Close Encounters of Unkindness I

Steven Craig Hickman, of Social Ecologies & Alien Ecologies (formerly Dark Ecologies, Noir Real) & Nigel McMillan, an old friend, locally, had an encounter of difference, under a joke FB post.

I’m not going to do a close reading of the encounter, which is not as simple as it might seem. Both participants have their respective positions & understandings of what took place. Depending on the context one chooses, different conclusions can be drawn. Rather than attempt to resolve a delimited encounter, theoretically irresolvable as an abstracted isolation, & susceptible only to the oscillations of irony, it is perhaps more philosophically productive to consider themes which arose during the encounter, & the larger contexts which they suggest; it’s a good chance to explicate the cultural forces lurking in the background.

In both encounters; there was a strong scatological theme, introduced by Nigel McMillan, with the signifiers, “shit”; & “piss”; continued by Steven Craig Hickman with “crap”; & “crapology”, all of these referenced with significant frequency. Whether such universal biological necessity is used as an alleged symbolics of democracy; or as stabilising metaphors of existential authenticity, the anchorings of anatomical waste amid the ongoing, globalised rush of intangibilities, idealisations, & dislocations, constituting the so-called Information SuperHighway; is a significant, sociological resonance.

In this, it is redolent of another semiology of individuation; the tattooing culture, & its inscribing of a personal history of events on the somatic skin-screens of Self; both marking spatiotemporal location, & thereby anchoring Self in such significant localisation, in the meanings of these personalised marks, wherein the body becomes a living monument of the ‘personalised Self’.

The same identifying technology used in tattooing culture, when recapitulated as the ‘Brand’ or ‘Branding’, connotes the various ‘enslavements’ of livestock, slavery, & corporate ownership.

If tattooing is a personalised inscribing of Self, a ‘Self-Branding’ indicating ‘Self-Ownership’; then, both the tattoo & the ‘Brand’, share in the same Hellenic culture of the glorified Name; whether the psychological ‘marks’ of self-reflection, or the imperial ‘marks’ of sociological regi-mentation, there is the same use of ‘significant surface’, as the inscribed interface of symbolic ‘rule’, & other various necessities, of the Name.

As the techno-logics of information increasingly infuse environments with the filigree of Control; the emergent technosensorium has taken centre stage. Always there; history of road systems; Highways of war; the Information SuperHighway, as entire global system, of Oneiric production, is a Dream Machine. Now, every cultural scene, every sociopolitical scenario, public & private, has been commandeered by the filigree of cybernesis. This world, an autobahn of affects; the conveyance & redistribution of engineered sentiments; driven circulation of carefully crafted emotions; in an onward rush of oneiric desire, the desperate transactions of “new worlds for old”, in shakedowns that never end.

It is precisely in such an onrush, one configured at every level by economic & political abstractions of profit governance; an Administration According to the intangibilities of an Asymptotic Idealism; that this regime’s functionaries are reduced to turning towards the rhetoric of the only unpriced tangibility left to them, that of their own biological waste.

Unwanted by the system; rejected & ejected, even & especially, by themselves; absolutely undesired; this last concrete authenticity, uniquely theirs, is the only substance definitively escaping ownership by Kapital & the global system of Oneiric production. As such it serves as the only palpable symbol of freedom & self-grounding, capable of obscuring their own internalised perceptions of desirability/undesirability; their own self-perceived statuses in the contrived hierarchies of Desire, arising from Kapital’s profit system; & of dispelling the Technosensorium’s continual emotional broadcast, the existential feeling of being “Lost in Hollywood”.

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Close Encounters of Unkindness II

I wrote the next section, “Close Encounters of Unkindness III”, as YouTube comments in September 25, 2009, in response to this: “Saintly Man? – That Mitchell & Webb Look – BBC Two”

I include the piece, as it gives an interesting ‘take’ on the British ‘sense of humour’, a ‘sense’ so strongly & strangely informed by the metaphorics of urinary transaction, in the phrase, “taking the piss”, a phrase which arose in the discussion, on & after, Steven Craig Hickman & Nigel McMillan’s ‘encounter of difference’.

For a contemporary exemplification of this culture, the television programme, “Have I Got News For You!”, is quite typical.

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Close Encounters of Unkindness III

“Funny sketch!

Of course, one could say that such humour relies (sic) on the tacit acceptance of a life-sensorium, lebenswelt even, amenable only to “capitalist exploitation” -‘let’s not be too clever, we’re English’, “the nation of shopkeepers”- and innately hostile to any human development beyond it’s powers. As such, the video “takes the piss”, and is merely propaganda for the spirituality of beer and football, which are more social religions and major contributors to the economy, too. Having said that, the guru business in India generates many millions.

Meditation has been practiced in all the major religions, they all have their respective traditions. The video, however, has two signifiers, attire and facial hirsuteness styling, that would seem to connote yogis of the Hindu tradition. Whether sitting on very high wooden platforms was a common yogic practice, I do not know. But it is plausible that two British comedians, nostalgically recalling Monty Python, and overcoming their immense erudition in global spirituality, would conflate stereotypes in order to appeal to a British public who, of course, know everything about everything, and can convert it into a one-liner, between sips, after “taking the piss” out of their mates, who “take the piss” out of them.

England does have a particular talent for marginalising abstract and speculative spiritualisations, so to speak, trying to reduce everything to “common” forms of understanding, the basest of secularisms. It is not alone in this, just the best at it, which is why it had the biggest empire. But that diabolical tactic, “divide and rule”, is at the heart of British culture (“taking the piss”), preventing the highest possibilities of culture from truly realising themselves, trapping the people in a bedrock of satanic negativity, undermining the impolite temerities of any authentic individuality. It’s a control system deep in the English psyche, paranoia of an island nation, perhaps. True indivduality is distorted, coerced into simplistic scenarios of dramatic conflict, endless and farcical replays of the same old emotional vocabularies, the same “variety show”.”

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Close Encounters of Unkindness III – Addenda 1

“aardvarkbilly says: September 25, 2009 at 1:43 am

You’re a long­winded tit aren’t you? I think the Empire had more to do with the policy of Naval Supremacy than “marginalising abstract and speculative spiritualisations”. I was going to ignore you, but this comment plumbed such depths of nonsense it reached my “bedrock of satanic negativity”.”

“derritrane says: September 25, 2009 at 1:43 am

Could “the policy of Naval Supremacy” have anything to do with protecting economic interest, or is that too much of a speculation? What was i thinking! It’s because “we do love to be beside the seaside… we do love to be beside the seeeeea”.

It is an achievement of sorts to be able to discern any sort of depth in meaninglessness. But yes, you are right, plumbing the depths of nonsense known as British culture one is then able to discern diabolic geologies. Thank you for confirming that.”

This is a response to Dominic Fox, here.

[Dominic Fox]: “Now, it seems to me that for Laruelle, the Real is “like” (but see caveats below) a sort of global codomain that absolutely everything has an inclusion function into, since all “regional” domains are just subsets of this codomain. So for absolutely anything you like, it has both a “regional” identity (mapped by the identity function on its regional domain) and a One-in-one identity (mapped by the inclusion function from that domain into the Real).”

{AK}: Hasn’t this “Real” as “global codomain” always been in both formal & informal use, anyway, in practice?
The notion of “global codomain” as “Totality”; “Universe”; “Brahma”; “Being”; “Universal Set”; etc., with all their derived regionalisations, is not a novelty, & I’m not sure what Laruelle’s reinscribing of it, under the sign of “the Real”, can add to that?
The full panoply of such cartographic projections, of metaphysical contextualisation as perspective, between ‘atman’ & ‘Brahman’, for example, has been done, for millenia. It’s a necessary corollary of ‘meaning’; for ‘meaning’ is always selective; & a selection is necessarily a perspective.
Likewise, is a “principle of unilateral identity-in-the-last-instance with the Real” a uniquely necessary condition for inclusion?
I could accept it as a retention or reminder of initial region of origin, as it were, when speculative developments reach such levels of innovation as to form ‘regions’ in themselves, but I would think that the need for such reminders characterises the propensity to exclusionary dogma, the kinds of “tunnel vision” that actually do forget such constitutive delineations (regional origin > levels of innovation >>>>etc.,> new principle, or, new excuse for dogmatic ignorance).
It could be Laruelle’s way to lead those stuck in habitual metaphysical fixations to a looser, more flexible consideration, but really, is this necessary, in the 21st century, for those not so stuck?

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[Dominic Fox]: “the One is not”

{AK}: If read literally, as ‘the One IS Nothing’, it becomes the Sunyata of Mahayana Buddhism, or the ‘Neti, Neti’ of Vedantic Hinduism. Both concepts are at the borders of the determinate, they operate at the zone between the determinate & the indeterminate, neglecting neither, but not exhausted by either, whether singly, or in any combination.
If “the Real” & “the One”; both of which already, & do, function as synonymic moments of Sunyata or “Neti, Neti”; is, or are, Laruelle’s chosen & privileged signifiers for essentially the same referent & tasks as that which Sunyata or “Neti, Neti” already cover; then it seems to me, that Laruelle’s choice of emphasis runs risks of metaphysical fixation.
A Nagarjuna would say that the concept of “the Real” derives from the metaphysics of realisation & identity, i.e., the realisation of (an) identity. But identity is always supervenient, “dependently originated”, lacking the “own-being” of any ‘Absolute Substance’; in its limited & abstracted form, precisely as an ‘identity’, as an identified or selected variable or ‘thing’.
Thus, the concept of “the Real”, as derivation of such a metaphysics, is already implicitly determinate in a very particular way; & in a potentially paradoxical way; the ontological hunt for essentialised structures of the “Real”, or of “Truth”, is necessarily an ordering of metaphysical localisation, which contradicts its identification as general & global  all-inclusiveness. Through additional developments, ‘global all-inclusiveness’ is shown  as supervenient conceptualisation, too.
For these reasons, Laruelle’s choice, like that of the Speculative Realists, can be seen as a localised project of metaphysical nostalgia, one determined by histories of fixation that they as yet lack the theoretical understanding or inclination to think beyond or through, & whose local character they reject in advance, as such a localisation necessarily suggests explicit access to a terra incognita, an unknown terrain not susceptible to any effective utilisation or exploitation, not amenable to the replay of previously ‘successful’ procedures of the Enlightenment & Modernity.

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[Dominic Fox]: “the mathematical analogy breaks down, as we should probably expect it to.”

{AK}: This need not be the case for a future mathematics, no longer bound by habits of unthought ontological commitment, in a mathesis liberated from unnecessary metaphysical fixation.

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[Dominic Fox]: “We must not picture whatever structures we can imagine being stabilised, held fixedly within an underlying global order of structure that is just like them only somehow bigger.”

{AK}: Yes, I agree. It’s an implied corollary consideration, of what I was referring to here, on Terence’s “PRINCIPLES OF THE EMPTY SIGN”:

“Of course, one can ground all this with “emptiness” (or “empty sign”), but such a sunyata is at the root of every such ‘ground’. However, the “empty sign” cannot be uniquely identified as “the possible foundation of the mathematisation of the world without us”, alone, it is far more than just that, & far less.”

However, that is not to say, that ‘effects’ of such a hypothetical “global order of structure” are not produced (whatever those might be). Giordano Bruno’s: “The Universe is a sphere whose centre is everywhere, but whose circumference is Nowhere”, (Now Here?), is an insight that might well be relevant. Lol
It’s natural to import notions of ‘scalar magnitude’ into the metaphoric of topological distribution used in all theorisations, but they are supervenient constructions, too.

A bit of fun:

-3, -2, -1, ?0, +1, +2, +3
                @1,
                @2,
                @3, hree Domains

Responses to Dominic Fox, discussion here. 

[Dominic Fox]: “Is it still situated within semiosis? I’m minded to say not, because semiotics however general is still the domain of the *sign*, and the grammatology Derrida’s talking about points beyond that domain.”

{AK}: “My conception of “language” is not restricted to what humans do.”

Concerning the “sign”, he says: “Now, it is inevitable that not only inequalities of development (which will always occur), but also the necessity of certain contexts, will render strategically indispensable the recourse to a model known elsewhere, and even at the most novel points of investigation, to function as an obstacle.”

Concerning the “beyond”:
Derrida: “There is  not a transgression, if One understands by that a pure and simple landing into a beyond of metaphysics, at a point which also would be, let us not forget, first of all a point of language or writing.”
                       

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 Derrida: “Psychologism is not the poor usage of a good concept, but is inscribed and prescribed within the concept of the sign itself, in the equivocal manner of which I spoke at the beginning. This equivocality, which weighs upon the model of the sign, marks the “semiological” project itself and the organic totality of its concepts, in particular that of communication, which in effect implies a transmission charged with making pass, from one subject to another, the identity of a signified object, of a meaning or of a concept rightfully separable from the process of passage and from the signifying operation. Communication presupposes subjects (whose identity and presence are constituted before the signifying operation) and objects (signified concepts, a thought meaning that the passage of communication will have neither to constitute, nor, by all rights, to transform). A  communicates B to C.  Through Semiology and Grammatology, the sign the emitter communicates something to a receptor, etc.”

{AK} The emphasis of structures of ’emission & reception’ is unnecessary in inquiries where they are not an explicit or overt issue.
 

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“Kristeva:  If language is always “expression,” and if its closure is thereby demonstrated, to what extent, and by means of what kind of practice, could this expressivity be surpassed? To what extent would nonexpressivity signify? Would not grammatology be a nonexpressive Semiology and Grammatology “semiology” based on logical-mathematical notation rather than on linguistic notation?
 
Derrida: I am tempted to respond in an apparently contradictory way. On the one hand,  expressivism is never simply surpassable, because it is impossible to reduce the couple outside/inside as a simple structure of opposition.
This couple is an effect of differance,  as is the effect of language that impels language to represent itself as expressive re-presentation, a translation on the outside of what was constituted inside. The representation of language as “expression” is not an accidental prejudice, but rather a kind of structural lure, what Kant would have called a transcendental illusion. The latter is modified according to the language, the era, the culture. Doubtless Western metaphysics constitutes a powerful systematization of this illusion, but I believe that it would be an imprudent overstatement to assert that Western metaphysics alone does so. On the other hand, and inversely, I would say that if expressivism is not simply and once and for all surpassable, expressivity is in fact always already surpassed, whether one wishes it or not, whether one knows it or not. In the extent to which what is called “meaning” (to be “expressed”) is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text,  a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly “simple term” is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority. It is always already carried outside itself.
It already differs (from itself) before any act of expression. And only on this condition can it constitute a syntagm or text. Only on this condition can it “signify.” From this point of view, perhaps, we would not have to ask to what extent nonexpressivity could signify. Only nonexpressivity can signify, because in all rigor there is no signification unless there is synthesis, syntagm, dif[erance, and text. And the notion of text, conceived with all its implications, is incompatible with the unequivocal notion of expression. Of course, when one says that only the text signifies, one already has transformed the values of signifying and sign. For if one understands the sign in its most severe classical closure, one would have to say the opposite: signification is expression; the text, which expresses nothing, is insignificant, etc. Grammatology, as the science of textuality, then would be a nonexpressive semiology only on the condition of transforming the concept of sign and of uprooting it from its congenital expressivism.”

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“Kristeva:  Semiology today is constructed on the model of the sign and its correlates: communication  and structure.
What are the “logocentric” and ethnocentric limits of these models, and how are they incapable of serving as the basis for a notation attempting to escape metaphysics?

Derrida:  All gestures here are necessarily equivocal. And supposing, which I do not believe, that someday it will be possible simply to escape metaphysics, the concept of the sign will have marked, in this sense, a simultaneous impediment and progress. For if the sign, by its root and its implications, is in all its aspects metaphysical, if it is in systematic solidarity with stoic and medieval theology, the work and the displacement to which it has been submitted-and of which it also, curiously, is the instrument-have had delimiting effects.  For this work and displacement have permitted the critique of how the concept of the sign belongs to metaphysics, which represents a simultaneous marking and loosening of the limits of the system in which this concept was born and began to serve, and thereby also represents, to a certain extent, an uprooting of the sign from its own soil.
This work must be conducted as far as possible, but at a certain point one inevitably encounters “the logocentric and ethnocentric limits” of such a model.  At this point, perhaps, the concept is to be abandoned. But this point is very difficult to determine, and is never pure. All the heuristic and critical resources of the concept of the sign have to be exhausted, and exhausted equally in all domains and contexts. Now, it is inevitable that not only inequalities of development (which will always occur), but also the necessity of certain contexts, will render strategically indispensable the recourse to a model known elsewhere, and even at the most novel points of investigation, to function as an obstacle.”