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.
