Furthering Negative Limitations (notes)

//Trying to get back in the habit of posting here....even if only a place to keep the occasional note, such as this one for the Thornscape essay.//

When identity (executive synchronic function) is removed or blunted forcibly, there can be an instinctive
fightback against this loss (which is not dangerous or problematic on its own, but only relative to certain
mental outlooks that privilege the Self as Center).

This fight itself (in brain terms: pathologically persistent search functions operating on zero data/an
empty frame of reference OR the pathological addition of new data to a frame that is in the process of
being emptied or broken) generates new identity-frames that temporally extend the experience of
dissociation. This can be extended toward a limit where, when we reach a point at which “bare” identity
is generated out of “nothing”, every glimpse of a frameless state autogenerates a new frame that
emerges directly into a state of autodeconstruction. This oscillation prevents a “clean” experience of
the frameless void-state/mors mystica, and prolonged exposure to this oscillation can generate
extreme anxiety, depression, various and sundry negative or painful brain states (this can resemble
tinnitus - depending on certain environmental factors, you can actually *hear* the oscillation).

This can last indefinitely because every recovery attempt generates movement away from the
frameless space, leading to a state in which the identity only remains insofar as it is connected to loss
or pain or whatever is removing the frames - i.e. a negative bias against frame-removal will result in
the pain of breaking frames, fear of lost frames, grasping at new frames, etc; while a positive bias
toward frame-removal will experience negativity in the sense of being unable to speed up the removal
without generating new frames, fear of being unable to prevent the generation of new frames,
grasping at nothingness, etc.

His Brain was Infected by Devils: Tinnitus as Master Sound, Waveguide to the Frameless State

/// ...Another trait the flat tone. No life. Same flat tone at all times.
For its affirmations. For its negations. For its interrogations.
For its exclamations. For its imperations. Same flat tone. You were once.
You were never. Were you ever? Oh never to have been! Be again. Same flat tone...

Samuel Beckett -- Company ///

Originary Bleakness from the Voidmouth : Bleaker Than Bleak by PJE

Hopefully Paul doesn't mind if I post this…originally on Three Pound Brain. Too good not to share. 

Bleaker than Bleak (by Paul J. Ennis)

Bleak theory accepts that it itself is almost entirely wrong. However, precisely on the basis that it accepts humans are almost always wrong about how it goes with the world and so what are the chances of this theory being right? In this paradoxical, confused sense it is a theory of human fallibility. Or the inability of humans to see themselves for what they are, even when, as per contemporary neuroscience, we kind of know (have you not yet heard the “good” news that you are not what you think you are?). We kind of know because we are beginning to see ourselves from the third-person perspective. Subjectivity is devolving into objectivity and objectivity entails seeing things clearly, even if not transparently. That opacity, always there in the subject-object distinction, is collapsing and the consequences are bleak. The second reality-appearance “appeared” as a crack we cracked. It has been going on ever since. Consider the insanity of the entire post-Kantian tradition and the in-itself – is it not just an expression of what it feels like when you recognise what was once a “transparent cage” (Sartre) of looking directly at the world is a hallucination, a real one, all the same.

We cannot outpace this very blindspot that renders us a self or a subject. We are deluded about our beliefs or intentions (a given, so to speak), but more significantly we are deluded that somehow we can ‘recursively’ leap ‘over our own shoulders’ and see not just the trick, as Bakker might put it, but something substantial. Rather than just a model or a process withholding information from “you” yourself. Your own brain lies to you. It hides noise (‘data-reduction’) so that you do not collapse into a schizophrenia of buzzing information. This much Bergson, Deleuze, and Meillassoux have suggested is a most horrifying possibility. If all the data of the world flowed in you would be at one with matter, but what would you hear? Do you even want to countenance what that might involve? Hell is all around you. Your brain is just trying its best to stop you being lit on fire.

Everything is pretty patterns (Ladyman and Ross) and you are too. The problem with patterns is that sometimes they clash. If the brain has been hacked together it’s bound to be buggy as hell. Look at your computer. One subpersonal process goes askew and you need it fixed. The technician tries a few things, maybe it works, or maybe it does not. Maybe, as in severe cases of schizophrenia or depression, you just have a crappy system. I’ve said before that consciousness is the holocaust of happiness, meant sincerely, not lightly, and by this I mean that if the conditions or constraints that created a self never came together, in just the way it has for us, there would never have been any conscious suffering. Consciousness is the final correlate of all human suffering. You can blame almost anything else, but had “we” (is it really “us”) never believed we should be stable, integrated selves none of the bugs that followed would have appeared. Our world would have been a beautiful, empty, unthinking collection of material patterns: perhaps even a heaven of unthinking noise?

Chaos, as I am sure you have heard, is a ladder, but so too is evolution. Lifted up from the dregs of biology into cultural evolution we came to see what nothing else could see. Some foolishly believed this was a gift. Civilisation was realised. When in reality each one was built on war. Philosophers know how to dance around this problem: we can think our way, collectively, toward a more rational, constrained future. Except collective intelligence most often works best when deployed toward destructive ends: where do you find the most creative minds? The war-room. ‘War, everywhere I look…’ (Tormentor). To make it explicit, so to speak, if you want new masters, as Lacan said, you will find them. Look into the dead eyes of those who desire freedom and there rests fear. Fear that they will build a palace of reason only for the stability so hard fought for to collapse under the weight of the chronic irrationalism of the baser human aspect, untameable, unpredictable, and unknowable. History books are the evidence you stack up to adduce this, but at least today we have learnt enough to include the accelerated process of decline into our calculations. We no longer fight our enemies. We kiss them on the mouth and ask if we can join them in the decadent decline in advance.

I know I should not speak like this. What a waste to spend your time reasoning about the impossibility of one day sticking the hook in and indexing some little part of reality that, Tetris-like, delivers temporary respite. Only, of course, here comes more bricks. As I feel, always in my very bones, what I know is coming, the far-off end (it is never close enough), bleak theory morphs into even and ever bleaker theory, sometimes just bleak, once bleaker than black, but now bleaker than bleak. Rust Cohle, in True Detective, at one points let’s his interrogators know: ‘I know who I am. And after all these years, there’s a victory in that.’ It is the most paradoxical of victories. The “pyrrhic” victory of traditional philosophy, found in thinkers as diverse as Husserl and Meillassoux, where one gains a foothold on the world after a long struggle. The question bleak theory asks, adrift the perennial tradition, is whether knowing who we are will result in precisely the inverse of the oldest goal of philosophical self-knowledge: we cannot understand ourselves except as that entity which cannot truly know itself. Know thyself? Perhaps all along it has been the wrong question.

The tradition of philosophy always hinges on a subtle revision of position and orientation. This is the generative process whereby, for instance, the ambiguity of postmodern philosophy culminates in a counter-revolution of rational normativity. This is our contemporary example, but it is found everywhere. Heidegger ontologising phenomenology. Hegel gobbling up the Kantian noumena. Today there is possibly another: one that, again to evoke Rust Cohle, means to ‘start asking the right fucking questions.’ Not about what we are, but what we are not: “transcendental egos,” “subjects,” or “selves.” Perhaps not even “agents,” but I leave that problem for other minds to debate. I know what I am, a ‘disinterested onlooker’ (Husserl), but deluded that I am unconcerned.

True madness lies ahead for our species. Normativity, humanism, anti-reductionism, anything not bathed in the acid of neuroscience are all contributing to a sharpening of the knives. Building dams to keep the coming dissolution at bay they will render the shattering of the illusion that much harsher, harder. We are not going to Mars. We are going to go out of our minds.

.

[ Dr. Paul J. Ennis is a Research Fellow in the School of Business, Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Continental Realism (Zero Books, 2011), co-editor with Peter Gratton of the Meillassoux Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and co-editor with Tziovanis Georgakis of Heidegger in the Twenty-First Century (Springer, 2015). A version of bleak theory, ‘Bleak,’ first appeared in the DVD booklet for A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (Soda Pictures, 2014).]//////////////////////

veneration of violation

(from an "audition review" for a doom/sludge blog.)

SWANS - COP (1984)

a ritual of humiliation.
an endurance test.
a glorification of submission, even as it is repeatedly proven horrific, unsafe, and weak.
an ugly tombstone over buried happiness.
the opening riff of Half Life never ends, grinding you down as effectively as it grinds the laborer of the lyrics, passive and crushed by an obscene but far from otherworldy tyrant. in fact, the real-ness of their pessimism, unburdened (on this album, at least) by concerns for the metaphysical, adds an urgency to lyrics such as
"ambition is senseless
don't make a wrong move work with a purpose"
...sounding for all the world like a fellow prisoner of the Machine whispering the "rules" to a newcomer, an outsider, in an effort to help him understand his place and the hopelessness of any attempt to deviate from the Work. the constant downward trajectory of the main phrase drags you ever deeper into this machinery, into the hole. a pervasive atmosphere of meaningless toil and futility numbs you into accepting it.

the lurching stutter of Job (track 2) splits this inelegant droning with a confused "waking up" that slowly solidifies into a grooving chant, an effort to regain some feeling of the natural, of something organic. from there it begins slipping into and out of rhythm while equally wavering between the elemental and the structural, between tearing apart and desperately gripping. the song culminates with an exhausted wearing down, carrying the burden of heartache as a mantra until collapse.

the third track Why Hide opens on firmer ground, insistent bass and solid, compact drumming providing an ominous foreground for the exorcising of an overwhelming lyrical nihilism. bathing in a crushing lockstep, m gira shouts why hide the lie?? over and over as if THIS was the moment he was waiting for to ask the question of his abuser. as if his oppressor was looking through him, dead-eyed, as he recorded the vocals.

barely a pause for breath between tracks, but those silences are a welcome glimpse outside the isolation this album evokes. these are not dance songs. you are fitted for the collar from the first seconds and it never relents in its exertion of power and domination. the listener is never in a position of control, is never allowed to relate to the dominant perspective even when (especially when) those perspectives are shown. there are only brief moments where the pain and discipline let up to take a deep breath before intensifying. Clay Man wastes little time establishing a musical corollary to the dissonant drive into sexual submission. the ghoulish lines "get into this car bow your head down" over painfully grinding mechanical drones twist the Work alluded to in previous tracks into an obedient acceptance. unexpected chokes and lunges in the noise feel like the moment a bone breaks or a dentist wrenches a tooth free, the onset of a panic attack, an unwilling orgasm. the last minute brings with it an undeniable pulsing heaviness that, almost ironically, forces you to bob your head in time as it sucks the air from your lungs. maximum volume, indeed.

Your Property disguises itself well as a rebellious shout at Control, until you realise it as the desperate howls of someone learning it was their own weakness that led to control in the first place. Authority is corrupt and corrupts, Authority is worshipped nonetheless. to be trapped in this is perceived as an ultimate weakness and the vocals grow harsher, the music more nakedly aggressive as it briefly loses a pretense of subtlety. inward contempt is far more malign than any exterior assault.

track six. Cop. this is where it gets dark.
it slithers in sinister, sleazy, initially maintaining a calm demeanor. proclaiming "the punishment fits the crime" and judging the guilty in a combination holding cell/execution chamber over an unhealthy melody that, despite being nearly atonal, subtly reinforces the infectious reptilian menace of this song's mood. as the beating continues, the music keeps steady as a metronome, placidly describing atrocity with an almost-accessible laid back throbbing. through the primary section the perspective never fully sets on victim or bystander until finally collapsing into a hypnotic, martial agony that (in a ferocious dichotomy) gradually but spectacularly crumbles and bursts until nothing is left.

after all the buildup of intensity, all the intentional and directed increase in depth and hostility, Butcher is all hanging tension. a pause in a relentless attack on the Self juuuusst long enough to see outside and warn someone. "don't be a whore you could be screwing yourself", advice given from a position of intimate knowledge of a great darkness. the music never seems to resolve, solidifying the uncomfortable and unsettling feelings elicited by words like "you're in the wrong skin i don't recognise your smell" and "you're too close".

halting, cacophonous bursts of feedback scream above a strangled, sluggish drone that sets the stage for the final catharsis of degradation. Thug is confrontational and provocative in a sneering passive aggression. "obedience pays if you use it right", but "the only real thing's misery"…..words finally breaking down into paroxysm and even a seven second fade out feels suffocating and endless. Having this album on repeat for a few hours in order to write about it pulled me through a significantly more visceral and challenging experience than i expected, even having heard the record quite a few times before. it forces one to inhabit all of the negative spaces it describes in ways most art (and even a great deal of the hostile stimuli referred to in the lyrics) can't come close to replicating, and it left me shaken, stretched thin, and feeling sickly afterward in such a way that almost overwhelms any possible cathartic value.