formatting edits to concrete pluralism and moloch meme

content/exeunt/Concrete Pluralism.md

@@ -11,27 +11,34 @@ date: 2024-03-25
 1. I am sitting in cafe Kava Saia off of East Burnside in Portland, the Pacific Northwest, the Portland Basin, formerly inhabited by Chinookan-speaking tribes - Clackamas, Kathlamet, Multnomah, and Tualatin, whose art in the pre-Columbian period is noted by a Chinook Nation blog to have contained a prevalence of mirror imagery, skeletal or “x-ray” portrayals of human and animal forms and a preference for the numbers 3 and 5. The number 3 in Jung is said to signify surface, flatness - it is the second digit in the figure 137, the reciprocal of the fine structure constant (1/137). Wolfgang Pauli - physicist, author of the Pauli Exclusion Principle and lifelong correspondent with Jung - was obsessed by the number 137’s general persistence in the physical sciences, and it is the Pauli-Jung correspondence that I sit here, at Kava Saia, reading with my mug of Holy Basil and only partial interest.
 
     The number is a so-called “naked number,” meaning that its appearance in the equations is independent of units - it is here in the soil, in the concrete, in the kava, a fundamental information-trace of the electrodynamic that binds our reality. Information, according to the physicist Sarah Imari Walker, is that material feature that is bigger in time than humans can directly cognize. Materialize time, the logic goes, and you’ve materialized information; no dear concepts in the pure abyss, all of us just here, entangled and responsible for each other in the great upheaval of the block universe. This thought parasites my brain just as the streetlight outside of Kava Saia flickers.
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 2. The signal from the depths has no godly explanation - that is, the specific dynamics behind this flickering lay out there in the morphospace, unobserved, beyond any authority, and all I have to play with is that Bayesian purview known as “in all likelihood.” All things have a cause, it should be affirmed without doubt, and yet this empirical principle must reckon with the the threshold of accountability that is _matter-in-time_. That limit point is sometimes framed as distant and theoretical, or irrelevantly small - the so called “measurement problem” - but I promise you this uncertainty whelms our whole environment, a beguiling tumult that frightens our planners, ruins intelligence officers, latent cybernetic inspiration that no creature or body has learned to control.
 
     Being beyond our direct evolutionary area of concern, these operations have caused some to appeal to the supernatural, to construct _deities_, forms that might explain the exponential level-up in network effects that occur when you include the vastness of time in your graph (and all the mysteries therein). Ancient conflation of the mysterious with the mystical: they are beyond our threshold, but they are no less physical for being so. All these wild behaviors of the material network - what physicists call the “circuit complexity” - they are epistemic traps, dense chemical and biological and informational entanglements, pure cognitive turbulence. Their unknown physicality is a locust of power, the models and representations we assign to them giving us an **ɑ** for effort as they carry along in an ordered march beyond their own persistence, more actual than is knowable. More actual than is knowable - this is an appropriate definition of a city.
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 3. In 2016 the City of Portland overhauled the residential streetlight system from the low-pressure sodium lights extant since the 1930s - described by one commentator of the time as having a “eerie, ominous quality” - to the Amerlux-brand LED 3000 K CCT units, saving the city $100k per month from the novel efficiency of the LED bulbs. That lamplight buzz you heard skateboarding late at night as a teenager disappeared. Still, aura: the A in Amerlux resonates with Pauli’s troubled fine structure constant, which has the symbol **ɑ** - _alpha_. Amerlux is a subsidiary of Delta group, _delta_ defined by Cambridge as an area of low, flat land, sometimes shaped approximately like a triangle, where a river divides into several smaller rivers before flowing into the sea. Delta waves are high amplitude neural oscillations that occur in deep sleep, known as stage 3-4 of Non-REM sleep, between 0.5 and 4 hertz, last on the cusp of the REM stage where vivid dreams occur.
 
     Mysteriously, the dive into REM sleep closely mirrors the neural patterns of stage 1, which is why it is sometimes known as “paradoxical sleep.”
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 4. Karen Barad writes, in “What Flashes Up,”: “Memory is not a mere property of individual subjects, but a material condition of the world. Memory- the pattern of sedimented enfoldings of iterative intra-activity- is written into the fabric of the world. The world ‘holds’ the memory of all traces; or rather, the world _is_ its memory (enfolded materialization).”
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 5. Fungi biofilms line Portland’s mostly above-ground electric grid, cladosporium, penicillium and aspergillus thriving in the damp Pacific Northwest climate, forming a kind of shadow biome to this electro-prosthetic infrastructure of the urban human organism. The prefix _urb_is not of Greek or Latin but Etruscan origin, and it seems that the division of the Western-style city into four squares is an inheritance from Etruscan ritual practice, a diagrammatic capture of inhabited reality that persists from those ageless magicians to this shadow biome, crawling along cardinal latitudes. The fungi generate acetic acid as they metabolize, reacting with the aluminum in the electric wires to create miniscule amounts of aluminum oxide (_the latter being its chemical composition before industrial refinement in what is known as the Hall–Héroult process, invented almost simultaneously by the American Charles Martin Hall and the French [Paul Héroult](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_H%C3%A9roult) when they were both 23 : they both died in 1914, the year of the great war, at the age of 51_).
 
     The corroded or renaturalized Al2O3 is an “in all likelihood” explanation for my Kava Saia synchronicity, aptitudes of light, flickering out there in trials of cause and effect that were networked up in an object space that I cannot know - the barely objective relations, the creativity of them, the power. Synchronicities, connections, what flashes up is the iceberg’s edge of sleeping processes that are wide awake here in the paradoxical city.
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 6. The city is a network, a fold, cosmopolitan, cosmic, transhistorical. To look at it with open eyes is to see the vast extent of our entanglement, the astonishing figure of it, a snake of tightly bound wires within which are hidden countless dimensional recesses. Recesses. In the Old Latin, _port_ meant _house_ or _place of habitation, refuge_, but this definition evolved organically from the original sense: _gate_. “But what if beauty were understood,” Fred Moten writes in _The Universal Machine_,  “as the material difference of another, heretofore unimaginable interiority of­ things, whose unlocatable loci are the quarters, territories, borderlands, passages, bridges, cisterns, and tunnels that reveal the very structural openness of the polis in and by way of the scars that mark its always incomplete historical closures?”
 
     Under the concrete, in every alley, in the air aloft, particles tangle across time and space with signs and patterns that are fugitive, dead letters sent to you from the gate in a shape familiar yet charged with the nuclear glow of illegibility and inhuman contingency. The city is a place of rude and anonymous productivity. Beyond all surveillance, flat deltas of all of the classes of being invert and mirror in threes and fives until they reach an origami depth, “unimaginable interiority,” riffing envelopes of _musique concrète_, the splice tape patchwork of _Bitches Brew,_ the fragmented surface of a crazy quilt.
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 7. The chinook word for eye, something like “[siyáxus](https://chinookjargon.com/2020/04/30/eyes-are-related-to-mirror/)” is closely related to [shilakom](https://chinookjargon.com/2020/04/27/a-chinookan-etymology-for-mirror/), the word for “mirror.” This is my city. Look and see, along flat deltas, the great inversion.
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 8. I have moved from the cafe to B-Sides pub, 20 yards east - and from Holy Basil to beer. The entire length of the barside above me is umbrella’d by dim flat lights through which x-ray photos of actual bone fractures shine. The occult mysteries at Eleusis are thought now to have sprung from a barley-based beer tainted with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, a trip (we know from an unlikely outbreak in Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951 from tainted Rye) that can engender visions of hell and the dead. I spent weeks at this bar before I noticed the decor. The vision of reality I tend to favor came synchronously from French philosopher Bruno Latour (recently passed) and American Manuel DeLanda: “flat ontology,” the philosophical conviction that all categories of being are _real_.
 
     It’s a strange hybrid of rationalism and utter medieval mysticism, the way we classify and subordinate the beings around us, apparently an inheritance from a supernatural notion of the Great Chain of Being (the episteme that arguably sparked the European colonial project). This is the enemy of the flat ontologists. Paradoxically, this regarding of the world in flatness, releasing the beings from this subordination, is so foreign and disorienting to the average superstitious Westerner as to be almost psychedelic, resembling a spiritual ordeal (or ergot poisoning).
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     This MDF divider imitates a cross-grain veneer style developed by Egyptian woodworkers, the secret early progenitors of Pythagorean insights that sprouted mystery schools and gnostic sects, cults of worship of the virtual forms that bred disdain for the human body internalized two thousand years hence in the Victorian sensibility in whose ruins we still live, in whose temporal lobe latrines we still dwell. Contemptus Mundi. Those psychic binaries engineer our internal architectures, mental maps that are virtual but not unreal, taking their shape in miniscule molecular structures in our brains - yes, the architecture of our shame lives somewhere, and we project it into our daily lives as a fractal multiscale paint brush that sculpts a world of things and creatures far transcending its scale. Sharpie tags alert the paths of fecal microbes that will persist in an epigenetic trace for centuries; you look into the mirror and see in the material alight your own collagen image, a drunken trigger that drains the blood flow in your stomach, starving the biome, escalating a hormone whose whim will inspire a work that appears in an art gallery down the street, joining a chorus of  “expression” reaching back to Botticelli, to a 40,000-year-old lion man carved of mammoth ivory - art being an object of ochre and self-directed rage, lapis lazuli and silicon and mammoth tusks, bathroom tags and trinitarian cosmic arrogance, entangled orchestra and a democracy of objects whose influence upon your own personal universe has taken you on aleatory internal star-flights where you are unaccountable to yourself, unsurveilled calcium highways in the brain that bubble in the city’s cultural underground into cybernetic inspiration upon billboards and streetwear and language flows, ecstatic process in free turbulence.
 
     The city is a place of rude and anonymous productivity, electric with butterfly effects, interparticipatory with the slightest being, with Chicxulub impacts and funeral dirges, stick-nest rats and gravitational waves, a burgeoning family of second order effects sleeping together entangled on the flat urban delta.
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 9. This is the paradoxical materiality of things: The valorization of classes of being, the powerful’s deluded conviction of cosmic hierarchy can be glacial in consequence, generating second order effects and contradictions that invalidate the hierarchical claim, but don’t drain it of its power. Or not yet. That’s up to us.
 
     The glacial metaphysics that are most naturalized are the ones that are most powerful. We aren’t speaking in conspiracies. This is the matter: the acceptance of nondemocratic or authoritarian structures in economic life - which is the very life of value, of judgment, arbitration of what will persist and grow and what will whither away. The embeddedness of those antisocial practices in a game whose assumptions have been naturalized to the point where their interrogation is, in the house of power, unspeakable. The capture of that cybernetic threshold, the _wall_, which is power itself, behind a curtain of ‘personal responsibility,’ of ‘individual achievement,’ of cogito. Germinal process colonized by a supernatural inspiration that only sees the self in things, that will have you scorching ecosystems for a ergotless white claw on an outsized boat in whose material inspiration all you can see is mirrors and mirrors of _you_.
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 10. This game seems to involve a calculated confusion of the ancient coordination technology of credit-debit ledgers with fealty to a regime of violence that is supposed to have special sanction to divulge and limit access to that technology. The corporate and bureaucratic digitization of that coordination imperialism. The extensive, systematic sanction and ideological encouragement of credit accumulation activities as an end in themselves. The breaking open of an age-old, community contingent contract. The creation of a violent antisocial tension that self-referentially occasions the needs for the very regime of violence that initiated it.  A theater of self-reference imported from the wizard logic of wartime imperial economies - arrogant Assumption, the sky on fire, War all the time. A finite game.
 
     Math, brains, silica: what if you could construct a witch’s brew that embraced the multiscale chaos of being - of the city? That rode the forms even as they break out of their classes, delivering a dose of ontological flatness to those who can’t help but Assume, Subordinate? The primal battle of the computer age, Von Neumann versus Terence Mckenna: do we use this tool to set the sky on fire, or to explore our commonness, and the otherness that commonness permits and lets flourish?
 
     This is nothing else than the x-ray realization that ideas are time, they grow and they weave, and those who help them break out of their classes will unlock the power of their entanglements. Abundant experimentation with the entire field of economic models is the prerogative not of some abstract past but of us, here in now, as we work to conceptualize through practice and perfect through empirical reflection the problem of being in a world of thermodynamic constraints, of negotiating our commonness and our singularity in a way that is productive and nourishing of both.
 
     This is the call of the city, its flat and mirrored mechanics, the democracy of beings: the use of technology to expand the Overton window, break the subordination, the calculated denial of the materiality of money and finance, the biomes it negotiates, the entanglements it dictates and the death it occasions and our actual agency over those outcomes.  So that this crucial dimension of our lives ceases to be a mystification, a feature of seemingly divine ordainment, and becomes one of direct agency at the level of individuals, communities and the global tribes that traverse them.
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 11. The city is a cosmological plateau. Entanglements bleed out of all boxes. Urban localism isn't about our immediate surroundings, it is about touching the edges of the hyperobjects that animate our social field, and cultivating, on an embodied and community level, the technological and social ability to enact agency over them.  When you look into the mirror, the image of your Self hides a dynamic harmony -  Australian Bauxite, Great Plains Silica, Magnesium, concept, pressure, light. Before being shaped by collagen skin into Thales’ rectangle this mysterious matter stood witness to the flaming radioactive sun of untold millenia, a godless hydrogen overseer lighting with naked-number contentment the face of reality in its utter (generative) pluralism.
 
     Technologies that dethrone the complexity-denying rule of the great State fictions are technologies of reality. Graffiti, street rhythms, pidgin codes - the distributed ledger joins the ancient tradition of the city as it puts on public display the interstitial wall of reality production that nobody owns, the Common-wealth of our material world’s entangled genesis.