Photographie, Arme de classe

Runaway

There are sparkles of rain on the bright
Hair over your forehead;
Your eyes are wet and your lips
Wet and cold, your cheek rigid with cold.
Why have you stayed
Away so long, why have you only
Come to me late at night
After walking for hours in wind and rain?
Take off your dress and stockings;
Sit in the deep chair before the fire.
I will warm your feet in my hands;
I will warm your breasts and thighs with kisses.
I wish I could build a fire
In you that would never go out.
I wish I could be sure that deep in you
Was a magnet to draw you always home.

Kenneth Rexroth

I am a man with no ambitions 

And few friends, wholly incapable 

Of making a living, growing no younger,

Fugitive of some just doom.

Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?

At midnight I make myself a jug

Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds. 

In a torn grey robe and old beret, 

I sit in the cold writing poems, 

Drawing nudes on the crooked margins,

Copulating with sixteen year old

Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.

Kenneth Rexroth

Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere 

unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world.

Joseph Roth


daZipLair

When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world—no matter how imperfect—becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love. (now it rubs the damn lotion on !)

Søren Kierkegaard

psychic maladies such as depression and burnout define our times. In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation…the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes of optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, with the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity (Positivmaschine). The neoliberal subject is running aground on the imperative of self optimization, that is, on the compulsion always to achieve more and more. Healing, it turns out, means killing.

...

Power that is smart and friendly does not operate frontally – i.e., against the will of those who are subject to it. Instead, it guides their will to its own benefit. It says ‘yes’ more often than ‘no’; it operates seductively, not repressively. It seeks to call forth positive emotions and exploit them. It leads astray instead of erecting obstacles. Instead of standing opposed to the subject, smart and friendly power meets the subject halfway. Smart power cosies up to the psyche rather than disciplining it through coercion or prohibitions. It does not impose silence. Rather, it is constantly calling on us to confide, share and participate: to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences – to tell all about our lives. Friendly power proves more powerful, as it were, than purely repressive power. It manages not to be seen at all. Today’s crisis of freedom stems from the fact that the operative technology of power does not negate or repress freedom so much as exploit it. Free choice (Wahl) is eliminated to make way for a free selection (Auswahl) from among the items on offer. Smart power with a liberal, friendly appearance – power that stimulates and seduces – is more compelling than power that imposes, threatens and decrees. Its signal and seal is the Like button. Now, people subjugate themselves to domination by consuming and communicating – and they click Like all the while. Neoliberalism is the capitalism of ‘Like’. It is fundamentally different from nineteenth-century capitalism, which operated by means of disciplinary constraints and prohibitions. Smart power reads and appraises our conscious and unconscious thoughts. It places its stock in voluntary self-organization and self-optimization. As such, it has no need to overcome resistance. Mastery of this sort requires no great expenditure of energy or violence. It simply happens. The capitalism of Like should come with a warning label: Protect me from what I want.

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Byung-Chul Han

Modernity is not distinguished by an aversion to violence. Violence is simply protean. It varies its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. Today it is shifting from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual, from the physical to the psychological, from the negative to the positive, withdrawing into the subcutaneous, subcommunicative, capillary and neuronal space, creating the false impression that it has disappeared. It becomes completely invisible at the moment it merges with its opposite, that is, with freedom. Martial violence is currently giving way to an anonymized, desubjectified, systemic violence that conceals itself as such because it becomes one with society.

Topology of Violence

Byung-Chul Han  

back in print

A template for pranksters, artists, adventurers and anyone interested in rampant creativity, for years to come. 

Tales Of The San Francisco Cacophony Society tells the history of the most influential underground cabal that you have never heard of. 

Rising from the ashes of the mysterious and legendary Suicide Club, The Cacophony Society, at its zenith, hosted chapters in over a dozen major cities, and influenced much of what was once called the underground. 

Flash Mobs, Urban Exploration, and Culture Jamming are a few of the pop culture trends that Cacophony helped kick off. 

Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, Burning Man and Internet social networking powerhouse Laughing Squid were informed and inspired by Cacophony. The Burning Man Festival actually began as a Cacophony event as did the annual, and now world-wide SantaCon.

Cacophony events could range from something as simple as climbing the Golden Gate Bridge or having a discussion over drinks about a movie seen together, to something as elaborate as The Atomic Café — an event involving a hundred bedraggled "nuclear holocaust Survivors" mounting elaborate costumed rituals throughout the bowels of a massive abandoned tooth paste factory.

Yes.... Cacophony was that strange.

Elephant's Eye

Roy DeCarava (1961)

Roy DeCarava

There is nothing to realise.
There is nothing new to gain.
On the other hand a man must lose his ignorance. 
That is all.

Sri Ramana Maharshi

I am skeptical. 

Anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary — it just helps people cope. However, it could also be making things worse. Instead of encouraging radical action, it says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live. And yet mindfulness zealots believe that paying closer attention to the present moment without passing judgment has the revolutionary power to transform the whole world. It’s magical thinking on steroids.

Mindfulness is sold and marketed as a vehicle for personal gain and gratification. Self-optimization is the name of the game. I want to reduce my stress. I want to enhance my concentration. I want to improve my productivity and performance. One invests in mindfulness as one would invest in a stock hoping to receive a handsome dividend. Another fellow skeptic, David Forbes, sums this up in his book Mindfulness and Its Discontents:

Which self wants to be de-stressed and happy? Mine! The Minefulness Industrial Complex wants to help your self be happy, promote your personal brand — and of course make and take some bucks (yours and mine) along the way. The simple premise is that by practicing mindfulness, by being more mindful, you will be happy, regardless of what thoughts and feelings you have, or your actions in the world.

Of course, this is a reflection of capitalist norms, which distort many things in the modern world. However, the mindfulness movement actively embraces them, dismissing critics who ask if it really needs to be this way.

Mindfulness is now said to be a $4 billion industry, propped up by media hype and slick marketing by the movement’s elites. More than 100,000 books for sale on Amazon have a variant of “mindfulness” in their title, touting the benefits of Mindful Parenting, Mindful Eating, Mindful Teaching, Mindful Therapy, Mindful Leadership, Mindful Finance, a Mindful Nation, and Mindful Dog Owners, to name just a few. There is also The Mindfulness Coloring Book, a bestselling subgenre in itself. Besides books, there are workshops, online courses, glossy magazines, documentary films, smartphone apps, bells, cushions, bracelets, beauty products and other paraphernalia, as well as a lucrative and burgeoning conference circuit. Mindfulness programs have made their way into public schools, Wall Street and Silicon Valley corporations, law firms, and government agencies including the US military. Almost daily, the media cite scientific studies reporting the numerous health benefits of mindfulness and the transformative effects of this simple practice on the brain.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

Ronald E. Purser

The inevitability of war is in you. The military wars out there are the extension of what is going on all the time inside you. Why is there a war waging inside you? Because you search for peace. The instrument you are using in your attempt to be at peace with yourself is war.

There is already peace in man. You need not search. The living organism is functioning in an extraordinarily peaceful way. Man’s search for truth is born out of this same search for peace. He only ends up disturbing and violating the peace that is already there in the body. So what we are left with is the war within man, and the war without. It’s an extension of the same thing.

Our search in this world for peace, being based upon warfare, will lead only to war, towards man’s damnation.

UG Krishnamurti

Man, the animal who knows he is not safe here, who needs continued affirmations of his powers, is the one animal who is implacably driven to work beyond animal needs precisely because he is not a secure animal. The origin of human drivenness is religious because man experiences creatureliness; the amassing of a surplus, then, goes to the very heart of human motivation, the urge to stand out as a hero, to transcend the limitations of the human condition and achieve victory over impotence and finitude.

Ernest Becker

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

Ernest Becker

“We can do our best to push death to the margins, keeping corpses behind stainless-steel doors and tucking the sick and dying in hospital rooms. So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals. But we are not. We are all going to die and we know it. As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.” The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m. Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves.”

Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

Ernest Becker