I don’t know why this is here but it is.
Month: March 2018
Double Occupation
I’m in Budapest right now and this morning I spent a couple of hours in the “House of Terror” — a former administrative building, police headquarters, prison, and place for interrogation (read: torture) and execution during both the Nazi and Communist occupations of Hungary.
The museum that now occupies the space does a surprisingly good job of guiding the visitor through almost sixty years of knotted and difficult history. I had no idea, before coming here, that the country had been subjected to totalitarian puppet-governments for so long.
As I walk around now, I’m struck not only by how horrific and complex this country’s recent history is but also how at ease it seems with this history already.
In a lot of ways, it seems a part of the fabric. History clings to it, clogs it up, like the thick soot and grime of pollutants that make so many of the imposing city blocks look their age — and look all the grander for it.
(I must confess: I am not very well travelled. This is my first time in a country that was once hidden behind the Iron Curtain, and so I don’t know if what I am about to say is unusual or typical. Forgive me if I’m being naive, but…)
What is fascinating to me is that, although this city has a three-story building, a major monument by any measure, the entire purpose of which is to remember the horrors of the Nazi and Communist regimes — and, if only due to its longevity, the terrors of the Communist regime seem much worse by Hungary’s measure — there is still nonetheless a noticeable presence of Communist tat here.
Of course, you won’t find any Nazi merchandise, not even of the “spoils of war” kind you find elsewhere, but you can buy Communist stars on street corners amongst other things.
The House of Terror talks, at one point, of a “double occupation” — a moment where the Nazis and Communists fought for control of the city, each eventually as unwelcome as the other. This phrase seems just as applicable to the present moment too, however. Communism has had a double occupation here all of its own — in the streets and, now, in the imagination.
It’s no surprise that the ideals of communism perservere whereas so many other ideologies have fallen by the wayside, but it is a surprise to find them still visible here, even as tourist souvenirs, all things considered…
State Decay: Collapse II
If Proudhon’s philosophy of progress can be summed up in just a few words, it would be this: things grow and things decay, and things grow again elsewhere. State decay, community decay, cultural decay, economic decay so on and forth – this is the necessary movement for state growth, community growth, cultural growth, economic growth, etc. etc. It will, however, never run backwards: what has inevitability decayed will never return in its original form.
The baton of productivity has been officially passed to Edmund Berger. He’s on fire this week.
His latest post, “Ruin and Freedom“, features a little shout out to “State Decay: Collapse“. (Thanks for that, Ed!) It’s a great post:
One of the common critiques of U/ACC is that it doesn’t deal sufficiently with the question of collapse, that its assumptions align with the most Promethean of moderns in that it envisions, on the ‘other side’ of technoeconomic take-off, unending wealth, prosperity, and orgiastic delirium. Nothing could be further from the truth (except perhaps the last one, though the delirium in mind is hardly that of bourgeois decadence). Sites of techno-economic intensity will doubtlessly be characterized by self-reinforcing growth, which – until it hits the transcendental wall of hard singularity – will bleed through society in the form of higher standards of living, health, and happiness. But things decay, and growth elsewhere. The interior cost of this techno-economic feedback will be the consolidation of the human agent into the gears of the urban machine, but the exterior costs will be something completely different: ruin.
I have lots of thoughts on this but I’ll save them for the follow-up proper to “State Decay“. I don’t feel like I can write it fast enough at the moment. It’s getting longer and longer but I’m very excited about it. We’ll be moving from Kant and Bataille to Deleuze, Blanchot and Emily Brontë.
(I’m hoping the more I tease it in these in-between posts, the more I’ll force myself to actually finish it before I run out of steam with it. Unfortunately, that’s still likely to a few weeks off. The immediate future promises something a bit different, perhaps. I’m heading for the exit tomorrow morning, leaving the UK for the first time in what feels like (and might very well be) two years, to spend the next five days in Budapest. I didn’t pick the destination — it’s somewhere my partner has wanted to go for a long time. However, having since learnt that it is “the capital of caves“, you can rest assured this holiday will provide some blog fuel.)
(Remember this?)
Seasteading
My recent Wind Waker shitposting on the timeline aside, I must admit that seasteading is a project that really interests me.
In light of all the recent chatter about patchwork, I wanted to give a post over to seasteading in particular.
(Doesn’t the sea seem like the appropriate location for a U/ACC chaos patch…? It’s certainly an environment analogous with the #CaveTwitter worldview. Sea caves sound even better…)
However, there is much to be wary of with regards to the way the project is being steered by political and financial interest groups.
New Post on the Vast Abrupt
Run script… Check for Pulse…
Out of the corner of my eye the rectangular screen of my laptop suffers strange non-Euclidean distortions.
You can now read Part 0 of ‘Experiments in the Summoning of an AxSys Demon’ here.