a direction. One is to experience its sublimity in intercourse with it. But what of that stark beauty of a face, regardless of its physical form? Its animation? The way that life's energies pass over and through it, lighting it up and changing its colors? Or what of one's energy as it goes in and becomes reflected back?

I don't wish to be misunderstood: intercourse is just fine, and nice. But what about other things? Why does our attention have to exist as so many fragmented, sharp points, oscillating in and out?

Keep It Together

Yes it is very strange, that as this particular society - and certainly others in the past - approaches the acceleration curve of its dissolution ever closer, it becomes more interested in wiping any marker or experience of pain, fear, and death from its immediate span of attention. This is an act which, paradoxically, intensifies discomfort when contact with these things actually does happen.

But then fascists, as if existing as an inversion of this particular waveform, wish to convince everyone that all is dying and that to throw oneself heroically into this state of affairs is to live, which unsurprisingly multiplies death. This is a strange collective, this constellation of constituents that are vibrating at ever-greater rapidity.

What happened to simply living? What happened to life itself, with its disintegration and integration and the acknowledgement of such? Ah yes, yet again I repeat myself, but this is central! To repeat yet again, this is what spiritual practices like meditation (and many others) seek to reconnect with: this perpetual flux of energy, which does in fact collect and persist, particularly after instances of trauma or intense acts of excitement or pleasure, but which itself must dissolve.

That life is constantly hiding from itself, and staying hidden for some time, is something the Hindus understood quite well. Then to awake, to ride the crashing wave down, without worshipping it and accelerating oneself into the ground, and without attempting to climb back up it and perhaps halting it, when one comes to terms with it as it is, one is living.

Of course everyone has their definitions of living, which reflects what they truly are, and which will determine where they proceed. One is to live by denying death, by savoring the last ghostly drops of a waning life, or the echo of an expression of life made long ago, or one can live by becoming death, or one can live by coming to terms with both. And one can also sit in judgement with these respective paths, which is also part of what one is, as one exists as a formation in time and space, a formation with a certain character.

There are always going to be those first drops that roll off of the thawing ice; everyone must take their positions in space, as the energy moves.

But I suppose I'll stop rambling for now. What I'm really doing is attempting to put off doing some work that I should be getting to.

An Extended Discussion on Arendt and Eichmann

This one covers quite a bit of ground, and all of it is very good and recommended.

There is much to comment on, but I think it is better to let the article do the talking.

However this particular passage struck me:

As she explained to Fest: “This inability, as Kant says…’to think in the place of every other person’…. This kind of stupidity, it’s like talking to a brick wall. You never get any reaction, because these people never pay any attention to you.” Such a person, she went on, is “infinitely worse” and “incomparably more fearsome” than a murderer who kills from passion or self-interest, because “he no longer has any relationship with his victim at all. He really does kill people as if they were flies.”

It strikes me so vividly because Noam Chomsky just recently despaired about this very phenomenon (using very similar language) in his exchange with the morally blind Sam Harris, who insisted on analyzing and contrasting the inner "intentions" of purveyors of state violence versus purveyors of "illegitimate," and "terrorist" violence, and who also seemed more interested in emphasizing the gentlemanly rules of debate, as opposed to contemplating the suffering of living persons in societies foreign to him, an exchange which forms the basis of a short comment I wanted to make. Chomsky comments on the Clinton Administration's bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory (additional discussion here):

"And of course they knew that there would be major casualties.  They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?"

There is this paradoxical act of extending one's own insulated ideology over the other, as opposed to attempting to extend a compassionate understanding towards the other, in order to acknowledge a shared human condition. This act is paradoxical in the sense that an attempt to make the other like oneself ideologically, in order to understand the other and bring  the other closer, actually results in the other's alienation and separation, whereas letting go of one's self and one's ideology and acknowledging the difference of the other actually allows one to form a common human bond, that emotional undercurrent whose universality ideological systems tend to form boundaries around and obscure. This reveals tensions, symbolic and experiential boundaries between living bodies, rich and stable, and poor and tumultuous.

There is much more to digest here: power and discourse, ethics and action, tensions between the Jewish character and the state of Israel, and etc.

See You

Most people in the modern world suffer from an ineffable – but no less present – sense of invisibility in terms of their basic reality in the eyes of the mainstream public. Here we are bathed in these images of “stars,” great shining human beings who are extraordinary in every way, and whose every image and utterance is captured by the greater public for intense scrutiny and worship, and yet so many of our daily appearances and performances dissipate into the ambient environment unheard, unseen, and unappreciated by a connected social body.

This connection is key. One could be praised to the stars by one's mother. One could get that warm nod of approval from the pops, and those cheerful accolades from friends, and these things are indeed important and they feel good. But to the modern subject it is not enough! No, it must be that the entire universe lights up around oneself, awash in the divine glow emanating from one's self.

As absurd as this sounds, it is the subjective truth for many people, including at times myself. How could an entire population of narcissists ever achieve the satisfaction of being universally worshiped when every narcissist requires the undying devotion of the next? To sustain this state of affairs we have to pick a winner every once in a while, and the winner must appeal to the greatest number possible so as to garner the greatest return for capital.

This is partially what animates the cultural rat race. All these writers, thespians, artists, musicians, etc. all clamoring over each other, making all manner of compromise to elbow over the rest and retain the spotlight.

And curiously enough, the only way that this process can sustain itself is by destroying its subjects. Our stars are both loved and hated. Consider the meteoric rise of our pop stars, bathed in widespread love and enthusiasm, but then as soon as they begin to pass out of favor, the first flaw or weakness that glimmers through is seized upon and used as a lever by the resentful public to tear the star down.

What did we think would happen when we attempted to encase a society of thrashing individual egos within the yoke of a centralized collective culture?

The truth of the matter is that there is a fundamental tension between the centrality of our society's locus of attention and the complexity and heterogeneity with which it conducts itself. A great culture perceives itself as all-powerful, even immortal. Its lifestyle is perceived by its adherents as The Way, which should be shared by everyone.

The Way should be stretched and extended so that its umbrella subsumes all cultures, and at the same time, this uber culture is always seeking exotic subjects to incorporate, so as to regenerate itself. But to subsume difference without dissolving itself, the collective has to reinforce its own homogeneity, asserting its anglo-cultural origins, and its patriarchy, converting its absorbed subjects into its own cultural codes, alienating the ever-widening frequencies of foreign subjects it seeks to subsume.

But for whatever reason, a community has to see itself, and be seen in turn. Its members must be appreciated by each other, not just from peer to peer, but appreciated within the entire framework, so that everyone sees that any given individual is appreciated by the rest.

Weird Work

I don't usually go back and read the commercial work that I do, because I just don't really care enough about it. However I did have the occasion to survey some of the edited pieces I had done, and what I found was very strange.

The pieces were completely mangled. I don't mean this stylistically, in the way that someone ruins an artist's original work by altering it in some impure way - and this certainly isn't art - but in a basic sense of the work's intelligibility and purpose.

There are whole paragraphs that are simply nonsense. The language is very bad. And some of the pieces I saw no longer communicate what their titles suggest. I have no idea what the nature of this editing process is, but it has become apparent that this company has done the equivalent of setting up a machine to process raw works for their clients' consumption, and the works, when put through the process, become completely mangled.

And the clients seem to gladly consume this mangled material. Indeed it is as if this mangling process is put into place to satisfy the client. Because they keep asking for more.

You see this frequently in marketing copy. I have read marketing blurbs and felt as if my mind turned off. There is nothing there to understand. There is a sequence of words put together to achieve a general desired effect: to get the customer to buy. But put under scrutiny and one may feel pressed to derive meaning.

In the same way, a lot of SEO marketing copy has a coherent meaning that is more secondary and accidental. The material is primarily put together in order for the search engine to consume it, and decide whether it is worthwhile for ranking. Google has attempted to counteract this with natural language algorithms, but I still see a lot of strange things regardless. And when I am looking for something online now, I often have to sift through links and links of commercial material which has risen to the top, as that is where much of the energy is flowing, and it is expressing itself in the search. 

This too illustrates the private nature of much of what we choose to fill our public spaces with, regardless of our efforts change it. The imprint of accumulation - economic accumulation is the primary animating principle - can be found everywhere.

There are huge distortions in our most cherished channels of communication and production. Work becomes meaningless: what exactly do I think I'm producing? And so does public communication itself. It appears as a form of madness, but it is only concentrated power bending all productive energy in its direction.

European Architecture

I'd like to add some huge caveats to this post, as this was my first time in Europe, and possibly last, due to the growing unsustainability of the cosmopolitan lifestyle. One's impressions in a new place are always going to be a bit biased, compared to one's impressions of a familiar place that one has already become habituated to. Further, any deeper and abstract comments on architecture in a place with layers and layers of architectural features spanning over 2,000 years are bound to be imprecise.

That said, my strongest impressions of the European cities in Spain, France, Italy, and Sweden we visited had to do with the stunning architectural beauty, pretty much everywhere. This beauty, which of course has a partial basis in the elaborate and ornate building-work, arises for me in the sense of space and perspective.

The old city landscape unfolds much as an ancient canyon, its beautiful walls curving away from view. This lends a charming element of surprise to city exploration. Especially prevalent in Rome, one would be wandering within an alley, and suddenly a great church face or temple would be standing before you in the sunlight.

This haphazard and semi-chaotic flow stands in contrast to the wide boulevards and sharp, straight lines and tunneling lines of sight more prevalent in US cities. In these places one feels as if one is walking within a circuit board, or a factory floor.

One can see spatially the aging of a civilization in sharper relief, with the bourgeoisie given a wide-open canvas in the new world to experiment with and begin anew, whereas in the old world there was a sense of oppression from the overhanging historical presence, and the bourgeoisie were only able to erect their own material creations in the form of shoots that rose between ruin sites and the older beloved buildings.

There are positives and negatives associated with both worlds: in the new world there is a sense of freedom and possibility, but which gives way to an anxiety of rootlessness, and the sterility and desolation characteristic of purely rationalist architecture, a sterility that refuses accidents and aging. In the old world, the buildings have the warm, weathered features of pockmarked rock faces; there is a greater complexity of variation and expression, but there is the domestic sense of historical burden, that there is not much room for novel expansion without disturbing some beloved ruin or building.

One pattern that arises between the two worlds is a gradual straightening of lines and tightening of planning which favors simple, repeatable patterns, almost like a sort of crystallization over time, as you move from the old to the new.

What's more, one can gain a sense of public feeling and collective purpose just by contrasting the various forms of architecture. The old architecture still betrayed the concentration of wealth and power: all of that energy in one place had to be directed and presided over by individuals or a limited organization.

However the display of power and wealth was much more public. Great works, especially in architecture, tended to stand in the open and were able to be enjoyed by all. The church may have concentrated its wealth in the cathedral - in direct violation of its own originating ideology - but in the cathedral everyone could enjoy the material splendor together, and share a sense of awe. Great sculptures and paintings were plastered all about public surfaces and shared.

But with the dawn of the modern age, material wealth and its display seemed to have become increasingly private. Many modern buildings have become stripped of their expression, serving instead as mere functionary structures. The economic life shows its primacy, with accumulation the greatest motivating impulse. Expenditures of creative energy are less shared in a public space, and more shared indirectly through private works that are distributed and communicated about.

Wealth and power itself becomes increasingly compartmentalized, appearing more in private spaces.

Again, these are meant to be generalizations, useful for painting a simpler picture. It is impossible to fully encapsulate the multiplicity of forms in a given era. For example, the great architect Antoni Gaudi was part of a movement that sought to recover older forms of expression in the modern age, and his works stand in vivid contrast to much that was produced then, and even today. Curiously enough, it is as if the presence of Gaudi's buildings in Barcelona allow for a greater multiplicity of architectural forms and creative license, and a greater tolerance for aberrant architectural appearances. The most vibrant and bold works mark where the boundaries are that a majority of the population will proceed.

One can tell from my language which architectural landscapes I admire more, but I'd like to stress as always that the varying forms and patterns between the worlds mark changes in the constitution of a civilization over time and space. One can make judgments about the relative merits of these variations as an interested ego in time and space, but it is doubtful that an infallible, objective standard could be established, and that on the objective level these varying forms simply are.

Our Modern Problems

As we learn more about ISIS, there is reason to believe that the movement is less an expression of Islam (whatever that monolithic label means) and more a totalitarian expression of a crushed people.

The followers may be true believers, serving as poster-children for the single dimensional media account of crazed fanatics, but a cursory examination of the leadership and organizational structures reveals calculation and sober analysis, as a recent report has noted.

This is a movement whose ideological forms, organization, and practical actions perpetually morph with a utilitarian eye for opportunity, coupled with spiraling and kaleidoscopic patterns of deceit, for the sole purpose of accumulating power.  These characteristics have long been pointed out by historians as distinctive traits of the Nazi movement when it was acquiring and sustaining its power. Consider also Bob Altemeyer's famous study of right-wing authoritarian behaviors.

Doubtless, Hannah Arendt, who obsessively studied totalitarian movements, would find this particular movement interesting.

But another thing that historians who have studied the Nazi movement agree on is the fact that Germany's collective economic and political humiliation after WWI, combined with extreme economic hardship and social atomization in the following years, proved to yield fertile conditions for the gestation of Nazi-style fascism.

So then, will it take the eventual dying down of the flames of destruction for there to be any sort of understanding this time?

Driving

Music, talk radio, and companions keep us blissfully distracted while driving a car. But drive alone with everything off, and look and listen, and the experience becomes very strange.

This endless stream, this collective mass, everyone within sealed off and alone.

Moral Feeling

The moral imagination requires a capacity for feeling the experience of the other, so as to have a concrete foundation to map a rational understanding over. Otherwise the rational mapping can only continue to extend from one's own self and its provincial feeling.

The failure of this capacity in the moral reasoning of various members of high civilization, which results in the inability to imagine oneself as a living being within a society that is external to and separate from one's own society, can only be construed as a form of savagery, as it results in all sorts of actual cruelty.

Brief on Institutions

Our institutions take their form from how they are supposed to function, given the way we all feel about each other, and the universe, in a specific point in historical time.

Art and Absorption

Art is a way to become reabsorbed in a society, after having failed to become absorbed, or integrated into a social niche. It is an indirect means to have the pain of being left outside recognized, and thus in a sense, become welcomed back into the social circuit.

But there does come a time when reabsorption becomes more difficult, especially when the content of one's art or movement is fatally unacceptable to mainstream discourse. Perhaps there is no longer living tissue to become integrated in.

But then artists and movements competing for reabsorption clash against each other, demanding each others' recognition in vain, or otherwise reabsorption is attempted through contrived means, appealing to acceptable discourse but whose artificiality induces despair.

Perhaps it takes the establishment of a new body. This language carries the danger of encouraging totalitarian impulses. What type of body is to be established? Or what about a multiplicity of bodies? Who is to do the establishing?

There is a lot of compression here. I'll try to elaborate in subsequent posts.