INTO THE BARGAIN
Narrator’s Voice: ‘The financial crisis is produced in the thalamus, the brain’s busy little administrator, according to a set scheme. We need change on a regular basis not to bore ourselves to death. It got nothing to do with any inner logic of capitalism when the economy go boom then bust. Horrifying forms of occult initiation & yogic acrobatics can rewire this system flaw in no time. Lean back & relax.’
NO IDYLL ANYWHERE
‘The phantasm of self-organisation is legalistic’ whispers an empty voice from a room without light. ‘Your latest alibi so you can tell yourself you’re better than your participation in the institutional game…you say you only want the public institutions to pay you the way out of capitalism so you can self-organise your amazing contribution to society. Is it physically possible for your big head to get any bigger?’ (Everybody takes another good long look at your ass.)
DERNIÈRE MANOEUVRE
‘Oh, the decadence of the entertainment industry in an atomised society ridden with late-stage anomie & economical deregulation.’ ‘Yeah, the good old days. Too bad the right-wing fundamentalist neo-Puritanism unite in struggle with the self-proclaimed progressive state-interventionist current to keep the status quo…the next 20-25 years are gonna be dull, man!’ Double monologue.
ANOTHER UTOPIA
‘It still needs a conspiracy theory’ I wrote in the questionnaire. The weather was nice enough for the season, nothing suspicious. No new signs of an impending world catastrophe, just the usual misery. I didn’t like what I’d written, crossed it out. You shouldn’t even give that little away. Wrote instead: ‘There will be no apocalypse. Forget the messianic promise. The eschatology is a process of becoming.’
1. ‘FOCUS ON THE CONCRETE’
2. ‘The truth is concrete, but not the kind they made monuments of in the German democratic republic.’
3. ‘What an asshole Bertolt Brecht really was.’
4. ‘The working man hates artists, not art.’
5. ‘If I say ART IS NOT WORKING how many possible meanings &/or interpretations can there be extracted?’
NEIGHBOURS
Answer: ‘The emigration from Denmark to the US wasn’t that big, like Sweden, so the Danes that did go to the US were the loonies…because the first to migrate are the loonies, right…so a lot of the present-day all-American Mormons got Danish ancestry so it seems to be the cool thing for Mormons to go to Denmark on their one-year missionary duty…’
‘EVERYTHING IS INTERCONNECTED
---which makes it uniformly dull. The next step is: everything is interconnected, but some things are more interconnected than others. The implicit Stalinism of right-hand path esotericism & the theoretical models of quantum mechanics, all malignant mysticism & science, collectivist mushrooming of what-is-called discourse (dead words).’
STICKY STUFF
‘The general double-bind makes us wanna play to draw in the socio-political field…0-0, or better yet 1-1, is easier than a win/lose situation---& (best of all) nothing is resolved.’ The heroics of sportsmanship in the present day. ‘ Any society is a big tube of super glue for wound closure.’ But how does it make all these smoothed-over antagonisms end up looking like oppo-sames?
‘WITHOUT ANY TEMPLE
I have acquired the mason word
I have acquired the 2nd sight
Not written with majuscules
Because transcendence is easy
& no idealist affair necessarily
Not written with majuscules
To avoid the tired old puns
On the tired old capitals
The temple
The word
The sight’
‘OH,
the allure of transversal radicalism, the anarchic drift between left- & rightwing totalitarianism, the beyond-good-&-evil as political machine, the superhuman as architect, the reactionary bohemian dilettante as renaissance man, the heroics & pessimistic worldview of the nihilist self-transcending, the future as return to the past now decently organised, no pig shit on the shoes.’
'[What a shit day---yeah, get the irony:]
FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH...
but that only go back to
the French Decadent occult revival,
romanticisation of
the Knights Templar & everything,
total Priory of Brownshirt,
Hollow Blood Hollow Grail,
Da Flimsy Code
33rd degree nonsense
before Pierre Plan-retard,
Mick/Keith/Richy/Henry,
& Dan Brownshit's
2nd degree nonsense.
PRIMARY SCHOOL
‘All the forms of governments in modernity is based on the same principle, the People’ we were told. ‘The People is realised through its regime & folks who do stuff the people in & of the People is not supposed to do have to be dealt with, re-educated…hot lead enemas, watching reruns of Seinfeld, reading Anthony Giddens---damn Id, listen up!’ We didn’t.
DIDN’T WE KNOW
All the revolutionarily inclined went gaga over the riots: ‘It’s a real opening up for new configurations of resistance.’ A year later they’re all going: ‘Too bad, the fight to keep the autonomous Youth House went from wanting to save this one social centre from demolition to more broadly demanding a profusion of liberated spaces. But then it narrowed itself in again to focus on establishing the new all-too-singular Youth House.’
STUFFY STICK-IN-THE-MUD
‘Yeah, Newton’s occult studies, heterodox religiosity, & mechanistic worldview, went well along with him being a total asshole, no doubt about it!’ It’s dark outside. The weather has been okay for this time of year all day. There hasn’t been too many episodes of reality principle all over my face this month, so why can’t I just chill for once?
INTERMEDIATE SCHOOL
‘Modernity, the aeon of Being, oh blame the French encyclopédistes & the German big system thinkers & their evil spawn Adolf Heildigger, the Guvernator. Not ideal as in Plato’s philosophy, but principle, as the Prussian Socialist/National-Bolshevik/National Revolutionary/Conservative Revolutionary current of the Weimar Republic era proved…didn’t help much though.’ Only snoring to be heard.
SAME PERSON, NOT YOUNG (OR OLD)
'I would prefer the church of Christ without God, a Christian Buddhism.' 'I would go with God without the Son & the Holy Ghost, an Esoteric Christianity...without the scape-goat atonement on a cross & the resurrection, without the 2nd Coming & the Final Judgement, without the Church & the Bible.' 'I would take a Traditionalist trajectory: check which religion is the most vital generally speaking & 2ndly see if any got an extraordinary resonance for me, make my decision whatever that might be, though not choosing syncretism which is always shallow, but a single, straight-forward path.'
NEIGHBOURS
But then she continued with a smug grin ‘---unfortunately for these guys with their ill-fitting suits & rigid haircuts Mormons are considered a fringe-cult in nice secular-Lutheran Denmark---like somewhere between Jehovah’s Witnesses & the Hare Krishna freaks on the dingbat parameter…’ flashing painfully regular teeth any dentist would be proud of.
‘OH NO,
you know all to well it’s just symbolic. Hunting for luck as a deity, come on---too sad! This is gold prospecting in the age of immaterial labour---another dull day at the office for us quasi-polymaths. Magic operates in a polytheistic world system of disappointingly Manichean law-&-chaos dualism with a moral relativism of ever shifting coalitions---no different from our dull post-monotheistic late-secularity.’
'FALLING APART AGAIN
into two competing ideologies in a 2-piece puzzle, the expanding supermarket versus the terrorism of anorexic religion, would be a comforting rerun of classic modernity so we wouldn't have to face the fact that pre-modernity never really went away.'
PLUS
'The 1st pendulum swing goes from the flaneur who's got a detached love for the world to the political beast's will to change-the-world (&/or destroy it), 0/360 to 180 degrees; the 2nd swing goes from the religious fool's &/or the religious trickster's cold command of association drift through mythological props to the Enlightenment hard-liner's cantankerous desire for lingual hygiene, 90 to 270 degrees.'
HIGH SCHOOL
‘The late-modern principle is “the multitude”, but that’s not gonna change anything. Even though you cross out the Being in “the multitude” it is still the Mass the totalitarian regimes doll up to become the People. Only the closure of a rhetorical figure by now all too transparent, a fact you can recognise & do nothing about. Now go off to university.’ Hurrahs.
SMURFS
The high-brow mystic into Jeffersonian Democracy: ‘Anarchy is the antithesis of style which is its only redeeming lack-of-quality.’ The Agorist didn’t answer, all sphinx-like smirk. I said ’who cares---anarchy got too many rules anyway.’ She said ‘stop confirming my misanthropy, it’s so boring.’ We couldn’t. Smirk.
'MY DREAMS
are always about work, wage labour, not doing it good enough, not doing it as it's supposed to be done. Only that kinda dreams I remember...because they wake me up. Dreaming these dreams, waking up, that feels like work too. Like work, too. I like sleep, not dreams. I don't mind working too much...keeps me from drinking heavily every day. EVERY DAY. There's no critique hidden away in this I'm saying.'
GOING BEYOND METAPHYSICS
Another attempt: ‘The icon is always looking back at you. It can never be reduced to an idolatrous con---it’s you looking straight into the eye of the sacred (not necessarily a deity). Not the hegemonic gaze & the regime of the profane, the terrain of Being & forgetting-of-Being & rediscovering-of-Being that only can reach to the sky with the chthonic & Olympian forces of the mountain.’
'BROWN EYE
the PaganMagicalLuciferian fetish of fin-de-siècle decadents
always lodestar
rather loadstar
for the ProgressiveCapitalist film-industrial anti-sphinx complex
always beneath us
rather beneath us'
(& closed the notebook as I couldn't really be bothered with finishing this.)
'[...] SCHOLASTIC GYMNASTICS
to make the 1st modernity revolutionary paradigmatics somehow relevant by pulling it through the small hole in the post-modern coin & into the current alter-modernity or re-modernity or whatever you wanna call it' 'CUT! I'm not gonna call it anything as I'm not even sure we have reached any break with pre-modernity.'
'EVERYTHING CAN & SHOULD BE PERFORMED.
The public sphere must be saved.
We want to see the surveillance footage of ourselves.
The surveillance footage of ourselves is a great boost.'
'Give power to the people.
It's the best way to total corruption.
At home alone with nothing to do.
That is exile from life & everything in the world.'
CAMP
1 schizoid personality type of Germanic Europe:
'A) Leaving the camp B) not as nomads C) because nomads take the home with them D) but leaving then returning E) to trash the camp F) & make new configurations of the trash G) but not a new camp.'
PATHS
'The sociopath is over-socialisation while the psychopath is brain damage. The psychopath have no emotional depth. A hollow person who doesn't get more than half of whatever is being communicated. Only the facts are being transported, not the social interaction & the feelings. The psychopath can recognise this & acts out the frustration in violence & manipulation. The sociopath do have the emotional depth of a normal person, but behaves like a psychopath anyway. Way more nasty.'
'THE STATES OF MODERNIST PROJECTS NEEDED ART.
Nobody remembers why. It's not our culture anymore. Some artists keep up a nostalgia for public patronage. Everybody knows why. The political class of late-democracy poker-faces that issue, too. Art won't escape the institution & become a real social force anyway. Using art as a ladder to reach a new plateau & then cast it aside is also impossible.'
INFINITE REGRESS
‘All the alternative blog-based style connoisseurs &/or semioticians dissipating their memes back into the mythical streets in the hunt for authenticity & the last few left-academians criticising the idealist residue of any conceptualisation of authenticity walking hand in hand.’ Innumerable veils, completely transparent, lowered down.
'WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE WHO STILL GO TO PSYCHO-THERAPY SESSIONS
& what do they think they benefit from it, I would like to know. Those of 'em I have to interact with are the people I least like to be around. They're rigid. They're self-absorbed...like everybody else. But their self-absorption isn't a scheme to go in life or just a spontaneous survival tactics. It just seems frozen. They can't still be so hooked on themselves & their so-called problems that they think they're mysteries to themselves. They act it, but why? They want a priest to tell them a grand narrative about their lives, but we all got that nostalgia. (It's hard work being around in the nihilist times where the only way to live a dignified life is to live aesthetically.) But why do they think their insecurity is somehow more intense than what everybody else got?'
‘THEY REPORTED ON HIS FAKED AMNESIA
---the news papers could pretend to be Bourgeois Public Sphere Unlimited yet another day & he could pretend his gimmick had some sort of really-existing meaning in civic society. Then he declared himself dead & continued as the-estate-of-himself which some critics & university inmates thought was cutting-edge & the rest of us just saw as pathetic in any meaning of the word.’
'OCCULT WAR
determines world history of course, but it's not like there's one single, over-arching, jumbo conspiracy controlling everything. It's just a bloody mess of countless conspiracies more or less blocking each other out. The subterranean &/or celestial dimensions of the social scenario are just as screwed as the immanent terrain & the problematics are the same: activist or contemplative or neither.'
PATHS
'Yeah, but the psychopath can be told he's emotional empty & not care because he's got next to no emotions. Tell the sociopath he's behaving like a psycho black hole with zero conscience he gets it---not only factually, but also emotionally. Way more devastating.'
HALLELUJAH-PESSIMISM
M: 'Okay, so you can't establish a negativity in dialectic infight with the omnivorous status quo. But you can go for the undialectical negativity which is impenetrable because it's radically useless.' R: 'Only go for discourse with awareness of its own defeat. Everything is impossible & anyone who says that is a pompous ego-tripper who hasn't even noticed everybody knows.' K: 'Talking about the strange loop of radicals in the mainstream can never be anything other than talking inside that strange loop.The usual slapstick consequences.'
MY HOLY GUARDIAN ANGEL:
'When there's no difference between going to a cafe to get a bit of the buzz from all the strangers & taking in your neighbour's noise pollution at random hours you will have become a Master of Wisdom like Jesus, Siddhartha, K'ung-fu-tzu, & St. Germain. But only then.' I believe that.
INXIT
Yadda yadda yadda '[...]on the terminal beach of capitalism reinventing itself by absorbing all critique. Death To Boredom & being-bored-to-death as identical. 'Staying stuck in this set-up facing it with desperate cynicism all to aware of the futility---or lifting yourself by your own boot-straps by going market anarchist: Capitalism should be even more free-wheeling---that's the only way to get outta this deadlock. Capitalism should get so unrestrained it wont even need the critique & that double-bind. Capitalism should go so over the top it'll become interesting again.'
YOU ARE EVERYTHING
1. 'So your street party against capitalist gentrification was inspired by Negri & Foucault you say. The vandalism was hedonistic, but guess what: the evil consumerism is hedonistic too. Foucault-as-usual (aaaaaarrrggghhhhh!!!!!!) says there are only 2 possibilities for society: either the police state or being pirates (nuanced analysis, gee!). But the evil capitalists want to be pirates too, the gangs fighting over the drug market want to be pirates too.'
THAT YOU DESPISE
2. 'So you write you might work in the supermarkets where the surveillance technicians buy their junk food & booze, you might wipe the butts of their senile parents forgotten in run down apartments or hospitals or nursing homes. The dread 'normals' shouldn't feel themselves too sure in their over-regulated comfort zone apparently. Ooh, scary. Answer this: in what way exactly are you different than the all-controlling bureaucrats you're dead set against?']
MODUS OPERANDI
‘When all is said & done it’s not like anything monolithic to quote BE unquote quote AN ARTIST unquote’…the quote-signs gesticulated 1990s style even…‘Anything is better than falling back to the nostalgia for the radical critique of art stuck in the same old Hegelian-Marxian dialectics some art historians (let’s not mention names) just can’t stop circling around like so many moths…’
'AFTER THE END
of dis-identification as last identity, when capital has become us & we cannot deny it anymore so it's impossible to do anything to raise ourselves above ourselves in existential projects, we have finally come home from the big detour called history.' 'Yeah, but it won't be the festivities the big pessimist envisaged.'
OUT OF THE SYSTEM
Narrator’s voice: ‘Is it a cancerous growth…& if so, benign or malignant? Or a mutation, potentially…benign, malignant---neutral? Healthiness is a neutral state: after all immunity is an active process of not quite being sick & not being totally untouched by disease either…’
