CULTURAL IMAGES IN CYBERNETIC WINDS AT THE END OF HISTORY
Feudal nobility versus trading merchants who work with the world.
This falls into the classic pattern of the master/slave dialectic of Kojeve and Marx.
The slave overthrows the master through worldly power; in conventional terms, business, colonialism, et cetera, produced cash to pay armies and finance military rebellions.
The nobility then made concessions, lessening taxes, and so on, which rerouted resources from Royal appointed mercantilisms to the eventually enlightenment and modernist organisations of bourgeois capitalism.
If those mercantilisms were organised according to feudal or royalist hierarchy, the eventually modernist organisations required a different organising principle, not based on such hierarchy.
If royalist hierarchy had its origins in ability to provision efficient protection and provisioning of kingdoms, the new, eventually modernist, organisations were then obligated to function as a likewise or preferably better provisioning force, but one whose principles of organisation were more palatable to those that it organised; all this, if it was to effectively supersede feudal organisation.
Universality was the instrument used to garner the widest support, enabling bigger armies to be paid, more influence to be bought. This partial power grab from the ruling nobility was predicated on an ecumenical appeal, one that was articulated and deployed using the concentration of sociopolitical, military, and monetary forces at the command of merchantry.
Casting a universal net was always the best way of achieving quantitative force (the masses). Qualitative force (forms of activity concentration as nodes of network control), always had to rely on networks of relative, quantitative assent; or at least, not generate destabilising, quantitative dissent. If the qualitative forces, of ruling polarities, could not secure such more or less consensual networks, influence, power, and perhaps revenues, were considerably diminished. To the extent, that any conflicts between ruling polarities risked susceptibility to the question of whether or not such quantitative networks had been secured. It was out of this theatre of conflicting forces that the ideology of democratic universalism quite naturally emerged, as the simplest protocol of personalisation required for network efficiency. From a wider perspective, in no way could it seriously be considered an innovation, instead it was just a replay of a prior spiritual movement. The movement of ideological homogenisation had already been set by Christianity, itself a replay of anticolonial trauma, a replay conveying both imperial and colonised elements, a narrative pattern of irresolution itself perhaps eminently suitable as a therapeutic configuration applicable to all the travails of Occidental expansion, one calculated to appeal to all affected parties?
If the romanisation of the West familiarised the Occident with the experience of centralised administration and law, albeit from a polytheistic, spiritual base; Christianisation was that law as a universal projection, from a monotheistic, spiritual base, albeit, in Tridentine form.
The more sophisticated a network becomes, the more crucial does every node of its operation likewise become. Building in redundancy is costly enough; too much, is exorbitant.
Looking at the Earth as a site of global production, the immediate and interim task would be to generate as many exploratory tendencies as is possible. This is the injunction of variety, having a sufficiently wide spectrum of possibilities already inhabited and tested by experience, as a repository of future responses to unknown challenges. Under the sign of this injunction, no development can be underestimated, no culture can be dismissed. It is not the case, that there is any final arbiter of judgement or justification, in these matters; that it might be a case of either local or global appeal, whether in the political or any other sense. All of these categories are merely part of an ongoing process, one which requires further exploration before absolute, categorical fenceposts are dogmatically installed. From an operational outlook, such limitations of thought are a luxury that the alleged ‘species’ cannot yet afford.
Giving inordinate emphasis to anthropic culture of status and vanity wars, as an alleged driver of technological progress, is getting to seem ridiculous in an era where that culture obstructs said progress as much as it might be said to produce it. The reflex actions of ‘profitability’ have long been in counterintuitive excess of its usual, positivist, and hackneyed, justifications. Partisan rationales of all types continue to be trotted around as likely candidates of mass allegiance, so many would-be stallions of secure expediency in some hypothetical ‘race’ whose actual course no one has ever found.
Ideologies of progress require directions, about which there is mutual consent; the lack of which, given the absence of unquestionable, universal values; therein; resides the nub of the issue at stake.
Is survival enough, if that survival is hamstrung by an ingrained, genetic masochism, or cultural programming, whose parameters of a symbolic economy of ‘sweat’, ‘ground’, and ‘dust’, eventuate in the wrong kind of work ethic, one which actually obstructs free play, invention, and healthy innovation? If Baudrillard is right, that ‘work’, or ‘labour’, given its increasing dispensability to contemporary production scenarios, is actually a privilege that the worker could or should pay for, what fate for that Protestant work ethic, once so valued for its link to prosperity?
If qualitative force was once valorised for its ability to fend off competitors in the race of increasing provision for both itself and the quantitative masses, what value does it have when it can no longer do this, or when it elects to engage in partisan provision, in exclusive, non-universal ways? Is this backtracking from universal ambitions, exploitations, and responsibilities, a failure? Was the whole thing only ever a ‘Ponzi scheme’; a scam; a vast, historical heist? ‘Modernity’, merely a network aftereffect of the concentrated techno-compartmentalisations of such greed? One in which as much was lost, as gained? These questions accompany any and all historical change, and have no single answer; perspectives of evaluation multiply to the extent of producing potentially incommensurable narratives.
This is an age, perhaps like any other age, where nostalgias of all types make strong claims. But the danger of producing such nostalgias in ‘surround-sound’; in high-definition holography; and in the thematic repetitions of a gaming culture leaking its contrived ludicity beyond the borders of its productions into the wider, so-called ‘world’; all these developments are relatively new, the seeming reconfiguration of a historical womb or matrix, into which a culture that has perhaps lost its hubris seems to be retreating, perhaps unable to face the challenges it once so confidently faced.
Or it could simply be that the epistemological overflow resulting from what has been called ‘information overload’, exceeds traditional anthropic configurations, and modes of application, of knowledge? That a new episteme is necessary in order to effectively manage the unruly proliferation of data silos? This is not a new problem, neither is it entirely unanticipated:
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“Carmody essayed a feeble joke. is this any way to run a galaxy?’ he asked.
Well, how did you, expect us to run it? We’re only sentient, you know.’
‘I know,’ Carmody said. But I had expected that here, at Galactic Centre -‘
‘You provincials are all alike,’ the Clerk said wearily. Filled with impossible dreams
of order and perfection, which are mere idealized projections of your own incompletion. You should know by now that life is a sloppy affair, that power tends to break things up rather than put things together, and that the greater the intelligence, the higher the degree of complication which it detects. You may have heard Holgee’s Theorem; that Order is merely a primitive and arbitrary relational grouping of objects in the chaos of the universe, and that, if a being’s intelligence and power approached maximum, his coefficient of control (considered as the product of intelligence and power, and expressed by the symbol ing) would approach minimum – due to the disastrous geometric progression of objects to be comprehended and controlled outstripping the arithmetic progression of Grasp.'”
Robert Sheckley, “Dimension Of Miracles” (1968)
In addition:
“These were the innocent days before the problem became acute. Later, Index runs were collected in Files, and Files in Catalogs – so that, for example, C3F5I4 meant that you wanted an Index to Indexes to Indexes to Indexes which was to be found in a certain File of Files of Files of Files of Files, which in turn was contained in a Catalog of Catalogs of Catalogs. Of course, actual numbers were much greater. This structure grew exponentially. The process of education consisted solely in learning how to tap the Rx for knowledge when needed. The position was well put indeed in a famous speech by Jzbl to the graduates of the Central Saturnian University, when he said that it was a source of great pride to him that although hardly anybody knew anything any longer, everybody knew how to find out everything.”
(Draper, Hal. “Ms fnd in a lbry.” Fantasy and science fiction, Dec (1961).)
My own, “The Administrations of The Infinite” (http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=686), further explores the predicament:
“However, because of the decontextualised nature of ‘cyberspace’, the degree of abstraction from the flow of ‘background life cues’, as it were, is greater. The increased abstraction enables a space wherein all possible ‘objectifications’ render as pure possibilities. Such a space, being conducive to ‘pure’ intellectual consideration, enhances the range of considerable possibilities to infinity: the task of navigating the infinite is endless, without final objectification. It is essentially the task of a writer. One is being asked to author one’s own life as an object in a general ontological system. “
“As the so called ‘world’, ‘itself’, dissolves into its ‘own’ possibilities, as one ontological habitat or another, pronounces its wary, self-interested, structural verdict, at every step of an abyyssal dissolution it tries to objectify as ‘elsewhere’, but which its very actions essentially constitute, the lecturer’s predicament is truly that of everyone and every ‘objective’.”
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The usual responses to information proliferation are various ideologies of necessity, and then ideologies of selective use and preference, in short, the specific and subjective question: “What do you want?”
Given that the notion of the subject is equally applicable, potentially, to any form of decision-making agency; whether a conventional ‘organic individual’, a ‘peoples’ (under whatever ‘collective’ rubric), a polity, corporation, or some other form of institution, to say nothing of possible ‘artificial intelligences’; the stage is effectively set for each and every one of those differentiated ‘subjects’ to engage in declarative interchange, according to network protocols they themselves propose.
Looking beyond the insularities of vision and perspective, the partisanship of purposes, all the ironies of global variety being compressed into electronic simultaneity. The resulting intermittent conditions of anthropic experience, oscillating between the parochiality of the local and the technological synthesis of the global, produces an abyss of possibilities no longer bound by the usual anthropic conventions of history.
The gates have been opened, for all insularities to disappear into each other and themselves, and perhaps even for insularity itself to disappear, leaving only a vast, global anxiety; one which no wishful plane of insularity can flatten; one which stretches in all directions; a multidimensional, epistemological environment surrounding each and every insularity attempting unilinear imperialism, in which every conquest or acquisition, is simultaneously a deprivation.
This is a new scenario, a world, if ‘world’ it be, where those who wish to lose themselves, find themselves; and those who wish to find themselves, lose themselves. A world where Socrates’s injunction to “Know Thyself!”, displaces every wishful and insular self-image, to reveal a fractal and fluctuating, processual core, stretching into the unknown. From this perspective, the earlier mentioned development of ‘surround-sound’, nostalgia-cocoons, is perhaps no surprise. The price paid by any insular ignorance with global ambitions, but unable to meet its global responsibilities. When imperial desire is not matched by imperial knowledge; when exploitation is the only epistemological relation; the ongoing production of horror, for which one’s own imperial allegiances are responsible; is quite naturally a scenario that the insular wish to block out and hide.
IDENTITY GAMING ON THE INTERNET: NEURO-BUBBLES PLAYING WITH MARKERS OF FLESHLY FORM, OR PERHAPS IT’S THE OPPOSITE?
Victor Tangermann’s article, “Actually, Social Media Isn’t An Echo Chamber” (https://futurism.com/social-media-is-not-echo-chamber/), claims that: “Social media might not be the filter bubble we make it out to be. Quite the contrary — having access to a social media feed could, in fact, push us to get our news from a wider variety of sources.”
Apparently, he is of the belief, in the Internet age, that a social media ‘echo chamber’ is merely the simplest of self-censorships: “we confine ourselves to news bubbles”; that, “[w]e wrap ourselves in a warm blanket of news that reinforces our beliefs and opinions back to us”; that, “Facebook News Feed is an echo chamber, reinforcing each person’s political and ethical stances.”
This simple equating of levels of information exposure to inverse levels of ‘bubble’ filtration or censorship, is not the significant issue at play. ‘Big, bad, corporations and governments’ do not at all have to engage in such primitive manipulations, though it’s not the case that they have desisted from this. It’s not necessary, not when considerable sections of the public themselves can do it for them. Not only do it, but advocate for considerably more extreme and sophisticated forms of it.
Identity politics, of whatever kind, too often, occurs in corporate-hosted arenas, in which the so-called ‘public’, knowingly and unknowingly, enthusiastically do the bidding of wider, corporate interests, usually because they derive some psychological and/or financial benefit from doing so.
Marketing campaigns are most easily conducted through targeting market sectors according to mass categorical relevance, in short, through market identification. Production imperatives often obligate ‘market creation’, which entails identity construction. Identity construction, is most easily achieved through simple opposition. Without opposition, the identity in question cannot determine itself, at least not according to the classical, Occidental demands for determinate identity, apprehensively delimited and in tangible form. It’s required for all ‘divide and rule’ operations, too.
No one is saying that because people choose to live in a bubble of constrained belief that they are going to practice a total censorship through outright suppression of alternative information. That the article has been written as if such a belief were the case, actually emerges out of, and caters for, the simplistic literalism that it attempts to modify. It’s a typical example of the kind of positivist and dogmatic ghettos wherein lazy, obstinate, and arrogant, thinking, attempt to surreptitiously install their hegemonic dominance. That’s not how it actually works.
At the risk of repeating such stupidity, it might be that further explication is called for.
The article is correct in describing the emotional entrenchment that takes place through oppositional discourse and exchanges. It is through these general and informal discursivities of exchange, that misrepresentations of opposing tendencies are formed. The identity warrior surveys a range of media, not just those directly affirming held identity, but also those media belonging to the opposition, or potential opposition, as a kind of reconnaissance of enemy territory.
This has been observed on the Internet for decades.
On virtual worlds, such as Second Life, it is easy to observe people quite deliberately seeking out ideological opponents, whatever the ideology concerned. Much of this has to do with the domestication of cyberspace, giving familiar and determinate form to the limitlessness of possibility that the Internet enables. There are no passports on much of the Internet, no common set of standards by which to organise identity exchanges. This then eventuates in a general situation of personal obligation and responsibility, as far as identity expression is concerned. What can thus be observed, is a scenario whereby those most inculcated with dogmatic styles of ideological expression, those most hostile to the unfamiliar and the unknown, are the most aggressively proactive of identity warriors, and the most insistent and devious practitioners of disingenuous misrepresentation.
The resulting chaos serves the interests of the same dogmatic cultural groupings that it has served in the past. At the same time as the Internet enables greater communication, this movement produces greater levels of reactionary irresponsibility and denial.
The construction of identity bubbles, previously catered for by national governments and media, has now devolved to islands of local enthusiasm, and their often hysterical productions. Accessibility to all global information is also susceptible to the full range of global interpretations, inclusive of the ignorances of extremist hysteria. These identity-gang tendencies have always been there, they were not necessarily or wholly invented by governments or corporations, even though they might be manipulated by them, or even arise out of them. In fact, a government or corporation itself can be considered as a ‘gang’.
The xenophobic impulse is, largely speaking, the origin of social identity in all militarised regimes. This impulse perpetuates itself through the people, themselves, and the Internet merely allows the expression of that fact.
It’s not that the Internet or social media is necessarily an “echo chamber”. Echo chambers are deliberately desired and constructed, for whatever reasons, to produce echo effects. The desire for an echoic existence is usually positioned psychologically, as a figure of narcissism. The ‘culture of narcissism’, as described by Christopher Lasch, in the 1970s, never went away. What can be observed, is this culture, very much a corollary of consumerist culture, repackaging itself as virtualised, social conflict. As previously stated, this repackaging has been quietly engineered over the last few decades, in virtual worlds and in computer gaming. It’s a repackaging, as both virtualised identity and opposition. What is at play, is the commodification of the unconscious, itself. Ironically, though it expresses and produces conspiracies and paranoia, aplenty, there is no actual conspiracy behind it, at least nothing beyond the people’s tacit consent and desire. The atavistic desire for romanticising fantasy nostalgias, seen in so many contemporary media productions, is merely a commodified escape route from the disciplines of incessant production, but one that has seemingly become itself an ‘incessant production’, showing all else in the light of this productive insistence. Hence, the hysteria and ‘fake news’. The simulacrum has merely announced itself.
The article merely outlines a simplistic, behavioural explanation directed towards altering a simplistic literalism that, in any case, only an ignorant attitude would entertain. That such obviousness requires the expression of an entire article to indicate, is itself a symptom of mass cultural identity presupposition, one that perhaps sustains the slow, decelerating and simplifying obligations of its own identity game.
ON ONEIRIC ECONOMY: THE TRANSACTION OF DREAMY EQUIVALENCES
Trump and Bannon, through ‘Cambridge Analytics’, are using the ‘Kosinski’ algorithm, which is just an updated data analysis technique, of the ‘markey survey’ type that enabled Thatcher and Reagan to win power in the last century. The irony is that through the ‘Kosinski’ algorithm, the USA is essentially governing itself, through its online behaviours, and wherever else data sets are sourced from. This self-governance tracks desires in ‘real-time’, the results controlling the delivery and logic of Trump’s public statements. It’s a libidinal economy of desires; an oneiric one, governed by dream. I wrote about this oneiric economics, back in the early 1990s.
It’s truly ‘consumer-driven’, as they say, a true reflection of the people. Because of this, it generates the responses typical of social hypocrisy; horror; displacement and projection of horror onto others; and entrenched identification with horror, universalising the horror as unavoidable, in order to justify the identification.
When a so-called ‘culture’ has no self-understanding, it loses confidence; and when the misunderstood forces of its emergence are spent, because of this lack of self-understanding, it looks to nostalgic repetition for replenishment.
The dominant sign of economy is no longer even ‘consumption’, but rather, that of ‘dream’. That consumer desire is retained, as a powerful motivic force, but does not at all displace its circulations and configurations according to oneiric hegemony.
Under the sign of oneiric hegemony; ‘industry’, ‘consumption’, ‘virtue’, ‘morality’, ‘reality’, and even ‘identity’; all of these are forms of capital, in the dominant oneiric economy.
[Originally appeared, March 4th, 2017 at 6:21 pm; http://www.xenosystems.net/the-sad-left/#comment-311892]
THE REQUIREMENTS OF GALACTIC COMPREHENSION
At this point, it almost seems as if the discussion is on the brink of an in-depth phenomenology of writing, or perhaps a grammatology of grammatology. If it should proceed in such a direction, then that excavation can be said to have already begun, and this notice of it, merely its somewhat formalised announcement or acknowledgement.
There are many points, here, in your preceding response, that have been introduced, somewhat in the fashion of a proliferation, multiplication, or dissemination, of the initial topical impetus, though there was more than one topic. The comparative simplicity of origin has escalated into a constellation of potentially unruly complexities. Perhaps we have moved from a solar understanding to the requirements of a galactic comprehension?
The ‘standard moves’ point was not aimed at anyone in particular, but does indeed seem to constitute a large amount of theoretical and philosophical output that we probably both have seen over the years. It’s certainly not directed at you, Terence. Neither, really, is it a critique of anyone else, the ‘standard’ does occasionally require sufficient expression so as to constitute its standardisation. Your observation concerning the “time-wasting obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens” is a personal evaluation based on your own engagement with Stiegler’s oeuvre, as you say, and if I had read much more of Stiegler perhaps I would agree with you. But this is not really the central issue that I feel is at play behind these concerns.
The issue is, I would suggest, considerably broader in extent and sidesteps the more localised concern of basic immersion in a particular oeuvre, a concern that you characterise as a form of immanence. The areas that Stiegler addresses, that he actually writes, ‘about’, are common topoi to those of us with an interest in such things. With this in mind, another question can be asked: is there any philosophical writer, at all, who does not engage in “obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens”, when they are under the impression of conveying some kind of conceptual innovation?
I ask this question, to point out the deeper pressures of conventional imposition that afflict every writing occurring between an author and a reader. Those pressures of conventional imposition are largely responsible for the over-explication, or, as you say, “obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens”, afflicting any philosophical author attempting to convey their particular weltanshauung. But the common denominator underlying all of these attempted conveyances are the somewhat uncertain figures
of ‘convention’. It is usually always with a never-spoken respect to, or for, this figurality; to the obligations of this ‘figured reality’ of the conventional; that most authorial productions seem to circulate. Every author senses the consensus in their own way, responding to it, according to their intuitions and receptions of it. But the consensual is always a generalising assumption, configuring the somewhat uncertain figures of convention.
If Stiegler has built a ladder to do a particular job of ascension, his continued maintenance of that ladder may not lead to any different elevation, but perhaps it maintains the safety of that stepped implement?
(Thank you, to Terence Blake of AGENT SWARM, for the Facebook discussion, of which this post is a response.)
NOSTALGIC TIME-SEQUENCES AND THE TEMPORAL TECHNICIAN
Reflections in time, back-and-forth they go, from one memory to another. This playing of mnemonic transactions, a ceaseless interchange of objectifying compulsions, all according to the metaphysics of that strange and unquestioned notion called ‘form’. It is under the spell of this notion, under its unquestioned assumption only, that one can talk about ‘repetition’. Without such an objectifying assumption, without these hypothetical ‘forms’ – at least one – there is nothing to ‘repeat’.
It’s not my intention here to outline the conditions of form or formal metaphysical assumption, but merely to suggest that beyond all the usual reflexive productions of insight attaching itself to this notion, mystery, or the mysterious, continues on its merry way, perhaps hinted at by this or that economy of ‘knowledge’ and its always not quite adequate ‘conclusions’, but never exhausted by these epistemological labours.
As is the case with economies of knowledge, so also with cultural economies of history and memory. It is quite possible for an entire culture to proceed in a particular ‘historical direction’, as it were, failing to adequately register the lessons of its development, and in such a way, that it proves impossible to simply follow along with such a culture, without provisioning radical explications apparently beyond that culture’s understanding. Not that there is necessarily any responsibility to do so, but refusing the task of giving explicatory contextualisations would be an unnecessary neglect.
If both Baudrillard and Fukuyama talked about the ‘end of history’, it is not so much that chronological developments have suddenly ceased to operate, but rather that the notion of ‘history’ in its conventional form; with its linear expectations and traditional narrative understandings; is no longer sufficient as an organisational mode. More is required. But the requirement of such an excess seems beyond the capacities of present cultural cognition. In the grip of this excess which it is no longer able to think, traditional cultural institutions continue on, incessantly repeating themselves and their procedures with ever-increasing uncertainty, as they slide into the unknown.
All that is left, for these alienated creatures, these ‘Occidental Androids’, who do not actually wish to think, is the contentment to merely and vicariously ‘operate’, sputtering positivist ‘memes’ to each other in vast, anxious, and swarming frenzies of ‘self’ and ‘world’ confirmation. As if repeating the exhausted terms of their Cartesian crisis with ever more fervent enthusiasm can somehow substitute for lack of greater understanding, in maintaining what seems to be mostly a dogmatic, miserable, and ignorant, charade. None of this is exactly new, but it is now globally instantaneous, and that is the key that has unlocked the first stages of a noospheric achievement, as it were, beyond conventional notions of both ‘knowledge’ and ‘history’. It is precisely those conventional notions which are in a crisis of inadequacy; their adherents, acolytes, and exploiters, in a crisis of promotion. What can be observed is merely the reflexive dissolution of those conventional dogmas, according to various arcs of nostalgic repetition.
I have, of course, referred to this before, at the outset of this blog: “Philosophy, in its institutional forms, has been busy archiving, classifying, and otherwise industrialising, the driven contemplations of various canonical traditions, as grist for the mill of future recombinant streams of commodified ‘wisdom’: a grist that will sustain the perennial tensions of these venerated traditions, with new brands of ‘logic’, intensified ‘epistemologies’, concentrated ‘ontologies’, nouveau-‘mysticisms’, etc.. All of this, circulating within the same circles of interpretation; playing the same topoi; in rhetorical oscillations, where the current jargons of reduction will scintillate with the shine of ‘progress’. A ‘progress’ in which the same, age-old platitudes can be uttered incessantly, as if they were unearthly revelations, never before thought or expressed.
All this, we have seen, and it has not proved sufficient.”
(“Possibilities of Thought”, Saturday, July 21, 2012: http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?page_id=7)
It has become necessary to return to my earlier period of writings, 1987-1997, for a more suitable and fertile context in which to address these issues. This, of course, is natural for me due to the element of personal continuity, but might prove somewhat strange to readers of this blog, as for the most part, the majority of my Internet writings have been strategically limited to theoretically contained, critical responses and observations , with only a sprinkling of writings from the earlier period. That was sufficient, in terms of addressing the philosophy blogging scene on the Internet, which I’ve done for six years now, but that scene is not sufficient. More is required. If Baudrillard and Fukuyama right, about the ‘end of history’, this recollection of an unexpressed, earlier period is possibly more than mere nostalgia.
PATCHY CLARIFICATIONS: WICKED PLANTINGS OF WOULD-BE TRADITIONS – STILTED, QUILTED, QUILLETTE – THE STRAINED MEDIOCRITIES OF MOULDY BUGS
Clarification was necessary, only because your reading was based on your own positivist assumptions rather than what was actually written.
I’m not expounding ‘from’ Neoreactionary works, I’m challenging the entire Neoreactionary ideology; its uses of pre-existent ideas; its logic and construction; all of it really.
Of course, I’m serious, I have my reasons for making such a claim. And, as yet, you haven’t actually demonstrated that my challenges are actually mistaken.
You’re more than welcome to create a cult around Neoreactionary nonsense, but don’t expect it not to be challenged. If you resort to juvenile levels of prevarication, more akin to a Scientology justification, don’t expect that not to be noticed as a weakness.
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Neoreaction clearly stipulates ‘exit’ as a foundational strategy constituting patchwork’s appeal. This clearly necessitates ‘open borders’ enabling restrictionless ‘exit’.
Without restrictionless ‘exit’, some kind of ‘slavery’ obtains, the charge of ‘cathedralism’ can be levelled at Neoreaction’s patchwork system, and Neoreaction is undermined by the implications of one of its own central tenets.
The concept of exit has as much right to the phrase ‘open borders’, and its logical implications, as any other concept.
The originating article, uses ‘open borders’ with respect to both ‘entry’ and ‘exit’. That may be what you’re assuming as the positivist, received sense of the phrase; a building block that you take for granted, perhaps, without being fully aware of the logical implications at play. Evidently so, if Neoreaction proscribes the universal entry condition whilst simultaneously promoting the universal exit condition.
If the respective sets of entry criteria constituting patchwork states follow strict essentialising logics, to the point of all states of the patchwork system becoming mutually exclusive; then, assuming the patchwork system has global coverage in terms of both territory and people, a state of entropic population distribution is reached wherein full allocation according to all prevailing sets of state entry criteria has been satisfied, from the perspective of those states and their criteria. Full allocation, from the perspective of mutually exclusive sets of state entry criteria, would entail a distributional achievement of those criteria, which, if they are mutually exclusive, prevents any further entries. As that distributional achievement is global, likewise, entry prevention is global, too. If entry prevention is global, exit is impossible.
Neoreaction could respond with the objection that the achievement of full allocation renders further entry and exit entirely unnecessary, as all relevant factors have been adequately classified. Furthermore, if confronted with the argument of an idealised state of globally adequate classification being susceptible to stasis, stagnancy, and degradation; Neoreaction would of course argue that the classification is based on ‘real conditions’, being constructed to more adequately meet the challenges of those conditions. That might be the claim, belief, and assumption, but it is far from being demonstrated.
Basing patchwork states on prevailing ideological categories, in order to let them fight it out in a corporate-Darwinian scenario, is no more really than a tawdry attempt at hosting traditional ideological consumerism, in a kind of computer game scenario.
It may reflect contemporary conditions and their banal receptions, at least somewhat, but it does not effectively anticipate the shapes of things to come.
Nick Land recommends increased differentiation, but the increase in differentiation, if proceeding according to the restrictive teleological tendencies of state entry criteria, would entail only restrictive innovation according to the involution of those criteria. If those state entry criteria were, for any reason, to be compromised by forms of expediency, this necessarily shows the inadequacy of those criteria, in real terms. If the expediencies call upon the characteristic resources of excluded sets of state criteria, this undermines the entire rationale of Neoreactionary patchwork organisation at a fundamental level.
TOWARDS A METAPHYSICS OF TRANQUIL IDENTITY: NOTHING TO PROVE, YET EVERYTHING TO UNDERSTAND
The attributes that you confer on immanence in order to generate synonymy with non-duality are reflexive anchorings occurring after identity assumption, logically speaking. Those attributes affix themselves to subsequent substantialist positionings of identity assumption; becoming identified, substantialised, and positioned; themselves; according to uncritical conceptions and conventions of those substantialist positionings.
This entire structure of conceptual self referral, originates from two dualistic identifications; substance identity, and worldly identity, both, assumptions. Both are corollaries of each other, but not quite necessarily so. Substance identity, necessarily arises as an artefact of any positivist identity assumption, if that identity is held to be delimited in some way. As identity, in order to be an identification, is necessarily and simultaneously a delimitation, substance assumption characteristically arises as a question of the production of positivist identity, itself produced by this delimitation.
The delimitation producing positivist identity simultaneously produces negative identity, the two sides of any delimitation. The search for the ‘substance’; ‘essence’; ‘interiority’; et cetera, of the positivist identity necessarily occurs within the space of negative identity, everything that the positivist identity is allegedly not. This search, within ‘negative substantial space’, is a quest for correspondence, likeness, sameness, unity, homogeneity, et cetera. It is a quest for agreeable affinities in which the individual instance or instantiation discovers its own positivity in that ‘negative substantial space’.
Under the category of a substance, the individual instance or instantiation can be positively characterised, relieving it of a potentially infinite burden of possible negations. With a sufficient number of substantial categorisations, it can be ‘definitively’ characterised, if not exhaustively. The criteria and parameters of whatever that ‘definition’ might be, are contingent – at least on a prima facie level – on the production of that definition and its purposes. Though that characterisation is, of course, a positivist one. The joys of substantial concord or accord, affirm the ecstasies of positivist resolution, in definitional closure.
But note, this entire categorical drama, the theatrics of positive and negative duality, is contingent on an initial delimitation, and on the subsequent ascribing of values, such as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’; ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’; ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’ (to a – positive – substance); et cetera.
All of it, is conventional.
Though it may have arisen, ‘naturally’, this does not really say very much; at least, the positivist assumption of it; as the category of ‘nature’, too, is a convention. So, too, with the category of tradition, whether formal or informal, and in its positivist garb. What positivist traditions and assumptions have not answered before, it would be unreasonable to expect them to answer in future.
What we see, with positivist distortion or bias, is the overuse of substantialism, attempting to populate ‘negative substantial space’ from a limited and inadequate stock of habitual, substantial instruments, at the expense of considering the logical role of ‘negative substantial space’ between those instruments, in a more sophisticated and intuitive, interstitial way. The neglect of this consideration, which really is the neglect of an entire and essential perspective, leads to the fevered production of posits in fruitless attempts at what has essentially become, a hamstrung positivist comprehension. It is even the case, often, that ‘negative substantial space’ becomes reified as a positivist, substantial identity; ascribed to another, configurational, identity; going by the rubric, ‘world’; as yet another reductive, positivist explanation.
It is not that positivist explanations do not have a role to play. But exclusive reliance on their habitual, uncritical use; at the expense of appropriate, specific, and complementary negative expertise; results only in a positivist hysteria manically throwing half-baked positivist ideas into the void in desperate attempts to resolve the leaking discrepancies caused by such exclusive reliance, in the first place.
The characteristically obsessive theme structuring this positivist hysteria is the figure of the ‘thing-in-itself’, whose desperate oscillations in psychosocial consciousness power the hysteria.
The justification for the emphasis of positivist identity, for the notion of a thing-in-itself, is the convention of everyday empiricity – the encounter with ‘things’. It is this convention of empirical encountering which is raised up into the fixation of metaphysical principle, displacing, eliding, and obscuring, to varying degrees, the logic of delimitation and identification from which it arises. Once raised up, its appeal and justification is always to some everyday intuition, as the occasion for this principled fixation.
Such occasioning becomes the pretext for prioritising the notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’, as the governing model of positivist identity, due to the sequential logic of perceptual and cognitive discovery suggesting metaphysical systems of appearance and essentialisation, under the methodological signs of constitution or constitutivity, comprising ‘element’; ‘component’; ‘contingency’; ‘whole’; ‘mechanism’; ‘environment’; et cetera.
But a shift occurs, positivist identity and its governing model have become prioritised as an exclusive condition or centre governing all considerations, at the expense of serious reflection on the condition of delimitation from which its initial identification is produced. This often occurs under the sign of ‘the given’, an unquestioned assumption. If it were to be questioned, the customary response is to produce a spectrum of conventional intuitions occurring under the aegis of ‘the given’, affirming and negating these intuitions in a show of consideration, but not actually questioning the form or principle of ‘the given’, in ‘itself’, nor clearly delineating its function.
Positivist identity and its philosophical transactions, mainly occurring within the parameters of metaphysical systems of appearance and essentialisation, constitutes a globally hegemonic culture which relegates serious reflection on delimitation to either relatively innocuous formal specialisations or marginalised, fringe concerns. With this social and institutional distribution; seriousness is lost; genuine questioning is kept at bay; the grip of positivist imperialism seems to be unshaken.
If ‘forms of language’ reflect ‘forms of life’, then it very much seems to me that the culture of positivist instrumentalisation is beset by a very particular kind of referential poverty. The inflation of that culture exercises a systematic restraint or constraint coercing all expressions to follow the abbreviations and semantic routes of positivist identity. This is a dictatorship of coercive desire covertly hostile to any tranquility of consideration that might escape it.
WRY ZONES
[William Theodoracopulos] “Force as force does not need a name..here Buddhism is helpful to recognize that ” form is empty, emptiness is form” ..so you’re wrong..forces do not need to form in order to exist..this is also the new science…as for distinction there is no need for identity either. Spinoza is clear here in discussing affects…what composes is affirmative..what decomposes isnt…how can one tell the difference? Being tells the difference..knows this difference
Perhaps deleuze is harsh with the dialectic..his book on Nietzsche has been criticized for this…but there is value in what he says
Hegelianism is a negative and abstract movement which is a kind way to say its fake, just as identity is fake..for Nietzsche and deleuze it remains part of christian thought..that is..preying on other beings for its own existence..it is a movement of incorporation ,like napolean and the rise of the nation state..and even above..trying to incorporate everything into itself..it is territorializing and totalitarian…even metaphysically it demands all thought to be about itself
Obviously deleuze hates it which is why he has such concepts as deter rotor is luxation and lines of flight..post structuralism is arguably an assault on the Hegelian structures of nations institutions and even thought itself…it is simply against dialectics in every way
William Theodoracopulos Deterritorialization not deter rotor”
[William Theodoracopulos] “Force as force does not need a name..here”
{AK}: That may be so, but you’re already using one, ‘force’, to assert that observation.
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[William Theodoracopulos] “Buddhism is helpful to recognize that ” form is empty, emptiness is form”
{AK}:Yes, that is true, but Buddhism would characterise the Nietzschean metaphysics of forces and their Deleuzian affirmations as empty, too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[William Theodoracopulos] “so you’re wrong..forces do not need to form in order to exist..this is also the new science”
{AK}:The concept of ‘force’ is no less ‘metaphysical’ than the concept of ‘form’. In practice, assertion of either, always involves the implicit support of the other. This is not merely ‘linguistic’ or ‘conceptual’, as if language or conceptuality were independent phenomena, neatly divorced from the scenarios they reference.
At the most radical level, if one asks what do the words ‘form’ and ‘force’ do, a set of operational relations is obtained, largely involving referential and signifying uses. This is a characterisation from the perspective of utility. The conditions necessary for those uses to obtain are the structures of reference and signification. Those structures, in advance, and in the majority of social uses, express metaphysical patterns and theoretical bias.
Arguments against this, from alleged ignorance of intention; from claimed non-apprehension of metaphysical concerns; and so on; are not valid in the instances where cultural materials are used, and where those cultural artefacts are already complicit with and sourced from a history of metaphysical considerations. Secondly, those arguments themselves presuppose theories of intention and apprehension, choosing their options of defence through selections undeniably metaphysical.
This is not to say, that metaphysics in some way necessarily ‘owns’ all that it comes into contact with; or even that metaphysics is something ultimately determinable, at all, in such a way as to suggest a strictly determinate entity capable of such exclusive appropriations, at all.
Yes, it is the case that forces can operate without formally staged apprehension, but it is not the case that discourses and uses of the word, ‘force’, whether formally staged or not, do not draw on referential and signifying conventions commonly associated with the formal history of that word. Citing relations of independence between the linguistic form of the word ‘force’ and its referents; the allegedly ‘non-linguistic’ ‘forces’ referred to; is in itself the exploitation of a formal, metaphysical relation, that of ‘independence’. Thirdly, it is not the case that the linguistic is constrained only to formalisation. Language is just as susceptible to theorisations based on concepts of force, as on those based on concepts of form.
Thus far, my response has been to the statement, ‘forces do not need form in order to exist’, but you actually wrote,’ forces do not need to form in order to exist’. The addition of ‘to’ introduces a different emphasis, requiring special consideration. Firstly, though, as both versions of the statement appeal to the concept of existence, that should form the initial analysis.
If we take ‘to exist’ in its root or radical meaning, as ‘to stand forth’, then this could suggest, as corollary, that ‘forms’ are marks or registrations of ‘existence’; that they are ‘phenomena’ that ‘stand forth’, in some way; ‘appearances’ of existence; ontic-ontological signs; et cetera.
Whatever the nature of this existentiality; whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’; ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’; ‘physical’ or ‘mental’; if we consider existentiality as inclusive of all these possibilities, then it is sufficient to say that the concept of ‘standing forth’ applies to all of them.
That being the case, if form is that which ‘stands forth’, in all of these cases, the next consideration, would be the question of what ‘standing forth’ consists of; what conditions enable it; and what it suggests?
Firstly, on what basis does ‘standing forth’ occur? Difference, is the basis, and one of the enabling conditions, for ‘standing forth’ to be possible. Without selectivity, identity, the possibility of indication; all, corollaries of difference; ‘standing forth’ is not possible.
Distinctness; however it’s ‘nature’, ultimate or otherwise, might be characterised; is the minimal, enabling condition, for ‘standing forth’ to occur. It doesn’t have to be an absolute distinctness, merely an accessible one, in some way.
It is this existential distinctness or differentiation, that you implicitly appeal to in your contrast of ‘form’ and ‘force’, with respect to the concept of existential ordering ([WT] “forces do not need to form in order to exist”). So, straightaway, you’re engaging in speculative, metaphysical distribution of categories; asserting definitional closures for the concepts of form and force.
I said that difference was one of the enabling conditions of the ‘standing forth’ relation; the other condition, arises with the question of what does ‘standing forth’, ‘stand forth’ to? What registers that ‘standing forth’ occurs?
If there is no discernible registration of ‘standing forth’ in any distinct way, on what grounds can ‘standing forth’ be assumed or declared? Such would be an assumption or declaration based on a lack of distinct indication. If distinct indication is not in operation, what exactly is being referenced or meant, where is the differentiation? These are not necessarily insurmountable objections, but resorting to them could be premature if there has been a lack of adequate philosophical demonstration.
The rejection of existential registration, of the ‘standing forth to’, requires either of two concepts: one, the concept of a positable self-existent, not ‘standing forth to’ anything at all, not even itself; two, the concept of a positable ‘existence’, not configured by any determination at all, to the extent that registration of it is impossible due to this determinative lack. Both concepts are more redolent of mystical totality, than any positivist empiricism of forces, as proffered by Nietzsche and Deleuze. Buddhist thought does not neglect the analysis of these concepts, though in slightly different contexts to the one that I’m developing here.
The first concept, of a ‘self-existent’, is that of the classical ens, whose strict criteria of self-sufficiency prevents its full application to empirical entities, due to their alleged contingency.
The second concept, of an ‘existence’ without determination, is the afterglow of ontological inclusion, a non-specific assumption of Being, the hypothetical host instantly interiorising all suggested posits, kind of like Deleuzian immanence.
Underlying both concepts, is another assumption, the philosophy and metaphysics of identity.
The concept of a ‘force’ is one in which a distinct tendency that ‘stands forth’ in some way is formalised according to the distinctness with which it ‘stands forth’. It is as much a defined formulation, as any ‘form’. Though it may not be projected into the transcendence of a timeless Platonised stasis, its supervenience on the metaphysics of identity is equal to that of the concept of form.
Whatever qualities or attributes might be associated with the concept of ‘force’, in contrast to those belonging to the concept of ‘form’, the metaphysics of identification inaugurating both concepts is operationally identical. Whatever the subsequent claims of ‘existential’ distribution might be, with respect to the contrast between ‘form’ and ‘force’, those claims supervene on prior constructions of metaphysical assumption arising within identity inauguration.
The fixation of these prior constructions into an unanalysed and unthinking habit is one of the factors responsible for the narrow perspectives of insularity dominating contemporary philosophy, in general.
It is within the ambit of the Occident’s insular and positivist ontological habits, that
we see the circle of its mutually self-confirming assumptions in operation. Each categorical determination draws its raison d’être from the others. They are legitimised and delegitimised in accord with each other’s respective orderings. Traditional philosophical systems privilege one or other route through various schemas of these foundational, structuring principles; emphasising ‘stronger’ or ‘weaker’ forms of these principia, as metaphysical tastes dictate.
But the root condition on which the kaleidoscopic variations of all the others rest, is identity assumption. And it is precisely this notion of identity which most requires full, analytical consideration. If notions of substance and transcendence necessarily arise as supplements to the alleged inadequacies of the yearning identity posits of Becoming, this supplementarity is merely emblematic of the contingency associated with identities in transition; which, if classical stringencies are to be believed (the criteria of a self-existent ‘ens’), are not really identities, at all.
If it is the case, that avowed empirical contingencies are treated as alleged ‘self-existents’ networked in the service of a ‘univocity of immanence’, as it were, this might well provision a comforting and uncomplicated lebenswelt of seemingly transcendence-free practices, wherein one could potter about in plurality, taking everything at face value, entirely undisturbed by the deeper complexities of substantial variation, especially if the ideology of ‘immanence’ has essentially replaced or displaced those troublesome complexities.
But if we look closer, asking exactly what ‘immanence’ is, how it arises, what does it mean? All of these questions have one answer, the inversion of ‘transcendence’. The ideology of immanence is rooted in that which its users attempt to proscribe or elide. The logics determining immanence and transcendence are one and the same, as with the Heraclitean observation that the way up and down is the same. Buddhist philosophy would not characterise non-duality as ‘immanent’, because of the polarisation that it seems to suggest.
Under the sign of rejected ‘transcendence’, resides a host of historically interrupted developments, not all of which were necessarily forms of ignorance grown obsolescent. They require more understanding than philosophy and contemporary academic fashions of the 21st-century seem able to provision. Domestication to what is after all the populism of an easy positivist, meme-mentality, is not the most effective production of such insights.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[William Theodoracopulos] “…as for distinction there is no need for identity either.”
{AK}:
[William Theodoracopulos] “Spinoza is clear here in discussing affects…what composes is affirmative..what decomposes isnt…how can one tell the difference? Being tells the difference..knows this difference”
{AK}: Notions of ‘composition’ and ‘decomposition’ require contexts of delimitation to arbitrate which is which. Those contexts of delimitation, theoretically speaking, could be seen to be arbitrary, but in practice are contingent on initial identity assumptions of some sort.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[William Theodoracopulos] “Perhaps deleuze is harsh with the dialectic..his book on Nietzsche has been criticized for this…but there is value in what he says”
{AK}:I don’t have anything to say about this, it’s not controversial, at least not at this time; not really interested in pursuing the issue.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[William Theodoracopulos] “Hegelianism is a negative and abstract movement which is a kind way to say its fake, just as identity is fake..for Nietzsche and deleuze it remains part of christian thought..that is..preying on other beings for its own existence..it is a movement of incorporation ,like napolean and the rise of the nation state..and even above..trying to incorporate everything into itself..it is territorializing and totalitarian…even metaphysically it demands all thought to be about itself
Obviously deleuze hates it which is why he has such concepts as deter rotor is luxation and lines of flight..post structuralism is arguably an assault on the Hegelian structures of nations institutions and even thought itself…it is simply against dialectics in every way”
{AK}: The apparent anti-imperialism of this paragraph is in line with conventional, contemporary receptions and fashions. It appeals to the concept of fakery to condemn both Hegel, identity, and even thought itself.
Interestingly, back in the early 1990s, I began to develop a critique along the lines of the latter, titling it, ‘beyond the laws of thought’ or ‘afterthought’. The conventional concept of thought; the conception of it and its traditional sitings or positionings; were, it seemed to me, an entirely inadequate and insular fixation. So I can agree with those estimations.
However, appealing to a notion of fakery presupposes a conception of truth. Whilst this is a traditional dualisation of contestation, is it the most effective response when such a tradition might be in question?
On poststructuralism, I would just add that it is quite simply the considerations occurring ‘after’ structuralism, where ‘structuralism’ can be taken to be perhaps all of modernist thought, not just the thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, et cetera, identified with Continental structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s, incorporating, of course, the Czech and Russian thinkers who were precursors.
The ‘after’ would not only refer to chronological development, but to the theoretical questions occurring after the culminations of modernist projects. So it is in this sense, that ‘poststructuralism’ segues into ‘post-modernism’.
THE POSTMODERN PEASANT: ALL-TRITE BARBARIANS OF MODERNITY
Peasant revolts were always common in Europe. From feudal-nobility cruelty and exploitation, to colonial-military cruelty and exploitation. The feudal kingdom was a feeding ground for nobility; the colony was a feeding ground for burghers and peasants.
Strangely, one never hears any complaints from so-called ‘white nationalists’, about the 50 billion a year France receives from its erstwhile, colonial interests, in Africa.
Equally strangely, those areas in the southern USA, more heavily and historically involved in slavery, continue to be places of increased racial tensions. If we look around the world, it can often be observed that those peoples who had increased reliance on the slavery and exploitation of other peoples in the past, continue to be the agitators and terrorists of the present.
Modernity has seen large sections of the nobility often reduced to poverty. Under the pressures of commercial capitalism, ‘stately homes’ had to be opened to the public, or even sold off, the titled owners moving into ‘council houses’, etc..
These changes, by and large, provoked no unrest in the mass majority. Just as colonial exploitations abroad, from which the mass majority ultimately benefited, were conveniently ignored, or justified according to various modernist grounds, that is to say, European exceptionalist grounds.
Ironically enough, though, the globalisation of those same grounds now provokes hypocritical reactions from the mass majority along the lines of the very anti-colonial arguments that they either ignored or rejected in the past.
When exploiters are disenfranchised and unable to retrieve their self-conferred exceptionalist status, in ways sufficiently satisfying and pleasing to themselves, they become nostalgic for the historical iniquities and hierarchies that did so provision that status. Unable to create or innovate newly successful self-images, they agitate for the return of colonial mythology and its comforting portraits of jingoist victories.
DEPREDATORY AND DISINGENUOUS MOVEMENTS OF EXPLOITATION
The entire abstract, merely begs the question of normativity, deferring it to some assumed notion of good sense which merely needs to be excavated out of the alleged realm of “originary proto-ethical normativity”.
Objectification itself; what gets objectified; how ‘it’ gets objectified; why ‘it’ gets objectified; all these constituting reifications emerge out of an aetiology implicated with the ethical from the get-go!
Ethical consideration, where morality or moralis is custom, the customary; can be considered to be moral reflexivity, the consideration of customs, in light of different customary notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In this sense, what is being spoken of is a
‘moral calculus’ with respect to objective conditions.
Objective conditions, in simplified form, are commonly represented by prima facie conventions (“adequacy conditions”). But those conventions are not the conditions that they are held to spring from, through allegedly referential relations. The desire for simplicity of reference is susceptible to casuistical complication.
The casuistical gaming of moral calculations is enabled by disingenuous shiftings and reframings of prima facie conventions through systematic and differential bias of objective representations supporting those conventions.
For any set of prima facie conventions, an infinite number of aetiologies is potentially available.
Gaming this area of aetiology, so as to provide hidden advantages and profits to those doing the gaming, is pretty much de rigueur in contemporary forms of business morality or real-moralic; the melancholic of the real-moralic, lol.
That it is ‘melancholic’ is confirmed by the plethora of ‘motivational’ speakers, tracts, courses, services, and other resources, constituting the SOS businesses following primary exploitation encampments dotted around the globe. This is behavioral regulation for Occidental androids of the warmind.
The subject-object duality is not in itself a licence of essentialism encouraging exploitation. If subjective rights are granted to objects, exploiters will merely wage war on those subjectified objects. If subjects are objectified, exploiters will merely appropriate those objectified subjects. Simple metaphysics, and its conventional idealisations, alone, no matter how complex their architectures, are no defence against depredatory and disingenuous movements of exploitation.