BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.3

There's so much construction happening at the moment and obviously that's a part of city living, but there's this voice in my head now which stands on recent globally catastrophic events (increasingly frequently this century) which is saying; 'why bother' It whispers this now behind everything I do. When I get out of bed in the morning, when I wash dishes or vacuum or make the bed or read a book, or boil water for another pot of coffee presumably seeking an energy boost for some project. Every little ritualised thing now in my day is underlaid by this creaking skeletal voice, rising up from this crypt of existential doubt and dread (only very recently furbished), and also boredom (of all things), and it's refreshingly consistent compared to everything else right now. Always and ever the same. Why. Fucking. Bother? Like everyone I live in the barely habitable gutter between hope and despair in a rat's nest of junk food and netflix. I see and hear people moving around me, doing things, striving for things, torn between their own motivations and the objective intel around them that the aspirations they had are mostly meaningless now, desires constructed from a world that suicided around April. The new world, which is really just a default setting of morbid uncertainty that those denuded of infrastructural accoutrements already know intimately, those unfortunates that Badiou tallies as the remainders in a less-than-universal equation of Human Rights; yeah, the new world is a winter-garden and those desires and dreams which have motored me and others towards an untenable horizon of affluence are summer strains that will barely seed, and if they manage to sprout at all will certainly wither and die before budding. Lol. Individualistic competition and it's ecologically damning cultures of environmental abstraction/extraction are meeting a wall. My optimism about capitalism's 'end' though is tentative just because it's proven time and again to be a fluidly adaptive beast that can assimilate it's poisons and reconstitute them as strength and merit; even in lethal doses. Whether or not the system regroups beyond this critical moment as a doubly insidious enslaving force (i.e. binding the poor to fixed precariousness and a spiritual shame of themselves despite their circumstances being mostly systemic; ignoring the red-flags of global warming and continuing plunder-for-progress as per the western fable of Growth with a Capital G), depends on these elections, depends on these next few years and whether the holders of the world's wealth are comfortable with both having kids and knowing that inherited wealth won't save them; that in fact the earth will be an arid unliveable ash-pile in the next few decades; that increased and lethally mutated virulence has been a long expected diagnostic of climate-change, that covid is a symptom of rising temperatures which scientists have a morbid hunch (more like an empirically supported forecast) is probably the merest tip of the iceberg. If you're thinking of having kids right now you may as well just take a loaded gun into the delivery room with you and the second it breaches pop a cap in it's head, because essentially going full term is the equivalent only with an arduous middle-man; by 'middle-man' meaning adolescence and if they're lucky a noirishly hardboiled adulthood (but definitely not middle-age lol). Bringing it back to the construction going on outside my window, driving a slow screw into both my temples with it's incessant industrial ambience; I understand it's election year and towards Christmas there's a lot more works going on because council needs to give the appearance of having sensibly spent it's grants etcetera, but Jesus fucking Christ that voice in my head screaming 'why bother why bother' is seeing cycle-lanes and newly smoothed curbs and wondering who the fuck is that for? Like, it's the veneer of planning for the future, of fortifying infrastructure in the most cosmetic capacity because honestly it's gonna get another generation's fair use and then bye-bye. And what's it like to be in high school right now? What does it feel like to be in the middle of formal-ish compulsory training for a world that imploded overnight, no less as a cumulative result of our hubris of which secondary curriculum is a complaisant buffer? Does it feel like those last few weeks of school before the summer holidays when you;re there but not really, when everybody's relaxed and half the school's bunking anyway and teachers might share your smoking spot without batting an eye. Is it like that but a whole year of it, with an additional doom-aesthetic? Are the kids okay or is it giving them ptsd? I guess only time will tell.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.2

I've been reading a lot of Nick Land recently and I know he's something of a controversy because he's been recruited by the alt-right (or his ideas have) since his 'ousting' from academia. But to be honest this is on brand for him. If you don't know Land was a contemporary of Mark Fisher, the Capitalist Realism guy, and if Land didn't invent accelerationism then he definitely mainstreamed it (or took it as mainstream as you can when you're a fringe-cultural-theorist-cum-contemporary-philosopher). By accelerationism I mean the idea that the only way to transcend capitalism is to unleash all of it's self-destructive potential by leaning radically into it's fundamentally suicidal tenets, deliberately exacerbating it's more incendiary systematising to trigger a cataclysm; from the ashes of which a surviving remainder (cyberpunks and occultists?) can create a new world. I first discovered the guy when I picked up a pretty-looking book at the library, recently published; a collection of the anonymous writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which Wikipedia will tell you existed as a cultural theorist collective at Warwick University in England from 1995 to 1997. Land's involvement in the CCRU was minimal, the Unit being more of an online forum for critical exploration of his thinking by alumnis and acolytes. What's even more interesting about the CCRU is how it's contributors have remained anonymous, tying in with Land's narrativising of late-stage disaster capitalism as a faceless force of profoundly omniscient/omnipotent and prophetic annihilation. Hyperstition he called it; the collective realisation of apocalyptic 'hunches' proliferated through a rabidly decentralised media, giving material force and self-fulfilling potential to mere superstition through the internet's connective ability to create swarms (plagues?). Like Land's, the CCRU writings fixate on the eschatological mythologies of H.P. Lovecraft and his subterranean horde of Elder Gods, nightmarish forces which lie dormant in a netherworld but which are slowly waking up. At the time Lovecraft's convention of cosmic horror was a xenophobic expression of his more personal horror at the prospect of immigration in a newly-industrialised (and decentralised) world. This more than anything probably obfuscates Land's work as covertly racist, making possible it's ideological high-jacking by violent conservatives and traditionalists. More than anything this cleaving to Lovecraftian mythology shows capitalism and it's myriad death-dealing flows as abject, as within Land's work capitalism establishes the conditions by which the Elder Gods (a legion lead by Lovecraft's own demon-god-king Cthulhu) finally awaken and unleash unholy retribution on the cultural hubris of the developed world. Even more interestingly, and further bolstering Land's defensive case, racism and the animosities it invokes within Land's eschatological schematic can be read as symptoms of capitalism's self-annihilating potential, in which case (maybe not so defensibly) he can be seen as (ironically?) querying Charles Manson's purge-like Helter Skelter, in which a race war would cleanse contemporary society of it's performative hypocrisies and in doing so hasten it's own end. Perhaps Charles Manson can be cited as the original accelerationist, and Nick Land merely a doe-eyed follower transplanting Helter Skelter's unwieldy motivations in an academic setting. What was infuriating for high-browed academia at Land's work was how it dipped into theatricality, posturing itself as conspiracy only to demonstrate the notion of hyperstitiality (prophetic self-fulfilment) that he cited within entropic capitalist systems. His work took theory and reflexively performed the socio-cultural mechanic it alleged to be critiquing/theorising, INSIDE the theorising. The result was a reimagining of theory as much more plastic, fluid, and dare I say fun, than academia has any right to be. Running wildly with an academic register and extending it's possibilities. By modelling his work as the pseudo-religious writings of a cult, stealing from such academically counterintuitive genres as science-fiction, cosmic horror, and the occult (specifically a cyber-punk Kabbalah), Land presented his idea of capitalist tendencies towards fanciful (apocalyptic/dystopian) world-making by DOING that world-making; so that his critique of capitalism's inherent barbarism retains an extra-dimensional didacticism which more conventionally executed critiques lack. It's a dismantling of a capitalist-mythic (perhaps a counter argument to Fisher's Capitalist Realism), by generating an equally insidious capitalist-mythic. But even without Land's dark whimsies, the Cthulhu Club (a fictitious cult which the CCRU monitor through their collected writings) is still operable as a metaphor for the inherent 'boom-and-bust' of capitalist systems. In a century of capitalist experimentation every 30-40 years produces a crisis, as if on a timer. In the 1930's it was the result of real-time production catching up with unbridled financial speculation (which let's be honest is still a fucking blight), in the 1970's it was the collapse of Fordism, and in the late 2000's it was the implosion of willy-nilly lending schemes around sub-prime mortgages. If anything, Land's schematising of the Elder Gods is as the mythic embodiments of capitalism's tendentious curve towards crisis. So far though, the crises experienced tend to be more Keynesian than Marxist. To explain; economist Maynard Keynes alluded to capitalism being sustainable with just enough fiscal strong-arms to bring us back from ruin at every systemic depression (which inevitably occurs when growth's winners hoard capital), seeing crisis as almost necessary for re-shuffling social relations and replicating market forces in a sturdier and more egalitarian form. Call it a programmed learning curve towards which the fluctuating unemployment levels of any society is a critical barometer; keep the little hand on green or yellow and we're sweet, let it drop below red and the Elder Gods awaken. Marx on the other hand denounced the economic necessity of cyclical crises and urged the working masses (whose labour hoarded capital undermines) to exacerbate the potential for radical rupture in each scheduled collapse. In this way, capitalism's systemic crux potentially affords the means towards substitutes and alternatives. In light of this you could say Karl Marx was the very first accelerationist, though cultural Marxists prefer a more bespoke version with community gardens and genderless divisions of immediately productive labour. It makes you wonder; has anyone even read Marx? I feel like Nick Land actually has; what's more, he presents a radical Marxist playbook which looks a lot like psychopathic scheming against the corporatised state by full-immersion in (satanic) capitalist flows. Sounds fun.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World, vol.1

I used to think cinematic mysteries approximated those of the void, the world, the impenetrability of matter itself, the incorrigible secretiveness of bodies remaining subjectively secretive despite how readily accessible an online MD. I used to think cinematic mysteries could bare similar shapes to the riddles of time and birth and death and the seeming performance of the air itself only pretending to be air. You know? But actually I feel now like I've seen behind the curtain and glimpsed all there is to glimpse, taken all the pleasure there can possibly be in deconstructing constructed riddles and mysteries. That are then honeyed with attractive players and gilded with expensive production values and borne aloft digitally enhanced screens; with popcorn and soda and neutral company. Is this everyone's theatre experience? So cinematic mysteries no longer feel satisfying to me, the convention of the entertainments available which I used to religiously pursue now seem so fucking stale so laughably faded and expected, dropped like palliatives like sedatives; I'm embarrassed to have ever thought storytelling (in this medium anyway) had radical potential. But then I guess that's my personal measure of value, if something has radical potential; a fluid measure seeing as capitalism is so adept at coopting the means of it's demise aimed by dissident hopefuls. Who more often than not cash in somewhere along the way because a comfortable life is a sunnier prospect than misery, poverty, and eventual defeat. No matter how principled. Maybe cinema is only ever as exciting as a mirror, so this dysphoria I'm experiencing could be symptomatic of some other seismic shift in my personality. Navel-gazing is perhaps a suitable cinematic accompaniment. It is after all about window dressing the capitalist individual's psyche, the Hollywood productions anyway. But it's naive to think that 'indie' cinema, whose budgets are still passed through gate-kept thresholds, whose content is still calculated through a metric of manageable (even complimentary) dissidence; it is naive to think, for example the recent prestige-kerfuffle of A24, that independent or alternative cinema which then pitches itself as such is anything but a variation in flavour, as opposed to being emblematic of the weakening of parasitical commerciality's hold on despairing publics. Despairing is right. We are systematically beat down by an ideological accessory to nature's existing cruelties which include the corruption of time, the inevitable loss of being temporally bound beings. Tethering to others in the harrowing flux, for comfort, according to our programming as social animals; only to have these tethers painstakingly un-braided over life's sublimely indifferent march towards oblivion. I used to think cinema was a refuge but now, having proven itself the oppressor through the insidious omnipotence of streaming, the toad nestled in the tree-roots has eaten every last spore and grub, every last possibility of magical renewal of itself, of fresh saplings; gone. Why do I even care so much that cinema seems dead to me; not that it objectively is, just that I'm having a momentary loss of romantic feeling for it. A romantic feeling which for me has historically been very strong. I think it's a sign. From my wider self, from the version of myself that uses gut-feelings and cock-twitches to communicate to my shallower, more limited conscious self; the single-hemispheric management department, the vantage which collates objective materials only and neglects in it's rigid equation all the penumbric deities like hunches and nightmares and excessive horniness. I personally believe there are messages from the divine in excessive horniness. But as a gay man I might be biased. What I suspect is happening is that my higher self is registering that the world is winding down, and cinema being the mirror or lens through which I'd cohere my environment into a legible 'world', now seems defeated by a surplus of information, by a maelstrom of pressurised data. Cinema as an external hard-drive, as a cognitive extender, has reached maximum capacity (personally speaking). Of course, there's always the fact that cinema no longer functions as centrally as it once did in terms of dictating/manufacturing reality. Even before the hyper-connectivity of the Internet and normalcy of personal computers, and way before smart phones, the cinema screen and it's dominant diegesis shifted from ideological strong-arm to a richer discursivity, an increased number of voices producing a greater variety of images/stories/affects towards dynamism, plurality, and other words people use when they want to critically justify watching semi-pornographic 'art'. But cinema's specific diegesis no longer monopolises cultural production in the universally influential way it did for the latter part of the twentieth century. T.v. does that shit now. You'd think approaching ruin as we are on a global scale that television, long keeper of temporal flows what with classical forms being dictated on a nationally broadcast schedule (now freed in a soupy internet time-flux from which viewers can conjure and shelve entertainments at will); yeah, you would think that a medium so wedded to temporal regulation, so enamoured of the 'normalcy' of the five-day work week and it's vetting, would suddenly be exploding with apocalyptic thematics. But it's doing the opposite. I only see shows about life sans pandemic. They are unbelievable at this point. The normal lives they depict are even more fantastical now than they were a year ago; not because of their tailored bodies or effortlessly maintained inner-city apartments or polished quippy dialogue, but because the presumed backdrop of all of these whimsical players and their interactions just imploded. 'Normal life', from this side of 2020? What a fucking fairytale.

Zelda breath of the wild death stranding cigarettes ecological dysphoria

I can't think straight enough to say anything about the world right now so I'll talk about video games. 

Video games have always fascinated me, like from a distance because when I was growing up we could never afford a recent console (don't worry I'm not going to use gaming to demonstrate closed access to leisure-as-commodity, though obviously that's a thing). When I was a kid we picked up a decrepit sega system from the late eighties at a garage sale and that was me for the summer, addled by an increasingly violent world (post 9/11) and the then inarticulable suspicion that I was a raging homo. It was the system that had in-built game Alex The Kid, which anyone familiar with the console and that particular era of gaming will tell you brings back fond memories; which in reality is a retroactive sugaring of what were probably reasonably dissociative childhoods with high instances of trauma (lol). 

But whatever the reasons people throw themselves into games, and at whatever age, I find myself immersing in Legend of Zelda; Breath of the Wild like I haven't since I was a kid, whether on our ancient sega system or on a neighbour's or cousin's more up-to-date unit. This probably has something to do with the fact that we are in lockdown yet again, a combination of excess time on my hands coupled with the lure of escapism against a backdrop of societal collapse (which of course is the founding gesture of this blog). There's no way of knowing if I would be as readily embracing this Zelda game without a pandemic, without a lockdown. But that remains beside the point, the point being I am so enamoured of this game that spending time with it, pouring over it's narrative devices, it's eerie and desolately beautiful landscapes, meandering between it's loftier quests in details so infinitesimal you'd swear they sprouted from their own immaterial ecologies; the point is, this game has the sublime feeling of bonafide literature, the transcendent aura of high fantasy which works as both political and spiritual allegory, and then goes further than metaphor in being a numinous property all it's own.

Literally another world.

Again, my haphazard experience with games means my opinion falls short of what I imagine is the male-ish purview of more 'committed' gamers. That said, my respect and druggish thirst for pop artefacts won't let me ignore gaming. I mean,  it's a billion dollar industry and still only of marginal interest to cultural studies. I feel like the internet happened, so arbitrary demarcations of high and low culture are exactly that; arbitrary. So why the nearly total lack of critical attention to gaming?

I used to have this absent notion of video games as indoctrinating media that was persuading a generation in it's youth to think and feel reality in certain ways. Of course mass media does this to a certain extent anyway, or attempts to; but for some reason I had this bias around video games, that they were particularly insidious examples of 'immersive propaganda'. Nowadays the fractal deluge of information is so great that I wouldn't deign to pretend to know from where and in what ways I'm being manipulated into this or that mindframe. And I wouldn't peg video games with being particularly responsible for this state of affairs.

If anything, perhaps the haphazard accessibility of gaming offers alternatives to mainstream narrative-building in as much as it's audience is less managed, and in that respect retains radical potential where cinema and television (and even News) reside in agendas of mass-produced homogeneity. 

A scarier (expansive?) thought; I pertain to criticality but in all seriousness, what does that even mean? Where did my register of alleged criticality come from? How do I know that criticality itself, as a mediating looking relation, isn't another methodology of mediated knowledge-formation; of designer world-building?

Ironically this ability games have to world-build easier than any other medium is the source of both my suspicion and adoration of gaming, perhaps because the worlds of games are 'given', disguising their biases more easily than in the mediums of cinema and literature. Or so you'd think.

Could this possibly be because we are more familiar with the diagetic methods of cinema and conventional text, as opposed to being a textual feature of gaming itself? 

One of the reasons I think I love Breath of the Wild so much is because it's so gorgeously rendered, the world so layered, and yet the questing of it's protagonist is so gently imbued with what feels like organic exploratory relations that you're barely aware of the story moving around you as you follow your own whims; basically picking a point and heading out with the faith that eventually everything will tie together. What makes Breath of the Wild so special is that a lot of breathing space is allowed between player autonomy and story; and I do mean a lot. At times the map seems so vast that it's like throwing yourself into a high-resolution void. Am I meant to be here? Should I double back and find some path, some recognisable gaming feature; a side-quest, a boss level. That sort of thing.

While these features exist in Breath of the Wild they are few and far between, and also end up feeling secondary to the pleasures of wandering. 

It bears similarities to another recent release, Death Stranding. 

For starters, both games are set in a dying world, or worlds that have seen a cataclysm and are subsequently inhabited by survivors. In both games players learn the history of each world's fall, and it's with this knowledge that you 'wander', always with the sense of being in a fallow aftermath. The painterly construction of both games is in this respect Gothic with a capital G, as much as the genre of gothic storytelling spends time flashing back to tragic histories juxtaposing memory with a present laid waste (Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein etc). 

The most striking similarity here is that Death Stranding and Breath of the Wild, while bearing elements of gothic storytelling, offset an ambience of gothic despair/desolation with the possibility of reconstruction. In Death Stranding you are literally rebuilding America which has been laid waste by a legion of science-magic demons, connecting fortress cities by putting an old communications system back online. This is done by physically visiting regional sites and re-activating the network terminus by terminus. Between sites you wander, which comprises the majority of game-play. 

To any die-hard gamer reared on violent button-mashers such as Doom or even God Of War, this might seem boring. To anyone not habituated to the tropes of gaming this might seem esoteric, considering the shoot-em-up formula dystopian science fiction normally hews to (in film and television anyway).

And to the discerning aesthete, this gorgeously experimental and oddly high-profile provocation is the gaming equivalent of an Andrew Tarkovsky film. I'm not even kidding. 

Breath of the Wild also opens on a broken world, ravaged a century ago by a demonic entity named Ganon. And just as in Death Stranding you're tasked with visiting and bringing back online a grid of ancient technological sites, shrines and towers which belonged to the kingdom of Hyrule before it was destroyed. And between these sites which are numerous you wander, traversing vast swathes of empty lands that are riddled with interactive flora and fauna. And just as in Death Stranding, for huge stretches of the game you are entirely alone.

Though both games have other characters for the most part the biggest character is the land itself. After a while, and without the didactic trappings of games in which story oversees a players every action, gameplay becomes meditative. The minutest fluctuation in weather, a change of the wind or bolt of lightning or fresh veil of rain all becomes a phrase of the game itself, standing in for story in when moves towards narrative coherence are absent.

This has been a dormant possibility of gaming ever since 'open-world' became technically possible with last decade's rash of consoles, from the PS3 to the XBOX ONE. Nintendo missed out on a console with open-world capability so they're reasonably new to the party, but whatever the reason for the wait it was well worth it because in my opinion Breath of the Wild takes the existing formula, more conventionally explored in games like Dark Souls and Batman's Arkham Trilogy, and elevates it.

What comes through more strongly in Breath of the Wild than Death Stranding is a romantic loneliness, a sensibility of sweeping-spiritual environmentalism harking to colonial conceptions of the commons, of the wilds as mirrors of the human psyche. On top of this we have two worlds whose destructions were brought about by industrialising gone awry; in Death Stranding a subtle weapon which rent the seam between the worlds of living and dead, and in Breath of the Wild a kingdom whose guardian-machines were hacked and turned against them. Both doomsday scenarios were ushered in by measures of war, and both can only be remedied by rehabilitative wandering from post to post, a gradual rebuilding on an intimate scale as opposed to the oppressively totalising metrics of Defense. 

When 'open world' first started being thrown around to describe this new type of game I thought it sounded like a gimmick. But now I think it's nothing short of a new art form, a medium which 'game' falls short of describing in all it's possibility. If a book or film or television show makes allusions to vastness, it is gaming now which can actually approximate it. I think we've only just scratched the surface of what profound implications these open-world statements are making.

Anyway, I've gone full rabbit-hole with Breath of the Wild. Wading through a mythical place where new life pushes through the rubble of ancient ruin kind of makes me want to lay waste to this world rather than endure the long, slow, agonisingly drawn out demise. Is that the appeal of utopian/dystopian fiction? I would call my relationship with Breath of the Wild escapism is I wasn't having such an intensely emotional reaction to it. 

Maybe I need to up the ante on my cardio game. 

Identity is a bust and am I even human? Maybe there's something in post-humanism beyond silver eye-paint and art-parties where they try and pass noise off as dance music lol

Here we are in a wasteland of netflix and home cooked meals. If I see one more post about resisting capitalism by not being productive then I am going to fucking kill myself. I mean, does capitalism own productivity? And what is so fucking radical about not doing anything for twelve fucking hours, what's so fucking radical about binge watching a series or sitting on your bed staring into the wall like a piece of mould, sad and thoughtless? (Or wearing track pants until they're discoloured and masturbating until your dick or clit falls off).

Also; I do not care if you are using this time to dig deep and learn how to cook, or acquire a second language. These are things that no one should be advocating or that no one needs to know about, not your friends or family or colleagues. People are literally dying. 

What I am interested in is thinking about how life will 'carry on' on the other side of this fucking shit show, with respect to the fact that we have endured a pandemic and people have lost their lives. Anyone brazen enough to reduce this period of enforced isolation to an 'opportunity' to clean out their Tupperware drawer or spend quality time with their family is a brainless fuck-wit with the emotional intelligence of a mole-rat. 

PEOPLE HAVE DIED. END OF DISCUSSION.

What matters now and what everyone currently identifying as human should be concerning themselves with is whether or not the previous capitalist status quo, comprised of collective human misery and socioeconomic uncertainty, is something we feel like resuming after this breather. 

Important questions to ask oneself before we exit level-4 lockdown; 

Does mindless consumption make you happy?

Does having an unthinking unfeeling complicity in systems of third-world exploitation and deliberate impoverishment bring you happiness? Are you content with this being the premise of our lifestyles, and the legacy of our generation?

Are you content with the bombastic inequality within our society, in which you can enjoy relative comfort while others struggle through subtle blocks of discrimination which disable them from attaining the same levels of basic subsistence? 

I hate to bring 'discrimination' into it because it serves a bullshit identity politics which would like to think it is transcending the raced and gendered biases of history, but which uses history as it's ultimate signifier, has wrung cultural/social/cognitive capital from the late-capitalist model of immaterial currencies while masquerading as some kind of disruptive force. The truth is identity is never a disruptive force. Identity is a commodity and will NEVER have a radical influence on the way society organises itself because it is structurally identical with the commodity form. Identity is a product, whether you're gay or straight or white or non-white; it is all up for grabs in the metric of capitalist value. So even though I am firmly sided with the majority of Leftist values and crusades for re-distributive social justice, if you are someone who thinks that society can be renewed through this crusade then you are fucking deluded. 

The only radicality available to us is yet to exist, will only come into existence when we find a means of extending beyond identity, the endgame of which I cannot see but an action towards which might be in acknowledging identity itself as a technology, as something akin to the avatar and it's systemic function of mobility through an existing matrix. 

Right?

Fuck identity. Is what I'm saying. Alienating people on the basis of what they are has somehow become the Leftist argument du jour, and I refuse to participate beyond this point because the stakes are too fucking high. 

So with that behind us, is there a possibility now of a more profound and spontaneous solidarity? If this crisis has any benefit at all perhaps it's in this, levelling the usual socioeconomic demarcations towards a unity of an elite billionaire ruling class versus everyone else. I'd like to think so but I'm also aware of how deftly capitalism has proven in the manipulating of it's own crises towards an even stronger position for itself. Look at the 2008 financial crisis for example, in which governments bailed out banks with tax-payers money, despite the low-income tax-payers being the obvious victims of deregulation and the double bind of systemic debt and credit. Instead of state power disciplining the recklessness of speculative value and it's corrosive effects on production, the most vulnerable were left footing the bill so that a toxic status quo could be maintained indefinitely. The end of the world is apparently a minor obstacle when it comes to the up-keep of executive lifestyles. 

And it's those lifestyles and their ecologically devastating modes of production and consumption which have brought us to where we are, a pandemic symptomatic of an ideological manoeuvre pitted against the environment in service to capitalistic efficiency, an efficiency which tabulates human life itself as equal in value to the methods and materials of production; just another resource. And so this pause is a breath being taken by the world machine which has two options before it; either implement a more mindful model in which profits are distributed evenly, a reconfiguring of production to serve actual human welfare (including a more infinite-minded approach to environment-as-resource), or total barbarism. 

Democracy and it's free-market mascot have always been heavily flawed but within them the symbolic value of a world order, allegedly pitted against exploitation and war, has kept total global barbarism at bay (if only selectively and in fits and starts).  That symbolic order has just taken a heavy blow, and utopian thinking has all of a sudden become less of a fantasy and more of a viable solution. That is, compared to the alternatives. 

An unpopular opinion; recently my IG feed has come up with anti-Jacinda sentiments which I find hard to swallow. Firstly because she's in a coalition government and so the logistical failures of a bipartisan cabinet, not to mention an eight year neoliberal legacy which there's no way one person can rectify in a four year term, are disconcertingly being lumped on Jacinda in the manner of scape-goating. This is something I would expect of alt-right agitators such as Mike Hosking, but never of mutual friends and acquaintances who I'd assumed fairly intelligent, or intelligent enough to recognise the reluctant value of 'lesser evils'. Secondly this sentiment, which apparently includes a failure to acknowledge or meet needs of Maori, is dividing the left all over again, which during an election year bodes ill for the ballot. Certainly, if I have anything positive to say about National it's that they efficiently managed Iwi reparations for which I am grateful (even if Nga Puhi couldn't organise themselves in time to get a decent slice of the pie). However, I wouldn't have them back in a million years even if it meant more money for Iwi's, because they're operating from distinct neoliberal premises which have otherwise destroyed the middle-class and created a terrifying new world of precarious working poor. The Left cannot afford to splinter now lest in our confusion we let National back in, which will surely mean a tipping of the scales towards barbarism. 

A solution to Jacinda's allegedly sub-par approach to Maori (which admittedly includes neglecting to visit Ihumatao) is to vote double red, to give her full authority so she's not bound by anyone else's racist conservatism (Winston Peters, cough).

Ardern's competency and compassion cannot be understated. I know for a fact that she is in direct conversation with small business owners and renters, keeping herself informed on a grass-roots level which I can't imagine there's too much of a precedent for. 

If you have an issue with how she's conducted herself to date, check yourself, repeat the words 'bipartisan government', and on Election Day tick red. Otherwise shut the fuck up, because the Left cannot afford to be divided right now. 

The banks are evil, Japanese animation is lit, and nothing feels real anymore, least of all the flimsy routine I've set up for myself in isolation which frankly feels like the performance of denial, leisure in crisis etc

Defamiliarising ourselves with a way of life that is undeniably closing is the theme right now. I wondered why I was having such a grief-like response a full week before lockdown and realise now it was a visceral reaction, a piecing together with faculties outside my 'conscious' mind, of these facts; the fact of collapse, the fact that a pandemic was slowing the world down in ways which it should have back in 2008 when it became evident the current order and it's privately centralised banks, just would not do. And here we are, having had that defunct world system dragged out for a further twelve years, miseries abound, and to the detriment of the species it is not rationality or radical praxis that's bringing cogent attentions to this system's gross discrepancies, but a fucking virus. 

Was it really so difficult to isolate and contain a problem of it's scope (the insidious leverage the banks have over every world government, their usurpation of welfare and public access with gig-economies/harrowing fluidity which we're meant to read as 'freedom' etc) only under duress of a secondary crisis, one to exhume the first and create dialect alongside? Not getting overly technical, but historical dialecticism seems to have won out here but amazingly in service to the potential dismantling of it's own structural violence (FYI historical dialecticism is a mode of discourse which gives primacy to history as a narrative and justifies everything and anything in the name of a binary consistency;  meaning anything from war to genocide to a pandemic can be turned towards the benefit of the whole, as a kind of transformative collateral). Here's hoping the global reach of this crisis, it's literally-fleshy intimacy as a threat, might topple the mind-tricks otherwise used to justify resuming the status quo when the dust finally settles. Here's hoping the villain of this story (if there needs to be one) ends up being the banks, and that governments can finally out-manoeuvre the hostage situation we've been in to them since certain reformations that gave primacy to finance. 

Fuck the fucking banks.

Drinking and eating and generally consuming is like, my life now. I guess it always was but now it's really apparent how the domestic space has been coded as a fortress of 'entertainment', and I'm asking myself what implications does this intimate proximity with a rabid media complex have, what is it's value outside of a crisis, who does it serve?

Obviously industry pundits get a dollar, food production gets a boon because there are junky-caffeinated-sugary consumption habits around entertainment which have historically been sold as 'comforts', which in reality are as insidious as smoking because marketed to be habit forming etcetera. I live with someone who is a gamer, and who has recently admitted to me that when they're not being constantly inundated with media (gaming, frankly terrible music, watching a shitty movie) they feel acute anxiety. I know there's not much to do in isolation if you don't have clear 'working from home' parameters but this person's clear addiction, seeing them deny what could otherwise be a period of introspection and a re-inscribing of themselves in a shifting world order, is really starting to bum me out. 

But I also don't want to judge any person's reaction to this, or how they see fit to wile away the enforced time at home; but on the other hand I don't want to endorse infantile behaviours which might seem harmless but which mostly lead to active disempowerment. Yuck.

So yes, actively defamiliarising with everything we've taken for granted about this way of life, the petty consumption habits which we don't necessarily think about in terms of  a resource expenditure because their initial cost seems trivial, is perhaps something worth doing right now, because if anything what's happening should teach us that no cost is trivial, that every expenditure (monetary or other) accumulates and plays out in time. This lesson is inherent to this pandemic because the virus and it's spread are the ambience of industrial-consumerist processes in critical stages. They are the result of a metric that has no remainder, in which every factor of late-stage capitalism has contributed; population bursts in urban areas, global warming, the privileged accessibility of travel etcetera. The concept of waste also probably needs to go, or at least our pathological avoidance of it's trajectory; knowing that nothing is ever simply flushed down a toilet or dropped off in a desert in a lead vault, cleanly removed from the world of operations which somehow exists over and above it's own refuse. This concept should die, because it's a fiction. 

And look where it's gotten us.

More thoughts on old movies I've been rewatching in isolation;

Howl's Moving Castle is more queer than I remembered, the flamboyance of it's main character which as a teen should've been proof enough to me of a queer agenda but which at the time I couldn't see past Miyazaki's painterly sensibilities. Not that I could really call it an agenda, but it's fun to indulge this idea of a conspiracy of queerness underlying mainstream culture (especially cinema and television), which is probably just the love child of cultural post-modernism and queer theory. 

But outside the conspicuously dapper figure of Howl just how queer is the film?

If queerness can be cited as fluid otherness, as a mode always against the normative, then perhaps Howl's queerness can best be exemplified in his anti-war stance. Which is actually more of a passive anti-war stance, because it's not that he disagrees with or is preaching against the war fundamentally, only that his interests do not enclose the war and so it is of minimal importance to him. Howl's interests we are told are more vain, and that vanity is in turn pathologized. But why?

If Howl's vanity pits him against war categorically then why is he seen as 'incomplete' until love interest Sophie restores his heart (literally, if you haven't seen the film go watch it now for reference) and he can finally consummate his partial being in a heterosexual union?

Well, Sophie's got her own flaw or erroneous element seeking consummation inside the magic circle of heteronormative coupling. A witch has put a spell on her turning her into an old woman, but also she has terrible self esteem and this is repeatedly offset against Howl's own (pathological?) self-love, a self-love which the film measures as pathological by his indifference to the war and his refusal to lend his magic to the king's military. 

Sooooooo, what's the greater good here; Howl's vanity/self-love lifestyle as a sorcerer and romantic adventurer, or the consummation of self-love and self-loathing when Howl and Sophie end up together in the film's climax (during which they accidentally discover the missing prince over whom the war is being fought, effectively ending it)?

Again, the value of these modes is measured against the war and with that in mind the film seems to be saying that though Howl's Don-Juan-escapades and wizard's indulgences neutrally ally him with a pacifist stance, it's in coupling with Sophie and (only very accidentally) ending the war that the greatest good lies. 

However, Sophie's deprecating servileness is also presented as the flaw of an indulgent character, even if negatively. So it seems it's not 'vanity' per se which is pathologized, but self-interested behaviours and attributes themselves, a romantic excess of introspection leading away from an engagement with the polity and wider society (especially when the latter is in crisis). 

But then why is the effectiveness of political engagement paired so emphatically with a normative coupling? Or perhaps their coupling is not so normative in as much as both Howl and Sophie operate as inherently queer/fluid personas; Howl a shapeshifting sorcerer, Sophie an ageless victim of a witch's curse posing between old and young, maiden and crone. 

But more importantly who cares?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (I was in the park yesterday and this fucking cop told me I wasn't allowed to be on the grass doing my crunches, that if I was to be out of the house taking my state approved exercise then I had to keep moving; I hope he gets cancer because when we come out of isolation and I have no core to speak of and zero self esteem then whatever I do as a result will be on his head)

Feeling myself disintegrating in a not completely unpleasant way, like there's this caustic dissonance between the roving anxiety inside me (about things like financial ruin and premature death) which when I leave my house for my designated walk is incongruously offset by abundant leisure, which in any other circumstance would be a sign of national abundance. Instead it's the result of this ghostly pause on everything. There were birds in my window box the other night, who never normally venture this far from the refuge of the park come dusk. The city is that quiet. It's unnerving and gratifying all at once; gratifying to that part of myself that's too lazy to think constructively through crisis and would rather there be a conflagration to clear the slate. Harrowing to that part of myself that hopes there'll be enough time to have a nice life with an admittedly vaguer hope (if only for lack of a radical program) for equal access of the same to others. 

But that's definitely not going to happen. We will not be afforded the luxury of a singular event with bells and whistles. Instead collapse will be prolonged, agonisingly so. People will die, are dying. Meanwhile other people will play music and video games and watch movies and get high and cook their favourite comfort foods, all under duress of public health. Disaster, and leisure, deployed in amounts equal to recognised citizenship, to existing privileges; the more the merrier, the more the easier to weather an unprecedented global event such as this, the more a quarantine resembles a working holiday. For some. 

Funny how this virus has thus far, or until recently, had a character of severity only to those in certain age brackets and with pre-existing health conditions; in the circulation of these facts and to the layman (myself included) a profile has formed, definitely inaccurate, of those prone and those practically immune. But now people in their twenties are dying too, and I feel stupid for ever thinking a virus would make demographic selections on which hosts it would infect and to what degree. I keep thinking about low income families and how my mind is melting here in my relative privilege, which is basically only a privilege of not having dependents and certainly not a privilege of means. It's also a privilege of community. I've chosen to root myself in one particular area and as a natural result I'm basically surrounded by support. There's a lot of mutual leaning happening right now and it's kind of fucking great. I'm wondering how long this will even be possible though, when the dust settles and no one has jobs and there's no economy to speak of. What then? Is it counterproductive to be having these concerns now? Or is it reckless not to, to just sink into an ennui that I swear these walls are whispering me towards? 

Just kidding, I'm not hearing voices just yet. 

I don't know what everyone else's situations are during isolation but mine can barely be called isolation in as much as I am sharing a flat with seven others, boyfriend included. But then this is also giving a false face of pleasantness to the situation. It's collapse and we think the storm has started but it hasn't, and that might've sounded hysterical last week but this week it's too fucking true. I can't believe how easily disrupted, how vulnerable it turns out our world order actually is, that something complaisantly relegated to the dark ages (a virus!) could bring us to our knees practically over night. 

I have never felt so revoltingly close to history. 

Some thoughts on one of the many movies I've been rewatching of late;

Alex Proyas, the 'visionary' behind The Crow (which let's be honest must've been a fluke because everything he's done since has been characteristically stylish but not remotely ballsy enough to carry his ludicrous plots), released a film in 2009 which I think is the best apocalypse movie this side of Deep Impact (another insanely underrated end-time movie). The movie is called Knowing and stars a typically hammy Nicholas Cage as this science professor who's grappling with his purpose in life after the death of his wife. He is also now raising their hearing impaired son and having the same Shamaylan-esque crises of faith as Gibson's ex-priest character from Signs, despite being an academic and not a man of the cloth. The first half (or generously two thirds) of the film runs like a well oiled machine of suspense and intrigue, truly unpredictable and riveting enough to make you forgive it's cheesier riffs on cosmology and determinism. The ending is insane, far-fetched pure science-fiction nonsense and really after the impossible promise of the first half it could only have gone down the road of bonkers. Far from a negative though, the dizzying ambition of the film's conclusion is what makes this stand out for me. 

Spoiler alert. 

Basically the deaf-ish son pulls a letter out of a time capsule at his school, which has been buried in the ground for roughly fifty years. His astro-phsyicist (or something) father figures out that it's a cypher with the dates, coordinates and fatalities of every significant disaster (natural or otherwise) from the last twenty years. Three dates remain and Cage realises these are disasters which are yet to occur and that this cypher is an act of prophecy, which by unseen forces has made it's way into his hands so that he might prevent them from happening. The trouble is the last date is actually an extinction event, the end of all life as we know it. 

Turns out the predictions were made by a little psychic girl who could tap into some higher-dimensional communication by extraterrestrial beings who've known for a very long time that our planet had an expiration date, that a massive solar flare would wipe out all life. Though never confirmed in the film it's implied that these extraterrestrial beings are something like interplanetary guides, perhaps the race that seeded humanity in the first place;  not an overly original idea, but linking this up with exegetical notions of biblical revelation, insinuating the prophecies and angels from the bible are actually alien in origin and not celestial. That's a nice touch. 

The film ends with the children being taken to a second planet so that humanity can continue which leaves more questions than answers; why only kids allowed on planet B? (there is of course a bible passage in which we 'must be like little children to come unto The Lord'; don't ask me which). Also, if they knew earth would burn eventually, why even set up shop here? Why not start on planet B in the first place? It would certainly save an excessive waste of human life, considering they only took like two percent of the population and let everyone else die. Did the adults do something wrong? Is it another romanticism of childhood innocence, when actually we know children if anything are feral instinct-driven bastards and if such a thing as innocence exists then it is learned, acquired through rigorous moral lesson. 

Maybe we were seeded to terraform the planet with carbon, extract it as a resource where they couldn't because the earth's natural atmosphere was poisonous to them? 

Or maybe, and this is more likely, the aliens are bigoted geneticists who feel their creation has been muddied. At the film's conclusion it turns out they're only just taking kids to the new planet, but kids who've 'heard the call'. The criterion remains vague, but what with the nazi aesthetic of the beings themselves, there's a definite eugenics vibe which makes all the existentialist talk before it seem ideologically nasty.