Decolonization vs Anti-racism, Why Terminology Matters and also, Doesn’t Matter at All.
Justice through Absensing
Tableau ov Contex
A poem, a madness, written by me on may the 4th that I believe was only shared on the demonic platform known as instagram. A blessing which is a bleeding, a bleeding through, a bleeding with, a bleeding for… or perhaps just bleeding. The etymology of blessing is derived from the old english word for blood. Makes you fucking think.
Some notes/book review of byung-chul han, philosopher artist, in which i continue to build my case.
A crooked respite in the glowing crack of science fiction media and the viciousness of petty tyrants who seek to create the things that we were warned not to create.
Main article: “Decolonization vs Anti-racism, Why Terminology Matters, and also, Doesn’t Matter at All”
Housekeeping
2. Byung-Chul Han - Philosopher Artist
I have been enjoying Han’s recently translated book “Absence” which discusses the fundamental (and often obscured) worldviews of Occidentalism v. Orientalism, western vs eastern worldviews. While i think that there is more room to play in the absence-field of eastern cosmology and aesthetics than Han puts forth (after all, this book is only 100 pages), these are basic-ass basics that i think should be rammed down every westerner’s stupid throat.
Ming often said that one of the main health issues that westerners face stems from their believing that they “don’t have a philosophy”, that their agnostic/secular/atheistic stance is somehow not rooted in a stream of preferences that came before them, dictating almost every idea they think is their own individual taste.
Indeed, i posit that the primary step one must take in order to begin decolonizing their perception is to first turn said perception in on itself and categorically examine the biases, opinions, stories, fairy tales, mythologies and basic predicates that make up what one already believes is “true”. That one must begin to delight in unravelling the threads that have already woven the rug one stands on, in order to deliberately pull it out from under oneself.
QUESTION YR ANSWERS, as i have stated many times before.
Why do you think this way or that? and to not stop at the first or second reason that springs to mind, but to excavate the deep and often unconscious reasons, the ones that are “baked into” the mass-media culture. After all, even the most atheistic non-Christian person knows almost the entirety of Christian mythology offhand by the age of ten. Almost every major “classic” of cinema and television is in part based upon the suppositions put forth by Christian mythology and its stranglehold on western/white cultural normativity.
This post-Judeo-Christian Puritan-Protestantism essentially IS Americana. IS Brittania. Whether you like it or not, believe it or not, perceive it or not.
Han’s book swiftly eviscerates a number of famous western philosophers and their evolutionary lines of thought. For a beginner, the first section alone might warrant multiple read-throughs and copious self-directed research. For a culture so against real education and so addicted to “information”, this may already be too much to ask, yet in my humble opinion our membership into adulthood demands this kind of attention to detail and history.
This little book is a big primer for more nuanced, confusing and weird explorations, and it’s the kind of book i wish existed thirty years ago. I’ll be returning to this and starting to read Han’s “The Scent of Time” shortly, and after “The Crisis of Narration”.
I also came across these two good articles/interviews with Han that i’m digesting and have relevancy.
Byung-Chul Han: “I Practise Philosophy as Art” - ArtReview 12.2.21
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han: Information Without Narrative Disrupts Democracy (noemamag.com) 4.21.22
Some notes I took while reading Han’s book (all quotes are mine)
The crisis of sense-making is a crisis of western philosophy itself.
The palest horse is the soul, the self
immortalized, named
THE GOD DISTINCT, defined
a church with no doors
no way in, nor out
this is not some story i’m telling you
a true thing is true
whether it is believed or not
a battle of “two souls” - two stories.
absence before absence, absence before absence
a concept before its antithesis
the justice of no-one-dreaming
NOBODY GIVES US A PROCESS, A WAY OF THINKING, A VIEW, AN APPROACH METHODOLOGY THROUGH WHICH WE CAN DESIGN CONTEXTUAL PROCESSES AND APPLY THEM TO VARYING SITUATIONS: EXPERIMENT, ASSESS, REDIRECT/REFINE, REPEAT.
3. SCIFI OR REALITY?! TEEVEE?!
i’ve really been enjoying the appleTV show SILO (7 episodes in, A)
a properly done dystopian warning.
really, there’s been a grip of good scifi and fantasy media the last few years, and i am still playing catch-up (Station 11 i see you).
Recently i’ve watched Fallout (solid B), Russian Doll season 2 (A!), started Dead Boy Detectives (first episode is great, A minus thus far). Further back, The Last of Us (Solid A minus, but that one episode with nick offerman is truly sublime storytelling regardless of the genre).
Links
Pluralistic: You were promised a jetpack by liars (17 May 2024) – Cory Doctorow
because i love/envy how prolific of a writer cory is, and how he can remix language to illuminate the veils of hypocrisy and subterfuge of our modern dystopia. this recent article is chock-full of amazing sentences.
a harrowing fifteen minute podcast of poetic power outlining what freedom of speech actually refers to in a modern imperialist nation state ruled by greed and violence. i do strongly suggest you listen, as the links i provide in each blog post form a kind of mosaic or tapestry that links seemingly unrelated patterns into coherent waves.
*************
A dialogue between users
NDLSSWR24: u up?
baby_animal_queen: emoji emoji screenshot meme
NDLSSWR24: LOL babe, u typify the union of opposites while remaining powerful in commercially profitable feminism, i have a proposition for u
baby_animal_queen: bizness or pleasure?
NDLSSWR24: business IS pleasure
baby_animal_queen: said the spider to the web. but as long as im protected from risk & my subs increase, then i agreeeeeee
NDLSSWR24: Folk wisdom as ecstasy
baby_animal_queen: Hypostasis of their secret other sources
NDLSSWR24: Unsatisfied significance of the guilty
baby_animal_queen: midnight and the absolute remain the same throughout
NDLSSWR24: Forever disabled.
baby_animal_queen: the opponent of creation requires a touch
NDLSSWR24: For every neck a boot, for every boot a neck!
baby_animal_queen: boots ❤️ necks 2getha 4eva xoxo
**************
on my watch list:
ON THE SILVER GLOBE: two hours and forty-four minutes of 1970’s era psychedelic anti-communist polish sci-fi cinema, stitched together years after the halted production from the unfinished reels saved from their destruction. i can’t even! this is the kind of art and cultural drama that spawns entire realities. I NEED TO FIND THE TIME TO SIT DOWN AND BE PUMMELED FOR THREE HOURS.
4. Decolonization vs Anti-racism, Why Terminology Matters and also, Doesn’t Matter at All.
i’ve been transforming ideas, social constructs for a while now. i do think it is partly because of my “mixed-racedness”. However, my stance on these things is actually far more radical than most people. One might say i’m a concept-abolitionist, not because i think we can really finally get rid of concepts, but that there is a determined practice to cut through concepts, even cherished concepts, to get beyond the addictive identification with fixed ideas and abstracted meanings.
One of the main reasons i am queer is not because i care all that much about sexuality, or even that my sexuality is somehow uncommon (it’s not), but because the function of queerness (and nonduality) is to become slippery to binary and polarized notions of reality.
so anti-racism, in a sense is to be the “opposite of racism”, as if there is a light switch in the mind that is turned one way or the other. But human beings are crooked, imperfect, transitional creatures made up of innumerable other beings and relationships. there is no “abiding self” that “makes a choice” via its “free will”.
i think of a lot of these kind of trickle-down or trickle-up liberation movements as “liberation for dummies” or “liberation for kindergarteners”. They are like guardrails on the highway or training wheels on bicycles. useful because we are accident-prone.
but in a greater philosophical sense, constant assistance may be limiting our capacity to mature and responsibilize our behaviors. I say responsibilize to be a better replacement for “free will” or “preferences”; to responsibilize our lives is to deliberately take the position of integrity. to practice integrity is all its complex iterations and transformations.
it says something heartbreaking about our culture that this conversation i’m having feels like “too much” for people, that people feel harmed by engaging in real critical discourse with their own feelings as if somehow talking about the underpinning philosophy of our narratives is dangerous to the most marginalized.
as a mixed person, i choose “mixedness” because it speaks to the interdependent, compound nature of reality. this reality that animism and nonduality is directly seeking to align with and disappear into. the arc of adaptation that nondual animism takes is not one of constant striving and colonial hunger. instead, it is one of yielding to the world as it is, as we are. it is becoming the world instead of a self.
for me, the term decolonizing is a more appropriate and respectful process to discover what liberation and abolition is actually pointing towards. we all know that BIPOC people, or LGBTQ can be capitalists, or fascists, or abusers. so, what is the point of anti-racism if the ghost of narcissistic addiction will just jump into the skin of the next most socially acceptable vessel?
in a sense i flunked out of anti-racism school because i saw how easily immature and infantilized people could take advantage of others or be taken advantage of, because they had no real practice by which to make grounded, animistic decisions that didn’t default into dualism, colonialism and addiction.
it may be that the way i am using the term decolonization is also opposed to the way many people would like the term to be used. this is definitely a difficult aspect of the english language, with its ideal of rigid, fixed definitions of words. all of these terms are only useful if the communicator has a process that can adapt flexibly to the current situation and still maintain integrity. if one has never felt sustained integrity then of course this is an impossible task. then words become dangerous in the mind of the perceiver. words can set off “triggers” that appear to happen to the person, because the person cannot perceive their own perception co-creating the bad feelings in the moment of perception. this is part of the structure of fragility, of anxiety and panic.
language and the perception of language must also be decolonized from these poisons.
to decolonize perception, or to undergo “neuro-decolonization” as Dr. Micheal Yellowbird puts it, is to embark upon a salvage mission to return the modernized human mind, the post-modern self, to the earth mind, the “earth-non-self”. It is returning the mind, the perceptual process, to the wildness of land, an elemental return. a rewilding of perception and sensation, of meaning-making, of feeling and “emoting”.
being and doing no longer at odds or distinct in some binary fashion. instead, the world as being as doing. no meaningful distinction between aspects of a whole system of movement and transformation. this “apex animism” is the nonduality inherent in all wisdom traditions, whether it is direct or indirect, obvious or obscured. the commonality is the commonality of the nondual which is animism before and beyond oppositional narration. beyond and before social constructs such as race and gender. before and beyond the socio-cultural bonds of identity. liberation is the liberation from these habits, not just the liberation from material oppression impressed upon us by imperial nation-states.
when people speak of also abolishing the cop inside or the prison inside, this is the level to which that intention can permeate.
none of this will reduce a person to some kind of robotic nihilist either. that fear and that tendency is still the colonial virus manipulating the neurobiology of a person. the natural state of liberation produces generosity, compassion and creativity. if one cannot perceive these spirits in the field, then one may need to question if liberation is actually being practiced.
Are you actually practicing what you say or think you are practicing?
a practice, a system, a process should have some non-random effects. should have the capacity to experiment and collect data. actual information which can be transformed via reflection and contemplation into knowledge, which then can be transformed into wisdom and integrity over time by doubling back on itself and refining perceptions and behaviors.
i have found that to really unravel one’s fate, the kind of love that must be cultivated can appear as rebellion or even animosity to the normalized culture (and as terrorism to the state). here, artists and poets are equal to that of abolitionists and nondual practitioners because all are constrained, limited and/or oppressed by conservative or fascistic norms in their culture. it is not enough to “pick a side” because these oppressive tendencies morph and infect, jumping from host to host as a virus does. the side you are on now might attack you tomorrow. this is why the path i am describing of decolonization must be united with ferocious spiritual practice and exacting critical inquiry. there is no single word, phrase or brand that can encompass all that is required to do this kind of work in human society.
This great task may not be possible in a single lifetime, i am not underestimating the difficulty of it, i am just saying that this is basic nature that eventually reveals itself to the human mind, usually upon exhaustion or death. To sustain a modern civilization with this kind of embodied consciousness may be a relic of the past or an artifact of some unimaginable future. Each person must dedicate themselves to this lest they be pushed around by exploitative forces with little self-sprung clarity. And the abyss of pain is ever widened by our hubris. If this were the last ten seconds of life i would not want to think of the ten million petty interactions that stain my temper, nor of the unevenness of my fate. I would rather totally release all reference and come into contact with this present moment, and even cut through that, meandering or lingering, no departure nor arrival. How sweet without name, memory or history, just like it is.
Can your anti-racism do that? Can your politics be a politics of nature undefined?
what is the/a soul unshackled from the isolating drive towards ascendancy or transcendency, a soul that leaves no trace? No lasting absolute soul, without presence, without essence or essentialness…
As a start first you must be able to imagine death without loss.
Absence, reduction, negation without a sense of loss whatsoever.
So then what is loss? A fabrication, a concept, a dream?
Fundamentally perhaps it is an opinion with no basis in truth or fact, except in what one ‘feels’ and then narrativizes. An idea of fear, culturally imposed and made to be ‘real’ and ‘normal’.
“Fear dressed up and gone to church.”
So too then we would have to interrogate and investigate our ideas of grief and trauma to find if there is anything there that is real, anything besides this ‘opinion of loss’.
I find it depressing to gaze upon our society and see how scarce real education is. Even these blogs i’ve been writing for a few years are built upon mountains of prior knowledge, prior experiences, prior ancestors. To really understand reality, each other, requires enormous datasets and robust epistemological systems with which to interpret those datasets. We cannot merely understand things in shallow ways, glancing at words and phrases and assuming we know the meanings behind them, the underlying agendas or fantastical presuppositions. No, we have to root into a way of sensing and perceiving that is magnitudes larger than our current cultural orthodoxies.
There must be poetry, rigor and critique. We must attend to the unborn and the unknowable, in order to cohere our actions towards integrity.
The understanding i am pointing towards is not one of absolutes or certainty, not another form of colonizing the other. The magnitude i am speaking of is a style of orienting that allows for and becomes the world, as it is in all its mystery and ache. An approach methodology with no where to go, a return never having left, a dying without ever being born. This requires not just a suspension of belief, but a suspension of disbelief as well, to the entire notion of belief or its opposite so that one is immersed in suspension, floating in suspense. A confusion that is entirely open and aware so that the urge to be “not confused” never takes control of the heart. A confusion that is the pre-eminent creative state.
This submission to becoming world upends the western version of submission, which requires a subject-object or dominant-submissive power dynamic. This kind of submission negates the very concept of subjects, of subjectivity. To submit in this way negates the personhood and reveals the worldhood. It is a reduction that expands. So too is the decolonial movement a reduction that expands. A loss without loss. A revelation without additive measures. A degrowth which enhances vitality.
This absencing or absensing that is so indicative of nonduality with its emphasis on all phenomena being ultimately empty (made of basic space or pure potential) can also be perceived in many other indigenous practices where channeling, mediumship or trance possession occurs. The practitioner or performer trains to “step aside” or move out of the way, to “become a hollow bone”. Much like the greek idea of inspiration gifted from the muses (to be inspired is to be breathed), the person, the self, is reduced, negated, moved aside so that something “else” can fill or move through that space. That “elseness” need not be defined as another self, another definable entity (though it often is defined that way). Instead, we can practice self-negation to let the emptiness be just emptiness, which reveals basic nature, which reveals the world without a subject to behold it from a subjective, separate position.
Apophatic meditation is a style of meditation that involves clearing the mind, without a focus on an image or visualization. It is connected with apophatic theology, which is a form of religious thinking that approaches the concept of God, or the Divine, by contemplating only what it is not.
i link this together with artmaking precisely because artmaking requires a struggle to remove oneself from obstructing the process by which one becomes confusion which eventually leads to unpredictable actions whilst wandering through the artmaking process. Just like trance channeling, one must train to “get out of the way” and let the art happen, as if by another agency.
Combining the ideas and processes talked about in this article can have a wide range of impacts on the variously problematic roots of symptoms such as pain, fear, trauma, addiction and more. By being able to experience and communicate these deeply non-western, nondual processes, we can also prevent ourselves from adding more harm and obstacles to other beings and ourselves, knowing that all beings and phenomena are more similar than dissimilar and that this commonality, like a river running to the sea, is ultimately able to purify naturally. And will purify faster if we reduce polluting it.
Epilogue
If it seems like I continually repeat myself over the years, it’s largely because the more difficult and specific facets of deathpractice, deathclown and nonduality (such as astro-geomancy, divination that isn’t fortune telling, demons & ghost possession and actual ancestral influences) are all so absurdly inflammatory to westernized people’s frazzled and misinformed perceptions — the same people who actually maybe need this wisdom the most and who are also the most susceptible to cultic behaviors and the ills of living with compromising privilege.
In order to have even a small positive impact, westerners need to be totally re-educated and un-indoctrinated, so that the really gnarly shit can be discussed without exacerbating it.
Lastly, i must emphasize that i do perceive that anti-blackness is a major issue with society today, and that this anti-blackness bias shows up in many ways that are not only about skin color or race.
5. Housekeeping
Donating is Liberating & Sharing is Caring
venmo @dare-sohei or paypal.me/daresohei
These longer articles take around two weeks or more to create, depending on the interplay between my fate and my health condition. I use the notes tab for more frequent, shorter communications. Id love to be able to write and make art on a tighter schedule but i’m just not.
I’m available for private sessions as well as group sessions. If a group organizes themselves i can create a small class series for you. Otherwise, i still can’t see a path forward in today’s false culture for offering my services. The way people can’t do community means that we can’t do community practices.
In other news, leaving instagram and facebook has been good, though now i’m trying to figure out where to find good memes and news coverage. Perhaps another platform or newsletters do some kind of curation without the poison of infinite scroll short form media adhd. Let me know your faves in the comments.
One of the addictive parts of those platforms is the sense that you could be part of the conversation. You could interact. But of course, this interaction is largely parasocial and vapid. Entire relational constellations reduced to misinterpreted snippets of text, decontextualized from their larger and more time-consuming-to-communicate philosophies. Yet there is a sense of missing out on some real thing. The commodified and castrated simulation of a real thing, someplace else.
This is what cultural entropy looks like, after it has been commodified and locked behind paywalls. The theft of the commons is also the colonization of relationships: pay to exist, pay to be loved, pay to have basic decency, pay to have someone pay attention to you, etc. & if you can’t pay, you can have the freemium version of the simulation. Everything flattened to a kind of porn-on-demand-because-you-poor-lonely-bastard-can’t-afford-the-escort service. Everything personalized, and everyone saying that personalization is natural. The fake news upside is that you-can-get-what-you-want-for-a-price. The downside to this is that your pain, your sickness, your health, your welfare, your oppression is also personalized.
The cost is more than just blood money, the cost is sanity. (Sanity not in the sense of sanitization but in the sense of contact with living environs unlegislated by merchants.) We trade sanity for simulation, and we run from corral to corral, from virtual ghetto to virtual ghetto, constantly mediated by tolls and gaps we cannot reach across. The poets become copywriters; the painters become content creators. In the end, virtuality and digitality cannot replace analogality. The AI algo cannot love you, but it can appear to love you, and you should shut up and be grateful.
Lastly, I have been considering how to diversify my ideas and projects in order to survive all this and try to do my level best to be a decent sober person. I have thought about creating a paid tier form of content on this substack, i have thought about a separate patreon that would just be for visual art and poetry. Currently all of these platforming and revenue streams don’t really matter if i can’t focus the bulk of my time on making things, and i can’t focus the bulk of my time on making things if my health and bills can’t get paid. May those guillotines arrive soon.
Ta for now
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an arrow of absence danced into a web of relations singing an awakening of perception