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CONTENT WITH FORM: A (DE)LIMITED LOGICAL HALLUCINATION?
[Redacted] “My minimal suggestion is this: insofar as the contingency or emptiness or worldlessness is itself a consistent fact (that it describes what is always already the case), then contingency is itself not contingent, not empty, i.e., absolute or the form of all content.
If the universe were truly and completely contingent, then the possibility of non-contingency becomes a logical possibility.
I think Nagarjuna is not affirming meta-contingency but at some point thinks there is an absolute that = contingency (nirvana = samsara).”
{AK}: A ‘fact’, is a ‘thing made’, a fashioning.
That the collection of supervenient ‘facts’ are seemingly supervenient on a ‘systematics of manufacture’, merely displaces the essentiality of origination, the integrity of classical entity or ‘ens’, to that ‘systematics of manufacture’. Reifying such a ‘systematics of manufacture’ as a ‘form’ governing ‘content’ misses or elides the conventional, empty, & perspectival nature of ‘facts’.
If no ‘fact’ has ‘own-being’, why should an infinite quantity of them suddenly start to have ‘own-being’?
This is a confusion of the reifying intuitions of socio-perceptual convention with the logic of metaphysical category? It’s an ‘idealism’ no less speculative or mystifying than Hegel; but it’s allegedly hallucinatory nature, in the Hegelian case; is masked by consensual practice, in the case of socio-perceptual convention.
Its origin, & the origin of the faith in it, is based on a notion of increasing & graduated coherence with a veridical structure of ontological essence, scientifically sifting out a correspondence to a fixed truth. That’s the model, & it’s a model, itself based on the very essence, or ‘own-being’, that it presupposes as its horizon. That model is a perspective, of probabilistic fixations. This is not to say that such a model is without utility; it is the ‘ground’ of utility, & conversely, utility is its ground.
But if the becomings of utilisation are governed by a journey of increasing coherence, along a sequence of probabilistic fixations, towards an unknown figure of ‘fixed truth’; is this not all too easy & contrived a perspective? A complacent idealisation? An open adventure of a ‘theology’, collapsed into the stagnant closure of a habitual ‘religion’?
This is why Nagarjuna would reject the figure of ‘Consciousness’, as an Absolute.
Schopenhauer, in the quote, understood this, but broke off to do a phenomenology of the ‘motivic’ (force-‘Will’) & recurrent imaging (form-‘Representation), ‘consensual concept chatter’, that can be written about.
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[Redacted] “insofar as the contingency or emptiness or worldlessness is itself a consistent fact (that it describes what is always already the case),”
{AK}: Okay, consistency of ‘fact’, “describes what is always already the case”, & suggests the invariance of abstract law, which suggests Platonised idealism & fixation; hence, non-contingency.
[Redacted] “then contingency is itself not contingent, not empty, i.e., absolute or the form of all content.”
{AK}: But ‘contingency’ is not an independent ‘fact’, ‘quality’, or ‘thing’. Contingency requires things that are, or seem to be, ‘contingent’. But those ‘facts’, are not truly ‘things’ or ‘entities’, in an absolute sense, their entityhood is alleged. Conversely, in the classical sense, no entity is ever contingent, if it is truly an entity.
Thus, factual contingency is not classical contingency, in the sense of an actual entity that could be said to be truly contingent, absolutely. The fact of Contingency vitiates the very classical objectivity that could support its own absoluteness. No absolute ideality of the Contingent can be achieved, because of the contingency of supporting evidence.
[Redacted] “If the universe were truly and completely contingent, then the possibility of non-contingency becomes a logical possibility.”
{AK}: Both contingency & non-contingency are supervenient operations of the metaphysics of Identity. Without identities, there is nothing to ascribe ‘contingency’ or ‘non-contingency’ to.
[Redacted] “I think Nagarjuna is not affirming meta-contingency but at some point thinks there is an absolute that = contingency (nirvana = samsara).”
{AK}: My suggestion, is that Nagarjuna is engaged in the radical critique of Identity, of its metaphysics, & of its conventions. Such a critique transcends the traditional binary discursivities & conventions of contingency & non-contingency, before they can even arise, as supervenient fixations of a (de)limited logical hallucination. This, I feel, is in line with the ‘Two Truths’ doctrine of the Mahayana.
CULTURAL INSULARITY AS BYPRODUCT OF PROFESSIONAL INCULCATION?
Relevant Links:
“Babich and Bateman: Last of the Continental Philosophers” (November 29, 2016)
“Terence Blake: Very interesting discussion on Continental Philosophy between @babette_babich and @SpiralChris“
“The “Analytic Co-opting” and Death of the Continental Tradition”
I think that what Prof. Ben-Ami Scharfstein writes, in his explications concerning the differences encountered between global traditions of thought that can be considered as ‘philosophical’, apply, mutatis mutandis, to the so-called Anglo-American Analytical/Continental Divide.
A lot could be said concerning the Anglo-American Analytical/Continental Divide; about the historical forking from Kant onwards, vis a vis, acceptance or rejection of Hegel, etc.; about sociopolitical styles of the background cultures involved; yes, one can differentiate endlessly about these things. Do the approaches involved, reflect tactical considerations of those background cultures? Are there political agendas involved? No doubt, cases can be made for such views.
As to the figure of the ‘philosopher’, moreover, the professional ‘philosopher’; cultural insularity can be said to be the very byproduct of professional inculcation,, as Ben-Ami Scharfstein outlines here:
“Introduction
Soon, after this introduction is done, each of us, the authors, will be speaking for himself; but before we arc reduced to almost unrepentant individuals, we should like to express the attitude that thc five of us, who are colleagues and friends, hold in common towards the subject of comparative philosophy. We can begin to express it by stating the implications of the title (including the subtitle) we have chosen for our book. The title, as we see it, has three major implications. It implies that philosophy is not confined to the West; it Implies that the Indian, Chinese, European, and European-allied Islamic traditions are worth comparing and are similar and different enough to make the comparison intellectually profitable; and it implies that the comparison ought to be critical, by which we mean, factually careful, and as intelligent as its authors are able to make it.
This justification of our title may be more persuasive if each of its three is itself explained or justified. Take the first point, which may not seem worth arguing. It is true that there have been Western philosophers with a serious interest in Chinese, Indian, or Islamic philosophy. The Interest in Islamic philosophy was mostly confined to the Middle Ages, when Chinese & Indian philosophy could only have been. Later, however, in the seventeenth century, there was a moment when Leibnitz hoped that China would give him the universal logic for which he was searching. During the eighteenth century, French thinkers half-invented an ideal China, the kingdom of philosophers, the better to criticise a Europe that appeared to them as absurd as it was cruel. Still later, Kant and Hegel, though they may not have given the Chinese and Indians a high cultural rank, studied what they could of their thought, while Schopenhauer, who read the Upanishads every night before going to sleep, made his own synthesis of Indian certainties and Kantian doubts. In the twentieth century, the American philosopher, Santayana, more than once compared his own so-to-speak Platonic naturalism with Indian mysticism. Still more recently, Jaspers devoted a good many pages of his book, The Great Philosophers, to Buddha, Confucius, and Nagarjuna.
Yet these and the other examples that could be cited have never been enough to convince very many Western philosophers that philosophy, in the sense they most appreciate, exists outside the Western tradition. By and large, they seem to have believed that Eastern thought was either pre-philosophical or extra-philosophical, that is to say, either composed of traditional, perhaps superstitious rules of conduct, or of formulas for mystical salvation. They seem to have found it incredible that non-Westerners should have engaged in the constructive intellectuality, adventurous reasoning, and logical analysis that is identified with philosophy in the West.
They are wrong, of course. The reason for their error, if we may speak bluntly, Is either cultural myopia or personal ignorance. Both stem from an insufficient education. Western education, whether that of philosophers or others, has never been seriously concerned with the thought of anyone or anything not long assimilated into the Western tradition.’ Consider the education of the professional philosopher, which we, along, we suppose, with some of our readers, have enjoyed or been subjected to. The professional philosopher may have studied logic and philosophy painstakingly, he may have read and practised linguistic analysis, which is nothing if not painstaking, and he surely has read, with painstaking attention, such books and articles as his teachers have regarded as essential. He has probably learned a second and perhaps a third European language. And he has, in addition, studied a number of the great philosophers—Plato and Aristotle, Locke and Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, not to speak of the contemporaries who interest him. At this stage he may well begin to attempt serious original philosophizing, or, if his Interests run that way, serious scholarship relating to philosophy. Absorbed in his attempt, he can no longer spare the time or summon up the desire to study philosophers from other traditions. What, at this stage, could inspire him to sit down again like the callow student he once was, who learned with a sense of revelation what Plato meant by an Idea and Aristotle by Substance, and study the strange concepts, transliterated from unknown languages, of philosophers from puzzling, distant cultures? Out of curiosity, he might leaf through the Analects of Confucius or through a paperback edition, in pseudo-Biblical English, of some Upanishads, and he might even find rational ethics or poetically stimulating religion in them; but these would no longer have the power to transform him as a philosopher. He would be likely to assume that the rest of Chinese and Indian thought was approximately the same, and so he would not attempt the later, more complex books. For now he would be feeling. not the student’s curiosity, but the professional’s mastery, and he would be unlikely to delay or humiliate himself by becoming a student again. A young philosopher on the verge of his career is apt to assume that what his teachers never required of him cannot be of any importance. Then, when he himself becomes a teacher, he perpetuates the attitude he has learned, the beginning is never made.
The first point will not be argued any longer. Like the others, its plausability rests on the evidence we bring in the body of our book. The second point, that the traditions we have chosen are worth comparing and similar and different enough to make the comparison intellectually profitable, must be worked out slowly and by example. We shall try to characterise each of these more or less self-sufficient cultures so that each becomes more visible by way of contrast with the others. Over and again, we think, a clearly analogous technical device will be seen to serve a different cultural end; and at least somewhat analogous cultural purposes will be seen to be served by different technical devices. Each of these traditions has its sacred writings and revered philosophers, and, during long periods of time, everything that is said in them appears to be said by reference to such writings and philosophers; but sometimes there is open denial of the writings and always there is a process of surreptitious change from them., conscious or not. Arguments become more keen and better elaborated, paradoxes are raised, and scepticism or sophistry begins to flourish. It has often been noted that the great philosophical systems of China, India, and the West (to which Islamic philosophy may be said to belong) were all in part developed in answer to the potentially destructive paradoxes of men who seem to have taken pleasure in wielding the instruments of the logic they had discovered. The great systems all incorporate something of the scepticism they combat. Sankara is something of a Buddhist, and so is Chu Hsi; and the Buddhist himself has a touch of philosophical nihilism. Likewise, Plato incorporates Gorgias, Descartes incorporates Montaigne, and Kant incorporates Hume.
If you continue to compare, you find formal or at least formalizable logic in India, including a Buddhist theory of syllogisms, which looks not un-Aristotelian, except that it has an existential qualifier. You find elaborate lists of fallacies and discussions of modes of sound and unsound argument, including Indian analyses of the types and the validity of evidence. It is possible that Sankara, the ancient Indian, depending in this upon the ‘school’ of Mimamsa, has a view of evidence like that of Karl Popper, namely, that no hypothesis can, in the positive sense, be proved to he true, but can only be shown to have successfully resisted the attacks levelled on it. Incidentally, one branch of the Mimamsa (that led by Prabhakara) teaches a Kant-like morality, for it contends that religious precepts should be carried out, not for possible reward or punishment, which are morally irrelevant, but for the sheer consciousness of duty performed. Furthermore, In Indian and Islamic philosophy, matter, time, and space are atomized, in both familiar and unfamiliar ways, while the Chinese, we are told, unify the world by means of quasi-field theories. The European problem of causality, which will be compared with the Islamic, receives a hundred Indian and a few Chinese forms, reminiscent, respectively, of the Epicurean, Stoic, Neoplatonic, Humean, Kantian, and Hegelian forms. Bertrand Russell appears to be anticipated and answered. The great Scholastic debaters of Nominalism and Realism have their peers.Briefly, there is a wealth of thought and experience concentrated in philosophical abstractions.
We now come to our third point, that the comparison we are undertaking should be factually careful and analytically close. Even though five of us are collaborating on this book, we are, individually and collectively, aware of how much there is that we ought to know but do not. But we take our relative ignorance to he a cause, not for despair, but for the attempt to be explicit about our evidence and careful in interpreting it. Too much of the study of comparative philosophy has been motivated by nationalistic pride or shame, too much of it has assumed just what it ought to have found evidence for, and too much of it has been intellectually slack. We hope that we are taking a genuine step out of our own provincialism and towards the world in which the different philosophical traditions exist as equals and together express the single humanity of them all.”
(“Philosophy East/Philosophy West: A Critical Comparison of Indian, Chinese, Islamic, and European Philosophy” Ed. Ben-Ami Scharfstein; Basil Blackwell, Oxford; 1978: pp. 1-5)
The Cult Of Opportunist Exploitations & Its Doubled Schizo-Reality
“Artxell Knaphni “teleiopoesis”
Nice play on ‘distance’ & ‘telos’
Within the present confines of the “absolute, perfect, completed, accomplished, finished” sentence, can be found the junctions, waystations, intersections; of other ‘sentences’, other ‘discourses’, other objectifications. The seemingly Zenoian differentiations lead ‘out’, as it were, beyond the confine-mentation of sentential presence, into an ‘architext’ no longer quite governed, or wholly governed, by a fixed topology of ‘interiority’/exteriority.
Allan Holdsworth, when asked about the limits of his left hand reach, said: “I don’t know, I don’t want to know, because then I might not try something.”
Like · Reply · 1 · 16 June at 10:27 · Edited”
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The routes of Zenoian differentiation, referred to above, when configured as ‘difference’, could suggest, it is ‘true’, a particular metaphysics; one, that, in the final analysis, can only draw on that of a complementary ‘identity’. This, we know all too well; & it is precisely this, that contemporary ‘philosophies’, in the 21st century, are unable to confront in any interesting way.
Choosing to circulate, only in the sinister & scintillating detritus of a nostalgia for traditions now allegedly broken; fetishising their truncations, deformations, & ‘horrors’; are all ploys to remain within the horizons of such nostalgia, to perpetuate the investments of an ignorance that was always incapable of seeing beyond the narrowness of its self-interest. Equating this self-interest with the ‘real’, such an ignorance is able to inhabit the contradictions & discrepancies that arise, as a theme park of necessary hypocrisies, which it takes great pleasure in practicing. This pleasure is a strong characteristic of the cult of opportunist exploitations.
It always exploits the inherent ambiguity that the notion of ‘Reality’ affords. The double sense, of immanent immediacies, & of underlying, substantial constancies. The first, which speaks in the languages of experience, perception, or scientific data, treats this production of the allegedly undeniable elements of immanent truth, or of the subliminal flow of lived events; usually under the signs of ‘Empiricism’; or ‘Science’; or of some other unquestioned, or weakly questioned, ‘given’. This first sense, is constructed, configured, & applied, in such ways, as to necessarily disqualify the other sense of ‘Reality’, that of substantial constancy; which is held to speak in the languages of structural idealisation, of theorisation, or of some ‘key’ of explanatory ‘truth’, treating this production of organising ‘principles’, contexts, & perspectives, as, in some way or another, privileged responses, sanctified, in their exclusive exceptionalism, as the guidance of a favoured set of coordinations, & of the alleged benefits such favoured coordinates are held to provide.
All this, is well known, taken for granted, to such an extent, that it forms a ‘given’ in itself, that of a thoroughly inhabited methodology which is never questioned, except along the routes & procedures only it, as entrenched method, self-referentially provides. In these dual provisions, of benefits & self-critiques; all disclosures of truth, all that such entrenchment can confide, is only the metaphysics of a long ago forgotten immobilisation, wherein this very forgetting has become its own substantial configuration, & all ‘substantial’ truths that it might seek, reside precisely in that which has been forgot, in the history of an immobilisation whose horizons can no longer even be identified or known, but whose trauma is only repeated, as the methodical call, of what has become the most futile of identifications.
League of Extraordinary Minds
(I) League of Extraordinary Minds
If the League of Extraordinary Minds were just another eminent institution, this post would constitute a statement of its inauguration. However, the League has been brought together under the auspices of an ostensible crisis, in response to which it forms an emergency measure of sorts.
Besieged by the threat of intelligence; ad hoc collectives, drafting disparate personnel of indeterminate ontological status; are to be engaged in counteroffensive operations.
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(II) BiblioCountenance Origins
Simon Charles Smith
14 March 2015 ·
Here’s a question about opposites. It is often said that an extreme form of one idea/philosophy can turn circle and resemble its polar opposite eg. extreme forms of communism may largely resemble fascism. With this point in mind, I want to pose this highly pertinent question; is it possible for someone to be so utterly and benightedly stupid that they become a genius? Can one single act of sheer and unadulterated/unparalleled stupidity put you on a par with geniuses such as Steven Hawking or Albert Einsten?
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Simon Charles Smith That sounds like an intelligent thought provoking concept so therefore it would not work. What I am searching for is a thought of such unparallel stupidity that i become a genius or even immortal after thinking it!
14 March 2015 at 13:22
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Artxell Knaphni [SCS]: “an extreme form of one idea/philosophy can turn circle and resemble its polar opposite”
{AK}: Yes, Simon, this is what I’ve often said, & it’s the natural result of ‘dualistic’ conceptuality & thought.
“Genius” &”Stupidity” are only zones of possibility that reside beyond conventional mappings of ‘dualistic’ concepts.
As “Genius” &”Stupidity”, to be determined as such, require definition according to these “conventional mappings” – with respect to what normativity can they be deemed, “Genius”, &”Stupidity”? – it’s debatable whether either could be “Unadulterated” or “unparallelled”, in an absolute sense?
14 March 2015 at 13:48
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Simon Charles Smith The only thing that spoils that point Artxell Knaphni is that it is well expresssed and a logical and cogent argument. What I’m after is stupidity on a scale never experienced before in the entire history of time!
14 March 2015 at 13:47
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Artxell Knaphni [SCS]: “The only thing that spoils that point Artxell Knaphni is that it is well expresssed and a logical and cogent argument. What I’m after is stupidity on a scale never experienced before in the entire history of time!”
{AK}: Some of the best minds would like to know the answer to that, Simon! Such an honourable task is beyond conventional abilities.
But when the necessary connection between;”well expressed” and “logical and cogent argument”; & its contrary; is understood: when both are located, without histrionics; then, one can simply forget about them, getting on with the real work, unencumbered by obsessions of a contingent conventionality. Therein, resides the secret of both “genius” &”stupidity”. “Stupidity” is much harder, of course. Have you thought of setting your sights lower, Simon?
14 March 2015 at 14:10
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Simon Charles Smith I’ve had a few thoughts that are a bit stupid but am still aspiring to the ultimately stupidest thought ever Artxell KnaphniArt !
14 March 2015 at 14:16
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(IIa) At the League of Extraordinary Minds
We, here, at the League of Extraordinary Minds, are on a mission to conserve the valuable resource known, often disparagingly, as “Stupidity”. First to discern the onset of its scarcity, we are heavily involved in emergency measures to rectify what can only be called a crisis.
We hope you all understand, even as uninformed laypeople, the seriousness of the situation.
This, of course, involves a careful use of technical terms, such as “dunce”.
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(III) Stupidity Given Official Status Due to Resource Depletion Crisis
Of all academic disciplines, Stupidity has been the most neglected. Lacking any institutional representation, whatsoever, it has been consigned to the regions of ‘informal folk practice’. A derogatory epithet, any unqualified individual can offer judgments of “stupidity”, as if they were experts!
Obviously, this state of affairs is unsatisfactory. Without formalisation, without official accreditation, how can determinations of ‘stupidity’ be proffered with any reliability?
The future brings with it the possibility of a new, disciplinary autonomy. No longer a reference to failure in other disciplines, but Stupidity as a legitimate field in itself. With research institutes in every university around the globe, the development of Stupidity can only be advanced to levels never before seen. It could be a new Renaissance for knowledge.
It can be observed that the discipline of Stupidity is involved in all other disciplines, so can be seen as ‘foundational’ in these pursuits. If Philosophy & Theology have historically been seen as “Queens of the Sciences”, Stupidity has as much entitlement, if not more, to such Royal comprehensiveness. Has a new royal sibling emerged?
There have been ‘nay-sayers’, of course, those who argue about the feasibility of financing such a radical adventure. But Professor Stuart Pidlington, long-time advocate of institutionalisation, offers a novel, but persuasive, mechanism to raise funding: “Every day, in academic institutions throughout the world, Stupidity is cited with reference to alleged malperformances; no royalties or fees are paid; no acknowledgements are given. However, sufficient technological infrastructure exists; all the surveillance, smartphone, & other recording devices; to register each & every use of Stupidity. So we have here a tremendous opportunity for the ‘free market’ to self-finance the global institutionalisation of Stupidity; we would be fools if we didn’t grab it!
And, of course, such ‘foolishness’ carries a risk. Do ‘foolishness’ & Stupidity create a ‘null set’? Or is uncontrollable feedback likely? We just don’t know, these are questions requiring resources that only a global institution of Stupidity can fund.”
It can be seen that the management of Stupidity has reached a crisis. Under an illusion of its seeming abundance, Stupidity has been exploited for centuries. The degree to which Pidlington’s marketisation ideas are vulnerable to corruption by profit-driven intelligence is a relevant question here. But, unless effective interventions occur, Stupidity, our most valuable resource, could run out.
Close Encounters of Unkindness
Close Encounters of Unkindness I
Steven Craig Hickman, of Social Ecologies & Alien Ecologies (formerly Dark Ecologies, Noir Real) & Nigel McMillan, an old friend, locally, had an encounter of difference, under a joke FB post.
I’m not going to do a close reading of the encounter, which is not as simple as it might seem. Both participants have their respective positions & understandings of what took place. Depending on the context one chooses, different conclusions can be drawn. Rather than attempt to resolve a delimited encounter, theoretically irresolvable as an abstracted isolation, & susceptible only to the oscillations of irony, it is perhaps more philosophically productive to consider themes which arose during the encounter, & the larger contexts which they suggest; it’s a good chance to explicate the cultural forces lurking in the background.
In both encounters; there was a strong scatological theme, introduced by Nigel McMillan, with the signifiers, “shit”; & “piss”; continued by Steven Craig Hickman with “crap”; & “crapology”, all of these referenced with significant frequency. Whether such universal biological necessity is used as an alleged symbolics of democracy; or as stabilising metaphors of existential authenticity, the anchorings of anatomical waste amid the ongoing, globalised rush of intangibilities, idealisations, & dislocations, constituting the so-called Information SuperHighway; is a significant, sociological resonance.
In this, it is redolent of another semiology of individuation; the tattooing culture, & its inscribing of a personal history of events on the somatic skin-screens of Self; both marking spatiotemporal location, & thereby anchoring Self in such significant localisation, in the meanings of these personalised marks, wherein the body becomes a living monument of the ‘personalised Self’.
The same identifying technology used in tattooing culture, when recapitulated as the ‘Brand’ or ‘Branding’, connotes the various ‘enslavements’ of livestock, slavery, & corporate ownership.
If tattooing is a personalised inscribing of Self, a ‘Self-Branding’ indicating ‘Self-Ownership’; then, both the tattoo & the ‘Brand’, share in the same Hellenic culture of the glorified Name; whether the psychological ‘marks’ of self-reflection, or the imperial ‘marks’ of sociological regi-mentation, there is the same use of ‘significant surface’, as the inscribed interface of symbolic ‘rule’, & other various necessities, of the Name.
As the techno-logics of information increasingly infuse environments with the filigree of Control; the emergent technosensorium has taken centre stage. Always there; history of road systems; Highways of war; the Information SuperHighway, as entire global system, of Oneiric production, is a Dream Machine. Now, every cultural scene, every sociopolitical scenario, public & private, has been commandeered by the filigree of cybernesis. This world, an autobahn of affects; the conveyance & redistribution of engineered sentiments; driven circulation of carefully crafted emotions; in an onward rush of oneiric desire, the desperate transactions of “new worlds for old”, in shakedowns that never end.
It is precisely in such an onrush, one configured at every level by economic & political abstractions of profit governance; an Administration According to the intangibilities of an Asymptotic Idealism; that this regime’s functionaries are reduced to turning towards the rhetoric of the only unpriced tangibility left to them, that of their own biological waste.
Unwanted by the system; rejected & ejected, even & especially, by themselves; absolutely undesired; this last concrete authenticity, uniquely theirs, is the only substance definitively escaping ownership by Kapital & the global system of Oneiric production. As such it serves as the only palpable symbol of freedom & self-grounding, capable of obscuring their own internalised perceptions of desirability/undesirability; their own self-perceived statuses in the contrived hierarchies of Desire, arising from Kapital’s profit system; & of dispelling the Technosensorium’s continual emotional broadcast, the existential feeling of being “Lost in Hollywood”.
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Close Encounters of Unkindness II
I wrote the next section, “Close Encounters of Unkindness III”, as YouTube comments in September 25, 2009, in response to this: “Saintly Man? – That Mitchell & Webb Look – BBC Two”
I include the piece, as it gives an interesting ‘take’ on the British ‘sense of humour’, a ‘sense’ so strongly & strangely informed by the metaphorics of urinary transaction, in the phrase, “taking the piss”, a phrase which arose in the discussion, on & after, Steven Craig Hickman & Nigel McMillan’s ‘encounter of difference’.
For a contemporary exemplification of this culture, the television programme, “Have I Got News For You!”, is quite typical.
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Close Encounters of Unkindness III
“Funny sketch!
Of course, one could say that such humour relies (sic) on the tacit acceptance of a life-sensorium, lebenswelt even, amenable only to “capitalist exploitation” -‘let’s not be too clever, we’re English’, “the nation of shopkeepers”- and innately hostile to any human development beyond it’s powers. As such, the video “takes the piss”, and is merely propaganda for the spirituality of beer and football, which are more social religions and major contributors to the economy, too. Having said that, the guru business in India generates many millions.
Meditation has been practiced in all the major religions, they all have their respective traditions. The video, however, has two signifiers, attire and facial hirsuteness styling, that would seem to connote yogis of the Hindu tradition. Whether sitting on very high wooden platforms was a common yogic practice, I do not know. But it is plausible that two British comedians, nostalgically recalling Monty Python, and overcoming their immense erudition in global spirituality, would conflate stereotypes in order to appeal to a British public who, of course, know everything about everything, and can convert it into a one-liner, between sips, after “taking the piss” out of their mates, who “take the piss” out of them.
England does have a particular talent for marginalising abstract and speculative spiritualisations, so to speak, trying to reduce everything to “common” forms of understanding, the basest of secularisms. It is not alone in this, just the best at it, which is why it had the biggest empire. But that diabolical tactic, “divide and rule”, is at the heart of British culture (“taking the piss”), preventing the highest possibilities of culture from truly realising themselves, trapping the people in a bedrock of satanic negativity, undermining the impolite temerities of any authentic individuality. It’s a control system deep in the English psyche, paranoia of an island nation, perhaps. True indivduality is distorted, coerced into simplistic scenarios of dramatic conflict, endless and farcical replays of the same old emotional vocabularies, the same “variety show”.”
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Close Encounters of Unkindness III – Addenda 1
“aardvarkbilly says: September 25, 2009 at 1:43 am
You’re a longwinded tit aren’t you? I think the Empire had more to do with the policy of Naval Supremacy than “marginalising abstract and speculative spiritualisations”. I was going to ignore you, but this comment plumbed such depths of nonsense it reached my “bedrock of satanic negativity”.”
“derritrane says: September 25, 2009 at 1:43 am
Could “the policy of Naval Supremacy” have anything to do with protecting economic interest, or is that too much of a speculation? What was i thinking! It’s because “we do love to be beside the seaside… we do love to be beside the seeeeea”.
It is an achievement of sorts to be able to discern any sort of depth in meaninglessness. But yes, you are right, plumbing the depths of nonsense known as British culture one is then able to discern diabolic geologies. Thank you for confirming that.”
Asymptotic Aim of the Name
The asymptotic “aim of increasing financial capital (Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: here)”?
“The goal of the capitalist isn’t to accumulate capital but to accumulate capital in order that he may feel inoculated against ontological insecurity and existential vulnerability.” Arran James (here)
“immortality, or an effective illusion of immortality” Arran James (here)
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All of this follows an oneiric logic of the Name; the Hellenic obsession with nominal glory, or glorious nominalisations, as it were. It’s a perpetually repetitive mechanics of mnemonic recognition, technologised; merging with that which formerly memorialised, inscribing the ephemerality of anthropic bios onto the enduring lithic media of monument; a monu(mentality) where nominal sign & its medium are unified in the enduring ecstasy of lithic legend – the spectral stone*, of the West.
*3D screen consciousness
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: algorithms of immortality
Note (“algorithms of immortality”27-09-2011)
“algorithms of immortality
Eurocentric obsession with delimited objectivities, suppression of ambiguity, of the unmanipulable?
Greek & Eurocentric obsession with names
the identifiable, identities susceptible to perpetual recall by the mechanised algorithms of enduring techno-immortality device, the regime of such an arrangement
nostalgic desire to conform to ancient mechanisms of salvation?”
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: On the Naming thing, & the Oneiric
The Hellenic ‘naming perspective’ occurred to me in the early 1990s. There was a conjunction of ideas; Saul Kripke’s, “Naming & Necessity”, suggested the conjunction of the two concepts in its title; Cioran’s “To bear a name, is to claim an exact mode of collapse” was in there, linking the two concepts more explicitly. My notion of ‘Oneiric economy’ was there, too, as well as others.
Not sure if I’d already read Sol Yurick’s virtuosic “Metatron”, wherein, he pretty much does everything, in one way or another, that was occurring in the intuition I was having through the conjunction of concepts mentioned. But then, in the 1980s, I wrote: “We all live in Aristotle’s mind,” which kind of encapsulates one of the logics at play. Sol Yurick, of course, wrote his stuff back in the early 1980s, & he’s the only theorist I can think of, who has the powers of ‘idea compression’, as it were; of analogy, extrapolation, & metaphoric leaping, all without losing critical intuition or precision; & sheer speed (best read fast); of the better SF writers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargazer_%28Rainbow_song%29
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Meillassoux as Symptom?
Meillassoux’s diatribe against so called “correlationism”, is a symptom of the Occidental desperation to fixate itself as a determinate, perpetually repeatable, sign. Hence, the need to locate the ‘Real’ as absolute other, the Occident as exception to this ‘Real’ & its own cyclical modes.
Meillassoux’s characterises his ‘Absolute’ as not merely indifferent, but in terms of his own ‘realist hysteria’. It’s the purchasing of understanding; through the logic of sado-masochistic self-sacrifice, hence the need for ‘Universalism’, to offload that sacrifice onto ‘universally appropriated’, empirical Others; & through harsh disciplines of ‘working & tested truth’; all of it is configured by historical trauma, of which, it is the configured, dogmatic expression.
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 1 – Rainbow: Stargazer
Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow: Stargazer (Legendado PT-BR) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGsfugB8LPQ
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 1a – Lyrics
Rainbow – Stargazer Lyrics
High noon, oh I’d sell my soul for water
Nine years worth of breakin’ my back
There’s no sun in the shadow of the wizard
See how he glides, why he’s lighter than air
Oh I see his face!
Where is your star?
Is it far, is it far, is it far?
When do we leave?
I believe, yes, I believe
In the heat and the rain
With whips and chains
To see him fly
So many die
We build a tower of stone
With our flesh and bone
Just to see him fly
But don’t know why
Now where do we go?
Hot wind, moving fast across the desert
We feel that our time has arrived
The world spins, while we put his dream together
A tower of stone to take him straight to the sky
Oh I see his face!
Where is your star?
Is it far, is it far, far?
When do we leave?
Hey, I believe, I believe
In the heat and the rain
With whips and chains
Just to see him fly
Too many die
We build a tower of stone
With our flesh and bone
To see him fly
But we don’t know why
Ooh, now where do we go
All eyes see the figure of the wizard
As he climbs to the top of the world
No sound, as he falls instead of rising
Time standing still, then there’s blood on the sand
Oh I see his face!
Where was your star?
Was it far, was it far
When did we leave?
We believed, we believed, we believed
In heat and rain
With whips and chains
To see him fly
So many died
We built a tower of stone
With our flesh and bone
To see him fly
But why
In all the rain
With all the chains
Did so many die
Just to see him fly
Look at my flesh and bone
Now, look, look, look, look,
Look at his tower of stone
I see a rainbow rising
Look there, on the horizon
And I’m coming home, I’m coming home, I’m coming home
Time is standing still
He gave back my will
Ooh ooh ooh ooh
Going home
I’m going home
My eyes are bleeding
And my heart is leaving here
A place I’ve known
But it’s not home, ooh
Take me back
He gave me back my will
Ooh ooh ooh ooh
Going home
I’m going home
My eyes are bleeding
And my heart is leaving here
The place I’ve known
But it’s not home ooh
Take me back, he gave me back my will
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Going home, I’m going home
My eyes are bleeding
And my heart is leaving here
The place I’ve known
But it’s not home, ooh
Take me back, take me back
Back to my home oh oh ooh
Time standing still
Songwriters: WOLF, LENNY / STAG, DANNY / FRANK, JOHN BURT / STEIER, RICK J.
Stargazer lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 1b Meanings
“The song has been called a “morality tale”,[6] and its lyrics are written from the standpoint of a “slave in Egyptian times”, according to lyricist Ronnie James Dio. They relate the story of the Wizard, an astronomer who becomes “obsessed with the idea of flying” and enslaves a vast army of people to build him a tower from which he can take off and fly.[4] The people hope for the day when their misery comes to an end, building the tower in harsh conditions (“In the heat and rain, with whips and chains; / to see him fly, so many died”). In the end, the wizard climbs to the top of the tower but, instead of flying, falls down and dies: “no sound as he falls instead of rising. / Time standing still, then there’s blood on the sand”. The next song, “A Light in the Black”, continues the story of the people who have lost all purpose after the Wizard’s death “until they see the Light in the Dark”, according to Dio.[4]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargazer_%28Rainbow_song%29#Description
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 1c – Discussions
Good discussion of the song, here, http://lyraka.com/ourfatherofmetal/rainbowsstargazer.htm .
Lays out the mass psychology of ‘belief’; the Wagnerian (arguably fascist or proto-Nazi) techniques of “enchantment”, for transitioning into the Oneiric; in short, the mass hallucinatory construction of the Cult of the Real.
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Asymptotic Aim of the Name: Addenda 2 – Rainbow – Lost In Hollywood
This song’s title evokes being lost in the Oneiric TechnoSensorium.
Rainbow – Lost In Hollywood – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYVqpauiq8E
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Arguably, better guitar solo on this version. Malmsteen does his thing.
Alcatrazz アルカトラス – Lost In Hollywood [Live in Tokyo, 1984] – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=870H3mggCdw
No Conclusion to the Inclusion of Illusions
This is a response to Dominic Fox, here.
[Dominic Fox]: “Now, it seems to me that for Laruelle, the Real is “like” (but see caveats below) a sort of global codomain that absolutely everything has an inclusion function into, since all “regional” domains are just subsets of this codomain. So for absolutely anything you like, it has both a “regional” identity (mapped by the identity function on its regional domain) and a One-in-one identity (mapped by the inclusion function from that domain into the Real).”
{AK}: Hasn’t this “Real” as “global codomain” always been in both formal & informal use, anyway, in practice?
The notion of “global codomain” as “Totality”; “Universe”; “Brahma”; “Being”; “Universal Set”; etc., with all their derived regionalisations, is not a novelty, & I’m not sure what Laruelle’s reinscribing of it, under the sign of “the Real”, can add to that?
The full panoply of such cartographic projections, of metaphysical contextualisation as perspective, between ‘atman’ & ‘Brahman’, for example, has been done, for millenia. It’s a necessary corollary of ‘meaning’; for ‘meaning’ is always selective; & a selection is necessarily a perspective.
Likewise, is a “principle of unilateral identity-in-the-last-instance with the Real” a uniquely necessary condition for inclusion?
I could accept it as a retention or reminder of initial region of origin, as it were, when speculative developments reach such levels of innovation as to form ‘regions’ in themselves, but I would think that the need for such reminders characterises the propensity to exclusionary dogma, the kinds of “tunnel vision” that actually do forget such constitutive delineations (regional origin > levels of innovation >>>>etc.,> new principle, or, new excuse for dogmatic ignorance).
It could be Laruelle’s way to lead those stuck in habitual metaphysical fixations to a looser, more flexible consideration, but really, is this necessary, in the 21st century, for those not so stuck?
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[Dominic Fox]: “the One is not”
{AK}: If read literally, as ‘the One IS Nothing’, it becomes the Sunyata of Mahayana Buddhism, or the ‘Neti, Neti’ of Vedantic Hinduism. Both concepts are at the borders of the determinate, they operate at the zone between the determinate & the indeterminate, neglecting neither, but not exhausted by either, whether singly, or in any combination.
If “the Real” & “the One”; both of which already, & do, function as synonymic moments of Sunyata or “Neti, Neti”; is, or are, Laruelle’s chosen & privileged signifiers for essentially the same referent & tasks as that which Sunyata or “Neti, Neti” already cover; then it seems to me, that Laruelle’s choice of emphasis runs risks of metaphysical fixation.
A Nagarjuna would say that the concept of “the Real” derives from the metaphysics of realisation & identity, i.e., the realisation of (an) identity. But identity is always supervenient, “dependently originated”, lacking the “own-being” of any ‘Absolute Substance’; in its limited & abstracted form, precisely as an ‘identity’, as an identified or selected variable or ‘thing’.
Thus, the concept of “the Real”, as derivation of such a metaphysics, is already implicitly determinate in a very particular way; & in a potentially paradoxical way; the ontological hunt for essentialised structures of the “Real”, or of “Truth”, is necessarily an ordering of metaphysical localisation, which contradicts its identification as general & global all-inclusiveness. Through additional developments, ‘global all-inclusiveness’ is shown as supervenient conceptualisation, too.
For these reasons, Laruelle’s choice, like that of the Speculative Realists, can be seen as a localised project of metaphysical nostalgia, one determined by histories of fixation that they as yet lack the theoretical understanding or inclination to think beyond or through, & whose local character they reject in advance, as such a localisation necessarily suggests explicit access to a terra incognita, an unknown terrain not susceptible to any effective utilisation or exploitation, not amenable to the replay of previously ‘successful’ procedures of the Enlightenment & Modernity.
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[Dominic Fox]: “the mathematical analogy breaks down, as we should probably expect it to.”
{AK}: This need not be the case for a future mathematics, no longer bound by habits of unthought ontological commitment, in a mathesis liberated from unnecessary metaphysical fixation.
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[Dominic Fox]: “We must not picture whatever structures we can imagine being stabilised, held fixedly within an underlying global order of structure that is just like them only somehow bigger.”
{AK}: Yes, I agree. It’s an implied corollary consideration, of what I was referring to here, on Terence’s “PRINCIPLES OF THE EMPTY SIGN”:
“Of course, one can ground all this with “emptiness” (or “empty sign”), but such a sunyata is at the root of every such ‘ground’. However, the “empty sign” cannot be uniquely identified as “the possible foundation of the mathematisation of the world without us”, alone, it is far more than just that, & far less.”
However, that is not to say, that ‘effects’ of such a hypothetical “global order of structure” are not produced (whatever those might be). Giordano Bruno’s: “The Universe is a sphere whose centre is everywhere, but whose circumference is Nowhere”, (Now Here?), is an insight that might well be relevant. Lol
It’s natural to import notions of ‘scalar magnitude’ into the metaphoric of topological distribution used in all theorisations, but they are supervenient constructions, too.
A bit of fun:
-3, -2, -1, ?0, +1, +2, +3
@1,
@2,
@3, hree Domains
Possible Worlds, Shifting, from Tongue to Tongue
“He moved in a direction best characterized as “down”, through the myriad potentialities of earth, and into the clustered improbabilities, and finally into the serried ranges of the impossibilities.” (Robert Sheckley, “Dimension of Miracles”:1968)
If language is only to be equated with a particular lingual (tongue; & anthropic) utilisation, & not difference-in-general (I would say ‘system of differences’, but am wary of overly restrictive metaphysical conceptions of systematicity), then I could accept a convention of increasing scope that goes from language to semiosis to differance, etc.
But my own use is much more flexible. Whether ‘language’ refers to more, or less, specific conceptualisations; whether it references the use conventions of this or that writer or tradition; all these possibilities of discursive inhabitation should be available, but I’m wary of ossifications that might exclude other traditions of consideration, with differing metaphysical distributions of signifiers, as it were, that are not quite so central anymore.
It is not a question of subjective caprice, but rather that of retaining an openness in practice, & not merely settling into the signifying habits of even the most radical discourses, already to varying degrees assimilated, even if not adequately understood, perhaps.
If language is, actually, a ‘system of differences’, I don’t see a problem with its metonymic use for difference-in-general. Surely, context is an adequate guide to which sense is being used? There are languages, & language-in-general. E.g. Zoosemiotics can be seen as the study of animal languages or communication, etc..
On the question of “linguistic idealism”, surely this would depend on what conceptualisations of language are being referred to, & not the signifier “language”, itself. There is no essential link between the signifier,” language”, & those conceptualisations. In order for “linguistic idealism” to obtain, “language” would require characterisation solely according to a metaphysics of Idealism; or, if reduction to the ‘idea of language’ is being referred to, what limiting criteria could such an ‘idea’ or conceptualisation be truly said to have, when language & the sphere of linguistic operation, are both ultimately indeterminable & so ‘universal’?
If that “multiplicity of modes of semiotisation”, concerns those unconscious economies & layers without a tongue, perhaps giving them the signifier, ‘language’, now & then, can give voice to the unspoken silence of their signs, & “linguistic enunciation” need not be condemned, anymore, to its soliloquy of lone import.
THE SIGN: SWITCHING IT ON/OFF
Responses to Dominic Fox, discussion here.
[Dominic Fox]: “Is it still situated within semiosis? I’m minded to say not, because semiotics however general is still the domain of the *sign*, and the grammatology Derrida’s talking about points beyond that domain.”
{AK}: “My conception of “language” is not restricted to what humans do.”
Concerning the “sign”, he says: “Now, it is inevitable that not only inequalities of development (which will always occur), but also the necessity of certain contexts, will render strategically indispensable the recourse to a model known elsewhere, and even at the most novel points of investigation, to function as an obstacle.”
Concerning the “beyond”:
Derrida: “There is not a transgression, if One understands by that a pure and simple landing into a beyond of metaphysics, at a point which also would be, let us not forget, first of all a point of language or writing.”
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Derrida: “Psychologism is not the poor usage of a good concept, but is inscribed and prescribed within the concept of the sign itself, in the equivocal manner of which I spoke at the beginning. This equivocality, which weighs upon the model of the sign, marks the “semiological” project itself and the organic totality of its concepts, in particular that of communication, which in effect implies a transmission charged with making pass, from one subject to another, the identity of a signified object, of a meaning or of a concept rightfully separable from the process of passage and from the signifying operation. Communication presupposes subjects (whose identity and presence are constituted before the signifying operation) and objects (signified concepts, a thought meaning that the passage of communication will have neither to constitute, nor, by all rights, to transform). A communicates B to C. Through Semiology and Grammatology, the sign the emitter communicates something to a receptor, etc.”
{AK} The emphasis of structures of ’emission & reception’ is unnecessary in inquiries where they are not an explicit or overt issue.
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“Kristeva: If language is always “expression,” and if its closure is thereby demonstrated, to what extent, and by means of what kind of practice, could this expressivity be surpassed? To what extent would nonexpressivity signify? Would not grammatology be a nonexpressive Semiology and Grammatology “semiology” based on logical-mathematical notation rather than on linguistic notation?
Derrida: I am tempted to respond in an apparently contradictory way. On the one hand, expressivism is never simply surpassable, because it is impossible to reduce the couple outside/inside as a simple structure of opposition.
This couple is an effect of differance, as is the effect of language that impels language to represent itself as expressive re-presentation, a translation on the outside of what was constituted inside. The representation of language as “expression” is not an accidental prejudice, but rather a kind of structural lure, what Kant would have called a transcendental illusion. The latter is modified according to the language, the era, the culture. Doubtless Western metaphysics constitutes a powerful systematization of this illusion, but I believe that it would be an imprudent overstatement to assert that Western metaphysics alone does so. On the other hand, and inversely, I would say that if expressivism is not simply and once and for all surpassable, expressivity is in fact always already surpassed, whether one wishes it or not, whether one knows it or not. In the extent to which what is called “meaning” (to be “expressed”) is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly “simple term” is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority. It is always already carried outside itself.
It already differs (from itself) before any act of expression. And only on this condition can it constitute a syntagm or text. Only on this condition can it “signify.” From this point of view, perhaps, we would not have to ask to what extent nonexpressivity could signify. Only nonexpressivity can signify, because in all rigor there is no signification unless there is synthesis, syntagm, dif[erance, and text. And the notion of text, conceived with all its implications, is incompatible with the unequivocal notion of expression. Of course, when one says that only the text signifies, one already has transformed the values of signifying and sign. For if one understands the sign in its most severe classical closure, one would have to say the opposite: signification is expression; the text, which expresses nothing, is insignificant, etc. Grammatology, as the science of textuality, then would be a nonexpressive semiology only on the condition of transforming the concept of sign and of uprooting it from its congenital expressivism.”
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“Kristeva: Semiology today is constructed on the model of the sign and its correlates: communication and structure.
What are the “logocentric” and ethnocentric limits of these models, and how are they incapable of serving as the basis for a notation attempting to escape metaphysics?
Derrida: All gestures here are necessarily equivocal. And supposing, which I do not believe, that someday it will be possible simply to escape metaphysics, the concept of the sign will have marked, in this sense, a simultaneous impediment and progress. For if the sign, by its root and its implications, is in all its aspects metaphysical, if it is in systematic solidarity with stoic and medieval theology, the work and the displacement to which it has been submitted-and of which it also, curiously, is the instrument-have had delimiting effects. For this work and displacement have permitted the critique of how the concept of the sign belongs to metaphysics, which represents a simultaneous marking and loosening of the limits of the system in which this concept was born and began to serve, and thereby also represents, to a certain extent, an uprooting of the sign from its own soil.
This work must be conducted as far as possible, but at a certain point one inevitably encounters “the logocentric and ethnocentric limits” of such a model. At this point, perhaps, the concept is to be abandoned. But this point is very difficult to determine, and is never pure. All the heuristic and critical resources of the concept of the sign have to be exhausted, and exhausted equally in all domains and contexts. Now, it is inevitable that not only inequalities of development (which will always occur), but also the necessity of certain contexts, will render strategically indispensable the recourse to a model known elsewhere, and even at the most novel points of investigation, to function as an obstacle.”
MALINGERING WHILST GAUGING THE AUTOMATIC
Responses to Dominic Fox, discussion here.
[Dominic Fox]: “The Derrida quote is pivotal: I agree with him that mathematical writing belongs within a system of general writing, and that the “liberation” of mathematical inscription means breaking with phonologocentrism, which is why I think that mathematics is not “a language” but something like a foreign body or ur-prosthesis with respect to language.”
{AK}: “My conception of “language” is not restricted to what humans do.”
I often use the word, “language”, I guess, as a synonym for what Derrida calls the “grammatological”. In this sense, & following my own history of confrontations with what I always felt to be the overt & constrictive univocity of conventional usage, I’m going to continue with my own pattern of use. I’ve been well aware of “phono- & logo- centrism” for over 26 years, but I’m not aiming to repeat Derrida’s work, through substituting his initial analyses of the logocentric as a new centre of overt & constrictive univocity (“This is why it has never been a question of opposing a graphocentrism to a logocentrism, nor, in general, any center to any other center.”).
On the question of mathematics vs. Language, Derrida’s critique concerns particular -centric trends, under those disciplinary rubrics. It’s not a case of essentialised linguistic ‘badness’, & innate mathematical ‘goodness’. The determination of logo- or phono- centrism is not magically tied to the signifier “language”.
Would Derrida consider Joyce’s most polysemic or disseminatory adventure to be logo- or phono- centric, simply because it’s linguistic?
And if it was a case of Mathematics being the exemplar of centreless writing, why would he speak of its “renewal”, here: “The effective progress of mathematical notation thus goes along with the deconstruction of metaphysics, with the profound renewal of mathematics itself, and the concept of science for which mathematics has always been the model.”?
No ‘sign’ or ‘system’ is necessarily ‘logocentric’ in itself. The attribute of being logo- or phono- centric is always context-bound, not tied to an allegedly irreducible essence.