Great works - like paid specializations - do more than reveal or create; they act as teachers, training the mind within a given state of being. They do this through repetition: if you think about something once, or do something just once, more than likely the effects of that thing are to fade away and dissolve without too much efficacy. With much sustained repetition, their effects become greater and more permanent, until there is enough momentum that they perpetuate themselves, and it takes more work to simply get rid of them.
If one obsesses over a given work and goes over it again and again, thinking about it and thinking about things through its lens, eventually one sees everything through that lens, and one cannot unsee it. It has been fixed into consciousness, and so that thought and that way to think can even be perpetuated institutionally, say through social or economic pressure on the part of its adherents in an academic establishment.
Further, what wage labor and class and caste systems have in common is that they serve as mechanisms - often very complicated ones - to guarantee the perpetuation of a given state of affairs. For example, crops, cupboards, circuit boards, and engines all imply extremely intricate fabrication disciplines that have to be rigorously repeated in the individual, and then reproduced in subsequent individuals.
The higher up the chain of specialization, and the more a given technology requires the unconditional perpetuation of all of those constituent parts, the more is at stake, the more a society needs to take care to ensure that its constituents are reproducing all those many repetitions in concert. This growth of idea and discipline, and the carrying out of repetition to sustain it, can be a very powerful tool, utilized for the good of human beings. But then it can also be the case that this growth does not turn off.
There then arises a condition in which there are so many ideas and projects vying for attention in the human organism, all of which demand to be reproduced in perpetuity, even when there is not enough energy to sustain them all, that it becomes impossible for everything to continue together in its present state.
It is here that crises and failures become teachers in their own right.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
I Just Know It
Throughout history, there are indeed "bad times" or periods of widespread suffering or "endings," so to speak. But these bad periods can emerge out of periods of plenty - if given enough time - or stagnant periods for that matter, and then the bad times themselves do eventually dissolve into the air from whence they came.
That bad period has a certain character that coheres into an image in the perception as an apocalypse so to speak, and the opposite is true for good times. It is tempting for us finite beings, with our need to anticipate or orient ourselves to a given state of affairs, to assume a character of optimism or pessimism that is large part of our identity, which can be in accordance with - or completely discordant with - a given state of affairs.
That need to anticipate intensifies with power and the potential for loss, which is largely a state of consciousness, as demonstrated by mystics "living in the present" with their given practices. One suffers when one attaches to an image that contradicts a given state of affairs, especially when met with disbelief from one's peers, and when one's actions in the present don't accord with the surrounding reality, though this can eventually be validated in something like a written work which outlives one's own life.
And by the same coin, one can be viewed as a prophet in one's own life, or have one's actions accord with the surrounding state of affairs, and then have writings or records survive one's life and then one is labeled a fool in a different era that follows. And so on.
These aren't all just parlor games. After all, for the person being stabbed in a time of "good and plenty" there is certainly a small apocalypse being experienced. In the same way, a billionaire may perceive the gated palace in the midst of calamity as a small patch of heaven.
That bad period has a certain character that coheres into an image in the perception as an apocalypse so to speak, and the opposite is true for good times. It is tempting for us finite beings, with our need to anticipate or orient ourselves to a given state of affairs, to assume a character of optimism or pessimism that is large part of our identity, which can be in accordance with - or completely discordant with - a given state of affairs.
That need to anticipate intensifies with power and the potential for loss, which is largely a state of consciousness, as demonstrated by mystics "living in the present" with their given practices. One suffers when one attaches to an image that contradicts a given state of affairs, especially when met with disbelief from one's peers, and when one's actions in the present don't accord with the surrounding reality, though this can eventually be validated in something like a written work which outlives one's own life.
And by the same coin, one can be viewed as a prophet in one's own life, or have one's actions accord with the surrounding state of affairs, and then have writings or records survive one's life and then one is labeled a fool in a different era that follows. And so on.
These aren't all just parlor games. After all, for the person being stabbed in a time of "good and plenty" there is certainly a small apocalypse being experienced. In the same way, a billionaire may perceive the gated palace in the midst of calamity as a small patch of heaven.
Give It a Chance
Past traumas projected forward into the future through one's own sense of - or lack of - trust and one's anticipations interact with others' projections, producing a present of its own. This present, which as it exists now, consists of a mutually reinforcing and interlocking web of bad faith, bad intentions, and bad anticipation; it obscures any sort of good faith or good will, which may hang in the air between peoples, as if in escrow, waiting for a mutual exchange of good to be restored.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Just Do It
A civilization is largely built on "doing something," the repeated applications of which eventually serve to unravel it.
Social Trust
One thing the opioid crisis made visible was how precious of a resource social trust is. It did this in a negative way, by demonstrating very dramatically what happens when that trust is lost.
The crisis itself emerged from a confluence of destructive trends and developments. The regions hit the hardest tended to be regions suffering from economic neglect and/or a history of extraction and abandonment.
What's more, these regions were deliberately targeted by organizations like Purdue whose cultivated instincts were to seek out regions of economic opportunity to be exploited and exhausted for limited gain, instincts that have developed culturally and economically for centuries and more.
The economic opportunity in this case was a despair and a cultural malaise lingering as residue after earlier "economic opportunities" had run their course, which coupled with the more immediate necessities of pain relief, among other things, served as the perfect environment for dependency and addiction.
But the initial crisis, in which staggering numbers of patients became addicted and then accidentally overdosed, was only the beginning. The initial crisis itself primed the steady destruction of a powerful medical tool. Fear and alarm elevated the crisis to an epidemic-level event, and those hit the hardest by the convulsions of blame and reaction were the chronic pain sufferers themselves.
Now, just because a dodgy corporation produces something doesn't necessarily disqualify it as useless and/or destructive. But the nature of an organization does tend to be expressed in its products: products that don't work as advertised, and products that draw its customers in through extractive intent, reflect the intentions, activities, and care of its creators.
That said, the dominant form of production - and the dominant productive entities who owe their characters to the dynamics of that form - has thoroughly monopolized the field of medical procurement, and those in need of things like pain relief have to take what they can get. And opioids do work quite well for this sort of thing given average conditions.
But the crisis itself - along with a slew of other crises of varying natures but of common roots - has done profound violence to social trust. This leaves us with a medical establishment that doesn't trust its patients with powerful pain killers, and a greater society that doesn't trust the medical establishment to have their interests at heart, when those interests don't coincide with a healthy profit. This results in disruptions and dampenings in the distribution of opioids and the relief of those suffering from chronic pain who need them most.
And then you have the prized and upstanding members of high society like the Sackler family, who in comical-evil-capitalist-caricature fashion (like as in Milo from Catch 22 fashion) profit from both encouragement of the crisis and addressing the crisis with addiction treatments. This type of behavior, which must necessarily take place within the social body, induces mass paranoia in that body; it signals that with enough power, anything goes.
Further, no one can expect to be protected from such abuses, as the state will not go the distance to punish such offenders in any meaningful way. With mass paranoia at its peak, nothing can be done really without triggering some destructive impulse. If everyone already expects everyone else to behave in the worst way, then any sort of behavior that arises, whether benevolent or not, can only be interpreted as such.
It is one thing to lose trust; it is entirely another to have something like paranoia grow in its stead. And as we well know by now, woe to the society with a fully developed and self-reinforcing collective sense of paranoia.
The crisis itself emerged from a confluence of destructive trends and developments. The regions hit the hardest tended to be regions suffering from economic neglect and/or a history of extraction and abandonment.
What's more, these regions were deliberately targeted by organizations like Purdue whose cultivated instincts were to seek out regions of economic opportunity to be exploited and exhausted for limited gain, instincts that have developed culturally and economically for centuries and more.
The economic opportunity in this case was a despair and a cultural malaise lingering as residue after earlier "economic opportunities" had run their course, which coupled with the more immediate necessities of pain relief, among other things, served as the perfect environment for dependency and addiction.
But the initial crisis, in which staggering numbers of patients became addicted and then accidentally overdosed, was only the beginning. The initial crisis itself primed the steady destruction of a powerful medical tool. Fear and alarm elevated the crisis to an epidemic-level event, and those hit the hardest by the convulsions of blame and reaction were the chronic pain sufferers themselves.
Now, just because a dodgy corporation produces something doesn't necessarily disqualify it as useless and/or destructive. But the nature of an organization does tend to be expressed in its products: products that don't work as advertised, and products that draw its customers in through extractive intent, reflect the intentions, activities, and care of its creators.
That said, the dominant form of production - and the dominant productive entities who owe their characters to the dynamics of that form - has thoroughly monopolized the field of medical procurement, and those in need of things like pain relief have to take what they can get. And opioids do work quite well for this sort of thing given average conditions.
But the crisis itself - along with a slew of other crises of varying natures but of common roots - has done profound violence to social trust. This leaves us with a medical establishment that doesn't trust its patients with powerful pain killers, and a greater society that doesn't trust the medical establishment to have their interests at heart, when those interests don't coincide with a healthy profit. This results in disruptions and dampenings in the distribution of opioids and the relief of those suffering from chronic pain who need them most.
And then you have the prized and upstanding members of high society like the Sackler family, who in comical-evil-capitalist-caricature fashion (like as in Milo from Catch 22 fashion) profit from both encouragement of the crisis and addressing the crisis with addiction treatments. This type of behavior, which must necessarily take place within the social body, induces mass paranoia in that body; it signals that with enough power, anything goes.
Further, no one can expect to be protected from such abuses, as the state will not go the distance to punish such offenders in any meaningful way. With mass paranoia at its peak, nothing can be done really without triggering some destructive impulse. If everyone already expects everyone else to behave in the worst way, then any sort of behavior that arises, whether benevolent or not, can only be interpreted as such.
It is one thing to lose trust; it is entirely another to have something like paranoia grow in its stead. And as we well know by now, woe to the society with a fully developed and self-reinforcing collective sense of paranoia.
Fatigued
Something is still very wrong; I'm just tired of doing the intellectual equivalent of shouting. When one stands and simply shouts (such as in an insulated space or an unpopulated wilderness), in a sustained manner, and nothing changes, and no one comes running with urgent concern, the attention drifts to one's irritated throat, and one's tiring lungs. The shouting becomes tiring.
Anyway, I figure I can keep steadily whispering "danger, danger," so long as the lights are still on.
Anyway, I figure I can keep steadily whispering "danger, danger," so long as the lights are still on.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Simplicity and Complexity: Caveats
Of course the language of "simplicity" and "complexity" is fraught with misunderstanding and baggage, and I've worked in the past to get some of it untangled, and remain dissatisfied and troubled by various conceptual problems, implications of egocentricity and ethnocentricity, and self-contradictions within the project still.
But there is one takeaway: in the absolute, reality is infinitely complex everywhere. And relative complexity, or observer-dependent complexity, necessarily implies simplification. It arises out of the building up of numerous prior simplifications, or conceptual building blocks which were stripped from their contexts and compressed in the first place. Relative complexity requires more organized energy, so to speak.
More generally, simplicity arises from constant repetition and the elimination of error and discord towards harmony, and it also arises from dissolution and catastrophe, whereas complexity arises out of turbulence and dissonance, but it also occurs in movements towards harmony and continuity as well. Again, no clear way forward.
But there is one takeaway: in the absolute, reality is infinitely complex everywhere. And relative complexity, or observer-dependent complexity, necessarily implies simplification. It arises out of the building up of numerous prior simplifications, or conceptual building blocks which were stripped from their contexts and compressed in the first place. Relative complexity requires more organized energy, so to speak.
More generally, simplicity arises from constant repetition and the elimination of error and discord towards harmony, and it also arises from dissolution and catastrophe, whereas complexity arises out of turbulence and dissonance, but it also occurs in movements towards harmony and continuity as well. Again, no clear way forward.
Further Movement Towards Simplification
Another pressure towards simplification can be found in the concentration of power - a dynamic that has been discussed here previously. When power concentrates among a complex social system, more of the motive impulses are diverted away from the regions of governance that need them most.
This is because complexity by its nature requires a self governance in those deeper tiers, as concentrated power only has so much energy to attend to governance in a given tier or specialization.
Where one has motive, one must have power to set that motive into motion. When power concentrates, that intersection of motive and power is also concentrated, so that those most able to affect change haven't the slightest clue of how that change actually came about in the past.
It is a problem of the ineffectual movement and concentration of energy in time and space.
So power proceeds by its own necessities, and diverts its energy to those regions most sympathetic to it, simplifying its own operation. However to increase its effectiveness power must in turn develop those regions further after reorganizing and proceed again to a complexity with its appropriate delegations of power and motive.
This is because complexity by its nature requires a self governance in those deeper tiers, as concentrated power only has so much energy to attend to governance in a given tier or specialization.
Where one has motive, one must have power to set that motive into motion. When power concentrates, that intersection of motive and power is also concentrated, so that those most able to affect change haven't the slightest clue of how that change actually came about in the past.
It is a problem of the ineffectual movement and concentration of energy in time and space.
So power proceeds by its own necessities, and diverts its energy to those regions most sympathetic to it, simplifying its own operation. However to increase its effectiveness power must in turn develop those regions further after reorganizing and proceed again to a complexity with its appropriate delegations of power and motive.
I Forget
Living systems undergoing volatile progression - with progress in this case merely referring to movement in a given direction - can typically do one of two things. They can rapidly emerge and then rapidly unravel, resulting in an otherwise dazzling fireworks show before they return to the ether to eventually become something else.
If they are to persist however, there is a growing and changing complexity of those modes of self maintenance required to perpetuate that living system, which eventually has to result in a forgetting and a more gradual unraveling.
One good example here can be seen in the baffling, upsetting, and I suppose dazzling spectacle of modern mass politics. On the individual level, yes politics is still in part art and performance, but there is a systemwide process of manufacture that mirrors our modes of production in every other sphere.
Much of the most frequently utilized political language turns up nationwide at least, and with the globalization of capital and the proliferation of international trade and financial institutions, much of this language has been exported as well. The politics of economic liberalization, of austerity, of free trade, social democracy and etc. all feature regularly utilized language that is preformed and prefabricated.
Language like "austerity, free trade, capitalism, socialism, liberal, conservative, tax, tariff," and so on and so forth comes ready-made for the vast majority of participants, included as implements of political offense and defense, pre-loaded with the appropriate set of values when one puts on one's red or blue shirt to step into the arena with. Which to be sure, is partially situational based on cultural and geographical differences and smaller moment to moment practicalities and improvisations, but which largely holds on national and oftentimes even international arenas.
For a minority of participants, much of these concepts are carefully worked through and either reified or agitated against in their respective parties or organizations, and then for the majority the usual long chain of reactions, of affirmations and negations are worked through using the current language and concepts, in accordance with one's values and beliefs.
Upon coevolving with our many other forms of production, it has worked just fine for some time. The problem is being on the cusp of a massive paradigm shift, which tends to reveal the extent of the forgetting of the political machinery itself, and how it is supposed to work.
Once all of the political machinery has been built up, it has to be used over and over in accordance with existing necessities and practicalities, which in the face of political conflict and competition becomes more complex and specialized as political operatives and specialists take the machinery up and improve upon them with existing infrastructure and disciplines like mass communications, PR, marketing, data analysis, and etc.
This leads to an institutional dependence on the ready-made language and concepts themselves, the machinery, so to speak, and it results in a forgetting of the fundamentals that produced the machinery, and made the machinery necessary in the first place. So it is a desperate dependence on the machinery that continues the usage of the machinery, even when that machinery is digging deeper and deeper ruts.
What this progression eventually results in is a recourse to practical and conceptual simplicity, not through any sort of engineering principle, intellectual ideal, or artifact of wisdom, but through the mere necessity of addressing the inevitable crises that crop up when the machinery no longer works.
This happens because the ruling elite does everything in its power to shut out radical alternative (largely on the left) and then drag its feet as much as possible when working with those radicals (again on the leftward end of the spectrum) to craft policy and administrate reform.
The establishment is more than willing to humor the right on many fronts, due to shared conservative impulses, but then demures when it comes to adopting the more radical reactionary stances, which tend to lay bare the fundamental principles that underpin the baroque machinery that the establishment has come to rely on, machinery with a complexity that developed precisely to address some of the more problematic aspects of those underpinnings, such as careful focus group-tested euphemisms and framings that hide underlying realities like class domination, historical and contemporary racism and misogyny, and etc.
In short, there will come a time when the rightward-drifting establishment discovers that using technical curmudgeons like tariffs, sanctions, law, and propaganda tends to be more expensive than the effects are worth, and that they don't even work as well as they used to, because they aren't even that well understood anymore, and that it is much simpler and more effective to simply aggress militarily, further militarize and imprison domestically, and openly threaten, and these means will increase in sophistication until the next crisis.
If they are to persist however, there is a growing and changing complexity of those modes of self maintenance required to perpetuate that living system, which eventually has to result in a forgetting and a more gradual unraveling.
One good example here can be seen in the baffling, upsetting, and I suppose dazzling spectacle of modern mass politics. On the individual level, yes politics is still in part art and performance, but there is a systemwide process of manufacture that mirrors our modes of production in every other sphere.
Much of the most frequently utilized political language turns up nationwide at least, and with the globalization of capital and the proliferation of international trade and financial institutions, much of this language has been exported as well. The politics of economic liberalization, of austerity, of free trade, social democracy and etc. all feature regularly utilized language that is preformed and prefabricated.
Language like "austerity, free trade, capitalism, socialism, liberal, conservative, tax, tariff," and so on and so forth comes ready-made for the vast majority of participants, included as implements of political offense and defense, pre-loaded with the appropriate set of values when one puts on one's red or blue shirt to step into the arena with. Which to be sure, is partially situational based on cultural and geographical differences and smaller moment to moment practicalities and improvisations, but which largely holds on national and oftentimes even international arenas.
For a minority of participants, much of these concepts are carefully worked through and either reified or agitated against in their respective parties or organizations, and then for the majority the usual long chain of reactions, of affirmations and negations are worked through using the current language and concepts, in accordance with one's values and beliefs.
Upon coevolving with our many other forms of production, it has worked just fine for some time. The problem is being on the cusp of a massive paradigm shift, which tends to reveal the extent of the forgetting of the political machinery itself, and how it is supposed to work.
Once all of the political machinery has been built up, it has to be used over and over in accordance with existing necessities and practicalities, which in the face of political conflict and competition becomes more complex and specialized as political operatives and specialists take the machinery up and improve upon them with existing infrastructure and disciplines like mass communications, PR, marketing, data analysis, and etc.
This leads to an institutional dependence on the ready-made language and concepts themselves, the machinery, so to speak, and it results in a forgetting of the fundamentals that produced the machinery, and made the machinery necessary in the first place. So it is a desperate dependence on the machinery that continues the usage of the machinery, even when that machinery is digging deeper and deeper ruts.
What this progression eventually results in is a recourse to practical and conceptual simplicity, not through any sort of engineering principle, intellectual ideal, or artifact of wisdom, but through the mere necessity of addressing the inevitable crises that crop up when the machinery no longer works.
This happens because the ruling elite does everything in its power to shut out radical alternative (largely on the left) and then drag its feet as much as possible when working with those radicals (again on the leftward end of the spectrum) to craft policy and administrate reform.
The establishment is more than willing to humor the right on many fronts, due to shared conservative impulses, but then demures when it comes to adopting the more radical reactionary stances, which tend to lay bare the fundamental principles that underpin the baroque machinery that the establishment has come to rely on, machinery with a complexity that developed precisely to address some of the more problematic aspects of those underpinnings, such as careful focus group-tested euphemisms and framings that hide underlying realities like class domination, historical and contemporary racism and misogyny, and etc.
In short, there will come a time when the rightward-drifting establishment discovers that using technical curmudgeons like tariffs, sanctions, law, and propaganda tends to be more expensive than the effects are worth, and that they don't even work as well as they used to, because they aren't even that well understood anymore, and that it is much simpler and more effective to simply aggress militarily, further militarize and imprison domestically, and openly threaten, and these means will increase in sophistication until the next crisis.
Monday, September 17, 2018
Capital and State
For analytical purposes - and less savory propagandistic purposes for that matter - capital is often posited as an entity entirely distinct from the state. But for all intents and purposes, those analytically or rhetorically separated entities are one and the same. The one in its current form would not exist without the other, and the two perpetuate each other.
The odd part of it is the way in which this perpetuation is carried out. We see an unsteady continuity miraculously held firm by the clashing actions of classes positioned against each other, lurching from crisis to crisis. It could be that this antagonism partially accounts for the analytical and rhetorical separation of the sectors, but conceptually, this juncture has a complicated cultural and intellectual history, and I digress.
Capital, left to itself, continues to expand indefinitely, all the while exhausting the resources and living systems that it relies on. Upon some sector of society threatening to blow up, or the whole of society itself growing unsteady, capital finally relents to a set of regulations and controls set forth by the state, to save capital from itself, and which also serves, of course, to temporarily free the state from the hateful gaze of its constituents.
This all happens after the state has been plenty busy cultivating the environment that capital needs to flourish: markets must develop after societies have been thoroughly separated from the land, and law must be crafted and contracts and private property must be enforced and held in place through violence, for starters.
On the other side of the coin, the state, with its multi-tiered local, statewide, national, and international ambitions of governance, requires infrastructure. It requires lines of communication, transportation, data management, procurement of resources for its stewards and constituents, instruments of violence, and etc.
And so the state is very much interested in keeping capital inflated and running properly. That beast - or perhaps, that god - has an appetite and a set of desires of its own. Sometimes it fears the waves of destruction it sets forth and shrinks back, and sometimes it proceeds confidently and arrogantly, resenting any sort of outside interference.
These distinctions account for the unique dynamics of such a human system over time, but the system is still a unitary whole, no matter its pretensions to minimize a given part of itself at an expedient point in time.
The odd part of it is the way in which this perpetuation is carried out. We see an unsteady continuity miraculously held firm by the clashing actions of classes positioned against each other, lurching from crisis to crisis. It could be that this antagonism partially accounts for the analytical and rhetorical separation of the sectors, but conceptually, this juncture has a complicated cultural and intellectual history, and I digress.
Capital, left to itself, continues to expand indefinitely, all the while exhausting the resources and living systems that it relies on. Upon some sector of society threatening to blow up, or the whole of society itself growing unsteady, capital finally relents to a set of regulations and controls set forth by the state, to save capital from itself, and which also serves, of course, to temporarily free the state from the hateful gaze of its constituents.
This all happens after the state has been plenty busy cultivating the environment that capital needs to flourish: markets must develop after societies have been thoroughly separated from the land, and law must be crafted and contracts and private property must be enforced and held in place through violence, for starters.
On the other side of the coin, the state, with its multi-tiered local, statewide, national, and international ambitions of governance, requires infrastructure. It requires lines of communication, transportation, data management, procurement of resources for its stewards and constituents, instruments of violence, and etc.
And so the state is very much interested in keeping capital inflated and running properly. That beast - or perhaps, that god - has an appetite and a set of desires of its own. Sometimes it fears the waves of destruction it sets forth and shrinks back, and sometimes it proceeds confidently and arrogantly, resenting any sort of outside interference.
These distinctions account for the unique dynamics of such a human system over time, but the system is still a unitary whole, no matter its pretensions to minimize a given part of itself at an expedient point in time.
Proper Behavior in the Body of Capital
The loose cohering of interests which characterize a capitalist society also accounts for the strange autocratic purgatory we find ourselves in.
Right-behavior has been snapped into place through a mixture of legal codification, cultural internalization, and informal pressures exerted by multiple sectors of society cohering together and influencing each other.
Every sector of society is set against each other in interest, while at the same time they are bound together to make each other work, or capital descends like a ghost, attracted to the disturbance, to correct it.
What is meant by this? No there is no dictator (yet) leering through the two-way monitor. But make a very minor ruckus in the suburbs and see how free you are. How strange it is, to sit in the still air, listening to the neighborhood and contemplating free possibility and free movement, yet at the same time aware that simply turning up an amplifier and opening the window could lead to descending clubs!
The more noise and "disorder" you beget - and the more predetermined you are to be under suspicion in the first place - the more quickly the state shows up to your door to quiet you down and set you back in place, and that is after the household or neighborhood attempts to do it itself through social pressure and sanction.
That sudden fire that breaks out in the belly, that howling anxiety that bears witness to a growing chaos, must be put out at any cost. And so the family preemptively puts out its fires, and when that fails, the police, who anxiously cruise the streets searching for disorder, put out the fires in their own bellies and make the disorder orderly again.
And fires that break out in the police are quickly put out within the department, or else some internal affairs department or government regulator descends to put out the fires in their own bellies. And when the fires of the regulators break out, some financial institution or committee descends to put out the fire in their own bellies, and enforce fiscal responsibility, and so on.
And much like in the forests of the west, all those fires being constantly put out contributes to the development of choking undergrowth, ready to go up in flame en masse when conditions allow.
It isn't fire and chaos that is categorically snuffed out. There is always chaos, and there is always fire, but these things are marshalled in a single direction: consumption and dissolution for the powerless, and energy and constitution for the powerful.
The burning always has consequences, but those consequences become distributed in unique patterns of their own, patterns which tighten all the more that controls on the burn tighten.
I'm getting more vague and obscure as the post goes on, I know. The rest is ground I'll have to cover and flesh out at another time.
Right-behavior has been snapped into place through a mixture of legal codification, cultural internalization, and informal pressures exerted by multiple sectors of society cohering together and influencing each other.
Every sector of society is set against each other in interest, while at the same time they are bound together to make each other work, or capital descends like a ghost, attracted to the disturbance, to correct it.
What is meant by this? No there is no dictator (yet) leering through the two-way monitor. But make a very minor ruckus in the suburbs and see how free you are. How strange it is, to sit in the still air, listening to the neighborhood and contemplating free possibility and free movement, yet at the same time aware that simply turning up an amplifier and opening the window could lead to descending clubs!
The more noise and "disorder" you beget - and the more predetermined you are to be under suspicion in the first place - the more quickly the state shows up to your door to quiet you down and set you back in place, and that is after the household or neighborhood attempts to do it itself through social pressure and sanction.
That sudden fire that breaks out in the belly, that howling anxiety that bears witness to a growing chaos, must be put out at any cost. And so the family preemptively puts out its fires, and when that fails, the police, who anxiously cruise the streets searching for disorder, put out the fires in their own bellies and make the disorder orderly again.
And fires that break out in the police are quickly put out within the department, or else some internal affairs department or government regulator descends to put out the fires in their own bellies. And when the fires of the regulators break out, some financial institution or committee descends to put out the fire in their own bellies, and enforce fiscal responsibility, and so on.
And much like in the forests of the west, all those fires being constantly put out contributes to the development of choking undergrowth, ready to go up in flame en masse when conditions allow.
It isn't fire and chaos that is categorically snuffed out. There is always chaos, and there is always fire, but these things are marshalled in a single direction: consumption and dissolution for the powerless, and energy and constitution for the powerful.
The burning always has consequences, but those consequences become distributed in unique patterns of their own, patterns which tighten all the more that controls on the burn tighten.
I'm getting more vague and obscure as the post goes on, I know. The rest is ground I'll have to cover and flesh out at another time.
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Playsets
The separation and sterilization of the landscape, itself a product of economic development, generates ever new demands that serve to fuel further development. For example, the child's playset emerges to serve children having been cut off from a realm of surprise, wonder, and creativity. Felled trees, burnt oil, and poured chemicals combine to form hulking playsets that serve as entertainment for a couple of years and then are left to rot.
Skilled Tools
Highly skilled tools are one visible form of social cleavage that emerges out of specialization. There is only so much time and energy available to master a given advanced tool, for the utility it provides and the regard that it brings. Slight fault lines develop in the life experiences and social regard that accompanies individuals developing in this way.
Social Wounds in the Industrial Core
Today, within the cores of those powerful developed nations and their allies, much physical, spiritual, and psychological damage occurs socially. That is, much suffering occurs as a result of a given advanced society's regular contact with its own self, much like an engine whose violent vibrations steadily loosen bolts and wear down metal.
Before individuals are pushed into poverty and misfortune, at least when they are not already marked for such a fate via class/race/gender/sexuality/ideology/etc., their person and constitution is worn down by repeated social stress.
Indeed, part of this is life, which is already pain, in which difference crashes against itself as different plays of energy in people, other living things, places, and things follow their own courses of development, influencing each other and correcting each other.
But an advanced economy - which is at least capitalistic in nature - can only absorb so many "winners," driving competition and cultivating a hostility for challengers and "others." Conformity intensifies partially out of the fear of failure, a fear that grows as chances for successful absorption shrink, as fearful competitors monopolize more of the social arena to prevent backsliding.
So mere difference presents a constant antagonism; there are fewer chances to heal and bind, amidst a backdrop of increasing environmental and social stress.
A single slight to someone beat up enough can trigger a small depression, or a panic, leading to damaged brain cells, damage from cortisol, bad eating, further slights, and worse. In such an environment, the self appears as a shell which must protect against constant outer blows, which steadily weakens under repeated stress.
Before individuals are pushed into poverty and misfortune, at least when they are not already marked for such a fate via class/race/gender/sexuality/ideology/etc., their person and constitution is worn down by repeated social stress.
Indeed, part of this is life, which is already pain, in which difference crashes against itself as different plays of energy in people, other living things, places, and things follow their own courses of development, influencing each other and correcting each other.
But an advanced economy - which is at least capitalistic in nature - can only absorb so many "winners," driving competition and cultivating a hostility for challengers and "others." Conformity intensifies partially out of the fear of failure, a fear that grows as chances for successful absorption shrink, as fearful competitors monopolize more of the social arena to prevent backsliding.
So mere difference presents a constant antagonism; there are fewer chances to heal and bind, amidst a backdrop of increasing environmental and social stress.
A single slight to someone beat up enough can trigger a small depression, or a panic, leading to damaged brain cells, damage from cortisol, bad eating, further slights, and worse. In such an environment, the self appears as a shell which must protect against constant outer blows, which steadily weakens under repeated stress.
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Hey Easy There
It really is pretty strange watching the United States act on the world stage - and having knowledge of that history for that matter. There is a basic hostility towards anyone who refuses to be in general alignment with the hegemon's range of interests, but right at the point where that hostility is most veiled, one glimpses a telling tension between symbolic act and intent.
Take for example the decades-long history of the use and abuse of economic sanctions, tariffs, payment systems, reserve currency, and the like, much of which betrays a profound hostility and disregard for the economic and political wellbeing of the target nations, but which at the same time assumes some sort of veneer of fairness and justice to present the hostile actions as "tit-for-tat" responses that are wholly justified.
The range of this behavior does change across racial, ethnic, and class lines for starters. Typically, the more developed a country is, and the closer to a useful economic peer that country is perceived as, the more veiled and obscured the imperial aggression. The more of an existential threat that country is considered, and the more economically developed it is in turn, the more work is put in towards employing legalistic, economic, and political propaganda to pull public opinion in a direction that warrants more direct and naked aggression, which is work that implies a considered wellspring of aggression in the first place.
A large part of this has to do with the way in which modern liberal ideology works. If you are perceived as a relative equal - largely economically at least - then you are bound under the same general global legal and economic framework which has been carefully built up over the last century. This is a framework that, through its universality, binds together all those participating under it, so that any overtly hostile and capricious attack on an adherent to this system tends to damage the credibility of the entire system as a whole.
That legal and economic framework - however rational its underpinnings - functions on a faith in continuity: that the system can be predictably navigated, and that the laws behind it are not capricious, but fairly arrived at over the course of practical experience, precedent, and good faith. By many, this is no longer earnestly believed, but however much damage such a collective conviction has undergone, there is still a mass belief in it, or at least a dependence on its functionality, however desperate.
Because in a way law is manufactured to carry out a purpose. Modern law is built onto an endlessly complex array of practicalities, theories, and time-worn customs which are put together as a society's development progresses, and which are gradually scaled up to account for higher and higher levels of legal governance depending on the case.
Over time trust in law has become habituated precisely because it is so baroque: as with every large scale social project, the practice has been taken over with armies of specialists whose life training and labor goes towards understanding and administrating the law as it pertains to various spheres of life. We simply have to trust (or otherwise accede to) them, because it is so huge and so omnipresent; what else is there to be done? And of course this too is rapidly changing along with the changing political compositions of developed nations around the world.
As we now know, large scale wars are incredibly costly in many ways. With instant communication and various forms of rapid transportation, modern war has scaled up enormously, to say the least of the instruments of destruction themselves. They lead to mass destruction, social upheaval, and oftentimes profound rearrangements of global power. They're messy and chaotic; bad news especially for top-heavy and sclerotic great powers at the tops of pyramids.
Historically, the revving up of the great wars has entailed states of affairs that have spiraled far out of anyone's control, where they were experienced as a sort of overwhelming pull, not unlike that of a black hole. Even the aggressors themselves were responding to the chaotic forces of their collapsing societies, just as one may lurch forward to compensate for tripping backward. Which is not a justification by any means, but some attempt at an explanation.
Save a quickly unraveling global emergency, nations - including, usually, the hegemon - work to exercise hostility through these legal and economic channels while they are still functional and legitimate. They save on time and energy, as they have already been built up, and they atomize and individualize conflict, keeping most of the body politic intact, as opposed to a great war, which rends it every which way.
Much like the neoliberal who pooh-poohs the state ideologically, and then turns around and makes extensive use of it as the powerful tool that plays a huge part in maintaining that project from the beginning.
But of course, using economic and legal systems in this way tend to corrupt them anyway. It just makes these things happen a little more slowly.
Take for example the decades-long history of the use and abuse of economic sanctions, tariffs, payment systems, reserve currency, and the like, much of which betrays a profound hostility and disregard for the economic and political wellbeing of the target nations, but which at the same time assumes some sort of veneer of fairness and justice to present the hostile actions as "tit-for-tat" responses that are wholly justified.
The range of this behavior does change across racial, ethnic, and class lines for starters. Typically, the more developed a country is, and the closer to a useful economic peer that country is perceived as, the more veiled and obscured the imperial aggression. The more of an existential threat that country is considered, and the more economically developed it is in turn, the more work is put in towards employing legalistic, economic, and political propaganda to pull public opinion in a direction that warrants more direct and naked aggression, which is work that implies a considered wellspring of aggression in the first place.
A large part of this has to do with the way in which modern liberal ideology works. If you are perceived as a relative equal - largely economically at least - then you are bound under the same general global legal and economic framework which has been carefully built up over the last century. This is a framework that, through its universality, binds together all those participating under it, so that any overtly hostile and capricious attack on an adherent to this system tends to damage the credibility of the entire system as a whole.
That legal and economic framework - however rational its underpinnings - functions on a faith in continuity: that the system can be predictably navigated, and that the laws behind it are not capricious, but fairly arrived at over the course of practical experience, precedent, and good faith. By many, this is no longer earnestly believed, but however much damage such a collective conviction has undergone, there is still a mass belief in it, or at least a dependence on its functionality, however desperate.
Because in a way law is manufactured to carry out a purpose. Modern law is built onto an endlessly complex array of practicalities, theories, and time-worn customs which are put together as a society's development progresses, and which are gradually scaled up to account for higher and higher levels of legal governance depending on the case.
Over time trust in law has become habituated precisely because it is so baroque: as with every large scale social project, the practice has been taken over with armies of specialists whose life training and labor goes towards understanding and administrating the law as it pertains to various spheres of life. We simply have to trust (or otherwise accede to) them, because it is so huge and so omnipresent; what else is there to be done? And of course this too is rapidly changing along with the changing political compositions of developed nations around the world.
As we now know, large scale wars are incredibly costly in many ways. With instant communication and various forms of rapid transportation, modern war has scaled up enormously, to say the least of the instruments of destruction themselves. They lead to mass destruction, social upheaval, and oftentimes profound rearrangements of global power. They're messy and chaotic; bad news especially for top-heavy and sclerotic great powers at the tops of pyramids.
Historically, the revving up of the great wars has entailed states of affairs that have spiraled far out of anyone's control, where they were experienced as a sort of overwhelming pull, not unlike that of a black hole. Even the aggressors themselves were responding to the chaotic forces of their collapsing societies, just as one may lurch forward to compensate for tripping backward. Which is not a justification by any means, but some attempt at an explanation.
Save a quickly unraveling global emergency, nations - including, usually, the hegemon - work to exercise hostility through these legal and economic channels while they are still functional and legitimate. They save on time and energy, as they have already been built up, and they atomize and individualize conflict, keeping most of the body politic intact, as opposed to a great war, which rends it every which way.
Much like the neoliberal who pooh-poohs the state ideologically, and then turns around and makes extensive use of it as the powerful tool that plays a huge part in maintaining that project from the beginning.
But of course, using economic and legal systems in this way tend to corrupt them anyway. It just makes these things happen a little more slowly.
Better Get That Looked At
Almost always when reading the news - if one isn't simply skimming a headline or quickly digesting a sound bite - the longer one sits and analyzes world affairs, the more one sees a particularly alarming pattern worth getting into.
I suppose there are no shortage of alarming patterns to pick up on these days, so by golly, which one am I referring to?
Here I mean to highlight that pattern in which some blatant wrong or dysfunction flashes upon the surface of the collective consciousness, and is momentarily held in view. But as it is held in view, and as one analytically penetrates the circumstances and context of the wrong, one finds many other connected wrongs, so many in fact that the original wrong begins to appear inevitable and irreversible as a result.
One immediate example I can think of is the ongoing set of scandals surrounding the current administration in the US. Take just one: the paying off of porn stars with hush money. These revelations on their own are already troubling in terms of gendered power differentials, relationships between sex and power, a host of social and political attitudes, legal issues surrounding campaign finance, and the like, but it does seem a stretch to make the claim that they should be seen as existential threats to an advanced civilization.
But once one starts tracing all of the threads connected to this state of affairs, the emerging patterns become more ominous. Where is the hush money coming from, when and how is it being utilized, and what are the legal implications of this? What of the immunity granted to the National Enquirer CEO, and the endless threads of influence and hush money sloshing around in that sphere, the buying of social preservation and the selling of social ruin? And who can afford such luxuries and why?
Why are prosecutors focusing so intently on these limited issues, and why are the prosecutors given so much credence and deference as a formative social force, and as an element of collective governance? Why is the media so focused on such things to the detriment of others, and how did the media become so concentrated in the first place? Well, I could go on. The one implies the all.
This level of functionality must also be referenced against what must happen: what is it that our social systems have to accomplish to perpetuate themselves, and is this happening? The familiar interconnected problems of climate change, environmental destruction, social inequality and disintegration, global conflict, and etc. appear to progress further and relatively unopposed - things outside the scope of this post - and so is this society functioning at the level required to deal with these issues? My short answer is no.
As cliche as it has become to draw the comparison, various forms of rot are the most readily comparable phenomena that I can think of. The weakness or dysfunction of wood that is structurally intended to support, or the visual tell of rusted or corroded metal are the immediately recognizable surface flaws, which upon further investigation - and to the dismay of the investigator - peel away to reveal whole landscapes of multi-level decay.
In the same way, the smell of rotting flesh or the appearance of a few maggots serve to draw one in, revealing some horrific panorama of catastrophic decay. Left alone, living processes antagonistic to the living systems they feed off of necessarily follow a path of development of their own, drawing vitality from the openings in potentiality set off by the disintegration that they further.
This is part of what makes the appearance of rot so frightful. Instinctively, it is not experienced as some sort of error or flaw to be repaired with one's existing faculties, but an invading force with a will of its own, a will set counter to everything implied by what's threatened. Rot in wood and metal threaten the entire integrity of the structure, and they imply the ongoing growth of things destructive to not only that structure, but destructive to the things making use of those structures.
Wood rot often accompanies moisture and the growth of mold, which can be harmful to living things. Metal rot implies rust, which can be harmful to living things as well. Rot in organic matter is fairly self-explanatory, and things like infectious disease are even worse: the rot jumps organic vessels, and at greater scales, affects continuous social structures and arrangements.
When one peers into the latest public scandal, which has suddenly flashed into public consciousness like a burning flake of magnesium, one sees a social order which is already corrupt and corrupting, in which individuals are regularly buying and trading the social powers to self-servingly smash the very laws and taboos that they've been benefiting from.
That flashing, that instant recognition and resonance, is the response of a public already intimately acquainted with those processes for some time, and who believe, that upon exercising the most blatant and visible manifestations of the process, can banish and purge some sort of corporeal evil and be done with it.
Which isn't always an inappropriate measure to take. Medical professionals can isolate all sorts of rotting and degenerating materials, treat the causes at their sources, and cut away the damaged tissue to save the rest of the body. But what happens when the hand and the scalpel themselves are rotting as well?
If horror at its base addresses the fear of total disintegration and/or destruction, then this is closer to the true spirit of that stuff that makes up horror. This isn't just broken bones, hurt feelings, temporarily dysfunctional infrastructure, or in general, temporary trauma that heals. This is something that signals the end of something else.
But what these revelations do indeed lead to, when they don't lead to complete devastation at least, is an enlarged consciousness of the whole, and an amplified sensitization to possibility and alternative.
When one thing goes wrong, it takes less energy to stick with what works and make the necessary piecemeal adjustments to keep things running, which is all too appropriate in many situations. But when everything goes wrong?
I suppose there are no shortage of alarming patterns to pick up on these days, so by golly, which one am I referring to?
Here I mean to highlight that pattern in which some blatant wrong or dysfunction flashes upon the surface of the collective consciousness, and is momentarily held in view. But as it is held in view, and as one analytically penetrates the circumstances and context of the wrong, one finds many other connected wrongs, so many in fact that the original wrong begins to appear inevitable and irreversible as a result.
One immediate example I can think of is the ongoing set of scandals surrounding the current administration in the US. Take just one: the paying off of porn stars with hush money. These revelations on their own are already troubling in terms of gendered power differentials, relationships between sex and power, a host of social and political attitudes, legal issues surrounding campaign finance, and the like, but it does seem a stretch to make the claim that they should be seen as existential threats to an advanced civilization.
But once one starts tracing all of the threads connected to this state of affairs, the emerging patterns become more ominous. Where is the hush money coming from, when and how is it being utilized, and what are the legal implications of this? What of the immunity granted to the National Enquirer CEO, and the endless threads of influence and hush money sloshing around in that sphere, the buying of social preservation and the selling of social ruin? And who can afford such luxuries and why?
Why are prosecutors focusing so intently on these limited issues, and why are the prosecutors given so much credence and deference as a formative social force, and as an element of collective governance? Why is the media so focused on such things to the detriment of others, and how did the media become so concentrated in the first place? Well, I could go on. The one implies the all.
This level of functionality must also be referenced against what must happen: what is it that our social systems have to accomplish to perpetuate themselves, and is this happening? The familiar interconnected problems of climate change, environmental destruction, social inequality and disintegration, global conflict, and etc. appear to progress further and relatively unopposed - things outside the scope of this post - and so is this society functioning at the level required to deal with these issues? My short answer is no.
As cliche as it has become to draw the comparison, various forms of rot are the most readily comparable phenomena that I can think of. The weakness or dysfunction of wood that is structurally intended to support, or the visual tell of rusted or corroded metal are the immediately recognizable surface flaws, which upon further investigation - and to the dismay of the investigator - peel away to reveal whole landscapes of multi-level decay.
In the same way, the smell of rotting flesh or the appearance of a few maggots serve to draw one in, revealing some horrific panorama of catastrophic decay. Left alone, living processes antagonistic to the living systems they feed off of necessarily follow a path of development of their own, drawing vitality from the openings in potentiality set off by the disintegration that they further.
This is part of what makes the appearance of rot so frightful. Instinctively, it is not experienced as some sort of error or flaw to be repaired with one's existing faculties, but an invading force with a will of its own, a will set counter to everything implied by what's threatened. Rot in wood and metal threaten the entire integrity of the structure, and they imply the ongoing growth of things destructive to not only that structure, but destructive to the things making use of those structures.
Wood rot often accompanies moisture and the growth of mold, which can be harmful to living things. Metal rot implies rust, which can be harmful to living things as well. Rot in organic matter is fairly self-explanatory, and things like infectious disease are even worse: the rot jumps organic vessels, and at greater scales, affects continuous social structures and arrangements.
When one peers into the latest public scandal, which has suddenly flashed into public consciousness like a burning flake of magnesium, one sees a social order which is already corrupt and corrupting, in which individuals are regularly buying and trading the social powers to self-servingly smash the very laws and taboos that they've been benefiting from.
That flashing, that instant recognition and resonance, is the response of a public already intimately acquainted with those processes for some time, and who believe, that upon exercising the most blatant and visible manifestations of the process, can banish and purge some sort of corporeal evil and be done with it.
Which isn't always an inappropriate measure to take. Medical professionals can isolate all sorts of rotting and degenerating materials, treat the causes at their sources, and cut away the damaged tissue to save the rest of the body. But what happens when the hand and the scalpel themselves are rotting as well?
If horror at its base addresses the fear of total disintegration and/or destruction, then this is closer to the true spirit of that stuff that makes up horror. This isn't just broken bones, hurt feelings, temporarily dysfunctional infrastructure, or in general, temporary trauma that heals. This is something that signals the end of something else.
But what these revelations do indeed lead to, when they don't lead to complete devastation at least, is an enlarged consciousness of the whole, and an amplified sensitization to possibility and alternative.
When one thing goes wrong, it takes less energy to stick with what works and make the necessary piecemeal adjustments to keep things running, which is all too appropriate in many situations. But when everything goes wrong?
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