Becoming a producer, producing productively, according to a representational standard that we may or may not begin to buy into as the best definition of "who and what we are". Nature forced to play this bag. The pure presentations of Nature's Economy forced to re-present themselves as fitting commodities that can be a "functional fit" in relation to one or another Market cog. Production machines: Still the post-industrial representation of the Being-human who's a "functional fit".
Produce! A production machine, forced to flow in accordance with the structure of the representation, and not according to the presentation of Nature's Economy. The object that contains the juice of the Market... allowing ourselves to be squeezed on the clock, by the hour; just so we can be free to bond with a few of those "special" objects that we have become devoted to after-hours. Subjects: Squeezed dry by the representational practice of conscripting life-force over time; then heading out to squeeze some Market lemons to get all juiced back up for the 'morrow. Managers of our own flows, who carry the colonizing and commodifying dogma back home. "Produce. Now! Consume. Now! Distribute. Now! Just do it!" The managerial structure, the bureaucratic representations within us. Mirrors to the system that we are, by necessity, forced to live in day after day. Just as we have our flows managed in the work place, according to the latest Market demands, we also begin to manage our own flows, and, perhaps, lose touch with and sense of any non-representational rhythm of flowing in a purely presentational manner. In this way we have become coded to enact the representational subparadigm of the regime that we empower through our productive labors day to day. In other words, we enact in our off-hours the representational structures that we are in-formed by as Market participants. Commodities. Profit/loss. Cost-benefit analysis running through our head at the grocers. Can't leave it alone. The representational dogmas overhwhelm us like all of those "overlapping dimensions" of the "power network of so-called multinational capitalism". Media. Movies. Multi-dimensional propaganda. 24-7. Global commerce in hyperspatial surrealism seducing libidinal discharges from the billion billions. Representational overlords. Paradigmatic suffering. Postmodern update. The once and still potentially mighty libidinal flows have become all dammed up. The libido confined by the force of enacted representations. The pure presentation forced into the jello-mold of conscious comeuppance. A persistent trickle is spared, though; we save our juice for the office. The productive jouissance: marketable. Is this who we have become --- as Being-humans --- a forced and enacted representation, a representation of what is, quite likely, innate and non-representational? No wonder, then, we can feel lost; have no sense of ourselves; feeling as if we are frauds; often knowing not what we do and why we do it. Living according to the simulacra, that by degrees grow into imaginal representations with no actual reference to a basic reality. All of those representations, the bureaucracy within. Just here on behalf of so and so, representing the interests of such and such. That's all. No pure force allowed, unless it can be coded in and as the representational framework of acceptable Market doctrine. That's all. Me? Just here on behalf of so and so, representing the interests of such and such....
If, for instance, we determine that a representation could be an "image", in the Baudrillardian sense, we would note that this imaged representation can follow the "successive phases of the image" noted above. Where the representation is initially a "reflection of a basic reality" and ends up as a representation which "bears no relation to any reality whatever". This process occurs despite our best intentions and because of the recursive and reifying nature of self-consciousness, where comparative analysis through dialectic reflection abides. N. Katherine Hailes, in her book, How We Became PostHuman, writes that "The observer generates self-consciousness... when he endlessly describes himself describing himself". The Body becomes aware that it is "a Body of awareness". Not only of self, but of the Other as well. In this regard, we attempt the functional fit of the objectivists, by many measures, meant to inscribe/proscribe ourselves with various representations. And not only do we do this in relation to our "self", to our Body, but also in relation to Nature and Culture as we attempt to inscribe the various Bodies therein with our motivations, our self-representations, taken as fact, as truth. It appears then, that self-consciousness, self-aware Bodies, capacity for discrimination and comparative analysis through reflection, and the capacity to interact with the representations constructed from our interactions with the world are all of the same order, or pattern of Being-Becoming-Embodied. It is this pattern, or "order of being", which I have chosen to refer to as the "representational paradigm", of which the Being-human is the fruit-seed of. In mirror-like and reflective fashion the Being-human has the capacity to compare and analyze through recursive looping of the cognitive faculty. This comparative analysis can give birth to new synthetic constructs. First, through comparative analysis, the self-aware Body adjures and adjudicates in a discriminating fashion. Second, through reflective refraction the self-aware Body is able to wonder over the consequences of a trial and error approach to mixing and merging the elements deduced from the former comparative analysis. Synthetic secretions are born as the simulated real. The torso of a man attached to a goat. Genetic reconfiguration. Imaginary gamesmanship. Toying with the esoteric biological secrets. The "representational paradigm" takes a quantum leap of exponential proportions through the just now commencing gene-pool revolution. Can we get the Being-human to embody the model? Can the Being-human be reconfigured so that the map becomes the territory? Can the self-aware Bodies be re-presented to Nature and Culture as embodiments of a simulated reality; living images; gene-spliced simulacra of bio-organic distinctness? (No wonder the best hope is to sometimes just want to become lost somewhere... Quite simply so we can forget what we don't want to be reminded of anymore: All of our representations. "Yes, I am here representing the interests of.... the representational code of... whose representative is....") Through the "dialectic of progress" the representational paradigm creates it is own unique pathologies. The "dialectic of progress" being, in the words of philosopher Ken Wilber, the notion that "the emergence of a new level solves or 'defuses' some of the central problems and limitations of the previous stage (or else it wouldn't emerge), but it also introduces its own new problems and new scarce resources". With the scarcest resource, in a cognitive sense, being the ability to existentially reference our self, as subjects, in what I'll call the "representational hyperspace of postmodern hyperreality". It is here where the force of the techno-economic wavefront converges on the subject, and in many senses, overwhelms that subject with simulacra portrayed as the Real; images conveyed with more Market potency than the actuality of an embodied being. This representational hyperspace of the postmodern is hyperreal. Like reality on crack: hyper. Like the real being schizophrenic in relation to itself, turning surreal. The dreamscape of techno-revolutionaries converges with the Yanomami of the Amazon River basin; the tribes of Papua New Guinea are seen marketing Cocoa-Cola and the ten year old T-shirt of the 1970's American slogan "Keep on Truckin'". This is the hyperreal that makes for cognitive orientation in relation to the representational free-for-all of hyperspatial postmodernism so very, very surreal and hyped up.
Urban shamans and What the #@$%?
Tribal elders in power suits and
The hyperspatial discord of cultural convergence: What the @#$%?
Lost in the web of representations; because the Real was too scary, too unmanageable, too embodied, too Real. It is safer in the "simulated real". We are presently constituted of flows: Flows of blood and shit and semen and estrogen and testosterone and the flesh of the Other --- be it a plant fiber or some blood drained meat flowing in, through, and out. When we cease to be able to flow --- when the flowing subsides --- then we are considered to be no more (at least here on Earth anyways). In order to be, then, one must be flowing to one degree or another. Flows of blood cease internally; flows of self cease externally. As I understand it to be, the fluid flux of the self is constituted in relation to what we are impressed with. What comes in as impression becomes reconstituted and repatterned --- assimilated as self. What we allow into our body, into our being, our self, our constitution is a large part of what we become --- in actual terms. We are made up of what we term the Other. In other words, we assimilate our environmental Other, reconstituting it as self --- making it a part of us, and intimately so. We are the world that we have taken in; that we have flowed in/as/through. We are made up of that Community that we are embedded in; that sustains us and nourishes us; that feeds and shelters us; that breathes and stimulates us; that one day assimilates us whole-bodily back into the five primordial elements of fire, earth, air, water, and space. The poverty stricken of Guatemala drink the raw sewage of their neighbors and family members out of necessity. The Tibetan herdsmen drink the icy runoff from the Himalayas out of necessity. The Milwaukee housewife drinks the chlorinated tapwater out of necessity. The flows become reconstituted flows. Used up bodies and waters are re-ingested by others --- treated or not. A necessary evil. I inhale what you exhale. Airborne pathogens are a dime a hundred thousand dozen. As trite as it has been made to sound: We are the world. Each one of us self-aware Bodies. Nature squared. Refining, reflecting, digressing Nature turned Culture. No postmodern hyperbole here, but 45th parallel northern-breath and Colombian coffee bean wired voice choking on Western born smog that has been windswept over the Rocky Moutains and across both the Great Plains and the Great Lakes before being exhaled once again. Off to New Foundland and Icelandic airspace. Breath.
Within the bounds of the apparent stasis is a continuing fluxual morphing. Blood flows, beating hearts, stomach digestation, pancreatic turbulence, sweaty emanations; flows. The fluxual organization occurs beyond the time of noting, as representations occur after the fact, when a flow is now --- a pure presentation of Nature's Economy. In other words, the organization is already the case --- has already occurred by the time it can be represented cognitively by the self-aware Bodies who reflect on their own innate functional capacities. Life: Flow. Death: Stillness. The living move, are not frozen in our time like the dead are.
We are constituted of flows; multiple, numerous. By thine very Flow thou shalt live. For out of them shall flow living waters; that shall be as Life to the people. Rivers. With Kosmos as the Totalizing Flow of celestial flux imparting meteoric wisdom onto earthe sphere where reside the bodies of self-awareness of every color and kind. Immersed in; we are. This is Nature's Economy, made up of, and constituted by, those very unrepentant flows of desire that arise without remorse or forgetting. Tiger shall hunt; flow of desire to consume Other, unrepentantly. Flows taking up down, taking down up, moving here there, and there to here. Fluid membranes allowing for assimilation of the once was not-me and now is me in here with us as biological we-ness. Right liver, heart, kidney, blood, corpuscle, retina, neuron? Nature's Economy, in and out, is made up the flows that are immediate and based upon necessity. Inside the Body it is done so as to be done for the Body. Let us live! Outside the Body it is done for the Other so as to be done. It is done. The flows do happen, are happening, will happen. See? They are. This is Nature's Economy. The Market, on the other hand, rather than being a pure repesentation of Nature's Economy is a creation of and through representations. The Market is an indicator of what we have deduced through reflection and analysis from Nature's Economy. And those representations that are the Market and of the Market are "only" sustained and brought to life again and again by the injected libidinal forces of Beings-who-are-Bodies. Libidinal fuel. Natural gas. The Markets not so surreal surcharge; the one that allows it to function. If there were no injection of libidinal stores from the Being-humans, who trade in bodies and forms, forces and flows, then there would be no Market such as it is. In this way Nature's Economy supports the Market, undergirds the Market --- and it is not and never the other way around. Nature's Economy is fundamental in relation to the Market. A forest of Mahogany trees are presented to us before a showroom of furniture can be represented by us. While the Market is a totalizing system of representations, Nature's Economy is a Totalizing Flow of pure presentations. The Market, and its offered up representations, is empowered alone by the displaced libidinal quotients of the investing Being-humans. The Market is not and never a replacement for the pure presentations of Nature's Economy that are the Life and the Living I ams of the Real. The pure presentations of Nature's Economy can be displaced, injected into, or re-presented in a system, such as the Market. The pure presentations are what sustain and empower the Market, or, is the sacrificial fuel hanging on the cross on behalf of the inert representations that are offered as systems of code and law. In other words, the pure presentations of Nature's Economy are what fuel the inert simulacra: the representational systems of the Market. The Real is empowering belief in the Unreal. The actual divorces itself from itself to play at simulating itself. The representational paradigm. Let's assume that the whole flowed field of pure presentations = Nature's Economy. And, whereas representations thrive only from the injection of natural libidinal quotients through belief, the pure presentations of Nature's economy, on the other hand, need make no measures to such referral from representations. Need, that is. Can, but do not need to.
Let us just say that Nature's Economy just is, like Sun and process of photosyhtesis, it just is. On the other hand, the representational paradigm, of which the Market is the greatest ideological and material force, lives on only through the injection of libidinal surpluses that the Being-humans give to it. In short, we feed the machine. We fuel it. We empower it through our belief, and also through our sacrificial offerings day by stock-ticking day. We colonize resources; inject them into the Market; the Market rises, is further empowered. We are the primary ideological participants when it comes to the Market. No one else is the position that we are in as Being-humans, who are relatively free to choose how much of we invest. What sacrifices are we willing to make? And what goes to far? What price is too high? The Market re-presents the pure presentations of Nature's Economy, while Nature's Economy simply refers to ItSelf. Nature's Economy as Totalizing Flow refers to Nothing. Nature does not take directives from the Market. The Sun has not been privatized, yet. Nature's Economy as the Pure Presentation of the Totalizing Flow we are all embedded in is our Fundamental Ground. This fact and truth is often obscured by the blinders placed over certain self-aware Bodies who are ideologically entrained, and thereby have a certain primary perception of the Real negated in favor of ideological simulacra. Nature's Economy is the whole flowed and flowing field of Pure Presentations; those Pure Presentations which are the sole source of fuel for the representational paradigm, of which the Market is the chief ideological and material force at this time. The Market rides on the back of Nature's Economy.
Now, what I see taking place in regards to the Market is that these coded representations are only sustained by the displaced libidinal forces of the Being-humans. The "simulated real" only exists because of an injection of life-force from the believer who deems that there may be a profit/pleasure gained from engagement with that simulacra. In this way, and increasingly so, the pure presentations of Nature's Economy are conscripted, through systematized propaganda, and a forced "fit" is managed. Into the Market representations we go. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily... Life is but a dream. There may be a profit/pleasure gained from engagement with that representational structure. It is not Real, but there may be a profit or pleasure gained from engagement with that simulated reality. Let's be honest here: We are now entering a period of the representational paradigm when our representations and image simulators are about to have an ever increasing effect on what has been long considered to be Real. In other words, our fabricated simulacra are going to act on the world in an increasing manner through acting on the self-aware Bodies who present the greatest threat, both to themselves and the rest of Creation. Seeking out the best simulated reality that we can find is a favorite past-time of those who can afford to engage the virtual worlds. Jean Baudrillard writes, in an alarming tone, that "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory --- PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA --- it is the map that engenders the territory... the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own". Children in the developed nations reference, not Life in relation to simulacra, but reference simulacra in relation to Life. For instance, amongst a group of teenagers at the mall I can hear a young girl say,"Oh, that is just like that scene in the movie I saw last night where....." In this way the simulated real becomes the reference point for non-simulated real; which either points to how good our simulations are becoming, or how divorced and alienated from the non-simulated world we are becoming. Another example would be the teenage crime sprees that are enacted across America more and more frequently; where the crime spree is based on a simulation, on a non-reality, on a movie or a video-game. Just like Baudrillard has already written; "...it is the map that engenders the territory". It is the map provided by the simulator which precedes the enacting of the simulated reality in real-time, with real blood and real tears in a real territory.
---Frederic Jameson
The Market is the new Greater Good. A self-regulating system of exchange with no governmental or religious oversight; no political heavy-hands with a fascist grasp on this Market! No, the Market is free. The Free Market, "as Utopian as socialism has recently been held to be". And perhaps, with no facetiousness implied, about as free "as socialism has recently been held to be", as well. Greider: "In sum, despite the reigning pieties, the global system could not properly be called a free-trade regime. When all of the contradictions, exceptions and purposeful evasions were taken into account, most of the world's trade was not a free exchange based on market prices. One way or the other trade was massaged and regulated...". Deals go on behind the scenes. Market prices get adjusted and are turned up or down based upon the power plays of those with the brass balls in hand. And for those at the bottom of the global free-trade hierarchy, there is little freedom. "Just do it" rings out around the world. This is where we run into the free-market propaganda. It is a lot like the Cold War all over again (in the sense of creating mass movements through issuing the appropriate propaganda), only this time we are sold not on a threat, but on the pot of gold waiting for us all at the end of the globalizing rainbow. Open markets and cheaper goods. Instant gratification and the Myth of E-Progress. Techno-economic revolutions and gene pool reconfigurations. It is all the same sing-song love affair; a global Narcissus staring lovingly into the pond of future reflection. Sold on the promise. "It has to be all-good. I can't wait. What a lovely sight."
Initially, according to various Market-fed in-geniuses, Nature's Economy is perceived as a non-represented chaos, a disorganization, and must be framed in representations, rendered as commodity, packaged, distributed, consumed. There. Now it's all better. The Market propaganda has grown to such an extent, that now it sells itself as a commodity. The viability of the Market and the necessity of representing Nature's Economy in Market terms is an ideological commodity traded on the street and pushed into the home via the airwaves; all of this while continually devaluing any non-representable element of Nature's Economy. Any non-ideological presence. "It must be marketable. We have to create a market for it". Jameson confirms this when he states, that, "...in the postmodern... it is the very idea of the market that is consumed with the most prodigious gratification...". This is noted duly by statesmen and consumers alike. We need to get into the Market, open markets, play the market. Yakkity-yak This raises a question: Is the map preceding the territory here? With the free-market ideologues selling that new, latest, greatest map of our Greater good, "the free-market", thereby leading to the very creation of that territory that the so-called "free-market" propagandists prescribe? We are sold on it before it arrives. We buy it sight unseen, because some propaganda engine that horsepowers the media outlets tells us so. Well, if Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather say so then it must be true... Right?
Mark Slouka: The Market and techno-revolutionary forces are what increasingly stand between the subject and any umediated reality. The Market, in concert with the media and technology, is giving birth to simulacra that as we have noted, "bears no relation to any reality whatever". This sort of "Precession of Simulacra" is what Baudrillard prophetically noted and is what Slouka intimates. We are in transitionary times. Postmodern: beyond the modern, after the modern, not yet where we are going; in transit. All we know is that we are post-modernism. Merely commenting on and offering critical analysis, like a postgame report after the Super Bowl. In these times of transition, many of us are forced to live in diverse worlds. One, the Pure Presentational world of Nature's Economy, which is our fundamental base and support for all our embodied endeavours; and two, the representational world of the various ideologies which include that new latest greatest ideology of the supreme good; that of the Market. The conflict and/or balance between pure presentations of Nature's Economy and the representations of those pure presentations is something that we all encounter and engage in, whether we know it or not. For we are each a pure presentation of Nature's Economy, born of Nature, representing no Other, unrepresentable in whole, Mystery. Yet we also must live within the representational framework of various ideologies which fall under the heading of the Market. The trick for all of us is how to fit the innate authenticity of Pure Presentation within the created-constructs of representational living, where we live according to re-presentations; re-runs. In other words, how do we live as embodied beings that are Pure Presentations of Nature's Economy, while also engaging in the representational structures that just are, but can, and often do, serve to limit and confine us unwittingly? Example: If we lean too much to the side of representational living we risk losing the awareness of ourselves as a Pure Presentation of Nature's Economy. At the same time, leaning too much to the side of Pure Presentation renders us mute in relation to the representational aspects of living here in the postmodern hyperspatial resonance and discord of global discourses. We cannot deny that we are a Pure Presentation of Nature's Economy, and yet, we cannot just remain mute in relation to the representational structures that, just by merely being alive at this time, we are forced to live with daily. This all begs the question: how to most effectively engage representations while knowing ourselves as a Pure Presentation of Nature's Economy? Or to put a postmodern paraphrasing on the words of Christ: To live "in" the world of representations but to not be "of" that world of representations. Or: To live "with" the world of representational structures, but to not define ourselves according to that world.
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