Marxism has always been a peculiar guide to consciousness. And by “peculiar,” I mean more than just “dialectical.” Cognitive dissonance experts won’t believe their ears, but consciousness resides ontologically at a level greater than mere smoke and mirrors. Part of me wonders, however, if by “greater than,” I mean “prior to.” This manner of thinking about thinking, like a body trying in the midst of practice to pick up and weigh its parts: is there a quality to it that distinguishes it from mere performative noodling? I feel challenged when faced with duplicating my experience of mind via words. Yet language is all that remains when the Cartesian self severs ties to productive agency with regard to that which lies beyond its senses. I prefer active listening. Selective co-production of meaning. When I walk, for instance, I modulate the directionality of my awareness as if I were operating an ambient musical interface not unlike a soundboard. Sound-objects rise and fall, as it were, in the mix. The best moments, though, I tell myself, are when awareness dips and the mix directs itself.
Tag: language
Sunday December 24, 2017
Ball of shredded paper with spider legs marches down a street. Rendered with military-entertainment-complex CGI, the same entity reappears as an AI-operated policing unit. Consciousness, ever wary of being locked into someone else’s home (and thus someone else’s rules), launches upward into a cartoon sky. Let it pause here at an airy height, perusing materials and media. The “I” recognizes its oddity, the peculiarity of its rebellion, the hand it was dealt by history. On back of each eyelid, it says, imagine flashing multiples, stacked cubes containing sometimes smokestacks, sometimes candles. Hot air balloons vie for exits in the sky. Consciousness is made, the same way Soylent Green is people. Or else it’s this holy ghost, this transcendent other, this apparition, self-knowing and self-manifesting in language but not of it.
Sunday September 10, 2017
Writing requires as its precondition grounds on which to relax and listen. Words appear — enter perception — in some domain ontologically different from, but nevertheless coextensive with, embodiment amidst being. This domain is what I’ve elsewhere called “consciousness.” Raymond Williams, by the way, neglected to include that term in his book Keywords. Do I need to review debates within Marxism regarding materialism and idealism? How else would one assemble a theory of consciousness? We who wish to advocate on behalf of acid communism need such a theory, for consciousness serves as the heavily trafficked bridge connecting the otherwise radically distinct discourses of Marxism and humanistic psychology. (Along with the latter, I should add, we also need to consider its successor, the field of “positive psychology.” About this more recent field, I remain conflicted, particularly given the current, ongoing appropriation of its concepts — “eudaimonia,” “human flourishing,” etc — by paid ideologues working on behalf of capital.) “So I sing these words,” sings Kevin Ayers. “Let them fly around like birds.”
Horn part on “When Your Parents Go To Sleep,” I salute thee. Soundtrack thus established, we return again to the task at hand. Remember, too, to consult the work of Lev Vygotsky — including, for instance, his book Mind in Society. My theory of consciousness views the mind as an embodied multi-sensory medium; dreams and fantasies are its purest productions, assembled through use of historically-derived forms, images, concepts, languages, sign systems — in other words, that vast edifice that Marx called the “General Intellect,” acquired by each of us through socialization (though only ever incompletely), and modified dialectically through lived experience. What happens to consciousness, however, when its experience-stream delivers to it the event known as ego death? To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever myself experienced anything akin to that. Except: no, wait: I take that back. Those jumps, remember? Screen glitching, consciousness tumbling rapidly down many levels. The Subject, through parallel realities, takes flight. The unity makes itself up, just like that — and we are one with that, remember? The path keeps changing scale, until my observing self turbo-powers itself free of the gravity and haecceity or “thisness” of all things. The bodies of the non-player characters, with their oversized plastic bobbleheads, rapture away one by one. The self acknowledges itself as the occulted Alpha and Omega, the one with all the free swag. Thus the Self invents as a gameworld for itself its own adulthood.
Trance-Scripts 