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‘m sure ‘spiritual materialism’ could mean any number of um things. that’s part of its poetical if not philosophical appeal, as poetry is the art of being profoundly vague. so one doesn’t like to ‘disambiguate’ too strongly. however, here’s a bit more about what i had in mind. others will have their own, different notions of what it might mean.

many of us, as writers and/or artists or whatever, find ourselves working with ‘the material’ in ways that we weren’t earlier on. with less emphasis on transcribing our ‘inner thoughts and feelings’ and more emphasis on what the words are saying. and yes there are often things we want to get them to say, if we can (like now), but we observe that not only are we not entirely clear what that might be, until we find the words, but that even when we do, they aren’t quite what we thought they might be and are often better as something we didn’t anticipate at all via not mindless manipulation of symbols but through a process of writerly/artistic discovery that involves mind and mindless, material and material, material and spiritual. via engaging with the material both in an objective manner, as things on a page subject to choice and cutup, random and thoughtful selection…and all the compositional techniques we use.

and this different engagement with ‘the material’ is part of what i had in mind as a kind of materialism. of course the term ‘materialism’ has a very interesting history going back to Indian and Greek atomism and into the contemporary world in many different ways. usually the ‘material’ is atomistic. matter. a philosophy of the composition of matter and the generation of the ten thousand things.

only recently has it been associated with consumerist zeal and denials of the importance of feelings, emotions, and so on. a blip on the map.

usually there’s a scientistic element, often a strong one, to materialisms. they often seek to apply an occam-like razor to eliminate assumptions that are not required or to eliminate attribution of causes to supernatural agents. materialisms usually do their darndest to appeal only to reason and material evidence in their theories.

but of course, as artists, we are by no means in the bizness of appealing solely to reason. we don’t produce many theories of the universe and everything but, instead, are basically wordy minstrels singing into the black hole of mind and media. and, for lack of a better word, there is a ‘spiritual’ dimension to what we talk about, what we do, how we go about it, and so on. emotion, feeling, mood, tone, connotation, subjectivity, all these are normally important to art.

yet our approach, or the approach of many of us, to writing and/or art or whatever, in our current age, does involve this ‘materialism’ i mentioned that does indeed have a scientistic dimension in that we do try to keep our eye somewhat objectively not on what we ourselves are feeling and thinking about what we’re creating but on what others might also get from it and, beyond that, in our approach to working with the material as recombinant, as involved in the processes of network cutup, reassembly, and our sources of the material can be spam or texts recovered from net searches or whatever and our methods of composition can involve the algorithmic and so on. kedrick james’s term for all this is ‘writing post-person’.

but, even so, we are not so much interested in creating interesting language machines as in the human appeal of these machines made out of words. so that a contemporary, writerly materialism usually involves some sort of meditation on our relations with language and machines. not to dehumanize but to locate and explore our humanity in relation to mind and mindlessness, the intention and the unintended, the machine and the human.

there’s that kurzweil book ‘the age of spiritual machines’. with emphasis on artificial intelligence. and that’s interesting, but typically our emphasis is not on artificial intelligence but on our own intelligence extended, changed, dwarfed, zoomed, augmented, pounded, filtered, twittered, frittered, coerced, directed, freed, drugged, blasted, spliced, diced, googled, ogled, bamboozled, frugalled, layered, informationalized, playered, stirred, blurred, penetrated, iconized, infiltrated, visualized, datafied, search enginized, tokenized, blip bopified, ding donglered and piece-wise transformed via our engagement with language and contemporary language environments. our own intelligences are somewhat artificial. and we operate in a material combinatorium of language not as in a meaningless concourse of atoms but in our own very purposefully processual cyclotrons, intent upon both the material and energy of its release.

Jim Andrews
http://vispo.com

Tags: Jim Andrews | materialism | spiritual

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