The Breakfast At Camp Quest (Ion): Beyond The Anthropic, The Alien, And The Universe: Food For Thought
A big thank you to Michelle Filippi for this picture!
The tines of the fork*, or the various voices of the anthropic, under the sign of a forked imple(mentation) of techne, of technology-direction (the tines of a fork point in the same direction); are accelerated by those caffeine drivers of modernity, Tea and Coffee.
The plate in the distance, carries an uncertain food, the nutrition of the future; the future as nutrition.
The nearest plate, present at hand, is empty. This is a Platonic plate, a Platonised plate; empty, absent, of actual nutritional presence, but a space ‘full’ of ideas, ready to fill itself with the future, with the food of the future.
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*Interesting resonance, cf. “Cranthimus Jaxley Terence is right.
Or, more simply, it’s what I would call the instrumental positivist’s revenge, on those theoretical tendencies that tend to suspend, and radically question, traditional substantial commitments. It’s the corollary, of what’s going on in current sociopolitical scenarios.
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· Reply · 27 August at 12:37
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Cranthimus Jaxley
Cranthimus Jaxley It’s a kind of imperialism of stupidity, wherein the stupid are finding it increasingly difficult to hide the essentially militarised mechanisms of their exploitations. The gap between the ‘people themselves’, and their alienated forms of governance, has collapsed. The distance enabling disingenuousness, hypocrisy, and denial, has disappeared. The two tines of the Occidental ‘forked tongue’, have fused, and do not know what to say.
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· Reply · 27 August at 12:55″
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This breakfast scenography, suggested the above conceptual geometry to me. From here, it is possible to go in many directions of connective interpretation, proliferating further conceptual geometries, perhaps ‘topologies’ is a better word.
Is this merely a consideration of consumption? One based on the question of consumption; on the model of consumption; on consumption as a metaphysical principle of configuration? Yes, it can be all of those things. It can even be used reductively and/or radically; in all kinds of inflationary ways. But let us not neglect deflationary possibilities; those options, where the model and its various mirages of explication, interpretation, insight, and intuition; in short, its modellings; withdraw and absent themselves, not only from the positive chatter of their inflationary insights, but from their usual and habitual conventions and uses, too; leaving metaphysical ground and space, not merely for another festival of extrapolatory combinatorics based on yet another well worn positive convention, but thinking something, everything, and nothing, all at once, simultaneously and systematically, and yet always free to go in any ‘metaphysical’ direction, whatsoever. Here, of course, even the notion of ‘system’, comes into radical question. However, instead of following the traditional discursive and economic circuitry, of placing one positive insularity after another; in what can only ever be misguided attempts at positive domestication, a facile and reductive conversion of insights communicating very little or nothing; the relation of subsequence, here, might be better used as a means of maintaining that alleged ‘nothingness’, as a ‘fulcrum’, as it were, granting unlimited insight(s) into all possible conceptual geometries, the full range of theoro-topological possibility. So, with another resonance of the ‘fork’ and ‘tines’ metaphoric, an apt quote from Derrida.
“As such, philosophical discourse is always presented as a self-effacement before the thing said, before truth, before essence, before content, before meaning, etc. Philosophical discourse in fact strives for this wherever it is at work, and this effort has certain determinate effects in its partial successes and its necessary failures. What I advance here, therefore, is not a projected philosophical discourse. That is why I started by saying to the French Philosophical Society that I was not offering it a philosophical type of discourse. Consequently, if it is the mark of philosophy that it efface itself, insofar as it is a signifying text, before the signified truth, the content, the presence of the meaning of being, etc., then what I proposed was a questioning of that mark. And I can only do that by inscribing it (in every sense of the word), that is, by exceeding philosophical discourse somewhere and thus writing a text which, I am afraid, cannot efface itself totally before what is to be said. It requires, solicits, and sometimes even obtains—as I am grateful to you for having proved by your intervention-—a “divided” attention—-to use your word. In broaching your question, you also noted that I meant something [vouloir dire] and that, even if you did not understand it completely, you were convinced of my wanting-to-say-something. I am less sure of this than you. I have posed the question of intention [vouloir dire], of its affiliation to the essence of logocentrism and metaphysics, elsewhere. At the point at which this question is posed, intention is no longer involved. Perhaps not even a questioning intention.
Finally, I freely acknowledge that the different stages of the path I proposed were very unequally illuminated. I will not appeal to time, which I have moreover amply overrun, to justify the fact that I have not been able to clarify equally all the words which I have used. As you have noted in an admirable word, they are nests of language, full or empty—who knows and it matters little, only the simulacrum matters here—the weaving [tissage] of which obscures its structure beneath all its folds, equally and simultaneously. It does not openly expose itself. [ll ne s’exp0se a plate couture] This is not the result of animal cunning but of the structure of a fabric or tissue [tissu], of the organization of the text. From the text which you wanted to pass unperceived, we leave ourselves free to concern ourselves with the content of this nestlike object. I have tried to justify theoretically the impossibility of illuminating, of giving an equal thematic weight to all parts of the text, which is made of differences and of differences of differences, and is therefore, in principle, irreducibly heterogeneous. This heterogeneity connects up again with what I have said about strategy: I privilege one or other chain of concepts in the light of a given context which, moreover, I can only analyze and master in part. I leave the other concepts in a shadow, be it provisional or definitive. I also try to formalize this shadow and draw its spectral and schematic figure.
As much as possible. Through forks and nests.’
Wood, D.C., and R. Bernasconi. Derrida and Différance. Coventry/Evanston, Ill.: Parousia Press/Northwestern Univ Pr, 1985. (pp. 87-9)”
RADICAL INFORMATION
The ‘architext’ is just structured information, in any form, whatsoever. It can’t be ‘centred’, as such, because no metaphysical commitment is asserted with respect to informational differences. The only way to centralise it, would be through a ‘metaphysics of information’. One in which the concept of information itself, at its most radical level, and in all its anthropic receptions, shows itself as a limited case; a case of limited perspective; a particular and closured procedure. This is only possible, in an economics that exceeds the ‘localisation’ of radical information.
ONEIRIC IRONIC
I began writing this as a FaceBook comment, in response to this, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=457778147942543&id=100011310857862 , but it seems to have turned into a blogpost.
[Steven Craig Hickman] “It’s as if we are in a pre-WWII novel living out the nightmares and repetitions of some strange and nefarious experiment gone awry… someone plz close that portal and put the hellish brew back into the abyss.
Somehow we’ve got to stop the hate, now.
I keep remembering the first time I read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. But it can… and, dam it if we don’t do something it will get worse. As if Lewis were speaking of Trump: “People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there’s been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America—” …. listening to Trump bark at NK and Venezuela one wonders if he is seeking some event so he can impose Martial Law and become a populist dictator in actual not virtual fact and deed.
Sadly, we’re just allowing it to happen, and the Establishment dems and repubs are sitting idly by like idiots, doing nothing.”
{AK}: Really, Steven, what can they do? It’s the people themselves who voted for Trump. It’s the people themselves who swarm and cluster around whatever simplified political polarities are subjected to inflationary exploitation by businesses of fringe hysteria. It’s politics as identity ideology consumerism, in search of a ‘reality’.
The guy who started the ‘fake news’ business, catering for the Trump crowd, is actually a Democrat; but there is money to be made in selling the nostalgia of a certain kind of majority ethnocentric confirmation bias.
As I’ve pointed out before, many times on my blog, the dominant hegemony is oneiric. Only by looking at all the data, as configured by systems of dream and desire, does a certain clarity take place. In practice, everyone knows that. Marketing is all about that. Bannon, and Cambridge Analytics, exploited it to the hilt.
Positivist appropriation of mythic nostalgia is an ongoing fact. ‘In fact’, it produces ‘facts’. Paul Ricoeur’s “conflict of interpretations” is the model of the mediascape’s ‘contest of realities’. It’s all, a “Logan’s Run” scenario, driven by positivist desire. Whether it’s a desire for ‘common sense’; ‘scientific sense’; ‘religious sense’; ‘financial sense’; ‘aesthetic sense’; or even ‘political sense’; it’s all deprecated into caricatures of ineffectual, positivist simplicity. Caricatures in the service of complexity-avoidance, at precisely the time when complexity is ‘reality’.
The explicit relation between Healthcare; the Protestant-Calvinist ‘work ethic’ and its accusatory moralisations, leading to various positivist moral isolations; and capital; necessarily sets up a gladiatorial arena of competing moral representations. The discrepancy between lived reality of social conditions and the veneer of obligatory moral presentation, necessarily produces reflexivities of moral representation, in which any simple notion of communal and consensual ‘reality’ is bound to collapse. This can be observed. This explains the disingenuousness of Trump speaking against ‘hate’, whilst “instigating it through his backdoor handlers”.
The “strange and nefarious experiment” you speak of, is exactly what Nick Land refers to, here, some years back, in response to my comments: “Science is modern, not accidentally, but essentially. Modernity is no mere bet, but a venture, through which everything is hazarded, including itself. The widest horizons arise from ‘within’ it (but its ‘inside’ is not, in reality, inside)”
It’s a good answer, and to varying extents, I can agree with it. But again, it’s very easy to fall into a ‘mythology of modernity’; a positivist caricature of surface technical achievements that actually neglects more complex and relevant microcultural-movements, not so susceptible to the abbreviations of modernist mythology. Is it even possible to close “that portal”? Or would that just be another simplifying figuration of positivist reduction? The panic projection of a horrifying ‘abyss’ into which can be cast the “hellish brew” of desire and profit driven alienations, dreamt as nightmare monstrosity?
THE FLAT REGIMES OF OCCIDENTAL GEOMETRICKS
Image text by Robert Sheckley
The desire for fundamentalist simplicity and insular locality implicit in the resurgence of ‘flat earth’ ideology, flattens the very global ambitions originated by that desire in its imperially expansive mode. The scientific epistemology of actual imperial expansion was global. With the advent of the Internet, a level of electronic homogeneity emerges, both the dimensionality and directionality suggested by the metaphoric of an ‘information superhighway’. Here, at this levelling of information interchange, a communicative superconductivity begins to occur, and epistemology becomes subject to all kinds of cultural reflexivity.
Geometry, is the measurement of Earth (geos).
Whatever the currently dominant geometric figuration of Earth may be, as immediately intuitible, extraterrestrial cosmic shape; such a unitary outline and the epistemology of global responsibility it might suggest, do not account for differential forces of desire residing within the apparent borders of that outline yet not bound to any responsibility for it.
That presidential assent has been given to human exploration and colonisation of Mars, contrasts in a most interesting way with presidential deletion of ‘climate change’ information; the silencing of the ‘call of Earth’. The immediately suggested contrast, is between the Martian symbolics of war and the ‘one world’ ideology of ‘peaceful togetherness’ on Earth.
The actual hegemonic impetus is consumption, with various ideological ‘Earths’ and ‘worlds’ hallucinated in accord with this impetus. Whether the spatiotemporal stability of cosmic process apparently hosting these hallucinations can survive their onslaught; or perhaps require them and their effects, for continued survival; is an open question.
I’m not going to delineate the seemingly destructive factors currently held to be in play. The deep entrenchments of ‘dominion ideology’; various political and religious hysterias; and so on. All of these ideological mechanisms are susceptible to casuistical contextualisations; their essences, natures, and functions, contingent on contextualisation. And as can be seen, at the level of their explicit interchange, concurrence of contexts seems most often to occur as conflict rather than any clarity of unanimous accord. Thus, a complex, multi-dimensional scenario, beyond the flat simplicity of any ideology, and perhaps even beyond the Platonist idea.
UNHEARDISM
Wrote this well over a decade ago, as a text message to Harvey John Brown, the notorious violinist! lol
“It is difficult, now, to understand the controversies that so beset initial performances of the founding works of Unheardism. From the infamous Boulez episode, through to the street protests, the ‘Bring Back Music’ marches, the reactionary critiques. With the decline of such partisan dramatics, a more balanced and measured judgment has come into play, from which, the advances that have been made can be more securely estimated.
This is not to say that there is a soporific unanimity attendant upon the movement, there are differences, often heated, even amongst the leading proponents of the movement. But the fundamental tenets of the “Revolution of Forgotten Silences” (Schmidt:HRFS, pp.i-vii) are accepted by all, even the soundees, or ‘musicians’, as they like to call themselves.
We are fortunate today to have the founder of the tradition with us, prior to the inaugural performance of his latest work, and he has kindly agreed to a few words with us before introducing the work.
The piece is rather short compared to previous works, at two and a half hours long there have been speculations that he is crossing over into the more commercial realms of “Quiet” popularity. He strenuously denies this, and the difficult part writing in the third movement seems to add confirmation to such denials.
But what is truly revolutionary about the work is the option for the audience to play Bach and Al Di Meola on their m-players, throughout the performance. Some have called it genius. Though, there has been one dissenting voice. The radical Gustavio Zizzo. Although currently conducting a six month workshop in orbit around Saturn (“the hadrons are less noisy there”), he has surveyed the score and declared, unequivocally, “Reactive Dilettante!”, ironically echoing the precise words of the founder when asked about John Cage as a possible precursor.
AKs response: “Well, Gustavio is a virtuoso, and he has furthered my explorations of molecular noise reduction to an incredible degree, but he misses the point, I think.”
Gustavio cannot hear spoken responses at present, as his ears have been surgically removed, a practice he often indulges in to enable fine tuning.”
ANALECTA ALOGICA: FRAGMENTS WITHOUT ORDER (1989ish, not sure, though)
ANALECTA ALOGICA
A collection of rhetorical devices?
At present, Humanity seems to be composed of oppressive communities whose governing principles are derived from Man’s baser instincts. These coarse and cruel principles keep throwing us against the wall so that we are continually dashed into little pieces. Collected here, from the latest shatterings, are some of those pieces, just a few, forlorn fragments…
During these brief, eristical expeditions, it must be borne in mind that Reasoning is always in danger of being just so many genetic fallacies, but this is no demand for grief, for no matter where they go, the rhapsodies of Reason are always in time with the rhythms of reflection, and these rhythms invariably carry one away, to think, on some other day…
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“What was that rushing by?”
“Oh that! That was just a minute. We get millions of them in this neighbourhood.”
These writings are my scribal responses to the pressures of Life. Life pushes me, I push a pen. You may ask why I write, why do I respond this way? I could answer that by weaving these cocoons of connotations I protect myself from the harsh rigours of an anomie-filled existence. But I won’t, because I don’t. Protect myself from an anomie-filled existence, that is.
I write because… I like to write, because… I wish to keep some sort of account of some of the mental travels which my mind is continually embarking upon, I write out of desperation, out of joy, out of other emotional postures, too, each posture being a play, a strategic state of mind, a move in a game of emotional chess, again which never comes to rest…
I also write* because I feel that reading and writing is one of the most sublime species of social intercourse available to Humanity…
(*marginal note: *Writing is reading.)
“Having knowledge is having a ledge from which to know, a conceptual ledge, that is.” (Inline note: “All ledges are lost… in limbo, perhaps?… are lost!??” | The ‘are’ is underlined three times, pointing to: “Being! Misplaced?”)
Occasionally, my life seems to be dressed in dilemmas, but I won’t get overly dramatic about it, at least not yet, I’ll allow such dire dramas to develop naturally, at their own pace, perhaps…
“I seem to feel my mind reel as I ride upon life’s insanely spinning wheel.”
Reel, both verb and adjective,
Adjective – film reel,
Reality, Film, Image.
Shall I take this medicine of Enlightenment, this escapism that acts as an emetic, that causes one to vomit illusions. Shall I take this stuff before I’ve experienced the symptoms of Suffering, a Suffering caused by illusions.
Why not? Because, you know, I have suffered, I have experienced the symptoms of Suffering, I really have.
“I am a philosophic pétroleur, and I have planted an incendiary in your id. It’s guaranteed to blow your lid.”
” Oh, thank you. I could do with some excitement.”
Let us make speech.
I think I’ll say this phrase at various points in this ongoing monologue, albeit a monologue with apparent interruptions. I’ve borrowed the phrase from Abu Jabbar, The Possibility Merchant, who is a character in my book, “A Divine Avenue”. I guess you could say that as Abu Jabbar is my fictional construction, I’ve borrowed it from myself.
I find it pleasant that there is so much of me as I can lend and borrow within the circus of experiences that apparently constitute me.
It strangely comforting to think that the ‘human condition’can be complex and busy. There’s a persistent hope that among all this confusion, lying hidden, is something magical and wonderful, a private panacea. Perhaps this magical panacea lies in our perceptions, perhaps the magical quality is one way of seeing, a single selection from a variety of visions…
“The erection of an ‘I’ structure can prove somewhat difficult when the potential self, the soon-to-be-self, is immersed in pantheistic musings.
(Note at top of page: “*With what forms should I fumble?”)
What should I write about? What bits of information should I jungle? What do you want to read? What do you wish to know?
Should I be experimental, political, philosophical, emotional, urbane, charmingly rustic, sophisticated or cutely simple, specious and/or veracious.
Or should I try ineffable Wisdom!
Wisdom Lane: “I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was an old feeling, evasive but distinct. Continually elusive but ever present. I couldn’t define it, but I knew what it was. I KNOW what it is. It isn’t anywhere, in heaven or on earth, but it is always here, it is always there, it is everywhere…”
You get the picture. A few negativistic indications of the arcanum, a sort of indication by elimination, and also the revelation, by means of apparent contradiction, that the arcanum is the Reality behind all appearances.
Is that okay? Or do you want something different? Are you bored of my aphoristic, micro-philosophies, of my fast and trashy junk wisdom? Do you resent following this itinerary of improvisations?
“Sorry can’t stop! I’m on my way to help constitute a certain momentous event in history.”
Refinement will have to wait; nowadays I like to scream and shout. Occasionally, though, I leave some subtlety about.
I enjoy asking questions, going on a quest. Occasionally, though, this ‘Why Thing’of mine goes a little wild. Not that I mind. Because it is through this tendency to forever question, this ceaseless and untamed Criticality, that I achieve a lucid looseness, an arcane clarity, a kind of freedom that pulses through the complexities of Life, a kind of existential electron flow.
“Money makes the economy go round. Money is promises – ‘I Promise To Pay The Bearer On Demand The Sum Of…’.
And the essence of business is to promise more than is actually delivered. The concealment of this deficient delivery leads to a commerce of appearances. When appearances reign supreme, even the genuine loses its integrity and a sort of sugar flavoured sugar seems to sweeten our tea.”
“Well, man, well,” said the Styrofoam Queen, her legs all agleam and asheen. “Shing! Shing! Shing!” went the handmaidens, dressed in sequins, riding on dolphins.
Whatever!
“This is the News. Streams of Excluded Middles attacked Aristotle today, claiming that the philosopher had exploited them for years. We spoke to one of the Excluded Middles, A or B, and asked him to comment on today’s rebellion.”
“Well, the Greeks were bad enough, but the Scholastics were the last straw. Of course, Aristotle was, and continues to be, the main culprit. Anyhow, we’ve been gathering of forces and now we are abandoning your world. You can use other logics, we’re skedaddling down a side alley. Goodbye!”
“Reason, son of Rea Rhetorica the well known actress, collapse from nervous exhaustion today. He is reported to have said, just before his collapse: “Everyone seems to need me to live, and people keep coming to see me. I just can’t take anymore.”
“According to hospital doctors, Reason just needs a long holiday.”
“Abstracta, the world’s greatest hermit, forgotten until today, when he re-entered the Universe after being away for millions of years, spoke to our reporter, Geoff Humphries:
“Abstracta, what have you learned during your time of seclusion?”
” isolation is a form of relation, Mr. Media man. Isolation is just a relation. However, being a relation does not invalidate it. Isolation is still an option and I very much recommend it.”
It is amusing to note that ‘chain’ is synonymous with ‘sequence’ and ‘shackle’ and ‘bond’. Is a sequence a trap?
Chain: (nouns) coupling: fetter: link: manacle: progression: restraint: train: sequence: series: shackle: succession: union
(verbs) bind: confine: enslave: restrain: train: sequence: shackle
To indulge in sequential thought patterns is to be bound! Is that so? Is life a train of thought?
I want to create works of unparalleled beauty, of unsurpassed insight. For I want to create a suddenly pellucid profundity, to surprise Sofia in her most secret activities. I want, I want, I want. I am, I am, I am. Desire and Being, Yearning and Feeling. A moment in Time and the Moment of Time.
“Like Hegel, Nagarjuna also rejects the temporal causal view, but, unlike him, does not substitute any rational pattern for it. Instead of grasping separatedness in terms of unity, as Hegel advocates, Nagarjuna refers, perhaps, to a meditative state, or to the effect of such a state, in which, paradoxically, separatedness may exist as before, but is not taken as such: one seems to have lost, or, rather, overcome the awareness of events in time. Not that one ceases to react to phenomena, but that one acts as though the moment of action is eternity.
Nagaruna’s insight, I think, should have been clarified in less intuitive terms. But I must admit that I do not find the right words to define it. But perhaps finding them is missing it. What Nagarjuna helps us to do, and Kant and Hegel do not, is to forget about philosophy and still rest satisfied.”
“Philosophy East/Philosophy West: A Critical Comparison Of Indian, Chinese, Islamic, And European Philosophy” Edited by Ben-Ami Sharfstein
Etc. Can’t be bothered to put the other pictures in, yet.
ON THE ARGOTS OF THE ANDROID’S ABBYSS
A compilation of self-quotes,enabling a semantic and thematic clarification, of sorts.
“This is disturbing, it is redolent of other book burning practioners rather than David Hume. Hume’s scepticism emerged out of a genuine philosophic path, rather than the unthinking ‘cult-speaks’ that characterise the epoch of an exploitative ‘modernity’, of which ‘speculative realism’ seems to be the most recent, sub-cultural ‘gang’ argot. A collation of anachronies and out-of-context citations, ‘speculative realism’ attempts to contrive imaginary philosophical contentions by replaying ‘positions’ no one has seriously held for centuries.”
(“Fighting Things You Cannot See: A Quick Response” – http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=154)
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“Modernity brought in a fresh consideration of these issues, applying eminently modernist formalisms, reflexively, to the processes of modernity itself. This has obviously proved too much for those who merely chant ‘progress’ as a mantra, believing in the argot of ‘modernity’, even as it displaced the autonomies of everything contrary to its projects, to the extension of its ‘networks’, and supplied them with the booty, the sp(oil)s?, of this regimentation. But this ‘supply’ has been getting a little uncertain, recently. Time to boost the old ‘self-esteem’, the flagging spirits, let’s run the good ol’ narratives of ‘can-do’, no-nonsense reductionism again, the ones that gave us what we have, the simple ones that we can understand, the ones with heroes like Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud.”
(“Fighting Things You Cannot See: A Quick Response” – http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=170)
“It isn’t my task to explain anything within such an oneiric regime (”’Oneiric economy’”), in the argots and understandings of a regime necessarily susceptible to the distortions and closures characterising the psychopathology of its governing constitution. One can only ‘show’, as it were.”
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“BROODING ON BIGOTRY: THE USA AS A THEMED THEATRICKS OF IDENTITARIAN ROLES: V. Conclusion
Essentially, what you’re saying, is that anything that sounds like critique to you, of whatever you perceive your identity affiliations to be, is invalid mythology for which you can trot out a weak differential and demythologising critique, but it’s okay for you to indulge in pontifications about those not belonging to your perceived affiliations, in an argot dripping with false assumptions, exaggerations, and outright misrepresentations.
This is why Elif Verney-Eliot, and his Communist ‘witch-hunt’ comrades, called you ‘racist’.
You’re not actually racist, though, you’re just not objective enough to transcend whatever personal trauma you’ve experienced at the hands of black authority figures. Instead, you universalise your personal conclusions in erroneous ways. That’s down to lack of raw theoretical ability; and an astounding naivety, considering you live in New York; but not any explicit racism.”
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“Losing oneself in the Neoreactionary argot of involuted self-understanding: desperately searching for a mythological precursor: generations who can only see global politics as a computor game of imperialised objects: a networked nightmare on the sports channel. That’s entertainment!
Losing oneself in the Neoreactionary argot of involuted self-understanding: Neoreaction loses itself in a replay of fundamental nostalgias, under the banner of “reality”, attempting to deal with radical technological transformation, through ideological resources (traditional identities) long since rendered redundant by the the emerging technoscenography. The essence of Occidental Modernity is expansion. To backtrack from this ‘expansionary understanding’ is for the Occident to self-destruct ”
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Adorno was brilliant. A lot of Neoreactives seem tremendously lacking in critical acumen, to the point of insanity.
Even in your own argot:
1) If a Neoreactionary suggests rampant colonial exploitations, through corrupt and unethical tactics, were justified by a Darwinian ideology, then why should so-called “NeoLiberal” elitism (the “Cathedral”) be denied access to the same justification?
2) Wouldn’t the same Darwinian ideology, carried through, say that Neoreaction is the the most ironic form of defeat? After centuries of privilege, there is a group of disaffected hypocrites, who are unable to prevail in a world of multinational kapital whose very development they worship, but whose functioning they are now unable to withstand without whinging complaint.
3) You’ve been locked out of academic careers because of “affirmative action”? Choose a field requiring the highest IQ, which your HBD mumblings parade so incessantly.
You’re not popular because you represent a “privileged” group? Wow! That sounds like prejudice! Such bigotry is awful. You must feel terrible. How unfair! But I’m sure the alleged genetic predisposition towards high civilisation can enable a dignified tolerance.
How come we don’t hear the so called “Neoliberal elites” complain? Is it because they’re the winners of the Darwinian race? Or is it because they’re not insane?
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“English tendency towards abbreviation reflects the diminishing of personal expression in favour of the argot of socio-corporate activity, utility-speak. It is the language of the ur-user.”
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“To what degree, is the telegraphic abruptness of the Neoreactionary style (as shown regularly on ‘Outside in’), an argot of dehumanised abbreviations constituting psychotic reduction as linguistic narcotic?”
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“The rhythmics of intensification and release suggested by a “concentration of powers” is largely configured by a deprivation anxiety conditioned by history and a particular ‘evolutionary’ sequence. The notion of an ‘android’, or ‘robot’, is not new, or even a unique characteristic of Modernity. The notion of an artificial being or man goes back millennia, to ancient times. But its contemporary emphasis, and realisation, is a concomitant of larger and ‘deeper’ movements, which can, of course, be aligned in interesting and insightful ways with this or that topoi, ‘metaphysical’ or ’empirical’; but all of these ‘things’, these abbreviations, are in operation; and really, one has to be able to see that, and not ‘reduce’ it to one’s favoured argot of insularity. But this is precisely what the Occident seems unable to do. It has used division and differential classification for so long as weaponry, that it can no longer distinguish itself from its own armoury. The ‘android’ emerges, to the degree that the pretence of this distinction collapses.”
INTERNET, SPLINTERNET
A quick response to Terence Blake’s “ACADEMIC TRAUMA OR NOETIC DREAM: on the vicissitudes of dialogue“.
[TB] “Readers may see my blog as just more froth in the prevailing sea of philo-babble, but my goal is more democratic (and more pedagogical), and I have made quite a few enemies in trying to de-esotericise the philosophies I discuss.”
{AK}: Who cares whether they think it’s frothy or not?!
[TB] “The almost universal form that this enmity takes is that of ignoring my very existence, of refusing to acknowledge my work or to cite me. This has nothing to do with my use of the blog form, as the same authors occasionally cite blog posts favourable to their cause.”
{AK}: It’s not worth worrying about. Individually, we never really get the level of responses we’d prefer. I don’t really have any expectations about it. It comes with the territory of individuality.
[TB] “Publicity, not dialogue, is their aim. Laziness, not openness, is their method. Tautological self-validation is their pay-off.”
{AK}: Usually, they’re not very good, and they know it.
[TB] “These people transpose the power structures of the university to discussion on the web. They seem to be unaware that academics talk of dialogue, its openness and pluralism in order to prevent it from happening. Dialogue would be too traumatic for them, and their careers are based on avoiding it, or repressing it.”
{AK}: It’s a lot of work, to even write the low-level stuff of bog-standard academic production. Such obligations of production, naturally reduce the time and energy available for Internet shenanigans. Due to the effects of networked compression, not all institutional modalities of discursive production fare well in the new electronic environments.
[TB] “In the neo-liberal university there is only one dialogue that counts in the last instance (to cite a cynical expression of the Laruelleans). Money talks to money, and deals are made on that basis.”
{AK}: Let them get on with it! It won’t make them any better, lol.
[TB] “Power, the power to make and to do, to think and to express oneself, does not count, and is actively discouraged. Anyone who has been to university has witnessed this obscene underside (to talk like Zizek) and its symbolic violence at work, and seen its casualties.”
{AK}: I don’t really care about any of that, Terence. When it is good, it’s good. When it isn’t, it’s not. Not worth having any expectations.
LOOKING INTO LARUELLE, ON THE CRITIQUE LIST
It’s my contention, that where Laruelle says anything valid or worthwhile, this would consist of highly obvious extensions and implications that do not, it seems to me, contribute much in the way of insights, but nevertheless, licence a regression of sorts; the kind of nostalgia, of positional retrogressions, that can be observed as instancing a more general cultural movement of the contemporary era.
More suited to the populist demand producing Donald Trump, ‘Laruellean licence’ similarly, serves a philosophy readership unused to thinking ‘radically’ and questioningly, always, and as a matter of course. Such a readership always looks through ‘reversed telescopes’, exercising a kind of ‘consumer choice’ on what it sees, projecting, fixating and privileging, only along the lines of its own, essentially positivist, understanding. The resulting buffer zone of doxic fragmentation, the zone of positivist consumer psychology wherein in a host of superficial and easily accessible opinion-choices, can be proffered, again and again, as philosophy, even under the rubric of its apparent negation.
There is a price to pay, of course. In this case, it seems to me, the valorisation of current receptions; no matter how superficial, uninventive, or uninformed; is the unfortunate result. Thus we see, more or less, only a history of bad and uncharitable interpretations, each being the necessary condition for subsequent promotional campaigns of philosophy production. Countering one bias of poor interpretation with another, all the while clinging on to the modality of superficial opinion transaction. The value of this procedure is eminently social and communicative. The reversed telescopes move together, communally, avoiding the arduous alienations and depths of solitary contemplation. This is ‘hive learning’, a ‘swarming philosophy’ for an increasingly networked world. The mass distribution of loved wisdom, engineered according to protean and prevailing, real-time, l.c.d. (lowest common denominator) needs. It is a market philosophy, modeled on the 6.00 news, telegraphic, televisual, telly-typed (sic). Because its emphasis is social, it opens up the usual sociopolitical possibilities, various theoretical worlds transitioning into a perpetual broadcast context and its configuring logic. Usually, that logic’s hegemonic principle is reality, or as its proponents insist on calling it, ‘the real’. Such insistence, of course, is paradoxical, especially when those same proponents declare themselves both to always inhabit this ‘real’, and yet to never reach this alleged habitat of their own declaration. There are obviously two different and unanalysed conceptions at play, the interstices of which are readily susceptible to the most banal discursive productions, whilst still being able to retain the rubric of philosophy, somewhere in the vicinity. This, of course, enables populist relevance; multiplies interdisciplinary employments; and increases the market value of various academic philosophy brands.
Market context and configuration, whilst important to some, is not necessarily radically pure conceptual critique, as it were. So, I’ve put Laruelle on the critique list. Let’s see what all the non-sense is about!
TECHNO-ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE TECHNOSENSORIUM
As all definition moves closer towards simply being desire; each definition a dialectic between varying probabilities; between the reliable regularity of alleged certitudes, and the increasingly improbable; that nostalgic conceptual economy, rubricised as ‘world’, grows ever more granularised, into micro-epistemologies, into micro-libidinal epistemologies; vast swarms of sense, in both senses.
In and around this imaginary, of a ‘world-pen’, huge herds of meaning can be observed, their migratory patterns almost instantaneous to a subset of biological perceptions, caught in its global techno-entanglement of electronic light.