MANUALIS IN VACUO ( part 1: November 2019)
(intro with a soft hysteric undertone that you can skip but it offers a moody ambient as an entrance):
We don’t need to kick our own ass if we are peaceful beings. Sometimes in masked peace we will encounter situations that kick our ass in such ways, that we will necessarily respond. So the notion of ass kicking is not to take for granted as a necessary “lesson of life” itself ( oh how poetic ) but an implicit byproduct of (mh.. maybe ..?) Capitalism- for those of us that can’t help but being sensitive.
SO NO, these lesson are not meant to produce another product that masks and embodies the masked and embodied violence of a capitalist society.
That would mean to become the provider of a placebo of a lack. Rather TRY (and fail a million times since you swim against the stream to ) to respond to violence, by attempting to demask your environment.
Capitalist realism could also be called:
Me dying from you, you dying from me.
Is it a responsibility? Is there no alternative?
Is it a duty to provide for killing the other?
A force of nature of universe ☀️☀️☀️ that pretends to romanticise ONLY
Fake gardeners ( since they intervene in the virgin eco system), fake trees (since they pretend to be generous air recycler, but grow only high to overthrow their neighbour tree) , fake sunlight (since without light there would be no brain, but it provides skin cancer in exchange and depressive thoughts)- it seems to me that some basics of capitalism were never and option but always a rule. Seems we have to deal with some basics of being then:
May Darwin win. WIN WIN.
ONLY REAL COMPETITION.
Perma culture is another word for eternal life. Eternal life another word for paradise. Paradise another word for death. Let the middle age fetichism come back. Put your money on the after life.
Since you know better. You extinct.
FOR THOSE STILL ALIVE
When I encountered the void few years ago I made temporary peace with my sexual organ and declared infinite war to each and everyone maintaining psychological intactness in my direct environment. If you look closely, of course, there are not many left, to truly have an upright fight with anyhow ( most of us suffer anxiety, sleep disorder, depression already or still). But there are a lot of those, that for many apparent reasons keep up pretending to maintain psychological intactness. I may call this a coping mechanism.
All of you depressed, suicidal, frustrated, rebelling, confused- all of you are still standing (if you have not died yet) and all of you that did not give in yet even if deformed, distorted, disfigured by us- I love you and it is you I believe in - your depression is a poetic response to the madness around - your tears are thunders releasing tension within a field of human consciousness, completely corrupted in a cloud of dense ignorance of daily inattentiveness.
You are the absolute absolute absolute reason I can be hopeful. Every and each of your doubt is a holy grail, a guideline to paradise. Even if that means we won’t survive this, which we anyhow won’t.
When knifes smile to your wrist, balconies invite you to fall off from them, waters seduce you to drown, dreams are your only refuge, but sleep starts to become harder to reach, I have a single one and only solution!!!!!
1st. chapter:
Stay with your environment! STAY STAY STAY.
The remains of a sandwich lie on the ground of a public space. You can see the traces of the teeth that bit of the toast bread, ham and cheese in between. The quality is this cheap paper like bread that cannot really be called bread but is the dutch joke for nutrition. Still, the bread is not responsible for its own ridiculousness- I pity it for being such bread without any pride and respect for the history of bread. But as in pity lies always love, I cannot help but love it. I sincerely honour it for revealing to me the dishonour of those that are in charge of producing it, along side so many other breads, equally dishonoured.
The humiliated bread has its own pride because it is transparently showing to me all that is left of its former idea. And that is indeed very complex, validating and demasking a history of bread and capitalism, nutrition and mass production.
It has dignity by itself because each and every detail of the cosmos has dignity and respect, as long as being attended. It has dignity because it is. And it really is. It truly lies there on the ground, with its whole pride of being.
Some cheese and ham rest inside, or if you want, the elaboration of an idea of value of a cow in our un loyal society, hostile to animals, humans and plants, now presented in a sliced format that can fit perfectly the two bread pieces. Cutting edge technology towards how stupid one should become to grasp ones own nutrition in the manual sense and in the metaphorical one.
They became a temporary company of their own. They ended up being a small family of textures tracing history, half eaten and then thrown on the ground. There, on the ground that is a public space and supposed to be held clean by someone.
Here, someone else, that is not the cleaning personal, disrupted the order. We know the toast should not be there. But here it is, singing silently a song about hope.
Why and how to be hopeful about that sandwich?
Look at the details of the grains, the cheese, the bite trace. Look at what it wants to tell you. It becomes slightly comical, this revelation of dysfunctionality.
It is more than that, it is a real trace, that within the urban habitat, hints towards the fact, that there has been life here. A living thing, a prey for the hunter, which is the human. But first you have to understand what you are looking for, hunting. While looking at the bread, you may hunt for another kind of sense of nutrition. A nutrition, that goes beyond the functionality the bread stands for, which is to feed. Now halfway eaten, halfway used and thrown on the ground its obvious function got dishonoured as it is put into a place where it is deprived from meaning. As it does not invite to be eaten and do its task for nurturing, maybe you that you are looking at it, maybe you look for another kind of nurture, that it has to offer to you. The nurture that lies within the bread on the ground may be in experiencing its functionality by listening to what it has to tell you, in relation to its direct and indirect context.
Yes I know, the context of the public space can seem pretty empty, so scheduled and untouchable, that all you feel is being alienated from any source of nutrition.
You are a hunter deprived from your prey, and instead capitalism gives you a placebo effect that temporary stills and steals your desire to encounter your world by letting you buy sandwiches in supermarkets. That you may then half way eaten, throw on the ground. Here they become a true trace for an alternative nutrition, an alternative prey.
Think about this kind of prey as a prayer. When praying, you might be led to a sense of hope, a nutrition that grants you with a sensation of crating mechanisms of belonging to this world. In the toast bread case, before it becoming your prayer, you need to learn to read the language of the traces, otherwise you cannot become a hunter of the prayer.
So read the bread well. Can you figure, that this trace can bring you out of a labyrinth of mechanisms operating on the appearance of “for grantedness” in a world where nothing ever was for granted and therefore everything is precious. Even that toast? In days where you had to read your environment in order to survive, the world revealed itself as a speaking scenario, with present, history and future, with character and humour, with multilayered and playful pathways of things and beings ending up and meeting each other. A toast bread would be a curiosity and not a default. It was a place where things could be touched and felt, smelled and seen, interpreted and misunderstood. We were in a speaking world. Not a muted, ignorant one that pretends to be overthrown by algorithms, have clean public spaces, where people eat perfectly packed sandwiches, that disappear in their stomachs as if eating is nothing else but an oiling of the machinery, that has to happen in the meantime of one metro line and another.
The algorithm failed, the toast lies on the floor. Let’s start by the hope that the algorithm fails constantly. In minor and major gestures. People will throw the bread on the ground for you to read and at the same time trash the algorithm. Thanks GOD! Or whoever.
So, This is just an example. Look at your world. The toast can speak. It can tell you about its history in just one slightly elongated blink of an eye, where you recognise the toast and what brought it there. Become a listener, a friend to the toast. Half way eaten, humiliated on the ground. And never ever take it for granted for what it is and became since it came there by a complexity of relations.
This is how you learn the language of loyalty with your environment- do that with trees, animals, buildings, empty bottles, rain drops, trash, clothing, packages, super market signs - do that with the back of the neighbour you never talk to, see how it is hunched or maybe in perfect upright position of a spine. but ask yourself if that speaks necessarily for the metaphorical dimension of this person actually having a spine, however.
Stay with your environment. And let it reveal itself to you. Love every message and let it linger and resonate before thinking you know how things have to be, should be, if they have relevance or importance or not. Read your traces as messages from the environment. Let them speak their poetry, songs, their stories and just listen. But you must stay. Stay stay stay stay stay. Reading traces is still the only way to survive.
Why life can always be a gift if you are not totally fucked up, dead sick, traumatised and a victim of mayor relational conflicts of humans and their environment, such as war, crisis, violence and situation where the gift of life is impossible to elaborate on itself
When you let the traces of your world speak to you, the house wall, lid by daylight, every single brick, the trash on the ground, the colour of the clothes of people in the street, the rattling of the leafs of the trees, the giggling of the water in the rivers, the song of the nightingale in the absurd cold night of November, the weird sound of people using language and laughing about their jokes, will become aware of you, they will start to flirt with your perception, and thank you in showing you how complex, masterfully weird, intense, jolly, annoying but cute, rewarding they can be. When you let those traces reveal how they came into the world in a long and precise development of steps that made love to each other, merged and accumulated, excavated and fought, went through the hole range of whatever their expression and impression of emotionality may be in order to come to being, then you can see each gesture of life as a powerful gift elaborating itself to you. Almost like a daily choir of encounters and things singing and reflecting upon its own sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful existence. That what seems mundane becomes a playground of sensations telling their own story through you, being the perceiving human. If you perceive you make yourself available to receive. If you are able to receive life on a level of such profanity you will encounter richness. Abundance of a sort, that is so mystical, complex, useless in a sense of beyond capital utility, lonely, collective, temporary and fleeting, that you might feel glad to be alive. Not juts glad you will vibrate a sense of aliveness that can connect you to your environment as an intrinsic experience of itself. And you will not feel that alone any longer. Try it for a bit.
More of will you see, lonely drives, defaults and mistakes implemented in a world, that is not perfect. A world that tries to push through its ideologies, desires, ideas, that has a crazy, malicious and fascinating drive of being. Since it loves being so much, and so too much that all that it can think of is to be, All the time. A narcissist choice of an imperative of being that reveals itself in the defaults of relations. Birds fighting for food, cars fighting for space, humans that stop connecting with love, but talk in between the lines, anxiousness of being left to die, disgust towards decomposing materials or toast breads on the ground and so on. There again, is also space for humour, to lean back and discover how decisions are being made, reactions are hysterical ticks, things will be postponed by fear, fear will be clumsily integrated in the bigger picture of traces, organising our life and being and its dramaturgy.
Cynicism in a neoliberal embrace
At some point in the story we have been encountering a desire for organisation and form. The expressing world, the traces that changed in the course of time and locality wanted to get fixed, to hold on to them. With symbols emerged language, as writings, gestures as ambitions for creating, cave drawings, into memoirs, into Torahs, Bibles, practices, into constitutions into positions in between humans in relations to agreements, animals, plants, into functions defining what the drive strives towards. And those into ideas of what serves who and who serves what, into a system we are dying from right now that is not called life only but now also capitalism.
A brand of capitalism behaves as Neo liberalism. As I become a neo liberal being, with every breath I take I immerse myself into the logics of those ropes holding my hands into place, my thoughts on track, my feelings in a rhythm of its metronome, steadily accelerating. It seems an economical structure is embracing me, keeping me alive, and making others die, or vice versa, with every toast bread I buy, every plastic bottle of water I consume, every job I say yes to, as a contribution to a bigger picture. An annoy of my own voice rages inside me, comes to judge upon my feeling, saying: we know that. Bring me solutions, bring me answers. Or shut up. I know this annoy is a byproduct of my fear of being submitted to the structure. A byproduct of a history of separating content and form. I am the content that holds the form, I think. The form indoctrinates me with content, with what I am, I think. Very Brecht. This idea of the product of environment.
As I choose to shut up, to not bother myself, the other or the ideology, what expresses in me is an alternative of some cynical sort. So cynical that tears show up to resist the bitterness of a system that entered us in our most private and intimate encounters of our world, our friends, our steps, our relations and choose to corporate anything and anyone’s effort to make sense of their own being. A system that tries to keep us away from making use of our ability to read our world, to talk to our world, to listen to our world. There it comes dark and sad. Cynicism.. it feels toxic but at the same time it measures my engagement simply in a cryptical way, diminishing a message underneath that might be coming from a true desire to express. Letting it revolt my fake humbleness of shutting up and showing me the face I carry out while facing a mask of a world.
The cynicism is a form of hope. So don’t you disguise it when it comes your way. And its only way of being operative is by choosing to customise itself in the form of a dark joke. But again, if you were to read your traces well you would not ignore the cynical dimension of life and try to read its origin, so keep in mind my hint: STAY with it. When it comes our way. Stay.
So here it comes:
The handbook for spineless beings in post somatic realism. For dancers and non dancers and people that lack a sort of directionality or have terrible back pain. How to live without loyalty.
The era of centre is over. There is no central authority, giving direction to the system. There is no central exchange. Emerging decentralised markets are connecting sellers to buyers by peer-to-peer trading. Exchange is not a meeting point of different interests but an operative chain of motion, weaving a web through gigantesque and sensible systems of advertisement and promotions, connecting the “(a)like” minded in a market philosophy that works through confirmation rather than communication. We congratulate each other and shake hands. The perpetuation of the 20th century ontologies, that are based on the idea of use and abuse, implode in an infinite chain of copy-paste algorithms, that completely deprive anything and anyone from being worthy enough to be seen on a distinctive expressive level of being a being, that can speak and move, humans, animals, plants, objects, matter in its singularity and in its encounter with matter. Capitalism has led us into a world where we can only think in quantities, in masses, in fragmentation against a sum of things, where this equals and unequals that. On the other side, waves of identity politics emerge, calls from perspectives that are over jumped, overran by those that cannot make sense or money out of the perspective of difference, or those that are simply “riding a ( for some king of reason mysteriously unquestioned) wave“ of a career. As Bracha Ettinger describes it well, the phallocentric psychoanalyst world view is a binary one. It is you or the other in the oedipal conflict, marked by the fear of castration. And the other side of that thought is indeed the naive idea of eternal and infinite symbiosis. In both cases “difference” cannot be acknowledged. Neoliberal societies then throw identity politics back into the machinery, where they become a distributable good in the decentralised organism of production and consumption. When everything can be consumed, nothing matters. Matter is just there to be strategically dispersed, organised, being made available, demystified, objectified and distributed. No one sees the matter crying, dying, being compressed into toast bread, being compressed into depression. An idea of matter has triumphed over spirit, like the tarot card of the 5 of swords:
Geburah(Severity on the Tree of Life) always supplies disruption. In the 5 of Swords, Venus rules Aquarius which implies weakness rather than excess of strength. Hence, weakness is the cause of the disaster. Here, one has succumbed to the body's fear of discomfort, and losses the will to "fight on". If you're still breathing, you can't be defeated, for the Soul is the one who provides the breath in the body. So your immortal "secret lover", is still within you. However, if you are not in communication with your soul, because your identity is controlled by "fear of rejection" and/or the survival mind of the material world, whom you have made as Foundation/ Master of your own body, you'll be defeated by your own fear of death, which translates into all other fears.
To deprive matter but also to deprive the moment when something matters, from its own sensibility is the ignorant core of a capitalist and neoliberal society. What is deeply connected to this ignorance, is the fear of meaninglessness “that nothing matters” once the system of value collapses. The idea of being or having to encounter a sort of nothingness is still the core believe driving the binary of “to be or not to be”.
Once the sneaky mask, identifying and distributing our values ( good, thoughts, relations) for the favour of that binary, which means giving value to only parts of the environment and the inhabitants while devaluing others parts of the environment and exploiting their inhabitants as unworthy of being- once this mask was to slide down- what could it mean for our goods, thoughts, relations, how could they bloom, flourish, express what they always had to say? Could that maybe happen if one was to give up- And then what is to truly give up? Is it just to give away? How to give up even?
I say it is about reanimating our perception towards an intelligence, sensibility and spirit of the forms we encounter and let them express what they do, can do, could do. To understand that these forms are never fixed and always in vibration through communication. Even the toast bread wants to communicate. It is a form that wants to have a form of conversation with its environment, one could say.
A form of conversation means that conversation is a form. A form of something that can livingly exchange and express itself through an architecture or a system, incorporating different expressions that encounter one another. So if capitalism itself could be seen as such a conversation could we think of altering the way how we speak and listen to one another within that relation. If we were doomed to capitulate to that form, as the only possible way of living, we truly had no alternative. We were truly speechless and in ourselves unintelligible to exchange. We were to make an important mistake, as Negarestani explains in Intelligence and Spirit:
if concepts themselves are absorbed by capitalism, then the very idea of capitalism becomes ineffable.Talking about capitalism and diagnosing its pathologies will then be little more than exercises in producing subjective and arbitrary narratives about something that is, in truth, unintelligible.
What does that mean? It may mean that by capitulating capitalism, we cut off ourselves from our own ability to converse in intelligible manner. Intelligence here means maybe not the driving force of creation in a product orientated sense, but a creation of a movement, or of many movements. Movements that can vibrate and alter the form and course of beings. Therefore one has to start to see forms as beings and beings as flexible, elastic encounters of vibrating matter, with frequencies that have a temporal appearance and structure but which are always fragile, malleable as they are always in relation to a synergy of a conversation. That synergy, that conversation our forms are taking part into, can alter the forms, can change their vibration. Synergy is the idea that a conversation is a meeting of energies that can alter each others frequency and therefore no form ever can be considered as something fixed. Not a thought, not a stone, not an idea, not a foundation. Let us step back further and further from the form as a fixed encounter towards forms as fluid, intelligent moments of exchange.
As our intelligence creates movement, our perception renders into our attention the intelligence of our environment. Through relation we are able to create thoughts, ideas, an attempt to express our poetics into the space we inhabit. Which means we attempt to attend that space. Again, these attempts to attend are not to be confused with fixed views, but rather temporal spirits and inspirations that chant towards and in the meeting with our environment. The meetings become tangible as movement traces, incorporating the reflection of past events and the hope or desire for future vibrations.
Here and very important when elaborating those, we need to make sure that the creations of those movement traces, which can be our identity politics, our socio-political ambitions, our dreams and hopes won’t be eaten up and incorporated as ready-made sellable products within the neoliberal ideology of a corpus itself.
Going back to the neoliberal decentralised market, one might recognise that wether by default or strategy, this market is often targeting our most intimate and private relations and takes our goods, that is sometimes all that we have, in order to feed it ideology of movement and finally product orientated organisation. How those encounters are being capitalised upon is mostly more easily felt for, let’s say, a freelancer working within a small community, than a worker in a big company. But what is urgent to understand by all of us, is that the system we operate inside of, where each and every gesture we place into, has a real effect and creates a direct reality to the world we inhabit and thus, right back at us.
Acknowledging the intimate conversation at the threshold of each encounter with the neoliberal system is a first step towards altering the communication we can have with and inside of it. SO again STAY STAY STAY.
Let me dare to make an analogy. If we see the loss of centre as having psychological and physical consequences within our bodies or body-beings, what would it mean to us as individuals and our way of moving and being moved within a neoliberal, decentralised fluctuation. Instead of one centre, we encounter a couple of centres that take over the conversation around value, on different levels of existence. Being doomed to being, being doomed to survive, the body-being will experience a certain stream or locomotion that it has to follow up with and feed such being fed by. True critic is suicide, as it appears that a true critic will only catapult you out of what seems to be the only choice in the 21st century.
I dare to say, that as we are pulled and pushed around and against this mechanism of decentralisation, we become deprived from directing our own intelligence to make conversations with our environment. As the era of centre is over, the era of conversation and direction as well. What is masked in the idea of “decentralisation” is not that power truly exists and operates, that is pretty obvious and smoothly functioning. Whats is masked instead is rather the notion that someone’s actions and motion can be held responsible, that someone can enter a conversation and their activity can leave a trace in the environment to reveal what brought it there, for what reason, with which agenda and default mechanism. That trace that leads into communicating with the environment is what is masked by the operation of decentralisation. The only loyal environment to hold on to is one that is in a complete state of flux with a constant alteration of “what a front” is and “what it means to confront something or someone”, and thus multi-directionality acting upon the directions of the body-being and its attempt to receive and direct expressions from its environment.
One could also say that attention will be all the time distracted producing a sort of soccer play, where the eye of the mass is focused on the ball and not on the environment and in a hypnotic survival exctacy the bigger picture will have to be left out. The focus is permanent but what to focus on is forever exchangeable.
When the social being, the human being is deprived from its way of directing conversations and attending its environment, by such manner the physical and psychological experience results ultimately in a loss of communication finally resulting in a general “loss of spine”, as the delicate arrangements of vertebras collapse inside the speed of a vortex and the stretch of a hyper elastic moral, being twisted and intertwined, for whatever reason may sell us further. Spineless beings. Spineless beings that cannot attend one another.
This happens not just in the human bound body but also in the body that binds humans to generate bigger corporations, as in communities, collectives, scenes. And here is where intimacy get corrupted into a game, that I am not sure who wants to really play it in the end.
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