Aesthetic Materialism

Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 9   Procula’s Castle     You, Dismas, press yourself against one of the pillars of the Domus.  You are confident, in your element.  You see a guard striding into the house.   You follow him in, pull out a bag, slip it over the guard’s head while putting the guard into a sleeper hold, and then drag the guard’s unconscious body into a supply closet.  Moments later you emerge wearing the guard’s clothing.  You sneaks further into the house.     You hear people talking nearby, and quietly sneak up and peak into the room.  You see a middle-aged, rich-looking woman, reclining on a sofa.  Beside her, standing nervously and slightly bowing is her advisor.  As you watch, suddenly a gorgeously-dressed young woman enters the room.  She displays the arrangement of her fine clothes to the older woman, with a little sashay.  Sitting at the feet of the middle-aged woma...

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 8 Dismas and Gestas emerge out onto the plain.  Dismas climbs up out of the valley that surrounds the stream first.  He is solemn of countenance, alert yet unwavering.  Gestas pops up behind him.  His eyes are darting this way and that.  A loud noise suddenly startles him.  "What was that!?!" "It was nothing.  Come on, let's go." "No, I definitely heard something, over there, by those bushes.  Say, Dismas, would you mind if I could have that knife back?" Dismas walks on, silently. "What are we doing, anyway?  Finding that woman's kids?  How is that any of our business?  That is so you, Dismas - always going off on adventures, without the least bit of- There it is again!" Now it's unmistakable: something is rustling in the bushes.  Something... big. Dismas circles around and confronts the beast.  It's a dugong.  It's huge: at least 10 feet long, and ferocious....

  As an anti-fascist, at the level of economics and politics, I believe in a workers' movement for economic democracy: worker ownership and control of the means of production.  Culturally, I am not just pluralist and "libertarian": in my opinion, deviation from conformity should not only be tolerated, it should be actively promoted.  At the level of ideas, lifestyles, etc., we should have as much difference and variation as possible.  I consider the multiplicity of worldviews and forms of life an intrinsic good and a goal in and of itself.  I also think it has positive consequences, because, as Frank Zappa said, "Without deviation from the norm, progress is impossible" - in science, in literature, in art, in popular culture, and at just about every level.  If promotion of such cultural pluralism implies conflict, then conflict should be encouraged. I do not consider postmodernism a reliable ally in either my economic/political aims, nor in my cultural aims....

The purpose of government today is inflation.  That is why it exists.  Capitalism is inherently deflationary.  It tends toward a crisis of values.  In a (hypothetical) perfect capitalist economy, prices would deflate all the way to zero.  The result would be a tremendous crisis - the word "recession" does not cover it - a cataclysmic depression, the likes of which the world has never seen.  Realistically, prices would be unstable, with some prices spiraling into negative territory, and others skyrocketing - to say nothing of the prices of purely financial instruments, including money itself, which is one of the things that would eventually become worthless, but which might fluctuate wildly beforehand.  We almost had a little taste of something like such a moment at the advent of the Great Depression, but it was heavily muffled and mediated. Government's purpose in the 21st century is to prevent that, by artificially propping up prices - that is, artifi...

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 7 The bone crow is sailing through the air, high above Sheol.  "Fallen!  Fallen!" it screeches.  Fade-out. In the evening sun, the silhouette of a man briskly, deliberately climbs a stool beneath a tree and places a noose around his own neck.  Then he kicks the stool away and hangs, swinging, his body jerking involuntarily.  The spasms become more exaggerated and the swings become wilder, and suddenly the rope snaps and man falls headlong into a potter's field, where his chest and stomach suddenly burst open and all of his organs and blood spill down into the ground. The camera follows the blood as it quickly seeps through the ground, falling, faster and faster through layers of sedimented earth, until it drips into a dark tunnel, deep under the earth's crust.  There the blood and organs come together and quickly reform into the man's body, alive and well.  There's a pile of clothes neatly fold...

    Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 6 "What do we do with him?" says Gestas, looking down.  Jesus lies in a crumpled heap.  Flies buzz around; if you look very closely, you can see that one of them is very slightly glowing. Dismas sighs and grabs Jesus's legs. Slowly he starts pulling him up. "Well, let's go!  Help me carry him!  Let him have some dignity!  Let's wrap him up," he says. Gestas clearly finds touching dead bodies a little distasteful and uncomfortable.  He daintily picks up one of Jesus's wrists and lays it across his chest with a grimace of disgust.  Dismas remains serious and stoic.  Then Gestas seems to have a moment of emotion and tenderly closes Jesus's eyes with his palm.  Together, they carry him over to the shroud which is lying outstretched nearby and wrap Jesus up tightly, waving away the bugs.  Then they pick him up, along with the sacks of goods from Balas, and solemnly carry J...

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 5 The tip of the knife presses into Gestas's throat.  Your eyes meet Gestas's.  The knife trembles, and then your grasp falls a bit away.  Gestas takes the opportunity to twist his way out of your chokehold.  "Would you relax?" he cajoles.  "I didn't frame you for murder.  Or anything like that!" You scowl, even as your rage is beginning to subside. "Buddy!  Buddy!" he goes on.  "You know I would never do anything to harm you.  You're my top earner!" "Hey!" comes a voice.  "What are you two doing behind my house?" A man is leaning out the back door of the house the two of you just ran through. "Oh, I'm very sorry, sir.  We were just leaving," oozes Gestas in the most innocent voice he can muster.  It's not all that convincing. As the two of you walk on, Gestas throws his right arm around your shoulder.  "I will admit, though, that last...

    To be cool is to negate fun without putting anything in its place. 

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 4 Nazareth, 33 AD “Joanna!”     Joanna is awake.  For a moment she isn’t sure where she is.  She looks around at the earthen walls.  She’s in her hiding spot.  She had been dreaming.  She can’t remember the dream - scattered images dissolve as soon as she brings them to mind.  All that remains is that... what was it?  A song?  Or just a voice, speaking, calling to her?  And what was it saying?  Something about “Deeper down, deeper down” and something about “Passing through fire.”     Hands are reaching down in.     A dark, gravelly voice: “What! ...have you... done?”  Big furrowed brows and squinting, piercing eyes from a face hardened by the desert wind, framed by long, black hair.     Joanna looks down at herself.  The scroll is open.  One of the wooden rollers is still sitting atop her belly; the other ...

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 3   "Hey!" you shout. You grab the dagger from the ground, and chase the man through the crowd of zombies.  As you run, trying to catch up to the man, the zombies lurch out at you, and you have to fight them, using the dagger as a weapon and the badge as a shield. You almost catch up with the man.  You reach out to grab him, but just when his shoulder is an inch from your grasp, he bolts further ahead, his fat stomach bouncing rather comically as he runs.  "What?" he shouts, and then again, "What's the deal?" and disappears once more into the crowd. Now you see a new kind of enemy: hazy, gray figures, barely there.  They crowd around you, like shadows, moving without moving.  You swipe at them in a panic with your blade, touching nothing, as if in a dream.  Eventually you manage to squeeze through them and continue running. Up further ahead, in another crowd of zombies, you spot the man you're ...

Start at the Beginning Previous chapter: Day 1, Part 2   More "worms" are crawling toward you from every direction.  You hold up your "badge."  The worms don't have eyes, but they seem to wince as if it's too bright.  The ones directly in front of it wriggle away, as if afraid.  You move the badge and point it at others, and one by one, they slither away as well.  But others are slinking around behind you.  You whip around and scare them off as well. You turn this way and that, repelling the worms as they advance on you from all sides.  As you do this, you slowly make your way back to the wall of worms.  You're able to get through it now by repelling them with your badge. This is successful, but on the other side, you are greeted by the appearance of a much larger and more menacing worm.  What's worse, it doesn't seem scared by your badge and begins to chase you.  Your only choice is to run away.  You're running through an unde...

Wagner's "O sink hiernieder, nach der Liebe" from Tristan und Isolde approaches something like religious music, but not of a type one would hear in church. In it, one senses something of the sacred, but not the eternal, or at least not in the religious sense. On the contrary, at every moment, one feels it slipping away, which makes it all the more precious. In it, fulfilment and loss are experienced simultaneously, and this has its own kind of eternity: eternal loss, finite eternity. It is not the feeling of having something and then losing it - the inevitability and the necessity of this loss imply that this loss was beginning before the creation of the universe, into an eternal past as well as an eternal future, that the moment of enjoyment was at once the moment of keenest longing. More: one desires the loss, as the culmination and completion of longing.

Analytic philosophy ends up affirming what continental philosophy has already known for centuries.  It's always playing catch-up.  Empiricism, at its slow, plodding pace, eventually gets to the paths long-trodden by those who were willing to take huge intuitive leaps. ...But ultimately it's worth it to do this.  When the continental, in sophisticated boredom, drawls that it's all been thought before, the analytic can confidently reply: but not by me.

 The short version of the story of how modernism drifted into postmodernism: the modernists got religion.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Walter Benjamin was, strictly speaking, a postmodernist.  But there are many tendencies of postmodernism in his writing, and the seeds of other tendencies that would be more fully developed by other writers.   First and foremost: in the Preface to "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," he calls "creativity" an "outmoded concept".  Clearly, this is a postmodern, or anti-modern perspective, reminiscent of Mussolini's declaration that humanity has grown tired of liberty, because striving for creativity is central to the modernist project, and giving up on the very idea of creativity in a provocative pose of trollish world-weariness is the only thing that postmodernism has ever accomplished.  Benjamin may partially disavow or distance himself from the declaration that creativity is outmoded by saying that not he, but "they brush aside outmoded concepts such as creativity and genius" - ...

What Wittgenstein and Derrida have in common is: 1. An antipathy to philosophy.  Not only an antipathy to (almost) the entire history of existing philosophy, but an antipathy to philosophy per se , an antipathy to the figure of the philosopher.  And especially, an antipathy to what they (perversely) call "metaphysics". 2. A delusionally over-broad generalization, a grand sweep of philosophy since Ancient Greece, shoehorning the vast diversity of different ideas and thinkers into their schematic, c account - a universalizing account that elides historical, material differences, as though all philosophy were the same, thus effectively making philosophy into a kind of personality type. 3. A ridiculously ineffective, if not non-existent, solution for a problem that doesn't exist.  A self-defeating, self-undermining responsibility, reduced to the level of language alone, that is ultimately more of a vague sense of morality - a kind of loosely implied guilt - than it is a convi...