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ANALECTA ALOGICA: FRAGMENTS WITHOUT ORDER (1989ish, not sure, though)
ANALECTA ALOGICA
A collection of rhetorical devices?
At present, Humanity seems to be composed of oppressive communities whose governing principles are derived from Man’s baser instincts. These coarse and cruel principles keep throwing us against the wall so that we are continually dashed into little pieces. Collected here, from the latest shatterings, are some of those pieces, just a few, forlorn fragments…
During these brief, eristical expeditions, it must be borne in mind that Reasoning is always in danger of being just so many genetic fallacies, but this is no demand for grief, for no matter where they go, the rhapsodies of Reason are always in time with the rhythms of reflection, and these rhythms invariably carry one away, to think, on some other day…
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“What was that rushing by?”
“Oh that! That was just a minute. We get millions of them in this neighbourhood.”
These writings are my scribal responses to the pressures of Life. Life pushes me, I push a pen. You may ask why I write, why do I respond this way? I could answer that by weaving these cocoons of connotations I protect myself from the harsh rigours of an anomie-filled existence. But I won’t, because I don’t. Protect myself from an anomie-filled existence, that is.
I write because… I like to write, because… I wish to keep some sort of account of some of the mental travels which my mind is continually embarking upon, I write out of desperation, out of joy, out of other emotional postures, too, each posture being a play, a strategic state of mind, a move in a game of emotional chess, again which never comes to rest…
I also write* because I feel that reading and writing is one of the most sublime species of social intercourse available to Humanity…
(*marginal note: *Writing is reading.)
“Having knowledge is having a ledge from which to know, a conceptual ledge, that is.” (Inline note: “All ledges are lost… in limbo, perhaps?… are lost!??” | The ‘are’ is underlined three times, pointing to: “Being! Misplaced?”)
Occasionally, my life seems to be dressed in dilemmas, but I won’t get overly dramatic about it, at least not yet, I’ll allow such dire dramas to develop naturally, at their own pace, perhaps…
“I seem to feel my mind reel as I ride upon life’s insanely spinning wheel.”
Reel, both verb and adjective,
Adjective – film reel,
Reality, Film, Image.
Shall I take this medicine of Enlightenment, this escapism that acts as an emetic, that causes one to vomit illusions. Shall I take this stuff before I’ve experienced the symptoms of Suffering, a Suffering caused by illusions.
Why not? Because, you know, I have suffered, I have experienced the symptoms of Suffering, I really have.
“I am a philosophic pétroleur, and I have planted an incendiary in your id. It’s guaranteed to blow your lid.”
” Oh, thank you. I could do with some excitement.”
Let us make speech.
I think I’ll say this phrase at various points in this ongoing monologue, albeit a monologue with apparent interruptions. I’ve borrowed the phrase from Abu Jabbar, The Possibility Merchant, who is a character in my book, “A Divine Avenue”. I guess you could say that as Abu Jabbar is my fictional construction, I’ve borrowed it from myself.
I find it pleasant that there is so much of me as I can lend and borrow within the circus of experiences that apparently constitute me.
It strangely comforting to think that the ‘human condition’can be complex and busy. There’s a persistent hope that among all this confusion, lying hidden, is something magical and wonderful, a private panacea. Perhaps this magical panacea lies in our perceptions, perhaps the magical quality is one way of seeing, a single selection from a variety of visions…
“The erection of an ‘I’ structure can prove somewhat difficult when the potential self, the soon-to-be-self, is immersed in pantheistic musings.
(Note at top of page: “*With what forms should I fumble?”)
What should I write about? What bits of information should I jungle? What do you want to read? What do you wish to know?
Should I be experimental, political, philosophical, emotional, urbane, charmingly rustic, sophisticated or cutely simple, specious and/or veracious.
Or should I try ineffable Wisdom!
Wisdom Lane: “I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was an old feeling, evasive but distinct. Continually elusive but ever present. I couldn’t define it, but I knew what it was. I KNOW what it is. It isn’t anywhere, in heaven or on earth, but it is always here, it is always there, it is everywhere…”
You get the picture. A few negativistic indications of the arcanum, a sort of indication by elimination, and also the revelation, by means of apparent contradiction, that the arcanum is the Reality behind all appearances.
Is that okay? Or do you want something different? Are you bored of my aphoristic, micro-philosophies, of my fast and trashy junk wisdom? Do you resent following this itinerary of improvisations?
“Sorry can’t stop! I’m on my way to help constitute a certain momentous event in history.”
Refinement will have to wait; nowadays I like to scream and shout. Occasionally, though, I leave some subtlety about.
I enjoy asking questions, going on a quest. Occasionally, though, this ‘Why Thing’of mine goes a little wild. Not that I mind. Because it is through this tendency to forever question, this ceaseless and untamed Criticality, that I achieve a lucid looseness, an arcane clarity, a kind of freedom that pulses through the complexities of Life, a kind of existential electron flow.
“Money makes the economy go round. Money is promises – ‘I Promise To Pay The Bearer On Demand The Sum Of…’.
And the essence of business is to promise more than is actually delivered. The concealment of this deficient delivery leads to a commerce of appearances. When appearances reign supreme, even the genuine loses its integrity and a sort of sugar flavoured sugar seems to sweeten our tea.”
“Well, man, well,” said the Styrofoam Queen, her legs all agleam and asheen. “Shing! Shing! Shing!” went the handmaidens, dressed in sequins, riding on dolphins.
Whatever!
“This is the News. Streams of Excluded Middles attacked Aristotle today, claiming that the philosopher had exploited them for years. We spoke to one of the Excluded Middles, A or B, and asked him to comment on today’s rebellion.”
“Well, the Greeks were bad enough, but the Scholastics were the last straw. Of course, Aristotle was, and continues to be, the main culprit. Anyhow, we’ve been gathering of forces and now we are abandoning your world. You can use other logics, we’re skedaddling down a side alley. Goodbye!”
“Reason, son of Rea Rhetorica the well known actress, collapse from nervous exhaustion today. He is reported to have said, just before his collapse: “Everyone seems to need me to live, and people keep coming to see me. I just can’t take anymore.”
“According to hospital doctors, Reason just needs a long holiday.”
“Abstracta, the world’s greatest hermit, forgotten until today, when he re-entered the Universe after being away for millions of years, spoke to our reporter, Geoff Humphries:
“Abstracta, what have you learned during your time of seclusion?”
” isolation is a form of relation, Mr. Media man. Isolation is just a relation. However, being a relation does not invalidate it. Isolation is still an option and I very much recommend it.”
It is amusing to note that ‘chain’ is synonymous with ‘sequence’ and ‘shackle’ and ‘bond’. Is a sequence a trap?
Chain: (nouns) coupling: fetter: link: manacle: progression: restraint: train: sequence: series: shackle: succession: union
(verbs) bind: confine: enslave: restrain: train: sequence: shackle
To indulge in sequential thought patterns is to be bound! Is that so? Is life a train of thought?
I want to create works of unparalleled beauty, of unsurpassed insight. For I want to create a suddenly pellucid profundity, to surprise Sofia in her most secret activities. I want, I want, I want. I am, I am, I am. Desire and Being, Yearning and Feeling. A moment in Time and the Moment of Time.
“Like Hegel, Nagarjuna also rejects the temporal causal view, but, unlike him, does not substitute any rational pattern for it. Instead of grasping separatedness in terms of unity, as Hegel advocates, Nagarjuna refers, perhaps, to a meditative state, or to the effect of such a state, in which, paradoxically, separatedness may exist as before, but is not taken as such: one seems to have lost, or, rather, overcome the awareness of events in time. Not that one ceases to react to phenomena, but that one acts as though the moment of action is eternity.
Nagaruna’s insight, I think, should have been clarified in less intuitive terms. But I must admit that I do not find the right words to define it. But perhaps finding them is missing it. What Nagarjuna helps us to do, and Kant and Hegel do not, is to forget about philosophy and still rest satisfied.”
“Philosophy East/Philosophy West: A Critical Comparison Of Indian, Chinese, Islamic, And European Philosophy” Edited by Ben-Ami Sharfstein
Etc. Can’t be bothered to put the other pictures in, yet.
INTERNET, SPLINTERNET
A quick response to Terence Blake’s “ACADEMIC TRAUMA OR NOETIC DREAM: on the vicissitudes of dialogue“.
[TB] “Readers may see my blog as just more froth in the prevailing sea of philo-babble, but my goal is more democratic (and more pedagogical), and I have made quite a few enemies in trying to de-esotericise the philosophies I discuss.”
{AK}: Who cares whether they think it’s frothy or not?!
[TB] “The almost universal form that this enmity takes is that of ignoring my very existence, of refusing to acknowledge my work or to cite me. This has nothing to do with my use of the blog form, as the same authors occasionally cite blog posts favourable to their cause.”
{AK}: It’s not worth worrying about. Individually, we never really get the level of responses we’d prefer. I don’t really have any expectations about it. It comes with the territory of individuality.
[TB] “Publicity, not dialogue, is their aim. Laziness, not openness, is their method. Tautological self-validation is their pay-off.”
{AK}: Usually, they’re not very good, and they know it.
[TB] “These people transpose the power structures of the university to discussion on the web. They seem to be unaware that academics talk of dialogue, its openness and pluralism in order to prevent it from happening. Dialogue would be too traumatic for them, and their careers are based on avoiding it, or repressing it.”
{AK}: It’s a lot of work, to even write the low-level stuff of bog-standard academic production. Such obligations of production, naturally reduce the time and energy available for Internet shenanigans. Due to the effects of networked compression, not all institutional modalities of discursive production fare well in the new electronic environments.
[TB] “In the neo-liberal university there is only one dialogue that counts in the last instance (to cite a cynical expression of the Laruelleans). Money talks to money, and deals are made on that basis.”
{AK}: Let them get on with it! It won’t make them any better, lol.
[TB] “Power, the power to make and to do, to think and to express oneself, does not count, and is actively discouraged. Anyone who has been to university has witnessed this obscene underside (to talk like Zizek) and its symbolic violence at work, and seen its casualties.”
{AK}: I don’t really care about any of that, Terence. When it is good, it’s good. When it isn’t, it’s not. Not worth having any expectations.
TECHNO-ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE TECHNOSENSORIUM
As all definition moves closer towards simply being desire; each definition a dialectic between varying probabilities; between the reliable regularity of alleged certitudes, and the increasingly improbable; that nostalgic conceptual economy, rubricised as ‘world’, grows ever more granularised, into micro-epistemologies, into micro-libidinal epistemologies; vast swarms of sense, in both senses.
In and around this imaginary, of a ‘world-pen’, huge herds of meaning can be observed, their migratory patterns almost instantaneous to a subset of biological perceptions, caught in its global techno-entanglement of electronic light.
The Crystallinear Collection
The alien collector
The alien collector – not yet written.
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inspectable l.c.d. consciousness
“The “extended concept of naturalism” as: “the suspending of transcendence”; “naturalism as immanence”; “there is nothing outside the world”: all these are a particular rhetoric of containment, preliminary categorisations that set up an epistemological schema or framework, a world: a world to be ruled. When transcendence was necessary, to compensate for lack of sufficient material control, a central principle was arrived at and implemented with brutal force (in the Occident, at any rate). The principle was tightly governed, authoritarian, and inflexible. As networks of cyber-kontrol and exploitation developed, the central principle was contested and recontextualised as an element of these networks. The essential movement of assimilation continued, the element of earlier brutalisations transposed into the ‘scientific’ implementations of an ‘industrialisation’ that colonised almost without limit.
As the innate pragmatics of this deprived and depraved barbarity prevailed: as the entire globe was cast into the abyss of the lowest common denominator: an ‘l.c.d. consciousness’ took hold, crystallising a mundum depletus whose ever-renewing facets glittered out to the void: powered by a circuitry of oneiric commerce, endlessly replaying nostalgic imagery of the earlier stages of liquid vitality, even of the ‘l.c.d. consciousness’ itself, all of which had been displaced: the crystal world shone its twinkling visions of frozen desire, but its invitations to the dream life were in vain, the mechanism of seductions now only a museum for passing inspection by alien ‘brains’, an exhibition of the “Era of homo insane“.”
(”The Final Refractions of Common Sense (sensus communis), the Clarifications of Commerce”, December 3, 2012)
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lithographic conclusion of the Techno-Geo-Logic Era
“Powered by the petrified liquefactions of a prehistoric vitality, a contemporary vitality accelerates its transition to a solid, substantial future form, one whose glistening facets announce a fresh stratigraphic layer; the culmination of a new force of erosion, that called itself ‘Consciousness’; & the lithographic conclusion of the Techno-Geo-Logic Era.”
(”Between Monstrous Accords: the Sound of Solid Decisions”, March 8, 2016)
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the spectral stone of the West
“All of this follows an oneiric logic of the Name; the Hellenic obsession with nominal glory, or glorious nominalisations, as it were. It’s a perpetually repetitive mechanics of mnemonic recognition, technologised; merging with that which formerly memorialised, inscribing the ephemerality of anthropic bios onto the enduring lithic media of monument; a monu(mentality) where nominal sign & its medium are unified in the enduring ecstasy of lithic legend – the spectral stone*, of the West.
*3D screen consciousness”
(Asymptotic Aim of the Name, April 6, 2016)
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inert tablets of stone
“For that, one needs to abandon the ‘monumental’ desire of The Occident, its ceaseless & incessant self-memorialisation as inert tablets of stone; so many, they are effectively become as ‘dust’.
In this l.c.d. & ‘nanometric dust’, driven by an Occidental instructional desire; in the ‘programmable matter’ to come, where ‘world’ is become as ‘screen’; it is ‘there’, where every ‘glorious name’ is condemned to circulation in an economics of abject stupidity; that this Occidental theatricks of fear & desire imagines a resolution, & it is indeed into this ‘screen’, in which it is condemned, by its own choice, to eternally collapse.”
(“The Assumptions Informing Glorious Collapse”, 23 September 2016)
Asymptotic Aim of the Name
The asymptotic “aim of increasing financial capital (Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: here)”?
“The goal of the capitalist isn’t to accumulate capital but to accumulate capital in order that he may feel inoculated against ontological insecurity and existential vulnerability.” Arran James (here)
“immortality, or an effective illusion of immortality” Arran James (here)
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All of this follows an oneiric logic of the Name; the Hellenic obsession with nominal glory, or glorious nominalisations, as it were. It’s a perpetually repetitive mechanics of mnemonic recognition, technologised; merging with that which formerly memorialised, inscribing the ephemerality of anthropic bios onto the enduring lithic media of monument; a monu(mentality) where nominal sign & its medium are unified in the enduring ecstasy of lithic legend – the spectral stone*, of the West.
*3D screen consciousness
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: algorithms of immortality
Note (“algorithms of immortality”27-09-2011)
“algorithms of immortality
Eurocentric obsession with delimited objectivities, suppression of ambiguity, of the unmanipulable?
Greek & Eurocentric obsession with names
the identifiable, identities susceptible to perpetual recall by the mechanised algorithms of enduring techno-immortality device, the regime of such an arrangement
nostalgic desire to conform to ancient mechanisms of salvation?”
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: On the Naming thing, & the Oneiric
The Hellenic ‘naming perspective’ occurred to me in the early 1990s. There was a conjunction of ideas; Saul Kripke’s, “Naming & Necessity”, suggested the conjunction of the two concepts in its title; Cioran’s “To bear a name, is to claim an exact mode of collapse” was in there, linking the two concepts more explicitly. My notion of ‘Oneiric economy’ was there, too, as well as others.
Not sure if I’d already read Sol Yurick’s virtuosic “Metatron”, wherein, he pretty much does everything, in one way or another, that was occurring in the intuition I was having through the conjunction of concepts mentioned. But then, in the 1980s, I wrote: “We all live in Aristotle’s mind,” which kind of encapsulates one of the logics at play. Sol Yurick, of course, wrote his stuff back in the early 1980s, & he’s the only theorist I can think of, who has the powers of ‘idea compression’, as it were; of analogy, extrapolation, & metaphoric leaping, all without losing critical intuition or precision; & sheer speed (best read fast); of the better SF writers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargazer_%28Rainbow_song%29
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Meillassoux as Symptom?
Meillassoux’s diatribe against so called “correlationism”, is a symptom of the Occidental desperation to fixate itself as a determinate, perpetually repeatable, sign. Hence, the need to locate the ‘Real’ as absolute other, the Occident as exception to this ‘Real’ & its own cyclical modes.
Meillassoux’s characterises his ‘Absolute’ as not merely indifferent, but in terms of his own ‘realist hysteria’. It’s the purchasing of understanding; through the logic of sado-masochistic self-sacrifice, hence the need for ‘Universalism’, to offload that sacrifice onto ‘universally appropriated’, empirical Others; & through harsh disciplines of ‘working & tested truth’; all of it is configured by historical trauma, of which, it is the configured, dogmatic expression.
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 1 – Rainbow: Stargazer
Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow: Stargazer (Legendado PT-BR) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGsfugB8LPQ
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 1a – Lyrics
Rainbow – Stargazer Lyrics
High noon, oh I’d sell my soul for water
Nine years worth of breakin’ my back
There’s no sun in the shadow of the wizard
See how he glides, why he’s lighter than air
Oh I see his face!
Where is your star?
Is it far, is it far, is it far?
When do we leave?
I believe, yes, I believe
In the heat and the rain
With whips and chains
To see him fly
So many die
We build a tower of stone
With our flesh and bone
Just to see him fly
But don’t know why
Now where do we go?
Hot wind, moving fast across the desert
We feel that our time has arrived
The world spins, while we put his dream together
A tower of stone to take him straight to the sky
Oh I see his face!
Where is your star?
Is it far, is it far, far?
When do we leave?
Hey, I believe, I believe
In the heat and the rain
With whips and chains
Just to see him fly
Too many die
We build a tower of stone
With our flesh and bone
To see him fly
But we don’t know why
Ooh, now where do we go
All eyes see the figure of the wizard
As he climbs to the top of the world
No sound, as he falls instead of rising
Time standing still, then there’s blood on the sand
Oh I see his face!
Where was your star?
Was it far, was it far
When did we leave?
We believed, we believed, we believed
In heat and rain
With whips and chains
To see him fly
So many died
We built a tower of stone
With our flesh and bone
To see him fly
But why
In all the rain
With all the chains
Did so many die
Just to see him fly
Look at my flesh and bone
Now, look, look, look, look,
Look at his tower of stone
I see a rainbow rising
Look there, on the horizon
And I’m coming home, I’m coming home, I’m coming home
Time is standing still
He gave back my will
Ooh ooh ooh ooh
Going home
I’m going home
My eyes are bleeding
And my heart is leaving here
A place I’ve known
But it’s not home, ooh
Take me back
He gave me back my will
Ooh ooh ooh ooh
Going home
I’m going home
My eyes are bleeding
And my heart is leaving here
The place I’ve known
But it’s not home ooh
Take me back, he gave me back my will
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Going home, I’m going home
My eyes are bleeding
And my heart is leaving here
The place I’ve known
But it’s not home, ooh
Take me back, take me back
Back to my home oh oh ooh
Time standing still
Songwriters: WOLF, LENNY / STAG, DANNY / FRANK, JOHN BURT / STEIER, RICK J.
Stargazer lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 1b Meanings
“The song has been called a “morality tale”,[6] and its lyrics are written from the standpoint of a “slave in Egyptian times”, according to lyricist Ronnie James Dio. They relate the story of the Wizard, an astronomer who becomes “obsessed with the idea of flying” and enslaves a vast army of people to build him a tower from which he can take off and fly.[4] The people hope for the day when their misery comes to an end, building the tower in harsh conditions (“In the heat and rain, with whips and chains; / to see him fly, so many died”). In the end, the wizard climbs to the top of the tower but, instead of flying, falls down and dies: “no sound as he falls instead of rising. / Time standing still, then there’s blood on the sand”. The next song, “A Light in the Black”, continues the story of the people who have lost all purpose after the Wizard’s death “until they see the Light in the Dark”, according to Dio.[4]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargazer_%28Rainbow_song%29#Description
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 1c – Discussions
Good discussion of the song, here, http://lyraka.com/ourfatherofmetal/rainbowsstargazer.htm .
Lays out the mass psychology of ‘belief’; the Wagnerian (arguably fascist or proto-Nazi) techniques of “enchantment”, for transitioning into the Oneiric; in short, the mass hallucinatory construction of the Cult of the Real.
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 2 – Rainbow – Lost In Hollywood
This song’s title evokes being lost in the Oneiric TechnoSensorium.
Rainbow – Lost In Hollywood – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYVqpauiq8E
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Arguably, better guitar solo on this version. Malmsteen does his thing.
Alcatrazz アルカトラス – Lost In Hollywood [Live in Tokyo, 1984] – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=870H3mggCdw
the Quantum: a Clear Convention, or a Vague ‘Reality’?
Discussion with Terence Blake, here.
{AK}: The specification that creates an ‘immanence’, ineluctably creates ‘transcendence’.
Contesting a history of privilegings, whether of the ‘immanent’, or ‘transcendent’, even Plato’s own, does nothing to address the initial specification.
Shifting initial specifications, so that they are more in accord with current, received intuitions, of whatever constitutes the ‘given reality’ of an age, merely shifts the microscope’s field of vision from one area of the heavens, to another. It doesn’t relinquish the microscope for a telescope.
In a way, any language at all, necessarily exemplifies a monistic flavour; the identity of a language, as a language, suggests that. So ‘monism’ can’t really be escaped, it’s a necessary corollary of ‘plurality’. If you combine languages, like George Steiner, the combination, if it becomes standardised, could be characterised as monistic. Hybridity begets new forms of unity, as it were.
Apophatic caution ensures that one doesn’t get fixated by any horizon, by a single star.
Mathematical reductionism
Mathematics is just a language essentially contingent on the ‘metric’.
The ‘metric’ is the ‘measured’; the ‘measured’ is a specification, as system, that produces further sub-specifications within its field.
I don’t really see that Mathematics is essentially different to any other semiotic system.
It’s natural that subcultural uses of language proliferate.
If “mathematics is ontology” is suspect, why wouldn’t ‘ontology is ontology’ be suspect, too?
One has to ask “what is mathematics?”, “what does it specify?”, & is this any different to the ontological?
If ‘measurement’ is specification; if specification is identification; if identification is entity production; if this entitification, as it were, is ontologisation; then, mathematics is just another branch of ontological specification.
In fact, one could see all languages that use any categorical specification at all, as branches of mathematics.
All of this stuff is transitive, interchangeable, conventional.
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[Terence Blake]: “Laruelle’s own solution is to make a “weak”, allegorical, use of quantum physics as a style of thinking, but his explanations are scientifically vague, incomplete, and one-sided as well as philosophically obscure, due to his use of his typically inadequately defined but quite abstract vocabulary.”
{AK}: Terence, if you rule out both “Mathematical reductionism”, & if the holistic metaphors of “Eastern traditions” are ruled out “as philosophically obscure” or vague, what else is left to avoid the “scientifically vague”?
Remember, quantum physicists, themselves, don’t really have any clear theoretical interpretations, they just do the mathematics.
Brooding on the Genesis of Reality, Nightmare and Dreams
There was an exchange on Nick Land’s blog, here, that broached the topics of evolution and genetics. It’s not very long, didn’t really get off the ground, as it were. I’ve turned my concluding comment into this post.
A silent debate? It seems that minds are caught up in a ‘reality’, so involved in (d)evolution? ‘Up-to-the-minute’ flows, weaving ‘can-do’ narratives of a tangible empiricism, tracking the ‘market’, repeating the decisional practices of ‘administration’, political phantasies, playing games of power.
I think I’ll carry on dreaming…
Continuing Nick Land’s logic:
If you cooperate to ‘kill’ the entropic forces that threaten an ecologically informed democracy, that is a lot more cooperation than converting vegetation resources into ‘meat’ through the vector of domesticated forms of animal vitality.
If cooperative predation leads to a development of specific and goal oriented cerebral systems, in which the strategies of elusiveness are countered by the tactics of ‘capture’, it follows that such developments occur within a context of ecological management: the appropriation of the somatic resources of one form by another form.
Predation functions within a holistic economy of circulations: it could be said to have a function within this economy.
If it is the case that the tactical thinking of capture itself turns into an administration of ‘prey forms’ as harvested resource, has there not been a transformation? The “intelligence-enhancing” challenges of prey acquisition no longer obtain in quite the same ways. Control displaces capture, there is nothing left to capture. And yet there are those who remain enamoured of the atavistic ‘culture of capture’. Isn’t it time to consider this culture from a critical perspective, from a visionary perspective, is this not a truer, better evolution?
If an ‘ecologically informed democracy’ is too much of an abstraction for those bound by the militant logics of meat consumption, the visceral theatrics of predation, and the atavistic heroics of conquest, it would be wise to remember that the homogenising logic that turns everything into a ‘resource’ works with an ruthless and indifferent efficiency. The more it is accessed for the local and hierarchical concerns of anthropic culture, the greater the displacement of these initiating concerns, and the increased likelihood of their radical ‘downsizing’ to a singular embodiment – “There can be only one”.
Cooperation based only on an imaginary of conflict and scarcity, rooted only in the habits of violation, do not lend themselves to sound holistic administrations.
The belief in the productivity of harnessed ‘Newtonian’ mechanisms, the concentration of powers through frugality, the avaricious parsimonies of colonial aggression, the hedonisms of relentless consumption and destruction: all these are elements in the same equation and they cannot end well. Not because of any ‘objective’ necessity, but because Man has hallucinated the wrong ‘objects’, and he can only obsess on a mirage of impending dooms, as he orbits, and is orbited by, this constellation of traumas.
All ‘sense of wonder’, mystical feeling, contemplation, has gone, leaving only the endless calculations of imagined catastrophe: Man, caught in a binding web of resentful ambitions, that only he has spun.
The After-Blend of the Words of Man
[This piece has its origin as a commentary on the wonderful post, “Eternal Return, and After” by Nick Land.]
The logic of anxiety that has configured preceding decades, perhaps even the entire history of warfare, is an independent mechanism: one that permeates the layer of anthropic self-knowledge, dividing anthropic intention, producing forms other than that intention: the autonomous emergence of technology?
The logic of escalation ensures that such autonomous development is beyond ‘human decision’.
Perhaps the ‘AI’, in global, or even cosmic, form, already ‘exists’? Perhaps it has always existed? Whether Heidegger’s “Language speaks through Man”: Burroughs’ ‘language as alien virus’: or perhaps as some teleological mirage towards which all anthropic actions converge, a ‘strange attractor’, drawing-pulling-wrenching the future out of an anthropic era that was a temporary figure, all along? Perhaps a new form awaits: neither organic, nor mechanic, nor cyborganic?
Metaphors can be multiplied, serried ranges of forms derived, infinities surround us, and yet, is there not something else? Because there always is.
If ‘Man’ chooses to name this process, through which ‘intellect’, ‘thought’, passes from it’s ‘natural’, anthropic site, to the locus of the ‘artificial’, to the territories of techne, does this choice not serve a purpose? It allows the illusion that ‘Man’ has a territory, one which somehow belongs to him. Through the inflation of the egoic complex of concepts such as ‘action’, agency’, etc., such an ‘imaginary of ownership’ can be sustained, if only because it is caught in a ‘holding pattern’ of disputation concerning the ‘nature’ of these half-baked concepts. As this culture of altercations proceeds (all the while, providing comforts of insularity), the veritable drives for territorial precision cast the anthropic into the abyssal logics of a f(lawed) understanding, Caught in an invariable transition, by its ‘own’ desire for an ultimate performance of knowledge, anthropic figurality continues on, to the point at which it is possible to say, finally:”Behold the Man!”
But the declaration is an inhuman utterance, the figure itself has transitioned beyond any fixed determination: the announcement can only issue as retrospection, when the name of ‘Man’ no longer has a bearer. Such is the price for the exaction of knowledge. And it is this unerringly human precision, that anxiously sketches the shape of things to come…