Cough Syrup Soaked Atmosphere

Or, robo-tripping through a pseudo-context

My brain has grown a club foot. I can feel it dragging, layering up in coarse wool heavy with the smell of a sheep’s grundle. My broken airy barn door brain, the intro to Indiana watercolors covered bridge painting in my head, papering over all those complex analyses, that incisive cultural commentary not at all redundant, windy, futile, slapstick serious, otiose and overworked at the same time, all those strained attempts to fit a twin sized spread over a California king situation.

No time or energy for that subscholarly double chin stroking and one man circle jerking. Like I’m going to walk 15 miles in a day and finger all that mail, accumulate a thousand hangnails, my whole hands nothing more than hangnails, cuticles as arid and desolate as the far side of the moon, and come home in the evening, usually after 6 pm, bones aching, load bearing and continence regulating spinal discs bulging and slipping, and then read and think and even write sensitively about technology and culture, of all things, when I need to cook my own food lest I pay airport lounge bar prices for a burger or noodle bowl that will twist and inflate my intestines like a clown’s balloon animal, and then clean the cat turds and spend time with my girlfriend, much less fit in some other kind of socializing, what people supposedly used to do as a matter of course, every day and night, in their bowling leagues and reading groups and sock hops and potlucks and barbecues and dinner parties and prayer circles, all of which no one does anymore, from what I hear, from what I can’t stop hearing about every time I hear anything from someone I don’t know who knows one of our biggest problems is how no one knows anyone anymore. Wedge in a few moments of attentive reading and thinking, and if I read a timely subdermal contemplation it will be about how I’m not social and fertile enough to qualify as a proper human being, and that more people spend more time alone reading and thinking about how everyone is now alone.

Many people have said Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message; McLuhan also said the medium is the massage, and I say he also said the median is the message, and probably something about how if you come up with a few catchy and suggestive aphorisms you could write a hundred thousand books and still your one or two drunken gnome in a dream utterances would be quoted over and over and your wide ranging and sophisticated and dense and complex work would be condensed and processed into a lightly specked ham loaf saying or two, down to a manager’s special supermarket profundity, the sound of bologna slices slapping each other. Never mind that the phrase the medium is the message is logically incoherent; an instrument of communication influencing the user of the instrument doesn’t erase the difference between the two or change the definition of either a message or its method and form of conveyance. Case in point, the medium is the message is a message I can understand in a variety of mediums, if it were reducible to or interchangeable with its medium what would I get from it. For the phrase to make sense, it must be wrong; if it were correct, it wouldn’t make sense. The real point is always less than what it hints at; sometimes the truth isn’t fatal or thrilling or a secret passed along by hooded acolytes, it’s banal, staid, middle aged and average, and smells vaguely of a high school basketball game concession stand.

The truth being; messages do absorb and transmit the traits of specific mediums, and communication is shaped by dominant systems and instruments and sometimes shadowy and sometimes strutty vested interests, but messages are also substrate neutral or independent or detachable from contexts, and primarily traceable to and verifiable by users of communicative instruments.

Not only messages, but persons, objects, functions, identities, spirits, souls; they tear themselves from their webs. Monstrous outlines performing obscene gestures; waves whitecapping themselves. All is just as much isolated as it is bound. Remember the ol cogito, which every good Humean skeptical empiricist and Buddhist knows is only a bundle of perceptions, every Kantian knows is a formal reference point of a mechanical ordering process; every Hegelian knows is a sublated moment of self-relation in absolute spirit’s self-development, every Marxist knows is an early capitalist bourgeoise reification of instrumental rationality and every Heideggerian knows is an interpretation of a derivative mode of being in the world inherited from a philosophical tradition of misunderstandings and forgettings of original questioning; eppur si muove, despite it all. I know I don’t exist, but I think I do; and that thinking nonentity isn’t going anywhere, it might not even die when the rest of me does, no matter how much I historicize or meditate or critically delimit the bounds of rational enquiry.

All this to say: critical discourse on contexts and systems, on the arbitrary and interested historico-cultural construction of identity and the unreality, illusoriness and impotence of subjectivity has achieved its own individualistic, subjectivized predominance in the hypermediated classes which undergirds atomization and reinforces egotism and gives rise to retrograde myths of presence, immediacy, community, silence, simplicity, ultra neo romantic mystifications that feed into reactionary parapolitical movements as well as separatist, quietist and fatalistic disengagement, all the while passing far over the heads of disintegrated class fragments of globalized peasantry and culturally marginal yet economically persistent laboring ethnic and religious enclaves.

At some point of critical elaboration it’s no longer the ideological false consciousness of bourgeoise individual autonomy inhibiting understanding and action, it’s the reflex contextualization of systemic influences serving as a fetish distraction from getting a grip on what does lie within the power of persons and groups(and, in a Kierkegaardian or Pascalian vein, as a rather dour diversion from an even grimmer duty towards one’s immortal soul headed for heaven or hell); easier to put into practice in more culturally mediated and individualized arenas, admittedly, and here I’m thinking first of media experience and use: put down your phone if it makes you feel like a drooling cretin, everyone knows the score by know, but also use it to call your mom, it will be you talking to her and not two phones talking to each other, despite the cracked out subject predicate reversals we’ve all played around with but then some of us got hooked on. Even if it’s the CIA’s fault and they’re mining your data and watching your every move, you’re still paranoid; either live with it and use it to your advantage and limit its negative effects or drop it.

Not entirely dismissing critical awareness of tech industry abuses, but algorithms seem to stunt the mind less than references to algorithms, dependence on the idea of algorithms flattening and homogenizing and siloing taste; criticism of automated industrial cognition becomes automated and depersonalized. And I promise there’s no pressure to externalize and express every aspect of your identity, beyond a sometimes relevant and real change in economic modes of symbolic production which do colonize more psychic and lifestyle territory, but even there it’s contestable; but what I mean is, generally, on social media, casually, in an everyday sense; no one cares, there’s no real urgency, you don’t have to keep up or explain and justify your every move, there’s no need for an ongoing panic attack.

Mediation is narrowed to an issue of digital technology, generating a mirage of analogue or organic presence, direct contact. The oasis of meaning and connection and fulfillment which now appears in the distance of the desert of the virtual is a distorted mirror image of the utopian longings that always and everywhere arise from cracks, deadlocks, gaps in reality, puzzles and frustrations that then drive the construction of artificial environments and habits, second natures. People now think they invented distraction, and that’s the real historical and psychological meat to chew on (you can ask, why are people invested so feverishly in the idea of their own distraction, what psychological need does that serve, and you can also ask how do the current economic mode of production and economic and political ruling classes benefit from the narratives of algorithmic funneling, dopamine, attention capture and deficits, loneliness, sterility, and all the neoromantic reactions, seeing as how none of the data and discourse are suppressed but rather redundantly exposed and rehearsed, intrusively so). Pseudo-context prevails; the unmasking operation recycles illusions; the dialectic of enlightenment not only intensifies domination through emancipatory projects but then liberates through its control mechanisms; you’re freer and more limited than ever, depending on the specific sense, with ambivalence on both sides of freedom and constraint.

The most tech addled hypertextual meme believers build cottage craft identities, sometimes really roughing it and sometimes producing the digital discursive/artistic equivalent of churned butter and hemp undergarments, as the technically less alienated sons of variegated soils play candy crush and facetime their relatives without a care in the world.

But I’m mail-brained now, a mere duped tool of Administered Society; don’t mind the foregoing reflections. I mostly think about flats and parcels and protecting what’s left of my extremities.