READING NOTES #12
Updates on the Oceanic Extinction-Drive.
Already . . . this painting by Varley that is new to me. Travels across time. Early melt. Late melt. #drip
What year is it now?
TL;DR
If Obama-era post-internet aesthetics was the equivalent of ‘rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic’ and Trump era resistance discourse was ‘playing tiddly winks on the Titanic’, then the post-NFTs moment is ‘rebuilding a life-size replica of the Titanic on the deck of the Titanic itself’.
Enter the Romandisea Titanic in Sichuan province, China, also new to me.
Or here is how I would write the tweet:
~2010- Obama-era ‘post-internet’ discourse ‘rearranging deck chairs’.
~2016- Trump-era ‘resistance’ ‘playing tiddly winks’.
~2021- post-NFT-era ‘rebuilding a to-scale replica of the Titanic on the deck of the Titanic itself’.
(Enter China. Shanzhai Titanic.)
Connect the titanic to the gigantic. Mostly let the screenshots do the talking. The gigantomachia peri tes ousias (battle of the giants over being) occurs somewhere near the start of Being and Time. It also goes down in the replies, and keeps going.
How I want these newsletters to be:
I love you, reader. I also hope that you are infinitely lucky.
‘Updates’ (The Same, Extended and Repeated)
I’ve been inwardly updating Titanic metaphors as a form of almost sexual ataraxy for a while now. It seemed to me that, in terms of the aesthetic/political discourse sector, the years from ~2010 onwards were a classic ‘rearranging deck chairs’ phase. We had internet art, fidget spinners, Gangnam Style, and the spread of the word ‘anthropocene’. Things felt ‘over’ but the gestures of recuperation and cruel optimism were nonetheless cogent (‘rearranging’). We could see the deck.
From 2016 onwards, things accelerated, and we were found playing tiddly winks on the same deck, while others were still moving the deck chairs around in the background. The deck chairs were themselves now tiny.
The games of what I like to call denihilism (definition below) were at this time scaled down, running out of time, timed out—but still just about visible. The iceberg itself loomed and loomed on the inner screen. We were even—later on—about to discover pictures. But little was the doubt that we were no longer ‘Kings of the World’.
In the present, in a post-NFTs hot moment, we resort to nothing less and nothing more than a rebuild of a to-scale replica of the Titanic on the deck of the Titanic itself. Gone are the political movements of progressivism (deck chairs, Acid Communism, and so on) or their nano-inversions (art as politics, open letters, neo-abolitionism, black theory, etc), and we are left with a completed phase of completed denial. The nihilism in denihilism comes back as the re- in rebuild, and as ironic hyperbolic denial: better not to know what we know, let’s build back better, again and again.
The tone of this is captured at its deepest, most oceanic level (more of oceans in a second) in Cixous’ recent We Defy Augury:
My grandmother is a tower. A cliff that sways on its base. She is double. She is a twin tower, a creature with double locks.
Translation: we are on the Titanic and we are rebuilding the Titanic on the Titanic to kill time. We must keep the ocean-going Verleugnung going, it’s the same thing as the love of life, and the concept of the love of a lifetime. The grandmother is a twin tower. We are in those twin towers right now. It was DJT, after all, who wished to rebuild their replicas, as Twin Towers 2.
(As for the ocean-coloured pills, there is only one choice.)
It’s not what you know, it’s how far you are prepared to go in knowing how to deny it i.e. know-to-not-know-it. The incohoinnocence of denihilism.
Biden’s incoherence has become alarming, and we’re not sure we want to see it either. But the president’s handlers can’t continue to hide his condition from the American people.
Since the collusion and collision of collusion and collision is more-than-inevitable, we may as well enjoy rebuilding the whole thing all over again even as the imminent disaster shatters the very idea, internally, in advance, on the deck. Now, not-at-all-that-surprising here therefore that the Chinese got there first. Here she is again, the Romandisea Titanic, in landlocked Sichuan province.
Oceanic.
Titanic.
Gigantic.
Verisimilitude, reversal, inversion, conversion, diversification, aversion, reversion, verging, verso, vice versa, Verflechtung (entanglement), Verleugnung (denial), Verneinung (negation).
Is not all this engineered as cover for a single man’s senescence? The big taddy himself, the bullshit-hoard of the carrier-ship. Finnegans Wake again:
Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
When Adam Curtis referred to the ‘benign elite’ over flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict BBC archive NFTs of Joe Biden celebrating, was he not sucking taddy’s cock to kill every mommy at the mast at the most obscene and unsayable level and time?
Coherence has reached its own Fat Elvis stage
and denial
its incoherence-phase.
No indications of value were still legible, but that did not matter. It had been minted, unmistakably, as the payment for a world.
Here.
My definition for you, infinite reader.
Highly coherent and useable. What I take is the pharmacological entanglement of nihilism and its denial, all as one addictive regime. I call this denihilism. It’s ubiquitous and invisible as a pill.
This (the ocean, the death-drive, the drops over-saturating) helps us to work out, while killing time, why they are ‘happy to take questions’ as long as there are no questions.
They cut the feed. They remove the video.
We get seasick on the Verflechtung (entanglement) of Verleugnung (denial) and Verneinung (negation). The more certified spazzatura-pilled alloverdose, the better. It is as if Covid 9/11 were a titanic metamorphosis of the Bible. And ice versa.