[2nd cycle] Encounters of power and potential..

Make no mistake, modern man is advertised man, manipulated man, intellectually-arrested man. What used to be respected as the power of thought, even by those who largely lacked it, has become a thing mocked today by the shrieking laughter and hedonic hilarity of the modern world, the world that the science and politics of advertising has given us, a gross distortion slowly sinking into an undifferentiated madness. The problems of defining human nature aside this living nature, still largely in potentia, is not so much under attack as outright denied, manipulated and thrown again into shackles. Man is told he cannot be this, he must be that; to think has always been detrimental to the wider culture, but today un-thinking is actually the dominant and necessary structural component of society. 


Man is a ghost, we alone see him. Man is one who both gapes at everything and is gaped at, his mode and method are to gape for he is a man who cannot process or reason his thoughts or feelings and would look upon the prospect of doing so with great horror. Modern man has a gaping hole through the center of him, he is transparent, he lacks any substance or cohesion. Food and entertainment are his drugs, sex and fashion his gods, slavery his life and time his death.


If advertising is to be turned and utilized for living rather than dying means, what would we advertise? But the position has already been stated that if advertising can be redeemed then we may be sure that man himself can never be. For if the cure is worse than the poison and the patient does not die but enters into a disabled state from which recovery becomes impossible, then the disease has progressed in the shadows to the point where it consumes fully the inner essence and health -- upon what non-pathological basis must we conclude otherwise? Man is already becoming invisible to us, we philosophers, yet more even than this we struggle with the problem of our own nature, of our own response and necessary action in the face of this problem of man. 


In a world where everything is a fashion statement the genuine act becomes pre-empted and its motive impossibilized. Somehow even the philosophers have largely become convinced that they can sell out in their day-time and still pursue something real and worthy in their night-time. But no true philosopher ancient or modern, no real thinker would ever subscribe to such a notion nor would he allow himself to be convinced that his participation in the dominant political-economic forms of hegemony and fascism can somehow produce means to reinvent or overthrow these forms. Yet even so it cannot be said that we are bound by the limits and errors of those who came before us, and the question remains of to what extent we can either build upon, or must concede to, that which has preceded us. 


Our role in the history of philosophy speaks to our new role in the world, in its future. To reform thought itself, to work with great authenticity and without compromise toward our ideal, to not allow ourselves to be convinced of our efficacy within the dominant forms of death, and perhaps to "endure the final dissolution of culture" -- is man doomed, can he not be reformed, do we really believe he can be manipulated into a self? To approach this question is to approach ourselves, to approach our power and the (de-)limit(-ation) of that power, its possibilization. What we must do now, we authentic ones, we suffering ones, we true living beings, we relics, we destinies, is to reinforce our own method and make ourselves strong in our own capacity against the capacity of all other forms of strength that would seek to entice us into weakness with the mere images of power. If advertising is indeed the lasting structure of power in this world then how must the philosopher approach this power? Ought we ignore this gross offense completely and focus our efforts on the forms of the future alone, to call lovingly to these forms at the expense of all present today, or must we fall in love with the modern mechanisms of life, falling into these mechanisms armed with our own drive to dominate, with our own will to power? Modernity is perhaps that which precisely the philosopher must forsake if he is to prevent the destruction of philosophy, and therefore also prevent the destruction of man. Or, perhaps the philosophical can again be found in the roots of this world, perhaps something truthful and vital might yet emerge from the detritus of decaying things.

We cannot get out of the system, but now neither can anyone else. The Dali Lama has Twitter. The masons have Zuckerberg. No one is going anywhere without anyone else. It's scary, and it's cozy. It's free-balled and meticulously planned. It's overbearing surveillance and the limitless potential of global interconnectivity. There are those who are running off to escape the system, but the system is everywhere. I have said this for a long time: there is nowhere to hide. We can mitigate life by moving to organic farming communities and things like that, but the real decisions being made about the direction of our species will not come from places like that, so why bother with something like that? I am genuinely asking, because I have not really received that great of a response.

Regardless, here we are.

But to get here we have given up all language. We have to give up morality. We had to give up a lot of things. I am not disputing that.

I am arguing that you cannot have one without the other. You cannot hope to do anything interesting or progressive without being connected, but you cannot be connected without it threatening to take over completely. Like nature's dance, like the body, like the stars and the waves, it is a balance. We must remember that. Because now that so many smart people can get together and wax on about the type of society they would like to live in, it's easy to forget that this is a cosmic circus, and we're just barely in the opening act.

The first interesting act, as far as I am concerned, is the internet. Websites.

What is a (Successful) Website?

A successful website is an idea that operates so much better than an existing service the public demands its existence. The sites like Drudge, Huff, and IW, that have undercut existing power structures have done so because they are simply better. Things that operate better, succeed. This is important to remember. Because we use money, and because money drives everything, it dictates that ways to make money are even more powerful than any single person, or even group on the planet.

Making Things Better

If you can make things better, you can change the world. Look at something like Bitcoin, which I doubt was anything other than what it looks like: something new from some random person who decided to code it up. TPTP took steps to control it, but the important thing is that now there is a whole new way of moving money around.

You cannot hope to change everything at once, or elevate humanity into some sort of philosophical utopia, but you can set out to make something better. Isn't that was noble endeavours consist of, be it in self, or in some artistic expression?

Re-Defining What We Want

We can redefine what we want. Language has been destroyed, but in that, there is freedom. There is no disputing that we are at the will of the masses, but that means that the masses have a will. The act of becoming is not lost; it is actually stronger than ever. If language is a blank canvas, make up a new word, or a new definition for an old word. It's even reflected in success. Look at all these businesses that have simply taken something from the old paradigm and reworked it into something for ours.

We too must rework the old forms of resistance into new forms. We must be cool, and within the folds of society. Where once, people resigned themselves to a small community of “pure” thinkers, we currently face a situation where I don't know if that is possible anymore.

Right now is the time to be online, because right now we're actually existing in a state that provides the most potential to do anything, should you want to. I mean we're all free to do pretty much what we want. They are trying to lock the net down, but they still haven't. Anyone can still start blogging and potentially change the world, so I don't know why more people don't want to try, and have resigned themselves to this dark view of the world where nothing is possible.

What Do We Advertise?

It doesn't matter. It's not about the content, it's about sustaining and nursing this system that they have set up, which we are now making our own. It's true, they have the ability to surveil everyone on the planet I would presume, but it's an assumed power. In day to day operations, the average person benefits way more from the internet than some old masons and crusty guys clinging onto some plan; or some alien directing an off-world plan through them; or whatever. I don't know what is going on, but what I do know is they are trying desperately to bring about this world that we all fear, and they cannot seem to do it.

My interest in advertising is strategic. I do not plan to get in there and make commercials about certain things. (And what I want to do is already happening anyway, so it might be different.) I plan to promote a system where people are not in a brain-dead state from commercials they don't need. We need the public because they are the true power, and the more time that we give them in their day to think about the nature of life and existence, the better.

Constants

So for example, Hulu talked about an revenue model that would allow people to pick a video about something that they like. For people like us, that topic would be something truth-related. Something that is going to empower us, or at least allow us to think. Here is the thing: it's the same for everyone, just in spectrum that correlates to their intelligence. So, plot this out over time: the smart get smarter, the dumb stay around the same. The ads get shorter, and more precise.

People have more time.

It's not like we all don't need stuff. Sure, that trait is exploited in the current Capitalistic model, but that is what I am trying to change here, even if just slightly. Less buying stuff you don't need, and more buying stuff you do actually want (because you know about it in the first place) is good.

How many people do you know that would be “awake” if they just had a bit more time to, say, watch that 4-hour documentary that you have, but most haven't. How many people like us would have more time to do the things that we want to do if the system itself operated much more efficiently?

It's not that I am saying we all should be watching televisions shows, and viewing ads that we like that are still about products that support the tyranny of the current system. I am saying that more time for people to do the things that we want is what we're all ultimately after. Craving out those minutes litte-by-little is what it's all about, isn't it?
More time to think means more thinking. More thinking means a greater depth to life, and a greater chance at not killing ourselves here.


Like I said, this is just the first act. We cannot hope to even begin to address deep philosophical questions until we alter the system enough to even make room for the process.

Man... Man doesn't exist: much less woman. Do you see? Are you ashamed yet at the weakness of your betrayal?

But I am weak, for I could not destroy, could not even bring myself to try to destroy your enemy who you seek to become. I relinquish advertising to you! I have no more business with it, as it is ugly to me and I would not attack it.

The task of us, who are seen still by philosophers, is honesty with pride. Pride... It is simply good taste, unabated by danger.

So, now you see: you are not fighting me or mine for advertising, and you will not get our help, either. You are fighting ghosts, and perhaps if you saw yourself alone with your adopted tools, no enemy to force them on, perhaps you would relinquish it too... But perhaps not. I am not interested enough.

We the strong do not see ourselves, do not consider our lot bound to that of "humanity" or its admittedly more handsome offspring "the masses." They can do as they will, they have failed all tests of good taste (though they are always welcome to retake them). It is not us who must win them over, but they us. And their world, the world of advertising, the world of the market exchange of ideals, that is, falsehoods, is not pleasing to us. We will not go machiavellian on their minds, not out of desperation, but precicely the opposite.

We live off of their system? They feed us with their systems. They are only managers, in any case, stumbling imitators of the ideas of large men. The comedy is enough to keep our hearts light, our feet nimble. We yell to the four winds our deepest knowledges and secrets, our heaviest treasures... And the advertised man blinks. He seeks the alternate motive! Good comedy, not too dark as we never stop scheming...

Our fears exist and the advertised man is twice removed from them. They are like mosquitoes biting a man with a doctor. The blood loss is insignificant, and all their diseases simple annoyances. We give them this thought, and no more: there is large stuff that is actually equal to us.

Yes, it is a sad thing to see so many walking dead, so many empty, emptied and emptying souls. We agree that the soul doesn't exist anyhow, they can always retake the tests.

The task now is to see the task, stop worrying about seeing the task and inheriting it. The more an idea is defended, the less likely it is to have any value. I read a book on anarchism and the law: all defence. Anarchy as a historical philosophical discipline is empty, I was right all along to see it as I do: a denial, a no, a simple thing not meriting a single line of written thought. Important as all fuck to any that would say this no. A yes masking a no. A no masking a midwife, for there is no no in life.

A memory, perhaps. A sight.

What we would work on cannot be advertised, we have decunstructed advertising and found its components disappointing in structure, in chemical historical structure.

Hear me: life is chemical. There is no God, no no, and all action is chemical. As far as any thing can be responsible, you are responsible for your chemical trail. Magic, its superstition slain, is truth.

Thank fuck for death! It does not need our help... We are free, finally, free to know that we are free from weilding it, we cannot weild it.

We, the dark, brooding reprobates, are the flag-bearers of life. We have our copy cats and our convergent evolutionist imitators. Evolution is life!

Good taste, this is all that matters to the chemist. We know what we want, we just can't tell you if you don't already see certain things, and to see is a chemical historical action as well. Our philosophers are able to write down the tasty bits, and it is them among human groups that seduce us, no other... Well... Also the shaman.

Life needs no defending, it goes on undefended. It is the refining of it that requires so much effort, so many stakes and values. The stakes and values are there, the owls exist despite all the butterflies that wear their semblances on their backs. The yellow on a bee means something quite real, no simple coquetry of the insect. And yet, the animal can manipulate it. And yet? And thus!

Permit me to take this opportunity to invite all who would go crazy to take the leap. Will you be able to return? Will you want to?

Who can fear advertising or the fate of the masses with these questions in mind? If you come back or stay there, you certainly won't care.

Oh man... Will you be worthy of our love again? Only your strength will tell. Our strength, too, for our action is all creation of man.

In short, yes, I do seek to seduce. My seduction, however, is on a chemical trail much removed from advertising. More primitive, more stinky, as much less work is done in general to advance it.

Advertising is a true elixir of immortality; those baptized in it remain forever young and enticing, albeit while changing their faces many times. Our generation is in no more cultural decay than the two before it; the major news story  at the launch of Apollo 13 was the fact that the Beatles were breaking up; news of the astronauts was thrown in somewhere on the weather page. And so today our news is filled with meaningless pop culture stories, while the exciting discoveries in science or events in the world stage get mere passing glances. Nothing fundamentally has changed though; the cultural decadence is just wearing a new face these days. Advertising relies on an aesthetic, an image of beauty, to persuade us, and as Stendhal said, beauty is only the promise of happiness. So ads cannot help but to be reduced to the mere promise of enjoyment, as every kid knows who brings home some toy he saw on TV with such revelry and enthusiasm, only to have grown bored with it about 10 minutes after having opened it.

The free market is simply a scam, in America. The extreme costs of advertising insure that only the people already in power will be able to have a voice in the bid for power; only they will be able to afford to purchase a voice. So we have a pseudo-market which charges exorbitant rates on the behalf of advertising agencies, and only those men who already have large claims in the market and are able to pay for those ads get to sell their product, drowning out the voice of everyone else. Then they simply buy the ad agencies once they have enough accrued wealth, inherit all of their intellectual capital from all the different things they have peddled from whatever sources, and effectively make all their money back plus whatever cash their own products made them. Rinse, and repeat. There is a similar problem with out fetishistic capitalism, in that men make inordinate wealth, buy resource rich land, then set around and charge other people to use that land. They thus are able to make money simply by already having money. Then they simply play the stock market, increasing their wealth even further, eventually passing it down to their offspring so that they can continue doubling and tripling it, and so on. In this system, power and wealth become black holes.

It is true that the internet offers a powerful alternative to this advertising model, if the people can maintain their control of it, and it avoids become yet another instrument in the hands of those who support the former model.  

It seems that modern day advertisements are as synthetic as the products they sell, as if they too were put together on an assembly line. You can take them apart and put them back together in a new arrangement and they make about as much sense as they did before. The necessary individual parts in the ad are detachable and can be interchanged in accordance with derived formulae, even to the point of completely alienating any meaning. That is why we have talking Geckos selling car insurance. This is only because the real aim of the ad is external to its product; the ad is simply selling the idea, the actual product is incidental. It is memetic in nature. Every ad is selling one thing, in reality, ever hit pop song is a plug for the same tune; ads are the modern form of propaganda, they have merged, culture and advertisement, in technical as well as economic terms.

A paradox; the more direct and obvious a statement is, the more difficult it is to interpret the statement. This is because that extreme directness bypasses all the inter-subjective instrumentation of human communication which it is necessary for us to follow through in order to truly grasp something and incorporate it into our universe of meaning. The Socratic method is the re-enfolding of that universe of meaning in an opposite direction, the unpacking of that deep instrumentation into an external form. Ads are always presented in an extremely direct manner, like Nike's slogan Just Do it or that of Mcdonalds- I'm loving it. Thus the ad bypasses the higher regions of the human psyche and directly tantalizes the Id. This bypassing is actually a fundamental pathology of our culture and extends beyond advertisements. George Carlin has the rant on euphemism, about how shell shock became post-traumatic stress disorder. The poetically rich idea of melancholy became simply depression, whose treatment is a bottle of pills- and not the good kind of pills. Language has been demythologized in our culture, and we are so isolated from one another emotionally because of what I just pointed out- this extreme directness in our culture accomplished the paradoxical effect of making everything incomprehensible rather than clear. It seems like people do not even know what a fucking personality is anymore, they think it means combing your hair and having white teeth or something. That form of language is not my language though, I imagine it is none of ours. One must save one's self from all this and wait for this destroyed culture to pass like a spell of night terror over the consciousness of the human species. The one human power that can never be defaced is the power to tell everyone else to go fuck off, and it is on this power that all others depend. It is not walking the walk that gives us the right to talk the talk, but the other way around.

Life is not teleological, nor is advertising. It is only a continuation of life, of peacock feathers and great war efforts, of ways to show to our mates that we are worthy of being met; a prelude to the transaction of blood seed sweat and tears that amounts in the foam at the surf of the sea of life, the foam that is man, and we can call advertising the froth of the foam - but Aphrodite was born of the same foam and indeed she is the goddess of advertising. Lust, invitation, deception and a long standing affair with her brother, the god of war and destruction.

The relation of advertising as a phenomenon to specific products is "circumstantial, nothing written in the sky", and it is being altered in the process of its own evolving self-expression, and so the products we consume are also altered; and it is impossible to escape this double helix of interest interference, as any movement against it is feeding into its premises of repulsion and attraction. In order to master the condition somewhat one has to sink deeper into the connection of the subconscious mind to the mechanism of advertising, to dig out the logic not from the ad, but from the mind that processes it. The layering of an advertisement is like that of a flower, where form and function are most hermetically entwined; the lure is perfectly integrated with its  function, and a piece of work is required here that only the most rigorous art matches on that higher arc, where art is allowed to roam free in the mind while advertising steams and ploughs at the more unsightly level of evolution itself, where beauty is produced to approach the justification of the notion "purpose".

Beauty is purpose, in as far as there is any to be humanly discerned; humanity is so exceedingly single minded in its focus on aesthetics and pleasure, that to even attempt to bring out something from beneath the surface that is not related to this 'principle' seems altogether vain and doomed - or perhaps destined - to produce the very depths it attempt to uncover by causing subtle disturbances of the surface, so subtle as to work into the very fabric of that surface, and to make it 'age'; to question after the reasons of beauty is poisonous; the reasons are never quite as beautiful. Beauty certainly can not afford honesty, it must endure the pain of lying among the various other pains required for its production.

To understand the term "the function of beauty", we may contemplate the difference between advertising and postmodernism. Neither form is sufficient to be art, but both possess an attribute of it. The latter involves the limitlessness of art, the former its beauties. Art stands above nature, advertising is embedded inside of it. It exerts no control, it only oscillates between its needs and its capacities. If we approach this function as if it were metaphysical, it would be imaginable that, through 'strengthening' or 'substantiating' or 'deepening'  the phenomenon of advertising, this would enhance the quality of the relationship between needs and capacities. In reality, we'd expect the medium to follow the components of the relationship, but still, I wonder if the lesson of this all isn't rather that reality needs to be lied to in order to be real, and that the task is rather to increase the quality of the lie.

Perhaps it is because we've discredited the lie that we've become so easy to fool.

Advertising can't require an act as would disband itself from human thought and the social circle of that thought, the impulse runs from deep to deep; the complaint of philosophy being that the world thereby cut philosophy out from the world's own picture, it has become "self-sufficient". We can indicate the many problems with this but those complaints are only secondary, at best- the world no longer requires anything 'beyond itself', or certainly no longer wishes for it and any lingering need continues to dilute toward more remote peripheries and de-powered madness, one driving force behind the mass proliferating consumerism and "individualism" movements.

There's no way to sum this cycle, because it is endless -- no one has seen through advertising, we would need another Nietzsche or Christ for that, a noble truth or a noble lie either to present an alternate structure to replace the current gravity, but such people no longer exist. Nietzsche's truth is proven by the fact that it almost immediately disproves itself, the rupture is too deep to contain itself, as Zizek said of Hegel; the modern ideas are simply the old ideas in shiny new packaging, philosophy decided to adopt the methods of marketing in a world that was already moving on from the value of "pure thought" long before Nietzsche first picked up a pen.

So here we are, children of this world, and of philosophy, neither can we accept or be accepted by either, and why would the question even arise? Has not man always been shaped by his culture and circumstance? Our inability to submit to such forces is also our own having-been-shaped, cut out of the system as remainder, thus our potential access to the spaces of truth, if we are willing to put in the effort.. we've been told to accept advertising reality and use it, success on its terms, or radically opposite it. Or simply ignore it. Or look inward and see what comes from this reality that is already us. But we can hope only to identify some fatal move in the clockwork of the system around which worlds turn: one cannot undo the world, only oneself- the patience to watch realities pass away, or the passion to violently engage one's circumstance with charge, to create changes.

Not even yet has advertising over-written a majority of human historical value and social experience, this is all still very new. We don't yet have the death of music or literary creation, for instance, nor yet even the death of the individual's ability to and passion for changing his own life, and by extension the world, according to his values; the ads are only just on our screens, not yet fused in our brains or seared directly upon our cornea, and men still interact with one another in the external, unbounded world; the circle is far from closed.

Until that circle closes, nothing we say about advertising is going to demonstrate a power or need unless we speak to that closing itself. This is the trap that reveals itself here: to submit the modern reality to the operations of our thought is only to enhance that object itself which we would aim to submit to analysis, criticism and change, and likewise to de-cohere the horizons of our own thinking. We have yet merely begun to encounter the furthest edge, where things most come from dark and deeply real- we yet have little will for such encounters, we have no vital struggle with our illusions as Parodites put it, we've no will and no way here, to "advertise" simply means for the philosopher that he exercise his thought somehow upon advertising. Without the absolute engagement, without totally pushing the boundary beyond 100% and past all reference points, then we are merely self-advertised, and self-advertising.

It is clear, each one of us has our means of approaching the problem in good spirits. But it is also clear that "advertising" can only mean that we no longer expend ourselves absolutely in service of anything. The self-arrested process, and since radical expenditure must occur "insanely" or with no solid shared point of reference to a common world, perhaps advertising merely reflects an impossibility of communication among men, one that we philosophers experience as the difference of our respective views and tasks, and that man himself experiences as the addictive pleasures of untruth. Advertising, as... the need to avoid all shared projects.