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SUBSTANCE ADDICTION, AND ITS DESTRUCTION OF OCCIDENTAL CIVILISATION, AND ‘NON-CIVILISATION’
I agree that reiteration alone, doesn’t necessarily equal an overall, theological closure, of any kind, whether actually ‘theological’ or not. What I’m suggesting, is the extent to which fetishisation might be going on; my impression, is that, in the contemporary era since the 1990s, it is the case.
My other implicit point, concerning “additional didacticism”, and its “burden”, referenced of course the general obligations of communication; but more particularly, the seemingly endless task of pointing out the habitual closures of knee-jerk positivist surface rhetorics, forever in thrall to unconscious substantial assumptions, whatever those assumptions may be, and where the fixation with which, constitute problematic blockages of thought and conception.
Running along with a positivist line (of thought), and then simply switching to another, whilst always susceptible to the celebratory image of bricolage; if done whilst under the spell of a blocking, unconscious substantial assumption; is forever condemned to unknowingly circulate around the economy of that blockage and it’s assumed configuration.
Back in 2009, I wrote this YouTube message to the poster of a Heidegger video.
“It’s kind of like this:
All metaphysical terms are like train tracks, the lands are converted into territories, epistemic dwelling zones, the stations are the points of validation, and/or categorisation, the points at which the territories are legitimised as realities.
The problem is that all metaphysical terms have their origins in the general lebenswelt or sensorium of anthropic experiences, experiences which are largely informed by common understandings pertaining to anthropic utility, so to speak. This bias, whilst not necessarily damaging in and of itself, is the vector by which all the ignorances that doxa is prey to, come rushing back in.
The lust for the final object or “”ground””, for thought’s resting place (the “”topos of repose””, the throne of ultimate authority), traverses all relations hierarchically- order is conducive to “”understanding”” and “”substance””. It dreams of a final substance or theory: God, Unified Field Equation, etc., the “”head”” of the hierarchy. But every “”thing”” is constituted by relations, even, especially, nothing.
Your experience of this “”nothing”” is perhaps of-
Richard Rorty calls it “”radical contingency”” and prattles on about Wittgenstein saying we didn’t need a foundation anyway. He has university funding, a best selling book that domesticates Derrida for American pragmatism, etc..
Buddhist “”sunyata””, but you are freaked out by an ingrained and conditioned need for an objectified position. British culture, especially, is inimically hostile to that which it cannot practically manipulate (handle, grasp). “”Keep it real””: the folk wisdom admonition that polices all exercises of speculative imagination.
You fixate on the possibility of “”Absolute Nothingness””, admit its “”identity”” with the “”Absolute””, but simultaneously alienate yourself from both.
Each of these three terms are essentially questionable. As is “”necessity””, too.
Of course, “”necessity”” has its application, in the calculus of cosmological forces structuring “”physicality””, even there, though, it is beginning to be readjusted and recontextualised.
You are not allowing yourself to think. You allow the stock Pavlovian reactions of your culture to prevent you thinking past the tradition of metaphysical emotionalities.
The map is not the territory, the territory is not the land.
Every journey is driven by some purpose.
If you lose the way, whose purpose is it?
Nietzsche said that he sometimes felt like he was a pen that was being written with.” 19 December 2009 00:34 (GMT-8)
Although it’s questionable, in many ways, it serves as a kind of rough filler prose, to further delineate the issues at play. I hadn’t yet got back into philosophy; was constrained by the comprehension limitations of my interlocutor; so it was an example of the “additional didacticism”, and its “burden”, that I refer to, here. At the time of writing, I felt that it didn’t really communicate precisely what I was getting at.
Over the years, I’ve noticed the philosophy blogging scene circulate around the same network of substantial assumptions, without showing any awareness of its effects. Instead, there is only positivist emphasis of metaphysical insularity, shown by the still prevailing preoccupation with notions of ‘reality’ or ‘the real’, conducted in largely antiquated ways; an antiquary of lazy ignorance rather than exploratory insight.
One has to acknowledge the truth! On the whole, people would rather argue over contrived trivialities, as long as they are sufficiently consensual, than work towards personal insights. This, it seems to me, is as operative in philosophy (or ‘non-philosophy’), as it is in electoral politics.
The exclusive preoccupation with the positive rhetorics of traditional substantial assumption is always weighed down by strategies of fixation, as configured by the limited horizons of ‘preferential belief’.
Both overt and covert, this socialisation of metaphysical possibility results in ghettos of l.c.d.* habits of reflection (*lowest common denominator/liquid crystal display) chaotically circling around uncertain, substantial commitments, and displacing their logical considerations. All this, largely as a result of futile attempts to appease the populism of utilitarian relevance, and its traditional imagery. Entire industries of reinscription are needlessly created, between unnecessary and equally insular, fashioned contrivances. This is merely philosophy (or ‘non-philosophy’), as consumer appeal. The destructive business of substantial commitments, of substance addictions, remains entirely unquestioned and unthought.
CONTEXTUAL METAPHORICS AND SUBSTANTIAL ASSUMPTION
It’s enough of a task to write in a way that one considers satisfactory according to one’s own criteria; but to add the burden of communicating to those subscribing to other criteria, criteria that do not exert the same effects on one’s personal procedures, as they seem to exercise on those others; is an additional didacticism weighed down precisely by that which one is obliged to contest.
It’s somewhat uncertainly amusing to note the general history of conceptual inflations surrounding the words, and concepts, of ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’.
The progress has merely been from the 18th and 19th century, as well as theological, fetishisings of the one; to the physics-envy, and scientististic differentiation, fetishisings of the other. Both have had a tendency towards positivist abbreviations and assumptions, automatically eliding, misrepresenting, or otherwise dismissing, serious narrative consideration of the opposing polarity’s distributive obligations.
There comes a time when a culture or civilisation is required to be equal to the self-images of development it has expressed; chaotically and clumsily weaving filigrees of positivist abbreviation around ad hoc structures of cartoon-like formalisation, might fulfill some Deleuzian fashion for ‘rhizomatic’ proliferation; or some other differential reaction to prior homogeneous styles of thought; or the opposed movement of homogenising reaction to allegedly established differential styles of thought; but all of that is a far cry from understandings not quite so susceptible to such fashionable and predictable fetishishisations, and, let us be honest, is a gesture of general cultural ‘backtracking’, one of enormous proportions. The gesture, being honest once again, is a revelation only of the inability to actually think in any way beyond the knee-jerk positivist surfaces of chosen substantial assumption. The entire sequence proceeds only according to the display of so many disingenuous nostalgias.
That’s not really a burden one would wish to carry; but it does require pointing out.
‘Immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, are always contextually dependent, and interdependent. Context is always subject to radically variable determination. So, neither is susceptible to any final determination. The same positivist instance, can be both ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’, both attributions being drawn from equally possible and available contexts.
Contexts themselves, can be both formalised or unformalised positive instances in their inflationary and extensible forms, as substantial orders. They are metaphorics, and their characteristic structural economies are the substantial patternings configuring logics of intuition and their substantial assumptions.
Anything at all, can be a ‘positive instance’, or a ‘context’.
RADICAL INFORMATION
The ‘architext’ is just structured information, in any form, whatsoever. It can’t be ‘centred’, as such, because no metaphysical commitment is asserted with respect to informational differences. The only way to centralise it, would be through a ‘metaphysics of information’. One in which the concept of information itself, at its most radical level, and in all its anthropic receptions, shows itself as a limited case; a case of limited perspective; a particular and closured procedure. This is only possible, in an economics that exceeds the ‘localisation’ of radical information.
ONEIRIC IRONIC
I began writing this as a FaceBook comment, in response to this, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=457778147942543&id=100011310857862 , but it seems to have turned into a blogpost.
[Steven Craig Hickman] “It’s as if we are in a pre-WWII novel living out the nightmares and repetitions of some strange and nefarious experiment gone awry… someone plz close that portal and put the hellish brew back into the abyss.
Somehow we’ve got to stop the hate, now.
I keep remembering the first time I read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. But it can… and, dam it if we don’t do something it will get worse. As if Lewis were speaking of Trump: “People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there’s been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America—” …. listening to Trump bark at NK and Venezuela one wonders if he is seeking some event so he can impose Martial Law and become a populist dictator in actual not virtual fact and deed.
Sadly, we’re just allowing it to happen, and the Establishment dems and repubs are sitting idly by like idiots, doing nothing.”
{AK}: Really, Steven, what can they do? It’s the people themselves who voted for Trump. It’s the people themselves who swarm and cluster around whatever simplified political polarities are subjected to inflationary exploitation by businesses of fringe hysteria. It’s politics as identity ideology consumerism, in search of a ‘reality’.
The guy who started the ‘fake news’ business, catering for the Trump crowd, is actually a Democrat; but there is money to be made in selling the nostalgia of a certain kind of majority ethnocentric confirmation bias.
As I’ve pointed out before, many times on my blog, the dominant hegemony is oneiric. Only by looking at all the data, as configured by systems of dream and desire, does a certain clarity take place. In practice, everyone knows that. Marketing is all about that. Bannon, and Cambridge Analytics, exploited it to the hilt.
Positivist appropriation of mythic nostalgia is an ongoing fact. ‘In fact’, it produces ‘facts’. Paul Ricoeur’s “conflict of interpretations” is the model of the mediascape’s ‘contest of realities’. It’s all, a “Logan’s Run” scenario, driven by positivist desire. Whether it’s a desire for ‘common sense’; ‘scientific sense’; ‘religious sense’; ‘financial sense’; ‘aesthetic sense’; or even ‘political sense’; it’s all deprecated into caricatures of ineffectual, positivist simplicity. Caricatures in the service of complexity-avoidance, at precisely the time when complexity is ‘reality’.
The explicit relation between Healthcare; the Protestant-Calvinist ‘work ethic’ and its accusatory moralisations, leading to various positivist moral isolations; and capital; necessarily sets up a gladiatorial arena of competing moral representations. The discrepancy between lived reality of social conditions and the veneer of obligatory moral presentation, necessarily produces reflexivities of moral representation, in which any simple notion of communal and consensual ‘reality’ is bound to collapse. This can be observed. This explains the disingenuousness of Trump speaking against ‘hate’, whilst “instigating it through his backdoor handlers”.
The “strange and nefarious experiment” you speak of, is exactly what Nick Land refers to, here, some years back, in response to my comments: “Science is modern, not accidentally, but essentially. Modernity is no mere bet, but a venture, through which everything is hazarded, including itself. The widest horizons arise from ‘within’ it (but its ‘inside’ is not, in reality, inside)”
It’s a good answer, and to varying extents, I can agree with it. But again, it’s very easy to fall into a ‘mythology of modernity’; a positivist caricature of surface technical achievements that actually neglects more complex and relevant microcultural-movements, not so susceptible to the abbreviations of modernist mythology. Is it even possible to close “that portal”? Or would that just be another simplifying figuration of positivist reduction? The panic projection of a horrifying ‘abyss’ into which can be cast the “hellish brew” of desire and profit driven alienations, dreamt as nightmare monstrosity?
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.
NOTIONAL COMMOTION
Communications systems, codes; languages and worlds, from the outset, proceed out of selective idealisation; out of processes and economies of intent(ion). An intention, or intentio, is a picture or picturing, configuring and configured by, lines of motivic force; each line itself, as ‘motivation’, a sent emissary of another vision. This interplay between vision and motivation, or ‘form’ and ‘force’, is one in which each declares the other, proceeds from the other, ‘informs’ the other. Such a scenario of mutual structuration and relation; of effusive phenomenality in all directions; a vast variety of visions, motivations, and missions; all of which can be seen as constituting ‘notional commotion’.
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)
Time Flies: from, Self, World, and Writing
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
“Time flies: from, Self, World, and Writing” was written some time between 1989-1992. As can be seen, my advanced hermeneutical technique of non-reading, though nascent, was obviously in its early development, here, lol. The references to “weak thought”, are not to be confused with Gianni Vattimo’s idea, though I was aware of his work, he’d been on television, with John Searle & David Farrell Krell.
This was based on an actual experience.
Time Flies: from, Self, World, and Writing
This writing is an anticipation of, but not an encounter with,Thomas Nagel’s text, “The View From Nowhere”, unless one counts anticipation as a form of encounter. This writing veers away from the text of TN.
I lack the force, the power, perhaps even the inclination, to knock my philosophcal head on walls made of Nagelian bricks. However, this is no celebration of weakness, of a “weak thought”. Nor is it the claim of some reflexive logic that weakness is actually a form of strength. It is, rather, a reminder that weakness as weakness is an indispensable perspective, that a cursory reading is perhaps philosophically valuable in itself, and that haste and superficiality in interpretation can be useful strategies in avoiding the hypnotic images of of metaphysics (“In skating over thin ice, our safety is our speed.” Emerson)
Consciousness as conceived is a simple and accountable fact, but the ultimate provenance of consciousness may well lie beyond all conception. The events of consciousness are significant vibrations, trembling meanings, and what occurs in the space of consciousness is a complex resonance of events, a resonance whose source transcends all realities within the hearing of consciousness, a source external to every phonic fact. A source of courage, perhaps, exterior to the phobic phonations that serve the closed economies of consciousness and knowledge?
A bench, trees, and birds suggest an avine metaphorics: the being and wing-buzz of these birds requires translation into conceptual spaces. An avine metaphysics? Why not? Why should “consciousness”, “intellect”, “reason” – the metaphors of “Man” – take precedence over the avine in populating conceptual space?
WANTED: an avine and arboreal logic require a consciousness, with incorporated perceptual faculties, to act as an interpreting nexus for the buzz of perceptual information (the “information atmosphere”) generated by our avine-arboreal cosmologic, so as to create an ecstatic ecology. An ecology that, through the agency of its interpreting consciousness, and powered by circadian and seasonal rhythms, projects flight into new spaces, and analogises birdsong beyond the audible.
…as the birds fly around him, forming a halo of sharp, tumbling melodies and pulsing winged rhythms mind, world, and self are lost: the emphases of epistemology fade and give way to an ecstatic ecology…
…we must fly away from the realm of epistêmê, and practise ornithomancy on each other…
Time has flown—
Aeolian Inquiry: Quest(ion)s of the Whirlwind
Is it the case, in the face of ‘human’ cultural production, that one can only settle into a comfortable anthropology of ironic hypocrisy? A settling as submission at a distance?
As the way is cleared, of the same tired doxa and identity wars, is it possible to think again. Or has this doxa been inflated, so that all we hear is the clamour of ‘believing spirits’, their well-rehearsed and circumscribed clashes, the litany of disngenuities constituting their manufactured ‘history’?
These questions describe the formations by which a general consensuality tends to function, the tacit standards of reductive appropriation exemplified in its actual effects. With such questions, no more is necessary than simple statement. To attempt any answer amenable to general understanding, only leads to tacit reduction.
Is it the case, that such anthropic doxa constitutes a centralised control system from which deliverance is required? Are we dealing with a Hegelian “Borg” cube? Or is this yet another self-image, which such a ‘cube’ feeds itself, which the Social feeds itself, as a ‘holding pattern’, to obscure its own disingenuous hypocrisies?
It seems that it is precisely such conceptual fixations, and perhaps the desire to amplify these fixations through simulations of populist communication, that constitute the modulations of tacit reduction forming the mode of ‘control’ itself.
Nevertheless, it is not my contention that any process is somehow, simply and essentially, a fixation in itself. Notions of ‘fixation’, too, are contingent on contextual determination.
However, through the tracing of such contextual determinants; their topographic distributions as seen from this or that conceptual plane; the various modalities of their operation; a larger and more precise sense of what is at play can be developed. If it is argued that the language of ‘precision’ is merely one set of images disciplined, or ‘filtered’, by another: I do not deny this, but rather, investigate why this is so. If a similar objection is offered concerning ‘magnitude of theoretical comprehension’, this, too, is easily susceptible to further inquiry.
The enshrining of expediency as the driver for innovation has become a cliche.
Neither the production of surface technical novelty, nor its deep consideration, have been lacking; but the productions have often been fragmentary and disconnected; their mutual relevance, endlessly deferred and displaced into further differential commentaries; the generation of valuable insights, if it occurs at all, never leaves the academy; actual implementation is always obstructed by representations of vested interest, of sociopolitical power, sometimes within the academy itself, which acts as a holding reservoir of futures, deployable only according to the interests of those ‘vested interests’. As all of this can be said to fall under the rubric of an ‘anthropology of ironic hypocrisy’, it cannot serve as a primary reference, though its consideration is not to be entirely neglected.
More often than not, the procedures of innovation are governed by an ambient and global Taylorism that dominates all social activity these days. Even meditative and contemplative states are measured, their effects on performance catalogued and commodified. Every aspect of ‘existence’ is converted into the standardisations of a general information phenomenology, therewith to construct; ‘Being’; ‘Existence’; as the ultimate shopping catalogues.
“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.
Beyond this economic code of competing conveniences, that tries to be all things to all (its?) consuming souls, resides an ignored possibility, a space no longer governed by this code and its conventions, beyond its siren call to harbours of a treacherous Necessity.
All along, stronger winds have always blown, within and without. With regard to these forces, the comforting theatricks of Necessity can no longer track any course beyond its habitual play of self-deceptions. There is no shelter in the incessant and cathartic replay of its mutual corruptions.
The train of transformations was never singular, only administered mythologies ever conveyed their unity, usually under an anthropic rubric, with which all were trained to identify. But the desperate hubris of such a universal was only ever a Modernist hysteria, the inflationary ecstasy of an imagined technological control belonging to the specific singularity of ‘Man’, itself a hysterical and dogmatic conception.
But such a figure can no longer contain the very forces of transformation it sought so effectively to exploit; thus, the ‘future’ brings forth new equilibria, their sequence of emergence, a function of emanative possibility, rather than anthropic history. With such emergences, even their ‘novelty’ stands revealed as an artifact of anthropic understanding. It is precisely this misnamed ‘understanding’, preoccupied exclusively with the theatricks of its own necessities, that, beyond the singularity of its self-elected fixations, has always perceived only whirlwinds, rather than wisdom.
Escaping this theatricks of Necessity and its increasing formations of insular ignorance, its fascinations of local turbulence, is a Fugal Drama; a ‘Theatre of F(light)’; in which the ‘Minstrel of the Improvisations, that Mistral of Ceaseless Inquisitions’, follows an aleatoric strategy of ‘Aeolian Inquiry’.