Abyssal

My life seems to consist of an endless stream of "this weird bullshit just happened to me and now I've gotta deal with it." There are plenty of structural and endogenous - you could say they form a unity  -factors in play which work together to bring that state of affairs about, part of which I'll be getting to in this post. I didn't really intend for all of this to read like a crabby comedy-of-errors diary, but I guess that's what I've got right now and it is the format I'm going with. As usual here, I at least intend to produce some workable universals from these particulars; if you're going to sit and listen to someone crab at you all day, you might as well get something out of it. 

We've talked before about the commanding heights of a money-governed class system, and how the stocks and flows of that money - and by extension power - are maintained and governed. But what it is like at the opposite end of that polarity? More particularly, what is it like to be cash-poor and have subsistence rations of power in the United States? 

I say cash-poor to lower the hammer a little bit on a loaded concept like "poverty." I have a wealth of resources in the form of a constellation of support and contacts and various useful skills and knowledge, and I don't consider myself desperately poor. But I do skate on the knife edge of economic ruin as part of daily life, which is a result of how lean I have to live to do what I do. Of course, given the ongoing forces of economic concentration and polarization in the United States, most of the people living in this country are not too far from financial misfortune themselves, getting sucked under by the social rip currents generated by this dire economic milieu in the process. 

And besides, there is a case to be made for living lean and on the edge: it can be appropriate to tuck in what you can and cut the dead weight so you don't have more surfaces that are going to snag and drag you under. 

The precipitating event for this discussion is a minor little car accident, the details of which we could briefly sketch out to bring into relief some of the forces at play here. I was sitting at a junction in a parking garage and someone came right around a blind corner and ran right into me, smooshing the front of my car and busting the radiator. 

The accident itself was relatively uneventful: low speed, with minor damage that was significant enough that my car was no longer drivable, but relatively intact. The person who hit me immediately admitted fault and coordinated everything through her own insurance to ensure she took responsibility. Our interaction was cordial. It was when insurance got involved that things got interesting. 

I'm a little ignorant about such matters. Twice I had to file claims in two different events when my car windows were busted and things were stolen from my car. Both times I had such minimal insurance that there were all sorts of little technical catches that I had to navigate in order to get the claim filled out. Insurance can be quite expensive and add up fast, so you opt for what coverage you can get depending on what you afford, which for me was pretty skimpy. I ended up having my window replaced on the second event after eating the loss on the first window which was under-covered- eating the loss in both cases on all the stolen shit - which in itself was like pulling teeth trying to collect from the damn company. 

Talking about the impaired functionality of the engine itself, and damage to the frame of the car is a different matter entirely though. When I spoke to an insurance representative about the accident, they concluded that due to the age of the car I'd probably have to total the vehicle. I thought, well that's extreme, the repairs seem pretty minor, but OK. I then consulted with family about this decision and got, "nope nope nope don't do that!" 

Through persuasion and education, what I eventually realized would happen is that the company would give me the bare minimum for a vehicle that was basically fine, and then take it to auction, hopefully at a profit and coming out ahead of the claim and then I'd be screwed trying to scrape money together for a used car that was now likely to be more expensive now, possibly with further mechanical issues that were difficult to foresee. I could opt instead for an owner salvage, get paid less of a value, and hopefully be able to get the car fixed myself within the allotted return; a gamble to someone without deeper mechanical knowledge and the personal means to advance the repairs. I'd be at the mercy of a local garage, rates for labor cost, replacement part prices, and etc. Personally, one's consciousness shifts from that of intentional daily movement to that of being pinned down and trapped between more powerful conflicting economic interests. 

Note here that it was possible for me to wander naively into dramatically increased economic hardship, and through my ignorance I had to be pulled back from the brink by the scruff of my shirt by someone who knew a little more about the matter. Comparable to an ecological tourist being warned away from a dangerous plant or animal by an experienced local guide. The wilderness in this case involved economic movements in settled society, which require specialized information and experience of its own to navigate. We'll get more into that at another time.  

Let's step away from this now and survey things from a greater remove. Theoretically, a stable community is one that can respond to shocks and damages with the proper remediation. Things like severe damages, injuries, and deaths are a little more complicated, but all in all if a damage occurs to some part of the community, and that damaged thing can be made whole, or at least healed enough to a satisfactory degree, then it is done, in the interest of maintaining the integrity of that community and its ongoing connections. 

Due to our political economy - which we'll have to continue to explore in further posts - it is in the nature of the insurance company to minimize costs on its customers' claims as much as possible, while profiting as much as possible on the insurance obligations coming in, which are possible given an established monopoly privilege in which their business is ensured through political and legal enshrinement.

It's also in the nature of our political economy to have all of our social and economic needs - including that theoretical social and material process of remediation - handled by self-interested private businesses operating on their own specialized and technical knowledge and experience, and of individuals themselves to be cast as self-interested and clawing what they can out of any given interaction, which as such a state of affairs advances, results in the shredding of social trust and the progression of such a state of affairs into something ever more intensely resembling itself. 

Socially this produces a powerful downward pressure with individuals in association with each other constantly dragged down and into gradients of disintegration, requiring a constant maintenance and then accumulation of social and economic power to remain buoyant and above these gradients. This in turn requires individuals in association with each other to leverage their collective power, knowledge, and experience to capture what power they can from the greater collective economic surplus, which simultaneously shrinks that surplus, while producing cleavages of oppositional associations forced by necessity to do the same thing in response, to survive, accelerating the contraction, destroying ever more trust and increasing the pressures for exploitation and domination. Plenty more to address on that later too.

With that relentless social conveyor pulling oneself ever-closer to the abyss, one discovers a problem. It begins to appear inevitable that one proceeds ever downward, no matter how one angles or thrashes. Something curious happens though. The deeper one goes, the darker and quieter it gets, one begins to see and hear curious things, by virtue of the absence of the things one is normally seeing and hearing. Some of this is strange and unsettling, yes. But one learns things. Namely that there remains plenty of life where death presumes to be, and for that matter, vice versa. One learns much more about navigating both the depths and the heights and everything in between.   

Nevertheless it is dangerous down there. You don't want to lose so much power that you are thrust ever downward, especially not being built for such things, where you are eventually crushed by the extreme pressures at the terminus. Much like the Titan submersible, that small libertarian vessel whisking CEO and friends down for a voyeuristic peek at the abyss, to be crushed like an empty soda can in the process. An uncanny inversion of the Icarus myth, which upholds the myth's core lesson all the same. 

Back to the immediate problem though. What does having an intact car have to do with survival in the United States? It is not the end of the world to be without a car. There are plenty of places in the country where you can get by just fine without a car. But departing from the mainstream economic regime and car-dependency requires some consideration and preparation. All in all the infrastructure in the country is built for cars. 

The reasons for this are complex and deeply rooted. The individuality of the personal automobile, reflected in the individuality and self-interest at the core of our political economy itself, makes for a tight fit. And the material reality is a simple matter of an enormous influx of concentrated energy (in the form of oil) and the relentless material expansion afforded by that influx, a material expansion that was well underway before fossil fuel, but which was further enabled and even intensified and accelerated by it.     

This results in massive distances opened up in the relationality of economic ties. That is, the entire economic regime is built upon the ability to annihilate space, which through repeated application, establishes a dependency. You have massive tracts of land in which virtually no food or other types of natural resources can be found, which aren't trucked in. Because within a certain regime of cheap energy it might be more efficient to truck in various resources to centralized operations with mechanized logistics, which can then be further trucked out to the extremities. 

This is not just an application in transportation, but a general economic principle. Witness the social and economic destruction of older, slower, collective methods of communication and organization, in favor of a homogenization and standardization administrated through the central nervous system of the Internet, embodied in the stories floating around of libraries or bookstores in which the actual books disappear, with various forms of merchandise and computer screens remaining. This may afford a certain form of efficiency and convenience in the short run, but it can also represent a dangerous vulnerability if that system suddenly goes away, as demonstrated in the chaos and angst arising when electronic payment systems go down, with central banks slowly and quietly backing away from their endorsement of full cashless schemes. 

I'm getting further and further away from my initial point: due to the function of our political economy - namely constant material revolution and expansion - one must constantly reproduce and regenerate one's literal and metaphorical economic engines to be able to traverse that landscape, in an environment where those engines are progressively deteriorating with every iteration, through the combined effects of planned obsolescence, economic hysteresis, inflation, and so on. Yet all of this too we'll have to get into at another time. 

I talked about interesting things down in the depths. Old, redundant modes of economic production and material survival for example, old social and spiritual relations, and so on, which tend to be maintained and preserved especially by those "left out." 

Further, not all of the directionality of our collective sinking is downward. The down-going is more turbulent than all that, with various updrafts and other oppositional forces generated within the agitated waters. I might have even found an updraft of my own, particular to my immediate predicament that could be of some use. 

Cloud and Mountain

 

Zombie

I had planned on a slightly different priority list for the posts I was going to roll out, but here we are just passing election day and on somewhat of a precipice, so it seemed timely to get this one out instead, which will nibble around the edges of some of the issues at stake currently. I'm not necessarily going to comment on the immediate results of the election, in favor of a more gut-level read on a basic mood and zeitgeist. I'm not going to trot out the tired lamentation that Trump's victory spells the end of democracy - whatever that is - either. I guess we could just jump right into this. 

I don't think I need to get into too much background to establish that there has been a whole lot of apprehension surrounding the 2024 US election here and around the world - even more than the usual dread and lamentations for "democracy" that have come around every 4 years here - and there are so many fascinating and terrifying analyses on the subject floating around at the moment. And when you have this much apprehension and consternation, it is usually a sign that things are very tenuous and fragile, and had to become that way somehow, which could be traced back decades at this point, or centuries if you wanted to get ambitious. In particular, I wanted to get at the subjective dimensions to this moment that I want to explore briefly as we cross this particular threshold. 

To first point to a historical analogue, in the first half of the 20th century - amidst the destruction of the World Wars and the breakneck social change accompanying it - when the era of mass propaganda and advertising really went into full swing, there was an obsession among the ruling elite of gaining control of what was often described as the "unruly mob." And even though this was an ugly thing that lead to all sorts of deeper pathologies, it was also kind of understandable. There was a deep fear and distrust of peoples as masses in general, further instilled by spectacular outbursts of political instability, nationalist fervor and rising demagogues, mass runaway slaughter in the wars, and so on. Nevermind that generation after generation of elite activities and machinations produced much of this hated "mass" that they were insisting was quite dangerous and needed to be managed carefully. 

So why was this the case and what did this look like, and what does it have to do with our predicament today? We could tie in and explore all kinds of historical threads to account for this state of affairs, and a lot of really great work has been done on countless related subjects. We've done some of this surveying here over the years. At the moment though I just wanted to get at the subjective experience with the usual help of some colorful imagery. 

I've absorbed an endless amount of excellent analyses of the structural, political, and economic forces driving the imperial era and then the run-up to the World Wars, as well as the explosive unwinding of these forces in the prosecution of the wars themselves, and one can readily put together a convincing intellectual account of all of this which can be quite useful, but what continually re-emerges in my mind are the really vivid and colorful first-hand accounts, such as Hannah Arendt's subjective observations of a society full of bitter despair and resignation, and caustic hatred for everything that exists, and then of course the resonance in one's own heart that those observations evoke. There were powerful collective emotional and spiritual undercurrents that were leading up to the wars that could be really felt and apprehended, a feeling quite unmistakable and striking which is growing ever-thicker in the air today. 

Those feelings imply a kind of violent movement to be experienced, which was an experience of being a part of something that was happening and going to happen as history unfolded in the present. In the media space we've had a constant flood of navel-gazing and intellectualizing of that history, in which we've wondered how it was that people could behave in such ways, and how such terrible things could be done, and now we're experiencing in real time a sort of increasing and accelerating sense of chaos and dynamism. The deep apprehension and tension itself could be seen to be the subjective experience of a high amount of potential energy, because after all, one holds one's breath when one senses the possibility for sudden violent change or transformation, which carries effects that are difficult to predict in terms of their beneficial or detrimental (or both) downstream consequences.    

This stuff can take a long time to build up. To track some of this, it might be helpful to trace out some of the popular cultural production that uses this subjectivity as raw material for its storytelling. For instance, for decades there has been a cultural fascination with zombies as a mythological construct, which as imagery has evolved over time as it is revisited and reimagined through contemporary lenses as they progressively iterate. One of the major underlying anxieties in the zombie mythos is of a mass of humanity suddenly changed, and then set into motion as killer automata which trundle across the landscape, devouring any surviving "decent" and "unturned" individual caught in their wake. Though of course with recent popular re-imaginings like The Walking Dead, the surviving hold-outs are often some of the worst and most dangerous threats as they fight to survive in spite of themselves amidst the altered landscape. 

One of my personal favorite zombie motifs is the "hoard" and all of the associated dynamics and anxieties that accompany that concept. The presence of the hoard (basically a large mass of zombies) tends to change the story calculus from particulars and individuals and all of those associated dramas - which themselves are good and interesting no doubt - to a structural calculus of environmental forces that need to be navigated. 

The hoard, due in large part to its sheer size and momentum as the accumulation of numerous single zombies - which each on their own carries a potential danger of its own but which can be managed on an individual basis - carries with it so much destructive force as a sum that merely being caught in its general direction implies certain ruin. It is a problem of the destructive force of overwhelming number and movement. And so the solution to coping with it is not so much gaining mastery over it as it is learning what direction it is moving and at what velocity, and then managing to stay out of its way. 

The particulars of the zombie mythos are many, and so can be creatively applied in many other ways, but to repeat one common theme, it can be seen to express that old early modern fear of the crowd, echoed long after the World Wars, when masses of violent and chaotic runaway human energy were unleashed on an industrial scale with industrialized implements of destruction. 

To bring it back to our subjective analysis, what are the experiential underpinnings which build up such destructive forces and then set them into motion? As we've detailed in discussions previously, that growing instability and dynamism accompanying a mass loss of temper is coming back into full swing, which you can see and feel. Troublingly, a lot of what I've seen in people - and then heard about in various accounts - is that your average person is just not ready or equipped for such things, which is part of the point being made here. I don't want to put people down as "sheeple," it is just that most people don't have the time or resources to build up the spiritual and intellectual structures needed to individually absorb the incoming mass trauma that we're going to see, without of course producing additional cascades of reaction and trauma in turn. 

Part of this is capacity and then part of this is time and energy. For example, if you are slighted by someone but you are not immediately threatened, you might chew over what was said and done for a while. There are many ways to do this: with tools of communication, by meditating on the other person's subjective experience, by situating the slight within your own consciousness and making room for it, and so on, and you may be able to resolve the slight within yourself or even with the other person without continuously amplifying it and making it worse. 

However if you have less time, underdeveloped coping skills and resources, or the stakes are higher, or a combination of these things, you have to react to that slight or even threat with what you have at the moment. And even reactions are conditioned by training and knowledge previously built up. The man coming at you with a knife has to be reacted to whether you can sympathize with his history and motivations or not, but someone trained in self-defense is going to handle it differently than someone who is not. 

I think of the difference between water passing over concrete on the one hand and then settling into a wetlands on the other. Water needs all of those little recesses and passages and living systems to trickle into and then become absorbed in and made use of. With something like concrete, it only passes over it, accumulating in mass and speed. When you witness and absorb world events, all of that needs to percolate through all of the various knowledge structures that you've built up. Sitting with it, you can absorb it and situate it within ongoing world events. People who have not had the time to build up these structures however are hit with it all at once, and have to react with what they have, oftentimes with crude tools passed to them by those looking to gain something by the crudity and nature of those tools. 

Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda for example have talked about Jewish friends suddenly discovering Zionism after October 7. I've seen this too. I'm working off of memory of an insightful podcast they put on a while ago, but as Levine and Kovda put it, it tended to be people without previously built up political ideologies, skills, and experiences, who were suddenly confronted with an extremely traumatic event without the means to situate that event historically or politically, and who reacted to it in kind. What do you do with news of an act of directed violence? You situate that direction within ready-made - and cynically circulated - crude explanations such as a mainstream conception of antisemitism and the nature of Israel. 

The act of violence witnessed on October 7 - as a dialectical act connected to many other acts of violence over a long span of time - becomes amputated from that greater reality and focused upon as a singular event, and then grafted onto a simplified narrative of antisemitic violence, deployed as a shaped charge to provoke reactive violence in a specific direction, which in the end can be used to justify something like genocide. 

Domestically, you see this in the polarization surrounding the US dual party system and the media apparatus that amplifies and reproduces that system. You see people en masse latching onto the political squabbles of the legacy parties and then polarizing with them, snapping into that simple binary schema and eating up the simplistic political narratives that come down the pipe, narratives that are produced both to grease the wheels of an antiquated and dysfunctional political system and to turn a profit. 

The nature of both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump reflect how the greater political and cultural apparatus work, and how they produce people and for what purpose those people are produced. What they do and say in the course of their campaigns, and then in office, reflects a professional functionality and totality that is rapidly breaking down, and there are plenty of people who have commented on these things and/or who have voted anyway with this full knowledge. But there are plenty more who are latching onto these candidates as true believers, fully taking up their rhetoric and their communicated aspirations as a standalone reality, and will be set in motion in the direction prescribed by these things, which in a polarized dual party system means in direct and violent opposition to each other. 

How things are built is a contributing factor to how they become unbuilt. A falling high-rise is a terrible thing, and for that matter one that is bombed is an even more terrible thing. What goes up must come down, and what goes way up must come way down and with much force, and where there is concentrated energy, there is the potential for its concentrated dispersal as well. 

What I'm getting at here in general is that our industrial societies are built to go ever higher and ever faster, and to become ever more top-heavy, instrumentalizing the whole of creation to do so. People are produced and cyclically reproduced to administrate this system, and so it is no wonder that so many of them, atomized and strung out, their backs to the wall, latch on to the simple schema and manipulations at hand when increasingly unstable and concentrated forces begin peppering them from all sides, those forces increasingly set free by the ungainliness of the very system that their increasing chaotic velocity is degrading. 

It is difficult to say how significant the election will prove to be after we are afforded some hindsight, but it is certainly an important cyclical milestone and break-point which can be pointed at, making more visual and apparent a whole array of affairs connected to it, and which implies a certain flow of changes cascading from it in turn.  All of which is to say: good luck to all of us!

This was another difficult piece to produce, and I'm going to have to assume that it might be a bit difficult to read as well. But as usual, we're going to keep exploring many of these themes and continue to clarify them in time, especially as I get these rusty joints moving again.