The Dance

As one's constructed realities break down, and as reality itself begins rushing in - and sometimes as the madness creeps in - one's writing takes on the quality of a dance. Or a ride down the side of a mountain. Or simply the intuitive juxtaposition of what one finds to be beautiful, or terrible for that matter, while one has the energy to do so.

Magical Wealth

There is great power in a complex social system, such as an industrial society: to the outsider it produces wonderous materials like magic. But the nature of this power conceals itself to the outsider, and even to many insiders. The power relations remain camouflaged and hidden from view. That is, a beautiful industrial creation like an automobile or a tool says very little about how it is produced, and who gets to enjoy it, and who gets to produce it, and who gets to suffer for it, for that matter.

Some colonized groups behold the material powers with awe, yet when they seek to integrate themselves into this powerful body, so as to channel this power, they are instead enslaved and even destroyed. Or else a small minority prospers, at the pinpoint where the wealth is being vacuumed up.

This issue manifests in many other ways, such as with the resource curse. The supposed blessing of oil wealth suddenly becomes a curse. To process the oil and welcome in money and investments, the colonized quickly find their society transformed, mirroring capital with all of its social consequences. And of course colonial or imperial capital always wants to take a little more than it gives.

Healers

Who heals the healer? Presumably the healer.

The healer finds that force can no longer be exerted outwards. No, it must now be turned inwards, toward the self.

But there is a dilemma. One finds oneself at an impasse in which, exhausted from the pain of others, one seeks to conceal the pain of exhaustion, so that it will not give others any more pain. Yet to conceal is to give the other pain in the long run.

So the healer must simultaneously open up, which requires others.

Wealth in Circulation

Wealth often appears to the perception as static: a heap of gold, or a glittering kingdom, sitting. But really it is constantly in circulation, which has all sorts of implications of its own.

For example, the planes moving traffic from Los Angeles to Chicago and back again are virtually brand new, spacious, fancy. But the planes moving traffic from Chicago to Detroit and back again are aging and run-down.

Further, both of these circuits of transport represent wealth, but they are wealth in different stages: a wealth that is passing, and a wealth that is renewing.

Imperium

A force reaches from outside to change one's own nature, removing oneself from the flow, the generative context in which one is born. One becomes alien to oneself, and then alienated to one's own circumstances and environment. To survive, one in effect reproduces the imperium.

Junk News: Closing Thoughts

As the junk news process grinds on, I'd like to get down a few closing thoughts on the matter before I relax my fevered gaze on its unfolding.

We have the production of fake news, junk news, which is both morally and economically possible because of the general ambient background of the body politic. That same ambient background is also producing the junk truth-measuring instruments, whose purpose of sustaining truth is demonstrating the opposite function of destroying truth.

As a war transforms both combatants simultaneously by virtue of what takes place between them, the production of junk and anti-junk is only reinforcing the emerging patterns that are giving rise to them in the first place, and these emerging patterns are transforming the nature of our institutions and loci of human activity, such as the instruments for junk and anti-junk production.

The junk-producing right is drawing its political force from a domestic proto-fascism, whose raging fires, wounds, bad karmic cycles, or what have you, have been allowed to fester. Now I say "proto" because these forces aren't yet fully developed, and I say the "f-word" because it conjures the immediacy and focus one gets when pointing to a fire and saying, "hey, not good, that's fire." Technical fascism was specific to a historical period, and today we don't entirely know what shapes this new reactionary populism will take.

The anti-junk producing left - please excuse the simplistic right and left designations by the way, just devices for now - is drawing its political force from foreign proto-fascist fires that have been allowed - and even encouraged - to rage. Yes, much of the Russophobic paranoia that has accompanied the fake news witch hunts has been found to be most forcefully emanating from Ukrainian nationalist actors, trafficking in the same paranoid proto-fascist undercurrents as the far right in that nation.

Here a more physical analogue comes to mind, in which cultivated regions of poverty become vectors of diseases that were long since thought to be vanquished.

Both junk processes will produce similar results in the end. The ending of Hamlet also comes to mind, in which everyone busies themselves with poking each other with poisoned rapiers.

We keep looking for the monsters, the identifiable evil Mordor kingdoms, while it is all happening simultaneously, right under our noses. These are baffling patterns peculiar to the human capitalist era, which however unprecedented it may be in human social, technological, and economic history, is still similar to earlier historic patterns in which there is a dramatic accumulation of material power that grows and holds, and that proceeds to an equally dramatic dissolution.

Am I then some wise observer, perched upon a hill, unsoiled by the mud fights taking place below? Well, of course not. I am also a willing participant, who nevertheless has to learn to live by some kind of ideal in these barbarous times. That project to come, in time.

Patterns of Wear

The worker, as a specialized function within the division of labor, is worn down by a sustained exposure to high volumes of distinct work. And similarly, different individuals become more sensitive to different types of wear. The motion and repetition of something often determines the pattern of wear.

In a larger sense, one sees new entrants in the workforce bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as they say, and over time their enthusiasm wanes as they find that their initiatives for transforming their environments are suppressed.

Even a new job after a string of many is perceived as a new beginning, a birth, and the energetic intervals afforded by these bursts of energy shorten further and further as the worker becomes more cynical.

Junk News Cont'd

It seems as though the singular event of the American executive power transfer - and its perceived failure by many in the republic - has ignited a galaxy of latent antagonisms, which have cascaded out in every direction. Granted, any further plunge in an already precipitous public trust will tend to do just this.  

It will be difficult to ascertain the magnitude of the effects of this completed election cycle until after the dust clears. Though of course the outcome of the election cycle itself can be construed as yet another effect that is consequence of a complex historical process.  

All too easy to get ahead of ourselves. For the moment, it is useful to focus in once again on the "fake news" phenomena, and the struggles contained in it, to trace the contours of this ongoing unfolding. Pardon the obsession, these developments are just too irresistible to me.

The establishment reaction to the fake news phenomena is already well underway, and this reaction will most likely further progress the system to the supercritical state mentioned earlier. This is because the system that has tasked itself with filtering out quality news and hence truth has in fact contributed mightily to the concentrations of power that have produced these distortions of truth in the first place.

This of course requires some unpacking.

Suddenly we have enthusiastic tech entrepreneurs and programmers, who having concerned themselves with the troubling proliferation of fake news outlets, have bravely faced up to the task of building filtering tools for browsers in order to warn users of impending fakeness. The problem is that these filtering devices have to draw from established lists of news outlets that have been reputed to produce low quality news, which of course is a political decision.

As an aside, it is curious that both a person spearheading the fake news push and a person spearheading the fake news filter push initiated their efforts as a cynical joke which then took off. It seems the ironic self-reference and self parody that accompanies the breakdown of overarching public truths and the onset of relativist epistemology is back in full swing. The breakdown of the political order is ushering in a recurrence of the postmodern electrical storm.

As for the political decision for the filter list, we are already seeing this decision being made; its results are all too predictable. CBS was one of the first news outlets to promote the anti-fake tool, and doubtless their name was on the good news list, along with other establishment media organs, despite the very visible degradation in news quality from these outlets, which has real consequences.

Of course a developer of a tool like this will want to ensure that the outlets that plug its products will be included on the good list. And all of the independent news sites that actually produce reliable news, and which lack the resources to pose a real threat, are being swept up in the net with the other fake news organs. So the public truth is indeed breaking down, as the public's instruments for maintaining those truths are themselves breaking down as coherent and reliable entities of efficacy. Here an image impresses itself: one is going into battle with a blade that is doing battle with itself.  

And I assume the people who gladly consume the fake news are going to drop what they are doing and trust that the instruments telling them to stand down and respect the truth are indeed telling the truth! The circulation and build up of capital required to produce the instruments that vet the truth is simultaneously producing substantial power imbalances, which is in turn fostering the resent necessary for people to consume news media that is flattering to their sensibilities, regardless of its quality.

There is something profound that is happening here, and I don't believe I am giving it proper treatment at the moment, though the ground covered in this post makes for plenty of headway. This subject will have to be revisited, perhaps again and again, so that I may at some time properly convey it. Until then, plenty to think through for some time.

Can't Get No Satisfaction

I think it is worth reiterating - and I'm sure I've written about this before - that I am perpetually dissatisfied with my writings. Each paragraph, along with all of the concepts that are elucidated or at least implied in it, is constantly threatening to fall apart, or even blow up.

I am reminded of that old cartoon gag in which the protagonist is unfruitfully attempting to plug up some leak, only to have it burst forth somewhere else, and soon enough there is a deluge of uncooperative reality, as it were.

Reality is pouring forth in every direction, and all I can do is attempt to use the limbs and tools I have to plug up what streams I can, and arrange them into a communicable artifact.

And here it is: eventually you do just reach some limited artifact that is a finished work. I am inclined to obsessively poke, prod, and revise a given piece. But every artist - and I've found this in music composition - knows that you eventually have to stop, or you'll just spoil the damn thing. Finish it, and allow the transformative - and entropic - effects of the atmosphere take hold, as the piece is processed by others with differing perceptions and values.

Or maybe it will simply languish in a sealed room, I don't know! And there is that constant nagging doubt in the background: should I even be doing this? Is it a worthwhile project?

And the harder I work to surmount the limits of my self, to represent a reality so much larger than myself, then all the more this work asserts itself as an irreducible artifact of myself, with all of the limits that implies.

Junk News

This is incredibly fascinating, albeit morbidly so.

The fake news phenomenon has to be taken in conjunction with Trump supporters' desire for an alternate reality. For precision, let's speak here of the alt-right's desire for an alternate reality.

It isn't so important that the alternate reality is a lie; the observation in the Stone article that this alternate reality is a function of the authoritarian leader's power is very prescient. There are parts of this reality that are indeed coherent and sensible: the distrust of establishment politicians and institutions, the distrust of capital (at least liberal capital), the distrust of free trade, the distrust of immigration policy, etc.

The alternate reality does take its power from this coherence and correspondence, but it then distorts the picture with xenophobic and domineering nonsense, as a function of the reactionary's instinct to power. This ends up decoupling the alternate reality from an inclination towards harmony and justice, and towards a delineated and separated sphere of power that ends up progressing the entire system to a supercritical and destructive state.

This alternate reality requires manufacturing, which is something that capital is very good at for obvious reasons. Like the processing of refined sugars, corn syrups, and enriched flours, the alternate reality is manufactured by the breaking down and recombining of living bodies, their most appealing components distilled and combined in the greatest number, so as to be irresistible to some isolated organ, regardless of the effects on the rest of the body (or body politic). Because of this constructed quality, a business can be built around intentionally manufacturing facets of this reality. One doesn't have to wait around for reality to assert itself and provide the scoop; one can simply construct an appealing reality to be taken up.

So a fake news story takes off and all of those seedy entrepreneurs smell blood. There is a feeding frenzy in which everyone is constructing their own fake news outlets, and the frenzy attracts the attention of advertisers and even Facebook, which has allowed the fake news stories to flourish on its networks for want of a cut of the advertising money.

Evidently Google has tried to suppress these fake news sites, but there are many more advertising networks waiting to get in on the action. Could this be an instance of ominous foreshadowing? These tech companies are still large and powerful, but we saw what happened to both the Republican and Democratic establishments...

This could very well be an indicator as to why the right is enjoying such a rapid ascendance around the world, against all odds. As a radical leftist, it would be very wonderful if capital suddenly started flooding in to attend to my prejudices, but alas, the money spigot has turned away from my kind.

The constructed mythos of the left is suppressed by money power at every turn because it is actually threatening to money power. The right's tribal alliances on the other hand are shared with members of the ruling class, and the prejudices of this alliance are manifested in the right wing mythos, so that it is steadily amplified by capital flows.

The fake news is junk yes, but we are no longer talking about some form of information that is supposed to aid in regulating the body as a whole. We are speaking of a sort of catalyst or enzyme within an altogether new metabolism, a metabolism that does not progress towards the maintenance of some stable relation, but its precise opposite.

Brief Thoughts on Nationalism

The nationalist fervor that characterized the prewar conditions of the early 20th century could be seen as a defensive posture on the part of numerous ethnic groups across the world. What people were realizing is that their civil rights would not be respected unless they had guns pointed at their would-be oppressors, and they wanted control of a state that could be used to both jack into capitalist markets and protect them from those markets at the same time.  

Hannah Arendt for example observed that refugees and stateless peoples were treated worse than criminal citizens; they were viewed as subhuman and disposed of as such. It took having a nation to one's name to be coded as a citizen and therefore able to enjoy the protection of basic human rights, guaranteed by none other than a state which considered its resources best placed in its identifiable citizens.

This isn't an argument for nationalism. It is however the sort of logic that unfolds when a national empire - or multiple empires - exists. And having a nation doesn't even guarantee one's protection if the ruling class sees one fit for marginalization in any way.

Organic Culture as Proof of Life

What the assimilationist Hopi gradually realized is that if they were to shed the artifacts of their culture, they would more or less be marked for subhumanity and gradual destruction, which the United States government and businesses typically do with indigenous communities and communities of color.

The assimilationists seized upon their traditions and held them up as talismans to ward off Western exploitation and aggression, or as some sort of life raft. To the imperialist, here was a culture, something of beauty and value, which produces valuable artifacts and interesting aesthetics, and which demands itself to be seen as living, through the force of its own existence. Surely something like this deserves to live on?

The assimilationists were taken somewhat seriously as a result, though this only slowed the process of their marginalization and destruction, especially if they sat on top of some particularly valuable natural resource or piece of land.What could be extracted and torn from the cultural context was seized upon, leaving the living culture itself to languish.

The assimilationists then found themselves in between a rock and a hard place: they were pitied by the traditionals for abandoning their culture and assimilating, and disrespected (and worse) by the Western culture they were trying to assimilate into.

Culture is a sort of resource. It displays one's value and existence to something that otherwise devalues and destroys everything foreign to it. However resources that can be broken off can be extracted, and capital usually finds a way to do this, if it is possible.

Hush

I should just stop writing. I should shut up - and so should everyone else. And then we can let the silence really sink in and do its work.

But if I did that, there would certainly be someone to seize upon the space and write some real garbage, completely unhindered. I must continue to put the good out - my good - lest the bad - what I think is bad - drive out the good.

There is a similar problem with capital. The nervous workaholic capitalist sits at his mahogany desk, or what have you, anxiously wringing his hands, terrorstruck that the other capitalists are going to innovate, increase efficiency, and eat his lunch. Or if he were to renounce wealth, all of his friends would sail past him laughing, in their yachts.

And so on with violence. We can't place our guns down, because there is always someone to pick up the gun and take everyone else over.

More generally, there is a constant pouring forth, a pouring outward. And this pouring forth takes its surroundings with it, through sympathetic outpourings in response. It produces a current, an all powerful exertion that sweeps us up.

This is expressed mechanically in our interlocking patterns of cultural reproduction, through the mimetic drive. We see some great power, whether creating or destroying life, and our instinct is to mimic it.

Defense is mimicry out of necessity, and offense to someone else is yet more mimicry as instigation and anticipation. So on it goes.

The memory of the outpouring evokes the outpouring. Anticipation of offense evokes offense, and so offense evokes itself in perpetuity, reproducing its germ even as it crashes against natural limits. Is this to be integral to the human condition?

Organic Growth and Invention

As the human organism ages, it progresses from a spontaneous, organic growth to a conscious and deliberate repetition of invention. The entity begins to discover the patterns that sustain it, and conjoins and repeats them to perpetuate itself. The circle becomes a square.

Tangentially, but perhaps not unconnected, a thing that cools crystallizes as the energy leaves, its molecules orbiting fewer random points.

And the square always desires to become the circle again, and vice versa. In art, or more generally, techne, the object of the artist or craftsperson is to repeat a series of mechanical motions to approach mastery, which appears as warm and smooth.

This is only a portion of the story. Even in art, there are oscillations of these opposing drives, the mimicry of the organic and the mechanical, and everything in between. And these cycles of oscillation occur within greater cycles of oscillation.

Baldwin

Said it best.

Trump'd 2016

The one thing that happens to arouse me from my depressive writing slumber is the political catastrophe of the 2016 election. I feel as some ancient creature, weakly rising up off of its belly, scattering dust, looking faintly into a horizon troubled by a distant storm.

At one time I had gazed over my earlier writings on Trump with a blush on my face, concerned that my manic hyperbole was ultimately misplaced. But now, I do feel that some of my observations were correct, or at least congruous to the strange chaotic reality before us, and that the weather systems I was trying to understand are still going in the general direction I believe them to be.

Not that I need to be validated by these things, nor do I even want to be. It would be far better to write myself off as misguided and watch the world piece itself together in spite of the difficulties ahead of it.

But that's enough about me.

There is still plenty of time before Trump takes office, and the brittle US political system is certainly not going to handle the kind of transfer of power we're accustomed to without some kind of shower of sparks or grinding of gears. The 2000 election was tumultuous enough after all. And the global economy is so tightly integrated, we'll most likely see some pretty dramatic effects in the form of sympathetic reactions, whose effects will feed back into the US political system in short order.

It may be worthwhile to try to wrap one's head around what has actually happened, however much nausea it causes as one reminisces on the campaign trail, and apprehends the fact that Trump as a phenomenon really does exist, and he is poised to wrap his fingers around the levers of the most powerful empire in the world. This is even taking into account the waning power and influence of the US empire, which is arguably a much more dangerous force, with its insecure rebuffs against power-sharing and increasing alienation and humiliation.

The election cycle, which is to peaceably transfer power to the leader of another faction, has run into a snag: there is nothing there to transfer power to! In the conventional sense anyway.

No doubt, Trump is there to receive the power with open arms and a broad smile upon his face. But what is Trump? What does he embody? What does he represent? Trump is not a politician with whom you entrust power to maintain a system; you entrust him to smash it. Or in other words, this is not the beginning of a new political order, but the collapse of an old one.

The catapult of his person to the presidency can only be construed as some vast, national cry of despair. Those that actually believe in the candidate are doing so with bellies poisoned by decades of swallowing contradictory and preposterous business propaganda, and who are otherwise willing participants in the long historical process of dispossession and imperial growth.

Those that voted Trump as a protest, casting their vote with a cynical confidence in him as a weapon, like tossing a brick through an establishment window, or into the face of an establishment politician for that matter, draw from that same well of despair. More constructive things have happened with the tossing of actual bricks through actual windows.

This is a people who have indeed suffered, and continue to suffer, but who have chosen greater suffering as a solution. Not that this sudden, grim outpouring emerged from a vacuum either. No, we have had a long historical procession of foreclosed redemptions and denials of justice, culminating with the DNC's stonewalling of the one sensible candidate in the whole campaign, which makes it all the more tragic.

And we have to look on in horror at the plight of the American public, which has suddenly become alarmed that the weight it has thrown around the globe to enrich itself has become tangled around its own neck, dragging it down. With Trump the answer is to untangle the instruments of domination, and make them point outward once again, as opposed to retiring them completely. Historically, this is a project that makes the predicament much worse of course, to the point of vast destruction and suffering.

Indeed, we find this moment's analogue in Brexit, where to every pollster's surprise, a people chose to accelerate disintegration. A few months in and they continue to squabble over rejoining the connections they've severed, slowly bleeding out in the process.

Whatever process of disintegration we have to watch may very well tear open some new power vacuum, by virtue of clearing out the corrupt and convoluted tangle that the neoliberal empire resembles. Within such a vacuum is possibility, but at the same time there exists the site of a bitter struggle between all of the shearing forces that have been unleashed.

Cold comfort in a dark time, without a doubt. But that promise of possibility begat countless vital movements throughout history, and countless horrors too, let's not forget. The best that can be done is to struggle in the direction of what one believes to be good. Weak tea perhaps, but I can't help but draw from the well of despair myself. It seems to be all they are serving.

After the Fact

I was thinking of the study of capitalism like the study of the disassembly of an already-invented engine. But there are always limits to the machine as metaphor.

Capitalism, and civilization for that matter, was not invented. It came into being, it emerged, almost with a will of its own, amidst a set of self-reinforcing patterns that were sustained and repeated over a period of time.

And we really only partially understand the very reality that we collectively make. A science of capitalism, or economics, or even political economy, had to develop after the process was already well underway and in motion. Indeed, the understanding developed concurrently with the process itself.

We have competing understandings of the same things, based on our respective social and spatial arrangements. Capital's sycophants, for example, worship it as a deity, as a value-creator that bestows blessings on those fit to receive them. That understanding is conditioned by the deeper need to maintain one's socio-spatial arrangement.

The understanding is bound up with the thing itself. What the hell is it?

The Extension of Simplification

In many cases that we speak of complexity, we are speaking of a certain array of affairs within our locus of control, or at least our field of perception.

Simplification in this case would have to do with ceding control or attention to external entities, so that they may govern themselves, or at least carry on without you paying conscious attention.

Something becomes more complex when you no longer trust it to function in your favor when your attention drifts from it. And it becomes overly complex when you lack the faculties and energy to attend to all of the points of control or attention.

But when you stop caring about something and trust it to simply nurture you, or not pose a threat, it drifts out of the attention, where it is governed by the realm of reflex. You stop thinking about it. It becomes automatic. It becomes easy. This is all very possible locally, and a wonderful thing.

But this auto-reinforcing volatility that characterizes global capital is by its nature untrustworthy.

Like one watches a calving glacier, one can't look away. It is a spectacular event.

And when you're sitting at the base of the calving glacier, you're compelled to pay attention, to map its every contour, and trace out its path of destruction. Because you're in its path.

The Extension of Complexity

There is a constant concern that modern society is far too complex for our children at this advanced stage of development, leaving the dears strung out and distracted.

But John Dewey was wringing his hands in the late 1800's about the prospect that life was too complex for the children, leaving them distracted and strung out, and that educational concepts needed to be simplified.

Alas, to the common perception, observable reality appears as infinitely complex. The Inupiat look out over the snow and see a vast textural galaxy and endless stories. Amazonian tribes possess dizzying accounts of the forest life. Various indigenous American tribes pass down traditions that map out complex spirit worlds.

So it seems that the complexity comes into play as a limited observer seeks to understand some swathe of the observable universe, so as to navigate, subsist in it, or even manipulate and control it.

This investigation never ends. The inflation theorists look out and find ever-stranger and sophisticated cosmic structures and movements, the further their inquiry pulls back. And the string and quantum theorists, the deeper they focus in, find unfolding landscapes of complexity that baffle and frustrate the understanding.

It is still meaningful to speak of complex societies, as there is an actual material and ideological extension of the administrative and technological structures, owing in part to the force of expansion and mass volume that is to be managed. Complexity, as we often colloquially refer to it, may just be that which lies within our locus of control, and our field of perception.

The tree extends itself in ever more complex networks of foliage above and roots below, so as to capture sunshine, water, and nutrients and maintain itself.

Give Capitalism a Break

Why a fixation on capitalism now? It does feel a little quaint, a little dated, so to speak, considering the wide scope of inquiry available in the vast, rich intellectual domain that exists thanks to digital culture.

Well, besides the fact that capitalism as a phenomenon takes up such a vivid presence in the radical imagination - like a fire commands attention to the owner of a straw house - capitalism, as a phenomenon of disintegration, makes for a useful skeleton key  that can unlock the secrets of civilization, or how a complex society unfolds over time.

Disintegration makes one more intensely aware of the structure that is doing the disintegrating. Or, after an engine has already been invented, and one isn't building it up from scratch, the easiest way to understand how it actually works is to take it apart.

If one understands how things disintegrate, one can begin to understand how things are constructed, and how those things persist. Put everything together and you've got a passable theory of history, if history is to be construed as the movements of complex human civilizations.

Besides all that, it is much easier to understand an age if one is vividly present in it, that is, living through it and observing it in person. Capitalism is one of the central characteristics of our age after all.

The lack of a retrospective vantage point does make for some considerable difficulty. One isn't able to use the long arc of history to situate current events and compare their contours against the general topography of history's procession.

However one is given the advantage of being steeped in the ideological and perceptual landscape of one's time. To truly understand Greek logic and law for example, and how it relates to ancient society, one must have somewhat of a grasp on the Greek conception of time and space, something that is exceedingly difficult, but perhaps doable.

Though as Spengler so perceptively observed, a civilization that gazes over the history of some past or parallel civilization is really re-coding the outside civilization's experiences within the perceiving civilization's ideological and perceptual landscape.

Boil

It is a little curious how many Americans react to what should be relative statements, or statements of opinion or subjective experience. These relative statements are taken as normative statements, and if the listener's opinion or experience varies, the listener gets prickly, as if the person making the statement is moving to encroach upon the listener's position and declare the listener's position invalid.

This reaction exists for good reason. Many people do in fact posit their opinions and subjective experiences as normative markers of the real. And of course the more privileged the individual, the more this is a default position.

So there is this constant boiling action, this constant movement of relative statements, angling for a higher position in the normative hierarchy. A constant leapfrogging. A constant transfer of  aggressive energy. Etc.

Chaser

No one wants to be a grump. I certainly don't.

I would much rather be writing of springtime and the joy of sunny afternooons and blooming, buzzing meadows. Of course, this inclination is more likely a response to the winter fixation, and compensation for it, as all of the seasons have their charms, and the totality of the cycles carries its own cosmic beauty.

All of these cycles still exist in some form in the present, and can be observed and enjoyed. However within my own field of vision, these things are fleeting. One must contend with the most prominent features found in one's world.

I suppose we tend to occupy ourselves with the most pressing and significant matters which call the most attention to themselves at the moment. At this moment we are concerned with winters, with contraction and even dissolution. At least a dissolution implies the eventual rebirth of something new.

A Little Unfair

There may be moments in exercise, or making music, in which I experience the most profound instances of cosmic ecstasy and bliss, but then the moments before the exercise or jamming, I have the strongest resistance not to do that thing, and am filled with dread at the prospect of it, and I must force myself to embark on it.

The same with food, in which I am filled with reluctance to begin chomping down on vegetables, and then end up feeling so much better afterwards.

Just saying, it isn't altogether fair. 

Tear

I take joy in a daily work routine. It feels instinctively good to sit down doing that thing that regularly sustains me, yet that very routine includes doing something that I hate, that in the end is destroying the world I am to subsist in, that is, writing commercially.

I take even more joy in reading, thinking and writing, playing music, meditating, exercising, relating with others outside of the market, none of which is paid, going towards my subsistence in a market society.

A constant contradiction. The jouissance exists in pockets outside of the means of subsistence. And generally speaking, sustaining the environment and one's social relations tends to lie outside the actual means of subsistence within a capitalist economy.

To actually persist with dignity and joy means to commit a little less to the actual capitalist field of subsistence, which sustains me in my current state, as well as those around me. I am slowly torn asunder.

Current state is the key though. There is a tensile regime of living that must be torn through, tearing myself in the process. To become something else.

Stand

In these dark times in which all is frustrated yet lumbering on, it may become difficult to justify one's continual standing as oneself, in occupying some position, and not simply lie down and allow oblivion to take over. After all this does appear to be the tendency. It feels quite exhausting to continue to stand. Why bother at all?

There is an old belief - no idea where it comes from at this point - that suggests that in difficult times one has no other choice but to figure one's stance, one's position of strength, and hold it no matter the circumstances. This alone often leads to better outcomes, as in the end one seeks to preserve what one is and what one should be, which implies one's social relations and surroundings as well, and one's stance represents a distillation of this.

One's face, one's visage, appears grim in the winter light, and the harsh arctic blasts wear down warm, generous flesh to bare bone. But one adopts a stance, and continues to stand - perhaps absurdly - because one must. Because one was made to do so.

The Tumble

I have several competing self images, or beckoning directions of development. Each new image becomes generated upon the failure of the previous, and then when the new image finally fails, there is a reversion to the previous, in the direction of least resistance. I develop where the energy takes me, where there is opportunity for growth, sort of like walking step by step, or in this case, tumbling. Of course I can do better at explaining this.

First, I am to become the sober writer and philosopher. Well, the academic landscape is fairly horrifying. How is one to subsist in this field, within its pathways, and at the same time maintain a clear mind for sound development? I forego professorship, and try my hand in the private sector. I make peanuts, and remain unhappy. One gains great joy from writing philosophical works, but one is limited to still conventional channels to subsist while producing that special work. One must do academic work, or else write commercially and bide one's time, hoping that the soul is not extinguished in the process. The conventional field is a wasteland, experiencing a gradual process of destruction. To face it with a sober mind is shattering.

Next, I try the intoxicated musician and artist. Why not ride the destruction, as opposed to lamenting it? This proves to be a promising line of development, and good times are had. Yet one must still subsist! Now even the need to engage in ecstatic musical improvisation must be directed to producing a commodity, within conventional channels. This must be done within one's social relations, if one is to improvise, and the social relations are strained and chaotic due to the strained and chaotic environment within which they take place. In other words, one's band mates are domineering, or uncommunicative, or beset with substance abuse; the musical joy becomes elusive.

Aha, so subsistence and social relations are constantly sabotaging one's efforts! One must go further out: attack and reform the channels of convention! I try the political activist. With blooming political consciousness, these channels of convention become the superseding harbingers of misery. They must be changed if one is to continue doing good work, which means integrating with radical communities and developing alternatives. But this takes social relations too, and those relations themselves are steadily corrupting. The political arena is profoundly frustrated and confused, and subsistence while working within the arena becomes continuously more threatened.

I see, so there is a greater problem: that of the field of subsistence itself, and all of the assumptions that go with it. So one is to go off grid, to release one's fetters to the market, and renew one's efforts to develop channels of subsistence and social relations. But I don't have the wealth, and subsistence keeps coming back as an issue.

Well, finally one is to go mystic. Make do with less, shed one's material commitments, purify one's self so as to regenerate sound social relations. Even this process is frustrated, as some crisis or other brings one right back into the material realm.

Each image is shattered, so one goes back to another in order to nurse oneself back to strength, where one is safe and in a solid position.

Where there is an image, I develop part of myself in the direction of the image, which always stays with me, even amidst failure. So each direction of development slowly changes the aggregate of my character; all of it comes with me as I travel, as I tumble, each of my characteristics ground or polished as they are touched upon. This is a process of much pain and frustration, and doubtless many others are caught within similar processes of their own - these processes taking their shapes from the natures of the individuals - affecting each other as they tumble against each other. Hopefully whatever comes out is worthwhile.

One tumbles, and one must hold tight to one's stance, whatever that may look like, and hold tight to others who are maintaining stances of their own, in mutual love and respect, generating those social relations that are to hold under harsh winds, in the hope that one's project isn't deserving of being wiped off the earth entirely.

Vegans, Jains, and Power Horror

This one has been on the back-burner for some time. But the subject of veganism and similar dietary and even religious ideologies presents a ripe opportunity to trace the nature of ideology and its vectors of change as it unfolds in space and time.

A common reason given for veganism and vegetarianism is that it is more healthy, which seems to imply that there were health concerns that arose when meat became a regular and abundant part of one's diet, and that perhaps meat production itself became subject to health concerns.

As an ethical philosophy, veganism is partially described as an ideology that "rejects the commodity status of animals", a clear reaction to the ongoing growth and movement of industrial capital. And perhaps not just industrial capital but the machinations of a large and complex resource-intensive culture. We see the emergence of veganism and vegetarianism not just in industrial England, but in ancient Greek culture, ancient Arab culture, and in the form of ahimsa in Hindu and Buddhist cultures.

But if one rejects the commodity status of animals, why not plants? Why not the microbes noted by Jainist philosophy? Why not the commodification of anything at all? Why stop at animals?

Of course one does find radicals in this vein, but the radicalism itself always exists on a spectrum of degree; its intensity and breadth diminishes as the ideology itself spreads, which we'll elaborate on shortly.

More interesting is why a given swathe of life is delineated for protection, and why this delineation manages to hold, and where does it come from in the first place?

After all, many indigenous cultures had no problems consuming animals, and even felt close to these creatures and grateful to them as they did so. There were often strict guidelines for doing so: nothing should be wasted, and the utmost respect should be afforded to the fallen. Health concerns were less apparent, though there were other threats to take account of.

Here in the West, we look on and we are horrified to see the treatment of animals in industrial farms, perhaps as part of a blooming cosmic consciousness in which we become aware once again of the value of other life systems besides our own, a development in consciousness that must situate itself in opposition to a non-reflective imperial consciousness that treats the earth and its inhabitants as mere objects.

Yet more reactions, yes. And the nascent ideology produces reactions of its own as it ages and disperses.

The ideology is birthed and then it disperses as it generalizes to the greater population, increasingly becoming a general instrument for buttressing one's status in certain circles; its meaning and power is diluted.

You do see this regularly at work. All the time you see the more dogmatic vegans sneering down at their fellow meat eaters, tsk-tsking at how barbaric and harmful it is, while disregarding the reality that the benefits they derive from industrial agriculture - no matter how organic or vegan it is - still results in the deaths of animals, and ecosystems for that matter, and that their very lifestyles are often antagonistic to poor communities.
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Anyway. This is to say that ideologies and their movements live and die. It is the nature of things. This tendency provides the impetus for rebirth, or revitalization, and of course the birth of new ideologies and movements, as the values are modified, inverted, or re-inverted due to the reactions to old values corrupting.

Veganism and its more extreme expressions found in Jainism can be seen as manifestations of a historical feeling, of power vertigo or horror. Participating within a violent empire, one becomes too intense of a presence, and one seeks to diminish oneself, by seeking to preserve those vulnerable forms of life beneath oneself, and horizontal to oneself for that matter, if the ethics are truly to be borne out.

But follow that logic to its conclusion, and suddenly one is faced with annihilation, as is the case with a radicalism without end. One is to protect animals. Well, why not plants? Why not the microbes? Why not the colonies of bacteria one destroys as one washes one's hands? Even the Jains acknowledge for the most part that plant life must be destroyed so that their own lives can continue.

As a living thing, one must carve out a space that demarcates oneself, with respect and compassion for the universe. This realization is what provides the tolerance for other ideologies and movements outside of oneself, so long as those ideologies and movements are just and its members are doing the work. Otherwise one's ideology is instrumentalized to emulate righteousness, and to consolidate one's own power by putting down others who may very well be doing good work themselves.

This then may be a glimpse into the general phenomena of corruption: the increasing diversion of public fruits into private ends, private ends that go beyond the necessities required to sustain the individual.

Taking all of this together, an even more general glimpse into the movement of Western culture is afforded. We see that various radical ideologies are produced as reactions to some symptom of imperial expansion. Are they to acknowledge their own limits, linking up with other radical movements in love and respect, so as to form a mass with the strength to affect systemic and structural change?

Or are the movements more likely to seek expansion out of love of their own power, setting themselves against other movements and dividing externally and internally in turn, doomed to mimic the expanding and dividing empire they are reacting to? In truth we get a constant mixture of these two possibilities, set against constant change over long periods of time. And we are indeed running out of time.

One's Project

I hadn't given much thought to the way I wanted to put something together until I really started reading Das Kapital.

It isn't that Marx's Capital is the best possible way for constructing an intellectual work, but that the work itself is put together in such a systematic and crystalline fashion.

Starting from the commodity, Marx builds an entire system up from very simple mechanisms. You don't see this type of project a whole lot anymore.

I look at my work and it appears as a confused mess in comparison, but I'm not sure that this is entirely a bad thing. Marx is indeed a tragic figure, as it seems that he did end up producing a private work in social association with other private thinkers.

And the work appears as a great cathedral, or work of production, that had to be produced on the backs of workers and slaves, if one is to trace back all of the various strains of material support.

It is a towering work of one person's thought, so that it takes a rigorous, academic approach to truly understand the nuances of the argument.

One can be right about it. One can be wrong about it. And one has to concentrate a huge amount of energy, of computing power, in a limited number of individuals. It becomes clear why Lenin was so adamant about a vanguard class, and why the practical revolutionary struggles curdled into the Stalinist regime. Stalin was reputed to have impeccable logic.

And this is the issue. The more that one single person strives to understand a greater breadth of existence, the more idiosyncratic and abstract that understanding becomes. Universal truths must be expressed in a private language in this case.

The mystics on the other hand seem to understand quite a bit, and at the same time they are insisting: give it up! Perhaps it is because there is a more even distribution of thought and action.

Hmm, some things to consider. And what am I to do?

Ecstasy Cont'd

A curious thread, this ecstasy. What is its nature and from where does it come? For now we can't say much on this mystical subject, but we can elaborate on another aspect of its expression.

It does need to be expressed. It occurs within a situation of individuals in a society.

While there is energy to burn, the ecstasy can keep climbing, and it must.

One is in the ecstatic state and it becomes excruciating to back down, or even stagnate.

A blooming flower comes to mind, its unfolding proceeding from the stem in all directions.

This happens everywhere on multiple levels, but here I'm thinking of the big psychedelic music superstars in the 60s and 70s, walking about in public and on stage on heavy psychedelics, in full bloom, their naked selves on display.

This fact is pretty remarkable considering the cultural climate today. If one is to bloom, it is best to do it within a supportive environment, the energy flowing in. Within a hostile environment one is more likely to shrivel, unless one adopts a warlike stance.

The big pop stars today do occasionally wander about in a state of intoxication, but much of the acts are heavily rehearsed and controlled, or else lip syncing is put into use to prevent divergence from the album sound.

You don't generally see the large scale kind of unfolding in which the core comes out, in which the individual is making all sorts of ecstatic gyrations and facial expressions, baring their true selves, which can only emerge out of a deep and generally improvised psychospiritual journey, which must leave expression up to chance amidst the dance between the self and its surroundings.

Today the self exists in a wintry cultural climate, where the blooms are pulled firmly into their protective sheathings, and any kind of expression must be drawn out with vast theatrical and rehearsal machinery. Or else one faces the world honestly with teeth barred, unless one is in a supportive environment, which sometimes has to be created or fought for.

But then one must also ask: what is to bloom, and upon what soil? What is to provide the raw materials for the full flowering on top? Why does one person or group at a certain time get to fully unfurl its petals in rapture, and then at another time shield itself or fight its way through?

Ecstasy in Production

Social ecstasy may be an obscure and esoteric subject, but as a phenomenon it does exist, and for the time being we can try to trace its contours in video game production.

What does ecstasy in production look like? It might be a little difficult to talk about what is actually happening in the subjective experience of the producers, but one can find markers of its existence upon apprehending the actual work of art. Something feels great in the work, or something is being expressed that suggests that the artist expressing it was clearly experiencing some sort of ecstasy or cosmic vision.

But what I'm interested in at the moment is how this ecstasy becomes possible, and then how is it to ebb and flow given the modalities it arises with?

Something happens over time in the video game industry, which is related to the structure and modality of reproduction of the society that the industry exists in. Large corporate economic structures form around various intellectual and technological properties, and there is a pattern in which original and vital franchises form at a slower rate, and repetitious sequels and spinoffs churn forth in increasingly degraded states. The culture itself calcifies, with a conservative fan base rallying around the hyper-masculine and violent franchises they've been consistently fed all their lives.

Yes, there must be a raw material that fuels the ecstatic vision. For the most part, the mainstream strains of our video game culture has chosen war.

There are common technologies and ideas that are shared socially, which form the soil from which these creative visions spring forth. However over time increasingly idiosyncratic and proprietary developments are fenced off by the conservative and acquisitive corporations, which take less chances as the production process becomes more expensive and intensive, choosing instead to milk the cash cow, the successful franchise that worked.

Where do these successful franchises come from? Maybe someone spots a rare talent, or some team of talents comes together organically before the company's social structures have completely hardened. Maybe there is a trusted talent who has an existing team, and a new idea is developed then?  I can't claim to know the interiors of the companies, but there is enough information present to make inferences. From the outside, it helps to reiterate that all these things suffer from diminishing returns, and I given company, the truly inspired pieces become fewer and far between. Restructuring, mergers, various reinvigorations, and the like may complicate things further, but I digress.

A useful contrast lies in the existence of The Valve Corporation, which has put out consistently excellent quality franchises and games - at a reduced frequency - in part because of its free associative organizational structure. Teams are allowed to organically combine and disband depending on what employees are interested in working on. Still there are limits to this as well.

To go further, if one is really looking for something special, in which the writing and the art direction is truly inspired and even ecstatic, one must go to the indie realm, where projects are greatly scaled down and the production process is less intensive. The process may be accessible enough so that a single person with vital ideas and talents may be able to make the entire game, or else a few compatible team members can come together organically.

In the mainstream portion of the industry, to find an instance in which the ideas, the writing, the art, and whatever else are all working together to form a consistently excellent whole is much more rare. Even more rare is to find a game which bucks the most basic conventions of the industry, or even of the greater culture.

The technology itself - the product of the engineer's ecstasy - persists for some time, and can be successfully reproduced if there aren't systemic issues with the organs of production - this is another issue altogether - and so graphics, physics, framerates and all the like are quite consistently spectacular, while the writing and the subject matter is comparatively dull and lifeless. And there are even increasingly glaring problems with the technology itself as time wears on, such as strange or even fatal bugs and flaws, which can probably be traced back to the social structures of production, and even to the surrounding technological infrastructure itself.

This is all getting ahead of another set of questions. Where does the ecstasy go? Who gets to enjoy it? Who gets to do work that they enjoy, and who gets to get respected for that work? Are we huddled breathlessly around the work of janitors who maintain the buildings of production, and the technicians who maintain the computers and other machines of production? No, in this case, the full blooming, and the full social witnessing of the blooming occurs at the levels of cultural work and high technology.

And given the historic concentration of capital and even worker resources, this ecstasy blossoms in limited circles, delineated by class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, etc. Yes, in the cultural realm things are changing, sometimes rapidly in some quarters, but there remains a political struggle for participation in a wide swathe of cultural production, a participation which necessarily requires a certain amount of resources and standard of living, all political struggles in their own right.

And further, everyone is still working under the constraints of capital, even the indie workers, who toil under constrained resources.

Now one major question to go back to is this: why is it that when something reaches a certain point of development in this society, its creative spark, or its soul is lost?

One explanation we can point to lies in the structure of the modern corporation itself. It was once built to be formed and then collapsed to administrate large economic projects, but now it is erected and persists for as long as it has the means to accumulate money and capital for its owners, which happen to be a minority resting at the top of the structure.

The ecstasy then is consistently reserved for the businessman, who is permitted by his society to latch on to some cultural phenomenon of interest, establish an economic structure around it, and then exploit it for his ecstasy, his delight in accumulation. This necessarily must order all of the cultural activity underneath it towards this aim, breaking up the connections which are formed in various ecstatic directions, and then reordered to perpetuate and intensify accumulation.

The economic landscape of video game production becomes a sort of great game, in which the executives controlling the economic apparatus hijack the entire field of activity in order to accumulate and consolidate their operations and capital. And well, by now this is an old story to seasoned ears.

Paranoia in Montana

Within the small ravine, there was a preponderance of stories to be told. There was rock flowing like water down the middle of the ravine. On the ravine floor, there was a bleached bone which appeared to be a section of a vertebrae.

It was beautiful, so I picked it up. Upon inspection I found that a spider had made its home within the hollow center. I put the bone back. At this time it was meant to stay.

All is passing away and emerging somewhere else. Something died here in the canyon. A deer? An elk? But one of its bones became a home. Where does one begin? Where does one draw lines to signify what is? The ontological reality becomes an endlessly shifting process of expression, in which things, limited expressions, are transformed within their relations between each other.

There was the existence of something else that was beckoning consideration. I found myself sticking to the very bottom of the ravine, so as to remain hidden. The paranoia was growing.

There was a palpable fear out in the Montana hills. Nearby was a man living in a large house on the hill, who routinely scanned the landscape with his binoculars, looking for something that was out of place.

A couple of years ago he had moved out to the country to get away from the city. He was going to become more self-sufficient. He built himself a windmill to get off of the grid, and then was promptly hassled by the local power company - which had ingratiated itself to the local government, winning local zoning ordinances -  to deactivate it. Now the windmill stands high above his house, sitting idle, a reminder of what could have been.

Meanwhile, the man has become increasingly embittered, suspicious, and self-isolating, according to neighbors. A botched job on his house attributable to unscrupulous contractors, and a steady stream of invasive hunters crossing his easements has steadily worn away his composure.

Now he prowls the hills with an enormous grimace on his face, looking for the slightest sign of an invader, scaring off a van full of lost teenagers in one case.

There are all sorts of individuals such as these littering the countryside. Frowning at their windows with telescopes and binoculars, placing ever more threatening signs on the boundaries of their private property.

Here the earth is constantly scanned and mapped. The landowner is poring over the countryside, looking for anything out of place. To the landowner, even someone politically, socially, and temperamentally the same as them could be suspect if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. God forbid you are coded as out of place prior to being out of place in the countryside in the first place.

The hillside is a collection of increasingly atomizing patriarchies, the patriarchs presiding over their lone hills, suspicious even of each other.

A set of unknown headlights coming up the driveway is more often met with a cocked shotgun than a smile or even looks of curiosity or charity.

And to exist in such a climate of fear is to participate in it. One becomes fearful in turn, becoming suspicious of those finding oneself suspicious, strengthening the logic of fear.

A plane buzzes overhead. Afghanistan comes to mind, where to the paranoid US military, the locals are always out of place, and a buzzing plane could very well be readying its rockets. There we have created a fearscape on another order of magnitude altogether. Better to call it a hellscape.

One hears stories of the locals looking up and praising stormy skies and dreading blue skies, which give the drones better visibility.

The project then is to compress everything into its place. The other becomes an object to be situated in a hierarchy which intrinsically makes the position of the powerful more stable. This project happens both within and without.

Simultaneously engaged in crimes against the global South, the imperialists retreat to their fiefdoms, alienating their societies and even the relations between themselves in turn.

This is certainly a shame in Montana, where the beauty of the landscape is breathtaking, and the breadth and scale of the surroundings contributes to an air of expansiveness, which is quickly dashed away by the descending ceiling of paranoia.

One can take a deep breath, in appreciation for living, and the ceiling is raised temporarily. Yet...

Change and Fragility

It is a given that everything is constantly in motion, but perpetual motion tends to lend to the illusion of stillness. There are moments when one can experience the motion however.

There are points at which that movement lies temporarily in suspended animation, and we are given a glimpse into that motion. When a decision is to be made or a greater change is to occur, we can see things moving. This is more an artifact of reason and perception than anything else, but it still serves as a useful window into the flow of time and space.

Change is a curious notion!

Consider the design of the US Government. This structure resembles a machine, designed by its founders with a mix of good intentions and not-so-good intentions. In retrospect there was probably more of the latter, but moving on.

The building of the machine was an attempt to artificially generate change, so as to keep things the same. The design of the machine betrays a profound distrust of the concentration of power, a distrust perhaps taken from experiences of early traditional and monarchical abuses of power.

It would be fruitful to consider that the building of a machine in itself is an assertion of control by a private individual, or an association of private individuals, which has all sorts of interesting implications on its own. Unfortunately for now we must keep moving.

The tradition was bad! But then those monarchies had formed under pressures of violent change, those chains of causation reaching far back into the collapse of the Roman empire. So we see a constant violent movement, and buttressing forces which compress the movement and delay its inevitable bursting forth once again.

For the Hopis on the other hand, sticking to tradition was a radical act, and the last adherents to the traditional form wrapped their arms around it, as if they were bracing themselves against a violent wind.

The Hopi system is profoundly conservative, but it is a conservative adherence to an ideology of perpetual motion: one is to live in rhythm with the land, and let all living things around oneself govern themselves, perpetually in motion but united in stable rhythms.

Western conservatism, when compared to this system, appears as a temporarily frozen crest on the top of a tidal wave of change.

This machine with its cogs and levers and balanced compartments and engines and cooling chambers is made up of humans; it bears all the characteristics of an organic body. It is as if you were to design and build a machine and have all of its components begin to sprout appendages and other various growths, taking on a life of its own.

The elections are a great example of this. Consider the iron law of institutions and the ways in which both the RNC and the DNC were expressions of a buttressing concentration of power in the face of change.

The superdelegate system is a good illustration of the iron law of institutions at work, in this case revealing the Democratic Party as a living thing, seeking to concentrate power independent of the body politic it was built to serve. It does this so as to manage change.

But then its opponents, meant to balance themselves against this concentrated power, must do the same. And then the Republicans are hopeful that they can concentrate more power so as to better manage change themselves.

The fragility of a given system reveals itself plainly in these flashes of insight, which appear as change passes over it. Change in this case manifests as the power passing from organized bodies to other bodies, all of which are organizing to concentrate the most power in the face of this forced change. 

The more violent and explosive the change, the more strong and powerful something has to be, and the more strong and powerful something is, the more power is concentrated in that thing, which eventually provokes ever greater forces of change.

There is a death and suddenly someone with power must be replaced. Now watch as all of the interest groups, the pockets of organized power struggle to assert themselves. We saw this with Scalia for example.

Witness the pain of Brexit. A complex society suddenly decouples all of its economic and social flows, and finds itself struggling to reconnect them, which necessitates the renegotiation of these flows. To whom does the power now accrue? We see here to that an increased density of desire and necessity expands the pockets of organized power, seeking to assert itself in myriad directions.

We can also consider things more mundane, say an accident in the middle of the freeway or a cracked water pipe. Organized power struggles to assert itself around these wounds. Something in motion is suddenly stopped. Where is it going to go next? It is organized power which must determine this.

Who is to pay for the cracked pipe in other words? Who is to clear the accident? Or take blame for its occurrence?

Ableism on the Mountain

At the top of the mountain was a spectacular lodge and viewing platform, accessible by gondola. Curiously enough however, the full potential of the viewing platform was curtailed for people with disabilities.

Some sections of the platform were only available by stairway. There were ramps, but they were covered in snow, neglected by staff and effectively blocked. But this is only a small portion of the greater issue.

The truth of the matter is that the entire mountain could be friendly for disabled people. The technology exists to do it. The lifts could have disability supports built in; the built human landscape could do the same. There are specifically designed skis and chairs which disabled people could easily navigate with.

It isn't done because of the concentration of capital and the relation of that concentration to the concentric circles of families, lovers, friends, and racial, religious, and political tribes.

Yes capital expands in all directions, but at the same time its concentration remains sticky, under the control of largely xenophobic individuals; through this tendency it establishes gradients of inclusion and exclusion, lines which must be constantly fought, negotiated, and held.

The sensibility of that of the capital accumulator is that of a delight in separation, in the accumulation of personal power and a localized sense of control over the cosmos, which incidentally comes coupled with a distrust and fear of difference, and a retreat to sameness.

Businessmen interested in profit have made their decision concerning the available energy and resources, and the graduated classes beneath them have made their respective decisions in turn, given what they can hope to attain.

These decisions have to be negotiated by those left outside; more often they have to be fought.

What's more, in these strange times we have artificial constraint on our abundant resources. Less is made available, and more is wasted or standing idle, so as to preserve the class position of the businessman. Society must begin to freeze, to further preserve this position. Its energy modalities must persist as they are.

Which happens to introduce real constraints through a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlimited growth becomes impossible, all the more it is defined into a definite shape, which of course takes its shape partially in response to the antagonisms generated by explosive growth in the first place.

A hole is being drilled into the living fabric. And it will take more with it as it grows.

Wonderful Election Year

The 2016 election process has been difficult to follow for many reasons. The more one pays attention, the more one thinks on it, the stranger and more bewildering the spectacle becomes.

Perhaps the historical view will make much more sense in a couple of years. But to take the immediate process, as it is in motion, one (or at least someone like myself) is struck with an overwhelming sense of dissolution of perception and anticipation. And perhaps this is the nature of participating as a politically interested observer, as a subjective entity that is affected by the object of its perception. If this truly is the process of a breaking apart, one participates in the breaking apart; one becomes it.

One can only fix into one's mind some historical analogue, and hold tight to it to anticipate events, as the two major parties dance and transform, mirroring each other in their mutual desires for status quo in the face of the impossible, both cracking under the pressure, albeit in different ways. A morbid and grotesque unity of the opposites.

If a more coherent piece comes together it would make for some interesting writing. But one vague impression that I would like to get onto paper is as follows:

Donald Trump does seem to be the embodiment of a breaking or a rending. One looks for a person in the Western sense, as an integrated aggregate of interests and desires which affects some sort of material efficacy in the physical world, which does things and causes things, but one has trouble finding it.

Trump is a whirlwind of smiles and nods, of hand waves, of carefully chosen words and not so carefully chosen words, and it all seems to be constantly shifting. There is no expertise or competence or even efficacy, in the Western sense. One gets the impression that his is an instinct of raw accumulation and preservation (it is the extreme accumulation and the preservation that accompanies the violent dissolution) and that the anxious bootlickers, friends, and family he gathers around him are nervously guiding his movements for him, riding his naked drive and navigating him like some ungainly vessel.

He is as a shifting mosaic, his fractured pieces attempting to mirror and harmonize with the tumult of the society and the earth around him. As a communicator and a doer in a complex society, he appears as an abomination, but his instincts are excellent. And perhaps that is the terrifying source of his growing power. He is at the center of a hurricane which is gaining its spin off of the ambient social dissolution.

I'm no fan of the fascists, but I think there is some truth to their insistence on instinct and the gut, especially in a time of dissolution. And where you find dissolution in a modern democracy, you find fascists wiggling their fins, slowly becoming cognizant of friendlier waters for terror.

This isn't to say Trump is an isolated incident. I too (and others with shared sentiments) am experiencing an inner dissolution of higher order desires, relations, and understandings. Instinct appears as a welcome friend. One's heart, one's gut speaks, and if one listens, one is rewarded. Especially in a milieu such as we have today.

After all, the breaking apart of higher order symbolic and social constructs necessitates a return to the instinctual base, so as to further a sound reconstruction. One doesn't have to be a fascist, or engage in the project of shoring up white supremacy and capital, in order to navigate dissolution.

As for Hillary! Yes she does appear to be the integrated Western individual. She moves through debates and cocktail parties alike, saying the right things. She exudes confidence and competence. She traverses our constructed complexities with a grin. But one brushes off the frost on the surface a bit and suddenly her efficacious self is quite disastrous and incompetent indeed, especially when integrated into the grid.

Her instincts are terrible! Hillary and all of her slick peers are very competently making a mess of things no? The higher order fabric she moves within destroys everything it touches without.

But also the nature and direction of an instinct is just as important. Hillary's instincts are terrible and she's making a mess, but Trump's instincts are pretty good and he's accelerating the same process of dissolution. Geo politically, these two figures do seem to be spatially related to each other: their differing instincts are bound together by an overriding desire to maintain the instruments of domination, if only in differing ways, making the two and their respective constituencies gradations of a spatially bound surface.

And so if Trump is the breaking and the rending, Hillary is the weakening and the corroding that prepares the surface for the breaking. The two need each other to dance.

Pick your poison!

This may seem a curious stance, but I hope I'm quite wrong. I intend to keep watching and thinking, or at least trying to anyway.

Warning Lights - Lead Edition

The disembodied gaze of the establishment media passes over the myriad brush fires which break out over the body politic. Of course the disembodied establishment media enjoys its state of disembodiment, and seeks to maintain that state by encouraging the social bodies that it is connected with to ignore the brush fires.

Some establishment media does accomplish what amounts to the raising of eyebrows, or the scratching of the chin, but otherwise it is better that the people tune in, and perhaps talk hushedly amongst themselves after the report, and then go back to work the next day.

And for now that seems to be the extent of it. The media's searchlight passes over some fresh abomination or insult, and there is a frenzy which eventually quiets down, or which is eclipsed by the news of some new scandal or catastrophe. The attention drifts, and the myriad brush fires continue to burn.

The core culture grinds onward, its repetitions wearing ever deeper grooves into the earth, and its gear teeth are slowly ground down. The gears gradually drift out of their respective orbits, and traffic increases from the core to the fringe until the two equalize, at least temporarily. Real change happens at the fringes, its delayed effects eventually reaching the core in some way.

One particularly insidious example has to do with lead, which has been spread throughout the land over the last century, pushed outwards in wide circles through greed and recklessness, and then hidden from sight through a cowardly refusal to account for its harms or even its existence.

Its delayed effects come to the surface in the course of breakdown. In the case of Flint, fresh water reserves dwindled or were deemed expensive by a contracting society, and so the city switched to a polluted water source that was cheaper to administrate, which in turn corroded lead piping which leeched into the water flows.

This incredibly callous and reckless act only accelerated a process that is in motion throughout the United States, particularly in the east. Many cities throughout the eastern US have been actively fudging their water tests in order to ignore the lead problem. There is simply no collective will to replace the labyrinthine tangle of old lead piping. No, much of the work being done in these local governments is to maintain an illusion of a collective will, while the actual work required for ameliorating the problem is not done.

The early usage of lead might not have been in bad faith (well, maybe it was), but today its dangers are well known.

There is a flash of insight: the material foundations are breaking down. And this is followed by yet another flash: those with the power and the privilege position themselves upon the corpses of the vulnerable, so as to delay the consequences of the breakdown for themselves. Resent is spread in turn, and trust is steadily destroyed through the repeated revelation of lying authorities, which occurs on top of the material destruction with consequences of its own.

Lead poisoning leads to body aches, anxiety, and depression, all of which sap the psyche. It also leads to profound long term health effects, especially in the young. The damages to individual health, social trust and regard, and real wealth is incalculable.

Imagine these effects interacting with a global destruction of trust and respect in social institutions. It is appropriate to mention once again the fractal quality of this breakdown, which is even difficult to put into words due to its breadth and complexity. Within every sector of society, and on multiple levels of interaction, a breakdown proceeds, which affects a sustained attack on the integrity of global functions such as collective trust.

Wrap-Up of Travels Cont'd

• There is now a preponderance of dollar stores throughout the US. Dollar Tree on the West Coast, Dollar General in the South, and Dollar Family in the Southwest, from what I've seen. These places are basically usurious: the same shit products you can find in the grocery store are here, just with reduced portions to justify the low prices, and maybe even more so. Wares are terrible quality and disintegrate within weeks, perhaps spewing poisons and adding negative value, along with the shit food. The poor then are continuously buying and renting and never achieving true ownership. Plus the health problems. But every business has to make a profit no?
• In New Mexico and Arizona, blue and red lights have been added to worker and maintenance vehicles curiously enough, perhaps to command the fear and discretion that police and other emergency vehicles enjoy. A quick search says yes. Once again, there has been a profound loss of public purpose. You see people speeding through construction zones all of the time, endangering workers. A little fear seems to get em back in line, at least artificially and temporarily. But then that has costs...
• Are we on our way to greener transportation? Anyone? Well we'd like to say yes, though electric cars aren't a serious solution. And wherever one passes through suburbs, one finds universally the sinking of limited budgets into freeway widening. Alas, suburb design requires cars. Capitalism requires constant growth, and cultivates the taste for suburban living and personal autos in the process. Freeways must be widened then. 
• In New Mexico, this issue is a bit more low-key, but as soon as one enters Arizona, the inner and outer exploitation of Native American groups becomes part of the ad landscape. They're not even Indians, but anyway come in and buy some Indian jewelry. Kitsch tepees and cave drawings litter the landscape. Purveyors of genocide are appropriating cultural artifacts and selling them. Well, some indigenous people need to make a living. But here's a granular account of the implications of that.
• Re indigenous groups: how about reparations and land grants for starters? 
• Re cultural appropriation: the West needs to uptake foreign vital culture into its abyssal maw and assimilate it into the tempest of late Capitalism to keep mainstream culture juiced. 
• Everywhere sudden dead ends into private property. Paranoid signs and foreboding in the countryside. More on this later. 

Wrap-Up of Travels

Either I'm writing up a storm during travels, or I'm too busy or fatigued to write, saving up observations for later pieces. This is one of those trips where the latter comes into play.

Here is a brief summary of observations, soon to be followed with some pieces taken from experiences and world events.

• There was a palpable sense of paranoia in Montana, which felt strange considering the expansiveness and generosity of the landscape. A future piece will address this. 
• In South Dakota, there was a notable change in traffic dynamics on the Interstate. A great proportion of the drivers would pull over into the slow lane, even if they were moving fast. A perpetual repetition of polite behaviors en masse had established an unspoken code, which had generated impolite outcomes of its own, such as the phenomenon of a speeding vehicle bearing down on you in the slow lane. 
• Downtown Detroit was coming back, but the city felt empty, even on the weekend. So it goes: some natural disaster, violence cycle, or slow motion deindustrialization process leaves the locals to languish. Radicals move in seeking low prices and political flexibility. Hipsters follow shortly, and money comes in. Gentrification continues. 
• Truckers were more aggressive than usual in Kentucky. Scenes of speeding gasoline tankers passing sports cars in the fast lane. 
• There were buildings in Mississippi that were so long that they appeared as lakes from the highway. Completely opaque and closed, exhaust fans on the sides. Possibly an industrial farming operation. 
• Business is doing alright in the Downtown area and the French Quarter of New Orleans. The weather stained houses with stripped roofs sit quietly in the distance. 
• On the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana homes sit poised on stilts. The wealthy can afford beautiful homes suspended a good 7 to 10 feet off of the ground. Supposedly this is good for storage and parking. However the poor live in trailers, basically raised on cement blocks. Is it enough? 
• The character of a region cannot be ascertained from the Interstate. One has to go deeper into the countryside. Where there is a great flow of volume, there is homogenization. Within the mainline, one sees strip malls, gas stations, posh downtowns, concrete and asphalt, etc. A great city may display a character, but with the waning vitality of a creative culture, one sees only a monotonous business layer set over aging curiosities. Why? Plenty to account for. And is there value in a creative expansion that destroys everything around it, before turning on itself?
• Lead worries persist throughout the land, especially on the East coast, and there is good reason for that. A piece to follow on this. 
• Towering thunderstorms and huge downpours in Texas. It is an old story now: it grows hotter and the storms grow larger. 
• A preponderance of toll roads in Texas. Behold the glories of private enterprise. 
• Also a preponderance of comic irony in Texas. A curious state. On the southeast side, one is greeted by a billboard (and behind it rises the towers of oil refineries) that reads, "Drive Friendly, It's the Texas Way." The Texas way? Some of the most aggressive drivers I've seen. 
• In the South, proud displays of the Confederate flag, and in Texas, proud displays of the Lone Star flag. One wonders how the successionist movements are faring post Brexit. 

More travels to come, and more pieces to follow. 

Emotional Sight

We can understand quite a bit, but to truly understand something and act on it, it usually takes subjectively interfacing with it and experiencing it.

So you take a social state, and how difficult it can be to change directions when it is set in a certain motion, especially if that motion implies consequences for the participants. Let's say a friend is depressed or angry or fearful. Sure the group can sympathize or reverse this course as uninterested observers, but once the circumstances for this subjectivity bear down on them, the emotions must harmonize.The course this takes depends on the participants and the environment certainly.

So a friend comes by, upset that someone else has slighted them, and the group seeks to console the friend and reassure this person, which can re-establish homeostasis in relation to the group.

This is very different from a group sitting around a fire, and someone becomes incredibly frightened of a bear that has come on the scene. A new homeostasis will have to be established around the fear.

And we see now the tremendous difficulty of changing the course of a society in crisis. A collapse in trust is difficult to reverse, and the consequences of that collapse are difficult to prevent, when a genuine lie has been uncovered, and when a society's resources are being gutted from the inside out.

When the lower-level danger is clear for a greater proportion of the body politic, the effects of the propaganda wear off, vaporizing off of the top.

So to feel something will reveal something to be a certain way. Various emotions reveal different states of affars in accordance with their nature.

They can also be construed as a form of movement.

To experience the joy of one's expansion is to take part in expansion, while to contract in fear is to take part in contraction. Both modalities require that subjective partaking to fully understand their respective natures. And authentic reasoning that is to take place within a given modality must flow forth from a premise that is grounded in the modality.

Work

In a fit of depression, one is much less driven to engage in productive work.

Or let's reframe this: perhaps one is depressed partially because one is driven to work intellectually, and at the same time lacks the will to work, or one is deprived of the ability to work, which contributes to a diminished self concept and a general state of dissatisfaction with one's output and the world itself.

This state has structural origins. One is in a position in which one's self and one's environment are working together to sustain the depression: the opportunities to climb out are not there, or are not apparent, and besides, there is no energy available for climbing out. The state reinforces itself until it exhausts itself.

With this in mind, consider the analogous structure of an economic depression. Why do depressions happen? Why aren't they simply stimulated away and into another boom-state? We know that theoretically this is more than possible, though not without its own complications, especially further down the road.

But knowing and willing are different things, and in this case will is tied up with a conservative structure which accounts for the persistent accumulation of capital itself, which is in turn partially regulated by a moral logic of its own.

This moral logic contains strains of what is often called the Protestant work ethic, an overhanging religious sensibility that posits hard work as an unqualified good. This divergent outgrowth of religious sensibility was probably in part a reaction to the attempted Catholic monopoly on all spiritual activity. One is moral if one is constantly working to better one's self and society, a type of working that incidentally has its basis in specific social, political, and material conceptions of "better."

So capitalists, having outsized access to the levers of power, have nothing but contempt for the notion that a depression should be stimulated away with social spending and public works, that the common workers had to "pay" in sweat and blood for the depression, and work themselves out of their holes or die trying, and the capitalists were just the class to provide this opportunity.

This pseudo-morality was used in rationalizations for removing peasants off of the land throughout the birth of capitalism, and in later imperialist ventures as well. The peasants and "savages" were lazy and indolent, making them morally corrupt, and it was a moral act to forcibly remove them and work the land as it should be worked. This notion was ever-present in conceptions of progress.

The growing mercantilist nation-state was the vehicle for this productive accumulation and growth, and then slowly the private actor pulled away in power. Like fire leaping ravenously across grains of sawdust, disintegration paradoxically produced explosive capitalist growth.

Consider one of the characteristic symptoms of an overblown work ethic: the irresistible urge to be doing something, preferably something constructive which is geared toward some end. What is constructive? What is to be the end? A political decision.

But what happens when one is simply doing nothing? In a milieu of theoretical plenty, is this so catastrophic? One sleeps, giving the relaxed brain an opportunity for house cleaning. One fasts, and a relaxed metabolism reverts to toxin removal. And etc.

So modern work is not in fact bound up with necessity or the persistence of our species, but an overflowing and an overabundance which necessarily overshoots its mark, and crashes, constantly antagonizing its surroundings and reproducing turbulence.

Capital concentrates, and sheds, and destroys whatever it couples with, necessitating a restructuring that reabsorbs the antagonistic detritus and the cycle begins again. The moral logic compels one to work on; it must not stop. GDP-coupled emissions must be generated. E waste must be shipped to Africa. Torrents of food must be produced and then tossed away. Plastic, phosphorous, and nitrates must flow out into the ocean. A gasp of toxins and the system panics; we must work harder!

Grace

Moving with grace implies a certain tempered global state. It would be impossible to concentrate on being graceful, though it does sometimes take concentration to temper the state.

Truth and Action

To perceive the total truth - at least to the greatest extent one can in one's time, in accordance with what one is - is a staggering event in itself; it is the necessary prerequisite for moving with what grace is still possible in this world. One can't surmount or even cope with what one can't see (here we don't speak of physical vision, but general perception).

But once one sees, one can't un-see it. When one sees, one is bestowed with the unenviable but necessary task of coming to terms with that truth and acting in accordance with it. It affixes a constraint on one's actions, while at the same time illuminating a potential path to some sort of actualization if pursued to its logical end.

Information

The free flow of information is a great ideal and often more beneficial than not. But it is also complicated by the fact that information must be processed by a subject, a subject which takes on a certain nature in time and space, and whose nature determines the way in which the information is processed and eventually reproduced, and then of course what actions are to proceed from this.

Intellectual Works

Intellectual works are often compared to cathedrals via metaphor, and perhaps these comparisons aren't entirely fanciful. 

Intellectual works have to be built, and they have to stand, and cohere against gravity, while entropic forces gradually wear on them. 

And they take a certain amount of energy, concentrated in certain individuals in association with each other, who necessarily identify with their creations with varying degrees of propriety. 

Judgement in the West

Through the overwhelming calamity that has befallen expanding and contracting human societies over the course of several millenia, the word "greed," much like other negative words that denote some sort of failing, has become huge and monstrous in presence: it evokes expansive emotions. Greed, which becomes all the more irresistible the further it is set in motion, is a vice that historically has been responsible for great catastrophe.

 And so to judge someone's mistakes with this word is to overwhelm them in turn. The word, as symbol to connote this historical state of affairs, is imbued with all of the gargantuan affect of great catastrophe.

But then there is nothing to be done about this. Because the Western subject's great fear of judgement - as expressed in Camus' The Fall for example - grows all the more as the subject's ecstasy grows, due to the historical modalities with which that ecstasy is arrived at. It is a fear of ecstasy's shadow, a duality that is produced by the extreme oscillations in power that typify Western history.

The higher the subject climbs, the longer the subject remains suspended over the void, the greater and more terrible the fall seems. And the language takes on the affect that permeates these movements. The nature of white fragility becomes slightly clearer.

Superstition

A superstition could be seen as a part of the tangled remains of a dying body of thought. What once was instantiated to facilitate the understanding of the movements of causation becomes the object of causation itself.

One clings to a superstition because it is all that can illuminate, after one fails to grasp the greater structure of the body of knowledge that it was part of, because that body is disintegrating over time and space. Or else the superstitious are never afforded the processes of education required to grasp the greater structure of knowledge in the first place.

At this point, it would be understandable that one would cling to whatever tools or artifacts are available for a minimum understanding, given one's circumstances or characteristics. Whatever appears to have explanatory power when wielded successfully by others can be picked up and used in some way.