"Capitalism culminates when it creates out of itself its own most radical- and the only fruitful- opposite, totally different from what the classic Left, caught in its miserabilism, was able to dream about." - Peter Sloterdijk "Anger and Time"

"The sovereign self-negating gesture of the endless accumulation of wealth is to spend this wealth for things beyond price, and outside market circulation: public good, arts and sciences, health, etc. This concluding "sovereign" gesture enables the capitalist to break out of the vicious cycle of endless expanded reproduction, of gaining money in order to earn more money. When he donates his accumulated wealth to public good, the capitalist self-negates himself as the mere personification of capital and its reproductive circulation: his life acquires meaning. It is no longer just expanded reproduction as self-goal. Furthermore, the capitalist thus accomplishes the shift from eros to thymos, from the perverted "erotic" logic of accumulation to public recognition and reputation." - Slavoj Zizek "Violence"

I've yet to find a more appropriate description of our current trajectory as a peoples, even most interestingly as artists who consistently exchange ideas with this tangled, capitalist mess. It's strange for me to think that the very reason I make music is to give it back to the community for the sake of self-negation, to be able to prove to my contemporaries that I've provided them a service, thus rendering all further actions unto this finite pursuit of social acceptance and transparency; I mean- bullshit aside- we like to pronounce our declaration to the arts as if we came up with the idea, but what we seem to forget is the cathartic nature of artistic interaction between communities, how it feels to present ourselves as Master-Signifiers to a world that progressively disembodies from itself day-by-day.

As social links continue to merge, and information becomes more and more free to the "excluded," one day we'll look in the mirror and see- in place of one, broken soul- a multitude of complex desires, ambitions, questions and viewpoints staring back at us, and we'll think "Jesus, how did our grandparents pull this life thing off?"

Possibilities Precede Choice, Dummy

Just finished reading Slavoj Zizek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.
It was definitely dense and full of tangents within tangents, but when he hits it on the nose- he really HITS it.

"We should thus ruthlessly abandon the prejudice that the linear time of evolution is "on our side," that History is "working for us" like the famous old mole digging under the earth, doing the work of the Cunning of Reason. Should we then conceive of history as an open process in which we are offered choice? Within this logic, history determines only the alternatives we face, the terms of the choice, but not the choice itself. At each moment of time, there are multiple possibilities waiting to be realized; once one of them is actualized, others are cancelled. The supreme case of such an agent of historical time is the Leibnizian God who created the best possible world: before creation, he had in mind the entire panoply of possible worlds, and his decision consisted in choosing the best among these options. Here, possibility precedes choice: the choice is a choice among possiblities."

-Zizek

Subtract Thyself

"The true question here is: how is externality with regard to the state to be operationalized? Since the Cultural Revolution signals the failure of the attempt to destroy the state from within, to abolish the state, is the alternative then simply to accept the state as a fact, as the apparatus which takes care of "servicing the goods," and to operate at a distance towards it (bombarding it with prescriptive proclamations and demands)? Or is it, more radically, that we should aim at a subtraction from the hegemonic field which, simultaneously, violently intervenes into this field, reducing it to its occluded minimal difference? Such a subtraction is extremely violent, even more violent than destruction/purification: it is reduction to the minimal difference of part(s)/no-part, 1 and 0, groups and the proletariat. It is not only a subtraction of the subject from the hegemonic field, but a subtraction which violently affects the field itself, laying bare its true coordinates. Such a subtraction does not add a third position to the two positions whose tension characterizes the hegemonic field (so that we now have, along with liberalism and fundamentalism, a radical Leftist emancipatory politics). The third term rather "denaturalizes" the whole hegemonic field, bringing out the underlying complicity of the opposed poles that constitute it...

...Badiou's "subtraction," like Hegel's Aufhebung, contains three different layers of meaning: (1) to withdraw, disconnect; (2) to reduce the complexity of a situation to its minimal difference; (3) to destroy the existing order. As in Hegel, the solution is not to differentiate the three meanings (eventually proposing a specific term for each of them), but to grasp subtraction as the unity of its three dimensions: one should withdraw from being immersed in a situation in such a way that the withdrawal renders visible the "minimal difference" sustaining the situation's multiplicity, and thereby causes its disintegration, just as the withdrawal of a single card from a house of cards causing the collapse of the entire edifice."

-Slavoj Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce p. 128

I'm getting kinda sick of explaining myself, not just to others but to myself. As if the context of an experience is dependent on my ability to notice how much different it is from other experiences. We're swirling around in this soup together, crossing paths unexpectedly; who am I to say my path is correct and others are not?

Consider that our minds are fractal factories, their parts built onto each other with incremental purpose, derived from a microscopic world so small we can barely perceive it with the most powerful atom smasher.

Just as some cultures use shrines to witness the singularity of one, derived truth, we use buildings and monuments to realize ourselves. The sad thing- I suppose- is that while other cultures realize the impertinence of fetishizing a shrine, we Westerners are literally addicted to that which we worship.

Is any of this wrong? No. And Yes.