modern – Unexpected Objects

Read: “21st Century Speculative Philosophy: Reflections on the ‘New Metaphysics’ and its Realism and Materialism” | Leon Niemoczynski – Academia.edu — and ponder….

(99+) (PDF) “21st Century Speculative Philosophy: Reflections on the ‘New Metaphysics’ and its Realism and Materialism” | Leon Niemoczynski – Academia.edu
— Read on www.academia.edu/7265783/_21st_Century_Speculative_Philosophy_Reflections_on_the_New_Metaphysics_and_its_Realism_and_Materialism_

——- Interesting that I thought the term ‘metaphysics’ referred to something more than what we have to say about it. I’m not sure how there can be a ‘contemporary metaphysics’ and then other ones. Seems to me that’s exactly what’s happening: this issue of metaphysics is itself being viewed and debated. That is contemporary metaphysics: the belief that metaphysics is established through various arguments. The contradiction inherent therein is what brings about a feeling in those involved in the discussion that “something is in the air”.

The belief or orientation upon things which understands agency as a universe manifesting and effective force, and the content of proposals which express that sigular cosmology: metaphysics.x

Parlez-vous Parler? And more disturbing comment (for some).

Amazon is threatening to pull the plug on Parler because of the content of its users. Google Play and Apple Store are pulling the Parler app from …

Parlez-vous Parler?

— My mind Goes two places:

* those fear-actors will run all the more silent. The dark web will have plenty of people who will make a platform for their very small minded activism. (Is my bias showing?) and will organize more and more skillfully and intentionally.

*now days, there are too many people and correspondingly too many huge money interests to allow a collapse of anything so necessary to contentment as the huge blissful consumer capitalism. Even the revolutionary/anarchism/hackers rely upon the huge-money capitalism.

Ironic for this antisocial miscreant: i side on Power: We are already past a critical threshhold for crude overthrow ideology to ever work in the way those people imagine.

Freedom is established by the ecopolicial system; if ever there was doubt, we know now. Even the thought experiment of “what if” is merely a mirror of systemic norms: Global Civilization (or Galactic Humanity ??)will not recede; There is simply too much humanity for that to happen.

Yes. Maybe people will get hurt. There will be some insurrections.

Foucault’s implication for the clinical mind is operative: for every human progress, humans will be left behind. What we call “ethical” is a teleological manifestation of a utopian ontology: it is the projecting of being upon and “unknown perfection” where everyone is happy and sings it’s a small world after all for eternity. It doesn’t matter whether or not we “believe” in this ethical maxim, because the simple fact of having some sort of ethics toward the idea that everyone should be allowed to live, that we should not kill anyone, relies upon and notion of intentionality which necessarily an automatically kills people that are outside of that intention. In other words, modern subjective intentionality is a justification of the individual over the death or exploitation of another That is out of view. There is no escaping this in our modern world, whereas, in the past we still had an ability for a reasonable doubt that that could occur.

What Foucault calls ‘the gaze’ is selctive and implicitly avoids the ethical problems of its establishment through knowledge-power.

The gaze, as a means for progress Completely misses the human (body) toll for the sake of its motion of knowledge-power.

However depressing and arousing of revolting ideas, the consolation is that it happens, is happening, and has happened all the time. Ethics itself is a program of selected ignorance: The ideals that ethics forms (as a viewed body) excludes the truth of the existing human (the body itself).

Human activity is based on the Expiration of other bodies, human and nonhuman. Always. Ethics is more a justification, less a prescription for behavior: The behavior is justified by the modern gaze.

So, again, we have the retelling of the ancient story of Arjuna before battle pondering the necessity of killing family members and freinds.

Fortunately, intelligence is also ethically conscripted. Compassion beats fear.

—

I’ll get shot before I buy a gun; I’m too kind and smart. 😜. I care too much about the well being of others.

It’s kind of sad. In a way…
xx

What is called for is not another reactionary politics. The idea that we need to do some thing “more ethical”, come upon or manifest a better political system, or be ourselves “more ethical in our application of being and doing, Is simply to exclude people that do not agree with that kind of ethics. It is to promote, a search, and demand that all human beings “respect human beings” in a particular fashion, according to a particular belief system. No. that is the irony of liberal politics: any demand of ethics necessarily confines that ethics to something that is unethical and its application.

Hence, a new type of ethical understanding of what it is to be human is required.

Think about if I am in the military, or, in fact I’ve been watching Star Trek discovery lately; Think about Starfleet, since it is like the most idealized version of cooperation and ethics.

The point here is that people who join Starfleet, or at least the crew of the enterprise and discovery, Volunteered their lives for the sake of this ideal of Starfleet, this ethics.

What is radical about this version of ethics is that it is not modern. Now, I’m not saying we all should aspire to the Star Trek idea; I love Star Trek, but, come on people.

The point is is that the modern version of ethics is contained by a finitude that we define as death. Actually, birth and death. This is also the point that Foucault draws upon. It is not that we get to choose to define lives and situation’s in such away; to make such choices assumes that they have already been made for us. He is talking about an unfolding of consciousness as political/clinical identity. And I would assert that the post modern idealism which says we all get to choose our own reality, define our own parameters and such, is based in an idealism that is already given to us, which is to say, without the type of critical reflection that this archaeologist is posing.

The radical ethics that I’m talking about with reference to Star Trek discovery and Starfleet, is that death has no foundation beyond the mere idea. And I would add to this that the enlightenment ideals of freedom arises for the every day human being in the context that we get to choose our allegiances; this is basically the commentary on the nation-state. But it is this type of consciousness, One where our allegiance is left to Essential choice (how do we even talk about this idea without foreclosing freedom to nothingness?) which brings about the “terrorist extreme ism” that we find going on in the United States in many parts of the world as we speak.

This new type of ethics is very corporate, it is very Inc. It realizes on one hand that our freedom is already determined in the state, that the very system by which we know ourselves implies a space of unknowability that we associate, or that manifests as a consciousness in freedom.

And it is the irony that is playing out in our moment that will come out on the side of a Starfleet kind of ethics, again, without the idealized reference to some future utopia.

It is simply an unfolding of being human. x

The Gift

on the non-fixity of world identity.

It is not a definitive world by which reality is understood as a singular and fixed truththat is significant. The various opinions, attitudes and mentalities based in subjective meaning upon the stable ground of reality are not the issue. Rather, it is the relationship that we have with things which is truly significant.

I had a moment with a young individual today.

I don’t know how it is in the rest of the world, but in the US it is a strange kind of trend of adolescents who are depressed to self harm. I don’t know if this is a global thing but I know it is a United States thing.

It seems that there is a rash of depressed and or anxious young people who, lacking any particular sharp tool, such as a razor blade or perhaps a knife, will scratch themselves in one place with their own fingernail, often short, until The skin finally breaks and a wound develops. They will continue to scratch that one place longer and wider until some unknown threshold is achieved and then they will produce another one right next to it, often parallel and sometimes in squared or triangular designs. And they will do this, many of them, until their arms are covered with these kind of burn sores. When you get a bunch of these children together, it is at once striking and at the same time strangely of no concern; for in part, one might be just as inclined to wonder why a group of kids will start smoking tobacco or in our current situation, vaping. One has to admit there is a certain amount of fad or trend or whatever you would want to call it. Because anxiety and depression does not necessarily mean that you have to self harm, and indeed when I was young there was many kids my age, many who were depressed or had problematic families who were friends of mine, who never thought of self harming in the way that seems so trendy and ubiquitous for our children nowadays. It is sad and strange.

My intention for this post was not to discuss the philosophical fixtures of mental health theories or to offer any sort of help necessarily to these young people.

I really brought it up because this one person I was talking to today used to self harm, and then stopped for a couple years and only recently had started again because of some sort of life event that was triggering.

This person was also depressed but having more issues with anxiety. I was talking to this person and they happen to mention how they are not suicidal because their best friend had committed suicide a few years prior, so they never contemplate killing themselves.

It struck me how they said this so matter-of-factly, for it is common with people who suffer from great and long lasting general anxiety as well as depression to have to also battle with intrusive suicidal thoughts.

And I said to this person:

You know, that’s kind of amazing, in a strange way, when you think about it. What you just said…

Your best friend died? I said.

And so you never think about killing yourself, you simply don’t have thoughts about killing yourself? I said.

Then I said, you know, in a strange way, your friend gave you a gift, for he gave you a reason to live.

And this person began to slowly tear up, as I did also, with compassion in my heart.

They were looking down but then they kind of looked up at me through the tops of their eyes and gave a sleight little smile On top of that kind of frown that you get when there’s a deep hurt that just quickly surged to the surface, when your face can’t help but strain into an childish ugly grimace. A kind of embarrassment and yet of connection.

Yeah; maybe… they said.

Sometimes we need a different way to look at things. Sometimes we can hold what seems as two opposing sentiments for the sake of at once mourning and yet celebrating, missing and yet respecting. and yet, sometimes when we see it, it seems so obvious. Like, why didn’t I think of that.

I think some of it may be not so much that this person didn’t think of that, but they did not allow themselves to think of it because of the polemically reductive fashion by which we arrive with our ethical selves to the encounter with the world. We are often not permitted to think but in specific ways about specific things.

Often we just hold the sadness a certain way because we think that’s the only way that sadness is allowed to be, holding it so dear that we fear that person is going to be disrespected, as if it is this supremely fragile thing. Whereas actually it could be a source of the most profound strength and Resilliance.

The modern ideological and ethical sense sometimes misleads us into seeing tragedy as one way, into what Kierkegaard calls the “either/or”, which is the mentality of fixation, of limit, of finitude.

How much does my identity depend upon this either/or reduction towards self and world, as if indeed they either have to be 100% intertwined and subjective, or 100% separate, psychological and objective?

Maybe the relationship changes under various conditions. maybe it is both.

Algorithms and institutional isomorphism: A Call for a more Philosophically Comprehensive Theory Of Counseling.

Algorithms and institutional isomorphism

Algorithms and institutional isomorphism
— Read on markcarrigan.net/2019/03/10/algorithms-and-institutional-isomorphism/

This is quite interesting.

It resonates with ideas I have been throwing about. For example, the way that I use the term religion in my work seems consistent with the way that internet platforms are homogenizing corporate identities, as this summary (the link) might suggest. Less about what corporate activity, ability, or work that they do or products they make, the platforms through which they present such corporate subjectivities not only limit their ability to be viewed but indeed function as a space of reflexivity which thereby allows them to view themselves as a unique and valuable contribution to the socially economical universe, Even as this universe is contracting in its ability to grant universal value beyond its domain.

Also, as I suggest in The Philosophical Hack, what is significant is our relationship with technology. Less our subjective meanings and relative interpretations of our thoughts and feelings that we have about our relationship (which are indeed valid, if overworked and often understood as substantially ubiquitous), the relationship has more to do with how such subjectivities manifest as the relation. For example, how technology tends to allow us to think our meaning is unique and individual all the while confining that presentation to specific technological items.

We might then see through the lens of counseling, as counselors, that subjective issues may find more resolution by the smaller possibility for explanation rather that a wider one. The more possibility is understood for a context of therapeutic help, perhaps the less individual help will be achieved.

Hence, I might hypothesize that a more coherent and less divisive ideal for therapeutic help is indicated. Less assertions of various conventional scientific methodological truth( this method is more correct that that) as argument (less acceptance of universal subject-relativity and individual argumentative validity) and more theoretical philosophy which might function to supply a model which contains, explains and addresses the phenomenal possibility for therapy.

In other words, less client choice in therapy and less Counsellor self-righteousness about appropriate treatment options, could lead to a more effective therapy as a whole movement and client responsiveness to treatment.

Because it seems right now, on one hand the client has so many choices for therapy that they don’t even know what they might be choosing, and on the other hand counselors as such might be so self righteous and myopic in their theoretical basis that they are asserting a particular type of methodological solution up and against the larger arena of counseling which posits that there could be many effective treatments. I am proposing that if the theoretical basis of counseling is it self limited within a larger explanatory philosophy rather than granted in infinite relativity, then the client might feel like they are actually getting significant help even before the therapeutic process begins.

Philosophical Construction.

One can always tell when there is a religion in place in two ways:

1) The person will declare what they are and what they believe through a Name. For examples; Christianity. But also, Realist. On one hand we have Baptist; and on the other hand we have Existentialism.

The second way you can tell if a religion or religious belief is in place is that they will deny that it is religious.

This is where we find “philosophy” becoming a kind of religious faith. Through not witnessing its own operations honestly. Through the contradiction involved with a particular manner of coming upon reality.

In general, philosophers wish to retain the title or the name “philosophy” to mean Deconstruction, which is to say, to indicate pure process as opposed to any set of dogmas. Philosophers as a contemporary or modern sense (in the least philosophical meaning possible) speak of this pure process as a way to decode what is otherwise dogma or what we have found in the past 40 or 50 (80?) years as ideology encoded into discourse, but as well a name for a particular type of thinking (let us philosophize about religion; and or, the philosophy of computer programming; etc…)

But I ask, where did we get these ideas about what philosophy is?

The answer of the latter ‘kind’ of thinking is just a label for The kind of thinking that moves more deeply into a subject matter.

Of the former, The typical answer would be a kind of historical library of authors’ works. … actually I’m not sure. And this is exactly what I mean to indicate so far as philosophy becoming a kind of religious faith: There is no reason why we are currently involved in a “post truth” situation – the reason is because that’s what the theorists say. And I’m going to say something that I’m sure will arouse immediate disclaimers, whether it be in the philosophers mind only, or whether people actually say something about it (I will bet it will only occur in peoples minds, because in the same way that Christians are confined to interpreting the Bible is specific ways, so it is with conventional philosophy; the faith involved with philosophy will not allow them to make a comment upon it; one can only dismiss it) —

The reason why we might be In a post truth situation of reality (or whatever) is because the ‘clergy’ of modern philosophy have told us how dogma is to be assembled in order to create a proper meaning for reality. Much as the Scholastic of the Medieval period did for Christianity.

Yet there is a problem with the method…

We find a bookend to this faith with what we know as postmodernism. The whole idea behind postmodernism is that it argues it self into perpetual opening. After postmodernism no one is allowed to identify that which is being identified.

But i’m just about to stick my fist up into that opening (screw the hammer!😝):

Typically, we use the term “post modern” to identify a particular set of authors, a particular psychological mode, a particular set of ideas, a particular period in intellectual time, amongst other ideas. But all of these post modern ideas function together so that no one can ever say that ” post modern” is a set of beliefs for method. They can be identified to individual discourses which loosely (arguably) fall under the rubric of PM, but never as the definition of how theory must function as a methodology.

It’s fundamental and contradictory premises are involved in the assertion of it being a critique of what is modern. But I would submit that regardless of such fictional postures, the postmodern is intimately intertwined with modernity and at that, to establish for us a set of instructions by which to know what is real. In fact, I would say if you read a few of the well-known postmodern authors, this is exactly what they’re saying .

Nevertheless, This is what philosophy has become; no longer can you identify philosophy along a particular agenda because the postmodern sense of philosophy will immediately disrupt that conceptual territory, to thereby throw off any assertions that it is indeed developing into a dogmatic religion. It’s exactly like if you are not Christian and you argue with a Christian about the meaning of the Bible; you can’t get anywhere because they already know what the Bible means, And will assert that meaning at every corner and claim that you are not understanding what the Bible really says and will assert that meaning at every corner and claim that you are not understanding what the Bible really says.

In my second book “the moment of decisive significance: A heresy”, I approach this dilemma.

We even use the definition of religion to keep philosophy from being labeled as a religion. In general we identify religion as a set of beliefs and a set of practices. And then somehow philosophy avoids being a set of practices accompanied by a specific set of beliefs.

And yet I have identified philosophy just now. For, what is a set of beliefs? It is ideas accompanied by behavior. And what are practices but things that we do that are accompanied by a set of ideas?

It seems to me that our definition of religion speaks for itself but we don’t want to admit, as philosophers, that philosophy indeed answers to this very criteria, this very definition of religion. Postmodern is a set of ideas which motivate as they support a set a practices: Philosophy upholds a certain set of ideas set down in “scriptural” canon which proscribe how not only the philosopher – as a cleric of the religion of the true – but how now everyone is supposed to see and behave in reality. It’s PM theology has come true!

But we can go even further. I would submit that there is a reason why continental philosophy is generally centered around French thinkers: Freedom.

It is the French, not the Americans, but the French who tore down previous aristocratic structures and have ever since been attempting to justify existence in the context of an absolute freedom. And this is the context and justification of (ontological) philosophy now: it poses as though it is saying something, but what it is talking about no one can say.

If that isn’t another way of describing an Absolute Ineffable God — I mean. Come on.

We find it able to be identified as a system of beliefs and practices due to the bookend that we call Postmodernism.

And, my upcoming book “the philosophical hack: the concluding unscientific postscript to event” goes even further:

It is not that PM is wrong or incorrect. It is not even to argue that religion is a bad or incorrect manner or function. To suggest that identifying Philosophy as a religious effort is not indicting it as wrong or as something that needs be corrected; such a suggestion would be merely to suggest we need a better religion. Rather, we are concerned with it’s opposite: By the ability invested of itself to define subjects to specific parameters, it allows for a definition where by a science of philosophy may be determined.

Thanks for listening.

Quantum Computing and its relevance to Philosophy.

via A few videos on quantum computing and the physics of time I want to come back to later — Mark Carrigan

In order to move forward philosophically, we must get out of our philosophical head that everything must reduce to 0 or 1, nothing or common reality.

I begin with that statement because this is the problem that we face in philosophy: It is less a philosophical problem as it is quantitative problem in the Kierkegaardian sense; the quantum does not reduce the the classical qualitative criteria. The quantum is found exactly in what philosophy can do as opposed to its classical or conventional for of what Is.

This is to say that philosophy, as a name for a particular kind of process, exhibits and endorces as it then enforces implicitly the idea that all philosophical matter must reduce to a “all or nothing” result: All philosophical proposals must answer the the conventional ontological standard. Philosophy is caught in this problem; this is the modern and current problem of philosophy. A resurgence of Realism responds to a inability for what I term conventional philosophy to inhabit and address this problem, but its reactionary move is really a recourse to using a Sartrean Existentialist mode of psychological defense, the ‘out’ of revolt from the Abyss (which is contradiction, i.e. an answer which is not 1 or 0) back into real (political) identity.

This, of course, is not to imply, for example, that the realization of Quantum Physics somehow does away with or argues against the validity of Conventional or Classical Physics. Yet, when the quantum is approached by conventional philosophy, this is exactly its methodological response. In short it asserts that All philosophy must adhere to the Zero Sum Game (1 or 0). All philosophical proposals which do not meet the conventional criterion of amounting to a 0 or 1, is nonsense. I submit that Quantum Physics and all the wonderful applications that we have gained from it would never have arisen if Scientists were so closed minded and stubborn as philosophers. We merely need to view what is before us and stop rehashing what is –purportedly theoretically sound– already there.

There are philosophers who have or are beginning to incorporate quantum analogies into their proposals. Francois Laruelle, Slavoj Zizek, are only two that come to mind. AGENT SWARM somewhat often reviews authors who have entertained quantum ideas.

But we should be careful not to fall back into the conventional postmodern method of intesionalist Ontological immanence. This is to say that it is improper for philosophers, those involved with a process of engaging with the world, to figure for all instances that just because thoughts can be assembled in a meaningful manner that they therefore have real theoretical substance. We have seen what philosophical fantasies of this sort produce; strange discourses which appear to have conditional validity, and its associated incredulity, as well as blatant idiocy. A quantum computation of philosophy would not rely upon a conventional inspiration of free postmodernist range. Not everything is situational to inspired manipulations of discourse; the Kantian synthetical a priori so abused by some self-theorized Postmodernists is not as ubiquitous a self-reflecting truth as they would assert in their appropriation of the PM cannon. Some discourses actually require a more significant ground. This is what the Realist move responds to; the potential for nonsense to appear as more than nice fiction theoretical stories. While even Speculative Realism is responding, Id say, properly to check the promulgation of magical thinking, other philosophers who have indeed uncovered a realm which exists outside of the Zero-Sum Game of conventional philosophy, appear to actually be holding up a conception of a valid philosophical science based in quantum analogy.

“Keep those legs closed ! I haven’t taken my bong hit yet!”

(Who the F*^& keeps saying that stuff ???)

The book “The Philosophical Hack” confronts the conventional philosophical cock-block. It is a hack into the fortress of conventional certitude. It is an essay which addresses the miscommunication involved in the flattening out all philosophy to a unitive horizon. It is concerned with what philosophy can do, rather than endless ontological proposals about what is.

Out soon.

“The Philosophical Hack: The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Event” by Cedric Nathaniel. 140 pages. pocketbook format. Published by Od Parcel Press. estimated price: $7 + shipping.

We hope you will be interested in the future of philosophy.

An Attempt at Discussing Some ‘Disparities’: Terrorism, Religion, Truth and Belief.

Taking a cue from Amorinblog, I am making an attempt to speak to the notion of disparities. Lets see how is goes.

What is terrorism?

When we think about the activities of terrorism, a marginal view might situate terrorism in terms of truth. What we have with the possibility of terrorism is a function of truth, or “true-Being”. In the consideration of what human beings do, we should not ignore or set aside this aspect of truth: Truth is Being truth. To set this function of human consciousness in terms of ‘belief’ merely reifies the Western colonial construct of subjective centrism, a construct that posits free will and choice in an absolute context of the ability for the subject to align itself with a transcendent course, such as we found in the American context “manifest destiny”. This is to say, we ostracize such “pre-terrorists”, people who might not have becomes terrorists yet they did, through the ideological matrix of the self-referential ethics of choice to say that the one who is a terrorist is choosing unethical behavior; the native tribes of the western northern hemisphere were for most purposes to the early American government, terrorists in every light, even though we understand now how the American “post-colonial” period was an unethical act (still we do very little to repair the wrong). ‘Choice’, and correspondent terms such as ‘free will’, can be understood as a Western liberal code for creating antagonism in the world, an aggravating aspect of Western capitalism and its war machine.

Yet see that the question is not one about an essence of choice. It is practically nonsense to suggest that we do not have choice. But at the same time, if we do not recognize a dual aspect of consciousness, then we always stay within the ideological paradigm of an absolute ethics despite how we might want to situate or define any other liberal ethics of inclusion; we will routinely stay in the unity of consciousness that is able to consider parts of itself, parts it conceives, the unity that appropriates plurality to its uses. Reflection, in this way, is misunderstood axiomatically to be witnessing something outside of itself. As part of the liberal ethical front (and I mean this to describe a kind of Western impetus, a certain manner of coming upon reality) we should not worry so much about what others are doing, in fact, we are only able to understand such ‘other’ through this antagonistic orientation that is first and foremost based in worry, fear, and philosophical resentiment. Ours is based in a contradicting antagonism, and our plight, as well as our ability to act, is based upon a cognitive platform of reconciliation in knowledge. We have then, as we are, to deal with our own BS if we are to ever stop jutting forth to then recoil in the usual modern oscillation of the war solution. In an odd sort of reprimand, the very idea of enlightenment typically does not translate into domination through war; no wonder colonial-exploratory Europe had to see other non-Europeans as ‘less than human’.

Two things here: This is not a argument against war or that we should not have war; this is not an argument for pacifism. Neither is this a suggestion that we should (somehow) withdraw from interacting with others; the point is toward an ability to be honest with ourselves about the situation at hand. As part of an ideological situation, we indeed have a front line; we cannot but be involved with a partition, of sorts, whereby we face and have confrontation with those aspects of the world in which we find ourselves. To move this understanding into any sort of utopian theme of ‘universal peace’ would then be to set aside our moment, our modernity, to basically negate our moment into a whole past to say then that all wars and conflict in history arose due to these constraints, whereas the truth of the matter is that which arrives only within our modern situation as wars stemming from these defined antagonisms: Basically we identify our moment by establishing the contradiction in this context. If we are ever to realize (which is to say, understand the truth of) our situation, then it seems the manner must take place within as the contradiction that is outside of the ideological or mythological construct, a situation that is not accorded to the construct to be thereby abstract (it is indeed occurring within the norm) but, is rather marginalized to the extreme, actively being withheld for the purposes of maintaining a particular kind of reality (ethics).

This is no longer a critique of meta-narratives; such a critique was still occurring in the antagonistic space, a space that could only be resolved through various ‘faiths’ that resolve the modern contradiction (the Deleuzian “Zen”, the New Age Spirituality, the Eastern Karmic cosmos, the “Christian” denominations that are not properly Protestant nor Catholic, and other discourses that take place in ironic suspensions). We have found that the critique of meta-narratives was how a particular ideological state perpetuates itself through ulterior colonialist motions. The Postmodern (but particularly the subsequent ‘method’) thought itself as an exception to the metanarrative, and used irony to suggest its difference, but we found that it merely supplied the ‘final’ narrative to substantiate Capitalism as the ground of real discourse (the “postmodern methodological platform”; see Lyotard “The postmodern condition”, and “The Differend”: The demand for a ground of real veracity, a limiting of irony, calls forth the criterion of ‘efficiency’ that brings about ‘experts’ to define what knowledge is valid, which knowledge is allowed to be considered as true, as well as the reparations that will be made to that aspect of knowledge that was excluded in the interest of efficiency.) But we were not done with irony, that is why definition is insufficient to bring about decisive changes in ideology; hence the various philosophical reconciliations for identity that we find all over the internet, and hence the instigation of a divergence in philosophy.

(Note: The question for divergence seems to be noticed. What others have been trying to do with ‘non-standard’ ideas and such, I simply address directly and say I am a philosopher and this ‘other’ manner of philosophy is still true as it can be identified thus conventional because the orientation upon objects by which it addresses things to gain its veracity. We do not speak from the unitive philosophical paradigm but rather admit that such a paradigm exists at least in parallel. Only one kind of argumentation exists which can reduce all signals to a single matrix, and that is the conventional philosophical route; it does not propose that it is capable of doing this, and that is why we are able to identify its mode with nothing. As I have said elsewhere, we are dealing with the instance of what stays static while something else changes, a calculus, of philosophical reckoning. What has withdrawn has indeed withdrawn beyond all argumentation: It has already been established. As well, any further argumentation is superfluous, redundant but indeed real and valid.)

So this is also not a critique of such identities. It is a describing of how humanity functions; we should not expect such understanding will change our behavior. It indeed will bring about or be involved with some sort of change, but the change will be related in a particularly real manner that seems to be able to avoid the truth of statements and yet likewise be able to argue effectively for how the truth is not what originally was there (a mistaken intension of intentionality). Neither is this a pragmatics, nor a promotion of a way into praxis. This is analysis, a possibility into a beginning of a science that has been brewing for some time (time is not the issue). The fact of atomic interactions is related to the war machine only through incidental, circumstantial yet real discussion, negotiation and argument; the science itself dealt only with the interrelating of factual situations, itself as a founding term that actually departs (instead of merely feigning departure). When we rely only upon a determination of human activity through this former method (of the circumstantial discussion) we arrive at never having the bomb built in the first place, no nuclear energy, no astrophysics, no understanding of our sun or the solar system, etc. No wonder there has been an effort to get back to the “pre-modern” Real thing.

We thus have now reached that point of discernment, an ability to deal with the being of human without recourse to incessant mythological justifying defaults that reify the free intuiting agent of transcendence. Thus far, we have not had a scientifically philosophical way to gain access into what human beings do because we were too busy doing it, busy using the manner; as an analogy, we’ve been like astronomers who have been looking at ourselves looking at the stars thinking we were actually looking at and discussing the stars: Through this approach we can only get so much information about the stars. The most recent of this manner is what we could generalize into a category of ‘Enlightenment’, but other categories that need be sorted are ‘State’ and ‘Capitalism’, among others, and “Neurophysiology” is not one of these primary aspects at this moment. We do not know yet how these function for human beings; we have only been using such categories in a proposal to find out how we might Be, indeed, using them to Be. In our finding this out, then, we have reached a kind of apogee in mythological function: Coming upon such self-reflection there by understands such knowledge as a means to enact, what is now/then seen, as a Truth. Only when this occurs does a moment arise by which to view through a larger frame of what has occurred. It does not occur through any choice in the matter, but indeed functions to begin to detract from itself.

From this moment we might be able to understand what ‘Terrorism’ might be. The first order of business, though, is to dismiss oneself from the reflection of identity, and this does not occur through any choice of free will. As I noted above, this is not a suggestion to indicate that terrible things have not occurred throughout human history, or that we can identify some essential human attribute or psychology to thereby alleviate us from such terrible occurrences. This is a description of what role Terrorism is playing in the reality of being human: Terrorism, in a large sense, is the antithesis of free will and choice; quite terrible. Psychology, at this moment, is too overdetermined in solution to be able to ponder a fact that does not move toward choices of human solutions; there are too many human issues in the world for an institution to consider bare facts; all such facts are ideological and political arguments that function as platforms by which to enact a possibility of real solution. It does no discredit to such psychological method to point out what it does, though, but the reaction that would take such a description as indicating a fault of psychology, or as suggesting that psychology is incorrect or wrong, is missing the point of fact for the sake of its ideological purpose, which is to rely upon the self-evidence of its teleology of real solution. Science concerns facts; real solutions are of a different order, of a different moment. And such moments are not, or at least do not have to be, at odds.

We thus make a proposal that seems almost a truism: Terrorism is the act that takes place from an ideological point of exclusion; terrorism exploits points of access.

I have suggested above that the idea (ideal) of human ‘belief’ is a manifestation of an ideological lack, a founding term that is supposed by the constituents of the ideology to account for what lay outside its purview. It is a colonizing ideal: Belief. Again, in this conceptual moment, we need separate ourselves from the notion that human beings all throughout history have been having beliefs. We are not concerned with what history might have to say about what human beings might “have been” believing (for indeed they were); that is of a different order of analysis. What occurs in terrorism is that the open door, that is supposed to be welcoming and inclusive of various human capacities and manifestations of belief, is not being taken. There is something about the welcome that is understood intuitively and innately to not be welcoming; to wit, the sensible response: My belief is not a belief, it is the Truth. Regardless of how we wish to emphasize our open ideal, in the case of terrorism, it has not worked, that’s why such acts are “terrible”, because they make no sense, they occur outside of our sensibility, our ability to make sense. Our sense of it is 1)that it is terrible, 2)unethical, 4)insane, 5) inhuman,6)of a ‘bad’ sort of religious fundamentalism. Perhaps we even make sense of the people’s acts patronizingly; they are ignorant, they are delusional, they are uneducated, they have been raised in an intolerant culture, they are the product of ‘bad’ ideology or psychology, they have been brainwashed. We cannot dismiss that any of these disclaimers may be the case, but for the act itself, especially individuals who willingly and with intent sacrifice their own lives in the act of terrorism – how else are we to make sense of such acts but through the unitive aspect of consciousness and its humanity that has good and bad psychologies accompanied by ethical mandates ? One cannot choose to escape their reality.

In these kind of reckonings there is no consideration of, as Alain Badiou has said, “difference as indeed different”, in other words, there is no considering their position for what it is in actuality, which is to say, as indeed a Truth that does not reconcile or fit snugly and comfortably in ‘our’ ideological nest. Indeed; I recently heard of how Donald Trump approaches foreign policy in a way that is different than what America has historically: Instead of attempting to defeat authoritarian regimes or dictatorships, reprimanding them with trade and alliance penalties, like the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, Trump approaches other nations on their own ground, allowing their political organization to function in whatever way it does so long as it does not interfere with American interests specifically. This appears very much like a situation where what is different is engaged with in its difference. How ironic that the person who so many in America see as contrary to American interests would be the person who would take an approach that can appear philosophically sound? I doubt Trump is that smart or educated, but it goes to show that we are not speaking about practical reconciliations of thought and action, but indeed a scientific description of the situation at hand. Could this be an indication of a possible beginning of a philosophical science that does not answer to conventional philosophical method?

Terrorism occurs at points of access. (Side note: The paranoia that often arises out of the consideration of an actual Artificial Intelligence develops the very point of access that an A.I. would be able to take advantage.) Terrorism is the revealing that access is not automatic nor guaranteed by any sort of discursive item, and that access now must be authorized (by experts). This is not homicide or murder, in as much as those events target individual people for specific identifiable reasons; e.g. Sam hates Pablo. Of course, we could see some similarities breaching this codification in the U.S. legalizing the corporation as an individual person: The experts tell us now that the human being is an incorporation, and not the other way around. It is not that corporations have become people, its that people must be incorporated to have ‘free’ access. In this sense, then, “in the name of (the True) Islam, I kill a number of symbolic representatives of the Christian West” is murder because this individual is incorporated (with an institution called ISIS, Boko Haram, Al-kaeda, Neo-Nazi, Free-Speech Movements, Pro-life, Black Lives Matter, whatever.. ). The irony, and the evidence that such terrorist groups see themselves through the lens they wish to destroy, is that they are asserting their freedom of access, pointing out the contradiction inherent in the (Western Liberal Capitalist) liberal mind set. This is the divine beauty of Capitalism: Its apparent omnipotence. Those who are not terrorists are those who are definably and axiomatically free to access: They are born incorporated: Nationalism has ‘bred’ itself into an offspring. Of course terrorism is insensible: How does one make sense of an act of assertion that positions itself against something that is already inherent to the act itself? This is the contradiction as well as the blind spot we find also involved in the critique of race relations. How much more non-sensible can it be for those who must behave through such ideological mechanisms? But this is not an issue of knowledge and education as much as it is what is occurring. The fact that such marginalized groups would have to speak about how to gain for themselves basic and inalienable rights is just about the most ridiculous thing that could occur given our ideological ground. Might the ‘terrorist’ actually be more sane??

This is not my position, necessarily, by the way, nor am I arguing anything about what sanity might be. But, an analysis of a situation must be able to point out facts about the situation if we are to get anywhere: Speaking about or describing what is offensive should not be taken as an argument for that which offends. A person of color is not asking me to change my skin color, reject my heritage nor deny myself as a human being in the world; she just asks me to be open to facing some harsh truths that come from outside of my ability to reckon on my own.

Identity has been taken to a further extreme, perhaps as a counterpoint to the extreme absence of sense that the act of terrorism evidences. I am not going to make an argument against that kind of reckoning, but only point out that such situations are about the political order. As to facts, if I may take the Islamic Terrorists as a case example (though we could put this analysis to any so called Terrorist), the suicide bomber is not targeting specific people, in fact, the hatred is entirely ideological (as I said): It is not Burt that I hate but that Burt is American, and he is not so much an American, as I reestablish the Truth of my sense, the sense of Truth, and re-appropriate to assert the Truth, as much as he is an Infidel. The point of access is a symbolic act against symbols, the scheme of which, on the part of the Terrorist, functions to reclaim conceptual territory (see my REBLOG post about conceptual territory) through lumping the antagonist into the counter-partial founding category by which a closing is understood as an opening (an act of faith); the corresponding ideal of the West is ‘belief’. The point of access is exactly the gap that opens up with murder without personal motive; the personal motive is the successful attack upon Truth. It is no secret that the opening for belief allows for all sorts of ethical compromises that brings into question every ‘belief system’ that functions under its umbrella. Only in the “blasé” attitude (Walter Benjamin ?) that accompanies the pursuit of real identity may someone have a valid ‘belief’; one must suspend their ideals in ‘nothing’ in order to ‘really believe’ (or to have faith). It is this kind of nihilism that is terrified by someone who is willing to die to destroy even the smallest piece of the antagonizing ideological leviathan; the transcendence that accompanies the modern nihilism is of a different sort than that usual Western ideal that places religious thinking in the category of concern with a transcendent ‘creator’. The Western religion of nihilism (the state of belief) cannot bring itself to have any sort of passion strong enough that would allow itself to willingly kill itself; how ironic. Here we even have the beginnings of a philosophical explanation of addiction, as well as the reason why it has reached epidemic proportions in America; but as well, a possible explanation of China and how it becomes present in the West.

The point of the terrorist act is to destroy the antagonistic state, the state that directly confronts the Truth through the ideal of human belief (the ideal of ‘belief’ is a singular ideological Truth). The terrorist act thus is an act that is already admitting what it is losing; like the Kamikaze fighters of World War 2 Japan, Japan had already lost the war, but would not admit it. Slavoj Zizek speaks of this kind of ideological instance in the analogy of the cartoon character, say, Wile E. Coyote, chasing the road runner off a cliff, running out into the air. Coyote does not fall until he looks down and realizes that he is standing on nothing, and even then, he has time to wave good-bye to the camera. The interesting part of this, though, is that the terrorists are already a part of the ideology that they are terrorizing, because they are already admitting that this antagonistic state has a claim in their Truth: They are fighting against the ideal of belief, an ideal concept –like that which is unstable within Anslem’s argument for the proof of the existence of God, — that they already and inherently understand; we might see the contradiction suspended in the terrorist act in as much as they destroy their own lives in the process of attempting to destroy the whole of the antagonistic state: A ‘not-life’ for a ‘life’. Likewise, they know that their act will not actually destroy the whole of the infidel’s kingdom, but perhaps (who really knows) they ‘believe/know’ that their act will cause some sort of cascading event of collapse, as their disruption in concert with the ongoing series of disruptions will inevitably achieve their ideological goal, which is to dispense with ideology (as belief). We might see again a similar ideological activity in the events of Helter Skelter, ,where the murders of Hollywood celebrities would instigate a race war. Such antagonisms supply the fodder that ironically sustains the Capitalist ideology.

Terrorism could be marking that point when Capitalism has run out in to the air; perhaps it is now waving to us, but I doubt it. If I have to summarize the point of this essay on terrorism, perhaps it is that terrorism is an ideological construct that has its basis in nothing, an irony, because while it destroys people, actual lives, it is already serving Capitalism as a source of capital, of “magic”, of supplying energy to the ideological fetishized commodity that is identity: Terrorism is understood effectively, axiomatically, automatically to be identifying a real-true thing. Disgusting ethical juxtaposition really, but again this is why Capitalism could be said to be the umbrella Religion of Nothing, because people have to have faith in order to be able to ignore the incredible depth of the nothingness in which such events, and their labels, induce.

It is within such determinations that we find necessarily that I am not speaking of a unitive situation, but indeed, I am speaking about how such a unitive situation operates.

***

I could go on, and there is a further bit having to do with explosions, but Ill leave it here for now.

￼on the non-fixity of world identity.

on the non-fixity of world identity.