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THE POSTMODERN PEASANT: ALL-TRITE BARBARIANS OF MODERNITY
Peasant revolts were always common in Europe. From feudal-nobility cruelty and exploitation, to colonial-military cruelty and exploitation. The feudal kingdom was a feeding ground for nobility; the colony was a feeding ground for burghers and peasants.
Strangely, one never hears any complaints from so-called ‘white nationalists’, about the 50 billion a year France receives from its erstwhile, colonial interests, in Africa.
Equally strangely, those areas in the southern USA, more heavily and historically involved in slavery, continue to be places of increased racial tensions. If we look around the world, it can often be observed that those peoples who had increased reliance on the slavery and exploitation of other peoples in the past, continue to be the agitators and terrorists of the present.
Modernity has seen large sections of the nobility often reduced to poverty. Under the pressures of commercial capitalism, ‘stately homes’ had to be opened to the public, or even sold off, the titled owners moving into ‘council houses’, etc..
These changes, by and large, provoked no unrest in the mass majority. Just as colonial exploitations abroad, from which the mass majority ultimately benefited, were conveniently ignored, or justified according to various modernist grounds, that is to say, European exceptionalist grounds.
Ironically enough, though, the globalisation of those same grounds now provokes hypocritical reactions from the mass majority along the lines of the very anti-colonial arguments that they either ignored or rejected in the past.
When exploiters are disenfranchised and unable to retrieve their self-conferred exceptionalist status, in ways sufficiently satisfying and pleasing to themselves, they become nostalgic for the historical iniquities and hierarchies that did so provision that status. Unable to create or innovate newly successful self-images, they agitate for the return of colonial mythology and its comforting portraits of jingoist victories.
DEPREDATORY AND DISINGENUOUS MOVEMENTS OF EXPLOITATION
The entire abstract, merely begs the question of normativity, deferring it to some assumed notion of good sense which merely needs to be excavated out of the alleged realm of “originary proto-ethical normativity”.
Objectification itself; what gets objectified; how ‘it’ gets objectified; why ‘it’ gets objectified; all these constituting reifications emerge out of an aetiology implicated with the ethical from the get-go!
Ethical consideration, where morality or moralis is custom, the customary; can be considered to be moral reflexivity, the consideration of customs, in light of different customary notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In this sense, what is being spoken of is a
‘moral calculus’ with respect to objective conditions.
Objective conditions, in simplified form, are commonly represented by prima facie conventions (“adequacy conditions”). But those conventions are not the conditions that they are held to spring from, through allegedly referential relations. The desire for simplicity of reference is susceptible to casuistical complication.
The casuistical gaming of moral calculations is enabled by disingenuous shiftings and reframings of prima facie conventions through systematic and differential bias of objective representations supporting those conventions.
For any set of prima facie conventions, an infinite number of aetiologies is potentially available.
Gaming this area of aetiology, so as to provide hidden advantages and profits to those doing the gaming, is pretty much de rigueur in contemporary forms of business morality or real-moralic; the melancholic of the real-moralic, lol.
That it is ‘melancholic’ is confirmed by the plethora of ‘motivational’ speakers, tracts, courses, services, and other resources, constituting the SOS businesses following primary exploitation encampments dotted around the globe. This is behavioral regulation for Occidental androids of the warmind.
The subject-object duality is not in itself a licence of essentialism encouraging exploitation. If subjective rights are granted to objects, exploiters will merely wage war on those subjectified objects. If subjects are objectified, exploiters will merely appropriate those objectified subjects. Simple metaphysics, and its conventional idealisations, alone, no matter how complex their architectures, are no defence against depredatory and disingenuous movements of exploitation.
THE BEHAVIOUR OF ATTRACTIONAL SUPERVENIENCE
Desire and attraction: the inscribed horizons of these transitional forces are the forms which those transitions presuppose in order to delineate such becomings.
It is not unusual that scientific concepts so readily lend themselves to psychological metaphor, and vice versa. Both, after all, emerge out of a common, as it were, empirical domain, fluctuating between various polarities, such as psychologised subjectivity ( or subjectified psychology), and scientificised objectivity (or objectified scientificity). Again, the replay of older topoi; form and force; being and becoming, etc.. What went under the rubric of ‘natural philosophy’, supports both contrived realms.
But this oscillation, within the parameters of a scientific epistemology, of scientific epistemology, in general; within the parametric assumptions of ‘the knower’ and ‘the known’, two more assumed reifications supporting a third, ‘knowing’; are precisely the dogmatic struts from which the Occident’s catalogue of categorical coercions ensue; and by which it both consumes and is consumed.
THE OCCIDENTAL CULT(URE) OF CRAFTY INTELLIGENCE
The real purpose of all the CIA infiltration of culture, etc., both domestically in the USA and internationally, was to surreptitiously condition the collective unconscious into accepting that there was indeed an ‘intelligence’ at work, throughout the Occidental order.
All of the subterfuge, the cultural convolutions of domestic and international relations, their casuistical reflexivities ostensibly under the occult signs of espionage, all of this was a smokescreen covering over; but in plain sight, nonetheless; the central ‘cult of intelligence’.
This ‘cult of intelligence’, however, had very little to do with intellectual proficiency, and everything to do with the abilities of blatant denial; the perpetual deferral of responsibility; the artistry of the disingenuous, and all its works of dishonesty.
This is the Occidental conception of intelligence, and it is diametrically opposed to wisdom.
THE CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES AND IGNORANCE-GRIDS OF OCCIDENTAL POSITIVIST UNDERSTANDING: ARISTOTELIAN CATEGORY CAGES
Apparently, Big W, the Inuit have fifty words for snow. They could well regard Europeans as having “invented essentially zilch”, in comparison to themselves. ‘Zilch’, hides everything one is ignorant of; everything, outside of one’s channels of positivist preoccupation and emphasis.
The USA has a foundation of European-rejected extremities; Puritan and penal.
This background – Neoreaction and the All-Trite would call it ‘genetic’ – of religious and penal rejects, could well explain U.S. Americans extremist obsession with justification, whether in moral or other forms. It also explains the casuistical cast of its litigious propensities, with the sphere of reflexive legislation being exploited by ‘patent trolls’, for example. This boosts the market for nostalgic moral imagery, harking back to idealised simplicities, after the trials and tribulations of such ongoing exploitations.
Positivist approaches, done in exclusivist ways, usually lead to conditional reflexivity, which exclusivist habit is inequipped to deal with, being constrained by the inadequacy of its own stock of overstretched assumptions; all of which, usually results in a background of barely controlled and channelised, mass hysteria, which of course is an ongoing market of profitable anxieties to be assuaged.
When those channels of positivist assumption are habitual horizons of theoretical fixation, a particular kind of fundamentalism obtains, throughout all positions and contradictions on the surface which it governs. That positivist surface, is, the USA. If one wishes to understand it’s conditions, one has to transcend the fundamentalism of that surface. In fact, one has to transcend the entire Occident.
NAIVE CONFINES OF THE TECHNOSENSORIUM
Using naive, positivistic literalism, exploiting its apparent contrasts from the convoluted developments characterising philosophical specialisations and their discourses, is invariably an anchoring appeal to common intuitions. But there can be different reasons behind such an appeal.
In scientific demonstration, discursive convolution has a close relation to the teleology of ‘results’; these ‘results’ being a kind of cartography of future immediacies and reliable regularities; such teleological methodologies, no matter how wild their interim, empirical excursions might be, are always conditioned by ‘knowing’ obligations to arrive at the mappable effects of ‘demonstration’, in the construction, or constructive extension, of future commonalities and their eventual, given ‘intuitions’.
The social power of scientific discourse is ultimately contingent on the association with its applications and technological effects on common intuition; usually in ritualised forms of mass distribution, as prodigiously numerous, altared ‘engines of demonstration’, or engineered commodities. Under the signs of various scientific laws, priests administer these engines of habitual ritual, for pricely offerings.
But this perpetual festival of scientific demonstrations, though it exercises considerable challenges, rarely questions the utilitarian assumptions and habits it services. Even less, does it question the common intuitions, from which those utilitarian assumptions and habits arise. Within the confines of the technosensorium, naive, positivistic literalism, can continue on in the sphere of an l.c.d. (lowest common denominator), ‘user friendliness’, relatively unhindered by surrounding sophistications, which anyway have been largely constituted in its service.
THE CONDITION OF COMMODIFIED CONSCIOUSNESS
If there were no such thing as sound, there would be no such thing as ‘silence’.
The notion of a linguistic silence is inherent to language.
As the expansion of non-selection, non-intention, ‘absence’, ‘space’, etc.; it is the expansion of the condition of selection, intention, ‘presence’, ‘sign’, etc..
This expansion, as emphasis and increased consideration, begins to signify the non-significant; setting a conditional semantics, or semantics of condition; against that of simple, positivist, utilitarian, and habitual, selections; or, more precisely, those selections without non-significant, conditional reflection.
Selecting the non-significant, or more bluntly, signifying the non-significant, might seem to be a blatantly paradoxical enterprise. But this would only be the case, with universalising notions, of essentialist conceptions, of the sign and non-sign.
Just as a sign requires delimitation to function as ‘a’ sign; an amalgam of signs, constituting a code or language, too, require delimitation, to function as ‘a’ code or ‘a’ language. Therefore, the gesture of defining selection is always specifically conditioned; specifying that which is defined, with relation to the necessarily undefined. These requirements and gestures would be the minimal conditions necessary to produce ‘significance’, whether as sign or system of signs.
Without sign, or semiotic system; as specific ‘significance’, or specific system of significance production; there can be no non-significance. Signs are relational, so are ‘non-signs’. If there were no signs at all, there would be nothing to negate.
Naive positivist essentialism, has a tendency to look for ‘things in themselves’, at the expense of any genuine consideration of their conditions. It has a tendency towards axiomatic atrophication of signs, and hallucinating unnecessary incommensurabilities of its own construction. Rather than abandon this somewhat emotive attachment to positivist naivety, it will extend relational non-significance into an essentialist nihilism, under its self-imposed cultural duress of monumental self-mythology. In truth, though, this banal exceptionalist desire only suffers from a monumental lack of relational talent. Such is the condition of commodified consciousness.
THE WEAVING OF A TWISTED WORLD BY AN IMPERIALISM OF THE VOID
TRUMP’S populism is built from the algorithmic trackings of public opinion fluctuation overseen by Bannon and Cambridge analytics. That’s largely why he’s in the White House.
Capitalism being what it is, actual free trade policies would lead to the continued disenfranchisement of uncompetitive American business and labour by foreign competition. There are two forms of protectionism by which the USA has attempted to stem this trend.
One, the various global trade agreements, such as TTIP, etc., which enshrine the interests of corporate capital as prime legislation, handing over all arbitrations to internal, corporate decision. This has the effect of allowing U.S. Capital, as well as all international corporate interests, unlimited and risk-free lattitude in deploying their present capital reserves to fully monopolise all markets and drive out all competition.
Two, Bannon’s ‘economic nationalism’, which in effect does the same thing domestically. Lessening corporate deficits through tax cuts; creating the conditions for subcontractor/small business increase; these simple moves, whatever else they may do, ensure that U.S. corporate capital does not deplete. International trade is then arranged on a piecemeal basis, according to Trump’s ‘art of dealing’.
All of this is fairly innocuous and simple, but it neglects the unpopular military-industrial face of American business which Bannon; Trump, and his supporters; would rather ignore, in their dreams of a U.S. self-reliance, whose every international intervention is a magnanimous act of U.S. beneficence. To reflect this visage in America’s political mirror, would not only be to deny this dream of charitable autonomy; but it would be an explicit acknowledgement of the extent to which the USA configures, calculates, and controls; horror, injustice, and iniquity, around the globe.
No longer would this acknowledgement merely reside in oppositional rhetorics of the populist Left and Right; or in dispassionate political histories of the contemporary era. The discrepancy between mainstream, official declarations, and the leak of critique, has, with the ascension of Trump’s own indulgence in demonising the U.S. establishment from the White House itself, essentially collapsed that discrepancy.
The speeds characterising high frequency trading necessarily encourage acceleration of linked economic factors and processes, too. Political and media production, cannot help but reflect this. This, together with the hyper-visibility of the Internet, and the international polyvocity it enables; ensures that mainstream authorisation and its critical refutation occur almost simultaneously. In some cases, such refutations actually precede authorisations. Given this scenario, the traditional notion of an independent media reporting on autonomous political events no longer quite obtains. It’s not so much that representation and reference have entirely disappeared. Rather, all factors have collapsed into the singular momentum of pure eventuality, a sphere of self-caused ‘effects’ that mediates only itself, and is no longer susceptible to traditional linear explanations. Such explanations would have been reliant on the worldly distances between traditional categories. With the technological compression of those distances, creating a speed of events beyond the effective processing capacity of mass human reception; traditional categorisation, and the lineaments of world-building sense which it provides; has lost its purchase on eventuality and can no longer quite find the worlds of mundane yet reliable convention it once enjoyed. There is a twisting implosion in which the encoding embroidery of these conventions; the textile of the whole world; has become a mere ‘wet rag’ of reality, wrung ever tighter by Profit’s grip, in Finance’s quest to eke out every drop of unexploited value. This adventure of compressive desiccation, or desiccating compression, has reached the point where all liquidity has left this torso of conventional reality in torsion, dripping and disappearing into the virtuality of offshore, financial fictions. As further twisting tensions are applied, the fabric of reality begins to break, and the masses hang on to the weave of its nostalgia, by a thread. Noticeably fraying and unstitching, at the conclusion of this process not even a single patch of reality is left. In addition, it is no longer certain what is ‘loom’ and what is ‘weft’. For the empire of the real was not only clothed in the threads of imagination, but it was entirely built out of them, too.
PAN-cognitive equivalence & flat CAKE theory
[John Ó Maoilearca]:”After 5 years work, All Thoughts Are Equal is finally out. There’s a link to a 20% flyer below. Coffee and biscuits not included.” (here)
{AK}: “All Thoughts Are Equal” & “Coffee and biscuits not included”?
Although assertions of pan-cognitive equivalence do not directly contradict considerations of inclusivity with respect to the work on offer, the exclusion of such baked confections is worrying. The unilateral banning of a beverage, too, without explanation, is no less bereft of such anxiety.
Aside from the uncertain particularity of the ‘biscuit’ subset, regarding the general category of baked confections – Jaffa Cakes? – a more pressing consideration presents itself.
It is asserted that the unity of a textual work (“5 years work”), concerning an all-inclusive cognitive democracy, has been finalised (“is finally out”). Yet a subset of baked confections & a beverage appear only as negations, moreover, as negations mentioned ‘outside’ the allegedly ‘finalised work’. Whether or not they are cited within the hallowed confines of Ó Maoilearca’s pan-cognitive opus is uncertain. But, if such is not the case, are we confronted with the author’s mockery of his own work & claims? This is difficult to determine.
Ostensibly, the work could be seen as an integrated demonstration of the titular thesis, the externally mentioned negations as orbital confirmations of that thesis: “All Thoughts”, wherever they are, “Are Equal”, ‘textual work’ (“book”) boundaries notwithstanding.
Or, by couching the work in a hypothetical ‘transaction’, where the exclusion of biscuit & beverage purchases a reduction in cost of the “book” (the work-as-commodity; “a link to a 20% flyer”), has Ó Maoilearca secretly written a work of political economy?
More disturbingly, perhaps: does the author’s finalisation of his work index a departure from cognitive democracy itself? Was pan-cognitive egalitarianism a five year task that is “is finally out” & finished with? Is Ó Maoilearca free to return to hierarchical concerns?
Or, there is always the possibility that the author’s overt exclusion of the baked confection & beverage industries masks a covert collusion with them. The lack of brand specification in “Coffee and biscuits” suggests the complicity of general, industry-wide marketing boards, experimenting with the instruments of generality characteristic of Philosophy.
Whatever the details, it is obvious that the work itself, the “book”, is merely a pretext for its author. At the risk of initiating a new orthodoxy of interpretation concerning Ó Maoilearca’s work, it seems “incontournable” that everything hinges on the “Coffee and biscuits”!
The author’s real achievement, of which he was entirely unaware during its performance, is that of writing a work that has nothing to do with Francois Laruelle, whilst copiously citing that very thinker throughout the work! Only by giving himself over, entirely, to a Laruellean pretextual consciousness, was Ó Maoilearca able to generate, as a quantum effect of ‘critical emanation’ (cf. ‘Catastrophe Theoretics’), the random manifestation of baked confection (bcp) & beverage (bvp) particularities, in such a definite configuration (C(bcp-bvp)).
Consumed by the localised labour of the Laruellean thesis, even the possibility of non-local ‘critical emanation’ of C(bcp-bvp) was necessarily obscured to Ó Maoilearca. Nevertheless, as soon as that labour was complete, the inexorable law of non-local ‘critical emanation’ exercised its power through Ó Maoilearca himself, using him as its instrument of production.
No doubt, the author’s protestations are to be expected; & can be attributed to the proportional persistence of Laruellean pretextual consciousness; spellbound by his earlier labours, as Ó Maoilearca must be.
It is difficult not to fall into the position of Russell surveying Frege’s work on the foundations of arithmetic, or Bohr critiquing Einstein’s “hidden variables”, but, of course, this review is of far greater import. Those earlier encounters merely concerned local disciplinary concerns. This evaluation, like the work it examines, concerns everything, all that is thought.
Of the three scenarios of scrutiny, this review, definitely, & non-locally, “takes the biscuit”, even though only non-biscuits were offered.
[Tags: Area 51, Extraterrestrial Confection Conspiracy, Hollow Earth Semiotics & Jammie Dodgers as Transcendental Edible]
The Return of Alain Evàron
Alain Evàron is a philosopher who achieved notoriety during May 68. A sometime contributor, under various pseudonyms, to Tel Quel. He has held faculty positions at Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), École Normale Supérieure, and Paris X Nanterre. A truly global voyager, he has lost count of the lands he has traversed. His works are published by Éditions du Seuil.
This is an excerpt of an interview with Alain Evàron, from 2010.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: “How do you see Philosophy these days?”
Alain Evàron: “Philosophy thus far has been merely taxonomic, a servitude of the possibilities of thought to all human needs, good and bad. This anthropic delimitation has been constituted as such, leaving a merely terminological acknowledgement for what is beyond, with words like “transcendent”, “spirit”, and the like. And, as we know, even these avenues of hope have been domesticated into the most banal of secularities by my former colleagues. [Laughs]
Of course, such domestication has always been systematic, a litany of quite deliberate manoeuvres whose historical accumulations are not solely determined by arbitrary, local factors, such as sociopolitique, or at least any conventional conception thereof. There are other considerations; a book could be written, and not just from any of the usual perspectives.”
Bernard-Henri Lévy: “You have often been held to privilege an aesthetic basis for philosophy.”
Alain Evàron: “Are you trying to take refuge in a prosaic reality? An artless one? Instead, one should ask, where is the place without art, without the artist or artisan, without feeling? Yes, there is a need for security, comforting standards, amidst the displacing fero(cities) of global kapital. But, even there, are we merely being administered to, from an aesthetics of certainty constituted by statistical derivations?
And does not such an ‘aesthetics of certainty’ characterise the West, most of all. Even the contemporary obsessions with l’autre (the Other) as romanticised and mysterious imprecision, serves only to sustain the mythology of certainty. This is merely a projection of narcissistic insecurity, not ‘Other’ at all.
And yes, people will make noises about tourism, that an authentic otherness cannot be retrieved by an emissary who speaks in the vernacular of Western civilisation. But I choose not to accept this bipartite idealisation, of otherness as some mysterious inaccessibilité, which, let us not forget, is simultaneously the idealisation of Western hegemony, and its imagined homogeneity. Such notions wish to say that everything else is just like us, only not as good. If there is more, it is unknowable. With this, let us say, Kantian universalism, I do not concur. It is the unethical silencing of a necessary task, giving it so much importance that one doesn’t even begin, like the early Wittgenstein’s avoidance of ethics. Pour ces danses, je écris pas de musique.
Returning to your initial question, it is safer to claim that I do not neglect the aesthetic, that is quite different from any use of it in a foundational gesture. If there are foundational gestures in my work, they are accidental contingencies! [Laughs]