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”?