Category Archives: NewColonial Critique

Excrement as a recording medium, of neurophysiological memory, the excremental encoding of the human, is excrementalised into the ocean; the ocean is a hydrological memory unit; excremental encoding is released into hydrological encoding (the memory of water); marine life has many functions, including those of hydrological memory unit operation;

A conspiracy reading, involving the concept of the ‘alien’, a particular form of hypostatic estrangement; this formation of the alien, intercedes at various points; the stereotypical intercessions, from the perspective of anthropomorphic sociology, are, one; unofficial interventions from the wilderness, i.e., the unknown, introduction of the anomalous within the epistemological fabric of the known; this usually involves scenarios where the general public in some way or another encounter forms of hypostatic estrangement; two; interventions of official complicity, i.e., the unknown in alliance with one or another official institution or institutions; an institution is a form of abstraction, anyway, but allegedly deriving from anthropic origination; so, an anthropic estrangement (Kafka), susceptible to affiliation with non-anthropic forms of hypostatic estrangement, or at least this is the feeling or experience of alienated, anthropic consciousness, lost in the ocean of modernity.

The stage is set, anthropic excrement as information capital, its subatomic vectorial spaces encoding the totality of human information, and exploited by hitherto unspecified aliens, through the storage mediations of oceanic, hydrological memory units. These were always a subsidiary formation of the so-called, ‘akashic records’, another hidden branch of them, located most effectively within the very medium anthropic consciousness had a tendency to reject.

The regime of Hyper-Selfishness, otherwise known as the USA, reacts to these revelations with characteristic hysteria; governments and various institutions are all accused of being in league with alien forms of hypostatic estrangement, and their collection-conspiracies of anthropic, excremental information!
New forms of legislation are brought in, according to these populist fears; excrement is no longer to be dumped outside of the spheres of individual control; vast towers of excrement arise everywhere, each US citizen, a shit shadow, ‘taller than their souls’.

New forms of social competition arise; the characteristically erroneous belief that the higher the excremental erection, the greater the level of excremental enlightenment! These heights of quantification reach ever further into the sky! All gastronomic industries receive astronomic, economic boosts! Government subsidies are piled on, just to make sure! Elaborate air freshening systems are constructed, corollary industries are created, all of which boost various markets and their profits, even further! Everyone is happy!

The relieved aliens, bored shitless by centuries of anthropic information, can at last go home, their ecological task accomplished. For it was their excrement, their waste, that came first; producing the anthropic. The anthropic, as a process of bacterial decomposition, was running out of control; producing further quantities of excrement, purely as a pretext for further decomposition. The aliens realised that their waste had produced a viral, anthropic economy, threatening to consume all in its path. Splicing the ends of that economy together, in a suture of self-sufficiency, was the ecological task they were obligated to perform.
The USA had now become entirely covered by two sorts of towers; the anthropic, itself, and its excremental ambitions; but it was difficult to discern of such a twin economy, which was the excrement, and which was the parasite? However, driven by its now sutured ambition, foundational stability became an issue, and the differentiation supporting the earlier ambiguity of attribution, began to collapse, as the anthropic and excremental ambition began to combine.
Whether or not such a collapse led to anything approaching some kind of nativist enlightenment of the anthropic, was not really a question that the exhausted aliens any longer had any interest in learning.

Nick Land doesn’t really understand anything about speed, or about the science-fiction way of looking at things. I’ve actually told him this, at least with regard to science-fiction, on his blog a few years ago. He didn’t contest the assertion. Whatever nonsense he did back in the 1990s, was already passé, two decades before. I knew that, even before starting to write in philosophical contexts.

Alvin Toffler introduced the notion of future shock at the outset of the 1970s. Bruce Sterling, the Texan science-fiction writer, radicalised that concept, giving it a considerable ‘acceleration’, whilst doing so, far beyond, incidentally, what Land and his regressive cadre were attempting to rehash, a decade after.

In the early 1990s, the original and innovative thinkers of speed, were obviously people like Paul Virilio, and Sol Yurick, who dealt with the topic, as a matter of course, quickly and without tendentious fetishisation, on his way to more interesting insights.

The primary issue or problem, is the wrong kind of regression, the mainstream commodifications of adventurous thinking that lead to simplistic and formulaic banality of the worst kinds, where liberatory insight is merely converted into callous, socialised convention; what I have often called ‘holding patterns’, in the new century.

There’s no doubt that my cultural references and assumptions are not those of the general, mainstream academia and culture, now occurring. From the perspective of those references and assumptions, that mainstream culture, almost all of it, is a backward, reactionary, and somewhat dystopically aberrant formation. I understand why, all of the considerably complex structural explanations for that formation, but it’s one that cannot be catered for, any more than has been the case. It’s a pernicious development, ‘against the grain’ of which, it’s important to go, at least somewhat. ‘Against the grain’ is a phrasal theme I produced in the last century, for precisely the pernicious eventuality I describe here.

It’s not anyone’s responsibility to lock themselves in the game of pandering explanations, in the service of deliberately recalcitrant understandings, content to rest on their backward substantialisms. Such tendencies of pernicious recalcitrance merely persist in disingenuous ignorance, choosing only to reinvent their characteristic forms of malice in whatever crevices of the new conditions they are able to perceive. If malicious consumption is the dominant sign of the times, whatever other banners it might wave and surround itself with, then it is precisely that hegemonic signification and all its expressions, that become an object susceptible to precisely the full range of transactions and operations which its insular hypocrisies have always attempted to deny.

The objectification of the victim, no matter how indirect and clothed in hypocrisy, is the objectification of the victimiser, as well. The victim has nature on its side in the form of desire for liberation, it doesn’t need the victimiser; whereas the victimiser has only the nature and need of domination, for which it requires a victim. The more intrigues and masks it throws into the abyss in pursuit of such a requirement, the more the abyss can see the victimiser’s each and every tiresome susceptibility.

Sheltering in malicious projections of its own invention, hiding in exhausted claims of undemonstrated exception, the victimiser always seeks to justify its chosen economies of victimisation. With spurious games of superficiality, the victimiser habitually evades the question of its chosen exploitations, for which it takes no responsibility, offering only to the abyss the most delicate tapestry of both its culpability and vulnerability. The question, then, is what does the abyss do with this unwanted opportunity?

The underlying rationale and rhetoric of the socially atomistic individual emerges out of Cartesian assumption, leading to inflation of corresponding structures of atomistic evaluation.

When such evaluations are of socio-economic generality, based on these general interests, rather than the richly vital fabrics of personal and community complexity, new opportunities of incentivised social division and exceptionalism arise, such imagined exceptionalisms usually attempting to naturalise themselves according to a limited stock of organic metaphors and conventions, nostalgic references to that which the innovation of exceptionalising division has simultaneously, ironically, and contradictorily, rendered obsolescent. This appeal to nature is structured by alienation at the outset, transforming every decision into a potential exploitation, converting the previously customary into a Cartesian arena of consequentialist choices susceptible to general calculation, and competitive exploitation.
The granularity of choice structuring is flexible enough to casuistically game in surreptitious ways, at the expense of one’s opponents, especially if all arenas of public debate are forcibly reduced to the simplifying terms of natural intuition and positive presentation, especially as a pre-politicised framing of prefabricated factuality.
When an economics is based on very particular, culture-specific and heavily artificed, notions of the atomised individual, that economics is weighted in favour of those notions and the characteristic divisional categories of social atomism they produce. To the degree, that such an economics can impose its functional structure on others, whether by direct or surreptitious coercions, it installs a system of culture-specific and heavily artificed exploitation.

To the extent that knowledge constitutes an economic function, it can be seen from the Atlantic article (“The Architect of the Radical Right“), that knowledge becomes a power and the value susceptible to the casuistical calculation of competitive choice structuring. Southern economist, James M. Buchanan’s, attack on the public education system, consisted of these factors:

“crux of the desegregation problem”; “state run” schools had become a “monopoly,”; “which could be broken by privatization.”; “If authorities sold off school buildings and equipment, and limited their own involvement in education to setting minimum standards, then all different kinds of schools might blossom.”; “Each parent “would cast his vote in the marketplace and have it count.”
“The argument impressed Friedman, who a few years earlier had published his own critique of “government schools,” saying that “the denationalization of education would widen the range of choice available to parents.””

The principle of encouraging educational diversity through forces of market privatisation, as against state-sponsored monolithic monopoly, through an appeal to parental choice, has the eventual effect of reducing knowledge itself to being merely a production of market forces, always constrained by the filter of market assessment. Knowledge thus becomes a mass commodity, whose only criteria of evaluation is that it sells, there is no other platform of critique. In principle, this is an oppressive conventionalising of knowledge, equivalent to any alleged tyranny of homogenising state sponsorship, but one in which market constrained, individual choice, replaces government mediations and representations of public choice.
It’s fairly obvious, though, that the private choice argument was being promoted, merely in order to reconstruct segregation by other means, economically as well as educationally. By attacking education, economic disparity could be preserved.

US Americans don’t seem to understand the complexities sufficiently, they psychologise it too much and are too positivist about it, largely revolving around intuitions of instinctual immediacy and their fulfilment, in overt, positively instrumentalising ways. This characteristic reduction of theoretical scope results in compensations of inflationary overproduction and chaos; deceptions and subterfuge; and overreliance on techniques of blatantly ‘full-spectrum domination’. It’s a hugely dangerous weakness.
But there is a logic to the production of chaos, which is to maintain a somewhat positively readable surface of indirect control or influence of what is not properly understood, through enforcement of simplifying conditions and effects, the controlled variable experimentation of behavioural manipulation, of what is believed to be understood. It’s the inevitable reduction to bog-standard, game theory, that goes along with the easy social atomisms habitually assumed by motivated exploitation, the dominant characteristic of impoverished conceptions of selfhood.

The inordinate addiction to the ideological rhetoric of choice and freedom, if allied to market production, is susceptible to infinite deferral of satisfaction, according to perpetual shifts of personal desire. The Rolling Stones expressed it very well, in “Can’t Get No Satisfaction”. The addiction follows a libidinal logic, bouncing metonymically around its spectacular commodity maze in search of some unspecified ‘freedom’ it can never quite seem to attain. Those mechanisms are known very well, there is no need to turgidly elaborate them.
But it is this addiction, that in the last century I called ‘resource addiction’, which is the general motivation behind exploitation. It reproduces itself, through a sustained complicity powered by the mutual discrepancy between ideology and behaviour. The motivic power derives from the sustained tension of this discrepancy.

Any imagination of ideologically determinate source, immediately gives rise to installation within the dialectics of such determination, forever in search of coincidence with that imaginary determination, according to the endless routes of resource. There is no way out of that endless road system, if it’s imaginary has displaced the development of other possibilities, all of which it instantly converts into further positive commodities and ideological determinations, on the road. This is an autobahn of the absolute, the metaphysics of motorway, the hegemonic highway of commodified desire.

That system of metaphysical transportation, the libidinal circuitry of desire, gives rise to all the nostalgia circulations and distributions necessary to its further constitutive realisation.

If Hells Angels originate from army motorcyclists of World War II, then the hell of the battlefield transposes itself into a particular subcultural emphasis of primal desires and appetites, all of which can be put into motion, and released according to the profitable celebration of various commodity controls, the totemic expense of heavily customised motorcycles, etc.. “Born to Be Wild”, in which ‘lawless’ oases and scenarios of primal exchange are offered, distributed designer theatres of freedom, dotting the routes to freedom.
But, on the hegemonic highway of desire; motion, the feeling of motion; in and of itself, comes to innately signify freedom. For it is this motion, the transport itself, that carries the self from scene to commodified scene, whose precise nature of liberation consists only in the impulsive transitions between commodity scenes enabled by that transport. To the extent, that the self is caught up in the tension-producing, oppressive relations of libidinal circuitry production, there is a corresponding release of tensions on the nostalgia circuits of consumption through impulsive transition. The torments of production Hell, transfigured by the impulses of scenic Heaven, these perhaps are the post-traumatic conditions, following World War II, of such a ‘transitional freedom’, as they occur through the therapeutic market spontaneity of libidinal circuitry?

Black Sabbath – Heaven & Hell

(The lyrics seem to be quite heavily susceptible to ideological interpretation)

If social atomism and alienation are mutual corollaries, calling each other into existence according to a defining Cartesian necessity, it is perhaps too easy to fit religious, lifestyle, cultural identity, and other playable factors into a system of mutual compensations, proceeding according to the theatrical gameplay of a travelling roadshow, fuelled by the exploitations of resource addiction. But does such an ease symbolise, and define, an important truth? One perhaps hinted at by by JL Borge’s “The Lottery of Babylon”?

In response to this – https://www.facebook.com/owenjones84/videos/596744154004309/

Exploitations of national sentiment and exacerbations of xenophobic anxiety, using Margaret Thatcher’s market survey techniques put in the context of real-time algorithmic manipulation, continue to drive the contemporary political scene.
All these fictions of unease are produced by a calculus of crafty coercions, the simplifying mechanics of the mass image. What M John Harrison called “a thousand and one labyrinthine excursions beneath the political crust” (“Settling the World” (1975) M John Harrison), has now turned into hyper-visible spectacles of online confusion. It’s all there, easy to see, but vested interests, stupidity, and bigotry, are the new forms of obscurity, no secret services necessary.

Concerning Jeremy Corbyn’s restraint concerning Russia, the British public have to decide whether they appreciate the simplifying rhetoric of strong and stupid statements, or thoughtful and considerate ones. It’s nice to resolve situations quickly, but correctness is another essential attribute: anyone can do quick stupidity, even Boris Johnson, as has been noted.
Conmen usually use speed in order to facilitate their deceptions, global politics is certainly no different, in this respect.

Steve Bannon, setting up offices in Brussels, in order to influence European elections, is no different, really, to Russian interventions in the USA, through Facebook manipulations. The irony, of course, is the point and proponents of anti-globalist arguments, being undermined by their resorting to various right-wing, international alliances and techniques of manipulation, lol.

In the inordinate concern with frames, these days, it seems that pictures are entirely neglected, simply taken for granted. This is the typical, tunnel vision of instrumentalist thought, that narrative theories were questioning; but the fundamental mediocrity of political intellect never really changes, for its practitioners the framing becomes the positivist picture, and the picture is simply forgotten.