Showing posts with label alienation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alienation. Show all posts

Conspiratorial materialism


A few thoughts on what conspiratorial materialism might look like...

From quantity to quality: from one dead banker to ten thousand dead bankers.

From paranoia as individual pathology to paranoia as the correct affect and understanding of a pathological systemic order: from the false certainty of misrepresenting how the world works to the dead-on certainty of that misrepresentation as the actual presentation of the world's workings.

The problem isn't just the difficulty of cognitive mapping but what you see when you do it correctly. All those slippery connections, backhanded deals, flows of money maybe secret but never fully surprising aren't proof of hidden drivers at the wheelor cabals of the powerful pulling the strings. It's just the clearly lit fact of the totality, and hence mapping it better reveals only the tangles piled high.

And then to avoid the dysphoric muteness that results from the necessary attempt to present the mess sharply. Maybe to remember how Alexander the Great dealt with the Gordian knot (that is to say, sharply: don't untangle, just cut through) and learn how to do it en masse.

Splashdown

Back from LA, where I made the requisite pilgrimage to the Bonaventure for some disorientation. A video I made of the elevator descent to share a sense of the deep weirdness of the place that quite exceeds its infamous descriptions. Here manifested in the elevator descent which is an odd bastard combination of the Barbican and Splash Mountain, if that combination can include the sudden transition from mirrored distortion to an interior that includes concrete pod outcroppings with individual exercise machines and a surprising number of vacancies.

Gleam and doom


Emi took this photo in the building near Shinjuku where she's staying right now. As she wrote me:

The attached photo is of the hallway outside my room, but the entire building is this weird, white, immaculate place. You actually have to take your shoes off at the front entrance, put them in a special white box with your number on it, and then don weird navy blue flannel slippers that are far too big, before padding over to the blindingly white elevator.

When alienation doesn't bother hiding itself in a fuzzy cloak of Ikea shag faux-modernism and the free un-choices of contemporary mass politics, it's rather refreshing.

Oh, you think modern life is alienating and atomistic? Leave your shoes at the door, and I'll really show you the cold sterility of non-communal managed living...

(Of course, I'll take this over the fake eccentricity of new vintage anyday. Scuff marks should be made, not bought.)