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METAPHYSICAL STRUCTURING OF LINEAR DESIRE
If ‘metaphysical structuring’ consists of ‘metaphysical hypostases as assumptions of cultural injunction and coding of social instruction’, whether or not, those assumptions are explicitly known or implicit, this is merely the observation of possibilities of fresh, theoretical application. Testing out different grids of theoretical extrapolation that are extensions of sets of principles, whether conventional ones driven into new territory, or fresh ones as yet unconventionalised, to see what they say.
The situating and privileging of a Trumpian figure of response that is untutored by teleprompting, is a figure staging the productions of an alleged, psychic interiority, as a type of authenticity. That type of authenticity of psychic interiority would be one which contrasts a structure of psychic immanence, as an allegedly unmediated, metaphysical hypostasis, with the structure of remote, cybernetic instructions, suggested by ‘teleprompting’ – ‘tele-‘, being distance, remoteness.
So, the figure of teleprompting, suggests the remoteness of network distribution exceeding structures of conventional, psychic reception, the teleprompter user thus represents as a node of such remoteness. The average voter without socially significant, powers of distribution, for whom such networks are experienced passively, and not personally, in ways that are sufficiently, individually satisfying, would tend to have increased alienation from such networks of remoteness, distrusting their excessive remoteness from the concerns of personal relevance.
What is at stake is not the quality of Trumpian, psychic interiority, but rather the psychic interiority of USA American selfhood, itself. That psychic interiority, what Christopher Lasch called, ‘The Culture of Narcissism’, in the 1970s, has been configured for over a century by remote forces of market or marketing culture, to the extent, that US American selfhood is difficult to distinguish from the market forces sustaining it. When everything has been commodified, it is difficult to find authenticity beyond commodity. The commodity gaze is always in operation, it seems.
Thus, the last site where alleged authenticity of psychic interiority can take a stand, is in the caprice of the consumer, the consumer being the highest aspiration of marketing activity. Marketing always attempts to coincide with the identity of the consumer.
The fact that Trump doesn’t need a teleprompter, to represent the psychic figure of consumption or the consumer, is a key, marketing achievement. Because the consumer doesn’t need a teleprompter; the consumer isn’t trying to sell anything. The consumer is a buyer.
By representing himself as the ultimate consumer; by incessantly reminding the public of his alleged wealth, giving him full access to the range of consumption; Trump represents himself as a ‘winner’ in the consumption game, with no personal stake in political change, beyond the alleged authenticity of a psychic interiority of self, that could choose political disinterest, if it so desired.
By repeating populist grumblings with no consideration for other kinds of cultural or political etiquettes, Trump can represent the grumbling and dissatisfied, populist consumer, thus taking away the pressure of tacit, social injunction, such removal of social pressure being representable as a kind of liberation, as well. It’s populist, political psychotherapy.
The fragmented opinionation of Trump’s incessant tweeting, is another strategy of reaffirming populist identity. That Trump repeats what his share of the US electorate say, reaffirms their identity, as well as confirming his representation of them. He is teleprompted by them, not by any other form of remoteness that doesn’t coincide with their own vacillations. It doesn’t matter to them, that Trump changes his output, according to their own changes. It doesn’t matter that the mechanics of repetition is a background construction or staging. None of that matters, as long as the circuit of repetition is constant. Because that circuit is a cybernetic circuit, the echoing of the Trump electorate, for which Trump chooses to play the mimetic puppet.
That Trump might be personally profiting from the various events, merely confirms his authenticity for his supporters, because the figure of personal profit is an accepted link to concerns of individuation, that are foundational in circuits of alleged authenticity belonging to the figure of psychic interiority, as it occurs in the base model of US American selfhood, as imported from the inculcations of Calvinist and Protestant, northern European, socio-economic systems.
It’s a development in line with US production of its own dream. It’s a movement in general, oneiric economy.
It’s a nostalgic movement in new conditions, new conditions showing the old conditions of baseline brutality of exploitation for what they were and are. The nostalgia of old conditions is engaged in multiple vectors, of denial; of revision; of affirmation and justification; of the production of a chaotic confusion in order to justify brutality of exploitation. All of those vectors are the result of contained, social contradictions, emerging out of their prior structures of arrangement, into the dreamspace of uncontained, electronic communication. If newspapers, radio, film and television, constituted prior networks of social containment, obviously those networks and their containments are no longer going to be able to function in the same way, given new conditions where all of those technological mediations have been rolled into one, through the Internet, and broadcast ability attainable by all, in possession of a network device.
All of this is just standard, techno-theory, even media theory.
More interesting, then these kinds of standard, ‘techno-sociology’, as it were, are the longer lines of development, in play. Those which are not so much the concern of standard models of self-interest, at least they are not discussed within the circuits of concern belonging to such models. Or if they are, they are discussed only according to habitual, metaphysical inflections, often constituting serious distortion of what is at play. That’s understandable, given that such developments seem to be even more remote from those circuits of self-concern, than those they currently seem to be rejecting, which ironically enough, they are simultaneously producing, as well.
This mutual rejection and production, though, occurs within their own dramatis personae, within the highly conditioned, theatrics of psychic interiority, within Christopher Lasch’s narcissistic economy. All of these constitute the hypostatic, staging principles, of the collective, US dream; it’s a ‘socialism of the unconscious’ which they are continuously projecting as a reverse gesture of an ostensible, ‘individualism’, whose ideal conditions, as set in their own minds, they are unable to fulfil.
This sets up the oscillating contradictions between images of ‘self-reliance’; ‘duty’, ‘obligation’, ‘responsibility’; and ‘care’ or ‘carelessness’. In an increasingly interconnected scenario, the clarity of such images is increasingly difficult to achieve, according to prior structures of social arrangement and containment. Given market conditions, of commodity environment and the sensorium of commercial transaction that it constitutes; and given current events reporting based on fragmentary fluctuations of those market conditions; individualised, informational relevance, becomes increasingly difficult to achieve, at least in a way that might present unproblematically, in socio-economic and cultural terms.
For those inculcated with the figure of psychic interiority, as occurring in the base model of US American selfhood, the new conditions of interconnection threaten the old images of self-individualism, in multiple ways and along multiple vectors. That those new conditions of interconnection have been driven by their own desires is an irony which they seem unable to acknowledge. Consumer expectation and demand is not usually associated with any kind of ironic appraisal concerning itself.
The consumer wants what it wants and doesn’t really want to think about the consequences of that desire. If it doesn’t get what it wants, then resentment comes into play.
What the US consumer really wants, is an environment totally in accord with its own desire, attentive to its every need. This is an attitude that has been deliberately inculcated by decades and decades of market conditioning. The desire is not only for commodities, but for cultural attention, as well. In fact, the desire is for absolute, self-cultural celebration, to increasingly hysterical levels, in order to satisfy or satiate the market-implemented, structure of narcissistic expectation, that is at work.
This desire for absolute, cultural attention, is at odds with global interconnection, hence, all the culture wars and the resentment against any academia not giving such attention.
By creating domestic discord and division, cultural attention is being sought, which is being received, thus satisfying to some degree the logic of narcissistic expectation that seems to be at work. Socio-economic problems and poverty exacerbate this need for cultural attention.
Really, it’s a desire for cultural recognition by a culture that has grown bored with itself and wishes to reinhabit the nostalgia, the horrors, challenges, and imaged successes, of its own development, by which it entertains itself and continues to give itself meaning. It’s a desire that wishes to continue looking into a mirror that it has distorted, in advance, and wishes everyone else to look into, as well. But it’s a desire doesn’t really seem to be interested in understanding, either itself, or anyone else. That is because it’s a desire that no longer knows how to understand, it has lost itself along the linearity of its own trajectory.
THE TYRANNY OF HISTO-RHETORIC HYSTERIA: Ridiculously Restoring the Rhistoric
A short note. I’ve written this comment somewhat more consciously in line with my considerations and work of the period, 1989-1996. It’s not that those considerations and that work aren’t in the background of everything that I’ve written in the allegedly new century, since I began writing, again. But I haven’t always been as explicit as I would like; it seems, though, that those writings and ideas, like those of Sol Yurick’s, are proving to be a more effective instrument for dealing with past, present or contemporary, and future, problematics.
The prevailing forms of cultural understanding, including the reactions to them, are pretty much antiquated fragments of habitual, cultural obsession, that were obsolescent long before I was born. But it is this atavistic, cultural content, which is being incessantly reproduced, by a fundamentally uninventive and backward cultural motivation, inspired only by its characteristic insularity.
It’s an unhealthy, self-destructive context, that has received enough attention, to no avail. Accounting for its insatiable needs and broken understandings is not the most interesting activity, probably requiring some form of sociopsychological counselling.
This text is a response to a Facebook post concerning the quantitative decline of US students taking up history, with only a few, so-called ‘Ivy League’ colleges, experiencing greater demand for courses in history. The first paragraph is in reference to that topic. The rest of the text explores what might be called a theory of conditions of historical conceptions and discourse.
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The same point, about disciplinary control by a well-advantaged, social group, was made in an academic paper over 25 years ago, on the art world. How high-level degrees in fine art were only available to those who could afford to spend over a decade accruing them; how they were extremely specific in terms of their possible career utility, that is to say, of not much general use in employment scenarios.
That this specificity, affordable only to the few and privileged, served to channel that group onto editorial boards of influential art publications; art museums and institutions; the art world, generally. This allowed a specific, socio-economic group, to control all discourses on art and to be the arbiters of cultural taste in art.
The western notion of history is finished, has finished, according to John Baudrillard.
That’s not because of student disinterest; it is due to deeper problems with the way that history is done, and how the past is configured and viewed. I’ve written recently, a comment about the ‘fascism of the present’. If fascist orders play with inclusions and exclusions, in terms of what they consider permissible to present, admissible to their version of ‘the present’; then, the mechanism of modernist rupture can be seen as the inaugurating ideology enabling not only neo-rationalist polity, but fascist rationalisations, too.
Even if neo-rationalist polity, or modernist society, portrays itself as all-inclusive and progressive; this necessarily implies an exclusion of regression. Like nations, the culture of the present is susceptible to producing self-celebratory propaganda, skewing, distorting, or otherwise misrepresenting, the past, always in its own favour. This is ideological chronology; it’s an epistemological mechanism by which various social phenomena, can be ordered or regimented.
Because of the genealogy of military hostility accompanying so much of historical discourse over the last 4000 years, all history, including modernist history, has become deeply problematic. Those problems aren’t going to go away merely through hasty retreats into imagined, factual realms, of alleged scientific objectivity. Because the nature of scientific objectivity is itself at stake as a historical or chronological production.
There is of course the global conflict of geo-historical interpretations; the various centrisms that have arisen, such as Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, et cetera. This is species-specific, internal to the public relations propaganda of internal orders of anthrosocial power, primarily emergent from the humanist ideology of anthropic supremacy, whose conceptual roots go all the way back to Aristotle and Protagoras.
Although this global conflict is a symptom of chronological disruption, it is not an explanation for it. History is a certain form of chronological culture; a certain experiential ordering and distribution. But the experiential root of that ordering and distribution is no longer quite so central, as it once was, or seemed to be. Common forms of anthropic experience have been brought to the limits of their traditional epistemological configurations. Those habitual configurations are no longer sufficient to account for newly emerging chronological conditions, conditions that were always there, but which could be safely ignored. Such ignorance is no longer possible. But the understanding which ought to be replacing that ignorance, doesn’t seem to be emerging, at least not in ‘human’ form. This indicates the nature of common, anthropic experience, as an effect. An effect of conditions of a chronology it is unable to understand.
MORE MENTATIONS OF MUNDANE SETTLING
A tribute to M John Harrison’s short story, “Settling the World” (collected in “The Ice Monkey, and other stories” | Victor Gollancz: 1975).
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Estrades requested the meeting, speaking of matters of utmost importance, in his usual, hyperbolic style. Curious, I made my way to the mutually agreed location in Cafe Italia, Frith Street, opposite Ronnie Scott’s, the famous jazz club. He was upstairs, accompanied as always by Eisenburg. After the usual jocular preliminaries, Estrades got straight to the point.
“What is to be done, Oxlade, with this mad American? This pretend-Wagner, this vassal or hopeful vessel of Nietzschean anxieties?” Estrades raised his hands in a show of questioning invocation.
“Why need anything be ‘done’, at all, Estrades? Why not leave the spider of ‘New World’ insanity to its own cocoon of desperate weavings?” Oxlade answered, mimicking Estrades penchant for metaphoric expression.
“Oxlade, Oxlade,” he repeated, shaking his head in disagreement, and sighing. “Your caution exceeds itself! A reserve without effective expenditure!” Estrades continued shaking his head. “To speak of the Wagner puppet, this play-Nietzsche occupying himself with old toys, is to speak of the entire puppet show, Oxlade! Surely, Oxlade, you cannot be so naive as to imagine that his ridiculous self-communion is not serving a larger purpose?”
“I thought you’d retired from such intrigues, Estrades? Are you sure you aren’t simply a victim of your own, professional imagination, nostalgically spinning in its New Conditions of indolence?” Oxlade countered.
Estrades impatiently waved the words away. “Doubt as much as you like, Oxlade! Mistrust was always your forte.” He spoke directly, pre-emptively ploughing through any further objections. “Unwitting pawn, though this New World, Wagnerian Nietzsche, might be; nevertheless, this feckless foot soldier serves a greater esprit.
You think this theatre of contemporary confusions, this vehicle of multiple forms of unease, is merely driven by literary ambitions of bad taste, and hopes of registering itself in some dark beverage, annal of record achievements?” Estrades gave an imploring look. “Yes, yes, there is no need to disagree on this. It is not what the puppet thinks that is of interest. Look beyond its banal journalese, Oxlade, what function does the puppet serve?”
Oxlade shrugged.
Estrades continued, “What purpose does any confusion serve, Oxlade? What did it serve, when either you or I were the instigators and professional architects of it? It served our mission objectives! ” Estrades said, answering his own question. “The question, is, what mission objective is being served by this puppet show of bad ideas?”
“Not everything proceeds according to your so-called, ‘mission objectives’, Estrades. That’s your professionalism talking again. People just live and do what they do, exciting themselves with exotic roles as harmless entertainment,” Oxlade offered.
“Again, Oxlade, you misunderstand. Such exotic pursuits are neither harmless nor entertaining. In the New Conditions that you are so fond of, Oxlade, the inexecrable utopia you defend so ardently, do you not observe the dissolution of the contours of our profession?”
There, Estrades had a point, even from his North African retirement and the pleasures of Byzantine military history, he assiduously observed the increasing encroachment of domestic and civil concerns in the previously sequestered realms of international espionage. Greater reliance on the private sector by traditionally aloof institutions of secrecy, rooted in an earlier era of simpler demarcations, had resulted in the collapse of the civilian and the classified, one into the other, to the point where neither could be easily distinguished. The New Conditions of communication served further to promote this suspect integration. Perhaps Estrades could discern these factors more clearly from his standpoint of self-incurred, North African isolation?
“I don’t deny that there have been changes, Estrades–”
“Understatement is no defence, Oxlade!” Estrades interrupted. “In our New Conditions, it merely becomes Antipodean exaggeration. Half of our work at Alexandria involves playing in online computer games and virtual worlds! Your department knows of this, anyway. How can it not, when it does the same? Eisenburg seems to have a talent for these things, he’s built up quite a reputation in that world.”
Eisenburg drew his cupped hands together, waggled his thumbs, and grinned, moving his shoulders up and down with a theatrics of enthusiasm.
“He has my old position, now, as Head of Section Intelligence, but I occasionally visit–”
“He visits at least two times a week,” Eisenburg interjected.
“Yes, and when I do, he’s either playing these online games, or hosting public relations events; school trips; even regular meetings of his fan club!”
Eisenburg’s face beamed.
“It’s gone too far, Oxlade! ‘He’, is mocking us!” Estrades gestured towards the vast entomological memory of God’s Road, the three of them shared.
“Here he goes again!” said Eisenburg, raising his eyes heavenward.
“You know, Oxlade, why God’s Motorway can no longer be found?”
Estrades was referring to the seeming disappearance of the Road of God. God’s Motorway, vanished some twenty years ago, as mysteriously as its arrival.
“It hasn’t disappeared, Oxlade, it has grown so large we can no longer perceive its horizon,” he gestured at the iPhone on a neighbouring table. “We are living in it, Oxlade, and there is no other choice, certainly not any that could truly be called one’s own.”
“If its horizon is no longer perceivable, why should the oppressive character you attribute to it be any clearer?” asked Oxlade. “Perhaps you are living in the belly of an imaginary beast, Estrades? Perhaps it is just your nature to,” Oxlade hesitated, “to chafe?”
Estrades laughed.
MARK(ET)S OF ANDROID AFFILIATION
Consumer desire? Commodity desire? The alleged ‘subject’ and ‘object’?
Through the exclusivist practice and understandings, the metaphysical configuration of cultural actuality, of ‘positivist object talk’; of ‘Lego-logos’ and ‘system-speak’; consumer and commodity become one, in affiliate ecstasy. Every market relation is converted into the communing of ecstatic information, flowing through circuits of android affiliation, in mechanisms of production whose teleology is objective hallucination.
‘TAKING BACK CONTROL’: DREAMS OF CYBERNETIC LEADERSHIP
If “some of the world’s wealthiest people” are to be considered as members of the so-called, ‘global elite’, that President Trump so often rails against, then the Trump message of ‘taking back control’ from those global elites, seems to have hilariously reached those ‘global elites’ and their advisers, themselves! lol
It’s a game that two can play, in a narcissistic festival of politicised insularity, while ignoring the worlds beyond.
Dreams of cybernetic leadership; the imagined nations of sovereignty; the imaginary of sovereign nations? Figurations of responsibility; the gaming of thrones; the elevation of comfortably seated, numbness of decision, imagining domination of Pandora-inflected determination.
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“Welcome to The Wealth Report
12th edition
In last year’s “Welcome”, I commented that the world appeared to be at a crossroads. Fast forward 12 months, and we are still waiting for strong global leadership to determine the direction of travel.
The range of events creating political turmoil is more diverse than ever: high-stakes verbal sparring between North Korea and the US; the EU’s need to help Spain navigate the Catalonian crisis and balance the growing East-West schism over migration; food security concerns; and ongoing unrest in the Middle East, to mention but a few.
Set against this backdrop, the health of the global economy surprised many in 2017 – and is likely to continue to provide more good news this year. Yet despite positive economic fundamentals underpinning many of our markets, reading through this edition of The Wealth Report, many articles – in particular our interview with eminent historian Niall Ferguson – confirm that it is the political risks that have the potential to cause upset, making the future ever harder to predict.
As an adviser to some of the world’s wealthiest people, life at Knight Frank is fast-paced and exceptionally interesting. Providing the best advice during constantly changing times is challenging. But by employing the best people, continuously enhancing our research capabilities and extending our global network, we aim to react quickly to events, ensuring our advice enables our clients to constantly recalibrate their investment strategies.
The desire to “take back control” is an increasingly important part of these strategies. Many of you are taking a more hands-on role when it comes to your investments, employing in part your own expertise, forming syndicates and building relationships with carefully selected trusted advisers who can offer bespoke advice on specific sectors. The growing influence of family offices as real-estate investors, described on page 53, is a clear example of this.
As ever, Knight Frank is listening and evolving to meet the needs of our clients. Our Family Office Forum brings like-minded private investors together, while a dedicated 26-strong high-net-worth focused team provides our most global clients with a single point of contact for all their property needs in the key markets worldwide.
I am confident that this year’s edition of The Wealth Report will both guide and reassure you. In addition to exploring the movement of wealth around the world and the f luctuations of the world’s luxury residential property markets, this year’s report offers some fascinating insights into luxury spending trends, be it investing in a record-breaking piece of art or, as in the case of one particular client, your own sports team.
It is likely that many of the articles will prompt further questions. Please do get in touch if you would like further information from our research team or guidance on your property portfolio. We are here to help you, and look forward to working with you in 2018.” [LORD ANDREW HAY, GLOBAL HEAD OF RESIDENTIAL]
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’.
ECONOMICS OF EXCREMENTAL ESTRANGEMENT
Excrement as a recording medium, of neurophysiological memory, the excremental encoding of the human, is excrementalised into the ocean; the ocean is a hydrological memory unit; excremental encoding is released into hydrological encoding (the memory of water); marine life has many functions, including those of hydrological memory unit operation;
A conspiracy reading, involving the concept of the ‘alien’, a particular form of hypostatic estrangement; this formation of the alien, intercedes at various points; the stereotypical intercessions, from the perspective of anthropomorphic sociology, are, one; unofficial interventions from the wilderness, i.e., the unknown, introduction of the anomalous within the epistemological fabric of the known; this usually involves scenarios where the general public in some way or another encounter forms of hypostatic estrangement; two; interventions of official complicity, i.e., the unknown in alliance with one or another official institution or institutions; an institution is a form of abstraction, anyway, but allegedly deriving from anthropic origination; so, an anthropic estrangement (Kafka), susceptible to affiliation with non-anthropic forms of hypostatic estrangement, or at least this is the feeling or experience of alienated, anthropic consciousness, lost in the ocean of modernity.
The stage is set, anthropic excrement as information capital, its subatomic vectorial spaces encoding the totality of human information, and exploited by hitherto unspecified aliens, through the storage mediations of oceanic, hydrological memory units. These were always a subsidiary formation of the so-called, ‘akashic records’, another hidden branch of them, located most effectively within the very medium anthropic consciousness had a tendency to reject.
The regime of Hyper-Selfishness, otherwise known as the USA, reacts to these revelations with characteristic hysteria; governments and various institutions are all accused of being in league with alien forms of hypostatic estrangement, and their collection-conspiracies of anthropic, excremental information!
New forms of legislation are brought in, according to these populist fears; excrement is no longer to be dumped outside of the spheres of individual control; vast towers of excrement arise everywhere, each US citizen, a shit shadow, ‘taller than their souls’.
New forms of social competition arise; the characteristically erroneous belief that the higher the excremental erection, the greater the level of excremental enlightenment! These heights of quantification reach ever further into the sky! All gastronomic industries receive astronomic, economic boosts! Government subsidies are piled on, just to make sure! Elaborate air freshening systems are constructed, corollary industries are created, all of which boost various markets and their profits, even further! Everyone is happy!
The relieved aliens, bored shitless by centuries of anthropic information, can at last go home, their ecological task accomplished. For it was their excrement, their waste, that came first; producing the anthropic. The anthropic, as a process of bacterial decomposition, was running out of control; producing further quantities of excrement, purely as a pretext for further decomposition. The aliens realised that their waste had produced a viral, anthropic economy, threatening to consume all in its path. Splicing the ends of that economy together, in a suture of self-sufficiency, was the ecological task they were obligated to perform.
The USA had now become entirely covered by two sorts of towers; the anthropic, itself, and its excremental ambitions; but it was difficult to discern of such a twin economy, which was the excrement, and which was the parasite? However, driven by its now sutured ambition, foundational stability became an issue, and the differentiation supporting the earlier ambiguity of attribution, began to collapse, as the anthropic and excremental ambition began to combine.
Whether or not such a collapse led to anything approaching some kind of nativist enlightenment of the anthropic, was not really a question that the exhausted aliens any longer had any interest in learning.
TACKY TROPES OF SENSATIONALIST VELOCITY: NICK LAND, THE ACCELERATIONIST ACADEMY OF SNAIL CONVENTIONS AND FORMULA ONE TORTOISE RACES
Nick Land doesn’t really understand anything about speed, or about the science-fiction way of looking at things. I’ve actually told him this, at least with regard to science-fiction, on his blog a few years ago. He didn’t contest the assertion. Whatever nonsense he did back in the 1990s, was already passé, two decades before. I knew that, even before starting to write in philosophical contexts.
Alvin Toffler introduced the notion of future shock at the outset of the 1970s. Bruce Sterling, the Texan science-fiction writer, radicalised that concept, giving it a considerable ‘acceleration’, whilst doing so, far beyond, incidentally, what Land and his regressive cadre were attempting to rehash, a decade after.
In the early 1990s, the original and innovative thinkers of speed, were obviously people like Paul Virilio, and Sol Yurick, who dealt with the topic, as a matter of course, quickly and without tendentious fetishisation, on his way to more interesting insights.
The primary issue or problem, is the wrong kind of regression, the mainstream commodifications of adventurous thinking that lead to simplistic and formulaic banality of the worst kinds, where liberatory insight is merely converted into callous, socialised convention; what I have often called ‘holding patterns’, in the new century.
There’s no doubt that my cultural references and assumptions are not those of the general, mainstream academia and culture, now occurring. From the perspective of those references and assumptions, that mainstream culture, almost all of it, is a backward, reactionary, and somewhat dystopically aberrant formation. I understand why, all of the considerably complex structural explanations for that formation, but it’s one that cannot be catered for, any more than has been the case. It’s a pernicious development, ‘against the grain’ of which, it’s important to go, at least somewhat. ‘Against the grain’ is a phrasal theme I produced in the last century, for precisely the pernicious eventuality I describe here.
It’s not anyone’s responsibility to lock themselves in the game of pandering explanations, in the service of deliberately recalcitrant understandings, content to rest on their backward substantialisms. Such tendencies of pernicious recalcitrance merely persist in disingenuous ignorance, choosing only to reinvent their characteristic forms of malice in whatever crevices of the new conditions they are able to perceive. If malicious consumption is the dominant sign of the times, whatever other banners it might wave and surround itself with, then it is precisely that hegemonic signification and all its expressions, that become an object susceptible to precisely the full range of transactions and operations which its insular hypocrisies have always attempted to deny.
The objectification of the victim, no matter how indirect and clothed in hypocrisy, is the objectification of the victimiser, as well. The victim has nature on its side in the form of desire for liberation, it doesn’t need the victimiser; whereas the victimiser has only the nature and need of domination, for which it requires a victim. The more intrigues and masks it throws into the abyss in pursuit of such a requirement, the more the abyss can see the victimiser’s each and every tiresome susceptibility.
Sheltering in malicious projections of its own invention, hiding in exhausted claims of undemonstrated exception, the victimiser always seeks to justify its chosen economies of victimisation. With spurious games of superficiality, the victimiser habitually evades the question of its chosen exploitations, for which it takes no responsibility, offering only to the abyss the most delicate tapestry of both its culpability and vulnerability. The question, then, is what does the abyss do with this unwanted opportunity?