Gotta keep moving

Generally why I like being back. Or, at least why being here now matters so much. I’ve gotten a weird sense of picking up where I left off by being in Austin again. I don’t believe I find an authoritative, real sense of who I am here, but I know that the sense of place I have developed here brings out certain qualities and feelings that I need to stare down to understand what I need in my life in a more general sense. Who ‘I am’ can’t really be found or known, and I want to make everything that pisses me off about living as me to drive me towards a better sense or approach to the world.

It helps me figure out what’s missing, in a lot of senses. I guess this refers back to certain times in my life when I’ve been really happy, or at least happy and comfortable at the same time, which has some particular value.
In Athens – Austin is a sense of where I was, what my future requires. I think finding some reason for my comfort level gives me a base to work from to develop an activist/progressive future. Actually, no. I think being comfortable is the wrong approach, the times when I’ve had the most energy is when I felt the least comfortable, the most ‘off’ from myself. Knowing what made me comfortable and at least happy here makes me want to develop that sense of community/feeling again. Getting here, just smelling the weird stuff about Austin gave me a picture of what I love. The smells, experiences are tied into everything about my life that I miss, don’t always get elsewhere. Knowing it again makes the absence more pronounced, which makes me more focused in the drive to create. The ‘recharge’ I get isn’t physical or energetic, it helps me focus the energy I have again towards something else. Austin gives me the feeling of demanding satisfaction from the world, feeling good enough to stand on what I think is right to demand change.

Part of being here gives me a sense of misdirection and overstability. I know there are certain qualities to my life that my life in Austin meets. I know I have a home, certain privileges that afford me a sense of stability that I don’t feel elsewhere. Having this causes me to seek relationships with qualities I don’t think I could discover were I anywhere else. Knowing the places to be, the basics of living that can only be afforded through time, gives me a certain restlessness and particular purposelessness that searches for connections beyond the basics – I have a home with certain people and places, my desire to expand elsewhere extends to new types of feeling you don’t get when just searching for an initial sense of placement. There is a different kind of isolation attached to being here, which is isolation though my past. It’s easy to avoid human contact because of the nature of my home, and comfortable places that I developed here. This is different, and perhaps more dangerous than the isolation that comes with a new place and not knowing what to do. With the isolation by your past, it’s possible to miss out on your life and not know it, or care about it. My fear with being here is that I’ll become complacent with existence as me, when I don’t think the person I find here really represents the calling or sense of self I desire ultimately. That’s why I need to keep moving and driving for something greater.

I’ve been attracted to creeks lately. I like creeks in cities because they mix the human with the uncontrollable. Creeks remain because waterways are difficult to change or pave over, and they become built around. They can’t as easily be owned or directed, and the lack of a human element makes them ideal spaces to wander though. In our developed lives, walking through one will take you to places you may not otherwise be able to get – the means of a creek (or sometimes powerline right of way, or railroad tracks) provides access to places you ignore without the intent to, so they provide the ability to experience the in between in a way that other transportation (car, sometimes bike) wouldn’t. They provide a mix of the known and controlled with the indeterminate, which suits my approach to the world right now.


Duncan

Something about morality...

I would like to stake out a position on morality and responsibility that walks a line between utter dependence and vapid individualism. Staking personal feeling and enjoyment on other people ends up failing you. Not because of corruptability or any overriding sense of self interest, but because of the shifting nature of their own desire and requirements for life. No one leads a static life, with static approaches to desire. Predictions and expectations about the actions of others becomes its own form of truth process, a strange form of personal morality that conditions our actions in relation to a supposedly self evident set of goals. Acting for the sake of someone else always in reality is action for yourself. This concerns a notion I thought about before, I think. Uncritically endorsing the choices of the oppressed to found a political perspective fails to theorize why those choices are available to people. Power operates by offering certain rewards and sanctions to create subjects who willingly adopt positions that support the privilege of particular groups. Creating positions around the norms that define subjugated groups – some forms of identity specific feminisms, for example – assumes that those social norms have neutral content.

The other side to this process looks too much like libertarian ideology of pure self reliance and abandoning of any concern for others. I’m finding difficulty walking this line, trying to cultivate human concern and affect without assuming a relationship of reliance. I find it difficult to tell people that they have total control over the entirety of their lives, that they can create anything they want, as I have regularly seen the differential impact class/race/gender privilege has had on my life. This response would further insulate myself within these privileges if it had the result of blaming people for subjugation to social oppression.

Duncan

Myth, censorship

The rhetoric of censorship presumes that news reporting has self evident content. If something gets censored, there is pregiven content that gets blocked or diverted. This ignores the productive nature of language, as well as the shifts in meaning and content defined by the context and purpose of speaking. Even if there was a predetermined reality that would be reported on, what gets blocked out can never be known.

Doors of perception – the reality that people experience through drugs – “opening the doors of perception” – is no less constructed and arbitrary than the real that we experience without drugs. Both are equally partial and incomplete in that they represent one experience, but a different perception under different conditions. Neither can be considered authoritative because neither state can make any conclusive, material, claim to authoritative experience that is grounded in the different mediums by which reality is experienced. Nothing about one chemical process implies a realer experience than the other.

Unmasking oppression – exposes of oppression, seeing the reality of ‘the system,’ and to some degree consciousness raising all rely on the fact that the context and overall meaning of communication can be controlled by the people ‘sending’ the message. These tactics pay too little heed to the slipperiness of description, as well as the physical/corporeal stuff I wrote about before.

Duncan

This is not about progress

Pain has to drive you forward. Loss and the irretrievable nature of communication means that the only way forward is through change and production from the life we experience. Irredentism in time fails –we can’t go back to join ourselves as we’d like to be seen as we’d like to know ourselves. Merely hating the “now what” is hating yourself and everything productive about existence. Being alive is productive, because it changes. Holding on to events that sting like a bitch and squeezing them, discovering every little thing about them that makes it hurt turns you towards a new mode of living that realizes the promise of existence.

This is why marriage is a bad idea – the threats attached to a lifelong bond between two people serves to constantly re-create one form of an ideal relationship between two people, to require that arguments be resolved in such a way that reinforces the marriage as a whole. Everything must come back to making a coercive relationship work ‘as it should’ in a way that subjugates each and every issue to a sustainable relationship for life. We become slaves to our own future. This is why I can’t promise forever to anyone, because creates expectations about my feeling that structure relationships in such a way to deny the dynamic life within it. Affect affect affect.

This is why we can’t sedate ourselves with drugs TV love or otherwise.


Duncan

Triple Threats

More on the physical characteristics that define politics in a more profound way than language. The structural dependencies created by technology defines reality and experience more so than language. Three examples demonstrate the forms of dependence

Being in a doctor’s office: Expertise linked with physical ailment constitutes power. Medical training and time spent in practice leaves the patient with comparatively little confidence in diagnosing and treating their physical problems. Even if they are able to conquer the discursive tools used by the medical profession, access to technology and medicine are conditioned on control of capital (which ties to broader issues of relative scarcity and exchange). Even so, the physical condition of the patient determines their needs. Being hurt or ill (perhaps terminally) creates structures of dependency that calls into being certain realities that cannot merely be coded into language.

Riding a bike: when you ride a bike, after a while, you begin to hate people in cars, because of the physical relationship you have to them. They control large machines of metal and explosives that threaten you passively every time they pass by you. Your constant state of vulnerability makes every move by someone driving a car an expression of power over you, which creates resentment. Cars create affect and emotions in cyclists simply by driving, by technology.

Global food: the structure of export agriculture creates dependency which inevitably creates power relationships between different reigons. Areas reliant on export agriculture (or really any production/export, but agriculture in particular) also rely on other areas for survival. monopolizing and monoculture-ing farmland undermines a region’s capacity for self-sustaining existence. Survival becomes a function of exchange rates, commodity (oil) prices or political decisions concerning trade rules. The very nature of this power relationship creates resentment, as seemingly arbitrary changes in prices can drastically impact someone’s livelihood or existence. No system is entirely stable, and the power differentials within the trade system make those instabilities particularly dangerous.


Duncan

Radical reforms?

When do political demands shift from being radical to being reformist? Does the demand “US out of Iraq now?” really represent an anti-war stance anymore? It seems that the question revolves around the rhetorical devices that other people employ to justify the policy; if the Iraq Study Group can demand withdraw in order to preserve US military and political dominance in the Mideast, the demand looses its force as an anti-System demand. Individual policies are transient, the real question is whether they coincide with ideas or concepts that can create a new political reality. When something can be logically adopted as a course of action that re-invigorates a form of political hegemony, the motivations and political position of the person constructing the argument matters less. However, not all types of non-radical demands end up with this fate. Demands for social justice, which are attached to some political figures, such as ecological sustainability can be linked to a variety of demands that cascade to seriously change our political situation. This is why impossible demands can be effective: they prevent the reduction of a political position to a particular policy proposal, and so prevent the redeployment of that policy for the sake of supporting a system the group would otherwise reject. So, the fact that the option “withdraw now” has become an option for mainstream politics – a way to win, a way to get out ‘OK,’ does in fact indict the usefulness of the demand for anti-war groups. This should inspire not just blind political opposition, but rather constant criticism, political groups willing and able to constantly reformulate demands for change once their proposals have been adopted as a part of mainstream political doctrine.

Duncan

Overman and such

The internal contradiction of Nietzsche: Nietzsche’s contradiction comes at the moment of achieving status of the overman. There seems to be no way to ‘become’ in such a way to achieve the overman, as the constraints on the will come from two contradictory sources. First, the overman must become greater than the herd. They must embrace their own will and attempt to act in the name of joy and overcome the will of the masses and adherence to false idols (all of them). Second, the overman must become more than themselves, and overcome adherence to their will. This of course presumes that the will of the overman can be divided out from the will of others, but even more so, it contradicts the first step of overcoming. The only way to overcome the internal self constraints is the influence of forces beyond yourself, i.e. the people and ideas that have already been rejected in the first move in overcoming. Leaving yourself requires the influence of others to push beyond what you know already.

Why it’s not drugs that enable overcoming. The reason drugs won’t help is the association with the body, the corporal underpinning. Drug use has the effect of becoming something greater, of applying the will in a new way, however that use is tied to often addictive chemical processes that create a relationship of dependence. Also, taking drugs is a search for becoming that means we will only find ourselves again reflected in the new creations and thoughts that come from the experience. I am also disturbed with the rhetoric surrounding it that promises access to our ‘truer selves’ (opening the doors of perception…) as if there were an absolute notion of truth concerning the self, which again reflects not a truth but another instance of the will to power invested with the mask of authority.

Nietzsche has no discussion of the communicative practices involved in achieving the overman. Conversation and communication necessarily invests our human essence, our selves, in other people. Mutual intelligibility (even the self-perpetuated myth of it) demonstrates a connection with other humans. The ability to discern intent in communication means we see a certain level of equivalence and concern for other human beings. In order that communication elucidate a response from anyone requires an understanding of the conditions of another’s experience. Language undoes the notion that we may transcend the herd.


Duncan

Grand Unified Theory...

I hope to one day find a ‘grand unifying theory’ of power capable of explaining the reasons why certain discourses become prioritized over others in structuring of politics. It seems like there should be a way to describe why certain subjectifying experiences become dominant over others in the way people internalize their identity and notions of self. Obviously, this should consider the marginal nature of any description of the world: how any description or theory of human action originates in a particular social experience, and contains residual elements of a ‘will to power.’ Still, the notion of a ‘will to power’ overemphasizes the role of language and individual will in shaping people’s outlook on life. Both of these things seem interchangeable to me. The recent election demonstrates the relative unimportance of individual people in determining the structure of power, and our subjectivity as citizens. There are more powerful forces at work, shaping political constructs such as the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘The Senate.’ Similarly, with language, the fact that language can be deconstructed, and often is, suggests that forces beyond language determine reality. Often politics concerns competition over how to interpret particular terms, suggesting that interests and ‘reality’ lies beyond language. The question remains as to where and what beyond language and people drives politics.

Duncan