SLEEPY (ZZ, zz) SHIFTINGS OF DOPEY SUBSTANCES
Quick response to Terence Blake’s “ZIZEK ON DELEUZES LETTER: against identitarianism“
[terenceblake] “so it is only fitting that Zizek misreads it, and Deleuze’s work generally, as avoiding any encounter with Hegel, who he (Zizek) claims represents “absolute Alterity”.
{AK}: What would “absolute alterity” mean?
The notion of otherness, inherently presupposes that of identity. Without an identity positioning, the ‘other to-‘ relation cannot obtain. So, strictly speaking, if “absolute alterity” is in any way identified, as severed from identity, it could no longer be ‘alterity’. Its absolute inflation exceeds the relation of its production.
As can be seen in the italicisation above, this absolute inflation is itself a product of a totalising identification.
Zizek’s phrasing, reflects the positivist assumptions of a simplifying, substantialist procedure, neglecting logical and implicative conditions. It has never been the case, that identity thinking, or differential thought, are in and of themselves essentially inadequate or deficient in any way. How can they be, given their essential complicity? But it is the case, that practices of positivist abbreviation and assumption, lead to the cul de sacs and fixations of habitually unthinking and inappropriate, substantial commitments. Such an entrainment of abridged assumptions; mechanically, lazily, illogically, and incompetently applied; results in insularity and positivist instrumentalisation. It is the inflation, not of identities or differences, but of fixations, however those fixations might be characterised, in what can only be called an imperialism of insularity.
The question might be asked, however, as to how the determination of ‘fixation’ is to be accomplished. For some, asking questions and honest consideration, are all that is necessary to discern theoretical blockage. For others, caught in the grip of fixation, more work is perhaps necessary. But the question itself, when in the modality of hasty demand, exemplifies fixation.
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[terenceblake] “All the uncertainty is left out.”
{AK}: Yes, and all the stupidity is left in! That, in a positivist nutshell (nut’s hell), is the exclusionary procedure of positivist instrumentalisation.
ARTISTRY BEYOND TOTALITY
This was a quick thing, occasioned by reading a long FB post mentioning art and its interpretations. I include it here, on Visions of Temporal Accumulation, because it mentions ‘monadic consideration’, which takes on a specific resonance in my work on General Conceptual Holography.
Whilst the artwork has long been institutionalised as a sociopolitical staging, and mantrick direction, for monadic considerations and contemplations; anything at all, really, can be utilised for such meditations, at the individual’s idiomatic leisure. The artwork, is thus not necessarily obliged to take sociopolitical form. Neither is it compelled to show, at any point, any signs that might distinguish ‘artistry’ or the ‘artistic’, as if such signposts could position Art and its workings in anything other than a conventional way.
One could, of course, object that an Art without defining boundaries, is no Art at all, or is a totalitarian Art, the hegemony of its aestheticising substance an absolute sublation or sublimation, towards some so-called gesamtkunstwerk or other. Such an objection, of course, has merit as a ‘cautionary’ towards clarity, but speculative considerations of definition do not usually exceed the extrapolatory scope of the conventionscapes of their origination, new maps are required for the heart of art: charts that may well exceed the entire institutionalisation of ‘Art’, without any totalising gestures.
THE DOCUMENTS OF CYBERNETIC SALVATION AND SELF-FULFILMENT
{AK}: “(Microsoft) Cognitive Services”, is on the Azure, cloud platform. I looked at that, a few months ago, it’s very good.
[Fabio Moioli] “The improvements we are making in understanding speech and language are driving a paradigm shift, moving away from a world where we’ve had to understand computers to one where computers understand humans. We call this conversational AI. In addition, tools such as Microsoft Bot Framework, already used by 130.000+ AI developers, are helping people to interact in a more natural way with AI.”
{AK}: There are different ways of looking at that.
It contrasts two forms of understanding, ‘computing’ and ‘human’. But we must ask, on what basis, does this contrast obtain? Do not humans compute? What, really, is ‘computing’? What, really, is ‘human? Here’s what Sol Yurick has to say about it:
“With the invention of new sensing devices, new perceptual systems come on line. All beings are some function of their information intake, no matter how indirectly the information is received. What was done in the mind must now be done through computers … programs begin to become quasi-solidified thought. New procedures for action and behavior take the form of a ritual, requiring the playing of an excruciating game called programming. People resist? The languages are too hard, the steps too long and complicated? Money is now poured into developing computers that “talk English,” are touch-responsive or voice-activated. Computers for dummies.”
Sol Yurick, “Metatron”, in “Introduction”
If we look at things informationally, then there are only different systems, whether biological in form, or not. Arguably, everything ‘human’, is susceptible to cybernetic or systematic representation, and thus, to computability.
Equally, though, everything ‘human’, through this very computability, has the potential to re-present, and configure, cybernetic systems.
The establishment of the cybernetic algorithm as a wider worldly emphasis, is the mundane institutionalisation of the purposes originating that cybernetic algorithm.
As we have seen, cybernetic control is a two way street, and all its systems can be gamed, by anyone ‘determined’ to do so. Both the good and the bad, of the human experience, are susceptible to cybernetic inflation. As the technosphere steadily permeates the ‘world’ with its systems; and as those systems spread according to human modes of utility and weaponisation; the entire spectrum of irresponsibilities characterising humanity secretly configures that ‘world’, in its own image and only according to its horizon of possibilities. ([Fabio Moioli] “We are also infusing AI into every product and service we offer, from Xbox to Windows, from Bing to Office.”)
Relinquishing the obligation to understand anything that transcends average human capacities, whilst increasing use of powers transcending those capacities, leads only to scenarios of dangerously inflated ignorance. One in which the ‘lack of understanding’ referred to earlier, infects those transcendences. It is too easily observed, that average human capacities, en masse, prefer the insularity of ignorance to the efforts of understanding. When the lazy ecstasy of thoughtless irresponsibility prevails over the demands of deep consideration, only anthropic futility and the limited horizons of its insularity, are left, with regard to informed action. As in ancient times, religious soothsayers filled the gaps of an unknown future. So now, artificial intelligence constitutes another hallucinated configuration of salvation waved at anxieties over the future; another system of prescribed ritual to be followed; another prewritten and inhabitable document of cybernetic self-fulfilment! ([Fabio Moioli] “To conclude, as the computer scientist Alan Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Considering all of this, as an alternative, you may use Artificial Intelligence to predict it.”)
THE MONOTONOUS REVELATIONS OF REALITY
[terenceblake] “Laruelle’s “non-standard” thought is thus a half-way house between standard philosophy and ontological pluralism.
{AK}: Academic philosophies of-, are, without exception, metaphysical-semantic inflations of concepts. There is an unlimited conceptual alphabet, so to speak, the majority of which is neglected in favour of the anthropic and academic preoccupation with the notion of realisation, and it’s hypostatic imaging as the ‘real’. The inordinate inflation of this principle is mainly due to deprivation and expression anxieties. There are others, but their delineation requires a more expansive context of explication. We can call almost all socially institutionalised philosophy ‘realist’, in this sense. The reality principle is a not so strange attractor, exerting its pull on all communi-cable philosophies of the anthropic.
Laruelle’s response to both epistemological and ontological proliferation, is essentially a monist empiricism, or empirical monism, which he achieves largely through a judicious appropriation of Buddhist techniques of metaphysical deflation. His borrowings, though, are selective, serving the purposes of his monist empiricism. The nature of that selectivity; its procedures and omissions; strongly characterise it, I would argue, as an insidious apologia at the outset, for innate forms of positivist instrumentalisation at the social core. The instrumental option is nothing new, but the lengths to which Laruelle has gone, in order to absolutise it as a reality-bolstered axiom, show both a degree of intriguing defensiveness, and an ideological inflation of a very specific idea of ordinariness, which can only be characterised as some yet to be determined cultural resistance. The notion of resistance bespeaks a threat, whether hallucinated or not. Obviously, whatever its forms, that threat is interpreted as a threat to the core reality of positive instrumentalisation.
Laruelle’s conversion of philosophies into a Lego or Meccano set of material possibilities is something that SF thinking has been doing all along, with far greater range, but it doesn’t just do that alone, nor as some kind of monotonous revelation.
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">[terenceblake] "There is the non-standard voice of an unknown stranger and an unassimilated foreigner in Laruelle’s texts (“étranger” in French means both stranger and foreigner) along with the more standard voice of a Continental academic philosopher. Even the title of the book expresses Laruelle’s awareness of, and struggle with these two voices.
Laruelle’s appeal and continuing relevance lies in the difficult and conflicted harmony (or at least co-presence) of these two voices. He maintains the exigency of immanence in perhaps its purest form today, although that very purity may have prevented him from attaining it except in its most general, and programmatic, outlines.</span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">{AK}: How 'pure' can such an exigency be, if there are two irreducible voices? Is that not a telling duality artefact of the current fad for the transcendence of immanence? To describe it in terms of 'purity' at all, betrays this idealisation of the immanent, and thus, concomitantly, of its polar twin, the transcendent. The same conventional and questionable logic of metaphysical distribution informing both terms is at play; the same hallucinated surfaces of substantial structuring and positivist instrumentalisation continue on, like cartoon characters running past the edge of a cliff, in theoretical mid-air, their dogmatic limbs spinning around according to their misplaced nostalgias of effective philosophical or non-philosophical, action.
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[terenceblake] “Reading this book and the immediately preceding books (where Laruelle tries to come to terms with Lacan) and also the succeeding ones (where he tries to come to terms with Levinas and Althusser), we can see that something more than non-philosophy is required if Laruelle is to actually implement his research programme.
Laruelle is in need of a non-standard supplement to allow him to pass from the critique of philosophy’s sufficiency and abstract programmatic talking about a different mode of thinking to its concrete practical effectuation.
{AK} When John Coltrane said that he didn’t know how to stop playing his saxophone solos, miles Davis told him: “Take the horn out of your mouth!”
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[terenceblake] “We can conclude that despite the seeming promise of its (negative and positive) heuristic principles of Laruelle’s metaphysical research programme it is missing a crucial element: the bridging principle that would permit the practice of non-philosophical thought. This un-bridged gap accounts for the disappointing attempts at realisation, usually amounting to repetitive affirmations of a “new use of philosophy” by Laruelle and his disciples, as if simply proclaiming something made it so. This characterises Laruellean non-philosophy as a form of performative idealism
{AK}: I agree. There is a risk of instituting an insularity of action or performance, something I cautioned against, almost two years ago:
“[John Ó Maoilearca]: “Individually, they are all One – and this is firstly a performative gesture before it becomes an ontological thesis (that tells us ‘what they are’)”:
{AK}: If this “One” is “firstly” a somatic sign, is such deliverance into an ecstasy of accomplishings, not a flight into an ‘action mysticism’?
There are two possible subtextual registers operating here: one, is the anchoring in a kind of Wittgensteinian “showing” that sidesteps interpretative drift; two, is the implicit valorisation of an unquestioned expediency, in the appeal to ‘practical action’ as an unquestioned ‘given’.
The dancing ‘body’ is, in-deed, important, but it is precisely because of that import that it risks returning to whatever insidious & coercive dualisations are floating around: the remnants of Cartesian afterglow.”
(http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=886)
LARUELLE AND HIS PHILOSO-FEE
As far as I can tell, so far, Laruelle took Derrida very very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that his response against Derrida reads like a satire of Derrida. He really had nowhere else to go, at that level, except to produce a rehabilitation of the ‘real’ or ‘reality’, using Zen-like logics to do so; basically, shifting the philosophical grid away from ontological concern, and onto the populist conceptuality, albeit Zen-powered, of this common term.
That he engages in a conceptual populism is perhaps shown by his practice of basing axiomatic definitions on common epistemological assumption (‘that which everyone already knows’). This is an appeal to the effortlessness of the ordinary. But it is also, as he would say, but is careful not to, an ‘autoposition’ of the ordinary. In addition, my argument would be that this ‘autoposition of the ordinary’, as inflected by an ordinary understanding of science, too easily plays into the hands of a crass, instrumental positivism; from there, perhaps, it is processed into a surface of conceptual consumerism.
This is shown by the considerable elisions of interpretation Laruelle practices in his encounters with Derrida. The ostensible reason for these omissions is structural; he projects onto the ‘philosophies of difference’, the burden of various binary and triadic structures; as characteristic of them, and of ‘ontological philosophy’, in general.
He imagines, that by dispensing with ontological concern, and switching to the conceptual populism of reality, he can escape those structural burdens.
By casting ‘ontological philosophy’, as a Moses before the promised land of Being, Laruelle can then institute his notion of ‘the One’ as a Zen-like immediacy, transforming the onerous textuality of ‘ontological philosophy’ into programmes and workshops under the signs of the ‘real’ and ‘non-philosophy’.
This has the advantage, of course, of socialising ontology, but eventually Laruelle and his followers will find that sheltering in the contemporary nostalgia of social-scientific-empirical modularisation comes at a price. Monotonously chanting positivist mantras, in the name of the ‘real’, does not make that price less exorbitant. No ‘axiom’, however facile, can satisfy that fee.
The Institutions Of Philosophy: Games Of Academic Pac-Man
Nietzsche, using empiricism and the language of differential force, critiqued the docility of traditional form.
Heidegger, using temporalised ontology and the question of being; its space of inquiry; to recast and redistribute traditional categories, according to their originary source intuitions, as given by the Presocratics and etymological excavation.
Derrida, using structural critique, displacement, and deferral, displaces the centralising hegemony of traditional categories.
Laruelle, using presumptions of disciplinary sufficiency suggested by prima facie, nominal unity, critiques the category of philosophy.
It can be seen that each uses an allegedly neglected categorical perspective to disrupt and/or displace, the thetic integrities of his predecessors. Each tries to consign their predecessors to the role of being an unwitting dupe of a categorical system. Whether an unknowing emissary of the mechanisms of ‘metaphysics’, ‘philosophy’, or whatever else the predecessor is held to have proposed; the systematic nature of any semantic extension, always makes available resources not belonging to that extension, for the purposes of critique.
This seeming relay race of disciplinary discursivities, each discourse a conceptual ‘Pac-Man’ trying to gobble up all the others, is quite possibly an academic corollary to the internal sectarianism of corporate bureaucracy.
So many semantic inflations, cunningly twisting around each other, and all on the basis of an unceasing argot of positivist exploitation.
SUBSTANCE ADDICTION, AND ITS DESTRUCTION OF OCCIDENTAL CIVILISATION, AND ‘NON-CIVILISATION’
I agree that reiteration alone, doesn’t necessarily equal an overall, theological closure, of any kind, whether actually ‘theological’ or not. What I’m suggesting, is the extent to which fetishisation might be going on; my impression, is that, in the contemporary era since the 1990s, it is the case.
My other implicit point, concerning “additional didacticism”, and its “burden”, referenced of course the general obligations of communication; but more particularly, the seemingly endless task of pointing out the habitual closures of knee-jerk positivist surface rhetorics, forever in thrall to unconscious substantial assumptions, whatever those assumptions may be, and where the fixation with which, constitute problematic blockages of thought and conception.
Running along with a positivist line (of thought), and then simply switching to another, whilst always susceptible to the celebratory image of bricolage; if done whilst under the spell of a blocking, unconscious substantial assumption; is forever condemned to unknowingly circulate around the economy of that blockage and it’s assumed configuration.
Back in 2009, I wrote this YouTube message to the poster of a Heidegger video.
“It’s kind of like this:
All metaphysical terms are like train tracks, the lands are converted into territories, epistemic dwelling zones, the stations are the points of validation, and/or categorisation, the points at which the territories are legitimised as realities.
The problem is that all metaphysical terms have their origins in the general lebenswelt or sensorium of anthropic experiences, experiences which are largely informed by common understandings pertaining to anthropic utility, so to speak. This bias, whilst not necessarily damaging in and of itself, is the vector by which all the ignorances that doxa is prey to, come rushing back in.
The lust for the final object or “”ground””, for thought’s resting place (the “”topos of repose””, the throne of ultimate authority), traverses all relations hierarchically- order is conducive to “”understanding”” and “”substance””. It dreams of a final substance or theory: God, Unified Field Equation, etc., the “”head”” of the hierarchy. But every “”thing”” is constituted by relations, even, especially, nothing.
Your experience of this “”nothing”” is perhaps of-
Richard Rorty calls it “”radical contingency”” and prattles on about Wittgenstein saying we didn’t need a foundation anyway. He has university funding, a best selling book that domesticates Derrida for American pragmatism, etc..
Buddhist “”sunyata””, but you are freaked out by an ingrained and conditioned need for an objectified position. British culture, especially, is inimically hostile to that which it cannot practically manipulate (handle, grasp). “”Keep it real””: the folk wisdom admonition that polices all exercises of speculative imagination.
You fixate on the possibility of “”Absolute Nothingness””, admit its “”identity”” with the “”Absolute””, but simultaneously alienate yourself from both.
Each of these three terms are essentially questionable. As is “”necessity””, too.
Of course, “”necessity”” has its application, in the calculus of cosmological forces structuring “”physicality””, even there, though, it is beginning to be readjusted and recontextualised.
You are not allowing yourself to think. You allow the stock Pavlovian reactions of your culture to prevent you thinking past the tradition of metaphysical emotionalities.
The map is not the territory, the territory is not the land.
Every journey is driven by some purpose.
If you lose the way, whose purpose is it?
Nietzsche said that he sometimes felt like he was a pen that was being written with.” 19 December 2009 00:34 (GMT-8)
Although it’s questionable, in many ways, it serves as a kind of rough filler prose, to further delineate the issues at play. I hadn’t yet got back into philosophy; was constrained by the comprehension limitations of my interlocutor; so it was an example of the “additional didacticism”, and its “burden”, that I refer to, here. At the time of writing, I felt that it didn’t really communicate precisely what I was getting at.
Over the years, I’ve noticed the philosophy blogging scene circulate around the same network of substantial assumptions, without showing any awareness of its effects. Instead, there is only positivist emphasis of metaphysical insularity, shown by the still prevailing preoccupation with notions of ‘reality’ or ‘the real’, conducted in largely antiquated ways; an antiquary of lazy ignorance rather than exploratory insight.
One has to acknowledge the truth! On the whole, people would rather argue over contrived trivialities, as long as they are sufficiently consensual, than work towards personal insights. This, it seems to me, is as operative in philosophy (or ‘non-philosophy’), as it is in electoral politics.
The exclusive preoccupation with the positive rhetorics of traditional substantial assumption is always weighed down by strategies of fixation, as configured by the limited horizons of ‘preferential belief’.
Both overt and covert, this socialisation of metaphysical possibility results in ghettos of l.c.d.* habits of reflection (*lowest common denominator/liquid crystal display) chaotically circling around uncertain, substantial commitments, and displacing their logical considerations. All this, largely as a result of futile attempts to appease the populism of utilitarian relevance, and its traditional imagery. Entire industries of reinscription are needlessly created, between unnecessary and equally insular, fashioned contrivances. This is merely philosophy (or ‘non-philosophy’), as consumer appeal. The destructive business of substantial commitments, of substance addictions, remains entirely unquestioned and unthought.
CONTEXTUAL METAPHORICS AND SUBSTANTIAL ASSUMPTION
It’s enough of a task to write in a way that one considers satisfactory according to one’s own criteria; but to add the burden of communicating to those subscribing to other criteria, criteria that do not exert the same effects on one’s personal procedures, as they seem to exercise on those others; is an additional didacticism weighed down precisely by that which one is obliged to contest.
It’s somewhat uncertainly amusing to note the general history of conceptual inflations surrounding the words, and concepts, of ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’.
The progress has merely been from the 18th and 19th century, as well as theological, fetishisings of the one; to the physics-envy, and scientististic differentiation, fetishisings of the other. Both have had a tendency towards positivist abbreviations and assumptions, automatically eliding, misrepresenting, or otherwise dismissing, serious narrative consideration of the opposing polarity’s distributive obligations.
There comes a time when a culture or civilisation is required to be equal to the self-images of development it has expressed; chaotically and clumsily weaving filigrees of positivist abbreviation around ad hoc structures of cartoon-like formalisation, might fulfill some Deleuzian fashion for ‘rhizomatic’ proliferation; or some other differential reaction to prior homogeneous styles of thought; or the opposed movement of homogenising reaction to allegedly established differential styles of thought; but all of that is a far cry from understandings not quite so susceptible to such fashionable and predictable fetishishisations, and, let us be honest, is a gesture of general cultural ‘backtracking’, one of enormous proportions. The gesture, being honest once again, is a revelation only of the inability to actually think in any way beyond the knee-jerk positivist surfaces of chosen substantial assumption. The entire sequence proceeds only according to the display of so many disingenuous nostalgias.
That’s not really a burden one would wish to carry; but it does require pointing out.
‘Immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, are always contextually dependent, and interdependent. Context is always subject to radically variable determination. So, neither is susceptible to any final determination. The same positivist instance, can be both ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’, both attributions being drawn from equally possible and available contexts.
Contexts themselves, can be both formalised or unformalised positive instances in their inflationary and extensible forms, as substantial orders. They are metaphorics, and their characteristic structural economies are the substantial patternings configuring logics of intuition and their substantial assumptions.
Anything at all, can be a ‘positive instance’, or a ‘context’.
ACADEMIC LIE SEE UMS
I guess, because it’s an academic industry, money is always a problem. That problem filters its way through institutional procedures and practices, affecting the work done, in various ways.
The whole ‘public intellectual’ thing is a concern with public relevance, a relevance that is always in question; increasingly so, when financial, political, and social information electronically proliferate into the new forms and swarms of a ‘cloud’ based culture. It’s all ‘in the air’, so to speak. I guess, Marx’s dictum, “All that is solid melts into air”, has become literally true, lol.
There are countless ways of manufacturing meaning, and I’m sure they’re all worthy pursuits; but there are different understandings, purposes, and needs; so that automatically creates a diversity of requirements. In unsettling times, of radical change, people are under duress to congregate around ideological simplicities, or at least they are more susceptible to them. That may be what’s occurring in general intellectual and academic discussions. They’re trying to mine a simplicity of sense; the motherlode of a superconducting, integratative (sic) efficiency. It’s the corollary of the profit drive, which is the corollary of a ‘Heaven’ ideology. They worship the god, ‘BetterOff’, so avidly, they are unable to contemplate or even acknowledge, anything else. That’s their ‘reality’, and it’s the only game that they can play, but they themselves are the pieces in that game.
IS IT ‘REALITY’ THAT IS HEARD, OR YET MORE CONTRADICTORY STUPIDITY: ALL THE ‘NARROWING ADDICTIONS’, ATTEMPTING TO EXCLUSIVELY INHABIT THE SILLY MECHANICAL GAME OF THE SELF-PRIVILEGED PRESENCE OF THAT EXHAUSTED NAME?
I couldn’t be bothered, to read more than two pages, and the abstract, of ‘Rocco Gangle’s’ essay, “THE THEORETICAL PRAGMATICS OF NON-PHILOSOPHY”, so I wrote this instead.
I have no objection at all, to using category theory or any other metaphoric, as a way of modelling philosophical structures in different ways, hopefully innovatory and insightful, at least for those who do them. Utilising the characteristic structures of different domains, as mutual metaphorics of transformation and transposition, is just one basic, combinatorial technique of SF thinking. To be done well, it really has to be intuitive and fast, at the speed of thought, sensing all possibilities, and no longer being bound by any habitual ideology of conventional use. When it’s done badly, it descends into mere contrivances of uninspired variation, essentially anchored within the anchoring horizons of conventional fixation.
It’s against this bad trend, the trend towards self-satisfied ‘banality’ described below, that the animus of what I’ve written is a cautionary gesture. Especially so, given the current confusions of epistemological inflation observable throughout contemporary cultures. This is not a time to retreat into the false security of nostalgias, disingenuously erecting old challenges as a ‘holding pattern’ of new sensationalisms. Piddling around with a combinatorics of disciplinary differences and outlook is ‘merely’ the specularity and fusion of what are, after all, initially contrived Aristotelian habits. Using, but not being bound by the conventional disciplinary protocols of, those habits of disciplined difference, is an automatic prerequisite of SF thinking. But SF thinking, at least in terms of my own personal receptions, moved far beyond these incidental transcendences at its outset.
Hence, a certain reluctance to return to such archaic concerns, especially when such emphatic sensationalism is presented so exclusively. It’s a bit like watching an ecstatic crowd learning the first two letters of the alphabet, and inflating the bare achievement of that task, to the proportions of a universal revelation.
It’s just the logic of mass hysteria; a painfully slow and sensationalist shift of fixation by structures of consensual dogma; a ‘reality’, that just can’t be taken too seriously.
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The distinction between the performative and the constative is an opportunity to critique both; not only in terms of each other, their usual conceptions; but also, in conjunction with the greater, fresher insights and understandings, enabled by a theorisation no longer quite so tightly bound by their insular everyday nostalgias.
Raging absolutism is the corollary of everyday insularity, whereby, it is not any thinking of the Absolute, in itself, whether in its ‘philosophical’ or ‘religious’ guises, that is generative of problems, but rather, it is the social game of authoritarian fetishism, or fetishising authority, that arises due to the lazy, narrow, and utilitarian demands for totemic simplicity exemplified by everyday insularity.
The hostility to the alleged alienations of ‘philosophical theory’ are the characteristic response of everyday insularity, of its contrived resentments towards any cultural horizon exceeding its immediate, avaricious grasp, the stubborn belligerence towards any development not susceptible to its order of banality. This is the revenge of positive instrumentalisation (instrumental isolation?), of an insularity itself an instrument of general instrumental production, on everything that does not submit to the injunctions of instrumental isolation, to its “unilateral usage… as mere material”.
Unwittingly perhaps, Laruelle gives unilateral expression to a Heideggerian enframing, to a technological telos, and a primacy of purified manipulation as an ‘end in itself’. One which converts everything into a resource, into ‘mere material’, into the homogenised techno-calculi always constrained to monumentalise ‘unilateral use’.
As soon as people are viewed as ‘expendable’, whether ‘instrumentally’, or even as a result of some logic of humility and charitability, privileging the social over an overweening individuality, Kant’s injunction concerning the treatment of people as ‘ends in themselves’ is lost. Whatever the dialectics of initial value may be, contrary gamings of casuistical interpretation are always a possibility; not only because of disingenuous desire, though that is all too commonly displayed, to the extent of formally constituting entire institutions of exploitation; but because the boundaries of perceived fidelity are themselves often problematic and inherently perspectival.
That Laruelle, at first glance, might be seen as rehabilitating the perspective of a lost proletarianism, with an ‘alternative stream’ of ‘oraxiomatic’ usage; sidestepping the perceivably baroque convolutions, and apparently resolution-allergic of Derridean usage, for example; is certainly the positive rubric or face of its contemporary display. But one has to ask, whether or not, this fasces or fascia is singular, in the monolithic and perhaps ‘narcissistic’ way it would like to consider itself – it’s so called ‘vision-in-one’? On the one hand, it is possible to sympathise with Laruelle’s metaphoric of what is after all an ancient concern stretching back to Eastern forms of thought, then to Ancient Greece, and on to the ‘present day’. The stock of images by which this concern has been known through the ages, are profuse.
Laruelle’s selection from this resource, and retrofitting of that which he selects, are highly specific to his purposes. The usage, is not that of some expansive tolerance resulting from immersal in an oceanic understanding. Unlike Freud, he does not disparage spiritual contemplation so readily, largely because he exploits the logics and concepts of its labours, in the service of the very instrumentalisation and everyday insularity that, ironically, they always gently questioned and transformed. Whatever Laruelle’s personal relation to this area of ‘spirit’, his appropriation of its resources occurs, as we have seen, according to the modular receptions of a contemporary positivist nostalgia.
The retrofitting, caters to the immediate, avaricious grasp of everyday insularity, to its order of banality, and the modular-mechanical procedures of blocked understanding it follows. When these procedures are transposed to metaphysical and experiential registers; everything; every relation, every sign, every nuance, every self-image; is converted into an isolated and autonomous block. The contrivance of isolation and autonomy is the surface concession to ideologies of freedom. Beneath this concession, however, there is only the order of banality; it’s positive instrumentalisation; and its unilateral, monolithic and insular, purpose. This incommensurability of instrumental isolations, is the raging thought of alienation, on disconnection from that unilateral order. The exclusively modular understandings of positive instrumentality, can only function as component in the order of banality. Without this function, there is only rage.
That all this is so, is shown quite clearly by a history of that order’s domesticating responses, all of which seek to first abbreviate and then appropriate whatever developments might not be in line with its basic, unilateral procedure. We are not speaking of an alienated order, not resident in those who cling to its unilateral and modular procedures as its exclusive proponents. On the contrary, it is difficult to find those who have not been coerced into inhabiting its modes, in some way.
The rage for the Absolute, is a misnomer. Absolute thinking or thought always exceeds itself, usually in gestures of novel understanding. It naturally proceeds according to a free theorisation and inquiry. Such inquisitiveness is primary and playful, never under duress to any delimited fixation.
Rage, is always reactive, the result of frustration when expectations or desires are not realised; this discord between expectation and realisation generates a fixation, the fetishisation of the real. In contrast to the playful inquisitiveness of free theorising, which sets no boundaries of expectation, the entire spectrum of emphatic and emotive concerns revolving around the rubric of reality, is characterised by reactionary disappointment or disillusion.
Such a reaction is inherently the production of a social conditioning issuing discrepant injunctions and instructions concerning this ‘real’, which it simultaneously inculcates as insularising fetish, psychologising it as a cybernetics of ‘personal frustrations and satisfactions’. The reactive thinker is characterised by an onset of inquisitive thought subsequent to such inculcation; instead of exploratory free theory, there are only social inquisitions, all of which occur under the fetishised sign of ‘reality’, or the ‘real’.
It begins in disappointment; the psychosocial real, does not keep its expected appointments! Reality, is not real! This reneging on the consistency of pretences towards objective agreement, stages the reality fetish as consensually constrained, social drama, rather than exploratory expedition. The thinker who fetishises the real, is always a reactive thinker, never an exploratory one; always socially directed, never theoretically free; always an evangelist of the vicarious, of a vast variety of disingenuous indirections, never of honest innovations.
The Absolute was always the province of the ascetic, the mystic, the recluse, no one else really cared for it, enough to get angry over it. But realisation, however, was a different story. Absolute reality, could be left to itself, and those ‘crackpots’ who chose to dwell there. But the more mundane modalities, the realities!, of this Absolute, could be contrived both as a horizon of psychosocial contention; as a production line of regimented insularities supplying that horizon; and as ongoing narrative of discursive narcosis, the addictive configuration of the ecstasies of so many petty realisations. It is this narrative, which is the rage of the real. A rage that speaks with the full fury of alienated emotions invested at the outset in that social ordering of a disillusioning, regimented reality; because it never learned to think or question, naturally, without coerced reaction, for itself.
That this is so, is indicated by a distinct lack of experiential understanding, of spontaneous vitality of insight, in favour of bare articulation of the modular calculations of convention. Whereas, a spontaneous vitality whose understanding is already absolute, requires neither rage nor the ever-unfulfilled modular-metaphysical arrangements and production quotas generating that rage. Realities are enjoyed, when and where they are available; but “unilateral usage… as mere material”, is too redolent of robotic injunctions and cybernetic exploitations, both of them in the pejorative sense, to prove as anything other than profoundly distasteful.