Category Archives: Techno Theories

The underlying rationale and rhetoric of the socially atomistic individual emerges out of Cartesian assumption, leading to inflation of corresponding structures of atomistic evaluation.

When such evaluations are of socio-economic generality, based on these general interests, rather than the richly vital fabrics of personal and community complexity, new opportunities of incentivised social division and exceptionalism arise, such imagined exceptionalisms usually attempting to naturalise themselves according to a limited stock of organic metaphors and conventions, nostalgic references to that which the innovation of exceptionalising division has simultaneously, ironically, and contradictorily, rendered obsolescent. This appeal to nature is structured by alienation at the outset, transforming every decision into a potential exploitation, converting the previously customary into a Cartesian arena of consequentialist choices susceptible to general calculation, and competitive exploitation.
The granularity of choice structuring is flexible enough to casuistically game in surreptitious ways, at the expense of one’s opponents, especially if all arenas of public debate are forcibly reduced to the simplifying terms of natural intuition and positive presentation, especially as a pre-politicised framing of prefabricated factuality.
When an economics is based on very particular, culture-specific and heavily artificed, notions of the atomised individual, that economics is weighted in favour of those notions and the characteristic divisional categories of social atomism they produce. To the degree, that such an economics can impose its functional structure on others, whether by direct or surreptitious coercions, it installs a system of culture-specific and heavily artificed exploitation.

To the extent that knowledge constitutes an economic function, it can be seen from the Atlantic article (“The Architect of the Radical Right“), that knowledge becomes a power and the value susceptible to the casuistical calculation of competitive choice structuring. Southern economist, James M. Buchanan’s, attack on the public education system, consisted of these factors:

“crux of the desegregation problem”; “state run” schools had become a “monopoly,”; “which could be broken by privatization.”; “If authorities sold off school buildings and equipment, and limited their own involvement in education to setting minimum standards, then all different kinds of schools might blossom.”; “Each parent “would cast his vote in the marketplace and have it count.”
“The argument impressed Friedman, who a few years earlier had published his own critique of “government schools,” saying that “the denationalization of education would widen the range of choice available to parents.””

The principle of encouraging educational diversity through forces of market privatisation, as against state-sponsored monolithic monopoly, through an appeal to parental choice, has the eventual effect of reducing knowledge itself to being merely a production of market forces, always constrained by the filter of market assessment. Knowledge thus becomes a mass commodity, whose only criteria of evaluation is that it sells, there is no other platform of critique. In principle, this is an oppressive conventionalising of knowledge, equivalent to any alleged tyranny of homogenising state sponsorship, but one in which market constrained, individual choice, replaces government mediations and representations of public choice.
It’s fairly obvious, though, that the private choice argument was being promoted, merely in order to reconstruct segregation by other means, economically as well as educationally. By attacking education, economic disparity could be preserved.

US Americans don’t seem to understand the complexities sufficiently, they psychologise it too much and are too positivist about it, largely revolving around intuitions of instinctual immediacy and their fulfilment, in overt, positively instrumentalising ways. This characteristic reduction of theoretical scope results in compensations of inflationary overproduction and chaos; deceptions and subterfuge; and overreliance on techniques of blatantly ‘full-spectrum domination’. It’s a hugely dangerous weakness.
But there is a logic to the production of chaos, which is to maintain a somewhat positively readable surface of indirect control or influence of what is not properly understood, through enforcement of simplifying conditions and effects, the controlled variable experimentation of behavioural manipulation, of what is believed to be understood. It’s the inevitable reduction to bog-standard, game theory, that goes along with the easy social atomisms habitually assumed by motivated exploitation, the dominant characteristic of impoverished conceptions of selfhood.

The inordinate addiction to the ideological rhetoric of choice and freedom, if allied to market production, is susceptible to infinite deferral of satisfaction, according to perpetual shifts of personal desire. The Rolling Stones expressed it very well, in “Can’t Get No Satisfaction”. The addiction follows a libidinal logic, bouncing metonymically around its spectacular commodity maze in search of some unspecified ‘freedom’ it can never quite seem to attain. Those mechanisms are known very well, there is no need to turgidly elaborate them.
But it is this addiction, that in the last century I called ‘resource addiction’, which is the general motivation behind exploitation. It reproduces itself, through a sustained complicity powered by the mutual discrepancy between ideology and behaviour. The motivic power derives from the sustained tension of this discrepancy.

Any imagination of ideologically determinate source, immediately gives rise to installation within the dialectics of such determination, forever in search of coincidence with that imaginary determination, according to the endless routes of resource. There is no way out of that endless road system, if it’s imaginary has displaced the development of other possibilities, all of which it instantly converts into further positive commodities and ideological determinations, on the road. This is an autobahn of the absolute, the metaphysics of motorway, the hegemonic highway of commodified desire.

That system of metaphysical transportation, the libidinal circuitry of desire, gives rise to all the nostalgia circulations and distributions necessary to its further constitutive realisation.

If Hells Angels originate from army motorcyclists of World War II, then the hell of the battlefield transposes itself into a particular subcultural emphasis of primal desires and appetites, all of which can be put into motion, and released according to the profitable celebration of various commodity controls, the totemic expense of heavily customised motorcycles, etc.. “Born to Be Wild”, in which ‘lawless’ oases and scenarios of primal exchange are offered, distributed designer theatres of freedom, dotting the routes to freedom.
But, on the hegemonic highway of desire; motion, the feeling of motion; in and of itself, comes to innately signify freedom. For it is this motion, the transport itself, that carries the self from scene to commodified scene, whose precise nature of liberation consists only in the impulsive transitions between commodity scenes enabled by that transport. To the extent, that the self is caught up in the tension-producing, oppressive relations of libidinal circuitry production, there is a corresponding release of tensions on the nostalgia circuits of consumption through impulsive transition. The torments of production Hell, transfigured by the impulses of scenic Heaven, these perhaps are the post-traumatic conditions, following World War II, of such a ‘transitional freedom’, as they occur through the therapeutic market spontaneity of libidinal circuitry?

Black Sabbath – Heaven & Hell

(The lyrics seem to be quite heavily susceptible to ideological interpretation)

If social atomism and alienation are mutual corollaries, calling each other into existence according to a defining Cartesian necessity, it is perhaps too easy to fit religious, lifestyle, cultural identity, and other playable factors into a system of mutual compensations, proceeding according to the theatrical gameplay of a travelling roadshow, fuelled by the exploitations of resource addiction. But does such an ease symbolise, and define, an important truth? One perhaps hinted at by by JL Borge’s “The Lottery of Babylon”?

In response to this – https://www.facebook.com/owenjones84/videos/596744154004309/

Exploitations of national sentiment and exacerbations of xenophobic anxiety, using Margaret Thatcher’s market survey techniques put in the context of real-time algorithmic manipulation, continue to drive the contemporary political scene.
All these fictions of unease are produced by a calculus of crafty coercions, the simplifying mechanics of the mass image. What M John Harrison called “a thousand and one labyrinthine excursions beneath the political crust” (“Settling the World” (1975) M John Harrison), has now turned into hyper-visible spectacles of online confusion. It’s all there, easy to see, but vested interests, stupidity, and bigotry, are the new forms of obscurity, no secret services necessary.

Concerning Jeremy Corbyn’s restraint concerning Russia, the British public have to decide whether they appreciate the simplifying rhetoric of strong and stupid statements, or thoughtful and considerate ones. It’s nice to resolve situations quickly, but correctness is another essential attribute: anyone can do quick stupidity, even Boris Johnson, as has been noted.
Conmen usually use speed in order to facilitate their deceptions, global politics is certainly no different, in this respect.

Steve Bannon, setting up offices in Brussels, in order to influence European elections, is no different, really, to Russian interventions in the USA, through Facebook manipulations. The irony, of course, is the point and proponents of anti-globalist arguments, being undermined by their resorting to various right-wing, international alliances and techniques of manipulation, lol.

In the inordinate concern with frames, these days, it seems that pictures are entirely neglected, simply taken for granted. This is the typical, tunnel vision of instrumentalist thought, that narrative theories were questioning; but the fundamental mediocrity of political intellect never really changes, for its practitioners the framing becomes the positivist picture, and the picture is simply forgotten.

Has anyone written on contemporary dialogical conditions, any better than Adorno!? They’ve had decades to be able to do so.
The picture (Lee Ufan, Relatum – Discussion, 2003), is a great visual resonance, very apt.

It’s bringing to mind some of the themes I was working on, back in the early 1990s, one of which I’ve surreptitiously, ‘tactically’ even, continued on my blog.

The notion of calculation, of calculi or calculus; literally, pebbles; was one of the themes I explored back in the early 1990s, in various contexts. It links directly to the l.c.d. (‘Lowest Common Denominator’/ ‘liquid-crystal display’) theme, developed back then or earlier, but which I’ve used this century on my blog, though somewhat allusively, somewhat lucidly. The ‘allusive’ element arises due to the earlier, originating context, informing contemporary expressions conditioned by that origination, but not specifying or explicating it.
Similarly, with the concept of the ‘monument’, the monumental and the ‘micro-monumental’. The ‘micro-monumental’, of course, links up with the l.c.d. theme.

It’s interesting to note that writing on tablets of stone, or clay (baked stone?), characterises more strongly the cultural developments of the Occident, Mesopotamia and perhaps ancient Egypt. The Indus Valley did produce the ‘seal’, but it would be an easy speculation to suggest that as this artefact of endurance was used in trade; and if the bulk of that trade was for export; then the Indus Valley seal represents a hybrid concession to Occidental metaphysical need.
If the Occident is governed by this metaphysical need, by a temporal anxiety assuaged with the lithic mediations of mnemonic and recollective technologies; does it become a servant of such ‘stoned’ deferral? Does this organic anxiety transition the entire Occident into being a merely necessary function and expression, of a dialectics of the lithic and monumental?
In an effort to answer this, the Occident puts its hands in the pockets of its fashionable attire (another system of deferral), digitally manipulating pebbles, from pocket to pocket, round and round like rosary beads, in calculations and determinations, without end.
These are the manipulations of monumentation, so caught up in its binary contests and theatrick plays of self-encryption, that all vitality is reduced to a ‘factor’, directed towards asymptotic calculation of an alleged ‘freedom’ never actually lived, but always displaced by those very computations. The endlessly deferred lava of life, bearing its crystalline burdens of micro-monumentation, through channels of, and on, the l.c.d. screen, always according to a semantics of stone.

Guðjón, sometimes one has to expand the notion of ‘following’ away from the usual, default protocols, of sense or meaning production, in order to make room for other kinds of expression.

Years ago, when playing in Oxford, there was a somewhat eccentric lady, often walking around the city centre, who would hold loud conversations with herself, whilst listening to music on headphones. I seen other similar characters, in London. Usually, these people are seen as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’, constituting them as marginalised figures in urban life.
What was highly noticeable, was the preponderance of references to media circulation, within their verbal productions. References to celebrities, news topics, anything at all! The alleged craziness or madness was actually a mediation of media circulations, and this I found highly significant. Because there was a kind of ‘production’ going on, and that production was thoroughly determined by the encounter with mediated significances not marginalised as craziness or madness. There seemed to be a complicity at work, one which questioned the conventions of each of the elements constituting that complicity.

Apparently, there are quite a a lot of people who do talk to themselves, not in the sense of the people mentioned above, publicly and loudly, but to themselves, in private. This phenomenon, it seems to me, could suggest many things. Conventionally speaking, the obvious and sarcastically humorous implication, would be to talk about a sliding scale or slippery slope of sanity/insanity.
But I don’t think that that is what is going on.
Another anecdote: I remember being in the Marble Arch, KFC, in London. There was an Afro-Caribbean man, in his 30s or 40s, talking to himself; not loudly or too quietly, just normally. He was having quite a good self-conversation. After a while, I actually talked to him, and he instantly went into a normal mode, and we had a good conversation, though I don’t remember what it was about. I do remember that he was actually a very intelligent man, well balanced, by no means could he be classified as crazy.

The city is an urban machine, a semi-organic mechanism of intersecting forces, configured according to multiple conceptual images susceptible to topical presentation. Out of the profusion of those topical regulations, verbal production cannot help but express, at least partially, its conditions of production. It seems to me, that however such productions might be classified; whether marked as marginalised or privileged; significant or senseless; relevant or irrelevant; these markings, themselves, are merely the continuations of the productions that they attempt to categorise. I think that a lot more than this, is at play.