On the Question of what to do about the Capitalist Socius
Part 1
Preface to Postulates
Musings. Meanderings. Misunderstandings.
On the Question of what to do about the Capitalist Socius
Part 1
Preface to Postulates
I need to be able to write precisely now because wehn else is there? There is no other time than now so let's write. I need to be able to write because there is no time, there is no other time. This is a need borne out of a deprivation of time, a deprivation that comes hand in rhinestone glove with an introduction of the ticking hand on the clock's face.
The clock wraps us into its gaze, we break up the flows of our desire in blocks we call time and this is of course linked with the packets of emptiness we call money.
In the regime of the clockface, we get a notion of time whereby events (but not necesssarily Events) are triangulated into measured moments of seconds, minutes, hours. HAppenings are no longer vaguely associated with seasons, lunar cycles or equinox, but are now precisely codified as occurences recorded onto a running-on schedule or script. Now that the happening has been 'located' in time, the event can be understood in context to the other addresses of temporality, enabling a uniquely sharp sense of where one thing repeats and another suspends.
However with this acuity comes further limitation: the clock face is a judgemental one. Even though each minute or each hour on the clock is essentailly just a marking seperated from other markings with a particular angle or placement on the clock, we nonetheless see in this face all the social connotations of certain hours or movements of the clock hands. A deadline looms and every tick of the clock is a nail in our coffin, or every minute passed is a minute irrevocably lost, wasted or could've been better utilised.
When we are late to work, the clock patronisingly reminds us of this 'fact'. When we are waiting for something to happen, or needing something to be over, the clockface turns into a mocking one, with each second labouriously sustained for maximum irritation.
The clock is different from the calendar. The days of each week are clearly and unambiguously demarcated by the rising and setting of the sun, and the lunar calendar the movement and 'rotation' of the moon. However because these transitions happen at different times depending on where you are in the world, there is no global end or start of a day, however there is a kind of 'global' start or end of a minute, or an hour. Sure the timezones may differ and clocks may be out of synchronisaation etc., nevertheless the clock brings about a universal standard of 'micro-time', it takes 3 minutes to microwave soup, it takes 2 hours to visit your Aunt and come back home, it takes 24 hours for the sun to rise, set and then rise again.
Time hurts.
Written late 2020, early 2021
wantuing done with this
Sketches
* "Supernatural", preternatural, cryptid, etc. phenomena has a material, real, basis. However this isn't a material of determinate species of being or deceased determinate beings/species, but rather are indeterminate beings comprising a frankenstein multitude of what we know of as determinate species.
* The supernatural is not demons or angels, at least not in any theologico-poetic transcendent sense. If there is a domain of the indeterminate speciesdom, it is not of a transcendence of our domain of the here and now, but is somehow immanent to it, working through it, but also radically differentiated from our social organisation.
* When we think of a man, this is simple, this is a unit of the species homo sapiens, and when we think of a wolf this is a unit of lupine species. But what is more complicated (but not impossible) to think about is a wolf man, some kind of chimerical hybridisation of homo sapiens and lupine species, a frankenstein 'monster' of recombined organs of multiple species. A Wolf Man is harder to think about, but of course this is not outside the capabilities of our imagination. However we do not normally see this sort of extreme hybridisation in our everyday lives, or even out in nature, except in fringe cases that defy standard understandings of Darwinian theory, such as the platypus. The platypus takes on the appearance of multiple species. It is at once (but not) a duck, an otter, a beaver and it has venom like a snake, and lays eggs unlike all other mammals etc, But the reason platypus does not frighten us in this strange frankenstein appearance is because it is ultimately still playing by the same physicalist, bio-chemical rules as of our own biological composition, even if we may have to rethink what biological evolution means upon encountering it.
But with the cryptids, who can take on more humanoid forms, there is definitely and perhaps understandably a strong and upsetting sense of the uncanny when witnessing these entities. They're like us, but also very much not, more animalian but at the same time beyond animality or at least beyond the sort of animality we are used to.
The mysterious aspect to the cryptid is important to include into the very nature of this phenomenon. If platypus are reliable enough to track down, then the cryptids are virtually impossible to track, trap or analyse. They appear and disappear seemingly at whim, and it seems like at least on occasion the cryptid knows that they are capable of doing this, or are swept up in the process of this happening to them, so there is a subjectivity of sorts in these cryptids, a self-reflexivity that is not seen in what I will coin "pseudo-determinate species", with the exception of certain highly intelligent "pseuds" like dolphins, great apes, human beings.
It is not as though they are simply hybridisations of animals, possibly science experiments gone awry that broke out of the lab or were set loose by the scientists. Or at least it does not seem this would be the full story if something like this was happening. The "supernatural" characteristics and capabilities of these cryptids implies there's more at work than genetic manipulation gone horribly wrong/right. There is something one could say "spiritual" regarding this phenomenon. Here we should be careful not to see this as a transcendence spirituality of heaven, hell, demons, angels, God, divine judgement etc. Instead the phenomenon seems to imply a spirituality of immanence, whereby concepts we know of as determinate or at least pseudo-determinate from our vantage point can hybridise, concepts can come into inconcievable unity with opposing or incompatible concepts, without contradiction but also without a neat dialectical synthesis. The elements do not mix but co-exist, they flow into one another but stop short of total dissolution into an unrecognisable intermediary, but yes a new concept is formed in this 'unholy' assemblage, that is the concept of this multitudinous species. There is an inherent indeterminacy to these strange entities. They may be either this species or that, either wolf man was a man perhaps wearing a very good halloween costume, or it was a wolf standing on hind legs, or it was a bear which from a distance might look like a bipedal wolf. This experience may or may not have happened. The creature may or may not have been obeying all the laws of physics, evolution, biology, and so forth. Indeterminacy seems to come part and parcel with the phenomenon, and as such it seems imperitive to ensure we keep this factor in mind when researching and theorising on this topic.
... In a way we human beings are also hybrids. Perhaps we have much more in common with the members of "indeterminate species" than unitary determinate species.
* The hybridisation however may not end in simply a blend of species on the genetic level. There can also be an 'epigentic' mix of behaviors from other creatures that are not immediately observable in the physiological profile of the cryptid. For example, a not infrequently sighted cryptid, the 'crawler', is a lanky, hairless humanoid that can exhibit the movements of a bear, but with its hind legs reversed. The crawler appears as a mutated human but with beastly, quadrapedal physiological differences. As if the behavioural 'operating system' of a bear was spliced into the genetic template of a human or other hominid. So it is not just that species physiology can hybridise, but rather an animal of one type can take up the life and behavioural patterns of another, creating a dynamical or behavioural frankenstein form as a result. It is here we should avoid the easy temptation of dismissing these cryptids as genetic manipulation experiments gone awry. This seems more to point to a logic in natural, biological evolution that we simply haven't yet the language to elucidate.
Some inventions seem to defy the logic of the time they are invented in. While this much is obvious, as without this there would be nothing truly new or groundbreaking invented, it is possible for the logic introduced its invention to come from the future, an anachronistic retroactive insertion of a future logic.
It is as if a particularly modern sensibility is anachronistically detectable in artefacts at a time in our historical record, which changes our conception of this time and also the relation of this time to our own. As an example, let us look at old turn of the 20th century photography. There was a time when the only photography in 1800s and early 1900s was grainy, low-res, blotchy, cloudy and so forth. But nowadays with modern technology we can re-develop many of these old negatives and blow them up to super crisp HD resolution, albeit in black and white (but even here, there have been considerable improvements in colour reproduction). This shouldn't surprise us given what we understand of the physics of light and how photographic negatives work, new technics and techniques in the developing lab, however it seems (and I claim further than this) that it was the advent of HD and digital photographic methods which have somehow infected these early photographs, as if our modern expectations of photo-realism were applied to a context it has no right to apply to: this changes the way we see this time in history in an uncanny fashion.
It's startling to see this 'wild west' era anachronistically rendered in super high definition, bringing into clear view images of a time we had hitherto left to fuzzy memories or even fuzzier photographs. But this 'clear view' of the situation seems fake in a way, because such a clear view did not exist at the time, and looking at these clearer images does not necessarily provide us with more insight about how the period really was like to experience. It is as though we are bringing our own 'ideological' baggage to this period of history, but somehow this also retroactively re-records over these apparently historical recordings.