NAIVE CONFINES OF THE TECHNOSENSORIUM
Using naive, positivistic literalism, exploiting its apparent contrasts from the convoluted developments characterising philosophical specialisations and their discourses, is invariably an anchoring appeal to common intuitions. But there can be different reasons behind such an appeal.
In scientific demonstration, discursive convolution has a close relation to the teleology of ‘results’; these ‘results’ being a kind of cartography of future immediacies and reliable regularities; such teleological methodologies, no matter how wild their interim, empirical excursions might be, are always conditioned by ‘knowing’ obligations to arrive at the mappable effects of ‘demonstration’, in the construction, or constructive extension, of future commonalities and their eventual, given ‘intuitions’.
The social power of scientific discourse is ultimately contingent on the association with its applications and technological effects on common intuition; usually in ritualised forms of mass distribution, as prodigiously numerous, altared ‘engines of demonstration’, or engineered commodities. Under the signs of various scientific laws, priests administer these engines of habitual ritual, for pricely offerings.
But this perpetual festival of scientific demonstrations, though it exercises considerable challenges, rarely questions the utilitarian assumptions and habits it services. Even less, does it question the common intuitions, from which those utilitarian assumptions and habits arise. Within the confines of the technosensorium, naive, positivistic literalism, can continue on in the sphere of an l.c.d. (lowest common denominator), ‘user friendliness’, relatively unhindered by surrounding sophistications, which anyway have been largely constituted in its service.
EURO COMMODITY: SELF DEGREE ZERO PRODUCTION
A response to this: http://www.xenosystems.net/horseshoe-quiz/
Berardi is an okay writer. His semio-critique is quite appealing, I’ve seen bits of it on Facebook; a linked interview; but haven’t had the chance yet to check him out properly.
The letter is a dramatic and passionate gesture, but could be a little naive, like most 21st century discussions. Most political writing is naive, though. Necessarily so, because of the limitations of what I have called, back in the last century, l.c.d. (lowest common denominator) thought.
The very techniques of modernity, exploited to generate European prosperity, necessarily displace all conceptions of responsibility. Ideologies of dominion economy, necessarily displace all conceptions of ecology. In short, that’s the basic logic at play, in practice. If you want a ‘world’ to live in, it doesn’t really matter whether you ‘believe’ in it or not, but you do have to look after it, not just incessantly take it, and use it. In practice, particularly in the USA, there is only the transaction of simplistic, blocked-beliefs, not of thoughts or thinking. It is a narcissistic economy of blocked credibilities, with no perspective on itself, though it hallucinates many in its hysterias of self-consuming. It’s so simple to see, the avaricious, Occidental android fever, of commodity. Its rhetoric of polity, a logorrhoea of absolute convenience.
NOTIONAL COMMOTION
Communications systems, codes; languages and worlds, from the outset, proceed out of selective idealisation; out of processes and economies of intent(ion). An intention, or intentio, is a picture or picturing, configuring and configured by, lines of motivic force; each line itself, as ‘motivation’, a sent emissary of another vision. This interplay between vision and motivation, or ‘form’ and ‘force’, is one in which each declares the other, proceeds from the other, ‘informs’ the other. Such a scenario of mutual structuration and relation; of effusive phenomenality in all directions; a vast variety of visions, motivations, and missions; all of which can be seen as constituting ‘notional commotion’.
THE CONDITION OF COMMODIFIED CONSCIOUSNESS
If there were no such thing as sound, there would be no such thing as ‘silence’.
The notion of a linguistic silence is inherent to language.
As the expansion of non-selection, non-intention, ‘absence’, ‘space’, etc.; it is the expansion of the condition of selection, intention, ‘presence’, ‘sign’, etc..
This expansion, as emphasis and increased consideration, begins to signify the non-significant; setting a conditional semantics, or semantics of condition; against that of simple, positivist, utilitarian, and habitual, selections; or, more precisely, those selections without non-significant, conditional reflection.
Selecting the non-significant, or more bluntly, signifying the non-significant, might seem to be a blatantly paradoxical enterprise. But this would only be the case, with universalising notions, of essentialist conceptions, of the sign and non-sign.
Just as a sign requires delimitation to function as ‘a’ sign; an amalgam of signs, constituting a code or language, too, require delimitation, to function as ‘a’ code or ‘a’ language. Therefore, the gesture of defining selection is always specifically conditioned; specifying that which is defined, with relation to the necessarily undefined. These requirements and gestures would be the minimal conditions necessary to produce ‘significance’, whether as sign or system of signs.
Without sign, or semiotic system; as specific ‘significance’, or specific system of significance production; there can be no non-significance. Signs are relational, so are ‘non-signs’. If there were no signs at all, there would be nothing to negate.
Naive positivist essentialism, has a tendency to look for ‘things in themselves’, at the expense of any genuine consideration of their conditions. It has a tendency towards axiomatic atrophication of signs, and hallucinating unnecessary incommensurabilities of its own construction. Rather than abandon this somewhat emotive attachment to positivist naivety, it will extend relational non-significance into an essentialist nihilism, under its self-imposed cultural duress of monumental self-mythology. In truth, though, this banal exceptionalist desire only suffers from a monumental lack of relational talent. Such is the condition of commodified consciousness.
THE CIRCUITRY OF IDENTIFICATIONS
Looking one way, into the bibliographic vertigo of representations constituting the ‘book’. Looking the other way, discovering the cartooned conditions of representation seemingly occupied.
Reading frames, in both directions. The frame of the book, the cartoon frames seemingly occupied. Frames are determinations.
The notion of ‘freedom’ is an inherently contingent one. There has to be a determination of ‘confinement’ in order to produce a ‘liberation’.
All determinations are necessarily representations, governed by the very assumptions and orders of ‘presence’ which they attempt to determine and re-present. A determination of ‘absence’, if delimited in any way, is necessarily an inverse presence. Conversely, presences are inverse absences. The logic of delimitation governs both terms of absence, and terms of presence.
To construct another sequence, another economy, of representations; mirroring the economy of determinations encountered, in an ecstasy of adequation-acknowledgement and repetition-satisfaction; continues the chosen obligation of fractal reflexivity. That hallucinated machinery of determinations, reinscribing and reproducing itself, at every reflection, inflection, and deflection.
THE WEAVING OF A TWISTED WORLD BY AN IMPERIALISM OF THE VOID
TRUMP’S populism is built from the algorithmic trackings of public opinion fluctuation overseen by Bannon and Cambridge analytics. That’s largely why he’s in the White House.
Capitalism being what it is, actual free trade policies would lead to the continued disenfranchisement of uncompetitive American business and labour by foreign competition. There are two forms of protectionism by which the USA has attempted to stem this trend.
One, the various global trade agreements, such as TTIP, etc., which enshrine the interests of corporate capital as prime legislation, handing over all arbitrations to internal, corporate decision. This has the effect of allowing U.S. Capital, as well as all international corporate interests, unlimited and risk-free lattitude in deploying their present capital reserves to fully monopolise all markets and drive out all competition.
Two, Bannon’s ‘economic nationalism’, which in effect does the same thing domestically. Lessening corporate deficits through tax cuts; creating the conditions for subcontractor/small business increase; these simple moves, whatever else they may do, ensure that U.S. corporate capital does not deplete. International trade is then arranged on a piecemeal basis, according to Trump’s ‘art of dealing’.
All of this is fairly innocuous and simple, but it neglects the unpopular military-industrial face of American business which Bannon; Trump, and his supporters; would rather ignore, in their dreams of a U.S. self-reliance, whose every international intervention is a magnanimous act of U.S. beneficence. To reflect this visage in America’s political mirror, would not only be to deny this dream of charitable autonomy; but it would be an explicit acknowledgement of the extent to which the USA configures, calculates, and controls; horror, injustice, and iniquity, around the globe.
No longer would this acknowledgement merely reside in oppositional rhetorics of the populist Left and Right; or in dispassionate political histories of the contemporary era. The discrepancy between mainstream, official declarations, and the leak of critique, has, with the ascension of Trump’s own indulgence in demonising the U.S. establishment from the White House itself, essentially collapsed that discrepancy.
The speeds characterising high frequency trading necessarily encourage acceleration of linked economic factors and processes, too. Political and media production, cannot help but reflect this. This, together with the hyper-visibility of the Internet, and the international polyvocity it enables; ensures that mainstream authorisation and its critical refutation occur almost simultaneously. In some cases, such refutations actually precede authorisations. Given this scenario, the traditional notion of an independent media reporting on autonomous political events no longer quite obtains. It’s not so much that representation and reference have entirely disappeared. Rather, all factors have collapsed into the singular momentum of pure eventuality, a sphere of self-caused ‘effects’ that mediates only itself, and is no longer susceptible to traditional linear explanations. Such explanations would have been reliant on the worldly distances between traditional categories. With the technological compression of those distances, creating a speed of events beyond the effective processing capacity of mass human reception; traditional categorisation, and the lineaments of world-building sense which it provides; has lost its purchase on eventuality and can no longer quite find the worlds of mundane yet reliable convention it once enjoyed. There is a twisting implosion in which the encoding embroidery of these conventions; the textile of the whole world; has become a mere ‘wet rag’ of reality, wrung ever tighter by Profit’s grip, in Finance’s quest to eke out every drop of unexploited value. This adventure of compressive desiccation, or desiccating compression, has reached the point where all liquidity has left this torso of conventional reality in torsion, dripping and disappearing into the virtuality of offshore, financial fictions. As further twisting tensions are applied, the fabric of reality begins to break, and the masses hang on to the weave of its nostalgia, by a thread. Noticeably fraying and unstitching, at the conclusion of this process not even a single patch of reality is left. In addition, it is no longer certain what is ‘loom’ and what is ‘weft’. For the empire of the real was not only clothed in the threads of imagination, but it was entirely built out of them, too.
NIHILISTIC MOMENTS: THE JUNCTIONS OF EXPLOSIVE AMBITION OR COMPLACENT APATHY, OR BOTH?
This responds to Timothy Lavenz’s FB post, here, which quoted a section of a blog essay, “Evil Compassion”, here. This is the quote:
“Nihilism is a belief in the sufficiency of any determination of what is, of how it is, of how one is, of what the future will be, in short, of what can or even might be (known, created, changed, destroyed). To turn one’s back on this presumed sufficiency of the thought-world necessarily leads to offense — but offense is not the goal, nor the non-nihilist’s point of pride; it is rather an effect of the search for future causes, for novel grounds of creativity not legitimated by any given situation or horizon of sense — causes that remain essentially unknown and suspended in their sufficiency, thus in constant contact with their own evental conditions, their own force of potential and means of invention. In Nietzsche’s words: ‘Excess force in spirituality setting itself new goals.'”
{AK}: To say that “Nihilism is a belief in the sufficiency of any determination of what is, of how it is, of how one is, of what the future will be, in short, of what can or even might be (known, created, changed, destroyed)”, is to characterise Nihilism according to ontological modality, and its given conventions (“sufficiency of any determination of what is”). This is precisely not an availing of Nihilism’s potential for liberation from any ontological “sufficiency”, whether allegedly quiescent or otherwise.
That Nihilism is often equated, by Occidental convention, with apathy, is merely the symptomatic characterisation conferred by Occidental ontology’s PR hype; its relentless campaign of self-celebration; & its ideology of positivist inflation.
The nihilistic moment, is the exceeding of any “given situation or horizon of sense”, in order to generate explosive Nietzschean revaluation.
But how often, do such alleged revaluations not merely return to the tired sufficiencies of ontological convention – “Every vaunted revolution, one more turn of the wheels of oppression.”?
THIS FESTIVAL OF ACCELERATIONS
Decades ago, I read: “The world is an anarchy of nation-states.”
The nation-state has, hitherto, been the largest formalised grouping of people. This has now changed, with both consumer & ‘social’ networks. Nation-state networks, hitherto, coordinated consumer, pre-internet ‘social’, & Corporate, networks; this coordination function is now shifting, to an indeterminate ‘state’, interstitial to all three.
The anxiety of this shift, is causing a lot of attention-seeking, in all of those networks; as they attempt to secure positions of imagined dominance, usually by replaying the nostalgic cultural detritus of histories of perceived authoritarian success. Such nostalgic replays are, of course, the dream-stuff of advertising & propaganda, & it is this oneiric substance which is being accelerated, now through all networks, not just through those of commerce & entertainment. The acceleration enabled by public elctronic networks, accelerates the fluxions of desire, leading to a libidinal directness obviating alienating mediations through the archaic convolutions of administration belonging to past cultures of political specularity. ‘High Frequency Trading’, begets ‘High Frequency Politics’, with concurrent loss of depth considerations that could effectively question any systematics of production concerning this festival of accelerations.
The Occident is getting the ‘world order’ it deserves, the mundane mirror it cannot bear to look at, the demonic reflection it accelerates away from.
CONTENT WITH FORM: A (DE)LIMITED LOGICAL HALLUCINATION?
[Redacted] “My minimal suggestion is this: insofar as the contingency or emptiness or worldlessness is itself a consistent fact (that it describes what is always already the case), then contingency is itself not contingent, not empty, i.e., absolute or the form of all content.
If the universe were truly and completely contingent, then the possibility of non-contingency becomes a logical possibility.
I think Nagarjuna is not affirming meta-contingency but at some point thinks there is an absolute that = contingency (nirvana = samsara).”
{AK}: A ‘fact’, is a ‘thing made’, a fashioning.
That the collection of supervenient ‘facts’ are seemingly supervenient on a ‘systematics of manufacture’, merely displaces the essentiality of origination, the integrity of classical entity or ‘ens’, to that ‘systematics of manufacture’. Reifying such a ‘systematics of manufacture’ as a ‘form’ governing ‘content’ misses or elides the conventional, empty, & perspectival nature of ‘facts’.
If no ‘fact’ has ‘own-being’, why should an infinite quantity of them suddenly start to have ‘own-being’?
This is a confusion of the reifying intuitions of socio-perceptual convention with the logic of metaphysical category? It’s an ‘idealism’ no less speculative or mystifying than Hegel; but it’s allegedly hallucinatory nature, in the Hegelian case; is masked by consensual practice, in the case of socio-perceptual convention.
Its origin, & the origin of the faith in it, is based on a notion of increasing & graduated coherence with a veridical structure of ontological essence, scientifically sifting out a correspondence to a fixed truth. That’s the model, & it’s a model, itself based on the very essence, or ‘own-being’, that it presupposes as its horizon. That model is a perspective, of probabilistic fixations. This is not to say that such a model is without utility; it is the ‘ground’ of utility, & conversely, utility is its ground.
But if the becomings of utilisation are governed by a journey of increasing coherence, along a sequence of probabilistic fixations, towards an unknown figure of ‘fixed truth’; is this not all too easy & contrived a perspective? A complacent idealisation? An open adventure of a ‘theology’, collapsed into the stagnant closure of a habitual ‘religion’?
This is why Nagarjuna would reject the figure of ‘Consciousness’, as an Absolute.
Schopenhauer, in the quote, understood this, but broke off to do a phenomenology of the ‘motivic’ (force-‘Will’) & recurrent imaging (form-‘Representation), ‘consensual concept chatter’, that can be written about.
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[Redacted] “insofar as the contingency or emptiness or worldlessness is itself a consistent fact (that it describes what is always already the case),”
{AK}: Okay, consistency of ‘fact’, “describes what is always already the case”, & suggests the invariance of abstract law, which suggests Platonised idealism & fixation; hence, non-contingency.
[Redacted] “then contingency is itself not contingent, not empty, i.e., absolute or the form of all content.”
{AK}: But ‘contingency’ is not an independent ‘fact’, ‘quality’, or ‘thing’. Contingency requires things that are, or seem to be, ‘contingent’. But those ‘facts’, are not truly ‘things’ or ‘entities’, in an absolute sense, their entityhood is alleged. Conversely, in the classical sense, no entity is ever contingent, if it is truly an entity.
Thus, factual contingency is not classical contingency, in the sense of an actual entity that could be said to be truly contingent, absolutely. The fact of Contingency vitiates the very classical objectivity that could support its own absoluteness. No absolute ideality of the Contingent can be achieved, because of the contingency of supporting evidence.
[Redacted] “If the universe were truly and completely contingent, then the possibility of non-contingency becomes a logical possibility.”
{AK}: Both contingency & non-contingency are supervenient operations of the metaphysics of Identity. Without identities, there is nothing to ascribe ‘contingency’ or ‘non-contingency’ to.
[Redacted] “I think Nagarjuna is not affirming meta-contingency but at some point thinks there is an absolute that = contingency (nirvana = samsara).”
{AK}: My suggestion, is that Nagarjuna is engaged in the radical critique of Identity, of its metaphysics, & of its conventions. Such a critique transcends the traditional binary discursivities & conventions of contingency & non-contingency, before they can even arise, as supervenient fixations of a (de)limited logical hallucination. This, I feel, is in line with the ‘Two Truths’ doctrine of the Mahayana.