Aesthetic Materialism

“To Dissolve Man” An Investigation into the Liquefactionist Party In the 21st century, we will have to deal both with the odious Liquefactionists and with a confused and reactionary anti-Liquefactionism, which is far more apparent and obviously horrifying. I borrow the term “Liquefactionist Party” from William S. Burroughs, who writes about the Liquefactionists in the “Parties of Interzone” section of Naked Lunch - which, as a political policy guide, is unmatched in its insight and accuracy.  He writes that, “ The Liquefaction program involves the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption. ”  He goes on: “It will be immediately clear that the Liquefaction Party is, except for one man, entirely composed of dupes, it not being clear until the final absorption who is whose dupe.” Paradoxically, Burroughs goes on to tell us that “Liquefactionists in general know what the score is.”  If they know the score, how can they be dupes...

Each of us is a theory, put forward by nature - a hypothesis, about what can and will survive.  And every one of us theories gets tested by our experience, and every single one fails.  But some theories are fecund and fertile and give rise to other theories - that is, these theories produce new theories, by reproducing themselves, but every copy of a theory is a slight variation on the original.  And these new theories will be tested in the great experiment of life and some will pass the test a bit longer and give rise to yet more theories, and thus the great research program continues.

I keep coming back to Frankenstein.  It seems to be my icon, my standard. To me, Victor Frankenstein is a hero.  A tragic hero, yet a hero nonetheless.  He is the exemplar of virtue taken to its ultimate and necessary conclusion.  If he is a villain, he is the necessary villain - his character is not something to be avoided, but to which we can and must aspire.  He is the creator, the worker, the humble servant of the ars magna .  To create, to make, to do, to live, is have one’s creation misunderstood and misunderstood, again and again, hated, until it is a contemptible, pitiable mess, a hodge-podge of this and that, a mismatched melange, a palimpsestuous pastiche, a collage of good and evil.  We all create life.  Life is something that is created.  All of our lives are creation.  We are all creating our lives, this moment, together.  But how creative are we?  How creative dare we be?  Dare we take responsibility for crea...

Aesthetic Materialism, part 2 [click here to see part 1] Every time another science fiction movie or comic book hero movie comes out, it's pundits' job to tell us that our culture is "escapist".  Another way to think of materialism is to ask: what is escapism escaping from? Work?  Think of the phenomenon of "grinding" in video games.  Many video games require the player to perform the same action over and over again, more or less identically, for many hours at a time, in a manner that closely resembles work.  In some games, the player's character actually goes to work and does labor - fictitious labor, for fictitious bosses, to earn fictitious money, but which requires real time and effort and occasionally causes repetitive stress injuries in players' hands (who knows what it's doing to their minds).  This labor is forever being abstracted, quantified, supervised by software, tested, judged, and assigned a value, whether points in a score or...

I have like a bazillion things I've written, sitting on my computer, that the world has never seen.  I'm going to start uploading them here. Aesthetic Materialism I happen To prefer Everything is a matter of taste.  My preference is for fMRI scans, drivers’ instruction manuals, raw red entrails, landfills, nebulae, sandpaper, a face in the wind.... I like things to be real.  Thick, juicy.  Then again, thinness is a perfectly materialistic trait.    That’s good, too.  So is dryness, and tastelessness.  Chocolate and velocity.  Vapor is a kind of material.  Light is a kind of material.  Thought is a kind of material. Everything is material, of course. So then, how can there be a materialism, an advocacy for the material, an identity with the material?  Can one have a preference for everything? Or could we ask: what is it that makes material material?  I have an answer and a non-answer to this question....

  Where are they?  What happened to them?  The people called "libertarians"* in the USA always seemed to me to be people who had gone so far into their intellectualism that they disappeared up their own assholes.  Or, to put it nicely, they seemed "idealistic."  They seemed completely divorced from the material reality of everyday struggles of working people - instead they treated human beings as abstract, ideal concepts - vague, transparent beings without shape, color, depth, or determinate characteristics.   "Libertarianism" seemed simple-minded in the extreme.  For instance, when they said that every individual being had to be entirely individually responsible for its own welfare, it seemed to me that they had not considered blind people, or deaf people, or cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, or quadriplegics, or the mentally ill, or all people, once they get old enough, and develop dementia and all the infirmity of old age, or pregnant pe...

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein’s July 6th, 2017 article (“Back to the Center, Democrats”) was completely devoid of any facts, statistics, or analysis, and instead rested its arguments purely on bald assertions.  Perhaps this is because even the most cursory glance at the facts will not bear out Penn and Stein’s now completely discredited theories.  It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Penn and Stein would rehearse these outworn and empty phrases, since this is the type of advice taught to freshmen political science majors.  In statistics, the normal (or Gaussian) distribution, more popularly called a “bell curve,” depicts the way that everything from dandelions to airline flights seem to arrange themselves.  Most things are average, and if you go away from this “mode” at the center, there will be fewer and fewer things, making a nice bell shape.  And in normal times, that seems to be how people align politically.  If you graph all of the people, grouped by t...