Amerikanische pic.twitter.com/YnGDBXrBAP
— Bravo Johnson (@BravoJohnson5) June 16, 2021
Category: Uncategorized
It Can’t Never Happen Here
Memes
https://x.com/BravoJohnson5/status/1400184297294761985
Robota
Air Conditioned Prose (Weapons of the Weak)
Air Conditioned Prose Writers:
Hipsters in air-conditioned universities cuttin’ up Scott’s “Weapons” like discount sushi, twistin’ it into a weapon against the very resistance it documents. Bullshit. Scott wasn’t peddling resignation, man, he was unveiling the roach motel of power. The weak ain’t sheep. They’re cockroaches scuttling through the cracks, pissing on the carpet of control. This refers to critics who analyze social issues from a position of privilege, potentially overlooking the realities faced by those they study.
Weaponizing WotW Against Itself:
This suggests some critics twist Scott’s ideas to downplay the agency of the weak.
Thick vs. Thin WotW:
Thick WotW:
That’s the real deal. The peasants ain’t gonna storm the castle with pitchforks, they’re gonna steal a loaf here, a chicken there, plant a seed of dissent in the master’s head while he sleeps. A slow, grinding resistance, a million tiny cuts with a rusty knife. They don’t overthrow the system, they gum up the works, make it cough and sputter. This aligns with Scott’s original argument. Subordinate groups, like peasants, may engage in subtle, everyday forms of resistance that challenge the existing power structure. They might not overthrow the system, but they can undermine it and carve out spaces of agency within it. This “thick” version emphasizes a more active and strategic resistance. The score’s rigged, man. The weak ain’t sheep waiting for slaughter. They fight back, a million tiny cuts with rusty shivs. Feigned illness to dodge the bossman’s drudgery. A sly joke that unravels authority like a bad stitch. It’s a guerilla war in the margins, a silent scream against the machine.
Thin WotW:
that’s the academic hustle. These cats take Scott’s insights and turn them into a downer trip. The weak just lie down and take it, they say. Bullshit again. The weak ain’t passive, they’re playing a long game, a game the air-conditioned cats wouldn’t understand even if it bit them on their skinny asses. They see resignation, we see resistance. We see the system getting undermined from the bottom up, a million tiny acts of rebellion that chip away at the foundations. This criticizes those who use Scott’s ideas to argue that the weak must simply accept their situation. They might downplay the forms of resistance Scott highlights, focusing only on how the powerful maintain control through a veneer of legitimacy. This “thin” version emphasizes a more passive acceptance of the status quo.
Consent vs. Resignation: Forget consent, man. The weak ain’t buying the script. They’re playing their own game, a game of survival and subversion. They might not win, but they damn sure ain’t going out without a fight. They’re the virus in the system’s bloodstream, and it’s only a matter of time before the fever breaks. The “thick” version suggests a more nuanced view. The weak might not explicitly consent to the system, but they navigate it through everyday acts of resistance. The “thin” version paints a bleaker picture, implying the weak are simply resigned to their fate.
These armchair revolutionaries, they miss the point. It ain’t about waving red flags or storming the Bastille. It’s the everyday hustle, the sly defiance whispered in the roach motel bathroom. The thick version, dig? The weak ain’t buying the script the suits are selling. They’re hacking the system, bending it to their own twisted ends.
MAP AND TERRITORY
MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE REDUX
EPISODE 4
Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
— Werner Heisenberg
If territory is a concept, the question would be: what is the problem to which it answers? Territory: An area of of phase space under the jurisdiction of a certain temporality. A concept is a way to organize a set of patterns that would otherwise remain chaotic. Concepts are not given as part of the universe, nor are they sitting waiting to be discovered in some Platonic world of Ideas. Rather, they are invented and maybe later ossify into “common sense”
“On Exactitude in Science” Borges writes about a fictional empire so adept at cartography that they are able to make a map of the exact size and dimensions of the Empire but when but when future generations lose interest in mapmaking the massive maps decay and litter the empire. Jean Baudrillard used Borge’s fable to illustrate what he saw as the inversion of the relationship between models (copies) and reality.
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory. Territorial refers to the issue of individuality as an entity, identity, be it a person or a location or something else. If the territory you are familiar with is crossed by other people, the space would be crossed by different maps. There is not one map that stands out and defines space. Or is there?
We are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not. Scribbling on the map does not change the territory: If you change what you believe about something that is a change in the pattern of neurons in your brain. The real thing will not change because of this.
“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”
~ Jeff VanderMeer
Korzybski’s Quest
Alfred Korzybski was a Polish-Polish engineer and war veteran. He wrote the source book for the field of study we know as General Semantics. He was haunted by his war experiences and asked how it is that humans have progressed so far but still fight wars. He believed that the progress of the sciences has not kept pace with the pace of human progress. His work is concerned with the role of language and language habits in human behavior.
Korzybski’s quest: What makes the human species human? What are the similarities among humans that differentiate us from other species? What accounts for the vast differences in behaviors that are exhibited among humans? Is it possible to characterize these vast differences such that we can more rapidly increase behaviors that advance and progress humanity?
What makes humans human? Time-binding
Plants as Chemistry-binders
Plants absorb, or bind, specific chemicals in their immediate environment. They reproduce cells and produce growth. Growth and reproduction are influenced by other environmental factors such as climate, gravity, and (of course) plant-eating animals and pollinating insects.
Animals as Space-binders
Animals possess (to varying degrees) the ability to move about in their environment. If the source of its food or water depletes, an animal can move to another place. Korzybski referred to animals as space-binders in that they ‘bind’ the spaces within their living territory.
The refrain TUNE WHISTLING/HUMMING
The Ritournelle has been translated in fact in English by refrain Deleuze, as, use an onomatopoeia in order to explain this word: “Tra la la” as a kid would hum.
When do I do Tralala ? When do I hum? I hum when I go around my territory…and that I clean up my furniture with a radiophonic background…meaning when I am at home. I also hum when I am not at home and that I am trying to reach back my home…when the night is falling, anxiety time…I look for my way and I give myself some courage by singing tralala. And, I hum when I say “Farewell, I am leaving and in my heart I will bring…”. The ritournelle (refrain), for me, is absolutely linked to the problem of territory, and of processes of entrance or exit of the territory. I enter in my territory, I try, or I deterritorialize myself, meaning I leave my territory.
The Ritournelle is therefore a form of incantation for a claimed spatiality,
Humans as Time-binders
The most critical difference between humans and animals is our ability to create, manipulate, record, and transform symbols. The ability to transfer knowledge from human to human, within and across generations, is called time-binding. Languages and other symbol systems provide humans with the means to document experiences, observations, tips, descriptions. Knowledge among the human species can therefore accumulate and advance as a body, not as random lessons taught and learned by copying, mimicking, or experience. All human achievements are cumulative; no one of us can claim any achievement exclusively as his own.
We all must use consciously or unconsciously the achievements of others, some of them living but most of them dead, to do greater things by help of things already done by others. It is this ability to ‘bind’ time that makes humans human, and is the defining capability of human time-binders. The capacity for accumulating experience, enlarging it, and transmitting it for future expansion is the peculiar power, the characteristic energy, the definitive nature, the defining mark, of man.
The definition of’ territory’ evades simple categorization because it continuously transforms into something else. It does not privilege or preserve any particular homeland’s nostalgic or xenophobic protection.
The territorial codings between and across certain bird species and their environments are carried over into the music in the use of birdsong. In response to these pressures, musicians have tried to open a space releasing “lines of flight” from the interdisciplinary territories in the hope of connections and new productions. The work of Olivier Messiaen, who used birdsong in his works from about 1955 onwards, linked birdsong to the piano in a way that transformed the domain of the musical instrument
The evolution of life is not about the survival of the fittest through cutthroat competition in conditions of ecological scarcity, but about self differentiating life overflowing with experimental self-organizing forms. For Deleuze, contracting habits was a way of creating order out of chaos. Habits are constitutive of the subject, not expressions of it.
A truly human existence involves overcoming habit, moving from mechanical repetition to creative repetition. Repetition is either conservative or is it creative, he says. In jazz, improvisational jazz, one hazards an improvisation, to join with the world. The idea of repeating with a difference is one of the defining features of improvisation in jazz.
Repetition is in one case a reparative reaction to trauma, a compulsive repetition of the same while the other repetition is a creative response to some of life’s little complexities. What Deleuze would call creative repetition or repetition with a difference
The territory is a multiplicity of partial objects that must be brought together or combined in order to create something that will never be completely stable in itself. To improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. It is only through the expansion of territory that an identity takes form. Without it, one would be in a static milieu, crystallized:
Territory is a part of phase space and is not granted, but created, the territory itself is structured by some kind of repetition of forms of behavior and their function. In both situations it will be a sequence in of markings, or signs, postures, gestures etc. which will be in both situations.
Multi-territoriality is based on deterritorialization. It disrupts existing modes of meaning, wiping out crystallised individuals, de-substantializing jobs and rewriting history. The territory must have an outside, and there must be a way out of it. This creates an illusion of autonomy where the laws become flexible, but this redistribution of power also puts us all the more under the influence of other territorialities rather than only liberating us. TERRITORIALIZATION
The word ‘ territorialization’ was inspired by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For Lacan,’ territorialization’ refers to the way an infant’s body is structured around and defined by erogenous zones and their relations with part-objects. As the infant undergoes a process of territorialisation its orifices and organs are conjugated. In the psychoanalytic sense, to deterritorialise is to free desire from libidinal investment.
This reconfiguration of Lacanian ‘territorialisation’ is that the subject is exposed to new organisations; the principal insight being: deterritorialisation shatters the subject.
LINES OF FLIGHT
Deleuze and Guattari would rather consider things not as objects, but as groups or multiplicities, concentrating on events rather than static essences. Music’s purpose is to facilitate a’ phase’ in which flight lines can be released within these numerous interdisciplinary territories to communicate with each other. The capitalist class attempts to control and submit to the reproduction of capital all of the mechanisms of deterritorialization in the order of production and social relations.
In this respect it must not be viewed in a negative way, it is not the polar opposite of territorialization or reterritorialized. It is not a reversal of the territorialization of the territory, but the formation of new combinations of the elements that made up the original territory. It can best be understood as a movement producing change, in so far as it operates as a line of flight, and indicates the creative potential of an assemblage. Philosophy is an example of absolute Deterritorialization, capital is a relative example.
GENERAL SEMANTICS:
What accounts for the differences in mapping: Evaluating
Korzybski knew from first-hand experience in World War I that human mapping did not always result in “improvement” or “greater things” Because people can expect to experience the ‘same’ event or situation differently, their reactions to the experience will inevitably be different. So in assessing the differences in human behaviors, Korzybski theorized that these differences were matters of evaluation, that is mapping, due to the different meanings that individuals attached to events and experiences, based on their own individual values.
Korzybski published his time-binding theory in Manhood of Humanity in 1921. For two years he observed patients at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washinton, D.C. He observed the language of the mentally ill, specifically how in many instances their language (maps) did not match the ‘real’ world (territory), which reflected pathological cases of misevaluation. He specifically sought a way to articulate and communicate how a misevaluation differed operationally from an appropriate evaluation.
The Map|Territory Analogy
Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by [Josiah] Royce (Korzybski, 1994, p. 58).
1. The map is not the territory.
A map depicts only limited aspects of the territory it represents or symbolizes. For a map to be useful, it must accurately reflect the relative structure or relationships of the key features of the territory. Similarly, our language behaviors can be thought of as maps of our actual life experiences. These verbal expressions of how and what we think, feel, react, judge, assume, etc., should be in accordance with the ‘territory’ . And on a pre-verbal level, we can use the metaphor to remember that even our lived experiences — what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, etc. — are neurological constructs (‘maps’) of whatever it is in the ‘real’ world outside ourselves.
- The word is not the thing.
- The symbol is not the thing symbolized.
- The name is not the thing named.
- The referent is not the thing referenced.
In other words, a particular type of distinction is expressed: one thing is not the same thing as another thing which the one thing is represented by. More generally, an abstraction is not that from which the abstraction is abstracted. The map (an abstraction) is not the territory ( whatever is not an abstraction; but hold that thought until the summary of this page).
2. The map cannot show all of the territory.
Maps are limited in size and detail. They can only depict selected items of interest or importance. Our language behaviors are limited and cannot include or comprehend all of whatever we are trying to describe or understand. On a pre-verbal level, the maps of what we are seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling account for only a fraction of what exists in the territory of the ‘real’ world.
3. A map is self-reflexive and made by a map-maker.
A human being makes a map by deciding the purpose of the map, the size, the scale, the features to be included, how many copies will be made, who will use it, the colors, etc. We are making our own maps (evaluations) of our experiences, and we can also then evaluate our evaluations. In language, since we can almost endlessly talk about our talking, we are in a sense making maps of maps, of maps of Maps, etc..
In deciding all those details, the human map maker must also determine which features will not be included, which might be exaggerated or emphasized for importance, what descriptive annotations might be helpful. And if the map-maker were constructing a map of the territory which surrounded the map-maker herself, then a theoretically-complete map would include both the map itself and the map-maker.
Abstracting-Evaluating
Abstracting, in the context of Korzybski’s model, refers to physio-neurological processes that occur on non-verbal and verbal levels. From the world of energy stimulations that envelope us, our nervous systems abstract (or select, choose, pay attention to, etc.) only a fraction. From these partial, incomplete, and fleeting sensations, the nervous system must construct our conscious or aware experiences by matching patterns of stimuli with the brain’s ‘database’ of previous experiences.
Evaluating is used in much the same way as abstracting, although you could consider it a higher-level, more generalized term in that we can cognitively evaluate the abstractions that result from our abstracting.
Abstracting by necessity involves evaluating, whether conscious or not, and so the process of abstracting may be considered as a process of evaluating stimuli, whether it be a “toothache,” “an attack of migraine,” or the reading of a “philosophical treatise.” A great many factors enter into “perceiving” … (Korzybski, 1990b, pp. 686–687)
Abstraction process: Structural Differential
Alfred Korzybski developed this diagram in the 1920’s as a means to visualize the abstracting process. The parabola represents an environment (the world around us) consisting of innumerable characteristics or events. Only some of these characteristics can be detected by human senses. These initial sensory data are further abstracted and transformed as the nervous system/brain recognizes and associates the data with a word or label. The tag below the circle represents the Descriptive (verbal) level of abstracting.
From descriptions of events we form inferences, assumptions, opinions, beliefs, etc., by generalizing this experience with our past experiences. And we can continue, indefinitely, to forming ferences from inferences,. which may then be subsequently recalled in future experiences.
Abstracting
Something happens (Event);
I sense what happens (Object);
I recognize what happens (Description);
I generate meanings for what happens. (Inferences)
Abstracting refers to ongoing physio-neurological processes that occur on non-verbal levels. EVENT is not OBJECT is not DESCRIPTION is not INFERENCE, etc. We can verbally differentiate certain phases, or levels or orders, of the abstracting process to analyze our behaviors and reactions. What we experience is a function of the unique capabilities and limitations of our own individual nervous system.
Two Worlds
As a consequence of our abstracting-evaluating processes, you can say we live in two worlds — the world that exists out there beyond our skin, and the world in here within our skin. What each of us knows about the world out there is constructed by our in here nervous systems based on our individual sensory interactions with the world out there.
Summarizing
A. We need to acknowledge and take into account the characteristics of these two worlds.
B. We need to understand that even our most basic sense experiences of the out-there world are created by our brains.
C. We need to maintain awareness, and take responsibility, for the neurological fact of this foundational distinction — what we experience in here is not what’s out there to be experienced.
In Korzybski’s terminology, we need to maintain a consciousness of abstracting, beginning with the understanding that everything we experience represents an abstraction of something else. In a very real sense, all we can ‘know’ are abstractions and associated neurological constructions.
… we used and still use a terminology of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, both extremely confusing, as the so-called ‘objective’ must be considered a construct made by our nervous system, and what we call ‘subjective’ may also be considered ‘objective’ for the same reasons (Korzybski, 1990c, p.650).
Identification
In General Semantics, the behavior we label identification is normally to be avoided, or at least recognized. We allow the stimulus to determine our response, without deliberately or conditionally evaluating the stimulus. Examples of identification include: mistaking the word as the thing, or the map as the territory. An extreme example would be someone eating a menu because the pictures of the food look so tasty. Someone who eats an unfamiliar food, then later has a rather upsetting reaction when informed what the food was, isn’t reacting to the food. The person is reacting to the sound of the name of the food. The verbalized name is associated (identified) with a previous or imagined terrible experience and that drives the reaction. The author was responding to a negative review on Amazon.com of a plastic product made by a company called Steelmaster. This, even though the reader acknowledged the product was described as being made of plastic.
BIOLOGY AND THE UMWELT
If we approach territoriality from the perspective of biology, we can use the understanding of territory advanced by the ethologist Jakob von Uexküll. Von Uexküll proposed that there is no meaning outside of a milieu (Umwelt). For him a ‘territory’ refers to a specific milieu that cannot be separated from the living thing occupying and creating the milieu, so that the meaning of a milieu for Von Uexküll is affective.
NOMADICISM
The origin of the word ‘nomad’ is not, as many have assumed, a romanticized image of actual nomadic peoples, such as the Bedouins, but rather Immanuel Kant’s disparaging claim that the outside of philosophy is a wasteland fit only for nomads. The immediate origin of the concept would seem to be Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the despot in L’Anti-Oedipe (1972), translated as Anti-Oedipus (1977). The despot is an intermediate figure between the primitive society without a state on the one hand and the so-called civilized imperial state on the other.
What is crucial about the concept , however, is the fact that in Deleuze and Guattari’s description it refers to a latent state of being, meaning it is virtual and presupposed, but never actual. The figure of the nomad stands for the power of the virtual, or what they call the war machine. The nomad is a tendency towards deterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari argue, that can be found to some degree in all phenomena. Their project consists in identifying this tendency wherever it can be located and finding ways of amplifying it. A philosophy would be a great philosophy, not if it could be placed within a specific and limited territory of reason (such as a correct and consistent logic) but if it maximized what philosophy could do and created a territory: creating concepts and styles of thought that opened up new differences and paths of thinking.
The signifier holds no sovereignty over interpretation in this account, for intensity of experience is more important than meaning. The signifier is not the determinant of what is signified, for the significations of the text change with the placement of the text in context.
In this sense, nomadic space is smooth-not because it is undifferentiated, but because its differences are not those of a chessboard (cut in advance, with defined movements); the differences establish positions and lines by movement.
A tribe dreams about, crosses and dances a space and thus fills the territory from within; the real territory — the material extension held by this tribe which could then be measured and quantified — would be different from (and dependent on) the abstract, nomadic territory, for if the tribe went on, danced and dreamed elsewhere, the original territory would have been already there.
And if the first territory was crossed by other people, the space would be crossed by different maps. There is not one map that stands out and defines space. Or is there?Ric Amurrio
Aliens in the Cave
In Werner Herzog’s documentary film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” he explores the discovery of the Chauvet Cave in France, which contains some of the oldest known cave paintings in the world, dating back over 30,000 years. Herzog draws a comparison between the experience of exploring the cave and the hypothetical discovery of extraterrestrial artifacts, in that the images in the cave seem to belong to a familiar but distant universe, and can evoke powerful emotional and psychological responses in those who experience them.
Additionally, the level of technical skill and artistry displayed in the cave paintings suggests that they were not just simple representations of reality, but rather complex and sophisticated works of art. This level of skill and sophistication implies a deeper understanding of the world and its workings, and could be seen as evidence of an ultimate truth or reality that transcends any one specific cultural or religious tradition.
Herzog also notes that the experience of exploring the cave can be a profound and transformative experience for those who visit, evoking powerful emotions and memories that seem to come from a distant past. One scientist interviewed in the film describes having overpowering dreams during his first visit to the cave, and Herzog describes the paintings as “memories from long forgotten dreams.”
Overall, Herzog’s comparison between the Chauvet Cave and the hypothetical discovery of extraterrestrial artifacts highlights the power of art to evoke a sense of wonder and mystery, and the importance of preserving and studying our cultural heritage.
Plato’s Cave
In Plato’s allegory, the cave represents the world of appearances, where humans are chained and forced to perceive only the shadows on the cave wall, which they mistake for reality. The outside world, which represents the world of true knowledge and enlightenment, is represented by the sun.
Similarly, the Chauvet Cave can be seen as representing a hidden world of ancient art and culture, which was unknown to modern humans until its discovery. The cave paintings can be seen as representations of a deeper reality that was previously hidden from view, much like the outside world in Plato’s allegory.
It could be argued that the Chauvet Cave paintings are in fact representations of an ultimate truth or reality, and that this truth is not necessarily tied to any one specific purpose, such as religious or cultural expression. Overall, while the meaning and interpretation of the Chauvet Cave paintings may be debated, there is evidence to suggest that they represent a deeper reality or truth that is not tied to any one specific purpose or tradition, and that this truth has the potential to transcend time and culture.
DMT
There are some interesting parallels that could be drawn between the Chauvet Cave paintings and the DMT experience, particularly in relation to the idea of encountering a deeper reality or truth.
During a DMT experience, users report intense visual and auditory hallucinations that are often described as otherworldly or mystical. These experiences can include encounters with entities, landscapes, and dimensions that are beyond the normal realm of human experience. Many users describe feeling as if they have encountered a deeper reality or truth, one that is not accessible through normal sensory perception.
Similarly, the Chauvet Cave paintings could be seen as a means of accessing a deeper reality or truth that is not accessible through everyday experience. The paintings depict animals and landscapes in a way that suggests a profound understanding of the world and its workings, and their technical skill and artistry suggest that they were not just simple representations of reality, but rather complex and sophisticated works of art.
In both cases, the experience of encountering a deeper reality or truth is often accompanied by a sense of awe and wonder, as well as a feeling of connection to something greater than oneself. This connection may be seen as evidence of a deeper reality or truth that transcends time and culture, and has the potential to unite individuals across vast distances and differences.
Transreal-CyberPunk
Structural Arrogance
This “structural arrogance” you speak of, it ain’t pride, it’s a concrete maze, a self-licking loop where power postures as petrified monuments. These suits, these cogs in the status machine, they gotta puff out their chests, gotta wear their damn importance like a poorly tailored exoskeleton. Why? Because the whole damn edifice, this social skyscraper, wobbles on a foundation of perception.
This “structural arrogance,” it ain’t just a stiff upper lip and a monocle, oh no. It’s a writhing, insectoid carapace, chitinous and cold. It’s the system, see, a vast, pulsating organism built on the backs of the down-trodden. And this arrogance, it’s the psychic glue that holds the whole damn monstrosity together.
These status quo suits, they puff up their chests, pronouncements dripping from their reptilian smiles. They speak in a language of acronyms and legalese, a code designed to exclude, to baffle, to keep the rubes at bay. They cling to their corner offices like molting crabs, convinced their polished mahogany fortresses are the pinnacle of existence.
But the joke’s on them, really. This arrogance, it breeds a kind of social rigor mortis. They become ossified, calcified in their own self-importance. They gotta convince you, gotta convince themselves, that they’re the gargoyles guarding the gates of legitimacy. Their pronouncements become pronouncements from on high, booming pronouncements dripping with jargon, a language so convoluted it becomes a mantra to ward off the chaos of new ideas. Questions? Heresy! Innovation? A monstrous termite gnawing at the baseboards of their precious power.
It’s a word game, a shell game, a vast conspiracy whispered through smoke-filled boardrooms. They throw up these walls of structure, these bureaucratic pyramids, to keep the outsiders at bay, the ones who see the cracks in the facade. They ain’t maintainin’ no status, they’re maintainin’ a goddamn illusion, a flimsy scrim over the abyss.
This arrogance, it’s a double-edged scalpel. It may prop them up, but it also isolates them. They become trapped in their own sterile air-conditioned hellscapes, blind to the simmering discontent just outside their gilded cages.
And that discontent, my friend, that’s the buzzing of awakened minds. It’s the tremor in the earth before the earthquake. It’s the hungry, feral glint in the eyes of those who see through the facade.
So let them puff up their chests, these architects of structural arrogance. Let them play their power games in their airless vacuums. Because the cracks are already there, spiderwebbing across the edifice. And one day, the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down, not with a bang, but with a Burroughs-esque, mind-b
Hyposubjects
By Timothy Morton
1 hyperobjects, narcissism, white boys, looping, teenagers, toys, games, squats, gut bacteria.
We live in a time of hyperobjects, of objects too massive and multi-phasic for humans to fully comprehend. Many of the hyperobjects that concern us have human origins. For example, global warming.
A certain kind of human has helped usher the world into the hyper- objective era. Hypersubjects wield reason and technology as instruments for getting things done. They command and control, they seek transcendence, they get very high on their own supply.
There is no time for hypersubjection any more. It is hyposubjectivity rather than hypersubjective that will become the companion of the hyperobjective era
The road to our present condition is paved with mastery of things, people and creatures. We have weird faith in our species’ alleged ability to always know more and better. We wonder whether that sense of weakness and insignificance is actually what needs embracing.
Like their hyperobjective environment, hyposubjects are multiphasic and plural, not-yet, neither here nor there, less than the sum of their parts. They do not pursue or pretend to absolute knowledge and language let alone power. Instead they play, they care, they adapt,
Can you imagine what it’s like being in Generation Z? As much as I dislike PR advertising labels, I’m fond now of being an X-er. X is a high scoring letter in Scrabble, for a kickoff. And the X implies something fun and foolish about one’s parents, the Boomers
Fail better and fail often.
When I turn the ignition, that’s a statistically meaningless action. But at the same time, scaled up to earth magnitude — we’re talking about billions of key turnings every few minutes, — I am contributing to global warming.
A hyposubject is how a hyperobject feels about itself.
We humans have a “massive, narcissistic attachment to our own sense of distinctiveness as a species” “We are the ones who may have gotten ourselves into the Anthropocene but we’re also the saviors, the only ones who are going to get us out of this situation”
There is no one narcissism, and there is not narcissism versus non-narcissism. So Derrida argues that there are in fact many different narcissisms and the idea would be to try to extend one’s narcissism to include as many humans and nonhumans as possible.
Wounded narcissism sees itself as the top of the food chain. Once you know that an agricultural project that was doomed within a few hundred years of its beginning, like neoliberalism, you have a narcissistic wound.
In other words, one of the ways we get towards hypo- subjectively accommodating ourselves to hyperobjects is through some kind of rapprochement with narcissism. If you destroy the narcissistic relation, you destroy in advance any possibility of relation to the other.
Because in a certain sense, narcissism is a feedback loop to yourself and the only way to work through hyperobjects, most honestly and least violently, would be underneath or within
One of the complaints about ecological politics is that the Nazis thought it up. Are we going to do something even more violent, to achieve a way to relate to these big-scale entities? Is it possible to go to a place which is more playful, maybe, or open.
I don’t want to stay in tragedy mode forever. Not just because it sucks, but because it’s a symptom of the problem that we’ve been in, that we find ourselves caught in the headlights of our own doings.
We face the unenviable challenge of, while still hallucinating madly, trying to disrupt our current pleasuring loops, because those loops now have produced catastrophic oscillations as scaled up to the planetary level.
Even Neanderthals, would have loved Coca-Cola Zero. We use resistance in the classic way: ‘I’m not a consumerist. This has to be the age of squatting and occupation of the hyper-objective terrain. It’s not resistance in a typical literal, political way, speaking truth to power.
I doubt that speakingtruth to power will be enough to disrupt our hyperobjective condition. Playing is the hyposubjective qualities we need to maintain and to nurture. Also to realize that we’re all hypocrites, with incomplete toys at the political, philosophical, psychic levels.
The technocratic character of much of the resistance discourse and apparatus at our disposal, makes the future feel very forlorn. Even if it were to win, would you want to live in that world?
The question is more, what kinds of toys are we going to fit to other toys? We have a lot of toy making wedded to a particular kind of Taylorist, Fordist industrial apparatus. That abundance of mass-marketed toys, and not just games of monopoly, but also all the epistemic toys
Gameification, is a constant reinvestment in the way things are. The intolerable way things are. It’s saying that this particular neoliberal model isn’t a toy, it’s the toy factory. You can play with all the toy, as long as you don’t make the factory into a toy, and change that.
In order to make things that the corporations want, engineers have to make a lot of toy things. And then the corporation decides this toy is not a toy, it’s our product. That’s the bit that sucks for engineers, in the same way than for the humanist as someone who just toys around
prototypes can also be fun. They can be mischievous. They can be uncertain and incomplete. And in that way I think they’re more toy-like. Squat the hyperobject. That’s the new t-shirt that everybody has to wear.
II ooo, dasein, bananas, phenomenology, children’s books, space movies, revolutionary infrastructure, micronauts
The notion of us being possibly extinct has become quite clear. The work of the hyposubject is precisely to find a better way of inhabiting a world of hyperobjects we live in. You have to think of a clever way of playing with them, as opposed to seen them as demonic
Object-oriented Ontology OOO is an approach to phenomenology that looks at the place of the subject in relation to objects. In the phenomenological tradition, subjects are always very present, the necessary ego. Can we connect hyposubjects to the tradition of phenomenology?
OOO is a school of thought that rejects the “anthropocentrism” of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. In object-oriented ontology, all relations between objects distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness, and exist on an equal footing with one another
“OOO” is an un-alienated theory of the subject. A hyposubject is in a way someone who can tell they’re intrinsically un-Alienated. “A shrimp sandwich is a thing that happened to some shrimp. It means you don’t have to prove that lemurs have a self-concept
The word hyposubject and also the word object are that they imply terms borrowed from Aristotle that might be part of the problem. We don’t have to make everything be one to get rid of the subject/ object dualism. Instead we have a kind of duality at every place in the universe.
A book we might talk about is How Forests Think. I really love the idea of networks of things communicating indexically. But there are ways without even being indexical. We don’t generate new concepts as a matter of will or insight but rather we are being infused by new condition
Play suggests that isn’t just about the darkest images and concepts we are capable of conjuring. There’s an opening bifurcated now into a) hypersubjective titan form. We are now realizing that our titan form has accomplished a path of acceleration toward planetary extinction.
Extinction logistics reaching a kind of almost perfect functioning, that if left to continue, would within the next hundred years quite happily wipe out 50% of all life forms on the planet. Humans too would be part of that.
For a moment everything has been mastered but it’s only an illusion. Suddenly the whole apparatus is shredded, by a chain of human actions gone awry. But that’s also a kind of perfect extinction fantasy, having sacrificed ourselves to unite with the deep inky infinite.
b) Whereas otoh, there is a new sort of potential human that’s being awakened here that hasn’t figured out what it can do yet or what its responsibilities and entitlements and ethics can be — but what it does know is that it is not the mega. That one certainty of ID: “that’s not me
III global village, dyslocation, right wing fantasies, finance capital, speculative realism, downloads, bliss-horror, role-playing games
History has a tendency to proceed as a discipline based on prepackaged theoretical constructs that are unexamined. So, you know: ‘human beings evolved, and made all the other ones extinct’ That’s the ultimate dream of the old school humanism: I can keep on transcending myself.
In other words, Sapiens. The word itself, suggesting that the human is what he is thinking: canny, wise — that’s why we beat the Neanderthals. It’s an old-school story: ‘we were able to see around corners that they couldn’t see around.’
I worry that if ecological discourse means progressing into an ever more democratic future with an eighteenth- century way of picturing things, not adjusting to the Anthropocene and the philosophy that weirdly goes along with it, then I never want to be in that future.
I was just reading John Stuart Mill, and liberty sounds very wonderful until you realize that children don’t get it, that women probably won’t get it, and that everyone living outside civilized Europe gets “benevolent despotism.” Mill worked for the British East India Company
Children get it another way, by being forced into chimneys and machines. Yes. So there is an era that produces these discourses on the human, on liberty, on freedom. And these are very much the engines of the beginnings of what becomes today’s order, already naturalizing violence
Revolutions are all wedded to mega-level industrial programs, needing mega-levels of energy to power enormous productive apparatuses. It’s not about the globalized proletariat seizing back use value production, so much as pervasive creative squatting within the grid/ road world
So much of our thinking is warped by the long inefficient supply chains of fossil and nuclear energy that empower centralized governments but force the rest of us to pay rent for their inefficiencies.
Grid engineers hate solar energy because they see it as parasitic and weird and intermittent. They view renewable energy as a virus in the grid world, endangering the health and stability of the system. But it’d dawning on us that the grid doesn’t matter so much any more
Part of the unthinkability of moving against the trajectory of the Anthropocene is this idea that we must always continue to supply the grid of reinforcing the hypersubject-hyperobject death drive loop.
That’s the problem with Marxist-Leninism. It wants the fires to burn just as brightly as before. A kind of Hegelianism where you say, ‘go to the top level, and then you change the totality, then everything will be different at successively lower levels.’
The reality of “globality” has become inhibiting in political speech. This supposed abstract global has turned into another kind of local, only really, really big. There have been postmodern ways of saying what we’re saying right now, but now is when it really happens
Maybe the Euclidean worldview just can’t be sustained anymore. The attempt to build a nice stable little fantasy home and hearth in the middle of a torrent of finance capital, multinational corporations, new kinds and intensities. Dislocations multiply.
Not dislocation, but malocation, the idea that location is a little bit sinister. My locatedness isn’t good. It’s all dislocation but this dislocation is dys-location. It’s not that I find myself nicely cozily here, and then it’s all disrupted.
It’s that I find myself rather sinisterly here. I’m on a planet. And it’s this planet and not that planet. And this planet retroactively affects all its sub-regions. So one of the problems for the hyposubject is this feeling of dyslocation.
Dislocation from an Americanized 50s fantasy space, while neglecting the great public infrastructures that the New Deal built — the roads, the bridges, the dams — all these mobility and energy infrastructures that a certain mode of nation-statehood was built upon.
Atst it invested rather heavily in global telecom infrastructure and the Internet, which in turn created the possibility for finance as hyperobject. It’s not that the local has died. It’s that the local has metastasized and that the universal has died or is in serious condition
This metastasis of the local and neoliberalism leads to an increasing appetite for these fantasies of national purity and extra-national invasive species. But to the extent that a lot of people believe in the fantasy, one must take it seriously. It’s a certain kind of real.
Fascists aren’t how they used to be. Which might be a symptom of the emergence of hyposubject and dyslocation. Even fascism has to change so that it isn’t about blood and soil. It’s some kind of weird smell of leather and a barbecue in suburbia. That doesn’t mean it’s nicer
I’m horrified by my reason, and my reason itself is horrifying, and instead of soaring into the heaven, I’m rubbernecking my inclusion in the Cthulhu-like multipodal abyss of horror. “I have to invent a big global force that is oppressing me in order to comfort myself”
Strangely, it’s comforting to imagine that I’m a little sucker on the tentacle of Cthulhu. Rather than imagining that I’m an agent in a world of agents, with the interminable task of getting along with one another that’s actually more irksome, irritating and draining of my libido
If a tiny thing that I do brings this extremely negative orgasm of bliss-horror into my world — destructive, incandescent — I am actually inhibiting the ways in which I could imagine plugging my libido into other stuff like putting solar panels on the roof…
With the pursuit of bliss-horror, we deflect ourselves from investing in ideas and behaviors that would actually, at a mass level, make a difference. The reason to act is that you’ve done something wrong. And then eventually you realize, the reason to act is because I am wrong.
I become horrified by my own horrible stuff. Horror is one level below shame. It’s more phenomenologically accurate and it’s more compelling than the shame of being a human who doesn’t even recycle or whose recycling efforts are haphazard.
To my mind, gaming is not only a place not for fantasy and experiment but also a place for the training of the imagination to work across scales and phases and locations. Gaming is how the hyposubject can learn and extend its abilities.
Game ideation is a place where unexpected thoughtlines can begin to develop. Sure, gaming has social institutional structure, we all know that. But it’s something to be taken seriously. Clearly, corporations are taking it seriously.
The whole phenomenon of gamification where you have to allow the libido of the corporation to leech itself off of you, to penetrate you, to that extent where not only must you work really hard and look like you’re enjoying your work, but actually really enjoy it, for real.
When you think about technologies of the self that are widely available, and that attract people through their sheerly ludic qualities — even when they aren’t actually sure of what it is they’re attracted to — then you have to think about games.
So it became more of an improvised performance, and the game master essentially operated as a storyteller, setting up a mystery that could be explored through the game play. The thing is, the beasts were so — Absurd. Absurd, but also deadly. Absurdly deadly.
The Cthulhu mythos (game)was about the possibility of encountering something of a radically different scale and significance that would leave you utterly transformed. It was a experience of messianic time. Not just slogging through linear time, getting a loot and then gtfo
In D&D terms the Lovecraft monsters had -20 charisma, which basically meant that when you saw them, you would go completely round the bend. I think we should push hard on the idea that hyposubjectivity offers very fertile ground for game-making and gamer-making.
If we’re living in a world where we’re being asked to inhabit these dreary political fantasies and games — the MAGA games — then why shouldn’t we be calling for a proliferation of new kinds of game that could take on those fantasies and work through them to unlock new possibilities?
IV subtraction, transcendence, excess, implosion, singularity, subscendence, unplugging, roombas
Is the concept of hyposubject robust enough to include the nonhuman? Must it necessarily include it? What I like about the notion of hyposubjects is that it feels subtractive. You take away some features of the subject, thus allowing it to percolate into other domains
Ray Kurzweil has proposed a remake of the classic idea that humans can use AI to upload themselves into the cloud. That we’re capable of transcending ourselves. That we’re hypersubjects like Heidegger’s idea of Dasein allows other beings to fall into its lawn-mowing path
Maybe the whole idea of hyposubjects is that we’re talking about beings that can’t actually transcend itself. A kind of Western agricultural mode, which remains one of our big problems, is a kind of dispositif, a paraknowledge regime.
It’s an elephant in the room that sucks other beings into its orbit, and disposes of them. It seems to me that the project is to think of a way to crawl out from under it rather than to transcend it, because transcendence is precisely the operational mode of agriculture.
Transcendence is a powerful and seductive fantasy. “We’re going to somehow transcend our material conditions. It’s exactly the same as when you talk to people invested in the oil and gas industry about technological breakthrough in carbon sequestration
The point being that even if that’s true, this is a moment in which to think otherwise. Even if we could push a button to make our problems go away, would we want to live in a world where the button-pushing is done by a massive oil corporation ran by a transcendence epistemic?
In a way, everything is shaping the world to its own ends. The problem being the philosophy behind the agrilogistics is, when scaled up to earth magnitude, obviously toxic to other life forms establishing a rigid boundary between what is inside and outside social space
We need to pay attention to the fact that we are interconnected with other beings. Ie, between cattle who die in genocidal industrial slaughterhouses and humans who are being driven to become refugees. Both are forms of life that are being extinguished by interrelated processes
We need to recognize and recover the enormous quantity of nonhuman and human labor that was required to constitute Modernity. That labor has been completely silenced and occluded behind institutional walls. We only hear about human invention and genius and breakthroughs.
We never hear about all the life that was orchestrated to make it happen, he says. “This is all about transcendence again. We can’t allow it to become an ontological reduction to a general category of life,”
No one physicist could possibly be in charge of CERN anymore, if at all, ever, he says. We can’t allow it to become an ontological reduction to a general category of life, a One that unites us all. If we’re all the same underneath, then it’s even easier to manipulate us.
Or maybe instead of thinking of ourselves as everything, we could think of ourselves as an enormous something that isn’t everything. All qualities we attribute to god are qualities of us that we’ve alienated. So, god is love means love is god, as John Lennon said.
A point about the Nietzschean übermensch is about what über means in German, it’s not ‘over;’ so ‘overman’ is the wrong translation. Über is more like a volcano whose lava is spilling outside of its crater. It’s a condition of excess so übermensch is the excessively human,
It’s the being that’s always already spilling outside of itself. There one also senses the deeper crypto-Hegelian trope of constant dialectical process in which becoming is always overwhelming being, always confronting it, negating it, leaving being
There’s an excess, but it’s not something that’s bursting out, but rather imploding. An imploded form of subjectivity is worth considering as an antidote. One that is denser, but also more aware of the architecture of its density and of the gravitational forces that hold it
What would it be if we weren’t beings who established our destiny.’ What if that wasn’t what being an entity consisted of. It would have to be thinkable along the lines, articulated in there. The notion of a multiplicity of physical qualities that can’t be reduced to,
Hyposubjects necessarily include nonhumans, because hyposubjectivity always has more in it than it itself. The whole is always less than the sum of its parts. Think of Houston, as megacity, is much less than the totality of all the houses and streets and pathways and sprawl t
The emphasis on knowledge, inevitably involves a new project of mastery and transcendence through incorporation. We’re very good at it. We’ve practiced it in many different modes for at least 12,500 years.
In the next ten years, something the size of a blood cell maybe will have an iPhone’s computing power. This going to involve an awful lot of rare Earth elements and electricity.The whole techno-fantasy is really about transcending the physical in the final analysis.
The transcendence narrative has to do with inhabiting some gridlike structure that’s much bigger than me, in a much better way, he says. White masculinity is just software loaded onto a machine, but it seems preferable to living as wetware.
Their idea of transcendence Is basically Christian millennial apocalypticism without the inconvenience of sin and redemption. Transcendence is not going to be a Terminator scenario.: It’s a sweet spot fantasy in which we have transcendence of the human without catastrophe
We already are part of intelligences that totally outstrips you. We’re surrounded by things that are much more clever than us, just by dint of being a part of a biosphere. This whole techno-fantasy is really about transcending the physical in the final analysis.
Whats scary about artificial intelligence being smarter than you is scary about women being more powerful than you. I suspect the whole singularity fantasy is a displaced reaction to feminism. And mortality and reproduction and children
The transcendence narrative inhabit some gridlike structure that’s much bigger than me, that enables me to be much more powerful “I’m going to wait until I’m as great as I can possibly be before I figure out what to do” And then, we’ll be able to look after the animals.
So here’s the politics of something we might call subscendence as opposed to transcendence. Dismantle the apocalypse. The important thing being not so much the content conveyed, but rather the energetic infrastructure itself.
The medium is the message so to speak
I try to subscend my fantasy of a perfect marriage between the misogynistically disembodied matrix and my power trip. That becomes an identification with the poor nonhuman beings, such as one’s own flesh, that have gone to the trouble of allowing me to think fantasies of myself
The insight is that a given concept set is actually ontologically smaller than the things it’s drawing a line around. Subscendence happens when a set of things begins to exit its concept and becomes its own entities.
What if neoliberalism (always one step ahead of you) its more like a T-Rex, a big, scary creature with tiny little arms that can easily topple over and become extinct. Bailing out could be ridiculously easy. 12,000 is a long time but it’s also not eternity
*12,000 years
One of the limits we are facing is that our inherited critical practice often wishes to offer a hyperobjective solution to a hyperobjective problem. Once upon a time what was going to save us was the proletariat. But the proletariat is a hyperobject if I’ve ever heard of one.
It’s the imagined holistic antidote to the generalization of bourgeois society on a global basis.
Marx never used the word “capitalism.” Not once. I don’t think he saw the society he opposed as being ontologically systemic or even whole. It was always about capital for him, which was the formalization, but diverse formalization, of productive activity.
In the 20th century meanwhile, from the 1930s onwards there’s such a strong influence of cybernetic and other electronic modes of thinking. The proposition of autopoietic systematicity is again the same holistic Ontology in a different costume.
Systematicity is a wholly death-driven and transcendent fantasy, which is the kind of Ontology this planet can no longer afford. It also reinforces a kind of paranoia that isn’t helpful, he says. It’s more like thinking about an algorithm.
You have these materials to do this thing and then you pay people just a little bit less for more work or ask a little bit more work for the same amount of money and that’s how you turn M into M’, right? It’s an algorithmic procedure.
But you can also imagine a different procedure that doesn’t sap the soil and the worker in the same way and which would thus cause the first algorithm to die on the vine.
There’s no need for this bleak sense that we’re all part of a system. Everything’s going to be co-opted in advance; all of our Resistance is futile.
Yes. All of our resistance is futile, and yet we’re going to resist anyway.
There’s a way of integrating the vulnerabilities that does not include the heroic savior which is another transcendental trick even to the point of paranoia about hypersubjects adopting the language of hyposubjects as a philosophical escape pod for the conditions they created
Desire is a product of, well-nourished types that by virtue of income need no fat storage. Desire is the nub of the problem. I want infinity in the infinity.
The trouble is that the psychoanalytic formulization of consumerism, also contains within it a kind of sadism. I can do anything because everyone is manipulable
A sugar high is apparently so potent that it was worth organizing a global apparatus of agriculture, slave labor and transportation to make it available on demand
The fantasy that I can do anything to anything is predicated on my always already being caught in a force field between me and at least one other entity that’s already doing something to me. The Coke bottle is hailing me.
Subscendence doesn’t necessarily mean that we want less food. In other words, pathologizing obese people is a like another kind of magic bullet/transcendent solution, like if we could just get rid of gluten! If we could take that out, the whole system would function smoothly.
Smooth functioning is itself a concept. And we keep on wanting smooth functioning to function smoothly. We want this idea that problems can be patched over. Even a lot of environmentalism seems to be saying: if we just fixed this one little thing, then we’ll be okay.
Ecological politics shouldn’t be about trying to make things function smoothly. The smooth functioning period of consumerism is called “need”. At some point we knew what we want, and we wanted what we knew. And then we started invent- ing new needs.
Then there was an excess and the system broke down, and now we have luxury products and desire. Consumerism didn’t invent desire; it’s logically prior. One task we have is to disentangle desire from the way it’s been captured by neoliberalism.
The inverse of obesity is the desire to look thin and muscular and blissfully free of fat which is then stored somewhere else. We need to recognize the material basis of pleasure and craving, the chemicals and neurotransmitters that are involved in the operation of desire.
There’s never enough of salt. It’s just that varying amounts of sodium across that barrier end up causing or inhibiting the flow of ions through the channel. There’s an off-switch in your brain for sugar. You don’t have an on-switch for salt
What is distinctive about the contemporary economy of pleasure is that it’s objective is apparently to stay in a pleasured state constantly, to stay as consistently high as possible, whether that’s through sugar or alcohol or a variety of pharmaceuticals
Fitness can participate in the same economy to the extent that one is chasing endorphin rushes there as well. What has changed is that there’s no longer oscillation, or when one comes down, you’re falling farther and faster than ever before.
So that is medicalized too, as “depression,” the retreat from pleasure, a pathological inability to get high despite the happy abundance of options. The unexpected byproduct of modern temporality is that now even wfh we expect the potentiation of pleasure at all time
A big part of the issue with the Anthropocene is how to deal with certain magnitudes of energy use. Consumerism is obviously part of that problem, with all those flights to Caribbean.
Subscendence helps by revealing that consumerism is filled with vacancies and those vacancies point toward a practice of squatting. Small and seemingly insignificant occupations that can reform our present conditions and relations in a less “catastrophogenic” direction
The challenge is creating spaces of intermediacy. We’re living in a culture of either immediacy or infinite postponement of gratification. The desire loop has to do with infinite desire and therefore infinite dissatisfaction + infinitesimal immediate gratification simultaneously
The rise of Fordism and Taylorism led to the domestication of a certain kind of machinic manual labor. By the 1970s it became obvious that that productive model compromised life and environment at every turn. Pressure mounted to send industry elsewhere, increasingly to Asia
Then we could enjoy the fruits of industrial productivity but not suffer negative environmental effects. What are good middle class subjects in the Global North going to do with themselves if they’re not working a factory job? And that dilemma created the “knowledge economy”
With fewer people working now, it truly reveals how capitalism is about exploitation of surplus labor time. Even leisure time is turning into labor now, especially with the Internet. The Internet started off in academia and the military and now it’s everybody.
Part of the fantasy was that our new interactive digital technologies and artificial intelligence have finally provided us with our long promised absolute leisure conditions. But of course we then discover that that leisure is empty and purposeless and filled with yearning.
The message being that it’s fine that what our actually-existing digital technologies did over the past thirty years was to recolonize our leisure time as forms of usually unwaged work. Patriarchy plus washing machines.
There’s so much maintenance. Maintaining machineries is what we’re about. Maybe not machines of iron but of silicon and electricity. Not to mention maintaining a smoothly functioning agrilogistical project.
At all costs, we have to keep the smooth functioning going, and we have to keep the smooth functioning of smooth functioning going. We want to believe that every bit of sand can be made a pearl.
tldr:
Hyposubjects is about the possibility of encountering something of a radically different scale and significance. It is about experience of messianic time (time of a ‘specific recognisability). Not just slogging through linear time, getting a loot and then gtfo