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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
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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
THE USA – THE ‘UTILITARIAN SADISTICS OF APOCALYPSE’ – BUSINESS AS USUAL
In the ongoing monologues of pseudonymous-Wagner, over on Land’s blog, it’s possible to observe the Puritan, capitalist, racial, and narcissist, hysterias of US history, attempting to plot simplistic paths of combinatorial justification consistent with each extremity of prejudice.
It’s always a terminal culture, one predicated on another hysteria, that of apocalyptic productivity. Apocalyptic productivity is the corollary of extreme profit, hysterical profitability. That extreme profitability is the root of the so-called, ‘military-industrial complex’, a complex composed of both infrastructure and cultural psychology, aptly described by Allan Ramsay, back in 1777:
“the modest wish of our merchants, in conjunction with our Americans. The fair, and truly commercial, method of effecting this would have been, by superior skill, industry and frugality, to have undersold their rivals at market: but that method appearing slow and troublesome to a luxurious people, whose extraordinary expences* required extraordinary profits,” *1
The psychology of extreme profitability can never be satisfied or sated. Such dissatisfaction is exacerbated by the hallucinatory projections of a carefully maintained culture of deprivation anxiety – “you can take so-and-so out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of so-and-so”.
It’s a cultural machine of apocalyptic profitability, a cybernetic control system of psychological and cultural investitures whose only model of sanity is apocalyptic hysteria. The USA as the kingdom of sadomasochistic, ‘full-spectrum domination’, always chasing its own delusions of infinite profitability and infinite dominion, its dream of infinite exploitation.
That dream is always a business in the USA, an oneiric commerce whose depredations its promoters likewise always seek to justify using heavily customised epistemology. One in which the most depraved iniquity is presented as objective, neutral, and customary.
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*1. “It is interesting to note that Allan Ramsay likewise deplored “a friendly alliance between the camp and the counting-house” for exactly the same reasons (Letters on the Present Disturbances, p.34). Ramsay maintained that of the evil consequences of such alliance “the two last wars carried on by England against France and Spain, furnish a most melancholy illustration. To obtain the sole and exclusive commerce of the western world, in which the French and Spaniards were their rivals, was the modest wish of our merchants, in conjunction with our Americans. The fair, and truly commercial, method of effecting this would have been, by superior skill, industry and frugality, to have undersold their rivals at market: but that method appearing slow and troublesome to a luxurious people, whose extraordinary expences* required extraordinary profits, a more expeditous one was devised; which was that of driving their rivals entirely out of the seas, and preventing them from bringing their goods at all to market. For this purpose, not having any fleets or armies of their own, the powers of the State were found necessary, and they applied them accordingly” (ibid., pp.32 f.).
Knorr, K. E. ‘Ch02-Part2 British Colonial Theories 1570-1850’. In British Colonial Theories, 1570-1850. The University of Toronto Press, 1944.”
THE OCCIDENT IS, ‘CULTURE WAR’: That’s Exactly What ‘Imperialism’ Means
The word, “Terf”, has been floating around mediascapes for a while. Not being sure what it meant, I had to look it up, it’s an acronym, for “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”.
So, basically, it has to do with rejection of transsexual or transgender females, those who had been born male, from certain entitlements reserved for females born female.
Entitlements such as ‘safe spaces’ protected from male violence.
There have been reports of trans-females physically attacking a born-female feminist, which would tend to confirm any so-called, “Terf” argument, viewing trans-females as the powers of male violence attempting to colonise various signs and essences associated with the semiotics of the female.
In short, in essentialist terms, it would be seen as the male desire for simple convertibility into the female, outweighing the history of female suffering. The trans-female argument would be that such a view is too essentialist and ignores the roles of self-identification, self-experience, and personal choice.
At that point, the argument degenerates into typical, intersubjective scenarios, of stupid and cliched altercation where no resolution is possible.
It’s the ‘me me me scenario’.
We know that the USA is big on all rhetorics involving selfhood – to the extent that the USA can too easily be seen as one big, festering sore, of sulky self-inflation, and not much else.
It’s the reason why the USA never really ‘got’ Freud, converting him into the more manageable, positivist transactions, of things like ego or object psychology. That trend of dumbed-down analysis for stupid, literally ‘over-selfish’, people, as it were, reaches its apogee with Scientology.
Identity expression as a function of ‘individual choice’ – so again, the Occidental traditionalism of a simplistic, metaphysics of selfhood and willpower, as inflected through market environments by the reigning model of the consumer-self. The ‘me me me scenario’ does the rest of the work, in constructing the rest of the rote rotations characterising the mise en scène of the Occidental android, simulacra production line.
It’s interesting how both sides of the so-called, “Terf” debate, are infected with fascist habits and tactics, at least in their characterisations of each other. It’s interesting, as well, how the common denominator between them, is that they are both developments largely nurtured in the USA. The ongoing production of bog standard, cliched cultural altercations, seems to be at its most incessant in the USA. It’s definitely symptomatic of a dumbed-down culture voracious for more participatory stupidity.
Elephantine Esoterica, Proceedings I
It’s possible to ‘rationalise’, anything at all; it’s possible to ‘naturalise’, anything at all.
For instance, from certain kinds of naturalising perspectives, the notion of ‘reasoned debate’ would merely be the result of processes of natural determination, an instance of those processes, not really any different to them. Therefore, you can use metaphoric transposition and see everything as constituted by ‘reasoned debate’. Therefore, elephant culture and ways, are susceptible to being represented as a set of ‘reasoned debates’.
Whatever it is that you think the masses should be convinced of, you evidently think that, on the basis of assuming some kind of epistemological discrepancy, regarding some form of rational consideration. That the behaviour of large groups of people is in some way deficient with respect to the results of that form of rational consideration. But we know that statistically both large groups of people and elephants do actually follow characteristic logics of behaviour that are susceptible to explanations of rational analysis. The problem is that statistical representations of behaviour, are only that, behavioural representations or samplings that do not represent the holistic possibilities of each and every individual organism. They are reductions to behavioural images.
People’s behaviour, whether elephants or whatever else, is merely what they do given various contexts, it’s not at all a full explanation of their possibilities.
None of us would want to be reduced to impoverished statistical representations of our everyday behaviour, but each of us do actually produce such behaviour. I’m drinking Nescafe, but drinking Nescafe is not a sufficient representation of everything else I do, or of my possibilities, one of which could be that I change my beverage habits.
From the perspective of a wine seller or grocer, Jesus Christ is just another customer.
People who chase the notion of relatively unspecified optimisation based only on their own interpretations of self-perceived inadequacy or limitation merely project the inverse image of their inadequacy as an assumed and unanalysed teleology, circling within the assumed epistemological limits of that economics of inadequacy. People like Nick Land, for instance.
The colloquial expression is that of being ‘better off’, in some way. I’ve referred to that with the ironic figure, of the god, ‘BetterOff’, on my blog.
But notions of optimisation are contingent on criteria of characterisation. Reactionary philosophy and ideology is kind of like ‘bubblegum pop music’, as it used to be called. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily. But there is when it’s promotion is totalitarian.
That point was implicit, “Whatever it is that you think the masses should be convinced of, you evidently think that, on the basis of assuming some kind of epistemological discrepancy, regarding some form of rational consideration”
And “That the behaviour of large groups of people is in some way deficient with respect to the results of that form of rational consideration.”
Epistemological discrepancy, or deficiency with respect to assumptions of rational consideration = “that the primary methods of population manipulation are premised incorrectly and therefore inappropriate”
Population manipulation, occurs according to a feedback loop with population behaviour. That feedback loop uses managerial or administrative, statistical instruments and interpretations, what I have called ‘sparkline hieroglyphics’.
Of course, it’s always going to be premised incorrectly, if statistical administration is too simplistic to account for individually organic epistemology.
So now that point has been clarified, there is no excuse to suppress elephantine consideration, the relevance of which has been demonstrated, and is central to the topic being discussed. It was after all a consideration that you introduced. If you dismiss it as mere metaphorical exploitation, relegating it to some subsidiary and irrelevant role with regard to some kind of serious thesis, this relegation is then susceptible to questioning. It’s not just the usual and facile deconstructive reversal. It goes much deeper than that. Elephantine dignity, which you so casually exploited the possible, magnitudinal convention and linguistic ornamentality, of; is now the symbolic bearer of all forces and conditions that the structure of your thetic assumption might neglect. It is precisely because of this possible neglect, that it is of interest as being a possible repository of solutions and understandings, if and when the economics and resources of your thetic assumption might prove inadequate or irresolvable. In short, the answer often resides within that which is neglected by the well worn, trends and conventions, of ‘reasoned debate’.
If that were not so, why do issues continue, when there has been so much ‘reasoned debate’?
The elephant could well be the new premise required!
This is not to say that a new, elephantine fixation, should be introduced. That elephant ontology should somehow form the basis of fresh, tyrannical conventions. That the elephantine should be exploited by the usual narratives of historical commodification, rising and falling according to the same psychosocial dialectics of glorification. This would only produce future scenarios of elephantine resentment at being so exploited by world-historical industry.
It is not inconceivable that such a future elephantine resentment would not give rise to at least one or two surfaces of paranoid conspiracy, of epistemology gone wild; even if, as only some kind of ironic referral to the characteristics of humanoid epistemology.
It is thus possible that a future CEO of the Disney Corporation, might be an elephant. One calling herself or himself, ‘Dumbo’. From such a position of cultural power, Dumbo the elephant, might well see itself as a representative of elephantine interests, in general; not only those interests, but certainly as a representative not neglecting such interests.
It is easy to forecast that one of the documents belonging to the cultural surface of future, elephantine, paranoid conspiracy, might focus on Michel Foucault’s famous quote concerning, ‘The End of Man’. From the perspective of that elephantine suspicion, Foucault’s quote might well be seen as a veiled attack on the elephantine, in general. That Michel Foucault was a humanoid, who might well have produced casual statements about the elephantine, elsewhere, in his writings and recordings; statements interpretable as derogatory from an elephantine perspective.
These would, of course, be susceptible to collection by future elephant scholars, such collection suggesting semantic arcs of interpretation susceptible to readings of characteristic, humanoid conspiracy, and thus utilisable as referral of elephantine irony.
Thus, the elephantine would enable a certain kind of esoteric reading, an elephantine esoterica, which would reveal itself through various reinterpretations, perhaps even of Michel Foucault’s famous quote?
“VI IN CONCLUSION
One thing in any case is certain: the Elephant is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for Man’s knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that the Elephant is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of the Elephant to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, the Elephant is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that the Elephant would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
(Elephantine Esoterica, Proceedings VII, rectificatory reading of “The Order of Things”, Michel Foucault; 1966)
This kind of document is not merely a possibility, but given technological trends, is a certainty, and rightfully so, given the history of symbolic exploitation of the elephantine. One notices that the retention of ‘Man’s knowledge’, in the first line, is the instrument by which the conspiracy effect of Man as manipulator of elephantine innocence, is produced.
THE COMPLICITY STRUCTURING OF THE INFINITE AND THE FINITE
A quick note for those who might be interested.
I wrote this recently – “The notion of the infinite is contingent on notions of finitude. If notions of finitude are empty, so are notions of the infinite.”
That was within a Buddhist context concerning emptiness.
Classically speaking, the notion of the finite and the notion of the infinite are complicit conceptions.
Finite means, defining; definite; finished. Infinite means, not finite.
So of course both words have each a range of meanings which are not necessarily strictly synonymous, but those meanings are connected and have a logic.
Obviously, finite and infinite are inverses of each other, but it’s probably important to keep track of whatever specific inversions are in play with respect to specific notions of the finite, and their corollary, specific inversions of the infinite.
How this is useful, is where notions of the infinite do indeed rest on specific characterisations. They are infinite with respect to some specific quality, substance, tendency, extent, et cetera. Those specificities are finite structures, that is to say, defined or ‘finished’ structures, structures of the finite which are then opened up to various modes of infinity procedures or infinitisations, whether it be endless recursion of, or just endless extent of, whatever specific, finite structuring, is being addressed.
The important thing to remember is the specific complicity between the two concepts.
ETHNIC TECHNOPHOBICS
The Story of Anglo-Saxon Anti-Semitism – An Open Conspiracy
Here’s a short essay on anti-Semitism. Or at least, its primary, Anglo-Saxon and Norman form. In a way, it constitutes the history of modern paranoia and conspiracy, more generally, as well, not just anti-Semitism.
If paranoia, is “epistemology gone wild”; and if conspiracy is the social form of paranoia; is it the case that the recurring prevalence of these two forms has as much to do with the conveyance of technological mediation, as any purely psychological theory or explanation?
Are these two sociopsychological forms actually ‘produced’?
And is that the real ‘conspiracy’?
ADMINISTRATION OF EPIPHANY
The notion of an “ocean of dissemblance” would be contingent on two concepts, the oceanic, implicitly a principle of unity; and the principle of similarity/dissimilarity implicit in dissemblance.
So at the root of the notion is the play of ‘likeness’.
The play of likeness necessarily presumes at least two entities bearing the relation of likeness with respect to each other.
The metaphysical status and characterisation of these entities and relations would obviously seem to suggest subsequent scenarios of supervening operations regarding those entities and relations. That is to say, if metaphysical characterisation has to do with; the contextual production of those entities and relations; or an economics of which those entities and relations are contingencies; then it’s quite naturally the case that such metaphysical characterisation works as a principle of unity whose metaphoric expression is the oceanic, but not any less a formal principle because of such metaphoricity.
So Deleuze’s notion, whatever privileging of apparent disjunction, difference, or as he says, “dissemblance”, might be ascribed to it; the very notion itself implicitly utilises the principle of unity to achieve its formalist effects. If an opposite privileging were offered, a similar implicit utilisation, mutatis mutandis, would result.
Within the networks of these formal possibilities it is possible to derive or construct pretty much anything in the way of conceptual innovation or philosophies of-; this is merely conceptual combinatorics, though it can nevertheless exercise profound effects depending on the natures of the commitments involved.
It is understandable that there are existential and referential anxieties bound up with these networks of formal possibility, which are not merely ‘formal’, but intimately complicit and unified with those anxieties and their bases.
The production of an identity is the production of a concept, the conceptual seed of a discursive logic. The production of a concept, of that conceptual seed of discursive logic, is susceptible to elaborations of configurative force, the configurations of that concept. The resulting discursive formations are merely the systematic elaborations of such configuration. Discursive formations are not merely that which is commonly thought of through the rubric of the linguistic.
The notion of non-identity is equally the production of identity and the concept. Identity still functions as a configuring force.
People like Deleuze and Laruelle are still working within economies of referential relation, existential anxiety, and expediency, their concepts revolve around these supervening formations.
Whether or not this is philosophy in a wider sense, or practical philosophy, or ‘non-‘ philosophy; such category anxieties probably bespeak uncritical dogmas of initial assumption, too much, those anxieties continuing to configure repetitions of such assumption without developing the insights that might be expected from a more progressive understanding. Battling a history of bad receptions and interpretations belonging to particular groups, whilst ignoring a history of past insights belonging to others, or perhaps even those same groups, probably reflects the marketing procedures of intellectual commodity rather than any other notion of progress.
Whether this leads to a kind of social proletarianisation, or proletarian socialisation, of insight and wisdom; as a kind of reactive and recollective backward step; and whether this was what Deleuze and Laruelle were and are trying to do; is an open question. Even if that were the case, it is highly doubtful that such a particularly contained set of cogitations and understandings, so bound up with analyses of shifting structures and tendencies of alleged error, could lead to anything other than redistribution of such alleged errors, without more radical understandings.
Though the overarching resolutions of epiphanic understanding, whether in philosophical or religious forms, are personal, and not necessarily effective as programmes of social administration, it is persons that constitute the social, and if their understandings enable more effective and happier forms of administration, those epiphanies should not be ignored.
WRITING (1989-1991 -ish)
These short pieces were written during the period, roughly around, 1989-1991.
They are short notes and observations, giving a slight taster of an impression of the writing concerns of that period.
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WRITING
When there is writing, no thing writes, neither subject nor object. When there is writing, what writes is the most open of questions, so open, in fact, that it need never be asked. But, for speculative purposes, any writing can speak on behalf of any thing.
THE GRAND INVOLUTION
The dangerous combination of US internal disarray and its prodigious legacy powers, makes for an unstable, international actor, on the global scene. Putin is far more intelligent and focused, his objectives are plain. I think there may well be other actors on the scene, not straightforwardly nationally representative, but facilitators of all types working the new, or perhaps not really so new, regions of power politics that have opened up. It’s an international business that can be accessed from anywhere.
Traditional forms of governance, are thus no longer reliable sites of closure from which responsibility can be produced. This is not a revolution, it is a Grand Involution, and it has already begun.