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CONTOURS (con tourisms) OF OCCIDENTAL POSITIVISM

I think there’s an article somewhere associating Michel Foucault with so-called, ‘neoliberalism’.



Postmodern and poststructuralist critiques, whether of Marxism or anything else, are important qualifying stages of epistemological, ontological, and other forms of, reflexivity; forms of reflexivity that require more than just practical, pragmatic, or Occidental-theoretical, understandings.


Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Instead, there have been all kinds of reactive epistemology, things like ‘speculative realism’; object-oriented ontology; and even the various cults of immanence, some of which attach themselves to Deleuze and Guattari.


It’s interesting that someone like Nick Land preferred the seeming tangibility of Deleuze and Guattari, instead of what he saw as the ‘academic formalism’ of Derrida. It’s obvious that he did not understand Derrida.
It’s then interesting to see his taking up with right-wing politics, something that is arguably not at all disconnected from his philosophical preferences and dislikes.


In my own work, of course, I have observed a general movement that can be called Occidental positivism, which probably isn’t that far away from Derrida’s logocentrism.


The entire Occident is caught up in its own ‘brand’ of positivism which proceeds according to its distinctly ‘marked’ epistemology, in one direction only. It knows of no other way but this proprietary and unilinear herding of knowledge.
This is why it could not solve the paradox of desire, because it was spellbound by the hypostatic and substantialising atrophy of its own principle of desire, which it could only image as the loveless invariance of servile control.
It is this age-old image of imperial security, intrinsically belonging to the West, that is attempting to rehabilitate and readjust itself according to its ridiculous philosophical exhaustions, dressed as rhetorics of immanence.
These shapes of contemporary reaction and how they show themselves all describe some of the contours of Occidental positivism.

COERCIVICS: AN INTRODUCTION II (some relevant quotations)

“I now feel it might be worth expressing those possibilities that are other than ‘received understandings’; perhaps other than the language of conventional ‘positions’ which have thus far constituted the manifest contentions of sociopolitical scenography. If only to register the fulfilment of any ‘social responsibility’ that subscribers of the partisan are wont to demand.

 

(“Towards A Critique of NewColonial Manifestation – Introduction” by Artxell Knaphni – Sunday, December 09, 2012 http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?page_id=238)

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“”Necessity”, they say, “is the mother of invention”, but is it the mother of fresh understandings beyond the novel technical object, and its secret demands on thought? Or does only an empty and contextless rush of expediency prevail, its animating logics forgotten, in a ‘stampediency’ driven by dreams of unlimited convenience?

 

The easy and unquestioned transactions of ‘Necessity’ have often been the pretext for countless structures of social and political coercion, all of which have their alibi in various images of ‘Necessity’. ‘Vested interests’ use the opportunistic proximities of power to enable disingenuous constructions of administrative necessity favouring only themselves. The desire to secure such convenient forms of distribution, as it were, exercises considerable ideological constraint on the general culture, on its interpretations, practices and world-views. Management of reaction to these constraints is easily achieved through tactical delimitation, around intuitive, issue-based polarities.”

 

(“Aeolian Inquiry: Quest(ion)s of the Whirlwind” by Artxell Knaphni – Thursday, July 16, 2015 http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=844)

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“The ideology of war, what I seem to be calling the ‘philosophy of coercion’, is not merely limited to the battlefield, but is quite possibly constitutive of the ‘human’ imaginary, the ‘human’ self-image. This constitution is constructed and maintained. And it is a cultural administration that so perpetually constructs and engages in such incessant maintenance.”

 

(“Culture and Coercion 1” by Artxell Knaphni – Saturday, December 29, 2012 http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=555)

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“If it is a development of the sovereign state, then it has to be considered as the product of warfare. Whether its constituents were commandeered through explicit conquests, or rallied to the banner of a prevailing force that could provide protection, the underlying impetus would’ve been the threat of war, and perhaps internal disorder.

 

And it is this culture, of destructive contentions, that I am calling ‘coercion’.

 

And, arguably, this ‘coercion’ permeates all modern cultures, nationalistic or otherwise, all the time.”

 

(“Culture and Coercion 3” by Artxell Knaphni – Thursday, January 03, 2013 http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=566)

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“This statement reflects a certain type of individual. An individual with cultural kapital sufficient to exceed having to fall back on mere national privilege. And, wherever national privilege exists, it is often as a result of geopolitical coercion.”

 

(“Culture and Coercion 3” by Artxell Knaphni – Thursday, January 03, 2013 http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=566)

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“For me, the notion of ‘Reality’ has always been an ‘idealisation’, & it has never only been singular, except as the consensual mirage of unity that various thinkings celebrate, through various monistic apprehensions. But notice, a ‘mirage’ is nevertheless an event, a constrained ‘effect’, a necessary structural moment. One can reduce it to various forms of supervenience, using empirical, theoretical, aesthetic vocabularies; but these differential positionings, too, are supervenient ‘metaphysical’ operations, always issuing from some cave of conceptual enclosure, as it were; the slums of imagined ‘sureness’ constituting ‘Knowledge’ with a big ‘K’; which invariably turn out to be yet another consensual coercion, another do-be-us invitation to inhabit the same set of theoretical limitations; limitations constituting yet another mechanism, another production line, of dogma production; of fetishised conceptual circulations forever in search of (an) ultimate expediency.”

 

(“Phil Zero So Fee: The Real, I Deal, is So Free!” by Artxell Knaphni – Saturday, April 25, 2015 http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=804)

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“All its existential references have turned into calculable, Cartesian points, any self it might produce would only be an empty, gratuitous, combinatorial gesture. The tools through which it continues to manipulate others have ironised its very essence. The astringent demands with which it castigates others, the corollary of its mentality of ‘dogmatic expression’, exclude it from the holistic and unquantifiable mysteries that could lead to creative regeneration. Circulating within its economics of banal certitude, it has become a global network of infernal necessities, a generalised coercion, a colonisation of ever increasing intensity.”

 

(“Responses 2” by Artxell Knaphni – Tuesday, December 11, 2012 http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=269)

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“Philosophers are coerced into producing vast amounts of rubbish, & then fall into infighting over its dubious merits. (innocuous noises concerning clarity & obscurity are a big favourite). The coercion is towards quantity, not quality. It isn’t possible to do anything worthwhile under the duress of such a ‘professional’ demand. So most fall into the silent agreement of pretending that the copious trivia of their output is ‘philosophical work’.
Unable to let go of a ‘career’ already invested in, grumbling sets in. In danger of disappearing in the deluge of their own output, desperate overtures are made to other disciplines, or public life, seeking a spurious relevance. But secretly, they are looking for shelter from the self-imposed, Tantalean tasks of turgidity they erroneously imagine are necessary in attaining the brilliance they covet as a corollary of career advancement.”

 

(“The Anxious Superpositions of Wisdom, When Philosophy Is Quantified” by Artxell Knaphni – Monday, June 29, 2015 http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=835)

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COERCIVICS: AN INTRODUCTION (I)

 

Around 6 years ago, I coined the word, ‘Coercivics’, as a guiding concept of civilisational analysis critiquing forms of sociopolitical implementation and practice. Wishing to avoid any developments according to stereotypical routes of programmatic manifesto, as it were, I didn’t bother introducing the neologism, though it has informed everything I’ve written, that might in any way be considered to bear some kind of sociopolitical relevance. The avoidance of use was not only due to the somewhat tactical refusal to engage in traditional obligations of position, whether political or otherwise, but more largely was informed by the logic of an emergence in which theoretical patience has value, in itself.
Coercivics is not just politics or political theory.

Coercivics, then, is not just “an arc of political speculation”, even though it might trace such arcs. Given that I’ve written, elsewhere on this blog, that ‘politics is over’, in the sense of traditional political systems and institutions having become obsolescent, to varying degrees; Coercivics is not to be determined by the perspectives of such obsolescence, but it occurs precisely at the borders of this transition, accounting for that conditioned movement, using resources that do not necessarily belong to that movement or its ostensible conditions.
Coercivics seeks to understand all socio-ideological movements that might be in play, producing assessments as to whether or not those movements produce coercion; to what degrees they produce unnecessary or unjustifiable coercion; from whose perspectives they produce coercion; and why they produce coercion?
The question asking, ‘why the production of coercion’, is of course eminently susceptible to ideological production of genealogical explanation. Coercivics is the radical investigation of those ideological presuppositions, of their genealogical constitutions and productions, but not necessarily from the usual, habitual perspectives, used in such considerations.
Nostalgias are not neglected; mnemonics, after all, are constitutive of civilisational form; but ‘reactions’ are critiqued and rejected, given their often contemporary emergences as stereotypical exemplifications of the coercivical.

 

Any political system can work, if it’s implementations are competent; no political system can work, if it’s implementations are incompetent or sabotaged.
The key issue is not the system, political systems are only systems of distribution, decisional frameworks concerning how distribution is to occur. Alongside systems of political or governmental distribution, marketing systems of distribution have developed in so-called, private and commercial sectors. These marketing systems cater for libidinal economy, for movements of consumer desire. It’s not at all a contentious thing to say that the ethos of consumer desire has become the hegemonic rationale of all political systems, of political systematicity, itself.

 

Back in 2000, at Cafe Italia, opposite Ronnie Scott’s Jazz club, I had a conversation with a Latin (Spanish or Italian?), young man, probably a university student, possibly working in computing. He spoke about how marketing was now central in philosophy, politics, and world affairs. The initial context had probably been philosophy or theory, not politics or marketing. So the sudden preoccupation with politics and marketing was a bit unexpected.
Given the events of the last 19 years, it looks as though the young student’s prognosis was valid. More valid than I suspected, at the time. Not that I necessarily disagreed with whatever was said, but the mechanisms he described, were only supervenient mechanisms of more arcane, historic-philosophical and cultural shifts, which those mechanisms might well be a reaction against.

 

Consumerism and its market articulations have been the dominant figure in transitioning between different models of selfhood.
Though there are considerable, contemporary reactionary nostalgias, for earlier modes of social configuration that sustained earlier models of selfhood, the New Conditions, in play, provision superconductive, communicatory surfaces, permitting only the velocities of sociopsychological, hysteria and stasis, not so much, anything else. Network nodalisation seems to preclude the development of any other socialisation.

 

Given that the dominant figure of social organisation is consumerism; given the oneiric and libidinal casts of such consumerism; given the ongoing collapse of institutional and social structures, their sensory and spatiotemporal characteristics, into a generalised, informational flow; the scenario of possibility is now so open to reconfiguration that it quite possibly exceeds any notion of reconfiguration, altogether.
No doubt the mnemonic militancy of simplistic, nostalgias of reconfiguration, are going to continue to echo through the New Conditions, as Doppler effects of stellar iniquity, from this or that history attempting its own achievement. But those constellations of resource concentration have transitioned into a different kind of cosmos, one in which even the expectation of historical entropy, no longer holds sway.
No cyclical comforts of pessimism-laden, Spenglerian prophecy; no ‘patchwork quilt’ as themepark and global safety net, of geopolitical amusement and its epistemology.
The New Conditions are such that even nostalgic attributions of ‘fragmentation’ are irrelevant.
Everyone knows this, of course, without knowing it. That is why they are so frenetically busy trying to sustain the worlds with which they were programmed, by arguing, disputing, and mutually destroying the features of those imagined worlds, as if such extreme contentions somehow confer ontological stability.
It doesn’t, it’s a symptom of precisely the ontological instability, feared.

 

Pandora’s box has been opened, some time ago.

DESIRE, DREAM, AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

This system of mediated nostalgia, based on the continuing residues of bibliographic organisation, has, through market disciplines, achieved sufficient agility of infrastructural and techno-spheric implementation, to the extent that the full narrative spectrum of political possibility can be instantly delivered, as so many administrative styles, in response to the motions of mass desire, according to the calculi of libidinal economy.
But beyond the market administrations and calculations of libidinal economy, are occurrences of mythological motion, the oneiric transports of the figures of desire, constituting an oneiric economy. These figures have been bibliographic constants throughout the mechanism of history. The production of history, as mechanism; always occurs according to their exploitative variation, as combinatorics of libidinal figuration. It is this constancy of figural identity, enabling the necessary continuity of narrative development constitutive of bibliography, that delimits notions of desire, dream, and book.
The constancy of figural identity, supports the constancy of bibliography, both of which support the constancy of the oneiric.


“A place is made, in that essay, by all rights, for such a positive inquiry into the current upheavals in the forms of communication, the new structures emerging in all the formal practices, and also in the domains of the archive and the treatment of information, that massively and systematically reduce the role of speech, of phonetic writing, and of the book. But one would be mistaken in coming to the conclusion of a death of the book and a birth of writing from that which is entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” One page before the chapter which bears this title a distinction is proposed between closure and end. What is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely. If one does not simply read the title, it announces precisely that there is no end of the book and no beginning of writing. The chapter shows just that: writing does not begin. It is even on the basis of writing, if it can be put this way,
that one can put into question the search for an archie, an absolute beginning, an origin. Writing can no more begin, therefore, than the book can end”


[From, “Positions”, Jacques Derrida ]

THE ‘TIMELESS’ PRESENCE OF LIGHT

The notion of a ‘present moment’ (nunc stans) requires a structure of presentation, at the very least, a minimal condition of reception.
In order for it to be a logically meaningful concept, negation is required, momentariness not present.
So, the concept has an implicit complexity, automatically calling on notions of ‘past’ and ‘future’, in its very articulation.


The notion of the present is thus an anticipatory conceptualisation directed towards the assumption of an event. An event is a distinct, or distinguishable, temporal object, or objectification, the multiplication of which suggest the sequences constitutive of temporality. Whether as ‘internal psychic states’ or ‘external transitions between events’, ‘temporality’ is supervenient on both of these factors.


Imagine a universe, in which nothing at all happens. Would it be at all reasonable to speak of temporality with regard to such a universe? Temporality, or at least temporal conventions as commonly understood, simply would not obtain in such a universe.


Therefore, temporality or time is intrinsically tied up with objectification, with the determinate objects known as ‘events’. Events, or eventuality, more generally, are/is bound up with general and localised determinations of process.


The notion of the ‘eternal now’, is a standpoint ‘apprehending’ eventuality, ‘as a whole’, but without any form of localised grasp. Therefore, such an infinite apprehension cannot be so easily communicated in the language of localised processes and their semantic conventions.
This is not merely a theoretical supposition.
At the speed of light, there is no time. So, for a bunch of photons whose journey begins with the hypothesised onset of the so-called universe, nothing at all has happened. Light is alleged to be a ‘physical’ property, but that property arises from its interactions with other processes and events, a subset of considerations of which constitute the concepts of physics. But those very concepts indicate a quite specific ‘timelessness’, that can be ‘seen’.

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NOSTALGIC TIME-SEQUENCES AND THE TEMPORAL TECHNICIAN

Reflections in time, back-and-forth they go, from one memory to another. This playing of mnemonic transactions, a ceaseless interchange of objectifying compulsions, all according to the metaphysics of that strange and unquestioned notion called ‘form’. It is under the spell of this notion, under its unquestioned assumption only, that one can talk about ‘repetition’. Without such an objectifying assumption, without these hypothetical  ‘forms’ – at least one – there is nothing to ‘repeat’.
It’s not my intention here to outline the conditions of form or formal metaphysical assumption, but merely to suggest that beyond all the usual reflexive productions of insight attaching itself to this notion, mystery, or the mysterious, continues on its merry way, perhaps hinted at by this or that economy of ‘knowledge’ and its always not quite adequate ‘conclusions’, but never exhausted by these epistemological labours.


As is the case with economies of knowledge, so also with cultural economies of history and memory. It is quite possible for an entire culture to proceed in a particular ‘historical direction’, as it were, failing to adequately register the lessons of its development, and in such a way, that it proves impossible to simply follow along with such a culture, without provisioning radical explications apparently beyond that culture’s understanding. Not that there is necessarily any responsibility to do so, but refusing the task of giving explicatory contextualisations would be an unnecessary neglect.
If both Baudrillard and Fukuyama talked about the ‘end of history’, it is not so much that chronological developments have suddenly ceased to operate, but rather that the notion of ‘history’ in its conventional form; with its linear expectations and traditional narrative understandings; is no longer sufficient as an organisational mode. More is required. But the requirement of such an excess seems beyond the capacities of present cultural cognition. In the grip of this excess which it is no longer able to think, traditional cultural institutions continue on, incessantly repeating themselves and their procedures with ever-increasing uncertainty, as they slide into the unknown.


All that is left, for these alienated creatures, these ‘Occidental Androids’, who do not actually wish to think, is the contentment to merely and vicariously ‘operate’, sputtering positivist ‘memes’ to each other in vast, anxious, and swarming frenzies of ‘self’ and ‘world’ confirmation. As if repeating the exhausted terms of their Cartesian crisis with ever more fervent enthusiasm can somehow substitute for lack of greater understanding, in maintaining what seems to be mostly a dogmatic, miserable, and ignorant, charade. None of this is exactly new, but it is now globally instantaneous, and that is the key that has unlocked the first stages of a noospheric achievement, as it were, beyond conventional notions of both ‘knowledge’ and ‘history’. It is precisely those conventional notions which are in a crisis of inadequacy; their adherents, acolytes, and exploiters, in a crisis of promotion. What can be observed is merely the reflexive dissolution of those conventional dogmas, according to various arcs of nostalgic repetition.


I have, of course, referred to this before, at the outset of this blog: “Philosophy, in its institutional forms, has been busy archiving, classifying, and otherwise industrialising, the driven contemplations of various canonical traditions, as grist for the mill of future recombinant streams of commodified ‘wisdom’: a grist that will sustain the perennial tensions of these venerated traditions, with new brands of ‘logic’, intensified ‘epistemologies’, concentrated ‘ontologies’, nouveau-‘mysticisms’, etc.. All of this, circulating within the same circles of interpretation; playing the same topoi; in rhetorical oscillations, where the current jargons of reduction will scintillate with the shine of ‘progress’. A ‘progress’ in which the same, age-old platitudes can be uttered incessantly, as if they were unearthly revelations, never before thought or expressed.
All this, we have seen, and it has not proved sufficient.”


(“Possibilities of Thought”, Saturday, July 21, 2012: http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?page_id=7)


It has become necessary to return to my earlier period of writings, 1987-1997, for a more suitable and fertile context in which to address these issues. This, of course, is natural for me due to the element of personal continuity, but might prove somewhat strange to readers of this blog, as for the most part, the majority of my Internet writings have been strategically limited to theoretically contained, critical responses and observations , with only a sprinkling of writings from the earlier period. That was sufficient, in terms of addressing the philosophy blogging scene on the Internet, which I’ve done for six years now, but that scene is not sufficient. More is required. If Baudrillard and Fukuyama right, about the ‘end of history’, this recollection of an unexpressed, earlier period is possibly more than mere nostalgia.  

 

 

TOWARDS A METAPHYSICS OF TRANQUIL IDENTITY: NOTHING TO PROVE, YET EVERYTHING TO UNDERSTAND

The attributes that you confer on immanence in order to generate synonymy with non-duality are reflexive anchorings occurring after identity assumption, logically speaking. Those attributes affix themselves to subsequent substantialist positionings of identity assumption; becoming identified, substantialised, and positioned; themselves; according to uncritical conceptions and conventions of those substantialist positionings.


This entire structure of conceptual self referral, originates from two dualistic identifications; substance identity, and worldly identity, both, assumptions. Both are corollaries of each other, but not quite necessarily so. Substance identity, necessarily arises as an artefact of any positivist identity assumption, if that identity is held to be delimited in some way. As identity, in order to be an identification, is necessarily and simultaneously a delimitation, substance assumption characteristically arises as a question of the production of positivist identity, itself produced by this delimitation.


The delimitation producing positivist identity simultaneously produces negative identity, the two sides of any delimitation. The search for the ‘substance’; ‘essence’; ‘interiority’; et cetera, of the positivist identity necessarily occurs within the space of negative identity, everything that the positivist identity is allegedly not. This search, within ‘negative substantial space’, is a quest for correspondence, likeness, sameness, unity, homogeneity, et cetera. It is a quest for agreeable affinities in which the individual instance or instantiation discovers its own positivity in that ‘negative substantial space’.


Under the category of a substance, the individual instance or instantiation can be positively characterised, relieving it of a potentially infinite burden of possible negations. With a sufficient number of substantial categorisations, it can be ‘definitively’ characterised, if not exhaustively. The criteria and parameters of whatever that ‘definition’ might be, are contingent – at least on a prima facie level – on the production of that definition and its purposes. Though that characterisation is, of course, a positivist one. The joys of substantial concord or accord, affirm the ecstasies of positivist resolution, in definitional closure.


But note, this entire categorical drama, the theatrics of positive and negative duality, is contingent on an initial delimitation, and on the subsequent ascribing of values, such as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’; ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’; ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’ (to a – positive – substance); et cetera.
All of it, is conventional.
Though it may have arisen, ‘naturally’, this does not really say very much; at least, the positivist assumption of it; as the category of ‘nature’, too, is a convention. So, too, with the category of tradition, whether formal or informal, and in its positivist garb. What positivist traditions and assumptions have not answered before, it would be unreasonable to expect them to answer in future.
What we see, with positivist distortion or bias, is the overuse of substantialism, attempting to populate ‘negative substantial space’ from a limited and inadequate stock of habitual, substantial instruments, at the expense of considering the logical role of ‘negative substantial space’ between those instruments, in a more sophisticated and intuitive, interstitial way. The neglect of this consideration, which really is the neglect of an entire and essential perspective, leads to the fevered production of posits in fruitless attempts at what has essentially become, a hamstrung positivist comprehension. It is even the case, often, that ‘negative substantial space’ becomes reified as a positivist, substantial identity; ascribed to another, configurational, identity; going by the rubric, ‘world’; as yet another reductive, positivist explanation.
It is not that positivist explanations do not have a role to play. But exclusive reliance on their habitual, uncritical use; at the expense of appropriate, specific, and complementary negative expertise; results only in a positivist hysteria manically throwing half-baked positivist ideas into the void in desperate attempts to resolve the leaking discrepancies caused by such exclusive reliance, in the first place.
The characteristically obsessive theme structuring this positivist hysteria is the figure of the ‘thing-in-itself’, whose desperate oscillations in psychosocial consciousness power the hysteria.      


The justification for the emphasis of positivist identity, for the notion of a thing-in-itself, is the convention of everyday empiricity – the encounter with ‘things’. It is this convention of empirical encountering which is raised up into the fixation of metaphysical principle, displacing, eliding, and obscuring, to varying degrees, the logic of delimitation and identification from which it arises. Once raised up, its appeal and justification is always to some everyday intuition, as the occasion for this principled fixation.


Such occasioning becomes the pretext for prioritising the notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’, as the governing model of positivist identity, due to the sequential logic of perceptual and cognitive discovery suggesting metaphysical systems of appearance and essentialisation, under the methodological signs of constitution or constitutivity, comprising ‘element’; ‘component’; ‘contingency’; ‘whole’; ‘mechanism’; ‘environment’; et cetera.


But a shift occurs, positivist identity and its governing model have become prioritised as an exclusive condition or centre governing all considerations, at the expense of serious reflection on the condition of delimitation from which its initial identification is produced. This often occurs under the sign of ‘the given’, an unquestioned assumption. If it were to be questioned, the customary response is to produce a spectrum of conventional intuitions occurring under the aegis of ‘the given’, affirming and negating these intuitions in a show of consideration, but not actually questioning the form or principle of ‘the given’, in ‘itself’, nor clearly delineating its function.


Positivist identity and its philosophical transactions, mainly occurring within the parameters of metaphysical systems of appearance and essentialisation, constitutes a globally hegemonic culture which relegates serious reflection on delimitation to either relatively innocuous formal specialisations or marginalised, fringe concerns. With this social and institutional distribution; seriousness is lost; genuine questioning is kept at bay; the grip of positivist imperialism seems to be unshaken.


If ‘forms of language’ reflect ‘forms of life’, then it very much seems to me that the culture of positivist instrumentalisation is beset by a very particular kind of referential poverty. The inflation of that culture exercises a systematic restraint or constraint coercing all expressions to follow the abbreviations and semantic routes of positivist identity. This is a dictatorship of coercive desire covertly hostile to any tranquility of consideration that might escape it.

DEPREDATORY AND DISINGENUOUS MOVEMENTS OF EXPLOITATION

The entire abstract, merely begs the question of normativity, deferring it to some assumed notion of good sense which merely needs to be excavated out of the alleged realm of “originary proto-ethical normativity”.


Objectification itself; what gets objectified; how ‘it’ gets objectified; why ‘it’ gets objectified; all these constituting reifications emerge out of an aetiology implicated with the ethical from the get-go!


Ethical consideration, where morality or moralis is custom, the customary; can be considered to be moral reflexivity, the consideration of customs, in light of different customary notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In this sense, what is being spoken of is a
‘moral calculus’ with respect to objective conditions.


Objective conditions, in simplified form, are commonly represented by prima facie conventions (“adequacy conditions”). But those conventions are not the conditions that they are held to spring from, through allegedly referential relations. The desire for simplicity of reference is susceptible to casuistical complication.


The casuistical gaming of moral calculations is enabled by disingenuous shiftings and reframings of prima facie conventions through systematic and differential bias of objective representations supporting those conventions.


For any set of prima facie conventions, an infinite number of aetiologies is potentially available.


Gaming this area of aetiology, so as to provide hidden advantages and profits to those doing the gaming, is pretty much de rigueur in contemporary forms of business morality or real-moralic; the melancholic of the real-moralic, lol.


That it is ‘melancholic’ is confirmed by the plethora of ‘motivational’ speakers, tracts, courses, services, and other resources, constituting the SOS businesses following primary exploitation encampments dotted around the globe. This is behavioral regulation for Occidental androids of the warmind.


The subject-object duality is not in itself a licence of essentialism encouraging exploitation. If subjective rights are granted to objects, exploiters will merely wage war on those subjectified objects. If subjects are objectified, exploiters will merely appropriate those objectified subjects. Simple metaphysics, and its conventional idealisations, alone, no matter how complex their architectures, are no defence against depredatory and disingenuous movements of exploitation.

THE OCCIDENTAL CULT(URE) OF CRAFTY INTELLIGENCE

The real purpose of all the CIA infiltration of culture, etc., both domestically in the USA and internationally, was to surreptitiously condition the collective unconscious into accepting that there was indeed an ‘intelligence’ at work, throughout the Occidental order.


All of the subterfuge, the cultural convolutions of domestic and international relations, their casuistical reflexivities ostensibly under the occult signs of espionage, all of this was a smokescreen covering over; but in plain sight, nonetheless; the central ‘cult of intelligence’.
This ‘cult of intelligence’, however, had very little to do with intellectual proficiency, and everything to do with the abilities of blatant denial; the perpetual deferral of responsibility; the artistry of the disingenuous, and all its works of dishonesty.
This is the Occidental conception of intelligence, and it is diametrically opposed to wisdom.