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SEE(ING THROUGH) SHELLS OF REPRESENTATION
Back in the 1980s, I wrote that, “we all live in Aristotle’s mind”, which is to say that his grid of classifications and categories form the default template of the entire Occidental culture, and all the subcultures arraigned under its rubric.
The Indian philosophical tradition has all of the Greek within it, but quite a lot more, as well. If that tradition was never truly engaged with, by the Occident, kept at varying degrees of exoticising distance, it nevertheless directly captured both ancient Greece, with scepticism; Europe, with the number system; and the modern logic of Anglo-American modernity, with Navya Nyaya logic.
Scepticism, mathematics, and modern logic, all directly derive from an Indian source.
Given that derivation, it can equally be said, that “we all live in an Indian source”.
Exclusively monolinear rationalisations of substantial assumption have a tendency to habitually exploit schemas, configurations, and associations of element distribution, whatever the base elements are held to be in the field of consideration, that only derive from simply assumed ranges of positivist use or utility. In other words, the loci of interest are always, whether overtly or secretly, utilitarian; derived from utilitarian imagery, from pictures of conventional anthropic practice. This has the effect, in those who follow such rationalisations, of always restraining theoretical mobility to this subliminal metaphoric of habitually monolinear utility.
This is not just language as incessant representation.
The notion of representation is easily susceptible to semantic expansions, to the extent that any sign, signifying in any way, whatsoever, can be said to be ‘representational’; in that it re-presents, at least, the signifying operation of its identity as sign; and the function of its signified, whatever its operand, so to speak, whether a traditional, worldly referent is involved or not. Similarly, for the referential function, irrespective of whether or not actual references are involved.
Of course, the notion of presentation ‘itself’, in advance of any assumed repetition of ‘it’, as an ‘identity’, would be sufficient to bring representation into question, ‘showing’ its conventionality.
There’s nothing at all necessarily wrong with representation or reference. The practices and notions of representation and reference, in and of themselves, are not the problem. But they are a problem, there is a necessity of wrongness, when they’re done badly.
Some of the characteristics of exclusively substantial representation; of blocked, substantive rationalisations whose exclusive raison d’etre is always some mystical mishmash of utility; are its failures to achieve multidimensional clarity, due to the hasty impatience of a monomaniacal mindset limited only to the dogmatic modality of positivist pursuits. This leads to the hysteria of positivist limitation and production, whose time compressions and addictive need for the ecstasies of immediate resolution, displace genuine concern for the complexities of theoretically wide-ranging, verbal mediation; leading to a stylistics of telegraphic reduction of expression, attempting to compensate for its theoretical impoverishment through incessant metonymic appealings towards scenarios of conventional intuition. This continues the movement of reduction under the guise of the most moderate of multidimensional considerations. Merely switching and shuttling constantly, between heavily conventionalised mediums, usually offering this revelation of banal transcendences as a compensation for complexities it is either too lazy or too stupid to engage. This, of course, constitutes the disingenuous appeal of a Wittgensteinian ‘show and tell’, or ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’. One in which positivist dishonesty desperately casts about in every conventional medium to which it has ignorant access, in order to put on a shell game, or a ‘shell show’, of compensations circling from convention to convention, in its hysterical festival of banal substitutions. These are the prevarications of the philosophical hawk or hawker, and it isn’t difficult to know which parts of the world, and which types of people, they primarily originate from. This professionalisation of ‘profitability’ consists entirely of competence in producing monolinear results in environments of multidimensional contingency, but wholly at the expense of those environments, and according to the structure of the ‘shell game ‘, where the pea of profit is secretly inserted, only under the conman’s profiteering cup.
So it’s not representation, per se, that in and of itself necessarily leads to the closures of dogmatic substantialism; but it is a certain practice of representation; a quite misplaced, because over generalised, and exclusively held, positivist economics of reduction. The very disciplinary fanaticism of frugality, as an idealisation stemming from deprivation anxiety, serves as hegemonic horizon for an always hallucinated positivist closure. This fixation ineluctably leads to a ‘semantics of stone’.
MORONS OF MESOPOTAMIA: the OCCIDENTAL POSITIVIST AND ONTOLOGICAL SUBSTANCE ADDICTS OF BEING (MORE ‘ONS’)
If India was ‘contaminated’ by ideologies of naturalised social iniquity, we know exactly where those ideologies originated from, the Occident. Occidental culture, began with sovereignty and authoritarianism, right at its root, in Mesopotamia.
The Indus Valley Civilisation, proto-India, was engaged in trade with Mesopotamia, and that, no doubt, was the vector for the infection of iniquitous, social relations, being the osmotic origin of subsequent developments such as the caste system, which was the mode of socialisation by which succeeding waves of Occidental settler-invaders, such as the Persians, Greeks, and so on, sub-colonially inserted themselves, often militarily, into Indus Valley-Indian culture, producing Vedic India.
Occidental incursions were attracted to Indus Valley-India, primarily because of its accumulations of material wealth. Occidental greed was the motivating factor for a continuing, 4000 year cycle, of Occidental depredations.
Does Karl Marx, the product of Occidental ideology, seriously have anything to say, to Indus Valley-India culture, concerning egalitarian ideas? Especially considering the following:
“Although some houses were larger than others, Indus Civilisation cities were remarkable for their apparent, if relative, egalitarianism. All the houses had access to water and drainage facilities. This gives the impression of a society with relatively low wealth concentration, though clear social levelling is seen in personal adornments.[clarification needed]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation?oldformat=true#Authority_and_governance
“Authority and governance
Archaeological records provide no immediate answers for a centre of power or for depictions of people in power in Harappan society. But, there are indications of complex decisions being taken and implemented. For instance, the majority of the cities were constructed in a highly uniform and well-planned grid pattern, suggesting they were planned by a central authority; extraordinary uniformity of Harappan artefacts as evident in pottery, seals, weights and bricks; presence of public facilities and monumental architecture; heterogeneity in the mortuary symbolism and in grave goods (items included in burials).[citation needed]
These are the major theories:[citation needed]
There was a single state, given the similarity in artefacts, the evidence for planned settlements, the standardised ratio of brick size, and the establishment of settlements near sources of raw material.
There was no single ruler but several cities like Mohenjo-daro had a separate ruler, Harappa another, and so forth.
Harappan society had no rulers, and everybody enjoyed equal status and hence some type of Democracy.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation?oldformat=true#Authority_and_governance
Without Indian influences on Greek philosophy, and on European modernity, there would have been no Karl Marx. There’s a phrase about “selling sand in the Sahara”, that’s quite apt for Marx’s naive disquisitions on social equality regarding India. Marx, like so many other Western thinkers, was condemned to always recapitulate the background of default, Occidental banditry, as patronising projections of ridiculously ignorant, Occidental ideology.
THE LITHOMANCY OF OCCIDENTAL ANXIETY
Has anyone written on contemporary dialogical conditions, any better than Adorno!? They’ve had decades to be able to do so.
The picture (Lee Ufan, Relatum – Discussion, 2003), is a great visual resonance, very apt.
It’s bringing to mind some of the themes I was working on, back in the early 1990s, one of which I’ve surreptitiously, ‘tactically’ even, continued on my blog.
The notion of calculation, of calculi or calculus; literally, pebbles; was one of the themes I explored back in the early 1990s, in various contexts. It links directly to the l.c.d. (‘Lowest Common Denominator’/ ‘liquid-crystal display’) theme, developed back then or earlier, but which I’ve used this century on my blog, though somewhat allusively, somewhat lucidly. The ‘allusive’ element arises due to the earlier, originating context, informing contemporary expressions conditioned by that origination, but not specifying or explicating it.
Similarly, with the concept of the ‘monument’, the monumental and the ‘micro-monumental’. The ‘micro-monumental’, of course, links up with the l.c.d. theme.
It’s interesting to note that writing on tablets of stone, or clay (baked stone?), characterises more strongly the cultural developments of the Occident, Mesopotamia and perhaps ancient Egypt. The Indus Valley did produce the ‘seal’, but it would be an easy speculation to suggest that as this artefact of endurance was used in trade; and if the bulk of that trade was for export; then the Indus Valley seal represents a hybrid concession to Occidental metaphysical need.
If the Occident is governed by this metaphysical need, by a temporal anxiety assuaged with the lithic mediations of mnemonic and recollective technologies; does it become a servant of such ‘stoned’ deferral? Does this organic anxiety transition the entire Occident into being a merely necessary function and expression, of a dialectics of the lithic and monumental?
In an effort to answer this, the Occident puts its hands in the pockets of its fashionable attire (another system of deferral), digitally manipulating pebbles, from pocket to pocket, round and round like rosary beads, in calculations and determinations, without end.
These are the manipulations of monumentation, so caught up in its binary contests and theatrick plays of self-encryption, that all vitality is reduced to a ‘factor’, directed towards asymptotic calculation of an alleged ‘freedom’ never actually lived, but always displaced by those very computations. The endlessly deferred lava of life, bearing its crystalline burdens of micro-monumentation, through channels of, and on, the l.c.d. screen, always according to a semantics of stone.
HEIDEGGERIAN MONSTROSITY: FACTORS OF FRICTION
It’s been a cliche for a long time, for the Occident to talk about war being a driver of technology. To whatever extents, that might be true or false, and one could say that obviously in military contexts emphasising war, such a declaration can only be a self-fulfilling truism. Not because of some exclusive and essential link between war and techne, but merely because all things develop out of their own necessities, including war.
Given the emphasis of such cultural militarisation, together with all its celebratory paeans of contentious regimentation, why not philosophically thematise those factors of friction in fiction?
That’s something Heraclitus didn’t neglect.
HEIDEGGERIAN MONSTROSITY
Basically, there is a sense in which ‘Western metaphysics’ is technology or techne. Heidegger perhaps saw that in a certain kind of way, which explains some of the affinities and parallels with ‘Eastern thought’, that he himself began to broach (“Letter to a Japanese Friend”, etc). But he did add, that the West couldn’t simply ‘turn Japanese’; that there was a specifically Western destiny, and development.
I can see why he would think that, and there’s easily various levels on which he can be considered to be correct. But I do wonder, much more recently, whether his assumption is merely the arbitrary root of the movement of Western exceptionalism? Both the founding inauguration and identification enabling the geographic to produce such an allegedly distinct cultural emergence.
Because, it would be quite easy to look at it all in a different way; the West, as a mere movement of implementations, implementations of ideas belonging to Oriental origination, thus as stages of oriental continuity; or as Hegel might have put it, of the spirit of the East.
I could deconstruct all of that, of course, but to do it effectively and thoroughly, Western cultural- philosophical resources are insufficient.
Of course, Heidegger must’ve had subconscious premonitions of Indus Valley Civilisation precedence! He was able to intuit, but without any form of understanding, the emergence of my ‘General Conceptual Holography’, and its continuation of that precedence! Of that there can be no doubt!
His publication, of “Letter to a Japanese Friend”, was a tactic of confrontation through the deliberate deferral of slight, but significant, misdirection. This was Heidegger’s gesture of philosophical reconnaissance, attempting to establish Occidental opposition further east from the Indus Valley, both as a kind of lassooing strategy, and due to his lack of the necessary conceptual resources required to attack the contemporary philosophical formations originating from Indus Valley culture!
Of this simplistic ruse, despite the obligatory immersal in yogic distances, I was well aware! Not wishing to be caught up in contingency actions involving tiresome engagements with the turgid, ontological forces under Heidegger’s command, I withdrew whatever few battalions of ancillary attention had been devoted to, what was after all, merely a German farmer’s peculiar obsession, in order to continue with developments more profoundly significant than Bavarian ‘Being’! Without neglecting it all together, however, as such deep neglect would merely empower it into a monstrosity of festering facticity!
URBAN VERBAL PRODUCTION
Guðjón, sometimes one has to expand the notion of ‘following’ away from the usual, default protocols, of sense or meaning production, in order to make room for other kinds of expression.
Years ago, when playing in Oxford, there was a somewhat eccentric lady, often walking around the city centre, who would hold loud conversations with herself, whilst listening to music on headphones. I seen other similar characters, in London. Usually, these people are seen as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’, constituting them as marginalised figures in urban life.
What was highly noticeable, was the preponderance of references to media circulation, within their verbal productions. References to celebrities, news topics, anything at all! The alleged craziness or madness was actually a mediation of media circulations, and this I found highly significant. Because there was a kind of ‘production’ going on, and that production was thoroughly determined by the encounter with mediated significances not marginalised as craziness or madness. There seemed to be a complicity at work, one which questioned the conventions of each of the elements constituting that complicity.
Apparently, there are quite a a lot of people who do talk to themselves, not in the sense of the people mentioned above, publicly and loudly, but to themselves, in private. This phenomenon, it seems to me, could suggest many things. Conventionally speaking, the obvious and sarcastically humorous implication, would be to talk about a sliding scale or slippery slope of sanity/insanity.
But I don’t think that that is what is going on.
Another anecdote: I remember being in the Marble Arch, KFC, in London. There was an Afro-Caribbean man, in his 30s or 40s, talking to himself; not loudly or too quietly, just normally. He was having quite a good self-conversation. After a while, I actually talked to him, and he instantly went into a normal mode, and we had a good conversation, though I don’t remember what it was about. I do remember that he was actually a very intelligent man, well balanced, by no means could he be classified as crazy.
The city is an urban machine, a semi-organic mechanism of intersecting forces, configured according to multiple conceptual images susceptible to topical presentation. Out of the profusion of those topical regulations, verbal production cannot help but express, at least partially, its conditions of production. It seems to me, that however such productions might be classified; whether marked as marginalised or privileged; significant or senseless; relevant or irrelevant; these markings, themselves, are merely the continuations of the productions that they attempt to categorise. I think that a lot more than this, is at play.
POLITICS IS OVER, NO MORE POLITICS
Politics is over, no more politics.
Politics requires a polity, citizenry with regards to a state.
The notion of a state is transforming. No longer does it conform only to geographical singularity of location, because the cultural markings of its former constitutions, its languages and laws, its people and their customs, all these have dispersed through various forms of technological osmosis into a global system, wherein, though they attempt to recover the localised flavour of their former connections, they are unable to do this without resorting to detours beyond the very traditional borders that they try to recuperate.
The nationstate as a geocultural form has broken loose from the moorings of locational experience, becoming so many fragments in an electro-globalised flow.
This flow has no borders, not even ‘global’ ones, and thus cannot produce sufficient geocultural delimitation to constitute a nationstate, even though such may continue on as repetitions, Doppler effects of geocultural memory within the overall information flow.
CULTURAL IMAGES IN CYBERNETIC WINDS AT THE END OF HISTORY
Feudal nobility versus trading merchants who work with the world.
This falls into the classic pattern of the master/slave dialectic of Kojeve and Marx.
The slave overthrows the master through worldly power; in conventional terms, business, colonialism, et cetera, produced cash to pay armies and finance military rebellions.
The nobility then made concessions, lessening taxes, and so on, which rerouted resources from Royal appointed mercantilisms to the eventually enlightenment and modernist organisations of bourgeois capitalism.
If those mercantilisms were organised according to feudal or royalist hierarchy, the eventually modernist organisations required a different organising principle, not based on such hierarchy.
If royalist hierarchy had its origins in ability to provision efficient protection and provisioning of kingdoms, the new, eventually modernist, organisations were then obligated to function as a likewise or preferably better provisioning force, but one whose principles of organisation were more palatable to those that it organised; all this, if it was to effectively supersede feudal organisation.
Universality was the instrument used to garner the widest support, enabling bigger armies to be paid, more influence to be bought. This partial power grab from the ruling nobility was predicated on an ecumenical appeal, one that was articulated and deployed using the concentration of sociopolitical, military, and monetary forces at the command of merchantry.
Casting a universal net was always the best way of achieving quantitative force (the masses). Qualitative force (forms of activity concentration as nodes of network control), always had to rely on networks of relative, quantitative assent; or at least, not generate destabilising, quantitative dissent. If the qualitative forces, of ruling polarities, could not secure such more or less consensual networks, influence, power, and perhaps revenues, were considerably diminished. To the extent, that any conflicts between ruling polarities risked susceptibility to the question of whether or not such quantitative networks had been secured. It was out of this theatre of conflicting forces that the ideology of democratic universalism quite naturally emerged, as the simplest protocol of personalisation required for network efficiency. From a wider perspective, in no way could it seriously be considered an innovation, instead it was just a replay of a prior spiritual movement. The movement of ideological homogenisation had already been set by Christianity, itself a replay of anticolonial trauma, a replay conveying both imperial and colonised elements, a narrative pattern of irresolution itself perhaps eminently suitable as a therapeutic configuration applicable to all the travails of Occidental expansion, one calculated to appeal to all affected parties?
If the romanisation of the West familiarised the Occident with the experience of centralised administration and law, albeit from a polytheistic, spiritual base; Christianisation was that law as a universal projection, from a monotheistic, spiritual base, albeit, in Tridentine form.
The more sophisticated a network becomes, the more crucial does every node of its operation likewise become. Building in redundancy is costly enough; too much, is exorbitant.
Looking at the Earth as a site of global production, the immediate and interim task would be to generate as many exploratory tendencies as is possible. This is the injunction of variety, having a sufficiently wide spectrum of possibilities already inhabited and tested by experience, as a repository of future responses to unknown challenges. Under the sign of this injunction, no development can be underestimated, no culture can be dismissed. It is not the case, that there is any final arbiter of judgement or justification, in these matters; that it might be a case of either local or global appeal, whether in the political or any other sense. All of these categories are merely part of an ongoing process, one which requires further exploration before absolute, categorical fenceposts are dogmatically installed. From an operational outlook, such limitations of thought are a luxury that the alleged ‘species’ cannot yet afford.
Giving inordinate emphasis to anthropic culture of status and vanity wars, as an alleged driver of technological progress, is getting to seem ridiculous in an era where that culture obstructs said progress as much as it might be said to produce it. The reflex actions of ‘profitability’ have long been in counterintuitive excess of its usual, positivist, and hackneyed, justifications. Partisan rationales of all types continue to be trotted around as likely candidates of mass allegiance, so many would-be stallions of secure expediency in some hypothetical ‘race’ whose actual course no one has ever found.
Ideologies of progress require directions, about which there is mutual consent; the lack of which, given the absence of unquestionable, universal values; therein; resides the nub of the issue at stake.
Is survival enough, if that survival is hamstrung by an ingrained, genetic masochism, or cultural programming, whose parameters of a symbolic economy of ‘sweat’, ‘ground’, and ‘dust’, eventuate in the wrong kind of work ethic, one which actually obstructs free play, invention, and healthy innovation? If Baudrillard is right, that ‘work’, or ‘labour’, given its increasing dispensability to contemporary production scenarios, is actually a privilege that the worker could or should pay for, what fate for that Protestant work ethic, once so valued for its link to prosperity?
If qualitative force was once valorised for its ability to fend off competitors in the race of increasing provision for both itself and the quantitative masses, what value does it have when it can no longer do this, or when it elects to engage in partisan provision, in exclusive, non-universal ways? Is this backtracking from universal ambitions, exploitations, and responsibilities, a failure? Was the whole thing only ever a ‘Ponzi scheme’; a scam; a vast, historical heist? ‘Modernity’, merely a network aftereffect of the concentrated techno-compartmentalisations of such greed? One in which as much was lost, as gained? These questions accompany any and all historical change, and have no single answer; perspectives of evaluation multiply to the extent of producing potentially incommensurable narratives.
This is an age, perhaps like any other age, where nostalgias of all types make strong claims. But the danger of producing such nostalgias in ‘surround-sound’; in high-definition holography; and in the thematic repetitions of a gaming culture leaking its contrived ludicity beyond the borders of its productions into the wider, so-called ‘world’; all these developments are relatively new, the seeming reconfiguration of a historical womb or matrix, into which a culture that has perhaps lost its hubris seems to be retreating, perhaps unable to face the challenges it once so confidently faced.
Or it could simply be that the epistemological overflow resulting from what has been called ‘information overload’, exceeds traditional anthropic configurations, and modes of application, of knowledge? That a new episteme is necessary in order to effectively manage the unruly proliferation of data silos? This is not a new problem, neither is it entirely unanticipated:
~~~~~~~~~~
“Carmody essayed a feeble joke. is this any way to run a galaxy?’ he asked.
Well, how did you, expect us to run it? We’re only sentient, you know.’
‘I know,’ Carmody said. But I had expected that here, at Galactic Centre -‘
‘You provincials are all alike,’ the Clerk said wearily. Filled with impossible dreams
of order and perfection, which are mere idealized projections of your own incompletion. You should know by now that life is a sloppy affair, that power tends to break things up rather than put things together, and that the greater the intelligence, the higher the degree of complication which it detects. You may have heard Holgee’s Theorem; that Order is merely a primitive and arbitrary relational grouping of objects in the chaos of the universe, and that, if a being’s intelligence and power approached maximum, his coefficient of control (considered as the product of intelligence and power, and expressed by the symbol ing) would approach minimum – due to the disastrous geometric progression of objects to be comprehended and controlled outstripping the arithmetic progression of Grasp.'”
Robert Sheckley, “Dimension Of Miracles” (1968)
In addition:
“These were the innocent days before the problem became acute. Later, Index runs were collected in Files, and Files in Catalogs – so that, for example, C3F5I4 meant that you wanted an Index to Indexes to Indexes to Indexes which was to be found in a certain File of Files of Files of Files of Files, which in turn was contained in a Catalog of Catalogs of Catalogs. Of course, actual numbers were much greater. This structure grew exponentially. The process of education consisted solely in learning how to tap the Rx for knowledge when needed. The position was well put indeed in a famous speech by Jzbl to the graduates of the Central Saturnian University, when he said that it was a source of great pride to him that although hardly anybody knew anything any longer, everybody knew how to find out everything.”
(Draper, Hal. “Ms fnd in a lbry.” Fantasy and science fiction, Dec (1961).)
My own, “The Administrations of The Infinite” (http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=686), further explores the predicament:
“However, because of the decontextualised nature of ‘cyberspace’, the degree of abstraction from the flow of ‘background life cues’, as it were, is greater. The increased abstraction enables a space wherein all possible ‘objectifications’ render as pure possibilities. Such a space, being conducive to ‘pure’ intellectual consideration, enhances the range of considerable possibilities to infinity: the task of navigating the infinite is endless, without final objectification. It is essentially the task of a writer. One is being asked to author one’s own life as an object in a general ontological system. “
“As the so called ‘world’, ‘itself’, dissolves into its ‘own’ possibilities, as one ontological habitat or another, pronounces its wary, self-interested, structural verdict, at every step of an abyyssal dissolution it tries to objectify as ‘elsewhere’, but which its very actions essentially constitute, the lecturer’s predicament is truly that of everyone and every ‘objective’.”
~~~~~~~~~~
The usual responses to information proliferation are various ideologies of necessity, and then ideologies of selective use and preference, in short, the specific and subjective question: “What do you want?”
Given that the notion of the subject is equally applicable, potentially, to any form of decision-making agency; whether a conventional ‘organic individual’, a ‘peoples’ (under whatever ‘collective’ rubric), a polity, corporation, or some other form of institution, to say nothing of possible ‘artificial intelligences’; the stage is effectively set for each and every one of those differentiated ‘subjects’ to engage in declarative interchange, according to network protocols they themselves propose.
Looking beyond the insularities of vision and perspective, the partisanship of purposes, all the ironies of global variety being compressed into electronic simultaneity. The resulting intermittent conditions of anthropic experience, oscillating between the parochiality of the local and the technological synthesis of the global, produces an abyss of possibilities no longer bound by the usual anthropic conventions of history.
The gates have been opened, for all insularities to disappear into each other and themselves, and perhaps even for insularity itself to disappear, leaving only a vast, global anxiety; one which no wishful plane of insularity can flatten; one which stretches in all directions; a multidimensional, epistemological environment surrounding each and every insularity attempting unilinear imperialism, in which every conquest or acquisition, is simultaneously a deprivation.
This is a new scenario, a world, if ‘world’ it be, where those who wish to lose themselves, find themselves; and those who wish to find themselves, lose themselves. A world where Socrates’s injunction to “Know Thyself!”, displaces every wishful and insular self-image, to reveal a fractal and fluctuating, processual core, stretching into the unknown. From this perspective, the earlier mentioned development of ‘surround-sound’, nostalgia-cocoons, is perhaps no surprise. The price paid by any insular ignorance with global ambitions, but unable to meet its global responsibilities. When imperial desire is not matched by imperial knowledge; when exploitation is the only epistemological relation; the ongoing production of horror, for which one’s own imperial allegiances are responsible; is quite naturally a scenario that the insular wish to block out and hide.
ON ONEIRIC ECONOMY: THE TRANSACTION OF DREAMY EQUIVALENCES
Trump and Bannon, through ‘Cambridge Analytics’, are using the ‘Kosinski’ algorithm, which is just an updated data analysis technique, of the ‘markey survey’ type that enabled Thatcher and Reagan to win power in the last century. The irony is that through the ‘Kosinski’ algorithm, the USA is essentially governing itself, through its online behaviours, and wherever else data sets are sourced from. This self-governance tracks desires in ‘real-time’, the results controlling the delivery and logic of Trump’s public statements. It’s a libidinal economy of desires; an oneiric one, governed by dream. I wrote about this oneiric economics, back in the early 1990s.
It’s truly ‘consumer-driven’, as they say, a true reflection of the people. Because of this, it generates the responses typical of social hypocrisy; horror; displacement and projection of horror onto others; and entrenched identification with horror, universalising the horror as unavoidable, in order to justify the identification.
When a so-called ‘culture’ has no self-understanding, it loses confidence; and when the misunderstood forces of its emergence are spent, because of this lack of self-understanding, it looks to nostalgic repetition for replenishment.
The dominant sign of economy is no longer even ‘consumption’, but rather, that of ‘dream’. That consumer desire is retained, as a powerful motivic force, but does not at all displace its circulations and configurations according to oneiric hegemony.
Under the sign of oneiric hegemony; ‘industry’, ‘consumption’, ‘virtue’, ‘morality’, ‘reality’, and even ‘identity’; all of these are forms of capital, in the dominant oneiric economy.
[Originally appeared, March 4th, 2017 at 6:21 pm; http://www.xenosystems.net/the-sad-left/#comment-311892]
PATCHY CLARIFICATIONS: WICKED PLANTINGS OF WOULD-BE TRADITIONS – STILTED, QUILTED, QUILLETTE – THE STRAINED MEDIOCRITIES OF MOULDY BUGS
Clarification was necessary, only because your reading was based on your own positivist assumptions rather than what was actually written.
I’m not expounding ‘from’ Neoreactionary works, I’m challenging the entire Neoreactionary ideology; its uses of pre-existent ideas; its logic and construction; all of it really.
Of course, I’m serious, I have my reasons for making such a claim. And, as yet, you haven’t actually demonstrated that my challenges are actually mistaken.
You’re more than welcome to create a cult around Neoreactionary nonsense, but don’t expect it not to be challenged. If you resort to juvenile levels of prevarication, more akin to a Scientology justification, don’t expect that not to be noticed as a weakness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Neoreaction clearly stipulates ‘exit’ as a foundational strategy constituting patchwork’s appeal. This clearly necessitates ‘open borders’ enabling restrictionless ‘exit’.
Without restrictionless ‘exit’, some kind of ‘slavery’ obtains, the charge of ‘cathedralism’ can be levelled at Neoreaction’s patchwork system, and Neoreaction is undermined by the implications of one of its own central tenets.
The concept of exit has as much right to the phrase ‘open borders’, and its logical implications, as any other concept.
The originating article, uses ‘open borders’ with respect to both ‘entry’ and ‘exit’. That may be what you’re assuming as the positivist, received sense of the phrase; a building block that you take for granted, perhaps, without being fully aware of the logical implications at play. Evidently so, if Neoreaction proscribes the universal entry condition whilst simultaneously promoting the universal exit condition.
If the respective sets of entry criteria constituting patchwork states follow strict essentialising logics, to the point of all states of the patchwork system becoming mutually exclusive; then, assuming the patchwork system has global coverage in terms of both territory and people, a state of entropic population distribution is reached wherein full allocation according to all prevailing sets of state entry criteria has been satisfied, from the perspective of those states and their criteria. Full allocation, from the perspective of mutually exclusive sets of state entry criteria, would entail a distributional achievement of those criteria, which, if they are mutually exclusive, prevents any further entries. As that distributional achievement is global, likewise, entry prevention is global, too. If entry prevention is global, exit is impossible.
Neoreaction could respond with the objection that the achievement of full allocation renders further entry and exit entirely unnecessary, as all relevant factors have been adequately classified. Furthermore, if confronted with the argument of an idealised state of globally adequate classification being susceptible to stasis, stagnancy, and degradation; Neoreaction would of course argue that the classification is based on ‘real conditions’, being constructed to more adequately meet the challenges of those conditions. That might be the claim, belief, and assumption, but it is far from being demonstrated.
Basing patchwork states on prevailing ideological categories, in order to let them fight it out in a corporate-Darwinian scenario, is no more really than a tawdry attempt at hosting traditional ideological consumerism, in a kind of computer game scenario.
It may reflect contemporary conditions and their banal receptions, at least somewhat, but it does not effectively anticipate the shapes of things to come.
Nick Land recommends increased differentiation, but the increase in differentiation, if proceeding according to the restrictive teleological tendencies of state entry criteria, would entail only restrictive innovation according to the involution of those criteria. If those state entry criteria were, for any reason, to be compromised by forms of expediency, this necessarily shows the inadequacy of those criteria, in real terms. If the expediencies call upon the characteristic resources of excluded sets of state criteria, this undermines the entire rationale of Neoreactionary patchwork organisation at a fundamental level.