Dead Tree

 

Uy

Yes, at the moment, the writing is shit. But bear with me, I've got to get some things written down here. 

Society Is Strange

As social and political animals, society itself exists to our perception as the proverbial water exists to the fish. It can be difficult to ascertain its nature because we are suffused with it and it is us. For example, the rebellious teenager looks at society and sees it as a noxious monolith, which at times does indeed behave as one, but under closer inspection, is much more strange than all that. The teenager can be forgiven though, as after all many people never quite advance intellectually beyond that basic perception, or that aspiration anyway. 

We see this all the time in the common attitude of: why can't we make so and so do this, or why can't things simply be such and such way and then it will all be fine? This is an attitude that usually crops up when some society-wide change is desired, which flattens the infinitely complex intricacies of social reality in favor of a given individual's field of vision and being. 

This is setting aside the more principled stances based upon more complex theories of change, in which a complex array of considerations informs a given plan of action's impact on society. Which, considering the nature of society itself, are considerations that are nevertheless steep simplifications, yet these compressions that are required for navigating the complexities of the social arena, unless one is to become completely overwhelmed and paralyzed by those complexities. Social changes themselves then proceed from the distortions introduced by limited intelligences initiating changes that reflect their limited perspectives and loci of action, which generalize and fan out from a minority and ripple through the greater population. 

I suppose though that I should get to the point, and illustrate some of the strange aspects of what society is. From a vantage point of naivety, what motivates people to cohere in the incredibly complex living patterns required to sustain a society like this one? The whip of hunger and the direct threat of violence are good places to start I suppose, but even those supposedly simplistic motivations quickly melt into vast complex historical processes upon further analysis.

Say, with the technologies and wealth of technical knowledge, why can't burdened people simply get up, move somewhere else, stick their shovels into the dirt and produce their own food, and so on? Most people can get beyond this simple question: movement is difficult and expensive in a dense human environment, and the movement itself - along with habitation, food and water, etc. - is subject to a complex web of permissions and obligations which track along lines of class, race, ability, gender, and etc. 

Producing food is reliant on the characteristics of a given habitation and its ownership, as well as zoning, climate, soil characteristics, and so on. It takes time to produce food, within which existing food must be obtained, establishing economic, political, and social dependencies that aren't easily departed from. These conditions then imply historical processes that arrive at those points. 

Violence too requires a class-based application of force, force that is applied in a way that a majority considers legitimate enough not to intervene or respond in kind, and this legitimacy is constructed through sustained propaganda or else simply maintained through fear. And where does the violence emanate from, and in what direction? Questions like these then reference the historical rise and fall of empires and centers of power. 

We've got the coercive part, but society also has to function, and industrial society in particular has to function with a steady 3% annual growth rate, at least theoretically. That's compound growth. We're talking an enormous amount of sustained motivation and dynamism. We are talking now about a delicate balance between coercive motivations and positive motivations in which through individuals' own interests, the numerous aims and desires of a society are propelled forward. 

Adam Smith's conception of capitalism then is in one way the attempt of a society to reorganize itself around the falling debris of a disintegrating feudal order. Indeed, very strange. Now I'm going to pivot a bit, but I'm trying to further the general point: society is really strange.  

How is it that the absolute figure of an absolute monarch can go bankrupt? Doesn't the absolute monarch have absolute power to do whatever the monarch wants? Another naïve question worth asking, which eventually dispels the notion of an absolute power in itself. Nay, that absolute power is the intersection of a vast web of powers that are crossing at the right points with the right directions and velocities at that moment. And yes, we do still have monarchs, there are just more of them and they've agreed to share power through various elaborate rituals. 

Money and banking are not only tools, they are expressions of a distinct human tendency which given enough mass and velocity takes on a life of its own, as distinct from the absolute authority of a dictatorial power. The need to rule and organize is very different from the requirements of talent in trade and enterprise, and these tendencies tend to differentiate and are only fully expressed in individuals and institutions which specialize in them, which then develop dialectically together in need of each other, but distinct from each other and operating apart from each other, and so exert influence and constraint on each other. 

The banker would devour the host through exploitative accumulation without some sort of external constraint, while the absolute monarch would freeze society into a petrified husk without the vigorous dynamism of enterprising investment and opportunity. Of course, these extreme states of imbalance are constantly approached, ever more so as a given society becomes more unstable and the various sectors vie to take control. 

However, the existence of both the banker and the monarch, their mutual dependence on each other and then the dependence of them on their societies and vice versa (at least in certain points of time) are facts contingent on historical trajectories. What's more, everyone attempting to escape capital in the world system have been forced to revert to the logics of capital to survive; it all has to be done together at this point, another state of affairs worth analyzing. 

Now, strangeness is only a reality that remains unexamined or fully judged by the human perception, itself an ideal that will never be fully realized. But we can live alongside the strange, and continue our examination anyway. So it goes. 

What Gives

During the past couple of months, the writings here have been particularly abstract. I've always tended towards abstracting various subjects of inquiry anyway, as far out as I could go to stretch seemingly disparate phenomena across a simpler set of determinations, so as to capture what is happening at a greater scale. But I'm aware that it has been more so as of late. 

Part of this has to do simply with the new normal of the daily functioning of my brain with the influences of long covid. The reduced horizon of concentration, the dysfunctional memory, difficulties with language and motivation and passion, etc. all contribute to make the writing more difficult, so I have to work with what I got. 

There is much to write about in terms of particulars in the political economy of the United States, and the rest of the world for that matter, but after a point there is only so many times I can keep harping on the same threads of doom. I'm tired. Everyone else is tired. We all know where this is going, which is a rhetorical and stylistic exaggeration, as there is much gaslighting and denial going on as well, so not everyone really knows. But you get the picture. 

The continuing circulation of the virus, extreme weather events, the sagging and gasping supply chain, and the incredibly intense political tensions, among many other things, may together make for an explosive culmination in the coming years, to understate things. In time I may find reason to write about them, and indeed I do continue to write about them in a sense, just in a much more generalized way. For now I'm still laying down some bones, hopefully to help with future analyses. 

The nice thing about abstracting is that when the various components are rendered well they can be put together into more complex models and say some pretty interesting things about our reality. If the abstraction is any good, you begin to see its signature - in however imperfect form - in reality itself, a useful aid for thinking about and anticipating that reality, though it can very easily be misused or abused. I've worn that theme plenty well into the ground here, but it is certainly a theme worth the wear. 

Holiday Season

What with the falling of winter and that cyclical and conceptual winding down of the year, the reflections and evaluations come flooding in. But besides the superficial "end of the year" prompting, I think there are some deeper structural influences that encourage the self-reflecting mood. 

For one, the cyclical mass gathering of people familiar to each other and who know each other puts them into a closer proximity both through space and time. Conversation, tones, body language, and all the rest are presented at close range and across longer stretches of time and at higher resolutions than is usual for regular correspondence through communication technologies. 

This provides the occasion for mutual evaluation and judgment, whether solicited or not, and so one leaves the family gathering vibrating with vivid feedback on the current state of one's life and one's person, and the reflections begin not long after that. It can be a painful experience for the atomized modern, accustomed to the rarified cube or at least the nuclear household, suddenly pressed into the communal image and beckoned to interact.

If anything, it takes some more work to construct an attractive and believable mask, though an increasing part of the collective conversation involves acknowledging the rapidly unraveling social fabric, whether through commiseration or heated argument. 

It can be good too. Good food and drink, enjoying the company and perspectives of fellow travelers, and so on. Just as many smiles and winks as growls and snarls.  

Devil's Club

 

Family

You'll see in families different ways of moving through society and relating to other people, which propagate as they reproduce themselves. Say, this here family tends to be louder and more direct in relating to others, while this here family tends to be quieter and indirect, and then these tendencies can cluster in certain classes or cultural groups, oftentimes influenced regionally or geographically. There does seem to be a generational inversion of values, or at least selections of values. For example, the offspring reveling in disorganization in reaction to the aggressive controlling organizing tendencies of the parent, though even these reactions can revert back to a deeper tendency with aging, the whole "I'm becoming like my mom/dad" sort of thing. 

Just Stuff

A person's material possessions are bonded to them in a way, and surround them as an aura with a unique character appropriate to their person. You'll often see visceral reactions in people to others' things based on their affinity or contempt of those others. 

That's Not Me

Through a grotesque series of historical transformations, the Nazis emerged from the existing industrial order at the time. Like a growing cancer or an invading virus, the body perceives it as an external and separate encroaching force; "that's not me," that sort of thing, at least in terms of a historical, established consensus. But what really is an industrial nation in relation to the other nations? What is a nazi in relation to a dysfunctioning society? What is cancer in relation to the body? What does it mean for a virus to flourish? What then is a body? Because there are well-worn pitfalls associated with the organic body analogy. No immediate answers here, but there will be some thoughts here coming up along those lines.  

History

One of the things that makes history so endlessly fascinating is its temporality, which compounds the complexity already existing in the study of a society isolated from its context. History not only illuminates multiple objects of study across very large spaces, allowing for endless comparisons and contrasts, but the passage of time itself reveals another layer of complexity by eventually connecting those disparate objects together, in a relation of constant transformation. We're talking here about a larger and denser chunk of reality to be presented to the inquiring consciousness. 

Did I Hear You Right?

A lot of human interaction is based on imperfect comprehension or even a misunderstanding of a given set of symbols. What does it mean to love or hate? To labor? To suffer? These basic fundamental ideas may mean very different things depending on the individual, though there are always elemental similarities which make up the bindings of mutual understanding. Conversation proceeds along with a slackness across links of ideas, which then tightens up to a breaking point when conflict arises, in which misunderstandings and misalignments have to be reconciled. What's more, to labor too hard at setting it right can insult the other and break the exchange entirely. 

Though

I've got a little tic in which I may waffle on a point and muddy the waters a bit. Usually it is some sort of qualification that follows a "though" or some such. The idea is to make some sort of assertion and then introduce a conflicting claim that weakens the assertion: "such and such is x, though sometimes it is y." This has become quite intentional, and I suppose could be described as a minor routine ritual carried out in the course of writing. 

Not only is reality infinitely complex and building up good models can be devilishly hard, but then as soon as you do so the reality is already drifting away and the model is beginning its disintegration. On a large enough scale, capturing reality is forever a moving target, forever ambiguous. 

This is a belief and practice that is bound up with the view that ideology is an act of construction, as opposed to the practice of bringing to light faithfully something that already exists, and then of course making a proprietary claim over that faithful representation. There is some truth to the latter, but in a time that emphasizes disintegration, the construction aspect comes to the forefront. To put it another way, in great times of upheaval, there is a concerted collective effort to come to terms with death.   

Sure, one could deliberately adhere to an air of certainty to project confidence. A perfectly reasonable approach, though what happens when the dynamic moving parts put enough pressure on the static symbol, and then the whole thing cracks open? This is compounded with the dilemma that the thing professed to be unbreakable in the first place. 

Morning Mountains

 

Change or Stay?

Beliefs in determinism, or stronger yet, predestination, could be understood as crystallized ideological relics of the basic reality that we possess an inner, denser emotional/experiential core that although at times malleable, is a little more difficult to alter with conscious effort. It tends to take the white hot early stages of child development to give shape to the core, and after that it can be banged into other shapes with a good enough wallop, say a traumatic or ecstatic event. 

And then conscious effort can be put towards various methods of altering the thing too, albeit in a more gradual, deliberate, and incremental manner, but then even the conscious effort itself has to rest on a deeper, denser emotional and spiritual commitment, which itself is often forged through more powerful external cultural and historical forces. 

People can go through all sorts of material metamorphoses, and pass vast temporal and geographical distances and remain themselves. But they can change too; to what extent however seems to rely more on large, persuasive, external circumstances, in which peers, communities, institutions, nations, historical periods, etc. are changing with them. Though these changes are nevertheless composed of the changing individuals themselves.  

Feel Good Chain

There is a whole economy of rituals for restoring the perception of cleanliness and wellbeing that exists apart from anything actually effecting those things, though the economy of rituals itself is constantly altered in feedback with what actually exists. Say, throwing out the garbage and putting in a clean plastic trash liner with some sort of fresh scent: the clean shiny plastic and the good smell triggers a sense of renewal, in accordance with existing beliefs and attitudes towards various forms of waste. The dirty trash is gone. 

But this sense can be readily modified, and indeed it is often put there in the first place, in this case with the conventions welded into place by daily economic choices and practices of the mass, as well as mass advertising. And then what changes it? The understanding of where the plastic comes from for example, and where it goes, and what it is doing to the greater ecology for example, which can instill a sense of guilt and even horror.

But then this has to compete with the discomfort and disgust of rotting trash piling up with nowhere to go, and the presence or absence of alternative forms of amelioration.

Or how about using soap? The fresh smell on the one hand, and the basic beliefs about soap's effects, which of course are backed up by centuries of observation, knowledge, and practice, back up a feeling of cleanliness and security after the ritual is carried out. But the feeling can be changed, especially with the knowledge of certain kinds of chemicals which might clean in the short term, but which then do longer term damage to the environment, and one's own health for that matter, which of course depends on the type of soap and its composition, thus the flowering of the market of ecologically friendly and mild soaps. 

Green tech is another good example. The electric cars, the standing windmills, the fields of solar panels... here there is a complex interplay of pragmatic action and powerful images. The image communicates a cleaner, more moral way of being, opposed to the dirty, belching petroleum energies that are obnoxious and harm. Setting aside the simplistic, binary, and problematic schema of dirty and clean, there may very well be good reasons for switching to alternative forms of energy, though at what scale and what form this takes is another question and socially and culturally determined. Thus we are endowed with the noxious phenomenon of green washing.

The massive processes of mining and smelting that must continue for the enormous amounts of steel and rare earth metals to be procured to outfit a massive energy transfer of a large complex society, without of course radically altering the composition and aims of that society, may very well open or widen very different sets of wounds, and then these realities necessarily pass through the collective consciousness in uneven ways, depending on a given individual consciousness, specialization, political persuasion, economic interest, and etc. 

The rituals are needed. One must move through the world believing one is right and good, the monsters included. There is a driving action to it; it feeds the will to go on. This element, this economy unto itself, must remain stable and functional, resting atop a constantly changing reality and altering it and being altered by it. It is constantly doing this organically, but it can also be manufactured and instrumentalized like anything else. 

Macho Lattice

Of course the imperial character doesn't just emerge ready-made out of a vacuum. The frustrated and humiliated late-imperialist does have a few things right about the general character of the people that existed in the vaunted golden era of a given imperial power, and these characteristics tend to be similar across time, such as the hardiness and vigorous aggression required of the struggling founding generations to clamber their way to the top of the heap. 

The reality of such a multitude of circumstances involved in the rise of an entire empire is much more complex of course: great imperial powers tend to arise out of periods of great upheaval and constant warfare, wherein the coalescing warring powers are eventually reconciled and then centralized, out of interest of generating a longer term stability. 

But the act of gazing wistfully back into history, or looking into the future for that matter, always involves some compression, and necessarily happens in the time and place that the thinker is doing the gazing, assisted by the available tools of analysis and concerns and cultural and historic perceptions at the time, and so a whole lot is left out in the final analysis. 

As for the compression, the humiliated late-imperialist pulls from the complex flow of history a few simplified symbols, cobbling them together so as to suggest a glorious restoration to past heights. But this is a superstition comparable to their own projected contempt of the cargo cults attempting to emulate their power. 

The moment has already passed. And indeed, it was a large and unwieldy moment: no one is going to get that bull by the horns. It was a unique set of historical circumstances that led to the rise of the imperial power in question. 

And the nature of imperial power follows the basic mimetic tendencies of our strange reality. When one acts in the world, the world begins to respond in kind to oneself. The towering imperial power evokes in the Other (as a multitude, not a monolith) not only feelings of defensiveness and antagonism, but all kinds of other feelings like envy as well, which can be based on anything from the desire of power to a pragmatic need for self-protection. 

The moment that the powers of violence flowing outwards begin to weaken, the other aspiring imperial powers make their moves and consolidate their own power, overtaking the old oppressor. The flow of imperial power is by its nature unidirectional and irreversible in this way; it is the nature of the beast.  

The crisscrossing threads of history's forces tend to snap individual actors in and reinforce their trajectories. To tear out of the lattice completely is to unravel the whole thing, though this does eventually happen of its own accord, after which it begins to reconstitute itself again.