thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you're missing amusical computer music barty, bytes and bits zipping by, the the ever intensifying search for the novel configuration as you hit that zone of fruitless intensification.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Is it really dematerialisation, though?

it's still the human body, moving in rhythmic patterns... ritual synchrony at the drop, the breakdown

it's still humans in a social space... packed tight together... inhaling each other's air... humid... sweaty flesh rubbing against sweaty flesh

(the smells of rave is something no one ever goes on about, including me. but i can still remember the sharp tang of a particular crustie's armpit in a really grotty mini-rave on Acre Lane in early 93... where condensation was dripping from the ceiling, the staircases where we went to chill out were soaking... on the dancefloor you knew you were imbibing recycled perspiration, that a nasty cold was scheduled for the middle of next week. "What's yours is mine" - rave as a communism of viruses as much as a communism of emotions

the infantile, child-regression stuff in hardcore is i think more to do with (and there's quotes on this in the 92 piece) the recovered physical joys of the pre-sexual body - romping, prancing, cavoring, spinning around, making yourself dizzy

pointless jubilant fully-embodied fun

the dematerialisation potential is there in what happens to the sped-up vocals maybe - dematerialised, de-gendered, disincarnated

but then i think that is going on with most singing, even before you get to messing around with on a sampling keyboard
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
well hc is probably (i hate those bourgeois terms) but what was that wanker, nicholas taleb?

black swan? was jungle as much of a black swan?
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
what are the best things you think you've ever written?

i won't go there - but with that ardkore92 piece i was on fire

almost literally - synapses crackling. wrote it in America buzzing off my tapes and the memory rushes.

any bit of writing where you're trying to work something out for the first time has got something special about it - wrestling with 'why do i like this? it it really as significant as it feels? how does it work? etc'

it'll have clumsiness and mistakes and big spots of incomplete knowledge and wild overstatements in it. but rather that than measured and mature. maybe.

in some ways it's better to be able to write without having all the facts at your command... you want that freedom to turn the subject into what you want it to be (not consciously, but as a side effect - consciously you're trying to get it right, trying to be as accurate as you can

that is a big handicap I feel about writing today, which is that the temptations are there to over-research, there is so much data on anything. by the time you get to actually writing a sentence you are already half-dead from processing all this information.

when i started reviewing records etc in the late Eighties, you had a single-page press release, which i would rarely read anyway. i was more interested into what i could make out of a band and its record, than what they actually had in mind.
 
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version

Well-known member
This thread got me thinking about McLuhan's reading of Burroughs and the stuff about the 'electric age' being the process of man externalising himself in the form of machines and gadgets, you can see it in the way people rely on Google rather than remembering or learning things themselves. It's like outsourcing cognitive functions.

"Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare."

"Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order."

"During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks."

"... there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure."
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
This thread got me thinking about McLuhan's reading of Burroughs and the stuff about the 'electric age' being the process of man externalising himself in the form of machines and gadgets, you can see it in the way people rely on Google rather than remembering or learning things themselves. It's like outsourcing cognitive functions.

"Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare....

"Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure."

i'm glad McLuhan's been brought up

Because one thing I was thinking reading some of the earlier comments was that people have been reckoning with this becoming-dematerialised syndrome for a while

Certain bits of language would have me flashing a little on Baudrillard, or this feller who wrote books after book of post-Baudrillard / post-Virilio delirium, Arthur Kroker (a lot of it very dated, very 1990s, now I'm sure, but the book he wrote largely inspired by sampling, Spasm, is full of great passages)

And then before all that lot, yes, there's McLuhan

And I actually mentioned the Spectacle myself so there's the spectre of Debord and the Situationists. Debord being indebted both to McLuhan and - i strongly suspect - to a fantastic book published in 1961 I think, Daniel Boorstin's The Image, about the creeping malaise of unreality taking over American society and culture. Written 58 years ago!

Which is not to say that there aren't things about this specific moment worth trying to capture - the contours of what's unfolding, becoming clearer as the residual drops away and the emergent takes sharper shape.

There are things that are possible now, and that indeed are routine now - and the distortions of subjectivity resulting from that - that they could never have imagined. What can be done with a phone and the daily effects of it on life and mentality and the emotions. I don't know if anyone of them could have anticipated something like YouTube and the Broadcast Yourself concept - micro-fame, performance of self. Or social media. Or a dozen other examples.

But I do think these precursors were grasping some of the emerging general principles of what happens to the self, or the social, in conditions of telecommunicational overload, instantaneous access, remote connection / disconnection from the local etc etc etc

The abstraction of Baudrillard's writing, his bloody irritating refusal to put in much in the way of concrete examples or proofs (same goes with many of that lot - Foucault, Virilio, etc), actually makes it more open-ended and capacious - less tied to his present.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
But I do think these precursors were grasping some of the emerging general principles of what happens to the self, or the social
still think you had it right comparing it to the advent of writing, in terms of fundamental impact of society and the social self, if not universally the inner self

obviously there are are specific processes, folkways, what have you, that begin with industrialization, thru mass communication, to now

to what extent is this fairly recent modern syndrome an iteration of always existing flesh/spirit tension

put another way, to what extent are forces driving dematerialization technologically determined? culturally? psychologically (spiritually)? how do they act on one another? on the self?

one thing - seems clear those great media theorists of that last century had a much less complicated problem to diagnose, even if proscribing solutions was still as difficult as ever
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
btw Debord was definitely influenced by Boorstin, who is critically discussed in Ch. 8 of Society + the Spectacle

his problem with Boorstin is separation of the image, commodity, consumer from the society, leading to inability to go past diagnosis to root cause

"[Boorstin] fails to understand that the commodity itself made the laws whose “honest” application leads both to the distinct reality of private life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social consumption of images"

the crucial transition not foreseen by Debord (and others? idk never read McLuhan or Virilio) is I think the one from spectator to participant

have to think Andy Warhol was far closer to the mark than all those dudes tbh

not that he in any way foresaw the technologies or mediums, but he really nailed the future of universal personal branding, everyone their own curator
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
outsourcing cognitive functions
that technological determinism feedback loop again

speaking of Debord, does remind me of his comparison of religious fervor to consumer enthusiasm

i.e. outsourcing materialization will to god or gods, sublimated in the cthonic or elevated in the sublime

Burroughs is a very good look here btw. one of the few true prophets of dematerialization - body horror, cut-ups, ectoplasm, feel the heat closing in
 

version

Well-known member
Another relevant section from the McLuhan/Burroughs notes.

- - -

The Burroughs diagnosis is that we can avoid the inevitable “closure” that accompanies each new technology by regarding our entire gadgetry as junk. Man has hopped himself up by a long series of technological fixes:

You are all dogs on tape. The entire planet is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender.

We can forego the entire legacy of Cain (the inventor of gadgets) by applying the same formula that works for junk — “apomorphine,” extended to all technology:

Apomorphine is no word and no image — […] It is simply a question of putting through an inoculation program in the very limited time that remains — Word begets image and image IS virus —

Burroughs is arguing that the power of the image to beget image, and of technology to reproduce itself via human intervention, is utterly in excess of our power to control the psychic and social consequences:

Shut the whole thing right off — Silence — When you answer the machine you provide it with more recordings to be played back to your “enemies” keep the whole nova machine running — The Chinese character for “enemy” means to be similar to or to answer — Don’t answer the machine — Shut if off —

Merely to be in the presence of any machine, or replica of our body or faculties, is to be close with it. Our sensory ratios shift at once with each encounter with any fragmented extension of our being. This is a non-stop express of innovation that cannot be endured indefinitely:

We are just dust falls from demagnetized patterns — Show business —

It is the medium that is the message because the medium creates an environment that is as indelible as it is lethal. To end the proliferation of lethal new environmental expression, Burroughs urges a huge collective act of restraint as well as a nonclosure of sensory modes — “The biological theater of the body can bear a good deal of new program notes.”
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
also other people said some interesting things too - don't have time rn properly address but will maybe try to go back thru later
 

luka

Well-known member
burroughs and mcluhan are two of my closest collaborators and accomplices. well done for noticing! what they talk about is very real.

i must write an essay on Burroughs because i understand it better than anyone else who has come out publicly, including mcluhan. the only other essay i know of that deals with burroughs on the correct level is the ccru one 'lemurian time war' i'm not sure if that was Mark but it's brilliant. everything else fails to recognise the full scope of his project.
 
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luka

Well-known member
Is it really dematerialisation, though?

it's still the human body, moving in rhythmic patterns

no. it's not. and yes, it is. because it is an earlier wave, and as ever, we are always talking about a mixed condition and the ratio/ http://deepmeditationtherapy.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-writing-i-am-interested-in.html
so again it's a question of filtering- how is this event foreshadowed in this wave? what elements in it belong to this event and embody this event, and which don't. mdma is not a psychedelic. it goes some of the way and at it's highest pitches of euphoria and clarity it can get very close, but it's not a true psychedelic. what it's very good at is enhancing emotional intelligence so that you can see and feel, internally, the entire interconnecting field and how what you do affects it so if everyone is on it together, operating with that understanding, you can create quite astonishing interlocks, which in themselves are a component of dematerialisation- the collapsing of boundaries- the horizontal- the paranoid, armored self, the defensive self, the aggressive self, all these melt away.

(or, to put it another way, hardcore couldn't be the culmination of the project becasue it was waiting for the technology to catch up. this analysis underpins my stance on the bigbeat thread! that time period representing trough as opposed to the preceding crest. it's a wave pattern)
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
zGHQb4O.gif
 

luka

Well-known member
Because one thing I was thinking reading some of the earlier comments was that people have been reckoning with this becoming-dematerialised syndrome for a while

absolutely. it's always been there. it's just now it is becoming more and more literal. and this is what i was alluding to with the anti-christ comment. this is something we can do without technology so there is this fatal ambiguity present now. is it one thing or is it two things? (good and evil)
 
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