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HEIDEGGERIAN MONSTROSITY: FACTORS OF FRICTION
It’s been a cliche for a long time, for the Occident to talk about war being a driver of technology. To whatever extents, that might be true or false, and one could say that obviously in military contexts emphasising war, such a declaration can only be a self-fulfilling truism. Not because of some exclusive and essential link between war and techne, but merely because all things develop out of their own necessities, including war.
Given the emphasis of such cultural militarisation, together with all its celebratory paeans of contentious regimentation, why not philosophically thematise those factors of friction in fiction?
That’s something Heraclitus didn’t neglect.
HEIDEGGERIAN MONSTROSITY
Basically, there is a sense in which ‘Western metaphysics’ is technology or techne. Heidegger perhaps saw that in a certain kind of way, which explains some of the affinities and parallels with ‘Eastern thought’, that he himself began to broach (“Letter to a Japanese Friend”, etc). But he did add, that the West couldn’t simply ‘turn Japanese’; that there was a specifically Western destiny, and development.
I can see why he would think that, and there’s easily various levels on which he can be considered to be correct. But I do wonder, much more recently, whether his assumption is merely the arbitrary root of the movement of Western exceptionalism? Both the founding inauguration and identification enabling the geographic to produce such an allegedly distinct cultural emergence.
Because, it would be quite easy to look at it all in a different way; the West, as a mere movement of implementations, implementations of ideas belonging to Oriental origination, thus as stages of oriental continuity; or as Hegel might have put it, of the spirit of the East.
I could deconstruct all of that, of course, but to do it effectively and thoroughly, Western cultural- philosophical resources are insufficient.
Of course, Heidegger must’ve had subconscious premonitions of Indus Valley Civilisation precedence! He was able to intuit, but without any form of understanding, the emergence of my ‘General Conceptual Holography’, and its continuation of that precedence! Of that there can be no doubt!
His publication, of “Letter to a Japanese Friend”, was a tactic of confrontation through the deliberate deferral of slight, but significant, misdirection. This was Heidegger’s gesture of philosophical reconnaissance, attempting to establish Occidental opposition further east from the Indus Valley, both as a kind of lassooing strategy, and due to his lack of the necessary conceptual resources required to attack the contemporary philosophical formations originating from Indus Valley culture!
Of this simplistic ruse, despite the obligatory immersal in yogic distances, I was well aware! Not wishing to be caught up in contingency actions involving tiresome engagements with the turgid, ontological forces under Heidegger’s command, I withdrew whatever few battalions of ancillary attention had been devoted to, what was after all, merely a German farmer’s peculiar obsession, in order to continue with developments more profoundly significant than Bavarian ‘Being’! Without neglecting it all together, however, as such deep neglect would merely empower it into a monstrosity of festering facticity!
THE ONTOLOGICAL PRODUCTION OF EXISTENTIAL LIMITATION
[Saris Aurelius] “I believe meaning exists, this is why I have will. There is meaning in that I have a sense to engage.”
{AK (CJ)}: “If both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ are forms of ‘standing forth’, then to ask whether “meaning exists”, suggests a simple statement of tautology; ‘meaning means’, or, ‘existence exists’?”
If both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ are forms of ‘standing forth’, then they are both forms of distinction or difference; ‘standing forth’, necessarily implies ‘that which stands forth’, as a distinct difference, with regard to ‘that which it stands out from’. Thus both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ share this differential structuring of the distinct.
Obviously, for you, the order of ‘meaning’ is not the same as the order of ‘existence’, as you locate the order of ‘meaning’, first, in a statement of belief, concerning an existential claim, which seems to assume the separation of the ‘order of meaning’ from the ‘order of existence’. The assumption of this separation suggests a very particular and determinate concept of ‘existence’, for which the mere quality of ‘standing forth’, ‘distinction’, and ‘difference’, are not sufficiently qualifying attributes. However, you link the belief in existential meaning, to the concept of will, presumably granting the concept of will membership within this specifically determinate concept of ‘existence’, a specificity initially separate from the ‘order of meaning’.
Obviously, the concept of will, in your discursive arrangement, functions as immediately existential, in the specifically determinate sense previously implied; whilst the ‘order of meaning’ does not so function, having to traverse the detour of belief before arriving at such existential immediacy, as configured by the concept of will. An additional detour, the possession of a “sense to engage” is stated, as another condition for the specifically determinate ‘existence’ of the ‘order of meaning’.
An initial separation between two forms of ‘standing forth’; producing an ‘order of meaning’ without determinate ‘existence’, and a specifically determinate ‘order of existence’, but without determinate ‘meaning’.
Yet the common background for both orders is ‘standing forth’ – the differential structuring of the distinct.
So we then have to ask why it is that a specifically determinate ‘order of existence’ gets produced?
What are the reasons for the production of such an ‘existential’ determination?
And why is the ‘order of meaning’ existentially indeterminate in the absence of the detours of ‘belief’, ‘will’, and the ‘sense to engage’.
Not mentioned, but present as background assumption, is the metaphysics of subject/object.
>The concept of will, functioning as existential immediacy, is thus ‘objective’, an ‘objective feature’ belonging to the specifically determinate ‘order of existence’.
>The concept of belief, functions as a switching point, between the separated orders of ‘existentially indeterminate Meaning’ and ‘meaningfully indeterminate Existence’.
>This switching point oscillates between the ‘objectivity’ of the specifically determinate ‘order of existence’, and the presumably ‘subjectively’ accessed ‘order of meaning.
Given the background assumption and traditional conventions of the metaphysics of subject/object, the underlying rationale structuring the implicit presuppositions of your initial statement, become clear. The obvious resonances that might be suggested, are a metaphysics of the will, particularly as inflected by Friedrich Nietzsche, though earlier precursors might well be relevant, too. The structure is traditional, after all. There is a kind of metaphysical centring on psychological, perhaps sociological, motifs: ‘belief’; ‘will’; ‘sense to engage’; as anchoring points.
But one of the most important assumptions, the unanalysed assumption of separation, between subjectively accessed ‘meaning’ and objective ‘existence’; no clear criteria has been given for this separation; it is simply assumed, as a ‘given’; in this it follows a Cartesian route, the route of modernity.
The other, connected assumption, again taken as a ‘given’, is the production of a specifically determinate, concept of ‘existence’; again, offered without clear criteria, those criteria being largely social in origin, an unquestioned and shared habit of consensual inculcation.
The issue of existential legitimacy, of what counts as ‘objectively existent’ beyond the fluctuations of subjectivity; beyond the fluctuating subjective access to an ‘order of meaning’ characterised by existential indeterminacy; such existential legitimacy can only occur with respect to a concept of existence no longer bound only to the discernible difference of ‘standing forth’. In order for the concept of existential legitimacy to even arise, further criteria enabling such a legitimacy are required, these have to be invented and produced. What it is that does the inventing and producing, is an open question, and one can look perhaps to the ‘order of meaning’ for various entertainments, in this regard.
But equally, all the notions and habits constituting the metaphysical conventions issuing from the metaphysics of subject/object, are interpretative inventions produced out of the ‘order of meaning’, largely as a result of what can conventionally be called ‘social production’. Because social production is susceptible to the variousness of uses, the notion of shared consensuality arises and is enabled. This commonality, in systematic forms accounting for variousness of use, is the ‘metaphysics of objectivity’, said metaphysics being systematically linked to those forms as a mutually confirming corollary. Existential legitimacy, is a functioning protocol of metaphysical registration belonging to that systematic network.
But the limits of that network, are the limits of its ‘existential legitimacy’.
URBAN VERBAL PRODUCTION
Guðjón, sometimes one has to expand the notion of ‘following’ away from the usual, default protocols, of sense or meaning production, in order to make room for other kinds of expression.
Years ago, when playing in Oxford, there was a somewhat eccentric lady, often walking around the city centre, who would hold loud conversations with herself, whilst listening to music on headphones. I seen other similar characters, in London. Usually, these people are seen as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’, constituting them as marginalised figures in urban life.
What was highly noticeable, was the preponderance of references to media circulation, within their verbal productions. References to celebrities, news topics, anything at all! The alleged craziness or madness was actually a mediation of media circulations, and this I found highly significant. Because there was a kind of ‘production’ going on, and that production was thoroughly determined by the encounter with mediated significances not marginalised as craziness or madness. There seemed to be a complicity at work, one which questioned the conventions of each of the elements constituting that complicity.
Apparently, there are quite a a lot of people who do talk to themselves, not in the sense of the people mentioned above, publicly and loudly, but to themselves, in private. This phenomenon, it seems to me, could suggest many things. Conventionally speaking, the obvious and sarcastically humorous implication, would be to talk about a sliding scale or slippery slope of sanity/insanity.
But I don’t think that that is what is going on.
Another anecdote: I remember being in the Marble Arch, KFC, in London. There was an Afro-Caribbean man, in his 30s or 40s, talking to himself; not loudly or too quietly, just normally. He was having quite a good self-conversation. After a while, I actually talked to him, and he instantly went into a normal mode, and we had a good conversation, though I don’t remember what it was about. I do remember that he was actually a very intelligent man, well balanced, by no means could he be classified as crazy.
The city is an urban machine, a semi-organic mechanism of intersecting forces, configured according to multiple conceptual images susceptible to topical presentation. Out of the profusion of those topical regulations, verbal production cannot help but express, at least partially, its conditions of production. It seems to me, that however such productions might be classified; whether marked as marginalised or privileged; significant or senseless; relevant or irrelevant; these markings, themselves, are merely the continuations of the productions that they attempt to categorise. I think that a lot more than this, is at play.
POLITICS IS OVER, NO MORE POLITICS
Politics is over, no more politics.
Politics requires a polity, citizenry with regards to a state.
The notion of a state is transforming. No longer does it conform only to geographical singularity of location, because the cultural markings of its former constitutions, its languages and laws, its people and their customs, all these have dispersed through various forms of technological osmosis into a global system, wherein, though they attempt to recover the localised flavour of their former connections, they are unable to do this without resorting to detours beyond the very traditional borders that they try to recuperate.
The nationstate as a geocultural form has broken loose from the moorings of locational experience, becoming so many fragments in an electro-globalised flow.
This flow has no borders, not even ‘global’ ones, and thus cannot produce sufficient geocultural delimitation to constitute a nationstate, even though such may continue on as repetitions, Doppler effects of geocultural memory within the overall information flow.
Limited Inc., Hick Incorporations of Psychological Convention
This post is a response to this, https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/thought-of-the-day-the-limits-of-the-mind/
The span of the hand, of the ‘grasp’, of its apprehension; quite literally, a digital thought.
What is a ‘hand’, if not a digital economy of articulations belonging to some neural intent.
The dogmatist, a conceptual hick, clinging to the surfaces of unquestioned convention, there is only the positivist abbreviation of a hand as its mere anatomical form, together with the range of conventional uses and experiences associated with it. But such a domestication, perhaps appealing to a banal democracy of habitual use, neglects the richness of experience associated with this crucial element of anatomy. The dogmatist equating the expedient banality of his own ‘handy’ conceptions, with those of everyone else, merely engages in the universalising of that expedient banality, blocking any revelation of experiential richness that might reside in alternative, anatomical contexts.
The hand as a speculative figure, has been projected into many contexts, exceeding those of anatomy. But even in its anatomical setting, there is a richness of cultural relation irreducible to any single, positivist surface. The interiority, as it were, of speculative extensions issuing from such a richness of relation, literally within the hands grasp, can be contrasted with the exteriority of metaphoric projections, in which the figure of the hand and its qualities constitute a veritable swarm of metonymies.
The dogmatist, habituated to piloting only along positivist routes, can no longer think in any other way, reduced to squawking about a ‘truth’, which is merely the hypothesised, positivist form of his own alienation, stubbornly haunting his every ignorant thought.
Genghis Khan often used to signature himself as “the Hand of God”. It’s unlikely that he was a dogmatist.
THE THEATRICS OF LIBIDINAL LIMITATION
Some quick thoughts, weaving their ways, after being invoked by a discussion on Facebook, between Mario Hierro and Daniel Calder; a discussion which I did not fully read, whose assumptions I did not fully engage with or accept, but one which could perhaps be said to help constitute a relation of ‘tangential evocation’ with the foundational revocation of it, that follows. An essay towards an escape of the habits of its epistemology, a veering away from the ‘world’ of those habits and their development, an avoidance no longer exclusively governed by its ‘objects’.
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Metaphysics, after ‘Nature’, or after the system of ‘Nature’, ‘Nature’ being the system of regularities or repetitions belonging to Kant’s notion of ‘Understanding’, or the ‘judgements of perception’; but this ‘Nature’ is still notional, a regulating ‘idea’, thus, as a totality, ‘metaphysical’. So the concept or idea, of ‘Nature’, is an ideologically circumscribed category whose interior determinations, that which it is said to encompass as its categorical domain, are an alleged ‘immanence’ whose very quality as ‘immanence’ is supported by a metaphysical or ‘rational’ idea.
If, on its other, originary meaning, the metaphysics are merely Aristotle’s books ‘after’ the ‘physics’, even here, with this bibliographic conception, the distinction between what is and what is not ‘physical’, is allied to a discursive separation perhaps or potentially itself reflecting the categories of ‘matter’ and ‘form’ constitutively residing at the root of metaphysics itself.
Mutual irreducibility necessarily implies mutual relation. When neither term of said relation is ever found as an incontestable purity; necessarily so, when the conditions of such foundation are preconditions always set and sought for from the location of the opposite term; then it is only left to speculative allegiance as to which term speaks.
The notion of a ‘universe’, is a guiding idea; and if the notion of what speaks is one linked to a metaphysics of ‘agency’; then the expansion of that notion of ‘agency’, looking for its epistemological and ontological ‘grounds’, so to speak, eventually coincides with this ‘universal’ notion. The coincidence is one of speculative totality, a movement in search of foundational objectification or reification. If that reification is merely the product of a search for epistemological-ontological reunification, a reunification itself produced out of fluctuating vacillations, or vacillating fluctuations, between the arbitrary terms of an alleged ‘mutual irreducibility’; then it is merely the case that this entire ‘metaphysical’ theatre of possibilities is one that arises as a result of objective desire, one dispensing the roles of reification according to this libidinal limitation.
THE REQUIREMENTS OF GALACTIC COMPREHENSION
At this point, it almost seems as if the discussion is on the brink of an in-depth phenomenology of writing, or perhaps a grammatology of grammatology. If it should proceed in such a direction, then that excavation can be said to have already begun, and this notice of it, merely its somewhat formalised announcement or acknowledgement.
There are many points, here, in your preceding response, that have been introduced, somewhat in the fashion of a proliferation, multiplication, or dissemination, of the initial topical impetus, though there was more than one topic. The comparative simplicity of origin has escalated into a constellation of potentially unruly complexities. Perhaps we have moved from a solar understanding to the requirements of a galactic comprehension?
The ‘standard moves’ point was not aimed at anyone in particular, but does indeed seem to constitute a large amount of theoretical and philosophical output that we probably both have seen over the years. It’s certainly not directed at you, Terence. Neither, really, is it a critique of anyone else, the ‘standard’ does occasionally require sufficient expression so as to constitute its standardisation. Your observation concerning the “time-wasting obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens” is a personal evaluation based on your own engagement with Stiegler’s oeuvre, as you say, and if I had read much more of Stiegler perhaps I would agree with you. But this is not really the central issue that I feel is at play behind these concerns.
The issue is, I would suggest, considerably broader in extent and sidesteps the more localised concern of basic immersion in a particular oeuvre, a concern that you characterise as a form of immanence. The areas that Stiegler addresses, that he actually writes, ‘about’, are common topoi to those of us with an interest in such things. With this in mind, another question can be asked: is there any philosophical writer, at all, who does not engage in “obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens”, when they are under the impression of conveying some kind of conceptual innovation?
I ask this question, to point out the deeper pressures of conventional imposition that afflict every writing occurring between an author and a reader. Those pressures of conventional imposition are largely responsible for the over-explication, or, as you say, “obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens”, afflicting any philosophical author attempting to convey their particular weltanshauung. But the common denominator underlying all of these attempted conveyances are the somewhat uncertain figures
of ‘convention’. It is usually always with a never-spoken respect to, or for, this figurality; to the obligations of this ‘figured reality’ of the conventional; that most authorial productions seem to circulate. Every author senses the consensus in their own way, responding to it, according to their intuitions and receptions of it. But the consensual is always a generalising assumption, configuring the somewhat uncertain figures of convention.
If Stiegler has built a ladder to do a particular job of ascension, his continued maintenance of that ladder may not lead to any different elevation, but perhaps it maintains the safety of that stepped implement?
(Thank you, to Terence Blake of AGENT SWARM, for the Facebook discussion, of which this post is a response.)
NOSTALGIC TIME-SEQUENCES AND THE TEMPORAL TECHNICIAN
Reflections in time, back-and-forth they go, from one memory to another. This playing of mnemonic transactions, a ceaseless interchange of objectifying compulsions, all according to the metaphysics of that strange and unquestioned notion called ‘form’. It is under the spell of this notion, under its unquestioned assumption only, that one can talk about ‘repetition’. Without such an objectifying assumption, without these hypothetical ‘forms’ – at least one – there is nothing to ‘repeat’.
It’s not my intention here to outline the conditions of form or formal metaphysical assumption, but merely to suggest that beyond all the usual reflexive productions of insight attaching itself to this notion, mystery, or the mysterious, continues on its merry way, perhaps hinted at by this or that economy of ‘knowledge’ and its always not quite adequate ‘conclusions’, but never exhausted by these epistemological labours.
As is the case with economies of knowledge, so also with cultural economies of history and memory. It is quite possible for an entire culture to proceed in a particular ‘historical direction’, as it were, failing to adequately register the lessons of its development, and in such a way, that it proves impossible to simply follow along with such a culture, without provisioning radical explications apparently beyond that culture’s understanding. Not that there is necessarily any responsibility to do so, but refusing the task of giving explicatory contextualisations would be an unnecessary neglect.
If both Baudrillard and Fukuyama talked about the ‘end of history’, it is not so much that chronological developments have suddenly ceased to operate, but rather that the notion of ‘history’ in its conventional form; with its linear expectations and traditional narrative understandings; is no longer sufficient as an organisational mode. More is required. But the requirement of such an excess seems beyond the capacities of present cultural cognition. In the grip of this excess which it is no longer able to think, traditional cultural institutions continue on, incessantly repeating themselves and their procedures with ever-increasing uncertainty, as they slide into the unknown.
All that is left, for these alienated creatures, these ‘Occidental Androids’, who do not actually wish to think, is the contentment to merely and vicariously ‘operate’, sputtering positivist ‘memes’ to each other in vast, anxious, and swarming frenzies of ‘self’ and ‘world’ confirmation. As if repeating the exhausted terms of their Cartesian crisis with ever more fervent enthusiasm can somehow substitute for lack of greater understanding, in maintaining what seems to be mostly a dogmatic, miserable, and ignorant, charade. None of this is exactly new, but it is now globally instantaneous, and that is the key that has unlocked the first stages of a noospheric achievement, as it were, beyond conventional notions of both ‘knowledge’ and ‘history’. It is precisely those conventional notions which are in a crisis of inadequacy; their adherents, acolytes, and exploiters, in a crisis of promotion. What can be observed is merely the reflexive dissolution of those conventional dogmas, according to various arcs of nostalgic repetition.
I have, of course, referred to this before, at the outset of this blog: “Philosophy, in its institutional forms, has been busy archiving, classifying, and otherwise industrialising, the driven contemplations of various canonical traditions, as grist for the mill of future recombinant streams of commodified ‘wisdom’: a grist that will sustain the perennial tensions of these venerated traditions, with new brands of ‘logic’, intensified ‘epistemologies’, concentrated ‘ontologies’, nouveau-‘mysticisms’, etc.. All of this, circulating within the same circles of interpretation; playing the same topoi; in rhetorical oscillations, where the current jargons of reduction will scintillate with the shine of ‘progress’. A ‘progress’ in which the same, age-old platitudes can be uttered incessantly, as if they were unearthly revelations, never before thought or expressed.
All this, we have seen, and it has not proved sufficient.”
(“Possibilities of Thought”, Saturday, July 21, 2012: http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?page_id=7)
It has become necessary to return to my earlier period of writings, 1987-1997, for a more suitable and fertile context in which to address these issues. This, of course, is natural for me due to the element of personal continuity, but might prove somewhat strange to readers of this blog, as for the most part, the majority of my Internet writings have been strategically limited to theoretically contained, critical responses and observations , with only a sprinkling of writings from the earlier period. That was sufficient, in terms of addressing the philosophy blogging scene on the Internet, which I’ve done for six years now, but that scene is not sufficient. More is required. If Baudrillard and Fukuyama right, about the ‘end of history’, this recollection of an unexpressed, earlier period is possibly more than mere nostalgia.