Non-Time and Hauntology

[gnosticheresy_2]

Interview with Mark Fisher at Full-Stop

Michael Schapira | 31 May 2011
in conversation with Michael Schapira

Full Stop travels to the U.K. and the world of politics today to speak with blogger, teacher and author Mark Fisher about the mordant pleasures of cultural critique. Fisher has been running his blog, k-punk, since 2003, where he writes about politics, philosophy, literature, music, and cybernetics. In his recent book, Capitalist Realism, Fisher explores “some of the affective, psychological and political consequences of the deeply entrenched belief that there is no alternative to capitalism.” And what’s more, he’s a man of discerning taste, as evidenced by the fact that he made a point of finding time during his first trip to New York City to head out to Coney Island and pick up a Warriors shirt for his young child. Pay attention to one of the more insightful voices out there today!

Can you describe in broad strokes where Capitalist Realism came from?

There were a number of threads running through my blog, and one of them had to do with politics. Not politics in some distant sense, but politics particularly in relation to my working life, which through a lot of the early years of the blog was as a lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at a further education college. (Ed. note: a further education college is similar to a community college in the U.S., but most students would be 16 to 19 years old.)

One of the stories that came into the blog a bit and sits behind Capitalist Realism is the story of recovery from depression, which was a large trajectory of my life in that last decade. Having done a doctorate in philosophy and literature, I was mentally destroyed in lots of ways and felt pretty useless and unemployable. Very burnt out, I found it very difficult to read any serious work. It was teaching and blogging that actually rehabilitated me. Teaching sort of re-engaged me in the world. When you are doing postgraduate research you can feel very disconnected from the world and your work can feel very pointless. But with teenagers you really have to front up because they won’t let you get away with much nonsense; they will interrupt you every 90 seconds, etc. It was difficult, but it was also an excellent grounding and initiation back into the world.

Alongside that I started blogging. Blogging was a bit like when Zizek says that you can’t sit down and think that you’re going to write a book. You have to think that you’re just going to write a few paragraphs, and then the paragraphs will build up and build up and suddenly a book forms. In the same way, blogging for me started off as not being that serious. The dead heavy weight of scholarly responsibility can interject and cause you think that you can’t possibly write on anything unless you looked at every possible source, which is of course impossible, but nevertheless you still feel the guilt and weight that goes along with that. The blog didn’t really have that. It was just a different space. I didn’t have that weight and responsibility and maybe I could just try out some ideas.

Your rehabilitation from depression seemed to be coextensive with a growing realization of the problems racking higher education and public services in the wake of New Labour. Can you describe the political context of your book a bit for American readers?

What I started to notice very strongly in my working life were the changes that had happened over this period. In lots of ways, Capitalist Realism is really a study of what it was like to work in public services under Blairism and New Labour. We could assume that the neoliberal right would push the interests of business, but we couldn’t necessarily assume that a notionally left-wing party would be doing this as well. There is a certain novelty about that, or rather we take it for granted now, but we ought not to in lots of ways.

What I was experiencing firsthand under New Labour was the imposition of a whole battery of new measures, particularly to do with self-surveillance. For example, [as teachers] we had to fill in 50-60 page long logbooks with “strategies for improvement,” bullet pointed, etc. The year in which I was made redundant, we were required to fill in “Active Schemes of Work.” No one really knew what this meant. This is kind of the Kafkaesque nightmare of these things. Everyone is second-guessing what they think the bureaucratic authorities might want to see. The bureaucratic authorities themselves, when they emerge – these would typically be the Inspectorate, employed by the government to come and check up on colleges – wouldn’t necessarily know either what exactly was required. These people were always interpreting this set of bureaucratic criteria that are slightly Talmudic. It would be one thing to have a set of clear and determinate demands that you could meet. But it is another thing to have this vague legalese, which is capable of multiple interpretations, and which is also guaranteed to maximize the anxiety of everyone who is involved.

It was really the encounter with these kinds of procedures that was one of the main starting points for the work that went into Capitalist Realism. Beginning in a raging exasperation, in writing the book I was able to see these kinds of things as systemic as opposed to just affecting me.

One piece of your analysis has been called into question by a wave of recent student protests in the U.K. In the book you describe British students as suffering from a “reflexive impotence,” by which you mean that their own perception of political marginalization fuels their actual depoliticization as a group. How have the student protests made you rethink this?

I really do think that that part of the book is somewhat out of date. I’m sure it still applies to many of students in the U.K., but it was dramatic and exciting to see those protests. A lot of what I talked about in the book was just encounters with students and their widespread sense of hopelessness that one could see. It seemed to me, on an anecdotal level, that you’ve got around fifty percent of students who are statemented with some kind of learning difficulty, often involving attention deficit through to people with serious affective disorders and depression. Depression is a very common problem amongst youths in the U.K. This is something that I try and stress in the book and ask “hold on, why, why do we accept this?” This in and of itself should be a political point, but once again it’s been successfully depoliticized as part of the agenda of saying, “don’t look for social causes for this kind of thing. It’s neurochemistry… or it’s the parents.” Given all that, there are n number of reasons why the young in Britain would feel incapable of acting, would feel that they lacked any kind of political agency, which is why it has been so great to see this emerge in so widespread a way in the months before Christmas. This is exactly what I’d been hoping for, to see this sense of hopelessness breaking down.

In addition to this rebirth in student activism, we have also seen a resurgence in theory on the left in recent years (seen, for example, in conferences like The Idea of Communism). Do you see these two phenomena as interrelated?

One thing that we can learn from neoliberals is the importance of theory. Neoliberalism didn’t spontaneously emerge, though it has artfully made it appear as if that was the case. There was the deliberate program in place – I think you can follow Naomi Klein’s analysis of this – that was opportunistic. Whenever things fell apart, they could helicopter in this set of ideological propositions readymade. I think that we on the left are not in a position to do that at the moment because we don’t fully know what we want, we don’t fully know what the program is. I think that we have to take the time out to develop that. Which isn’t to say that we should step out of any kind of activism of the moment.

But we just do need theoretical narratives, which are what is lacking. For example, there is gestural socialism at the moment, but what form that would actually take in the 21st century we don’t really know in detail or even quite vaguely. That’s not a reason to despair, but it is a motive to theoretically act at this time. But I do think the two things do work together. When I wrote this book I didn’t think it would have a political impact. I thought it was a work of cultural analysis that involved reference to politics, but I didn’t expect it to affect anything. That already feels different, because of the changing atmosphere. As theorists we should try and develop confidence that our ideas can actually go somewhere.

Do you see the university as being an essential site for where theory is going to have meaningful uptake?

I think a lot of different things about university. One line might be that there is no hope for them, in the sense that they are neoliberalized institutions. I know a lot of colleagues who strongly think that this is the case and we should be looking beyond universities now, in a way that you give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and Caesar has very definitely seized the university. I don’t necessarily think we should do that.

In a sense, why universities and the education system had any sort of egalitarian element in the first place was from pressure put on them from outside of the university system itself. In the U.K. any of the organs of the social democracy or institutions of the welfare state were not achieved as goals in themselves, but were the result of pressures from an active left. As that pressure has receded, forces of business have been able to take more and more control over the university. I think that somehow we again have to exert pressure from outside of universities to get universities to change back. Pressures within universities themselves won’t be enough to do it.

But that being said, higher education is in a major phase of transition in the U.K. and who knows where it is going. We don’t even know how many of the universities that currently exist will exist for much longer. What I can say is that I hope it continues to be a site of struggle, which it was before Christmas. We’ve seen the story go one way, which is more and more hold of business over education. I’m hoping we are seeing a counter-trend starting to emerge.

Can you say more about the character of the business interests that are being resisted here?

Part of the strangeness of the current policy of the U.K. government is that it is attacking universities and the arts as if they were this drain on the economy that we really can’t afford this anymore. It’s just economically false. The universities are quite successful investments for the U.K., same as with the arts. I think the figure is that for every pound that is spent on the arts counsel, two pounds come back into the economy. Even in their own terms of business, or apparent terms of business as we see, this agenda is not just about economic viability or economic success. It is about ideology. There is something threatening about philosophy, the humanities, and increasingly threatening I think in a world that requires a kind of supine submission to the ruling ideas. Those subjects produce and require a kind of critical reflection, which gives a good reason as to why they want to close them down.

What’s surprising in the U.K. at the moment is how naked they are about it, and that they can get away with it. One of the points of the book is to show how they are getting away with it. In their terms, what does realism mean? It means “hard economics,” but that itself is ludicrous because one can see that there isn’t anything hard about the leading edge of capitalism. Finance capitalism surely has more in common with conceptual art than it does with the manufacturing of goods. Their idea is somehow that finance and business is the real world that is solid and concrete, and that art and philosophy are nebulous, is especially dubious at this moment. After the economic meltdown of 2008 this is demonstrably false.

Kafka emerges as a key figure in unmasking the effects of this “business ontology.” Can you describe a bit how he figures into your book?

I’ve always thought that Kafka is best understood as a comedy of everyday institutions. The mistake people make about Kafka is reading him in terms of totalitarianism, in the sense of a very clear set of demands that are made on people. This is not what we see in Kafka. What we see instead is this endless, Talmudic anxiety about what it is that is required. What is it that the Castle wants? What can K do in order to satisfy the demands of the lowest level officials in the Castle, which can only be speculated upon? They themselves are only in turn similarly speculating on what higher ups might want. This structure of disavowed anxiety, it seems to me, is what Kafka is about and this is what we are living. It’s not about the Hapsburg Empire, or rather, it may have been about that but it’s equally about economic life as we endure it. Anyone who has ever dealt with a call center knows everything about Kafka whether they realize they do or not.

These points of analysis are oftentimes actually quite funny. Is there one that stands out as an especially artful piece of absurdity?

A good example of this came from filling in these logbooks when I was teaching. We’d filled in these logbooks and the manager says “Yeah boys, it’s all very well this, but you just haven’t criticized yourselves enough.” We said, “Yeah, okay, we’ll note down more criticisms for the logbook.” And then he says, “Yeah, of course it doesn’t matter, nothing will happen.” And that’s somehow supposed to make things better as we are engaging in this kind of business Maoism. But it’s business Maoism plus Stalinism. What’s Stalinist about it is that it’s all about the paperwork, the paper world, and not about any sort of reality or fact.

What are you working on now?

It gives me no pleasure — aside from a slight, mordant pleasure — to say that because of the conditions described in the book I’m not able to do any sort of longform writing at the moment. Since writing the book I’ve been pitched into different forms of precarious labor, partly because of the success of the book itself. My income streams are mainly public speaking, adjunct teaching, and freelance writing, and that plus cyberspace produces a very broken sense of time, which means that it’s very hard to produce projects.

I am supposed to be working on a collection of writings on music and culture, which is really the other side of Capitalist Realism. One of the other things I’ve written about is this concept of “hauntology,” which has roots in Derrida’s work, and which I and a few other critics have noted in relation to music in particular, but also film and television to some degree. If “capitalist realism” is what we are faced with, hauntology is the kind of mourning or melancholia in relation to what was lost, which isn’t just something that was in the past, but it was the future that we thought would arrive. So the next project will be to bring some of those writings together into a book. I’m not optimistic about being able to do that soon — but I’m partly saying that so as not to tempt fate.

I’m also increasingly concerned with the issues surrounding what I call “cyberspace-time” and the effects on intention and agency by a kind of full immersion into cyberspace-time. Over the last year I’ve seen a lot of people writing about a digital malaise. We’ve been online for a decade in terms of broadband, and we’re only now really starting to become aware of the impacts of this. It’s an important time to reflect on that, which is not to call for some kind of ludicrous withdrawal from the Internet, but it is to ask what it means to gain some time back. As soon as you have a smart phone, you are in cyberspace-time notionally all of your waking life, which means that your attention is split across different platforms, and there are certain kinds of affective pathologies that are starting to emerge from that.

Deleted Scenes: Mark Fisher
Alex Shephard | 07 June 2011
Deleted Scenes (which I used to call B-Sides and Rarities — Deleted Scenes is more fitting though, right?) is a way to feature interesting parts of interviews didn’t make the cut. In this installment Capitalist Realism author Mark Fisher talks about “market Stalinism,” unheralded writers, bureaucracy, and student protests. You can read the full interview here.

One of the more powerful ideas to come out of the book is what you describe as “market Stalinism.” Can you spell out how this functions?

What are the ludicrous features of Stalinism? They are those things that are captured in the famous line that the whole of Russia smelled like new paint to Stalin. We are invited to think that this devotion to constructing appearances, it is not like that now, but it is quite plain that the fact of these surveillance mechanisms is to produce precisely this effect – everything is for appearance. This is one of the things that is widely recognized about New Labour policy. New Labour is supposed to be defining themselves as the furthest away you can go from Stalinism. Yet there is this kind of return of the repressed. It’s coming back perhaps in an even more intense form than it was before, in a sense that at least with Stalinism you did have an actual fucking project to build dams and all of that, whereas with New Labour most of it was just PR. At least with Stalinism there was something in addition to PR.

You got a sense working in schools increasingly that effectively you were working as part of the PR department of the government. Teaching 16- to 19-year-olds, you are required to plan in detail what activities you will be doing with these students 40 weeks in advance. Clearly this is science fiction. It’s not going to happen like that, and if it does you are probably a pretty poor teacher. This disjunct between the world of appearance and what you are actually doing seems to me to be the hallmark of the reign of PR.

Nearly a third of your books have been sold in the U.S. How do you believe your ideas have translated into other political and cultural contexts, given that you generate a lot of your insights from working conditions in the U.K.?

I’ve been slightly surprised that it’s had any kind of audience outside the U.K. since the experiences are so based in the U.K. It’s been translated into Turkish, Italian, and Czech. I’ve recently been interviewed by somebody from Iran. It’s peculiar, but I guess the kind of things I’m talking about have a wider impact than I’d even thought. That has to do with neoliberalism being a global phenomenon. In the U.K. it has been more dramatic than the U.S. in the sense that we’d had quasi-Socialist forms of public institutions in the 1970s, which was not the case here in the U.S. The transformation was more violent perhaps, but in both cases we are talking about the destruction and vandalization of the public sphere by business. The particular tonality of the anecdotes is governed by my experience in the U.K., but the absurdity of trying to run public services or education as if it was a business are apparent to people in many different contexts.

Could you perhaps suggest some writers from the U.K. that U.S. audiences might not be aware of?

In terms of recommending other people, my book came out on Zero books, which is an imprint that I’m closely involved with. Because of the bureaucratization of academic labor, a lot of academic work has increasingly left the public world behind and become very neurotic; very based on having the right footnotes, etc. You’re not really expecting anyone else to actually read it. The thinking behind books being published by Zero Books is to not fall into these traps and have some kind of impactful presence in public discourse. One that I really like is called Non-stop Inertia by Ivor Southwood. He talks about the nature of precarious employment and underemployment. It’s quite humorous, but there is a bitter quality to the humor. He talks about his experiences of not quite being employed. A particularly sad anecdote he relates concerns a time when he’d made the mistake of going to the supermarket without taking his mobile phone with him and was chastised by one of these agencies who said “you can’t expect to get work if you are not available at all times.”

On bureaucracy and “realism:” What I could also see was that these things were not politicized. They were de-politicized, and that is really the “realism” part of Capitalist Realism. People say “Yeah, this is not a political matter, this is not something to argue over, this is just what we have to do to keep our jobs now.” This is just the kind of thing that is sold to us by managers, who themselves would say that it was twaddle and nonsense. Sometimes they would defend it, but often they would say, “We know, you might not like it, but we all have to do this.” I thought, “Well, why do we all have to do this?” We have been told by neoliberals and neoliberal-informed kinds of administration that bureaucracy was an old thing that had to do with Socialism and a centralized state. Well, hold on — certainly for teachers in the U.K., never had they been subject to more bureaucracy than as happened in the last decade.

But that’s not to say that there was not a difference between these new and old forms of bureaucracy, which is that now you have to do it yourself. The role of the Inspectorate is crucial here. Before, the inspectors would come into a college, say every two or three years, and pretty much the rest of the time you forget they are there. But with this new system, the work of the Inspectorate is increasingly contracted out to the college, who would be doing it on an ongoing basis. You’d get this kind of “anticipative hyperconformity” where you think “what are the Inspectors going to say,” and then guess what they are going to say and make sure to comply with it, perhaps more than they would even want. This whole complex of things was one of the major starting points for Capitalist Realism.

On the wave of student protests in the U.K.: What I see most in these protests is an attempt to prevent “reflexive impotence” from turning into apathy. Apathy has moral connotations. Part of the reason that I chose to use “reflexive impotence” was an attempt to get over the sense of things really weighing down on students, which they are aware of, and their awareness makes them even less capable of acting than previously in a perfectly vicious circle. For me the political task was to convert depression into anger, and actually in these protests you can see the possibilities of the conversion of that kind of disaffection into a kind of active anger, which is great.

[IanEye]

One of the other things I’ve written about is this concept of “hauntology,” which has roots in Derrida’s work, and which I and a few other critics have noted in relation to music in particular, but also film and television to some degree. If “capitalist realism” is what we are faced with, hauntology is the kind of mourning or melancholia in relation to what was lost, which isn’t just something that was in the past, but it was the future that we thought would arrive.

i noticed that the documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" taps into this feeling with the liberal use of Burial's "Forgive".

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I think Steinski's "Number Three on Flight Eleven" should be on the all-time Hauntology Top Ten....

[battleshipkropotkin]

Here's a new Simon Reynolds interview plugging his new book Retromania from one of my favourite music sites, The Quietus:

http://thequietus.com/articles/06386-simon-reynolds-retromania-interview

Pop is eating itself

[Joe Hillshoist]

[Joe Hillshoist]

Music always does that hypnagogic thing ... like you'll be lying in bed, waking up/lucid dreaming, and hear the Fairytale of New York on the radio, coming thru the wall from the house next door. Just coming into summer, leading up to Christmas.

They're timeless moments and they happen throughout your life. That one, the Pogues back in the late 80s... I was old enough to know and think, wow this'll be one of them moments, as I came out of it.

I think the nostalgia thing and music ... when you are young you don't have an adult's sense of time, and you are not as trapped in it as an adult... there will be music that really moves you and you might not remember it, cos once you start remembering stuff chronologically you've become trapped in time.

So you have a vague sense of it, but its not connected in time the way your current life is.

Thats why so much crap pop music today (and so much good music too) has these little patches of stuff that would have been on the radio before these kids playing the music went to school.

Kind of like how every heavy metal song ever is inside those first few Black Sabbath records.

See this catches people cos traditionally music is a doorway thru to the world next door and outside time, the one thats next door and more accessible before we become stuck in time.

I spose when the future dries up it becomes more attractive toi see that place as back before the future happened or something.

[JackRiddler]

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I'd like to draw attention to two aspects of this very complicated problem (with all of its pitfalls of privileging one's own perspective or time as special). One is cultural-artistic business as usual: the artistic cycle, which is in a very normal phase of late baroque. The other is the dilemma of the art work in the age of its mass reproduction, as Walter Benjamin put it long ago, combined with the accelerated instantaneous mass and multiple media of today, which is also an old set of conditions that I believe have crossed a few qualitative thresholds and achieved some new quantitative critical masses in our own lifetimes. For that, I'll indulge (as I sometimes do) in self-quoting, with light edit:

Mass broadcast media brought on a huge change: simultaneity and homogenization of cultural products across whole nations and regions, and the beginnings of a process that broke the old divide between the literate and oral social classes. Then came what we are still calling the media revolution - starting already with LPs, cassettes and VHS, all long before mass digitalization, portable communications and the Internet - which increasingly put the means of recording and distribution in the consumers' hands while also making media consumption a pervasive activity that most everyone is constantly engaged in whether at home, the workplace, in a car, on the street or subway, in a bar, or in a waiting room at a doctor's office or the unemployment department.

The combination and critical mass of technologies that has come together in the last few decades means that almost every entertainment and news snippet produced since music and film could be recorded is still in circulation or readily accessible, and often sampled and pushed at you in public or shared environments (office radio, TVs in bars and other places, music while you're on hold, etc.). So everything today increasingly belongs to a constant present that in spirit reaches back to about the late 1960s or even the 1950s. (Black-and-white to color is one of the dividing lines between The Long Present and The Pre-Present, as is to a lesser extent the move from orchestral big bands to rock and pop groups that any bunch of (talented) kids could start in a garage.) You have style revivals even while the style they're derived from is still commonly heard or seen. Acts that flopped and were never heard from again become golden finds 20 years later and exponentially more popular than they were in their own time, before going dormant again just as suddenly. Many of the kids currently being exposed to what I believe is the third major Beatles Revival are not cognizant of the fact that the Beatles broke up 40 years ago, a few if pressed may even think it's a current band. I think since about the 1980s (I have to be cautious because that's when I came of age) an era in the West no longer has a distinct "spirit" or feel, but rather an amalgam (worse: an average?) of all of them at once.

I do this every day. I always think how I was born with World War II still casting a shadow on everyone's minds, having only ended just 20 years before, and having very much set up my own life. (Without it I probably would have been born not in New York but in an isolated village of 400 without a road or power, however with all my grandparents alive.) Now 1945 is 65 years ago - equidistant from 1880! In other words I have now lived through more than 2/3 of what's still called the "postwar age."

As I became aware in the 1970s, there was a '50s nostalgia wave and to me it felt like an attachment to ancient history. I barely noticed the time go by, and then it was the 1990s and the mass culture was doing a '70s nostalgia wave! Yesterday I sang along with the radio to "Pulling Mussels from the Shell," and I couldn't help promptly announcing (at its end) that this song is pushing 30! Every movie I see, especially if I saw it before - for example yesterday we watched a DVD of "Happiness" (1997) - I'll announce, "More than 10 percent of all film history has passed since this movie was in the theaters!" (In case you're wondering why my girlfriend hates me.) And then I'll talk about how the audience reacted it to it "back" then. (1997? Don't tell me that's not The Present. I was already spending my life on the Internet.)

It's especially ridiculous with movies or bands I already thought were some kind of Final Death of Culture in the 1980s, and they're still around and there's been 25 years of often even worse trash since.

The fact is, we have a simultaneous over-production of really good shit, at least technically speaking, also going on, and constant waves of youth bringing new energy to the endeavor.

above first posted in
No one is sure where this feeling comes from -- "Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?"
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26958&start=0

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[JackRiddler]

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A very precedented aspect of today's Hauntology is just the common artistic cycle at work, something that has been seen over and over in all civilizations.

I picked up this set of ideas in working closely with an author I translated, the art historian and critic Sandro Bocola, author of an epic textbook treatment on Modernist art that very wisely included pocket histories of the world itself (since he refused to see artistic development as magically independent of its times). His scheme isn't original, he would tell you, but he refined it to define three broad stages in any artistic development (archaic, classical and baroque) and four major perspectives from which artists within the development approach their work (realistic, structural, romantic, symbolist). Pick up this book, The Art of Modernism: Art, Culture and Society from Goya to the Present Day, if you want a full rendering of his excellent thought.

Anyway, a new idea emerges, or a new period of political and social history begins. (Hey, let's electrify jazz and folk -- it's the postwar sound!) It's energetic, raw, strange, exciting, unknown, fantastic (archaic). It is learned, picked up by more practitioners, and developed by a few of the most gifted to what seems like a perfect, fully-developed set of works that in some way can no longer be topped while still being the same thing. That is the classical stage (with rock and pop I think it came in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper's and Jimi Hendrix and the San Francisco acid sound as a few mighty exemplars). Classic is always accompanied by an immediate rejection, critique, or detourning: the anti-classic. (In Bocola's telling of modernism, to simplify it perhaps unfairly, that was Duchamp arriving just a few years too late to be Picasso, so he drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa. In the line of development I'm identifying, that would be the Velvet Underground, another example would be Frank Zappa). This tension gives birth to a flourishing of variations and discovery of sub-genres (artists maintain the drive to find something new). This is an early baroque (the break-up into many genres in the late 1960s and 1970s). At some point these directions are mostly exhausted, and you enter a late baroque with many examples of technical perfection and endless repetitions and samplings and recombinations and covers and revivals. Late baroque can last a long time, maybe most of artistic history is spent in it. It prefigures but does not necessitate "end-times." The seeds of a new archaic are usually somewhere in there, widely unnoticed. Mini-archaics continue to happen all the time. The cycle is born anew with each subgenre and subculture, and after each major or minor historical break lending new impulse. (It can also be interrupted by the destruction or conquest of a society.) All this to Bocola (and to me, he convinced me) seems to be a natural outgrowth of how ideas spread and develop. Many cycles run simultaneously, but currently most forms are in a late baroque with a tendency thanks to modern media and markets for convergence to an unprecedented global late baroque. We're far from the end of the development, but most of it will have the texture of late baroque until there is some really new and radical historical break. Again, the mere presence of late baroque in most of the culture is not in itself an indication of imminent "end times." (Those are coming for different reasons.)

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[8bitagent]

I devoted part of my fm college radio show last night to this topic(non time/hauntology), and then played some arcade fire, burial, snog, david byrne and godspeed you black emperor

[kelley]

is jack or anyone else familiar with george kubler's 'the shape of time'? a formalist art history that traces classes of objects with regard to duration and innovation. wouldn't be surprised if bocola referenced this book in his text on modernism.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Man, this was a fascinating thread, what a toolkit. Thanks for this.

Strangely, the Hauntology meme has just exploded across my data steam in the past 24. Googling it took me back to RI. Apropos.

[gnosticheresy_2]

Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation

The new vogue in literary theory is shot through with earlier ideas

Hauntology is probably the first major trend in critical theory to have flourished online. In October 2006, Mark Fisher - aka k-punk - described it as "the closest thing we have to a movement, a zeitgeist". A mere three years later, Adam Harper prefaced a piece on the subject with the following caveat: "I'm all too aware that it's no longer 2006, the year to blog about hauntology". Two months ago, James Bridle predicted that the concept was "about six months away from becoming the title of a column in a Sunday supplement magazine". Only four months to go, then. My hunch is that hauntology is already haunting itself. The revival starts here.

Like its close relative psychogeography, hauntology originated in France but struck a chord on this side of the Channel. In Spectres of Marx (1993), where it first appeared, Jacques Derrida argued that Marxism would haunt Western society from beyond the grave. In the original French, "hauntology" sounds almost identical to "ontology", a concept it haunts by replacing - in the words of Colin Davis - "the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive".

Today, hauntology inspires many fields of investigation, from the visual arts to philosophy through electronic music, politics, fiction and literary criticism. At its most basic level, it ties in with the popularity of faux-vintage photography, abandoned spaces and TV series like Life on Mars. Mark Fisher – whose forthcoming Ghosts of My Life (Zer0 Books) focuses primarily on hauntology as the manifestation of a specific "cultural moment" – acknowledges that "There's a hauntological dimension to many different aspects of culture; in fact, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud practically argues that society as such is founded on a hauntological basis: "the voice of the dead father". When you come to think of it, all forms of representation are ghostly. Works of art are haunted, not only by the ideal forms of which they are imperfect instantiations, but also by what escapes representation. See, for instance, Borges's longing to capture in verse the "other tiger, that which is not in verse". Or Maurice Blanchot, who outlines what could be described as a hauntological take on literature as "the eternal torment of our language, when its longing turns back toward what it always misses". Julian Wolfrey argues in Victorian Hauntings (2002) that "to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns" so that "all stories are, more or less, ghost stories" and all fiction is, more or less, hauntological. The best novels, according to Gabriel Josipovici, share a "sense of density of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words". For the reader or critic, the mystery of literature is the opacity – the irreducible remainder – at the heart of writing that can never be completely interpreted away. The whole western literary tradition itself is founded on the notion of posterity, which Paul Eluard described as the "harsh desire to endure" through one's works. And then, of course, there's the death of the author ... All this, as you can see, could go on for quite a while, so perhaps we should wonder if the concept does not just mean all things to all (wo)men. Steen Christiansen, who is writing a book on the subject, explains that "hauntology bleeds into the fields of postmodernism, metafiction and retro-futurism and that there is no clear distinction – that would go against the tension which hauntology aims at".

As a reflection of the zeitgeist, hauntology is, above all, the product of a time which is seriously "out of joint" (Hamlet is one of Derrida's crucial points of reference in Spectres of Marx). There is a prevailing sense among hauntologists that culture has lost its momentum and that we are all stuck at the "end of history". Meanwhile, new technologies are dislocating more traditional notions of time and place. Smartphones, for instance, encourage us never to fully commit to the here and now, fostering a ghostly presence-absence. Internet time (which is increasingly replacing clock time) results in a kind of "non-time" that goes hand in hand with Marc Augé's non-places. Perhaps even more crucially, the web has brought about a "crisis of overavailability" that, in effect, signifies the "loss of loss itself": nothing dies any more, everything "comes back on YouTube or as a box set retrospective" like the looping, repetitive time of trauma (Fisher). This is why "retromania" has reached fever pitch in recent years, as Simon Reynolds demonstrates in his new book - a methodical dissection of "pop culture's addiction to its own past".

Hauntology is not just a symptom of the times, though: it is itself haunted by a nostalgia for all our lost futures. "So what would it mean, then, to look for the future's remnants?" asks Owen Hatherley at the beginning of Militant Modernism, "Can we, should we, try and excavate utopia?" It might just be worth a shot.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksbl ... y-critical

[Alfred Joe's Boy]

(See article http://www.realitysandwich.com/where_time for links.)

Where is Time?
Robert McCoy


"We have never encountered poor engineering in nature" --Albrecht-Buehler


It's 1978 and I'm sitting at a workbench, electronic test equipment arrayed all around me on shelves -- oscilloscopes and 'bit boxes', the tools of my trade. It's the night shift and the factory is 'cooling fan' quiet, almost like sitting in my living room -- at least in comparison to the buzzing of the day shift when the isles are full of managers and engineers... office types, disturbing my otherwise silent technical devotions. And just like in my living room, I light up a 'righteous' cigarette and lean back on my swiveling chair, contemplating a problem with a printed circuit board I'm troubleshooting -- trying to put some 'soul in the machine' -- but it won't initialize -- stuck in a loop. I take a puff (menthols!) and exhale up toward the high industrial ceiling. When my eyes come back to the problem I glance at the scope and notice a straight line on the screen but one that is fuzzy somehow -- they are never really straight. Only moments before it had been an incomprehensible blur, racing at megahertz speed and I had barely been able to sync it up so as to bring the blur into focus. Now, as I rest the probe at my side the screen is quiet -- in keeping with my surroundings -- relaxed at 'zero' volts.

It is my habit when I am stuck -- when I have no place left to look -- to absently rub my thumb back and forth across the tip of the scopes probe as if rubbing a genie bottle -- unconsciously 'wishing' perhaps that an answer will pop into my head. Whenever I practice this ritual the line will jump and its tiny, unseen curves are amplified somehow -- you can see it. The 'fuzz' gets louder. The dance of this noise distracts me somehow -- mesmerizes me into neutral like a brief 'reset', for a moment, till I'm ready to take up the loop again. Loops are the worst... no hooks to get a handle on. The rack of unfixed boards on the shelf behind me is predictably full of the ones with loops -- cut to ribbons with exacto knives in futile attempts to isolate the problem. No one likes them. They are always saved for last, undesirable scraps set aside for nights like this when the work flow slows to a trickle and we have nothing else to do.

When I'm done with my smoke I lean forward and place the tip of the probe on the lower right pin of a 16 pin chip... the ground pin (Earth!) and it jumps again. Noise. Same noise. It's everywhere.

Fast forward about 25 years and I'm sitting in my cube -- I am an 'office type' now (tobacco free!... and no degree!) and an email has arrived on my UNIX workstation from an author whom I have been in intermittent contact with about esoteric topics that occasionally pop into my mind -- when I'm stuck. It's a sort of 'smoke break' to distract me from my otherwise absorbing design gig. He's sent a link -- a link to a scientific paper -- a paper about noise. Noise... and the brain!

Timeout.

It's written by a researcher from a prestigious university and it's the usual incoherent 'code talking‘ (to the unwashed like myself) but one phrase jumps out at me like a left hook and I flinch -- it's the essential point of the whole paper, boiled down to one very uncharacteristically brief little sound byte -- a sort of Sesame Street moment in an otherwise convoluted read. The brain, according to this distinguished professor... feeds on noise... pigs out on it in fact... can't operate without it! Slops it up and spits it out as signals -- signals in the AM & FM bands -- like a damn TV! And like a contented cow, it grazes all day (and night!) -- not in a field of clover... but in a field of noise!

As it turns out, the brain and I had not been on speaking terms for some years now for I had been singing the praises of 'energy' to anyone who would listen. Any mention of anything thicker than a nadi was dismissed in my steel trapped mind as an artifact of the primary subtle source code and as such, an irrelevant distraction -- not worthy of my valuable time. But here was something that hit home in a way that I couldn't dismiss... I mean this was engineering... or more accurately, reverse engineering. It was right in my under educated wheelhouse, in a language I could relate to. Suddenly, in my mind, the brain had been 'elevated' somehow. No longer so easily dismissed, it was now an 'organ of respect!' -- an unbelievably sophisticated and counterintuitive bio-electric genius, its underlying mechanism having gone under reported in an otherwise 'Big-Pharma's' field. And it had been doing a 'rope a dope' -- with noise! the scourge of the electronics world, right 'under' my nose the whole time... Damn! I was impressed!

And in addition this paper just happened to come complete with a handy Block Diagram -- just like the ones on my desk. And like all block diagrams this one had something that was visually revealing about it -- but not so much in what it 'said' -- but in what it didn‘t ‘say'. The brain, according to the usual suspects (i.e., the experts) was supposed to be the storehouse of memory -- of all memories. Except this diagram had no large scale caches -- only 'data paths' (parallel bus's) and multiplexers! (millions to one!). It was all about movement and feedback (i.e., amplification and signal conditioning) not massive static storage. And like any good multiplexer it funneled down each of the many neurons' massively parallel signals into individual serial signals -- ones that we could, potentially (I would assume!) "select"... and "see!"... and "hear!"

Yikes! Somebody change the channel!! This was too much...

Or was it?

Rewind to a few years earlier -- stuck again! -- and I had come across an article by a Phd by the name of James L. Oschman, author of the ground breaking book Energy Medicine -- The Scientific Basis. Oschman was a biologist who'd done a tour at the prestigious Wood‘s Hole Oceanographic Institute and he was describing his own metamorphosis from a traditional western scientific view to what could only be described as a full blown empirically derived 'energy view' of the human body-mind (and cosmos). All of this had been precipitated by an aching back which had led him, eventually, to a paradigm changing encounter with a practitioner of the art of Rolfing who took the time to bring him up to speed on the subtle world. Fascinated, he took it upon himself to unearth the scientific evidence to substantiate it all and it turned out to be voluminous. For the newly initiated Oschman, the scalability and intelligence of this amazing 'human energy system' was elegance itself -- a thing to behold, but he was curious why there was no talk of it in the scientific community. Eventually he found himself contemplating a sort of 'McKenna's Dilemma' -- no one else seemed to want it! He was alone in line at the Buffet! And to 'top' it all off, despite all the 'Surf & Turf' on his plate, he found that it all 'boiled' down to water.

As it turns out, one of Oschman's colleagues at 'the Hole' was a Hungarian scientist of worldwide repute by the name of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the discoverer of vitamin C. It was Szent-Gyorgyi who initially postulated that proteins are more than just 'proteins' but only when saturated with water, at which point -- like biological comic book Super Heros -- they 'transform' into semiconductors! His observation was that water, a conductor, was what made electrons (energy!) mobile throughout the body's intricate collagen network (protein!) and that this was responsible for the flexibility, speed and subtlety that combined to help facilitate what he referred to as the 'living state'. And this network reached into literally every single one of our cells, right down to our DNA. So the body not only had a 'wireless' network but collagen 'land lines' as well! His term for this dynamic combination was 'Electronic Biology' and Oschman referred to his discovery of this system thusly:

Breakthroughs in cell biology now enable us to describe the scientific basis of this system. The first of these breakthroughs was the discovery that the molecules of which the body is formed are semiconductors. Conductors, such as the wires that go to a light or a toaster, carry useful energy. The wire to your telephone carries information. Semiconductors can convey both energy and information, and can do other things as well. Semiconductors are used to store information and to process signals -- to make choices or decisions. Semiconductors are used to make sensitive detectors of energy fields. Semiconductors can transport large amounts of power. Semiconductors are the essential components of our modern electronics industry, and make possible the miracle of the computer we are using to write this article.

In living systems, semiconductors probably play the same roles we have assigned to them in our technology. Living systems undoubtedly have developed additional tricks that have not yet been discovered by the electronics industry.

I had been contemplating this technological stew for a number of years when one more juicy ingredient arrived on my laptop in the form of a link to a video called "Thunderbolts of the Gods". It was about a theory that the 'quantumized' and sterile, disconnected 'gravity in a vacuum' idea of the cosmos (with mysterious spots of so called "dark energy" lurking about) is a 'dead short' so to speak. This 'new' view of the cosmos is actually a hundred years old and is referred to as the 'Electric Universe' and it talks of a ubiquitous primal universal force trillions of times more powerful than 'gravity' (and a lot less mysterious) -- i.e., electricity. Nice... And of course, where there is electricity there is magnetism ("for every force there is an equal and opposite...") Nice... And as it turns out, all the billowing clouds of 'stuff' out there have the qualities of plasma which is a nebulous fourth state of matter where particles are suspended in a soup of free floating electrons (i.e., energy) -- perfect for the conduction of electric currents. No dry 'dust', these currents have a name -- Birkeland currents -- and they have been recorded for decades. And these currents travel through space primarily in paths that resemble 'twisted pair' wires (long preferred in the computer industry for their ideal conducting properties) -- i.e., they are spiraling! -- like our DNA. And these currents form a huge network -- literally -- between all the planets and stars in the Universe like some kind of crazy cosmic web (imagine that!). So it's alive... it's electric... and the whole thing is buzzing like Yankee Stadium on opening day! And the entire model is completely scalable and has been reproduced in supercomputers that can replicate the whole process while it forms spiraling galaxies -- something the standard model has never been able to do. Imagine that!

So it was all coming together 'nicely' now... electromagnetic signals in the mind coursing through an electromagnetic body inside an electromagnetic cosmos. Electromagnetic universe, electromagnetic mind, electromagnetic body! Waves, waves, waves! It's a veritable sea of noise... one big Cymatic cacophony of a world, all joined together through a single ubiquitous universal web -- complete with user friendly 'wireless' and 'hard wired' connections at every level. It's a Wide Wide Wired World... the World Wide E-web... wired from the furthest galaxy right down to our teeth!... now imagine that!

The Gods must be smiling.



Now it's difficult to talk of time -- as we know it -- without talking about space -- as we know it. Although in the end, both may be subsets of absolute Time and absolute Space, the point of this discussion is to analyze the former as the latter is beyond words and quite frankly, not an obstacle to understanding in the way that time and space (as we know it) have become. In fact, the answer lies in the absolute but in order to get to the answer it first helps to define the problem -- or at least come up with a useful abstract working model of the problem to be used to turn over the crust of confusion and reveal the fertile top soil of reality. Concepts are useful in defining the problem. After that, the answers tend to get revealed by themselves.

One such method for turning soil is to employ a 'thought experiment'. A thought experiment is not a statement of empirical fact but a means of employing useful imagination to uncover possible hidden mechanisms (i.e., moving parts) which could then be assembled in the mind as a sort of working model which can then be employed by the mind as a visualization tool. It's what virtual reality used to be. It's an experiment with imagination instead of a test tube. But instead of gathering data, we're gathering possibilities. So when we employ a thought experiment we are still quite possibly a long way from the facts but one has to start somewhere and that is especially so in this case as there is scant empirical evidence to begin with. Time -- as we know it -- is short on hooks and handles.

One major obstacle that a seeker encounters in uncovering the absolute is that the individual has to deal with a layer of paradox which is created by the limited view of the intellect. Without an overlay of intuition the intellect simply isn't up to the job of 'understanding' as true understanding includes a simultaneous view of both the temporal and the absolute which by default resolves the misunderstandings of the intellect with the non-verbal knowing 'overview' of one's being. You could say that intuition, like water, fills in the 'cracks between concepts'... connecting 'things'... so to speak. So our model will attempt to address this symbiotic relationship.

According to at least one ancient occult view, time was tied only indirectly to space. Temporal time, to these ancients, was the mind's interpretation of movement in space which is a slightly different view than the contemporary one but it's the one that we'll employ here. As it turns out, the contemporary and the ancient may be closer than they first appear.

Any seeker who has had even an inkling of a 'timeless' moment knows that movement continues in spite of the apparent absence of 'time'. So it would appear that movement in space is a trigger -- it triggers an assumption in the mind which we interpret as 'time'. Thus the oft-referred to 'continuous moment of timelessness' would be, in our model, one where movement 'continues' in the absence of this assumption about time.

In order to help decouple movement from time in our minds though it will help to redefine it and in this case we'll rename movement and instead, refer to it as a 'sequence'. So timelessness -- as we know it -- could then also be defined as a 'continuous moment' when all 'sequences' in space have been 'decoupled' in the mind from the assumption of 'time' as we know it. This will be a primary assumption in our experiment.

If the world as we know it is based on waves then it might be useful to make another assumption, for our model's sake, and that is that space (as we know it ) is also a wave. So our experience of it would then be the mind's interpretation of a wave-like phenomenon, except this wave only takes 'shape' so to speak in the brain. But these are not just ‘waves' -- they carry information -- information that is modulated onto them -- like in the AM & FM bands. Such waves that carry modulated information are called carrier waves, so in our experiment we are going to refer to space (as we know it) as a primary carrier wave produced inside the brain.

One reason carrier waves were developed was to distinguish one signal from another when they shared a common conductor by giving each piece of 'information' on that conductor its own unique 'carrier' frequency -- as in a telephone line or modem. Thus the carrier waves of 'space' in our model would serve to distinguish one sequence from another by not only creating 'space' between individual competing sequences but also by helping to create a series of sequences -- with 'spaces' between them, so to speak. Thus sequences as we know them, whether in the guise of thoughts or images, would be the modulation of information waves onto the primary carrier waves of 'space' -- as we know it -- inside the brain. Also, in our model, this innumerable sea of sequences (information waves) outside the brain would then be referred to as noise... a field of noise -- Cloud computing if you will... like an electromagnetic fog.

So if we look back on what we've seen and discussed so far, it appears that the brain has a genius for creating modulated serial signals -- in the AM & FM bands -- from a sea of noise. Thus it takes a massively parallel phenomena (noise) and creates from it a set of sequences which are offered up to us -- in series -- as movement... movement in the form of a series of thoughts and images. And it is this presentation of the information in series -- that gives the impression of a 'series of sequences' in our mind -- like a damn TV. So in our model we'll assume that the mind in its reasoning mode has little choice but to interpret this sequence as such. Only one thing then, in our model, can override such an overwhelming presentation and that is to reintroduce noise back into the sequence -- in parallel with the sequence... massively parallel noise in the form of knowing, timeless intuition introduced into the mix as an 'overlay' of higher perception. Since the sequence appears to be a product of the neural net we can assume that we can't look to it for help here so this introduction of noise would have to come from an independent agent of the brain. So we'll say that this agent -- or backdoor savior -- is something like the pineal gland, which no doubt has its own twist on things. Thus in our model, this noise would then be re-introduced on the 'back end of the process', downstream of the neural network where the original noise was 'sifted' and then presented as a series of sequences. So the pineal gland would then be 'rope a doping' the sequence... so to speak... in our model.

So in our experiment, when left to its own devices, the mind has no choice but to interpret the serial presentation of sequences as a sequence in serial time. And the only thing that can overrule this logic is an introduction of something so overwhelming that the mind has no choice but to drop its assumption about this serial sequence of time and bow to the truth of the situation.

Thus in our model, the default reasoning of the mind's interpretation of the sequence as serial time can -- at times, be 'overshadowed' by the overwhelming evidence of the timeless knowing which is the default mode of the massively parallel noise of the world beyond the narrow multiplexing funnel of the neurons. Belief (and doubt!) would then be a product of the 'series' and 'knowing' a product of the noise. So knowing would, by its massively panoramic nature, 'trump' serial belief (and doubt!) and put it in it's proper perspective, while leaving the sequence of thoughts and images intact. Thus when the noise is present (on the backend of the process) we would 'see through' the belief in the sequence even while making practical use of it. We're not fooled by it. So when working in parallel with both the sequence and the panoramic noise, the necessary belief in the useful everyday things we need to have presented to us as a sequence would be 'seen through', so to speak, by the knowing timeless noise of the greater universal mind, while still being put to use, for practical purposes. You could call this multidimensional experience a form of 'moving meditation' or a 'continuous moment' of real time. Nice.

Now so called 'movement' in the sequence is a relative term as noise itself is movement. But the difference is that when the highly amplified series of sequences is exclusively presented it naturally gets our undivided attention. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. So in the brain, our attention is compelled to focus exclusively on the highly amplified series of sequences -- like a damn TV -- whereas in the vast sea of noise our attention would be diffused across the entire vista. So in our model, it's the exclusive attention on the amplified, high amplitude squeaky wheel of the serial sequence that creates the single minded impression of time -- as we know it. Likewise, any diffusion of attention over the vast sea of noise would disperse this single minded focus and create a much 'broader' view... a more 'timeless' view. So when the two are occurring simultaneously -- as in our description of a walking meditation -- we would have the impression of being 'in the world, but not of it'... so to speak. That is... in our model.

Thus in a way 'time' (as we know it) and 'space' (as we know it) would go hand in hand in our minds like 'fellow travelers‘. One is tied inevitably to the other -- but one is not necessarily the other.

And all of this happens... 'between the ears', so to speak, because in our model, it doesn't matter what we see and what we hear 'out there' ---- it's what we think and what we imagine 'in here'. You see, when it comes to time -- as we know it -- we don't "know it" at all... not the way it actually is... just the way we think it is. And what we 'think'... what we assume... is what we believe. And what we believe is a direct result of what we place our single minded inner attention on... and then we project that out... onto whatever we place our outer attention on.

So to the ones with the 'eyes to see' everything that happens 'out there' is happening in a single moment of time. Thus these 'ones' see a multiplicity of movement occurring in a 'Singular time'... whereas we see a series of movements -- and equate that with a series of times. Likewise, such ones may or may not see wondrous things, with their eyes... but they would all see through things... with the 'eye of knowing' -- in real time -- the only time there is.

So ironically, in our model, the brain would, in a sense, be a... "Time Machine". Only not in the way we normally think of it. It would be responsible for time 'as we know it'... but that doesn't have to prevent 'that which attends' from seeing time... as it is.

We live in a divided world... one of conflicting beliefs and confusion, doubt and double messages. We can't seem to concentrate on anything anymore for more than a moment. And that's just between the ears. Even our attention is divided (think about that). It's a prescription for distraction... by design. In fact, in our model, this world wasn't just ‘designed‘ for distraction... it was engineered that way. So is it any wonder we don't know what time is?



Technology (as we know it) has become a beast of mythic proportions. Like a many headed Cyclopian Hydra, it is often seen as a ubiquitous 'all seeing eye' from hell that is portrayed (via technology!!) as a transistorized vehicle for the death of us all (even at times to some of those who helped to design it). And not for 'no good' reason -- dealing with its health effects alone has become like a second job for many, even while we use it to search the world -- and the web, for the latest remedy. It's enough to 'drive' you crazy. It contributes to every major problem of the modern world (and some solutions!!)... while seeping into every pore of our existence... into our very own 'wireless networks' and the 'land lines' to our DNA! It's a 'fix' to fix us and a fix for our 'fix'! A loop! (like the mind!!) Damn!

But there is an another view of technology that says that technology's real purpose is not 'just' to torture us... that its creation is our attempt to simultaneously reveal our selves to our selves... like a self created late model demon. Thus if seen correctly, it ceases to become just 'the problem' and instead it then has the potential to transform itself before our eyes into a lesson book -- from our selves to our selves (from our 'engineer'... to our 'engineer'!!!) about the hooks and handles inside us and the universe around us... a mirror of the mechanism of our perpetual dilemma. As such, when seen correctly, technology (and our universe) can become a tool for liberation from the unconscious mechanical patterns that are the fabric of our habits. And the first step in breaking any habit is awareness of the habit... and then of its mechanisms. Loops can be instructive. They do have a message. And they can be 'rope a doped'... with inner attention.

The ancients taught that gazing at the world correctly was a spiritual practice, especially when the universe was viewed the way it truly is. This is why we are attracted to its mysteries even while attempting to shove it all away. So with 2012 approaching and the looming possibility of the end of time -- as we think we know it -- perhaps we have something to look forward to after all... in a time that‘s larger than any loop.



Postscript

For an excellent look at the chemical side of the brain (which I conveniently brushed under the rug!) as well as the effects of electromagnetic fields on the brain click here. The piece appeared recently on Reality Sandwich and it is an excerpt from the book "Revolution 2012" by Dieter Broers called "2012" and Electromagnetic Effects on Consciousness. It raises many excellent points outside the narrow scope of this piece including possible future electromagnetic Solar scenarios in 2012 and sage advice on how to prepare for them.

Another point conveniently ignored in this piece is the 'past' and 'future' (oh that!). I can only offer up my own individual opinion for what it's worth and that is that in our model here, both would then be seen as being 'simultaneously and continuously' available to the individual amongst the panoramic noise of Mind at Large at any given moment in 'real time'. More on that, perhaps at another 'time'.

And to carry the model to the next level, as in 'out of body' experiences, one could speculate that in cases such as Robert Monroe's instantaneous 'thought ball' transmissions, the usual 'serial thought sequences' experienced inside the body would then have been 'massively short circuited' so to speak, outside the body... by instantaneously available 'massively panoramic noise' that is no longer sifted by the neural networks in the brain. Examples of this abound such as in the cases where individuals outside the body report hearing the thoughts of several individuals simultaneously and on up to universal consciousness. In other cases, such as in the classic Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, chapter 43... "The Resurrection of Sri Yukteswar" he gives an example of how a potential temporarily manifested 'subtle body brain' might work as well as in other anecdotes scattered through the narrative such as the bi-location of one particular yogi, (not to mention the ubiquitous presence of the ethereal Babaji) a feat not unheard of in the literature of India, as well as in other cultures around the world. Perhaps the difference would be determined by the conscious intent and experience of the individual. But this would be pure speculation on my part.

For some interesting links on space as a wave and time as motion see the GOOGLE search on the topic... The WSM pages (Wave Structure of Matter) include an Aristotle quote implying that time is either the equivalent of motion or some 'effect' of it. Nice... There is also the proposition that all motion (time) are waves of and in space thus you could make an argument that all waves in space are essentially 'modulated' onto space itself, merely by their existence as space itself would be the 'common carrier'. There isn't room here obviously to dissect all of that but clearly in this model the terms 'modulation' and 'carrier' are relative terms! To conclude, we could speculate here that 'timelessness' then is the experience of a 'massively diffused panoramic inner attention' which overshadows the singular impression of time as we know it, while we're enjoying -- or consciously suffering through -- the outer sequences in all their amazing varieties. It's simple. (Whooa!)

Note: In our model. the degree to which belief (and doubt!) would reign over knowing would then be known as the 'sequence to noise' ratio. Thus degrees of awareness would be a fluctuating 'analog function' -- and not some static state -- except... in the ultimate ‘state'... wherever that is.



The Wave Structure of Matter pages are found here.



Note: Another interesting 'view' from the point of view of our model comes from Robert Monroe and his 'Focus levels' as a means of altering our perception of time, space and other dimensions. See the Overview of Focus levels from their website here.



One last 'loose end' to tie is the implication of this 'Electric Universe' and its ubiquitous web of currents -- from the furthest Galaxy right down to our DNA! More on that as well at another 'time' as it is a subject with vast implications in every area of our existence and there is no way to do it justice in this piece. In fact, just to even contemplate it is enough to 'drop ones jaw'... so to speak. To be continued...



Note: If the reader takes exception to my characterization of the standard model of the Universe that's understandable. It's just that I was never quite able to wrap my mind around it in a way that left me smiling. Since then I have put together a short list of qualifications that I filter any cosmological theory through and that is this: Is it simple? (Occam's razor and common sense); Is it scalable? (as above so below); Is it satisfying? (moi!). The Electric Universe fits all 3 IMO so I'm 'satisfied' with it for now. In fact I could even add a fourth: Does it spiral? but in interest of 'simplicity' I'll leave it at 3. No doubt I'm not the first to come up with such a cosmological 'short list' as all 'roads' seem to lead to it eventually.

The DVD on the Electric Universe mentioned above, "Thunderbolts of the Gods" can be found here, along with other excellent DVD's on this subject.

For an excellent website on the Plasma Cosmos see here.



Note: I've lost touch with the original paper about noise and the brain but several follow up studies are out there. So if you look for them online you may want to keep in mind that many are in Adobe pdf format. Also in your string search you'll want to include the phrase "stochastic resonance" as this is a key to understanding how noise works in the brain and possibly as a factor in Cymatics as well. It's also important to note that there is a fine distinction (in my mind) between noise in the brain and the noise of Mind at large. The noise in the brain would then be -- in our model -- an intermediate step between the panoramic noise of Mind at large and the serial sequence. See GOOGLE search.



Note: To say that James Oschman was 'alone at the Buffet'... well, I would have to qualify that as clearly he is reporting a slew of evidence reported by other interested and courageous scientists. But where he stands alone is in his reminding us of it all by compiling these discoveries in one place and reporting on them in a comprehensive fashion with language that the layperson can relate to. In doing so he placed a very bright spotlight on a field that had nearly been scattered to the winds by the power of conventional science to ignore it.

The quote by Albrecht-Buehler found at the head of this piece was from page 189 of James L' Oschman's book Energy Medicine -- the Scientific Basis.

The quote about water and proteins forming semiconductors came from an article by James and Nora Oschamn called "How Healing Energy Works". In it they also mention that Albert Szent-Gyorgyi received the Nobel for his discovery of vitamin C. They also employ a slew of technological analogies in their model of the human energy system. See here.

For an excellent interview with James Oschman see here.

For an interesting look at the conventional western scientific view of the purpose of water in "proteins" see here.

Although I use TV as a loose analogy in this piece, the quote below is interesting as both AM & FM signals would need to be present in Analog TV -- as are present simultaneously in the brain... kinda makes ya' wonder!

"Analog TV uses an amplitude-modulated (AM) signal for pictures and frequency modulation (FM) for audio."



The seekers 'double-life' dilemma between thought and being -- the path of Reason -- was summarized by Paul Cash in the quotes below from an article called 'Beyond the Maps'. It was written as a posthumous tribute to Paul Brunton, one of the early proponents of Yoga in the West....

"One of Brunton's most frequently repeated themes is that the thinker within us and the mystic within us need each other desperately: both the ability to think deeply with great precision and the ability to withdraw at will from thinking must be cultivated. And, most importantly to the philosophic approach, all must be turned in the direction of altruistic service to humanity at large."

In the same piece, Cash gives an example of Brunton's direct view of the 'practical mystical' state which he often referred to as an experience of the continuous presence of the 'Overself'...

"The mystical stages of this process involve a gradual displacement of the individual's mind's exclusive fascination with its own thoughts as 'the whole of one's identity' shifts to a higher plane. When this displacement is complete, or in parallel with its development, the philosophic stage begins. This stage involves reembracing of the thinking processes in a radically different way by a vastly deepened continuous self-awareness."

See here.

The Notebooks of Paul Brunton can be found here.




Endless...



Time... endless time...

no excuse.

Long train running... no caboose!

Thought not the problem... attention the key.

Un-trained attention... running over me!

Retraction of attention from report card on I

produces space... endless space...

for train of whole new dimension!



And finally... 'Where is time?' Well, if it's like everything else... it's probably going to be found in the last place we'd ever think to look for it!

[Joe Hillshoist]

An Inventory of Timelessness

We've dispensed with time, so we're lost in space.

by Michael Ventura (August 1987)

In America, from big city to tiny town, time and space have become tentative, arbitrary. And this in the most concrete, personal sense. There are instruments in each home eating away at the time and space of people who have become addicted to those instruments. Consciously, these are most often people who see themselves as normal, righteous and conservative, and they emphatically don't want this to change. Yet something else is operative in them, some hunger that they follow without thought or plan, in which they indulge in activities that subtly but thoroughly undermine their most cherished assumptions. Politically and socially they are demanding more and more boundaries - yet, by choice, they fill their lives with things that cause them to live less and less within those boundaries.

...

The electric lightbulb. An invention barely one hundred years-old. In general use for roughly fifty years now. The technological beginning of the end of linear time. Before the lightbulb, darkness constricted human space. Outside cities especially, night shrank the entire landscape into the space within arm's reach. (The moon figures so greatly in our iconography because it was all that allowed one to go far out into the night - when it was bright enough, and not obscured by clouds.)

...

The car is a private space that can go in any direction at any time. The motel room cinched that: anywhere you go, there will be a space for you. A fact unique to contemporary life, and alien to every previous society. But the fact that there's a room for you anywhere makes less substantial the place where you actually are. Thus you are a transient, without having chosen to be one. Human transience used to be defined almost solely by death.

...

Today, through a centuries-long process that culminated in our technological revolution, the West has what it's been praying for since the birth of Christ: every individual is being addressed directly, and constantly, by an infinite Universe. It may be a media conveyed universe, and the voice you hear may be anyone's from Mandela to Madonna; images of sensuality and mayhem may confront us wherever we turn (though they are no more violent or sexy than the images in the Bible); we may have asked for the holy and gotten the profane (complain to the Manufacturer) - but it is a Universe and it does seem to speak to us, even dote on us, individually. In short, we asked for a paradigm and we got it.

In biblical mythology, this state of being is followed by Apocalypse.

Read the article. Its pretty interesting.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Seriously I can't stress enough how relevant that article is.

[justdrew]