My recent conversation with Eugene Shimalsky for his podcast ‘Garden.Something.Meeting’ is here. In our free-wheeling discussion we touch on a wide range of topics including our relationship to news media; the war in Ukraine; disinformation narratives; cognitive overload; potlatch*; critical theory; algorithmic polarisation; Nick Land (again!); the development of Neo-reaction; the cult of acceleration; propaganda, war and trauma; fear and the psychology of reality denial.
*I’d like to clarify some of the comments I made about ‘potlatch’ in our discussion. There are two distinct but related meanings of the term. The first is the ceremonial cultural system of the First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest that was prohibited by the colonial authorities between 1885-1951. The second is an avant-garde appropriation of the idea taken from ethnographic literature first articulated by Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share (1949). Bataille used it as an example of a non-utilitarian, ‘general economic’ model of wealth that had, theoretically, a revolutionary, anti-capitalist potential. This idea was taken up by the Lettrist International through their journal of that name. It is through Bataille that the term ‘potlatch’ became associated with violence, excess, transgression and ‘getting wasted’. This is however not a characteristic of traditional potlatch ceremonies, which are very sober and strictly regulated events.
Invisible Mirrors 