constant escape
winter withered, warm
Just listened to an episode of Hermitix with John Cussans, whom I hadn't heard of but is apparently close to the whole ccru milieu. His main point was a point that I've encountered a couple times, perhaps here, but one that hasn't quite clicked until now. Namely, that the more you traffic through discourse/cultures that treat capitalism like this kind of emergent archon that we are inextricably bound up in, the more you become bound up in it.
He talked about Mark Fisher in this way, that much of the weight of this looming cybernetic capitalist matrix was brought on by how much time he spent plugged in, online. Cussans made the simple point that "unplugging" from the highway could actually serve to rearrange your reality such that capitalism no longer appears to be some kind of emergent frankenstein puppetmaster.
He said that most of his leftist academic friends, whom he made out as being dysfunctionally depressed, kept exposing themselves ever more deeply the sort of discourse that informs their depression.
And James, still don't know his last name, pointed out that the reason more leftist academic types don't try unplugging from their discourse-environment, is because they think unplugging is futile, that you cannot unplug and therefore shouldn't try.
And I started wondering if this principle can be generalized beyond the "deification" of capital, as Cussans put it. And it connected to a thought I had earlier, that perhaps I shouldn't get too used to listening to the same podcasts, or reading from the same news sources - that such things might function to territorialize ones reality. Such isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if your reality involves in ineluctable reign of capitalist energy over any and all contending motives, then perhaps a proper unplugging is worth exploring.
And it also ties into a point we made in the Teaching Machine thread, wherein one's ideological trainer is one's reality, rather than an actor or agent within a neutral reality. The "thing" doing the training is, itself, what appears to be the neutral backdrop behind the actors, and this backdrop defines/territorializes itself according to what you are exposed to. Reality ossifies, at least according to the average course of a life in the West.
So my broad question is: Can one strategically modulate their reality in order to indirectly modulate themselves? That is, can one willfully inform the matrix that is constantly informing them? I think this kind of modulation may be felt as a perpetual withdrawal, seeing as unplugging is, itself, a sort of breaking-away from an addiction.
But "plugged in" in a general sense, rather than specifically meaning online activity. One is plugged in to their reality, or, rather, plugged into the information sources that inform their reality. The longer you are subject to a constant set of influences, the more deeply their influence sediments into you, no?
This could perhaps be a key strategy in the effort to superimpose all ideological positions - this would just be a sort of converse expression of it. Instead of investigating differences among positions taken within a shared reality, we would be exploring the differences among the impressions that the shared reality makes based on how/where it is viewed.
Personally, I feel the shifting plates of reality as a sort of oscillation of baseline positionality. That is, one moment I may feel a subtle but poignant frustration with the ostensibly constant bombardment of guilt I'm being commanded to feel - and another moment, I feel rather clearheadedly that it really isn't unreasonable at all to request that someone respect preferred your pronoun choice.
I feel more attracted to the latter than the former, but the only reason I don't attempt to permanently pull myself away from the former position is that I think it needs to be better researched, how one can undergo ideological transformations. But these transformations are largely retarded/obstructed because of the tendency to find and defend a certain territory. That is, one looks for sources that feel closest to right, rather than approach "what feels right" as a dynamic factor in a system.
So what are your experiences with seismic shifts in your reality? Revelatory experiences, breaks from addictions, etc. Do you still feel a pull back to the prior reality? Or do you drift in and out of it?
Personally, this may change certain key elements of the capitalist techgnostic cosmology I'm always ranting about, namely that it may be too impacted by the kind of discourse that presents capital as this mass psychic energy that is always able to predict your next move. So advice there would be welcome as well.
He talked about Mark Fisher in this way, that much of the weight of this looming cybernetic capitalist matrix was brought on by how much time he spent plugged in, online. Cussans made the simple point that "unplugging" from the highway could actually serve to rearrange your reality such that capitalism no longer appears to be some kind of emergent frankenstein puppetmaster.
He said that most of his leftist academic friends, whom he made out as being dysfunctionally depressed, kept exposing themselves ever more deeply the sort of discourse that informs their depression.
And James, still don't know his last name, pointed out that the reason more leftist academic types don't try unplugging from their discourse-environment, is because they think unplugging is futile, that you cannot unplug and therefore shouldn't try.
And I started wondering if this principle can be generalized beyond the "deification" of capital, as Cussans put it. And it connected to a thought I had earlier, that perhaps I shouldn't get too used to listening to the same podcasts, or reading from the same news sources - that such things might function to territorialize ones reality. Such isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if your reality involves in ineluctable reign of capitalist energy over any and all contending motives, then perhaps a proper unplugging is worth exploring.
And it also ties into a point we made in the Teaching Machine thread, wherein one's ideological trainer is one's reality, rather than an actor or agent within a neutral reality. The "thing" doing the training is, itself, what appears to be the neutral backdrop behind the actors, and this backdrop defines/territorializes itself according to what you are exposed to. Reality ossifies, at least according to the average course of a life in the West.
So my broad question is: Can one strategically modulate their reality in order to indirectly modulate themselves? That is, can one willfully inform the matrix that is constantly informing them? I think this kind of modulation may be felt as a perpetual withdrawal, seeing as unplugging is, itself, a sort of breaking-away from an addiction.
But "plugged in" in a general sense, rather than specifically meaning online activity. One is plugged in to their reality, or, rather, plugged into the information sources that inform their reality. The longer you are subject to a constant set of influences, the more deeply their influence sediments into you, no?
This could perhaps be a key strategy in the effort to superimpose all ideological positions - this would just be a sort of converse expression of it. Instead of investigating differences among positions taken within a shared reality, we would be exploring the differences among the impressions that the shared reality makes based on how/where it is viewed.
Personally, I feel the shifting plates of reality as a sort of oscillation of baseline positionality. That is, one moment I may feel a subtle but poignant frustration with the ostensibly constant bombardment of guilt I'm being commanded to feel - and another moment, I feel rather clearheadedly that it really isn't unreasonable at all to request that someone respect preferred your pronoun choice.
I feel more attracted to the latter than the former, but the only reason I don't attempt to permanently pull myself away from the former position is that I think it needs to be better researched, how one can undergo ideological transformations. But these transformations are largely retarded/obstructed because of the tendency to find and defend a certain territory. That is, one looks for sources that feel closest to right, rather than approach "what feels right" as a dynamic factor in a system.
So what are your experiences with seismic shifts in your reality? Revelatory experiences, breaks from addictions, etc. Do you still feel a pull back to the prior reality? Or do you drift in and out of it?
Personally, this may change certain key elements of the capitalist techgnostic cosmology I'm always ranting about, namely that it may be too impacted by the kind of discourse that presents capital as this mass psychic energy that is always able to predict your next move. So advice there would be welcome as well.