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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’.

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]

IRRELEVANT NOISES ABOUT FREE-MARKET ECONOMY

A couple of days ago, on Disqus, I had an exchange with the author of an article on China-USA relations, and a subsequent, disingenuous moderation of one of my comments, by that author. The article, is here –

The Coming War on China: A Review of John Pilger’s Latest Documentary”| Foreign Policy Journal


My first comment, was the following:


Irrelevant Noises about Free-Market Economy 00
Eric Li, the Chinese entrepreneur, was distinguishing between the forces of capitalism, exemplified by the billionaire class, and the forces of state, exemplified as political authority.


Your presumption that for government to be above capital only leaves the role of directing markets, assumes market totalitarianism, that there is nothing else but the market! In which case, governments and states are entirely unnecessary, let the market do whatever it likes. The state form is redundant. Let people and corporations go wherever they want, according to market needs. Your assumption is based on such market mysticism.
The state form of any alleged democracy, is supposed to represent all interests, not just market interests. This is something you seem not to understand, somewhat understandably given the extent of market penetration into all areas of US social life, but not so excusable in an author writing in what is presumably offering itself as a knowledgeable journal of foreign affairs.
Your objections to earlier commenters are shallow, showing little understanding of the theoretical issues at play.


Given that, on every issue, American senators vote in accord with the billionaire class, US polity effectively functions as an exclusive representative of that billionaire class. Therefore, the US economy is a centrally planned economy, designed according to the interests of the billionaire class. Therefore, what you are citing as crony capitalism, is centrally planned economy, by crony billionaires.


The point that neither US nor Chinese economies are actually free-market economies is a trivial observation, everyone knows that, hence the earlier comments. However, whereas the Chinese government is straightforwardly honest about its market policies, it’s only the USA which makes such irrelevant noises about free-market economy, just as you’re doing, in your article and comment responses.
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To which the authors response, was this –



JR Hammond Response

JR Hammond




Irrelevant Noises about Free-Market Economy 01

My response, was the following:


“The point that neither US nor Chinese economies are actually free-market economies is a trivial observation, everyone knows that, hence the earlier comments. However, whereas the Chinese government is straightforwardly honest about its market policies, it’s only the USA which makes such irrelevant noises about free-market economy, just as you’re doing, in your article and comment responses.”



This passage does not make any reference to logical or factual error, but it does cite the contextual attributes of ‘trivial observation’ and ‘irrelevant noises’, with regard to the post’s references to free-market economy. Therefore, your request for specific identification of factual or logical errors, is a misplaced ‘red herring’, not pertinent to the text of my comment. Whether or not it has any relevance to you, regarding a personal preoccupation with particular conceptions of the factual or the logical, seems to be a hypothetical factor strongly suggested in your comment responses, where those themes have arisen more than once.



Another way of presenting the point about ‘market mysticism’, would be to ask, what role, if any, do you suggest, the government or state forms, should actually have? Should governments or states, exist at all? Because whatever configuration might be suggested, it would necessarily lead to conditions of mechanical consequence, potentially considered as iniquitous from the perspectives of rationales external to such configuration. Conceptions such as ‘minimal government’, for instance, are contingent on a particular criterion or conception of administrative magnitude. Given the nature of systematic consequence, any administrative gesture, at all, could be seen as an unwarranted and iniquitous intervention, of the greatest consequence. That is to say, conceptions of ‘minimal’ and ‘maximal’, are themselves contingent on conception, necessarily leading to constraints on ‘freedom’.
Even the suggestion of anarchy, as a governing or state principle, would be susceptible to the same critique, notwithstanding the potential play of contradiction, between anarchy and principle.



Given these considerations, any comparison between governmental or state forms, requires far more nuanced development than constant reiteration of a poorly assumed, free-market concept. That would be the unthinking evangelisation of an ideological fixation, not genuine or competent consideration of that free-market concept.



An important omission of your article, is John Pilger’s claim that the USA financed its industrial development through profits derived from militarily enforced, opium dealing. By all reports, the USA didn’t just deliver that opium to the coasts, like the British, they went into China, proactively promoting or pushing it, as is their characteristic style. They were doing all this right into the 20th century; that’s why JG Ballard talked about there being more millionaires in Shanghai, in the 1930s, than in the rest of the world.
Basically, the modern world of the USA was financed quite considerably by drug money; hence the narcotic aspect of its addictive, consumer culture?
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But as can be seen in the Disqus comment section following the article, as of this date, it doesn’t appear there, though it did so when I first posted it.
This was the original URL of the comment –
https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2017/09/27/the-coming-war-on-china-a-review-of-john-pilgers-latest-documentary/#comment-4158165161



Jeremy R. Hammond

The author and moderator is Jeremy R. Hammond.
As far as can be gleaned from an Internet search, he is allegedly a left-wing, independent writer, who is anti-USA, anti-Israel, and 9/11 cconspiracist. More information can be found at the following links –
http://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/2013/04/28/richard-falks-publisher-is-911-truther-foreign-policy-journal-just-a-1-man-website/


https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/foreign-policy-journal/


https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jeremy-hammond-antisemite-jack-frank-sigman


One noticeable feature of his comment responses, both on the John Pilger documentary review and on the third link above, is the emphasis on the factual and logical integrity of his claims, even when such integrity has not been questioned.


JR Hammond 00


If his responses are to be taken into account, as well as the considerable omissions of his work, at least as far as the  review of John Pilger’s documentary is concerned, he does not seem so much, ‘anti-American’, or even ‘left-wing’, but rather, a libertarian ideologist unable to conceive of anything beyond the play of market conditions. Insofar as this seems to be the case, his political orientation is largely irrelevant, as he falls into the typical US American fad of hating government. Unfortunately, this hatred of the US state, does not seem to result in either effective critique of the government he so seems to detest, or theorisation of the conditions in which it has coalesced. Very much unlike John Pilger’s documentary, which outlines and alludes to multiple issues, not merely the insularity of focusing on the contrast between the contemporary systems of economy of China and the USA. A noticeable feature of JR Hammond’s review, one characterising  many so-called independent writers in the USA, is the way that he attributes positions to Pilger which do not actually appear anywhere in the documentary. Hammond hallucinates oppositions concerning his economic obsessions into John Pilger’s documentary. He then berates Pilger on the basis of these hallucinated oppositions, even going on to state various neglects, on the same basis.
This kind of reframing, from the evangelising perspective of ideological narrowness, is common in the USA, characterising people like Alex Jones, and many others. It seems to be a business out there, and like Alex Jones, Hammond does not seem to have neglected the monetisation of his discourse.
His review is so innocuous, it could have been drafted by the Pentagon itself, but to be honest, they would have done a far better job, and it would have been far more critical of the US state.
Concluding this post, are some more comments, which I haven’t posted yet, on the review of John Pilger’s excellent documentary.



Irrelevant Noises about Free-Market Economy 02

I didn’t suggest any logical or factual error in your post or article. But it purports to be a review of John Pilger’s documentary. It is a review, but a highly selective one, ignoring much of what the documentary claims and suggests, to the extent some might say of being disingenuous, or at best narrow and superficial.


John Pilger does not suggest or imply that the free market is inherently evil or to blame, for anything. His message seems to be that the USA’s practices of allegedly free-market economy, are iniquitous, hypocritical, and self-serving. That China had to defend itself from blatant US exploitation, not from free-market economy. An exploitation that the USA itself would consider criminal hostility, if positions were reversed. That the means of defence China resorted to in the face of such exploitation, was another state form and ideology from the West, Communism, inflected by Chairman Mao, into Maoism.


The state form, if contrasted with market economy, is supposed to address that which is not addressed by market economy, it is government supplementation of what market economy might be said to neglect.


Unless the concept of market economy is viewed as a total expansion, with no remainder, market economy is only concerned with economic transactions of a state, not the totality of national transactions and decisions. In so far as this concern is not total, government or state forms could be said to be required in order to provision institutional address of the remainder escaping the operations of market economy.
If the concept of market economy is viewed as a total expansion, with no remainder, such market economy would have no internal borders, due to the fact that market economy is necessarily international. In which case, any analysis of market economy necessarily has to consider the fullest extent of that market economy, which is necessarily global. It would have to cover the historical development of that market economy, in order to adequately contextualise its forces in a relevant way.
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THE ENGINE OF PERFORMANCE MYSTICISM AND ITS SPELL OF PRODUCTION

The notion of ‘post-truth’, as a general specification, is still informed by assumptions of truth determination. Whether or not, these assumptions have become problematic due to the difficulty of establishing stable truth conditions constituting such veridical determination, does not alter the governing assumption of such determination. Pluralism would bring together various types of truth determination, together with their respective contexts or truth conditions. Pluralism is an acknowledgement that there are indeed different kinds of truth determination and different kinds of felicity. That the generality of the truth idea is susceptible to the differentiations of localised and situational expressions. But notice, criteria of ‘localisation’ and ‘situation’, are themselves constructed determinations. The same cautions apply to determinations of ‘immanence’; ‘plurality’; ‘temporality’; structures of evaluation; negative indication, or indication through negation; ‘reality’; structures of testability and experimentation. It’s understandable that explicit consciousness of the possibility of such determinations, under the sign of constructive action, could prove somewhat overwhelming in its complexity, especially given the fact that so many of those determinations are simply historical and cultural givens constituting the taken for granted, backgrounds, supporting life-worlds in which people dwell.
That the onset of modernist conditions has transformed the nature of localised interaction between life-worlds into something far more striated by what would be considered before as non-local forces, is simply the result of the forces of that ongoing modernity spreading itself according to its own logics, producing new forms of itself according to the conditions it finds itself in.


The notion of a ‘thought image’ is simply that of an idea; a position; a philosopheme; an order; etc.. In practice, a philosophical convention, perhaps even a philosophy meme? Yes, it’s possible to differentiate and distinguish all of these terms with a view to their respective uniqueness and incommensurability, but in practice there is considerable semantic overlap of use.


The notion of quantum, performance, and structural, images, are three different positions that seem to have developed contemporary relevance. That relevance situates itself according to certain kinds of need or desire. The quantum image is a particular site of speculative hypostasis; the scientifically arrived at limit of classical objectivity; producing effects that are radically susceptible to interpretation. Thus the site is vulnerable to all kinds of objective hysteria; every order of the object, of any object, seeks reconstruction according to the probabilistic granularity, or granular probability, of quantum possibility. The assumptions, and preoccupations, of atomistic constitution, provision the tangibility of collapse and initial, objective closure, a zoology of particularised and detectable actuality. But this actuality is structured, therefore a necessary complicity with the so-called, ‘structural image’.


The ‘structural image’; as an artefact of holistic perspective, both in ancient, modern, and multicultural, forms; is perhaps the contemporary replay of that perspective. There has of course been gestalt theory, in 19th and 20th century Germany, a perhaps corollary movement. But contemporary structuralism, at least its continental forms, has a well-known development, initially associated with linguistics. If it’s typological procedures are a little too modernist, too general and abstract, not immanent enough, that seems to have been sufficient provocation to produce the responses of libidinal materialism characterising Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s mid-period and early works, respectively. As well as perhaps Foucault, often called a structuralist, but distinguishing his epistemological, ‘epic schemes’, and highly immanent stagings of localised, historical analysis, from the linguistic emphases of structuralist typology. And then of course there is Derrida, who radicalises structuralism into post-structuralism, using structuralist resources. Foucault, of course, did the same, using epistemological reflexivity of consideration in his analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas.


If Michel Foucault’s subsequent treatments of power and knowledge, within the contexts of his ‘hidden histories’ concerning representation, madness, sexuality, etc., constitute the deconstructed, shifted and analysed, basis for both theoretical and practical action, as seems to be the case with his continued relevance to contemporary debates, then it is easy to see that the factor of contemporary appeal has very much to do with the stagings of immanence his work provides or enables.


The question of the performance image is central to such contemporary appeal. People like to do things; they like what they do, to be relevant. Perhaps it’s just cybernetics? A message requires both a sender and a receiver, the structure of transmission and reception is expected to do something, to have some kind of agreeable effect on whatever ‘world’ the interlocutors of the message form believe or consider that they inhabit. But those so-called, ‘worlds’, in the context of modernist permeation of global communications, are brought together through processes of mutual and vertiginous reflection, much like the mirror play within Las Meninas, effectively blurring the difference between the different kinds of truth determination belonging to those ‘worlds’. Much as the order of the object seeks reconstruction within quantum possibility; the ‘order of worlds’, of locales and life-worlds, seeks reconstruction within the arena of representations constituting global communication. Each of those ‘worlds’ aspires to the status of being an indispensable ‘model of representation’, hence the hysteria of repetitions by some of those ‘worlds’, as a quantity strategy of ‘full-spectrum domination’. Such a strategy necessarily operates according to full-spectrum appropriation, as well, attempting to reduce what it clones to the terms of its own, imagined model. These activities constitute the conditions of the so-called, ‘performance image’, the cultural war of imaginary models. Each imagining an order of its own substantial extension, as the absolute economy of its imagined model, which it’s every expression, it’s every message, simultaneously tries to establish and yet undermines. Obviously this is inclusive of any ‘model’, of ‘plurality’, as well.


If such models are principles of hypothetical socio-economic and cultural organisation, they constitute universalising aspirations towards a generality and security of conditions. But those universalising aspirations often read notions of generality and security, in profoundly different ways. Those ways have radically different aetiologies and rationales. Their resolution on a social level, requires social understanding. The development of such understandings is often contradicted by differing mechanisms of cultural utilisation and operation, susceptible to variable characterisations of acceptability and non-acceptability; of what constitute legitimate and non-legitimate, forms of exploitation. The clash of positivist observations leads to clashes of contextual justification, to an extent where all contexts are brought into question, resulting in a complexity exceeding the terms of conventional public debate and understanding.


If it’s the case, that Alain Badiou seeks to compartmentalise this complexity according to the truth rubrics of his own general categorisation, reflecting the ostensible expressions at play in the social field; and if François Laruelle is seeking to recover some kind of neo-positivist purity of the everyday, with a vocabulary of axiomatic givenness immunised against philosophical difference, enabling the neo-nativism of an idiomatic incommensurability; what could such gestures mean?
It might seem that Alain Badiou gives space to the messiness of social action; to the power of event and trauma; to the monumental motivations of dramatised rupture in a kind of Hegelian historical narrative of truth-disclosing, traumatic events; promoting the witnesses to such staged events, as might be accepted as such, to the privileged status of ‘subjects’, the eventual, publicity agents, jointly authoring Alain Badiou’s Hegelian narrative monument of truth disclosure.
It might seem that François Laruelle simply wants to begin again, shearing off the unpleasant messiness of history, as so many bad decisions for which there is no obligation to really learn anything or take any responsibility. All is forgiven, and nothing need be understood, under the aegis of ‘the One’, it’s all back to positivist business, as usual, or so at least Laruelle hopes.
Both thinkers are promoters of the performance image; both are caught up in its default assumptions; both are apologists for the ideology of production, at any and all costs.


But the performance image is contingent on the notion of performance. That notion, whether classically or in any other way, is susceptible to radical interpretation, to the extent of the extremity of there having never been any performance, at all. That extremity does not receive enough consideration or contemplation; there are insights to be had there.
Instead, both Alain Badiou and François Laruelle trot out their programmatic, metaphysical schemas as ideological insulation for the cabled conduction of the powers of axiomatic truth and incommensurable position. Those cables serve the engine of performance mysticism and its spell of production.

THE SO-CALLED, ‘UNIVERSE’, AS GENERAL ALIBI OF DISCONTENT

‘Physical reality’ would indicate the systematic apprehension of habitual interpretations concerning emergent phenomena. It would be a hypostatic convention contingent on both those interpretations and apprehensions, as well as the radical assumptions behind both contingencies. The systematic aspect, as unified apprehension, is suggestive both of an instance of seeming completion with regard to economies of habitual interpretation, as well as an instance of seeming incompletion suggested by whatever escapes the structure of apprehension producing habitual interpretation.


Science, is essentially concerned with establishing invariant structures of objectivity with respect to emergent phenomena, rearranging and revising habitual interpretation in accord with the establishment of such invariance, in order to produce the security of objective knowledge. Its activity follows the logic of approximation, towards such structures of invariance, with the implicit assumption of various types of regularity. So, it is concerned with the regulations of sequential emergence, and the systematics of such regularity.
But the assumption of objective invariance, known as truth, is the guiding principle behind scientific projects. However, as this principle necessarily issues from locations of apprehension receptive to particular streams of phenomenal emergence, it has to generalise the samplings from such an itinerary of apprehensions, according to powers of theoretical idealisation, in order to approach the truth of objective invariance.


Is it the case, though, that the so-called universe, as a system of general production, is necessarily bound to whatever legislative landscape of objective invariance that might present itself to a particular itinerary itself produced by that so-called universe?
Is it the case, that the so-called universe would privilege the operation of subjective and objective structural assumption as some kind of ultimate rationale? What would happen to the notion of objective truth if everything was susceptible to the free variations of subjective engineering, of some globally capable science? Where would truth and objectivity go, in a universal environment of total scientific design?
Once all patterns of physical determination have been mapped and harnessed, what is left? All of the other patterns of wishful determination, hitherto rejected? Does astrology make a comeback? Future forms of divination contingent on future objective vocabularies not yet even discovered? All of it held together by entanglements of quantum possibility somewhat susceptible to future, infinite machines?


But ask yourself, in these scenarios of future hypothesis, do nostalgic reconstructions arise? Archaeological gestures reproducing the early 21st-century, looking for that which was missed in the initial production, the simple joys of living and being together that were displaced by the burdens of bad epistemology, of weak and selfish understandings, all of which were inflicted by a contrived culture of sectarian intimidations and evil intents?

THE UNQUESTIONED AXIOM OF ABSOLUTE AGORA

[Matt Barber] “The “quantum image” is this image of the radical identity of the material which is real, absolute, immediate and not involved in any false process, dialectic, differentiation etc. The only way to reduce L’s work to a scientism would be to hack off the part of his project which includes radical and static emplacement of the chora which distinguishes and defines the universe and world in a way philosophy fails to achieve.”



{CJ (AK)}: Being able to treat anything at all, any potentially identifiable ens, whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’, as a ‘reality’, ‘absolute’, or ‘immediacy’, is merely one of the corollary operations of Science Fiction thinking and assumption. It’s Science Fiction bricolage, you pick it up quite naturally as a child when reading science-fiction. It’s a prerequisite of reading lots of short stories with different kinds of world building. That process, in my experience, involves conceptual operations, some of which appear in various kinds of philosophy or even Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’. But there are a lot more possibilities.


It would be possible to do a structural combinatorics of philosophical or non-philosophical positions, or discursive elaborations of radical, seed ens or entities, as various kinds of formal and informal outlines. This might seem to have considerable appeal to those intimidated by spectres of processual, dialectical, and differential, necessity. But each one of those seeming necessities itself potentially constitutes a radical seed entity.


The khôra could be said to paradoxically refer to the characterisation of the non-characterised, but such antinomy would be contingent on essentialised notions of ‘characterisation’ and ‘non-characterisation’, those essentialised notions themselves ‘characterisations’, if that convention is insisted upon.
But notice, the ‘khôra’, as a determination, is contingent on the theoretical construction which it might be said to exceed, or even ‘originate’, if the relation of origin is projected onto this alleged excess. Likewise, each and every moment of the theoretical construction, including the ‘khôra’, could be seen as permeated by the hegemony of any other moment, as the sign or symbol of any other. All of this, of course, in addition to the usual holistic nominations.


These possibilities are simple, first stage, speculations. They should be fairly obvious and intuitive, if all faculties are brought to the task. There are many understandings or possibilities beyond these first stage extrapolations of convention, but they require something more than than the channelled preoccupations of contemporary commitment.


Regarding the ‘quantum image’, a first step would be to consider the concepts and assumptions drawn together in its construction, and to radically consider those concepts and assumptions from all possible perspectives. This conceptual analysis lays out the background of discursive and philosophical assumptions in which the so-called, ‘quantum image’, is able to function. One then merely has to ask what the logic(s) of this ‘quantum image’ says (say).


“Distinguishing and defining the universe and world in a way that philosophy fails to achieve”, is an assertion contingent on methodological claims of constructive definition, as well as universal and worldly assumption. The attribution of success and failure implicitly brings in selectivity of outlook. The notion of achievement indicates the possibility of accomplishing such a selective outlook.
All of these operations presuppose some kind of systematic theorisation and necessity sufficient to produce the nebulous accomplishments of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. There seems to be a kind of vague and everyday existentialism involved? A nostalgia wishing to foreground the presences of its ‘reality’, as absolute and immediate possibilities available for its economy of libidinal desire?
The closest analogy to such a vaguely expressed position or assumption, would perhaps be an outlook of consumer dominion, based on an ideology of its own freedom from any other form of necessity. The system of consumerist immediacy becomes the only and absolute form of reality. Is this the only dominion that matters to Laruelle and his followers? A dominion of everyday freedom, in which all considerations of wisdom can be seen as failures?
If this is the absolute metaphysics of catering and consumption; of axiomatic appetite and its order; then it is no surprise that Laruelle would seek radical incommensurability from any philosophical gesture that might question that order. Just as Donald Trump has deleted climate change data, Laruelle seeks to delete the powers of philosophy, or perhaps copy-paste them into a bazaar of cognitive baubles and consumer cognitions, a market stall of mimetic ‘wisdoms’?
It is no wonder, then, that the distinguishing and defining ‘chora’ actually symbolises the always imagined, cornucopian overflowing of the ‘agora’.

ADMINISTRATION OF EPIPHANY

 

The notion of an “ocean of dissemblance” would be contingent on two concepts, the oceanic, implicitly a principle of unity; and the principle of similarity/dissimilarity implicit in dissemblance.

 

So at the root of the notion is the play of ‘likeness’.
The play of likeness necessarily presumes at least two entities bearing the relation of likeness with respect to each other.
The metaphysical status and characterisation of these entities and relations would obviously seem to suggest subsequent scenarios of supervening operations regarding those entities and relations. That is to say, if metaphysical characterisation has to do with; the contextual production of those entities and relations; or an economics of which those entities and relations are contingencies; then it’s quite naturally the case that such metaphysical characterisation works as a principle of unity whose metaphoric expression is the oceanic, but not any less a formal principle because of such metaphoricity.
So Deleuze’s notion, whatever privileging of apparent disjunction, difference, or as he says, “dissemblance”, might be ascribed to it; the very notion itself implicitly utilises the principle of unity to achieve its formalist effects. If an opposite privileging were offered, a similar implicit utilisation, mutatis mutandis, would result.

 

Within the networks of these formal possibilities it is possible to derive or construct pretty much anything in the way of conceptual innovation or philosophies of-; this is merely conceptual combinatorics, though it can nevertheless exercise profound effects depending on the natures of the commitments involved.

 

It is understandable that there are existential and referential anxieties bound up with these networks of formal possibility, which are not merely ‘formal’, but intimately complicit and unified with those anxieties and their bases.

 


The production of an identity is the production of a concept, the conceptual seed of a discursive logic. The production of a concept, of that conceptual seed of discursive logic, is susceptible to elaborations of configurative force, the configurations of that concept. The resulting discursive formations are merely the systematic elaborations of such configuration. Discursive formations are not merely that which is commonly thought of through the rubric of the linguistic.
The notion of non-identity is equally the production of identity and the concept. Identity still functions as a configuring force.

 

People like Deleuze and Laruelle are still working within economies of referential relation, existential anxiety, and expediency, their concepts revolve around these supervening formations.
Whether or not this is philosophy in a wider sense, or practical philosophy, or ‘non-‘ philosophy; such category anxieties probably bespeak uncritical dogmas of initial assumption, too much, those anxieties continuing to configure repetitions of such assumption without developing the insights that might be expected from a more progressive understanding. Battling a history of bad receptions and interpretations belonging to particular groups, whilst ignoring a history of past insights belonging to others, or perhaps even those same groups, probably reflects the marketing procedures of intellectual commodity rather than any other notion of progress.
Whether this leads to a kind of social proletarianisation, or proletarian socialisation, of insight and wisdom; as a kind of reactive and recollective backward step; and whether this was what Deleuze and Laruelle were and are trying to do; is an open question. Even if that were the case, it is highly doubtful that such a particularly contained set of cogitations and understandings, so bound up with analyses of shifting structures and tendencies of alleged error, could lead to anything other than redistribution of such alleged errors, without more radical understandings.
Though the overarching resolutions of epiphanic understanding, whether in philosophical or religious forms, are personal, and not necessarily effective as programmes of social administration, it is persons that constitute the social, and if their understandings enable more effective and happier forms of administration, those epiphanies should not be ignored.