THE BEHAVIOUR OF ATTRACTIONAL SUPERVENIENCE
Desire and attraction: the inscribed horizons of these transitional forces are the forms which those transitions presuppose in order to delineate such becomings.
It is not unusual that scientific concepts so readily lend themselves to psychological metaphor, and vice versa. Both, after all, emerge out of a common, as it were, empirical domain, fluctuating between various polarities, such as psychologised subjectivity ( or subjectified psychology), and scientificised objectivity (or objectified scientificity). Again, the replay of older topoi; form and force; being and becoming, etc.. What went under the rubric of ‘natural philosophy’, supports both contrived realms.
But this oscillation, within the parameters of a scientific epistemology, of scientific epistemology, in general; within the parametric assumptions of ‘the knower’ and ‘the known’, two more assumed reifications supporting a third, ‘knowing’; are precisely the dogmatic struts from which the Occident’s catalogue of categorical coercions ensue; and by which it both consumes and is consumed.
AFFECT-BUBBLES AND WORLD-CONSTRAINED EPISTEMOLOGIES
You’ve done a number of posts requiring serious consideration and response, but I’ve simply not had the time to do that, though I’ve wanted to.
Affect-bubbles, as mutual corollaries to world-constrained epistemologies, are the natural result of a system catering to consumer desire. All things, to all people. This multiplies worlds, necessarily leading to varying stagings and simulations, as a ‘result’ of being obliged to track the capriciousness of libidinal flows, according to the disciplines of profitability.
The gaming of the algorithmic can only exacerbate these flows in various ways, leading to their incessant transmutation and the corresponding necessity of algorithmic revision. Thus, escalations of various sorts are produced, in a contest of partisan leveragings exploiting whatever techniques and opportunities are to hand. So far, so good.
But tracing the mechanics of such social systematicity is only going to be a preliminary step. Perhaps that is enough, in some cases. But I suspect a lot more is required. At this stage, one becomes aware that performative ecstasy and justifying rhetorics of non-totality can always themselves be gamed for any purposes, including those of positivist habit, regressive nostalgia, and the denial of conditions constituting irresponsibility.
It may be that, as I have suggested many times, that an oneiric logic is the dominant mode of commonly perceivable configuration at work through all the transitions in play. The cybernetic epistemology is the vehicle for libidinal flow.
However, what interests me, are logics of configuration that are literally hidden, ‘in plain sight’, but are not usually talked about. Those that obtain after all conventions have been totalised, beyond their usual referential and habitual scopes, to a degree of non-pertinence opening out onto radically different ‘understandings’.
THE OCCIDENTAL CULT(URE) OF CRAFTY INTELLIGENCE
The real purpose of all the CIA infiltration of culture, etc., both domestically in the USA and internationally, was to surreptitiously condition the collective unconscious into accepting that there was indeed an ‘intelligence’ at work, throughout the Occidental order.
All of the subterfuge, the cultural convolutions of domestic and international relations, their casuistical reflexivities ostensibly under the occult signs of espionage, all of this was a smokescreen covering over; but in plain sight, nonetheless; the central ‘cult of intelligence’.
This ‘cult of intelligence’, however, had very little to do with intellectual proficiency, and everything to do with the abilities of blatant denial; the perpetual deferral of responsibility; the artistry of the disingenuous, and all its works of dishonesty.
This is the Occidental conception of intelligence, and it is diametrically opposed to wisdom.
THE CLASSIC OCCIDENTAL OSCILLATION 03: THE METAPHYSICAL PLAYGROUNDS OF CAPITALIST DESIRE?
Why distinguish between the machinic and the organic?
If the machine is a contrivance of power; one which enables the possession of power through devices, stratagems, and tricks; then is it not an engine of decisive resolutions?
Whence the culture of decision? Is it only organic? Or is every so-called ‘natural event’, a ‘decision’? Are ‘natural laws’, ‘decisions’?
Because, are not all of these, arrangements and machinations?
A decision, is a determination.
Preoccupying itself with the culture of decision, the contemporary philosophical scene’s enthusiasm for those, like Laruelle, who return to the comforts of its metaphysical habitat, can be seen perhaps as a nostalgia for conventional modes of determination, the wish to escape the ever more tangible possibilities of synergy that are in play. It is an anxiety of both power and understanding, as those occur in fixated forms. The irony is that such fixations are mechanical, ‘machinic’; traditions, habits, are ‘machines’. On this basis, organic economies, insofar as they are habitual economies, or economies of habit, likewise, can be said to be machines.
If decisional enthusiasm is the anxious nostalgia of and for determination, what else could this be, but the Occidental android’s desire to objectify, according to the metaphysics of machine?
The denial of lack, is the denial of desire. If the ‘becoming’ of any process or tendency requires the concept of need or desire to explain transitions between initially posited and alleged forms or states, this of course implies that those forms or states are not complete in themselves, that they are lacking, and that this lack powers transformation. Of course, this metaphysical scheme is contingent on the initial positings of ‘forms or states’ that it simply assumes. But given such assumption, the calculus of presence and absence, regarding forms and states, is unavoidable, at the level of their transactions.
To view this metaphysical mechanism of becoming only through its presences as configured by the substance of desire, whilst denying lack (absence), as both Deleuze and Lyotard do, in their libidinal philosophies, uses the conventional intuitions and common sense habits of substantial presence to elide the ‘negativity’ of absence implicit in any objective metaphysics. This partiality to the positivity of substantial presence, is bought at the expense of both; a loss of negative perspective; and of
the systematic and objectifying origination giving rise to the categories of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, in the first place.
The concern is not so much with Deleuze and Lyotard’s libidinal investigations, in themselves, and the contexts which they were addressing, but rather, in the potential appropriations to which they had been subjected since then. Whilst, for me, their works are brilliant openings out of constrictive tendencies, it seems to me that the areas, zones, and territories, they opened up have merely become the sites of constricted and closured nostalgic development. They have become guidebooks of a continuing positivist instrumentalisation, which to some degree, their texts can’t be said to not entirely support.
THE CLASSIC OCCIDENTAL OSCILLATION 02
{AK}: The “complete substantialization of desire” that you suggest is an absolutism of desire. This absolutism is the inflation of a particular ‘monoconceptual convention’, that of ‘desire’, into an ur-principle.
To assume that nothingness is impossible, on the grounds of referential, factical and ontological assumptions, begs the question, tacitly introducing objectifying or reifying expectations without questioning their axiomatic presupposition. This is a delimited theology of ‘desire’, constrained by objective horizon. This is why you spoke of “an immanent god”; and it is surely not without significance that you attach a litany of potencies to this conception.
Buddhist nothingness, is not bound by this objective or objectifying horizon, or its axiomatic presupposition. Thus, there is no requirement to objectify nothingness, as the ‘something’ of a ‘void’, which is merely objective op-position. Buddha said: “He who attaches to the void, is truly lost.”
Objectivity, in general, may well be driven by libidinal production, but there is no libidinal production if there is no objectivity or objectifying.
Thinking “desire as free from subjects and objects (from o towards someone or something)”, might question objective categorisations from the perspective of a libidinal principle, but the objective horizon has only been deferred on to that principle, if a “desire in-itself” is proposed.
So, though libidinal interpretation liberates consideration from traditional and substantial fixation on ‘subjects and objects’, it does not exceed the objective horizon which produces them, having, ‘itself’, become this horizon. This is merely the displacement of fixation, the rewriting of a traditional anxiety, according to the same circle of objective need.
Schopenhauer is aware of this, as he writes: This “nothing,” however, “is also the PrajnaParamita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 41112)
This is why I wrote, in the context of transcending the logic of objective and objectifying need: “then ineluctably another way of proceeding comes into play, beyond & other than the usual response of simply restating neglected metaphysica, as ‘positions’ or posited anchors. The angst of anchoring proves redundant.”
THE CLASSIC OCCIDENTAL OSCILLATION 01
[Mario Hierro] “Mario Hierro I think I loose some meaning in the intersection of the subtlety of your text and my shortages in english. Still, this substantialization was just an experimentation, in fact desire would be a non-substantial substance, it is like a pure relation had agency and power (to bind things together, to take them to its limit…). Is like if I was saying, to substantialize difference, which in fact is what de-substantializes anything. Also, is interesting this emergency of void or nothingness, which in fact comes into play with this centrality of desire. A desire without a body would have to operate, somehow, in vacuity. In my opinion, nothingness is impossible (because in fact, is something), and there is a curious dialectics between the impossibility of nothingness (which is condition for its possibility) and the potentialities of desire.”
{AK}: I guess there’s more than one way of substantialising, it doesn’t have to be quite such an absolute binary sort of thing.
The notion of ‘pure relation’, together with its configuring power, drawing that which it configures to a limit, suggests the metaphysical picturing is energised, and ‘at work’. Your point about substantialising the difference that desubstantialises, hints at that, too.
I understand what you’re suggesting with the substantialisation of desire beyond its usual configuration with its corollary and conventional distribution of ‘agency’. Desire itself becomes the agent. That’s why I thought Buddhist considerations might be relevant.
The question of ‘nothingness’ being ‘impossible’, because ‘in fact’ it is ‘something’; is the metaphysical question that the Schopenhauer quote distinguishes aptly.
A fact, or ‘factum’, is a ‘thing made’. Just as any identity is a construction, one constructed out of substantialising assumptions; so, too, is any ‘factual identity’. The referential ‘something’ is in advance an assumed position, which seeks substantialisation if subjected to the pressures and conditions of ontological demand and enquiry, as in ‘What is it?’.
You’re right, that there is a curious dialectics involved, in the expectations of desire.
Nietzsche’s phrase: “The highest will to power, is to imprint Being upon Becoming”; outlines effectively this printing of yearning, as it were.
THE CLASSIC OCCIDENTAL OSCILLATION
[Mario Hierro] “I would bet for a complete substantialization of desire.
Desire being everywhere, anywhere. Desire being a substantive, not just a verb (desiring) or an adjective (desirable). Is not just that I desire to eat, neither that eating is desirable, but that desire eats.
A desire without a body, with its virtual machineries or diagrams. Desire as an univocal content for multiple expressions. An immanent god.
Concentrical and centripetal vectoriality, condensation into affective attractors and passional triggers, dissipation into actions and explosions. Also power, as its codification, regulation, fixation, domination, exploitation. Also potency, as its force, capacity, frequency, liberation, exploration.
Potency as the affirmation of desire; power as its negation; resistance, as its reaffirmation.”
{AK}: Desire, as an ur-principle, has no problem at all in producing a semantic field or grid, total in coverage, one whose seeming universal extent can then be substantialised on the basis of this completion.
Desire and dunamis; the power of need, the power of capability. Interlinked concepts, a semantic climate within which it is always possible to dwell.
But the exclusive privileging of this conceptual level, in its conventional senses, as in the artificial constancy of a ‘climate control’, bespeaks only the monoconceptual conventionality of the substance it incessantly declares.
The anthropic dramas it celebrates through such declaration, are artefacts of encounter, selected and scaled; metaphysical habitats, self-veiled.
[Schopenhauer]: “On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.
This “nothing,” however, “is also the PrajnaParamita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 41112)
{AK}: I guess, if anything can be ‘Nothing’, i.e., if no determinate substantia can be said to obtain, in such a way, as to ground traditional metaphysical schemas, or ‘worlds’; according to the remits of the usual dogmatisms; then ineluctably another way of proceeding comes into play, beyond & other than the usual response of simply restating neglected metaphysica, as ‘positions’ or posited anchors. The angst of anchoring proves redundant.
But the calculi of clinging to determinations of ‘desire’, as in the simplicities of positivist instrumentalisation, more often than not leads only to the classic Occidental oscillation: “Rather than not will, it wills nothing (destruction) at all” Heidegger.
LOOKS VERY BECOMING!
If desire is the production of refications (“things”), it is thus a principle of their production.
But the notion of a thing or entity arises as an abbreviated perspective; that is to say, a construction of entitative (en)closure produced as in an intersection of forces, of which a subset of forces are responsible for entitative interpretation.
When entitative interpretation is radically responsible for the abbreviated readings of objectivity, the notion of desire as their ostensible mode of production, becomes a feature of perspectival interpretation, one facet of metaphysical possibility, glinting intermittently in the light of revolving consideration(s).
GENERAL CONCEPTUAL HOLOGRAPHY: THE FORMS AND FORCES OF DESIRE
If the metaphysics of desire is substantialised as an explanatory perspective, it requires objectifications, both at the level of principle and the level of operation, as structural moments of the logic describing its metaphysics.
Desire is always towards the desired, which is refied or objectified, as such.
If the metaphysics of physics and energy (energiea, work) are similarly substantialised, as explanatory perspective; objectivity has to do with structural recurrences, and appears through the interaction of these structural recurrences, of which a subset of interactions are held to constitute systems of structural perception – they perceive those structures.
These two substantial perspectives play out the twinned logic of another, ‘form’ and ‘force’. The articulation of the one always requires the resources’ of the other. Although, it might be thought that the logic of negation emerges out of a more formal logic and consideration suited to objectivity, rather than the differential nature of force or forces, the notion of a ‘force’ is just as much a reified identity or ‘object’ as any other, and therefore just as susceptible to the logic of position and negation.
Prior to any consideration of positing or negating; of ‘form’ or of ‘force’; the radical origination of identity, its usual metaphysics and supervenient assumptions, all need to be mobilised according to a mutual combinatorics of speculative projection; where each and every objectification, regardless of its traditional positionings as ‘element’ or ‘derivation’ in local metaphysical systems, is a possible substance and monadic perspective in its own right.
This is a necessary first step in generating the space of a new theoretical agility, no longer solely bound by perspectival notions of structure, and the local notions of ‘purpose’ and ‘interest’, from which their identifications originate.
The radical mobilisation of identity does not at all neglect the traditional and contemporary preoccupations associated with those notions, but neither does it neglect the opportunity for unlimited intercessions prior to the operations of identity assumption. Such a radical priority alone, cannot constitute a General Conceptual Holography, especially when considering the contingency of both logical, and chronological or temporal, sequencings. But as methodological strategy, enabling nominally ‘radical’ considerations that nonetheless exceed the holding patterns of positivist fixation responsible for the blockages of contemporary thought, the tactic of declaring a more profound beginning, has the merit of introducing a fresh configuration of inquiry, unburdened by the insular expectations of habitual nostalgia, though without neglecting possible aetiologies of that nostalgia.
THE CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES AND IGNORANCE-GRIDS OF OCCIDENTAL POSITIVIST UNDERSTANDING: ARISTOTELIAN CATEGORY CAGES
Apparently, Big W, the Inuit have fifty words for snow. They could well regard Europeans as having “invented essentially zilch”, in comparison to themselves. ‘Zilch’, hides everything one is ignorant of; everything, outside of one’s channels of positivist preoccupation and emphasis.
The USA has a foundation of European-rejected extremities; Puritan and penal.
This background – Neoreaction and the All-Trite would call it ‘genetic’ – of religious and penal rejects, could well explain U.S. Americans extremist obsession with justification, whether in moral or other forms. It also explains the casuistical cast of its litigious propensities, with the sphere of reflexive legislation being exploited by ‘patent trolls’, for example. This boosts the market for nostalgic moral imagery, harking back to idealised simplicities, after the trials and tribulations of such ongoing exploitations.
Positivist approaches, done in exclusivist ways, usually lead to conditional reflexivity, which exclusivist habit is inequipped to deal with, being constrained by the inadequacy of its own stock of overstretched assumptions; all of which, usually results in a background of barely controlled and channelised, mass hysteria, which of course is an ongoing market of profitable anxieties to be assuaged.
When those channels of positivist assumption are habitual horizons of theoretical fixation, a particular kind of fundamentalism obtains, throughout all positions and contradictions on the surface which it governs. That positivist surface, is, the USA. If one wishes to understand it’s conditions, one has to transcend the fundamentalism of that surface. In fact, one has to transcend the entire Occident.