The study today was taken from the new nature reserve by the runway. It had been our express intention to take a tree study of one of the gnarled specimens available there but with the sun shining so golden on the thawed grass we were hit with a premature joys of spring sentiment and took it in one. We rollicked through the process boldly enough but came a cropper on tackling the foreground brush which we had to scrape off once on account of a too imagined patterning creeping into the shapes. Even now there is a bit too much repetition but its done, lets leave it and on to the next which hopefully will be a portrait of my mother.
We are now quite determined to increase our portraiture, not for another crack at business, but for the craft itself. The goal? To find ways in both handling and symbolic embellishment to make a humble portrait of my mother, for example, become something more, something with relevance to all, just as VG does in his thinking on 'types'. In addition there is no better way to sharpen ones observation skills than portraiture. After our last birthday portrait we found our seeing of the landscape today was clearer.
As regards our recent wade through the abstractions and all that talk of astroturf, of idea laundering and the hyperstitious, we have drawn perhaps the inevitable conclusion - that we're not sure of anything. But look here, it's a world eat world dog out there and no mistake! That much is clear. We see and sense a world being covered by another; a far alt right take over, the process of automation, the next phase of nrx capitalism underway, all power to the silicone lads and to hell with it, all of the above and a whole lot more but the feeling for us is world eat world. Nowhere is this more in evidence, at least for our dollar bill, than in the far alt right flavour of lockdown protest where the astroturf is laid one step at a time and people make progress the way we used to play the 'cant touch the floor' game with John Wagg using tea towels.1 And when its laid people follow. And how they protest their desired reality, how it grows from the seeds of power. It is as if the idea of social radicalism itself has been co-opted by power to great effect. Is it too far to suggest that we see again the same co-opting of critique that we saw in the famous Apple campaign which took advantage of 1960's radicalism? Substitute Lennon and Ono for Icke and Jones: "Think Very Different".
Forgive us, once more as we have now gone to far. But we must push on as there was something we saw at my mothers BBC 4 projection that coincidentally hit us with relevance just as we mulled the Brand case the other day. It was by a historian called Schama, who has a good age and reputation, on the subject of the Romantics.2 We have always had a fair sized blank spot when it comes to the Romantics and so the program was all the more interesting for us. In it he walks us through how the Romantics invented, to some degree, social protest and that this aspect of Romantic sentiment is still of great relevance today. We nod in agreement. But as we took in more and more of Schama's interesting thoughts on the matter we could only think about the alt far right conspiracy protesters chanting on their fake pitch. How romantic they seem; astroturf romantics? Protest at democracy and demand authoritarian rule! Fuck me! And look here, that is the memo that manier left leaner did not receive as they stand shoulder to shoulder with the conspiracists.
But there is another way to think of this pot of source and that is by returning to Moldbug and his referencing of a splendid sounding story by Borges called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. We have read a slice of it which we found available on Borg for free and we really must read the full account as it is one that crops up in Nrx thinking and in fact Curtis Yarvin takes the name of his software company from it; Urbit. The story is about one world taking over another; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, describes a secret society, Orbis Tertius, that architects an entirely new world, Tlön, by publishing an encyclopaedia describing it. Over time, bits of this fictional world begin to emerge in the real world, consuming it, such that “[t]he world will be Tlön.” We found this description by a man named Tseng in the Smith Burrows text on the NRX.
Now listen to this: "as its knowledge spreads, Tlön becomes more real than what is real, and the culture of earth is supplanted by this new simulacrum, as people increasingly adopt the customs and languages of the world they have invented." And this comes from the pages of the Claremont Institute!3 Fake world replace real world until fake world is real - that sounds about right. You will say that it is all 'just progress' and yes it is but it is controlled and manufactured like never before and that is being done by people who openly want to be rid of democracy, even the un-real form we have, in favour of authoritarian rule. Neoreactionary tech utopians like it like that, no doubt imagining such a state in the most positive of snow crash metaverse fantasies but there might just be a few dictators who are rubbing their hands at the prospect. Nostrovia!! And by the way we just asked Borg about this Claremont Institute and it told us via the Wikipedia service that "the institute was an early defender of Donald Trump. After Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump refused to concede while making claims of fraud, Claremont Institute senior fellow John Eastman aided Trump in his failed attempts to overturn the election results." So you see.
Little Vladz has his tanks out and threaten to take another bite of Ukraine as it stands but it seems many a talking head doubts there will be a war. We follow it through the sports pages.
We say world eat world knowing that its not quite as simple as all that but look here, we have always conceded the crisis of authenticity. We read all about it years ago in the New Spirit of Capitalism4 or similar about there being no solid ground to base critique of capitalism and it has only added to our disorientation to find in the post truth era that we are in the strange position of needing to defend that unsolid ground in the face of far alt right attack. Between the rock (high finance, neoliberal madness capitalism) and a hard place (far alt right ethno nationalist Trumpism) our ground dissolves and the two new friends meet in the middle? Is it that? That is increasingly how it feels but it is more accurate perhaps to say that our place has become a site of crisis, panic, confusion, desperation, exasperation, anger, fear. Perhaps it's time to realize that our two enemies, messrs Rock and Hardplace, are now very much together, attached, with no space in between and in realizing this our space can go back to being against and beyond those two knuckleheads to creatively imagine and build something hopeful, in confidence. Maybe that is too much to hope for when we have just discussed the astroturf, the hate laundering and the hypostition.
Too much to hope certainly but lets make this hope our hypostition of the day. All in all it may be that hyperstition is in its wider artistic sense is still very interesting and of course in our frank correspondence with the singularity we enter fray but as for the political application its well bedded in. Whatever else this concept may offer us, hypostition has become just an election strategy, a campaign tool of the powerful if you ask us. It has happened. All these world eating tricks have been tried, tested and absorbed into contemporary life. We know it well, so let's move past it then. We have come to terms with the game of realities that is now the norm and so we should now be able to think beyond that stramash. Perhaps even face the elephant in our mind that the future is very likely to be openly authoritarian rule across the world. The tech not only enables it but necessitates it. The question is how nasty will it be? Industrial green or industrial black?5 With that hard thought thunk perhaps we can, with a good dash of complacency, imagine that it may not be so bad is some ways. You will scream and I will cower but look here, if we were doing this back in the 80's we would be focusing on the emerging neoliberal era and the damage to the world that the shift to it was doing. Much work exists of that sort. We were born in 1977 and so grew up in that particular time of world killing and shifting, but what was it like for us? We had a happy childhood and teenage years, the whole lot really thank you very much. Will it be so for my children who might very well grow up in hi tech authoritarian times? Their world will have to be navigated, a desirable path sought within what is generally presented just as we were able to take advantage of the creative economy and the monies offered by government to fund the arts. Of course our words are soaked in privilege and on top of that the changing climate changes everything, does it not?
Not only is hyperstition very real but I think we can also say that autofiction is now a way of life and not just for us in our decade long struggle in this direction in an artistic context, but for everyone. It feels as if one must have a relationship with reality and "reality". We said it at the close of last season, that we must dangle ourselves about, dipping in and out of realities like a tea bag. We said it in Bowers, "the Dutch daemon us and our wretched selves shall be dangled in to the future realm on a line tied tight to the here and now...".6 If this is true I suppose it is now time to find some value in the opposite, such is still the nature of the critical art creature.
Sleep Well,
John
1. We do not know who John Wagg is, perhaps a childhood friend.
2. The Romantics and Us: With Simon Schama.
3. A conservative think tank.
4. The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello
5. A line from John's Dignity Scholarship Season 2 proposal poem. See Johnny B Goode, verse 5, line 2.
6. See Dane Bowers, verse 38.