ask xenogoth

xenogoth

looking for an exit
For someone who might be trying to start a scenius-type community, or informal thinktank type thing... what're you think are some of the ingredients the CCRU scene had that really got things going? What'd they do right?
Doing it in the 90s.

lol! what version said. but i suppose what all the people involved in the ccru shared was having their fingers collectively on the pulse of the moment they lived in. and a sort of twisted monastic vibe where people were collectively engaged in cultural production that is hard to imagine taking place these days, at least in that form.

if the ccru existed today, it would probably be a tik tok collective plugging weird start ups with occultural trend data and mining bitcoin using power siphoned off the Greggs downstairs.

a pretty cursed image but then so much of what they found interesting has been appropriated by the forces they hoped to critique.

in that sense, it's not really possible to learn from them for today. the pressure-cooker conditions that produced the ccru don't (and perhaps couldn't) exist but there's surely space for something like it. not knowing what that would look like is sort of the point, i guess, and it sure ain't gonna emerge from well trodden ground.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
For someone who might be trying to start a scenius-type community, or informal thinktank type thing... what're you think are some of the ingredients the CCRU scene had that really got things going? What'd they do right?
For a while I've been enamored with the idea of starting some kind of independent scholar think tank or group. Granted I've quite a distance between me and ccru, but @version seems to have a point, in that their momentum was afforded by the collective feeling of being "onto something", that something being, I guess, the emerging computational infrastructure and culture? In that sense it probably was largely a right time, right place scenario.

But aside from that, I think the general conditions for success were simple: sharp, passionate people willing to pour their lives into their work. If the passions align, they can combust or leap-frog each other much farther than one would go alone, no?
 
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xenogoth

looking for an exit
Not sure what would qualify as "vanguardism", but what do you think about the base around Joe Rogan and the likes, which seem to approach the psychedelic from a more politically conservative set of positions? Not sure if there is a similar group/base in England, but could they be candidates for an acid proletariat? The "vanguard" would be the administers of mind expansion (don't know enough about the pertinent feminist "consciousness raising" to make that comparison).

I've only heard Edward Snowden and Cornel West interviews with Rogan, so I can't claim much familiarity with him and his base either.

i think this is part of the problem of what has happened to culture more recently, and related to the ccru question. when psychedelia is conflated with conspiracy theory and hotboxing a podcast studio with tech billionaires, i'd say that shows how the psychedelic is in crisis.

i've tried to write on this a bit in the intro to Fisher's "Postcapitalist Desire" lectures. the point to be made, i suppose, is that his sense of "psychedelia" was quite literal and detached from cultural stereotypes. by literal, i mean he was interested in how to manifest things that are in the mind. this was related to Spinoza and his "psychedelic reason" -- see: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003926.html for instnace -- but also to Marx's comment that we need not "interpret" the world but "change" it, which often seems to get bastardised as a kind of anti-intellectual stance but surely it means, if you're going to theorise, it has to have real world consequences. and so I think Mark found a lot of Marxism to be quite "trippy" in this regard -- the power of a book or work of theory to wholly reorient your relation to the world is a psychedelic process. and this explains why so much of the ccru stuff is so occultural or why the hard philosophy stuff is so unruly. to grasp it, you need to shift your whole mode of being a few degrees, and that's an endeavour worth pursuing. because being freed from the immediacy of capitalist-realist ideology isn't as simply as donning a pair of sunglasses, like in They Live, but the right kind of philosophy *can* do something similar.

not to say there's some toolkit of right books to read and you'll see the light, of course. these things have to be continuously dismantled and questioned.

how Joe Rogan fits into that, i don't know, but there are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there. i'm not so familiar with him either but i don't see him challenging the status quo so much as signal boosting the fringes of our current overton window, that is still focused on the success of capitalism and neoliberalism, ultimately. plenty of people do that. i've been on podcasts myself where you're treated like a kind of ideological anomaly to be viewed with a curious eye by some quasi-political weather-vane and what kind of impact those kinds of appearances have, i can't say, but it can't be the be all and end all, that's for sure.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
how Joe Rogan fits into that, i don't know, but there are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there.

Yeah I can't say he strikes me as someone tapping into truth - but perhaps he (or someone like him) can successfully prime some large body of people for more thorough, even political, transformations. People who are, perhaps, interested in heterodox/unorthodox values but are disillusioned with (or disgusted by) whatever party ostensibly represents those values.

Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but Rogan seems to have stumbled upon some kind of latent politico-ideological exodus route. Rough speculation here - but if the Democrats in the US were more class-based than intersectionality-based (that is, if Bernie Sanders wasn't suppressed?), perhaps this exodus (from right to left) would have been realized, rather than stagnating into some kind of marginal Bernie-bro, sensory-deprivation, DMT subculture.

Then again, maybe such was always the maximum potential of Rogan's influence. The vanguardism I speak of regards viewing his base as raw material.

And regarding your and Fisher's usage of "psychedelic" - my understanding is bogged down by the cultural elements, but if you have in mind the realization of (presumably utopic?) ideas or theories, that seems like a pretty broad and agreeable foundation. Wish I could speak to the stuff from Spinoza, but I'm not familiar with him.

Do you think the stigmas/connotations surrounding the word "psychedelic" detracts from the intended meaning behind it? I think this is more or less what you pointed out. But it seems the cultural/political baggage, in this case, is especially potent. That is, in attempting to redefine the popular conception of the psychedelic, you could well be rubbing up against some opposition to the connotations of the word, oppositions by people who don't want to see those connotations realized (even if your intentions behind "psychedelic" could very well be in their interest).
 
Do you think the stigmas/connotations surrounding the word "psychedelic" detracts from the intended meaning behind it? I think this is more or less what you pointed out. But it seems the cultural/political baggage, in this case, is especially potent. That is, in attempting to redefine the popular conception of the psychedelic, you could well be rubbing up against some opposition to the connotations of the word, oppositions by people who don't want to see those connotations realized (even if your intentions behind "psychedelic" could very well be in their interest).

what I have decided is the Big Job to be done at this point in the timeline is the rejoining of psychedelia and the avant-garde. When I look at psychedelia as a Famous Poet I despair. I think, my God, this is completely bankrupt. It's stalled. It's the Pantheon Bar from Mount Analogue/The Holy Mountain. It's the gift stores that cluster round at the bottom of the path that leads to the shrine. It's tacky and hackneyed and littered with dead forms and retrograde practice, glow in the dark Ganeshes, dream-catchers, Tie-dye T-shirts and Alex Grey posters, rave flyers from 1992.
No Sophisticated Operator is going to want to go near that.

When I look at what remains of the avant-garde as an Ancient Mariner and psychonaut I'm even more horrified. It's the performative connoisseurship of Cafe Oto with it's fine Japanese whiskies and it's craft beers. It's/ real ale drinking, grouchy old men arguing about Adorno, purple Alex Ferguson noses, broken veins, pot bellies. It's Goldsmiths students posturing on social media, pale skin, monkish shaved heads, pursed, priggish lips, beanies and big round glasses.
No psychically and emotionally healthy(ish) person is going to want to be anywhere near those grotesques.

The avant-garde has lost it's animating principle, it's reason for being, it's motivation, has become a deracinated aesthetic/intellectual game and niche market and psychedelia has become an enclosed space, a recapitulation of old experiences without the means to make it new, the means to make it live and breathe again.

Both have become unhygenic and unattractive backwaters, cut off from the moving current. In their current form they both disgust me. Apart neither means anything. The culture can't start moving again until they're rejoined.
 

luka

Well-known member
"At the very margin of discovery; where the adamant fixed zones of matter resist the pressures of imagination" to quote Prynne
 
Jeremy Gilbert said that a lot in that acid communism essay had come from him. I did like his psychedelic socialism essay

the exciting thing was the aesthetic revulsion mark had about hippy culture, but still seeing the potential in psychedelic effect. because i do think we're still mired by retro sounds and imagery
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Both have become unhygenic and unattractive backwaters, cut off from the moving current. In their current form they both disgust me. Apart neither means anything. The culture can't start moving again until they're rejoined.

Is this a result of their being pasteurized into markets? That is, you no longer need an extraordinary mind/passion to pass as avant-garde, and you no longer need to be deviant to pass as psychedelic? in taking the work/difficulty/rigor out of these things, the meanings is lost as well. But if they weren't pasteurized, or rendered accessible, their potential as lucrative markets wouldn't be realized.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
So I guess what endowed/enabled the meanings of these groups/titles was their exclusivity, reserved for those willing to live under such potentially intense parameters, no? Whereas now, all you need in order to qualify (to most people) is to convey the proper aesthetic.
 

luka

Well-known member
So I guess what endowed/enabled the meanings of these groups/titles was their exclusivity, reserved for those willing to live under such potentially intense parameters, no? Whereas now, all you need in order to qualify (to most people) is to convey the proper aesthetic.

BROADLY SPEAKING YES
 

luka

Well-known member
instead of butting up against "the very margin of discovery; where the adamant fixed zones of matter resist the pressures of imagination" there's a demaracted zone of codified moves and gestures which has come in to stand for 'psychedelia' and 'avant garde'.
 
There's something slightly depressing about this pastel version of psychedelics. the self-care psychedelia. which isnt to say i think its a Bad Thing. its just too nicely packaged, its important the weird and the terrifying aspects are honoured
 

luka

Well-known member
for psychedelia it is not just a question of aesthetics but the kind of moves which are being made in the psychedelic space and how that space is interpreted. this is something i talked a little to sheils about the other day
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
psychedelia as wellness industry adjunct.
Well the selling point is that you can have your cake and eat it too, no? - you can enjoy the looks/style of the definitive counter-culture, without running counter to the culture. It makes sense that this is appealing. (Almost) any time we can get away with this kind of lazy sublation (having/eating cake), we take it.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
This point might get me shunned here - but what if the psychedelic essence/impetus does organically drive in that direction - the direction of moving beyond the human, in a technologically manifest way? What are the prospects (realistically or idealistically) of a reactionary psychedelia?

@luka what if it has ceased to be the Outside? That is, the center has successfully planted itself in its own outside, hence the ostensible absence of counterculture, etc.
 
Can it be fully sanitised, medicinalised, shorn of its unpredictability though? there's a dilution that takes place as things get brought to market from the fringe but a dispersion too, as more people have a go
 
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