I couldn’t be bothered, to read more than two pages, and the abstract, of ‘Rocco Gangle’s’ essay, “THE THEORETICAL PRAGMATICS OF NON-PHILOSOPHY”, so I wrote this instead.
I have no objection at all, to using category theory or any other metaphoric, as a way of modelling philosophical structures in different ways, hopefully innovatory and insightful, at least for those who do them. Utilising the characteristic structures of different domains, as mutual metaphorics of transformation and transposition, is just one basic, combinatorial technique of SF thinking. To be done well, it really has to be intuitive and fast, at the speed of thought, sensing all possibilities, and no longer being bound by any habitual ideology of conventional use. When it’s done badly, it descends into mere contrivances of uninspired variation, essentially anchored within the anchoring horizons of conventional fixation.
It’s against this bad trend, the trend towards self-satisfied ‘banality’ described below, that the animus of what I’ve written is a cautionary gesture. Especially so, given the current confusions of epistemological inflation observable throughout contemporary cultures. This is not a time to retreat into the false security of nostalgias, disingenuously erecting old challenges as a ‘holding pattern’ of new sensationalisms. Piddling around with a combinatorics of disciplinary differences and outlook is ‘merely’ the specularity and fusion of what are, after all, initially contrived Aristotelian habits. Using, but not being bound by the conventional disciplinary protocols of, those habits of disciplined difference, is an automatic prerequisite of SF thinking. But SF thinking, at least in terms of my own personal receptions, moved far beyond these incidental transcendences at its outset.
Hence, a certain reluctance to return to such archaic concerns, especially when such emphatic sensationalism is presented so exclusively. It’s a bit like watching an ecstatic crowd learning the first two letters of the alphabet, and inflating the bare achievement of that task, to the proportions of a universal revelation.
It’s just the logic of mass hysteria; a painfully slow and sensationalist shift of fixation by structures of consensual dogma; a ‘reality’, that just can’t be taken too seriously.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The distinction between the performative and the constative is an opportunity to critique both; not only in terms of each other, their usual conceptions; but also, in conjunction with the greater, fresher insights and understandings, enabled by a theorisation no longer quite so tightly bound by their insular everyday nostalgias.
Raging absolutism is the corollary of everyday insularity, whereby, it is not any thinking of the Absolute, in itself, whether in its ‘philosophical’ or ‘religious’ guises, that is generative of problems, but rather, it is the social game of authoritarian fetishism, or fetishising authority, that arises due to the lazy, narrow, and utilitarian demands for totemic simplicity exemplified by everyday insularity.
The hostility to the alleged alienations of ‘philosophical theory’ are the characteristic response of everyday insularity, of its contrived resentments towards any cultural horizon exceeding its immediate, avaricious grasp, the stubborn belligerence towards any development not susceptible to its order of banality. This is the revenge of positive instrumentalisation (instrumental isolation?), of an insularity itself an instrument of general instrumental production, on everything that does not submit to the injunctions of instrumental isolation, to its “unilateral usage… as mere material”.
Unwittingly perhaps, Laruelle gives unilateral expression to a Heideggerian enframing, to a technological telos, and a primacy of purified manipulation as an ‘end in itself’. One which converts everything into a resource, into ‘mere material’, into the homogenised techno-calculi always constrained to monumentalise ‘unilateral use’.
As soon as people are viewed as ‘expendable’, whether ‘instrumentally’, or even as a result of some logic of humility and charitability, privileging the social over an overweening individuality, Kant’s injunction concerning the treatment of people as ‘ends in themselves’ is lost. Whatever the dialectics of initial value may be, contrary gamings of casuistical interpretation are always a possibility; not only because of disingenuous desire, though that is all too commonly displayed, to the extent of formally constituting entire institutions of exploitation; but because the boundaries of perceived fidelity are themselves often problematic and inherently perspectival.
That Laruelle, at first glance, might be seen as rehabilitating the perspective of a lost proletarianism, with an ‘alternative stream’ of ‘oraxiomatic’ usage; sidestepping the perceivably baroque convolutions, and apparently resolution-allergic of Derridean usage, for example; is certainly the positive rubric or face of its contemporary display. But one has to ask, whether or not, this fasces or fascia is singular, in the monolithic and perhaps ‘narcissistic’ way it would like to consider itself – it’s so called ‘vision-in-one’? On the one hand, it is possible to sympathise with Laruelle’s metaphoric of what is after all an ancient concern stretching back to Eastern forms of thought, then to Ancient Greece, and on to the ‘present day’. The stock of images by which this concern has been known through the ages, are profuse.
Laruelle’s selection from this resource, and retrofitting of that which he selects, are highly specific to his purposes. The usage, is not that of some expansive tolerance resulting from immersal in an oceanic understanding. Unlike Freud, he does not disparage spiritual contemplation so readily, largely because he exploits the logics and concepts of its labours, in the service of the very instrumentalisation and everyday insularity that, ironically, they always gently questioned and transformed. Whatever Laruelle’s personal relation to this area of ‘spirit’, his appropriation of its resources occurs, as we have seen, according to the modular receptions of a contemporary positivist nostalgia.
The retrofitting, caters to the immediate, avaricious grasp of everyday insularity, to its order of banality, and the modular-mechanical procedures of blocked understanding it follows. When these procedures are transposed to metaphysical and experiential registers; everything; every relation, every sign, every nuance, every self-image; is converted into an isolated and autonomous block. The contrivance of isolation and autonomy is the surface concession to ideologies of freedom. Beneath this concession, however, there is only the order of banality; it’s positive instrumentalisation; and its unilateral, monolithic and insular, purpose. This incommensurability of instrumental isolations, is the raging thought of alienation, on disconnection from that unilateral order. The exclusively modular understandings of positive instrumentality, can only function as component in the order of banality. Without this function, there is only rage.
That all this is so, is shown quite clearly by a history of that order’s domesticating responses, all of which seek to first abbreviate and then appropriate whatever developments might not be in line with its basic, unilateral procedure. We are not speaking of an alienated order, not resident in those who cling to its unilateral and modular procedures as its exclusive proponents. On the contrary, it is difficult to find those who have not been coerced into inhabiting its modes, in some way.
The rage for the Absolute, is a misnomer. Absolute thinking or thought always exceeds itself, usually in gestures of novel understanding. It naturally proceeds according to a free theorisation and inquiry. Such inquisitiveness is primary and playful, never under duress to any delimited fixation.
Rage, is always reactive, the result of frustration when expectations or desires are not realised; this discord between expectation and realisation generates a fixation, the fetishisation of the real. In contrast to the playful inquisitiveness of free theorising, which sets no boundaries of expectation, the entire spectrum of emphatic and emotive concerns revolving around the rubric of reality, is characterised by reactionary disappointment or disillusion.
Such a reaction is inherently the production of a social conditioning issuing discrepant injunctions and instructions concerning this ‘real’, which it simultaneously inculcates as insularising fetish, psychologising it as a cybernetics of ‘personal frustrations and satisfactions’. The reactive thinker is characterised by an onset of inquisitive thought subsequent to such inculcation; instead of exploratory free theory, there are only social inquisitions, all of which occur under the fetishised sign of ‘reality’, or the ‘real’.
It begins in disappointment; the psychosocial real, does not keep its expected appointments! Reality, is not real! This reneging on the consistency of pretences towards objective agreement, stages the reality fetish as consensually constrained, social drama, rather than exploratory expedition. The thinker who fetishises the real, is always a reactive thinker, never an exploratory one; always socially directed, never theoretically free; always an evangelist of the vicarious, of a vast variety of disingenuous indirections, never of honest innovations.
The Absolute was always the province of the ascetic, the mystic, the recluse, no one else really cared for it, enough to get angry over it. But realisation, however, was a different story. Absolute reality, could be left to itself, and those ‘crackpots’ who chose to dwell there. But the more mundane modalities, the realities!, of this Absolute, could be contrived both as a horizon of psychosocial contention; as a production line of regimented insularities supplying that horizon; and as ongoing narrative of discursive narcosis, the addictive configuration of the ecstasies of so many petty realisations. It is this narrative, which is the rage of the real. A rage that speaks with the full fury of alienated emotions invested at the outset in that social ordering of a disillusioning, regimented reality; because it never learned to think or question, naturally, without coerced reaction, for itself.
That this is so, is indicated by a distinct lack of experiential understanding, of spontaneous vitality of insight, in favour of bare articulation of the modular calculations of convention. Whereas, a spontaneous vitality whose understanding is already absolute, requires neither rage nor the ever-unfulfilled modular-metaphysical arrangements and production quotas generating that rage. Realities are enjoyed, when and where they are available; but “unilateral usage… as mere material”, is too redolent of robotic injunctions and cybernetic exploitations, both of them in the pejorative sense, to prove as anything other than profoundly distasteful.