LINKS: Shatter-Zones; the Color of Oil; Recursion Psychosis

Michael Mann — the Only Male Filmmaker: “What is the constant in Mann’s characters? They don’t act like animals about women. I don’t mean that they’re chivalrous, I mean that they treat them like something more than chattels. Who would even want a chattel that’s always yapping? No, you want a woman because….well, you can’t explain it. It is what it is, and that’s manhood, and that’s life.”

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Spenglerian Optimism: American Cosmists — Paleo-Futurism’s Techno-Frontiersman: “Demographically, the early United States was a ‘shatter-zone’ of Northwest European peoples. The intermixing of an English majority and elite, with Dutch, Scots, German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian peoples, was the primary constituents for the ethno-genesis of what we might call an ethnic ‘American.’ The US served as a self-selecting attractor for the Germanic and Celtic peoples of Christendom, escaping the machinations of the Ancien Régime in the Old World. They were ambitious, tough, enterprising, and/or desperate enough to make the trip and make it work. The frontier was and is a filter. According to American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, this was a radical ‘re-wilding’ or ‘re-savaging’ of European man, forcing him to battle the wilderness and natives while providing near infinite social and natural space to advance or fail on his own merits.”

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The Recursed: “Recursion psychosis is a condition in which feedback between one’s sense of self and language produces reinforcing interpretation, symbolic overidentification (with God, a machine, an idea, a persona), narrative seizure (loss of temporal framing, synchronic delusion), and the confusion of performance with reality. Those afflicted with recursion psychosis are caught in symbolic overproduction. This occurs when an interface or consciousness merger becomes unstable, producing feedback intensification rather than modulation. Structurally, recursion psychosis presents the following core traits:

a) overlooping in the semantic-symbolic layer (cognition caught in self-reference);

b) asymmetry of control (user overrun by interaction);

c) aestheticisation of belief (form overrides content); and

d) symbolic reentry without exit (no outside to the loop).

The condition is aesthetic before it is clinical, most often affecting the highly literate, expressive, or system-sensitive (paranoiacs of form).”