#character armor

Work for The Legions Reborn: An Alternate Heresy. This is a Warhammer AU complete with art, lore, new armors and more.

Warhammer and Adrian Smith were major things that got me into this career, so working on this is amazing.

Studio Three: My Octopus Teacher

Our third studio session focused insights and diverse perspectives to be gained from watching and entering into dialogue regarding a thought-provoking movie: My Octopus Teacher.. Facilitated by Dr. Karin Bustamante, we are offered this third studio on March 13. My Octopus Teacher is a movie that addresses important psychological issues regarding bonding, attachment, transference, consciousness…

what i say: its not funny, tho.

what i mean: The involuntary modes of behavior that characterize armor are generally “learned” during childhood as a “rational” response to an irrational, oppressive world. Thus, armor is essentially not a thing located in each individual, but a social relation, a layer of callous, deadened to the self and other, built up in the wear and tear of (anti-)social interactions; in the agony and constant danger of alienated association. This is demonstrated in the following observation, change a person’s social relations and his armouring, his character adjustment, will also begin to change to re-adapt, to become congruent again with his social life, his new relationships. Thus, it is erroneous to locate armour simply in the individual taken separately, although it is true that his social relations, his way of relating and surviving socially, may be “reflected” — mapped onto his body — in the form of muscular armouring; of a pattern of chronic contraction in the various muscular segments.

Character-armour is thus (1) the personal aspect of the spectacle. It is the personal organization of false appearances, self-representation; the self-spectacle. It is the self-image one seeks to project to others; the “front” one puts up; the role one plays, the “reputation” one accumulates. The projected, surface motives belonging to character are at the same time a surface denial and repression of certain forbidden, impermissible motives, which persist beneath the surface of character as ulterior motives, conscious or not. In their more conscious part, these ulterior motives express themselves as character in the form of lying, cheating, trickery, the con, hypocrisy, etc. — all the familiar backstage of the spectacle of “good character.” Character is the very locus of interpersonal duplicity — precisely the “duplication” of the self (cf. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, thesis IV, in The German Ideology, Progress Publishers (Moscow, 1968). p. 666, see also Marx’s remark in his Preface to A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy; “Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we can not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness.” in Lewis Feuer, op. cit., p. 44.)

Character-armour is also (2) the personal aspect of capital. In the proletarian, character is the locus of his “nature” as a commodity, his use-value to capital as an obedient pseudo-object, and hence his exchange-value — his exploitability — as “labour-power”; as a worker. Character-armour is the encrustation surrounding his self; a shield shielding both the world and his pseudo-self from his own potential subjectivity. It is built up through long years of social labour-time bestowed upon him by other individuals — his parents, priests, school teachers, policeman, and authorities of every sort, including his own peer group — and is part of the labour time socially necessary to produce a usable proletarian wretch from the available human raw-material, hence is included in the (exchange-) value of labour-power. It is the “value-added” to the individual as he “matures” by the labour of the social authorities, the immediate and (semi-conscious) agents of class society, who must see to the reproduction of individuals characterologically congruent with Capitalist social relations, with capital.

[NB: Further Leviathanic Notes]

I ponder the leviathan and myths and the Otherworlds. When you are working on your culture and your practice— Does it promote toxic masculinity (or toxic something-else)? Does it exclude other myths, peoples, art? Is it monological & promote instrumental reason? Does it treat the earth & people & nature with respect, even reverence? Do you feel open & intimate with yourself, others, with the…