A Maxim (i.e. shut your fucking mouth)

Hyperreality, simulacra: in which our digital copies—seemingly existing “beyond” the form of circuit, wire, electric current, motherboard, flashing screen—hold more detail and articulation than the physical movements of our lives, or even more shockingly: they hold more meaning, effect than our lives in reality do (because, for one, there are so many more eyes to see. . . ). We could call this the ultimate delusion. Our extensions have become essence and any essence has become an incessantly necessary extension to our digital copies (for now)—no longer do our actions speak for themselves (in secret or to a grand audience) but “speaking” is action

Kant argued that we should never treat a person as a means to an end, only as an end in themselves. What do we say of a person who only treats themselves as means towards fantasy-expression, a mock-social-being? Have they betrayed Kant, against themselves?

In truth though: the problem was already manifest, and still manifests itself, outside of the digital, for hyperreality is not confined to this area alone (Facebook, twitter et al.). The modern phenomenon is but an exaggeration of a previously existing one. Any excess of egocentric symbolism, sans honest humility, is the human condition as fraud par excellence. To speak, to advertise oneself as action (qua social being) without thought for objectivity (where the universal overrides the parochial) is the exemplum of narcissism. To turn oneself into a “hero” is simply to avoid death, to ignore the animalist defecation of one’s own mortal body. It is just that today, in the age of information technology, the “low” heroics of work, basic character, myopic relationships (i.e. mediocrity) have surpassed all “high” heroics and fables. To accept death, the abyss, is of course a high task for any human—to relegate human existence to the loud mouths of the self-centred “me-generation” was the coward’s choice, the lowest of courses, that our times have taken (perhaps an inevitable conclusion of late capitalism).

Let us not be fooled, this is what happens today, as we “express” ourselves digitally, with care to spend more time shouting, screaming our statuses, updates etc. than involving ourselves in the activities per se. in truth we all know that if our existence were truly important/meaningful, then we would have no need to prove them socially (though at times, one may have to accept, actions are to be proffered to the public gaze). As with love, life in its magnanimous form/manifestation would be passed in silence. . .

Instead we have hyperreality, hours and years of our lives spent telling the next person in line what we are doing, what we were doing and what we will be doing. This is why I propose an ethical conclusion to Hume’s claim that we are “bundles of ideas”: never mind the metaphysical difficulties of the statement, the implications of acting in a world in which the development of idea is a primary concern is astounding—all other expression is just a propagation of zero upon zero upon zero, ad infinitum: the sum is still nought. Cannot we be silent, admit our animalistic, meaningless existences, resist the buzzing of our immortality in our chests and speak only of the abstracts that exist in the ethereal space above our heads? We are, after all, acephalous cohabiters of pure reason’s dialectical sphere . . . idea has no application without extant observance and we nothing to observe beyond it. The public space should not be for trivial talk and dramatics (this has always been the burden of domestic life). And if we must pander to our feelings of immortality, why not be brave enough to do something grand, with vision, instead of “fluffing up our feathers”?

As much as we try to escape it, this is how society is fashioned today: meritocratic in a false sense, where the measure of achievement and success is based upon our own ability to advertise (without much objectivity placed into the process). Whilst thinking about this, I, by chance, came across the following passage written by Alain de Botton: “one’s status might now well be determined by one’s confidence, imagination and ability to convince others of one’s dues—a possibility of achievement which [shines] a less flattering light on philosophies of stoicism and resignation [. . . o]ne might be doomed not by a lack of talent, but by a species of pessimistic pride.” In a sense: only the sell-out is a capable member of society today—the rest are the uncounted majority, that have no say in altering the hegemonic standard, or even shaping it.

I will not venture to speak of business, or of its culture, but the issue is more pronounced in how sales & marketing has somehow infiltrated each stratum of society (this is commodity fetishism par excellence). We are nothing more than replicas of ourselves, purely symbolic as parts of a system of exchange and spurious values—it is from this perspective, this vantage point, that I can appreciate those that live “off the grid”, though I have always had an issue with the idea of personal escape, of “washing ones hands” of a social problem. The only solution is within the problem, involved: to proudly wear an alternate perspective, a slight twist, off the grid but visible. Here is the revolution, freedom that means something, ipso facto: to admit, openly, “yes, I have no value to you or to your game . . .” Many of us do this, to the dismay (and jealousy) of those in it (the game). This upsets the whole order, which somehow cannot ignore the free few, instead bombarding them with insults and penalties (which should say something in-itself).

Even Kierkegaard saw the value of man in the age of capital, the consumer turned commodity: “he recognises himself only by his dress.” To this phrase Ernest Becker comments: “This is a perfect description of the ‘automatic cultural man’—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium”. This is our modern-day “freedom”: to speak and scream; to SPAM; to update, update, update (even emotion is better expressed by the retarded presence of an on-screen icon)—continuously proving the vacuity within us, being Protean in our weekly, daily, hourly lives and acting as if it meant anything at all. Lacan once said: “in a country where you can say anything, even the truth, the outcome is that, no matter what they say, it has no kind of effect whatsoever”. To this, however, I would add that whilst what we say has no meaning or effect, we do however infuse power into it by the manner in which we say it, by how often we say it and how loudly. In place of content we position noticeability, self-as-propaganda (this is what talking about oneself truly is). We no longer speak of anything, we just flap our lips, roll our tongues and tap our keys . . .

Neurosis as the Language of (Self-Indulged) Oppression

[Disclaimer:

This was written a year ago, during a very violent time (apropos my intellectual opinion towards my own neuroticism). It is not intended polemically against anyone but myself, and even then parts do shift into vulgar, abusive absurdity. It is to be taken seriously but not personally; as a reflection of my own evolution not as a serious psychological evaluation. It signified a great turning point in my life and many of its tenets still hold true for me but do not hold for others. I request that no one takes offense on their own part, but I suppose I cannot preemptively barricade against such a reaction from taking place.

Lastly: the awful attempt at creating a topological map of the depressive's various parts, towards the end of the piece, should be disregarded as little else but experimental bullshit.]




Life as a polemic. Madness as a course of action. To be bold in one’s proliferation against the fatuity of life. To relegate all hubris to disgrace, yet to alleviate fascistic nay-saying with arduous affirmation. To laugh openly but sincerely, with all snorts telic in nature. To write a foolish statement (there’ll be a lot forthcoming), incorrigible in print, for the sake of dialogue, disjunction, in short: a didactive cacophony (viz. the very thing that the shift from Master Discourse to University Discourse was meant to engender, instead of dancing behind a nebulous show of hegemonic multiplicities, in which we can all choose our personal ‘masters’). To see that everyday Lacan’s “Il n’y a pas de Grand Autre” is written in ink but forgotten in practice - praxis now tripping up in its acephalous state. To realise that there is little that is protean in humanity, throughout history, but in its language and semblance. And in that last statement, the truth of which can only lead one, inescapably, to an urge to defecate upon the universal sense of ‘Man’, to fall into despondency, to wish to tear what is “All Too Human” from within you - in a sense to be anti-homo - only then, in that state, to turn one’s eye to the world with a new voice, a brash and unreasonable one, petulant in humour, tenebrous in tone, vulgar in its love, and incisive in its supervention: that is what is necessary of us; that is the price we have to pay.


*****



Neurosis as the Language of (Self-Indulged) Oppression


‘I’ vs. “I am - ‘I’ as the subjective point as such, infinitely small, and “I am” as the panoply of egotistical classifications and referential facts (the ‘hooks‘, once could say, that connect us to the contemporary flow of language, the sociological corpus).

Of the latter we could say: in which Sartre’s principle of “Bad Faith” serves as a paradigmatic evaluation of all that alienates pure subjectivity from itself, man from man. It is neurosis, a narcissistic one at that, the illness of our myopic standing par excellence, now so brilliantly embellished with the quasi-truths of positive science, that continues to haunt us (and we are all willing in its endeavour).This is not the ‘ego’ per se (fear not, we are not moving into the asinine realm of the New Age), but a lack of distantation from it, a lack of humour, an obsession with its faults and tics. This is to say that its purpose has been forgotten: the ego as the finite emergence, a vessel from the infinity of nonsensical formlessness to the finite nature of experience, each individual’s unique form of Kenosis (the meat on the cross as the exemplum of our nature as it should be, the active “guide to life” that we have so long repressed).

Neurosis, and the physician that aids us to indulge in it as nothing but a symptom that encompasses and circumscribes the entire ‘I‘, treated by ego-affirmation and/or various medication that moves us further from all visceral evaluations into the realm of arbitrary and physical pathology, is the blind spot, the complete removal of negation between Subject(ivity) and Ego. Of course, the neurotic, the narcissist (which we all are), is incapable of measuring or grasping anything in a fair light, of expanding upon the world of ideas; he is incapable, dilapidating with his face pressed against ‘himself‘ - and it is here that we can extrapolate the individual symptom onto our contemporary world as a whole, to realise neurosis as another method of suppression, a sort of necessary factor to the current state of globalised capitalism. The subject, the anonymous power of voice as such, has been castrated, duped into taking his place at the riverbank, either ecstatic or disembowelled by the reflection that greets him, whilst history and politics rages in the heavens above - what better way to keep each world citizen in his place, to mute him, than to have him entangled in the realm of doubt, despair and despondence, always measuring his life by idiotic standards and relations, always of the same popular vein (when even the act of measuring is ridiculous) - what better way to shun revolutionary potential, than to turn him into a neurotic consumer, to avert the danger. For what is revolutionary potential but subjectivity proper?:

“Is […] a radical gesture of striking at oneself not constitutive of subjectivity as such? And does this not imply that the time of subjectivity is a priori the time of a state of emergency: being a subject means that things can never ‘return to normal‘? In every ‘normal run of things‘, the subject who participates in it escapes the traumatic abyss that lies at the heart of subjectivity and ‘regresses‘ to a substantial mode of being, that is, reduces itself to a subordinated moment of a higher substantial order.”
- Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, p.398,
ISBN: 978-1-84467-598-2

What is neurosis (at least in its primary state, before it is perpetuated by narcissistic attention) but a natural fit, a burp in the machine that we so quickly wish to transform, through a clever twist of hermeneutics, into the ghost in the machine, as if the mistake itself was proof of, or the spirit itself. It is to be so terribly fixated on an ‘undesirable’ aspect of our own being, whether Imaginary or Symbolic, a form of desperate cathexis - in a sense, isn’t a neurotic the embodiment of desire, caught up on itself: Lacan’s drive that perpetually circles the phantasm of objet petit a, knowing it as shit, in truth, oneself as shit, but caught in the pleasure of misery?

The original neurotic break, the spark of emotion, the traumatic encounter, the occurrence of memento mori as event, the intellect’s revelation of life’s asinine and oppressive truths . . . all these things are something outside of the formation of a neurotic process, a process that dirties the original purity of these events, yet they are directly involved. If perpetuated-neurosis is a crime against life, a cowardice, then how else are we to react to the ‘break’, what path do we follow and where does it lay? Perhaps it is a neighbouring path, close to that of the neurotic, or perhaps one that shoots off obliquely from any that we know. . .

Deleuze and Guattari write that “Desiring machines work only when they break down, and by continuously breaking down.” (Anti-Oedipus, p.8). Our moments of “breaking down”, our spurts, false-starts, stalled engines, are but elements of the process of living, creating (and let us be careful here to separate ‘process’ from ‘system’ for the time being).

What is a break in conscience, in spirit, in strength, in confidence, but an opportunity to freshen and reappraise? Here production splits, attempts to ostracise itself from the slowly petrifying self, tries to continue (in a Deleuze/Guatarri-esque “flow”). Obsessive reactions to these events are but frightened gropes in the dark (and even more so are obsessions that need no event, no excuse nor reason to begin) - they are attempts to keep. When a machine breaks, it, unless wrapped in the shroud of final-death, comes to continue its flow, modified or not, similar or no . . . The broken down machine is but a failure in a concatenation of necessary, live failures. It is not the truth of the self, not something to be focused on as a possession nor as a characteristic (as I wrote before: this is not the ghost in the machine), but a heuristic progress (perhaps not directly telic, but by no means hermetic). It is at the moment that the engine stalls that the ego fits itself perfectly over all production, labelling all perspectives as “I am” and claims all to be a process of itself - it forgets its form to be, merely, an epiphenomenon of what came before, and instead turns everything into a tautological process of self-reference, immediate identity (here we once again find a lack of humorous distantation). Neurosis, narcissism: in essence a killing of all life (behold, the Zombie!). The many lines of action, of living, burn into an infinite loop of questioning. Idle we become . . . and “idleness is the beginning of psychology” (Nietzsche). Here: neurosis (perpetuated), as an idiotic detour.

Here is the trick of our self-subjugation; here is our willing movement into slavery: to create the inner domain, an incredible, personal and stubborn topology of psychological being. This is far from condemning psychology as a whole, but instead to attack the individual elevation of our caricatured spirits into spurious existences, that which we can spit out in ridiculously self-indulgent sentences (our pedantic ‘feelings‘) which the psychiatrist/therapist validates with his pen and paper (audience), a nod of his head (affirmation/conformation), his time (capitalist interest): “Yes, yes, all feelings and opinions are valid.” These ridiculous feelings, once healed by the natural dialectics of social existence (cf. the fact that various studies in the last few decades have consistently confirmed that cases of mental illness (especially those of schizophrenia) are rarer and last for shorter periods of time in third-world countries), is now turned into the possession of a newly created demographic, boxed, eventually a part of the capitalist market which (as with many other processes) feeds and strengthens it, giving the neurotic a place in the mythos of our time (the neurotic/narcissist as a member of an established Zeitgeist).

A neurotic seeks pleasure in security, of which can be said:

“. . . there is none. The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.”
- Henry Miller, Sexus, quoted from p.xvi of Mark Seem’s Introduction, Anti-Oedipus, ISBN: 978-0-14-310582-4

‘Perpetuated’-neuroticism is here an eternal escape from the world, a buffering and defensive construction between our miniscule desires and the traumatic world. Bluntly put: it is cowardice.


*****


To digress, let me ask: what, specifically, of the depressive?

If we are to declare a perpetuated-neurosis as a fault, an oppression/self-suppression of subjective force, then is the depressive anything but a farce, a romantic - a failure? No. To claim such a thing would relegate the importance of position, a sort of intrinsic element in the idea of the depressive, but in a sense directly external from his psychological ‘essence‘ - something who’s potentiality we must not refuse. The fault to be found in the depressive is in his inability to see himself as a symptom embodied (a symptom of ‘political’ or ‘social’ truths, or perhaps even simply as a symptom of himself: personality as proof/symptom of man’s original failure (read “Sin”, if you are so inclined)); instead, he is focused on his own symptoms. A depressive in-action, his fists raised against oppression (or the establishment) is a tank, a stick of dynamite that feeds off personal pathology instead of feeding into it, as a Subject. Unfortunately, such depressives are few and far between. The average depressive is far too busy raising his fists against himself and his own phantoms. He says: “I know I must do A, but in fear I focus my attention on its shadows . . . A1, A2, A3, A4,” ad infinitum. Here is where the ‘language’ of the depressive and the methods of psychology must be altered.

Let us be careful though, or more precisely let us be distinct. The great danger of pursuing this theme (the subject as depressive tank) is to find oneself reversing the circular motion of a depressive’s psychic neurosis, its repetitive distancing from Action, and to lead it instead towards blind Réssentiment. To take Nietzsche’s words to heart, we must not create false morals in reaction to oppression, but move into the space beyond, as a conquering of oppression. In short, the lesson can be encapsulated by Žižek’s disagreement with how we commonly blame capitalist crime on “greedy individuals” - no, it is not in them that we must find our blame, but within the fabric of the system (in Žižek’s example: capitalism itself).

The depressive as subject can thus be split into three positions, or elements, points of a moving triangle that are unfortunately lost in an imbroglio of undecided and unfocused lines. They can be shown as being point a: Subject(ivity); point b: Subject (as-Identified-by-“Position”); and point c: Subject (as-Identified-in-Neurosis).

All three parts are infinitely shifting, lost to each other by a lack of immobile coordinates. They can be described as three dancers: the idle one that observes and lives vicariously through the others, as if the audience member somehow appearing on-stage (this is a); the one that shifts his feet in awkward discomfort, a shameful despair upon the stage (caught up in the glare of the Big Other), because the floor is continuously moving from his feet (and was never there to begin with) (this is b); and the one of energy, the maelstrom that has no eyes to look out of its own, but eyes on-itself as it were, in-loop, all-ignorant (a kind of false being-in-itself) (this is c). As these pieces, the dancers, eternally shift, it is important to note that this is only in relation to each other - the stage remains the same, unmoved by these meretricious dramatics.

It doesn’t take much to understand why a would take shelter in c, as an avoidance, a way of refusing to be identified with the devastating truth of b. “I am” does not wish to entertain the element of death, of abyss (and here is where Heidegger is right in pointing our that life is inauthentic without the admittance, constant knowledge, or mortality).

Freud talked, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of a child’s repetition of a traumatic experience in an effort to master them (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p.13, ISBN: 978-0-393-00769-5) - here is perpetuated-neurosis! For is not neurotic behaviour this attempt, an untenable one (yet we persevere in it nonetheless), to master fate itself; is it not some bastardised notion, a nihilistic and antagonistic attempt against amor fati. Horse-blinders, myopia, parochialism, a case of idiotic nystagmus in the soul, a smoke-screen against truth. A perpetuated-neurosis is nothing but defence; any pain that is perceived or experienced within the bounds of such an illness is ultimately requested (“Victims be clear/You’re all volunteers”) - there is a protective pleasure in it, albeit an artificial one.

Here we can point at the neurotic, the Subject-as-Identified-in-Neurosis (c) and say, nay shout: “Now I have you, nihilist!”-

But once again, let us be careful where we tread. The dance consists of the three elements, c must be unmasked of its content but not eradicated in its form. Whilst such neurosis is the denial of a (the) traumatic situation and responsibility of living (a fear of action, cf. the Henry Miller quote above) it is also a source of energy per se. Although a chooses to lose itself in c’s movement (and isn’t that what c is in essence?), this is only because it is first confronted by the truth of b, before cowardly picking the shelter of neurosis, before, in a sense, adjusting the shape of c to fit the defensive narcissism of its fear. b is the mediator and c is the conclusion, the retroactive warning signal, a violent reaction in the ripples of b’s movements . . . a is nothing but the referential point of ‘vision’ that loses itself in a Symbolic position (or more precisely a lack of one, a fear of it. . . b) and the Imaginary volatility of c.

c is on a circular path, acting as a spurious “solid ground”, b is in free fall (this is according to the depressive - it is possible to imagine this formula reverses in the case of the “well-adjusted individual”).

The depressive here has a choice between two distinct positions: the Existentialist-Depressive-Identified-within-(THE LACK OF)-Position (in vivo) or the Self-Preserved-Depressive-Identified-within-Neurosis (in vitro).

This is the important factor, the choice, why the depressive cannot be rejected as a “ridiculous neurotic”. As a depressive, one should have the advantage of being able to become aware, and to commit to b’s freefall - others are potentially blind, lost, with a a joining the flow of c’s rotary motion but with b as the basis for its (still, but not acknowledged as being, spurious) ground - the distinctions blurring, lost in circular reasoning, immediate-identity, infinite stupidity, with no mediation truth (a neurotic that is not avoiding a traumatic truth, who is narcissistic for no ‘cause’ nor ‘reason’, is an ordinary, well-adjusted human being: a machine).

All the depressive must do, is to turn his position into an advantage, a process of truth, instead of being immobilised by what he sees.

“For the depressive, the habits of the former life world seem to be, precisely, a mode of play acting, a series of pantomime gestures (“a circus complete with all fools”), which they are no longer capable of performing, and which they no longer wish to perform. There’s no point, everything is a sham.”
- John Los

Here is a perspicuous summary of the subject confronted with the traumatic truth . . . Step two: Embrace it.


*****


So what is the answer to neurotic behaviour? Action. Volatile expression. The violence of the absurd. A commitment to one’s social and historical standing (fate) no-matter for any cynical analyses of the “concept” of society itself. . . .

Nothing can come from a sedentary life (nothing begets nothing), but only from the walking fire of liberated subjectivity. We must not fall short, and if one does so, we must pick ourselves up again.

As Jöns masterfully proclaims towards the end of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in his commentary of Antonius Bloc’s pleas for salvation, the knight’s neurosis:

“In the darkness where you say you are, there is none to listen to your lament. You are reflected in your own indifference.” [italics/emphasis added]

Jöns proliferates to the final moment (and even then muted only “under protest”) whilst Antonius was dead long before, unfecund, already at the moment he began his game with Death (and is this not another way of naming the moment in which he became aware of himself, identified in his words, in his ultimate position: I am mortal?) . . . What is painfully true, is that many of us do not even shift our wills, observe the truth, even in our dénouement. . . .


*****


In the spirit of proliferation (and as mentioned above: “foolish statements”, because there’s always room for more), here follows a list, a manifesto:

to be at war against anything that supports idleness.
to be at war against “scientific positivism” as an ideology (which, I must clarify, is far removed from scientific thought, method, and the scientist as individual as it can be - perhaps one could say: to clarify between the Versuch that is a healthy scientific sense of adventure or the Wissenscaft that is scientific progress, and the flagrant bullshit that is the public opinion and use of scientific theory).
to be at war against the world of “opinion” (where all attempts at truth, the dialectics of progress, the creation of new ideas, has been relegated to the field of the meretricious attachments, the ownership of past truth-processes already validated and integrated into the world of “opinion”).
to be at war against repressive psychology.
to be at war, period.
to be militant in action and word, in vivo, not only in the scholar’s test tube (defended, in its imaginary state, by all manners of scholastic and historic quotes).
to be without criticism, leaving that to the dilettanti of “opinion”, whilst instead bringing critical-analysis to the foreground.
to be able to see ego only as the epiphenomenon of the subject’s process - once again to treat all engine farts as part of this process.
to be able to refuse Homo Natura as an a priori category, or nature itself as a pre-existing condition - there is but movement and reaction (Nature’s balance has always been constitutive of its reactive element).
to . . . ah yes, to fuck!



- Amor Fati.

The Pervert at the Centre of Democracy

(Subjective-Objective as antagonism, and the Cynical glare of Audience)

There is a problem with democracy today. There has always been a problem. It has always declared itself the voice of the people (as have Dictators and Socialists); it has always acted systematically, against the idea of a revolutionary event, in an apparently objective motion, but by the whims of subjective individuals; it has always projected itself into an objective reality, from the subjective safety of power (the Oval Office, Downing St. etc.); but what it has never done, is to exist in practice as its theory claimed.

In the (post)modern West, Democracy has become the trump card of moral goodness, the epitome of an ethical-political system. Even though Churchill himself, faced with the onslaught of drastic Fascism, admitted that Democracy was in-fact a terrible system (although it was the best one we had/have), we still refuse to move past it, or to even question it ideologically. As if we have reached the very end, or Absolute (In a pseudo-Hegelian sense), of ethical-political history, we refuse to see past the mask of Democracy.

Much like the inner workings of a capitalistic/corporate world, in which the monetary and ethical value of an action is read from a strict, objective perspective, but acted upon from a subjective voice to a (faked)subjective employee/customer, the actions of democracy itself contradict each other in the very clash of the Subjective-Objective. Whereas the idea of democracy is to allow the mass of subjects (proletariat & bourgeoisie, master & slave) to act decisively on a level playing field, it is easy to see the inconsistency of the act.

Even if we are to take away the “unfair” notions of the majority being right, or the repression of the proletariat/slave/ethnically unwanted, Democracy still fails. In-fact, even in perfect conditions democracy is intolerable for the simple fact that it attempts to act upon a single level of Objectivity whilst always referring to the autonomy of the Subject.

For example, in the voting process a leader is objectively chosen—the very numbers of the (hopefully unaltered) votes, in-themselves, give an irrefutable result. The subjective wishes of the many are washed into the simple clarity of Yes or No. This leap from subjective to objective, from individual action to national (Universal) voice, is not ridiculous at all—in choosing this system for themselves, the masses claim to “take history into their own hands”. On a pure level of mathematics, nothing here is false or incorrect. The inconsistency comes into play when the leader, mathematically elected, turns out to be a Subject in-him(or her)self, not the Objective principle that was voted upon When the Objective Will of the many suddenly needs to jump back down into a subjective position, it crashes, bleeds, dies, empties of all its truth (pragmatically speaking), and ends with a false position (this is why modern democracies have to defend themselves from the terrifying centre of the Other (in this case: Mr. President) by constricting his freedom, and sharing his autonomy of power with many others, thinning out the force of action from the tight point of a stiletto shoe, to the flat foot of an elephant (aka the yap-yap of Capitol Hill)). When every action that is taken—in the name of democracy, morality or nationalism—is taken by the individual will of the elected leader, Objectivity quickly collapses, somehow taking a backstage place, almost like a faint outline of the Law, whilst the Subject stands bright within the spotlight.

There is nothing Democratic about any Presidential action. Saying that a president or prime minister (or whomever) takes an action democratically, is like saying that a young child in a playground Acts democratically because of the shouting and screaming of the children behind him (that may or may not affect him in his choice). There is no escaping the abyssal nature of the Leader's subjectivity: the action comes from he/she, and relies in no-way upon the democratic mass. The very notion of Democracy is a falsification; claiming Democracy because of an election in the U.S.A is much the same as claiming the current leadership (Hugo Chávez) of Venezuela as being “Democratic” simply because it was reached by election. The systematic string of various elected leaders, apparently all speaking for the people, culminating in the peak of the pyramid, is one of the most laughable monstrosities of truth in our present age. At least dictators, communists and fascists don't have to hide their true faces.

But Democracy isn't the primary problem (and we can fall back to Churchill once again). The corruption of the west really falls in the realm of the Audience, and how the masses react and view the world around them (or more specifically: the world they live in and alter). The problem today lies in the idle nature of the people. The End of History has been claimed—lazily. Intellectuals spend their times defending the present state against the revolutionary minority, instead of trying to move forwards (take for example Peter Berger's latest book, a monstrosity of horse-blinded Death: In Praise of Doubt (ISBN: 978-0-06-177816-2)). Time seems to continue on in a tightly closed circle (one that even the events of 9/11 were not able to disturb or shake). What is needed is the Act, or to put it as Badiou would: an Event. Enough of mere Being, of continuing “living” in a basic state, in homoeostasis:

“The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure 'I'. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength.”

—G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, ISBN: 0-19-824597-1, p.19.

What we need is this negative, this “death” of our current mode of life, of the still-safety of things as they have-been and are. The antagonism between the subject and the objective law of democracy-capitalism, like the cog that believes its own autonomy as a piece in the machine, but refuses to prove it (in a revolutionary sense), is a sickening trap, a false-livelihood that knows not the true meaning of life. Life comes in the excess, the sprouting from and evolution—life is the faithful crawl of mutated sea-creatures onto the beach, breathing freely. It does not come in stabilising the present condition, in staying still (like death).

In moving on, it is clear that the main threat to this attempt, or any urge to revolutionise, is not in the hands of the Leader, nor the Master, nor the Bourgeoisie, but in-fact, in the hands of the Audience: the masses, those that watch (and minimally act) within the political/ethical/social field. What hinders any realisation of democratic (and capitalistic) failure, is the lack if integrity in the every-day Joe. In the absurd cynical-distancing of the Audience (for that is what they are, those that watch in “physical silence” whilst abusing the air blue with verbal “acts” of disapproval) there is a lack of attachment or responsibility.

Take for example the voices of the Right after a (black, charismatic, press-baby) Leftist/Socialist victory: “I didn't vote for him”, “It's their [the Others] fault”, etc. Or the same problem vice-versa: “I didn't want the war, They did”, which is bipartisanship at is worst . . . (And is it not interesting to point out that George W. Bush's actions apropos the War on Terror, in which the watering-down of the Senate and various other powers were ignored for direct Subjective Will (in the name of the country, of the party, of Freedom etc.) is in-fact the very embodiment of true democracy and its frailties. It is as if the very King of Democracy (the elected leader par excellence) becomes the terrifying pit of negativity at the centre of the democratic system: he becomes the perversion, the very contradiction of political democracy (no wonder that we try so hard to humanise our leaders)).

The two directions one can take from this problem, or what we could perhaps call the two direct-answers, are either to take a leap (in a Kierkegaardian sense) of faith, so that the democratic system, and its Leader's actions, always conform to the will of the Audience by the simple fact that the People say: “Yes, you are the embodiment of our will, and hence, act for us” (which is what dictatorial and fascist regimes impose upon their followers), or the Audience can finally clear themselves of doubt, distance, cynicism and blindness, for the Event, the very negative act of Absolute eternity penetrating into the self-enclosed circle of the present State.

The revolutionary act does not necessarily have to come physically—perhaps all we need is the open discussion of intellectual movement. Perhaps a new vocabulary simply has to be placed within the (apparently) complete language of our lives.

September 27^th 2009

Sacramento

A Clarification

(on the Levels of Abstraction, the Immortality of Subjectivity,
& the Honesty of Contradiction)

This piece is designed to clarify certain ideas that compose the framework of my current metaphysics and general philosophical beliefs. In clarifying the meaning of these three terms, I hope to make further discussions and writings on various subjects more accommodating to the general reader—the piece is aimed at creating the foundations of my terminology.

In realising that the use of language (no matter for the objective standards that are printed in dictionaries, encyclopaedias or expressed by college professors) generally falls upon its own subjective use. Whether from a conditioned or artistically contracted source, the subject signifies the meaning (or at least attempts to) trying to capture the very essence of a feeling, sensation or expression. It would be easy to argue that this fails on most levels, and in most cases, and as Lacan realised: this is the torment of man, within his ability to express himself, he is only increasingly frustrated by the limits of his own tongue.

Bearing this in mind, this clarification of terminology falls into subjective obscurity itself. But this does not hinder my attempt. Language will always flow, frail and fragile, manipulated in the receiver's ears or eyes by his or her own subjective stance.

(1) The Levels of Abstraction

This is an important concept to the very fabric of my own reality, whether or not it is active in my thought in every living moment or not—it signifies the basis for my moral outlook on life (in relation to my actions against others, in judging other people's actions, and most importantly: in how I view the vitality of my life and its position in “the cosmos”).

To help clarify it I wish to begin with the very analogy that sprouted its origins.

Let us imagine a tree, or what is conjured from the word “tree” itself. The tree is a total of many parts, contracted into one by various concepts (some aesthetic, some scientific, some simply from conditioned reflex: from the nature of the space around it the separates, or the unifying concepts of living connection, as an organism living as a whole, to the way in which we are taught “tree” by small images in a picture book). What must be realised however, is that in a certain sense, the tree does not exist. As a total of parts it is simply that: a fabricated fiction, a mixture of other things. Nothing in a tree is a tree in itself. The leaves, rustling, living and dying within themselves, may affect the unified organism “tree”, and the tree as a whole may affect them, but they are not “tree” in their singularity. The notion of the tree comes to life only when we come to perceive it from the perception of a certain size, stance and knowledge. To the ant crawling along the bark, there is not a tree, but bark, wood, and leaves above (perhaps each branch that sprouted out of the central trunk was a tree in-itself to him. And these words too—bark, leaf, wood, etc.—in themselves can be split into a smaller portion, viewed from a more microscopic standpoint (is an atom within a tree, let us say an atom of what is referred to as “nitrogen”, a tree, a piece of bark, a leaf?).

This same manipulation of perspective can be taken in the opposite direction. Is the tree not a part of a larger eco-system, which in itself is part of a larger planet, which is part of . . . and so forth. Does a God playing with the Universe in his palm perceive The Universe, and does he pay any attention to the tree or ant from this Universal perspective? Is it actually possible from a single perspective to view the parts at the exact moment that you are admiring the whole?

The point of this is that the nature of things (subjectively based) lays completely in the very nature of the observer. Objective realities are a blend of these subjective views, and the contradictions they entail are born from these differences of perspective, and often from the Levels of Abstraction, the point in which the subject is viewing a certain thing (whether it be a physical thing, a moral point, a metaphysical claim). One man may say: I see a tree; another may say: I see many leaves, and many trunks . . . one many may say: I see a People; the other may say: I see a series of feet, smiles and eyes. When a politician takes an action, he sees a Nation, and those that are effected by such actions react on a personal and subjective basis, seeing not a Nation, but a person, or people within that grander concept, that grander level of Abstraction.

Now, one part of the definition of abstract, or abstraction, is that it can simplify, often to a point of losing its inherent meaning. But is not the word “tree” a simplifying and brutal disregarding of all its parts? Is the word “nation” not the same . . . “people” etc.. Language in itself is an abstraction, whether we will it or not. Even the nature of the subject is lost to this abstraction (and hence the Lacanian frustration): is my name, “Dylan”, not a monstrous fiction, something that attempts to clarify my many parts, my many thoughts and feelings into a single, senseless and shapeless abstraction? Is this not a Level of Abstraction that is necessary for everyday communication and action, but totally inadequate in the eyes of intra-personal awareness, even intimate inter-personal awareness?

Is language not vulgar in this? And from this, does it not lose all of its truth?

(2) The Immortality of Subjectivity

This realisation of this daily notion, this daily use, of abstraction, as the essence of life in-fact, may seem terrible and lonesome. But it has its uses, and in its truth, relinquishes the confines of pseudo-Knowledge, taking the weight off the shoulders of Truth itself, bringing forth the truths of the Many. What it gives birth to is the realisation of Life itself, in its brutal entirety . . . :

If nothing “exists” in a significant sense without the subjective view (from whatever point, level, abstraction etc.), then surely the very act of signifying, the subjective utterance from a certain Level of Abstraction in Infinity, is the very act of creation and birth of Life itself! Not to say that nothing exists in a physical sense without the act of observance or signifying: but it might as well not. The “tree” exists only as pointless matter, uncollected or recognised, without the voice or eye that says that it is . . . Without the subjective viewpoint, the Universe becomes a collection of space and matter, like the binary 1s and 0s, and infernal Nothingness (was not the first work of creation The Word?).

“The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters man's identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal [. . .] subjectivication is immortal, and makes Man. Beyond this there is only a biological species, a 'biped without feathers', who's charms are not obvious.” —Alain Badiou, Ethics, p. 12, ISBN: 978-1-85984-435-9

From this willing of signification, the naming action, the very act of observance and standing as a subject, we can see the very sprouting of Godliness, the bright light of living itself. The soul is not a metaphysical abundance but a simple trickery of awareness, that fickle thing known as consciousness. Language spawns this. When we grow as a child and learn to look at ourselves and conjure the meaning of “I”, we are born fully . . . beyond what was our base, biological birth from the womb. In willing our existence we come to fully exist. In embracing the objective fiction of ourselves, we come to exist (which could be deemed contradictory, and it is, but it is from this contradiction that our lives sprout, our notions of emotion and expression emerge: there is no real “I”, there is no real “man” or “woman” or “lover” or “father”, only our attempts to attach fictional works of language to the material binary code of the world around us—an act of immortality). This is Man.

All that is deemed beautiful in man, whether rightly or not, bears no reality outside of the subjective core—objectivity sees none of this, which is why the machines of Hollywood movies fail to recognise humanity: not for their strict logic, but the simple inability to perceive past the mechanist notion of the Whole. This absurd realisation will strike to some as a heavy weight, a final clarity and the meaningless quality of existence . . . its fickle breath. But these thoughts miss the mark. In searching for his objective meaning, man has missed the very truth of existential fright, living upon the meaningless space of existence in a Nietzschean roar of life: meaning can only be brought forth form its contradiction, life can only come from End & Death, and creation itself from the destructive ebb of Nothingness. . . .

To clarify:

Who holds the vitality of life? An immortal gnat that feels nought, names nothing, and fails to feel the hum of existence within him—or the mortal man who creates the existence of things around him with the use of fiction, sprouts meaning (however short-lived) into himself, and burns with the humming of existence? Is not the subjective shout of “I am a mortal man, who grows old and sick and finally dies” an act of immortality over the shining stars that simply go on forever (well, almost).

And let us not forget Kant's realisation of man's transcendence through Space & Time—it is in man's ability to turn the shapeless into the finite, to be able to perceive an object due to its position in space and also its position in a chronological line, that allows him to transcend over the base notion of the world and to a point in which one is able to see various objects, to come to create an understanding of what there is—man's immortality is in being able to subjectivize the world around him so that it is His. It does not matter that time is relative, nor that objects in space are perceived differently depending on the position in which they are viewed from—this is the act of creation, to make “something” out of “nothing”.

In essence, man is brought to his place by speaking as a Subject and viewing the world from whichever frame and Level of Abstraction that suits (the Ethics of this shall have to be left for another time).

(3) The Honesty of Contradiction

As with all good things, complete awareness of one's own existence and the existence of the world around oneself, comes not only from naming & signifying, but also from asking: why? in realising the contradiction beneath the idea, the abyss that language is suspended over, the negativity that surrounds the abstraction of the positivity you utter: when you speak Yes into the Abyss, it is formed by the Nay of the negativity it resounds within . . . In a sense a positive creation is as much that as a negation of everything else—

When man signifies, or when man makes any sort of claim, stretching out into the world to create a truth, he has two choices: (a) to signify or reason without any consequence, to deny its opposite or even the possibility of its opposite, in a blind Kierkegaardian leap of faith, a diabolically inhuman act of dishonest fiction; or (b) to only make actions of reason, language or belief upon the grounds of uncertainty, upon the very contradiction of their negativity, to be a Subject whilst realising the absurdity of the world around them, and still making the decision whilst realising the absurdity and fragility of their attempt!

Let us take belief, or faith, in God, as the most obvious and easily explained of examples. Is not a man who claims God, even shouts knowledge of it, but leaves no space in his life for its opposite, completely devoid of the claim? How can the claim, even linguistically, live without its fragile edge that mutters affirmation against the negation of its opposite, or lack-of? Is not the true notion of faith, of human adherence to God, the very act of questioning Him and laying in a pool of uncertainty (which was why news of Mother Teresa's journals, and their apparent dictation of lost faith or questioning, were the true signs of her religious being).

If we were to imagine a single spot of paint that we are define as “red”, can we contemplate it in its singularity without respecting the negating field of otherness that surrounds it: all that is not it. Does not a complete disregard for anything else than that which we are trying to perceive, or describe, or experience relegate the aim itself to Eternity and thus to Emptiness and Formlessness? Is the basis of human life and experience not that justification of all that is not just as much as what is—in the sense that we cannot appreciate or even acknowledge one thing without seeing the space between It and “Other” and Everything Else itself?

In contradiction is reality.

In calling something by one name, we negate all other things in eternity, including the parts that make the whole of which we just named. This is not always a downfall, nor a negative thing, but should be realised whilst in-action as means to perceive reality as whole. Some fail in this: Politics, in its apparent reach for “ethical universality”, fails man on his own level (of abstraction) for it disregards him as a significant individual, instead abstracting him into a named collective (that truly does not exist in any sense): The People, or The Universal; the educational and philosopik fail to pertain to the individual situation whilst aiming at the universal mind . . .

*****

Let us be clear, in no means do I want to say: everything is Relative. What I do wish to say, is that: the subject, in an infernal act of apparent God-hood, in his subjectivication, is the starting point for all notions of life and “humanity” (and I do not mean humanity in the collective, but in the singular, as an adjective not as a noun).

Creation spawns from The Word.

Further reading (for non of this has been original, but it has been poorly realised):

Ethics, Alain Badiou.

Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre.

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Friedrich Nietzsche.

August 19^th 2009, Santa Rosa

The Break, Fidelity & "The Adversary"

(Badiou and the Personal)

The Break (or The Event):

What is the break but the moment in which the very norm, the common (of society, history, psychology, fashion, art, science, knowledge etc.) is broken by a turning away from itself into a new space. Whether it is a creation or discovery of a new place is of little importance; its affect on the commonality of what came before it is where the importance lies.

These “breaks” can be ultimately large in universal scale or simply vast in a subjective dimension. The Break is Einstein against Newton, Tesla and the coil, The Communist Manifesto against Capitol (which re-enacts the break perpetually throughout the last hundred years of history, it seems); or it is making a decision against your own past, flying like Jonathan Livingston Seagull into the air, marrying yourself to a cause, falling in love . . . The break is a moment in which one's gaze is taken from its fixed position and shone out into the darkness of the unknown. That which it was fixed on before-hand is the common, it is “Knowledge” itself, where opinions vary but the expanse of information fails to. The break gives an opportunity to revalue all that is within this common space, even if it does not necessarily bring anything new.

The Break (Event) is like a birthplace for a new perspective. And in being a birth, it is life itself.

Fidelity (the ethic of the Break):

Fidelity, as an ethic, is adhering to this new perspective and continuing as far out of the common as one possibly can. Fidelity is living a truth, preserving it (without delusion) until the time comes to return it to the common of Knowledge. If we were to imagine the space of human knowledge, Geist, spirituality etc. as a globe with its own gravitational pull, then Fidelity would be the force that drove wandering objects from its surface, into unknown space, and thus capturing a new realm for the globe to expand into.

But the size of the globe is irrelevant, there must be no thought of a final “Absolute”. Death is the absolute, the space outside of the common is the absolute, and the space that is the common is, in a sense, absolute: for it is dead-still, unchanging without the spark of The Event. The only thing that lives is this excess from the norm, the flying arc of life, this Break that must perpetuate itself. On a base level, Existence itself is a break from the norm of non-existence, and thus living itself is an ethical act. But on a “human” level (a personal level) life is more than mere existence, and thus Life as an ethical act must be more than simply eating, breathing and shitting. Life Must Be The Break In-Itself and the perpetuation in action.

The Adversary (or why we must be our own Anti-Thesis, Anti-Christ, Anti . . . ):

The Ego-Ideal (the part of ourselves that we compare to, feel judged by, like the voice of complete undermining) is a necessary adversary. The imbalance and insecurity of human existence is like the fragile movement of petals opening at the dawn. A secure movement, a secure change, as if a result known in advance, is nothing but a robotic thread of in-action. An insecure growth, whether positive or negative, is the human Break.

On a vary basic level, I would ask: what gives any thesis, action, thought, life, word its insecure purity? Is it anything but its opposite, or the threat of it—the antithesis, the anti . . . What is life without the thought of death, but emptiness? What is love without the thought of hate, or apathy? What is a belief, an act of faith, without its Devilish opponent, its Adversary par excellence? Is not the very foundation of any event the combination of combating forces, like a synthesis of frictions, a duality that acts in One.

Are not all memories, words & dreams but stepping stones onto themselves that act as birth and death in the same instantaneous moment.

In thinking this, should we not accept the Adversary of anything that we consider to be beautiful, profound, moral or necessary, as the very whore-mother-origin of all that is wanted. The Adversary is the freedom of space and the willingness to step out of bounds. To oppose knowledge is to redirect to new thought, and this (albeit meaningless in-itself) action is the very nature of life itself, the profound act of faith that perpetuates nature from worm, tree, horse to man—but this is not simply the will to live, or the survival instinct in its basic and disgusting simplicity: it is a step beyond the realms of the necessary or the comfortable, like an artist's faith in new-discovery, a continuous proof of life and existence against the void of 0+0+0+0+0 that constitutes basic living.

The Break is the moment in which a new digit appears, and the Fidelity is the willingness to continue in its tracks . . . but the Adversary is the continuous friction of Fidelity against its Anti-, or perhaps Fidelity is the Anti- itself. Bravery and recklessness are not enough without the conscious recognition of one's own frailties, fears, insecurities, and failings.

Betrayal (in an honest form) is the most profound expression of love. A student who betrays his teacher for the evolution of Ideas; a child who becomes his own before being able to love his parent outside of the reality of childhood—these are the frictions of difference, the adoptions of opposition that give birth to life.

Judas gave birth to the world as he hung from his tree.

David Foster Wallace, Slavoj Žižek & The Monstrosity of “Zen” Cynicism

Reading through Wallace's essay “E UNIBUS PLURAM – television and fiction” (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, ISBN: 0-316-925284) I've come to realise the truly malignant notion of “postmodern” cynicism that has already been touched upon in Žižek's work. What both Wallace's critique on television and Žižek's insight into modern ideology hold in common is the very concept that we, in a fit of liberal education, are aware of the very systematic ideology that confronts us on a day to day basis; but, through our cynical adaptation of our daily lies, through a comical irony, we have convinced ourselves of our innocence and inculpability in relation to this “system”--in a truly cynical sense, we have convinced ourself of a lack of guilt even in our own actions. This cynicism comes with an unhealthy dose of zen-like apathy in which the inner journey of meditation and peace is justified by the refutation of “actual” actions through a mental distancing—in an absurd reversal of Sartre's citation of the waiter and his “bad faith”, modern cynicism seems to have eradicated any notion of freedom or choice at all, but not in a deterministic sense, simply in a nihilistic sense: almost as if the mind has given up to the corporate nature of reality, playing along with it . . . but when the cynicism is obvious (take Sartre's waiter or Wallace's example of TV viewer “Joe Briefcase” who sees the falsity of a commercial, feels rewarded for realising the irony of it, but still ACTS as Audience) we are culpable, guilty of “Bad Faith” at a far worse level than our parents and grandparents who may have been excused to a more “provincial” viewpoint (not yet cynical, but in Direct Belief) in Modern and Pre-Modern periods.

This is why Žižek spends so much time pointing out the ideology of our times when we seem to claim on a daily basis that we are “post-ideological”; this (latter) claim is a contrived piece of drivel seemingly spawned from a disillusionment with The Dream itself (in an American and international sense), or perhaps, as Wallace discusses, the rise of television's voyeuristic perversity into the realms of politics, social life and so forth, gave birth to the claim. When television broadcasting and mass-media allowed the everyday Joe to see the false-face of ideology itself, and even his/her own simple actions, is it not this cynicism itself that provided a means to escape the disillusionment—in this sense, and I'm sorry to say, shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, are the best examples of postmodern distancing and aloof commentating in which fun is made but every day life continues as usual (this is why I was disappointed in how Jon Stewart rebuked his own actions on the show Crossfire: the power behind one of the most powerful comedic actions of our times, rumoured to be the cause of the show's cancellation itself, expresses regret for stepping “out of bounds” . . . and isn't this a problem in-itself, as if the cynical eye is the “personal mind” that still refuses to act within the mass-system itself as a free-agent).

I never intended to write this piece in relation to an existential sense of freedom, but it's what it comes down to: act-freedom itself has been replaced by the “safe”-freedom of cynical distancing. Like a series of Zen drones acting out their every-day, ideological responsibilities (Heinrich Himmler always carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him) we, as a post-modern, cynical society, act out our duties whilst claiming that they are not our duties or actions at all. And technology really has made it worse, (or our irresponsibility in the face of technology has); this is what Wallace's piece confronts. The “pseudo”-narcissistic nature of our times (we can carry multiple personalities on the internet, through our correlation with TV shoes, our romantic interests in pop icons, movie stars and so forth) has allowed us to escape even further—but not into ourselves, or any “romantic” ideal as such. Instead, we have lost ourselves in a terrible noise, a White Noise (Don Delillo) of MySpace pictures, favourite TV shows, blogs, internet communities—in which our freedom in any given situation is relegated because we are justified by some “other image” of ourselves, or the world. The Individual is considered to be more and more aware of himself, but in-fact seems less and less separate from the “Other” of the Masses, or “Audience”. This is so wonderfully demonstrated by Wallace in the whole self-referential irony of modern TV commercials; it says to us: we know that you know that we are trying to manipulate you like some ordinary Joe, and we're going to reward you for your individual observation by being blatantly obvious about it—in this sense the TV becomes a caricature of itself, cynical before-the-fact, and treats everyone like an individual (i.e. telling us that so-and-so product makes us a highly-valued individual just like everyone else that consumes/uses/wears so-and-so product), an individual that is part of a Mass of individuals. In acting along with this, we become the culprits in the most widespread, communal act of “Bad Faith” that the the times know.

The greatest example of this distancing (blanketed by some idealist impression) is the character Kessler in the Lars von Trier's Europa. Unfortunately, in reality, such mentalities are not so well punished—there is no drowning train car for us millions and billions staring at the TV set, spouting cynical judgements at the screen, acting our daily lives with the pretence that we are “somewhere else, someone else, incorruptible and blameless”.