THE HIGHWAYS OF HUMAN REPRODUCTION
In response to this question –
“Do you think trans women are real women?”
From here – Two strangers, five minutes, eye to eye.
BBC Three 23 June at 17:02 ·
https://www.facebook.com/bbcthree/videos/10155896044135787/
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The question cannot be answered unless criteria for the category ‘real woman’ are stipulated?
As biology becomes increasingly susceptible to technological decision, the emergent birthing or even conceiving scenario of necessary parental decision with regard to offspring gender, arises. This creates the possibility of future discrepancy between that decision and subsequent offspring developments, and their decisions. Both are based on design decisions in which the contribution of nature, natural givenness or contribution, is increasingly displaced and problematised, on every vector of its traditional consideration, by technological decision.
When the forms of natural constraint are thus dispersed or dissolved, the cultural necessities and traditions based on those constraints disperse and dissolve along with them, giving rise to new cultural scenarios based on new sets of constraints, whatever those might be and however they might be produced.
If the scenario of such productions arises through social interaction and determination, it will be subject to the full spectrum of sociopolitical aesthetics prevailing at that time of production. That sociopolitical aesthetic, necessarily the ongoing developmental form or forms arising from the current and preceding ones, is subject to the resources and distribution necessities of the technological culture to which it belongs.
Increasingly, as this culture displaces that which it has categorised as ‘nature’ or the ‘natural’, it will be compelled to confront its own ‘nature’, previously considered as ‘artificiality’, in an aporia of questionable designs whose production it can no longer definitively determine, as the notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ are mobilised from their traditional sites-sights, onto highways of techno-economic distribution and techno-aesthetic, sociopolitical design.
Undoubtedly, on discovery of the weaponisation potential residing within possibilities of so-called ‘gender fluidity’, various state and corporate actors will engage and invest heavily in this area, converting it into militarised fluency of those possibilities. This is always the hypocritical mode of instrumentalisation by which traditional greed, the greed of traditions, transforms into that to which it might otherwise seem ostensibly opposed.
THE GRAND INVOLUTION
The dangerous combination of US internal disarray and its prodigious legacy powers, makes for an unstable, international actor, on the global scene. Putin is far more intelligent and focused, his objectives are plain. I think there may well be other actors on the scene, not straightforwardly nationally representative, but facilitators of all types working the new, or perhaps not really so new, regions of power politics that have opened up. It’s an international business that can be accessed from anywhere.
Traditional forms of governance, are thus no longer reliable sites of closure from which responsibility can be produced. This is not a revolution, it is a Grand Involution, and it has already begun.
THE ‘TIMELESS’ PRESENCE OF LIGHT
The notion of a ‘present moment’ (nunc stans) requires a structure of presentation, at the very least, a minimal condition of reception.
In order for it to be a logically meaningful concept, negation is required, momentariness not present.
So, the concept has an implicit complexity, automatically calling on notions of ‘past’ and ‘future’, in its very articulation.
The notion of the present is thus an anticipatory conceptualisation directed towards the assumption of an event. An event is a distinct, or distinguishable, temporal object, or objectification, the multiplication of which suggest the sequences constitutive of temporality. Whether as ‘internal psychic states’ or ‘external transitions between events’, ‘temporality’ is supervenient on both of these factors.
Imagine a universe, in which nothing at all happens. Would it be at all reasonable to speak of temporality with regard to such a universe? Temporality, or at least temporal conventions as commonly understood, simply would not obtain in such a universe.
Therefore, temporality or time is intrinsically tied up with objectification, with the determinate objects known as ‘events’. Events, or eventuality, more generally, are/is bound up with general and localised determinations of process.
The notion of the ‘eternal now’, is a standpoint ‘apprehending’ eventuality, ‘as a whole’, but without any form of localised grasp. Therefore, such an infinite apprehension cannot be so easily communicated in the language of localised processes and their semantic conventions.
This is not merely a theoretical supposition.
At the speed of light, there is no time. So, for a bunch of photons whose journey begins with the hypothesised onset of the so-called universe, nothing at all has happened. Light is alleged to be a ‘physical’ property, but that property arises from its interactions with other processes and events, a subset of considerations of which constitute the concepts of physics. But those very concepts indicate a quite specific ‘timelessness’, that can be ‘seen’.
SEE(ING THROUGH) SHELLS OF REPRESENTATION
Back in the 1980s, I wrote that, “we all live in Aristotle’s mind”, which is to say that his grid of classifications and categories form the default template of the entire Occidental culture, and all the subcultures arraigned under its rubric.
The Indian philosophical tradition has all of the Greek within it, but quite a lot more, as well. If that tradition was never truly engaged with, by the Occident, kept at varying degrees of exoticising distance, it nevertheless directly captured both ancient Greece, with scepticism; Europe, with the number system; and the modern logic of Anglo-American modernity, with Navya Nyaya logic.
Scepticism, mathematics, and modern logic, all directly derive from an Indian source.
Given that derivation, it can equally be said, that “we all live in an Indian source”.
Exclusively monolinear rationalisations of substantial assumption have a tendency to habitually exploit schemas, configurations, and associations of element distribution, whatever the base elements are held to be in the field of consideration, that only derive from simply assumed ranges of positivist use or utility. In other words, the loci of interest are always, whether overtly or secretly, utilitarian; derived from utilitarian imagery, from pictures of conventional anthropic practice. This has the effect, in those who follow such rationalisations, of always restraining theoretical mobility to this subliminal metaphoric of habitually monolinear utility.
This is not just language as incessant representation.
The notion of representation is easily susceptible to semantic expansions, to the extent that any sign, signifying in any way, whatsoever, can be said to be ‘representational’; in that it re-presents, at least, the signifying operation of its identity as sign; and the function of its signified, whatever its operand, so to speak, whether a traditional, worldly referent is involved or not. Similarly, for the referential function, irrespective of whether or not actual references are involved.
Of course, the notion of presentation ‘itself’, in advance of any assumed repetition of ‘it’, as an ‘identity’, would be sufficient to bring representation into question, ‘showing’ its conventionality.
There’s nothing at all necessarily wrong with representation or reference. The practices and notions of representation and reference, in and of themselves, are not the problem. But they are a problem, there is a necessity of wrongness, when they’re done badly.
Some of the characteristics of exclusively substantial representation; of blocked, substantive rationalisations whose exclusive raison d’etre is always some mystical mishmash of utility; are its failures to achieve multidimensional clarity, due to the hasty impatience of a monomaniacal mindset limited only to the dogmatic modality of positivist pursuits. This leads to the hysteria of positivist limitation and production, whose time compressions and addictive need for the ecstasies of immediate resolution, displace genuine concern for the complexities of theoretically wide-ranging, verbal mediation; leading to a stylistics of telegraphic reduction of expression, attempting to compensate for its theoretical impoverishment through incessant metonymic appealings towards scenarios of conventional intuition. This continues the movement of reduction under the guise of the most moderate of multidimensional considerations. Merely switching and shuttling constantly, between heavily conventionalised mediums, usually offering this revelation of banal transcendences as a compensation for complexities it is either too lazy or too stupid to engage. This, of course, constitutes the disingenuous appeal of a Wittgensteinian ‘show and tell’, or ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’. One in which positivist dishonesty desperately casts about in every conventional medium to which it has ignorant access, in order to put on a shell game, or a ‘shell show’, of compensations circling from convention to convention, in its hysterical festival of banal substitutions. These are the prevarications of the philosophical hawk or hawker, and it isn’t difficult to know which parts of the world, and which types of people, they primarily originate from. This professionalisation of ‘profitability’ consists entirely of competence in producing monolinear results in environments of multidimensional contingency, but wholly at the expense of those environments, and according to the structure of the ‘shell game ‘, where the pea of profit is secretly inserted, only under the conman’s profiteering cup.
So it’s not representation, per se, that in and of itself necessarily leads to the closures of dogmatic substantialism; but it is a certain practice of representation; a quite misplaced, because over generalised, and exclusively held, positivist economics of reduction. The very disciplinary fanaticism of frugality, as an idealisation stemming from deprivation anxiety, serves as hegemonic horizon for an always hallucinated positivist closure. This fixation ineluctably leads to a ‘semantics of stone’.
MORONS OF MESOPOTAMIA: the OCCIDENTAL POSITIVIST AND ONTOLOGICAL SUBSTANCE ADDICTS OF BEING (MORE ‘ONS’)
If India was ‘contaminated’ by ideologies of naturalised social iniquity, we know exactly where those ideologies originated from, the Occident. Occidental culture, began with sovereignty and authoritarianism, right at its root, in Mesopotamia.
The Indus Valley Civilisation, proto-India, was engaged in trade with Mesopotamia, and that, no doubt, was the vector for the infection of iniquitous, social relations, being the osmotic origin of subsequent developments such as the caste system, which was the mode of socialisation by which succeeding waves of Occidental settler-invaders, such as the Persians, Greeks, and so on, sub-colonially inserted themselves, often militarily, into Indus Valley-Indian culture, producing Vedic India.
Occidental incursions were attracted to Indus Valley-India, primarily because of its accumulations of material wealth. Occidental greed was the motivating factor for a continuing, 4000 year cycle, of Occidental depredations.
Does Karl Marx, the product of Occidental ideology, seriously have anything to say, to Indus Valley-India culture, concerning egalitarian ideas? Especially considering the following:
“Although some houses were larger than others, Indus Civilisation cities were remarkable for their apparent, if relative, egalitarianism. All the houses had access to water and drainage facilities. This gives the impression of a society with relatively low wealth concentration, though clear social levelling is seen in personal adornments.[clarification needed]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation?oldformat=true#Authority_and_governance
“Authority and governance
Archaeological records provide no immediate answers for a centre of power or for depictions of people in power in Harappan society. But, there are indications of complex decisions being taken and implemented. For instance, the majority of the cities were constructed in a highly uniform and well-planned grid pattern, suggesting they were planned by a central authority; extraordinary uniformity of Harappan artefacts as evident in pottery, seals, weights and bricks; presence of public facilities and monumental architecture; heterogeneity in the mortuary symbolism and in grave goods (items included in burials).[citation needed]
These are the major theories:[citation needed]
There was a single state, given the similarity in artefacts, the evidence for planned settlements, the standardised ratio of brick size, and the establishment of settlements near sources of raw material.
There was no single ruler but several cities like Mohenjo-daro had a separate ruler, Harappa another, and so forth.
Harappan society had no rulers, and everybody enjoyed equal status and hence some type of Democracy.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation?oldformat=true#Authority_and_governance
Without Indian influences on Greek philosophy, and on European modernity, there would have been no Karl Marx. There’s a phrase about “selling sand in the Sahara”, that’s quite apt for Marx’s naive disquisitions on social equality regarding India. Marx, like so many other Western thinkers, was condemned to always recapitulate the background of default, Occidental banditry, as patronising projections of ridiculously ignorant, Occidental ideology.
THE LITHOMANCY OF OCCIDENTAL ANXIETY
Has anyone written on contemporary dialogical conditions, any better than Adorno!? They’ve had decades to be able to do so.
The picture (Lee Ufan, Relatum – Discussion, 2003), is a great visual resonance, very apt.
It’s bringing to mind some of the themes I was working on, back in the early 1990s, one of which I’ve surreptitiously, ‘tactically’ even, continued on my blog.
The notion of calculation, of calculi or calculus; literally, pebbles; was one of the themes I explored back in the early 1990s, in various contexts. It links directly to the l.c.d. (‘Lowest Common Denominator’/ ‘liquid-crystal display’) theme, developed back then or earlier, but which I’ve used this century on my blog, though somewhat allusively, somewhat lucidly. The ‘allusive’ element arises due to the earlier, originating context, informing contemporary expressions conditioned by that origination, but not specifying or explicating it.
Similarly, with the concept of the ‘monument’, the monumental and the ‘micro-monumental’. The ‘micro-monumental’, of course, links up with the l.c.d. theme.
It’s interesting to note that writing on tablets of stone, or clay (baked stone?), characterises more strongly the cultural developments of the Occident, Mesopotamia and perhaps ancient Egypt. The Indus Valley did produce the ‘seal’, but it would be an easy speculation to suggest that as this artefact of endurance was used in trade; and if the bulk of that trade was for export; then the Indus Valley seal represents a hybrid concession to Occidental metaphysical need.
If the Occident is governed by this metaphysical need, by a temporal anxiety assuaged with the lithic mediations of mnemonic and recollective technologies; does it become a servant of such ‘stoned’ deferral? Does this organic anxiety transition the entire Occident into being a merely necessary function and expression, of a dialectics of the lithic and monumental?
In an effort to answer this, the Occident puts its hands in the pockets of its fashionable attire (another system of deferral), digitally manipulating pebbles, from pocket to pocket, round and round like rosary beads, in calculations and determinations, without end.
These are the manipulations of monumentation, so caught up in its binary contests and theatrick plays of self-encryption, that all vitality is reduced to a ‘factor’, directed towards asymptotic calculation of an alleged ‘freedom’ never actually lived, but always displaced by those very computations. The endlessly deferred lava of life, bearing its crystalline burdens of micro-monumentation, through channels of, and on, the l.c.d. screen, always according to a semantics of stone.
STICKY SYNTHESIS AND SUBSTANTIAL DECEPTIONS
If there is no truth, what is a lie?
Just supposing, ‘appearance’, and only ‘appearance’, was ‘truth’? This would necessarily relegate ‘non-appearance’ to falsity. In practice, though, how is ‘appearance’ to be distinguished from ‘non-appearance’? Because, the attribution of ‘appearance’, in practice, is variable, contingent on the perspective from which its determination is made. What is apparent or not, very much depends on perspective, whether of perceptual apprehensions or of theoretical outlooks. Furthermore, ‘perspectives’ are themselves constructed and contingent on particular assumptions, both in terms of actual ‘perspectives’, and the very idea of ‘perspective’.
If the appearance of Being is a sticky and synthetic holding of deceptions, as you propose, what holds those deceptions together, as ‘deceptions’, if not the ‘truth’? Where is the truth determining those deceptions as deceptions? Because, if there is no ‘truth’, as you suggest, neither can there be any ‘deception’ or ‘lie’.
Likewise, if “there is not anything”, this would be a positivist proposal stating a definitive lack of objective integrity; ultimately, of the lack of self-identity with regard to ‘things’. But then, is the proposed ‘definitive lack’ identical with itself? If it is, is it then, a ‘thing’, this not–a–thing, or ‘no thing’? But if its self-identity, as ‘definitive lack’, derives from a network of things that it has demonstrated as void of self-identity; then does not this derivation, and thus self-identity as ‘definitive lack’, disappear along with the voidness of the entity network, ‘it’ has demonstrated as void? Yes, it does.
The ‘void’ voids itself, revealing the workings of identification and definition, at every stage.
One should recall, that the Buddha said: “He who attaches to the void, is truly lost.”
The obvious interpretation, is as the admonition against nihilism, against fixating on the void, or on an image of the void. But it is tempting to take the subsequent clause, “is truly lost”; not just as Buddha’s declaration that the nihilist is dogmatically fixating the transitional result of a systematics of open contingency, according to essentially the same substantial assumption, merely using the opposite hypostatic polarity of that assumption; but to point out that both the nihilist and substantialist, so long as they unthinkingly follow the procedural assumptions and expectations of their respective identity (or non-identity) commitments, are condemned to forever wander the dialectics of such commitments, lost in the ‘truth’ or ‘truths’ of, and only of, those commitments, but never to have any other, or wider, understanding of them, or their origins. This would apply as well to the very notion or conception of ‘truth’, as determined by conventional assumptions.
What, exactly, is a ‘thing’, ‘entity’, or ‘id-entity’?
To what degree, does it arise with respect to modalities of definition?
To what degree, is ‘its’ validity expected to conform to the criteria of objectivity; the assumed self-identity conditions of ‘it’ being identical with ‘itself’; given that it’s very arising occurs with respect to modalities of definition? What is ‘definition’, anyway, if not the coding of a ‘thing’ with other ‘things’?
These questions all suggest an economy of assumptions whose conventional circulation is usually self-referential. If each assumption or moment of that economy, is observed in its most radical or elementary form (using the concept of ‘the universe’ as a semantic testing ground, is perhaps a good way to do this, as this allows unobstructed engagement with the conceptual logics at play, without the neglects of exclusionary obligation characterising the formalisations of utilitarian purpose); deeper and more precise understandings can be produced than those associated with most utilitarian conventions. The machinery producing conventional understanding comes into relief. The degrees to which conventional understandings are based on, too often, inappropriate substantial assumptions, is made clear.
TWINKLING TRACKS OF THE DIVINE
The idea of the ‘generic’ is still too much of an anthropic nostalgia.
The notion of ‘world’, whether as ‘totality’, or ‘infinite multiplicity of totalities’, because this is what actually occurs through any delimitations asserting alleged ‘totalities’; is not so much a nostalgia, but rather the incessantly dramatic preoccupation or even obsession, constituting inordinate inflation, with parochial conceptions thereof. This inordinate inflation is perhaps more mundane, or ‘worldly’, than any alleged ‘transcendence’, or the ‘spirit of such’, in which or for which, it might claim to speak.
You’re very much engaged phenomenological-metaphysical tracing of the ‘messianic’ with regard to the sedimentary assumptions of mundane convention, parallel somewhat and bring into relief certain aspects of ‘vectors’, as you would put it, or ‘tendencies’, of my own involvements over the years, perhaps even since I was 11 years old.
The dialectical details are somewhat parallel, but I think for my own history of approaches, both in theorisation and vitality, they form a subsection of possibilities within probably a personalised realm that began from a perspective of science-fiction expansions, together with the suggestion of a theological seed.
The jumping from dialectical horizon to dialectical horizon, from one concept-world to another, perhaps as in a kind of cosmological Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (“the world shifts from tongue to tongue”), is the ‘natural’ result of growing up with ‘immediately universal’, intuitive consideration? Metaphysical possibility becomes lived process, the somatic tracing of speculation. All this proliferation, of course, though it might seem to occur with respect to a ‘positivist’ horizon, need not emphasise that horizon, nor its ‘negative’ image, both of which are merely the binary tracing of the assumption of ontological constitution, belonging to an, or the, unquestioned modality of ontological apprehension. That game of assertion and denial need not be overly emphasised by a contemplation exceeding its operations and closures. It’s obvious to me, from that perspective, that Hegel has already done considerable work in that respect for the Occidental tradition. In a way, Derrida, Deleuze, and Laruelle, can be considered to be merely working within that Hegelian problematic, emphasising against this or that image of Hegel, the very tendencies which he developed. For instance, the idea of the ‘generic’, is Hegel, through and through, as is ‘difference’.
Don’t get me wrong, I think all of these people have done work of value,
Your tracing of the messianic image follows this formula: “You get the picture. A few negativistic indications of the arcanum, a sort of indication by elimination, and also the revelation, by means of apparent contradiction, that the arcanum is the Reality behind all appearances.” (“ANALECTA ALOGICA: FRAGMENTS WITHOUT ORDER (1989ish, not sure, though)” http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=1352).
It’s actually the ‘dialectic of the messianic’; the imaging of necessary negations arising through rejections of habitual convention; the tracing of an image of openings. using the pointillism of rejected, closural dogmatics. In line with the ‘neti neti’.
One of the mechanisms, that of ‘superposition’, is merely an obvious corollary concept arising within the Hegelian ‘identity of opposites’.
The concept of “insufficiency” loses its constitutive support, if absolute conceptual culminations cannot be found elsewhere. If the absolute is merely ‘ideal’, then the attribution of ‘insufficiency’ is ideal, as well. Likewise, the notion of the ‘ideal’, ‘itself’ is susceptible to the same disappearance of inflationary or absolutising constitution, to the degree that that constitution supervenes on what it allegedly opposes.
One should add, that the logic of appearance and disappearance, are similarly susceptible, lol.
I like the word, “heartwave”, reminds me of M John Harrison’s “The Course of the Heart”.
There’s a lot more to say, I think your master’s thesis conclusion is very good, very well written, and very well thought! I’ve only read it once through, a quick scanning, but I’ll try to address it more, when I get time to do so.
HEIDEGGERIAN MONSTROSITY: FACTORS OF FRICTION
It’s been a cliche for a long time, for the Occident to talk about war being a driver of technology. To whatever extents, that might be true or false, and one could say that obviously in military contexts emphasising war, such a declaration can only be a self-fulfilling truism. Not because of some exclusive and essential link between war and techne, but merely because all things develop out of their own necessities, including war.
Given the emphasis of such cultural militarisation, together with all its celebratory paeans of contentious regimentation, why not philosophically thematise those factors of friction in fiction?
That’s something Heraclitus didn’t neglect.
HEIDEGGERIAN MONSTROSITY
Basically, there is a sense in which ‘Western metaphysics’ is technology or techne. Heidegger perhaps saw that in a certain kind of way, which explains some of the affinities and parallels with ‘Eastern thought’, that he himself began to broach (“Letter to a Japanese Friend”, etc). But he did add, that the West couldn’t simply ‘turn Japanese’; that there was a specifically Western destiny, and development.
I can see why he would think that, and there’s easily various levels on which he can be considered to be correct. But I do wonder, much more recently, whether his assumption is merely the arbitrary root of the movement of Western exceptionalism? Both the founding inauguration and identification enabling the geographic to produce such an allegedly distinct cultural emergence.
Because, it would be quite easy to look at it all in a different way; the West, as a mere movement of implementations, implementations of ideas belonging to Oriental origination, thus as stages of oriental continuity; or as Hegel might have put it, of the spirit of the East.
I could deconstruct all of that, of course, but to do it effectively and thoroughly, Western cultural- philosophical resources are insufficient.
Of course, Heidegger must’ve had subconscious premonitions of Indus Valley Civilisation precedence! He was able to intuit, but without any form of understanding, the emergence of my ‘General Conceptual Holography’, and its continuation of that precedence! Of that there can be no doubt!
His publication, of “Letter to a Japanese Friend”, was a tactic of confrontation through the deliberate deferral of slight, but significant, misdirection. This was Heidegger’s gesture of philosophical reconnaissance, attempting to establish Occidental opposition further east from the Indus Valley, both as a kind of lassooing strategy, and due to his lack of the necessary conceptual resources required to attack the contemporary philosophical formations originating from Indus Valley culture!
Of this simplistic ruse, despite the obligatory immersal in yogic distances, I was well aware! Not wishing to be caught up in contingency actions involving tiresome engagements with the turgid, ontological forces under Heidegger’s command, I withdrew whatever few battalions of ancillary attention had been devoted to, what was after all, merely a German farmer’s peculiar obsession, in order to continue with developments more profoundly significant than Bavarian ‘Being’! Without neglecting it all together, however, as such deep neglect would merely empower it into a monstrosity of festering facticity!