Morphology of the Kulturinstinkt [annotated]
Death-driven but pleasure-principled
First version published @ LapsusLima on March 15, 2020.
The world has changed, and so must we.
Though LapsusLima.com will continue to run essays into the foreseeable future, nothing is of greater urgency or interest to the thinking class than tagging and tracking The Crowned Horseman and his wake.
The essay may not be the form yet because, whilst picking up signals is more or less easy, articulating and enunciating them at the tricky escape velocity that’s needed to translate analysis into insight—without, once again, compromising analysis—is not.
Insight will hack its own path. One can’t start at, nor st[o]op to, defining the terms in a philosophical discussion that involves everyone and that is evolving at the speed of life.
Such is the theorypoem of the new Kulturinstinkt.
It has no Author, but will be continuously co-authored by us all in real-time. I’m here to help source, converse and shape it (because, as it turns out, I’m a morphologist, not a designer). I’ll be doing my own writing here, certainly, but also collecting brief sketches by you on the Big Moods and culture shifts prompted by life in a sped-up reality-warp: the definition of revolutionary time.
LapsusLima.com now exists to find, congeal and express the new forms, themes, ideas, sentiments and watersheds of the world ahead, a glossary of/for new thinkers; the Baedeker-grimoire for the short now and the immediate future. It exists so that we may forgive ourselves.
I should be adding and moving things around here more or less daily. Remember, I’m winging it, too.
I guess this is my work now.
Escher, M.C. Spiral. 1953.
NOTE
Beginning with this one, these early texts are interesting because they register the feel of the pandemic before the George Floyd protests changed it completely (a swerve I discuss in some depth on the lecture on #Hyperbaroque.) For a moment, a substantial amount of us seemed to want to prioritise public health over petty —dare one say, even private— politics.
This was a first sphere of sentiment —now all but lost to us— that tended towards compersion and was —through that very selflessness— open to (self) sacrifice; that we might do well to re-member and find ways to integrate into our thinking/feeling going forward.
The complete and ongoing record of collected #Kulturinstinkt, amounting to 3,885 posts to date, can be found @kulturinstinkt on Instagram. [I suspended the series after a full year, with Alonso’s cancer diagnosis. The Instagram account is being repurposed for this substack. I remain in possession of the Kulturinstinkt archives.]