princess mike, pt. I

It was the harvest season, and the butterflies were coming. They appeared twice every year; once at the planting, once at the harvest. It started off always as a white girding like coils of sun-dried snowflake on the undersides of rafters, roof-beams, moist fuzzy puffballs growing to fill the curved space beneath the mossy tiles with a glistening web, as if some delinquent baker had spent an anonymous night squirting blooms of silvery icing into those damp crevices. Day by day the whiteness, at first limpid as cotton candy, slowly multiplied, compelled by an internal force, like a mold growing everywhere on high all at once. There were the songs that said, "swollen lattice for the lettuce / break the drabness come and get us!" If you asked, the villagers would deny knowing what, exactly, it meant, or where it had come from, or why they were so fond of chanting at cobwebs. But of course, there is a reason behind every emergent phenomenon, and even as the fresh spring light glittered, or the summer light from carafe of sky poured, and the hands-joined circles whirled and the invisible caterpillars were gradually spun beneath the blankets of their furred cocoons into something more proper to the time of year, the fields waited expectantly, draped in pungent silence.

the downtrodden are trodden down

"The primary excusatory function of ideology... is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe." Havel, The Power of the Powerless

"What Empire demands is not that each conforms to a common law, but that each conforms to its own particular identity. Imperial power depends on the adherence of bodies to their supposed qualities or predicates in order to leverage control over them." Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

luxury and lechery have an ongoing discursive and historical relationship. they are moons orbiting morality, which may (or may not) exist, which in its oldest sense is an appeal to a higher authority, a transcendent authority, which could be a god or a community, a sense of customs, a certain manner. Moralis engages rhythmicity, i.e. it shapes patterns at certain intensities and frequencies over time in governance of the actions of human beings by whom it is raised as an influence. in another time it may have been the light which guides, but for who? a privileged elite, economically empowered to have the possibilities of decision-making, to exalt the idea of what it is to decide - muddling around in the micro-potentials of fate, stepping on the faces of those do not have such luxury. a luxury which comes at the expense of the needs of the neediest, whose diverse needs are relevant to the specific material conditions in which they find themselves (their node or coordinate in the flow of capital).

capital moves. it flows from one node to another, through a vast array of machines, literally at the speed of light. human beings are also nodes. anywhere money pauses is a node. a node is the abstraction of the concrete bundles of history and possibility that humans move around in the form of money. money is pure exchange value. money is the symbol of abstract mediation of human relationships. by this i mean relationships in general; a relationship of family or tribe, work or custom. a relationship in which there exists socialized (cultural) structures of expectations - a moralis. we, as oppressed human agents, are constituted by a combination of coercion and our own consent. this is a dialectical relationship likened to the shaping of a growing tree through intensities of localized pressure. we grow, it directs, we resolve to keep growing because that is what beings do.

discursive creativity

To speak a word is an act which mediates and prescribes meaning. A word, when uttered, exists in a liminal space of time (that is, concretely). Simultaneously, a word exists insofar as it is sensible (that is, able to be sensed, to be perceived). To sense a word is to take the word and also to be taken by the word, to make a step or movement onto a path which we choose to follow and by which we are led. A word is an abstract object from which illumination is shed in many possible directions at once, a prism through which understanding might move and move us - to where, depends upon the angle at which we stand, the perspective from which we find and then define it. The word's possibilities depend upon the boundaries we draw around it. It is circumscribed only with as much specificity and intransigence as we bring to bear on it, the openings by which we grant it access to our experience and imagination. It is limited to the degree to which we fear misunderstanding and creative discourse.

The mind is used to memory and movement, from birth it begins the first timid steps of the dance, for mind is constituted of energy and change. The fear of this dance of abstraction is socially inculcated for political reasons. We are taught to accept the terms of what exists as what should exist. An apprehension of traversing allegedly fixed boundaries of the socially acceptable is reinforced by acts and images of violence which we perpetrate on ourselves and others. We are the authorities of our own imprisonment. We police ourselves to ensure the lines are always redrawn. Though the geometries may shift, the lines remain. The lines we locate everywhere; they signify order. Lines in the grocery store, assembly lines, property lines, lineage and narratives of development, architecture and urban planning, the bottom line. Lines do not have to be straight. They are insidious because they are taken for granted. A line is a path, a movement to and from. A line is a real-life application of an ideology of control. Lines are the methodology of simplification and fixation. They are what makes the world coherent. Coherence is a preliminary to reification, commodification, and control. This is the application of capitalism in action, the system whose mechanisms are calibrated to produce exchange value. An accumulation of lines and numbers, to which we alone assign meaning. We are the subjects behind this, but only if we begin to understand ourselves as such.

A word is a point on a line, if that's all you're willing to let it be.

three quotes

"[Marx's] enquiry into wage-labour is initiated from the point of view of a division of labour between self-employed producers (farmer meets cloth-maker), and proceeds to analyze the dual nature of labour: concrete (labour has use value) and abstract (it produces exchange value)." Dauvé, Value, Time, and Communism

"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges." Quine, The Verification Theory and Reductionism

"What we know is `So-and-so has a mind which has such and such properties' but we do not know `A has such and such properties', where A is the mind in question. In such a case, we know the properties of a thing without having acquaintance with the thing itself, and without, consequently, knowing any single proposition of which the thing itself is a constituent." Russell, On Denoting

isnt day tripper a beatles''' song ?

If you are afraid to walk into the forest at night, walk into the forest at night. The monsters are hideous in a different way than you'd expect. A whol straight line of trees can make a Nazi village of erect nationalistic design templates - as sweet as the century's vocabulary turn. It's hard to resist not making up me words, but neologismaticism, while it can be dogmaticism, perhaps romanticism, is certainly not responsible for the

"Vinothek" is a jolly good word

If the greatness of humanity resides in our "unique" ability to think, to adapt diverse environments to our uses and our needs... (An ontological assertion of capitalism)
Yet the observer can never be impartial, "we" being the observer. Neither can the actor, the agent, the Subject, "I"... "I" being the one Self who thinks and acts... Fragments of one-another, twofold, perhaps distorted...
Taking into account the sempiternality of shifting environmental factors, agents, vectors, components, whatever the fuck you want to call them...
Are humans capable of a deep enough understanding of our varied environments and their interconnections to be able to make decisions regarding what we should be adapting to and what we should be adapting to us?
Can we think clearly enough? Are we a healthy species? Can we as people even take a moral or ethical standpoint about the species? Can we change, be changed, change ourselves? Can we even consider ourselves all the same? Equal and free? What entitles us to this, or do we even need entitlement? Do we have the power in ourselves, united to dismantle the machinery of our lives and refuse to be manipulated?
Epistemology is meaningless when everything begs a question. Sometimes, we are meaningless beneath the weight of our own questioning.

Scissoring Scientists, what an artifice!

"Cosmos: a complex and orderly system, such as our universe; the opposite of chaos." (Counterbalance)

The cosmic and the chaotic may not exist severed from one-another as in the cisions of language and representation. References to "our" universe as complex and orderly contain not only the assumption upon which science elaborates itself (that all is knowable and will be known - the heights of intellectual utopianism) but also the ego of the "scientific observer". Though the structure of science may posit itself as that authority which seeks to reveal the universal-mathematical principles governing all (its own claim to truth), this position is deeply flawed, as it fails to take into account the forces of chaos present in the universe - the same universe it idealizes as a clockwork organism. The truth of the matter (and the anti-matter) is that not everything is observable, nor do science and its acolytes have the proper tools, physical and psychical, to apprehend all that is out there as well as within, intertwined, simultaneous, cosmic and chaotic.