For me this is what makes the end of these posts kind of thrilling in a way; these connections to the ideas through music. And here Adam Badí Donoval’s music is a perfect pairing to the ideas. The generative/ ambient etc. (add a technique) genre is as Brian Eno always says; about ideas. And this is what makes it exciting.
It was kind of a thrilling effect re-reading the post with the Donoval track in its looping effects (on repeat); especially after reading his liner notes. As ever the music recommendations open things up.
Music is an absolutely central part of my life; it's great to be able to share tracks like this, even if hesitantly, and to hear who responds to them and why. So thank you for the comment! That Donoval is a great, gnawing, strangely melancholy track, and its title alone—and the title of the album it comes from—seemed appropriate for the post. Glad you responded to it.
I’ve had this idea in my head for awhile that this essay put words to. You speak aptly here of the material substrate of life (the Anthropocene). I have been thinking of the cultural and social elements. Our lives of late have the quality of a slurry: of the extracted bits of relationships, economies, religious and cultural practices, etc., ground up and reconstituted into a bespoke “life replacement” in the same way you would say Soylent is a meal replacement. The result is the kind of substitution you are describing in small pieces, but of the human life world, not just our natural environment. Thank you for writing and sharing this!
The anodyne mulch of everyday experience now, so relentlessly filtered through today's decontextualized and overly social internet, is a lot like Soylent in that regard—substitution without clear referent. Thanks for reading and engaging.
Interesting thesis. You veered very close to, but didn't mention the hyperreal, Umberto Eco's idea of a fake that mimics reality so well, it becomes a kind of real itself, the hyperreal. He also references Disneyland as an example. So if Capgas is the real made artificial, hyperreality is the artificial made real. For me these are examples that demonstrate there is a dull , porous barrier between the world of the born and the world of the made.
Thanks, Kevin. I like Eco's use of the hyperreal, and would throw Baudrillard and his writings on the Simulation into such a conversation. Both approaches seem usefully grounded in a critique—or, at the very least, an analysis—of capitalism and its endless production of spectacle and distraction. Warholian and limitless in its capacity to mesmerize, capitalism had overwhelmed us with doubles, knock-offs, and counterfeits to the point that we might no longer believe an original ever existed at all.
What I like about the somewhat more theological approach that I tried to develop here—looking at, for example, the rise of an adversarial double, or a duplicitous surrogate that tempts us into falsity and misrepresentation—is the idea that we are being duped by something perhaps more fundamental than economic activity. I suppose this is part of an attempt to integrate a different vocabulary into this sort of discussion. For example, it's interesting to me that parables such as the bread/stone distinction used in this post would seem to indicate that theologians had already been aware of the threat or risk of a nefarious artificiality, long before capitalism gave rise to the Simulation or the Hyperreal. There was already awareness of a Capgrasian double hiding behind the surface of the world, perhaps waiting in the wings, and I'm interested in trying to understand what was at stake in those sorts of conversations. Does that make sense?
But, yes, a much shorter answer is that Eco's work is very interesting and useful here! Thanks for reading.
For me this is what makes the end of these posts kind of thrilling in a way; these connections to the ideas through music. And here Adam Badí Donoval’s music is a perfect pairing to the ideas. The generative/ ambient etc. (add a technique) genre is as Brian Eno always says; about ideas. And this is what makes it exciting.
It was kind of a thrilling effect re-reading the post with the Donoval track in its looping effects (on repeat); especially after reading his liner notes. As ever the music recommendations open things up.
Music is an absolutely central part of my life; it's great to be able to share tracks like this, even if hesitantly, and to hear who responds to them and why. So thank you for the comment! That Donoval is a great, gnawing, strangely melancholy track, and its title alone—and the title of the album it comes from—seemed appropriate for the post. Glad you responded to it.
I’ve had this idea in my head for awhile that this essay put words to. You speak aptly here of the material substrate of life (the Anthropocene). I have been thinking of the cultural and social elements. Our lives of late have the quality of a slurry: of the extracted bits of relationships, economies, religious and cultural practices, etc., ground up and reconstituted into a bespoke “life replacement” in the same way you would say Soylent is a meal replacement. The result is the kind of substitution you are describing in small pieces, but of the human life world, not just our natural environment. Thank you for writing and sharing this!
The anodyne mulch of everyday experience now, so relentlessly filtered through today's decontextualized and overly social internet, is a lot like Soylent in that regard—substitution without clear referent. Thanks for reading and engaging.
Interesting thesis. You veered very close to, but didn't mention the hyperreal, Umberto Eco's idea of a fake that mimics reality so well, it becomes a kind of real itself, the hyperreal. He also references Disneyland as an example. So if Capgas is the real made artificial, hyperreality is the artificial made real. For me these are examples that demonstrate there is a dull , porous barrier between the world of the born and the world of the made.
Thanks, Kevin. I like Eco's use of the hyperreal, and would throw Baudrillard and his writings on the Simulation into such a conversation. Both approaches seem usefully grounded in a critique—or, at the very least, an analysis—of capitalism and its endless production of spectacle and distraction. Warholian and limitless in its capacity to mesmerize, capitalism had overwhelmed us with doubles, knock-offs, and counterfeits to the point that we might no longer believe an original ever existed at all.
What I like about the somewhat more theological approach that I tried to develop here—looking at, for example, the rise of an adversarial double, or a duplicitous surrogate that tempts us into falsity and misrepresentation—is the idea that we are being duped by something perhaps more fundamental than economic activity. I suppose this is part of an attempt to integrate a different vocabulary into this sort of discussion. For example, it's interesting to me that parables such as the bread/stone distinction used in this post would seem to indicate that theologians had already been aware of the threat or risk of a nefarious artificiality, long before capitalism gave rise to the Simulation or the Hyperreal. There was already awareness of a Capgrasian double hiding behind the surface of the world, perhaps waiting in the wings, and I'm interested in trying to understand what was at stake in those sorts of conversations. Does that make sense?
But, yes, a much shorter answer is that Eco's work is very interesting and useful here! Thanks for reading.