TEXT TREKS: CHASING THE TRACES!

Text as text?  What would such a ‘text’ be? Whence this purity of ‘text’? How does one establish the allegedly constitutive ‘immanence’ of such purity? A purity serving as ‘ground’, but ground for what, itself? As foundation of the granular fragmentation of a self-involution?


What is it that was written?
The non-site is simply the (non-)position from which critique is written, before the measurements and constructions of situation arise. The residue beyond systematic localisation.
If and when, awareness of systematic localisation, awareness of system as specific locale results; however domesticated, whether as epistemological, system of knowledge; ontological, system of being; or whatever else; if that leads to seemingly archaic articulations of ‘non-duality’ reminiscent of religious anachronism or anachronicity; are not such urban agglomerations encrusting the absolute, precisely the archaeological sediments (’said I meants’/mentations) and textual traces, of innumerable histories and chronologies, all declaring the timeless city of God, perhaps?
Whether or not sufficiency of solution is found to obtain or not, is simply contingent on the nature of reception and criteria of satisfaction. Surely, it’s for each ‘mouth’, if that’s your conception of others, to arrive at their own determinations of efficacy or efficiency?
There is no question of ‘superiority’, because such an evaluation would only entail yet another measurement and construction.


Who is to say what constitutes nature or the natural, a bunch of shifting historical determinations, interpretations, .docs and doxas? There is always the possibility of listening without subscribing to closures of exclusive belief.
There comes a point when it is no longer worthwhile to sanction the horrors of history, the dogmas and dramas of its positivist wargame, played out according to it’s terms, ‘selves’, and positions, those ‘ends’ no longer apply.
One plays differently, without limit, without end. There are other possibilities to attend.



AL DI MEOLA Chasin`The Voodoo

THE ENDLESS SHELL GAME OF ATOMIC IMPOVERISHMENT: BRIGHTLY BURNING CHOICES, AND SHINY, LIBIDINAL CIRCUITRY

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”?

Seasonal Mist of Mechanical Mind – Warwick Papers 02 (1989-1991 -ish)

These short pieces were written during the period, roughly around, 1989-1991.
They are short notes and observations, giving a slight taster of an impression of the writing concerns of that period.

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Seasonal Mist of Mechanical Mind

“Your world is covered by the seasonal mist of mechanical mind. Those busy automata are but awful apparitions. The sphere of machinery entire is a dimension of death that touches me not. For I am nothing and nowhere. Only when there is an “I” is the realm of mechanism revealed for us to see. The presence of “me” leads ineluctably to a selfish logic. And “personality” is the portal to the sadistic scenes, sets, stage, and theatre, of machine – the play, of determined and deadly dreams.

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Reality Parks – Warwick Papers 01 (1989-1991 -ish)

These short pieces were written during the period, roughly around, 1989-1991.
They are short notes and observations, giving a slight taster of an impression of the writing concerns of that period.

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Reality Parks
Reality Parks, (P)reservations, providing nostalgic material— the images and symbols of lost presences— for future evocations. Perhaps this has already happened: our lives have become thoroughly aestheticised by means of commercial advertising. A barely remembered day during childhood, spent on a friend’s farm, is the sparse capital upon which a multitude of butter and milk commercials secure from us our false
familiarities with their mythical realities.

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Tekhnê Is but a Season – Warwick Papers 00 (1989-1991 -ish)

These short pieces were written during the period, roughly around, 1989-1991.
They are short notes and observations, giving a slight taster of an impression of the writing concerns of that period.

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Tekhnê is but a season


   Two writings compete, for being, and to
govern being. The grey codes of technology
and the green écriture of Earth.
    The grey scripture of technics arises from
the graphics of grasp, the argot of apprehension:
and “Man”, the éminence grise, continually
apprehends the world, holds it under a stuttering
arrest, that grows increasingly powerful as his
Technical-Testament steadily takes form.
Who is to say, that under such
artificial and adverse conditions, the vital
inscriptions of Earth and Nature might not
produce lifeforms of unprecedented complexity
and power, monsters and mutations that will
devour their natural prey, the machine?

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WRITING (1989-1991 -ish)

These short pieces were written during the period, roughly around, 1989-1991.
They are short notes and observations, giving a slight taster of an impression of the writing concerns of that period.

                                                                 ~~~~~~~~~

WRITING


   When there is writing, no thing writes, neither subject nor object. When there is writing, what writes is the most open of questions, so open, in fact, that it need never be asked. But, for speculative purposes, any writing can speak on behalf of any thing.


WRITING2


DESIRE, DREAM, AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

This system of mediated nostalgia, based on the continuing residues of bibliographic organisation, has, through market disciplines, achieved sufficient agility of infrastructural and techno-spheric implementation, to the extent that the full narrative spectrum of political possibility can be instantly delivered, as so many administrative styles, in response to the motions of mass desire, according to the calculi of libidinal economy.
But beyond the market administrations and calculations of libidinal economy, are occurrences of mythological motion, the oneiric transports of the figures of desire, constituting an oneiric economy. These figures have been bibliographic constants throughout the mechanism of history. The production of history, as mechanism; always occurs according to their exploitative variation, as combinatorics of libidinal figuration. It is this constancy of figural identity, enabling the necessary continuity of narrative development constitutive of bibliography, that delimits notions of desire, dream, and book.
The constancy of figural identity, supports the constancy of bibliography, both of which support the constancy of the oneiric.


“A place is made, in that essay, by all rights, for such a positive inquiry into the current upheavals in the forms of communication, the new structures emerging in all the formal practices, and also in the domains of the archive and the treatment of information, that massively and systematically reduce the role of speech, of phonetic writing, and of the book. But one would be mistaken in coming to the conclusion of a death of the book and a birth of writing from that which is entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” One page before the chapter which bears this title a distinction is proposed between closure and end. What is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely. If one does not simply read the title, it announces precisely that there is no end of the book and no beginning of writing. The chapter shows just that: writing does not begin. It is even on the basis of writing, if it can be put this way,
that one can put into question the search for an archie, an absolute beginning, an origin. Writing can no more begin, therefore, than the book can end”


[From, “Positions”, Jacques Derrida ]

THE URGENT: THE POSITIVIST HYSTERIA OF THE ANTHROPIC, CLOSURAL ‘MIND’

[KAS] “the urgency of reality (causal efficacy)”



{CJ (AK)}: That could easily slide into the metaphysical nostalgia of an impetus substantialism.
It’s already been done, as well, with the apocalyptic urgency of various evangelised narratives. In a way, even Marxism is one of those narratives.
The Ur-world of urgency, of urgent production!


The metaphysics of urgency, of the urge, and especially of the causal urge, is inherently based on representational assumption; in your example, the structural image of ‘urgent reality’.


If, say, you’re advocating for ‘inner urgency’, an ‘authentic urgency’ no longer quite so bound to conventional market surfaces, what do you do when those market surfaces commodify those rhetorics of alleged ‘interiority’ and ‘authenticity’, precisely as a ‘market surface’?
Given the degrees with which whatever conception of market culture that you’re taking issue with, is co-implicated, perhaps even coextensive, with whatever level of personal and social authenticity you might be trying to defend, on what basis is it possible to distinguish between them, that; one, isn’t representational; and two, if represented, and however represented, isn’t susceptible to internal contradiction, reflexivity feedback, and so on; all of these to do with the theory-laden nature of how situations get established and epistemologised, in the first place?


The very notion, at the outset, of a ‘presentation’, is necessarily the identity of a delimited image. The very notion, of ‘immediacy’, is bound up with the logic of mediation, the punctum of the urgent moment, or moment of urge, merely being a conceptual element supporting that logic.


One of the reasons that Nagarjuna often seems to be so direct in his approach, is probably due to his impatience with the turgid labourings of these kinds of conventional dialectics.


The society of the spectacle; panopticism; the reflexive image; in addition, the early 1990s saw the publication of a number of works around the philosophy of optical metaphoricity.

QUICK INQUIRY INTO THE BASICS OF THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE AND DIMENSIONS OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

If all determinations are theory-laden; which in absence of a determinate absolute, foundation, or closure, would seem to be a necessity; then those determinations necessarily describe complementary perspectives. Then, it could be suggested, that complementarity functions as foundation, but such complementarity does not reduce to any finalised determination of classically monolithic foundation – i.e., a substance.
The notions of ‘materiality’ and ‘ideality’, are substantial organising principles, metaphors of epistemological architecture following foundational procedures based on subjective and objective assumption.


A ‘positivist’, would be someone who offers monolithic explanation, regardless of what the monolithic principle might be held to be.
In order that the principle of materiality or matter has determinate meaning, it necessarily must exclude or negate. Whatever it excludes, is a neglect that automatically compromises its universality, or any alleged universality that might be ascribed to it, as well as a neglect that inevitably constitutes an alternative perspective, a different epistemological architecture systematically arising through the very determination of neglect or rejection.
Dogmatism arises through the inordinate inhabitation of one particular, epistemological architecture, following the train tracks of that particular, theoretical grid, as an exclusive perspective.

NEW FORMS OF SECRECY

In response to this – https://www.facebook.com/owenjones84/videos/596744154004309/

 

Exploitations of national sentiment and exacerbations of xenophobic anxiety, using Margaret Thatcher’s market survey techniques put in the context of real-time algorithmic manipulation, continue to drive the contemporary political scene.
All these fictions of unease are produced by a calculus of crafty coercions, the simplifying mechanics of the mass image. What M John Harrison called “a thousand and one labyrinthine excursions beneath the political crust” (“Settling the World” (1975) M John Harrison), has now turned into hyper-visible spectacles of online confusion. It’s all there, easy to see, but vested interests, stupidity, and bigotry, are the new forms of obscurity, no secret services necessary.

 

Concerning Jeremy Corbyn’s restraint concerning Russia, the British public have to decide whether they appreciate the simplifying rhetoric of strong and stupid statements, or thoughtful and considerate ones. It’s nice to resolve situations quickly, but correctness is another essential attribute: anyone can do quick stupidity, even Boris Johnson, as has been noted.
Conmen usually use speed in order to facilitate their deceptions, global politics is certainly no different, in this respect.

 

Steve Bannon, setting up offices in Brussels, in order to influence European elections, is no different, really, to Russian interventions in the USA, through Facebook manipulations. The irony, of course, is the point and proponents of anti-globalist arguments, being undermined by their resorting to various right-wing, international alliances and techniques of manipulation, lol.

 

In the inordinate concern with frames, these days, it seems that pictures are entirely neglected, simply taken for granted. This is the typical, tunnel vision of instrumentalist thought, that narrative theories were questioning; but the fundamental mediocrity of political intellect never really changes, for its practitioners the framing becomes the positivist picture, and the picture is simply forgotten.