ask xenogoth

[shiels]

It was the scientific and medicinal community that popularised their use. this current wave is of a different depth and scale obviously. but what im saying is that even big pharma clinical psychedelia booms, the substances and their effects are odd and unpredicatble enough for unforeseen and unintended consequences. they send people on all kinds of trajectories. there are common threads of positive behaviour change but also lots of weirdness. lots of big shifts and sometime doubling down and even regression. Im waffling, im tired!

 

[luka]

what you are arguing for Stan is not something i'm opposed to as much as it is something i am unsure about. it seems very ambiguous. christ or anti-christ?

 

[constant escape]

what's the point of critiquing a runaway process like the one you are describing? you might as well critique an avalanche. i mean, i think there is a trajectory towards dematerialisation obviously. everyone can see it. i started a big thread on it which is probably far too long now for anyone to read.

i guess that what remains unclear is whether the technoligcal manifestation of this is christ or anti christ.

As far as I can tell, what distinguishes accelerated evolution from runaway meltdown is how integrated the movement's auto-critique is. That is, if there aren't people at the forefront who express skepticism or criticism regarding the trajectory, its that much more a blind movement. It can only be successful if there are brakes built into the movement, brakes which enable it to curb its movement down a disastrous reality/contingency, such that it can pivot to a more optimal one.

If there were just transhumanist synth-types at the forefront drinking their own koolaid, that would more likely spell disaster than if there were a few skeptics who could keep up with them.

 

[luka]

are we building God or a hideous replica? is it the rapture or the capture?

 

[constant escape]

what you are arguing for Stan is not something i'm opposed to as much as it is something i am unsure about. it seems very ambiguous. christ or anti-christ?

Both. The daemonic, as opposed to demonic - if I understand that distinction properly. But then again I'm not sure how the daemonic figures into this in any different way than it has figured into the cutting edge in the past.

 

[constant escape]

I mean maybe I'm a totally delusional plebe, but it feels like a Marxism can be kept intact through all this.

edit: That was my point of departure, and the reason for all this second-order pragmatism stuff. Keeping one ideology intact and clandestinely active underneath another ideology, without the top ideology being fake.

edit edit: which sounds schizo to me.

 

[luka]

ive never read Marx. I don't know what it is.

 

[constant escape]

I mean that all of this could still be a means to communism. The dream. Don't need to read Marx. If you get/feel the operation-at-the-edge, which you do, thats arguably all thats ever been needed.

 

[luka]

oh i see. well in that case, sure. i wouldn't count it out.

 

[shiels]

well what acid communism starts to point to is a spiritual materialism that injects collective joy into the pious and closed off aspects of Marxist thought that your were laying into the other day ... its an odd juxtaposition. Can economics be spiritual?

 

[constant escape]

@shiels in any way related to how psychedelics can, potentially, serve to destabilize ego boundaries and actually let someone identify as merely a part of a grander collective? How can this be administered without resorting/defaulting to some kind of party dogmatism? That is, how can you identify with the collective without rigidly relying on the (transitional) party/political expressions of that collective?

 

[shiels]

well you can take Mdma on a dancefloor in Belfast and hug a Protestant and say “I don’t give a fuck about all that shit mate all that matters is tunes” can’t you?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Can economics be spiritual?

For years I've toyed with the idea of starting a thread titled "On the Spirituality of Money". No clear idea what I wanted to say, it just struck me as an interesting phrase.

This famous monologue from the 70s media thriller Network comes close, though - starts about 1:40 in:

 

[luka]

well what acid communism starts to point to is a spiritual materialism that injects collective joy into the pious and closed off aspects of Marxist thought that your were laying into the other day ... its an odd juxtaposition. Can economics be spiritual?

the way Pound thinks of economics in The Cantos has spiritual and ethical dimensions.

 

[Corpsey.]

For years I've toyed with the idea of starting a thread titled "On the Spirituality of Money". No clear idea what I wanted to say, it just struck me as an interesting phrase.

This famous monologue from the 70s media thriller Network comes close, though - starts about 1:40 in:

'the invisible hand'
'the world spirit'
marx and his vampires

 

[constant escape]

well you can take Mdma on a dancefloor in Belfast and hug a Protestant and say “I don’t give a fuck about all that shit mate all that matters is tunes” can’t you?

Haven't tried mdma, so I can't speak to it directly, but you're saying it short-circuits some of the contrived ways we divide ourselves from ourselves, and you're asking if this can be scaled up to some kind of political program?

In a way, I only see this working if psychedelics are increasingly sanctioned by the scientific community, no? Not that that would be a sufficient condition, but just a necessary one.

 

[Corpsey.]

For years I've toyed with the idea of starting a thread titled "On the Spirituality of Money". No clear idea what I wanted to say, it just struck me as an interesting phrase.

This famous monologue from the 70s media thriller Network comes close, though - starts about 1:40 in:

the move off the gold standard, thus the value of the dollar rooted in, essentially, belief

 

[xenogoth]

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).

i think that's part of the problem Fisher wanted to address. The Weird and the Eerie was an alternative exploration of the same sentiment in very different aesthetic contexts. that's sort of the issue i have with Gilbert being all like, "mark basically plagiarised me". he'd been interested in this stuff since day 1. if Gilbert did anything, it was soften his hatred of hippies as he realised there was a shared project there -- goth / hippie alliance.

but yeah, that quote from luka is boss. that's totally the vibe, i think. from postcap intro:

A new psychedelic culture is required, then, that will inform politics anew, but it may not look like we expect. Indeed, we should be vigilant against anything that appears too familiar. We might even argue that the aesthetic connotations of psychedelia today are to be rejected outright. As Fisher once wrote on Surrealism, one of countercultural psychedelia’s clearest antecedents: “Like punk, Surrealism is dead as soon as it is reduced to an aesthetic style. It comes unlive again when it is instantiated as a delirial program (just as punk comes unlive when it is effectuated as an anti-authoritarian, acephalic contagion-network)”.

that's the problem with gilbert's view of fisher's psychedelia coming from him. mark took it so much further.

 

[luka]

my favourite Mark is the visionary Spinoza-via-Burroughs looking for an exit Mark which is the Mark you could conceiveably describe as psychedelic.

 

[xenogoth]

re: reactionary psychedelia: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/27/...ghts-back-movies-now-kubrick-fights-back.html

Stanley Kubrick on "the new psychedelic fascism—the eye‐popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug‐oriented conditioning of human beings by other beings—which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom."

and mark running a mile with it: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003948.html and being very nice about luka too