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CONTEXTUAL METAPHORICS AND SUBSTANTIAL ASSUMPTION
It’s enough of a task to write in a way that one considers satisfactory according to one’s own criteria; but to add the burden of communicating to those subscribing to other criteria, criteria that do not exert the same effects on one’s personal procedures, as they seem to exercise on those others; is an additional didacticism weighed down precisely by that which one is obliged to contest.
It’s somewhat uncertainly amusing to note the general history of conceptual inflations surrounding the words, and concepts, of ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’.
The progress has merely been from the 18th and 19th century, as well as theological, fetishisings of the one; to the physics-envy, and scientististic differentiation, fetishisings of the other. Both have had a tendency towards positivist abbreviations and assumptions, automatically eliding, misrepresenting, or otherwise dismissing, serious narrative consideration of the opposing polarity’s distributive obligations.
There comes a time when a culture or civilisation is required to be equal to the self-images of development it has expressed; chaotically and clumsily weaving filigrees of positivist abbreviation around ad hoc structures of cartoon-like formalisation, might fulfill some Deleuzian fashion for ‘rhizomatic’ proliferation; or some other differential reaction to prior homogeneous styles of thought; or the opposed movement of homogenising reaction to allegedly established differential styles of thought; but all of that is a far cry from understandings not quite so susceptible to such fashionable and predictable fetishishisations, and, let us be honest, is a gesture of general cultural ‘backtracking’, one of enormous proportions. The gesture, being honest once again, is a revelation only of the inability to actually think in any way beyond the knee-jerk positivist surfaces of chosen substantial assumption. The entire sequence proceeds only according to the display of so many disingenuous nostalgias.
That’s not really a burden one would wish to carry; but it does require pointing out.
‘Immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, are always contextually dependent, and interdependent. Context is always subject to radically variable determination. So, neither is susceptible to any final determination. The same positivist instance, can be both ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’, both attributions being drawn from equally possible and available contexts.
Contexts themselves, can be both formalised or unformalised positive instances in their inflationary and extensible forms, as substantial orders. They are metaphorics, and their characteristic structural economies are the substantial patternings configuring logics of intuition and their substantial assumptions.
Anything at all, can be a ‘positive instance’, or a ‘context’.
IS IT ‘REALITY’ THAT IS HEARD, OR YET MORE CONTRADICTORY STUPIDITY: ALL THE ‘NARROWING ADDICTIONS’, ATTEMPTING TO EXCLUSIVELY INHABIT THE SILLY MECHANICAL GAME OF THE SELF-PRIVILEGED PRESENCE OF THAT EXHAUSTED NAME?
I couldn’t be bothered, to read more than two pages, and the abstract, of ‘Rocco Gangle’s’ essay, “THE THEORETICAL PRAGMATICS OF NON-PHILOSOPHY”, so I wrote this instead.
I have no objection at all, to using category theory or any other metaphoric, as a way of modelling philosophical structures in different ways, hopefully innovatory and insightful, at least for those who do them. Utilising the characteristic structures of different domains, as mutual metaphorics of transformation and transposition, is just one basic, combinatorial technique of SF thinking. To be done well, it really has to be intuitive and fast, at the speed of thought, sensing all possibilities, and no longer being bound by any habitual ideology of conventional use. When it’s done badly, it descends into mere contrivances of uninspired variation, essentially anchored within the anchoring horizons of conventional fixation.
It’s against this bad trend, the trend towards self-satisfied ‘banality’ described below, that the animus of what I’ve written is a cautionary gesture. Especially so, given the current confusions of epistemological inflation observable throughout contemporary cultures. This is not a time to retreat into the false security of nostalgias, disingenuously erecting old challenges as a ‘holding pattern’ of new sensationalisms. Piddling around with a combinatorics of disciplinary differences and outlook is ‘merely’ the specularity and fusion of what are, after all, initially contrived Aristotelian habits. Using, but not being bound by the conventional disciplinary protocols of, those habits of disciplined difference, is an automatic prerequisite of SF thinking. But SF thinking, at least in terms of my own personal receptions, moved far beyond these incidental transcendences at its outset.
Hence, a certain reluctance to return to such archaic concerns, especially when such emphatic sensationalism is presented so exclusively. It’s a bit like watching an ecstatic crowd learning the first two letters of the alphabet, and inflating the bare achievement of that task, to the proportions of a universal revelation.
It’s just the logic of mass hysteria; a painfully slow and sensationalist shift of fixation by structures of consensual dogma; a ‘reality’, that just can’t be taken too seriously.
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The distinction between the performative and the constative is an opportunity to critique both; not only in terms of each other, their usual conceptions; but also, in conjunction with the greater, fresher insights and understandings, enabled by a theorisation no longer quite so tightly bound by their insular everyday nostalgias.
Raging absolutism is the corollary of everyday insularity, whereby, it is not any thinking of the Absolute, in itself, whether in its ‘philosophical’ or ‘religious’ guises, that is generative of problems, but rather, it is the social game of authoritarian fetishism, or fetishising authority, that arises due to the lazy, narrow, and utilitarian demands for totemic simplicity exemplified by everyday insularity.
The hostility to the alleged alienations of ‘philosophical theory’ are the characteristic response of everyday insularity, of its contrived resentments towards any cultural horizon exceeding its immediate, avaricious grasp, the stubborn belligerence towards any development not susceptible to its order of banality. This is the revenge of positive instrumentalisation (instrumental isolation?), of an insularity itself an instrument of general instrumental production, on everything that does not submit to the injunctions of instrumental isolation, to its “unilateral usage… as mere material”.
Unwittingly perhaps, Laruelle gives unilateral expression to a Heideggerian enframing, to a technological telos, and a primacy of purified manipulation as an ‘end in itself’. One which converts everything into a resource, into ‘mere material’, into the homogenised techno-calculi always constrained to monumentalise ‘unilateral use’.
As soon as people are viewed as ‘expendable’, whether ‘instrumentally’, or even as a result of some logic of humility and charitability, privileging the social over an overweening individuality, Kant’s injunction concerning the treatment of people as ‘ends in themselves’ is lost. Whatever the dialectics of initial value may be, contrary gamings of casuistical interpretation are always a possibility; not only because of disingenuous desire, though that is all too commonly displayed, to the extent of formally constituting entire institutions of exploitation; but because the boundaries of perceived fidelity are themselves often problematic and inherently perspectival.
That Laruelle, at first glance, might be seen as rehabilitating the perspective of a lost proletarianism, with an ‘alternative stream’ of ‘oraxiomatic’ usage; sidestepping the perceivably baroque convolutions, and apparently resolution-allergic of Derridean usage, for example; is certainly the positive rubric or face of its contemporary display. But one has to ask, whether or not, this fasces or fascia is singular, in the monolithic and perhaps ‘narcissistic’ way it would like to consider itself – it’s so called ‘vision-in-one’? On the one hand, it is possible to sympathise with Laruelle’s metaphoric of what is after all an ancient concern stretching back to Eastern forms of thought, then to Ancient Greece, and on to the ‘present day’. The stock of images by which this concern has been known through the ages, are profuse.
Laruelle’s selection from this resource, and retrofitting of that which he selects, are highly specific to his purposes. The usage, is not that of some expansive tolerance resulting from immersal in an oceanic understanding. Unlike Freud, he does not disparage spiritual contemplation so readily, largely because he exploits the logics and concepts of its labours, in the service of the very instrumentalisation and everyday insularity that, ironically, they always gently questioned and transformed. Whatever Laruelle’s personal relation to this area of ‘spirit’, his appropriation of its resources occurs, as we have seen, according to the modular receptions of a contemporary positivist nostalgia.
The retrofitting, caters to the immediate, avaricious grasp of everyday insularity, to its order of banality, and the modular-mechanical procedures of blocked understanding it follows. When these procedures are transposed to metaphysical and experiential registers; everything; every relation, every sign, every nuance, every self-image; is converted into an isolated and autonomous block. The contrivance of isolation and autonomy is the surface concession to ideologies of freedom. Beneath this concession, however, there is only the order of banality; it’s positive instrumentalisation; and its unilateral, monolithic and insular, purpose. This incommensurability of instrumental isolations, is the raging thought of alienation, on disconnection from that unilateral order. The exclusively modular understandings of positive instrumentality, can only function as component in the order of banality. Without this function, there is only rage.
That all this is so, is shown quite clearly by a history of that order’s domesticating responses, all of which seek to first abbreviate and then appropriate whatever developments might not be in line with its basic, unilateral procedure. We are not speaking of an alienated order, not resident in those who cling to its unilateral and modular procedures as its exclusive proponents. On the contrary, it is difficult to find those who have not been coerced into inhabiting its modes, in some way.
The rage for the Absolute, is a misnomer. Absolute thinking or thought always exceeds itself, usually in gestures of novel understanding. It naturally proceeds according to a free theorisation and inquiry. Such inquisitiveness is primary and playful, never under duress to any delimited fixation.
Rage, is always reactive, the result of frustration when expectations or desires are not realised; this discord between expectation and realisation generates a fixation, the fetishisation of the real. In contrast to the playful inquisitiveness of free theorising, which sets no boundaries of expectation, the entire spectrum of emphatic and emotive concerns revolving around the rubric of reality, is characterised by reactionary disappointment or disillusion.
Such a reaction is inherently the production of a social conditioning issuing discrepant injunctions and instructions concerning this ‘real’, which it simultaneously inculcates as insularising fetish, psychologising it as a cybernetics of ‘personal frustrations and satisfactions’. The reactive thinker is characterised by an onset of inquisitive thought subsequent to such inculcation; instead of exploratory free theory, there are only social inquisitions, all of which occur under the fetishised sign of ‘reality’, or the ‘real’.
It begins in disappointment; the psychosocial real, does not keep its expected appointments! Reality, is not real! This reneging on the consistency of pretences towards objective agreement, stages the reality fetish as consensually constrained, social drama, rather than exploratory expedition. The thinker who fetishises the real, is always a reactive thinker, never an exploratory one; always socially directed, never theoretically free; always an evangelist of the vicarious, of a vast variety of disingenuous indirections, never of honest innovations.
The Absolute was always the province of the ascetic, the mystic, the recluse, no one else really cared for it, enough to get angry over it. But realisation, however, was a different story. Absolute reality, could be left to itself, and those ‘crackpots’ who chose to dwell there. But the more mundane modalities, the realities!, of this Absolute, could be contrived both as a horizon of psychosocial contention; as a production line of regimented insularities supplying that horizon; and as ongoing narrative of discursive narcosis, the addictive configuration of the ecstasies of so many petty realisations. It is this narrative, which is the rage of the real. A rage that speaks with the full fury of alienated emotions invested at the outset in that social ordering of a disillusioning, regimented reality; because it never learned to think or question, naturally, without coerced reaction, for itself.
That this is so, is indicated by a distinct lack of experiential understanding, of spontaneous vitality of insight, in favour of bare articulation of the modular calculations of convention. Whereas, a spontaneous vitality whose understanding is already absolute, requires neither rage nor the ever-unfulfilled modular-metaphysical arrangements and production quotas generating that rage. Realities are enjoyed, when and where they are available; but “unilateral usage… as mere material”, is too redolent of robotic injunctions and cybernetic exploitations, both of them in the pejorative sense, to prove as anything other than profoundly distasteful.
The Breakfast At Camp Quest (Ion): Beyond The Anthropic, The Alien, And The Universe: Food For Thought
A big thank you to Michelle Filippi for this picture!
The tines of the fork*, or the various voices of the anthropic, under the sign of a forked imple(mentation) of techne, of technology-direction (the tines of a fork point in the same direction); are accelerated by those caffeine drivers of modernity, Tea and Coffee.
The plate in the distance, carries an uncertain food, the nutrition of the future; the future as nutrition.
The nearest plate, present at hand, is empty. This is a Platonic plate, a Platonised plate; empty, absent, of actual nutritional presence, but a space ‘full’ of ideas, ready to fill itself with the future, with the food of the future.
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*Interesting resonance, cf. “Cranthimus Jaxley Terence is right.
Or, more simply, it’s what I would call the instrumental positivist’s revenge, on those theoretical tendencies that tend to suspend, and radically question, traditional substantial commitments. It’s the corollary, of what’s going on in current sociopolitical scenarios.
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· Reply · 27 August at 12:37
Manage
Cranthimus Jaxley
Cranthimus Jaxley It’s a kind of imperialism of stupidity, wherein the stupid are finding it increasingly difficult to hide the essentially militarised mechanisms of their exploitations. The gap between the ‘people themselves’, and their alienated forms of governance, has collapsed. The distance enabling disingenuousness, hypocrisy, and denial, has disappeared. The two tines of the Occidental ‘forked tongue’, have fused, and do not know what to say.
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· Reply · 27 August at 12:55″
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This breakfast scenography, suggested the above conceptual geometry to me. From here, it is possible to go in many directions of connective interpretation, proliferating further conceptual geometries, perhaps ‘topologies’ is a better word.
Is this merely a consideration of consumption? One based on the question of consumption; on the model of consumption; on consumption as a metaphysical principle of configuration? Yes, it can be all of those things. It can even be used reductively and/or radically; in all kinds of inflationary ways. But let us not neglect deflationary possibilities; those options, where the model and its various mirages of explication, interpretation, insight, and intuition; in short, its modellings; withdraw and absent themselves, not only from the positive chatter of their inflationary insights, but from their usual and habitual conventions and uses, too; leaving metaphysical ground and space, not merely for another festival of extrapolatory combinatorics based on yet another well worn positive convention, but thinking something, everything, and nothing, all at once, simultaneously and systematically, and yet always free to go in any ‘metaphysical’ direction, whatsoever. Here, of course, even the notion of ‘system’, comes into radical question. However, instead of following the traditional discursive and economic circuitry, of placing one positive insularity after another; in what can only ever be misguided attempts at positive domestication, a facile and reductive conversion of insights communicating very little or nothing; the relation of subsequence, here, might be better used as a means of maintaining that alleged ‘nothingness’, as a ‘fulcrum’, as it were, granting unlimited insight(s) into all possible conceptual geometries, the full range of theoro-topological possibility. So, with another resonance of the ‘fork’ and ‘tines’ metaphoric, an apt quote from Derrida.
“As such, philosophical discourse is always presented as a self-effacement before the thing said, before truth, before essence, before content, before meaning, etc. Philosophical discourse in fact strives for this wherever it is at work, and this effort has certain determinate effects in its partial successes and its necessary failures. What I advance here, therefore, is not a projected philosophical discourse. That is why I started by saying to the French Philosophical Society that I was not offering it a philosophical type of discourse. Consequently, if it is the mark of philosophy that it efface itself, insofar as it is a signifying text, before the signified truth, the content, the presence of the meaning of being, etc., then what I proposed was a questioning of that mark. And I can only do that by inscribing it (in every sense of the word), that is, by exceeding philosophical discourse somewhere and thus writing a text which, I am afraid, cannot efface itself totally before what is to be said. It requires, solicits, and sometimes even obtains—as I am grateful to you for having proved by your intervention-—a “divided” attention—-to use your word. In broaching your question, you also noted that I meant something [vouloir dire] and that, even if you did not understand it completely, you were convinced of my wanting-to-say-something. I am less sure of this than you. I have posed the question of intention [vouloir dire], of its affiliation to the essence of logocentrism and metaphysics, elsewhere. At the point at which this question is posed, intention is no longer involved. Perhaps not even a questioning intention.
Finally, I freely acknowledge that the different stages of the path I proposed were very unequally illuminated. I will not appeal to time, which I have moreover amply overrun, to justify the fact that I have not been able to clarify equally all the words which I have used. As you have noted in an admirable word, they are nests of language, full or empty—who knows and it matters little, only the simulacrum matters here—the weaving [tissage] of which obscures its structure beneath all its folds, equally and simultaneously. It does not openly expose itself. [ll ne s’exp0se a plate couture] This is not the result of animal cunning but of the structure of a fabric or tissue [tissu], of the organization of the text. From the text which you wanted to pass unperceived, we leave ourselves free to concern ourselves with the content of this nestlike object. I have tried to justify theoretically the impossibility of illuminating, of giving an equal thematic weight to all parts of the text, which is made of differences and of differences of differences, and is therefore, in principle, irreducibly heterogeneous. This heterogeneity connects up again with what I have said about strategy: I privilege one or other chain of concepts in the light of a given context which, moreover, I can only analyze and master in part. I leave the other concepts in a shadow, be it provisional or definitive. I also try to formalize this shadow and draw its spectral and schematic figure.
As much as possible. Through forks and nests.’
Wood, D.C., and R. Bernasconi. Derrida and Différance. Coventry/Evanston, Ill.: Parousia Press/Northwestern Univ Pr, 1985. (pp. 87-9)”
RADICAL INFORMATION
The ‘architext’ is just structured information, in any form, whatsoever. It can’t be ‘centred’, as such, because no metaphysical commitment is asserted with respect to informational differences. The only way to centralise it, would be through a ‘metaphysics of information’. One in which the concept of information itself, at its most radical level, and in all its anthropic receptions, shows itself as a limited case; a case of limited perspective; a particular and closured procedure. This is only possible, in an economics that exceeds the ‘localisation’ of radical information.
ONEIRIC IRONIC
I began writing this as a FaceBook comment, in response to this, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=457778147942543&id=100011310857862 , but it seems to have turned into a blogpost.
[Steven Craig Hickman] “It’s as if we are in a pre-WWII novel living out the nightmares and repetitions of some strange and nefarious experiment gone awry… someone plz close that portal and put the hellish brew back into the abyss.
Somehow we’ve got to stop the hate, now.
I keep remembering the first time I read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. But it can… and, dam it if we don’t do something it will get worse. As if Lewis were speaking of Trump: “People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there’s been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America—” …. listening to Trump bark at NK and Venezuela one wonders if he is seeking some event so he can impose Martial Law and become a populist dictator in actual not virtual fact and deed.
Sadly, we’re just allowing it to happen, and the Establishment dems and repubs are sitting idly by like idiots, doing nothing.”
{AK}: Really, Steven, what can they do? It’s the people themselves who voted for Trump. It’s the people themselves who swarm and cluster around whatever simplified political polarities are subjected to inflationary exploitation by businesses of fringe hysteria. It’s politics as identity ideology consumerism, in search of a ‘reality’.
The guy who started the ‘fake news’ business, catering for the Trump crowd, is actually a Democrat; but there is money to be made in selling the nostalgia of a certain kind of majority ethnocentric confirmation bias.
As I’ve pointed out before, many times on my blog, the dominant hegemony is oneiric. Only by looking at all the data, as configured by systems of dream and desire, does a certain clarity take place. In practice, everyone knows that. Marketing is all about that. Bannon, and Cambridge Analytics, exploited it to the hilt.
Positivist appropriation of mythic nostalgia is an ongoing fact. ‘In fact’, it produces ‘facts’. Paul Ricoeur’s “conflict of interpretations” is the model of the mediascape’s ‘contest of realities’. It’s all, a “Logan’s Run” scenario, driven by positivist desire. Whether it’s a desire for ‘common sense’; ‘scientific sense’; ‘religious sense’; ‘financial sense’; ‘aesthetic sense’; or even ‘political sense’; it’s all deprecated into caricatures of ineffectual, positivist simplicity. Caricatures in the service of complexity-avoidance, at precisely the time when complexity is ‘reality’.
The explicit relation between Healthcare; the Protestant-Calvinist ‘work ethic’ and its accusatory moralisations, leading to various positivist moral isolations; and capital; necessarily sets up a gladiatorial arena of competing moral representations. The discrepancy between lived reality of social conditions and the veneer of obligatory moral presentation, necessarily produces reflexivities of moral representation, in which any simple notion of communal and consensual ‘reality’ is bound to collapse. This can be observed. This explains the disingenuousness of Trump speaking against ‘hate’, whilst “instigating it through his backdoor handlers”.
The “strange and nefarious experiment” you speak of, is exactly what Nick Land refers to, here, some years back, in response to my comments: “Science is modern, not accidentally, but essentially. Modernity is no mere bet, but a venture, through which everything is hazarded, including itself. The widest horizons arise from ‘within’ it (but its ‘inside’ is not, in reality, inside)”
It’s a good answer, and to varying extents, I can agree with it. But again, it’s very easy to fall into a ‘mythology of modernity’; a positivist caricature of surface technical achievements that actually neglects more complex and relevant microcultural-movements, not so susceptible to the abbreviations of modernist mythology. Is it even possible to close “that portal”? Or would that just be another simplifying figuration of positivist reduction? The panic projection of a horrifying ‘abyss’ into which can be cast the “hellish brew” of desire and profit driven alienations, dreamt as nightmare monstrosity?
ANALECTA ALOGICA: FRAGMENTS WITHOUT ORDER (1989ish, not sure, though)
ANALECTA ALOGICA
A collection of rhetorical devices?
At present, Humanity seems to be composed of oppressive communities whose governing principles are derived from Man’s baser instincts. These coarse and cruel principles keep throwing us against the wall so that we are continually dashed into little pieces. Collected here, from the latest shatterings, are some of those pieces, just a few, forlorn fragments…
During these brief, eristical expeditions, it must be borne in mind that Reasoning is always in danger of being just so many genetic fallacies, but this is no demand for grief, for no matter where they go, the rhapsodies of Reason are always in time with the rhythms of reflection, and these rhythms invariably carry one away, to think, on some other day…
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“What was that rushing by?”
“Oh that! That was just a minute. We get millions of them in this neighbourhood.”
These writings are my scribal responses to the pressures of Life. Life pushes me, I push a pen. You may ask why I write, why do I respond this way? I could answer that by weaving these cocoons of connotations I protect myself from the harsh rigours of an anomie-filled existence. But I won’t, because I don’t. Protect myself from an anomie-filled existence, that is.
I write because… I like to write, because… I wish to keep some sort of account of some of the mental travels which my mind is continually embarking upon, I write out of desperation, out of joy, out of other emotional postures, too, each posture being a play, a strategic state of mind, a move in a game of emotional chess, again which never comes to rest…
I also write* because I feel that reading and writing is one of the most sublime species of social intercourse available to Humanity…
(*marginal note: *Writing is reading.)
“Having knowledge is having a ledge from which to know, a conceptual ledge, that is.” (Inline note: “All ledges are lost… in limbo, perhaps?… are lost!??” | The ‘are’ is underlined three times, pointing to: “Being! Misplaced?”)
Occasionally, my life seems to be dressed in dilemmas, but I won’t get overly dramatic about it, at least not yet, I’ll allow such dire dramas to develop naturally, at their own pace, perhaps…
“I seem to feel my mind reel as I ride upon life’s insanely spinning wheel.”
Reel, both verb and adjective,
Adjective – film reel,
Reality, Film, Image.
Shall I take this medicine of Enlightenment, this escapism that acts as an emetic, that causes one to vomit illusions. Shall I take this stuff before I’ve experienced the symptoms of Suffering, a Suffering caused by illusions.
Why not? Because, you know, I have suffered, I have experienced the symptoms of Suffering, I really have.
“I am a philosophic pétroleur, and I have planted an incendiary in your id. It’s guaranteed to blow your lid.”
” Oh, thank you. I could do with some excitement.”
Let us make speech.
I think I’ll say this phrase at various points in this ongoing monologue, albeit a monologue with apparent interruptions. I’ve borrowed the phrase from Abu Jabbar, The Possibility Merchant, who is a character in my book, “A Divine Avenue”. I guess you could say that as Abu Jabbar is my fictional construction, I’ve borrowed it from myself.
I find it pleasant that there is so much of me as I can lend and borrow within the circus of experiences that apparently constitute me.
It strangely comforting to think that the ‘human condition’can be complex and busy. There’s a persistent hope that among all this confusion, lying hidden, is something magical and wonderful, a private panacea. Perhaps this magical panacea lies in our perceptions, perhaps the magical quality is one way of seeing, a single selection from a variety of visions…
“The erection of an ‘I’ structure can prove somewhat difficult when the potential self, the soon-to-be-self, is immersed in pantheistic musings.
(Note at top of page: “*With what forms should I fumble?”)
What should I write about? What bits of information should I jungle? What do you want to read? What do you wish to know?
Should I be experimental, political, philosophical, emotional, urbane, charmingly rustic, sophisticated or cutely simple, specious and/or veracious.
Or should I try ineffable Wisdom!
Wisdom Lane: “I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was an old feeling, evasive but distinct. Continually elusive but ever present. I couldn’t define it, but I knew what it was. I KNOW what it is. It isn’t anywhere, in heaven or on earth, but it is always here, it is always there, it is everywhere…”
You get the picture. A few negativistic indications of the arcanum, a sort of indication by elimination, and also the revelation, by means of apparent contradiction, that the arcanum is the Reality behind all appearances.
Is that okay? Or do you want something different? Are you bored of my aphoristic, micro-philosophies, of my fast and trashy junk wisdom? Do you resent following this itinerary of improvisations?
“Sorry can’t stop! I’m on my way to help constitute a certain momentous event in history.”
Refinement will have to wait; nowadays I like to scream and shout. Occasionally, though, I leave some subtlety about.
I enjoy asking questions, going on a quest. Occasionally, though, this ‘Why Thing’of mine goes a little wild. Not that I mind. Because it is through this tendency to forever question, this ceaseless and untamed Criticality, that I achieve a lucid looseness, an arcane clarity, a kind of freedom that pulses through the complexities of Life, a kind of existential electron flow.
“Money makes the economy go round. Money is promises – ‘I Promise To Pay The Bearer On Demand The Sum Of…’.
And the essence of business is to promise more than is actually delivered. The concealment of this deficient delivery leads to a commerce of appearances. When appearances reign supreme, even the genuine loses its integrity and a sort of sugar flavoured sugar seems to sweeten our tea.”
“Well, man, well,” said the Styrofoam Queen, her legs all agleam and asheen. “Shing! Shing! Shing!” went the handmaidens, dressed in sequins, riding on dolphins.
Whatever!
“This is the News. Streams of Excluded Middles attacked Aristotle today, claiming that the philosopher had exploited them for years. We spoke to one of the Excluded Middles, A or B, and asked him to comment on today’s rebellion.”
“Well, the Greeks were bad enough, but the Scholastics were the last straw. Of course, Aristotle was, and continues to be, the main culprit. Anyhow, we’ve been gathering of forces and now we are abandoning your world. You can use other logics, we’re skedaddling down a side alley. Goodbye!”
“Reason, son of Rea Rhetorica the well known actress, collapse from nervous exhaustion today. He is reported to have said, just before his collapse: “Everyone seems to need me to live, and people keep coming to see me. I just can’t take anymore.”
“According to hospital doctors, Reason just needs a long holiday.”
“Abstracta, the world’s greatest hermit, forgotten until today, when he re-entered the Universe after being away for millions of years, spoke to our reporter, Geoff Humphries:
“Abstracta, what have you learned during your time of seclusion?”
” isolation is a form of relation, Mr. Media man. Isolation is just a relation. However, being a relation does not invalidate it. Isolation is still an option and I very much recommend it.”
It is amusing to note that ‘chain’ is synonymous with ‘sequence’ and ‘shackle’ and ‘bond’. Is a sequence a trap?
Chain: (nouns) coupling: fetter: link: manacle: progression: restraint: train: sequence: series: shackle: succession: union
(verbs) bind: confine: enslave: restrain: train: sequence: shackle
To indulge in sequential thought patterns is to be bound! Is that so? Is life a train of thought?
I want to create works of unparalleled beauty, of unsurpassed insight. For I want to create a suddenly pellucid profundity, to surprise Sofia in her most secret activities. I want, I want, I want. I am, I am, I am. Desire and Being, Yearning and Feeling. A moment in Time and the Moment of Time.
“Like Hegel, Nagarjuna also rejects the temporal causal view, but, unlike him, does not substitute any rational pattern for it. Instead of grasping separatedness in terms of unity, as Hegel advocates, Nagarjuna refers, perhaps, to a meditative state, or to the effect of such a state, in which, paradoxically, separatedness may exist as before, but is not taken as such: one seems to have lost, or, rather, overcome the awareness of events in time. Not that one ceases to react to phenomena, but that one acts as though the moment of action is eternity.
Nagaruna’s insight, I think, should have been clarified in less intuitive terms. But I must admit that I do not find the right words to define it. But perhaps finding them is missing it. What Nagarjuna helps us to do, and Kant and Hegel do not, is to forget about philosophy and still rest satisfied.”
“Philosophy East/Philosophy West: A Critical Comparison Of Indian, Chinese, Islamic, And European Philosophy” Edited by Ben-Ami Sharfstein
INTERNET, SPLINTERNET
A quick response to Terence Blake’s “ACADEMIC TRAUMA OR NOETIC DREAM: on the vicissitudes of dialogue“.
[TB] “Readers may see my blog as just more froth in the prevailing sea of philo-babble, but my goal is more democratic (and more pedagogical), and I have made quite a few enemies in trying to de-esotericise the philosophies I discuss.”
{AK}: Who cares whether they think it’s frothy or not?!
[TB] “The almost universal form that this enmity takes is that of ignoring my very existence, of refusing to acknowledge my work or to cite me. This has nothing to do with my use of the blog form, as the same authors occasionally cite blog posts favourable to their cause.”
{AK}: It’s not worth worrying about. Individually, we never really get the level of responses we’d prefer. I don’t really have any expectations about it. It comes with the territory of individuality.
[TB] “Publicity, not dialogue, is their aim. Laziness, not openness, is their method. Tautological self-validation is their pay-off.”
{AK}: Usually, they’re not very good, and they know it.
[TB] “These people transpose the power structures of the university to discussion on the web. They seem to be unaware that academics talk of dialogue, its openness and pluralism in order to prevent it from happening. Dialogue would be too traumatic for them, and their careers are based on avoiding it, or repressing it.”
{AK}: It’s a lot of work, to even write the low-level stuff of bog-standard academic production. Such obligations of production, naturally reduce the time and energy available for Internet shenanigans. Due to the effects of networked compression, not all institutional modalities of discursive production fare well in the new electronic environments.
[TB] “In the neo-liberal university there is only one dialogue that counts in the last instance (to cite a cynical expression of the Laruelleans). Money talks to money, and deals are made on that basis.”
{AK}: Let them get on with it! It won’t make them any better, lol.
[TB] “Power, the power to make and to do, to think and to express oneself, does not count, and is actively discouraged. Anyone who has been to university has witnessed this obscene underside (to talk like Zizek) and its symbolic violence at work, and seen its casualties.”
{AK}: I don’t really care about any of that, Terence. When it is good, it’s good. When it isn’t, it’s not. Not worth having any expectations.
TECHNO-ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE TECHNOSENSORIUM
As all definition moves closer towards simply being desire; each definition a dialectic between varying probabilities; between the reliable regularity of alleged certitudes, and the increasingly improbable; that nostalgic conceptual economy, rubricised as ‘world’, grows ever more granularised, into micro-epistemologies, into micro-libidinal epistemologies; vast swarms of sense, in both senses.
In and around this imaginary, of a ‘world-pen’, huge herds of meaning can be observed, their migratory patterns almost instantaneous to a subset of biological perceptions, caught in its global techno-entanglement of electronic light.
NOTIONAL COMMOTION
Communications systems, codes; languages and worlds, from the outset, proceed out of selective idealisation; out of processes and economies of intent(ion). An intention, or intentio, is a picture or picturing, configuring and configured by, lines of motivic force; each line itself, as ‘motivation’, a sent emissary of another vision. This interplay between vision and motivation, or ‘form’ and ‘force’, is one in which each declares the other, proceeds from the other, ‘informs’ the other. Such a scenario of mutual structuration and relation; of effusive phenomenality in all directions; a vast variety of visions, motivations, and missions; all of which can be seen as constituting ‘notional commotion’.
THE CONDITION OF COMMODIFIED CONSCIOUSNESS
If there were no such thing as sound, there would be no such thing as ‘silence’.
The notion of a linguistic silence is inherent to language.
As the expansion of non-selection, non-intention, ‘absence’, ‘space’, etc.; it is the expansion of the condition of selection, intention, ‘presence’, ‘sign’, etc..
This expansion, as emphasis and increased consideration, begins to signify the non-significant; setting a conditional semantics, or semantics of condition; against that of simple, positivist, utilitarian, and habitual, selections; or, more precisely, those selections without non-significant, conditional reflection.
Selecting the non-significant, or more bluntly, signifying the non-significant, might seem to be a blatantly paradoxical enterprise. But this would only be the case, with universalising notions, of essentialist conceptions, of the sign and non-sign.
Just as a sign requires delimitation to function as ‘a’ sign; an amalgam of signs, constituting a code or language, too, require delimitation, to function as ‘a’ code or ‘a’ language. Therefore, the gesture of defining selection is always specifically conditioned; specifying that which is defined, with relation to the necessarily undefined. These requirements and gestures would be the minimal conditions necessary to produce ‘significance’, whether as sign or system of signs.
Without sign, or semiotic system; as specific ‘significance’, or specific system of significance production; there can be no non-significance. Signs are relational, so are ‘non-signs’. If there were no signs at all, there would be nothing to negate.
Naive positivist essentialism, has a tendency to look for ‘things in themselves’, at the expense of any genuine consideration of their conditions. It has a tendency towards axiomatic atrophication of signs, and hallucinating unnecessary incommensurabilities of its own construction. Rather than abandon this somewhat emotive attachment to positivist naivety, it will extend relational non-significance into an essentialist nihilism, under its self-imposed cultural duress of monumental self-mythology. In truth, though, this banal exceptionalist desire only suffers from a monumental lack of relational talent. Such is the condition of commodified consciousness.