Advancing Atomization

There has been a lot of talk about the new isolation and atomization caused by the spread of the virus, and now we'll all be suspended and connected in the new techno dystopia, like some sort of exploitative amniotic fluid. A lot of seemingly novel and frightening trends are going to be laid at the feet of the virus as sole determinant of course, but it is important to continue to conceptualize the virus as emerging within a set of powerful historical forces - forces which made possible the emergence in the first place - that will continue in the direction they will, influenced by the virus certainly but not exactly materializing out of it either. 

The virus, like all other concentrated and readily-identifiable crises, will be treated like the visiting UFO, that Other par excellence, which through the use of its mysterious and unknowable powers, made a flying leap across the cold vacuum of space which separates us from a place far away that really has nothing to do with us. So don't think about it too much! At least in terms of its relation to us.

Anyway, atomization and isolation were already winking into view well before the virus, through fragile lines of spurious authentic contact and relationships, dislocation, dissolution of communities, intensifying inequality and economic precariousness, collapse of public purpose and institutional legitimacy and so on. 

It is the nature of a broad atomization that leads to the swiss-cheesing of major corporate and state powers, through collectively sanctioned social constructs and forces like vertical integrated financial entities and private equity, and these perforated powers do things like fuck up disaster mitigation, such as with an encroaching pandemic. 

So we've flooded our public sphere with hot lava. And we can attempt to stay aloft - or aloof - within the techno dystopia, a particularly rickety bridge for these purposes, seeing as how its ongoing construction is influenced by said historical forces. 

Fear of the Mimic

Much concentration of power is predicated on the fear of mimicry: the other is perceived to want what one has, so one has to take even more so that the other never has the opportunity to get it. But here there is an "isness" to power, and the mimicry is already done. The fear of mimicry reproduces the mimicry itself, because now the other who is feared and suppressed must get back on top. The credit of power is at once a debit on its future lack. 

Commodity

Herbal medicine is actually quite a sophisticated, deep, and powerful discipline. Though in the popular imagination its products are either held up as mysterious silver bullets on the one hand or useless bits of superstitious refuse on the other. 

There are complicated historical reasons for this, but part of the blame can go to the nature of the commodity. With its remote center of opaque production, the alienable medium of the commodity can be used to camouflage its nature. Its alienable properties can be transferred and separated from the original process of production, using money as both the cutting and binding agent, severing accountability in the process, at least as long as that accountability can be waved away with good PR. 

Because how is one to say that one was cheated if one has gotten something that appears to observers as a useful and vital thing? Especially if those observers are in on the take, and daily activity is too complex and historically volatile for anyone to adopt a strong, agreeable and enforceable standard. 

So one may receive a lifeless bag of desiccated plant dust, which at one point may have been part of a vital and healing organism, and which is promoted as such by boosters who may or may not know better. And then this exchange can occur with all sorts of different products. 

At this point in evolution, the commodity can be made to appear as an outstretched hand of mutual aid, when really it is the hand that is pushing one downward, so that its master can ascend on one's back and on one's alienable social energy.   

Waste Avenues And Dead Ends

Speaking of shit, analysis of the industrial waste flows can yield some interesting insights into the general shape and passage of energy usage in the greater society. 

So many energy and waste flows appear as simple linear progressions, in which energy in an organized and usable form is taken in, used up and processed, and then passed along outwards as waste energy to do what it will as an externality. 

We see a dramatic iteration of this pattern in Marx's contrast of the C-M-C circuit, in which there is a circular flow of commodities facilitated by money as joinery, with the M-C-M circuit, in which, through the commodity as joinery, there is a steady accumulation of the money element. Now, in the process of that accumulation, there occurs a polarization in which the steady accrual of highly organized and beneficial energy concentrates among the owners of capital, and then the unwanted and often damaging waste flows are passed downstream and accrue among the dispossessed and what is considered the "background" environment.  

What makes the pattern so interesting is that it occurs throughout human history, and in unsustainable societies in particular, and that it is not limited to the operations of capital, though analysis of capital is one way to extrude the contours of this pattern and bring the pattern's form into relief. 

We could take the energy and waste flows of massive agricultural operations and even domestic cycles of production as good examples of this general pattern. 

What we generally see with large agricultural operations are large masses of homogeneous livestock and plantlife concentrated and managed in a single space, and then the waste flows from those operations are then concentrated and massive and must be managed in turn. 

A single cow pie contains some of the nutrients needed for the soil to replenish some of the grass removed through eating, and so the waste is broken down by insects and microorganisms and returned to the soil. A whole mountain of cow dung however changes the landscape itself; indeed, it becomes the landscape, and changes the balance of what lives and dies where it exists.With too much of a single nutrient it burns and kills and smothers anything underneath, and allows for the proliferation of unwanted pathogens, for starters. And then you start getting into animal antibiotics, growth hormones, herbicides, pesticides, artificial fertilizers and etc. and waste management gets much more complicated. 

So with a mass of waste, that waste has to go somewhere else and either be dumped or treated, which takes more usable energy. And where it is not being returned to the land itself, the soil must be amended with additional usable energy, typically in the form of artificial fertilizers. 

And where outside energy is sought, it must be sought first in the most easily accessible forms, and when those statistically limited forms are depleted, one has to go to less accessible forms and go further out, taking more usable energy. The soil itself, the bare economic "asset" which produces and which can't be ignored as an externality, is now on the verge of complete exhaustion. And life in the surrounding rivers, lakes, and coastal zones go dead from ag runoff and eutrophication. 

These issues have steadily become more visible, so they are attempted to be dealt with within the confines of the economic system, or else more energy is put into displacing those problems or concealing them with better PR. 

The reality is quite messy. There are attempts to enter these wastes back into usable energy flows using various modern waste management practices, such as the spraying of treated lagoon wastes on grasslands, and through economic channels such as selling the wastes to be used in composts and fertilizers and the like. 

But what is economically viable is not only what makes sense in terms of cold hard numbers, as the mainstream economists will condescendingly tell you, but also what the greater mass of society is doing in economic coordination. If the government is putting massive subsidies into fossil fuel production and the growing of certain crops, where is the activity going to go? And further, who are the incumbents, how much inertia do their practices entail, and how much political power and connection do they possess?

It has to make more economic sense to either sell the waste or make use of it on the land, otherwise artificial fertilizer can be bought up to replenish the soil and the wastes go the path of least resistance, say into lagoons, rivers (in the past or when no one is looking), to landfills, etc. 

Further, the simple fact of large farm size causes many of these problems to begin with, but this simple fact is a very complicated historical-social product which is still being produced by collective economic activity and reactionary government policy. 

We can't blame it all on industrial agriculture - though these problems are an outgrowth of a greater social pattern that typifies industrial production in general. Just consider the domestic sphere and the general treatment of pet wastes and even our own wastes for that matter. 

Energy flows like food are trucked in, wastes are trucked out to be treated or dumped, and nary the twain shall meet in the centers of domestic production. Energy inputs and outputs appear as so many branching flows which are pulled inward and which flow outward, stressing the productive center which is still tasked to continuously grow, and so both exploitation and dumping in the periphery is intensified. 

To Hell With This

On a larger timescale, it can be difficult for the average individual to judge the effects of a given political-economic regime, not just because large systems are complicated, and complicate further over the passage of time, but because those systems themselves are the products of individuals working in concert, individuals who have changing perceptions of themselves and their worlds, and whose perceptions affect the systems in turn. 

Change on such a scale takes an enormous amount of labor, labor which is often being done by a minority with gifts of vision and conviction. It takes time and energy to put in the intellectual and relational work to represent to people what is really happening and the nature of the processes they are a part of. 

And it takes time and energy to put labor into things like legal, economic, and political systems, which are to connect the collective ideological understandings with the daily mechanics of material life, and which are operating with immense inertia, with a previous regime as the center of gravity. 

Of course when something breaks, and if that break is catastrophic enough, perception of the problem itself can become very stark and simple. Yet it is assembling the response to that problem that is the real challenge. 

Corona Hustle

Getting sick in the United States, along with pretty much everything else under the general description of, well, "activity," takes an ever-increasing amount of private labor, especially if you are low income. 

Our conception of illness carries with it images of lying in bed, sleeping, drinking chicken soup, consuming media, etc. All of these things do happen in the course of illness, but within the course of the coronavirus in particular is an extensive amount of legwork in various forms: one is researching symptoms, indications, prognoses, and best practices, both in terms of self care and self-isolation and the way in which one is relating to others and the environment. 

In the United States this has to be done because of the contradictory, unreliable, vague, and oftentimes obfuscating official accounts and directives. Work has to be put in to sift through sources and the streams of evaluations of those sources, and work has to be put in to wade through bullshit, horseshit, and all the other kinds of shit. 

One is calling medical centers, social services institutions, and insurance companies trying to suss out just what one's obligations and entitlements are, and talking to service reps and filling out forms after having labored through the communication and distribution networks themselves which are themselves designed to discourage and filter people out and offload the labor onto the individual who is annoyingly in need. 

And after this work is put in, still the minimum amount of public support is doled out, and one is working under pressure in the private home, making teas, acquiring groceries, researching and putting together remedies, and all of the rest to attempt to stay alive. And this is coupled with maintaining work relationships and maintaining one's place in the labor sphere, and putting in work to ensure the steady flow of financial support and the meeting of economic obligations like rent, insurance, utilities, and supplies, some of which are only temporarily lifted or ameliorated with measly stimulus payments. 

This is a buildup of private labor and effort that is a direct consequence of the disintegration of the public sphere and the abdication of responsibility of the ruling class in maintaining that sphere, which, let's be clear, implies specifically the disintegration of entitlement and public accommodating labor, while obligations and public requirements on the other hand are welded firmly in place, and indeed, augmented in their requirements on the individual.   

Over generations there is a steady yet imperceptible change, in which each successive generation accepts a lower standard of living and a greater amount of maintenance labor, much like a bad diet over one's lifetime steadily puts a greater load on one's system as damage accumulates. Eventually one is huffing and puffing and losing one's breath with only a vague sense that something is amiss (at least in terms of the average perception). 

All of this until a link breaks and all of the struggling processes grind to a halt. 

What do we owe each other? What should daily work look like, if we are to finish our collective projects in time for the nested cyclical patterns of day and night, production and reproduction, birth and death? 

Let's Do Some Writing

It's been over two weeks since my intention to resume writing. I've been doing fairly intensive physical work in the course of those two weeks, and on top of the expected recovery from being terribly sick, it has taken a substantial amount of energy to return to physical baseline after weeks of isolation, overhanging physical damage, and convalescence. There wasn't much energy left over to write, let alone do much else.  

Still not over the hump yet, but I'll have a little to say when I can focus and scribble a few words together.

Things in the world have been moving incredibly quickly in the last few weeks, and some of the stuff I'd like to put together in subsequent posts will be a little dated, but hopefully as I get back on my feet I can catch up in good time.