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CONQUESTS OF NOTHINGNESS: IMPERIALISMS OF THE VOID
Basically, delimitation instantly creates infinite proliferation.
But Western or Occidental metaphysics, which is basically ancient Greek metaphysics, doesn’t like infinity. The ancient Greeks liked odd numbers, not even numbers, because they thought even numbers led to infinity.
Occidental thought didn’t find infinity to be thinkable or desirable.
So, Western theology and metaphysics were reduced to the language of this lack of understanding.
There is a sequence of Western sociocultural presences in which signs of the infinite are permitted and even encouraged. Usually within the formalisms of mathematics and the mysticisms of religious and fantasy, cultures and genres.
Even in contemporary times, the infinite is usually considered in terms of its operational values within contexts of mundane practicality.
It’s within such contexts of mundane practicality, that the West discovered its raison d’etre and it’s within such contexts that it developed the obsession with reality, with what was real and what wasn’t; what could be done and what couldn’t.
It led to what could be called, ‘Promethean theology’, to coin a phrase.
The West or Occident is always trying to do creation ex nihilo.
Always trying to mimic the only God conceivable from its characteristic brand of stubborn ignorance.
That characteristic brand produces as corollary, the characteristic impulse of Western theology and its subsidiary social and disciplinary expressions.
The brand and impulse of the metaphysical model of creation ex nihilo – that “out of nothingness” – is the so-called, “nihilism”, which is the characteristic metaphysical sign of “modernity” and other cultural formations of the Occident.
The chance to “begin again”, as the blimp advertising “off world” emigration, declares, in the film, Blade Runner.
But the chance to “begin again”; “to be reborn” as evangelical Christianity would have it; to “watch out for worlds behind you” as Nico sings with the Velvet Underground; all of these constitute the usual existential semiotics of modernist rupture, which itself is the corollary of Christian apocalypse.
The West does all of this because the counterposition of nothingness enables the positioning of totality for “full-spectrum domination”, as the USA likes to say.
It’s only from the position of nothingness that the totality becomes available.
If the totality is desired, then there is nothing “left over”, so to speak, from the object of desire.
Nothing except the desirer, of course; but the desirer, consumed by a totalitarian desire because of the desire for totality, necessarily forgets itself as an object and is consumed by the totality of its desire. It loses itself in the principle of its own conquest; in the principle of “full-spectrum domination” to which the totality is expected to submit.
It’s probably the case that the European mind never recovered from the so-called, Dark Ages, and the mediaeval period wasn’t exactly a picnic, either. I’ve written, or mentioned, before, about the characteristic “deprivation anxiety” afflicting Northern European psychology.
Looking at the crucible of historical forces it becomes possible to discern the incubation of such affliction and the inculcation of a hysteria of avarice which finds contemporary expression in the spectacles and stagings of consumerism – in consumer society and consumer desire.
The West has been so busy trying to disingenuously deny its “anxiety of influence” (see Harold Bloom) with respect to non-Western cultures and to always “begin again”, that it has got stuck in a cycle of constant and whimsical renewal, stuck in the treadmill of ever-ending trends reflecting only the superficiality of the Occidental mind and that Occidental culture is an oxymoron, the culture of no culture.
This is because its essence is stalled at the nihilistic moment of its totalising mission.
Totalising can mean both destruction (in the vernacular) and summing.
Destruction is commonly said to result in nothing.
It’s the subtraction of a structure.
Summing is the summing of all structures, leaving “nothing” as the remainder.
The nihilistic calculus of destruction is positioned with regard to the voluntary, to Occidental voluntarism, by Heidegger: “Rather than not will, it wills nothing (destruction) at all” Heidegger
Schopenhauer, however, short-circuits the Heideggerian quandary of Occidental voluntarism:
“On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.
This “nothing,” however, “is also the PrajnaParamita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 41112)
It’s an interesting roundabout of metaphysical motifs that have gathered themselves together in this disquisition on delimitation and its history of metaphysical effects, one of which is the very notion of history, itself. So, anachronistic retrogression or retrogressive anachrony?
History is contingent on time; time is contingent on temporal delimitation.
POSITIONS OF ‘IGNORANCE’ AND THEIR CHARACTERISTIC ‘PRESENTATIONS’?
Both of you reduce everything to subjective terms, licensed by assumptions of authenticity driven by figures of personal experience.
In Zack Doctor’s case, it isn’t that you don’t objectify, but you are objectifying in out of context and mistaken ways. Your interpretations are stuck in the hypostatic fixations of some sorts of conventional reception.
You’re not looking at the ‘logical’ form(s) of the metaphysics of both ‘presence’ and ‘nihilism’.
Straightaway, you import concerns of subjectivity and meaning, considerably and unnecessarily complicating the issue.
Very simply, the concept of ‘presence’ inhabits a differential and binary structure of application, together with ‘absence’. Whatever ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ are predicated of and whatever or whichever such predications occur from the perspective of, vary according to the case of application.
But the differential and binary structure of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ remain constant.
The metaphysics of nihilism can take different forms, but all these forms revolve around the concept of ‘nothing’ or ‘nothingness’, said concept instanced as semantic function in the transactions and operations of nihilism.
The metaphysics of nihilism; its transactions and operations; the ‘nothing’ or ‘nothingness’ which such transactions and operations shuttle around; all of these constitute nihilism and the metaphysics of nihilism, as a ‘presence’.
Nihilism, as a logic of negation is contingent on ‘there being’ something to negate. If nihilism obtains, then there is nothing to negate, which can be interpreted in two ways, lol.
That there are no positive ‘things’ (or assertions), to negate; or that, hypostatically, ‘there is nothing’ (there actually is ‘nothing’, as a positive term or thing), to negate.
The first interpretation removes all positivity thus causing nihilist negation to be redundant, there is nothing left to negate.
The second interpretation positivises or positively asserts nothing or nothingness in order to negate it.
So negating the negation; negating the negative; which sounds suspiciously like Hegel?
It could well be what Heidegger means by “the Nothing nothings”, that phrase which Rudolf Carnap so eagerly ridiculed when critiquing existentialism and Heidegger? Not sure, though, would have to check it.
Anyway, the seemingly self-reflexive application of negation to negation, it would seem can only apply in conditions of positivised negation, the negative considered as positive instance.
Because, if the negative is seen as pure negation, with no positivity whatsoever, then it could not self-reflexively negate itself, because it is not an ‘itself’; an ‘itself’, at least within the context of consideration, would ‘automatically’ constitute a posit, position, and positivity.*
Notions of presence and absence hinge on these considerations.
But what can be straightaway seen, is a mutual and necessary contingency of the positive and negative, reflected in the oscillation of positivist consideration between the two interpretations of the obtaining of nihilism and the logic of nihilism.
That, in the absence of positivity, nihilist negativity cannot obtain; nihilism cannot absolutise itself, at least not without recourse to the very positivity vitiating its self-absolution.
Zack Doctor brings up nihilism in the context of conventional, US, psychology-speak; existential psychology-speak; et cetera. This is why he instantly imports irrelevant subjective considerations and even solipsism, all of which imports indicate only his own preoccupations and not those of the text he is interpreting.
A cautionary note, though.
One has to be careful to retain awareness of multiple levels of pertinence and not get lost or led astray.
So, in this case, it was entirely unnecessary that ‘Zack Doctor’ repeat his own preoccupations when the text he is attempting to address doesn’t licence those preoccupations.
It might be that ‘Zack Doctor’ brings up solipsism as an indirect and shifted, metonymic response, to Brian Barr’s staging and valorisation of self-interiority? Who knows?
*This can, however, be recontextualised and reversed, à la Schopenhauer.
THE ENGINE OF PERFORMANCE MYSTICISM AND ITS SPELL OF PRODUCTION
The notion of ‘post-truth’, as a general specification, is still informed by assumptions of truth determination. Whether or not, these assumptions have become problematic due to the difficulty of establishing stable truth conditions constituting such veridical determination, does not alter the governing assumption of such determination. Pluralism would bring together various types of truth determination, together with their respective contexts or truth conditions. Pluralism is an acknowledgement that there are indeed different kinds of truth determination and different kinds of felicity. That the generality of the truth idea is susceptible to the differentiations of localised and situational expressions. But notice, criteria of ‘localisation’ and ‘situation’, are themselves constructed determinations. The same cautions apply to determinations of ‘immanence’; ‘plurality’; ‘temporality’; structures of evaluation; negative indication, or indication through negation; ‘reality’; structures of testability and experimentation. It’s understandable that explicit consciousness of the possibility of such determinations, under the sign of constructive action, could prove somewhat overwhelming in its complexity, especially given the fact that so many of those determinations are simply historical and cultural givens constituting the taken for granted, backgrounds, supporting life-worlds in which people dwell.
That the onset of modernist conditions has transformed the nature of localised interaction between life-worlds into something far more striated by what would be considered before as non-local forces, is simply the result of the forces of that ongoing modernity spreading itself according to its own logics, producing new forms of itself according to the conditions it finds itself in.
The notion of a ‘thought image’ is simply that of an idea; a position; a philosopheme; an order; etc.. In practice, a philosophical convention, perhaps even a philosophy meme? Yes, it’s possible to differentiate and distinguish all of these terms with a view to their respective uniqueness and incommensurability, but in practice there is considerable semantic overlap of use.
The notion of quantum, performance, and structural, images, are three different positions that seem to have developed contemporary relevance. That relevance situates itself according to certain kinds of need or desire. The quantum image is a particular site of speculative hypostasis; the scientifically arrived at limit of classical objectivity; producing effects that are radically susceptible to interpretation. Thus the site is vulnerable to all kinds of objective hysteria; every order of the object, of any object, seeks reconstruction according to the probabilistic granularity, or granular probability, of quantum possibility. The assumptions, and preoccupations, of atomistic constitution, provision the tangibility of collapse and initial, objective closure, a zoology of particularised and detectable actuality. But this actuality is structured, therefore a necessary complicity with the so-called, ‘structural image’.
The ‘structural image’; as an artefact of holistic perspective, both in ancient, modern, and multicultural, forms; is perhaps the contemporary replay of that perspective. There has of course been gestalt theory, in 19th and 20th century Germany, a perhaps corollary movement. But contemporary structuralism, at least its continental forms, has a well-known development, initially associated with linguistics. If it’s typological procedures are a little too modernist, too general and abstract, not immanent enough, that seems to have been sufficient provocation to produce the responses of libidinal materialism characterising Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s mid-period and early works, respectively. As well as perhaps Foucault, often called a structuralist, but distinguishing his epistemological, ‘epic schemes’, and highly immanent stagings of localised, historical analysis, from the linguistic emphases of structuralist typology. And then of course there is Derrida, who radicalises structuralism into post-structuralism, using structuralist resources. Foucault, of course, did the same, using epistemological reflexivity of consideration in his analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
If Michel Foucault’s subsequent treatments of power and knowledge, within the contexts of his ‘hidden histories’ concerning representation, madness, sexuality, etc., constitute the deconstructed, shifted and analysed, basis for both theoretical and practical action, as seems to be the case with his continued relevance to contemporary debates, then it is easy to see that the factor of contemporary appeal has very much to do with the stagings of immanence his work provides or enables.
The question of the performance image is central to such contemporary appeal. People like to do things; they like what they do, to be relevant. Perhaps it’s just cybernetics? A message requires both a sender and a receiver, the structure of transmission and reception is expected to do something, to have some kind of agreeable effect on whatever ‘world’ the interlocutors of the message form believe or consider that they inhabit. But those so-called, ‘worlds’, in the context of modernist permeation of global communications, are brought together through processes of mutual and vertiginous reflection, much like the mirror play within Las Meninas, effectively blurring the difference between the different kinds of truth determination belonging to those ‘worlds’. Much as the order of the object seeks reconstruction within quantum possibility; the ‘order of worlds’, of locales and life-worlds, seeks reconstruction within the arena of representations constituting global communication. Each of those ‘worlds’ aspires to the status of being an indispensable ‘model of representation’, hence the hysteria of repetitions by some of those ‘worlds’, as a quantity strategy of ‘full-spectrum domination’. Such a strategy necessarily operates according to full-spectrum appropriation, as well, attempting to reduce what it clones to the terms of its own, imagined model. These activities constitute the conditions of the so-called, ‘performance image’, the cultural war of imaginary models. Each imagining an order of its own substantial extension, as the absolute economy of its imagined model, which it’s every expression, it’s every message, simultaneously tries to establish and yet undermines. Obviously this is inclusive of any ‘model’, of ‘plurality’, as well.
If such models are principles of hypothetical socio-economic and cultural organisation, they constitute universalising aspirations towards a generality and security of conditions. But those universalising aspirations often read notions of generality and security, in profoundly different ways. Those ways have radically different aetiologies and rationales. Their resolution on a social level, requires social understanding. The development of such understandings is often contradicted by differing mechanisms of cultural utilisation and operation, susceptible to variable characterisations of acceptability and non-acceptability; of what constitute legitimate and non-legitimate, forms of exploitation. The clash of positivist observations leads to clashes of contextual justification, to an extent where all contexts are brought into question, resulting in a complexity exceeding the terms of conventional public debate and understanding.
If it’s the case, that Alain Badiou seeks to compartmentalise this complexity according to the truth rubrics of his own general categorisation, reflecting the ostensible expressions at play in the social field; and if François Laruelle is seeking to recover some kind of neo-positivist purity of the everyday, with a vocabulary of axiomatic givenness immunised against philosophical difference, enabling the neo-nativism of an idiomatic incommensurability; what could such gestures mean?
It might seem that Alain Badiou gives space to the messiness of social action; to the power of event and trauma; to the monumental motivations of dramatised rupture in a kind of Hegelian historical narrative of truth-disclosing, traumatic events; promoting the witnesses to such staged events, as might be accepted as such, to the privileged status of ‘subjects’, the eventual, publicity agents, jointly authoring Alain Badiou’s Hegelian narrative monument of truth disclosure.
It might seem that François Laruelle simply wants to begin again, shearing off the unpleasant messiness of history, as so many bad decisions for which there is no obligation to really learn anything or take any responsibility. All is forgiven, and nothing need be understood, under the aegis of ‘the One’, it’s all back to positivist business, as usual, or so at least Laruelle hopes.
Both thinkers are promoters of the performance image; both are caught up in its default assumptions; both are apologists for the ideology of production, at any and all costs.
But the performance image is contingent on the notion of performance. That notion, whether classically or in any other way, is susceptible to radical interpretation, to the extent of the extremity of there having never been any performance, at all. That extremity does not receive enough consideration or contemplation; there are insights to be had there.
Instead, both Alain Badiou and François Laruelle trot out their programmatic, metaphysical schemas as ideological insulation for the cabled conduction of the powers of axiomatic truth and incommensurable position. Those cables serve the engine of performance mysticism and its spell of production.
THE SO-CALLED, ‘UNIVERSE’, AS GENERAL ALIBI OF DISCONTENT
‘Physical reality’ would indicate the systematic apprehension of habitual interpretations concerning emergent phenomena. It would be a hypostatic convention contingent on both those interpretations and apprehensions, as well as the radical assumptions behind both contingencies. The systematic aspect, as unified apprehension, is suggestive both of an instance of seeming completion with regard to economies of habitual interpretation, as well as an instance of seeming incompletion suggested by whatever escapes the structure of apprehension producing habitual interpretation.
Science, is essentially concerned with establishing invariant structures of objectivity with respect to emergent phenomena, rearranging and revising habitual interpretation in accord with the establishment of such invariance, in order to produce the security of objective knowledge. Its activity follows the logic of approximation, towards such structures of invariance, with the implicit assumption of various types of regularity. So, it is concerned with the regulations of sequential emergence, and the systematics of such regularity.
But the assumption of objective invariance, known as truth, is the guiding principle behind scientific projects. However, as this principle necessarily issues from locations of apprehension receptive to particular streams of phenomenal emergence, it has to generalise the samplings from such an itinerary of apprehensions, according to powers of theoretical idealisation, in order to approach the truth of objective invariance.
Is it the case, though, that the so-called universe, as a system of general production, is necessarily bound to whatever legislative landscape of objective invariance that might present itself to a particular itinerary itself produced by that so-called universe?
Is it the case, that the so-called universe would privilege the operation of subjective and objective structural assumption as some kind of ultimate rationale? What would happen to the notion of objective truth if everything was susceptible to the free variations of subjective engineering, of some globally capable science? Where would truth and objectivity go, in a universal environment of total scientific design?
Once all patterns of physical determination have been mapped and harnessed, what is left? All of the other patterns of wishful determination, hitherto rejected? Does astrology make a comeback? Future forms of divination contingent on future objective vocabularies not yet even discovered? All of it held together by entanglements of quantum possibility somewhat susceptible to future, infinite machines?
But ask yourself, in these scenarios of future hypothesis, do nostalgic reconstructions arise? Archaeological gestures reproducing the early 21st-century, looking for that which was missed in the initial production, the simple joys of living and being together that were displaced by the burdens of bad epistemology, of weak and selfish understandings, all of which were inflicted by a contrived culture of sectarian intimidations and evil intents?
THE UNQUESTIONED AXIOM OF ABSOLUTE AGORA
[Matt Barber] “The “quantum image” is this image of the radical identity of the material which is real, absolute, immediate and not involved in any false process, dialectic, differentiation etc. The only way to reduce L’s work to a scientism would be to hack off the part of his project which includes radical and static emplacement of the chora which distinguishes and defines the universe and world in a way philosophy fails to achieve.”
{CJ (AK)}: Being able to treat anything at all, any potentially identifiable ens, whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’, as a ‘reality’, ‘absolute’, or ‘immediacy’, is merely one of the corollary operations of Science Fiction thinking and assumption. It’s Science Fiction bricolage, you pick it up quite naturally as a child when reading science-fiction. It’s a prerequisite of reading lots of short stories with different kinds of world building. That process, in my experience, involves conceptual operations, some of which appear in various kinds of philosophy or even Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’. But there are a lot more possibilities.
It would be possible to do a structural combinatorics of philosophical or non-philosophical positions, or discursive elaborations of radical, seed ens or entities, as various kinds of formal and informal outlines. This might seem to have considerable appeal to those intimidated by spectres of processual, dialectical, and differential, necessity. But each one of those seeming necessities itself potentially constitutes a radical seed entity.
The khôra could be said to paradoxically refer to the characterisation of the non-characterised, but such antinomy would be contingent on essentialised notions of ‘characterisation’ and ‘non-characterisation’, those essentialised notions themselves ‘characterisations’, if that convention is insisted upon.
But notice, the ‘khôra’, as a determination, is contingent on the theoretical construction which it might be said to exceed, or even ‘originate’, if the relation of origin is projected onto this alleged excess. Likewise, each and every moment of the theoretical construction, including the ‘khôra’, could be seen as permeated by the hegemony of any other moment, as the sign or symbol of any other. All of this, of course, in addition to the usual holistic nominations.
These possibilities are simple, first stage, speculations. They should be fairly obvious and intuitive, if all faculties are brought to the task. There are many understandings or possibilities beyond these first stage extrapolations of convention, but they require something more than than the channelled preoccupations of contemporary commitment.
Regarding the ‘quantum image’, a first step would be to consider the concepts and assumptions drawn together in its construction, and to radically consider those concepts and assumptions from all possible perspectives. This conceptual analysis lays out the background of discursive and philosophical assumptions in which the so-called, ‘quantum image’, is able to function. One then merely has to ask what the logic(s) of this ‘quantum image’ says (say).
“Distinguishing and defining the universe and world in a way that philosophy fails to achieve”, is an assertion contingent on methodological claims of constructive definition, as well as universal and worldly assumption. The attribution of success and failure implicitly brings in selectivity of outlook. The notion of achievement indicates the possibility of accomplishing such a selective outlook.
All of these operations presuppose some kind of systematic theorisation and necessity sufficient to produce the nebulous accomplishments of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. There seems to be a kind of vague and everyday existentialism involved? A nostalgia wishing to foreground the presences of its ‘reality’, as absolute and immediate possibilities available for its economy of libidinal desire?
The closest analogy to such a vaguely expressed position or assumption, would perhaps be an outlook of consumer dominion, based on an ideology of its own freedom from any other form of necessity. The system of consumerist immediacy becomes the only and absolute form of reality. Is this the only dominion that matters to Laruelle and his followers? A dominion of everyday freedom, in which all considerations of wisdom can be seen as failures?
If this is the absolute metaphysics of catering and consumption; of axiomatic appetite and its order; then it is no surprise that Laruelle would seek radical incommensurability from any philosophical gesture that might question that order. Just as Donald Trump has deleted climate change data, Laruelle seeks to delete the powers of philosophy, or perhaps copy-paste them into a bazaar of cognitive baubles and consumer cognitions, a market stall of mimetic ‘wisdoms’?
It is no wonder, then, that the distinguishing and defining ‘chora’ actually symbolises the always imagined, cornucopian overflowing of the ‘agora’.
ADMINISTRATION OF EPIPHANY
The notion of an “ocean of dissemblance” would be contingent on two concepts, the oceanic, implicitly a principle of unity; and the principle of similarity/dissimilarity implicit in dissemblance.
So at the root of the notion is the play of ‘likeness’.
The play of likeness necessarily presumes at least two entities bearing the relation of likeness with respect to each other.
The metaphysical status and characterisation of these entities and relations would obviously seem to suggest subsequent scenarios of supervening operations regarding those entities and relations. That is to say, if metaphysical characterisation has to do with; the contextual production of those entities and relations; or an economics of which those entities and relations are contingencies; then it’s quite naturally the case that such metaphysical characterisation works as a principle of unity whose metaphoric expression is the oceanic, but not any less a formal principle because of such metaphoricity.
So Deleuze’s notion, whatever privileging of apparent disjunction, difference, or as he says, “dissemblance”, might be ascribed to it; the very notion itself implicitly utilises the principle of unity to achieve its formalist effects. If an opposite privileging were offered, a similar implicit utilisation, mutatis mutandis, would result.
Within the networks of these formal possibilities it is possible to derive or construct pretty much anything in the way of conceptual innovation or philosophies of-; this is merely conceptual combinatorics, though it can nevertheless exercise profound effects depending on the natures of the commitments involved.
It is understandable that there are existential and referential anxieties bound up with these networks of formal possibility, which are not merely ‘formal’, but intimately complicit and unified with those anxieties and their bases.
The production of an identity is the production of a concept, the conceptual seed of a discursive logic. The production of a concept, of that conceptual seed of discursive logic, is susceptible to elaborations of configurative force, the configurations of that concept. The resulting discursive formations are merely the systematic elaborations of such configuration. Discursive formations are not merely that which is commonly thought of through the rubric of the linguistic.
The notion of non-identity is equally the production of identity and the concept. Identity still functions as a configuring force.
People like Deleuze and Laruelle are still working within economies of referential relation, existential anxiety, and expediency, their concepts revolve around these supervening formations.
Whether or not this is philosophy in a wider sense, or practical philosophy, or ‘non-‘ philosophy; such category anxieties probably bespeak uncritical dogmas of initial assumption, too much, those anxieties continuing to configure repetitions of such assumption without developing the insights that might be expected from a more progressive understanding. Battling a history of bad receptions and interpretations belonging to particular groups, whilst ignoring a history of past insights belonging to others, or perhaps even those same groups, probably reflects the marketing procedures of intellectual commodity rather than any other notion of progress.
Whether this leads to a kind of social proletarianisation, or proletarian socialisation, of insight and wisdom; as a kind of reactive and recollective backward step; and whether this was what Deleuze and Laruelle were and are trying to do; is an open question. Even if that were the case, it is highly doubtful that such a particularly contained set of cogitations and understandings, so bound up with analyses of shifting structures and tendencies of alleged error, could lead to anything other than redistribution of such alleged errors, without more radical understandings.
Though the overarching resolutions of epiphanic understanding, whether in philosophical or religious forms, are personal, and not necessarily effective as programmes of social administration, it is persons that constitute the social, and if their understandings enable more effective and happier forms of administration, those epiphanies should not be ignored.
ON ABSTRACTION
Transcendence and immanence are mutually complicit concepts.
Abstraction simply means withdrawn; ‘the withdrawn’ or ‘withdrawal’, might require concepts of ‘distance’, ‘distanciation’, and transition. Those concepts of distance and transition require a susceptibility to the hypostatic forms of ‘localisation’, ‘locale’, or ‘locality.
Localisation, is susceptible to the production of concepts whose said-i-mentations form metaphysical conventions. Metaphysical conventions, are susceptible to the production of dogmatic dwellings and habitats.
There are transitions of qualitative change, sometimes accessed through some kind of distanciation over the range of one substance, sometimes through instant transition between two substances.
RINGING THE ESSENCES OF CHANGE
[Charlie Stephen] “Things that don’t change”
{AK}: Firstly, what determinate ‘thing’, doesn’t ‘change’?
What is this ‘change’?
Is it an apparent, perhaps structural, set of variations over an invariance?
Does this alleged invariance arise through comparison?
If it does so arise, is this invariance not contingent on such comparison?
What is this ‘comparison’, how does it arise, what does it involve?
If this comparison is structured, in such a way, as to provision a discernment of structure, and, moreover, a structure that always takes a certain ‘form of apprehension’; seeks out particular patterns of sense and arrangement; imposes a certain grid of interest; then are not these suggested fulcrums of invariant eternity merely the corresponding effects that arise along with such comparisons, apprehensions, and interests?
This is not to suggest any psychologising of the issues, psychology itself could equally be seen as being taken up within such comparative operations. Neither are idealist or materialist closures necessary, such hypotheses would merely be operations of interest.
The attribute of ‘change’, is a specific and comparative determination, it has to refer to something else in order to obtain. It has to be attached to something, to an identity assumption, in order to obtain. Thus, it is inherently a relational attribute, constructed out of assumptions of identity and structures of mutual self-reference.
If those comparative structures of mutually referring identities seem to trace formal patterns of relational process, suggesting idealisations inhabiting the temporal, yet producing the mirage of non-temporal effects, this is merely due to the equally constructed nature of temporal idealisation, itself contingent on assumptions of the ‘momentary punctum’, as commonly assumed foundation.
The ‘non-temporal’ arises with respect to a particular scenario of temporal assumption. Commonsense ideas tend to subject that scenario to all kinds of substantialist, mystifying inflations, throwing about that temporal assumption with a ferocious generosity of coverage that bespeaks perhaps some fundamental anxiety. But these mystifications, originating out of the narcissistic busyness-business of so many sordid and petty self-interests, arise only out of that inflationary scenario, clinging onto it with all the fervour that petty insularity can muster.
But at each and every point of this scenario, permeating it thoroughly and without remainder, is the ‘non-temporal’, the mere logical corollary, to that assumption of busy insularity, but it’s a corollary whose specificity most have habituated themselves not to see.
I’m not going to go into this here, but if identity assumption is going to be indulged, the notion of scale and scaling is important, as a theoretical agility lending itself to a fresh scenario of insights. That’s a hint of just one possible direction, there are lots of others.
Because of the contingencies of specific determination involved in attributions of change, those attributions are therefore contingent. Likewise, because of the logical structures of mutual self-reference involved in suggestions of the ‘non-temporal’, those suggestions are contingent, not only on those logical structures, but on the initial, identity assumptions, with which they, all, mutually arise.
Given the possibility of increased specificity as regards factors of identity assumption, temporality and non-temporality; attributions of the ‘essential’ and of ‘change’; it is perfectly possible to construct scenarios of processual ‘change’, as it were, whilst locating them entirely outside of specific conventions of temporality, outside of certain, specific chronologies, and ‘their’ scenarios of temporal assumption. If those conventional scenarios attempt to recoup such unconventional scenarios of processual ‘change’, under some vague and mystifying assumption of pan-temporality – merely the corollary reflection of its own inflationary insularity – then this ambition of an imperialising chronology attempting to substantialise itself, it’s dogmas and its outlooks, can only ineluctably lead to its own, quite specific, undoing.
PICTURING ASYMPTOTIC APPROXIMATIONS OF INSTRUMENTAL IDENTITY
I remember back in the last century, watching a programme, and there was a very brief reference to the Druze, stating that they read all the spiritual and religious works of the world, proceeding from this background according to some kind of spiritual synthesis characteristic of them.
I liked them a lot, on the basis of what I saw.
This century, when they came up, probably through a Facebook link to an article, I discovered that they originated from India, and from Vedanta, which I thought was interesting.
If God is an attempt to approximate explanatory conceptualisations, as Stephen says, is that relation reciprocal, are explanatory conceptualisations attempts to approximate God? If that’s the case, then conceptuality and the divine are caught up in a structures of mutual approximation, proceeding according to asymptotic shifts towards identity coincidence.
Ultimately, the theoretical scenario involved, is a Platonist delimitation, according to the figure of the idea.
One can rise up beyond the play of asymptotic shiftings and mutual approximations, seeing that all of these occur according to ‘frames of reference’. The entire realm of metric determinations arises through duality, dualisation (dual eyes), the theoretical assumption of a changeless point of determination from which to produce cultures of measurement, of the other elements and tendencies of change, distinguishable from the changeless point, according to the opposition of change/non-change.
However, the selection of framing is arbitrary, anything can fulfil the function of ‘changeless point’; likewise, anything can fulfil the roles of elements and tendencies of change. The production of all of these occurs through application of available epistemological possibilities, and is contingent upon those.
The epistemology occurs through initial acceptance or assumption of instrumental duality. Due to the preponderance of instrumentality and its habits, other theoretical possibilities become obscure, due to lack of the necessary practices and developments constituting the shared basis of clear communication.
THE URGENT: THE POSITIVIST HYSTERIA OF THE ANTHROPIC, CLOSURAL ‘MIND’
[KAS] “the urgency of reality (causal efficacy)”
{CJ (AK)}: That could easily slide into the metaphysical nostalgia of an impetus substantialism.
It’s already been done, as well, with the apocalyptic urgency of various evangelised narratives. In a way, even Marxism is one of those narratives.
The Ur-world of urgency, of urgent production!
The metaphysics of urgency, of the urge, and especially of the causal urge, is inherently based on representational assumption; in your example, the structural image of ‘urgent reality’.
If, say, you’re advocating for ‘inner urgency’, an ‘authentic urgency’ no longer quite so bound to conventional market surfaces, what do you do when those market surfaces commodify those rhetorics of alleged ‘interiority’ and ‘authenticity’, precisely as a ‘market surface’?
Given the degrees with which whatever conception of market culture that you’re taking issue with, is co-implicated, perhaps even coextensive, with whatever level of personal and social authenticity you might be trying to defend, on what basis is it possible to distinguish between them, that; one, isn’t representational; and two, if represented, and however represented, isn’t susceptible to internal contradiction, reflexivity feedback, and so on; all of these to do with the theory-laden nature of how situations get established and epistemologised, in the first place?
The very notion, at the outset, of a ‘presentation’, is necessarily the identity of a delimited image. The very notion, of ‘immediacy’, is bound up with the logic of mediation, the punctum of the urgent moment, or moment of urge, merely being a conceptual element supporting that logic.
One of the reasons that Nagarjuna often seems to be so direct in his approach, is probably due to his impatience with the turgid labourings of these kinds of conventional dialectics.
The society of the spectacle; panopticism; the reflexive image; in addition, the early 1990s saw the publication of a number of works around the philosophy of optical metaphoricity.