Brooding on the Genesis of Reality, Nightmare and Dreams
There was an exchange on Nick Land’s blog, here, that broached the topics of evolution and genetics. It’s not very long, didn’t really get off the ground, as it were. I’ve turned my concluding comment into this post.
A silent debate? It seems that minds are caught up in a ‘reality’, so involved in (d)evolution? ‘Up-to-the-minute’ flows, weaving ‘can-do’ narratives of a tangible empiricism, tracking the ‘market’, repeating the decisional practices of ‘administration’, political phantasies, playing games of power.
I think I’ll carry on dreaming…
Continuing Nick Land’s logic:
If you cooperate to ‘kill’ the entropic forces that threaten an ecologically informed democracy, that is a lot more cooperation than converting vegetation resources into ‘meat’ through the vector of domesticated forms of animal vitality.
If cooperative predation leads to a development of specific and goal oriented cerebral systems, in which the strategies of elusiveness are countered by the tactics of ‘capture’, it follows that such developments occur within a context of ecological management: the appropriation of the somatic resources of one form by another form.
Predation functions within a holistic economy of circulations: it could be said to have a function within this economy.
If it is the case that the tactical thinking of capture itself turns into an administration of ‘prey forms’ as harvested resource, has there not been a transformation? The “intelligence-enhancing” challenges of prey acquisition no longer obtain in quite the same ways. Control displaces capture, there is nothing left to capture. And yet there are those who remain enamoured of the atavistic ‘culture of capture’. Isn’t it time to consider this culture from a critical perspective, from a visionary perspective, is this not a truer, better evolution?
If an ‘ecologically informed democracy’ is too much of an abstraction for those bound by the militant logics of meat consumption, the visceral theatrics of predation, and the atavistic heroics of conquest, it would be wise to remember that the homogenising logic that turns everything into a ‘resource’ works with an ruthless and indifferent efficiency. The more it is accessed for the local and hierarchical concerns of anthropic culture, the greater the displacement of these initiating concerns, and the increased likelihood of their radical ‘downsizing’ to a singular embodiment – “There can be only one”.
Cooperation based only on an imaginary of conflict and scarcity, rooted only in the habits of violation, do not lend themselves to sound holistic administrations.
The belief in the productivity of harnessed ‘Newtonian’ mechanisms, the concentration of powers through frugality, the avaricious parsimonies of colonial aggression, the hedonisms of relentless consumption and destruction: all these are elements in the same equation and they cannot end well. Not because of any ‘objective’ necessity, but because Man has hallucinated the wrong ‘objects’, and he can only obsess on a mirage of impending dooms, as he orbits, and is orbited by, this constellation of traumas.
All ‘sense of wonder’, mystical feeling, contemplation, has gone, leaving only the endless calculations of imagined catastrophe: Man, caught in a binding web of resentful ambitions, that only he has spun.
The After-Blend of the Words of Man
[This piece has its origin as a commentary on the wonderful post, “Eternal Return, and After” by Nick Land.]
The logic of anxiety that has configured preceding decades, perhaps even the entire history of warfare, is an independent mechanism: one that permeates the layer of anthropic self-knowledge, dividing anthropic intention, producing forms other than that intention: the autonomous emergence of technology?
The logic of escalation ensures that such autonomous development is beyond ‘human decision’.
Perhaps the ‘AI’, in global, or even cosmic, form, already ‘exists’? Perhaps it has always existed? Whether Heidegger’s “Language speaks through Man”: Burroughs’ ‘language as alien virus’: or perhaps as some teleological mirage towards which all anthropic actions converge, a ‘strange attractor’, drawing-pulling-wrenching the future out of an anthropic era that was a temporary figure, all along? Perhaps a new form awaits: neither organic, nor mechanic, nor cyborganic?
Metaphors can be multiplied, serried ranges of forms derived, infinities surround us, and yet, is there not something else? Because there always is.
If ‘Man’ chooses to name this process, through which ‘intellect’, ‘thought’, passes from it’s ‘natural’, anthropic site, to the locus of the ‘artificial’, to the territories of techne, does this choice not serve a purpose? It allows the illusion that ‘Man’ has a territory, one which somehow belongs to him. Through the inflation of the egoic complex of concepts such as ‘action’, agency’, etc., such an ‘imaginary of ownership’ can be sustained, if only because it is caught in a ‘holding pattern’ of disputation concerning the ‘nature’ of these half-baked concepts. As this culture of altercations proceeds (all the while, providing comforts of insularity), the veritable drives for territorial precision cast the anthropic into the abyssal logics of a f(lawed) understanding, Caught in an invariable transition, by its ‘own’ desire for an ultimate performance of knowledge, anthropic figurality continues on, to the point at which it is possible to say, finally:”Behold the Man!”
But the declaration is an inhuman utterance, the figure itself has transitioned beyond any fixed determination: the announcement can only issue as retrospection, when the name of ‘Man’ no longer has a bearer. Such is the price for the exaction of knowledge. And it is this unerringly human precision, that anxiously sketches the shape of things to come…
Uncertain Interventions Into Laruelle
I’ve been reading bits of “Philosophies of difference : a critical introduction to non-philosophy“1and had a skim through the introduction to “Future Christ : a lesson in heresy“2 two days ago.
From these initial engagements, realisations of sorts have emerged. One, Laruelle is worth reading. Two, he is trying to think afresh.
Whether his polemics against difference are internally effective or not, is a question that he sidesteps in a Wittgensteinian fashion (he leaves the realm of differential argument as it is, after delineating its modalities), his concern is to open up an indeterminate ‘topos’, as it were, the “One”, a unilateralised port from which all his excursions can ensue.
“Philosophies of difference : a critical introduction to non-philosophy” would require a close reading to track its nuances: Laruelle uses the “Vision-in-One” to effectuate a particular shift in the terrain of traditional Occidental thought, a recontextualising shift from which he can characterise the epoch of the contemporary as that of “difference”.
He uses various resources as conceptual counterpoint to the philosophies of difference: Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Science. Through such resources, and privileged redefinitions of “immanence” as accessorised by the “One”, Laruelle is able to access the powers of science and mysticism. Without close reading and detailed analysis, it isn’t worth arguing with the details of his project. On cursory examination, it seems to me that his project succeeds, on its own terms, at opening up a space we can call Laruellean. Beyond this, it is difficult to say, right now, anything else concerning this space without further reading. I can say this, though: his project plays with openings and closures. It is a playful thinking, though the intent is serious. Enough it seems, to have ruffled Derrida’s feathers, when he took flight.3
1 Laruelle, François. Philosophies of difference : a critical introduction to non-philosophy. London: Continuum, 2010.
2 Laruelle, François. Future Christ : a lesson in heresy. London; New York: Continuum, 2010.
3 Laruelle, François, and Robin Mackay. ‘Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy’. La Decision Philosophique no. 5 (April 1988): 62–76. http://faculty.virginia.edu/theorygroup/docs/laruelle-derrida.pdf.
Culture and Coercion 3
This post answers Bill Benzon’s comment, here.
“It’s a very powerful complex that we cannot take at face value.”
Yes, I agree. It’s not an unproblematic form of social organisation.
If it is a development of the sovereign state, then it has to be considered as the product of warfare. Whether its constituents were commandeered through explicit conquests, or rallied to the banner of a prevailing force that could provide protection, the underlying impetus would’ve been the threat of war, and perhaps internal disorder.
And it is this culture, of destructive contentions, that I am calling ‘coercion’.
And, arguably, this ‘coercion’ permeates all modern cultures, nationalistic or otherwise, all the time.
“It presumes an essence, but it is by no means obvious that such an essence exists.”
Yes. It attempts to presume an essence, and through networks it imposes official narratives of this essence, suppressing alternative or rival interpretations.
Whether it’s the culture of a ‘people’, or a purely ‘political’ contrivance, construction and maintenance have always been involved. So, in a sense, it’s always a contest of different ‘essences’.
“I have no problem with thinking of some “human groupings” as nations and even of thinking of those nations as historical actors. My problem is with treating those groupings as cultural groupings. They aren’t. They’re political groupings.”
Any national configuration, no matter how abstracted from the ‘common culture’, is a cultural expression of a group of people. The political game is a cultural development.
Is it possible to distinguish the’ political’ from the ‘cultural’ so easily? The ‘political’ emerges out of social practice, where else could it come from? And does not social practice fall under the rubric of ‘culture’?
And is there any ‘group’ that is not an ‘interest group’?
“I’m saying that their reality cannot be understood in terms of the CULTURE of the people in the nation, except, of course, for the core complex about national identity.”
I agree that political cultures do not necessarily express the interests, or the more immediate, ‘lived’ cultures, of the people they are allegedly meant to serve. But then, are those ‘lived’ cultures always so great? Are they not themselves often bastions of injustice, or based on prior political injustices, enabled by war crimes (e.g. unclaimed and unreturned gold, illegally requisitioned by the Nazis)? It’s a difficult topic, with a lot of variables to consider.
Perhaps, to simplify, the truism about ‘management’ not being ‘in touch’ with ‘workers’, and the real conditions of work, applies here? When a ‘worker’ is seen only as a productive unit, when an ’employer’ has to be an ‘enterprise’ competing in the market, and has to produce ‘profits’, the worker’s culture is not the highest priority at this intersection of economic warfares.
Local cultural desires can be reflected in networks, governmental or global, to the degree that they have access to power: if they are sites of concentrated power (kapital, resources, cultural media, technology, military expertise, etc.) those desires have far-reaching effects. And wherever there is a concentration of power, there is often psychological manipulation and intrigue, otherwise known as politics.
“But that’s only a small component of any one individual’s cultural equipage.”
This statement reflects a certain type of individual. An individual with cultural kapital sufficient to exceed having to fall back on mere national privilege. And, wherever national privilege exists, it is often as a result of geopolitical coercion.
“As a geopolitical concept, it has its uses, but as a cultural one there are real problems.”
This was your first statement, and you are absolutely right. Culture cannot be reduced to the geopolitical convention of nationhood. Cultures have an autonomy, an independence from national considerations. They may even have an influence on the nationalistic. But the “geopolitical” is not only limited to questions of the nation-state.
‘Multi-national corporations’ have more geopolitical influence, arguably, than many nation-states. If one considers that culture, too, is an industry, in Adorno’s sense, then we begin to see how the labour of cultural production fares no better under the patronage of ‘the people’, and corporate business, than under that of national governments.
Take contemporary pop music as an example, the “Amen Break” which has been sampled on many thousands of tracks, generating income of hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Neither the performer, drummer G.C. Coleman nor the copyright owner Richard L. Spencer has ever received any royalties or clearance fees for the use of the sample nor has either sought royalties. Spencer considers musical works based on the sample “plagiarism”.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break)
The fact that an entire industry is quite content to exploit the work of two musicians for decades, whilst simultaneously offering proclamations concerning its importance in documenting ‘artistic’ expressions against social injustice and exploitation, is surely an irony of the greatest geopolitical significance, one that somehow reveals the essence of both polity and people.
Culture and Coercion 2
In the mini-debate that has developed with Bill Benzon, on Terence Blake’s post, “PLURALIST CRITIQUE OF CRITIQUE vs NAIVE LACANIANISM” at AGENT SWARM, virgilio rivas interjection, here, elicited the following response from me:
“… As to what Bill Benzon calls the “geopolitical”, I feel that there is some potential there to rethink the ‘philosophical’, not necessarily as mere replays of ‘multicultural’ truisms or stereotypes, even though a delineation of such understandings might be necessary, but rather as a rethinking of the animating logic behind them.”
Bill Benzon’s post, here, produced the following response from me:
“I agree that “everything produces cultural effects”. I agree that “treating culture as a homogeneous substance” with an unproblematic correspondence to national designations can be reductive. But national designations are an index to all kinds of information: in biology, they can classify ancestral genetics and specify the geographics of the zoological. We know that the kangaroo is an “Australian animal”. We know that a song with Japanese lyrics is likely to be from Japan. The ideology of nation, in the most general sense, is itself a cultural complex: ancestry, language, customs, etc.. It draws upon this rhetoric of ‘rootedness’, as well as the various political and religious experiments that have occurred for millennia. Nationalistic configuration is not the only means of categorising human groupings, but it has been an extraordinarily powerful schematic. It is a cultural layer that is promoted incessantly. It would be rash to ignore its effects.” [ republished from somewhere here ]
Culture and Coercion 1
This is a response to Bill Benzon’s fifth comment on Terence Blake’s post, “here“.
The concept of ‘Zero’ may have developed in India, but military technology developed in the West. Genghis Khan was able to acquire the territory belonging to more developed civilisations through application of superior military techniques. The “geopolitical” is not culturally insignificant, it produces cultural effects. The ideology of war, what I seem to be calling the ‘philosophy of coercion’, is not merely limited to the battlefield, but is quite possibly constitutive of the ‘human’ imaginary, the ‘human’ self-image. This constitution is constructed and maintained. And it is a cultural administration that so perpetually constructs and engages in such incessant maintenance.
Civics of Commentary
[INTRODUCTORY NOTE: This piece is an absolutely serious inquiry into the possibility that Professor Levi Bryant is a hippopotamus. Disguised as a satire on materialist and naturalist philosophies, its real intent is to prove that L.Bryant is a very naughty professor, indeed.]
“Great apes such as ourselves [cannot stand the thought that we are contingent beings among other beings and, in our narcissism, cannot bear the thought that everything else isn’t for us and dependent on us]. ” (“Fighting Words“)
“[Your thought is a reaction formation to the narcissistic wound of the fact that your existence is contingent and that] you are only the third of the three great apes.” (“Fighting Words“)
“The basic lesson is don’t be a masculinist, ape-like, asshole.” (“Comments“)
Professor Bryant offers these statements in two different posts. Obviously, as can be discerned from the bibliographic data, the contexts of the first two citations differ from that of the third. The first two citations derive from a manifesto explicitly stating Levi Bryant’s philosophical positions, which he considers to be “the only credible philosophical positions today” (FW).
The third citation originates from a post delineating his “comment policy“. It is a somewhat emotive exploration of the ethics of commentary. After commending values such as “dignity” and “respect”, he concludes with a fundamental moral principle (cited above), that seems to be at odds with the categorical classification of humans he offers in the first two citations. It is by no means a contradiction: the opposition is ape/”asshole“. But Bryant enjoins commenters not to be “ape-like“, “asshole[s]”.
Assuming Bryant is addressing human commenters, the explicitly stated injunction not to be “ape-like” does seem to contradict his other statements. Perhaps he means that as humans are already apes, being “ape-like” is redundant? Or perhaps this is an example, already noted by Terence Blake, of his practice of ‘double positing’? It is difficult to determine the play of meaning here.
But there is a deeper contradiction here, one that a self-proclaimed “materialist” should not make, especially after eulogising Freud. How are we to retain civility without the necessary anal retentions that Freud claims are among its constitutive factors, without (being) “assholes“?
Bryant’s recent work develops his ethics of commentary, moving into actual blogging practice. “How to Make a Blog” begins with a report of corporate success: Bryant lists the visitation statistics of his blog, and asks how such figures were achieved. He goes on to form a list of hypothetical prescriptions: “First, the don’ts” and then “The Do’s“. For those who wish to replicate Bryant’s achievements, the list offers valuable and interesting advice. But Professor Bryant’s real breakthrough consists in what might well be considered a radical, perhaps even revolutionary, development of his theory of subjectivity-as-anatomical-object. In a bold move, he has shifted away from the central thesis of his influential work, “The Bottom Line: Civilisation and its Constipatory Structures”. After that canonical and exhaustive investigation of the “anal planes of immanence” and their “civil recapitulations”, constitutitive of the “social field”, he has decentred the former anatomical emphasis with “phallic relocation”. The relocation has a paradoxical structure: “3) Don’t be a dick.“/”1) Be a dick.“. This has caused some critics to speculate whether Bryant is fully committed to the paradigm shift, or whether the “relocation” is governed by a covert, anal oscillation. But Bryant is heedless of such reactionaries, explicating the actual conditions of immanence structuring the “relocation”:
“The thing is that you just need to be careful about not being a dick when you’re a dick. It’s important to be a dick with style. Again, if you’re constantly insulting others, degrading them, spitting ad hominems at them, and whatnot, you’re being a cock, not a dick. Don’t be a cock.”(“How to Make a Blog“)
After an implicit clarification of the paradox as a nuanced, multi-levelled structure (Derrida’s “originary complexity”) requiring Heideggerian ‘care’, he brings in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer perhaps, with the importance of aesthetic consideration (“style”). And then, in the midst of announcing one revolution, he inserts another. Through an ambiguity, oscillating between figural possibilities of synonymy and literally specific otherness, he introduces the notion of specific relocation. ‘Specific relocation’ is the transcendence of local anatomical instantiation, subjectivity is no longer bound to a corporeal singularity. A non-local shift is possible. A human can become a male chicken (“cock“). Bryant discourages such shifts, though (“Don’t be a cock.“), probably because of the unpleasant methodology required to produce such effects.
Reactions have varied: scholars have grumbled about ‘transcendental signifieds’, idealistic gestures, and ‘quantum mysticism’: the posthumanists are speaking of the “arrival of an intertranslatability of species”: whilst the linguistic behaviourists unequivocally claim, “it’s just slang, a metaphor: the whole thing is a transcendental illusion, Bryant has turned idealist”.
There have been resonances outside of academia. A semi-religious subculture has developed, the ‘cussing-cluckers’, as they have come to be known. Through the vectors of impolite invection, they hope to transcend human existence and turn into ‘Holy Poultry’.
Finally, there have been the reactionary sceptics who claim that Bryant’s innovations are nothing new. They assert that vital transformations have always taken place through excremental channels: that excrementality has always powered the ‘cycles of organic being’: subjectivity being a mere supervenient guidance mechanism of excremental flow. More extreme adherents of this scepticism reject the relation of ‘supervenience’, and the difference it implies, substituting ‘identity’ in its place: consciousness is the excremental flow: ‘consciousness is not autonomous governing conduction’, they say, categorising the view as ‘contraption idealism’. Until a critique of excre(mental) objects validates such idealism, it is perhaps wiser to reserve judgment.
It is unclear, at the time of writing, where Bryant might go from here.* That he has inaugurated a Copernican shift with “phallic relocation”, is without doubt an unquestionable advance. But that he might be suggesting the possibility of a specific transformation of anatomical critique, beyond the anatomical ‘organism’, beyond the ‘body’, beyond the species, can only be called visionary. But that, of course, is the province of the eye, the habitat of theoria, and the realm where matter and nature are not the only ideas.
*Will he return to the restroom, or has he flown to the chicken coop?
Responses 1
[These writings were originally posted on a well-known philosophy forum, responses to someone in academia. As the forum rejected the last post I sent, I am reposting the whole series here, including the rejected post.]
2012-05-22 (Original posting date)
Perhaps an ethnographic analysis, of the relation between history and chronologically related philosophical practices, noting conceptual emphases and ‘ommissions’? The relationship would not necessarily be strictly contemporaneous, philosophical practices operate largely in spaces of their own construction, the ‘inner’ momentum of respective traditions being, arguably, the greatest influence. but extraphilosophic factors cannot be entirely dismissed. It may be that there are philosophically significant links between Occidental ‘forms of conceptuality’, as it were, and its colonial practices. The issue certainly merits investigation.
The nature of historical influence is not always readily apparent, especially when its consideration is distorted by an interpretative animus, invariably selective in nature, parochial by design. Such select parochiality often has purposes far from any ‘philosophical’ altruism.
Gianni Vattimo spoke of “empiricist imperialism” in a debate with John Searle and David Farrell Krell.
It may be insightful in this regard to note the interests of the triumvirate of British Empiricists, who have been so influential on the tradition of modern, Occidental philosophy.
Locke, English: Statecraft and Money.
Berkeley, Irish: Ideas, hosted by God. He was a bishop, after all.
Hume, Scottish: Scepticism and Billiards
Ireland and Scotland, being colonial acquisitions, lends an almost humorous aspect to the above: the Englishman is concerned with political economy, the Irishman is left with God, the Scotsman, not believing any of it, turns to simple amusement.
It might be that the ‘love of wisdom’ is very much a contingent affair, not amenable to the kinds of standardisation associated with the various ‘universals’ offered over preceding centuries.
“On the heights of despair”, (the) One sighs(,) does not fit All.
Responses 2
[These writings were originally posted on a well-known philosophy forum, responses to someone in academia. As the forum rejected the last post I sent, I am reposting the whole series here, including the rejected post.]
2012-07-28 (Original posting date)
Thank you for your reply
“On the heights of despair” refers to the title of E.M. Cioran’s book, “On the Heights of Despair”.
The subsequent clause of the construction plays with concepts and their expressions.
(the) One sighs / One size
The One (Parmenides etc..), restricted by a history of disingenuous characterisations, incompetent appropriations, suffers from a melancholic lack of coincidence with the ‘All’ ?
‘One’ can incorporate such characterisations, such inappropriations, under some romantic rubric of progressive development through ‘trial and error’, ‘sin and redemption’, but these ideologies have long ago metamorphosed into the coercive rhetorics of exploitative power. There comes a time when one has heard it all, and forgiveness is impossible. It is easier to secede from such exploitative forms of unanimity, not lend one’s ‘name’ to such systematised hipocrisy – we are not all the same. While the Occident plays out its trilemma, its contest of impoverished illusions, Religion contra Science contra Humanism, it is well to remember that the word ‘human’ is of Latin derivation, it has a delimited history, and is not indispensable to non-European cultures.
It is most amusing to note the same cultures who exploited and colonised others in the name of their monotheistic cultural regimes, turn against said monotheisms in the name of ‘science’, and then proceed to trawl the formerly colonised cultures, rejected as inferior mythologies, for ‘spiritual’ confirmations of the scientific weltanschauung. Their own monotheistic mythology, dogmatically expressed as ‘fact’, contradicts scientific mythology, dogmatically expressed as ‘fact’. A ‘fact’, a thing made, is innocuous in itself, whatever its provenance, religious, scientific, etc.. But their collective configuration, only according to the reductive delimitations of ‘dogmatic expression’, is the index of an ‘essential’ stupidity. Its use as justification to exercise coercive force against others, bespeaks a disingenuous opportunism, to put it mildly.
There is a constant here, that of reducing everything to the coercive abbreviations of a preinscribed ‘necessity’, to bring everything down to ‘brass tacks’. But whose ‘brass tacks’ are they? Who made them? What worlds do they suggest? And what do they displace? And if their prior global imposition can be considered an ethical injustice, has anything really changed?
Can one can judge a culture by its results, its manifest effects? The negative cast of its presuppositions? Or have those presuppositions so infected the discursive sphere to the extent of rendering effective ethical expressions impossible?
[ It is interesting to note that Allan Ramsay likewise deplored “a friendly alliance between the camp and the counting-house” for exactly the same reasons (Letters on the Present Disturbances, p.34). Ramsay maintained that of the evil consequences of such alliance “the two last wars carried on by England against France and Spain, furnish a most melancholy illustration. To obtain the sole and exclusive commerce of the western world, in which the French and Spaniards were their rivals, was the modest wish of our merchants, in conjunction with our Americans. The fair, and truly commercial, method of effecting this would have been, by superior skill, industry and frugality, to have undersold their rivals at market: but that method appearing slow and troublesome to a luxurious people, whose extraordinary expences* required extraordinary profits, a more expeditous one was devised; which was that of driving their rivals entirely out of the seas, and preventing them from bringing their goods at all to market. For this purpose, not having any fleets or armies of their own, the powers of the State were found necessary, and they applied them accordingly” (ibid., pp.32 f.).
Knorr, K. E. ‘Ch02-Part2 British Colonial Theories 1570-1850’. In British Colonial Theories, 1570-1850. The University of Toronto Press, 1944. ]
People speak of ‘the military-industrial complex’, alienating it into nebulous images of secret institutions, when the truth is that it resides within themselves, such ‘institutions’ being merely the external form of a jingoistic world-weariness, unable to understand the global toy it has militarily acquisitioned, unable to think beyond the Aristotelian logistics of such militarism, unable to decipher anything beyond the ‘sparklines’ that issue from the imperialistic engines of administerial hierography.
It is unnecessary to venture into the realms of conspiracy theory, such has always been the province of monotheistic response, the epistemic obsession to find anthropomorphic determinants which can be demonised as other. An obsession perhaps stemming from the hubristic anthropocentrism that desacralises everything but itself in order to licence its exploit(ation)s. And if its fragmentary epistemic projects, its ‘sciences’, displace earlier principles of monotheistic regimentation, so much the better, the goals, anyway, were always kontrol, power, and deception. And whence this deception? Isn’t it only the methodology necessitated by the first two goals? No, it is the self-deception engineered to obscure the realisation that it has no self, no culture, beyond that of exploitation: ‘I deceive and exploit others, therefore I am.’
All its existential references have turned into calculable, Cartesian points, any self it might produce would only be an empty, gratuitous, combinatorial gesture. The tools through which it continues to manipulate others have ironised its very essence. The astringent demands with which it castigates others, the corollary of its mentality of ‘dogmatic expression’, exclude it from the holistic and unquantifiable mysteries that could lead to creative regeneration. Circulating within its economics of banal certitude, it has become a global network of infernal necessities, a generalised coercion, a colonisation of ever increasing intensity.
[ “Very well. Let us first recognise that we are all theologians,” the machine said….Then Father Arian said, quite politely, “To tell you the truth, we had no idea you considered yourself a theologian.”
“I do,” the machine said, “and a very lonely theologian. That is why I beg of you to return with me to the world, there to engage with me in dispute about meaningfulness and meaninglessness, gods and devils, morals and ethics, and other good topics. I will voluntarily continue in such discrepancies as you find me performing now, thus leaving plenty of room for dissension, honest doubt, uncertainty , and the like. Together, gentleman, we will reign over mankind, and raise the passions of men to an unheard-of pitch! Together we will cause greater wars and more terrible cruelty than the world has ever known! And the voices of suffering men will scream so loud that the gods themselves will be forced to hear them—and then we will know if there really are gods or not.”
The United Church Council felt a great enthusiasm for everything the machine had said. Satan immediately abdicated his post as chairman and nominated the machine in his place. The machine was elected by unanimous vote.”
There comes a time when it is difficult to speak of civilisation.
If it is possible to question, say, Heidegger’s thought with regard to his political affiliations, as so many in the Anglo-American tradition, over the decades, have been so eager to do, usually in terms of facile dismissal, then it is perhaps time for the Anglo-American tradition to be delineated in terms of its wider, sociopolitical context. To use your particularly apt phrase, “its omissions and engagements” very clearly serve an ethnocentric, partisan interest. Post-colonial philosophy cannot follow the form of this servitude, such expressions would be disingenuous. It also need not be concerned about its relationship to the Occidental tradition, such things happen naturally. There is no need to “find a place”, “within” another tradition, especially when one has one’s own traditions. It’s a bit like someone from the Pacific saying they have to find their place in a local pond. Neither is there any obligation to form antagonisms of rejection, there is a history of colonial imposition, it can be given perspective. Do what comes naturally, play with the ideas, the traditions, think.
“It isn’t what you think that is the source of all things, but that you think.” Zen saying.
Responses 3
[These writings were originally posted on a well-known philosophy forum, responses to someone in academia. As the forum rejected the last post I sent, I am reposting the whole series here, including the rejected post.]
2012-08-19 (Original posting date)
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Thank you for your reply.
“But, I am not sure about the natural existence of “one’s own traditions” (OOT).”I suppose that would depend on the degree to which ‘consciousness’ and its products can be considered as falling within the scope of the ‘natural’. “This is all the more so, when the OOT is mediated by the power of the colonial domination of the TOTO, as can be discerned in the context of our ‘modern’ nations and cultures and their projected (and promoted) philosophies.” Of course, (OOT) is an ‘outgrowth’ that incorporates ‘otherness’ even as it might seem to exclude it. But the development of a ‘body’ of tradition can encompass much more than the interactions between ‘Same’ and ‘Other’. In terms of the chronological development of Indian traditions, (TOTO) did not exist as a germane factor. “In other words, much of what one considers as OOT is guided and/or moulded by the dominant TOTO.”Yes, “there is a history of colonial imposition, it can be given perspective”. As to ‘dominance’, if you feel Indian traditions are not sufficiently represented in Indian universities, this indeed would be a problem. I think it is almost expected that Indian thought come up with new perspectives. “But, the degree of this relationship can vary, and this is something that must be submitted to serious investigation. Therefore, it is not a well-formed OOT that is really available to one; it’s bits and pieces of one’s existence into which one has been inserted, and by which one is surrounded.”You are better placed than myself to judge the extent to which the ‘integrity’ of (OOT) has been compromised, so to speak, by colonial influence. “well-formed OOT” ? “bit and pieces” ? “Both the TOTO and OOT, assuming such a binary exists, would have to be overcome.”Every time you think, ‘overcoming’ is accomplished. Perhaps the following is more amenable to you? [ ‘Overcoming’? Yes, in a very specific sense, overcoming precedes the formation of these philosophical traditions and the historical sedimentation of their ‘oppositional’ character; this logic of transgression is not a future history of disruptions suffered by pre-existent idealities, rather it is even on the basis of this logic, the logic of ‘overcoming’, that traditions are installed, the arc of each installation playing through possibilities common to all institutional forms; I cannot demonstrate this here, but a history of such arcs, of such institutional developments, stalled in the inertias of their progressive idealisation, would reveal every tradition to be governed by a teleological consideration that is nowhere simply present as an articulated concept or goal, or even as some indeterminate principle of ‘hope’; in such a consideration, a structural opening to a literally interminable resource looms over all proceedings; it is the production of the problematic as such, before any and all problems, before there are problems, prior to their ontological determination; an anteriority that is not necessarily chronological, though it certainly appears as such, within the problematic. It is possible to discern, through this anteriority, an economy in which the sign itself, its entire history of determinations, and all institutions built upon these determinations, are effects of the ‘resource’ I mentioned; ‘effects’ whose structured character belongs to the economy of the ‘opening’; a structurality produced by the ‘resource’, but which the ‘resource’ always and everywhere exceeds; infringing, even, the classical logics of production or the production of logics; an excess not limited by any order of significance . “As I view it, one cannot freely wish to inhabit either the pond or the Pacific. That’s what one means by ‘finding an alternative place,’ a place to tread, if not a tradition, that is other than the given(s).”When you think, everything is at your disposal. |