Category Archives: Birds of Theory

Is it the case, in the face of ‘human’ cultural production, that one can only settle into a comfortable anthropology of ironic hypocrisy? A settling as submission at a distance?

As the way is cleared, of the same tired doxa and identity wars, is it possible to think again. Or has this doxa been inflated, so that all we hear is the clamour of ‘believing spirits’, their well-rehearsed and circumscribed clashes, the litany of disngenuities constituting their manufactured ‘history’?
These questions describe the formations by which a general consensuality tends to function, the tacit standards of reductive appropriation exemplified in its actual effects. With such questions, no more is necessary than simple statement. To attempt any answer amenable to general understanding, only leads to tacit reduction.
Is it the case, that such anthropic doxa constitutes a centralised control system from which deliverance is required? Are we dealing with a Hegelian “Borg” cube? Or is this yet another self-image, which such a ‘cube’ feeds itself, which the Social feeds itself, as a ‘holding pattern’, to obscure its own disingenuous hypocrisies?
It seems that it is precisely such conceptual fixations, and perhaps the desire to amplify these fixations through simulations of populist communication, that constitute the modulations of tacit reduction forming the mode of ‘control’ itself.
Nevertheless, it is not my contention that any process is somehow, simply and essentially, a fixation in itself. Notions of ‘fixation’, too, are contingent on contextual determination.
However, through the tracing of such contextual determinants; their topographic distributions as seen from this or that conceptual plane; the various modalities of their operation; a larger and more precise sense of what is at play can be developed. If it is argued that the language of ‘precision’ is merely one set of images disciplined, or ‘filtered’, by another: I do not deny this, but rather, investigate why this is so. If a similar objection is offered concerning ‘magnitude of theoretical comprehension’, this, too, is easily susceptible to further inquiry.

The enshrining of expediency as the driver for innovation has become a cliche.
Neither the production of surface technical novelty, nor its deep consideration, have been lacking; but the productions have often been fragmentary and disconnected; their mutual relevance, endlessly deferred and displaced into further differential commentaries; the generation of valuable insights, if it occurs at all, never leaves the academy; actual implementation is always obstructed by representations of vested interest, of sociopolitical power, sometimes within the academy itself, which acts as a holding reservoir of futures, deployable only according to the interests of those ‘vested interests’. As all of this can be said to fall under the rubric of an ‘anthropology of ironic hypocrisy’, it cannot serve as a primary reference, though its consideration is not to be entirely neglected.

More often than not, the procedures of innovation are governed by an ambient and global Taylorism that dominates all social activity these days. Even meditative and contemplative states are measured, their effects on performance catalogued and commodified. Every aspect of ‘existence’ is converted into the standardisations of a general information phenomenology, therewith to construct; ‘Being’; ‘Existence’; as the ultimate shopping catalogues.

“Necessity”, they say, “is the mother of invention”, but is it the mother of fresh understandings beyond the novel technical object, and its secret demands on thought? Or does only an empty and contextless rush of expediency prevail, its animating logics forgotten, in a ‘stampediency’ driven by dreams of unlimited convenience?

The easy and unquestioned transactions of ‘Necessity’ have often been the pretext for countless structures of social and political coercion, all of which have their alibi in various images of ‘Necessity’. ‘Vested interests’ use the opportunistic proximities of power to enable disingenuous constructions of administrative necessity favouring only themselves. The desire to secure such convenient forms of distribution, as it were, exercises considerable ideological constraint on the general culture, on its interpretations, practices and world-views. Management of reaction to these constraints is easily achieved through tactical delimitation, around intuitive, issue-based polarities.

Beyond this economic code of competing conveniences, that tries to be all things to all (its?) consuming souls, resides an ignored possibility, a space no longer governed by this code and its conventions, beyond its siren call to harbours of a treacherous Necessity.
All along, stronger winds have always blown, within and without. With regard to these forces, the comforting theatricks of Necessity can no longer track any course beyond its habitual play of self-deceptions. There is no shelter in the incessant and cathartic replay of its mutual corruptions.

The train of transformations was never singular, only administered mythologies ever conveyed their unity, usually under an anthropic rubric, with which all were trained to identify. But the desperate hubris of such a universal was only ever a Modernist hysteria, the inflationary ecstasy of an imagined technological control belonging to the specific singularity of ‘Man’, itself a hysterical and dogmatic conception.

But such a figure can no longer contain the very forces of transformation it sought so effectively to exploit; thus, the ‘future’ brings forth new equilibria, their sequence of emergence, a function of emanative possibility, rather than anthropic history. With such emergences, even their ‘novelty’ stands revealed as an artifact of anthropic understanding. It is precisely this misnamed ‘understanding’, preoccupied exclusively with the theatricks of its own necessities, that, beyond the singularity of its self-elected fixations, has always perceived only whirlwinds, rather than wisdom.

Escaping this theatricks of Necessity and its increasing formations of insular ignorance, its fascinations of local turbulence, is a Fugal Drama; a ‘Theatre of F(light)’; in which the ‘Minstrel of the Improvisations, that Mistral of Ceaseless Inquisitions’, follows an aleatoric strategy of ‘Aeolian Inquiry’.