Category Archives: Aesthetic Transactions

In response to this question –

“Do you think trans women are real women?”

From here – Two strangers, five minutes, eye to eye.
BBC Three 23 June at 17:02 ·
https://www.facebook.com/bbcthree/videos/10155896044135787/
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The question cannot be answered unless criteria for the category ‘real woman’ are stipulated?

As biology becomes increasingly susceptible to technological decision, the emergent birthing or even conceiving scenario of necessary parental decision with regard to offspring gender, arises. This creates the possibility of future discrepancy between that decision and subsequent offspring developments, and their decisions. Both are based on design decisions in which the contribution of nature, natural givenness or contribution, is increasingly displaced and problematised, on every vector of its traditional consideration, by technological decision.

When the forms of natural constraint are thus dispersed or dissolved, the cultural necessities and traditions based on those constraints disperse and dissolve along with them, giving rise to new cultural scenarios based on new sets of constraints, whatever those might be and however they might be produced.

If the scenario of such productions arises through social interaction and determination, it will be subject to the full spectrum of sociopolitical aesthetics prevailing at that time of production. That sociopolitical aesthetic, necessarily the ongoing developmental form or forms arising from the current and preceding ones, is subject to the resources and distribution necessities of the technological culture to which it belongs.

Increasingly, as this culture displaces that which it has categorised as ‘nature’ or the ‘natural’, it will be compelled to confront its own ‘nature’, previously considered as ‘artificiality’, in an aporia of questionable designs whose production it can no longer definitively determine, as the notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ are mobilised from their traditional sites-sights, onto highways of techno-economic distribution and techno-aesthetic, sociopolitical design.

Undoubtedly, on discovery of the weaponisation potential residing within possibilities of so-called ‘gender fluidity’, various state and corporate actors will engage and invest heavily in this area, converting it into militarised fluency of those possibilities. This is always the hypocritical mode of instrumentalisation by which traditional greed, the greed of traditions, transforms into that to which it might otherwise seem ostensibly opposed.

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.