Aliens

There is so much competition in the housing market right now, that there are buyers swooping in and snapping up the property well above asking price. And this is in a market with extremely inflated asset prices in the first place, taken against a backdrop of widespread precarity, hunger, and near-homelessness or flat out homelessness. Personally, I'm on the ropes here. Where do these people get this money? Where are they coming from? Alien invasion!

But to echo an old Nietzschean theme, perhaps if you go looking for aliens in outer space, you will eventually find them in your inner space, within.  

Tired

One issue is the public and collective exhaustion of pathos that pervades the body politic. With more people against the wall, it becomes more difficult to lend a helping hand, much like if you're holding up a heavy piece of lumber and someone asks you for a hammer. Collective exhaustion then deepens and advances. 

Coming Back

 A mind coming back to function can be quite manic and chatty. I remember at a Vipassana retreat, after 10 days of not speaking to anyone, the speaking constraint was lifted at the conclusion and after that, the conversation was raucous, loud, and high velocity, like at a party when everyone is wasted and getting excited, and then incrementally yelling over one another as everything got louder. In this case everyone was stone sober, but ah, high on life. 

Uncertainty in the Built Environment Pt. 3

This was a subject I dropped when I became very sick. Now that life is going on, and the process of thinking and writing is approaching a tolerable level of reliability, I can revisit an important practical subject I've been meaning to get to for some time. It is just as well, as the harrowing accounts of the Texas freeze continue to circulate, piled atop the fresh aftermaths of the California wildfires and the early pandemic waves, still ongoing crises of their own that followed a slew of previous crises. 

As much as I'd like to bellyache about the underlying conditions of political economy that have brought us to this point - one of my favorite things to do admittedly - which indeed form an integral component of the gradual and rolling cycles of destruction that continue to unfold, my aim is to curtail the scope of these posts to more immediate concerns, though it will still take some ground to cover to get even that far. 

In previous parts of the series, I spent some warm-up time yammering on about a summary of intentions for the discussion, as well as the phenomenological underpinnings of the subject. Now I think it is time to cut to the chase. 

Something as general a designation as the "built environment" points to processes and complexes of immense complexity, but I think it is safe to say that one of the foundational driving impulses underlying such a project is to anticipate and master "nature," a word which parsed out, is taken to mean that world increasingly separate from human affairs. 

Indeed, as the project to anticipate and master "nature" progresses, the realm seems to become ever more alien and appear ever more far away in the perception. Contrast that to countless forms of indigenous thought, where "nature" is seen as inseparable from human affairs, and is treated not as a beast to "master" but as a component of spiritual self to commune with. 

What you get in a built environment then is a rationalization and a systematization of that near-infinite array of labors and metabolisms to transfer energy from the environment into the human person, and an ever-growing phenomenological distance from that very environment. As Spengler noted, you start in the dirt, and then you get a progressing elaboration in structures still rising up out of the dirt, but soon enough, the whole of the soil is covered in built foundation to support ever larger and elaborate built structures. 

The dirt itself just about disappears, or is at least relegated to neat and tidy planters and containers where it keeps to itself. Lines straighten and the once meandering village tightens up into the grid, to be counted out and categorized in accordance with a centralized system of accounting. Out of the heat and friction of constant complex repetition coalesces a generalized and universalized abstract code, allowing ever-greater towering cathedrals of abstraction. 

The question arises: where is all of the energy and drive coming from for such a vigorous and explosive process? That certainly is a complicated question in itself, but I think one decent place to start is in the words of old homesteaders when you talk to them about undertaking the path that they tread. They'll tell you: oh, it can be quite an exciting and rewarding lifestyle sure. But for many of them, their thoughts will reliably drift to the hard times, to feelings that they don't want to feel again, but which can't be forgotten. 

The experience of being on the verge of starvation, vividly illustrated in stories of eating powdered milk or even river silt out of desperation, or being stranded in a severe storm with someone gravely ill and unable to get medical help: these are visceral experiences that don't go away, and oftentimes the only possible lesson of them is: never again. The pleasant lighted avenues, the carefully built climate controlled dwellings, the running water and sanitation, the plentiful food, the advanced medical care, all of these things - with their politically and economically fraught issues of class and access no less - become highly desirable in this respect. 

Here another question arises: how is it then that certain indigenous cultures can get by perfectly fine for thousands of years living off of the land, without the fear and alienation of the "natural world," and the accompanying drive to tame and master said world, and how do they get by without the massive build up and violent expansion seen in the proliferation of the "built environment," and its spread as far and wide as energetically possible? 

Another complicated question, part of which lies in historical contingency. As thinkers like Paul Cooper have observed, what many of these civilizations have in common is their genesis in what can be viewed harsh and challenging environments, which provide the impetus and the drive for their mastery, the conditions of which are not extreme enough to completely suppress and snuff out the striving parties. 

As history shows however, the same imbalances that lead to the towering accumulations of built environment tend to be expressed in the accumulations themselves, and through a long and steady dialectical inversion, begin to take on the chaotic, uncertain, and dangerous attributes of the "wilderness" that was thought to be mastered and surmounted. 

Next, I'd like to get to the nature of that uncertainty in the built environment. 

Unity and Separation

 What may appear as a unity to one may appear as a separation to another, depending on who is looking at what, and whether one wants to accept, reconcile, propagandize, control, refuse, exclude, or attack. 

Snow

A difference of temperature and the landscape transforms: the same substance that progresses along the land's contours, following the path of least resistance and demonstrating a fluid motion that melts away, now accumulates and sticks and clumps and persists. Of course at a higher scale of organization and time, difference in temperature itself appears as a unified movement, a unity of energy at play. Transformation as movement. 

Finger Trap

The financialization and neoliberalization is partially driven by ideologues, yes, but it is also largely driven by larger social forces, such as dwindling competition and survivability in financial "kill zones" and destroyed industrial regions. As the economy advances towards cannibalization, it makes more sense for the surviving organized economic units to conglomerate, abandon long term health, gaslight and propagandize, and engage in outright predation and psychological and economic warfare. Conditions worsen generally and universally until they are dire enough to threaten the entire system, say through the collapse and/or transformation of the political economy, or through the crushing and total pressures of an unstable ecological reality. 

Prickly Language

This happens more frequently when one inquires into the language used to put something or someone down, or lower their esteem rhetorically. One finds in the combative language a history of weaponization, in which the language itself develops out of various prejudices or on the fault lines of grinding classes or ethnic groups. Slurs are the low hanging fruit here, but there are land mines everywhere. 

Hip Shot

Even sitting and cooling down and taking in a given news piece carries with it certain hazards in comprehension and action. The longer one looks into a given state of events, the stranger it gets, the more previously unperceived actors and forces emerge, and the more complicated things become. 

Given the contemporary media structure and the speed at which information is disseminated, and the increasingly kinetic nature of the general environment, and the growing necessity to take a stand, coupled with all of the many heuristics and manipulated abstractions a community will marshal to cope with these things, there is immense pressure to react and put forth unexamined opinions, which if not seated well, can harden into ego-centric commitments that only calcify and set-fast in response to challenges. 

There are a few ways to cope with this state of affairs, such as throwing oneself into the cauldron itself and continuously take a beating as one constantly makes mistakes and learns. Another way is to withdraw completely and watch somewhat aloof and observe and learn that way. In the real world it is usually a mish mash of such approaches, contingent on context and necessity.  

What with all of the motion and the constant antagonism, one way to cope is working on the intellectual equivalent of "shooting from the hip," an image that is often disparaged as an unhinged and undisciplined form of action, in which the actor is recklessly firing away without aiming. Which of course can be a problem. 

But the impetus for shooting from the hip in the first place comes from being placed in an environment of specific constraints, in which a speedy and targeted response is constantly demanded at breakneck speeds. Coping with this state of affairs then means perfecting a course of action that takes these conditions into account. 

Intellectually, this coping can be seen in those who have gifts for quickly putting together an argument, and firing it off, as it were, not by taking the time and energy to raise the instrument and carefully line up the aiming aids to one's eye, standing still, taking breaths, etc. (as typified by sustained research, lining up of references, appealing to meta arguments and criticism,  but by aiming with the body, so to speak, and feeling out instinctually the situation, skills which can be informed by acquaintance with various aiming techniques anyway. 

Developing a "feel" means putting much work on the backend, developing a broad study of subjects and putting together a solid working model of the world, informed by one's instincts, and which informs one's instincts in turn, which are then paid forward onto the front end, taking some of the burden of constant research and verification in favor of quick and educated speculation, in the hope that the speculation lands and sits well as a given state of affairs further develops. 

If this situation proves to be intolerable, well, it is time to move entirely into another environment, say to unplug and take a moment to breathe and observe. That itself is an opportunity that must be afforded. 

Gimme That

What you often see in a high pressure situation - I'll start with a simpler, physical situation and then work my way up in the level of abstraction - such as what to do to get a car unstuck from the mud, say, is that there may be tussling every which way over an approach to the problem. 

There may be as many opinions involved as there are participants and observers, but what eventually wins out is the correct model of the forces at work and the experience and seniority that backs up such a model. It could be that someone who misapprehends the problem is given the reigns, but then the feedback is instantaneous in that the approach fails, and that person's competence is put into question. 

Ultimately the result of such a limited conflict is collective deference to whoever successfully solves the problem, an authority that can creep beyond the boundaries of that particular conflict. 

Even here, there are complex social conditions that can distort and foil a simple problem such as this, but then scale up the problem further up in the levels of social organization and things become much more complicated - and in a weakened society, fraught -  when you begin to speak of high pressure conflicts and problems in a complex society. 

What of an incredibly long arc of an incredibly complex social system? In which feedback to responses to a given set of problems can take decades to emerge as it fans out, and which then must be studied for more decades in turn, and which presents additional nested problems of conflict in defining the problems, formulating responses, and perceiving and apprehending the feedback in the first place?

Whatever is going wrong is going wrong in relation to a stream of converging activities of interrelated factions and classes, which in their mutual interrelations, dependencies, and antagonisms, have produced the totality of society in the first place. 

Amongst the differing factions, classes, etc. are different values and different ways in viewing society and the world, and those differences can only be subsumed into a higher level unity in a tenuous and imperfect way. 

And as general dysfunction accumulates to a fever pitch, the impetus to seize the reigns grows. To seize the reigns is to bring the current arrangement to an end, and a new beginning is instantiated in the image of the victorious power.

With a crisis of this complexity however, the various antagonisms won't vanish as the dust clears. No, such a process is likely to be drawn out in a series of spasms, further weakening the totality of participants. 

Throne of Bone

Taking into account the ideas of "tackiness" and "shabbiness" and the more general "eye sores" are themselves relative judgments, there is a common root that occurs in much of it: the selfish and careless arrangement of living, complex matter, simplified and - in the eye of beholder - effaced by a limited and provincial power, which opens the arrangement to judgment by an individual.  

The gaudiness of a conventional suburban landscape might be somewhat similar to the gaudiness of proudly presiding over a clearcut: one proudly stands over the selfish rearrangement of complex living things, in the form of lumber cleaved from trees in the latter and concrete mined out and cooked and spread flat and deathly over living soil, in the former. 

Part of what makes such a display gaudy is the same sort of shabby display of someone taking a selfie in front of some grand vista. The self is of course a highly complex, beautiful, and divine thing in itself; it is the juxtaposition: another thing is pushed aside to make room for the self, and so the observer is alienated from the narrative and forced to bow down before the other. 

Symbolic Capitol

This one is already getting a little cold, but a few words.

The Trump era - and its incendiary culmination - has proved to be a fascinating political phenomenon. As the symbolic center of gravity twists and turns under the strain of multiple converging crises, one is better able to grasp the contours and distinctions of the boundary lines between the constructed image - abstracted for the purpose of governing - and the material real. 

Part of the reason for this is the nature of the symbol in question. The governance of an immense, complex society - especially one built on violence and domination - requires an abstracted and universalized code of conduct (among other things) which is highly visible, not only for the purpose of being seen, but for the purpose of reassurance, sweeping away informal networks of status and privilege in favor of a universalized and generalized legal and economic code, which in this case is materially embodied in the capitol infrastructure, its institutional and social forms, and the textual codification of its operations.  

To restore some semblance of trust in favor of a cooperating citizenry, everyone has to be convinced they can live their lives without being completely screwed over. Now, what that living actually looks like is a very complicated question, but I'm going to leave that aside for now. 

The symbolic edification has to be done on the equivalence of the mountaintop, in plain view, as typified by the highly formalized and visible national capitol and institution, whereas in the equivalence of the forest there are plenty of obstructions of vision in which various localities can go on about their idiosyncratic business, and general, universal messages are distorted and dispersed the further out they travel. 

The benefit of the forest model of symbolic circulation is that in times of stability, various powers and interests can co-exist, albeit with the healthy helping of regular plausible deniability and gaslighting, while pointing to the carefully maintained universal and visible image and claiming that all is well. 

The problem with that is that over the past couple of decades the rule of law - or at least its perception - has been steadily eaten away by corruption, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, classism and conflicting class interest, and all the rest, and the underlying causes of these chronic stresses go unaddressed, in favor of the regular buttressing of the stabilizing image itself. Of course, anyone who knew their way around the forest could speak of these things, especially those with a gift of relating the forest and the mountain together, but that didn't matter so much to the operation of the empire, as it sat sizzling in the sun.  

Of course hidden things don't stay hidden forever, and visibility moves in accordance with available energy. And what visibility does is confer upon its shared participants a mutual commitment to whatever necessitated course of action that visibility reveals.

As more sectors of society were affected by the unaddressed crises mounting up, and greater amounts of explosive energy built up in all of the various repressed, contradictory, and compartmentalized hideaways, it got more and more difficult to tamp down on all of the various challenges, until - in the political sphere at least - one made its way all the way up to the doors of the capitol. 

Besides all of that, to the average citizen it is a fearful thing to hear of a state capitol stormed, or a city consumed with riots, but there is always the expectation that some superseding power will intervene and restore the wayward energy flows to harmony with some sort of national idea, no matter how tortured that harmony may be. 

The storming of the national capitol however, is something entirely different. It places the possibility of radical change closer to the center of gravity, closer to the seat of power, and thus threatens in the perception a real possibility of universal change which can affect oneself no matter one's spatial or energetic position. 

It doesn't necessarily have to be the case that this is the singularly revelatory Event. No, the moment the gates were breached, the stewards of empire got to fevered work sweeping the embarrassments under the rug and repairing the image. 

Besides, the storm and its aftermath revealed the willingness of an entire faction of the oligarchy and its followers to unilaterally smash the existing social contract - however insulting and fatuous that contract actually is - and the concomitant lack of resistance to such an impulse in the establishment, a lack that necessarily emanates from the other opposing factions of oligarchy, which ultimately results in acquiescence.

What I mean is that if a black or brown fist is raised, or there is a call for real economic justice that doesn't involve the manipulation and appropriation of billionaires and con artists, then suddenly there is an astonishing unity of focus and intent, and we can produce coordinated paramilitary responses to crush the threats and hunt down and snuff out their sources. But then right wing populists can waltz into the capitol building while mall cops fumble, all the while barely making efforts to conceal their identities or protect themselves, as they have become accustomed to regular social deference in making their grievances heard. Though of course, getting grievances heard and actually having something done about those grievances, and what the nature of those grievances were and who actually holds them and who benefits from them being addressed, well those are complications that ultimately brought these people to the doors. 

Moving on, curiously it was the highly visible policing and paramilitary apparatus - the heart - that failed the initial runup to the storming, and then the late cerebral reaction of the security agencies like the FBI - which historically operate in the dark - that put into motion the belated and half-assed repression in a last ditch effort to reconstitute the universal image. 

In a nation where someone can be thrown into a cage or killed for the escalating consequences of smoking an intoxicating plant, or jaywalking, or driving a busted vehicle, or hawking cigarettes, or even copping a bad attitude, it seems some harshness could be mustered up for something like massive financial crime or the intention to commit insurrection. And what response does the Democratic party in particular have prepared? Bailouts and harshly worded letters perhaps? 

It is in the end, acquiescence, and permission. You may as well throw the doors open. Just try not to be too obvious with a welcoming gesture, it will make you look bad. 

This itself is a political decision baked a priori into the structure of the empire itself. It is the direction that the structure will crumble; there is plenty more to come. At least now more can see this: the various factions have fragmented in the aftermath as the endpoints of their various platforms have been reached, and those existing memberships and alliances have been rethought and the various factions have begun to become reform and redrawn and reorganized. The lines have become more visible. Intentions must now better conform to them. 

But vision can be a tricky thing. We are still left with the strange willingness to go about living the same way we always have, moving in the same direction, and maintaining the integrity of the symbolic world - as embodied in the Biden administration - while devastation progresses in every direction. 

On Our Own

 We're moving into the wilderness again, on our own, together. More on this another time. 

Thought

Thought is most certainly built. We have a tendency to think of an objective reality which only has to be correctly apprehended, which is partially true in a sense, since our model of the world carries with it a certain material efficaciousness and real lasting effects in the so-called world. And certainly, one's model of the world is derived partially from one's life experiences. 

But one finds that one can't simply look at the data and glean the answers that everyone else is getting. No, it takes constant work to shape and refine the frameworks for understanding the data in the first place, and even then those frameworks are constantly threatening to slip away without constant maintenance. 

The thought stands apart from the thing perceived and being described. This is all the more confirmed by the increasingly widespread spectacle of the committed conspiracy theorist, who constructs majestic hall of mirrors structures of thought which are completely self-referential and demonstrably false, but which convince the believer otherwise through the sheer impressiveness of their reach and explanatory power, and which emanate from the believer's own precious and sacred sense of persecution and group membership.  

It doesn't even take the easy target of the conspiracy theorist, as we have the committed centrist, still comfortably ensconced in some intact niche of society which has not yet crumbled off, who through the aversion to disturbance and movement, clings to elaborate structures of thought premised on moderation, stasis, and smug objectivity, as the world spins, separates, and burns. 

There are plenty of other forms of thought to further scrutinize, and I'll be damned if I haven't turned the barrel towards my own forms. Like a loaded handgun, thought as a tool contains within it immense potentiality. A little self-criticism, self reflection, perhaps, is not the worse thing. And it is worth putting in a little consideration as to where the thing is actually pointing. 

Life Activity

 The power with which one's life activity shapes one's being is palpable and - for much of the time - deterministic. What one is constantly doing strongly influences how one thinks, what one thinks of, what one needs materially, what one eats, how one feels, how one relates to others, and so on. And of all these things reinforce and necessitate what one is constantly doing. 

Spread

A great power, as it spreads outward, has a tendency to transform the conditions it comes into contact with as it emanates, harmonizing the forces around it in accordance with its own nature. In the case of capital, it was an emerging activity happening at first on the extremities and margins of kingdoms, in the trade networks and colonial enterprise, which was then fed by the violent and centrifugal forces of decay, and then having found its wings, was spread by immense force, transforming social relations and the material relations around it. And finally, finding themselves immersed and ensconced in these conditions, in the general and universal operations of the market, individuals set free from their subsistence activity came to internalize the market and think like the market, and thus perpetually reproduce it socially and institutionally.