The Slough
Blood flows in one direction,
towards the heart.
Freedom, if the concept exists, never
Shall leave behind a single soul ever
Trapped inside wage
labor to do their part.
Not money but freedom is what I need.
Don’t give me none of that
wage slave’s currency.
It’s a great irony of civilization
that pure reason
is in fact
a Gateway drug of insanity.
the God of the West,
realism of capitalists-
Our spirit is formed
like water from hydrogen,
it counters that from
which it was formed,
the flame
And therein lies the Great
Mystery of palingenesia,
of the interconnectedness
of the heavy
& light,
the hot & the cold.
Emptiness is pure potential
at bottom chaos
the interconnectedness of all things,
butterfly effect
ultimately the unknown:
what Rimbaud sought
through his long dérèglement de tous
les sens
to know je est un autre.
“Truths are illusions
which we have forgotten
are illusions,”
(Nietzsche). This is
the matter of simulacrum,
for the utility
of an illusion
is in its
being seen through.
Stuck to facts,
all truth is
always the truth of power
in this rigged dimension
where might makes right;
Our human rights
are always the product of surrendering
personal sovereignty;
Our freedom of speech
is always the right of the State
to take that away;
Human freedom
under State government
is only that which can
by brutally denied
to you
if you’re standing
in its way.
thinking and writing,
Creating an edifice-
the mind is a calculation
machine,
striving to bring concepts
& things
into balance.
& Civilization is already
a simulacrum,
especially when imposing
a center on the boundless;
Hierarchizing creates
classes of Master
& Slave,
Language and mythologies
are a semiotic code
that justifies the Order,
and hence Ideology
& material subjection
reign.
The singularity of information
is the boot
of the control society,
And sold as liberating,
a freedom
that is slavery,
which is its neoliberal character.
Freedom as a War
of all against all,
Law that codifies in Justice
that the mighty will rule,
This is the neoliberal regime
& tyranny of the market
-making us, in the mythologies
of pseudoscience, believe
Competition & violence are
intrinsic to the human species.
Art sought pretentiously
to immortalize
By resisting death,
We’ve petrified life
And the contrivances multiplied.
The Lords even in death
continued to rule with their legacy
like mummified pharaohs,
The canon was haunted
by the auguring
of an Ozymandias,
And we all fell into a cult
of personality from Shakespeare
On, as if under the spell
of one such
fragile Ego.
Every poem kills,
like in an exchange
of value
alienated persons
can’t simply be
but in capitalist agony.
Write, rights
some have more,
much more time
deserving of value
to make their thoughts
on being an artist rhyme.
Being a subject
Every conception
is a form of syzygy.
Deny the poetry
in philosophy,
the ideology
in reality,
the magic
in thinking.
The Lords are artificial gods
whose powers are godlike.
They may not even exist
apart from the human mind,
Whose power is nowhere
when it is everywhere,
nowhere in the people
when in institutions;
Nowhere in communities
when in the State,
nowhere in our bones & sinews
when in our bellies as processed meat,
in our brains as pharmaceuticals,
Surrounding us as in a spider’s web
of digitized capital.
Power is a frame,
a picture frame,
The capstone of representational
thinking,
A Master code.
The structure of language
itself,
Structures of the unconscious
Like dinosaur bones,
an unending history of brutality,
Arranging in spacetime
the black blood of Empire.
Flowing always to the top
of the cybernetic head
of Talos,
As its structural hand
shatters the skull of the
indigenous
with a billy club-
Brutalize your Ego,
Kill It dead,
the Fascists
inside your head.
Give us
competition without resentment,
cooperation without hierarchy.
law absent of violence,
rule drained of domination.
We must
revolt against the given
with “[a]n impossiblist élan”! [1]
For to be a poet,
a good poet,
an actionable one,
is to be
a magician.
Desire is the means of production. No emancipatory structure can exist that doesn’t first collectively free desire.
(ii) It is consumption that primarily defines a late stage of Capitalism. Production and consumption are two sides of the same coin, like Master/Slave morality.
(iii) Desire must be overcome not through denial, but rather through disinterested affirmation. Denial is what fuels compulsory consumption. Production becomes pathological under Capitalism.
Be disinterested
in how
the State
defines your Self.
Be disinterested
in forms of power
that are slavery
which is the privileged
domain of currency.
Be disinterested, in the sense of free from commodity fetishism; disinterested in the sense of free from fetishism in general. Fetishism is a pathology of object-subjects.
Need is fundamental. Making need equivalent with money is a historical contingency.
(b) Desire is a complex need, an emergent one. Under Capitalist Realism, fundamental needs and superfluous desires become conflated.
(c) The reproduction of the system requires poverty; to perpetuate this injustice, the petty bourgeois who could align with the proletariat, are kept in bad faith illusions that equate a lack of superfluous desires with a lack of freedom and even the threat of impoverishment. In practice it becomes a check on challenges to capitalist realism, by limiting one’s imagination to see life without superfluity as meaningful or gratifying.
[1] Randolph Bourne, Twilight of Idols
towards the heart.
Freedom, if the concept exists, never
Shall leave behind a single soul ever
Trapped inside wage
labor to do their part.
Not money but freedom is what I need.
Don’t give me none of that
wage slave’s currency.
It’s a great irony of civilization
that pure reason
is in fact
a Gateway drug of insanity.
the God of the West,
realism of capitalists-
Our spirit is formed
like water from hydrogen,
it counters that from
which it was formed,
the flame
And therein lies the Great
Mystery of palingenesia,
of the interconnectedness
of the heavy
& light,
the hot & the cold.
Emptiness is pure potential
at bottom chaos
the interconnectedness of all things,
butterfly effect
ultimately the unknown:
what Rimbaud sought
through his long dérèglement de tous
les sens
to know je est un autre.
“Truths are illusions
which we have forgotten
are illusions,”
(Nietzsche). This is
the matter of simulacrum,
for the utility
of an illusion
is in its
being seen through.
Stuck to facts,
all truth is
always the truth of power
in this rigged dimension
where might makes right;
Our human rights
are always the product of surrendering
personal sovereignty;
Our freedom of speech
is always the right of the State
to take that away;
Human freedom
under State government
is only that which can
by brutally denied
to you
if you’re standing
in its way.
thinking and writing,
Creating an edifice-
the mind is a calculation
machine,
striving to bring concepts
& things
into balance.
& Civilization is already
a simulacrum,
especially when imposing
a center on the boundless;
Hierarchizing creates
classes of Master
& Slave,
Language and mythologies
are a semiotic code
that justifies the Order,
and hence Ideology
& material subjection
reign.
The singularity of information
is the boot
of the control society,
And sold as liberating,
a freedom
that is slavery,
which is its neoliberal character.
Freedom as a War
of all against all,
Law that codifies in Justice
that the mighty will rule,
This is the neoliberal regime
& tyranny of the market
-making us, in the mythologies
of pseudoscience, believe
Competition & violence are
intrinsic to the human species.
Art sought pretentiously
to immortalize
By resisting death,
We’ve petrified life
And the contrivances multiplied.
The Lords even in death
continued to rule with their legacy
like mummified pharaohs,
The canon was haunted
by the auguring
of an Ozymandias,
And we all fell into a cult
of personality from Shakespeare
On, as if under the spell
of one such
fragile Ego.
Every poem kills,
like in an exchange
of value
alienated persons
can’t simply be
but in capitalist agony.
Write, rights
some have more,
much more time
deserving of value
to make their thoughts
on being an artist rhyme.
Being a subject
Every conception
is a form of syzygy.
Deny the poetry
in philosophy,
the ideology
in reality,
the magic
in thinking.
The Lords are artificial gods
whose powers are godlike.
They may not even exist
apart from the human mind,
Whose power is nowhere
when it is everywhere,
nowhere in the people
when in institutions;
Nowhere in communities
when in the State,
nowhere in our bones & sinews
when in our bellies as processed meat,
in our brains as pharmaceuticals,
Surrounding us as in a spider’s web
of digitized capital.
Power is a frame,
a picture frame,
The capstone of representational
thinking,
A Master code.
The structure of language
itself,
Structures of the unconscious
Like dinosaur bones,
an unending history of brutality,
Arranging in spacetime
the black blood of Empire.
Flowing always to the top
of the cybernetic head
of Talos,
As its structural hand
shatters the skull of the
indigenous
with a billy club-
Brutalize your Ego,
Kill It dead,
the Fascists
inside your head.
Give us
competition without resentment,
cooperation without hierarchy.
law absent of violence,
rule drained of domination.
We must
revolt against the given
with “[a]n impossiblist élan”! [1]
For to be a poet,
a good poet,
an actionable one,
is to be
a magician.
Desire is the means of production. No emancipatory structure can exist that doesn’t first collectively free desire.
(ii) It is consumption that primarily defines a late stage of Capitalism. Production and consumption are two sides of the same coin, like Master/Slave morality.
(iii) Desire must be overcome not through denial, but rather through disinterested affirmation. Denial is what fuels compulsory consumption. Production becomes pathological under Capitalism.
Be disinterested
in how
the State
defines your Self.
Be disinterested
in forms of power
that are slavery
which is the privileged
domain of currency.
Be disinterested, in the sense of free from commodity fetishism; disinterested in the sense of free from fetishism in general. Fetishism is a pathology of object-subjects.
Need is fundamental. Making need equivalent with money is a historical contingency.
(b) Desire is a complex need, an emergent one. Under Capitalist Realism, fundamental needs and superfluous desires become conflated.
(c) The reproduction of the system requires poverty; to perpetuate this injustice, the petty bourgeois who could align with the proletariat, are kept in bad faith illusions that equate a lack of superfluous desires with a lack of freedom and even the threat of impoverishment. In practice it becomes a check on challenges to capitalist realism, by limiting one’s imagination to see life without superfluity as meaningful or gratifying.
[1] Randolph Bourne, Twilight of Idols