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.