Teach me about....

[luka]

I suppose one of the things I wonder about is whether it's really necessary to think about capitalism at all. Is everything I do really part of an ongoing death struggle with capitalism? Even the way I listen to or think about listening to a song?

I've got a foot in either camp. Sometimes I find myself here, sometimes over there.

 

[shiels]

as we’ve spoken about elsewhere, personality is armour, self is armour, so if you say you want to ‘circumvent armour’ that must start with being conscious and maybe mistrustful or at least curious about where the armour came from yeah? your tastes and inclinations How did you pick them up? In asking yourself these questions you’ll always be seduced by your narcissism... it’s because you just get it, are inherently special, you just have the rhythm etc, in my blood, but you have to keep pushing past that. Zoom far enough out and you start to see how your subjectivity is framed by material conditions to some degree. Did mark teach you anything? And this can’t be waved away because certain trendy phrases bore you

 

[luka]

Mark taught me that the word capitalism usually stands in for depressive tendencies.

 

[luka]

It's the current of his thought which I consider completely to be without value.

 

[kumar]

so many of the important reasons i like the music i happen to like have to do with contextual factors, information about the people responsible, what it might say about me by extension and who it might annoy, especially. these are very important hangups that i am not interested in shedding entirely, i have decided on legitimate grounds that certain badboy records have saved my life and so i have to respect those impulses, even when theyre instantaneous and barely detectable.

however as an experiment i am up for attempting to bypass these conditioned responses and i feel fairly safe at the moment that it will not result in me turning a blind eye to fascism in all its forms.

without wanting to get too wooly, the desire to be a neutral, unarmoured receptor, is not necessarily a neutral unarmoured desire.

but for the sake of the experiment it cant hurt too much

 

[shiels]

Don’t see the substance in what you’re saying... all anti-capitalists are just depressed? What about all the depressed people who don’t use this language, conceptualise this way?

 

[luka]

Well exactly. There's no way on earth I'm letting go of my dubstep is shit position. It's as fundamental to who I am as my own skeleton.

 

[luka]

Don’t see the substance in what you’re saying... all anti-capitalists are just depressed? What about all the depressed people who don’t use this language, conceptualise this way?

What about them? Don't get it. Don't understand. What I mean is capitalism is just a word which means I find life unsatisfactory. That's all. If it wasn't the word capitalism it would be another word

 

[luka]

Life is unsatisfactory. We all agree on that.

 

[shiels]

What I mean is capitalism is just a word which means I find life unsatisfactory. That's all. If it wasn't the word capitalism it would be another word

That’s a beautiful articulation of capitalist realism

 

[shiels]

The machine speaks through you luke

 

[kumar]

with music writing though, even if it is defunct or whatever, i like the idea of stuff which is squarely focused on plotting the bodily sensations of the music as they happen as best as possible, but i also really like the stuff where the pet shop boys record is second fiddle to the real show, showing off with glorious insights into cia narcotrafficing operations or whatever.

using music as a launchpad to pontificate wildly and shoehorn pointless theories into inappropriate holes is the only reason its lasted this long

sitting here right now im not sure where i could draw the line between an immediate visceral response to something and any intellectual conditioned framing reflexes that might ruin that, but maybe its a difference of degrees rather than kind

 

[luka]

You don't really believe in all that stuff though do you Shiels? You seem far too sensible.

 

[pattycakes_]

The machine speaks through you luke

Get a room you two

 

[shiels]

All what stuff? You're perfectly in line with Mark's thinking on this. and buddhism actually. personality and taste are manufactured and consumed as part of a causal nexus. Awareness of this, paying attention to how we're seeing, judging, reacting... tracing our lines of influence helps us to see better, understand more

the whole psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic tradition and the various ways they have tried to facilitate a kind of perception which is free, as free as possible, from the kind of delusions and pitfalls and failures we have described. Can we adopt that attitude towards what is before us?

To not interrupt the stimulus before it reaches the heart, to avoid rushing to name it, categorise and define it. Keeping that openness and suspension of judgement as a way to let it work upon you and unfold in its own time-span and time-pulse. To see more of something is always to see it better, to see it in its full magical dimension, as a thing which exists, a part of the fabric of the universe, to see the full extent of its implications and the forces and modes of being it partakes of.

Is saying a similar thing to this from his best ever blog

The danger, the great temptation, is to retain the dualism between the impersonal and the personal that Freud had so expertly dismantled. Ray put this to me very well once: we cannot think in terms of an opposition between the personal and the impersonal, as if granny doing her knitting was the personal, and the impersonal was the remorseless, gleaming wheels of the Kapitalist megamachine. No. Granny too is impersonal, and the Kapitalist megamachine produces personality alongside cars and computers.

The great Cold Rationalist lesson is that everything in the so-called personal is in fact the product of impersonal processes of cause and effect which, in principle if not in fact, could be delineated very precisely. And this act of delineation, this stepping outside the character armour that we have confused with ourselves, is what freedom is.

Attempting to understand the armour of taste so we can step outside it and see more clearly

and here he's influenced by zizek on bladerunner

Therein consists the implicit philosophical lesson of Blade Runner attested to by numerous allusions
to the Cartesian cogito (like when the replicant-character played by Darryl Hannah
ironically points out "I think, therefore I am"): where is the cogito, the place of my selfconsciousness,
when everything that I actually am is an artifact -- not only my body, my eyes,
but even my most intimate memories and fantasies? It is here that we again
encounter the Lacanian distinction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of
enunciated: everything that I positively am, every enunciated content I can point at and
say "that's me," is not "I"; I am only the void that remains, the empty distance toward
every content.

Blade Runner thus gives a double twist to the commonsense distinction between human
and android. Man is a replicant who does not know it; yet if this were all, the film would
involve a simplistic reductionist notion that our self-experience qua free "human" agents is
an illusion founded upon our ignorance of the causal nexus which regulates our lives. For
that reason, we should supplement the former statement: it is only when, at the level of
the enunciated content, I assume my replicant-status, that, at the level of enunciation, I
become a truly human subject. "I am a replicant" is the statement of the subject in its
purest -- the same as in Althusser'stheory of ideology where the statement "I am in
ideology" is the only way for me to truly avoid the vicious circle of ideology (or the
Spinozeian version of it: the awareness that nothing can ever escape the grasp of
necessity is the only way for us to be truly free).

 

[kumar]

its the “as free as possible” bit that seems important.

this might sound lazy but “the act of delineating, the process of stepping outside” is an impersonal, social process as well.

so i could say, casually, i’ve “stepped outside” my character armour for 5 minutes and heard that madonna song properly for the first time in my life, but its maybe better described as more of a "taking as much off as possible" than a “stepping outside”.

that sounds a bit like a wooly you cant break out of the structures of language using the structures of language sort of statement of the obvious.

but it feels more right to put it like that.

thats not to say you can’t, casually, say that you’ve stepped out of the armour of taste to see it more clearly, and that i would know what you mean by that.

it’s just that the success of “stepping outside” might not be best hinged on reaching a green and pleasant land free of all ideology and conditioning whatsoever, because the desire to do so is steeped in that as well.

taking off as much armour as possible seems like a good experiment now and again.

i can’t fail that way.

also very likely that this is just a complete load of hair splitting bollocks that no one cares about.

and we probably agree on it anyway.

 

[shiels]

Yeah you’re right you don’t get rid of it, you can’t stay out, new boundaries are drawn, walls built right away. And when you open up this way you of course allow in new prejudices, you are changed, the seeds of a new or adapted value system are sewn early, the first exposure is often the most formative

It’s a continual practice, bringing the armour into view, understanding the knee-jerk mechanism, making the unconscious conscious. These are ancient mindfulness principles: non-judgment, beginner’s mind, acceptance, trust. Buddhism has anatta, and the meditative practice of observing the likes and dislikes that arise and saying that's not me, that self is conditional and contingent on a billion other things. There's a freedom in watching it move and change through time and space.

‘Teach me something about…’ is an invite to find a chink in the armour. And then of course if it doesn’t work you get to feel great about your armour. How refined and impenetrable it is. This is the pleasure in denial mentioned earlier in the thread, the flirtation, the invite to seduce and the refutation

Other systems have this built in, for leftists its a privilege check, scientists a peer review. Show me my blind spots. For me its dissensus! Tell me exactly how i’m full of shit please!

 

[luka]

Are you agreeing with me or having a go at me I can't work it out

 

[luka]

The Party never ends.
Sourpuss forfeits smile bonus.

We all work in The Last Resort
with donkey tail pinned to uniform and the Fun never ends
and the Big Wheel never stops turning
and the Big Eye never shuts.

"Sunny Side Up!"
As day begins happiness is a decision. We will be children all our lives.
We are the Machine's smiling faces we are it's friendly voice.

POINT OF SALE

The product is a red herring, a tattered pamphlet, a ragged page, a threadbare excuse,
a Xerox of a Xerox, walk with a wiggle, earn it.

 

[shiels]

Are you agreeing with me or having a go at me I can't work it out

Agreeing but having a go at your dismissal of the pressure of self-expression and individuality under capitalism, production of taste, identities playing a role in this judgemental perception that tries on or discards things as me or not-me. Because I know its something you understand and maybe you're just having an allergic reaction to a word and doing a bit of this...

We don't read what people write, we alight on this or that word and fill in the blanks ourselves. We hear assumed intentions and not what is actually said. We don't wait for the stimulus to reach us, we preempt it before it reaches its target define it and calcify it.