THIS BLOG IS UR BLOG

Black market babies.  I buy vayne when I can, but it is a privilege.  After my mortgage, gas, bills, food, etc, if there's enuff left, i'll go for it, but the danger inherent in black market action forces the cost up into a bourgeois commodity value system. Danger in the gulf, gas prices go up; danger in the weed-market, same thing.  I buy krystal because it's cheap and satisfying.  I buy organic milk because in a blind taste test it destroyed the competition.  I buy vayne because I love it.  I'm not worried about whether or not my paychecks go back into the system: that's why you get a paycheck, to allow you to survive in the system. What I am afraid of is having my entire identity interpreted by my marketplace identity. 

I had an argument with Will a few years ago, where he claimed that any artistic gesture was inevitably made due to market interests.  While I am essentially a neo-marxist and socialistic in my views on just about everything, I believe that capitalistic realities are not what you would call natural laws, even from a antagonistic perspective.  It is an oppressive system of translation.  Our actions and needs are translated into credit and debt situations, and purchasing becomes power while labor becomes value.  Cravings become satisfied, but it's rarely on your own terms... until you associate those satisfactions with yourself.   

Unless you are making more money from the black market than you are spending, I'd say you are "voting" for non-representation.  The fact that the US economy depends on and accounts for the international black market by printing surplus money they know will vanish into underground dealings proves that the black market is always more gray than black.

Life action becomes very difficult when a system such as capitalism becomes so invasive.  Like language, it usurps the medium with which you encounter reality, when even destructive or revolutionary gestures are still spoken in the language of money.  When you buy piercings, rap cd's, even guns, anything, no matter how subversive it seems, the money still gets spent, and the only change is that you feel more satisfied and less needy than before.

When you rearrange the pieces of the present system you don't create a new one.  You "liquidate" the old one.  You may have just proven that the current system is collapsing, but as Yves Klein sold the air in an art gallery for a blank check, he did not produce a new type of art, he "completed the destruction of exchange."  Both are better than nothing, but there is a great distinction between rearranging, sampling and cutting, even if it generates subversive perspective, and actually creating new identity.  There is my humorless statement puke for the day.

As far as "new" blogs go, if I don't get e-mails reminding me of updates with a link connected, I'll probably never see them.  I honestly want to read everything you guys write, and I want to respond.  I have never been happier than when we were all blogging and commenting on each other, but now it's totally fragmented. I know some of my pals have left their friendster blogs for blogspot, but I never go there.  I've been, but I spend so little time on the computer that if it's not connected to my e-mail, I don't ever have time to surf, or travel far.  Is blogspot that much better?  Is the font different there?  Are there more or different readers?  I don't want to broadcast my indulgences much farther than my close friends anyways, so i'll probably stick to this. I may just be lazy and not realizing it, but I don't want to have an enormous presence on the world wide web.  I get a little paranoid out there, especially when it comes to speaking my mind about politics and meaning. 

A lot of what I've been thinking about lately and a lot of what has fortified my responses in the past two blogs is discussed with severity and great insight in a book I just read by the French socialist economist Jacques Attali.  The book is entitled NOISE:The Political Economy of Music.  Very tight, very audacious.  It has had the effect few things I have read do.  It wasn't a mind blower like some, rather it was like reading a far more informed and articulate account of what you are already thinking.  Some other examples from my list would be Ernst Cassirer's Language and Myth, and a recent contribution from Pat: Laclau & Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.  All of these texts have become both armor and weaponry in my always confusing navigations through our culture and my subjugation in America.  Hardy Har! Look them up if you're bored and we'll get into some shit together! 

Comments

[Andrew]

Baamm! Triggertongue!
What will happen to your identity when the marketplace burns down? Mom, Dad?

When i was reading this i thought of that OutKast line: "It's not what you make but how much you spent." And, then again, OutKast sold their identity at the marketplace. There's no going back. They spent their soul.
I hear what your saying about life action vs. the monster. It's almost impossible to be.

Also, what about emotional money (essence) and the capitalisms of friendship/relationship? There's something.

[jordan]

I created an initially defunct "blog" on blogspot because it was easier to comment on others' blogs if you were registered, and you had to officially start a blog to be registered. Hence when I actually wanted a blog, I just use that one (I'm hoping that Barry will do the same soon). Also, Friendster tends to be slow in the processing sometimes, so I thought Blogspot might be more efficient. That being said, my blog is inaccessible right now for some unknown reason.
So, there goes that theory.

[Nick]

That was the most lucid discussion I've read in a while, very tight. What about mountain biking, or cycling in general? I can't see how something as personal as this can be commodification, unless the only reason you have a bike/ride a bike is that you want to be cool. And if you go around riding thinking about that, you are going to get seriously hurt whether in the mtns, or on the road and will stop riding. Thoughts? Honestly, I think that cycling is the closest thing our culture has to a mystic purity, all you care about is further, faster, and when you get done you are literally Jello, your brain is plain gone, more so than any sort of drug. Listening to GD 9/12/81 right now, damn good. Back to Alternative Facility Financing.

[rob]

hey nicker,
there is nothing commodified about cycling except for the cycle itself. I don't think life itself is totally commodified unless you buy into it. There is still a degree of choice. Music can still be as "mystic" as ever as long as you aren't all about making records or selling stickers. Process of any sort, when it is for it's own sake and not for translation into another substance is always your own. The Dead were pretty good at failing to be commodity-based, and it helped that most of their records blew. And to respond to Andrew, I don't believe in essences.

[jordan]

If you don't believe in essences, what to Skexies drink?

[Ben]

I agree with Jordan regarding blogspot. It's easier to use and has fewer delays. By the way, Jordan - your blog is working again. It's not very hard to get to blogspot, Rob. We'd love to have you come over. In fact, the amount of time that friendster usually takes to load things is longer than it takes to go to blogspot. You just need to know the right url, or whatever it's called.

I also agree with Rob about cycling and other activities. In other words, the system of capitalism or consumerism is not absolute. It isn't the only way to define all actions, motivations, and experiences - or skin flutes. I think the thorniest question to resolve, however, is a moral one about lifestyle. But I'll save it for my own blog, I suppose.

What is an essence, anyway? I think I get into arguments with Rob about this one on occasion. Not often enough in the past two years, however. Maybe the arguments weren't about essences, and more about structuralism (skeletons, if I remember correctly?) and deconstruction.

[Nick]

I don't believe in essences either in and of themselves (at least the philosophical type) although we use them in language to compare things every day.

Essences were one of the things I hated about philosophy at Sewanee (well until we got to Hume, Kant etc.-- people who began to question people's theories about understanding, knowledge etc. and really gained some ground).

Almost all of the "popular" (i.e. ones taught at Sewanee through the majority of Hist. of Phil. I & II) western philosophers focused on forms or essences. I really think that you can substitute the two for each other on a conceptual level.

Essences and forms are a way to class and group qualities that can be used to describe different objects. For instance mass or weight is one. Color is another. It is a way to group "similar" objects. In Plato's case courage, justice etc. These classes, however, according to these guys' ideas exist apart from the object themselves. Many philosophers tried to prove God's existance by the arguement that if we can percieve essences they must be from God (especially if they represent the "Good", ignore the bad)

While this proves very valuable in some regards it also excludes other essences/forms that are not "popular"/useful, can't be verified, aren't morally acceptable etc.

Looking at this development through hindsight, motives are mixed. The philosopher was generally thought ill by contemporary politicos and the type, so you can't really claim that they had bad intentions in fooling with these ideas.

I think to some degree Plato's Reublic shows some of the outgrowths of these concepts, aka The Republic being ruled by philosopher kings etc.) Modern politics seems to be a bastardization of many of these ideas, which I don't believe was the intention of the philosophers, they were just trying to figure out something new.

That being said philosophers were never able to truly flesh out their concepts of essences. The ancients probably did a better job with this than the moderns and a good arguement can be made that the "primitive/creative" GOD died in relation to the renaisaince development of these concepts and subsequent political manipulations. However, I'll let you guys debate that one.

I'm sure Jerry will rip me a new butthole on these descriptions.

Hope that helps a bit.

-N

[Ben]

When I think of essence, I think of that part in the Dark Crystal when the gelfling protagonist gets hooked up to some kind of devilish machine that saps his life force, taking his essence out in liquid form.

Nick, thanks for that refresher. Not every proponent of essences agrees on their nature or quality, though, right? I think an interesting debate about essence is looming right in front us: if Platonic forms and understandings, as they're understand in gnostic/neo-platonic contexts (and by extension, most occult systems and approaches from then until now) are of interest to those of us preoccupied to some extent with, say, Freemasonry, Rosicruicians, Theosophy, etc., then how do we account for essences/forms from the standpoint of our other interests in poststructuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, postcolonialism, etc.?

[Angela]

Buh-yah-kah!
ahem....I will argue that Professor Bishop is begging the question within an instance of 'syllogistic exlusion' (exlusis sylogisticus) by sidestepping the issue of what, in practice, Skexies drank when they purported to be extracting a gelfling "essence" and injesting it.

Ben, I think you're right in that there is a stinkbomb right in front of us. I hope we can get to the bottom of this.

[Nick]

I should have clarified. I don't believe in the western/renaissance form of essence and really don't totally believe in Plato's forms either (I think both attempts are a sort of wishful thinking). I don't know enough about the neo-platonists to be able to comment on much of their work besides those that referenced Wittgenstien and talked of linguistic rules as rails, in which meaning is dependent on our use of linguistic rules (which I think bastardizes both Wittgenstein and Plato).

Religious/spiritual doctrine is full of descriptions of essences, miracles and all kinds of things not "directly" percieved. Now in this case I do think these types of essences exist. I just don't think we ever should try to construct a system that tries to explain them or connect them with "directly perceiveable reality", because they are two completely different realms. This is what most of the western renaissance philosophers tried to do (at least in my understanding, or how it was taught to me, yes there are differences, but the underlying arguement/desire on the part of many of these philosophers if not all was to create a proof for God's existance)

I personally find Wittgenstein's solution most feasible, in that words only have meaning through use in context. Essences are like trying to describe the undescribable because we don't really know what they are and can't prove their existance without saying at some level the only reason I believe it is because I believe it, I don't have proof. Point being if you believe it you believe it great, case closed.

Which brings us around to Rob's comments in previous posts about our language not being "up to par" at signification, it really is quite muddy. That's also why I don't believe in modern semiotics, especially when applied to art history. It attempts to over-analyze everything, as opposed to recognizing the uniqueness of human experiance and celebrating that in and of itself. Aka, that painting's bad ass because its badass.

Now I'm not brilliant about religions but I see a connection here, when you really start to get it with religion you realize that surrender is the only course of action, explaination only leads to self-righteousness and stunts growth (at least from my perspective.

So, I think post-modernism in every discipline evolved to try and break people out of this mold that I need to explain everything, everything needs rationality etc. and try to return dialogue to a point where it's not about explaination its more about description, which is a much more personal discipline to begin with because everyone sees different things in different ways. Yes, we can communicate about these things but we can't really explain them. I agree with Wittgenstein (and probably many post modernists) in that the only way to describe them is to study forms of life and try to describe them without wanting to explain them.

Oh and by the way the Skexies just said they drained the essence, they really just took some bad acid...never was a big DC fan to begin with.

[William]

"I had an argument with Will a few years ago, where he claimed that any artistic gesture was inevitably made due to market interests. While I am essentially a neo-marxist and socialistic in my views on just about everything, I believe that capitalistic realities are not what you would call natural laws, even from a antagonistic perspective. It is an oppressive system of translation. Our actions and needs are translated into credit and debt situations, and purchasing becomes power while labor becomes value. Cravings become satisfied, but it's rarely on your own terms... until you associate those satisfactions with yourself." - Robblog, original posting on 09/14/06

"there is nothing commodified about cycling except for the cycle itself. I don't think life itself is totally commodified unless you buy into it. There is still a degree of choice." - Robpost 09/14/06

"I also agree with Rob about cycling and other activities. In other words, the system of capitalism or consumerism is not absolute. It isn't the only way to define all actions, motivations, and experiences - or skin flutes. I think the thorniest question to resolve, however, is a moral one about lifestyle." -Benpost, after Robpost, 09/14/06

I think that, upon viewing the above listed string of commentary(ies) on this debate, that Ben's statement neatly finalizes what I wish to have ultimately gotten at in our discussion several years back - perhaps I would have arrived at this point, had I not been piss-drunk.

That's not to say that I'm retracting my statement, but I do wish to "develop" it a bit more, using Ben's enlightening thoughts on the subject. Indeed, lifestyle is the key word here - and, if you're going to ascribe to a lifestyle, choice obviously is a factor in that. But what gives one that choice is what I'm concerned with here.

In an effort to enunciate this more effectively, though perhaps a bit crudely/simply, let's take the bicycle example here: to purchase the bicycle or not to purchase the bicycle. Regardless of your "choice," if you really want to call it that, after all, choice will inevitably become dictated by a purchase/exchange/transaction - that's the whole point of it being a "choice," your "lifestyle" is inevitably going to be altered, even in the most minute degree (i.e., have bicycle, without bicycle = "have's and have-not's). Perhaps that's over-simplifying the matter a bit, but I thought a handy example. It's late and my brain is fried...Apologies for the meaningless drivel.

[William]

So, I didn't really finish my thought there, exactly...OK, we're left with someone who has/doesn't have a bicycle - a simple binary distinction...Now, think about all the other things about that person (tennis shoes, haircut, even their breathing/heart rate) - all these things are being recorded, so to speak, by a device that can do so...Eventually, the binaries splinter apart and break down - the person becomes, in a sense, unique - an individual again, but not without being under the banner of lifestyle according to his/her material possessions/opinions-made-up-by-the-possession-of-material-objects...So, there you have it - there's this device, recording everything about you, and it will set you free.