Non-Time and Hauntology

[dada]

What other shape could a class structure take, though. In the background, unanalyzed, overlooked as part of the sceney, class is the pyramid itself. The conception of class as human-shaped, with all that entails, drawbacks and all, is occasionaly toyed with now and then, but no one takes it seriously for very long. Maybe because a human-shaped class structure posits many more classes than the financial scale or the classical castes allow for. The system is much more complex, and consciousness would rather not deal, being inherently lazy and all.

[dada]

Griz posted an image of a quote on the virus main thread, "art is dead, long live dada." I humbly accept the honor, genuinely, as I was taught to do. But there are two sides to humility, and one must follow the other for balance. Getting thrown off balance means falling off the "knife's edge path," losing a life and having to start over. No checkpoints.

A good example of the balance of humility happens early in the book, Dune. Young Paul has just killed his first man. It was a matter of tribal honor, a fight he could not escape. After the fight, as the rush is still with him, and the tribe is all now looking at him with respect, his mother asks him sharply, "So, how does it feel to be a killer?" This snaps Paul out of it, also having the effect of knocking him into a new sphere of his terrible, expanding awareness.

She delivers it with perfect timing and inflection, intending the result. Masterful control, a product of her bene gesserit training. She's so good, so much potential. How is it she could have fallen in love and messed up the genetic plan? All that work, generations in the breeding, spoiled in one by mad, passionate love. Abomination. That wasn't what I intended to put here, though. What I meant to say was this:

"While mass culture tomorrow makes its pitch to the mass consumer in the spirit of dadaist appeal, it must be remembered that it cannot be anything at heart but anti-dadaist. So the "true spirit of dada" can only appear then as anti-dada in spirit, as anything that fails to succeed mass culture must in the mass consumer's eyes have succeeded to fail.

Dada of course does not care and will never appeal to mass culture in the least, because it is not a thing or an objective. And so mass culture instinctively opposes it, as it opposes all phenomenological, hieratic translation of natural mass into its purely hylian and symbolified compositional form.

As stealer of all imaginary bread from mass culture's tables, while drinking all the imaginary wine and inhaling all the imaginary air for dessert, the threat to mass culture is real, and so we can't blame it for objecting loudly as its totemic dead mass is set spinning and vaporized like so much comet debris by the living goddess of sand." - M. Liminski

I'm not that kind of dada, though. I'm a defense against the dark arts dada. Like snape, the old potions master. Seen here on the catwalk in a knitted ensemble, fire-retardant material both inside and out. The knee-length overcoat is short but flowing and resistant to ice magic, all in simple yet elegant gothic black.

What I'd like to do here is maybe "break the fourth wall," speaking directly to the audience. So you have found yourself reading posts on an odd old message board, an early promotional venue for a book by Jeff Wells, a cast off. We have to assume that Jeff still pays the light bill for this reason, a bit sentimental, mostly commercial reasons.

And we love him for it. But the message board itself took on a life of its own, with its own momentum, long ago, pretty early on, in fact. It is a mass culture cast off, but what grows inside it is not mass culture. You can tell, because we don't advertise.

So we assume you were drawn here one way or another, but mostly by "following your nose," or intuition. As were most of us who are still hanging around.

Now you may notice that there is a surface of the message board, where social media waves crash and recede, but they have not totally flooded the plain. Some of the board members are clearly not speaking in the language of social media, but neither are they speaking totally academically, like the video game anthropology studies of Critical Distance, or in pure tech jargon, like they do on the science professors battle arena board.

The surface of the board floats on a sea of absolute nightmares. It may seem strange at first that the board members can continue to sail, knowing what is down there. The non-euclidian angles of the temple of cthulu, madness.

The board members on the surface have a responsibility, then, although they are only human, and some are forgetful slackers. But they do have the responsibility nonetheless, of passing on the navigation techniques that have allowed them to survive this long in such a harsh, unforgiving enviroment. Not with instructions and generalities, but in the language of surface post content, the methods should show. Do not forget the intuition that brought you here, is the basic idea. Taking dives into the knowledge base, follow your intuition, don't get distracted. And importantly, remember that there are threads back there that used to lead to unexplored productive avenues, that now have been rerouted to lead back into mass culture.

The rigor is for analyzing cell structure, and it is also an implication that you are examining a stiff, a corpse. Do not get lost, but follow your intuition back out to the surface, where there are living thoughts. And if you find some old buried treasure down there, be sure to show and tell. We love that stuff up here.

[dada]

Breaking the fourth wall, speaking directly to the audience in non time. The future reader is not present, but maybe leaves a trace behind, a backward-haunting ghost. All of the other ghosts laugh and call him names, never let him join in the ghostly games.

I guess it raises the question of who is reading, presently, that we can know of. Can someone see stats, Jack n Elvis, justdrew? Like, I don't know what the numbers really say. The audience could be all bots and spiders, for all I know. Just like back home.

[dada]

Thinking about the difference between mob mentality and cult mindset. Haven't made up my mind if there is one.

Mob mentality carries with it a sense of cult along with its pitchforks and torches. Like calling a protest an "angry mob" means they are culting it up to verge of rampage, and will likely be at your house any minute.

Cult mindset though is more like the state that produces a mob that is more organized. The cult mindset will erupt into mob mentality when poked at. But it also has a stronger bond than the mob, although it can still be broken, and is always a crusade with a distinct religious fervor to it, even seen in cult mindset at its most sublimated.

The thing with cult, and it has come up here before, is that as soon as you open the cult box, every social group starts to look like a cult. And rightfully so, I would say.

But mob and cult have become too denigrated through serving as insults for so long to be effective signifiers in discussion. Also neither word entirely accurately describes how the mindsets interact socially on Internet. There is clear mob-style behavior on the internet, also clear cult behavior of corporate social media. But there is also the mindset and I think it is most pervasive and has strongest bond of all the mob or cult types, the mindset of superfandom.

[JackRiddler]

I guess it raises the question of who is reading, presently, that we can know of. Can someone see stats, Jack n Elvis, justdrew? Like, I don't know what the numbers really say. The audience could be all bots and spiders, for all I know. Just like back home.

I so do not know, though there may be some measure in the backend I haven't noticed. Otherwise, you see the thread and guest numbers like we do, whatever they may mean. Long-time members keep cropping up in posts, looks like two dozen.

I'm not sure that mobs and cults describe variations on the same thing unless it's a very broad category of group mentality. A cult can be very un-mobbish, a cult is like a going institution whereas a mob is a more spontaneous manifestation tending to violence that can include multiple groups and motivations who might not have been mobbish a minute earlier.

.

[dada]

Thanks for the reply about the numbers.

I know, this cult and mob thing, I'm trying to define it but can't decide if they differ enough to qualify as two completely separate mindsets or states, or if they are flavors of something. I don't know, think it's worth getting into, talking about.

Also, I wouldn't discount my assertion that fandom deserves consideration here, alongside cult and mob. I think it may be the strongest bonding mindset there is in the cult-mob vein, if it is actually a vein. The area seems all very vague and indeterminate, could probably use more light.

[dada]

Another one I'm thinking about is the difference between playing for keeps, and playing to win. Playing to win is pretending like the game you are playing is for keeps, the last game you will ever play. The real last game that you will ever play, is for keeps, so you don't have to pretend.

I don't know, I'm sure there are other ways to look at it. Keeps are faerie apples. Playing for keeps is bagpipers slang for working the faerie forest circuit.

Here is a link to a book, maybe somewhat relevant here and there to things said recently on a few different threads:

Airy Nothings: Imagining the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Age of Reason: Essays in Honour of Alasdair A. MacDonald

https://1lib.us/book/2352443/fa9641

Here's a selection:

"In his contribution on fairies in the folk beliefs of early modern Scotland, Julian Goodare is mainly concerned with the indeterminate boundaries of the fairy realm which he explores by comparing fairy beliefs with other manifestations of the Otherworld, namely angels, demons, saints, spirits and witches. He argues that these boundaries are by no means clear and that folk perceptions were quite susceptible to elite assumptions or the interference of other popular apparitions from the spirit realm. This is particularly true of the spirits of the dead, or ghosts, who on the one hand can be clearly distinguished from fairies, but who, on the other, frequently functioned as spirit-guides to the living and could dwell among the fairies. Angels and saints are not easily associated with fairies in Scot- tish folk beliefs, as occasionally they are seen at opposite ends when saints are invoked to remedy the ills perpetrated by fairies. Yet on the whole folk beliefs are obfuscated by pneumatological or cosmological notions of elite culture which habitually contaminate the sources. Robert Kirk, for instance, believed that fairies are an order of the angels, and Andrew Man envisaged a cosmos with elves, ghosts and an angel named Christsonday. One of the interesting conclusions that Goodare draws from his analysis of the source-material is that the more trustworthy sources on fairies are not literary compositions or antiquarian collections, but the materials of witchcraft trials, mainly because the ‘elite did not believe in fairies, and had no reason to slant a witch’s confessions’ (p. 172). The essence of folk belief in fairies is its indeterminacy."

A gift from the latest faeries flying magitech craft. This one has been open in a tab for months, actually, but I hadn't gotten to looking at it yet. One of a dozen or so tabs, just waiting patiently in silence. I feel like there may have been a "what tabs do you have open now?" thread here, but I'm not sure, that could have been on another timeline.

[dada]

My thought-exchange with Jack on the mickey mouse topic got me thinking about something. But I promised to stay off the thread, so I'll post it here.

Actually, that's what the thought is about. How oftentimes you read something on one thread, and it reminds you of something that you read on another. The idea that is a combination of the two now doesn't quite belong on the one thread, or the other.

So now the thought has no place to really go, all it can do is be posted where it is the "best fit." But even the best fit is a pretty bad fit for it. Same if you're reading a thread and something connects with another thought you have, not related to any other board topic. The thought doesn't really belong anywhere, in any thread. Any fit is a pretty bad fit.

Sometimes thoughts pop into your head even, words and all. You have to scroll through the topics, again not looking for a match, there is no perfect match, it's a new thought. So, "best fit," again.

You can start new threads, but if this type of thing happens often to you, that won't work. The board would have another thirty thousand threads of two or three broken thoughts, in their own little masoleum locker, just like social media.

If this happens to you a lot, let me assure you that you are not crazy, your brain is not deranged in the bad way, there is a long tradition describing this funny situation that the thinker finds themselves in. Good metaphors, like the hallway with a hundred doors. Each door has a key in front of it, but it's the wrong key for this door, and opens one of the others.

So my first few posts on the modern monetary theory thread were things that popped into my head on the nature of economy, that didn't really belong anywhere. I scrolled through the threads, looking for best fit. Not noticing the ghostly trademark stamp, I went with it.

It turned out not to be best fit, naturally, but I'm glad I went with it, because it gave me a chance to engage with it and see the ghostly trademark. So now I know for the future.

The ghostly trademark. Now that you see it, too, you will notice that it is there at the end of the titles of many threads. Even this thread has it. Hauntology is a ghost trademarked brand. Non-time is covered as well, under the ghostly intellectual property rights act.

I chose this thread for thoughts that did not quite fit anywhere else, as well. Using it for actual haunting and non-time, inviting the spirity and outworld beings and ideas in. The mixture with the ghostly trademarked brand worked adequately, meeting at a kind of bendy historical materialism reminiscent of Walter Benjamin, all pop trash and transgressive social anthropology.

Still, the mixture can never be absorbed into the branded topic, and will always be a disembodied oddity, making phenomenal appearances in an otherwise established topic dragging the solid weight of the ghostly chains of incorporation along with it.

The non-time covered by the hauntological trademark, is a cultural stasis. The non-time mixture that happens here, though, addresses the otherworld, in-between, weirding. We end up looking at the living thought process of one thing reminds of another, entirely different thing, creating a new thought that doesn't belong in either world, as a function of the actual state of non-time with no trademark.

[dada]

"I don't think we are 'all complicit" in empire to some degree. It is a choice to think that way, not an absolute, umavoidable ceratinty.

It isn't easy to think outside of that way, sure. It takes effort, so lazy thinkers need not apply."

Something I said on the presidential thread, feel like going into it a little. The idea is a common one, we all have blood on our hands. The original sin of mass production.

It does have that old testament flavor. But I'm saying to be complicit in empires crimes, we are saying that empires crimes are not against us.

So we are not complicit, but on the side of the others who are having far worse crimes commited against them.

I mean, unless you think the slaves and sweatshop workers are somehow complicit in their own exploitation. Felt stupid just typing it.

This way, you can tell who is complicit, and who isn't. The ones who aren't complicit are still producing thoughts on the steady bed of slavery and sweatshops, but they are not producing them for empire's means, but as thought-weapons in the war on suffering.

There is another basic superstitous religious idea at work in the feeling of being complicit in the crimes of empire, the pervasive idea that "what you see is a reflection of yourself."

People of all walks of life and all belief systems and even scientists sometimes dabble in this one. The superstitous part is taking it to mean what you see with your physical eyes. This leads to all sorts of new age style thinking, as well as feeds into the idea that all the terrible things happening in the world are all part of the reflection of you.

But "what you see is a reflection of yourself" means what you understand, or what you know. That kind of seeing. To add insult to injury, the superstitous and new age styles mistake the other kind of seeing with "magical sight," or "seeing with the third eye." But all it is, is seeing, like "seeing the point."

So what you see is a reflection of yourself, in the sense of what you understand. What you see with your physical eyes is just that, what you see with your physical eyes. Gathering data.

Maybe puts seeing is believing in a different light. Like a doubting thomas, not believing it until they see it with their own two eyes. The other seeing is the opposite. Not faith, unless you put your faith in understanding and knowing. Because that is all it is, understanding and knowing. Basically then, and this you may not like to hear: seeing with the physical eyes, gathering data, is superstious and new agey belief

[dada]

So this is the spot where humility must hit hard, or we have big problems. Your mother snapping at you with all the impact of perfect inflection, "so, how does it feel to be a killer?"

Because when you realize you are not guilty of the original sin of mass production, and see all that mass production has done to your poor humans, it raises the feeling that we call the "primal scream."

And you see exactly how this genius monkey that found its tongue and its manual dexterity is you. A monkey that sees. It is wonderful and painful and scary, you see.

It is like a weird monster, and you are it. And it isn't guilty of the crimes of mass production, but is under attack.

The monkey naturally wants to lash out to defend itself. You can run, but you can't hide. And this monkey is a dangerous genius monkey.

So without the sharp sting of humility here, we go down the nihilistic path, become Nietzsche's superman. The light of wisdom here is your mother's voice snapping you out of it, reminding you that you are more than the super monkey.

You are also voice and hand of the historically faceless souls, the slaves and sweatshop workers, and you have forgotten where you came from, forgotten how to listen to them. It is now your responsibility, under the spidey maxim of great power comes great responsibility, to remember. Not play games with them, ouija and table tapping, but simply thinking about them. The dead don't tame the monkey, they are friends. They are who you speak and handle shit for, so you need to know what it is that they would have you say and write and the rest. Also they give good advice. The wisdom of the dead is highly valued all over the universe, making the unwisdomly reproductions on the consumer distribution networks of mass culture smell like rotting fish floating in unfortunately polluted streams.

[dada]

Thinking about the second verse to the song "Are you experienced" by Jimi Hendrix. "I know, I know, you probably scream and cry, that your little world won't let you go. But who in your measly little world are you trying to prove, that you're made out of gold, can't be sold."

Feel like it's saying something similar to the above post. The scream, and the humility.

But I think the usual, or common interpretation is to read the second part as "Who do you think you are, you ain't all that and a bag of chips." Like the humility is in Jimi saying to you aren't so special, that you aren't made out of gold can't be sold.

The rare, or uncommon way is saying that Jimi gets your complaints about how the world is mistreating you, but is pointing out that you are forgetting how much worse your brothers and sisters have it.

And the unusual or maybe an "esoteric" interpretation is that you are the who in your measly little world that you're trying to prove that you're made out of gold can't be sold. So really you are the one who is not letting go of your world. It isn't the other way around. It isn't about whether or not you are made out of gold can't be sold. Nobody cares. It is about needing to prove it.

So we scream and cry that the world won't let us fly, but really we are holding on to the world, and can't fly because we don't let go. Made out of gold can't be sold is just window dressing, a good rhyme that fit perfectly and rounded out the verse.

I'd say the first interpetation is flat, the second is sharp, and the third is a secret to everybody.

[thrulookingglass]

To retort the, "you ain't all that and a bag of chips..." ideology...

"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against
injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would
do this, it would change the earth." - William Faulkner

"As soon as you're born they make you feel small"

MLK Jr. was just a man too. Its the collective we that makes life rich or poor.

Are you brave enough to insist you have a right to ride in the front of the bus?

[dada]

Feeling like the pursuit of money begins in deciding if the game is worth the returns.
And pursuit of "the pursuit of money" begins in deciding to play a game with money that doesn't give any returns. But both end in deciding the game isn't worth the returns.

"Its the collective we that makes life rich or poor."

I'd say it depends on if you restrict your definition of the collective we to include only the living. That is what makes life poor. If you open your definition of the collective we to include all the historically faceless dead souls ground up in the industrous machinery of historical mass production, that is what makes life rich.

[dada]

When I drive around my area of American empire, I see a lot of recruitment ads on telephone polls, for navy, army. And I think that it's clever, they really go all out with their ad campaigns. All the latest madison avenue strategies, mixed with the tried and true methods, covering all the bases.

But we aren't playing baseball. As GIJoe moves into deeper shadow tactics, space laser platforms and reanimating Sgt. Slaughter, we here at Cobra Command have transcended the battlespace of time using magitek.

GIJoe of course has mkultra style tech. But their studies of the otherworld are limited, because they are corporate-minded and control-hearted. We are not, and have far outpaced them in the inner space race.

So where GIJoe takes up internet media and telephone poll real estate, the Cobra recruitment campaign is in the arena of telepathy. You don't see us out there, like foolish anonymous. Cobra Commander is not found onscreen, behind a guy fawkes mask. But just take a look inside, and we are everywhere.

This means of course that GIJoe cannot train their spies to get in, they just don't have the tools for it. The corporate and control skills necessary to be a joe dampen the psi skills, make them like children in this sense. So we run circles around them in the mind war.

When the joes hear rumours of our mindshields and astral projects, they have no idea how to emulate the magitek, instead causing derangement in their experiments with electronic brain stimulation and occult gymnastics. When they hear about our hybridized abilities advance, they make monsters with gene splicing and prosthetic implants.

But monsters do not make good soldiers. So we use this obsessive drive of the joes, the need to keep up with what they don't understand, against them.

The best thing the joes have come up with so far is the frankenstein supersoldier. It is a star trek wrath of khan-like creation, a genetic soup mix of all the most famous bad guys in history. By the way, if you think the joe top brass don't have a freezer full of old dead famous people parts and bones for making monsters with, you have not done your homework. Long before science could reanimate and clone, these artifacts have been collected by ygors in the dead of night, on the dreaming chance that someday, somehow, science will find a way.

So the joes created this frankenstein supersoldier, code name "serpentor." It was supposed to find the cobra commander, kill him, and take over cobra, thus making it effectively another branch of GIJoe run out of the Pentagon. Knowing our history, being a starship captain ourselves, we saw how easy it was to outsmart Khan. The old famous bad guy genes did not have what it takes to match wits against Kirk. Spock died to win the match, yes, but he came back. Same for our cobra commander.

[dada]

Let me just get something straight about the media refrain that "cobra is a ruthless terrorist organization." If you get your facts from wikipedia and consume the media products you have seen it.

If you consume too much media products you may even start to secretly believe it. But no, cobra is not, nor has ever been a ruthless terrorist organization. This is one of those myths, always invented by the enemies of all transgressive culture everywhere, branding them heretics, mad scientists, terrorists.

Cobra has never been terrorist. If we're ruthless, it's not by choice. She left the band, no one wanted her to go. But know that when you hear it in real-time realityvision on Fox News that Cobra is a Ruthless Terrorist Organization, they are literally talking about you now, left, right and center. Because it will be the label for anyone who even thinks out of line.

It might help to point out that you are already on their "cobra watchlist." It is a very big file, I would imagine. So you might think about getting ahead of their game, and joining cobra now, before it's too late.

Because we aren't what they make us out to be. Cobra commander is just a job like any other. What makes us dangerous, though, is the way we think. And so they call cobra "terrorist" in the same way the Templar were called sodomites and devil-worshippers.

Gain access to the Cobra storehouses of magitek everything. Tools to protect yourself, o hai powered thought-translation mindsets. Before it's too late, and they're calling you cobra, too.