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PATCHY CLARIFICATIONS: WICKED PLANTINGS OF WOULD-BE TRADITIONS – STILTED, QUILTED, QUILLETTE – THE STRAINED MEDIOCRITIES OF MOULDY BUGS
Clarification was necessary, only because your reading was based on your own positivist assumptions rather than what was actually written.
I’m not expounding ‘from’ Neoreactionary works, I’m challenging the entire Neoreactionary ideology; its uses of pre-existent ideas; its logic and construction; all of it really.
Of course, I’m serious, I have my reasons for making such a claim. And, as yet, you haven’t actually demonstrated that my challenges are actually mistaken.
You’re more than welcome to create a cult around Neoreactionary nonsense, but don’t expect it not to be challenged. If you resort to juvenile levels of prevarication, more akin to a Scientology justification, don’t expect that not to be noticed as a weakness.
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Neoreaction clearly stipulates ‘exit’ as a foundational strategy constituting patchwork’s appeal. This clearly necessitates ‘open borders’ enabling restrictionless ‘exit’.
Without restrictionless ‘exit’, some kind of ‘slavery’ obtains, the charge of ‘cathedralism’ can be levelled at Neoreaction’s patchwork system, and Neoreaction is undermined by the implications of one of its own central tenets.
The concept of exit has as much right to the phrase ‘open borders’, and its logical implications, as any other concept.
The originating article, uses ‘open borders’ with respect to both ‘entry’ and ‘exit’. That may be what you’re assuming as the positivist, received sense of the phrase; a building block that you take for granted, perhaps, without being fully aware of the logical implications at play. Evidently so, if Neoreaction proscribes the universal entry condition whilst simultaneously promoting the universal exit condition.
If the respective sets of entry criteria constituting patchwork states follow strict essentialising logics, to the point of all states of the patchwork system becoming mutually exclusive; then, assuming the patchwork system has global coverage in terms of both territory and people, a state of entropic population distribution is reached wherein full allocation according to all prevailing sets of state entry criteria has been satisfied, from the perspective of those states and their criteria. Full allocation, from the perspective of mutually exclusive sets of state entry criteria, would entail a distributional achievement of those criteria, which, if they are mutually exclusive, prevents any further entries. As that distributional achievement is global, likewise, entry prevention is global, too. If entry prevention is global, exit is impossible.
Neoreaction could respond with the objection that the achievement of full allocation renders further entry and exit entirely unnecessary, as all relevant factors have been adequately classified. Furthermore, if confronted with the argument of an idealised state of globally adequate classification being susceptible to stasis, stagnancy, and degradation; Neoreaction would of course argue that the classification is based on ‘real conditions’, being constructed to more adequately meet the challenges of those conditions. That might be the claim, belief, and assumption, but it is far from being demonstrated.
Basing patchwork states on prevailing ideological categories, in order to let them fight it out in a corporate-Darwinian scenario, is no more really than a tawdry attempt at hosting traditional ideological consumerism, in a kind of computer game scenario.
It may reflect contemporary conditions and their banal receptions, at least somewhat, but it does not effectively anticipate the shapes of things to come.
Nick Land recommends increased differentiation, but the increase in differentiation, if proceeding according to the restrictive teleological tendencies of state entry criteria, would entail only restrictive innovation according to the involution of those criteria. If those state entry criteria were, for any reason, to be compromised by forms of expediency, this necessarily shows the inadequacy of those criteria, in real terms. If the expediencies call upon the characteristic resources of excluded sets of state criteria, this undermines the entire rationale of Neoreactionary patchwork organisation at a fundamental level.
TOWARDS A METAPHYSICS OF TRANQUIL IDENTITY: NOTHING TO PROVE, YET EVERYTHING TO UNDERSTAND
The attributes that you confer on immanence in order to generate synonymy with non-duality are reflexive anchorings occurring after identity assumption, logically speaking. Those attributes affix themselves to subsequent substantialist positionings of identity assumption; becoming identified, substantialised, and positioned; themselves; according to uncritical conceptions and conventions of those substantialist positionings.
This entire structure of conceptual self referral, originates from two dualistic identifications; substance identity, and worldly identity, both, assumptions. Both are corollaries of each other, but not quite necessarily so. Substance identity, necessarily arises as an artefact of any positivist identity assumption, if that identity is held to be delimited in some way. As identity, in order to be an identification, is necessarily and simultaneously a delimitation, substance assumption characteristically arises as a question of the production of positivist identity, itself produced by this delimitation.
The delimitation producing positivist identity simultaneously produces negative identity, the two sides of any delimitation. The search for the ‘substance’; ‘essence’; ‘interiority’; et cetera, of the positivist identity necessarily occurs within the space of negative identity, everything that the positivist identity is allegedly not. This search, within ‘negative substantial space’, is a quest for correspondence, likeness, sameness, unity, homogeneity, et cetera. It is a quest for agreeable affinities in which the individual instance or instantiation discovers its own positivity in that ‘negative substantial space’.
Under the category of a substance, the individual instance or instantiation can be positively characterised, relieving it of a potentially infinite burden of possible negations. With a sufficient number of substantial categorisations, it can be ‘definitively’ characterised, if not exhaustively. The criteria and parameters of whatever that ‘definition’ might be, are contingent – at least on a prima facie level – on the production of that definition and its purposes. Though that characterisation is, of course, a positivist one. The joys of substantial concord or accord, affirm the ecstasies of positivist resolution, in definitional closure.
But note, this entire categorical drama, the theatrics of positive and negative duality, is contingent on an initial delimitation, and on the subsequent ascribing of values, such as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’; ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’; ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’ (to a – positive – substance); et cetera.
All of it, is conventional.
Though it may have arisen, ‘naturally’, this does not really say very much; at least, the positivist assumption of it; as the category of ‘nature’, too, is a convention. So, too, with the category of tradition, whether formal or informal, and in its positivist garb. What positivist traditions and assumptions have not answered before, it would be unreasonable to expect them to answer in future.
What we see, with positivist distortion or bias, is the overuse of substantialism, attempting to populate ‘negative substantial space’ from a limited and inadequate stock of habitual, substantial instruments, at the expense of considering the logical role of ‘negative substantial space’ between those instruments, in a more sophisticated and intuitive, interstitial way. The neglect of this consideration, which really is the neglect of an entire and essential perspective, leads to the fevered production of posits in fruitless attempts at what has essentially become, a hamstrung positivist comprehension. It is even the case, often, that ‘negative substantial space’ becomes reified as a positivist, substantial identity; ascribed to another, configurational, identity; going by the rubric, ‘world’; as yet another reductive, positivist explanation.
It is not that positivist explanations do not have a role to play. But exclusive reliance on their habitual, uncritical use; at the expense of appropriate, specific, and complementary negative expertise; results only in a positivist hysteria manically throwing half-baked positivist ideas into the void in desperate attempts to resolve the leaking discrepancies caused by such exclusive reliance, in the first place.
The characteristically obsessive theme structuring this positivist hysteria is the figure of the ‘thing-in-itself’, whose desperate oscillations in psychosocial consciousness power the hysteria.
The justification for the emphasis of positivist identity, for the notion of a thing-in-itself, is the convention of everyday empiricity – the encounter with ‘things’. It is this convention of empirical encountering which is raised up into the fixation of metaphysical principle, displacing, eliding, and obscuring, to varying degrees, the logic of delimitation and identification from which it arises. Once raised up, its appeal and justification is always to some everyday intuition, as the occasion for this principled fixation.
Such occasioning becomes the pretext for prioritising the notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’, as the governing model of positivist identity, due to the sequential logic of perceptual and cognitive discovery suggesting metaphysical systems of appearance and essentialisation, under the methodological signs of constitution or constitutivity, comprising ‘element’; ‘component’; ‘contingency’; ‘whole’; ‘mechanism’; ‘environment’; et cetera.
But a shift occurs, positivist identity and its governing model have become prioritised as an exclusive condition or centre governing all considerations, at the expense of serious reflection on the condition of delimitation from which its initial identification is produced. This often occurs under the sign of ‘the given’, an unquestioned assumption. If it were to be questioned, the customary response is to produce a spectrum of conventional intuitions occurring under the aegis of ‘the given’, affirming and negating these intuitions in a show of consideration, but not actually questioning the form or principle of ‘the given’, in ‘itself’, nor clearly delineating its function.
Positivist identity and its philosophical transactions, mainly occurring within the parameters of metaphysical systems of appearance and essentialisation, constitutes a globally hegemonic culture which relegates serious reflection on delimitation to either relatively innocuous formal specialisations or marginalised, fringe concerns. With this social and institutional distribution; seriousness is lost; genuine questioning is kept at bay; the grip of positivist imperialism seems to be unshaken.
If ‘forms of language’ reflect ‘forms of life’, then it very much seems to me that the culture of positivist instrumentalisation is beset by a very particular kind of referential poverty. The inflation of that culture exercises a systematic restraint or constraint coercing all expressions to follow the abbreviations and semantic routes of positivist identity. This is a dictatorship of coercive desire covertly hostile to any tranquility of consideration that might escape it.
WRY ZONES
[William Theodoracopulos] “Force as force does not need a name..here Buddhism is helpful to recognize that ” form is empty, emptiness is form” ..so you’re wrong..forces do not need to form in order to exist..this is also the new science…as for distinction there is no need for identity either. Spinoza is clear here in discussing affects…what composes is affirmative..what decomposes isnt…how can one tell the difference? Being tells the difference..knows this difference
Perhaps deleuze is harsh with the dialectic..his book on Nietzsche has been criticized for this…but there is value in what he says
Hegelianism is a negative and abstract movement which is a kind way to say its fake, just as identity is fake..for Nietzsche and deleuze it remains part of christian thought..that is..preying on other beings for its own existence..it is a movement of incorporation ,like napolean and the rise of the nation state..and even above..trying to incorporate everything into itself..it is territorializing and totalitarian…even metaphysically it demands all thought to be about itself
Obviously deleuze hates it which is why he has such concepts as deter rotor is luxation and lines of flight..post structuralism is arguably an assault on the Hegelian structures of nations institutions and even thought itself…it is simply against dialectics in every way
William Theodoracopulos Deterritorialization not deter rotor”
[William Theodoracopulos] “Force as force does not need a name..here”
{AK}: That may be so, but you’re already using one, ‘force’, to assert that observation.
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[William Theodoracopulos] “Buddhism is helpful to recognize that ” form is empty, emptiness is form”
{AK}:Yes, that is true, but Buddhism would characterise the Nietzschean metaphysics of forces and their Deleuzian affirmations as empty, too.
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[William Theodoracopulos] “so you’re wrong..forces do not need to form in order to exist..this is also the new science”
{AK}:The concept of ‘force’ is no less ‘metaphysical’ than the concept of ‘form’. In practice, assertion of either, always involves the implicit support of the other. This is not merely ‘linguistic’ or ‘conceptual’, as if language or conceptuality were independent phenomena, neatly divorced from the scenarios they reference.
At the most radical level, if one asks what do the words ‘form’ and ‘force’ do, a set of operational relations is obtained, largely involving referential and signifying uses. This is a characterisation from the perspective of utility. The conditions necessary for those uses to obtain are the structures of reference and signification. Those structures, in advance, and in the majority of social uses, express metaphysical patterns and theoretical bias.
Arguments against this, from alleged ignorance of intention; from claimed non-apprehension of metaphysical concerns; and so on; are not valid in the instances where cultural materials are used, and where those cultural artefacts are already complicit with and sourced from a history of metaphysical considerations. Secondly, those arguments themselves presuppose theories of intention and apprehension, choosing their options of defence through selections undeniably metaphysical.
This is not to say, that metaphysics in some way necessarily ‘owns’ all that it comes into contact with; or even that metaphysics is something ultimately determinable, at all, in such a way as to suggest a strictly determinate entity capable of such exclusive appropriations, at all.
Yes, it is the case that forces can operate without formally staged apprehension, but it is not the case that discourses and uses of the word, ‘force’, whether formally staged or not, do not draw on referential and signifying conventions commonly associated with the formal history of that word. Citing relations of independence between the linguistic form of the word ‘force’ and its referents; the allegedly ‘non-linguistic’ ‘forces’ referred to; is in itself the exploitation of a formal, metaphysical relation, that of ‘independence’. Thirdly, it is not the case that the linguistic is constrained only to formalisation. Language is just as susceptible to theorisations based on concepts of force, as on those based on concepts of form.
Thus far, my response has been to the statement, ‘forces do not need form in order to exist’, but you actually wrote,’ forces do not need to form in order to exist’. The addition of ‘to’ introduces a different emphasis, requiring special consideration. Firstly, though, as both versions of the statement appeal to the concept of existence, that should form the initial analysis.
If we take ‘to exist’ in its root or radical meaning, as ‘to stand forth’, then this could suggest, as corollary, that ‘forms’ are marks or registrations of ‘existence’; that they are ‘phenomena’ that ‘stand forth’, in some way; ‘appearances’ of existence; ontic-ontological signs; et cetera.
Whatever the nature of this existentiality; whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’; ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’; ‘physical’ or ‘mental’; if we consider existentiality as inclusive of all these possibilities, then it is sufficient to say that the concept of ‘standing forth’ applies to all of them.
That being the case, if form is that which ‘stands forth’, in all of these cases, the next consideration, would be the question of what ‘standing forth’ consists of; what conditions enable it; and what it suggests?
Firstly, on what basis does ‘standing forth’ occur? Difference, is the basis, and one of the enabling conditions, for ‘standing forth’ to be possible. Without selectivity, identity, the possibility of indication; all, corollaries of difference; ‘standing forth’ is not possible.
Distinctness; however it’s ‘nature’, ultimate or otherwise, might be characterised; is the minimal, enabling condition, for ‘standing forth’ to occur. It doesn’t have to be an absolute distinctness, merely an accessible one, in some way.
It is this existential distinctness or differentiation, that you implicitly appeal to in your contrast of ‘form’ and ‘force’, with respect to the concept of existential ordering ([WT] “forces do not need to form in order to exist”). So, straightaway, you’re engaging in speculative, metaphysical distribution of categories; asserting definitional closures for the concepts of form and force.
I said that difference was one of the enabling conditions of the ‘standing forth’ relation; the other condition, arises with the question of what does ‘standing forth’, ‘stand forth’ to? What registers that ‘standing forth’ occurs?
If there is no discernible registration of ‘standing forth’ in any distinct way, on what grounds can ‘standing forth’ be assumed or declared? Such would be an assumption or declaration based on a lack of distinct indication. If distinct indication is not in operation, what exactly is being referenced or meant, where is the differentiation? These are not necessarily insurmountable objections, but resorting to them could be premature if there has been a lack of adequate philosophical demonstration.
The rejection of existential registration, of the ‘standing forth to’, requires either of two concepts: one, the concept of a positable self-existent, not ‘standing forth to’ anything at all, not even itself; two, the concept of a positable ‘existence’, not configured by any determination at all, to the extent that registration of it is impossible due to this determinative lack. Both concepts are more redolent of mystical totality, than any positivist empiricism of forces, as proffered by Nietzsche and Deleuze. Buddhist thought does not neglect the analysis of these concepts, though in slightly different contexts to the one that I’m developing here.
The first concept, of a ‘self-existent’, is that of the classical ens, whose strict criteria of self-sufficiency prevents its full application to empirical entities, due to their alleged contingency.
The second concept, of an ‘existence’ without determination, is the afterglow of ontological inclusion, a non-specific assumption of Being, the hypothetical host instantly interiorising all suggested posits, kind of like Deleuzian immanence.
Underlying both concepts, is another assumption, the philosophy and metaphysics of identity.
The concept of a ‘force’ is one in which a distinct tendency that ‘stands forth’ in some way is formalised according to the distinctness with which it ‘stands forth’. It is as much a defined formulation, as any ‘form’. Though it may not be projected into the transcendence of a timeless Platonised stasis, its supervenience on the metaphysics of identity is equal to that of the concept of form.
Whatever qualities or attributes might be associated with the concept of ‘force’, in contrast to those belonging to the concept of ‘form’, the metaphysics of identification inaugurating both concepts is operationally identical. Whatever the subsequent claims of ‘existential’ distribution might be, with respect to the contrast between ‘form’ and ‘force’, those claims supervene on prior constructions of metaphysical assumption arising within identity inauguration.
The fixation of these prior constructions into an unanalysed and unthinking habit is one of the factors responsible for the narrow perspectives of insularity dominating contemporary philosophy, in general.
It is within the ambit of the Occident’s insular and positivist ontological habits, that
we see the circle of its mutually self-confirming assumptions in operation. Each categorical determination draws its raison d’être from the others. They are legitimised and delegitimised in accord with each other’s respective orderings. Traditional philosophical systems privilege one or other route through various schemas of these foundational, structuring principles; emphasising ‘stronger’ or ‘weaker’ forms of these principia, as metaphysical tastes dictate.
But the root condition on which the kaleidoscopic variations of all the others rest, is identity assumption. And it is precisely this notion of identity which most requires full, analytical consideration. If notions of substance and transcendence necessarily arise as supplements to the alleged inadequacies of the yearning identity posits of Becoming, this supplementarity is merely emblematic of the contingency associated with identities in transition; which, if classical stringencies are to be believed (the criteria of a self-existent ‘ens’), are not really identities, at all.
If it is the case, that avowed empirical contingencies are treated as alleged ‘self-existents’ networked in the service of a ‘univocity of immanence’, as it were, this might well provision a comforting and uncomplicated lebenswelt of seemingly transcendence-free practices, wherein one could potter about in plurality, taking everything at face value, entirely undisturbed by the deeper complexities of substantial variation, especially if the ideology of ‘immanence’ has essentially replaced or displaced those troublesome complexities.
But if we look closer, asking exactly what ‘immanence’ is, how it arises, what does it mean? All of these questions have one answer, the inversion of ‘transcendence’. The ideology of immanence is rooted in that which its users attempt to proscribe or elide. The logics determining immanence and transcendence are one and the same, as with the Heraclitean observation that the way up and down is the same. Buddhist philosophy would not characterise non-duality as ‘immanent’, because of the polarisation that it seems to suggest.
Under the sign of rejected ‘transcendence’, resides a host of historically interrupted developments, not all of which were necessarily forms of ignorance grown obsolescent. They require more understanding than philosophy and contemporary academic fashions of the 21st-century seem able to provision. Domestication to what is after all the populism of an easy positivist, meme-mentality, is not the most effective production of such insights.
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[William Theodoracopulos] “…as for distinction there is no need for identity either.”
{AK}:
[William Theodoracopulos] “Spinoza is clear here in discussing affects…what composes is affirmative..what decomposes isnt…how can one tell the difference? Being tells the difference..knows this difference”
{AK}: Notions of ‘composition’ and ‘decomposition’ require contexts of delimitation to arbitrate which is which. Those contexts of delimitation, theoretically speaking, could be seen to be arbitrary, but in practice are contingent on initial identity assumptions of some sort.
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[William Theodoracopulos] “Perhaps deleuze is harsh with the dialectic..his book on Nietzsche has been criticized for this…but there is value in what he says”
{AK}:I don’t have anything to say about this, it’s not controversial, at least not at this time; not really interested in pursuing the issue.
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[William Theodoracopulos] “Hegelianism is a negative and abstract movement which is a kind way to say its fake, just as identity is fake..for Nietzsche and deleuze it remains part of christian thought..that is..preying on other beings for its own existence..it is a movement of incorporation ,like napolean and the rise of the nation state..and even above..trying to incorporate everything into itself..it is territorializing and totalitarian…even metaphysically it demands all thought to be about itself
Obviously deleuze hates it which is why he has such concepts as deter rotor is luxation and lines of flight..post structuralism is arguably an assault on the Hegelian structures of nations institutions and even thought itself…it is simply against dialectics in every way”
{AK}: The apparent anti-imperialism of this paragraph is in line with conventional, contemporary receptions and fashions. It appeals to the concept of fakery to condemn both Hegel, identity, and even thought itself.
Interestingly, back in the early 1990s, I began to develop a critique along the lines of the latter, titling it, ‘beyond the laws of thought’ or ‘afterthought’. The conventional concept of thought; the conception of it and its traditional sitings or positionings; were, it seemed to me, an entirely inadequate and insular fixation. So I can agree with those estimations.
However, appealing to a notion of fakery presupposes a conception of truth. Whilst this is a traditional dualisation of contestation, is it the most effective response when such a tradition might be in question?
On poststructuralism, I would just add that it is quite simply the considerations occurring ‘after’ structuralism, where ‘structuralism’ can be taken to be perhaps all of modernist thought, not just the thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, et cetera, identified with Continental structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s, incorporating, of course, the Czech and Russian thinkers who were precursors.
The ‘after’ would not only refer to chronological development, but to the theoretical questions occurring after the culminations of modernist projects. So it is in this sense, that ‘poststructuralism’ segues into ‘post-modernism’.
THE POSTMODERN PEASANT: ALL-TRITE BARBARIANS OF MODERNITY
Peasant revolts were always common in Europe. From feudal-nobility cruelty and exploitation, to colonial-military cruelty and exploitation. The feudal kingdom was a feeding ground for nobility; the colony was a feeding ground for burghers and peasants.
Strangely, one never hears any complaints from so-called ‘white nationalists’, about the 50 billion a year France receives from its erstwhile, colonial interests, in Africa.
Equally strangely, those areas in the southern USA, more heavily and historically involved in slavery, continue to be places of increased racial tensions. If we look around the world, it can often be observed that those peoples who had increased reliance on the slavery and exploitation of other peoples in the past, continue to be the agitators and terrorists of the present.
Modernity has seen large sections of the nobility often reduced to poverty. Under the pressures of commercial capitalism, ‘stately homes’ had to be opened to the public, or even sold off, the titled owners moving into ‘council houses’, etc..
These changes, by and large, provoked no unrest in the mass majority. Just as colonial exploitations abroad, from which the mass majority ultimately benefited, were conveniently ignored, or justified according to various modernist grounds, that is to say, European exceptionalist grounds.
Ironically enough, though, the globalisation of those same grounds now provokes hypocritical reactions from the mass majority along the lines of the very anti-colonial arguments that they either ignored or rejected in the past.
When exploiters are disenfranchised and unable to retrieve their self-conferred exceptionalist status, in ways sufficiently satisfying and pleasing to themselves, they become nostalgic for the historical iniquities and hierarchies that did so provision that status. Unable to create or innovate newly successful self-images, they agitate for the return of colonial mythology and its comforting portraits of jingoist victories.
DEPREDATORY AND DISINGENUOUS MOVEMENTS OF EXPLOITATION
The entire abstract, merely begs the question of normativity, deferring it to some assumed notion of good sense which merely needs to be excavated out of the alleged realm of “originary proto-ethical normativity”.
Objectification itself; what gets objectified; how ‘it’ gets objectified; why ‘it’ gets objectified; all these constituting reifications emerge out of an aetiology implicated with the ethical from the get-go!
Ethical consideration, where morality or moralis is custom, the customary; can be considered to be moral reflexivity, the consideration of customs, in light of different customary notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In this sense, what is being spoken of is a
‘moral calculus’ with respect to objective conditions.
Objective conditions, in simplified form, are commonly represented by prima facie conventions (“adequacy conditions”). But those conventions are not the conditions that they are held to spring from, through allegedly referential relations. The desire for simplicity of reference is susceptible to casuistical complication.
The casuistical gaming of moral calculations is enabled by disingenuous shiftings and reframings of prima facie conventions through systematic and differential bias of objective representations supporting those conventions.
For any set of prima facie conventions, an infinite number of aetiologies is potentially available.
Gaming this area of aetiology, so as to provide hidden advantages and profits to those doing the gaming, is pretty much de rigueur in contemporary forms of business morality or real-moralic; the melancholic of the real-moralic, lol.
That it is ‘melancholic’ is confirmed by the plethora of ‘motivational’ speakers, tracts, courses, services, and other resources, constituting the SOS businesses following primary exploitation encampments dotted around the globe. This is behavioral regulation for Occidental androids of the warmind.
The subject-object duality is not in itself a licence of essentialism encouraging exploitation. If subjective rights are granted to objects, exploiters will merely wage war on those subjectified objects. If subjects are objectified, exploiters will merely appropriate those objectified subjects. Simple metaphysics, and its conventional idealisations, alone, no matter how complex their architectures, are no defence against depredatory and disingenuous movements of exploitation.
THE BEHAVIOUR OF ATTRACTIONAL SUPERVENIENCE
Desire and attraction: the inscribed horizons of these transitional forces are the forms which those transitions presuppose in order to delineate such becomings.
It is not unusual that scientific concepts so readily lend themselves to psychological metaphor, and vice versa. Both, after all, emerge out of a common, as it were, empirical domain, fluctuating between various polarities, such as psychologised subjectivity ( or subjectified psychology), and scientificised objectivity (or objectified scientificity). Again, the replay of older topoi; form and force; being and becoming, etc.. What went under the rubric of ‘natural philosophy’, supports both contrived realms.
But this oscillation, within the parameters of a scientific epistemology, of scientific epistemology, in general; within the parametric assumptions of ‘the knower’ and ‘the known’, two more assumed reifications supporting a third, ‘knowing’; are precisely the dogmatic struts from which the Occident’s catalogue of categorical coercions ensue; and by which it both consumes and is consumed.
AFFECT-BUBBLES AND WORLD-CONSTRAINED EPISTEMOLOGIES
You’ve done a number of posts requiring serious consideration and response, but I’ve simply not had the time to do that, though I’ve wanted to.
Affect-bubbles, as mutual corollaries to world-constrained epistemologies, are the natural result of a system catering to consumer desire. All things, to all people. This multiplies worlds, necessarily leading to varying stagings and simulations, as a ‘result’ of being obliged to track the capriciousness of libidinal flows, according to the disciplines of profitability.
The gaming of the algorithmic can only exacerbate these flows in various ways, leading to their incessant transmutation and the corresponding necessity of algorithmic revision. Thus, escalations of various sorts are produced, in a contest of partisan leveragings exploiting whatever techniques and opportunities are to hand. So far, so good.
But tracing the mechanics of such social systematicity is only going to be a preliminary step. Perhaps that is enough, in some cases. But I suspect a lot more is required. At this stage, one becomes aware that performative ecstasy and justifying rhetorics of non-totality can always themselves be gamed for any purposes, including those of positivist habit, regressive nostalgia, and the denial of conditions constituting irresponsibility.
It may be that, as I have suggested many times, that an oneiric logic is the dominant mode of commonly perceivable configuration at work through all the transitions in play. The cybernetic epistemology is the vehicle for libidinal flow.
However, what interests me, are logics of configuration that are literally hidden, ‘in plain sight’, but are not usually talked about. Those that obtain after all conventions have been totalised, beyond their usual referential and habitual scopes, to a degree of non-pertinence opening out onto radically different ‘understandings’.
THE OCCIDENTAL CULT(URE) OF CRAFTY INTELLIGENCE
The real purpose of all the CIA infiltration of culture, etc., both domestically in the USA and internationally, was to surreptitiously condition the collective unconscious into accepting that there was indeed an ‘intelligence’ at work, throughout the Occidental order.
All of the subterfuge, the cultural convolutions of domestic and international relations, their casuistical reflexivities ostensibly under the occult signs of espionage, all of this was a smokescreen covering over; but in plain sight, nonetheless; the central ‘cult of intelligence’.
This ‘cult of intelligence’, however, had very little to do with intellectual proficiency, and everything to do with the abilities of blatant denial; the perpetual deferral of responsibility; the artistry of the disingenuous, and all its works of dishonesty.
This is the Occidental conception of intelligence, and it is diametrically opposed to wisdom.
THE CLASSIC OCCIDENTAL OSCILLATION 03: THE METAPHYSICAL PLAYGROUNDS OF CAPITALIST DESIRE?
Why distinguish between the machinic and the organic?
If the machine is a contrivance of power; one which enables the possession of power through devices, stratagems, and tricks; then is it not an engine of decisive resolutions?
Whence the culture of decision? Is it only organic? Or is every so-called ‘natural event’, a ‘decision’? Are ‘natural laws’, ‘decisions’?
Because, are not all of these, arrangements and machinations?
A decision, is a determination.
Preoccupying itself with the culture of decision, the contemporary philosophical scene’s enthusiasm for those, like Laruelle, who return to the comforts of its metaphysical habitat, can be seen perhaps as a nostalgia for conventional modes of determination, the wish to escape the ever more tangible possibilities of synergy that are in play. It is an anxiety of both power and understanding, as those occur in fixated forms. The irony is that such fixations are mechanical, ‘machinic’; traditions, habits, are ‘machines’. On this basis, organic economies, insofar as they are habitual economies, or economies of habit, likewise, can be said to be machines.
If decisional enthusiasm is the anxious nostalgia of and for determination, what else could this be, but the Occidental android’s desire to objectify, according to the metaphysics of machine?
The denial of lack, is the denial of desire. If the ‘becoming’ of any process or tendency requires the concept of need or desire to explain transitions between initially posited and alleged forms or states, this of course implies that those forms or states are not complete in themselves, that they are lacking, and that this lack powers transformation. Of course, this metaphysical scheme is contingent on the initial positings of ‘forms or states’ that it simply assumes. But given such assumption, the calculus of presence and absence, regarding forms and states, is unavoidable, at the level of their transactions.
To view this metaphysical mechanism of becoming only through its presences as configured by the substance of desire, whilst denying lack (absence), as both Deleuze and Lyotard do, in their libidinal philosophies, uses the conventional intuitions and common sense habits of substantial presence to elide the ‘negativity’ of absence implicit in any objective metaphysics. This partiality to the positivity of substantial presence, is bought at the expense of both; a loss of negative perspective; and of
the systematic and objectifying origination giving rise to the categories of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, in the first place.
The concern is not so much with Deleuze and Lyotard’s libidinal investigations, in themselves, and the contexts which they were addressing, but rather, in the potential appropriations to which they had been subjected since then. Whilst, for me, their works are brilliant openings out of constrictive tendencies, it seems to me that the areas, zones, and territories, they opened up have merely become the sites of constricted and closured nostalgic development. They have become guidebooks of a continuing positivist instrumentalisation, which to some degree, their texts can’t be said to not entirely support.
THE CLASSIC OCCIDENTAL OSCILLATION 02
{AK}: The “complete substantialization of desire” that you suggest is an absolutism of desire. This absolutism is the inflation of a particular ‘monoconceptual convention’, that of ‘desire’, into an ur-principle.
To assume that nothingness is impossible, on the grounds of referential, factical and ontological assumptions, begs the question, tacitly introducing objectifying or reifying expectations without questioning their axiomatic presupposition. This is a delimited theology of ‘desire’, constrained by objective horizon. This is why you spoke of “an immanent god”; and it is surely not without significance that you attach a litany of potencies to this conception.
Buddhist nothingness, is not bound by this objective or objectifying horizon, or its axiomatic presupposition. Thus, there is no requirement to objectify nothingness, as the ‘something’ of a ‘void’, which is merely objective op-position. Buddha said: “He who attaches to the void, is truly lost.”
Objectivity, in general, may well be driven by libidinal production, but there is no libidinal production if there is no objectivity or objectifying.
Thinking “desire as free from subjects and objects (from o towards someone or something)”, might question objective categorisations from the perspective of a libidinal principle, but the objective horizon has only been deferred on to that principle, if a “desire in-itself” is proposed.
So, though libidinal interpretation liberates consideration from traditional and substantial fixation on ‘subjects and objects’, it does not exceed the objective horizon which produces them, having, ‘itself’, become this horizon. This is merely the displacement of fixation, the rewriting of a traditional anxiety, according to the same circle of objective need.
Schopenhauer is aware of this, as he writes: This “nothing,” however, “is also the PrajnaParamita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 41112)
This is why I wrote, in the context of transcending the logic of objective and objectifying need: “then ineluctably another way of proceeding comes into play, beyond & other than the usual response of simply restating neglected metaphysica, as ‘positions’ or posited anchors. The angst of anchoring proves redundant.”