THE SO-CALLED, ‘UNIVERSE’, AS GENERAL ALIBI OF DISCONTENT
‘Physical reality’ would indicate the systematic apprehension of habitual interpretations concerning emergent phenomena. It would be a hypostatic convention contingent on both those interpretations and apprehensions, as well as the radical assumptions behind both contingencies. The systematic aspect, as unified apprehension, is suggestive both of an instance of seeming completion with regard to economies of habitual interpretation, as well as an instance of seeming incompletion suggested by whatever escapes the structure of apprehension producing habitual interpretation.
Science, is essentially concerned with establishing invariant structures of objectivity with respect to emergent phenomena, rearranging and revising habitual interpretation in accord with the establishment of such invariance, in order to produce the security of objective knowledge. Its activity follows the logic of approximation, towards such structures of invariance, with the implicit assumption of various types of regularity. So, it is concerned with the regulations of sequential emergence, and the systematics of such regularity.
But the assumption of objective invariance, known as truth, is the guiding principle behind scientific projects. However, as this principle necessarily issues from locations of apprehension receptive to particular streams of phenomenal emergence, it has to generalise the samplings from such an itinerary of apprehensions, according to powers of theoretical idealisation, in order to approach the truth of objective invariance.
Is it the case, though, that the so-called universe, as a system of general production, is necessarily bound to whatever legislative landscape of objective invariance that might present itself to a particular itinerary itself produced by that so-called universe?
Is it the case, that the so-called universe would privilege the operation of subjective and objective structural assumption as some kind of ultimate rationale? What would happen to the notion of objective truth if everything was susceptible to the free variations of subjective engineering, of some globally capable science? Where would truth and objectivity go, in a universal environment of total scientific design?
Once all patterns of physical determination have been mapped and harnessed, what is left? All of the other patterns of wishful determination, hitherto rejected? Does astrology make a comeback? Future forms of divination contingent on future objective vocabularies not yet even discovered? All of it held together by entanglements of quantum possibility somewhat susceptible to future, infinite machines?
But ask yourself, in these scenarios of future hypothesis, do nostalgic reconstructions arise? Archaeological gestures reproducing the early 21st-century, looking for that which was missed in the initial production, the simple joys of living and being together that were displaced by the burdens of bad epistemology, of weak and selfish understandings, all of which were inflicted by a contrived culture of sectarian intimidations and evil intents?
THE UNQUESTIONED AXIOM OF ABSOLUTE AGORA
[Matt Barber] “The “quantum image” is this image of the radical identity of the material which is real, absolute, immediate and not involved in any false process, dialectic, differentiation etc. The only way to reduce L’s work to a scientism would be to hack off the part of his project which includes radical and static emplacement of the chora which distinguishes and defines the universe and world in a way philosophy fails to achieve.”
{CJ (AK)}: Being able to treat anything at all, any potentially identifiable ens, whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’, as a ‘reality’, ‘absolute’, or ‘immediacy’, is merely one of the corollary operations of Science Fiction thinking and assumption. It’s Science Fiction bricolage, you pick it up quite naturally as a child when reading science-fiction. It’s a prerequisite of reading lots of short stories with different kinds of world building. That process, in my experience, involves conceptual operations, some of which appear in various kinds of philosophy or even Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’. But there are a lot more possibilities.
It would be possible to do a structural combinatorics of philosophical or non-philosophical positions, or discursive elaborations of radical, seed ens or entities, as various kinds of formal and informal outlines. This might seem to have considerable appeal to those intimidated by spectres of processual, dialectical, and differential, necessity. But each one of those seeming necessities itself potentially constitutes a radical seed entity.
The khôra could be said to paradoxically refer to the characterisation of the non-characterised, but such antinomy would be contingent on essentialised notions of ‘characterisation’ and ‘non-characterisation’, those essentialised notions themselves ‘characterisations’, if that convention is insisted upon.
But notice, the ‘khôra’, as a determination, is contingent on the theoretical construction which it might be said to exceed, or even ‘originate’, if the relation of origin is projected onto this alleged excess. Likewise, each and every moment of the theoretical construction, including the ‘khôra’, could be seen as permeated by the hegemony of any other moment, as the sign or symbol of any other. All of this, of course, in addition to the usual holistic nominations.
These possibilities are simple, first stage, speculations. They should be fairly obvious and intuitive, if all faculties are brought to the task. There are many understandings or possibilities beyond these first stage extrapolations of convention, but they require something more than than the channelled preoccupations of contemporary commitment.
Regarding the ‘quantum image’, a first step would be to consider the concepts and assumptions drawn together in its construction, and to radically consider those concepts and assumptions from all possible perspectives. This conceptual analysis lays out the background of discursive and philosophical assumptions in which the so-called, ‘quantum image’, is able to function. One then merely has to ask what the logic(s) of this ‘quantum image’ says (say).
“Distinguishing and defining the universe and world in a way that philosophy fails to achieve”, is an assertion contingent on methodological claims of constructive definition, as well as universal and worldly assumption. The attribution of success and failure implicitly brings in selectivity of outlook. The notion of achievement indicates the possibility of accomplishing such a selective outlook.
All of these operations presuppose some kind of systematic theorisation and necessity sufficient to produce the nebulous accomplishments of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. There seems to be a kind of vague and everyday existentialism involved? A nostalgia wishing to foreground the presences of its ‘reality’, as absolute and immediate possibilities available for its economy of libidinal desire?
The closest analogy to such a vaguely expressed position or assumption, would perhaps be an outlook of consumer dominion, based on an ideology of its own freedom from any other form of necessity. The system of consumerist immediacy becomes the only and absolute form of reality. Is this the only dominion that matters to Laruelle and his followers? A dominion of everyday freedom, in which all considerations of wisdom can be seen as failures?
If this is the absolute metaphysics of catering and consumption; of axiomatic appetite and its order; then it is no surprise that Laruelle would seek radical incommensurability from any philosophical gesture that might question that order. Just as Donald Trump has deleted climate change data, Laruelle seeks to delete the powers of philosophy, or perhaps copy-paste them into a bazaar of cognitive baubles and consumer cognitions, a market stall of mimetic ‘wisdoms’?
It is no wonder, then, that the distinguishing and defining ‘chora’ actually symbolises the always imagined, cornucopian overflowing of the ‘agora’.
ADMINISTRATION OF EPIPHANY
The notion of an “ocean of dissemblance” would be contingent on two concepts, the oceanic, implicitly a principle of unity; and the principle of similarity/dissimilarity implicit in dissemblance.
So at the root of the notion is the play of ‘likeness’.
The play of likeness necessarily presumes at least two entities bearing the relation of likeness with respect to each other.
The metaphysical status and characterisation of these entities and relations would obviously seem to suggest subsequent scenarios of supervening operations regarding those entities and relations. That is to say, if metaphysical characterisation has to do with; the contextual production of those entities and relations; or an economics of which those entities and relations are contingencies; then it’s quite naturally the case that such metaphysical characterisation works as a principle of unity whose metaphoric expression is the oceanic, but not any less a formal principle because of such metaphoricity.
So Deleuze’s notion, whatever privileging of apparent disjunction, difference, or as he says, “dissemblance”, might be ascribed to it; the very notion itself implicitly utilises the principle of unity to achieve its formalist effects. If an opposite privileging were offered, a similar implicit utilisation, mutatis mutandis, would result.
Within the networks of these formal possibilities it is possible to derive or construct pretty much anything in the way of conceptual innovation or philosophies of-; this is merely conceptual combinatorics, though it can nevertheless exercise profound effects depending on the natures of the commitments involved.
It is understandable that there are existential and referential anxieties bound up with these networks of formal possibility, which are not merely ‘formal’, but intimately complicit and unified with those anxieties and their bases.
The production of an identity is the production of a concept, the conceptual seed of a discursive logic. The production of a concept, of that conceptual seed of discursive logic, is susceptible to elaborations of configurative force, the configurations of that concept. The resulting discursive formations are merely the systematic elaborations of such configuration. Discursive formations are not merely that which is commonly thought of through the rubric of the linguistic.
The notion of non-identity is equally the production of identity and the concept. Identity still functions as a configuring force.
People like Deleuze and Laruelle are still working within economies of referential relation, existential anxiety, and expediency, their concepts revolve around these supervening formations.
Whether or not this is philosophy in a wider sense, or practical philosophy, or ‘non-‘ philosophy; such category anxieties probably bespeak uncritical dogmas of initial assumption, too much, those anxieties continuing to configure repetitions of such assumption without developing the insights that might be expected from a more progressive understanding. Battling a history of bad receptions and interpretations belonging to particular groups, whilst ignoring a history of past insights belonging to others, or perhaps even those same groups, probably reflects the marketing procedures of intellectual commodity rather than any other notion of progress.
Whether this leads to a kind of social proletarianisation, or proletarian socialisation, of insight and wisdom; as a kind of reactive and recollective backward step; and whether this was what Deleuze and Laruelle were and are trying to do; is an open question. Even if that were the case, it is highly doubtful that such a particularly contained set of cogitations and understandings, so bound up with analyses of shifting structures and tendencies of alleged error, could lead to anything other than redistribution of such alleged errors, without more radical understandings.
Though the overarching resolutions of epiphanic understanding, whether in philosophical or religious forms, are personal, and not necessarily effective as programmes of social administration, it is persons that constitute the social, and if their understandings enable more effective and happier forms of administration, those epiphanies should not be ignored.
ECONOMICS OF EXCREMENTAL ESTRANGEMENT
Excrement as a recording medium, of neurophysiological memory, the excremental encoding of the human, is excrementalised into the ocean; the ocean is a hydrological memory unit; excremental encoding is released into hydrological encoding (the memory of water); marine life has many functions, including those of hydrological memory unit operation;
A conspiracy reading, involving the concept of the ‘alien’, a particular form of hypostatic estrangement; this formation of the alien, intercedes at various points; the stereotypical intercessions, from the perspective of anthropomorphic sociology, are, one; unofficial interventions from the wilderness, i.e., the unknown, introduction of the anomalous within the epistemological fabric of the known; this usually involves scenarios where the general public in some way or another encounter forms of hypostatic estrangement; two; interventions of official complicity, i.e., the unknown in alliance with one or another official institution or institutions; an institution is a form of abstraction, anyway, but allegedly deriving from anthropic origination; so, an anthropic estrangement (Kafka), susceptible to affiliation with non-anthropic forms of hypostatic estrangement, or at least this is the feeling or experience of alienated, anthropic consciousness, lost in the ocean of modernity.
The stage is set, anthropic excrement as information capital, its subatomic vectorial spaces encoding the totality of human information, and exploited by hitherto unspecified aliens, through the storage mediations of oceanic, hydrological memory units. These were always a subsidiary formation of the so-called, ‘akashic records’, another hidden branch of them, located most effectively within the very medium anthropic consciousness had a tendency to reject.
The regime of Hyper-Selfishness, otherwise known as the USA, reacts to these revelations with characteristic hysteria; governments and various institutions are all accused of being in league with alien forms of hypostatic estrangement, and their collection-conspiracies of anthropic, excremental information!
New forms of legislation are brought in, according to these populist fears; excrement is no longer to be dumped outside of the spheres of individual control; vast towers of excrement arise everywhere, each US citizen, a shit shadow, ‘taller than their souls’.
New forms of social competition arise; the characteristically erroneous belief that the higher the excremental erection, the greater the level of excremental enlightenment! These heights of quantification reach ever further into the sky! All gastronomic industries receive astronomic, economic boosts! Government subsidies are piled on, just to make sure! Elaborate air freshening systems are constructed, corollary industries are created, all of which boost various markets and their profits, even further! Everyone is happy!
The relieved aliens, bored shitless by centuries of anthropic information, can at last go home, their ecological task accomplished. For it was their excrement, their waste, that came first; producing the anthropic. The anthropic, as a process of bacterial decomposition, was running out of control; producing further quantities of excrement, purely as a pretext for further decomposition. The aliens realised that their waste had produced a viral, anthropic economy, threatening to consume all in its path. Splicing the ends of that economy together, in a suture of self-sufficiency, was the ecological task they were obligated to perform.
The USA had now become entirely covered by two sorts of towers; the anthropic, itself, and its excremental ambitions; but it was difficult to discern of such a twin economy, which was the excrement, and which was the parasite? However, driven by its now sutured ambition, foundational stability became an issue, and the differentiation supporting the earlier ambiguity of attribution, began to collapse, as the anthropic and excremental ambition began to combine.
Whether or not such a collapse led to anything approaching some kind of nativist enlightenment of the anthropic, was not really a question that the exhausted aliens any longer had any interest in learning.
TACKY TROPES OF SENSATIONALIST VELOCITY: NICK LAND, THE ACCELERATIONIST ACADEMY OF SNAIL CONVENTIONS AND FORMULA ONE TORTOISE RACES
Nick Land doesn’t really understand anything about speed, or about the science-fiction way of looking at things. I’ve actually told him this, at least with regard to science-fiction, on his blog a few years ago. He didn’t contest the assertion. Whatever nonsense he did back in the 1990s, was already passé, two decades before. I knew that, even before starting to write in philosophical contexts.
Alvin Toffler introduced the notion of future shock at the outset of the 1970s. Bruce Sterling, the Texan science-fiction writer, radicalised that concept, giving it a considerable ‘acceleration’, whilst doing so, far beyond, incidentally, what Land and his regressive cadre were attempting to rehash, a decade after.
In the early 1990s, the original and innovative thinkers of speed, were obviously people like Paul Virilio, and Sol Yurick, who dealt with the topic, as a matter of course, quickly and without tendentious fetishisation, on his way to more interesting insights.
The primary issue or problem, is the wrong kind of regression, the mainstream commodifications of adventurous thinking that lead to simplistic and formulaic banality of the worst kinds, where liberatory insight is merely converted into callous, socialised convention; what I have often called ‘holding patterns’, in the new century.
There’s no doubt that my cultural references and assumptions are not those of the general, mainstream academia and culture, now occurring. From the perspective of those references and assumptions, that mainstream culture, almost all of it, is a backward, reactionary, and somewhat dystopically aberrant formation. I understand why, all of the considerably complex structural explanations for that formation, but it’s one that cannot be catered for, any more than has been the case. It’s a pernicious development, ‘against the grain’ of which, it’s important to go, at least somewhat. ‘Against the grain’ is a phrasal theme I produced in the last century, for precisely the pernicious eventuality I describe here.
It’s not anyone’s responsibility to lock themselves in the game of pandering explanations, in the service of deliberately recalcitrant understandings, content to rest on their backward substantialisms. Such tendencies of pernicious recalcitrance merely persist in disingenuous ignorance, choosing only to reinvent their characteristic forms of malice in whatever crevices of the new conditions they are able to perceive. If malicious consumption is the dominant sign of the times, whatever other banners it might wave and surround itself with, then it is precisely that hegemonic signification and all its expressions, that become an object susceptible to precisely the full range of transactions and operations which its insular hypocrisies have always attempted to deny.
The objectification of the victim, no matter how indirect and clothed in hypocrisy, is the objectification of the victimiser, as well. The victim has nature on its side in the form of desire for liberation, it doesn’t need the victimiser; whereas the victimiser has only the nature and need of domination, for which it requires a victim. The more intrigues and masks it throws into the abyss in pursuit of such a requirement, the more the abyss can see the victimiser’s each and every tiresome susceptibility.
Sheltering in malicious projections of its own invention, hiding in exhausted claims of undemonstrated exception, the victimiser always seeks to justify its chosen economies of victimisation. With spurious games of superficiality, the victimiser habitually evades the question of its chosen exploitations, for which it takes no responsibility, offering only to the abyss the most delicate tapestry of both its culpability and vulnerability. The question, then, is what does the abyss do with this unwanted opportunity?
ON ABSTRACTION
Transcendence and immanence are mutually complicit concepts.
Abstraction simply means withdrawn; ‘the withdrawn’ or ‘withdrawal’, might require concepts of ‘distance’, ‘distanciation’, and transition. Those concepts of distance and transition require a susceptibility to the hypostatic forms of ‘localisation’, ‘locale’, or ‘locality.
Localisation, is susceptible to the production of concepts whose said-i-mentations form metaphysical conventions. Metaphysical conventions, are susceptible to the production of dogmatic dwellings and habitats.
There are transitions of qualitative change, sometimes accessed through some kind of distanciation over the range of one substance, sometimes through instant transition between two substances.
THE NOTION OF A RANDOM OR STOCHASTIC EVENT
If probability laws govern the production of stochastic events, then can these events truly be called random? Because they do in fact occur within the bounds of expected possibility. The quality of ‘random’ undecidability is internally specific to the expected possibility range. So it arises as a function of the form of expectation. The randomness of probable events cannot be characterised entirely as anomaly.
The range of randomness is still determinate, a function of determinate expectation.
The philosophical issue or problem with Markov assumption, of determinate events without memories, would consist of several theoretical neglects. These neglects may not be considered significant, in terms of experimental or working criteria hinged on the practical production of useful physical processes, but it seems to me that the possibilities indicated by such neglects, could eventually take on increasing significance in future forms of scientific consideration.
The obvious neglect, is the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement, and whatever future significances that might hold.
The next neglect, is the possible risk of allowing premature assumptions of discontinuity, merely because tangible, physical influences, cannot be found. Then going on to a dogmatics of absolute, anomalous emergence. This is not to suggest determinate, ‘hidden variables’, or some such. It’s just a caution not to absolutise anomaly. Such an absolutism risks all the insularity of outlook characterising any other absolutism.
The reason that this is so, is contingent on foundational assumptions of universal delimitation. If absolute boundaries cannot in principle be drawn, attributions of quality can only be tentative and contingent. Given various forms of infinity, working approximations are accessible or available, but those have far more to do with forms of apprehension and experiment, with expectations, then with any absolute knowledge of a hypothetical universal object whose ultimate parameters cannot be found.
RINGING THE ESSENCES OF CHANGE
[Charlie Stephen] “Things that don’t change”
{AK}: Firstly, what determinate ‘thing’, doesn’t ‘change’?
What is this ‘change’?
Is it an apparent, perhaps structural, set of variations over an invariance?
Does this alleged invariance arise through comparison?
If it does so arise, is this invariance not contingent on such comparison?
What is this ‘comparison’, how does it arise, what does it involve?
If this comparison is structured, in such a way, as to provision a discernment of structure, and, moreover, a structure that always takes a certain ‘form of apprehension’; seeks out particular patterns of sense and arrangement; imposes a certain grid of interest; then are not these suggested fulcrums of invariant eternity merely the corresponding effects that arise along with such comparisons, apprehensions, and interests?
This is not to suggest any psychologising of the issues, psychology itself could equally be seen as being taken up within such comparative operations. Neither are idealist or materialist closures necessary, such hypotheses would merely be operations of interest.
The attribute of ‘change’, is a specific and comparative determination, it has to refer to something else in order to obtain. It has to be attached to something, to an identity assumption, in order to obtain. Thus, it is inherently a relational attribute, constructed out of assumptions of identity and structures of mutual self-reference.
If those comparative structures of mutually referring identities seem to trace formal patterns of relational process, suggesting idealisations inhabiting the temporal, yet producing the mirage of non-temporal effects, this is merely due to the equally constructed nature of temporal idealisation, itself contingent on assumptions of the ‘momentary punctum’, as commonly assumed foundation.
The ‘non-temporal’ arises with respect to a particular scenario of temporal assumption. Commonsense ideas tend to subject that scenario to all kinds of substantialist, mystifying inflations, throwing about that temporal assumption with a ferocious generosity of coverage that bespeaks perhaps some fundamental anxiety. But these mystifications, originating out of the narcissistic busyness-business of so many sordid and petty self-interests, arise only out of that inflationary scenario, clinging onto it with all the fervour that petty insularity can muster.
But at each and every point of this scenario, permeating it thoroughly and without remainder, is the ‘non-temporal’, the mere logical corollary, to that assumption of busy insularity, but it’s a corollary whose specificity most have habituated themselves not to see.
I’m not going to go into this here, but if identity assumption is going to be indulged, the notion of scale and scaling is important, as a theoretical agility lending itself to a fresh scenario of insights. That’s a hint of just one possible direction, there are lots of others.
Because of the contingencies of specific determination involved in attributions of change, those attributions are therefore contingent. Likewise, because of the logical structures of mutual self-reference involved in suggestions of the ‘non-temporal’, those suggestions are contingent, not only on those logical structures, but on the initial, identity assumptions, with which they, all, mutually arise.
Given the possibility of increased specificity as regards factors of identity assumption, temporality and non-temporality; attributions of the ‘essential’ and of ‘change’; it is perfectly possible to construct scenarios of processual ‘change’, as it were, whilst locating them entirely outside of specific conventions of temporality, outside of certain, specific chronologies, and ‘their’ scenarios of temporal assumption. If those conventional scenarios attempt to recoup such unconventional scenarios of processual ‘change’, under some vague and mystifying assumption of pan-temporality – merely the corollary reflection of its own inflationary insularity – then this ambition of an imperialising chronology attempting to substantialise itself, it’s dogmas and its outlooks, can only ineluctably lead to its own, quite specific, undoing.
ALL-TRITE EXPLOITATION RACING FOR HYPOCRISY COVER ON THE HYPERVISIBILITY HIGHWAY
The All-Trite fondness for the “strangling sphere of 19th-century ideas”, as you put it, as well as preventing others from breathing, is merely the nostalgia for a chapter of explicitly imperial power that they wish to reassert, whose hidden habits and practices never went away, merely transforming and dispersing its mechanisms of exploitative collection and delivery, beyond the range of both implicit and explicit strategies of All-Trite groups. They can no longer recover former advantages, in the same ways, the detours have gotten too complex for them. The powers of hidden and hypocritical networking are suffering erosion, through hypervisibility of communication networks.
This leaves only the desire to exit from the exposures of habitual hypocrisy by hypervisibility; the desire to destroy institutions and nations promoting hypervisibility; the desire to escape into new fantasy kingdoms, into virtualised safe havens of encryption and networked exploitation.
Contemporary cultural and political events are merely following the agenda of such a nostalgic desire, as the coercive rereading of that chapter of explicitly imperial power, whose configuration and understandings that nostalgic desire is simply trying to repeat, in new conditions.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“A place is made, in that essay, by all rights, for such a positive inquiry into the current upheavals in the forms of communication, the new structures emerging in all the formal practices, and also in the domains of the archive and the treatment of information, that massively and systematically reduce the role of speech, of phonetic writing, and of the book. But one would be mistaken in coming to the conclusion of a death of the book and a birth of writing from that which is entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” One page before the chapter which bears this title a distinction is proposed between closure and end. What is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely. If one does not simply read the title, it announces precisely that there is no end of the book and no beginning of writing. The chapter shows just that: writing does not begin. It is even on the basis of writing, if it can be put this way,
that one can put into question the search for an archie, an absolute beginning, an origin. Writing can no more begin, therefore, than the book can end”
[From, “Positions”, Jacques Derrida ]
PICTURING ASYMPTOTIC APPROXIMATIONS OF INSTRUMENTAL IDENTITY
I remember back in the last century, watching a programme, and there was a very brief reference to the Druze, stating that they read all the spiritual and religious works of the world, proceeding from this background according to some kind of spiritual synthesis characteristic of them.
I liked them a lot, on the basis of what I saw.
This century, when they came up, probably through a Facebook link to an article, I discovered that they originated from India, and from Vedanta, which I thought was interesting.
If God is an attempt to approximate explanatory conceptualisations, as Stephen says, is that relation reciprocal, are explanatory conceptualisations attempts to approximate God? If that’s the case, then conceptuality and the divine are caught up in a structures of mutual approximation, proceeding according to asymptotic shifts towards identity coincidence.
Ultimately, the theoretical scenario involved, is a Platonist delimitation, according to the figure of the idea.
One can rise up beyond the play of asymptotic shiftings and mutual approximations, seeing that all of these occur according to ‘frames of reference’. The entire realm of metric determinations arises through duality, dualisation (dual eyes), the theoretical assumption of a changeless point of determination from which to produce cultures of measurement, of the other elements and tendencies of change, distinguishable from the changeless point, according to the opposition of change/non-change.
However, the selection of framing is arbitrary, anything can fulfil the function of ‘changeless point’; likewise, anything can fulfil the roles of elements and tendencies of change. The production of all of these occurs through application of available epistemological possibilities, and is contingent upon those.
The epistemology occurs through initial acceptance or assumption of instrumental duality. Due to the preponderance of instrumentality and its habits, other theoretical possibilities become obscure, due to lack of the necessary practices and developments constituting the shared basis of clear communication.