O Z A R K
Is about how capital encroachment upends and corrodes us: The bonds between, the rituals high and low, the circulation of power, the values that define us.
The capital is power made material in the form of the Byrds. Who convince people to remake the land and remake themselves and rearrange their lowly shops. He entices the Snells with realizing ancestral vengeance into complicity with the same sin that birthed it. We all have the same hands in the end. Where do yours end and mine begin?
The Revolution of the Center
Be very careful who tells you this is a world where things change. From time to time there will be a revolution in social relations that are actually an adjustment - but not revolution - of material relations. Consider segregation. Laws that formally delimited race-based zoning over time became barriers to capital expansion.* Desegregating allowed capital poles to continue expanding with black neighborhoods being new zones for capital inflow/outflow.
The symbol crafted from this turn in history has a couple of faces, one of those being a clear demarcation between a blemished past and a present resplendent with justice. More attractive, certainly, than the reality of racialized inequity remaining a fixture of American life even amidst general falling fortunes of all citizenry.
The symbol loses its luster (authority as spectacular co-narrator) with this latter development. How can desegregation stand for a more just union, if there is less justice all around - widespread immiseration, mounting evidence of failed state and empire? If there is in fact, less evidence of the future than ever before?
You would need corroborating symbols also attesting to the future’s health under American stewardship. And (as mentioned above) these symbols would also run cover for capital’s drive to expand and reproduce, ie the re-shuffling of material relations.
This musing began when I considered the trend of modern fashion over the decades encompassing my life. In decades past clothing and accessories represented participations in public life that precluded other ways of participating. They were declarations of cultural identity informing others how and with whom this person oriented themselves toward society. In the 80s and 90s for example, you didn’t find many teachers with full tattoo sleeves or facial piercings. Not a lot of finance guys donning streetwear or embracing futurism.
Spectacular ad-barkers tell us this is how we remain individuals in the work place - you can be a cottage core mortgage broker, a gothic administrative assistant, an aggressively normie YouTuber, a body conscious PA - just express yourself! But to me this is a tacit recognition that all barriers that would preclude anyone’s full energies being plied in service as labor must be eroded. How could we keep someone from working in finance just because they have tattoos and piercings? Why stop a willing participant from becoming an adjust professor even if they dress like a 30 year old theatre kid? Before the imperatives of capital these can no longer serve as meaningful impediments and thusly, they do not.
Instead of asserting individuality they actually lay bare how all are reduced to mere workers irrespective of any superficial differences. A tacit acknowledgment that no mere cultural affect run through commodification can threaten political economy. The freedom of choice, and the ostensible extremes of those choices, are sold as revolutions but are - yet again - just the center revolutionizing itself, for itself.
*remember, Marx - helpfully explained by prof Harvey - describes capitalism as a system constantly in motion. Capital gains must be re-circulated into the market either from which it came or diversify into new markets that prove more lucrative (or less stagnant.)
More Thoughts on Reaction
AngieSpeaks says that in the marxist sense ‘reaction’ merely means ‘amenable to capital.’ I guess that makes sense. How many reactions have I seen that ultimately are amenable to capital? And let’s keep in mind how vastly adaptable capital is to any phenomena here. You blow up a building - what’s the response going to be? More police, more public opinion shaping. More reification of the carceral state, all that shit.
Most initial responses to something such as a police shooting sound reactionary: a hastily assembled march. Anything intended for youtube and social media in its conception and realization. Mainstream music and movies…the movies especially. Maybe that’s why so many movies don’t feel right.
So what is a response that isn’t reactionary? Or given capital’s saturation in all things, what are the least reactionary choices we can make when formulating a response to, say, another state-on-citzen murder?
Well. Probably something that doesn’t take place on social media. Conversations that happen without the pressure of needing to be ‘productive’ or ‘solutionary.’ My initial thought - which is also my frame of reference - is the kind of community organizing under which I was trained. My mind goes to the old outs: we need to establish authentic relationships. Ones that aren’t even contingent on ‘action,’ but rather the action being the recognization that people need one another to survive and our continued reliance on the state for survival ensures its dominance over us.
We need the rituals that help us metabolize and make meaning of: life and living, death and dying. We rely on mass culture (and its current false fractal iteration) for this and it undermines our ability to make anything generative. It points back to itself as the way through it all which only leaves us stuck.
Sleight of Hand
What if we have been mislead by a sleight of hand, snuck past us in the very story about the technology running our world?
We are told over and again tech has remade the world. There is always an invention – typically in communications – that has transformed our world into a distinct and different one than that which preceded it.
But what does this idea accomplish? Well, one, it ahistorifies us. How could we engage meaningfully with history if we believe we’re in a time discontiguous to any period before it? If this were the case - why would we?
So: What if this isn’t the case at all? What does it mean if we are functionally still living in the same exact world as the 1980s, 70s, 60s? That today’s issues aren’t new whatsoever, but we’re seeing them askew through the lens of self-supposed ‘future people’? What if we’re at an impasse with our problem solving because we are mislocating ourselves, placing ourselves at an imaginary point in history, a future that doesn’t actually exist, but is rather the accumulated projection of this sleight of hand as reinforced by the very communication technologies themselves?
Pandemic Prose
They say now the future is become ash of all the fires we lit to get here. They are children reading palms that have known only games of four sided dice and cards with pictures on them. Here is the place we have always been, which is the crystallized all-moment of creation. Forwards and backwards always were, were always going to be. The shuddering light of consciousness is merely wriggling through this fourfold solid, giving illusion of movement. There is no movement; there is but moment. I’ve a dice with pictures of crackers and slides in my pocket. I flick it at these vulgar historians and their mouths fling open, tongues forming a y axis to their twitching noses; they are like pac man or for base representations. They slobber and I bid them away.
Das Kapital Reflections #2: The Middle Distance
What if it’s not all or nothing?
I make light of the exasperating task it is to read all 200 pages of Marx’s chapter on machinery. That many pages and they didn’t even have typewriters! My mind regularly snapped back to “Bruh I can read this shit on a palm sized computer more powerful than any technology available to you - WHAT exactly can you tell me about machines?” But the overall gist is valuable and important: Technological innovations have implications for life under capitalism that are important to track and consider closely.
Part of the Das Kapital project is charting how capitalism immiserates common people through a revolution in material - and consequently, social - relations. The technological question is part of this. And as genius as this work is we can say: Marx and Engels weren’t fortune tellers. They forecasted some things and not others.
Capitalism as a revolutionary, totalizing force that brutalizes the vast majority? Yes.
Would there one day be technological achievements within capitalism able to solve (to some extent) its brutal, exploitive tendencies? Don’t think they saw this coming. Probably not appropriate for investigating given what the times called for.
A weakness in most casual leftism is an unwillingness to grapple with that question - what I call ‘the middle distance’ - even now. They appear to have inherited the general thrust of Marx (or more likely Marx influenced scholarship) that capitalism must be abolished completely for the new to be born. For many this is the only way liberation becomes possible. This is its origin point.
Okay. The resulting question is of course ‘how do we get there?’ And I think we see some of the strategic and tactical decisions in play - the recalcitrant feet drag of anti-voting, retreat from electoralism, and a lot of rhetoric promoting the commune, dual power, or left pastoral imagery. It remains to be seen if this is truly a viable project. That’s being generous.
What I don’t see a lot of is people engaging with the middle distance. What technologies do we have in play right now - both at a consumer level and that of the owning class - that could intervene in widespread mental/emotional/psychological/material misery? What can we learn from just-in-time supply chains, worldwide delivery systems, and delivery mechanisms that would allow us to claim the middle distance in a way that speaks to the possibility of there being something BETTER than what we have now —— even though it may not be “socialism” or “communism”?
THAT shit…is really mainstream.
Atoms can be seeds
Love is structured into life via the formidable super-structure of politics, economy, gender, and race that manipulate perceptions of reality. It’s like a second spacesuit atop the spacesuit of the flesh. A ‘virtual reality’ that distorts and clips what we see when looking at another. We carry the DNA of these structures in the choices we select moving forward into time. And when oblivious or careless our actions encode and recode the virtual into our present reality. Even in the intimate spheres - private tenderness and public affections - there is room to practice imperialism, commodification, hatred. The consequences of recklessness are to love someone poorly, incompletely, unhealthily. Killing someone as you hold them tight.
The Reactionary Moment
There’s so much to react to and so many ways to respond. And a lot of us are. We’re trying to find out when the next action is, where to donate, who to signal boost, what to share, but in general we’re feeling pressure to be of use in the moment, even if that’s just reframing whatever we normally do within a general ‘black lives matter’ or ‘defund the police’ ‘we must elect X’ or ‘fuck this candidate/celebrity’ pivot. There’s immense pressure to be productive within this moment.
But reaction will burn us out. Reaction precludes moving strategically. Reaction precludes theorizing, thinking, reconfiguring, repositioning.
It is actually okay NOT to produce. For the obvious reasons. You can supply some of them.
Reflections on “The Center” #1
Thinking about the funereal spectacle of the Democratic National Convention. This onetime mourning of and necrophiliac appeal to norms.
What it actually looks like is they held a convention for themselves and their true constituents in the Necropolis, and we on the party fringes, or outsiders, watched their recommitment to voodoo capital take place. What I heard, what I saw, what I believe is that where I feel defeat, loathing, betrayal, there is - obviously, as it has to be, like why would these millionaires and billionaires just commit several days to only shitting on my personal project - something else taking place.
I believe there is an ideological realignment or adjustment taking place, and not only among the Democrats but also with the Republicans. Together, the two party elites have clearly recognized we are in the midst of a free-falling crisis, and given the makeup of those two parties what can we deduce is their most likely response - save capital. Who am I to believe that they would reasonably look to radical alternatives to see their way out of this crisis? What makes more sense - that these millionaires and billionaires would throw in with people like me, represented by AOC/Bernie/even more radical folks? Or they would work with the forces of Capital to save and rearticulate the system through however this world is changing?
Formation of Purpose
Do we live within a symbolic history?
This summer it felt like history was taking shape around us. Within this is the feeling of re-attuning to historical continuity and causality. We remember things come AFTER other things and happen BECAUSE of other things: they have precedents, causes, and relational enmeshment with other happenings past and concurrent. The sensation of ‘awakening’ is the revival of mass movement aligned with our historical consciousness. History is a social, political, philosophical, economic, and material inquiry into the past. From out this inquiry sparked by recent state violence we see the past is present and as thirsty for our blood as ever. We see its imperatives - capital, racism, incarceration, heteropatriachy, nationalism, war - won’t be sated by our concessions and indignities but will speed up feasting like it suspects the meal is almost over. And our inquiry tells us we must resist. This conviction makes our resistance a historical act. We are acting upon history as we feel it acting upon us.
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But there is also a parallel history at work here. An affective history, a symbolic history, that produces false consciousness.
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Media exploits events via dialogue that exhausts us while never establishing them within any historical pattern or lineage. It’s contrary to the kind of inquiry mentioned above. National news is discussed like the biggest - even the last - story there will ever be. Think Rachel Maddow spending like 27 years on ‘Russiagate.’ This isn’t the measured language of examining new information in context of the old. The hysteria actually makes context impossible. These are politicized emotional appeals to a base where analysts deduce what they’re ostensibly supposed to explain. Stories become prisms filtering a viewership’s attitudes back to them; symbols equipping sides at war in the politics of pure signification.
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But they’re relevant only as long as they stay useful to the outlets mining them for attention. When the next story appears that produces sufficient hysteria the previous crisis is abandoned. They are now alienated from what came before it and whatever comes after. They meant something only to and only during the moment they emerged, never becoming kind of memory we can explore for historical inquiry. These objectified, alienated events make for a past told as a story of impressions, but not lessons or conclusions. This is an affective history told to us through the recollection of these symbolized experiences.
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But there’s that thing about symbols: Does the symbol prepare reality for its emergence into a more literal form? Or is the symbol residual reality? Do things stay symbolic for long? How long?
Das Kapital Reflections #1: Police
Police exist to reinforce capital relationships materially and conceptually.
The law has always prescribed punishing surplus populations (redundant workers or bodies incapable of generating surplus value at a given stage of industrial development) to create the discipline & compliance necessary for people to see themselves as a workforce before anything else. All productivity worship as well as its converse, criminalization of the poor, has its roots here. Constables - proto police forces - were deputized for the express purpose of carrying out these laws..