Thoughts on Christmas, and the Battle Between Materialism and Anti Materialism within Consumption Culture.
The circus has once again come to town, hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands upon millions of feet are marching up and down streets all over the country (indeed all of the world) on a multitude of separate
quests- chasing something, a dream, an image, an impossible reality sold to each and every one of us on our t.v’s, on billboards and in magazines. Like the children of Hamelin running blissfully towards their unhappy [1]ending all of us march glazed eyed and dozy footed through rows of lights and tinsel, eyes shining towards that unattainable moment, that glorious realization that can never quite be reached; because each time we get close to reaching material satisfaction, the advertiser, the store owner, the profiteer, our peers, and even ourselves snatch it away and raise the bar a little higher.
Yet doggedly we keep on, believing somewhere somehow perhaps that in material we will find salvation, that among the cess pit of new toys, lingerie, and Christmas fucking pudding we might find something that will bring daylight streaming into the underside of the hill[2]- but we won’t. Shopping, the quest for material enlightenment is like masturbation without the orgasm[3]. Yet, when Christmas is done and put away and we go back to working overtime at our nine to fives to pay back the money we owe to loan sharks and credit card companies; we will if nothing else have once again achieved one giant cum stain of waste, broken toys, and half eaten food in the landfill of post consumer commodities.
So here is the paradox. We live in a society that practically made I phone a religion, (there are probably more I phone users than Sikhs in the world right now with approximately 400 million ipods sold since 2008 compared to around 30million Sikhs worldwide) we spend half our lives chasing NEWER, BIGGER, BETTER, we have whole industries that exist solely to give us wet dreams about things we don’t own yet but will soon; and despite all of this we are fundamentally anti materialist in our interactions with commodities.
We hold them (commodities) aloft and afar as spectacle but in attaining them, in demystifying them, we devalue, degrade, and eventually destroy them. A perfect example of this interaction is the rate at which the monetary “value” of any item depletes from the moment it leaves the store; it’s so called value, it’s worth evaporates as soon as it is in the hands of the consumer. Now part of this of course is down to the power relationship between chain stores and individual consumers meaning that a shop has much more power to dictate “value” than you or I; however if we explore concepts like “mint in the box” and the obsession with “new” we see a trend which indicates a desire not for an item as a useful or valued thing, but as a concept a symbol of a lifestyle that is part of achieving some kind of perfection. We have reached a point where we no longer care for material possession; we care only for the thrill of the chase.
For me this new anti materialism is characterized by two key factors in our consumption; the first is the upgrade culture of add-ons and new versions of things (take for example Windows 1997,1998, XP et al) every five minutes, and the second is the throwaway culture attached to many commodities- many products including children’s bikes are not made too last more than a year, whilst even among individuals the destruction of material possessions is a common consumer act (you only need to look in the refuse bins of most housing estates to find all of the furniture, cooking equipment, and electrical goods needed to keep a household running).
So what does this conflict between spectacle and value mean, and where should we position ourselves around it? For me the root of the problem is tied intrinsically to the nature of our society and of our wider systemic structures. The capitalist and corporatist abattoir to which (like good little lambs to the slaughter) we have all merrily wandered into demands constant growth, constant expansion, and constant profit; despite being pitted against a world that cannot sustain this strategy and us such must continue to produce to “change” and to sell. When we run out of new markets and new products, we run out of capitalism and into a new freedom of reuse; the coming apocalypse of no more oil and the eventual ceasing of the ability to mass produce consumer commodities will see us all running to scrap yard to salvage our Iphone 2’s, Mini Disk Players, and gramophones; when this happens we will truly be free of the spectacle of material and perhaps once more understand the value of material.
Enough though of my nihilist predictions for the future, what can we do now? How do we eliminate the spectacle of material? An option in this war against spectacle is to simply destroy commodities “People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities[4]”, to tear them from the shelves and burn them, to destroy the adverts that perpetuate them, to smash the shops that sell them, and bomb the factories that produce them; this at least would end their reign of terror over our lives, negate them as anything meaningful, and eradicate at least for some short time their grip on our reality. However, in the modern capitalist setting, the impending doom of total environmental collapse leads this writer at least to question the effectiveness of such a tactic, and this for me is where our relationship to the value of goods because important.
Each and every product on the frickin shelf has a story, a life, a journey, it has almost certainly been made of one or many natural resources that the planet will sooner or later be entirely void of; if we destroy the product then we only perpetuate the wasting of thousands of natural resources. So what can we do? For me we must begin to reuse, to reinvent and to modify those commodities that we do have, to keep and to treasure them as valuable things, to look after them, and adapt them to make a new world from the tattered scraps of welded metal and processed oil of commodity culture.
Alongside this though, we must advocate a strategy of spectacle destruction; we must tear down the billboards and the cumming soon (though never actually cumming) culture, we must kill the voice inside our head that tells us we need the next car, t-shirt, or DVD, we must slay the advertising monster and make soup from its cold dead heart, we must smash the lie that the next product will bring us that step closer to material enlightenment or we will be crushed to death under the sheer weight of our own consumption.
Time is ticking.
[1] From the Tale of the Pied Piper http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/etext/piper/text.html
[2] Reference to the Pied Piper “And when all were in to the very last, The door in the mountain-side shut fast.”
[3] You work yourself up and up until in a frenzy, but never reach satisfaction.
[4] Guy Debord The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html

Comments
transformation is the
transformation is the conjugate relation of ‘creation’ [production] and ‘destruction’ [consumption]; i.e. ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ are conjugate aspects [‘phases’] in the one [circular] dynamic of ‘transformation’ of relational space.
as mcluhan observes in ‘understanding media’; ‘it matters little what we produce, what matters is how our act of producing transforms our relations with one another and the dynamics of the relational space we share inclusion in.’ [the transforming relational medium is the message].
western dualism artificially [by way of linguistic idealization] splits apart ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ and treats each of these as a separate process in-its-own-right, ... thanks to the notion that the space we live in is NON-RELATIONAL, an absolute fixed empty and infinite euclidian container [operating theatre] which we use to frame our mental model of dynamics in terms of absolute, locally existing material objects/systems, thus ‘getting rid of’ the physical reality of the continually transforming relational space, affirmed by modern physics.
our human selves, which experience life as transformative subsystems inextricably woven into the transforming One-ness [in the manner of a resonance feature like a storm-cell in the flow of the continually transforming relational space of the atmosphere], we synthetically re-render [using the psycho-idealizing powers of language] as local machines with dual capacities; production and consumption. by mentally modeling ourselves as ‘local systems’ that engage with the world by way of ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’, we ‘split ourselves’ out of the inhabitant-habitat relation give by Machean physics; “the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants”.
the machean physical reality is something the western culture casts aside, giving preference to the linguistically idealized rendering of the human individual as a local material system [in an absolute euclidian space operating theatre] with inputs and outputs which feed dual capabilities of production and consumption.
this western view of our ‘human selves’, as local independently-existing ‘things-in-ourselves’ is not just used for us ‘humans’, it is used for ‘sovereign states’ and ‘corporations’ and serves as the very foundations of capitalism.
the meaning-of-life of a ‘local material system’ is thus given by its ‘ability to produce’ and ‘consume’. it is no longer seen as an agent of transformation within the continually transforming relational space that is, according to modern physics, the physical reality of our experience. in other words, western culture has us trade out, in our heads, the meaning of a local material form as agent-of-transformation within a transforming relational-spatial One-ness [mcluhan’s ‘transforming medium is the message’ point about the real meaning of a Cadillac or cornflakes factory], for a reduced meaning in terms of a local material system; i.e. an engine with inputs and outputs tapping into an infinite reservoir/warehouse space and an internal processing system with dual capabilities of production and consumption.
ralph waldo emerson, coming from his non-dualist, ‘machean’ type worldview, discusses this ‘reduction of self’ by way of dualism, in ‘The Method of Nature’. that is, he points out that the ecosystemic ‘genius’ of nature wherein the influences of sun, earth, air and water give rise to the peartree and give it the ‘talent’ to ‘produce pears’. using this as an analogy for ‘man’, he points out that our habit is to ‘drop out’ the ‘inclusion in the relational ecosystemic One-ness of nature’, and to psychologically re-render the peartree by way of linguistic idealization, as a thing-in-itself, whereupon it’s meaning is jumpstarted from itself, so that we start seeing it as a machine for making pears.
“But nature seems further to reply, `I have ventured so great a stake as my success, in no single creature. I have not yet arrived at any end. The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but my aim is the health of the whole tree, — root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed, — and by no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at the expense of all the other functions.' . . . ‘Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man's wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine’. - Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’
the storm cell can be a local source of wind-power even though it is much more; i.e. it is the transforming relational space expressing itself through the local, visible, material form; i.e. the local, visible, material system is an expression of the ongoing transformation of the relational space it is included in. that is the physical reality. the linguistically idealized [pseudo-] reality we render in terms of the dualist notion of a material system in-its-own-right, with inputs and outputs and the dual capabilities of production and consumption. the physical reality wherein the local form is an expression of the transforming One-ness is lost in this linguistic idealization based reduction to a local machine capable of production and consumption.
this reduction is the foundation of capitalism; i.e. not only the human and organic forms are reduced to machines given meaning by their dual capacities to ‘produce’ and ‘consume’. capitalism animates so as to exploit both production and consumption. by continuing participation in this capitalist dynamic, we make ourselves over [and our sovereign states and corporations] into agents of production and consumption, whereupon our natural, physical role as agents of transformation is ignored. just as mcluhan points out for the case of the factory, our regarding it as a local machine does not stop the physical reality of transformation from transcending our intellectual linguistic idealization based dualist view in terms of production and consumption. that is, the transformation of the dynamic habitat we share inclusion in, continues to elude our ‘management’ of the various and sundry production oriented activities. in other words, by viewing the world and its inhabitants in terms of local machines with dual capacities for production and consumption, we allow our real physical influence as agents of transformation of the relational space we all share inclusion in, to 'flap in the breeze'.
resolving our unaware influencing of the transformation of the relational dynamics of our common living space, is not going to be accomplished by reshuffling our production and consumption practices, as the author of this article seems to be suggesting;
“For me we must begin to reuse, to reinvent and to modify those commodities that we do have, to keep and to treasure them as valuable things, to look after them, and adapt them to make a new world from the tattered scraps of welded metal and processed oil of commodity culture.
the only way ‘out’ of our institutionalized dysfunction, is to acknowledge that our linguistic idealizations that reduce our view of the world to ‘local material systems and what they do’ [shutting out of our minds the physically real relational transformation that we are included in] is merely ‘idealization-of-convenience’ that is confused for ‘physical reality’ at the price of ‘institutionalizing dysfunction’ [e.g. ‘capitalism’, ‘sovereigntism’, ‘authoritarianism’]. as emerson says, and poincaré, the tool of linguistic idealization, we are allowing to ‘run away with the workman’. this ‘tool running away with the workman’ is having us invert the natural primacy of non-dualism over dualism, the sovereigntist, corporatist producer-consumer society/culture is the result.
Very interesting stuff. From
Very interesting stuff. From my own perspective, I see two really important implications to be drawn from this:
1). The affirmation that objective physical reality exists and is knowable, and that for all the criticism of Western mentality (would really like a genealogy of authoritarianism in Vedic and Chinese civ, for instance), this implies an acceptance of hard science. Relativity, quantum mechanics and non-linear system dynamics would for instance be seen as scientific departures from the "Western" cultural tendencies of both Newtonian mechanics and "science" that is largely taxonomic categorization and naming (biology, for instance).
Naturally, this objective reality would have to be there, otherwise there would be nothing we need to recognize, and we must by implication have ways of knowing it. This perspective would really be a breath of fresh air, if not for the fact that revelations of buillshit in the West are usually coupled with a reactionary valorization of bullshit from elsewhere. It's all bullshit; there's no way people back then had any way to know this shit, and the identification of vague quantum mechanical stuff in the saying of Taoist sages, Brahmins and the like has more to do with common linguistic tropes being employed by both the mystics and the physicists; itself an example of needless "idealization" and appeal to language. At there very least, our understanding at any point in time should be seen as incomplete, and that there is room for "improved awareness" and integration with physical reality beyond what has existed in the past.
The other implication of this would be to empower both, oddly, anarcho-primitivists and anarcho-transhumanists. It completely fucks over the skeptical conclusions of postmodernism in the same way Zerzan did, by asserting that objective reality can be known outside of language, and that the problem of language is contingent and not essential to our condition.
2). That authoritarianism finds grounding in identity; in a false sense of self-containment drawn up by arbitrary conceptual divisions. These don't necessarily have to be an assertion of the uniqueness of one thing (the status of the king, the self-contained nature of the factory or body), they can also be categorical concepts that lend identity (national identification, race, gender).
The implications of this within the anarchist tradition would tend to lean toward Stirnerite ontology and against Kropotkin's biology, given the latter's appeal to an essential human nature.
That said, I do think there is a strong distinction to be made between the moral value of the emergent characteristic of mindedness, and inanimate matter which isn't so closely bound up with this process. The insight provided here would be folly of chopping this up into independent selves (though it is chopped up into independent subjectivities, processing units etc), as well as having too self-contained a view of themselves vis a vis the material flow of which they are a part, leading to such problems as reification, bounded thinking etc. It would seem to me that ethics would have to be refashioned from the view of how Mind as a whole relates to other forces.
It would also seem to me that an inevitable consequence of authority would be not simply the clinginess towards one's own identity (manifested not just in self-image but also in the "love of one's own" identification with groups that provide a collective identity, feeding nationalism and the like), but also a reaching out into the world in an attempt to stem dynamic processes that would serve to erode it; the tenuous nature of any identity within economic status, political status, families, gender etc. require one to assert increasing degrees of control on the surrounding environment to keep it still, or rather, to maintain the present identity of other "objects" who's pretense to a self-contained and independent nature is belied by the need to protect them from dynamic change.
I hope there is no such thing
I hope there is no such thing as "anarcho-transhumanists." Such a frightening combination of authoritarian and "anti-authoritarianism" that would make no sense.
I think I have met one of these folks before...talking about a future anarchy where robots do all our work, every individual has an electronic car, and where trains connect from city to city all around the world with little to no forests left since we would have "oxygen producing" machines. He scared the crap out of me....he was also really really high and mentioned some conspiracy theories on top of this transhumanist idea. I'm pretty sure he was one of those Zeitgeist "movement" weirdos.
Spent ten minutes writing a
Spent ten minutes writing a response only to have this piece of shit obsolete tech eat it. So I'm just linking. Short answer is yes, we exist. And no, it's not what you think.
http://humaniterations.net/2012/01/06/what-is-anarcho-transhumanism/
http://anarchotranshuman.tumblr.com/
Naturally, this objective
your comments re my comments are interesting but you make some very basic assumptions that grounds your remarks in a ‘materialist’ point of view; i.e. you say;
“Naturally, this objective reality would have to be there, otherwise there would be nothing we need to recognize, and we must by implication have ways of knowing it.”
the worldview of mach et al, and the worldview of a turtle island aboriginal have never started from a denial of a self-other experience. ‘experience’ which is inherently self-other, is what we are born into.
the debate in our western culture, going back to heraclitus and parmenides, has been in regard to whether the self-other experience is ‘dualist’ or ‘non-dualist’; i.e. whether the world is firstly a world of ‘becoming’ or firstly a world of ‘being’.
if it is a world of ‘becoming’; i.e. if the world is a transforming relational space, comparable to a fluid-flow where the self-other distinctions are purely relational, as in physics concept of a ‘field’;
‘Space is not Euclidian’ … “Space is a participant in physical phenomena” … “Space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.”, … “the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g(μ,ν), has, I think finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty.”…”Relativity forces us to analyze the role played by geometry in the description of the physical world.” . . . “A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone” —Albert Einstein.
if ‘things’ are not reducible to basic ‘being’ or ‘things-in-themselves’, but are instead relational field-flow features within the fullness of an energy-charged relational flow-space, then your view that “this objective reality would have to be there, otherwise there would be nothing we need to recognize”, is setting up an EITHER/OR logic-based strawman [things exist or they do not, and if they do not, there would be nothing we need to recognize’, ... which does not make sense relative to our real-life experience, so therefore, things must exist].
mach and the aboriginal, when they present their worldview in terms of space as a ‘One-ness’; i.e. as an energy-charged relational spatial-plenum [fullness rather than emptiness], are not denying the self-other differentiation, they are instead suggesting that the self-other differentiation is non-dualist rather than dualist. in other words, the creator and the created are not two separate things as in monotheism, but one thing with conjugate aspects; “the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat” [mach’s principle].
when someone, whether it is emerson or an aboriginal, critiques the concept of ‘being’ or ‘existence’ of a ‘thing’, and says; ‘those offshore islands do not exist’, they are not saying; ‘there is nothing there’. they are saying that what we are seeing is a feature within the continually transforming One-ness/fullness of space. we use language and geometry to ‘concretize’ and ‘objectify’ these forms, psychologically converting them into ‘things-in-themselves’ which we impute to have ‘their own development and behaviour’ which we ‘RE-present’ by imposing the notion on our mental modeling, of an absolute space and absolute time containing space in which THEY, now being seen as a plurality that is ‘real’ and ‘objective’, run around and interact’. but if we were to employ non-euclidian space which is purely relational and in which the habitat-inhabitant relation is a conjugate relation, our scientific worldview would be non-dualist like the aboriginal worldview;
“Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible. Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis
so, when you say; “Naturally, this objective reality would have to be there, otherwise there would be nothing we need to recognize, and we must by implication have ways of knowing it.”, you are obfuscating the question of whether the self-other differentiation is non-dualist or dualist. if it is firstly understood as ‘non-dualist’ then we can see that we use language and geometry to produce a ‘dualist version’ that is convenient for talking about the non-dualist physical reality which is essentially ‘beyond the capabilities’ of linguistic discourse [‘the tao that cannot be told’].
just because we can’t talk about the non-dualist world that we experience is no reason to regard the worldview that we construct with subject-attribute language architecture, as a ‘replacement reality’. as emerson says, when we do this, we are letting ‘the tool [of language-based mental modeling] run away with the workman’.
as previously mentioned, the non-dualist worldview [an understanding of which is inherently beyond the communicating capabilities of our simple ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’ language based constructions], sees change as ‘transformation’ in a relational-spatial sense, rather than in a dualist ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ sense [building a housing development is AT THE SAME TIME destroying some forest. this is what mach’s principle is all about; creation and destruction are not ‘two separate processes’, they are what language does to the one process of transformation of relational space]. as nietzsche says, our experience informs us that the world of our experience is non-dualist; i.e. where ‘space-as-energy-charged-fullness’ is transforming, rather than change being understood in euclidian/newtonian terms of ‘what-things-in-themselves do’ via two separate processes of ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ [i.e. ‘production’ and ‘consumption’];
““And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067
as mcluhan has also propounded, the transformation of the relational space of our experience is a more profound dynamic than the dynamics of ‘machines’ [our western newtonian biological sciences sees humans and other dynamic forms as ‘machines made of meat’];
““Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. — Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’
so, our western history documents how we, as a culture, have institutionalized ‘ignoring’ that physical reality is a transforming relational space, which has freed us [in our minds] to focus on ‘creation’ [‘production’] as if it were a process in-its-own-right, separate from ‘destruction’ [‘consumption’]. our institutionalized thinking that ‘splits transformation apart’ notionally into two separate processes has had us focusing on ‘production’ without acknowledging its simultaneous conjugate ‘consumption’ so that we have been sucking the nutrients out of the habitat that nourishes us at an unsustainable rate.
as john locke noted, our pre-modern practice was to enfold our labours into the relational dynamics of community, but with the invention of ‘money’ and the corollary concept of ‘paid labour’, we split ‘production’ apart as a thing in itself, and left ‘destruction/consumption’ out of sight and out of mind, regardless that these two are the simultaneous conjugate aspects of the real physical process of ‘transformation’.
how many sovereign states are there in the world merrily ‘doing their own thing’, focusing on ‘production’ out of the context of ‘consumption’? how many corporations? how many individuals, who have been infused with this notion of ‘self’ as a ‘machine made out of meat’ whose meaning is given by ‘what they produce’, out of the context of ‘what they are destroying as the flip side of what they are producing [i.e. ignoring the physically real change process as ‘transformation’ of the relational space they share inclusion in]?
if nietzsche and mach and schroedinger and the aboriginals are right, that the newtonian scientific worldview in which we are ‘machines made of meat’ is over-simplification, or as mach says;
“Science itself, … may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presenting of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought” –Ernst Mach
so, there is a lot that is passed over if the question of non-dualism and dualism are passed over by shifting to the strawman of ‘is there an objective reality or not’ with its ‘either/or’ logical basis.
in other words, the question ‘do we exist as local, visible, material, ‘things-in-ourselves’ aka ‘machines made of meat’ [causal agents of production] OR NOT, is too simple a question. a more comprehensive question would be; ‘are we, as one of a plurality of inhabitants of the world habitat, mutually exclusive of the habitat, or are we included in the habitat in the manner that a storm-cells in included in the atmosphere?]
but, because you pass over the fundamental world-view splitting question of non-dualism and dualism, you proceed with reasoning based in ‘time’ [time is not a physical foundation in the non-dualist, transforming relational space worldview]; i.e. you present a view of understanding in terms of a time-based evolution;
“It's all bullshit; there's no way people back then had any way to know this shit, and the identification of vague quantum mechanical stuff in the saying of Taoist sages, Brahmins and the like has more to do with common linguistic tropes being employed by both the mystics and the physicists; itself an example of needless "idealization" and appeal to language. At there very least, our understanding at any point in time should be seen as incomplete, and that there is room for "improved awareness" and integration with physical reality beyond what has existed in the past.”
what do you meann by ‘integration with physical reality’? physical reality is the primary reality and intellectual awareness is something lesser, as the multiple worldviews that differ by culture indicate.
the understanding of the world in dualist and non-dualist terms was available to ‘primitive’ peoples and there is a primitive person in each of us; i.e. we come into the world equipped for either.
the western scientific-thinking world has taken the dualist path in regard to intellectual understanding of the world. it has been based on deconstructing the transforming relational space in terms of absolutely existing local, visible, material ‘particles’ or ‘material bodies’ and ‘what they do’. mach, poincaré et al do not argue that this is not a useful thing to do; i.e. in that it delivers new ways of thinking of physical dynamics. they merely argue, that it has its limits and thus that the scientific worldview should not be used as a ‘substitute reality’ as it is being predominantly used [we have been ‘institutionalizing it’] in our globally dominating western culture way of viewing the world and engaging within it.
it is not the case, as you present it, that humanity is gradually, over time, improving our understanding of the habitat, so that we can improve our engaging with it;
“At there very least, our understanding at any point in time should be seen as incomplete, and that there is room for "improved awareness" and integration with physical reality beyond what has existed in the past.”
it is instead the case, that our intellection provided us with alternative foundations for viewing physical reality; non-dualist and dualist, and the western culture, which has risen to global dominance, opted for the dualist option which separated the creative source from the created objects, as in both monotheism and materialist/realist science;
“God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles." [that move about and interact within a notional absolute space and absolute time operating theatre] --- Isaac Newton
our dualist intellectual mental model of the world we live has informed our individual and collective behaviours. we have confused our linguistic-idealization based dualist worldview for ‘physical reality’, which is mistake. it is a collective ‘belief-bubble’ that we have institutionalized, that is about to burst.
our “improved integration with physical reality” will come about as soon as we acknowledge that the dualist, linguistically idealized worldview we have been confusing for physical reality’ is not physical reality and that an understanding of physical reality does not require scientific, aristotelian logic grounded intellection. it is ‘built into nature’. our western dualist intellectual-scientific, materialist, realist worldview is a convenient idealization that is in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things do’, which obscures the physical reality in terms of a continually transforming relational spatial One-ness [plenum or fullness].
there is nothing wrong with the dualist view per se [the problem is that it misses out acknowledging that 'production' does not happen without its flipside 'destruction' as in 'transformation']; the dualist 'thinking tool' has given us technologies and understandings in a mechanistic sense that alter, in a manner that can be useful to us, our inhabitant-habitat dynamic engaging. our problem is that this intellectual dualist worldview tool has been running away with the workman. we have institutionalized the confusing of this convenient but over-simplified dualist worldview for physical reality’.
your comments seem to pass right over this issue and subjectize ‘humanity’ as a thing-in-itself that is evolving over ‘time’, in contradiction to our understanding of physical reality aka ‘the world’, as a continually transforming relational-spatial One-ness in which we are relational features, which, like the pear tree, have certain talents, which, however, do not jumpstart from within ourselves [humanity], as if we were/are independently existing ‘things-in-ourselves’ with our own ‘independent evolution’ that is apart from the space we are included in, and instead relative to a notional absolute space and absolute time reference frame.
One time I was in some
One time I was in some emotional pain and I sat in my bed in meditation and I experienced my true nature as the void and the material world like a hologram that I was no longer connected to but still amidst. I was like a substrate that the hologram had it's being in. I was limitless, basically nothing. I knew that I could stay this way if I wanted or I could return to my self. For some reason I chose to return to my life because I had some unfinished business or there was some reason for staying in this world.
For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and whenever you create something you also destroy something even though matter can neither be created nor destroyed. I think the earth is a complex system and a living organism of which we are an integral part. We were made by the earth it wasn't made for us. There was a time when the earth was uninhabitable for humans and I don't see why it couldn't become that way again.
I think I might offer a more
I think I might offer a more mundane explanation.
Sorry to say, but meditation of that sort has that effect because it deactivates the parietal lobes, which serve to orient us by constructing a sense of place in time, and a self-contained sense of body. Deactivating it shifts perception to one of seamless continuity, being both everywhere and nowhere. It's a tracking system, and it tells you isn't wrong per se, but there's no point in blowing up the deactivation into something with supernatural significance apart from "normal" experience. It's simply the selection of a different track of relation with the world.
The opposite would be found in ecstatic/possession experience, in which the frontal cortex is deactivated and the lymbic system letting its emotions bubble forth. It's creates a sense of intense emotion without an accompanying sense of "i think" authorship, so the person then constructs this as being taken over by an outside force (loa, ghosts, the holy spirit etc)
Pretty much why there's no point in fetishizing one particular relation to it as natural, which we are obliged to honor. That would be the core behind deep ecology, and the ecological bent of 20th century fascism; a nihilistic acceptance of given place in a natural order (or in Emile speak, a given set of relational dynamics within it).
The reason I brought it up
The reason I brought it up was because I had a direct experience of some of emile's physics. The spatial plenum and the resonance features as well as becoming a non-local non-being (one-nesss). In the realm of religious experiences it's probably a pretty common one and possibly just a psychological response to emotional pain like dissociation. I've had other experiences that I would describe as ecstatic, transcendental or psychedelic but they don't seem as relevant to nondualism.
One time a stranger came up
One time a stranger came up to me and asked if he could put his penis inside my spatial plenum. I told him 'no way'. He seemed to understand my objection, so I inferred from this that we shared a common reality.
re 'the more mundane
re 'the more mundane explanation'.
imputing the source of profound experience to the brain is part of the general dualist habit of imputing the jumpstart sourcing of behaviour to the notional ‘independent thing-in-itself’. the seat of this jumpstart sourcing is imputed to be a ‘centre of direction’ that resides within the notional independent ‘thing-in-itself’. no doubt the activities in the brain change with changing experience, but so do the activities in a notional ‘local’ system called the ‘hurricane’ change with the changing experience of the hurricane. the sourcing of the development of the notional local system called ‘hurricane’, meanwhile, comes from the sun’s influence and the solar system dynamic’s influence on the atmosphere, or more generally from the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum. therefore, there is no reason to look to internal processes within a notional ‘local system’ for ‘explanations’ as to the behaviour of the system, such as looking to activities within the brain to explain human behaviour.
of course this is a popular thing to do, to explain things starting from the brain. where else are you going to go for an explanation of behaviour if you have already declared the ‘independence’ of the local material system; i.e. the independence of the newtonian machine made of meat aka ‘organism’. it is what keeps the pharmaceutical industry rich and oriental/holistic medicine practitioners out of the medical establishment.
as emerson made the general point using the example of the peartree, the relational ecosystem dynamic that inhabits the peartree also engenders it. where should we look for the central management in charge of the production of pears? should we look inside the peartree? whoops! the peartree does not have a central nervous system. plants manifest very intelligent, highly coordinated behaviours [e.g. Smarty Plants: Uncovering the Secret World of Plant Behaviour ]
we used to credit the nucleus of the cell with the sourcing of the behaviour of the cell, until recently when it became apparent that ‘signals from the environment’ sensed through cell ‘receptors’ that were informing cell ‘effectors’ [epigenetics] was the ‘physical reality’ while the notion of nucleus-directed cell behaviour was simply coming from the newtonian model of the cell as an ‘independent thing-in-itself’ so that one had to impute an internal jumpstart sourcing of cell behaviour, and some kind of ‘central authority’ is the model that western humans always come up with. this archetypeal model for explaining organization by way of a central authority, as nietzsche rightly puts it, exposes science as ‘anthropomorphism’.
modern experiments with the evolution of multi-species microbial communities [e.g. douglas caldwell et al] show that the ecosystemic relations [the relational spatial influence] is an outside-inward shaper of the development and behaviour of the species that develop within the microbial community. this appears in the work of lamarck and in nietzsche’s anti-darwinist writings and is implicit in mach’s principle.
it is quite possible to torture a person to the point that they have a mental ‘breakdown’. if one studies brain activity at that point, one will be able to CORRELATE aberrant behaviour with characteristic, atypical types of brain activity. does this ‘explain’ the experience of the individual? of course NOT! it is a ‘correlation’, not a ‘cause’.
only when people insist on the newtonian biological model of the organism as a ‘local system made of meat’ does this lead to the argument that ‘brain activity is the source of experience/behaviour’. once one assumes that the organism is a local independent, thing-in-itself ‘material system’ does one then force oneself to look inside of, and only inside of this local independent thing-in-itself for the jumpstart sourcing of its behaviour. the correlation between brain activities and experience/behaviour is then interpreted in a causal sense, as if the brain activity is the ‘cause’ of the experience. that follows from ignoring the physical reality that the dynamics of relational space not only inhabit the organism but create the organism [emerson, mach, nietzsche].
the physiology of the brain can’t explain human experience in the sense that experience ‘jumpstarts’ from the physiology of the brain. this would be like trying to explain the behaviour of the hurricane in terms of the physiology of the hurricane. this kind of thinking splits apart the hurricane from the transforming relational flow it is included in [influenced by the behaviour of the sun and solar system dynamic and other ecosystemic influences.] presenting the hurricane as a ‘local system’, notionally with its own local sourcing of development and behaviour; [katrina is growing stronger, katrina is acting this way and that way]. as emerson would say, the local system is not only inhabited by the flow of nature, it is created by the flow of nature. the same applies to all ‘local systems’ within a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum.
that is, in the machean physics view, THERE IS AN OUTSIDE-INWARD ORGANIZING INFLUENCE THAT NOT ONLY INHABITS THE MATERIAL FORM, BUT CREATES IT. it is the One-ness aka ‘relational spatial-plenum aka ‘spacetime-continuum’.
this outside-inward influencing force [together with its conjugate inside-outward asserting force] is the transforming relational space that the material form is included in.
meanwhile, you say;
“... ecstatic/possession experience, in which the frontal cortex is deactivated and the lymbic system letting its emotions bubble forth. It's creates a sense of intense emotion without an accompanying sense of "i think" authorship, so the person then constructs this as being taken over by an outside force (loa, ghosts, the holy spirit etc)”
this statement is mired down in dualist thinking. in the first place, the brain activity does NOT ‘create the experience’, and secondly, one does not have to go ‘outside of nature’ to the ‘supernatural’ [loa, ghosts, the holy spirit] to explain ‘an outside force’, one only has to ‘back off’ the idealization of the notional independent thing-in-itself ‘being’ of the human organism, and accept, as in mach’s principle that the transforming relational spatial-plenum not only inhabits the material form, but engenders it.
as the buddhist and vedic understanding goes, if one can ‘quiet one’s mind’, one can get in touch with the NATURAL physical dynamic which is very profound indeed without having to go ‘super-natural’ since the physical dynamic is like the gravity field; it is everywhere at the same time so that everything in the relational spatial plenum is interdependent with everything, as give by mach’s principle; e.g. the dynamics of the storm-cells/inhabitants in the atmosphere are conditioning the dynamics of the atmospheric flow-space/habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the atmospheric/flow-space/habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the storm-cells/inhabitants.” but it is convenient for us to use language and geometry and grammar to name-label and define the storm-cells of interest to us, and to RE-present them as ‘local material systems’; i.e. notionally as local, independent ‘things-in-themselves’, notionally with their own local, internal process driven and directed behaviours; e.g. Katrina, Ivan etc.
and so it is with ‘organisms’; ...notional local, independent ‘machines made of meat’, notionally driven and directed out of a notional internal ‘central authority’.
just because brain activity ‘correlates’ with the behaviour of the notional ‘local, independent material system’ and seems to ‘fit the bill’ for the imputed ‘central authority’ responsible for directing behaviour, because of the assumed model of ‘local independent being’, does not mean that the brain activity ‘causes’ or ‘explains’ the behaviour.
in other words, brain activity does not explain our experience and behaviour, it can be correlated with experience and behaviour. a profound experience of connectedness to everything in the universe is an experience of physical reality as given by modern physics. in order to ‘attune to’ this experience, we have to suspend our intellectual activity that is based in linguistic idealizations. as we know from brain wave activity;
“Beta (14-40Hz) – The Waking Consciousness And Reasoning Wave. Beta brain waves are associated with normal waking consciousness and a heightened state of alertness, logic and critical reasoning. Dominant Beta mode associates with stress.”
“Alpha (7.5-14Hz) – The Deep Relaxation Wave. Alpha brain waves are present in deep relaxation and usually when the eyes are closed, when you’re slipping into a daydream or during light meditation. Alpha associates with intuitive thinking.”
“Delta (0.5-4Hz) – The Deep Sleep Wave. The Delta frequency is the slowest of the frequencies and is experienced in deep, dreamless sleep and in very deep, transcendental meditation where awareness is fully detached. Delta is linked with deep healing and regeneration.”
there is no reason to believe that our natural experiences are born in the physiology of the brain, ... other than the belief in the newtonian biological model of the organism as a local, independently-existing material system with its own locally originating, internal process jumpstarted behaviour.
plants do not have brains and their behaviours are shaped by the conditions of the environment. as in the above reference to ‘smarty-plants’, there is no reason to impute ‘intelligent behaviour’ to a ‘plant’ other than having assumed that the plant is notionally an ‘independent local material system-in-itself’, with locally originating, internal process directed behaviour. mach’s principle gives a more straight-forward understanding of complex, cooperative plant behaviour, than ‘plant intelligence’, ... but ‘plant intelligence’ is what orthodox biologists talk in terms of since, the biological sciences, because of their newtonian modeling assumptions, ONLY ALLOW the sourcing of behaviour to come from the internal process of the notionally local, independent, thing-in-itself plant.
in summary, your ‘more mundane explanation’ is not an ‘explanation’ at all, it is a regression to the dualist model which confuses idealization for physical reality.
this statement is mired down
Except that this is obviously NOT what those people do; they themselves specify a distance between the relational forms of "possessing force" and "possessed person", which is only momentarily suspended. The dualism is theirs' to begin with, not mine.
Right, cause the concept of loa or the Holy Spirit is sooo much wiser. It's certainly on the right track (it is also an appeal to dualism in its own right, unless apparently you believe that you and they are just indistinguishable parts of the same spatial plenum apparently, which ecstatics generally don't).
Thank you, you've given me a
Thank you, you've given me a lot to think about. Like the Emerson quote a lot.
Sure thing, tool.
Sure thing, tool.
Hmm, judging the by the
Hmm, judging the by the comments of Anonymous posters here, i'll venture that it would not be unscientific to posit a correlation between idiocy and cowardice. Or perhaps cowardice is too generous; going by the default name could just indicate the person is a lazy hipster dilettante rolling through.
Hey, have you ever heard of
Hey, have you ever heard of this guy Fassbinder? I was just wondering because you seem kind of like the arty, intellectual type and my boyfriend was telling me he was pretty good. (I don't know if I should believe him though, he still hangs, like, American Apparel ads on his wall lol.) if all else fails maybe I'll get minky with my pinky in my bunghole in the monodrone, coz my clappy-fappy pussy is hyper-hot for my own moldy meatfist, and that seems, like, very sexy, and maybe more sophisticated than like Guy Debord or Fassbinder, or other old, creepy self-serious shit like that that nobody any more cares about, ya know?..Anyway, cheers!
I hadn't no- though i just
I hadn't no- though i just looked him up... arty intellectual type pfft unlikely, uneducated learning anarcha bashing out some thoughts with some mates and trying to learn some theory as opposed to just practice which is more what im used to... I may be reading wrongly (so please forgive me if i'm wrong), but your comment smecks of thinly veiled sarcasum, I really really hope your not a man because if you are i think that you should really have a think about whether that sort of language approach os really acceptable (personally if you are a guy trying to take the piss i think your doing it in a pretty sexist/mysoginistic way)... er if im wrong about that im most sory
My big problem finding a
My big problem finding a center on this pathetic planet is that there isn't one. When an initial idea or thread, of any kind of logical message, consistantly gets divorced from the main point for the sake of providing criticism solely is disgusting; especially when the material has to be constantly pushed into a professional realm that completly ignores the hunger of the layman. Yes, I'm rough, feed off your facade of superiority; I'm not nourished by it
I agree simple destructivism
I agree simple destructivism would be damaging and wasteful. We have ended up with such a complex system that wholesale recycling needs to be done from within while redefining what is right and wrong. I still think anarchists from all splinters can get together creating a new definiton of what that is.
i hope we can because if we
i hope we can because if we can't capitalism will just find a "solution"- think wall[e] meets mad max and throw in a couple hundred secure housing units (for the rich) amongst a post appolyptic waste land in which poor people will be pitted against each other every day in a kind of kill them or they kill you way.
Congratulations. You win the
Congratulations. You win the worst article award for 2012. Cutting it close, but on this New Years Eve, this is definitely the worst article I've ever read here.
cheers, though it would be
cheers, though it would be nice to have some constructive criticism and actual debate, the whole point of this blog is to try and help build annalsis and be a place to critically disect and argue different possitions... instead of anarchists just putting all the other work of anarchists down as shit, why no try and offer something that would make it better... if you have a counter theory or idea and would like to write it down please do; we'll upload it to the blog in the hope of starting a more discursive approach
I'm not feeling charitable
I'm not feeling charitable anymore when it comes to you. So my comment is "Hey bitch, Go find something better to do with your time. Maybe open a dildo shop an go fuck yourself."
You know nothing, Jon Snow.
You know nothing, Jon Snow.
i personally find the word
i personally find the word bitch offensive and the implication that my time would be spent worrying about m little orgasms than attempting to think critically about the world i experience is really shamefully fucking sexist, but hey sorry for having an opinion, maybe my time would be better spent in the kitchen cooking hot food for revolutionary street fighters such as yourself when you get back from your inportant manarchist ativity
yeah, i remember the 90s too.
yeah, i remember the 90s too. i was hoping this article would have more to say, in terms of anti-materialism, about the trendy eco, cyber, local, etc etc renovations of capitalism that have been picking up steam in the past decade, gearing up to provide a new mode of exploitation as well as co-opting the oh-so-radical moaning and groaning about 'consumerism' we've been hearing since at least the 60s. no such luck though...
it's a fair point, and an
it's a fair point, and an oversight on my part really, i guess i was stuck up in for me what is an inportant conflict in my politics, in my practice i see the need and desire to destroy the shit that exists now, and in my theory i feel fear that capitalism may destoroy itself (and kill fuck loads of people in thecross fire) before any of us get fucking organised enough to do it... I'd like to write more about the fucking yuppy health food stores that invaded my fucking neighbourhood and anaysle that a bit; but my conclusions on its place both in the "new"/"eco" capitalist market, and it's role in the gentrification process aren't solid enough atm keep checking i will get round to it... P.s. if you have thoughts on this area it'd be great to hear them, and if you've written anything on that precise topic then the collective would love to have it on the blog
yeah not really, but i mean
yeah not really, but i mean it's not just a question of "yuppie health food stores" but the concept of a question of a /total/ system managed in a cybernetic and largely decentralized fashion. for instance, the production process was once supposed to be concealed by the commodity's aura, now it's part of it. that's a pretty health food store type example though. but likewise i think the mystique of the commodity is now not just about fulfillment through consumption thereof, which i think everyone realizes is pointless and impossible, but to be more and more selling 'experiences' and 'lifestyles'. an identity which itself functions as a commodity in a social market. a holistic experience which kind of parallels the way that green capitalism means a capitalism that takes all its possible resources into account, as well as the increasingly total informatization and surveillance of basically everything. this is all relevant to an age in which the center of gravity of the capitalist valorization process, and thus of the means of social domination, has shifted from production to circulation.
"We shall not have succeeded
"We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings."
- Alfred Jarry
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