THE SECRET STAIRS
UNILALIAN FOOTNOTES ELLIS A. WILSON
Unilalianism is an Afro-Indigenous avant-garde movement, developed behind closed doors in northern California and Washington state in the mid 2010s by emerging multidisciplinary artist Ellis A. Wilson. The movement was formally announced in 2018 with the launch of The Unilalia Group, a creative firm and record label that specializes in facilitating semiotic, multimedia, and performative installations — its mission is to foster creative research that exemplifies, models, analyzes, and/or theorizes the technique of leveraging acontextuality as a means of subverting the constraints of symbolic relationality. Wilson’s concerns are rooted in a nuanced understanding of semiotics, meaning-making, and symbolization as a technology used to manipulate and direct perception by mediating one’s imagination of reality and selfhood. The term Unilalia is derived from the Latin unus and the ancient Greek laliá – in its pedestrian form, it signifies a continuous application of psychonautic theory in the studio of the artist and in daily life. Inspired partly from Situationist theory, these applications play themselves out as multifaceted installations which focus on deconstructing the superimposition of consensus reality over the terrain of daily life.
The following is intended to be read as notes (like rough ideations/sketches) that underline aspects of Unilalianism.
UNILALIAN FOOTNOTES From the ornamentalism, the endless successions of mediation, artificiality and the ritualization of alienated consumption to the fetishism of individuality that constitutes this hypermodern iteration of life, one can’t help but feel the momentum of symbolization as it pulls consciousness like gravity towards an objectified experience of nature. The imagination, irrespective of its cultural iteration, organizes itself according the objectifying logics of symbolic relationality: nature is relegated to the role of the referent as objects take its place. Here, the substitutional grammar of representation seeks to conceal nature behind a seemingly impenetrable veil of description – cultural illusions are manufactured and religious behaviors are cultivated around the manipulation of this primary principle as hidden institutions seek to exploit the power of language as a means of actualizing the total subjugation of consciousness to the directions and dictates of artificiality. The object reveals itself as the axiom of culture and it is precisely this revelation which rationalizes the institutionalization of subjectivity as both a sociopolitical impulse and an ontological perspective. In its current form, the evidence for the existence of this institution lies in the conventionality of self that characterizes the discontents and failures of symbolic relationality. Considering Leslie A. White’s (1949) contention regarding the symbol as “the basic unit of all human behavior and civilization”, those who have assumed a monopoly over the construction and management of the symbolic domain wield the understanding that within the theater of representation, the universe is distorted into a symbolic matrix wherein the disempowered collective finds itself subjugated to the wills of the semiotically proficient monopolists. When concerned with the consolidation of power, representation,
within its diachrony, emerges as a predatory practice, intended to deceive its audience for the sake of mediating and filtering one’s perception of and relationship to the natural. Commenting on this, primitivist philosopher John Zerzan (2002) reminds us that “symbolizing is linear, successive, substitutive; it cannot be open to its whole object simultaneously…Its instrumental reason is just that: manipulative and seeking dominance”. Symbolization emerges as a mechanism by which the natural may be pulled into definition, by which nature can be forced into context — it is a means of reducing nature into an impersonal matrix of notation for the sake of preserving the psychosis of civilization, producing an alienated life arrested by the syntax of objectification while simultaneously authorizing the construction of an identity that is absolutely maintained by separation and realized only via the use of spectacular language. The disillusion of symbolic and artificial boundaries naturally threatens this process, translating to a dramatic change in lifestyle wherein one’s perception of self is no longer contextualized by one’s image of self. This leads to the decontextualization of consciousness and thus, the inevitable and total realization of the Natural. Here, one observes the urgent and deliberate exodus from an objectified style of being, expressed as a triumphant dive into the psychedelic domain — this is the destination of the Unilalian approach for only in this domain is the individual able to realize Who They Really Are. In this, one will naturally oppose the aggression of depersonalization, that of which is the central dynamic that not only drives our social and economic systems, but also contextualizes the psychological atmosphere of the dominant society. Commenting on what she referred to as the Psychopathology of Work, Penelope Rosemont of the Chicago Surrealist Group (2004) illustrates an example of depersonalization within contemporary life, discussing the maintenance of a “pattern of working for someone else: making someone else’s “goods”, producing the wealth that someone else enjoys, thinking someone else’s thoughts (sometimes actually believing them to be one’s own), and even dreaming someone else’s dreams — in short, living someone else’s life, for one’s own life, and one’s own dream of life, have long since been lost in the shuffle”.
The dispossession of power and the depersonalization of the individual are both byproducts of an inherently misanthropic system. The corporate consumer State seeks to prevent mass resistance to this system by suppressing community through its maintenance of an alienated and heavily compartmentalized, competitive, and divided social climate. In fact, community is an enemy of the corporate consumer State, for it threatens the integrity of a social economy which is fueled by the mechanization of life coupled with the mass production of scarcity, expressed as the ubiquity of alienation, the poverty of intimacy, the repression of the sensual, and the celebration and reaffirmation of commodity relations and the reification to which it yields. Even further, alienation, separation, and isolation present themselves as prerequisites to the total disempowerment and manipulation of consciousness. The key is to alienate one from oneself because in this separation, and only in this separation, will the depersonalized individual be susceptible to identifying with the dominant images of self, a matrix of representation which consists of an evolving collection of mass produced and intersecting narratives intended to serve as a symbolic and dissatisfactory substitution for the Natural — thus; we observe the arrival of our familiar dilemma: the identity. Here, the identity, perhaps better understood as the contextual self, becomes synonymous with one’s prison uniform as they pace back and forth in the jailhouse of definition, sweat dripping from their brow as they turn the cogs which run the symbolic machinery of spectacularization. The exhaustion is crippling. Daily, one will dress oneself in the costume of their identity, eager to satisfy their roles and perform upon the stage of the spectacle, participating within a carefully maintained fiction, the manufactured consensus misidentified and treated as “reality”. One is deemed psychotic if they are to question and deny the dictates of the established convention, the consensus, the prepackaged fiction labeled as “life” that is sold to the public in exchange for their service to an impersonal authority. To be seduced by the charade of the identity is to relinquish one’s autonomy over their experience of Self, falling victim to the standardization of being and the complementary assault of categorization. All elements of being are then compartmentalized
and objectified as the commodity continues to assume totalitarian dominion over daily life, a routine any critical observer is all too familiar with. It should be noted that the identity finds its most powerful utility in its ability to entertain and distract an uninformed psyche, incarcerating one’s imagination of selfhood within the context of a social reality that is produced by, not only the maintenance of artificial divisions and boundaries, but also the total spectacularization of the natural. In fact, spectacularization is a prerequisite to the emergence of the modern State, what Debord (1967) referred to as “the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions” — widespread dehumanization reveals itself as an inevitable consequence, a signpost on the road towards the total realization of the spectacle, or perhaps more accurately put, the total spectacularization of reality. This impulse to reduce all forms of life into a spectacle is symptomatic of a deeper psychological condition, a profound example of disassociate psychosis expressed as the deliberate urge to suppress the realization of the Natural. Thus, spectacular life, or what Zerzan (2002) referred to as “symbolic life, essence of civilization”, presents itself as the primary opponent to the elevation of consciousness, for it exists only in the context of the spectator, making it functionally complicit in the total conflagration of the psyche that characterizes the zeitgeist of hypermodern civilization. As a prerequisite to contemporary civilization, the domestication of human consciousness requires the adaptation of the mind, through being socialized in captivity, to a life intimately associated with and advantageous to the wills and agendas of the corporate consumer State — similar to the fate of a household pet, the child must be housebroken underneath the roof of spectacularization, conditioned to accept and fulfill their prescribed role as both a consumer and producer of the illusion that perpetuates the entire system (which is the spectacle itself). Thus, as the collective is grabbed by the neck and submerged in the self-toxified currents of image, symbol, and representation, the civilized imagination finds itself restrained by the rigidity of the dominator style’s taxonomies, held captive behind
the towering walls of its binary and dualistic grammars as it simultaneously falls victim to the perversion of commodification. As a commodity, the imagination is considered only as far as its utilitarian applicability is concerned; its power is only given reality by the effectiveness to which it can be used to actualize the objectives of the corporate consumer State. With the advent of hypermodernity, the function of the imagination now has its reference point in its form, that being entirely dependent on the context in which it is expressed, rather than the inverse; thus, contextualization reveals itself as a strikingly potent and effective mechanism of manipulating the imaginative content of both the individual and collective psyche. By contextualizing one’s perception of self, the State is able to dictate the symbolic parameters by which one is permitted to construct their personal model(s) of reality. For example, we observe the monopolization of self expression, introduced in its benevolence as the modern entertainment industry — entertainment groups, multimedia conglomerates, and social media platforms are all examples of this. All of these entities seek to objectify the individual into an item of social commerce, capitalizing off the unlimited spectacularization of Self fueled by the ceaseless production of insecurity. In this, the body is stripped of its autonomy as the wide diversity of human biological and phenotypical traits are compartmentalized, standardized, symbolized and assigned different qualitative values — one’s overall physical appearance, skin color, perceived gender, hair type, nearly every conceivable visible detail becomes a symbolic attribute which is then removed from the individual, only to be displayed as a collection of spectacular objects, empowered and given reality only by the gaze of the spectator. Thus, in the context of contemporary social life, before the individual is seen as themselves, they are seen as a collection of attributes which are attached to a symbolic representation — the commodity’s carefully maintained image takes priority over the individual’s naturally occurring essence, both internally and externally. As social life is remodeled to reflect the grammars and principles of a highly competitive global marketplace, the corporate consumer State intends to further establish, maintain, and adjust the various standards by which the individual will value themselves
as a commodity, as a material and finite object of consumption, utility, production, transaction, and possession. From here, the collective’s perception of Self is vandalized — the Natural is censored via definition, hidden behind the veil of its representation, strangled by the unrelenting grip of commodification as the authoritative institutions seek to assume totalitarian dominion over all aspects of daily living. By employing predatory styles of symbolization, the State is able to suspend the collective within the context of the spectator, for only in this context can the symbol dominate life as society’s universal category. Shackled by the symbolic, the autonomous Self is to be abstracted into the spectacular consumer — the advent of the spectator translates to the genesis of a world wherein one’s experience of Self is to be relegated to an entirely fraudulent context produced only by the spectacular narcotization of consciousness. In this, one is only permitted to entertain the miracles of life through the filter of spectacularization, forever increasing the separation between one and oneself. The conception of humanity as somehow dislocated, separated, and alienated from the rest of nature only testifies to our initial division from the Natural, to our traumatic fall into a representational style of Self reflection which launched us into the profane psychosis of history, where we now find ourselves held hostage aboard the crashing train of spectacular consciousness. To hold the collective captive is no different than captivating an audience — the public falls prey to the incessant empire of entertainment, faces pressed against the cold glass of a reality fabricated by Fortune 500 corporations as they live a life of separation, servitude, depersonalization, depression, and fear. Colorful lights and images flash across their eyes, pupils dilated, as the world is reduced to that which is dictated by authority, an achingly tiresome and repetitive narrative laced in coercion, rife in frustration and saturated in quotidian details as all autonomy is stripped from the individual’s mind. Here, one lies naked, vulnerable to the molestation of symbology for symbolization denotes the assault of contextualization upon the Natural; thus, only within the confines of the authority’s
manufactured context is life permitted to run its course. Here, we witness what is perhaps the highest expression of domination, an inevitable consequence of the unfolding drama of Riane Eisler’s dominator culture, a term coined to define a predatory form of administration, characterized by its hierarchical, divisive, materialistic, egocentric, male-dominated, and dehumanizing pillars of social organization. Due to the overwhelming failures of this global maladaptive and misanthropic style of being, the human narrative has arrived at an eschatological moment in the historical process, a transition colored by the crippling anxiety of civilizational suicide wherein the redemption of the human enterprise is of paramount concern. For the sake of the total actualization of freedom and the complete restoration of the dignity of life, consciousness must be liberated from the hegemony of symbology; we must resist the imprisoning nature of the rigid definitions we place upon our lives, each other, and everything in between by fostering expression that targets and directly challenges the individual’s manufactured image of self. This will reveal the inherent malleability, frivolity, and triviality of symbolic structures such as civilization as well as linguistic constructs such as the identity, prompting the individual to seek what lies beyond the linguistically sanctioned experience we have grown accustomed to accepting as the totality of the human experience. By stripping away the layers of symbology that comprise the foundation of profane existence, one is able to traverse the frontiers of consensus reality and behold the Self [the Natural] for what it is. Terence McKenna (1992) refers to this as the Transcendental Other, as the “crucible of the Mystery of our being, both as a species and as individuals… Nature without her cheerfully reassuring mask of ordinary space, time, and causality”. In realizing oneself, one realizes life as One Self — the central and self-evident principle, the absolute, the cause of causality, that which prefers to evade definition, the ineffable, Brahman, and God. In this, there has never been a greater achievement.
Unilalian Footnotes.
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