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CONQUESTS OF NOTHINGNESS: IMPERIALISMS OF THE VOID
Basically, delimitation instantly creates infinite proliferation.
But Western or Occidental metaphysics, which is basically ancient Greek metaphysics, doesn’t like infinity. The ancient Greeks liked odd numbers, not even numbers, because they thought even numbers led to infinity.
Occidental thought didn’t find infinity to be thinkable or desirable.
So, Western theology and metaphysics were reduced to the language of this lack of understanding.
There is a sequence of Western sociocultural presences in which signs of the infinite are permitted and even encouraged. Usually within the formalisms of mathematics and the mysticisms of religious and fantasy, cultures and genres.
Even in contemporary times, the infinite is usually considered in terms of its operational values within contexts of mundane practicality.
It’s within such contexts of mundane practicality, that the West discovered its raison d’etre and it’s within such contexts that it developed the obsession with reality, with what was real and what wasn’t; what could be done and what couldn’t.
It led to what could be called, ‘Promethean theology’, to coin a phrase.
The West or Occident is always trying to do creation ex nihilo.
Always trying to mimic the only God conceivable from its characteristic brand of stubborn ignorance.
That characteristic brand produces as corollary, the characteristic impulse of Western theology and its subsidiary social and disciplinary expressions.
The brand and impulse of the metaphysical model of creation ex nihilo – that “out of nothingness” – is the so-called, “nihilism”, which is the characteristic metaphysical sign of “modernity” and other cultural formations of the Occident.
The chance to “begin again”, as the blimp advertising “off world” emigration, declares, in the film, Blade Runner.
But the chance to “begin again”; “to be reborn” as evangelical Christianity would have it; to “watch out for worlds behind you” as Nico sings with the Velvet Underground; all of these constitute the usual existential semiotics of modernist rupture, which itself is the corollary of Christian apocalypse.
The West does all of this because the counterposition of nothingness enables the positioning of totality for “full-spectrum domination”, as the USA likes to say.
It’s only from the position of nothingness that the totality becomes available.
If the totality is desired, then there is nothing “left over”, so to speak, from the object of desire.
Nothing except the desirer, of course; but the desirer, consumed by a totalitarian desire because of the desire for totality, necessarily forgets itself as an object and is consumed by the totality of its desire. It loses itself in the principle of its own conquest; in the principle of “full-spectrum domination” to which the totality is expected to submit.
It’s probably the case that the European mind never recovered from the so-called, Dark Ages, and the mediaeval period wasn’t exactly a picnic, either. I’ve written, or mentioned, before, about the characteristic “deprivation anxiety” afflicting Northern European psychology.
Looking at the crucible of historical forces it becomes possible to discern the incubation of such affliction and the inculcation of a hysteria of avarice which finds contemporary expression in the spectacles and stagings of consumerism – in consumer society and consumer desire.
The West has been so busy trying to disingenuously deny its “anxiety of influence” (see Harold Bloom) with respect to non-Western cultures and to always “begin again”, that it has got stuck in a cycle of constant and whimsical renewal, stuck in the treadmill of ever-ending trends reflecting only the superficiality of the Occidental mind and that Occidental culture is an oxymoron, the culture of no culture.
This is because its essence is stalled at the nihilistic moment of its totalising mission.
Totalising can mean both destruction (in the vernacular) and summing.
Destruction is commonly said to result in nothing.
It’s the subtraction of a structure.
Summing is the summing of all structures, leaving “nothing” as the remainder.
The nihilistic calculus of destruction is positioned with regard to the voluntary, to Occidental voluntarism, by Heidegger: “Rather than not will, it wills nothing (destruction) at all” Heidegger
Schopenhauer, however, short-circuits the Heideggerian quandary of Occidental voluntarism:
“On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.
This “nothing,” however, “is also the PrajnaParamita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 41112)
It’s an interesting roundabout of metaphysical motifs that have gathered themselves together in this disquisition on delimitation and its history of metaphysical effects, one of which is the very notion of history, itself. So, anachronistic retrogression or retrogressive anachrony?
History is contingent on time; time is contingent on temporal delimitation.
QUICK COMMENT ON THE SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF PROTESTANT MODERNITY AND ITS ECONOMICS
Protestant economics is predicated on the motivational drivers of selfishness and envy in the service of the nation’s economy and wealth.
So by harnessing the “bad” towards the “good”, it might be thought that the “good” has cleverly triumphed by transforming the “bad” into a labour of the production of the “good”, according to its casuistical dialectics or dialectical casuistry?
But this neglects the very success of that dialectical system in becoming a new set of sociopolitical standards and constituting a new norm.
It’s success transforms what was initially the clever but resigned exploitation of the “bad” – which in any case is produced – into a systematic necessity for the “bad” which then incentivises and increases the production of the “bad”.
These dialectical shufflings and transformations between “good” and “bad” are the sociological result of economic necessity that is in line with profitability strategy serving ideas of wealth.
It is interesting to note the frequent reversal of literal meanings in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular vocabulary of approval, where words literally denoting “badness” (including the word “bad”) are used to refer to the “good” or “goodness”.
This shows the malleability and mobility of moral evaluation characterising such social structures.
It’s a disciplined socius instantly responsive to the needs of military economy.
It’s why Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultures are indisputably the world’s most prolific and paranoid producers of conspiracy.
That conspiracy industry is the sign that Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so-called, “civilian” cultures are pre-militarised, militarised in advance.
That general form of militarisation is the real result of “modernity”, a result that has unfortunately become a global model.
NATIONALIST VIRTUE SIGNALLING IN THE MILKING SHED, BUT HAS THE CRYPTOCURRENCY CAT GOT THE CREAM?
It’s not by accident that the notion of “virtue signalling” has become so central in contemporary political and cultural debates.
On the one hand, sections of the domestic population, the so-called, “working classes”, and other ostensibly disadvantaged social echelons, usually seek social approval and communion through patriotic expressions which are the “virtue signalling” of nationalism and ethnonationalism.
This kind of “nationalist virtue signalling” serves multiple purposes.
The fervency of “nationalist virtue signalling” is an area in which the stridency of “working class” expressions attains equality or even superiority over the usually more moderate or genteel expressions of the other social classes.
This constitutes an egalitarian component of populist nationalism.
The second purpose is more complex and stratified involving the fact that overt patriotism is most usually characteristic of wars between nations.
So what could in a sense be construed as working class appropriation of overt patriotism, functions as a double reminder; of those wars between nations; and as a warning to the more privileged classes who might be distracted by international indulgences into forgetting national obligations.
The link between war and warning constitutes another metonymic layer of reminder and veiled threat.
So populist nationalism produces multiple forms of symbolic compensation for the so-called, “working classes”, et al.
It could be interpreted as the reigning in of internationalist and cosmopolitan, interests and cultures, what is commonly called “globalisation”, by locally bound nationalisms?
Given the globetrotting antics of antiglobalist proponents, though, it’s obvious that more than fidelity to geographical locale is at play.
In the 20th century, the global mobility of capital in contrast to the fixed locality of labour was a common theme.
The global mobility of capital meant that capital could source labour anywhere on the globe.
Traditionally, the reverse wasn’t true, labour could not easily relocate anywhere on the globe.
So capital had the global mobility advantage over labour.
But the internet has given international communication to all, including labour and the “working classes”.
The internet has given global mobility to “fixed locality”, it has given it to the fixed locality of nationalism as against the global mobility of capital.
What has happened is that the ideology of locality has both informationalised and internationalised itself as the globally mobilised, international politics of nationalism.
It was only to be expected and it is quite logical.
If capital used the global mobility of internationalism to escape local obligations, the escape route it was using was precisely the inter-, the between, criss-crossing the borderlines, so to speak, between the nations.
Obviously, from that borderline realm of “between the nations”, capital can have its profits run along to offshore, tax havens. Tax havens being the epitome of evading local obligations of nations.
But this borderline realm of “between the nations” is the necessary concomitant of “nations”, themselves. Without nations, obviously there cannot be any ‘inter-nationalism’.
So, if nations are the ‘milking sheds of capital’, so to speak, which of course they are, then it obviously makes a lot of sense to exercise strategic interventions of power in those ‘milking shed’, nations.
Labour is using exactly the limitation of locality that capital has always exploited to labour’s disadvantage, as an international rallying cry of internet-driven, chaotic information clusters, that have been replaying all of the tropes of populist nationalism with such dramatic and farcical force, that entire governments and the courses of nations have been radically altered.
The irony, of course, is that of localism having to use detours of the very internationalism it is trying to condemn. But internationalism is no longer the only escape route for mobile capital. In a hyper- connected world, the difference between localism and globalism is moot if the information from both sources is equally accessible.
That is why so much energy and effort has gone into cryptocurrency.
It’s another escape route for mobile capital, which requires new horizons of secrecy.
GAMES OF NEOLIBERAL REALITY AND FASCIST FICTIONS FOR RIGHT-WING ROBOTS AND CONSERVATIVE ANDROIDS
Are you going to blame the “neoliberal consensus” for the first, US Civil War, and for the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan?
What does “neoliberal consensus” mean, exactly, anyway, given that Democrats, Republicans, and Trump supporters, can all represent themselves as “fighting for freedom”, in some way or another, and therefore can technically all be called “liberal”, notwithstanding the fact that two of those groups don’t self-identify as liberal and use it as a negative epithet for the other group that does so self-identify?
Googling the question, this article, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot , gives a quick and magisterial survey of the relevant factors and relations.
What is called, the “neoliberal consensus”, is basically government by corporate capitalism.
Corporate capitalism is a practice and ideology intrinsically predicated on colonial economics and extraction.
The East India company has often been called the first corporation. That’s obviously colonialism.
So have the Knights Templar been called the first corporation. That’s obviously a sort of colonialism, too, resource and capital extraction from foreign markets.
It was obvious, at least to me, in the last century, that contemporary scenarios could occur.
They were guaranteed to occur given the onion-like layers of colonial propaganda constituting the base but convoluted norms of so-called, “Western nations”.
Corporate capitalism has to exploit someone or something, somewhere, in order to accrue profits significant enough to attract investment.
The colonial or neocolonial model of extraction is always the governing ideal of corporate capitalism, of Occidental, or western and middle eastern forms of capitalism, in general.
It’s a habitual and historical instinct, deep in the Occidental psyche.
So, if Western economies cannot impoverish foreign natives in foreign lands so as to accrue profits, or if they have done so and there is no more surplus value to be extracted; then the Western hunger for profits is going to colonise and feed on the domestic population’s wealth.
But the domestic population, though resenting such exploitation, is going to be caught up in a moral bind due to its own complicity in colonialism – in (neo-)colonial ideology and (neo-)colonial benefits.
In the same way that European governments had the difficulty of reconciling colonial wealth extraction with international laws concerning private property, domestic populations of Western nations enriched through colonialism and neocolonialism have the problem of trying to exempt themselves from being colonised by the very processes that they otherwise have a history of happily subscribing to and benefiting from.
European governments solved the problem of reconciliation by noting that European nations themselves were colonised by imperial forces, at the outset.
The reconciliation attains a consistency of sorts, but at the expense of enshrining imperialism and injustice as governing values.
That obviously militates against all of the nonsense propaganda produced by European nations and colonial extensions, such as the USA, concerning justice.
The domestic populations of Western nations, though statistically supportive of the view that colonialism was beneficial to those who were colonised, seem hypocritically reluctant to engage in similar colonial relations with their own governments and corporations.
So those domestic populations are caught in contradictory commitments; on the one hand, they identify with the forces of colonial or colonising capital; but, on the other hand, they are opposing the corporate forces of colonial or colonising capital, in so far as those forces are directed at them.
Identification is usually ethno-national; opposition is based on capital relations such as ownership and finance, usually according to some other associated form of class grouping.
Corporate forces deploy racism and nationalism, leveraging ethnonational identification as a distraction from oppositions based on ownership, finance, and other associated, class divisions.
Domestic populations of Western nations, or more precisely of those Western nations caught up in colonial and neocolonial relations, are thus on the cusp of the contradiction between the ethnonational identification identifying domestic populations with colonial exploiters and the property divisions identifying those same domestic populations with the colonised and exploited.
Domestic populations of Western nations, thus inhabit a schizophrenic, socio-economic position.
It’s a position that naturalises hypocrisy for those domestic populations as default behaviour.
The biggest market in the US mediascape is that of European-Americans who wish to believe in the twisted worlds of romanticised and revisionist colonial propaganda and call it “history”.
Note how all of the historical fantasy that those people seem to like carefully avoids the colonial era.
Most of it is mediaevalism, apartheid temporality, apartheid fantasy history.
It’s natural that such a market wishes to avoid narratives of its own villainy, however accurate those narratives might be.
And so it is that such market desire becomes the architect of apartheid fantasy history and of a new sort of commodity mnemonics, one that can be delivered in increasing HD, in 3-D, eventually as a holographic sensorium and artificial environment rivalling or even exceeding the resolution of reality itself!
This then is the ultimate escapism, into the commodity mnemonics of apartheid fantasy history!
It’s a commodity mnemonic environment driven by algorithms of Euro-American, ethnic anxiety, the crafted data of what right-of-centre, Euro-Americans, call “race realism”.
One, where eventually, in accord with the stringency to not cause European-American anxiety, ethnic otherness is carefully reintroduced into apartheid fantasy history as the themed spice of carefully categorised, commodity mnemonic exotica.
Everything is processed according to those commodity mnemonic machines driven by market desire and Euro-American, ethnic anxiety.
The USA as racialised regiments of productivity*; the so-called, right-wing, Euro-American regiments, constantly faultfinding with regard to non-Euro-American regiments, masking the faultfinding as the somehow de rigueur behaviour of free-market competition and free expression.
It’s all game theory and if the USA always and invariably proceeds according to game theory predicated on concepts of self-interest, then does the concept of the game itself take on the role of the real?
It seems obvious that it does, given the tu quoque robotics of US citizen response!
Very much a robotics of full commitment, there never seems to be any hint of awareness of anything beyond the games played.
* The USA dream consists of what is supposed to be the morality of equal opportunity in conjunction with what is supposed to be the meritocracy of devotion to and competence at productivity games.
ELECTRONIC SHOW BUSINESS AND THE THEATRICKS OF MICRO-FEUDALISM
{01} The notion of internationalism or cosmopolitanism segueing easily between nations is only going to be a viable reality for those possessing the necessary articles of entrance to such internationalisms.
{02}The qualifying conditions necessary to facilitate access to internationalism are of course visas and Visa cards, official documents of international bureaucracy and money, but there are other protocols of cosmopolitanism, too.
{03} If the problem is that because of the Internet, communication is international and instant, but a lot of the mindsets communicating over that Internet are irredeemably insular and ignorant – then that produces a “global village”, indeed!
But though Marshall McLuhan predicted that electronic environments would produce or reproduce tribalism, he didn’t say that those tribalisms would necessarily be nice.
{04} “Local yokel” and “hillbilly” workforces, globally, are set and maintained within highly regulated physical and psychological environments, within consumer land and mind -scapes catering towards all the usual consumer desires that themselves cater to the fascist unconscious.
The expectations of consumer desire begin to model and configure political expectations.
{05} Traditional forms of consumer desire are answered by commodity products which exercise no other reciprocity than the payment of capital. No greater or wider forms of responsibility are required, than those attaching to consumption and commodity transaction.
{06} But are the protocols of consumer culture sufficient to constitute models of citizenship conducive to any kind of political stability beyond those of consumer self-interest?
In the USA, the answer seems to be an unequivocal, ‘No’!
{07} The oscillation seems to be between consumerism and fascism, with consumer advertising exploiting tropes of the fascist unconscious.
There’s a history, a backstory, a context, to the contemporary architectures of carefully crafted ignorance and irresponsibility currently assailing the USA.
{08} Christian banning of usury was the banning of not only financial speculation but of the imaginary of financial speculation. That is to say, the imaginary of financial speculation leading to merchant power and bourgeois (conceptions of) freedom.
Without that imaginary of financial speculation, feudal relations are retained as hegemonic.
The concept of lordship (Christ is referred to as “Lord”) and the “divine right of kings” link both feudalism and religion, reinforcing the hegemony of feudal relations.
{09} Because Judaism was not bound by the ban on usury, Hebrews were not bound by feudal relations in quite the same way as Christians. So Hebrews were coerced into fulfilling a role within the Norman imaginary of financial speculation serving the needs of sovereign, Treasury, and state; probably in that order.
Norman sovereigns used Hebrews to circumvent the Christian banning of usury in order to administer state finance.
Cromwell and Britain’s bourgeois merchants encouraged the readmission of Hebrews into England on the basis of the international power of Jewish trade networks and the Protestant belief that the second coming of Christ was contingent on conversion of the Jews to Christianity.
{10} So Cromwell and Britain’s bourgeois merchants were then able to access the international imaginary of financial speculation through the power of Jewish trade networks.
This reinforced bourgeois merchant power taken from the nobility and King and created the beginnings of new channels of revenue, primarily colonial in nature.
Colonial revenues financed bourgeois projects of industrialisation and the emergence of modernity.
Feudal relations retracted themselves to make room for bourgeois relations, the merchant relations of capital and investment.
{11} This had the effect of displacing rural peasantry from the land and relocating them in the workhouse and factory. It was in these new locations of workhouse and factory, that the components of prefabricated consumer heavens, of predesigned heavenly consumption, were produced.
Rumbling along and shunting off the tracks of industrial logic called “assembly lines”, countless replicas of any sort of consumer heaven could be conveyed.
{12} The mise en scène or staging of imperialism was available to everyone through the crowning glory of consumerism – everyone could be a tyrant in their own castle, so to speak.
Castles and crowns, could be bought, both as toy facsimiles and as real things that could be bought on the market. Impoverished nobility were selling their castles in the 1970s.
All of that, together with this or that philosophy bolstering up concepts of the sovereign individual; and new markets began to arise, catering to those new micro-feudalisms and sovereigns.
{13} With so many imperious sovereigns of the new sorts of selfhood, ruling over so many micro-feudalisms, the stages of modernity were set to host the dramatics of multiple feuds, between all of those imperious sovereigns.
There is more than one reason why the genre of which “Game of Thrones” is a contemporary instance is so popular with the masses.
{14} In feudal times, “internationalism” usually meant wars of religion and resources, not the smooth and un-ruffled cosmopolitanism of airport lounges and modern city states.
The Internet has enabled the theatricks of micro-feudalism to hold hostage the impersonal bureaucracy of modern states, to hold hostage the model of the modern state, itself.
{15} The theatricks of micro-feudalism is the default consumer reality accessible to everyone.
But that theatricks was based on industrial replication; assembly-line reproduction; on what someone like Baudrillard might call ‘the simulacra of consumerism’.
{16} So, in a sense there are ‘simulacra sovereigns’, each catered to out of industrial processes presupposing the remote individuality of the psyches that industry marketing is directed towards alleviating the alienations of.
{17} So, taking into consideration the element of impersonal bureaucracy characterising modern states; it begins to seem as though industrial modernity and ‘the simulacra of consumerism’ constructed to alleviate the alienations of that industrial modernity and its characteristically impersonal bureaucracy; are the basis for a granular reemergence of feudalism as “the theatricks of micro-feudalism”.
{18} Economic inequality is conducive to promoting social differences structurally similar to feudal organisation.
Bourgeois merchants or the bourgeoisie, were able to displace governing feudal structures of sovereignty and nobility through the economic and military powers that they were able to deploy.
{19} So, if economic power is central to the development of modernity and to citizenship within that modernity, then does economic inequality necessarily produce different kinds of citizenship?
Does economic inequality produce social inequality in conditions of modernity?
{20} And if such is the case, are counter-movements towards personality over the impersonal; and “the theatrics of micro-feudalism” over the modern, only forms of expected, mass social response, given market conditioning, et cetera?
{21} It’s very much the case that in the USA, there seems to be a virtually pathological avoidance of the impersonal; indeed, an avoidance of any objectivity not susceptible to the easy personalisation and simplicity of common discourse characterising market advertising.
{22} So, the virtual pathology of avoiding the impersonal, results in the pathological, conflict-ridden “theatricks of micro-feudalism”, a theatricks of both “personal virtuality” and “virtual personality”, trolling and politicising its way over the Internet and World Wide Web.
{23} It’s a politics of feudalism; yes, the old sort of feudalism!
But it’s been processed into reconstituted and instant feudalism granules, all of it swirling around and dissolving into cups and mugs (faces? social media) of electronic show business!
{24} And that ‘electronic show business’?
How much more “society of the spectacle” can it get, than “social media”?
Social media, where society and spectacle coincide.
CONTOURS (con tourisms) OF OCCIDENTAL POSITIVISM
I think there’s an article somewhere associating Michel Foucault with so-called, ‘neoliberalism’.
Postmodern and poststructuralist critiques, whether of Marxism or anything else, are important qualifying stages of epistemological, ontological, and other forms of, reflexivity; forms of reflexivity that require more than just practical, pragmatic, or Occidental-theoretical, understandings.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Instead, there have been all kinds of reactive epistemology, things like ‘speculative realism’; object-oriented ontology; and even the various cults of immanence, some of which attach themselves to Deleuze and Guattari.
It’s interesting that someone like Nick Land preferred the seeming tangibility of Deleuze and Guattari, instead of what he saw as the ‘academic formalism’ of Derrida. It’s obvious that he did not understand Derrida.
It’s then interesting to see his taking up with right-wing politics, something that is arguably not at all disconnected from his philosophical preferences and dislikes.
In my own work, of course, I have observed a general movement that can be called Occidental positivism, which probably isn’t that far away from Derrida’s logocentrism.
The entire Occident is caught up in its own ‘brand’ of positivism which proceeds according to its distinctly ‘marked’ epistemology, in one direction only. It knows of no other way but this proprietary and unilinear herding of knowledge.
This is why it could not solve the paradox of desire, because it was spellbound by the hypostatic and substantialising atrophy of its own principle of desire, which it could only image as the loveless invariance of servile control.
It is this age-old image of imperial security, intrinsically belonging to the West, that is attempting to rehabilitate and readjust itself according to its ridiculous philosophical exhaustions, dressed as rhetorics of immanence.
These shapes of contemporary reaction and how they show themselves all describe some of the contours of Occidental positivism.
THE JUNGLE OF WHITE DECEPTIONS
If the task of lifting the automobile and tipping it over was an idealised picture of multiracial cooperation –though there did seem to be more white faces than black ones – then the heavy responsibility of destroying the automobile was initiated and mostly continued by white males.
There’s a sense in which an expression of Afro-American discontent has been hijacked by the white majority. Is it because the protest concerns an Afro-American individual, that in the eyes of white, ‘United States of America’, Afro-Americans are responsible for everything done in the name of the protest?
So whatever the respective motivations might be; white solidarity with black lives; inchoate white frustration with no other platform or outlet; the desire to construct an historical event; or just eagerness to engage with the excitement of a public event; the theme of Afro-American oppression actually serves as theme park for the psychopathology of white, US American, entertainment and disaffection?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fNao9-HxR0
~~~
Lions and tigers exploited at petting zoos.
What’s going on with the exploitation of lions and tigers at so-called, ‘petting zoos’?
Huge profits are produced at these stations of zoological sentiment.
How is it that so many US citizens, all across the USA, can afford the exorbitant prices of this kind of conspicuous consumption, are happy to fund a bloated health-insurance industry whose inefficiency has been priced at two trillion dollars over twelve years, yet are resentful at the idea of funding free healthcare for all?
Is it the paranoid, US American psyche, trying to identify with the power symbolics of predation through sentimental relations with its infant form?
~~~
01) “Business Insider reports:
Three former US servicemen and self-proclaimed members of the far-right “boogaloo” movement were arrested on domestic terrorism charges and accused of carrying unregistered firearms and trying to spark violence during protests against police brutality.”
~~~
02) “Fox News: Brutalization Of Black People Good For Stock Market”
03) “More of that Christian love: Christian TV host Rick Wiles is happy because he believes Trump is going to start rounding up and torturing liberal activists.
Right Wing Watch reports:
On Tuesday’s episode of his “TruNews” program, Wiles cheered Trump’s plan to use the military to quash nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and called on Trump to use the military to take down liberal organizations, arrest their leaders, and send them to Guantanamo Bay to be tortured.”
04) “Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick: Racism Won’t End Until The Left Learns To ‘Accept Jesus’”
05) “Texas County GOP Chair Claims George Floyd Killing Was ‘Staged Event’ To Damage Trump”
06) “Oregon Police Caught On Video Collaborating With Armed White Extremists”
07) – “Facebook Reportedly Axes Right-Wing Accounts That Talked Bringing Weapons To Protests
The suspensions reportedly came the day after hundreds of employees staged a virtual walkout after Facebook decided not to flag Trump’s posts like Twitter did.”
https://nowthisnews.com/news/facebook-axes-right-wing-accounts-for-threats-against-protests
~~~
Is there a circuit of insecurity describing such contiguous instances of anxiety?
02) People are complaining about the Fox News report stating that atrocity against black people is profitable on the stock market. They are complaining that the report is racist.
But what they’re not doing is acknowledging that the report is a confirmation that the stock market itself and by extension the economic system, is deeply racist.
That the stock market and economic system are not at all objective phenomena, but they are constructed from the outset to be exploitative and racist. The system is not only gamed, in the same way that casinos and fruit machines are, but unjust and exploitative practices are deliberately built into it.
03) & 04) It’s hilarious, Christian TV host Rick Wiles is literally suggesting that military troops be deployed against protesters and that should one of those military troops be sacrificed in the conflict with protesters it would serve as a pretext to introduce martial law which would obviate the civil rights of the protesters.
So, a strategy of cunning militarisation, serving the devious Christianity of fascist theocracy.
Has the Texan Lieutenant Governor, who was suggesting that racism is contingent on the political left not accepting Jesus, neglected to note the white nationalist who murdered the congregation of an Afro-American church?
05) & 06) Another Texan administrator, this time taking a leaf out of the Alex Jones’ conspiracy playbook, calling the police killing of George Floyd, a ‘staged event’.
~~~
The deviousness of white, US Protestant and Puritan, delusions and denial, always powered and sustained by an economic extremism feeding on racism.
The jungle of white deceptions always masquerading as ‘opinions’, together with the right to such ‘opinions’.
Or, the right to not only lie, but to impose that lie on those being lied about.
This goes back to the Norman conquest of Britain and the beginning of Anglo-Saxon anti-Semitism.
Those puritans who were the most virulently anti-Semitic, who were the most deceitful, moved to the USA.
So, 01) to 07), is not just a circuit of insecurity.
It is a deliberate circle of dishonesty and communal insanity.
It is the characteristic engine of psychotic profitability and militarised economy.
THE CUNNING KALEIDOSCOPE OF PROTEAN PROTECTIONISMS!
I remember a friend in Oxford saying that he didn’t want to “know what was happening on the other side of the world!”
He was, of course, referring to the content of broadcast media, the disparate logics and demands of which could be somewhat difficult to deal with, on a personal level. The information overload of the public realm vs. the sensitivity of the personal.
Robert Sheckley’s short story, “Protection” (1956), is interpretable precisely as a metaphor of this predicament peculiar to the Information Age.
Interestingly, Sheckley explicitly links this burdensome, epistemological multiplicity of information proliferation, with the very ‘supernormal’ perspective of the validusian derg’, affording the protective advantage of the story’s title.
But the predictive advantages of ‘supernormal’ perspective are gained through a corollary lack of localisation.
Sheckley refers to the collapse of the usual logics of separation structuring geospatial experience – “”Locale means nothing to me,” the derg replied stubbornly. “My perceptions are temporal, not spatial. I must protect you from everything!”” – a similar lack of both spatial relevance and localising referential coordination as that characterising the imperial telescoping of universalisms and the ‘current affairs’, narration style, of ‘news reporting’.
The informational concentration of such telescoping universalisms and corollary currents of reportage as conveyed by electrical and electronic, communications technology – telegraph, radio, television, et cetera – unavoidably impose the structural obligations of whatever imperialisms control them.
The localised epistemology of humanistic conventions; the alien and ‘supernormal’ perspective of the ‘validusian derg’; the supernatural world of spirits; Sheckley puts all of these on a sliding scale of existential perception and attention, their respective ‘worlds’ vying for attention.
Sheckley introduces the protagonist’s concern, whilst the protagonist is conversing with the invisible, ‘validusian derg’, to not be associated with the psychopathology of imaginary voices. This is a border concern between two of those ‘worlds’, the protagonist’s attention and behaviour split between two, discrepant orders or realms, with the corresponding difficulty of adequately satisfying the obligations of both.
So, Robert Sheckley introduces psychopathology as a function of variable, worldly perception and attention, similar to Philip K Dick’s explorations in the 1960s.
The story is a casebook example of techno-theory and philosophy of technology; of sociology and perception; of both the psychology and psychopathology of inventive production, or productive invention; of ‘worlds’ as economic systems.
I didn’t mention the Internet, personal computers, or smart phones. This stage of communications technology is one in which the distinction between broadcaster and receiver has become interchangeable, which is to say that anyone with access to such technology can be both broadcaster and receiver.
Obviously, this can set the stage for the sorts of retrogressive, cultural feedback loops, witnessed in recent times.
The conflicts between them; implosions of them according to their unacknowledged, inner contradictions; the donning of them, as the repetitive and populist nostalgia of a ridiculous profusion of heavily marketed, farcical reenactments; all of these movements can be seen, as the clumsily contentious stumbling of this or that, stupid identity ‘meme’. All very much as the typical vernacular would have it.
The very jingoism declaring its global imperialism so proudly is exactly the same localism railing against the very globalism it built railways and airports to construct, the same localism producing so much ‘hot air’ nationalism.
As the ‘nationstate’ increasingly becomes merely a subfolder in the global directory structures of even the most insular of interests, it is possible to ascertain that the jingoistic West or the jingoistic Occident; unlike the protagonist in Robert Sheckley’s story lured by the offer of safety; is the very monstrosity, the monstrous character of which, it chooses always to project onto others; is the monstrosity it arbitrarily scapegoats others as being, using the very instruments of globalisation which it condemns and pretends to be a victim of and yet simultaneously, it continues to build and use, always disingenuously.
The concept of ‘fake news’ is the result of the contradictions of Western hypocrisy no longer able to hide in the hidden spaces of an obscuring, geospatial distance, such being destroyed by the instantaneous clarifications of communications technology.
Why is it that there is such an interest in encryption technology?
In order to produce new hiding spaces hosting the profits from fresh forms of exploitation!
Exploiters always enjoy the production of chaos, this is another way of hiding injustice and exploitation. It’s an ongoing style that is used to distract from and displace the recollection and formation of evidence!
THE NINE BILLION NAKED EMPERORS OF POPULIST CONSUMERISM: Consensual Circulations and the Votaries of Vanished Values
According to The Independent, Trump produced this statement:
“He also insisted to supporters: “We did nothing wrong and we have tremendous support.””
During his election campaign, Trump said that his support was such that he could get away with killing or murdering someone openly, in the street. That with respect to such ‘support’, he could do no wrong.
This link between moral determinations of right and wrong and their seemingly assumed contingency on the presence of popular support, isn’t just characteristic of Donald Trump.
It is something that has grown to increasingly characterise general culture.
Whether or not, the media culture of soap operas and reality television shows have in some way promoted social consensus as an absolute value with utter disregard for any other kind of ethical or moral determination, is a question that needs to be asked and answered.
With the growth of marketing culture seeking and inventing new desires to unleash, new affects to liberate, in their own desire to further entrench and implant their profit cycles and schemes, no other consideration seems to be left but the rule of such libidinal contrivances, the absolute enslavement to such a sovereignty of mechanised desires.
It’s always their desire to achieve market saturation. They don’t want to change that desire just because markets can get saturated, or environments can be damaged, et cetera, so they implicitly rely on the promise of infinite markets, markets of infinite extent. It’s a promise that they constantly sell; whether it’s US evangelism and dominion theology; US marketing practices, et cetera; without actually doing anything towards infrastructural fulfilment of that promise.
So it’s always about those ‘full desires’, as it were; those ‘absolute commitments to’, and ‘total coincidences with’, whatever figure of desire has been selected or is being promoted.
Superlative hyperboles; hyperbolic superlatives.
You’ll notice that lots of musicians and entertainers, when being interviewed, constantly say, “Absolutely!”
They are in accord with the mores of promotional obligation characterising the general culture or society that their promotions are directed to. It’s a cultural habit of verbal emphasis that is in line with the tacit injunctions of a hidden fundamentalism, a silent tyranny that never speaks.
Derrida had quite a lot to say about the metaphysics of such libidinal plenitude, as it were. About the rhetorics and characteristic expressions of such cults of hyper-enthusiasm; about the slippages of their signifiers and signifieds. It’s easy to observe the radical narrowness of conception characterising such cults, the characteristically dogmatic approach with which their acolytes present anything and everything; constantly territorialising and attempting to reduce all else to the dumbed-down, base terms of its radical insularity, it’s absolutist and totalitarian insularity, it’s tyranny of insularity.
Whether it’s Ayn Rand’s libertarianism, a kind of ‘politics-for-one’; L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, psychoanalysis for stupid people, which actually becomes the blueprint for the society of psychic surveillance and control, according to all the whistleblowing reports about Scientology; or in the 21st-century, things like Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology, dumbed-down, market appropriations and retreads of philosophy.
All of these are characterised by the trope of restatement according to insular assumptions and the granularised conceptions and outlooks belonging to those assumptions.
It’s a sociopolitical and sociopsychological configuration, a grid of simplistic, lcd, libidinal circulation mobilised only according to its own operations and nothing else.
Those of a supremacist ilk openly advocate policies of social iniquity and exclusion, yet cannot themselves live up to their own standards of inclusion.
Even Buddhist philosophy is falling victim to these would-be, mass-market, mandarins of mediocrity; these experts of banality resentfully attempting to colonise anything and everything beyond the limits of their insular boundary; endlessly secreting their granularised discourses of insular assumptions as the slime of an imperialising domestication.
With all of these instances of radical narrowness, there is always the excuse and justification that they are catering to those of even greater insularity and ignorance! That somehow the existence of an allegedly greater ignorance can somehow justify the promotion or propagation of an allegedly lesser ignorance?
[redacted ]”if others agree with Cranthimus that i’m some sort of crypto-Hegelian “Trumpian Buddhist” watering down Buddhism for the “stupid masses” then let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix that.”
Note how the individual predicates his-her hypothetical decision on a consensual determination (“if others agree”), when s/he ought to really know and be able to determine for him/her -self, the truth values in question.
But this seeming submission to consensus is conducted to hide the fact of numerous failures of logical discernment and objective apprehension by this promoter of a domesticated and defanged, appropriated and banalised, consumer Buddhism.
S/he produces opinionating pronouncements about various areas of Buddhist philosophy and teachings, as if those pronouncements were objective facts rather than errors based on inadequate understanding. Whenever those pronouncements are proved to be erroneous, there has never been any admission of error, of even its possibility. Instead, displays of disingenuousness are produced, irrelevant misdirections, et cetera. Such petty juggling of red herrings is usually the sign of a political promoter rather than an exploratory thinker.
(Note the misleading quotation marks of “stupid masses”, as if it was verbatim quotation, when it was actually an interpretive reduction meriting single quotes.)
For such political promoters, of Buddhism or anything else, philosophy and theory are merely pretexts for some other motivation.
For them, mistakes are never opportunities to think afresh, because they are not thinkers, they are merely calculators of social position. This is why such political promoters lack theoretical and speculative ability, because really the list of their aims was always much more basic and mundane, and self-improvement was not on that list.
Those aims are wholly taken up and exhausted by social reactivity.
Whatever brand of politicisation might be involved, the centrality of social reaction doesn’t change.
This can even be observed with the most unpleasant, All-Trite, exclusionary, and ostensibly individualist, promoters on the Internet. They constantly abuse others and indeed their platform is the justification of such abuse. But when all their arguments and positions are defeated, they straightaway appeal to the very people they abused and treated so badly – the hypocrisy is quite astounding, in a way.
There is one common denominator between most of these promoter characters – they are largely from the USA.
THE FESTIVAL OF UNANIMOUS INTENT
Interesting itinerary of internet linking produced the following associations.
On Facebook, Stephen Paul KIng’s link to the logician, Peter Smith, itself linked to this tweet by David Allen Green:
“Retweet on TwitterPeter Smith Retweeted
David Allen Green56m
Brexiter trashing of independent domestic institutions – judiciary, parliament, civil service – tells against any sincere belief in “taking back control”
Instead, it is populist nationalist authoritarianism
Arbitrary government on the back of “the will of the people”
Dangerous” ( https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1176743259579854848 )
This line:
“Arbitrary government on the back of “the will of the people” Dangerous”; by David Allen Green;
is reminiscent of this, by Jerry Pournelle:
“Read your Rousseau on the subject; his theory of the general will. The general will is the will of all, and thus if you oppose what the government says, you are really opposing your own will, and therefore you may be forced to be free, hm?”.*
David Allen Green reads “the will of the people” as “populist nationalist authoritarianism” of the political right; whilst Jerry Pournelle reads Rousseau’s concept of ‘general will’, ‘the will of all’, as the radical imposition of a possibly dubious communist ‘freedom’, of the political left.
Whether or not the same aggregates of personal voluntarism are operative or being assumed in both characterisations; whether David Allen Green’s, “the will of the people”, equates to Rousseau’s concept of ‘general will’ or ‘the will of all’, as interpreted by Jerry Pournelle, is an interesting theoretical and hermeneutic point requiring discussion.
Of course, homogeneity of the demos and its intent, of democratic assent or voluntarism, is necessarily assumed as a unified and singular, majority decision. It’s the majoritarian structure that both of the opposed political tendencies are implicitly appealing to.
So obviously, the colloquial ‘tyranny of the majority’ in both cases, coalescing around assumptions of unified and singular intent, but such an allegedly singular intent always being the result of conflict and opposition between various, plural voices, who certainly don’t seem to be celebrating any festival of unanimous intent.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* Quote taken from interview with Jerry Pournelle, in Charles Platt’s, “Dream Makers: Science Fiction and fantasy writers at work”, Xanadu Publications Ltd: 1987: pp. 17-18
“”Representative democracy is not the be-all and end-all,” he replies.
“In fact I don’t give a damn if the political system is monarchical or elective, so long as it has large areas in which it leaves me alone. And my suspicion is, by the way, that a king has less power over me than a president. Read your Rousseau on the subject; his theory of the general will. The general will is the will of all, and thus if you oppose what the government says, you are really opposing your own will, and therefore you may be forced to be free, hm? That strikes me as being the ultimate rationale for something even worse than fascism, because fascism at least understood that there are differences between people and said, basically, ‘You are going to compromise your differences and work together.’ I’m talking about Italian fascism, not German national socialism, which is an entirely different matter and was not based on any rational view of anything.
“The communist system is based on Rousseau’s ideas of the general will. The Marxists say that we’ll just eliminate all the classes but one. So I still think that fascists are considerably less enemies to traditional Western civilization than communists, so long as we clearly distinguish between German national socialism and Ibero-Italian fascism. Mussolini not only made the railroads run on time, he built them. Whatever vou want to say. Italy would probably be better off under him than it is under whatever the hell it has now.
“I don’t know, I’m not an Italian, and in many respects I have no right to an opinion on the subject; but I just look at their economic development pattern in the 1920s, starting with a much lower base than they have now. And I find that the Italian anti-fascist writers do not have the verve of the German anti-Nazi writers; they find it harder to find something to hate. I mean, the guy who makes you drink castor oil is certainly not being very nice to you, but that’s entirely different from his putting you in a goddamn camp, or cutting your balls off. or making a lamp shade out of you.
I think it is very possible that Mussolini could have made a different decision and become an ally of the West. He almost was; he kept Austria from being absorbed by Germany for many years. and could to this day be a hero. After all, Stalin is still thought of in some heroic terms. and yet that son of a bitch managed to knock off more people than Hitler ever did, and I’m not talking about during the Second World War, I mean the phony famine in the Ukraine, and all the rest of it. He racked up a score that Genghis Khan would envy.”
I break in here, to object that there can’t be many people who admire Stalin any more.”