Many people who have lived in the city - including me - experience a form of paranoia out in the wilderness. A lot of it is a projection, an anticipation of one's environment which eventually has to be equalized with a new environment if one switches over abruptly.
In civilized society we often digest the wilderness through a fanciful lens. Our senses are constantly assaulted with visions of disaster, avalanche, and attacking vicious animals, depending on one's media intake. But the reality of living out in the wilderness is much more nuanced, where a slight rustle is more likely just a rat or squirrel, but it can be taken as a bear that is about to attack.
Similarly there is biophobia and a fear of all manner of insects, noises and processes, which abates as one learns more about the nuance of the landscape. Most of it is harmless to oneself. The threats still exist, but not at the frequency that the city sensibility impresses. So the projections themselves attack one throughout the night, until one slowly re-establishes equilibrium with the environment again.
Saturday, May 27, 2017
Labor Thought
With intense labor, much of the mind's resources are diverted towards thinking about one's actions, with less time built into various abstract structures.
However, one does still see various abstract representations, but much more of the thought ends up being absorbed into the labor itself.
On top of this, one is so exhausted at the end of an 8-12 hour day of intensive physical labor that the mind essentially shuts off. All one can do is rest.
This is partially how a class system structures itself spontaneously, but this structure also implies great mass and interconnection. A weekly 8-12 hour working day is only necessary if one needs to produce a large amount of food, so as to maintain an economic structure that requires constant expansion, stratification, and wealth polarization, among other things. In this instance, class has to develop out of this constantly increasing volume, complexity, and labor structure.
And I'm still adjusting to the work week, so there is more to explore here as well.
However, one does still see various abstract representations, but much more of the thought ends up being absorbed into the labor itself.
On top of this, one is so exhausted at the end of an 8-12 hour day of intensive physical labor that the mind essentially shuts off. All one can do is rest.
This is partially how a class system structures itself spontaneously, but this structure also implies great mass and interconnection. A weekly 8-12 hour working day is only necessary if one needs to produce a large amount of food, so as to maintain an economic structure that requires constant expansion, stratification, and wealth polarization, among other things. In this instance, class has to develop out of this constantly increasing volume, complexity, and labor structure.
And I'm still adjusting to the work week, so there is more to explore here as well.
Superbloom!
The desert superblooms that emerged in California after heavy rainfall this year - out of character after years of drought - were quite beautiful and surprising, to be sure. These blooms also appeared in certain regions of Montana, and doubtless many other places. Passerby could be seen stooping and admiring the flowers.
This visually stunning phenomenon, brought about by the increasingly unstable sloshing of the earth's moisture systems, really make up a sort of Siren-object no? They beckon onlookers with their exquisite beauty, and underneath the mesmerizing image is a slowly revving doom engine.
State of the Trump
This piece is going to be a bit rocky. I'm still adjusting to farm life and intense physical labor, but the writing should smooth out once again once I hit a certain stride. Nevertheless there are some developments here worth exploring further.
With the excitement and outrage surrounding Trump slowly dying out, we begin to see what it was that he might have represented, and as a consequence we can grasp the way in which his changes were affected. The forces he brought into public office with him, and the political character that he represented was already quite alarming, but as pure action, he lagged behind his own images.
Trump represented through his speech and his alliances a new breed of fascist sentiment, slowly stirring in its cocoon, but through his action, he was a mere banal agent of the neoliberal paradigm, or at least a crumbling agent, that is. It is worth pointing out that he is one of the most unhinged, incompetent, and chaotic of that paradigm's agents, and so we can catch a glimpse of a transition stage.
The transition is unfolding in numerous ways, and one of those ways is that of an inversion, which is worth touching on. I recall the sensation of emotional bipolarity and paranoia, in various states of flux. There was much going on in the world that was certainly something to be alarmed about, but the political consciousness of the nation had not yet caught up with the underlying realities. Emotional bipolarity in one's self emerged as a response to the sensitivity to suffering, which appeared as a personal and isolated mental state, a "pathology" as the "professionals" say, which is to be corrected and suppressed by an organized power efficacious enough to contain it.
Now that inner bipolarity has become turned inside out. One looks out at the world and remarks, ah yes, what was in me is now out there, by virtue of a slow psychic illumination following revelations of Trump America. One no longer struggles as much with the inner fear of madness, and turns instead to an exhaustion and emotional revulsion at the state which one perceives as being "out there, " which has become objectified by virtue of a critical mass being achieved.
Yes the country was full of crooks and liars from the start, and since the 60s and 70s the driving economic force has been the machinations and encroachments of rentiers, looters, and conmen. However now the embodiment of those corrosive forces has materialized in the presidency, the core political representation of a society, and suddenly it is as if the underlying reality of our political economy has crystallized.
The phantoms that the most sensitive among us have feared, and have complained about - sometimes loudly - are now solidified, in the open for all to see.
Through an inversion, like a flower unfolding out of its bud, this instability has emerged fully formed and personified. The clever ones know it is not just Trump. He is the catalyst that is calling forth the worst elements of the capitalist world, and those elements are feeding back into Trump in turn.
The national security state moves to assert control. Liberals and conservatives alike cheer authoritarianism and militarism. The mainstream media networks obsess over every bit of
Trump minutae, while ignoring many of the most pressing developments, all the while calling themselves the warriors of truth and light. And scores of readers have been all too happy to indulge in this nonsense - though there has been a welcome bit of pushback certainly.
Through mimetic action, the conmen glimpse new avenues of possibility. The Republican party is coalescing around this new depraved political character. Here in Montana, Gianforte, the rich landgrabber has won office spouting free market and anti-tax nonsense, even after strangling a reporter no less!
The conmen, the looters, and the landgrabbers accompany the fascists waiting at the fringes. These unhinged and absurd billionaires and millionaires are the transition point on the spectrum, where the capitalist meets the fascist. How long will it take? What will the new stage look like? Some things to keep watch for.
With the excitement and outrage surrounding Trump slowly dying out, we begin to see what it was that he might have represented, and as a consequence we can grasp the way in which his changes were affected. The forces he brought into public office with him, and the political character that he represented was already quite alarming, but as pure action, he lagged behind his own images.
Trump represented through his speech and his alliances a new breed of fascist sentiment, slowly stirring in its cocoon, but through his action, he was a mere banal agent of the neoliberal paradigm, or at least a crumbling agent, that is. It is worth pointing out that he is one of the most unhinged, incompetent, and chaotic of that paradigm's agents, and so we can catch a glimpse of a transition stage.
The transition is unfolding in numerous ways, and one of those ways is that of an inversion, which is worth touching on. I recall the sensation of emotional bipolarity and paranoia, in various states of flux. There was much going on in the world that was certainly something to be alarmed about, but the political consciousness of the nation had not yet caught up with the underlying realities. Emotional bipolarity in one's self emerged as a response to the sensitivity to suffering, which appeared as a personal and isolated mental state, a "pathology" as the "professionals" say, which is to be corrected and suppressed by an organized power efficacious enough to contain it.
Now that inner bipolarity has become turned inside out. One looks out at the world and remarks, ah yes, what was in me is now out there, by virtue of a slow psychic illumination following revelations of Trump America. One no longer struggles as much with the inner fear of madness, and turns instead to an exhaustion and emotional revulsion at the state which one perceives as being "out there, " which has become objectified by virtue of a critical mass being achieved.
Yes the country was full of crooks and liars from the start, and since the 60s and 70s the driving economic force has been the machinations and encroachments of rentiers, looters, and conmen. However now the embodiment of those corrosive forces has materialized in the presidency, the core political representation of a society, and suddenly it is as if the underlying reality of our political economy has crystallized.
The phantoms that the most sensitive among us have feared, and have complained about - sometimes loudly - are now solidified, in the open for all to see.
Through an inversion, like a flower unfolding out of its bud, this instability has emerged fully formed and personified. The clever ones know it is not just Trump. He is the catalyst that is calling forth the worst elements of the capitalist world, and those elements are feeding back into Trump in turn.
The national security state moves to assert control. Liberals and conservatives alike cheer authoritarianism and militarism. The mainstream media networks obsess over every bit of
Trump minutae, while ignoring many of the most pressing developments, all the while calling themselves the warriors of truth and light. And scores of readers have been all too happy to indulge in this nonsense - though there has been a welcome bit of pushback certainly.
Through mimetic action, the conmen glimpse new avenues of possibility. The Republican party is coalescing around this new depraved political character. Here in Montana, Gianforte, the rich landgrabber has won office spouting free market and anti-tax nonsense, even after strangling a reporter no less!
The conmen, the looters, and the landgrabbers accompany the fascists waiting at the fringes. These unhinged and absurd billionaires and millionaires are the transition point on the spectrum, where the capitalist meets the fascist. How long will it take? What will the new stage look like? Some things to keep watch for.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Switching Up
Switching gears for a bit here. A surprise call from a farm has landed me an apprenticeship, so my nomadic life is set to temporarily be fixed until October or so. I hope to continue to write throughout the apprenticeship, if it is logistically possible and my mind is alert enough at the end of the day, we'll see about that. Plenty of things to address in time, and lots of pieces on hold. Till then.
Thursday, May 04, 2017
Shit Products
The traumas that are generated through the antagonistic acts of buying and selling in the market are made even worse by inferior goods.
If a good breaks down, or is dysfunctional in some way, it intensifies the antagonisms present in buying and selling.
Suddenly the seller is the asshole that dropped this problem at the buyer's feet, or the buyer is the asshole for complaining about what they got.
Shitty cars and bad food do much worse: they kill people. And we're scrambling to produce as much of those things as humanly possible, at a constantly extending scale.
This is just a glimpse, just a limited slice, but it is apparent that there is a process here underway. The conditions for war, revolution, and civil strife are being produced, the further one looks.
Much like heat being produced through the friction of rubbing one's hands together.
So why the rubbing hands?
If a good breaks down, or is dysfunctional in some way, it intensifies the antagonisms present in buying and selling.
Suddenly the seller is the asshole that dropped this problem at the buyer's feet, or the buyer is the asshole for complaining about what they got.
Shitty cars and bad food do much worse: they kill people. And we're scrambling to produce as much of those things as humanly possible, at a constantly extending scale.
This is just a glimpse, just a limited slice, but it is apparent that there is a process here underway. The conditions for war, revolution, and civil strife are being produced, the further one looks.
Much like heat being produced through the friction of rubbing one's hands together.
So why the rubbing hands?
This Is My Little Teapot
A great Culture often impresses itself through material means that affect people's everyday lives, through which they can learn more about the Culture, if they wish. Food, music, spiritual practice...these things have immediate observable effects and persuasions, which don't depend on an ego-specific receptivity to a cultural idea or experience, so they spread far and wide very quickly, and oftentimes universally. It is through these universal material experiences that outsiders find their way into a cultures pulsing center. Let me explain what I mean by all this.
Over the years I've discovered that I have a love for green tea. First, it was just the taste, which was favorable. But slowly I started to discover its even and stable distribution of energy (with its moderated caffeine levels) and its warming and calming effects. It reverberated throughout the body; it felt good.
Over time one learns about the health benefits, the different types of tea, how to brew the delicate leaves, and etc.
To deepen this relationship, I picked up a cast iron teapot, and later a heat pad and platter, which come with it because of its thermal properties. I've never been much for ceremony, and I don't know much about the evolution of various ceremonious practices, but I suspect that there is a common thread between ceremonies and ornate objects with character, which interact with the bare senses, communities, patterns of thought, and social practices in complex ways.
In one way, these objects fix constellations of practices and activity; they bind them to a particular space, with particular people.
These things are essential for a weary earth. Sometimes it is all that one can do: one boils the water and ceremoniously prepares the tea with anticipation, and then finally one sits with a great sigh to enjoy the drink. Traces of this fact can be seen in the early formation of cultural self-consciousness around tea, manifesting as "Teaism," an aesthetic religion in 15th century Japan. In the very beginning of The Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo demonstrates that this Teaism was "founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence."
Sordid indeed. This is an opinion that indicates the weariness of an aging culture, after the old ideals disintegrate under warfare and upheaval, and a preoccupation of material realities achieves primacy.
What to do then? The little things do help, and they slowly get bigger too, in a way.
Soon enough, it becomes much more than mere tea, or the mere enjoyment of beautiful ceremony objects. One develops a spiritual relationship with one's material helpers. One carries these helpers everywhere, and unfurls them wherever one sets down. It is a way to establish place both materially and psychologically. And it gathers others around it, and brings them together around it. Through the sensual, healthy, psychological, and social delights of the tea and its vessels, another presence altogether is achieved, which is something that goes beyond the sum of its parts.
But something was missing. Where was all this green tea coming from? Where had the teapot come from? Where were these customs coming from, which ready-made, I was able to adopt as my own?
These questions gain intensity as the earth continues to blaze, and various cultures and groups are set against each other. As part of a dominant imperial culture, I can readily take advantage of a large range of comforts, delicacies, techniques, and aesthetics, while the originating cultures behind those things suffer cultural humiliation or worse. As Okakura Kakuzo himself remarks, "the glory of the West is the humiliation of Asia." Alas, the process of rapid modernization and industrialization that Japan itself underwent was seen in no uncertain terms as part of the "White Disaster" in many parts of Asia. Strong words that are not without good reason.
The concept of cultural appropriation, which enjoys wide usage in social justice circles, reflects the sensitivity to this reality. If I was to simply pluck up this teapot, this tea, and go on my merry way enjoying it without a thought to how these things were possible, I would in a way be appropriating them, stealing them.
To know the origins of one's joys and pleasures is also to know the shadow those things cast, which is often unfortunately the case in a world that is so deeply interconnected and at the same so violently unequal. Further, to know all of these things together is to move closer to harmony in thought, discourse, and practice, however insignificant one's efforts may seem in the face of titanic cruelty.
As for the helpers! Green tea, has been consumed for a long time, dating far back into ancient Chinese history. Far enough to fade into cultural myth in fact, with exact dates unconfirmed as far as I know. The leaves have gradually gone from being intended as medicinal to making up a part of a revered and cultivated beverage. But it is the implements for preparing and consuming the tea that have transformed more dramatically.
Earlier on, tea was made with water boiled in a cauldron and then a kettle. The teapot was invented in China during the Yuan Dynasty, an era in which a fracturing Mongolian Empire, which itself had spread through the ruins of older Chinese dynasties, had broken off to reconstitute a Chinese empire in the east, which then eventually grew and took up once again the other broken off Mongolian khanates to the west.
All of this reveals a common pattern. Great inventions arise through evolving purposes, customs, and technologies, amidst coalescing and growing societies, themselves which are often formed through various processes of disintegration, and that all of the processes interpenetrate various cultures as they are born, evolve, grow, and die across the earth.
Of course this history must be taken with contemporary world affairs. My teapot has its visual interest, but it is mass produced and bears a design that has been repeated far past cliche. What horrifying industrial processes, what endless circuits of retail distribution, all of which grind workers into the ground and lay waste to mass sprawls of land and ecosystem, were responsible for my particular piece? The same can be asked of the green tea itself, and of the pad that keeps it from burning the surface it sits on, and the heat that boils the water.
Out of respect, one must learn about one's material helpers, and about the long chains of history which have delivered them to one's arms. More importantly, there should be a recognition of the labor and sacrifice that makes these objects and customs possible, labor and sacrifice which have been offered by other cultures throughout history, cultures which have undergone the many births and deaths that we believe we are immune to, and for that matter, separate from.
Needless to say, it is not enough to merely contemplate these things. One's own labor and activity should go towards ameliorating the ongoing destruction that underwrites cultural production. All of it is bound up in one's helpers. It all plays a part.
Over the years I've discovered that I have a love for green tea. First, it was just the taste, which was favorable. But slowly I started to discover its even and stable distribution of energy (with its moderated caffeine levels) and its warming and calming effects. It reverberated throughout the body; it felt good.
Over time one learns about the health benefits, the different types of tea, how to brew the delicate leaves, and etc.
To deepen this relationship, I picked up a cast iron teapot, and later a heat pad and platter, which come with it because of its thermal properties. I've never been much for ceremony, and I don't know much about the evolution of various ceremonious practices, but I suspect that there is a common thread between ceremonies and ornate objects with character, which interact with the bare senses, communities, patterns of thought, and social practices in complex ways.
In one way, these objects fix constellations of practices and activity; they bind them to a particular space, with particular people.
These things are essential for a weary earth. Sometimes it is all that one can do: one boils the water and ceremoniously prepares the tea with anticipation, and then finally one sits with a great sigh to enjoy the drink. Traces of this fact can be seen in the early formation of cultural self-consciousness around tea, manifesting as "Teaism," an aesthetic religion in 15th century Japan. In the very beginning of The Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo demonstrates that this Teaism was "founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence."
Sordid indeed. This is an opinion that indicates the weariness of an aging culture, after the old ideals disintegrate under warfare and upheaval, and a preoccupation of material realities achieves primacy.
What to do then? The little things do help, and they slowly get bigger too, in a way.
Soon enough, it becomes much more than mere tea, or the mere enjoyment of beautiful ceremony objects. One develops a spiritual relationship with one's material helpers. One carries these helpers everywhere, and unfurls them wherever one sets down. It is a way to establish place both materially and psychologically. And it gathers others around it, and brings them together around it. Through the sensual, healthy, psychological, and social delights of the tea and its vessels, another presence altogether is achieved, which is something that goes beyond the sum of its parts.
But something was missing. Where was all this green tea coming from? Where had the teapot come from? Where were these customs coming from, which ready-made, I was able to adopt as my own?
These questions gain intensity as the earth continues to blaze, and various cultures and groups are set against each other. As part of a dominant imperial culture, I can readily take advantage of a large range of comforts, delicacies, techniques, and aesthetics, while the originating cultures behind those things suffer cultural humiliation or worse. As Okakura Kakuzo himself remarks, "the glory of the West is the humiliation of Asia." Alas, the process of rapid modernization and industrialization that Japan itself underwent was seen in no uncertain terms as part of the "White Disaster" in many parts of Asia. Strong words that are not without good reason.
The concept of cultural appropriation, which enjoys wide usage in social justice circles, reflects the sensitivity to this reality. If I was to simply pluck up this teapot, this tea, and go on my merry way enjoying it without a thought to how these things were possible, I would in a way be appropriating them, stealing them.
To know the origins of one's joys and pleasures is also to know the shadow those things cast, which is often unfortunately the case in a world that is so deeply interconnected and at the same so violently unequal. Further, to know all of these things together is to move closer to harmony in thought, discourse, and practice, however insignificant one's efforts may seem in the face of titanic cruelty.
As for the helpers! Green tea, has been consumed for a long time, dating far back into ancient Chinese history. Far enough to fade into cultural myth in fact, with exact dates unconfirmed as far as I know. The leaves have gradually gone from being intended as medicinal to making up a part of a revered and cultivated beverage. But it is the implements for preparing and consuming the tea that have transformed more dramatically.
Earlier on, tea was made with water boiled in a cauldron and then a kettle. The teapot was invented in China during the Yuan Dynasty, an era in which a fracturing Mongolian Empire, which itself had spread through the ruins of older Chinese dynasties, had broken off to reconstitute a Chinese empire in the east, which then eventually grew and took up once again the other broken off Mongolian khanates to the west.
All of this reveals a common pattern. Great inventions arise through evolving purposes, customs, and technologies, amidst coalescing and growing societies, themselves which are often formed through various processes of disintegration, and that all of the processes interpenetrate various cultures as they are born, evolve, grow, and die across the earth.
Of course this history must be taken with contemporary world affairs. My teapot has its visual interest, but it is mass produced and bears a design that has been repeated far past cliche. What horrifying industrial processes, what endless circuits of retail distribution, all of which grind workers into the ground and lay waste to mass sprawls of land and ecosystem, were responsible for my particular piece? The same can be asked of the green tea itself, and of the pad that keeps it from burning the surface it sits on, and the heat that boils the water.
Out of respect, one must learn about one's material helpers, and about the long chains of history which have delivered them to one's arms. More importantly, there should be a recognition of the labor and sacrifice that makes these objects and customs possible, labor and sacrifice which have been offered by other cultures throughout history, cultures which have undergone the many births and deaths that we believe we are immune to, and for that matter, separate from.
Needless to say, it is not enough to merely contemplate these things. One's own labor and activity should go towards ameliorating the ongoing destruction that underwrites cultural production. All of it is bound up in one's helpers. It all plays a part.
Tuesday, May 02, 2017
Getting Sick
In many cases within the U.S. population - and this could certainly be the case in many parts of the developed world - personal sickness deals double damage.
There is a separate issue when people contract serious illnesses in this country, an issue which stands apart from the physical problems that arise.
In these many cases, when people get sick, instead of seeking help and community support, they withdraw and isolate themselves.
Now there are both external and internal(ized) reasons for this, which tend to reinforce each other. People are well-aware that their health care services are tenuous and rigged, and that they probably lack the resources they need to get help without going into debt, or endangering one point of their cash flow.
Having an intermittent, insufficient, and uncertain income tends to engender an overall feeling of insecurity. One may have a thousand dollars in the bank, but every purchase feels as if one is chipping off a part of oneself, that one may need later.
This internalized feeling of insecurity is cultivated in all sorts of ways, and it expresses itself in just as many ways too, which we could take all day tracing and analyzing. But more simply one is induced to fall into despair, and becomes stressed about constant money problems and health issues, exacerbating those health issues.
One of the ways in which accumulated trauma expresses itself is in social isolation and the severing of links and contact. The modern individual is brought up with an artificial conception of self-sufficiency, and that to lean on others is disgraceful. One's body should be pristine and supple, and not exhibiting abnormal signs of contagion and "discharge", as it were. Physical disabilities and other discrepencies are regularly disrespected and worse in this culture.
An elderly member of the family may become sick, and the family, upon worrying about social services, expenses, or social judgments, begins hiding this fact, and all sorts of distortions arise, which compromises community trust.
All sorts of individuals become sick, and similarly, cut themselves off from the communities that can restore their strength. And through this regular occurrence, a culture arises that celebrates this "self-sufficiency" and self deprivation, as a function of the individual ego's need to assert its own conditions as just.
And so one major component of the healing process - the spread of information, and the consequent administration of resources - is suppressed and even destroyed.
More generally, there is something in our social fabric that produces a sort of positive feedback when it is damaged, in which trauma begets more trauma. This is the opposite of a normal healing process in which wounds heal, which of course does still exist in certain aspects, but as per usual here I'm focusing on the problem.
There is a separate issue when people contract serious illnesses in this country, an issue which stands apart from the physical problems that arise.
In these many cases, when people get sick, instead of seeking help and community support, they withdraw and isolate themselves.
Now there are both external and internal(ized) reasons for this, which tend to reinforce each other. People are well-aware that their health care services are tenuous and rigged, and that they probably lack the resources they need to get help without going into debt, or endangering one point of their cash flow.
Having an intermittent, insufficient, and uncertain income tends to engender an overall feeling of insecurity. One may have a thousand dollars in the bank, but every purchase feels as if one is chipping off a part of oneself, that one may need later.
This internalized feeling of insecurity is cultivated in all sorts of ways, and it expresses itself in just as many ways too, which we could take all day tracing and analyzing. But more simply one is induced to fall into despair, and becomes stressed about constant money problems and health issues, exacerbating those health issues.
One of the ways in which accumulated trauma expresses itself is in social isolation and the severing of links and contact. The modern individual is brought up with an artificial conception of self-sufficiency, and that to lean on others is disgraceful. One's body should be pristine and supple, and not exhibiting abnormal signs of contagion and "discharge", as it were. Physical disabilities and other discrepencies are regularly disrespected and worse in this culture.
An elderly member of the family may become sick, and the family, upon worrying about social services, expenses, or social judgments, begins hiding this fact, and all sorts of distortions arise, which compromises community trust.
All sorts of individuals become sick, and similarly, cut themselves off from the communities that can restore their strength. And through this regular occurrence, a culture arises that celebrates this "self-sufficiency" and self deprivation, as a function of the individual ego's need to assert its own conditions as just.
And so one major component of the healing process - the spread of information, and the consequent administration of resources - is suppressed and even destroyed.
More generally, there is something in our social fabric that produces a sort of positive feedback when it is damaged, in which trauma begets more trauma. This is the opposite of a normal healing process in which wounds heal, which of course does still exist in certain aspects, but as per usual here I'm focusing on the problem.
Monday, May 01, 2017
Van Life
As I'm about to shove off and begin my life as a nomad living in a car, I've become aware that there is a whole subculture that is quickly growing around this way of life. It is growing fast enough that now the bougie folks are getting into it, decking out their vans, trucks, SUVs, and whatever else with all manner of luxury implements and interiors, posting their experiences on various social media outlets, attracting the attention of corporate sponsors, and etc.
I believe they call it something like #vanlife on Instagram. Much of it seems airbrushed: a highlighting of adventures and fun outdoor living, and an erasure of the social disintegration that makes this lifestyle attractive. Many of the car people getting in on the recent action are weekenders, enjoying a slice of this cutting edge lifestyle. But many others are actually living the life, scaling down their commitments and needs, helping others do the same, and etc.
Now corporate sponsors, that's something else! The marketers have figured out that the Millenials prefer "experiences" and "emotional connections" with interesting car-bound individuals, individuals which serve as blank canvases to project their dreams of free road living and whatnot. These are among the many trojan horses that marketers enter the Millenial market with. It seems even the auto-makers are catching on to this trend, looking to sell people's social, political, and spiritual fragmentation back at them in the form of fancy camper cars and road trip vehicles. Much like the ongoing evolution of the gig and sharing economy, and that economy's relationship with the tech sector.
Capital is learning to market and monetize the increasing circulation of human detritus that it is playing a part in setting free. All fine and well, it has always done this. It does also open up more opportunities for people who are trying to survive in the system, but who have not been properly absorbed through traditional channels.
I'm aware there are problems with my new life as a car-dweller, living in a moving combustion machine within an intensifying greenhouse. But there are trade-offs too: I'm not really using heat or air-conditioning, I'm not taking very many showers, I'm wasting very little, using less, and forgoing many previous comforts. The net energy I'm using up is most likely much less than it was before. I'm still aware I'm a bit of a shitbag doing all this driving, no illusions there.
It is meant to be a transitional stage. It is a means of circulation, of displacing the tensions and contradictions within one's environment and community, which tend to build up over time as one stays still within intractable systems.
Through movement, one can temporarily leave the entangled pathologies of one's default community - while of course indulging in another set of pathologies simultaneously - transforming oneself through circulation amidst other communities engaged in various worthwhile projects.
The task that appears most vital to me at the moment is to transforms one's relations with the land, and relations with others simultaneously, which gradually happens through this constant movement. Will it actually work? Who knows. I could very well be deluding myself. And of course, there are plenty of ways that one can transform oneself and one's community, based on what one is and how one relates to one's community.
So serious! But there you have it. Now to try it out and see what happens.
I believe they call it something like #vanlife on Instagram. Much of it seems airbrushed: a highlighting of adventures and fun outdoor living, and an erasure of the social disintegration that makes this lifestyle attractive. Many of the car people getting in on the recent action are weekenders, enjoying a slice of this cutting edge lifestyle. But many others are actually living the life, scaling down their commitments and needs, helping others do the same, and etc.
Now corporate sponsors, that's something else! The marketers have figured out that the Millenials prefer "experiences" and "emotional connections" with interesting car-bound individuals, individuals which serve as blank canvases to project their dreams of free road living and whatnot. These are among the many trojan horses that marketers enter the Millenial market with. It seems even the auto-makers are catching on to this trend, looking to sell people's social, political, and spiritual fragmentation back at them in the form of fancy camper cars and road trip vehicles. Much like the ongoing evolution of the gig and sharing economy, and that economy's relationship with the tech sector.
Capital is learning to market and monetize the increasing circulation of human detritus that it is playing a part in setting free. All fine and well, it has always done this. It does also open up more opportunities for people who are trying to survive in the system, but who have not been properly absorbed through traditional channels.
I'm aware there are problems with my new life as a car-dweller, living in a moving combustion machine within an intensifying greenhouse. But there are trade-offs too: I'm not really using heat or air-conditioning, I'm not taking very many showers, I'm wasting very little, using less, and forgoing many previous comforts. The net energy I'm using up is most likely much less than it was before. I'm still aware I'm a bit of a shitbag doing all this driving, no illusions there.
It is meant to be a transitional stage. It is a means of circulation, of displacing the tensions and contradictions within one's environment and community, which tend to build up over time as one stays still within intractable systems.
Through movement, one can temporarily leave the entangled pathologies of one's default community - while of course indulging in another set of pathologies simultaneously - transforming oneself through circulation amidst other communities engaged in various worthwhile projects.
The task that appears most vital to me at the moment is to transforms one's relations with the land, and relations with others simultaneously, which gradually happens through this constant movement. Will it actually work? Who knows. I could very well be deluding myself. And of course, there are plenty of ways that one can transform oneself and one's community, based on what one is and how one relates to one's community.
So serious! But there you have it. Now to try it out and see what happens.
D Sells His Car
It kind of sounds like a dark comedy no?
Anyway, I went through the process of selling a car privately. Something that many Americans experience in their lifetimes, and something which, as it happens, should be routine for a culture that worships both cars and markets. Though this sounds like it is going to be a boring life journal post, I can assure you it is not. The experience has been revealing, to say the least.
Now it has become almost commonplace to assert that commodity markets tend to supplant people-relations with object-relations, at least as they become more powerful and widespread. If your very survival is predicated on the steady accumulation of trade-objects - money in this case - then of course whatever produces money is going to take priority in the consciousness.
And where survival is threatened, one feels great pressure. The objects of survival elevate themselves into the forefront of the attention with this constant pressure. The pressure is much worse in poor communities, who don't have whatever small cushion of family wealth to fall back on if something goes wrong. And forget about relying on the state, at least in the U.S.; the state is bound up in the same social darwinist claptrap, that one has to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps or one becomes weak and dependent, an ideology that is of course racialized to boot.
This pressure only grows as you ascend the commodity ladder. Larger, more expensive objects, like cars and houses for example, take on an existential importance. They operate as shreds of shedded capital, augmentable resources for one to latch onto and shield oneself against the constant economic disintegration presented by rent and hunger.
Of course it is important to remember that in many cases, this dynamic is completely reversed. To be poor, one eventually gives up on many things which one realistically acknowledges as unattainable, and so the pressure is lifted. Whereas for the rich, there is a constant pressure of cascading desires; the trade object is never enough. In the face of this reality, it is easy enough to understand the market paradox in which many of the poor are spiritually satiated and content (which goes without saying that this is not an excuse for poverty), while the rich act as if they are perpetually dehydrated and starving. Outcomes in this complex interplay of economic forces are by no means simple or easily predictable.
Now, I could still be considered to occupy the middle class, and the process of selling certainly did not present the urgency of life or death, but nevertheless the process took a prominent space in my waking consciousness, and it even made its presence felt in sleep, through various stress dreams.
Through the mere act of selling, I felt as if I was doing the buyer a great disservice. Charging the greatest amount I could get, I feared that somehow the buyer would be ripped off and left with an inferior car, to be indirectly injured by my own economic needs. But of course, I'm operating from a self-conscious desire for mutual generosity; I have failed to internalize the warlike spirit one takes going to market, that what is equally likely is that the buyer is pursing their own desires, and attempts to get as low a price as possible, at the expense of the other. It is the way of things; it is business.
Participation in a market, at least in this era, is a fundamentally antagonistic activity. There one is presented with the prospect that one is entering a wilderness where everyone is pursuing their own self-interest. Theoretically, we are speaking of a neutral medium here, in which there is a mutual exchange of equals. Yes, pursuing such relations with a generous spirit is one way to stave off this reality. One gives others a good deal, in the hope that the other will subsist as a sympathetic agent, eventually returning the favor. Economic relationships are established, mutually beneficial ones.
But as the economists say, the bad money drives out the good. Similarly, if a market is driven by predatory actors hoovering up value at the expense of everyone else, one can only be so generous for so long before one's self is steadily diminished. Within such a milieu, the self-interested forces described by game theory take over. One must take what one can get, and one expects the other to do the same.
As Funkadelic put it so eloquently, you descend to the level of your lowest concept of yourself. If it becomes permissible to instrumentalize another to make material gains, as a basic condition for daily survival, then instrumentalization, and objectification becomes a regular fact of social life.
Being able to manipulate and instrumentalize other people in order to get a greater share in trade necessarily revises one's global ethics; it is an instinctual change that occurs beneath one's own consciousness, which influences one's acceptable actions and pushes them in a certain direction.
If the character of a system depends on a certain threshold of constituent activity, then corruption is all that can become of the institutions predicated on a market society. The rule of law may keep such forces at bay for some time, but the institutions of law do not occur outside of the societies they regulate. Interpersonal relations permeate society, and there is no lasting barrier between market behavior and interpersonal behavior.
This last fact is easily demonstrated in the rise of neoliberal ideology as a governing principle, which has been applied to all branches of society. The market itself has spread to all corners of society, and so it is little surprise that many can only think in its terms, as even their survival instincts have been wired for this reality. And so as the market continues to operate, as bare self-interest spreads in number and density, a society must necessarily be restructured to accord with that reality, and corruption becomes a simple fact of social existence.
It bears articulating: markets are not the source of evil; their extension over a majority of the earth, and the forced participation in them, is. I did initially make the claim that theoretically, markets should appear as neutral, as a neutral act of exchange, but this is a purely logical claim that is ahistorical for the most part.
So long as societies have had a surplus to trade, and just as importantly, state actors to feed, markets have existed. But the increasing spread of markets is administrated with fundamentally self-interested and antagonistic activity. The personified archetype of the market, the merchant, is driven by these desires, who then upon reaching a critical mass in number, form the societies and institutions required to express their ecstasies. This has been achieved through explosive violence, a fact that lingers amongst our social relations like a smoldering fire, which seems to be steadily sparking outward yet again.
Anyway, I went through the process of selling a car privately. Something that many Americans experience in their lifetimes, and something which, as it happens, should be routine for a culture that worships both cars and markets. Though this sounds like it is going to be a boring life journal post, I can assure you it is not. The experience has been revealing, to say the least.
Now it has become almost commonplace to assert that commodity markets tend to supplant people-relations with object-relations, at least as they become more powerful and widespread. If your very survival is predicated on the steady accumulation of trade-objects - money in this case - then of course whatever produces money is going to take priority in the consciousness.
And where survival is threatened, one feels great pressure. The objects of survival elevate themselves into the forefront of the attention with this constant pressure. The pressure is much worse in poor communities, who don't have whatever small cushion of family wealth to fall back on if something goes wrong. And forget about relying on the state, at least in the U.S.; the state is bound up in the same social darwinist claptrap, that one has to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps or one becomes weak and dependent, an ideology that is of course racialized to boot.
This pressure only grows as you ascend the commodity ladder. Larger, more expensive objects, like cars and houses for example, take on an existential importance. They operate as shreds of shedded capital, augmentable resources for one to latch onto and shield oneself against the constant economic disintegration presented by rent and hunger.
Of course it is important to remember that in many cases, this dynamic is completely reversed. To be poor, one eventually gives up on many things which one realistically acknowledges as unattainable, and so the pressure is lifted. Whereas for the rich, there is a constant pressure of cascading desires; the trade object is never enough. In the face of this reality, it is easy enough to understand the market paradox in which many of the poor are spiritually satiated and content (which goes without saying that this is not an excuse for poverty), while the rich act as if they are perpetually dehydrated and starving. Outcomes in this complex interplay of economic forces are by no means simple or easily predictable.
Now, I could still be considered to occupy the middle class, and the process of selling certainly did not present the urgency of life or death, but nevertheless the process took a prominent space in my waking consciousness, and it even made its presence felt in sleep, through various stress dreams.
Through the mere act of selling, I felt as if I was doing the buyer a great disservice. Charging the greatest amount I could get, I feared that somehow the buyer would be ripped off and left with an inferior car, to be indirectly injured by my own economic needs. But of course, I'm operating from a self-conscious desire for mutual generosity; I have failed to internalize the warlike spirit one takes going to market, that what is equally likely is that the buyer is pursing their own desires, and attempts to get as low a price as possible, at the expense of the other. It is the way of things; it is business.
Participation in a market, at least in this era, is a fundamentally antagonistic activity. There one is presented with the prospect that one is entering a wilderness where everyone is pursuing their own self-interest. Theoretically, we are speaking of a neutral medium here, in which there is a mutual exchange of equals. Yes, pursuing such relations with a generous spirit is one way to stave off this reality. One gives others a good deal, in the hope that the other will subsist as a sympathetic agent, eventually returning the favor. Economic relationships are established, mutually beneficial ones.
But as the economists say, the bad money drives out the good. Similarly, if a market is driven by predatory actors hoovering up value at the expense of everyone else, one can only be so generous for so long before one's self is steadily diminished. Within such a milieu, the self-interested forces described by game theory take over. One must take what one can get, and one expects the other to do the same.
As Funkadelic put it so eloquently, you descend to the level of your lowest concept of yourself. If it becomes permissible to instrumentalize another to make material gains, as a basic condition for daily survival, then instrumentalization, and objectification becomes a regular fact of social life.
Being able to manipulate and instrumentalize other people in order to get a greater share in trade necessarily revises one's global ethics; it is an instinctual change that occurs beneath one's own consciousness, which influences one's acceptable actions and pushes them in a certain direction.
If the character of a system depends on a certain threshold of constituent activity, then corruption is all that can become of the institutions predicated on a market society. The rule of law may keep such forces at bay for some time, but the institutions of law do not occur outside of the societies they regulate. Interpersonal relations permeate society, and there is no lasting barrier between market behavior and interpersonal behavior.
This last fact is easily demonstrated in the rise of neoliberal ideology as a governing principle, which has been applied to all branches of society. The market itself has spread to all corners of society, and so it is little surprise that many can only think in its terms, as even their survival instincts have been wired for this reality. And so as the market continues to operate, as bare self-interest spreads in number and density, a society must necessarily be restructured to accord with that reality, and corruption becomes a simple fact of social existence.
It bears articulating: markets are not the source of evil; their extension over a majority of the earth, and the forced participation in them, is. I did initially make the claim that theoretically, markets should appear as neutral, as a neutral act of exchange, but this is a purely logical claim that is ahistorical for the most part.
So long as societies have had a surplus to trade, and just as importantly, state actors to feed, markets have existed. But the increasing spread of markets is administrated with fundamentally self-interested and antagonistic activity. The personified archetype of the market, the merchant, is driven by these desires, who then upon reaching a critical mass in number, form the societies and institutions required to express their ecstasies. This has been achieved through explosive violence, a fact that lingers amongst our social relations like a smoldering fire, which seems to be steadily sparking outward yet again.
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