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NEON REGIMENTS OF MODERNITY
Neon Regiments of Modernity I – Introduction
“Samarkand, the Pangolin / Rina Sherman” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7nGdhh4lsI
Samarkand, the Pangolin / Rina Sherman
DER Micro-ethnographies, C19, 2020
https://www.der.org/micro-ethnographies/#rina-sherman
Pour plus d’informations :
http://www.rinasherman.com/…/samarkand_the_pangolin.html
Samarkand, the Pangolin / Rina Sherman
DER Micro-ethnographies, C19, 2020
https://www.der.org/micro-ethnographies/#rina-sherman
For more information:
http://www.rinasherman.com/…/samarkand_the_pangolin.html
Rina Sherman’s video ethnography of Samarkand evoked two associations.
One association was from an interview with US science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle.
The other association was to a Black Sabbath song, occasioned by the shared reference of neon lighting and the linked theme of modernity.
Through the analysis of the contents and implications of both associations, the epistemological mechanisms which the politics of fascism both exploits and through which it arises, are clearly shown.
I include a section on what I have called, “VacciNations” which is largely concerned with how so-called Western nations construct and exploit immigrant populations according to “the sociopolitics of ethnocultural vaccination”.
I include it because its contents seem to describe a “cultural logic of ethnopolitical vaccination” peculiar to European colonial imperialisms going back to the ancient Greeks.
Colonialism promotes more or less insidious social militarisation – the militarising of the social within imperialising nations.
It was a cultural logic, highly discernible, which my notes on “immigration-as-inoculation”, as it were, pointed to the contours of.
The notes were written from 2017 onwards.
So it was before Covid and doesn’t have anything at all to do with the pandemic of recent years.
I’ve brought them together, here in this writing, because they are confirmed by a quotation from Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks”, which I read recently in September (2022) in the Wikipedia article on “Martin Heidegger and Nazism”.
They are excessively confirmed – more than confirmed! – by the quote from Heidegger.
My notes merely delineate the cultural logic of what is observed.
Heidegger goes beyond that to justify the malicious intent suggested by the cultural logic of what is observed.
The virulent anti-Semitism shown in the Heidegger quotation shows the very conspiracising deviousness Heidegger and other antisemites usually try to project onto Jewish people.
It basically shows Heidegger as a geopolitical psychopath.
The 21st-century has seen a global resurgence in fascism together with all of the turgid output of intellectual inferiority usually associated with that fascism.
It began with so-called, “Speculative Realism” and its valorisation of common-sense through regression, essentially, to the categories and worldview of mediaeval realism.
Jordan Peterson and the rest of the so-called, “Intellectual Dark Web”, have subsequently come along to promote, essentially, the social psychology of that regression, though often spiced with other disciplinary flavours.
It’s basically the motivational marketing of fascist politics.
Consumer fascism.
Consumer fascism is the result of the culture of narcissism, itself increasingly inculcated by decades of consumer conditioning through marketing techniques.
It’s the outgrowth of implicitly catering to the figure of the sovereign consumer for whom the entire globe is presented as a conquest to be consumed.
And it is to be ‘simply’ consumed, according to the order of consumer preference; a.k.a. domestic markets where customers are always right no matter how wrong or ignorant they might be; a.k.a. the culture of narcissism.
The figure of the sovereign consumer is the designed effect arising out of the order of consumer preference.
That order of consumer preference is the designed effect arising out of the economics of self-interest.
The economics of self-interest is basically British economic theory arising alongside colonialism which it reflects to varying degrees.
That’s a quick, somewhat hasty, contextual genealogy of “consumer fascism”.
Interestingly, it shows or at least strongly suggests how fascism (or its Germanic version, Nazism) is coextensive with European colonialism and neocolonialism, in general.
~~~+~~~
Neon Regiments of Modernity II – Analytical Interpretations
Jerry Pournelle, right-wing science-fiction writer, mentions Samarkand in his 1979 interview with Charles Platt.
[Charles Platt, interviewer] “I feel honor-bound to tackle some of the aspects of his work that bother me the most For instance, I feel that his books suggest to young readers that complex social problems can be solved by using brute force. Does he ever worry about encouraging kids to indulge in power fantasies?”
[Jerry Pournelle] “If you are trying to tell me that I should not depict realistically the attractions of a properly run military outfit,” he replies, “you’re a fool. Because it can be damned attractive. Do you think I should exercise self-censorship and not let people know? In the movie version of Faustus. Richard Burton is on horseback in armor and he says, ‘Is it not a pleasant thing to be a king and ride in triumph to Samarkand?’ Should that line have been suppressed? Are you telling me that I shouldn’t tell people that there is a share of glory? It’s a damned attractive life; if it wasn’t, why would so many people want it?”
Charles Platt’s, “Dream Makers: Science Fiction and fantasy writers at work”, Xanadu Publications Ltd: 1987:p.14
~~~
Pournelle’s books were bestsellers, selling to the USA’s so-called “moral majority”, precursors of present-day Trump supporters; and looking at the power fantasy of the quote, it’s not hard to see why.
~~~
Not sure how to read the Rina Sherman video?
Is it Samarkand?
Has it (Samarkand) become an ant’s nest (pangolin) with the blocks of modernity?
Those blocks of modernity are neon-lit; “better days with friends and families again”? At 1:08 and 1:15.
Neon light is used to highlight texts and images.
It’s function is to transition those texts and images into another reality, an idealised reality, Hegelian sublimation into the mythic realms of modernity.
Resurrection through neon-lit, technological reproduction?
~~~
Black Sabbath, “Neon Knights” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pXLQF7Tdkc ; great song, but the lyrics are susceptible to different meanings.
Does the combination of European mediaeval imagery with modernity signify fascism?
Mediaevalism + Modernity = Fascism?
In the song: “Captains at the helm” vs “jackals of the street”?
Captain, is a rank, of military or police.
Who are the “jackals of the street”?
If the scenario is police versus criminal elements, why the need to cast police work as the naval heroism of another age? Given that “helm” suggests such an anachronism?
If the scenario is not of policing, then what is being captained? Paramilitary fascism?
~~~
So what do the three images and my readings of them -the Pournelle quote; Rina Sherman’s video; the Black Sabbath song – suggest?
The Pournelle quote shows similar romanticising of war as heroic, with its citing of Richard Burton about Samarkand, as do the lyrics of Black Sabbath’s, “Neon Knights”.
Elsewhere, in the same interview, Pournelle responds to a question about a scene in one of his own novels, where “deadbeats and social parasites” “are massacred by mercenaries”.
Interviewer Charles Platt writes, somewhat ironically: “Pournelle, however, does not see this as advocating violence as a permanent solution.”
Pournelle brings up the difference between temporary and permanent solutions in answer to the interviewer’s concern, “that it is the presentation of violence as an easy answer that bothers me most.”
So, by answering an issue subsidiary to the one expressed by the interviewer, Pournelle implicitly doesn’t reject “violence as an easy answer”, or at any rate, violence as an answer, whether “easy”, or not.
Elsewhere in the interview, he ridicules Asimov’s motto that, “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”, by saying “that only the incompetent wait until it’s the last refuge”, confirming his non-rejection of violence.
That aligns him with fascism.
That alignment together with his fondness for tightly run, small military units, aligns him with paramilitary fascism.
Shifting the meaning of “easy” from the interviewer’s question concerning the ease with which violence is selected, to the “difficulty” of permanent solutions requiring more than temporarily effective, violent actions, Pournelle elides the role of the political actor or agent in choosing decisively on violent action.
Pournelle’s elision of political subjectivity, then, by default, introduces violent action as an “objective” necessity; which is to say, an allegedly “objective” step necessary to both temporary and “permanent” solutions.
In Pournelle’s novel, the massacre of political opponents by mercenaries is presented as a temporary solution buying time for politicians to construct permanent solutions.
Pournelle’s semantic choices regarding the question of political violence:-
– the way that he shifts the meaning of the interviewer’s question to implicitly construct a background structure of nested presuppositions;
– a structure within which political decisions implementing violence are erased, are simply not considered, in exactly the way Pournelle doesn’t consider Charles Platt’s question;
– and within which structure, violent action can then simply be presented as “objective”, subjectively neutral, and necessary to solutions;
are highly significant.
Pournelle’s choice to shift the point of inquiry from the question of agency to the question distinguishing between temporary and permanent solutions is a shift to accepting unilateral violence as unquestionably and objectively necessary.
The implicit rationale is that it can’t be questioned simply because it has been presented as “objective”.
Pournelle is practising that rationale in his avoidance of the interviewer’s question.
“Facts don’t care about your feelings!”, is a functionally equivalent, expressive cliche, of that rationale, frequently used by contemporary US fascists.
It’s a cliche expressing not so much the objective conditions of nature, but, as Wittgenstein would say, “the limits of” it’s utterer’s “world”.
The most disturbing resonance, though, is the characterisation of unilateral violence as a political “solution”, a characterisation shared by both Hitler and Pournelle.
Both Pournelle’s reflex non-answer and his semantic shifting reduce unilateral violence to the impersonal objectivity of dehumanised mechanisms serving political “solutions”.
The theme of dehumanised mechanisms recalls Heidegger’s post-war critique of technology.
Heidegger’s only post-war comment on the Holocaust was a glancing reference listing the Nazi death camps as another instance of technological and industrial production.
Googling “Heidegger on the Holocaust”, in order to quickly check the only reference to the Holocaust in Heidegger’s published works prior to the “Black Notebooks”, were some articles referencing Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks”, which I hadn’t looked at, so clicked on the hyperlinks.
And there, in those “Black Notebooks”, was the evidence of Heidegger basically being a bog-standard, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.
“The enemy is one who poses an essential threat to the existence of the people and its members. The enemy is not necessarily the outside enemy, and the outside enemy is not necessarily the most dangerous. It may even appear that there is no enemy at all. The root requirement is then to find the enemy, bring him to light or even to create him, so that there may be that standing up to the enemy, and so that existence does not become apathetic. The enemy may have grafted himself onto the innermost root of the existence of a people, and oppose the latter’s ownmost essence, acting contrary to it. All the keener and harsher and more difficult is then the struggle, for only a very small part of the struggle consists in mutual blows; it is often much harder and more exhausting to seek out the enemy as such, and to lead him to reveal himself, to avoid nurturing illusions about him, to remain ready to attack, to cultivate and increase constant preparedness and to initiate the attack on a long-term basis, with the goal of total extermination [völligen Vernichtung].”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger_and_Nazism#Attitude_towards_Jews
~~~
Heidegger’s work on technology, too, is exactly like the comically self-refuting, conspiracy-mongers of US ignorance.
Heidegger both wants to claim that technology is somehow European only and even uniquely German, but then wishes to claim that it was only Jews as metaphysics’s accomplices who accelerated the devastating impact of technology and only the Germans fought against it.
“HEIDEGGER: I could put what is said in the quotation this way: I am convinced that a change can only be prepared from the same place in the world where the modern technological world originated. It cannot come about by the adoption of Zen Buddhism or other Eastern experiences of the world. The help of the European tradition and a new appropriation of that tradition are needed for a change in thinking. Thinking will only be transformed by a thinking that has the same origin and destiny.
SPIEGEL: At exactly the spot where the technological world originated, it must, you think …
HEIDEGGER: … be transcended [aufgehoben] in the Hegelian sense, not removed, transcended, but not by human beings alone.
SPIEGEL: Do you allocate a special task specifically to the Germans?
HEIDEGGER: Yes, in that sense, in dialogue with Hölderlin.
SPIEGEL: Do you think that the Germans have a specific qualification for this change?
HEIDEGGER: I am thinking of the special inner relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. This has been confirmed to me again and again today by the French. When they begin to think they speak German. They insist that they could not get through with their own language.”
Heidegger, M. ‘Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview (1966)’. Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, 1981, 62.
“Donatella Di Cesare writes: [I]t is no surprise that Heidegger should discuss the Shoah and consider it from both philosophical and political viewpoints. Selbstvernichtung—self-destruction—is the key word. [Heidegger’s] argument is that the Jews destroyed themselves, and no fingers should be pointed at anyone except the Jews themselves. . . .
Heidegger does no more than draw his conclusion from everything he has said previously. The Jews are the agents of modernity and have disseminated modernity’s evils. They have besmirched the spirit of the West, undermining it from within. Accomplices of metaphysics, the Jews have everywhere brought about the acceleration of technology. The charge could hardly be more serious. Only Germany, with her people’s iron cohesion, could stem the devastating impact of technology. This is why the global conflict was primarily a war of Germans against Jews. If the Jews were annihilated in the death camps, it was because of the mechanism that they fomented by plotting to achieve world domination. The link between technology and the Shoah should not be disregarded: it was Heidegger himself who alluded to it elsewhere. What is Auschwitz if not the industrialization of death, the “fabrication of corpses”?”
Heidegger on the Holocaust: The Jews Self-Destructed » Mosaic
https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2015/02/heidegger-on-the-holocaust-the-jews-self-destructed/
~~~
Of course, Heidegger himself would predictably try to defend his own self-contradictions using ad hoc, tautological arguments and assumptions, from the narrow confines of his ignorance-adjusted, self-serving mythology.
But does such adjustment to characteristic brands of colonial ignorance afflict all who are of European ethnicity and implicitly inculcated with colonial propaganda?
Is it the case that Europeans are unable to effectively critique Nazism and fascism because European culture and self-conceptions are radically entrenched forms of colonial propaganda, at the outset, and do not sufficiently differ from extremist political expressions such as Nazism and fascism, to which they gave rise?
It may well be impossible for those who have grown up within European cultures but without sufficient critical distance from them, to not be essentially “Nazi” and/or “fascist”?
Because both Nazism and fascism are basically domestic forms of colonial foreign policy.
It could be that European peoples, anyway imbued with colonial history and folk-cultural residues of colonial propaganda, are by default proto-Nazis and proto-fascists?
Certainly, that political opponents of so-called “left” and “right” wings are persistently engaged in mutual accusations of being Nazis and Fascists, suggests that Europeans of opposed political persuasions see each other in that way.
Could it be that they are both objectively right about each other?
In which case, they would all be Nazis and Fascists.
Is that why they then resort to the politics of subjectivity and narcissism, in order to deflect and defer objective truths about themselves?
The usual response of US Conservatives to being labelled as Nazi or fascist is to insinuate that the high-frequency of such label use becomes all-referring and so meaningless.
But it doesn’t become all-referring, because the USA and its political scene isn’t everything.
Equating the USA with totality is obviously narcissistic.
It’s a characteristic form of self-incurred, colonial ignorance.
The result of narcissistic cultural circulation within internal convolutions of colonial insularity.
~~~+~~~
Neon Regiments of Modernity III – Colonial Militarisation And Immigration Inoculation
~~~+~~~
VacciNations
Introductory notes to previously written notes on cultural logics of ethnopolitical vaccination.
The notes describe what can be called ‘the sociopolitics of ethnocultural vaccination and its characteristic administrative styles’.
Which does not merely designate the tracking of racist behaviour, bigotry, and racist policy.
It’s not a rubric necessarily limited to empirical sociology.
Empiricism itself can be susceptible to ethnic bias. Experimentation can be gamed in different ways and is bound or limited by the mindsets of the sorts of people experimenting.
Western nations have the problem of reconciling contemporary residues of colonial ideology (mindsets and habits) with the sanitised self-images of Occidental idealism and Western exceptionalism they like to promote.
It’s unfortunate that the three notes I’ve collected in this VacciNations section are so accurate in discerning what can arguably be called ‘the Occidental mindset’ as it’s shown in the Heidegger quote on creating an enemy.
~~~+~~~
Introduction to “Ethno-Vaccinatory Supplements 00”
“Ethno-Vaccinatory Supplements 00” talks about colonial and cultural militarisation, cultural militarisation being a corollary of, or respondent to, colonial militarisation.
The historical periodising of modernity is a form of cultural militarisation, a shell game of era-tic relabellings itself serving continuing shell games of colonial appropriation and acquisition.
It goes on to talk about colonial militarisation in the form of immigration policy functioning according to intersecting logics of experimental testing and ethnic vaccination.
~~~+~~~
“Ethno-Vaccinatory Supplements 00”
Anyone can be racist or xenophobic, as an individual. But that’s completely different to the sedimented and structural implementations produced by histories of colonial militarisation that give scope to certain forms of racism or nationalism, but not others.
Colonial militarisation produces default racism.
Cultural modernity is an attempt to otherwise evade, cover-up, or redistribute, the iniquities produced by colonial militarisation.
It attempts to do this through temporal zoning of historical periodicity – ‘modern’, ‘pre-modern’, ‘post modern’, et cetera.
These are forms of cultural militarisation, distributions of time as the constructions of historical periodicity. The process of cultural militarisation is commercialised as fashion and lifestyle eras and epochs – the 1960s; the 1970s; the 1980s; ‘classic rock’; et cetera.
Colonial militarisation retains ‘ethnic minorities’ as vaccinatory supplements, self-consciously and tactically practising surfaces of equity policy with regard to those supplements, whilst simultaneously and systematically misrepresenting those supplements and their historical constitution.
By tactically distributing contemporary constructions along with historical misrepresentations, supplements are kept in limbos of contemporary fiction more easily susceptible to policy redistribution.
~~~+~~~
Introduction to “IT ISN’T REALLY ‘SHOCKING’ AT ALL”
“IT ISN’T REALLY ‘SHOCKING’ AT ALL”, talks about the ‘Third World’ being held hostage by a ‘First world’ militarised economic system and how “Third World immigrant populations” in those “first world” nations, are socio-politically functionalised, in varying ways.
~~~+~~~
IT ISN’T REALLY ‘SHOCKING’ AT ALL
The ‘Third World’ is held hostage in an essentially militarised economic system that extracts far more from them, than it returns. Immigrant populations in ‘first world countries’ operate, through their cultural inflation by the media, as vectors of vaccinatory pretext; ethno-barometric logics used to engineer continuity of exploitation, under the sign of its opposite.
This is assimilation; business; and beetles; British invasion; Anglo assimilation.
Temporality of the temperate; temporality duress of a harsher climate; produces a default framing or opportunistic picturing, according to exploitation.
Vaccinatory logic, immunising host nation with ‘administrations of the colonised’; administerings of scapegoating, too.
In cultures that privilege military invasion of others, that invasiveness forms a culture.
Britain gives more foreign aid than all of the EU combined. Harvey interprets this as a control system, he’s probably right.
France extracts 50 billion a year in colonial tax, from Africa.
~~~+~~~
Introduction to “Victims of Vaccinatory Inoculation”
“Victims of Vaccinatory Inoculation”, explores how oppression of ethnic others is reflexively mined, over and over again, for controversy that is contrived, contained, and profitable.
It explores how oppression of ethnic others is continuously mined for content that can be fed into simplistic structures of dispute susceptible to more iniquitous misrepresentations; more sensationalist inflations serving both political and media exploitations; leading to the monetising of both ethnic oppression and the effects of that oppression.
Right-wing political scaremongering is the instrument through which ethnic oppression is monetised and the marketing of mutual hate is promoted.
The contrived nature of structural oppression and monetisation of that oppression. through systematic scaremongering and scapegoating, is the politics of sadism.
It’s a politics of sadistic contrivance always requiring an enemy to victimise.
The third tweet of “Twitter – Victims of Vaccinatory Inoculation” outlines how European and Euro-[Continent or Nation Name] invention of threats and enemies is produced through what can be called “enmity engineering”, which is how European nations and European-derived nations sustain divide and rule policy through production and deployment of social hostility.
~~~+~~~
Twitter – Victims of Vaccinatory Inoculation
01) I’ve written about positioning of social justice discourses, before.
So-called, “woke” discourse, is merely ideological inoculation by forces of mainstream oppression.
It’s vaccinatory.
It’s all about mainstream gumbos miming imaginary dissent against themselves.
02) It’s a game of dress-up and talentless noise by mainstream morons engineered to pre-empt development of genuinely oppositional discourse.
Its social function is release of mainstream gumbo tensions and dissatisfactions in thematically entertaining ways.
03) Mainstream gumbos hate themselves, so they like to lose themselves in identifying with those they victimise.
Caricaturing victims to the extent of inventing yet another threat or enemy, gives them pretexts to continue victimising.
~~~
01)
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1501972157529743364?s=20&t=RJ0J4FgRA_F9Un13fs6SgQ
02)
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1501984192770592775?s=20&t=RJ0J4FgRA_F9Un13fs6SgQ
03)
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1501985600643248130?s=20&t=RJ0J4FgRA_F9Un13fs6SgQ
~~~+~~~
Afterword
By randomly commenting through the medium of social media, first-order observational commentary is produced.
Some theorising might occur, but it’s not overly programmatic.
Interestingly, though, the buildup of observational commentary over time gives rise to recurrent themes, or ‘theoremes’, so to speak.
Individual comments sometimes become strong exemplars or explications of a theoreme, or junctions instantiating multiple lines of thematic and theoretic concern.
Because all of this emerges out of (social) media res, so to speak or write, quite naturally and without prior programmatic intent, it could be considered social media anthropology, within the loosely techno-theory discursive contexts of my usual writing.
So, there’s something of the flavour of scientific chronicle involved.
To detect or discern resonances of the same theoreme in variously juxtaposed posts of social media received in one’s “newsfeed”, that are otherwise unrelated to each other, functions as confirmation of sorts within the growing bounds of such scientific chronicling.
It’s a form of theoretic recognition, that the theme concerned has empirical validity, to the extent of being somewhat objective.
The title of the essay, “Neon Regiments of Modernity”, obviously tracks the history of social militarisation – the militarisation of the social – together with its political expressions in fascism and Nazism.
The subtitles, “Colonial Militarisation And Immigration Inoculation” and “VacciNations”, likewise obviously refers to the ways that highly militarised regimes order ethno-spatiotemporal, geographic distributions.
Initial development of the title and subtitle themes wasn’t problematic, in any way.
They seemed obvious to me and validity wasn’t in question.
But considering reactionary receptions, it was easy to list the hackneyed forms of those reactive receptions.
There is a typology of ‘Occidental android’ objections, so to speak, because those objections are mechanical.
Refuting such “bad faith” objections isn’t interesting, so the Heidegger “Black Notebooks” quote (“On Creating an Enemy”) was useful – to say the least – in showing how the title and subtitle themes of “Neon Regiments of Modernity” are, unfortunately, in no way exaggeration or hyperbole.
“Neon Regiments of Modernity” was written, excepting this afterword and one or two corrections, between September and November in 2022. Thinking it required more revision work, together with a host of other factors, I didn’t get round to completing it.
The concerns it addresses are important, too, so there was an obligation to get it right, to express all the relevant points whilst showing the coherence of the determining relations involved.
On reading it through, it seemed the necessary work had been done at the outset and that some sort of compositional unity obtained.
An important point which I forgot to write in the main text concerns how Jerry Pournelle was compelled to resort to a Hollywood-distributed film in order to justify his glorification of violence and war.
He didn’t use an actual war in his justification, even though he had personal experience of the Korean War.
But that might be the reason why.
As he says, “I had been through a pretty miserable war”.
Shuttling between glory and misery, his personal psychology of war seems to be a somewhat schizoid, bipolar alternation.
GENEALOGY OF CONSPIRACY
Some recent tweets on conspiracy on the occasion of Nick Land mentioning the topic on Twitter.
As a preliminary, it might be worth adding some comments to the developing “genealogy of conspiracy” some of my writings seem to have outlined.
In the words of David Porush, “Paranoia is epistemology gone wild.”
Conspiracy is the social or communal form of paranoia.
There is a considerable literature on the intrinsic links between paranoid conspiracy and Protestantism, that is, Protestant Christianity; between paranoid conspiracy and US American political culture.
Conspiracy usually links with images of Kafkaesque bureaucracy, updated to relevant contexts.
The USA does that kind of thing constantly; “X-Files”; UFO literature; et cetera; it all feeds into the love-hate relationship US citizens have with US government.
It’s a schizoid identification, because the government is elected by, constituted from, and represents, US citizens; so essentially, US government is the political face of US citizenry; but simultaneously it is hated by that selfsame US citizenry.
This shows that the people of the USA have a love-hate relationship with themselves, through the mediating detour of political imaging and imagination.
Looked at in that way, it explains a lot about US culture and its peoples.
~~~
The genealogy of modern conspiracy begins with English anti-Semitism, which in many ways is the initiating and governing model of all subsequent sorts of conspiracy.
It’s why all Anglo-American, folk-manufactured intrigues, always seem to reference one or more moments of antisemitism, somewhere in their articulations.
It could just be that the Anglo-American imaginary of “Others” traces the chronology in which Anglo-Saxons encountered those “Others” – Greeks? Romans? Then Hebrews?
What about Moorish Spain, though? Does that fit the interpretation?
The central point, though, is the characteristically inordinate cultural inflations of those initial “Others”, by Anglo-Saxons, in comparison to other receptions around the world, by other peoples and cultures.
Or in other words, the exaggerated caricatures of Anglo-Saxon insularity, in comparison with the more modest images of informed, cosmopolitan pluralism?
Looked at in this way, it is then possible to see Northern European modernity and the ways that it packages culture in modular forms – catering to insular perspectives, assumed to be ignorant, at the outset – as intrinsically based on the propaganda of modularised, cult mythology.
That’s why “Logan’s Run” was a social metaphor not so much of the future but of the contemporary USA.
“Tellingly”, cultural others or Otherness, are/is only imagined as forbidden and irradiated wasteland, obliterated by atomic weapons.
Which, of course, unavoidably, or “incontournably”, as Derrida would say, recalls Heidegger’s observation: “Rather than not will, it wills nothing (destruction) at all.”
This is of course Heidegger on Man, or at any rate, on Western Man and on that Western Man’s addiction to wilful or obstinate ignorance. An addiction that Western Man traces to the extent of self-destruction, as Heidegger says.
Schopenhauer, however, short-circuits the Heideggerian quandary of Occidental voluntarism:
“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)
The Buddhist transcendence of all knowledge is the transcendence of epistemology and thus of paranoia and conspiracy, too.
~~~
Here are the tweets:
01) Sol Yurick says that conspiracy begins with the ancient Greeks, which means that “the West” or Occident is conspiracy.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496102145048858627?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
01a) Yurick, Sol. ‘How the Athenians Planned to Colonize the Mind of the West and Immortalize Themselves’. Social Text, no. 23 (1989): 29. https://doi.org/10.2307/466420.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/466420
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496102395755044871?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
02) The world has increasingly been run according to conspiracy for nearly a millennium – that’s when anti-Semitism begins, as the governing model of conspiracy.
It’s one in which only the wolf screams wolf, incessantly and at everyone else but itself.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496103584118804481?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
03) Nick Land wants to employ social division in the service of more productivity and profit whilst ignoring the costs of social alienation. That’s basically his so-called “techno-commercialism”, in a “nut’s hell”.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496104509311012871?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
04) Land doesn’t seem to realise the radicalisation of social division exceeds the linking powers of productivity and profit casuistry and only produces insurmountable incommensurability.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496105317544955904?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
05) The initially Anglo-Saxon “peasantry” vs. Norman “elite”, English conspiracy industry, was a founding puritan export to the USA where it flourished without limitation.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496106015439396866?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
06) Through the British Empire and US imperialism, the entire globe has been flattened into unidimensional phobic networks of paranoia.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496106536594247683?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
07) Conspiracy is the dominant social mode of the USA.
It’s the folk epistemology of the USA, it arises from “the folk”.
The internet unleashed a transplanted and reserved chronology – the Middle Ages – residing in the folk mediaevalism and regressive religiosity of the USA.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496107192872808450?s=20&t=1hgCJoT9s5SwkfBnYBQGYA
CONQUESTS OF NOTHINGNESS: IMPERIALISMS OF THE VOID
Basically, delimitation instantly creates infinite proliferation.
But Western or Occidental metaphysics, which is basically ancient Greek metaphysics, doesn’t like infinity. The ancient Greeks liked odd numbers, not even numbers, because they thought even numbers led to infinity.
Occidental thought didn’t find infinity to be thinkable or desirable.
So, Western theology and metaphysics were reduced to the language of this lack of understanding.
There is a sequence of Western sociocultural presences in which signs of the infinite are permitted and even encouraged. Usually within the formalisms of mathematics and the mysticisms of religious and fantasy, cultures and genres.
Even in contemporary times, the infinite is usually considered in terms of its operational values within contexts of mundane practicality.
It’s within such contexts of mundane practicality, that the West discovered its raison d’etre and it’s within such contexts that it developed the obsession with reality, with what was real and what wasn’t; what could be done and what couldn’t.
It led to what could be called, ‘Promethean theology’, to coin a phrase.
The West or Occident is always trying to do creation ex nihilo.
Always trying to mimic the only God conceivable from its characteristic brand of stubborn ignorance.
That characteristic brand produces as corollary, the characteristic impulse of Western theology and its subsidiary social and disciplinary expressions.
The brand and impulse of the metaphysical model of creation ex nihilo – that “out of nothingness” – is the so-called, “nihilism”, which is the characteristic metaphysical sign of “modernity” and other cultural formations of the Occident.
The chance to “begin again”, as the blimp advertising “off world” emigration, declares, in the film, Blade Runner.
But the chance to “begin again”; “to be reborn” as evangelical Christianity would have it; to “watch out for worlds behind you” as Nico sings with the Velvet Underground; all of these constitute the usual existential semiotics of modernist rupture, which itself is the corollary of Christian apocalypse.
The West does all of this because the counterposition of nothingness enables the positioning of totality for “full-spectrum domination”, as the USA likes to say.
It’s only from the position of nothingness that the totality becomes available.
If the totality is desired, then there is nothing “left over”, so to speak, from the object of desire.
Nothing except the desirer, of course; but the desirer, consumed by a totalitarian desire because of the desire for totality, necessarily forgets itself as an object and is consumed by the totality of its desire. It loses itself in the principle of its own conquest; in the principle of “full-spectrum domination” to which the totality is expected to submit.
It’s probably the case that the European mind never recovered from the so-called, Dark Ages, and the mediaeval period wasn’t exactly a picnic, either. I’ve written, or mentioned, before, about the characteristic “deprivation anxiety” afflicting Northern European psychology.
Looking at the crucible of historical forces it becomes possible to discern the incubation of such affliction and the inculcation of a hysteria of avarice which finds contemporary expression in the spectacles and stagings of consumerism – in consumer society and consumer desire.
The West has been so busy trying to disingenuously deny its “anxiety of influence” (see Harold Bloom) with respect to non-Western cultures and to always “begin again”, that it has got stuck in a cycle of constant and whimsical renewal, stuck in the treadmill of ever-ending trends reflecting only the superficiality of the Occidental mind and that Occidental culture is an oxymoron, the culture of no culture.
This is because its essence is stalled at the nihilistic moment of its totalising mission.
Totalising can mean both destruction (in the vernacular) and summing.
Destruction is commonly said to result in nothing.
It’s the subtraction of a structure.
Summing is the summing of all structures, leaving “nothing” as the remainder.
The nihilistic calculus of destruction is positioned with regard to the voluntary, to Occidental voluntarism, by Heidegger: “Rather than not will, it wills nothing (destruction) at all” Heidegger
Schopenhauer, however, short-circuits the Heideggerian quandary of Occidental voluntarism:
“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)
It’s an interesting roundabout of metaphysical motifs that have gathered themselves together in this disquisition on delimitation and its history of metaphysical effects, one of which is the very notion of history, itself. So, anachronistic retrogression or retrogressive anachrony?
History is contingent on time; time is contingent on temporal delimitation.
QUICK COMMENT ON THE SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF PROTESTANT MODERNITY AND ITS ECONOMICS
Protestant economics is predicated on the motivational drivers of selfishness and envy in the service of the nation’s economy and wealth.
So by harnessing the “bad” towards the “good”, it might be thought that the “good” has cleverly triumphed by transforming the “bad” into a labour of the production of the “good”, according to its casuistical dialectics or dialectical casuistry?
But this neglects the very success of that dialectical system in becoming a new set of sociopolitical standards and constituting a new norm.
It’s success transforms what was initially the clever but resigned exploitation of the “bad” – which in any case is produced – into a systematic necessity for the “bad” which then incentivises and increases the production of the “bad”.
These dialectical shufflings and transformations between “good” and “bad” are the sociological result of economic necessity that is in line with profitability strategy serving ideas of wealth.
It is interesting to note the frequent reversal of literal meanings in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular vocabulary of approval, where words literally denoting “badness” (including the word “bad”) are used to refer to the “good” or “goodness”.
This shows the malleability and mobility of moral evaluation characterising such social structures.
It’s a disciplined socius instantly responsive to the needs of military economy.
It’s why Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultures are indisputably the world’s most prolific and paranoid producers of conspiracy.
That conspiracy industry is the sign that Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so-called, “civilian” cultures are pre-militarised, militarised in advance.
That general form of militarisation is the real result of “modernity”, a result that has unfortunately become a global model.
NATIONALIST VIRTUE SIGNALLING IN THE MILKING SHED, BUT HAS THE CRYPTOCURRENCY CAT GOT THE CREAM?
It’s not by accident that the notion of “virtue signalling” has become so central in contemporary political and cultural debates.
On the one hand, sections of the domestic population, the so-called, “working classes”, and other ostensibly disadvantaged social echelons, usually seek social approval and communion through patriotic expressions which are the “virtue signalling” of nationalism and ethnonationalism.
This kind of “nationalist virtue signalling” serves multiple purposes.
The fervency of “nationalist virtue signalling” is an area in which the stridency of “working class” expressions attains equality or even superiority over the usually more moderate or genteel expressions of the other social classes.
This constitutes an egalitarian component of populist nationalism.
The second purpose is more complex and stratified involving the fact that overt patriotism is most usually characteristic of wars between nations.
So what could in a sense be construed as working class appropriation of overt patriotism, functions as a double reminder; of those wars between nations; and as a warning to the more privileged classes who might be distracted by international indulgences into forgetting national obligations.
The link between war and warning constitutes another metonymic layer of reminder and veiled threat.
So populist nationalism produces multiple forms of symbolic compensation for the so-called, “working classes”, et al.
It could be interpreted as the reigning in of internationalist and cosmopolitan, interests and cultures, what is commonly called “globalisation”, by locally bound nationalisms?
Given the globetrotting antics of antiglobalist proponents, though, it’s obvious that more than fidelity to geographical locale is at play.
In the 20th century, the global mobility of capital in contrast to the fixed locality of labour was a common theme.
The global mobility of capital meant that capital could source labour anywhere on the globe.
Traditionally, the reverse wasn’t true, labour could not easily relocate anywhere on the globe.
So capital had the global mobility advantage over labour.
But the internet has given international communication to all, including labour and the “working classes”.
The internet has given global mobility to “fixed locality”, it has given it to the fixed locality of nationalism as against the global mobility of capital.
What has happened is that the ideology of locality has both informationalised and internationalised itself as the globally mobilised, international politics of nationalism.
It was only to be expected and it is quite logical.
If capital used the global mobility of internationalism to escape local obligations, the escape route it was using was precisely the inter-, the between, criss-crossing the borderlines, so to speak, between the nations.
Obviously, from that borderline realm of “between the nations”, capital can have its profits run along to offshore, tax havens. Tax havens being the epitome of evading local obligations of nations.
But this borderline realm of “between the nations” is the necessary concomitant of “nations”, themselves. Without nations, obviously there cannot be any ‘inter-nationalism’.
So, if nations are the ‘milking sheds of capital’, so to speak, which of course they are, then it obviously makes a lot of sense to exercise strategic interventions of power in those ‘milking shed’, nations.
Labour is using exactly the limitation of locality that capital has always exploited to labour’s disadvantage, as an international rallying cry of internet-driven, chaotic information clusters, that have been replaying all of the tropes of populist nationalism with such dramatic and farcical force, that entire governments and the courses of nations have been radically altered.
The irony, of course, is that of localism having to use detours of the very internationalism it is trying to condemn. But internationalism is no longer the only escape route for mobile capital. In a hyper- connected world, the difference between localism and globalism is moot if the information from both sources is equally accessible.
That is why so much energy and effort has gone into cryptocurrency.
It’s another escape route for mobile capital, which requires new horizons of secrecy.
GAMES OF NEOLIBERAL REALITY AND FASCIST FICTIONS FOR RIGHT-WING ROBOTS AND CONSERVATIVE ANDROIDS
Are you going to blame the “neoliberal consensus” for the first, US Civil War, and for the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan?
What does “neoliberal consensus” mean, exactly, anyway, given that Democrats, Republicans, and Trump supporters, can all represent themselves as “fighting for freedom”, in some way or another, and therefore can technically all be called “liberal”, notwithstanding the fact that two of those groups don’t self-identify as liberal and use it as a negative epithet for the other group that does so self-identify?
Googling the question, this article, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot , gives a quick and magisterial survey of the relevant factors and relations.
What is called, the “neoliberal consensus”, is basically government by corporate capitalism.
Corporate capitalism is a practice and ideology intrinsically predicated on colonial economics and extraction.
The East India company has often been called the first corporation. That’s obviously colonialism.
So have the Knights Templar been called the first corporation. That’s obviously a sort of colonialism, too, resource and capital extraction from foreign markets.
It was obvious, at least to me, in the last century, that contemporary scenarios could occur.
They were guaranteed to occur given the onion-like layers of colonial propaganda constituting the base but convoluted norms of so-called, “Western nations”.
Corporate capitalism has to exploit someone or something, somewhere, in order to accrue profits significant enough to attract investment.
The colonial or neocolonial model of extraction is always the governing ideal of corporate capitalism, of Occidental, or western and middle eastern forms of capitalism, in general.
It’s a habitual and historical instinct, deep in the Occidental psyche.
So, if Western economies cannot impoverish foreign natives in foreign lands so as to accrue profits, or if they have done so and there is no more surplus value to be extracted; then the Western hunger for profits is going to colonise and feed on the domestic population’s wealth.
But the domestic population, though resenting such exploitation, is going to be caught up in a moral bind due to its own complicity in colonialism – in (neo-)colonial ideology and (neo-)colonial benefits.
In the same way that European governments had the difficulty of reconciling colonial wealth extraction with international laws concerning private property, domestic populations of Western nations enriched through colonialism and neocolonialism have the problem of trying to exempt themselves from being colonised by the very processes that they otherwise have a history of happily subscribing to and benefiting from.
European governments solved the problem of reconciliation by noting that European nations themselves were colonised by imperial forces, at the outset.
The reconciliation attains a consistency of sorts, but at the expense of enshrining imperialism and injustice as governing values.
That obviously militates against all of the nonsense propaganda produced by European nations and colonial extensions, such as the USA, concerning justice.
The domestic populations of Western nations, though statistically supportive of the view that colonialism was beneficial to those who were colonised, seem hypocritically reluctant to engage in similar colonial relations with their own governments and corporations.
So those domestic populations are caught in contradictory commitments; on the one hand, they identify with the forces of colonial or colonising capital; but, on the other hand, they are opposing the corporate forces of colonial or colonising capital, in so far as those forces are directed at them.
Identification is usually ethno-national; opposition is based on capital relations such as ownership and finance, usually according to some other associated form of class grouping.
Corporate forces deploy racism and nationalism, leveraging ethnonational identification as a distraction from oppositions based on ownership, finance, and other associated, class divisions.
Domestic populations of Western nations, or more precisely of those Western nations caught up in colonial and neocolonial relations, are thus on the cusp of the contradiction between the ethnonational identification identifying domestic populations with colonial exploiters and the property divisions identifying those same domestic populations with the colonised and exploited.
Domestic populations of Western nations, thus inhabit a schizophrenic, socio-economic position.
It’s a position that naturalises hypocrisy for those domestic populations as default behaviour.
The biggest market in the US mediascape is that of European-Americans who wish to believe in the twisted worlds of romanticised and revisionist colonial propaganda and call it “history”.
Note how all of the historical fantasy that those people seem to like carefully avoids the colonial era.
Most of it is mediaevalism, apartheid temporality, apartheid fantasy history.
It’s natural that such a market wishes to avoid narratives of its own villainy, however accurate those narratives might be.
And so it is that such market desire becomes the architect of apartheid fantasy history and of a new sort of commodity mnemonics, one that can be delivered in increasing HD, in 3-D, eventually as a holographic sensorium and artificial environment rivalling or even exceeding the resolution of reality itself!
This then is the ultimate escapism, into the commodity mnemonics of apartheid fantasy history!
It’s a commodity mnemonic environment driven by algorithms of Euro-American, ethnic anxiety, the crafted data of what right-of-centre, Euro-Americans, call “race realism”.
One, where eventually, in accord with the stringency to not cause European-American anxiety, ethnic otherness is carefully reintroduced into apartheid fantasy history as the themed spice of carefully categorised, commodity mnemonic exotica.
Everything is processed according to those commodity mnemonic machines driven by market desire and Euro-American, ethnic anxiety.
The USA as racialised regiments of productivity*; the so-called, right-wing, Euro-American regiments, constantly faultfinding with regard to non-Euro-American regiments, masking the faultfinding as the somehow de rigueur behaviour of free-market competition and free expression.
It’s all game theory and if the USA always and invariably proceeds according to game theory predicated on concepts of self-interest, then does the concept of the game itself take on the role of the real?
It seems obvious that it does, given the tu quoque robotics of US citizen response!
Very much a robotics of full commitment, there never seems to be any hint of awareness of anything beyond the games played.
* The USA dream consists of what is supposed to be the morality of equal opportunity in conjunction with what is supposed to be the meritocracy of devotion to and competence at productivity games.
ELECTRONIC SHOW BUSINESS AND THE THEATRICKS OF MICRO-FEUDALISM
{01} The notion of internationalism or cosmopolitanism segueing easily between nations is only going to be a viable reality for those possessing the necessary articles of entrance to such internationalisms.
{02}The qualifying conditions necessary to facilitate access to internationalism are of course visas and Visa cards, official documents of international bureaucracy and money, but there are other protocols of cosmopolitanism, too.
{03} If the problem is that because of the Internet, communication is international and instant, but a lot of the mindsets communicating over that Internet are irredeemably insular and ignorant – then that produces a “global village”, indeed!
But though Marshall McLuhan predicted that electronic environments would produce or reproduce tribalism, he didn’t say that those tribalisms would necessarily be nice.
{04} “Local yokel” and “hillbilly” workforces, globally, are set and maintained within highly regulated physical and psychological environments, within consumer land and mind -scapes catering towards all the usual consumer desires that themselves cater to the fascist unconscious.
The expectations of consumer desire begin to model and configure political expectations.
{05} Traditional forms of consumer desire are answered by commodity products which exercise no other reciprocity than the payment of capital. No greater or wider forms of responsibility are required, than those attaching to consumption and commodity transaction.
{06} But are the protocols of consumer culture sufficient to constitute models of citizenship conducive to any kind of political stability beyond those of consumer self-interest?
In the USA, the answer seems to be an unequivocal, ‘No’!
{07} The oscillation seems to be between consumerism and fascism, with consumer advertising exploiting tropes of the fascist unconscious.
There’s a history, a backstory, a context, to the contemporary architectures of carefully crafted ignorance and irresponsibility currently assailing the USA.
{08} Christian banning of usury was the banning of not only financial speculation but of the imaginary of financial speculation. That is to say, the imaginary of financial speculation leading to merchant power and bourgeois (conceptions of) freedom.
Without that imaginary of financial speculation, feudal relations are retained as hegemonic.
The concept of lordship (Christ is referred to as “Lord”) and the “divine right of kings” link both feudalism and religion, reinforcing the hegemony of feudal relations.
{09} Because Judaism was not bound by the ban on usury, Hebrews were not bound by feudal relations in quite the same way as Christians. So Hebrews were coerced into fulfilling a role within the Norman imaginary of financial speculation serving the needs of sovereign, Treasury, and state; probably in that order.
Norman sovereigns used Hebrews to circumvent the Christian banning of usury in order to administer state finance.
Cromwell and Britain’s bourgeois merchants encouraged the readmission of Hebrews into England on the basis of the international power of Jewish trade networks and the Protestant belief that the second coming of Christ was contingent on conversion of the Jews to Christianity.
{10} So Cromwell and Britain’s bourgeois merchants were then able to access the international imaginary of financial speculation through the power of Jewish trade networks.
This reinforced bourgeois merchant power taken from the nobility and King and created the beginnings of new channels of revenue, primarily colonial in nature.
Colonial revenues financed bourgeois projects of industrialisation and the emergence of modernity.
Feudal relations retracted themselves to make room for bourgeois relations, the merchant relations of capital and investment.
{11} This had the effect of displacing rural peasantry from the land and relocating them in the workhouse and factory. It was in these new locations of workhouse and factory, that the components of prefabricated consumer heavens, of predesigned heavenly consumption, were produced.
Rumbling along and shunting off the tracks of industrial logic called “assembly lines”, countless replicas of any sort of consumer heaven could be conveyed.
{12} The mise en scène or staging of imperialism was available to everyone through the crowning glory of consumerism – everyone could be a tyrant in their own castle, so to speak.
Castles and crowns, could be bought, both as toy facsimiles and as real things that could be bought on the market. Impoverished nobility were selling their castles in the 1970s.
All of that, together with this or that philosophy bolstering up concepts of the sovereign individual; and new markets began to arise, catering to those new micro-feudalisms and sovereigns.
{13} With so many imperious sovereigns of the new sorts of selfhood, ruling over so many micro-feudalisms, the stages of modernity were set to host the dramatics of multiple feuds, between all of those imperious sovereigns.
There is more than one reason why the genre of which “Game of Thrones” is a contemporary instance is so popular with the masses.
{14} In feudal times, “internationalism” usually meant wars of religion and resources, not the smooth and un-ruffled cosmopolitanism of airport lounges and modern city states.
The Internet has enabled the theatricks of micro-feudalism to hold hostage the impersonal bureaucracy of modern states, to hold hostage the model of the modern state, itself.
{15} The theatricks of micro-feudalism is the default consumer reality accessible to everyone.
But that theatricks was based on industrial replication; assembly-line reproduction; on what someone like Baudrillard might call ‘the simulacra of consumerism’.
{16} So, in a sense there are ‘simulacra sovereigns’, each catered to out of industrial processes presupposing the remote individuality of the psyches that industry marketing is directed towards alleviating the alienations of.
{17} So, taking into consideration the element of impersonal bureaucracy characterising modern states; it begins to seem as though industrial modernity and ‘the simulacra of consumerism’ constructed to alleviate the alienations of that industrial modernity and its characteristically impersonal bureaucracy; are the basis for a granular reemergence of feudalism as “the theatricks of micro-feudalism”.
{18} Economic inequality is conducive to promoting social differences structurally similar to feudal organisation.
Bourgeois merchants or the bourgeoisie, were able to displace governing feudal structures of sovereignty and nobility through the economic and military powers that they were able to deploy.
{19} So, if economic power is central to the development of modernity and to citizenship within that modernity, then does economic inequality necessarily produce different kinds of citizenship?
Does economic inequality produce social inequality in conditions of modernity?
{20} And if such is the case, are counter-movements towards personality over the impersonal; and “the theatrics of micro-feudalism” over the modern, only forms of expected, mass social response, given market conditioning, et cetera?
{21} It’s very much the case that in the USA, there seems to be a virtually pathological avoidance of the impersonal; indeed, an avoidance of any objectivity not susceptible to the easy personalisation and simplicity of common discourse characterising market advertising.
{22} So, the virtual pathology of avoiding the impersonal, results in the pathological, conflict-ridden “theatricks of micro-feudalism”, a theatricks of both “personal virtuality” and “virtual personality”, trolling and politicising its way over the Internet and World Wide Web.
{23} It’s a politics of feudalism; yes, the old sort of feudalism!
But it’s been processed into reconstituted and instant feudalism granules, all of it swirling around and dissolving into cups and mugs (faces? social media) of electronic show business!
{24} And that ‘electronic show business’?
How much more “society of the spectacle” can it get, than “social media”?
Social media, where society and spectacle coincide.
CONTOURS (con tourisms) OF OCCIDENTAL POSITIVISM
I think there’s an article somewhere associating Michel Foucault with so-called, ‘neoliberalism’.
Postmodern and poststructuralist critiques, whether of Marxism or anything else, are important qualifying stages of epistemological, ontological, and other forms of, reflexivity; forms of reflexivity that require more than just practical, pragmatic, or Occidental-theoretical, understandings.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Instead, there have been all kinds of reactive epistemology, things like ‘speculative realism’; object-oriented ontology; and even the various cults of immanence, some of which attach themselves to Deleuze and Guattari.
It’s interesting that someone like Nick Land preferred the seeming tangibility of Deleuze and Guattari, instead of what he saw as the ‘academic formalism’ of Derrida. It’s obvious that he did not understand Derrida.
It’s then interesting to see his taking up with right-wing politics, something that is arguably not at all disconnected from his philosophical preferences and dislikes.
In my own work, of course, I have observed a general movement that can be called Occidental positivism, which probably isn’t that far away from Derrida’s logocentrism.
The entire Occident is caught up in its own ‘brand’ of positivism which proceeds according to its distinctly ‘marked’ epistemology, in one direction only. It knows of no other way but this proprietary and unilinear herding of knowledge.
This is why it could not solve the paradox of desire, because it was spellbound by the hypostatic and substantialising atrophy of its own principle of desire, which it could only image as the loveless invariance of servile control.
It is this age-old image of imperial security, intrinsically belonging to the West, that is attempting to rehabilitate and readjust itself according to its ridiculous philosophical exhaustions, dressed as rhetorics of immanence.
These shapes of contemporary reaction and how they show themselves all describe some of the contours of Occidental positivism.
THE JUNGLE OF WHITE DECEPTIONS
If the task of lifting the automobile and tipping it over was an idealised picture of multiracial cooperation –though there did seem to be more white faces than black ones – then the heavy responsibility of destroying the automobile was initiated and mostly continued by white males.
There’s a sense in which an expression of Afro-American discontent has been hijacked by the white majority. Is it because the protest concerns an Afro-American individual, that in the eyes of white, ‘United States of America’, Afro-Americans are responsible for everything done in the name of the protest?
So whatever the respective motivations might be; white solidarity with black lives; inchoate white frustration with no other platform or outlet; the desire to construct an historical event; or just eagerness to engage with the excitement of a public event; the theme of Afro-American oppression actually serves as theme park for the psychopathology of white, US American, entertainment and disaffection?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fNao9-HxR0
~~~
Lions and tigers exploited at petting zoos.
What’s going on with the exploitation of lions and tigers at so-called, ‘petting zoos’?
Huge profits are produced at these stations of zoological sentiment.
How is it that so many US citizens, all across the USA, can afford the exorbitant prices of this kind of conspicuous consumption, are happy to fund a bloated health-insurance industry whose inefficiency has been priced at two trillion dollars over twelve years, yet are resentful at the idea of funding free healthcare for all?
Is it the paranoid, US American psyche, trying to identify with the power symbolics of predation through sentimental relations with its infant form?
~~~
01) “Business Insider reports:
Three former US servicemen and self-proclaimed members of the far-right “boogaloo” movement were arrested on domestic terrorism charges and accused of carrying unregistered firearms and trying to spark violence during protests against police brutality.”
~~~
02) “Fox News: Brutalization Of Black People Good For Stock Market”
03) “More of that Christian love: Christian TV host Rick Wiles is happy because he believes Trump is going to start rounding up and torturing liberal activists.
Right Wing Watch reports:
On Tuesday’s episode of his “TruNews” program, Wiles cheered Trump’s plan to use the military to quash nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and called on Trump to use the military to take down liberal organizations, arrest their leaders, and send them to Guantanamo Bay to be tortured.”
04) “Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick: Racism Won’t End Until The Left Learns To ‘Accept Jesus’”
05) “Texas County GOP Chair Claims George Floyd Killing Was ‘Staged Event’ To Damage Trump”
06) “Oregon Police Caught On Video Collaborating With Armed White Extremists”
07) – “Facebook Reportedly Axes Right-Wing Accounts That Talked Bringing Weapons To Protests
The suspensions reportedly came the day after hundreds of employees staged a virtual walkout after Facebook decided not to flag Trump’s posts like Twitter did.”
https://nowthisnews.com/news/facebook-axes-right-wing-accounts-for-threats-against-protests
~~~
Is there a circuit of insecurity describing such contiguous instances of anxiety?
02) People are complaining about the Fox News report stating that atrocity against black people is profitable on the stock market. They are complaining that the report is racist.
But what they’re not doing is acknowledging that the report is a confirmation that the stock market itself and by extension the economic system, is deeply racist.
That the stock market and economic system are not at all objective phenomena, but they are constructed from the outset to be exploitative and racist. The system is not only gamed, in the same way that casinos and fruit machines are, but unjust and exploitative practices are deliberately built into it.
03) & 04) It’s hilarious, Christian TV host Rick Wiles is literally suggesting that military troops be deployed against protesters and that should one of those military troops be sacrificed in the conflict with protesters it would serve as a pretext to introduce martial law which would obviate the civil rights of the protesters.
So, a strategy of cunning militarisation, serving the devious Christianity of fascist theocracy.
Has the Texan Lieutenant Governor, who was suggesting that racism is contingent on the political left not accepting Jesus, neglected to note the white nationalist who murdered the congregation of an Afro-American church?
05) & 06) Another Texan administrator, this time taking a leaf out of the Alex Jones’ conspiracy playbook, calling the police killing of George Floyd, a ‘staged event’.
~~~
The deviousness of white, US Protestant and Puritan, delusions and denial, always powered and sustained by an economic extremism feeding on racism.
The jungle of white deceptions always masquerading as ‘opinions’, together with the right to such ‘opinions’.
Or, the right to not only lie, but to impose that lie on those being lied about.
This goes back to the Norman conquest of Britain and the beginning of Anglo-Saxon anti-Semitism.
Those puritans who were the most virulently anti-Semitic, who were the most deceitful, moved to the USA.
So, 01) to 07), is not just a circuit of insecurity.
It is a deliberate circle of dishonesty and communal insanity.
It is the characteristic engine of psychotic profitability and militarised economy.
DISPUTATIONS ON THE THEOLOGY OF THE RADICAL OBJECT (some excerpts)
DISPUTATIONS ON THE THEOLOGY OF THE RADICAL OBJECT (some excerpts)
Your notion of radical objectivity would lead to the scenario wherein there could be an alleged ‘object’ that is completely subsistent to itself; an object that is never ‘thrown’, as it were, beyond itself; an object that is only present to itself and never anything else.
But what could such an object be if it has no effects except for itself?
But then, even on such alleged grounds of self-subsistence, this radical object would be obliged to divisively economise itself according to whatever quality might be attributed to it.
But what grounds are there for such attributions, anyway, if there are no objective effects beyond the radical object?
Only the radical object itself and the pure hypothesis of it?
It’s a theology of the object, theological objectivity; a theology of unconditioned objectivity?
~~~
Or it could be the case that the cosmic horizon hasn’t changed and everything is shrinking? lol
Your apologia for external objectivity precisely predicates itself on the distinction between internality and externality. The assumption of direct and indirect relationships characterising the causal relations of that distinction usually lead to the corollary assumption of independent objectivity.
Such allegedly ‘independent’ objectivity is precisely predicated on the notion of an objective privacy wherein the object ‘itself’, so to speak, is always inaccessible except through some structure of mediations.
The notion of independent objectivity is contingent on the unity of the object.
The unity of the object, in principle, can never fully present itself in any of the object’s effects, necessarily so, because the unity of the object has to be the unity of its effects, too, in order for those effects to belong to the object.
That unity which quite literally constitutes the principle of the object itself cannot be characterised or exhausted by this or that set of its effects, if it is obliged to function as the principle of unity for all of those effects.
Similar to the ontological relationship between being and beings, the relationship between the unity of the object – constituting the principle of the object itself – and the effects said to be of that object, are both equally delimited by the guiding principles the respective attributions bring into play. That is, by the guiding principles of ontology and objectivity.
But in both cases, the guiding principles themselves (seem to) escape instantiation.
The hypothetical unity of the object necessarily seems to lead beyond any of its possible instantiations, whether interior or exterior, internal or external. It seems to lead beyond that which it is supposed to unify, beyond all that it is supposed to negate?
So, if the unity of the object, the principle of the object itself, necessarily transcends instantiation, what object is left to attribute independence to?
What’s left? An “inner urge”? Does objectivity collapse into energetics, à la Schopenhauer? Et cetera, usual gingerbread!
What I’m suggesting is that the themes of interiority/exteriority; direct/indirect; or immediacy/mediation; independence/contingency; et cetera, are such that they all structurally condition each other.
That the metaphysics of alleged independence is itself conditioned by the assumption of those themes mentioned.
The metaphysics of independence is merely an absolutist theology of the object.
It’s a theology of the unconditioned object.
But the unconditioned object can necessarily have no attributes, no conditions can be attributed to it.
It even escapes self-conditioning.
So nothing is left except its principle or the principle of its mere assumption?
It’s important to think through the metaphysical implications of whatever is assumed, not just shelter in empiricist utility or the complacency of scientific approximation. Of course, if those are sufficient, then metaphysical consideration isn’t necessary.
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Looking at the entire universe as an object, with respect to what exactly does that universe-object modally or characteristically appear? Is it not the case that the mode of its appearance or presentation is necessarily constrained by the modality of that which it presents itself towards and appears to?
The subtraction of a subject from a universe would leave a subject-shaped hole, so to speak, in that universe.
If the contours of that subject-shaped hole constitute the contours of that subject’s apprehension of the universe, then it is the case that that subject apprehends that universe minus itself.
Given the uniqueness of the subject, its existential imprint, the ‘subject-shaped hole’, would be unique, too.
So the contours of its apprehension would be likewise unique, together with the universe-minus-itself that it apprehends.
It’s not a case of reducing the object to the modality of apprehension, subjective or otherwise.
A universe that is supposed to be inclusive of all things would necessarily be inclusive of all subjects supposedly apprehending that universe.
So universal inclusivity in principle prohibits apprehension of universal totality, given the requisite of external perspective.
The assumed condition of all inclusiveness displaces the possibility of externality.
But externality is a requisite of objectivity.
Does the notion of universal inclusivity necessarily collapse in the absence of externality?
If inclusivity is merely inclusivity and not internality, does that avoid the problem?
If externality is a requisite of objectivity, then the absence of such externality prevents the constitution of any objectivity.
If the universe cannot be constituted as an object, then not only are internality/externality not possible, but neither are inclusivity/exclusivity!
If it were the case that all apprehensions are external to the universe, what would that entail?
The Kantian injunction that all apprehensions are ends in themselves? lol
That apprehensions are not things, or at least are not the sorts of things that are susceptible to universal inclusivity? But isn’t universal inclusivity supposed to be inclusive of everything?
Is it possible to unify all apprehensions in a theological synthesis not susceptible to the sorts of quantification or reification characterising universal inclusivity? Et cetera!
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The systematics of both objective and subjective constitution exceed objectivity and subjectivity.
But objectivity and subjectivity are mutually conditional, in that an object not producing objective effects
An object or thing-in-itself not producing any effects on anything else would be indiscernible from nothing, so according to the law of the identity of indiscernibles, such an object or thing-in-itself would be nothing.
However, if it is said that the object or thing-in-itself produces effects on itself, this would necessitate that it be a compound entity and not a thing-in-itself.
If it produces effects on itself, then it would necessarily be self-differentiated according to those effects and into different states not identical with each other.
It could not be identified with any of those states at the expense of the other states, so it would have to be identified with the economic totality of states.
But such an identification with an economic totality of states would no longer be susceptible to the effects producing those states, because the identification is supposed to be a compound result of those states.
So the identification is the resulting abstraction of synthesising economy or economic synthesis?
An abstraction strangely sustaining itself according to an economics of differential tautology!?
But it’s a null abstraction, no longer susceptible to its own effects precisely because it is constituted by them!
So this attribute of self-effectuation, of self-subsistence and self-determination; all of which constitute the pre-requisites of independence; likewise, leads to indiscernibility from nothingness.
So, is the theology of radical objectivity, a necessary presupposition of realism, incoherent without nihilism?
Is the attribute of independence contingent on the deliberate insistence of that nihilism?
Is realism actually nihilism?
If it’s the case that objects or forms are equilibria between constitutive forces, then it is the case that those forces are necessarily constitutive of those objects or forms, in order that they be ‘constitutive forces’.
Forms are known by forces and forces are known by forms.
Measurements are forms..