Category: neo-modernism

Post-modernism’s Worth. 

When we are too close to an event, we talk about it as from a distance. That is, what we say is automatically distanced from the event, a maximum distance. The event is thus, by this occurrence, an object. As opposed to our psychotherapeutic model, the closer we are to an event, the more dishonest we are about its true bearings, that is, the truth of the matter, why it is that the (the wholeness of the) event has occurred the way it has. The impetus and the reaction can be come upon as an included item, a truth in-itself, only when we are distanced from the event. The truth of an object, as opposed to the True Object, can only be viewed in its truth from a distance. The equation is thus of inversion, of ratio.

Here then we may have a basis upon which to properly view foundational post-modern writers, namely, Derrida, Deleuze and Guittari, but others also.  To wit: Their descriptions were from a basis too close to the event, such that they attempted to quickly and finally establish a ground for the event; the event being thus so profound and significant, they were compelled to offer a reason.

They were not wrong, only rash. 

It is analogous to an explosion. We have now the data from the explosion, having encountered it ourselves, but also come across the initial first hand rationalization and fact crunching reports of the explosion itself – with that, subsequent explosions, and now the reports and experience of the aftermath(s) of explosions, we can now safely report upon the truth of the whole event. 

The Impossible, part 4: Spiritual Oneness and the State of Incorporated Reality.

The operative question that motivates the essays on the impossible can be formulated by the questions of determinism and contingency: Is the random aspect of the physical universe of science responsible or otherwise enacted or present in the random aspect that involves human choice, such that choice is determined by the state of the universe, or, is the human being a mediator or mediation of an extra or supra universal element and the physical world, where the random aspect of the physical is but that supra element of the human, that the physical universe is contingent upon the series of choice?

We should see that these questions remain salient so far as the terms themselves reflect or are capable of reflecting True Objects of a particular scheme. The impossible, then, lay at the exposure or decoupling of such metaphysical structures, at the complete shredding of all discursive-conceptual methods for meaning, including such conceptions that would end this with an ineffective nothingness or nihilism.

The reader should be clear in his or her orientation upon this reading. This is not a discernment of ‘either you’re in or you’re out’ situation; but, this statement assumes that the reader is indeed oriented in this way, or at least can understand from that perspective, and thus has been coming upon a sort of intuitive rebuttal, that some sort of antagonistic anxiety is cultivating the response that places the argument for nonsense, ripe to be useless, ridiculous, or for a term extrapolated to nothing less than impossible. This is the sign of irony; the argument presents the dissolution of its representation. The attachment to or faith in the True Object come upon by its dissolution as an indication of another True Object is, as Soren Kierkegaard rightly situated, despair, but its opposite elicitation is elation. The continuation through despair, and not the Sartrean revolt from it, is the revealing of the impossible into discourse, into the logic involved in the meaning of terms, it’s implicated scheme, that has become itself ripe to speak of the impossible in its impossibility, that what has so far been seen as the polemical position to reality is but a discursive situation of a modernist sort, which is to say, of a One True Universe, that is or has developed itself to the point of being capable of revealing its own limitation through its limiting definition of objects, such that these objects not only argue their determination but their contingency as well, and ultimately, that because this situation has arisen only and of the the supposed common humanity of meaning, that this common humanity can no longer be upheld, where the subject agent of will likewise is seen as a faulty conception. The irony is that the universe counts as a ‘one’ in which humans are not segregate, and that the universe, as a conceptual scheme that comes about in humans, has developed the meaning of its unsound concept. Hence, the concept brought to its objective ends is despair, yet it moved through is the phenomenon itself, an ironic reversal or upending of reality. The revolt from despair is a re-establishing of reality, as well as its historical truth.

The potential at any moment for the revealing the full extent of the contradictory feature of any conventional discourse evidences the true qualitative motion of history and is reflected in the mood or attitude of the era. What has been defined, at this late date, as modernist and post-modernist expresses the oscillation of history to non-history, and by this we should surmise that the history of which science designates evolution and the development of human beings and all its stages, is much, much older than what physics and anthropology has determined. In our moment we are struggling with the situation that has deconstructed the subject, what heretofore I have called the subject-object. The natural and automatic ‘revolt’ has been back into modernist objectivism, which is for our time, reality, the ideologized capitalized corporate structure. The conception that is left to fully dismantle the tower of righteous babble, since we have already seen how the human determines object contingency, thus involves the revealing of the object unto itself, which is to say, how it is the object itself that determines human contingency. The resistance to such exposure, the subject of the object of capitalism is the incorporation of the the effect of human ignorance into the exaltation of its own designation, the subject (-object) in despair of its own existence; in effect, this is the building of the ‘God-human’ out of the oppressing state of reality, which is to say, out of the real, inviolate, and essential human subject of faith. To reiterate: The effect of the inability to withdraw faith from the calculus of reality is capitalized upon, and this, also as effect, reduces reality to a real particular assertion of power that is enacted by the capitalist upon humanity. The con of capitalism is reality itself maintained through a ploy of the individual with free will.

The reason we must emphasize ‘effect’ has to do with the difference between authentic human interpersonal relations and the thoughts which overdetermine the activity of a larger common human whole. The traversing of what I shall term ‘local’ interactions to a ‘distant’ humanity calls forth the ideological negotiations of faith concerning True Objects, and thus the various religious (see below) assertions of Truth that become capitalized upon in the reducing capitalistic fetishism; in the avoidance of such objects of faith, one must speak about effects (see my earlier essays, particularly, “Aphilosophy, Convention, Faith and God”).

Yet, before we describe in detail the impossible situation of reality that most of know intuitively, we must begin with tying up some loose ends.

Whereas ‘before’, in the subjective ‘phase’, so to speak, such argument come upon was seen to indicate some sort of spiritual basis, some transcendent or otherwise meta or supra reality, some ‘other than regular’ world that lay at some recouping of total meaning that then indicated a Truth of the universe, that couples with regular reality. The idea is that usual reality is recouped or accounted for by a type of ‘psychic’ or thoughtful ‘centered-ness’, that in turn presents usual reality against a more real ‘One’ reality’. There are two rebuttals to this. The first concerns ‘logical’ discursive failure, as Western minds might consider metaphysics, and the second, spiritual or philosophical failure – and see that what is philosophical is meant in a more Eastern mode, such as Tantric or Zen Buddhist can be considered. The union of these two coordinations represent the one possibility of reality. Religion, or what can be called spiritual ideology, in general reflects belief that corresponds the logical and spiritual in this respect. Recently, Non-philosophy-as-method appears to resonate this ‘one’ posture, but its move is incomplete; this is why non-philosophy represents convention in-the-last-instance, the ‘least overdetermined’ object of reality, despite its ‘regular’ non-philosophical meaning incited in the ‘Future Christ’.

It is not difficult to see, though, that metaphysical speculation, which includes all forms of real speculation, will not relinquish its hold upon the agent as a fixed social construct. The subject object of faith will not allow reality to be disturbed, and the linear progress of history will continue as the individual subject-object remains under the dominion of a particular effective power of the doctrine of free will. We can only suppose that Non-philosophy will be taken as another philosophical object, even as we redefine what philosophy is or re-term it, and that its Future Christ will become another speckle in the lineage of philosophical ideas.

One issue in this that will be addressed later is the point of elucidating the truth of the matter if no one wants to or is capable of hearing or understanding it.

*

If we can concur that this can be a logical assessment of the facts thus far (see my essays on The Impossible, parts 1,2,3) then it is here from which we may derive all the facets of ontological and cosmological discourses, their arguments, including religion, philosophy and science. These purport to explain what can be called ‘the argument of the One’, which is always the basis of every reality, and which can amount to the query, how do we reconcile the random universe with the random human choice? We have just indicated above that the answer is routinely reconciled in having the universe as basic, and the human being as a thing of the universe, and that even taking the human being as central, the universe is situated likewise as basic. Science proposes to be able to discover or uncover the true thing (True Object) that is the universe, and psychology proposes that we may discover the true thing (True Subject-Object) of the human being, that we may discover the mechanisms and or functioning of the universal human, a thing of the universe. Religious and or spiritual thought also propose to be able to offer a true One of reality, but is not limited in the same way as science; spiritual proposals may use any number of rhetorical devices, but their arguments likewise draw from the sensibility of a knowable One.

We can see here that the historical solution to reality always tends toward falling into the True Object, as I define it, of faith; the bare human in the world is one of a past ignorance toward an informed future. The situation is always of the world of True Objects, since it is quickly apparent that there is a world of things that humans must negotiate in order to survive, but this imperative then colludes with the terms and derives reality proper. Any deviation from this endeavor, of things, as definition might distinguish various things from other things that are not things, is typically called ‘spiritual’ and is correspondent with a situation that occurs ‘within’ the knowing subject individual; psychology is scientific investigation into this ‘spirit’, and thus accounting for the motion that sees the universe as primary to any investigation, amounts to a ‘world religion’.

The motion of spiritual endeavor, though, the activity of psychic investigation, is taken up along two vectors of discourse that again collude ( I will take to the ethical implications later) in a quadripartite:

1) A practice of instruction that suggests the individual toward a correct understanding-and-practice, an experience-understanding gained by the individual. This is nothing more than an assertion of proper method. The Eastern philosophical teachings that propose a relieving of the individual of all true objects to the ‘meta-nirvana’, so to speak, recourses similarly to Sartre-esque motion. From a coming to a realization of the sangsaric phantasmagoria of temporal objects, the ‘enlightened’ individual may come to more intuitive or aware consciousness of bodily operations and how such operations may effect the individual’s appropriation of conceptualization of objective situations. The various coordinations amount to the methods traditionally call ‘martial arts’, as these stem from ‘right’ thought, action, attitude, etcetera, but extrapolated into achievement and practice for ability can said to include any proper method.

2) A practice of ‘following ones bliss’, so to speak, where the individual is disclosed upon his or her own motion as proper unto itself. Whether the individual sees itself as some sort of cosmic or psychic center or entity, in communion with a spiritual source, is worthy or unworthy, the product of such calculus is the same; the motion does not avoid this classification. When undertaken thoughtfully in experience as a thing unto itself, as a motion with ends of itself and not upholding a proper object as projected ends, this vector develops in a more ‘proper’ Sartre-existentialist motion, as I describe in my previous essay, “post-post-modern-modernism”. The individual ‘revolts’ from this precipitated abyss of nothingness and thereby finds true agency for the negotiations of established ideological structures, or True Objects, and appropriates proper methods based upon given routes for such methods, though most are not systematized to a degree as the Eastern martial arts to be called such. Of course, the individual of (now) free agency would never admit to their activity being determined, neither that they are fitting their agency into preexisting ideological structures of True Objects, it is more likely that such a one would adamantly assert that they have created or established something entirely new, but he is capitalizing upon the gap that is maintained in the revolt; the power of the True Object is gained through its becoming a fetish, the ‘magic’ that arises in the real denial of the gap (see below). Obviously, such agency is supplied by the old adage “ignorance is bliss”; it is similar to my assertion that computers function by water moving through vessels to fill rubber balloons, obviously I don’t care at all about how they might really work, but nevertheless, they still work for me. Hence it is useless to talk about ‘more real’ reality, but only effects of reality – the power that humans appear to have over objects is a real effect.

These two ideologic situations can be coaxed out of the present East-West ideological paradigms, where it can be seen each ideological-spiritual base involves the same polemical motive elements. Respectively, though aggravated argument can blur any statement of character, it is not difficult to draw an umbrella over the West to characterize it with individualism and as well see the European-American ideal of manifest destiny as an individualized motif. The individual, moved by a ‘invisible hand’ starts out and motivated by his or her own impetus, strives and thereby creates their own world united in individuality. The East, similarly generalized, contains individuals ordained in their incarnations under a celestial dictate that is evidenced in social order. Noted that such generalizations are not absolute in their designations; the West has an overreaching and implied structure of order, and the East has individuals that act upon individual ‘karmic’ designations. Indeed every human place carries these designations in their own way. Again, what can argue the inadequacy of such a generalization are based upon random factors that real investigation seeks to discredit in method, and by its effort establish the unified ‘One True’ universe.

( Note: This is the third-moving-into-the-fourth of non philosophy, but, as I have said elsewhere, the non-philosophical fourth is still but one fourth of two possibilities, such that we have a quadripartite of a quadripartite that derives its meaning from the philosophical object that is non-philosophy as it represents itself as (non-) cornered in the Real, extended by radical immanence into the Future Christ, that has inevitably been established by it.)

*

Again, the same problem poses itself through every route. The persistent aspect of real inquiry into True things that obscures the truth for the certitude of the One Reality can be called a ‘gap’. As to our discussion so far, we consider universal randomness, human randomness, universal basis, and human psychic basis. Conceptual gaps become presented in a critical consideration relating any to each of these categories, but are always overcome with reference to and or correspondent with whichever category is taken to be basic to the investigation. Francios Laruelle has indicated as much of philosophy in his non-philosophy. When the universe is taken as basic, then all discourse refers to its truth, that once the human mind is understood, a proper linking of causal relations will be made to universal physical randomness. When choice is basic, likewise physical interpretations will be able to be understood by a contextual consciousness, such as free will. Where the universal thing is basic, the human will be accounted for as an explained thing; where the psyche is basic, universal structures will likewise become realized. And, where choice, discourse will reconcile determinacy; where the universal true thing, randomness will be accounted for. Any combination of these four categories yield a correspondent solution oriented by what is taken as basic, but each solution, when applied dialectically to the possibility of other bases, will yield a conceptual gap, a contradiction that then necessitates a move upon, elliptically, in condensing and expanding substantive real quality, back into the base as truth of the matter in question.

Of course, the distinctions of these categories do not argue absolute categories and are not upheld, rather suspended, in the activity of consideration; each operating base organizes a particular matrix of transcendental and immanent elements within the discursive posture (see my earlier essay, “Aphilosophy, Convnetion, Faith and God”). Take for example the statement, “I am a human being.” In considering the statement’s veracity, any term of the phrase will reside in a transcendent or immanent state while one term is considered. For a universal basic query, the term “I” considered may yield an assertion of evolutionary physical traits acquired through a natural selection such that the term “I” is qualified; in such suspension, “am a human being” may state transcendent qualifiers that reify the universal proposition, while offering immanent qualifiers in the subsequent explanation likewise. The human query may refer the term “I” to a universal evolutionary stage, but then qualify the universal evolution to an immanent fact of knowing, thereby reifying the meaning of the basic human. The humanity of the universal, it the case here, and the humanity of the human position may have exchange due to the ignorance of the contradiction involved in approaching absolute bases. The term “human”, though understood as an object in-itself, as indicating a True object between such arenas (universal/human), is already a contradiction in argument, since one cannot have an evolutionary product decide upon its own agency to be evolutionarily determined. Yet also the contradictions are suspended within bases likewise in so much as ‘I’ may be a ‘human being’, but when I go to figure out what a human being is, ‘I’ am not including the ‘I’ in the consideration; ‘I’ have become immanent to the discussion, and by the time I may have found out what a human being is, I have probably situated it in a universal setting yet while avoiding again the basis of my evolutionary redundancy for the sake of arguing the human center of being human, so the evolution has become transcendent. Different terms and the statements that support argument pronounce or otherwise punctuate different ordinances of transcendental-immanent structure according to the base from which it is argued; this feature of discourse can be called a ‘differend’, the gap that is reconciled in a discursive redundancy that is denied for reality, and this occurs in ‘real time’.

To reiterate; for every basic argument, its conclusions are supported upon non-admitted contradictions that reveal its lack when considered against other discursive bases; to uphold its truth, it must retain an ability for plausible denial in its argumentative structure by speaking of and to possible referents of and to other discourses while never confronting the base of truth the other discourses rely upon: it must ‘disguise’ its equivocations that cover for the vacillating or oscillating discourse through posturing, or for another term, identity. In general, the science of physics and mathematics eventually comes to admit a type of universal structure that contains the possibility of ‘non-locality’ (an extrapolated meaning of the Heisenberg Principle), along with mathematical ‘complexity’ and ‘chaos’, where the non-local event resides in the position of observation; a contradictory situation, but also a noticeably ‘conscious’ indication. The scientific observation of non-locality in chaotic complexity excludes the observer as an included variable but instead develops parameters that include the description of the observer as ‘an excluded observer’, and by extended discursive moves, negates the act of observation through including multiple occurrences of different observers’ observations, which again, through yet more discursive maneuvers neatly avoid that the arena by which the observations have been or are being performed has already been established as the reality that they are testing, the results of which already determined by the parameters of real meaning; a particular orientation upon objects is assumed. Reality is seen as variable in contrast to the controlled experiment which yields the constant elements of reality, but reality is static in as much as it yields consistent results when a consistent method is applied. In other words, the procession of physical discourse, in its transcribing mathematical data to meaningful terms, must use terms that are a ‘best analogy’ and left uninvestigated in order to make the statements of its findings. What is truly static and variable is ignored for the definition that corresponds with a particular and proper orientation upon objects. In effect, science does its best to assure that the choice that is made upon a decision to experiment or observe, is mitigated by the ‘natural’ demands of physical element to be tested; the phenomena ‘lends itself’ to the formulation of experiment and the matter of its communication is likewise left to a presumption of the real universe where what is spoken about the findings of physics is necessarily consistent with the terms of the experiment. Take for example the Higgs Boson; this particle is supposed to have something to do with the manifesting or ‘ability to be’ of matter. What this Higgs-type Boson has to do with the scientists who are made of matter experimenting, finding this boson, and concluding things about it, I am not sure. It seems plain to me though that the boson is nothing more that a way to justify the individual human scientists in reality. What this boson has to do with me is I find an occasion to write in a particular way. To stick to some absolute category, such as physical science, as if they are really finding an actual basic particle of the True universe, avoids the reality that is already manifested so as to bring about that course of events, including me writing about the ridiculousness of the importance of the boson, for the sake of the individual free agent of reality.

Extended at root, the situation of human choice represents an effective conceptual gap from the physical base, a gap that occurs where the universe is segregated into static or controlled elements and ‘in motion’ or variable elements. Since the physical-mathematical world is taken as base, yet it is choice that has allowed such a base to become known, the knowing individual comes to miss its own resonant motion in the vacillation, for the sake of defining what is moving. One could say Einstein was a philosopher. Likewise and further, spiritual type findings of ‘acceptance’, as well for meditation, communion and proper action, deriving from choice as base, and seeking to find guidance or correspondence from some ‘higher’ source, may use the ideas of theoretical physics to support its spiritual affection claim, such as ‘chaos’, ‘complexity’, ‘fractal’, aspects of subatomic theory, to name a few from contemporary science, but the scientific and physical discourse of the manifestation of physical things indicates no effective ‘source’ that an individual may have audience with beyond an inference made by the spiritual participant. The individual is caught in a vacillation that he does not recognize due to the insistence of his own true conceptual-discursive base.

Though this may be a somewhat ‘dry’ interpretation or designation, while these two categorical arenas may seem to overlap and conspire with each other to define a sort of ‘holistic’ picture at certain junctures, the meaning of each discourse indicates a universe that cannot admit a transcending consciousness as well as a consciousness that cannot fully account for a (scientific) physical universe due to the insubstantial situation of those things, even while each might defer to the other to round out each respective lack. Together, the implicated unity of such universe relies upon discursive situational gaps that are avoided in the act of deference, or emphasized in the act of debate, to the ‘One’ truth. Here we find the definitional parameters of reality; the various discourses of truth have veracity only in as much as the truth they suppose to be the goal or purpose of their efforts contributes with other discourses of the One Truth, but this One Truth is always suspended in the very proposal that seeks it.

Yet, ironically, one argument is typically and routinely unheard, one that arises in the conflation of basic discourses, in the gap, so to speak. Our understanding of the universe has no necessary correspondence with what is true of the universe or ourselves beyond what is understood through faith. The effect, the ‘presence’ of the conscious human being thinking, acting, and behaving in the world, is consistently reduced in the prior decision of investigation that seeks the true One; faith is anachronized in a history of and displaced to religion and spirituality of the One True Thing. This is to say, the idea of reality is a mythology, as well an ideology of power that prescribes beforehand every investigation as to its object and purpose, as well as placement and function. Further, and in type contrast, in so much that the human being is merely another thing of the universe, all human activity must be correspondent with the universe functioning; that which evidences this without seeking a scapegoat of random occurrence must admit then that the mythology is the human-thing of the universe behaving universally. Yet, its behavior cannot admit anything ‘of the True universe’ since the universe’s operation is not evident ‘to’ the meaning that humans develop, but only ‘in’ the meaning. The meaning that would have humans gain a true understanding of the universe and its operations or even purpose, is an ‘overdetermined’ meaning, a meaning that derives from a presumption of the One, of transcendence and or immanence of divinity that ‘evens out’ the vacillations of existence for the sake of itself. This then outlines what is meant by the question “how do I know this”, and, “how do I segregate myself from the universe sufficiently to know of the truth of the universe”. To reiterate; human consciousness cannot be anything but a universal operation, which is to say, human consciousness ‘makes sense’, it ‘forms meaning’ and ‘means forms’, but that such meaning has no more meaning beyond its establishing than, say, a leaf might be able to know of a true photon of light. The relation of meaning meaning is one of pure effect unto itself. The issue then is not so much about what may or may not be determined or chosen, about the uncovering or discovering the truth of an object, but about how one is oriented upon the True Objects of reality.

*

Hence, not only have I outlined the problem of what is possible and thereby indicated what is impossible, and as well represented what is most offensive to faith in reality, but most significantly, I have presented a situation, the meaning of this essay, that is not only impossible, but more so, ironic. For if the meaning of this essay is true, then its meaning cannot be true. Indeed, it is, again, not real, absurd. For what has occurred in order for the meaning of this essay to be conveyed, is no discursive segregated overdetermination. The essay speaks of reality, for for a one that may not be included by it. It speaks of history for the future; in other words: nonsense.

It is for this reason that metaphysical speculation will always remain the procurer and law of reality, and irony remain excluded as a viable discourse of truth.

So, if I may accentuate my point with a quote from the bodacious author David Mitchell, from his abominable book “Cloud Atlas”, 2004, pg 401:

“Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power.”

*

More impossibility in part 5? Hold onto your diapers!

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Post-post-modern-modernism: The Mistake of Irony; Or, The Ironic Mistake.

Perhaps a little bitty on postmodernism and the, what could be labeled of our current situation, post-post-modern-modernism.

Here are a couple links that roughly define the conventional problem I will address in this essay. The first is a little less ridiculous than than the second. The first offers us an argument for why postmodernism is not dead, but is rather the condition upon which people find a new agency. David Foster Wallace is talking from so far down the conventional hole – at least, that he was at some point- his polemic reveals how deep his confusion is or was, as the case may be ( no disrespect intended).

http://partialobjects.com/2011/08/what-comes-after-postmodernism/

David Foster Wallace on Irony from philosophy

This is not to say that there was not this postmodern thing-era that these authors are talking about; it is also very interesting, and possibly ironic, that postmodernism has been seen as first represented in architecture (so says the first link). Nevertheless, the era was the conventional reaction to a large misunderstanding that continues.

It is not difficult to find a link between Constructive Undoing and postmodernism, especially with the irony/convention duality that has arisen here. So, in light of this parallel, and that irony is too often defined to postmodernism through deconstruction, sarcasm, posed apathy, withdrawal, multivocality and the like, as well that irony does not stem from any sort of reaction (though pm may) as it merely takes the proposed new as old hat, as already given before it became new, one has to hit it straight on, as a tangent, one might say. As the post of the link says, with “arms folded tight” one continues to lift; irony works, despite the conventional reaction.

We should look into this reaction. To do this, we will use the framework of the definition of irony, taken from Dictionary.com ( as of spetember, 2013) since the typical conventional misunderstanding involved with the coupling of irony and postmodernism is at play; the reaction allows postmodernism to be placed outside of its ironic bearings.

[Note: This essay is a shortened version.]

Irony:

1.)the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend.

Literature.
A.) a technique of indicating, as through character or plot development, an intention or attitude opposite to that which is actually or ostensibly stated.
(especially in contemporary writing)

B.) a manner of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., especially as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion.

3.)Socratic irony. (which is defined as feigned ignorance.)

4.) dramatic irony.

5.) an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.

6.) the incongruity of this.

7.) an objectively sardonic style of speech or writing.

8.) an objectively or humorously sardonic utterance, disposition, quality, etc.

Generally, all the definitions reiterate the fifth definition; basically, the opposite of what is expected expressed in the various arenas. (A) and (B) are literary devices of turning plot or meaning. (3) is an idiomatic expression of the complete misunderstanding of Socrates, a one-sided view. (4) is little more than (3); (5) restates all the definitions. (6),(7) and (8) are the key definitions, the ones that have been elicited from the most offense of irony, in the postmodern sense.

The really interesting thing about irony is the absolute comedy of its seriousness; in all seriousness, this is the most offensive aspect of irony, and is the reason postmodernism has become a kind of stigma in philosophy, a kind of joke for modern thought so much that it had to ‘die’. Where do I laugh? Where do I nod? How can I tell if what is being said is really meant for what it says? The irony never ends, and everyone wants ends. Most every one wants to be told the punch line – but not overtly; everyone wants to be in on the joke. But the joke and the deep meaning are one in the same; if you have to guess or wonder, then you get embarrassed: you are offended.

Though I can’t be sure about the intent of definition number 6, I assume it refers to definition number 5. In fact, unless it is a type-o, the definition is probably intended to mean irony as the incongruity of what is expected and what actually occurs, in distinction to def. 5 where irony is the “outcome”. If I say I am a liar, and then I lie, the irony could be not very ironic or be very ironic depending on what has been signaled, but the incongruity of this is that one would have to guess, that is, unless the liar while telling the truth were indeed poetic as he lay, for then he would indeed be lying. But what if he were telling the truth?? As it is, the definition number 6, as a definition for irony, is quite ironic, because none of the other definitions reference the other definitions, but we are expected to see that number 6 does. It is a simple pleasure then to think that the authors of this definition included just this presentation (of 6) as a particular definition of irony because probably the best definition of irony is the incongruity of this, as it is not only a definition, but also an example. And just as such a simple pleasure could be a proclivity of some people, this paragraph itself will find many quite fed up and see no humor or pleasure in this exposition; they find it corny or even lacking in a certain finesse or refinement, or perhaps they find it too subtle. Yet it is just this kind of insensitivity or intolerance that seeks ends, that, if not indicated to the punch, will develop a position highly distanced from it, the ironic move so lowly and indistinctive as it is patronized.

Such a humor is of the most inside that one can fathom, so it is no wonder that most cannot help but develop a resentment concerning its irony. To them, they are being made the butt of a joke; like some sort of transcendent wit they miss, they maintain their seriousness as they pull the heavenly act down to their mundane decisions and proclaim and accuse and dismiss. It is not a wonder postmodernism has a bad rap; the dense can hardly hold a tune, let alone wish to appreciate the finest symphony in the world without the liner notes. Grinding their teeth together they talk lightheartedly and then seriously about this and that fashion, all the while truly being the object of ridicule that was never intended for them except that they made it such. “We are not laughing at them, we are just laughing,” and they have much more serious things by which to set their recreation.

(7) and (8). The definition of ‘sardonic’: characterized by bitter or scornful derision; mocking; cynical; sneering: a sardonic grin. In other words, the distasteful, ‘dark side’ of irony: “objectively sardonic”. The attitude behind this irony is an anxious individual, almost despairing of the world. The irony is a type of ‘sick’ humor; his denial is palatable. This one has come close to his theoretical, indeed actual, demise and spits out his fate upon everyone and the world (the objects) because it is the world. Ironically, the world has let him to know, and he doesn’t like it; he doesn’t like being dominated but he has found his distance from it in one of two ways: a) The world is shitty. The world of history is not the place of his childhood dreams; it has brought everything opposite childish happiness had more than hoped for. He wants to be free, but his conscience tells him its all a sham, and this is known to him due to the world’s history coming upon him. The oppressive world. b) His attitude is justified in righteousness. The offense of the shitty world is countered by the nobility of human presence: the world is great, it is working in his behalf. This nobility is held in countenance for the world, but soon the world rejects it, it counters every move. A suitable image must be maintained; the oppressive individual. In both, the object is prominent; in (a), it is the object proper to convention, in (b), the individual, the subject-object, the subject of convention. Whether it is in reference to some ‘childhood dream’ or the ‘grown-up’ approach to reality before him or her, the motion is that the nobility rejects the rejection and the world crumbles; it deconstructs because the individual is no longer complicit with the world, but again, offended by it. The individual perpetually lives in a fear of his own making, cast upon the world that is surely going bad from the activities of himself – if only he could just leave, or, can he save it in time!

*

The reaction here is ironic; the ironic-sardonic postmodernist and the individual that sets postmodernism to a proper era are both implicitly involved in the conventional reaction. Consciousness, by its very nature, is a retreat from the world; perhaps more precisely, the world is consciousness’s retreat from existence. The individual who is being ironic by realizing that the world of the great (at least, modernist in the last, but conventional in its beginning) human history has brought itself to destruction, is reacting not to the world, but to her inability to reconcile it to her knowledge; her knowledge does not ‘reach’ the object. The reaction is completely of alienation, which is to say, the individual is not alienated due to some historical social motion where she is offended at the state of the world and so withdraws from it, but rather the individual is alienated from herself due to her rather un-ironic belief (faith) in the oppressing thing of the world, that is, that there is this world, which is reality, the conventional world of the true object. This is not so much that the world brought itself to its own destruction, but that the world did not destruct, and this is to say that the world did not find solution, but that the world is insolvent. The result of the world finding a new way due to the old way not working, or bringing itself upon destruction, is not finding a solution in this new way, the result is that the new way is exactly the same as the old way, that the two ‘ways’ could not but have caused and resulted from each other necessarily, that the causes will be found conventionally. The reaction is thus not of the world but of the meaning that the individual has derived from it, which contradicts that the human was ever part of the world in the first place. Then the reaction becomes dismissive, yielding the ‘that’s just life’ tail. Asserting the priority of beliefs and their function for finding ‘the good’, the reaction wields the power of resentment in hopes of stifling and ending all dissension.

The belief itself, the act or motion the term ‘belief’ signifies of faith, is what creates or allows for the alienated individual; the condition of the human being in reality is the separated individual. This separation, basic to the individual, is what constitutes freedom, the great future of progress, as well as its complimentary spiritual form of union (yoga) and ‘return’ (Christ, messiah, or ‘anointed one’; the motion as ‘to anoint’ connotes a uniting of separate substances, yet where one significant or uncommon element is rubbed on a regular or common element, and in this moment the two are transformed; the blessed oil becomes merely oil, the common, significant. The misused idea of ‘karma’, so prevalent in the West, falls in here also.) Nevertheless, it is recognition or realization, a coming into knowledge, that develops ‘alienation’ as a lived experience. But the inherent and unavoidable condition of human consciousness is separation.

Anxiety and despair over such a realization is usually understood to be relieved by two moves, though there are really three; the first two are conventional. The first is denial, where the realization is avoided. This reaction replaces the old with the new as part and parcel of willed, reasoned progress. The initial problem here is replaced with the solution that is human agency, the negotiation of parties, be it spiritual negotiation or mundane. The second is insanity. Both of these reactions are complicit in the resolution to the problem, since there is no true overcoming of the discrepancy; faith in reality accomplishes this feat through denial; hence, denial and insanity are the only real options. I emphasize real options, in the sense that I have already been developing conventional faith; anything else is absurd, insane. Thus the third option is the non-conventional, the ‘not-real’ option (Francois Laruelle might call this the Real option); the reconciliation that can come only does so with existence, through the experience of irony: denial and acceptance become not mutually exclusive.

The human being in existence cannot but help behaving in the only way it can: ultimately determined in every activity. But this activity, this existence, is also human consciousness; it can only behave the way it does. This is to say on one hand that consciousness does not behave or operate in any way separate from the behavior of existence, but also on the other that its operation is to have a world that is sufficiently separate from itself by which it can then perform its functions, and these are exactly formed and allowed for through the partition we call free will, that is, choice. Human consciousness must have a true object, it cannot function without it, but in order for there to be a true object there must be a correspondant of at least equal stature, and this is the individual thoughtful human being. The evident aspect of consciousness is thought, and is itself a mode or motion of the existing universe. Thought thereby retains an effectively universal operational structure as part of its nature, which is to say, the processes and features of knowing resonate the very motion of the universe as course, which is unity. Yet unity, unfortunately for the individual, can only exist by separation; only in the condition of separation can a notion of unity have meaning. Separation and unity have a significance for the meaning making existent human being; the tension or motion thereof, which is vacillation, is not allowed in the progressive reality: reality relies upon the equanimity of subject and object as real things, absolutely true objects, and its privileging of either dependent upon the circumstance at hand as the circumstance is foundational in indicating progress.

Stepping back from this, we can say nevertheless, once the equilibrium, or symmetry, of the statures of true object and thinking subject are upset, existence effectively takes over its proper imperative, that is, the sanctity of the true object begins to fail for knowledge, and knowledge likewise is compromised of its ability to ‘hold off’ the encroachment of the operation of thought upon itself: consciousness then must uphold its existential operation, as its foundation is the differend between thought and object, and the reduction of the knowledge of the object to the object of knowledge eventually brings thought into a consideration of itself, as an object of itself. Only in the balance that holds the (inner) subject and (outer) object at sufficient distance in consciousness can one say that the objective dominates; psychology is the conventional method that attempts to keep the distance of thought and object, to maintain the balance. Once this symmetry is lost, however, the motion never falls toward the object, the motion is always toward the knowing subject, falling in upon the subject of knowledge until consciousness almost comes upon itself and faith is reestablished; this can be called, what is typically known as a ‘psychological breakthrough’ or a ‘spiritual experience’. Where it indeed truly comes upon itself, we call this insanity or death. Where the individual is incapable of functioning constructively in the group of humanity, conventional reality is upheld by the group through a faith that functions to keep the balance and maintain the symmetry of the subject and object in knowledge, as an objective aspect, and thought, as a subjective aspect, which is to say, in knowledge that such an individual is insane defined as a true object for the purpose of establishing the standard for the individual: the subject (subject-object), and in thought for the purpose of establishing the objective standard of reality: the object.

*

The usual reading of postmodern exposition is contained thus far; not for a reiteration of it, but to a step from it. Though more than a few authors either contributed to the development of postmodernism, or step from it, to offer their version, I address two authors here: Jean-Paul Sartre and Francois Laruelle. Through a particularly conventional lens, each offers a stating of the point of contention, a reiteration, as well as a reconciliation of the ironic problem, while saying, really, ironically, the same thing. The punch line: the discrepancy (the individual is established in separation) is solved through an assertion of essential freedom. Again, this is to say that both proposals arise through a denial of existence and an assertion of the true object. This, in effect, is the definition of what Sarte terms “bad faith”, as I have argued of Laruelle in the Direct Tangents of Constructive Undoing.

Sartre’s points are foundational. The reduction of thought to an object of itself opens meaning to an ‘abyss’ of freedom, where meaning comes to its own essential lack. To (here now) reiterate the foregoing, the essence of meaning (if we can say there is such a thing) is seen to be vacant, void, nil, as Slavoj Zizek has said of the subject. This knowledge of contradiction, meaning that is no meaning, causes the individual angst, or Kierkegaardian ‘despair’; in my terms, the individual understands that the reality through which he or she was moving, that has been established and motivated through basic, what was before thought, true tenants of reality, true objects, is found to be not true. Sartre’s move then is to ‘revolt’ from this ‘nothingness’, since the individual supposedly sees now that meaning is arbitrary, and thereby find true freedom because the individual sees that he is no longer constrained by any essential, determined, or otherwise actual truth of any matter whatsoever.

Laruelle, if we are able to set aside the conventional-temporal object for one moment, where Laruelle builds his non-philosophy due to Sartre’s and others’ ideas before him, we may find his address through what I shall use as his basic idea. While all of his terms interact and compound upon one another to indicate the same thing, which is the point of contention, his ‘unilateral duality’ works to indicate the last conventional object. The ‘future Christ’ he terms as a culmination or basic differential which allows or accounts for the total meaning of, what I call, the scheme of meaning that is conventional reality, the meaningful organization of true objects. By summoning total meanings of significant oppositional objects, his critique of philosophy proper reduces its operational terms to explain conventional reality; he limits conventional reality to the arena of ‘philosophy’ for strategic reasons, and calls the consequence or result of this reduction the ‘Real’. Using the idea of future Christ, his reconciliation poses some sort of radical agency – mind you, ‘agency’ has been likewise re-situated in non-agency – that, one is to gather, comes about through a proper understanding of reality. The reason he can appear, as we say, ‘in the last’, is the real and the Real remain for him ‘lateral’ or maybe better, parallel but are situated more properly upon a parallax. The freedom of Sartre is similarly re-situated with the ‘radical’ form of knowing and proposes some more evolved state of humanity.

Again, keep in mind that I am presenting a typically conventional reading of these authors, that the fact of their presentations are routinely and faithfully, in Laruelle’s terms, ‘made into another philosophical object’, a representation of the point of contention. The problem is at all times conventionally upheld for reality, Real or free. The problem is not the presentation that these authors enact, but the re-presentation: the overcoming of the true object is impossible for conventional reality.

Hence, perhaps a better rendition of the matter at hand can be better situated to address the impossible. To put it directly into conventional grasp, we might then see that to confront the impossible is a matter of insanity.

*

Yet before we venture into the impossible, I would like to offer a small quote from Thomas Nagel, and his effort from the possible, of staying in the possible:

“However, I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them. I believe that these two radically opposed conceptions of ultimate intelligibility cannot exhaust the possibilities. All explanations come to an end somewhere. Both theism and materialism say that at the ultimate level, there is one form of understanding. But would an alternative secular conception be possible that acknowledged mind and all that it implies, not as the expression of divine intention but as a fundamental principle of nature along with physical law?”
~ ‘Antireductionism and the Natural Order’, in Mind and Cosmos, p.22.

One should see that Nagel’s situation is nothing larger than what Soren Kierkegaard offered 160 years ago: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? For the question Nagel asks here is nothing greater than conventional, though he might be trying to indicate something more (we shall see). Nagel is asking if there is a way to bring the remnants or basics of the bifurcated real meaning wherein we have idealist subjectivism and religious transcendence/immanence versus materialist objectivism, into a scheme of meaning that does not indicate upon such distinction, which is to say, does not reify the insolvency. The answer is: conventionally, no. All human reality depends upon the duality of meaningful categories; the real is the universal is the ethical. The answer ironically is: yes.

Extreme Dialectic: Spinoza and the Term (revisited).

“AS men are accustomed to call Divine the knowledge which transcends human understanding, so also do they style Divine, or the work of God, anything of which the cause is not generally known: for the masses think that the power and providence of God are most clearly displayed by events that are extraordinary and contrary to the conception they have formed of nature, especially if such events bring them any profit or convenience: they think that the clearest possible proof of God’s existence is afforded when nature, as they suppose, breaks her accustomed order, and consequently they believe that those who explain or endeavour to understand phenomena or miracles through their natural causes are doing away with God and His providence. They suppose, forsooth, that God is inactive so long as nature works in her accustomed order, and vice versâ, that the power of nature and natural causes are idle so long as God is acting: thus they imagine two powers distinct one from the other, the power of God and the power of nature, though the latter is in a sense determined by God, or (as most people believe now) created by Him. What they mean by either, and what they understand by God and nature they do not know, except that they imagine the power of God to be like that of some royal potentate, and nature’s power to consist in force and energy.” – Baruch Spinoza.

We do not simply read because we are taught how to do so. If there is an innate ability that merely needs to be awakened in a person then we do not know what it is beyond the Idea. This is because we are creatures that are prone to a type of knowing that I call conventional. As a child we are taught to read but then as we grow into adults we stick with the innately typical, childish orientation upon things and appropriate it into what an adult reality is. We forget that we forgot that we were children, and we remember at some point we remember that we were children; that is, at some point. What do we remember of our being a child? We remember that we were a child, the child that was ‘me’, only through our ability or capacity as adults. We forget that as a child we only behaved, wanted, needed, and appropriated what we were told in whatever manner through our being now being adults. One’s orientation upon the Idea reveals his faith in reality.

Adults then show their children the proper way to read as if it is a way that was innate to being human. What is innate in this way is thus not innate but rather conditioned by a particular manner of coming upon reality. The understanding of this feature of conventional reality is what has allowed conventional method to see and define such terms as ‘ideology’, ‘hegemony’, and the probably most significant term, ‘colonialism’ (please see my previous essays). Similarly for reading (and discussing, for that matter) what has occurred for reality is a colonization of the child by the conventional adult, a colonization that occurs by praising a particular kind of feedback from the child; it is due to this kind of mistake upon reality that perpetuates itself through childish desire for the world, that philosophy is typically misunderstood and misapplied, leading to the marriage of philosophy, ideology and science for the sake of maintaining a particular structure of knowing and power, that is conventional reality. This is the object of history.

We need understand the obstacle created by such a conventional orientation if we are to move beyond the modern-post-modern repetition, as ‘neo-‘ modernism, or whatever new term may be applied to our current philosophical-ideological ‘turn’, is merely a restatement of modernist idealist materialism. Aphilosophy attempts to reveal how this power structure, this particular orientation upon existence, hinders the human being from its actual innate potential.

This essay shows how reading and thus the understanding of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza has been commandeered for the conventional effort.

*

To approach the entry excerpt, we should first see that the functioning or operation of existence is inclusive and consistent at all reaches, but that this is all that can be said of existence itself. Nevertheless, we can extend and explain the meaning of this situation. The statement goes like this: Given a universe, all that exists and is real comprises an effective containment. Every thing, all in its most inclusive meaning, taken together as a totality, is the universe. The universe operates or functions like a grand machine; every element of the universe is interactive with every other element. Nothing is excluded (by definition). Matter is a result, energy is a result, yet if these are not, then they are essential basics. Everything of the universe arises from the same universal substrate. Life arose and or has arisen in concert with every other thing in the universe; no matter how small the linkage, the linking between any separate operations is there, a grand symphony. In this way, distinct objects or elements function of themselves complicitly and intimately with every other object. No essentially segregate object exists. In short, the universe is a closed system. Human beings are also life. Therefore, the activity of human beings likewise exhibits nothing extraneous to the universe’s inherent operation. This represents the basis of the existialist, post-modern dilemma that brought about the late twentieth-century tribulations of angst and crisis; it was a crisis of conventionality, a misreading of the proposed problem that advocated a particular, mistaken, solution.

The problem is just this: what is ‘knowing’? Or more precisely, what is this thing that human beings are capable of doing, that is able to treat and address the universe, that we call thought, concept, problem and solution? The typical answer is the apparent ability. We are capable of analyzing objects or aspects of the universe and discover or uncover true things, if not also basic laws of the operation of the universe.

My answer is another question, which seems an epistemological question but is actually a logistical question: how do you know? By this I mean, how is it possible for you to be or become separated enough from the universe to know these true things, or, the truth of these things?

As reconciliation between the problem and the answer above we have the usual possibilities. One can be called the religious reconciliation, or ‘creationism’. It says that we are created ‘first order’ entities, meaning, God created the universe of an established order of things, and human beings are at the top; we have dominion over the universe as decreed and evidenced by free will. Another can be called the ideological reconciliation, called ‘evolutionism’. Here, human beings are at the top of the order that developed through processes of natural selection; human cognitive ability is merely an adaptation to particular pressures exerted in particular environmental niches. Aside from that polemic; a current scientific notion suggests that our knowledge may not reflect anything of a true universe, and that the question of some essential or absolute basis of objective, universal truth is non sequitur with the real question of truth. For these modern thinkers, truth is a man made item, as well ‘universe’ or ‘objective world’, a formulation of the mind inept for grasping any ‘actual’ or ‘objective’ truth, that therefore merely resorts to practical models based upon solving problems that are presented to the mind. Such problems and solutions are particular to the mind’s ability or capacity, or even purpose in the universe. The assertion of any one of these approaches, even the model of the model, is supposed to limit one’s sense of truth to an either it is this or it is that position.

While these three approaches, and maybe more (these just came to mind), appear to argue with each other, when we begin to think critically about the initial question, we must come to but one solution: the answer is all three. It goes something like this: (A) god created the universe accorded to a particular order that is evidenced in the mind coordinating its own manner to achieve a reasonable development of staged priority in reality, itself as the center to top. While this appears to suggest an actual ‘god’, but really only shows that the idea of ‘god’ is a necessary element in our knowing, if only by the fact that we can consider its truth or falsity, here is a possibly better rendition: The implication involved of a mind coming upon its own ability in respect with its view upon the world is one of a certain effective ‘creator’ imperative, a precipitative aspect of a mind developing along lines that validates its apparent prolific survivability as privilege, even if this privilege asserts its own limited ability to exist through models. If we only come by models, then equally such models comprise the totality of the truth of the universe, as these models describe also their lack as ‘unknown’, and so far as we can know, then argues that what we know thereby these models is necessary for the universe, which means, the idea that we merely know by models is itself not a model but an absolute truth of the universe, which is contradictory to its meaning. For this essay, the attempt of the presentation of these statements then is to release one from the insistence of an either/or truth, and to invite a thinker to view the reality that is actually presented to their knowledge.

But such a comprehensive view of the truth of the matter cannot be achieved without establishing the basis that accounts for human knowledge as the manifestation correspondent with the operating of existence. One cannot hold to an apparent ability without compounding the problem the apparent ability beholds to solve. In this there can be no Hegelian ideal historical consciousness nor a subject-agent of it that moves as some sort of evolutionary spearhead. Neither can there be an ideological backlash that can accommodate or mediate the tendency for such big-headedness. At least, but at most, we can not be ‘inspired’ by some ‘intuitive’ element, some intuited transcendence or some immanent moment that is revealed of our selection, and this is to say, we do not learn from the past; the situation of knowing that is these cases informing the decisions of the day result necessarily. They are correspondent, inseparable.

The problem of resting in the apparent ability is thus located in that tendency to want from these situations. This ‘want’ is a determination of ideological truth that claims a true object. The ‘overdetermination’ of meaning that takes from the meaningful category and establishes the true object, finds itself in the determination of tomorrow as it separates itself from the past as meaning ‘the individual agent of free will’. Currently the history of the overdetermination is written as the process of discovering what this ‘freedom’ really means, a process that cannot help but resituate the vulgarities within a progress, but never really accounts for the supposed ‘progress’ that never saw itself as vulgar before the atrocity. There are other ways overdetermination may manifest, but the functioning of it is always the same: progress justifies the overdetermined state, in our case, freedom. This forgetful disposition defines the conventional Idea, and it is the denial that reveals that convention is not a ‘modeling’ of an unknown totality, but rather is an orientation upon the true object; the overdetermination cannot be an accident; it likewise mist be absolutely necessary in the operation of the universe. The question then is less what freedom means, than what freedom is, or is not.

If the universe is a closed system, this then also means, quite counterintuitivly, that if there is anything that is not of the universe then we cannot know of it, we cannot think of it – damn! – we cannot even think it, in fact – damn! damn! – we cannot even know it. We cannot know that there is anything extra-universal, for if we knew it we would be situating the universe as not the universe, but only a universe – which completely shows how terms do not identify any particular true thing, but only reflect momentary conditions of existence.

One so keen might see this idea in practice as a reiteration of a type leading to an absurd theatre. In one sense they would be right: in the conventional sense; in another, more significant sense, they would be wrong. The conventional orientation for reality is thus the issue that is treated aphilosophically; what we have to breach is the insistence of the conventional orientation upon knowledge.

*

To proclaim that such a statement of existence (inclusivity) defines or otherwise implicates a one universe merely adds upon the first statement and does nothing but limit the meaning of that statement to conventional knowledge. Such a move can be called transformation. What otherwise would be truth has been transformed into conventional reality; the process of conventional knowledge coming to positive terms with its own reality is evidenced in history and its philosophical counterpart, and ‘ends’ with non-philosophy. The process of coming to terms with the truth of the matter is called irony; it includes the critique or rebuttal of non-philosophy (as non-philosophy is a critique of philosophy) that will be called aphilosophy, and the appropriation, which is to say literally: an appropriate- tion, of non-philosophical methods accompanied by an aphilosophical response, that which addresses the point of contention as solution, we shall call metalepsis.

This is to say, knowledge manifests always in human consciousness as a complicity of ‘known’ and ‘unknown’, but that conventional knowledge would unite these ideas in a polemical potential that thereby establishes the true (one) universe against what is ‘not the universe’, or what is absolutely false, its physics and theoretical ideas, with all its accompanying parallel or multi-dimensional possibilities, the individual of free will, past and future.

Furthermore, what should be understood as true is due to this very nature of existence. Terms, being but another procedure in the operation of existence, an operation evidenced as human beings are likewise merely an operation, must necessarily reflect only a present existential manifestation, where substantial elements, elements (not to be confused with the Periodic Table of Elements – we will discuss the appropriation of mathematics and philosophy later) that comprise the functioning of existence, of the universe remain constant while the terms, as a loci of meaning, ‘float’ or are transient labels of momentary significance. The route of the conventional static-metamorphic term (see below) that identify particular true objects must be seen as merely one manner of coming upon existence that is also necessary, but in that it asserts its total omnipresence, it thereby lacks.

The problem presented by Spinoza concerns this feature. All men have an idea of what is Divine or transcendent, or not explainable, in relation to what seems natural, or explainable. It follows that what is extraordinary or contrary is deemed to be stemming or otherwise caused by a transcendent. But this is not so much a statement of his times, as if there are,as an absolute category, people who are ignorant, or ‘superstitious’, in a relation to people who are more ‘knowledgeable’, rather, it is a statement that says human beings are only capable of ‘knowing’ in this manner, that what is not explainable is put off into a transcendent category for knowing.

The point to become aware of is of a differend in knowing. Even today our rationale of reality configures knowledge of the explainable into a category of itself to justify our ‘enlightened’ ability to know. In this manner Spinoza’s argument is placed in a temporal category of ‘past’ that confines the term of his theses to particular absolutely true objects, this is to say, the context of historical progress that sees Spinoza as addressing an ideological or religious situation of his time where superstition and irrationality, or even love of power, still held sway against rationality and truth. Indeed, Spinoza was addressing these items, but in so much as the terms themselves are variable momentary identifiers of existential elements, his argument says much more and actually situates eternal truths concerning the existence of human beings.

We can further situate Spinoza’s in the following manner, as we begin to get a grip on the matter at hand:

{from the introduction to the sixth chapter of “Tractatus-Theologico Politicus”, in italics.}

“AS men are accustomed to call Divine the knowledge which transcends human understanding, so also do they style Divine, or the work of God, anything of which the cause is not generally known: for the masses think that the power and providence of God are most clearly displayed by events that are extraordinary and contrary to the conception they have formed of nature, especially if such events bring them any profit or convenience: they think that the clearest possible proof of God’s existence is afforded when nature, as they suppose, breaks her accustomed order, and consequently they believe that those who explain or endeavour to understand phenomena or miracles through their natural causes are doing away with God and His providence…”

For our current ‘enlightened’ atheistic or agnostic temperament of truth, ‘God’, the term, can be seen as or could be called the unquestioned base of, what I call, ‘conventional’ knowledge. But see, this is not to argue that there is a god or God at root under everything; rather, it is to say that conventional knowledge functions upon a given that is put into the impetus of the ‘potential of the future’ to hold that which is only not yet understood by its method (see also my essay “Aphilosophy, convention, God and faith). The method (conventional methodology), in this way, proclaims the truth of the universe by its universal ability to ‘uncover’ truth (the general rational ‘scientifical’ method). Such as this situation is, the truth of conventional knowledge is most clearly displayed as it ‘discovers’, explains or ‘develops’ things that were thought impossible, especially if it brings people profit or convenience, but also, when convention breaks with its accustomed order, for example, when people kill for the sake of killing, or the Law lets a guilty person go or imprisons an innocent. Exceptions to the rules allow the rules to be refined, more efficient and effective, and thereby enforce the reifying of conventional omnipresence and omnipotence.

The juxtaposition to see concerns how convention is oriented for reality. As indicated above, convention founds its truth in a historical progress of absolute categories, where terms of those categories maintain integral meaning to its object through time, and where terms change, the metamorphosis can be traced. This method sees that the categories ‘nature’ and ‘God’ of Spinoza indicate static elements, and that Spinoza’s argument concerns a critique of the God of miracles and by extension, an argument against the more superstitious rendering of God. His argument thus marks a moment of the progress away from religious hypocrisy or superstitious fantasy toward the more true or real scientific inquiry of nature. Conventional method thus sees itself as the motion and path of truth that has foreclosed the need for superstitious belief through open-minded investigating and explaining natural causes of before-seen miracles of God. In this way, though such superstitious belief is still around, convention has basically reduced all reality to a truth that is, can be, and will be found of nature; in the same motion, God has been pushed to the margins of incorporation with conventional reality; the workings of God are put into rational categories that are readily and easily adjusted for what science explains. In the most liberal of ideas, God is the relative unknown that resides into consciousness by the loose ends of science and psychology. As an effective unknown space, God can help, influence or be persuaded to move with a person and their life; God can comfort as well as create purpose out of misfortune, and of course God can be the inexplicable force behind good fortune. Similarly, God can be a sort of universal energy, still unexplained in its essence, but which can be used for a persons benefit; God in this manner is the basis of spiritual practice such as healthy living, meditation, tai chi, yoga, the 12-steps, and the like. Yet through all of these practices and concepts, God is no longer a truly active agent, but is more an involved element, a reason or result of conventional ideas and practices, all of which have a natural and rational basis of explanation that accounts for them. Furthermore, a necessity of God is not demanded, belief is an individual choice, since everything will have a natural explanation. Conventional reality thus accounts for all that can be explained by including within its potential, within its method of operation, that which is unexplained; nature and God are thereby brought under a general theory, so to speak, of methodology, where all that is explained and not explained is included in its dominion by its potential to make everything (at least, eventually) explainable. Nature as a category is inclusive to God, as creation, and God as a category is inclusive to nature as ‘a god’s’ effect concerns natural elements. In sum; convention has brought ‘God’ into itself, it has done away with a need for God by putting itself in that place. Convention, in this way, has encompassed ‘God and nature’ such that it sees its domain as total, as comprising all that is true, real, and existing.

Consequently, the conventional agent believes that those who explain or endeavor to understand phenomena through their ‘non-conventional’ causes, are doing away with the conventional methodology and its providence. The fact is, though, conventionalists have really no idea what it is to propose true and false, and has no standards but its own arbitrarity by which to place its standards. The nature of this method then corresponds with the next clause of Spinoza:

“…They suppose, forsooth, that God is inactive so long as nature works in her accustomed order, and vice versâ, that the power of nature and natural causes are idle so long as God is acting: thus they imagine two powers distinct one from the other, the power of God and the power of nature, though the latter is in a sense determined by God, or (as most people believe now) created by Him. What they mean by either, and what they understand by God and nature they do not know, except that they imagine the power of God to be like that of some royal potentate, and nature’s power to consist in force and energy.”

The point Spinoza is making, though he could not know it for the terms of our time, only his, is that the stasis of conventional terms prevents convention itself from falling prey to Spinoza’s formula; such conventional method typically distances itself from Spinoza by calling his position ‘pantheist’. in this way, through conventional progress, reality is presented to have included previously excluded ideas; for example, whereas resort to superstition used to be usual and accepted, now superstition has been debunked. To reiterate; convention thus disclaims God by its rationale, and affirms God so far a conventional method is activated in its considering of the possibility of God. The problem is revealed when what is ‘outside’ or ‘unaccounted by’ conventional reality is brought to bare upon conventional truths of method. The conventional response to this addressing, of elements devoted to the ‘God-ness’ of conventional reality, the ‘unknown’ outside conventional domain of the conventional ‘soon-to-be-known’ method, the effectively ‘miraculous’ or incredible aspect of conventional reality, is to view such non-conventional endeavors to be “doing away with”, what has now to be seen as, conventional ‘God-and-nature’ truth and its providence. Conventional method, offended by the revealing of what it cannot account for, sees the non-conventional or aphilosophical explanation as doing away with what is true, and thus reacts, as methodology usurps or commandeers what should be its true meaning, thereby making it a part of the conventional reality, for ideological, political or religious agendas, or plain calls it non-sense or false.

These are the facts of the matter, the discussion upon the point of contention, aphilosophy, and how it relates to conventional reality; it is the attempt to explain “phenomena” or “miracles” of conventional reality that is and or has been supposed within or by the conventional methodology to be natural, which is to say for much of it, sought in psychology. The irony is in the conventional orientation of itself dealing with nature, when it now must be seen, due to the aphilosophical explanation, that conventional reality is really a religious cosmology, a reality “formed in the mind of its God” that avoids what is natural existence by its very nature of avoiding is own existence. It is the conventional offense, its instilled fear of losing power, that reacts by redistributing true existential meaning onto the real map that is the conventional scheme of meaning that designates and corresponds true objects and their terms. Such conventional methodology would then place aphilosophical description in a particular category of either/or to for the truth of its faith in its own objects. And it is this feature of human existence that then speaks polemically, not relatively, of a universal ethical situation as existentially necessary – a discourse that modern theoretics will find quite distasteful.

Direct Tangent 5.31: Radical, Immanence and Faith.

I hope you have a good appetite. We are at a table in a restaurant. Laruelle is my dinner partner in the seat next to me. He is having non-philosophy as his main dish; ironically, I have have opted for the buffet. There are others at our table but they have not been introduced. Many people come by our table and say hi, comment on what we are having or how nice the restaurant is, or the weather, and then disappear back into the restaurant. As I look around, I see other tables ordering ‘what he has’ and pointing to our table…

* * *
This is a discussion of what may be ‘immanence’ and to this end, what may be ‘radical’, through an occasioning of non-philosophy.

*
“There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations.”
from “Struggle and Utopia in the End Times of Philosophy” by Francois Laruelle.

“In so much as there may be a radical non-philosophical agent, its appearance in reality never is apprehended for what it is, except by those who see the truth of the manifestation, where it therein becomes the mere occasion for radical agency.”
from “Direction 5.18: Recant and Reoccasion” by Lance Kair.

“This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it.”
Ibid. Laruelle.

Laruelle is the occasion for my work here. The significance of his premises are apparent, and the rest follows necessarily: once the issue is understood, the rest is obvious. Many, many, many will read me and argue that i do not thereby understand him, or will ask me to prove it. I will ‘prove it’ by stating the facts. Laruelle has also considered the facts; we are addressing the same issue but approaching it in different terms. What emerges subsequently is of the individual, and does not pertain to the truth of the premises necessarily, though it does sufficiently. The one who sees the parallax conjunction evident in these initial statements will need no discussion on the matter; his or her work will see in ours an occasion that verifies to them that they indeed know the truth of the matter. My problem with Laruelle was never that he is incorrect; my issue with L centers on why his is so shadowed in jargon and dressed in flattery – and if he himself is subject to the mirage (but I tend to think he is not). The truth does not disguise itself, nor does it appeal to tastes. But this does not mean there is no discussion to be had…

Some comments on the opening excerpts:

-In the first excerpt, Laruelle tells us that he recognizes that his effort, non-philosophy, will be taken as a philosophical object, that what may be an actual meaning of non-philosophy will be lost in the confusion, that non-philosophy’s “effectuations” will be commandeered by “interpretations”. The heritage that non-philosophy will leave in pieces will double back with interpretations of what occurred.

– I submit that due to this doubling-back upon the “tatters”, non-philosophy will remain ‘unheard’ due to the persistent confusion that is the discussion of the philosophical object. Yet neither can be excluded since there are no illusions; I would say illusions only occur with the conventionally oriented.

– The non-philosopher, what I could call the ‘radical agent’, is only comprehended by one who already understands what non-philosophy may be, but who may not have called it ‘non-philosophy’, and this one thereby has no need to present an interpretation of it, to make a philosophical object out of it, but instead sees non-philosophy as an occasion that verifies – not ‘tells it the way it is’ – the truth of the matter; that is, unless, as I see it, non-philosophy is proposed as, which is to say that L’s intension fulfills or otherwise acknowledges, an ironic ‘object’ of sorts.

-The question involved in the occasion here, then, is the discrepancy involved in the meanings inherent of these statements (above) taken individually and together. What can Laruelle be meaning by “immanence”? What does it mean for immanence to be treated in an immanent manner?

Most thoughtful people would say that immanence concerns or means, somehow, consistency or acceptance of or within oneself. The problem with such an idea is it means everyone already is behaving in this manner, and that the issue has to do with if they know, acknowledge or realize it or not. Then the question would be how is this possible; how can there be a bifurcation of the same movement? How can there be a ‘one being’ at odds with itself? We can get into the scientific convention of quantum physics later, but the question has to do with the usual answer. Rather, it is really the individual involved and concerned with a proper method that yields an inability to come upon immanence; that then brings a consolation that says immanence is attainable if one does the right things and applies the proper method. This method of consolation justifies the individual lack by reducing immanence to a religious, metaphysical or psychological idea that really means and has meant all along that one just needs to ‘be one’ with oneself, whether it is taken in a religious measure, such as atonement or confession or adhering to certain rituals or practices, or whether it denotes the individual coming to terms with his or her past, or doing some psychological work on the various issues and/or neuroses that are causing one to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with how one would rather be, is causing various problems in one’s life, or is otherwise preventing or hindering one from being comfortable in oneself or in other cases ‘being successful’. Noble and heartwarming as this intent and these activities may be, the proposed end result (objective) does not come close to immanence. It smells a lot like the super-mundane, utter ideological metaphysical pedestrianism, if not outright propaganda. But those so human-healthy will usually be the first to suggest that such activity is a spiritual exercise. What has occurred, though, is that what may be or have been true of ‘the spirit’ or the ‘spiritual’ has been deemed a type of misinterpretation, all this or that time just needing of discussion to figure out what it actually means or is. The discrepancy between the individual and his idea of himself thus marks a failure of the idea rather than the individual, or vice versa, instead of a failure of the scheme of meaning that has brought the idea as well as the individual to contradiction, which is to say, at odds. The method for correcting or reconciling the discrepancy is thus sought through the very scheme that establishes the problem in the first place. This is the method of philosophy, of bringing what may be various knowledges under one knowledge, of binding experience to a particular method of meaning, the discourse of the One Truth, the Universe of the True Object.

I would suggest then, that it is the negation (but not nullifying) of this type of thoughtful activity that Laruelle is up to with his non-philosophy (or at least he should be). Also, this is not my interpretation, rather, what is radical is that which is supposed to be the solution to the problem inherent of the scheme itself, and immanence is that condition that is thus let to knowledge once the scheme (of and in which the problem resides) has been fully renounced (the Name has been relinquished). But the question remains: How can this be?

Many will say this whole line of thought is ridiculous, but what we have here is exactly the condition of letting the concept come into existence through the phenomenon, rather than relying upon an equivocality of concept and phenomenon. It is not a matter of the term being solute with reality, but that such a solution denies other solutions. Hence my “conventional” and possibly Laruelle’s “philosophical” reality; yet, I see the real issue as centering on the ‘term’ and ones orientation upon the object. This cannot be estimated; that is, the reliance upon the equivocality that brings thought into a correspondent relation with (real) objects reveals the inherent over-determination already invested in the effort to produce a viable solution to the problem of reality: This over-determination is exactly transcendence and not immanence, radical or otherwise. The determination of reality must be precise in order for a true relation (or non-relation, as the case may be) to have any meaning at all: the determination must be not real. Otherwise, the meaning is exactly faith. For once the determination is true, no longer do we have reality equated to thoughts except through a mistaken willing of belief – but there exactly do we have difference. It is thus the ‘sameness’, the in-distinction that qualifies the philosophical movements that at once understand but still play the language games as if some progress can be or will be made due to the recognition, within which discussion abounds upon a transcending truth as everyone wills themselves into reality.

Thus, to come back to the individual’s inability to come upon immanence, this means that the individual is routinely unable, does not have the capacity, to renounce the problematic scheme wholesale, and so, as a human ideological-cultural motif, has deemed such ability, as well as any terms that might denote, refer or indicate such ability, to be false. The proper method – right action, right thought, etc…to mediation and yoga, to therapy, exercise or even medication, but also methods of negotiation, philosophical but also including economic, cultural and sociological methods – thus emerges in history toward the true ‘objective’ that has been determined in denial to never be a reconciliation of discrepant objects, but always the creation of problem within a posed solvent future, the mistaken past corrected by the future, which reveals precisely the ideological agenda of the conventional agent, as well as offers routes into cultural critique. Immanence at once is deemed an anachronistic and/or religious-metaphysical (read: false) notion for the sake of the transcendent truth, as well is absorbed into the conventional rhetoric to justify its reductive and unifying motion; immanence becomes an ideological justification of activity localized in the conventional agent. This last is why, i believe, Laruelle had to introduce radical immanence, to admit and assert poignantly and decisively what should not ever be confused -though it typically, habitually and persistently does – with, what I submit is a more precise terming, the conventional methodology.

*

My research has found that other authors have and are indeed addressing reality through the same understanding, but that often the authors and their conventional agents quibble over the use of terms. So it is from this perspective that I join the discussion. As a substrate to my proposals, I must ask: How is it possible that I have come upon such knowledge?

*

My posts have been growing rather lengthy. So I have decided to chop my essays into more easily digestible portions. This helps me to keep to more specific points, as well as develop a more sensible and consistent proposition.

So I will have a drink, and return from the buffet in a moment…

Tangent 5.16

TANGENT 5.16

I figure it prudent and sensible at this time to take a tangent, aside from the direct Laruelle-nonphilosophical discussion.

And back up..

What am I doing here in this blog, these posts? What am I addressing?
I have said the basic issue is duality. But though this can appear as a beginning, at times it can appear in the middle. So perhaps, a more beginning beginning.

As I proceed to live life, I merely live. I do, I think, I ponder, I solve problems, I interact with people and things, I process information, I have emotions, I encounter physical problems, I get sticks rammed through my toe when I step on them, I get scratches from my dog with untrimmed claws, I love my wife, I have sex, I love my child, I play silly games and hopefully give her a good basis by which to proceed into the world, I live life. Philosophico-crtiquo-thinkers seem to forget these basic aspects of life and the world; it is as if they live in a fantasyland, as if their fantasy is true.

As a thinker, I attempt to reconcile all these experiences to a sensibility, an understanding, reasons for things happening, I make decisions, I move into the world. I hear, feel and experience other creatures, human and not human, I discuss things big and small with others. I talk about sports, I talk about planets, climate change, culture, religion, politics, I hear opinions, I give them mine. As a critical thinker, I attempt to explain all these things and events. I consider how it is possible that there is someone else, what their opinions mean and what it means that I can consider their opinions; I attempt to describe the truth of the matter of life and existence.

Being involved in this process, I am inevitably brought to truth. I could lie or fabricate a sensibility, a description, and then I would be involved with literature or popular fiction. If I am programming a computer, I cannot string together random strings of code and have the computer do anything with it except reject it, or do nothing with it. I am not programming a computer here, but it is a good analogy: remaining with the principle of truth, I am limited in what I can say and have it be sensible.

In this process, then, I have to consider every facet of experience, I cannot leave out anything. I have to fully accept everything, and in this acceptance I further have to doubt it all. I have to put through the ringer every notion, challenging every idea with all possibility of rebuttal. I cannot cringe or run away from distasteful events or ideas. I have to account for my past, present and future, my idea of it, that this idea is an idea, and I have to be able to reconcile this to the fact that I am here now thinking about it, writing about it. I have to consider what a tree is, the meaning I have of it, what other people know of it, that there are other people, how this might be possible, and how this might be communicated.

My task is to make sense of it all, but not only that, I am in an effort to communicate it to others.

This is a most daunting task indeed.

One could say the biggest problem I have encountered has to do with what I could call ‘compartmentalization’. It has to do with being the event of doing. For example; If I am going to ride a bike race, I get the $5000 dollar bike. I also get the spandex clothes with the fancy color designs and the logos all over it. I get the tight shorts, the funky soled shoes that I cant walk properly in. I go to ride a bike race and I am a bike racer; I have the gear, I look the part. If I were to show up in cut-off jeans, a cigarette in my mouth, flip-flops on a beat up beach cruiser, other people would probably laugh; they might still believe that I was going to ride the race, but they would doubt if I was serious: they would doubt I was a bike racer.

Compartmentalizing activity in this way is not bad so far as it goes for the things we do. It identifies us, it allows for interaction along common lines, including dissent, it allows for the furthering of a activity by having controls against which we may discover better ways of doing things, such as, waring spandex clothes for racing reduces drag and allows one to go faster with less energy expenditure.

But honest, true critical discourse about life, existence and reality does not fall into a compartment in this way; in fact, in defies it.

The problem I have in presenting my ideas is that those who are in the business of considering such ideas have an idea of what one supposed to say and how one is supposed to say it. There is ‘gear and a look’ that one is supposed to have, or one is not taken seriously. And this seems to happen automatically. The serious bike racer looks at the cigarette clod rider next to him and writes him off before the race has begun, and his does this automatically. He makes no choice in this opinion, rather, his opinion is already made due to what a ‘real’ bike racer should be, how he should look, what he should be talking about. What discussion may occur between these two racers has more to do with the geared-up racer, if he has an open mind, suggesting to the cig-racer that, if he wants to win, he might want to not smoke, and he might want to get a better, lighter, more streamlined bike, and maybe get some spandex, suggestions for the course and how to take turns and certain hills. The discussion of the cig-racer telling his couterpart that he’s gonna ride real fast and kick your ass, means little or nothing to the geared-up-career racer. But this is not because the cig-racer might not win, it is because there is a history, a tradition, a science that has developed racing in such a way that it tells what a bike racer is, what they should do (if they want to win), what gear they should use, and all this translates into how they should look. And this is sensible so far as racing a bike has little to do with planting a garden, and when they are racing they are not considering what time of the season to plant tulips.

Of course this is an overdetermination, and there is no ‘winning’ in the critical discussion (or at least, maybe there is in some circles), but the activity I am undertaking is just like this: as soon as a person enters the arena, it is assumed that they are doing certain things and using certain tools, because the assumption, the given, the ‘supposed to’ is that the method and tools of investigating and discovering existence and reality have been developed in the same way as racing equipment. This understanding is automatic. It seems so automatic that the theories developed around such a topic soon have little to do with the life that was taken as the initial object of investigation. The theories and ideas become merely an identifier of a particular compartment of experience: just as if I may be talking about computers, I may be talking about existence. The discursive technology develops in the same way in both arenas, around a supposed object or activity that is distinguished from another.

Now to my point:

The problem is that the arena in which, and the topic about which the discussion is supposedly taking place is assumed. And, as we go about to define what it is, we move toward terms that supposedly identify a particular object of our consideration: but by then we have lost the initial reason why we are talking about anything. The arena becomes the defined object of consideration: it is redundant. The arena, the thing we are supposed to be discussing, has dissolved into the terms that we are using to frame the arena. Such terms do not thereby locate anything but the discussion itself. The problem is that describing reality or existence is not like another object like a car. The terms here, of existence, reality and the like, that are developed around a particular object of thought do not identify any object except the thought itself, that thought which has departed as soon as another person uses other terms to propose it. To assume the contrary is to rely upon an existence of a ‘thought-object’, which is to say, to rely upon a necessary correspondence between the thought and the object of discussion. The example of this is put thus: if such an object existed, I would only have to say something about it and the discussion would end, for everyone would know it was true (which is ironically the case for the few; see elsewhere in my essays).In so much as one might suggest that is what discussion ‘finds’ through its process, is likewise to rely upon some true object, as if there is some ideal form of sorts that exists between participants in the discussion. This is then the exact discussion of transcendence and immanence.

To propose that there is some ‘actual’ truth to the matter of existence or reality, because we have a history, a tradition, and a method that has given us logically reasoned out descriptions of existence and reality, as well as a method by which we can argue with old ones and propose new ones: this is exactly the proposal of a true object, as if thoughts, existence, reality, being, are things-in-them-selves that can be ‘gotten’ or understood, as if these aspects of life are actual true objects. Such discussions reveal, on one hand, nothing but metaphysical, religio-ideological postures, but on the other – and only for those who have stuck with the basic issue through the whole discussion, who have seen that the terms get nothing and nowhere – a description of existence and reality as it is presently manifested in discourse, a description of how the process of description is operating at this moment.

***

This last is indeed what Francois Laruelle has attempted to do, and has done very well. So, if this is the case, then inso doing, inso being able to describe in detail what or how the method of description is operating, the funtions and relations of its pieces, its terms, and how this scheme grants a particular picture that is the very picture we see including how such a description is presentable, the whole thing is thus called into question, and allows for the possibllity of a different… whatever term one wants to use.

Further, it is not just a theory, because the theory itself, the description, includes and/or realizes the lack involved in thoery, so it must be an actual lived practice, a praxis: the project of non-philosophy. This is not particularized, in fact, it is non-particularizable, non-campartamentizable. So it is that he becomes the occasion for my work.

Direct Tangent 3.1: Appropriation of the Rhetoric of Power, part 2

There is a book called “Castes of Mind” by a man maned Dirks. It is an historical analysis and critique of 19th century English colonialism through an overtly cultural difference, caste, and how this feature of Indian culture was dealt with both by the English in an attempt to rule, and the Indians attempting to assert cultural autonomy and agency. I do not remember what his argument is beyond a picture of this interaction, but what I inferred from his presentation was this idea of appropriation of rhetoric, what feminists and modern theorists and activists call, but from a slightly but significantly different view, ‘hegemonic discourse’. Dirks is giving us a picture of how ideology asserts itself through a process of discourse, where those who have the power, in the case of colonialism in India: England ( but colonialism in general), dictate the terms of the cultural negotiation upon the colonized, namely, the indigenous Indians. The scheme or group of terms and their definitional relations are seen as a mechanism or tool of asserting power (read: violence) upon those who are colonized, and, as a very light definition, this is called ‘hegemony’.

What this means is that those in power bring the terms by which those not in power may be allowed to exist. And this is literally the case. Dirks paints a picture of how this really means for us that people are permitted to exist through discourse. One example (keep in mind I am not doing a research paper here; I am merely recalling the book from memory – one can easily look up the book for themselves if interested) he gives is about some Indian ritual. If I remember correctly, Dirks is drawing his analysis from written material of the time of the events, from various sources. The significant point here, is that the English there had trouble making sense of it. When they would ask the locals what was going on, or their feelings about it or the reason behind it, the English had no context by which to understand them. The Indians were effectively silent; they could not be heard: they effectively did not exist. Because of this, the English could only act upon the events through the understanding they had, which was total misunderstanding. The English, because of their position of power, were righteous in their view, having little or no ability to understand that they perhaps did not understand the Indian context: the Indian context was exactly what the English thought it was. Thus, the Indian context, the reason and meaning of the ritual in this case, was ultimately written by the English. The Indians, in an effort to establish their cultural legitimacy thus, in various ways and circumstances, developed a position in relation to what the English were saying, and doing, and in this way the Indians began to exist, for if they did not respond to such rhetoric in that fashion, they would in effect ‘remain silent’, and would thus be forced, physically, existentially, out of existence.

This is the typical feminist reading, analysis and comment upon such a situation; there are many such analyses upon various cultural contexts. The feminists propose to reconcile this hegemony, to balance this abuse of power and infringement of human autonomy and rights, by advocating that the colonized people, whether it be women, blacks, Hispanics, Argentinians, Koreans, hair dressers, union workers, or what, raise their voices, as the Indians did, by asserting themselves actively into the discourse, what one could call, the priority discourse, or the discourse of power, what i call a ‘rhetoric of power’ for reasons I will develop later.

What I am saying is a critique of such feminist rhetoric. The Feminists say that one needs to appropriate the hegemonic discourse, so that there is enacted thereby a shift in power, so it loses its effective hegemony. See, hegemony is read to imply agenda that is not recognized or approved of by those who are the subjects of the hegemony. But I suggest that what occurs is not that the people are empowered to their agency, but rather, they themselves become subject of the rhetoric of power such that they then too get to partake in the spoils of – what has developed out of – the hegemony, of colonialism. The people who appropriate the priority discourse lose their identity as individual cultural agents, and instead become, as Paulo Freire might agree ( maybe, but his was not at this level of critique), oppressed: involved in the game of oppression, both the oppressor and oppressed likewise caught in play. The oppressed, who learn the ways of the oppressor, become acculturated such that they are rewarded for their complicity, and thereby sustain the game of oppression. Neither have enacted a true free agency, neither have come upon praxis; both are oppressed.

* *

This is the position Laruelle appears to be presenting, the position I present here. Laruelle has appropriated the rhetoric of power, the priority discourse, in order to present his minority view, which is exactly silent – but as opposed to the movement of feminist-colonialist theoretics, which present the possibility of pushing agencies out of real existence by virtue of the establishing reality of the hegemonic (priority) discourse. And, it is because of this feature of his proposing Non-Philosophy within or by the priority discourse that he appears to be in Bad Faith.

It is thus the explicating of this appearance that is my task at hand here. The existence Laruelle proposes is exactly real opposed to the reality of the rhetoric of power.

Direction 2.18

I have to start somewhere; I cannot, like most, start in the middle and expect to get anywhere but to an aggravation of the problem. I could start anywhere but I will begin with a few statements of what truth cannot be. Truth cannot be located in a real world, except as that world constitutes a reality. Truth cannot be found in discussion; only in reality can agreement be deemed as true. Truth cannot be relative because then we are left with an infinitely spiraling truth that there is no real truth but only a truth that we call truth, which is, in fact real. There are no terms which indicate nothing real.

What is serious has to do with death. Everything that is serious tends toward and responds from a tendency, or implied or inferred implication, of threat – and no threat is taken serious that is not linked to an idea of death. Death, while it may have something to do with what is true, really indicates what is false, and thereby we infer what may be true by the limitation set by our idea of the truth of death. If this manner of dialogue is not serious enough, it is because it speaks of death but is not offended by it, which is to say, I may have a natural response to impending doom, but I do not live life according to whether I will die today or tomorrow or ever: in so much as as I may die one day, and death, for what we can know for sure, ends all human relation, death must be true, but absolutely true, as opposed to just true in reality. What may be actually true, that is, not really true but absolutely true with reference to death, must be that which is most seriously false.

So, now that we have begun to spin some wheels, I will begin at a more definite beginning.

***

Thought.

The primary, that is, first and most basic, issue of thought has nothing to do with topics; or rather, it has everything to do with the subject. All problems are based in a fundamental misunderstanding of reality, a misunderstanding that is kept in place and indeed enforced because of an offense. The offense is so great that it effects a denial of what is true of existence. Such a denial thus allows for the establishment of the true object. In this way, reality is a misunderstanding of the truth of human existence. Reality is a method of negotiating true things, or real objects, that are created through denial. Though an object may exist, we can only know it in reality as meaning, and meaning is founded in knowledge; therefore, all objects are created as real through an agreement between human beings who misunderstand the truth of existence and reality. If I encounter an object on my own, I have no relatable knowledge of its truth except inso much as I have entered into a negotiation of knowledge with another human being. This may be said to be a line of communication but such a moment is really part of the question we are addressing. Also, If I know of a true object by myself, I have no need to refer to it as true or false. We cannot address the possibility of a human being alone in reality for such a pondering is entirely defined and contained in knowledge given prior to the consideration.

The matter of offense is a more involved issue that will arise and be made sense of as we continue.

For now, one should see that what I have to offer is merely an accounting of all the facts and that I am not attempting to convince anyone of anything. I have no strategy, no deceptive jargon by which to uphold a privileged mystery nor create a mystique. I have no hidden agenda, no career motivation, no deadline or line to tow; I have no reputation nor identity to maintain. I merely present the necessary conclusion given all the facts, and one of the facts that precipitates out from this giving is that no one will be convinced because very few people have the personal integrity to want to or be able to consider all the facts. Only those who already understand what I present will be able to see that it is true. The issue has always been the putting clearly into words the truth of the matter at hand.

The first and most basic fact is duality: there is no real reconciliation of duality. This is to say, there are only two types of such reconciliation: what i call, the ironic and the conventional. A conventional reconciliation of duality is ‘religion’, or a hoped-for truth, or a truth based in faith.; an ironic reconciliation is called (actual) ‘truth’.

The conventional reconciliation calls for or to a uni-verse, that is, One. Religious truth is, by definition, a conventional reconciliation of the apparent duality of reality in oneness. It avoids diversity and plurality by asserting that it all can be recouped in reality through some promoted method.

The ironic reconciliation is what will be developed as we continue.

For now, I’ll let you chew on what has been offered so far for a little bit.

Direction 2.18

I have to start somewhere; I cannot, like most, start in the middle and expect to get anywhere but to an aggravation of the problem. I could start anywhere but I will begin with a few statements of what truth cannot be. Truth cannot be located in a real world, except as that world constitutes a reality. Truth cannot be found in discussion; only in reality can agreement be deemed as true. Truth cannot be relative because then we are left with an infinitely spiraling truth that there is no real truth but only a truth that we call truth, which is, in fact real. There are no terms which indicate nothing real.

What is serious has to do with death. Everything that is serious tends toward and responds from a tendency, or implied or inferred implication, of threat – and no threat is taken serious that is not linked to an idea of death. Death, while it may have something to do with what is true, really indicates what is false, and thereby we infer what may be true by the limitation set by our idea of the truth of death. If this manner of dialogue is not serious enough, it is because it speaks of death but is not offended by it, which is to say, I may have a natural response to impending doom, but I do not live life according to whether I will die today or tomorrow or ever: in so much as as I may die one day, and death, for what we can know for sure, ends all human relation, death must be true, but absolutely true, as opposed to just true in reality. What may be actually true, that is, not really true but absolutely true with reference to death, must be that which is most seriously false.

So, now that we have begun to spin some wheels, I will begin at a more definite beginning.

***

Thought.

The primary, that is, first and most basic, issue of thought has nothing to do with topics; or rather, it has everything to do with the subject. All problems are based in a fundamental misunderstanding of reality, a misunderstanding that is kept in place and indeed enforced because of an offense. The offense is so great that it effects a denial of what is true of existence. Such a denial thus allows for the establishment of the true object. In this way, reality is a misunderstanding of the truth of human existence. Reality is a method of negotiating true things, or real objects, that are created through denial. Though an object may exist, we can only know it in reality as meaning, and meaning is founded in knowledge; therefore, all objects are created as real through an agreement between human beings who misunderstand the truth of existence and reality. If I encounter an object on my own, I have no relatable knowledge of its truth except inso much as I have entered into a negotiation of knowledge with another human being. This may be said to be a line of communication but such a moment is really part of the question we are addressing. Also, If I know of a true object by myself, I have no need to refer to it as true or false. We cannot address the possibility of a human being alone in reality for such a pondering is entirely defined and contained in knowledge given prior to the consideration.

The matter of offense is a more involved issue that will arise and be made sense of as we continue.

For now, one should see that what I have to offer is merely an accounting of all the facts and that I am not attempting to convince anyone of anything. I have no strategy, no deceptive jargon by which to uphold a privileged mystery nor create a mystique. I have no hidden agenda, no career motivation, no deadline or line to tow; I have no reputation nor identity to maintain. I merely present the necessary conclusion given all the facts, and one of the facts that precipitates out from this giving is that no one will be convinced because very few people have the personal integrity to want to or be able to consider all the facts. Only those who already understand what I present will be able to see that it is true. The issue has always been the putting clearly into words the truth of the matter at hand.

The first and most basic fact is duality: there is no real reconciliation of duality. This is to say, there are only two types of such reconciliation: what i call, the ironic and the conventional. A conventional reconciliation of duality is ‘religion’, or a hoped-for truth, or a truth based in faith.; an ironic reconciliation is called (actual) ‘truth’.

The conventional reconciliation calls for or to a uni-verse, that is, One. Religious truth is, by definition, a conventional reconciliation of the apparent duality of reality in oneness. It avoids diversity and plurality by asserting that it all can be recouped in reality through some promoted method.

The ironic reconciliation is what will be developed as we continue.

For now, I’ll let you chew on what has been offered so far for a little bit.

Direction.

One has to wonder what the point of this discussion may be. It is not at all an over generalization or stereotype to say that most people could not care less about philosophical-theoretical discussion unless ot has to do with their career. Most people work and play; that’s it.

I have to say that thats great. But I also have to say that they are willfully and blissfully ignorant and have thus little significance- or rather, their significance lay in their activity: which is exactly what our current philo- theoretical model says its all about.

.
So I too must act. And my action must be entirely consistent with my Being.
I must merely state my case: it is nothing less that the accounting for all the facts. A complete explanation of existance, reality, history and the basis of religion and spirituality.

Without unnecessary jargon, in (hopefully) simple language; anyone should be able to follow and understand the ideas with little study.

Of course, there will be those who see that such an endeavor must nessessarily be trite and uninformed, but i will account for such responses too. I will show how the traditional philosophical authors and their ideas all stem from the same problem and pretty much say the same thing. And I will show why they have been presented in certain ways as well as taken in certain ways. In short, I will invalidate the whole of what has been the establishment of institutional philosophy.

Sounds like a big order? Perhaps. But I will expect that most people will be incapable, even if they are interested, of accepting what I have to offer – and I will explain why this is so.

Ready?

The Exhibition begins.

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