Neon Regiments of Modernity I – Introduction
“Samarkand, the Pangolin / Rina Sherman” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7nGdhh4lsI
Samarkand, the Pangolin / Rina Sherman
DER Micro-ethnographies, C19, 2020
https://www.der.org/micro-ethnographies/#rina-sherman
Pour plus d’informations :
http://www.rinasherman.com/…/samarkand_the_pangolin.html
Samarkand, the Pangolin / Rina Sherman
DER Micro-ethnographies, C19, 2020
https://www.der.org/micro-ethnographies/#rina-sherman
For more information:
http://www.rinasherman.com/…/samarkand_the_pangolin.html
Rina Sherman’s video ethnography of Samarkand evoked two associations.
One association was from an interview with US science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle.
The other association was to a Black Sabbath song, occasioned by the shared reference of neon lighting and the linked theme of modernity.
Through the analysis of the contents and implications of both associations, the epistemological mechanisms which the politics of fascism both exploits and through which it arises, are clearly shown.
I include a section on what I have called, “VacciNations” which is largely concerned with how so-called Western nations construct and exploit immigrant populations according to “the sociopolitics of ethnocultural vaccination”.
I include it because its contents seem to describe a “cultural logic of ethnopolitical vaccination” peculiar to European colonial imperialisms going back to the ancient Greeks.
Colonialism promotes more or less insidious social militarisation – the militarising of the social within imperialising nations.
It was a cultural logic, highly discernible, which my notes on “immigration-as-inoculation”, as it were, pointed to the contours of.
The notes were written from 2017 onwards.
So it was before Covid and doesn’t have anything at all to do with the pandemic of recent years.
I’ve brought them together, here in this writing, because they are confirmed by a quotation from Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks”, which I read recently in September (2022) in the Wikipedia article on “Martin Heidegger and Nazism”.
They are excessively confirmed – more than confirmed! – by the quote from Heidegger.
My notes merely delineate the cultural logic of what is observed.
Heidegger goes beyond that to justify the malicious intent suggested by the cultural logic of what is observed.
The virulent anti-Semitism shown in the Heidegger quotation shows the very conspiracising deviousness Heidegger and other antisemites usually try to project onto Jewish people.
It basically shows Heidegger as a geopolitical psychopath.
The 21st-century has seen a global resurgence in fascism together with all of the turgid output of intellectual inferiority usually associated with that fascism.
It began with so-called, “Speculative Realism” and its valorisation of common-sense through regression, essentially, to the categories and worldview of mediaeval realism.
Jordan Peterson and the rest of the so-called, “Intellectual Dark Web”, have subsequently come along to promote, essentially, the social psychology of that regression, though often spiced with other disciplinary flavours.
It’s basically the motivational marketing of fascist politics.
Consumer fascism.
Consumer fascism is the result of the culture of narcissism, itself increasingly inculcated by decades of consumer conditioning through marketing techniques.
It’s the outgrowth of implicitly catering to the figure of the sovereign consumer for whom the entire globe is presented as a conquest to be consumed.
And it is to be ‘simply’ consumed, according to the order of consumer preference; a.k.a. domestic markets where customers are always right no matter how wrong or ignorant they might be; a.k.a. the culture of narcissism.
The figure of the sovereign consumer is the designed effect arising out of the order of consumer preference.
That order of consumer preference is the designed effect arising out of the economics of self-interest.
The economics of self-interest is basically British economic theory arising alongside colonialism which it reflects to varying degrees.
That’s a quick, somewhat hasty, contextual genealogy of “consumer fascism”.
Interestingly, it shows or at least strongly suggests how fascism (or its Germanic version, Nazism) is coextensive with European colonialism and neocolonialism, in general.
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Neon Regiments of Modernity II – Analytical Interpretations
Jerry Pournelle, right-wing science-fiction writer, mentions Samarkand in his 1979 interview with Charles Platt.
[Charles Platt, interviewer] “I feel honor-bound to tackle some of the aspects of his work that bother me the most For instance, I feel that his books suggest to young readers that complex social problems can be solved by using brute force. Does he ever worry about encouraging kids to indulge in power fantasies?”
[Jerry Pournelle] “If you are trying to tell me that I should not depict realistically the attractions of a properly run military outfit,” he replies, “you’re a fool. Because it can be damned attractive. Do you think I should exercise self-censorship and not let people know? In the movie version of Faustus. Richard Burton is on horseback in armor and he says, ‘Is it not a pleasant thing to be a king and ride in triumph to Samarkand?’ Should that line have been suppressed? Are you telling me that I shouldn’t tell people that there is a share of glory? It’s a damned attractive life; if it wasn’t, why would so many people want it?”
Charles Platt’s, “Dream Makers: Science Fiction and fantasy writers at work”, Xanadu Publications Ltd: 1987:p.14
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Pournelle’s books were bestsellers, selling to the USA’s so-called “moral majority”, precursors of present-day Trump supporters; and looking at the power fantasy of the quote, it’s not hard to see why.
~~~
Not sure how to read the Rina Sherman video?
Is it Samarkand?
Has it (Samarkand) become an ant’s nest (pangolin) with the blocks of modernity?
Those blocks of modernity are neon-lit; “better days with friends and families again”? At 1:08 and 1:15.
Neon light is used to highlight texts and images.
It’s function is to transition those texts and images into another reality, an idealised reality, Hegelian sublimation into the mythic realms of modernity.
Resurrection through neon-lit, technological reproduction?
~~~
Black Sabbath, “Neon Knights” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pXLQF7Tdkc ; great song, but the lyrics are susceptible to different meanings.
Does the combination of European mediaeval imagery with modernity signify fascism?
Mediaevalism + Modernity = Fascism?
In the song: “Captains at the helm” vs “jackals of the street”?
Captain, is a rank, of military or police.
Who are the “jackals of the street”?
If the scenario is police versus criminal elements, why the need to cast police work as the naval heroism of another age? Given that “helm” suggests such an anachronism?
If the scenario is not of policing, then what is being captained? Paramilitary fascism?
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So what do the three images and my readings of them -the Pournelle quote; Rina Sherman’s video; the Black Sabbath song – suggest?
The Pournelle quote shows similar romanticising of war as heroic, with its citing of Richard Burton about Samarkand, as do the lyrics of Black Sabbath’s, “Neon Knights”.
Elsewhere, in the same interview, Pournelle responds to a question about a scene in one of his own novels, where “deadbeats and social parasites” “are massacred by mercenaries”.
Interviewer Charles Platt writes, somewhat ironically: “Pournelle, however, does not see this as advocating violence as a permanent solution.”
Pournelle brings up the difference between temporary and permanent solutions in answer to the interviewer’s concern, “that it is the presentation of violence as an easy answer that bothers me most.”
So, by answering an issue subsidiary to the one expressed by the interviewer, Pournelle implicitly doesn’t reject “violence as an easy answer”, or at any rate, violence as an answer, whether “easy”, or not.
Elsewhere in the interview, he ridicules Asimov’s motto that, “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”, by saying “that only the incompetent wait until it’s the last refuge”, confirming his non-rejection of violence.
That aligns him with fascism.
That alignment together with his fondness for tightly run, small military units, aligns him with paramilitary fascism.
Shifting the meaning of “easy” from the interviewer’s question concerning the ease with which violence is selected, to the “difficulty” of permanent solutions requiring more than temporarily effective, violent actions, Pournelle elides the role of the political actor or agent in choosing decisively on violent action.
Pournelle’s elision of political subjectivity, then, by default, introduces violent action as an “objective” necessity; which is to say, an allegedly “objective” step necessary to both temporary and “permanent” solutions.
In Pournelle’s novel, the massacre of political opponents by mercenaries is presented as a temporary solution buying time for politicians to construct permanent solutions.
Pournelle’s semantic choices regarding the question of political violence:-
– the way that he shifts the meaning of the interviewer’s question to implicitly construct a background structure of nested presuppositions;
– a structure within which political decisions implementing violence are erased, are simply not considered, in exactly the way Pournelle doesn’t consider Charles Platt’s question;
– and within which structure, violent action can then simply be presented as “objective”, subjectively neutral, and necessary to solutions;
are highly significant.
Pournelle’s choice to shift the point of inquiry from the question of agency to the question distinguishing between temporary and permanent solutions is a shift to accepting unilateral violence as unquestionably and objectively necessary.
The implicit rationale is that it can’t be questioned simply because it has been presented as “objective”.
Pournelle is practising that rationale in his avoidance of the interviewer’s question.
“Facts don’t care about your feelings!”, is a functionally equivalent, expressive cliche, of that rationale, frequently used by contemporary US fascists.
It’s a cliche expressing not so much the objective conditions of nature, but, as Wittgenstein would say, “the limits of” it’s utterer’s “world”.
The most disturbing resonance, though, is the characterisation of unilateral violence as a political “solution”, a characterisation shared by both Hitler and Pournelle.
Both Pournelle’s reflex non-answer and his semantic shifting reduce unilateral violence to the impersonal objectivity of dehumanised mechanisms serving political “solutions”.
The theme of dehumanised mechanisms recalls Heidegger’s post-war critique of technology.
Heidegger’s only post-war comment on the Holocaust was a glancing reference listing the Nazi death camps as another instance of technological and industrial production.
Googling “Heidegger on the Holocaust”, in order to quickly check the only reference to the Holocaust in Heidegger’s published works prior to the “Black Notebooks”, were some articles referencing Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks”, which I hadn’t looked at, so clicked on the hyperlinks.
And there, in those “Black Notebooks”, was the evidence of Heidegger basically being a bog-standard, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.
“The enemy is one who poses an essential threat to the existence of the people and its members. The enemy is not necessarily the outside enemy, and the outside enemy is not necessarily the most dangerous. It may even appear that there is no enemy at all. The root requirement is then to find the enemy, bring him to light or even to create him, so that there may be that standing up to the enemy, and so that existence does not become apathetic. The enemy may have grafted himself onto the innermost root of the existence of a people, and oppose the latter’s ownmost essence, acting contrary to it. All the keener and harsher and more difficult is then the struggle, for only a very small part of the struggle consists in mutual blows; it is often much harder and more exhausting to seek out the enemy as such, and to lead him to reveal himself, to avoid nurturing illusions about him, to remain ready to attack, to cultivate and increase constant preparedness and to initiate the attack on a long-term basis, with the goal of total extermination [völligen Vernichtung].”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger_and_Nazism#Attitude_towards_Jews
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Heidegger’s work on technology, too, is exactly like the comically self-refuting, conspiracy-mongers of US ignorance.
Heidegger both wants to claim that technology is somehow European only and even uniquely German, but then wishes to claim that it was only Jews as metaphysics’s accomplices who accelerated the devastating impact of technology and only the Germans fought against it.
“HEIDEGGER: I could put what is said in the quotation this way: I am convinced that a change can only be prepared from the same place in the world where the modern technological world originated. It cannot come about by the adoption of Zen Buddhism or other Eastern experiences of the world. The help of the European tradition and a new appropriation of that tradition are needed for a change in thinking. Thinking will only be transformed by a thinking that has the same origin and destiny.
SPIEGEL: At exactly the spot where the technological world originated, it must, you think …
HEIDEGGER: … be transcended [aufgehoben] in the Hegelian sense, not removed, transcended, but not by human beings alone.
SPIEGEL: Do you allocate a special task specifically to the Germans?
HEIDEGGER: Yes, in that sense, in dialogue with Hölderlin.
SPIEGEL: Do you think that the Germans have a specific qualification for this change?
HEIDEGGER: I am thinking of the special inner relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. This has been confirmed to me again and again today by the French. When they begin to think they speak German. They insist that they could not get through with their own language.”
Heidegger, M. ‘Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview (1966)’. Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, 1981, 62.
“Donatella Di Cesare writes: [I]t is no surprise that Heidegger should discuss the Shoah and consider it from both philosophical and political viewpoints. Selbstvernichtung—self-destruction—is the key word. [Heidegger’s] argument is that the Jews destroyed themselves, and no fingers should be pointed at anyone except the Jews themselves. . . .
Heidegger does no more than draw his conclusion from everything he has said previously. The Jews are the agents of modernity and have disseminated modernity’s evils. They have besmirched the spirit of the West, undermining it from within. Accomplices of metaphysics, the Jews have everywhere brought about the acceleration of technology. The charge could hardly be more serious. Only Germany, with her people’s iron cohesion, could stem the devastating impact of technology. This is why the global conflict was primarily a war of Germans against Jews. If the Jews were annihilated in the death camps, it was because of the mechanism that they fomented by plotting to achieve world domination. The link between technology and the Shoah should not be disregarded: it was Heidegger himself who alluded to it elsewhere. What is Auschwitz if not the industrialization of death, the “fabrication of corpses”?”
Heidegger on the Holocaust: The Jews Self-Destructed » Mosaic
https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2015/02/heidegger-on-the-holocaust-the-jews-self-destructed/
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Of course, Heidegger himself would predictably try to defend his own self-contradictions using ad hoc, tautological arguments and assumptions, from the narrow confines of his ignorance-adjusted, self-serving mythology.
But does such adjustment to characteristic brands of colonial ignorance afflict all who are of European ethnicity and implicitly inculcated with colonial propaganda?
Is it the case that Europeans are unable to effectively critique Nazism and fascism because European culture and self-conceptions are radically entrenched forms of colonial propaganda, at the outset, and do not sufficiently differ from extremist political expressions such as Nazism and fascism, to which they gave rise?
It may well be impossible for those who have grown up within European cultures but without sufficient critical distance from them, to not be essentially “Nazi” and/or “fascist”?
Because both Nazism and fascism are basically domestic forms of colonial foreign policy.
It could be that European peoples, anyway imbued with colonial history and folk-cultural residues of colonial propaganda, are by default proto-Nazis and proto-fascists?
Certainly, that political opponents of so-called “left” and “right” wings are persistently engaged in mutual accusations of being Nazis and Fascists, suggests that Europeans of opposed political persuasions see each other in that way.
Could it be that they are both objectively right about each other?
In which case, they would all be Nazis and Fascists.
Is that why they then resort to the politics of subjectivity and narcissism, in order to deflect and defer objective truths about themselves?
The usual response of US Conservatives to being labelled as Nazi or fascist is to insinuate that the high-frequency of such label use becomes all-referring and so meaningless.
But it doesn’t become all-referring, because the USA and its political scene isn’t everything.
Equating the USA with totality is obviously narcissistic.
It’s a characteristic form of self-incurred, colonial ignorance.
The result of narcissistic cultural circulation within internal convolutions of colonial insularity.
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Neon Regiments of Modernity III – Colonial Militarisation And Immigration Inoculation
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VacciNations
Introductory notes to previously written notes on cultural logics of ethnopolitical vaccination.
The notes describe what can be called ‘the sociopolitics of ethnocultural vaccination and its characteristic administrative styles’.
Which does not merely designate the tracking of racist behaviour, bigotry, and racist policy.
It’s not a rubric necessarily limited to empirical sociology.
Empiricism itself can be susceptible to ethnic bias. Experimentation can be gamed in different ways and is bound or limited by the mindsets of the sorts of people experimenting.
Western nations have the problem of reconciling contemporary residues of colonial ideology (mindsets and habits) with the sanitised self-images of Occidental idealism and Western exceptionalism they like to promote.
It’s unfortunate that the three notes I’ve collected in this VacciNations section are so accurate in discerning what can arguably be called ‘the Occidental mindset’ as it’s shown in the Heidegger quote on creating an enemy.
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Introduction to “Ethno-Vaccinatory Supplements 00”
“Ethno-Vaccinatory Supplements 00” talks about colonial and cultural militarisation, cultural militarisation being a corollary of, or respondent to, colonial militarisation.
The historical periodising of modernity is a form of cultural militarisation, a shell game of era-tic relabellings itself serving continuing shell games of colonial appropriation and acquisition.
It goes on to talk about colonial militarisation in the form of immigration policy functioning according to intersecting logics of experimental testing and ethnic vaccination.
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“Ethno-Vaccinatory Supplements 00”
Anyone can be racist or xenophobic, as an individual. But that’s completely different to the sedimented and structural implementations produced by histories of colonial militarisation that give scope to certain forms of racism or nationalism, but not others.
Colonial militarisation produces default racism.
Cultural modernity is an attempt to otherwise evade, cover-up, or redistribute, the iniquities produced by colonial militarisation.
It attempts to do this through temporal zoning of historical periodicity – ‘modern’, ‘pre-modern’, ‘post modern’, et cetera.
These are forms of cultural militarisation, distributions of time as the constructions of historical periodicity. The process of cultural militarisation is commercialised as fashion and lifestyle eras and epochs – the 1960s; the 1970s; the 1980s; ‘classic rock’; et cetera.
Colonial militarisation retains ‘ethnic minorities’ as vaccinatory supplements, self-consciously and tactically practising surfaces of equity policy with regard to those supplements, whilst simultaneously and systematically misrepresenting those supplements and their historical constitution.
By tactically distributing contemporary constructions along with historical misrepresentations, supplements are kept in limbos of contemporary fiction more easily susceptible to policy redistribution.
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Introduction to “IT ISN’T REALLY ‘SHOCKING’ AT ALL”
“IT ISN’T REALLY ‘SHOCKING’ AT ALL”, talks about the ‘Third World’ being held hostage by a ‘First world’ militarised economic system and how “Third World immigrant populations” in those “first world” nations, are socio-politically functionalised, in varying ways.
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IT ISN’T REALLY ‘SHOCKING’ AT ALL
The ‘Third World’ is held hostage in an essentially militarised economic system that extracts far more from them, than it returns. Immigrant populations in ‘first world countries’ operate, through their cultural inflation by the media, as vectors of vaccinatory pretext; ethno-barometric logics used to engineer continuity of exploitation, under the sign of its opposite.
This is assimilation; business; and beetles; British invasion; Anglo assimilation.
Temporality of the temperate; temporality duress of a harsher climate; produces a default framing or opportunistic picturing, according to exploitation.
Vaccinatory logic, immunising host nation with ‘administrations of the colonised’; administerings of scapegoating, too.
In cultures that privilege military invasion of others, that invasiveness forms a culture.
Britain gives more foreign aid than all of the EU combined. Harvey interprets this as a control system, he’s probably right.
France extracts 50 billion a year in colonial tax, from Africa.
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Introduction to “Victims of Vaccinatory Inoculation”
“Victims of Vaccinatory Inoculation”, explores how oppression of ethnic others is reflexively mined, over and over again, for controversy that is contrived, contained, and profitable.
It explores how oppression of ethnic others is continuously mined for content that can be fed into simplistic structures of dispute susceptible to more iniquitous misrepresentations; more sensationalist inflations serving both political and media exploitations; leading to the monetising of both ethnic oppression and the effects of that oppression.
Right-wing political scaremongering is the instrument through which ethnic oppression is monetised and the marketing of mutual hate is promoted.
The contrived nature of structural oppression and monetisation of that oppression. through systematic scaremongering and scapegoating, is the politics of sadism.
It’s a politics of sadistic contrivance always requiring an enemy to victimise.
The third tweet of “Twitter – Victims of Vaccinatory Inoculation” outlines how European and Euro-[Continent or Nation Name] invention of threats and enemies is produced through what can be called “enmity engineering”, which is how European nations and European-derived nations sustain divide and rule policy through production and deployment of social hostility.
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Twitter – Victims of Vaccinatory Inoculation
01) I’ve written about positioning of social justice discourses, before.
So-called, “woke” discourse, is merely ideological inoculation by forces of mainstream oppression.
It’s vaccinatory.
It’s all about mainstream gumbos miming imaginary dissent against themselves.
02) It’s a game of dress-up and talentless noise by mainstream morons engineered to pre-empt development of genuinely oppositional discourse.
Its social function is release of mainstream gumbo tensions and dissatisfactions in thematically entertaining ways.
03) Mainstream gumbos hate themselves, so they like to lose themselves in identifying with those they victimise.
Caricaturing victims to the extent of inventing yet another threat or enemy, gives them pretexts to continue victimising.
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01)
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1501972157529743364?s=20&t=RJ0J4FgRA_F9Un13fs6SgQ
02)
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1501984192770592775?s=20&t=RJ0J4FgRA_F9Un13fs6SgQ
03)
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1501985600643248130?s=20&t=RJ0J4FgRA_F9Un13fs6SgQ
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Afterword
By randomly commenting through the medium of social media, first-order observational commentary is produced.
Some theorising might occur, but it’s not overly programmatic.
Interestingly, though, the buildup of observational commentary over time gives rise to recurrent themes, or ‘theoremes’, so to speak.
Individual comments sometimes become strong exemplars or explications of a theoreme, or junctions instantiating multiple lines of thematic and theoretic concern.
Because all of this emerges out of (social) media res, so to speak or write, quite naturally and without prior programmatic intent, it could be considered social media anthropology, within the loosely techno-theory discursive contexts of my usual writing.
So, there’s something of the flavour of scientific chronicle involved.
To detect or discern resonances of the same theoreme in variously juxtaposed posts of social media received in one’s “newsfeed”, that are otherwise unrelated to each other, functions as confirmation of sorts within the growing bounds of such scientific chronicling.
It’s a form of theoretic recognition, that the theme concerned has empirical validity, to the extent of being somewhat objective.
The title of the essay, “Neon Regiments of Modernity”, obviously tracks the history of social militarisation – the militarisation of the social – together with its political expressions in fascism and Nazism.
The subtitles, “Colonial Militarisation And Immigration Inoculation” and “VacciNations”, likewise obviously refers to the ways that highly militarised regimes order ethno-spatiotemporal, geographic distributions.
Initial development of the title and subtitle themes wasn’t problematic, in any way.
They seemed obvious to me and validity wasn’t in question.
But considering reactionary receptions, it was easy to list the hackneyed forms of those reactive receptions.
There is a typology of ‘Occidental android’ objections, so to speak, because those objections are mechanical.
Refuting such “bad faith” objections isn’t interesting, so the Heidegger “Black Notebooks” quote (“On Creating an Enemy”) was useful – to say the least – in showing how the title and subtitle themes of “Neon Regiments of Modernity” are, unfortunately, in no way exaggeration or hyperbole.
“Neon Regiments of Modernity” was written, excepting this afterword and one or two corrections, between September and November in 2022. Thinking it required more revision work, together with a host of other factors, I didn’t get round to completing it.
The concerns it addresses are important, too, so there was an obligation to get it right, to express all the relevant points whilst showing the coherence of the determining relations involved.
On reading it through, it seemed the necessary work had been done at the outset and that some sort of compositional unity obtained.
An important point which I forgot to write in the main text concerns how Jerry Pournelle was compelled to resort to a Hollywood-distributed film in order to justify his glorification of violence and war.
He didn’t use an actual war in his justification, even though he had personal experience of the Korean War.
But that might be the reason why.
As he says, “I had been through a pretty miserable war”.
Shuttling between glory and misery, his personal psychology of war seems to be a somewhat schizoid, bipolar alternation.