#i'm in a city that in theory has a great club scene but i'm only here this weekend and i don't think i'm making it to an actual godforsaken | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cosmiccino · 2 years ago

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In late 2020, Jack Ma, who had been one of China's most high-profile and successful businessmen, disappeared from public view for several months after he made critical comments about China's financial system and its regulators. He had spoken at a conference in Shanghai in October 2020, where he criticized China's regulatory system and compared it to an "old people's club."

Soon after his remarks, Chinese regulators suspended the planned initial public offering (IPO) of Ant Group, an online finance company that Ma had co-founded. The IPO, which would have been the world's largest ever, was worth an estimated $35 billion. Since then, Ma has largely remained out of the public eye.

It is not clear what caused Ma's disappearance or what the current status of his relationship with the Chinese government is. However, the incident highlighted the risks of criticizing the Chinese government and its regulatory policies, particularly for high-profile individuals and businesses.

Monday, 1st of March 2021 , Entry into the world of exile. (1)

I never went along with the idolization of the masses, not even in those times when I still pretended to believe in [the government’s] political theories. (2)

Now ousted and in exile out of sight, [I] was called to the city of Krakow (3); A city that attributes its founding to the mythical ruler of Krakus.

As I open my letter of invitation, it only reads this: more cityness in the city.

[…] While I rode in the night train I had a feeling of great grief, but in my heart of hearts I could not be mournful, and this for a strange reason: during the entire journey I continually heard dance music, laughter, and jollity, as though a wedding were being celebrated. (5)

It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. (6)

Its funny to look back and see how far I’ve come. Back in my younger years, when I proved the internet existed in China, I was often told: “Just drop that fool delusion that you're better than everybody else and go to work. In a year, you'll have an office that'll make you blush to think of this dump. You'll have people running after you, you'll have clients, you'll have friends, you'll have an army of [people] to order around!”. Hell! […] What can it mean to me? But this time I'm not fishing for anything for myself,(4)

The persistence of the present concentric obsession makes us all bridge and tunnel people, second class citizens in our own civilization, disenfranchised by the dumb coincidence of our collective exile from the [light]. (3)

And so when I saw [my invitation to Krakow], the approach seems on the contrary to be an almost aristocratic exile, not connected to democracy, but more an exile to the [shackles of law, which all of us have been conditioned to partake in]. (8)

Nothing can be more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness; and if these be favourable to virtue, and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behaviour. (9)

[Its understandable] how much may be effected this way, if you observe how even wild beasts grow tame by dwelling among us, and how no animal, however ferocious, continues to be wild, if it has long been accustomed to [world’s] companionship: all its savageness becomes softened, and amid peaceful scenes is gradually forgotten. (10)

It has alienated all its rights to the [law], who is, therefore, absolute master. (11)

From birth we are conditioned to “good behavior”. Our view towards the world is shaped by external influences, education and beliefs. We are shaped. We are encouraged to behave in balance with the law. In balance with the absolute master. We become merely puppets on the stage that is already set for us. Not only by regulation, by law, but also by religions, by superstitions and by myth.

When the guardians of morality perform a great tragedy […] and then believe that therefore the world is no longer in order and the great law of the gods and humankind is in danger, then kynical satire first admonishes us to stay calm. Let us see whether that is really so bad! Who is really harmed by this copulation that goes against the regulations? Only the naive illusion of law. How would it be, however, if human beings did not have to serve the law, but the law had to serve human beings? (2)

Tuesday, 2nd of March 2021, KrakOW — What nOW?

Alas, I have taken my first stroll through Krakow.

Back in China, I have become somewhat of a myth, just as the likes of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. But here, I am merely a migrant. Alienated to my surrounding, to the people and the places here.

We can be alienated from home (exile), from a fictitious world (in the theatre, in the arts), from ourselves. (13)

When I look around myself, as I explore the city, it already has everything a city needs. Maybe controversial, but the city is both Babylon, the place of alienation, exile, estrangement and violence, and Jerusalem, the place where Gods dwell, […], and invites humankind to peace. (4) Eradicating the negative would be comparable to putting a plaster over a gushing wound.

But then, what does cityness entail?

Walking amongst the masses and seeing all the houses of gods erected around me, all I can observe is that people, strangely enough move in the same rhythms, praying to the gods and performing their daily rituals ceremonies without questioning. It is as though life is a theatre, and everyone plays the part they are given. “Just drop that fool delusion that you're better than everybody else and go to work” (4). The worker (us) exchanges for a wage the power to determine what they will produce, how and when they will produce it, as well as ownership and control over the product of their labor. (14) And the same applies to our social hierarchy, all observing the strict etiquette […], and all organized according to their place in the hierarchy. (15) Humans are conditioned to stick to the rules and laws of life, like a dancer that practices the same choreography over and over again.

What if, [we] imagine the same scene, but [we] learned how to dance the night before; [we become] all too conscious of [our] feet. (16) We become too conscious of ourselves, because we haven’t learned to forget the constraints that shaped us through our entire lives.

That’s what differentiates the mediocre human from Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, or even myself. We are beasts. We just do. In my case however, the government that banished me from my own home, was the bigger beast.

An animal doesn’t practice before it hunts, it just hunts using its instinct. The emphasis is on animality, the animal side and animal basis of human existence. (2)

And, lest we forget, the animal is not “The Animal,” but the principle of animality that belongs entirely to human culture (12), that is encoded in all of our DNAs. Embracing the animal beast within us entails us to forget the laws (the great masters, the great god or whatever one wants to call it) that hold us back from our fullest potential.

That’s it! The problem doesn’t lie in the city itself, but the people living in it.

Wednesday, 3rd of March 2021, Mounding the genesis

This city is surrounded by so much myth. From all the churches and synagogues to the Mound Krakus.

So although I don’t try to imitate […] the language [of the gods], I can get a feeling for something of the imaginary, something of the mythical world of these characters; a secret ground in which I [will reinvent Krakow]. (20) Particularly on Mount Krakus, where the legend of Krakow’s founding took place on. Symbolically, forgetting will be celebrated on the mound, the very mound where the myth was born.

As I was observing some men working on a dragon sculpture, I discovered from a local, that in three months time the people of Krakow celebrate the Dragon Parade; simply said, they celebrate the slaying of the dragon, the slaying of the beast— the very event that founded this city. It’s a funny though, that the celebration revolves around the killing of the animal, the very essence what makes us human.

Symbolically, forgetting will be celebrated on the mound, the very mound where the myth was born.

Sunday, 7th of March 2021, Going back to the roots.

I’ve taken a few days to adjust myself to this city. Although I can move freely, without anyone suspecting who I am, I still feel like a myth to the rest of the world, a hidden god that moves in the shadows. This isn’t who I want to be.

Back in my homeland I tried to convince the people that everyone can become their own god. But of course, with the ever so controlling government, that message didn’t really deliver well.. I get it now. I can’t convince the people they can be like me. They have to believe it themselves, they have to embody it and be it.

Unless the myth is exposed.. unless I am exposed.. the magic of being animal, of listening to nothing but your own instincts, your own body, your own rhythms, it will only remain a concept that all the gods write about, that people willingly and unquestioningly follow and worship. The feeling of security in a “city full of gods" [provided by the old cosmological mythical religions] is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de-divinized, communication with the world transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, […] as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. (19)

What I’m trying to say is that we are all gods. But we forgot how to be gods. Its in our DNA. […] Once [our memory] has been "decoded”, [once we do the animality within us justice], [our potential] will jump into action. (17) We need to go back to our roots. Unleash the beastly gods within us.

Only when we are all gods within the city, will the city truly flourish.

But I can’t be the one to convince the people of this. That was the mistake I did back home. Gods aren’t appointed by people. No, gods exist. I must expose the myth of myself, the myth of Jack Ma and the myth of the beast that has been regulated for so long. Once this concept of the myth is graspable for the human, only then will he be willing to forget and therefore unlock the memory of the beastly god within them.

Forget what? Forget the laws, forget the biases, the rules that rule our our entire lives. We are beasts that have to follow a grid. No, now is the time the beast follows the beast, to listen to our own bodies, our own rhythms and respect the rituals that do our instincts justice. […] This belief needed to be justified: one needed to have the belief for the right reasons. (18)

(1) Corbin, Temple and Contemplation

(2) Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

(3) Hovestadt Buehlmann, Quantum City

(4) Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment

(5) Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections

(6) Burrows, Fictioning

(7) Rand, The Fountainhead

(8) Koolhaas Obrist, Project Japan

(9) Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

(10) Seneca, Complete Works

(11) Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

(12) Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968

(13) Braidotti Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary

(14) Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste

(15) Kuhl, 50 Buildings You Should Know

(16) Negroponte, Being Digital

(17) Hofstadter, Godel Escher Bach

(18) Wilson, Aesthesis and Perceptronium

(19) Voegelin, Order and History 5

(20) Cixous, White Ink

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