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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.
CONTOURS (con tourisms) OF OCCIDENTAL POSITIVISM
I think there’s an article somewhere associating Michel Foucault with so-called, ‘neoliberalism’.
Postmodern and poststructuralist critiques, whether of Marxism or anything else, are important qualifying stages of epistemological, ontological, and other forms of, reflexivity; forms of reflexivity that require more than just practical, pragmatic, or Occidental-theoretical, understandings.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Instead, there have been all kinds of reactive epistemology, things like ‘speculative realism’; object-oriented ontology; and even the various cults of immanence, some of which attach themselves to Deleuze and Guattari.
It’s interesting that someone like Nick Land preferred the seeming tangibility of Deleuze and Guattari, instead of what he saw as the ‘academic formalism’ of Derrida. It’s obvious that he did not understand Derrida.
It’s then interesting to see his taking up with right-wing politics, something that is arguably not at all disconnected from his philosophical preferences and dislikes.
In my own work, of course, I have observed a general movement that can be called Occidental positivism, which probably isn’t that far away from Derrida’s logocentrism.
The entire Occident is caught up in its own ‘brand’ of positivism which proceeds according to its distinctly ‘marked’ epistemology, in one direction only. It knows of no other way but this proprietary and unilinear herding of knowledge.
This is why it could not solve the paradox of desire, because it was spellbound by the hypostatic and substantialising atrophy of its own principle of desire, which it could only image as the loveless invariance of servile control.
It is this age-old image of imperial security, intrinsically belonging to the West, that is attempting to rehabilitate and readjust itself according to its ridiculous philosophical exhaustions, dressed as rhetorics of immanence.
These shapes of contemporary reaction and how they show themselves all describe some of the contours of Occidental positivism.
THE NINE BILLION NAKED EMPERORS OF POPULIST CONSUMERISM: Consensual Circulations and the Votaries of Vanished Values
According to The Independent, Trump produced this statement:
“He also insisted to supporters: “We did nothing wrong and we have tremendous support.””
During his election campaign, Trump said that his support was such that he could get away with killing or murdering someone openly, in the street. That with respect to such ‘support’, he could do no wrong.
This link between moral determinations of right and wrong and their seemingly assumed contingency on the presence of popular support, isn’t just characteristic of Donald Trump.
It is something that has grown to increasingly characterise general culture.
Whether or not, the media culture of soap operas and reality television shows have in some way promoted social consensus as an absolute value with utter disregard for any other kind of ethical or moral determination, is a question that needs to be asked and answered.
With the growth of marketing culture seeking and inventing new desires to unleash, new affects to liberate, in their own desire to further entrench and implant their profit cycles and schemes, no other consideration seems to be left but the rule of such libidinal contrivances, the absolute enslavement to such a sovereignty of mechanised desires.
It’s always their desire to achieve market saturation. They don’t want to change that desire just because markets can get saturated, or environments can be damaged, et cetera, so they implicitly rely on the promise of infinite markets, markets of infinite extent. It’s a promise that they constantly sell; whether it’s US evangelism and dominion theology; US marketing practices, et cetera; without actually doing anything towards infrastructural fulfilment of that promise.
So it’s always about those ‘full desires’, as it were; those ‘absolute commitments to’, and ‘total coincidences with’, whatever figure of desire has been selected or is being promoted.
Superlative hyperboles; hyperbolic superlatives.
You’ll notice that lots of musicians and entertainers, when being interviewed, constantly say, “Absolutely!”
They are in accord with the mores of promotional obligation characterising the general culture or society that their promotions are directed to. It’s a cultural habit of verbal emphasis that is in line with the tacit injunctions of a hidden fundamentalism, a silent tyranny that never speaks.
Derrida had quite a lot to say about the metaphysics of such libidinal plenitude, as it were. About the rhetorics and characteristic expressions of such cults of hyper-enthusiasm; about the slippages of their signifiers and signifieds. It’s easy to observe the radical narrowness of conception characterising such cults, the characteristically dogmatic approach with which their acolytes present anything and everything; constantly territorialising and attempting to reduce all else to the dumbed-down, base terms of its radical insularity, it’s absolutist and totalitarian insularity, it’s tyranny of insularity.
Whether it’s Ayn Rand’s libertarianism, a kind of ‘politics-for-one’; L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, psychoanalysis for stupid people, which actually becomes the blueprint for the society of psychic surveillance and control, according to all the whistleblowing reports about Scientology; or in the 21st-century, things like Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology, dumbed-down, market appropriations and retreads of philosophy.
All of these are characterised by the trope of restatement according to insular assumptions and the granularised conceptions and outlooks belonging to those assumptions.
It’s a sociopolitical and sociopsychological configuration, a grid of simplistic, lcd, libidinal circulation mobilised only according to its own operations and nothing else.
Those of a supremacist ilk openly advocate policies of social iniquity and exclusion, yet cannot themselves live up to their own standards of inclusion.
Even Buddhist philosophy is falling victim to these would-be, mass-market, mandarins of mediocrity; these experts of banality resentfully attempting to colonise anything and everything beyond the limits of their insular boundary; endlessly secreting their granularised discourses of insular assumptions as the slime of an imperialising domestication.
With all of these instances of radical narrowness, there is always the excuse and justification that they are catering to those of even greater insularity and ignorance! That somehow the existence of an allegedly greater ignorance can somehow justify the promotion or propagation of an allegedly lesser ignorance?
[redacted ]”if others agree with Cranthimus that i’m some sort of crypto-Hegelian “Trumpian Buddhist” watering down Buddhism for the “stupid masses” then let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix that.”
Note how the individual predicates his-her hypothetical decision on a consensual determination (“if others agree”), when s/he ought to really know and be able to determine for him/her -self, the truth values in question.
But this seeming submission to consensus is conducted to hide the fact of numerous failures of logical discernment and objective apprehension by this promoter of a domesticated and defanged, appropriated and banalised, consumer Buddhism.
S/he produces opinionating pronouncements about various areas of Buddhist philosophy and teachings, as if those pronouncements were objective facts rather than errors based on inadequate understanding. Whenever those pronouncements are proved to be erroneous, there has never been any admission of error, of even its possibility. Instead, displays of disingenuousness are produced, irrelevant misdirections, et cetera. Such petty juggling of red herrings is usually the sign of a political promoter rather than an exploratory thinker.
(Note the misleading quotation marks of “stupid masses”, as if it was verbatim quotation, when it was actually an interpretive reduction meriting single quotes.)
For such political promoters, of Buddhism or anything else, philosophy and theory are merely pretexts for some other motivation.
For them, mistakes are never opportunities to think afresh, because they are not thinkers, they are merely calculators of social position. This is why such political promoters lack theoretical and speculative ability, because really the list of their aims was always much more basic and mundane, and self-improvement was not on that list.
Those aims are wholly taken up and exhausted by social reactivity.
Whatever brand of politicisation might be involved, the centrality of social reaction doesn’t change.
This can even be observed with the most unpleasant, All-Trite, exclusionary, and ostensibly individualist, promoters on the Internet. They constantly abuse others and indeed their platform is the justification of such abuse. But when all their arguments and positions are defeated, they straightaway appeal to the very people they abused and treated so badly – the hypocrisy is quite astounding, in a way.
There is one common denominator between most of these promoter characters – they are largely from the USA.
SOLVING THE PARADOX OF DESIRE: LIBIDINAL LOCATIONS AND MISSING CONDITIONS
This essay solves the paradox of desire, in a definitive way, that to my knowledge has not been done before.
Using a thoroughgoing application of Buddhist logic and its
technique of negation, implicit in Buddhist apoha linguistics, a logical solution is achieved, avoiding both the unnecessary and strained mystifications of prior academic treatments, as well as the prevailing and dominant, positivist and substantialist metaphysical habits, that continue to afflict contemporary culture and thought in detrimental ways.
The essay proves the inadequacy of such detrimental positivity.
THE CARAVANSERAI OF CONTINUAL BECOMINGS AND ITS UNIVERSAL CONVENTIONS
In Baudrillard’s ‘desert of the real’, what we see is a continuous and repetitive caravanserai of conventions, hosting discussions of imaginary universes; reality constructions; epistemology engineerings; the busy building sites of objective fabrication and purpose, based on assumptions of realitease proving ever elusive.
Universalism requires a universe; a universe is a conceptual construction, therefore, a worldview; therefore, a convention; therefore, in Nagarjuna’s language, a conventional truth.
Schopenhauer seems to understand this –
[Schopenhauer]: “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 Prajna¬Paramita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 411¬12)
~~~
Schopenhauer renders the ‘universe’, conceptual complex of ‘real-world’, contingent on the principle of ‘will’. The principle of ‘will’, would essentially be a certain kind of motivic cartography of becoming; the application of theoretical grids, as extensions, based on the presupposition of observed and experienced interactions (‘stimulus-response’; ’cause-effect’; structural concordances of the preceding; et cetera).
The cartography of becoming is inherently based on assumptions of conventional objectification.
An assumption of conventional objectification requires an accounting of its limits; its nature; its properties, if any.
For a conventional objectification to be a ‘real’ object, the requirement is that ‘it’ be identical with ‘itself’; ‘self-existent’; not contingent on anything else.
If it is so contingent, then it is a contingent ‘effect’, with its ‘reality’ being deferred onto ‘it’s’ lines of allegedly constituting contingency.
Those lines of constituting contingency are then subject to searches for this deferred ‘reality’.
Those searches for deferred reality usually proceed according to objective assumptions of origin or origination; whether, temporal closures of precedence, the origin of ‘beginnings in time’; or, structural closures of completeness, the economics of totality, the lines of constituting contingency circling back on themselves in an ecstasy of self-emergence, a structural festival of self-identity.
All of these searches for a point of origin, however characterised, objectify that point of origin in different ways according to their respective modes of characterisation. Whether the point of origin is a temporal initiation or structural concordance of completion, objective closure is the imaginary at work.
But the very imagination of objective closure, the very delimitation that announces that closure in order to constitute the objective reality being sought, necessarily has to exceed in some way the delimitation it produces, for the objective reality produced, to actually be ‘objective’. But if the conditions of delimitation exceed the objective reality produced, that objective reality cannot be complete, because it is the production of structural conditions that it does not include. If it does include them, then it can no longer be ‘objective’, because there is nothing left to determine, delimit, or declare, its objectivity.
This is the fundamental aporia at the basis of the search for any ‘objective reality’.
Physical sciences are essentially searches for structural conditions of observable energy forms, according to economic models of completeness. It’s noticeable how traditional conceptions of the universe object as complete totality, get multiplied as ‘alternate universes’; ‘multiversal instances’; et cetera.
This multiplication occurs due to fluctuations of the epistemology of observability with regard to inadequate hypotheses of objective completeness.
Scientific notions of observable completeness, based on structures of reception delimited according to repeatability and structures of proof, are constrained to filter according to those factors, bringing into relief the very standards those factors presuppose, whilst necessarily excluding anomalous outliers that they don’t. This is a standardising filtration according to the dialectics of observable repetition.
Its epistemological range is determined by the notion of universal, consensual access. It is a kind of empirical and epistemological democracy, based on the principle of an observability equally accessible to all who engage in its procedures.
It is this epistemology of observability, as configured by scientific consensus, that produces fluctuating ‘worldviews’, both, when it encounters the epistemology of various other kinds of cultural convention, and in accord with its own fluctuation.
However, the epistemology of observable completeness is not necessarily the epistemology of objective completeness. It is the zone of discrepancy between those two forms of epistemology within which scientific and cultural activity circle. That circling consists of observational convenience forever searching for both objective reality and objective totality, or completeness. It is the desire of observational convenience to produce a representation identical or in complete concordance; not only with what it observes; not only with that which produces the observed; but with both as an apprehensible and manipulable objectification. This dream of perfect, objectifying representation, enabling total freedom*; both from the object represented and over that object; is the dream of perfect objectification, producing perfect, subjective control.
If achieved, however, the very perfection of representation is the very condition of identity with the represented, necessarily producing the very identity of subject and object and their resulting nonexistence as mentioned by Schopenhauer, because the ‘perfection’ has to be adequate to both conditions, of ‘the object represented’ and ‘subjective will or desire’. This is the necessary conclusion of the wilful narrative of objectivity and its productions.
*The freedom of ‘subjective will’.