tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49174055744063588892024-02-20T14:04:14.880-08:00naturnahlebenIn the ultra left milieu there are those that hope for a better tomorrow and there are those that aim to manifest their own desires, however they might come, beyond Good and Evil. We relish decomposition beyond Good and Evil. Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-92042160744401450992018-04-23T03:06:00.004-07:002018-04-23T10:10:07.394-07:00Chappie<span style="font-size: large;">Human consciousness has traditionally been defined as an essence, or a form; a spiritual correlate of a material body; and more recently as "something" beyond data, something that cannot be accounted for by materiality. In this sense it is best understood as residual. Residual being captures three metaphysical distinctions. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">We have received this distinction by another name: mind and matter. Mind things are of the order of "things" that can imagine Pegasus, say; whereas bodily things (the sensory apparatus, which is an interconnected neural relationship between nerves endings, and pathways in the brain), will, short of an hallucination, never verify the image combined (presumably) from a set of previous verifications. Material substance is not immaterial substance; and not everything is one substance. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">We late moderns take it for granted that this distinction is without use. Personally, I took it for granted that the mind was illusory, or at best something unnecessary in explanation. If we can explain morals by way of evolutionary hypothesis, for instance; if we can explain empathy by self-interest, say, then what is the point of the posit? What makes us human doesn't seem like the kind of thing that we have to worry about, if the explanandum has been robbed of the need for an explanans. But an impression managing psychopath is not the real McCoy, precisely because we, on the anti-material side of things, refuse to admit that the spiritual is reducible. Being genuine; being a truth teller, runs counterintuitively to calculation and self-interest. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Of course, everyone knows that self-interest is not easily distinguishable from empathy, as though the latter were a matter of capping off the former. Why? Because it makes sense to ask: Is there value is doing X, whatever the X. Obviously, the realist point that one might value even self- destruction, say in refusing to lie to save oneself, is well intended; and yet, the question: but don't you do that for some kind of reward, is always on the table. Why? <i>Because we take it for granted that we do things for a reason</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">+++</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Consciousness, however, does still pique an interest. I recently watched <i>Chappie</i>, a story about a robot that has been given consciousness and then learns how to download consciousness into a data form, with the final result being that one need not "go to the next world" because "one would thereby become fully living cyborg, and, you guessed it, "live immortally". If consciousness can be conceived as data, albeit very complicated data, then the life hereafter is unnecessary. We have then another distinction: the living and the dead. Data is dead; humans are alive; chappie is the living dead; and Deon becomes the living dead too. Of course, the cyborg promise is that our body parts are replaceable, for a fee, of course, if you can't just steal it. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">There is another traditional distinction caught up in <i>Chappie</i>. That is the worry of freedom versus determinism. Humans are free; Machines are bound by obligation and rule; they are programmed. Determinism is programming, whether from the Maker on high or some less than cosmic maker in the lab. Freedom is precisely what the buffoon played by Hugh Jackman did not have: the capacity to arrest the desire to do ill will, or to calculate motives. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So there you have it: mind and matter; freedom and determinism; self-interest and morality; life and death. It is because this movie reaches far into these distinctions that it tends to appeal. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">And yet, I am a little less convinced by the premise that these enduring questions can be satisfied by a simplistic middle ground analogy. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">---</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Obviously the idea that a machine can have consciousness is about as ridiculous as believing that Pegasus is real. And it's not that this is due to the fact that I have religious ideals that I wish to protect from science. It is that these ideas are not well grounded by scientific measure; they are not the kinds of thing that permit analysis by empirical tools. This is a debate that goes back to Descartes, Hume, Kant and the medievals. It didn't get sorted then, and it's now no longer on the table, after 200 and some odd years of empirical investigation. And yet, after all that, it seems to have found an audience. It may very well be the case that we have anxiety about the idea of humans being replaced</span><span style="font-size: large;">, outlined in ways above; b</span><span style="font-size: large;">ut these anxieties stem from a common perception of time passed; one that cannot be easily answered without traceable echoes. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Yes, the Hugh Jackman character is a buffoon. No he isn't bound to act viciously. Yes a machine follows orders. No we do not. Our freedom is residual; minds are residual. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">---</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Inventing a middle ground between humans and machines doesn't answer anything we are asking; it occludes an old memory, a set of three distinctions that must be articulated and which will always trouble. We still have the same anxieties, only we have a new set of permissible answers. But those anxieties are going nowhere because technology is not in the business of solving problems as much as it offers itself as a distraction. And so we trace them back, and so we profane. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-11887492630191181062018-04-12T04:46:00.001-07:002018-07-12T20:30:37.661-07:00Marx and the Eschaton<span style="font-size: large;">To suppose that Christ doesn't have anything to do with marxist eschatology is to fail to understand the spirit of the age; it is to fail to grasp the point that Hegel and Marx were both upon; speaking, as they were, in an essentially jewish register. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It was this same register that propelled the disciple and later apostle Peter to slice the ear off the servant alongside Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane; this same individual that wanted to reject the purpose Jesus had. In an ironic moment, in nearly the same sentence, Peter proclaims that Jesus is messiah, and yet denies that Jesus must die; a statement to which Jesus replies: "get behind me Satan". How could one be both understanding and yet so blind? It wouldn't be impossible to read this misunderstanding back into the prophetic works.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Throughout the prophets of the Old testament the promise is that the messiah will release the captives, set the oppressed free; we read this over and over, and yet always with the caveat that this will be a matter of <i>being led</i> by the messiah. And thus, it is not impossible that the same narrative plays in the reality of the Marxist eschaton. We must produce the kingdom of God now (utopia), the new world we have in our hearts. But this position is set in opposition to the desire that messiah has for us; messiah will lead us to greener pastures, while "we all, like sheep, have gone astray." The difference here is subtle: <i>As messiah leads I am made blind to my own.</i> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Peter was led astray in the garden because, being a Zealot, he expected messiah to lead him and the people of Israel out of political captivity, which is not without truth in the prophets. But messiah never came to release the captives from whatever we pridefully despise; his release includes the denial of self, because it was the selfish eschaton that stole from God's retribution. Retribution (vengeance) is mine, saith the Lord. Thus, can we understand what this looks like? or is that already to desire vision (and so, sin?) (John 9)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It is partially because this position is ambiguous that we might say there is difficulty. God supports the release; it is talked about throughout Isaiah and Jeremiah; but this release <i>on our terms</i>, is already a failure of self. Whatever the release might become is <i>not</i> on our terms. Perhaps all of it might be read back into the parable of the weeds, which grow alongside the wheat until judgement/harvest. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">To say that God supports <i>whatever we do</i> is to fail to understand prophetic warning. Thus the justice of God cannot be conclusively rallied as support for any world system: socialist, communist, capitalist, or whatever. Any effort to mimic will already fail to address prophetic warning. The God of the old testament led his people himself. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Will we wager then and hope that what we produce is analogous to the dictates of God, short of being led? Maybe we wonder what it's like to be led?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-9994023435703524212018-03-24T00:33:00.002-07:002018-07-12T20:32:17.242-07:00Indexed Offense. <div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-size: large;">The idea of
partitioned groups of individuals that consent to marry other individuals of
their race, doesn’t strike me as something that is morally repugnant; but that’s
because there’s nothing that’s morally repugnant, unless one can give a reason.
Want of a reason is the trouble. What is usually given is a loose conception of
a neatly packaged symbolic reality. And only if you buy into the desires of
others. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-size: large;">Reform for
individuals tracks a propulsion that anarchists ought to reject. Nothing about reform
(better) produces the overthrowing of the system. It is only the overthrow of
that system itself that produces whatever, which has nothing to do with the
best of the betters. The state will never give us what anarchists want.
Therefore, liberal politics, cannot. Etc., <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-size: large;">Being white
has at least two senses that need to be discussed: White people in the post-structural
sense has to do with being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of</i> the
ruling class. If being white (this body has the property of being-white) is
necessary for rule, we cannot explain how black bodies are in power; if it is sufficient,
we cannot explain how many whites do not have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">any</i> ruling power. Since this is the case, the connection between
whiteness and ruling as “the white man” is tenuous, and evidently rhetorical: There
is nothing necessary about being white that produces the reality of ruling. The
sense of the association comes out a bit more exactly as: whiteness in the
ruling sense <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">propels a set of likely
potentialities on individuals with white bodies</i>. Ruling propels, however,
onto many bodies that aren’t white. Obviously. Therefore, either we affirm that
ruling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">per se</i> is not white; or else,
we say, as I’ve said before, that Obama passes (performs) as a white person. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-size: large;">The
anarchist tendency is to reject ruling because ruling over people is garbage. If
whiteness is synonymous with ruling, then only Marxists are white. Only
collectivists are white. Lots of black bodies are white. Everyone should rule together
(impossible), or mind to themselves. No human should rule any other. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-size: large;">The problem of being white is not an individualist's problem. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-26023097781558847922017-12-26T08:15:00.000-08:002018-07-12T20:34:38.301-07:00Post-Technology<span style="font-size: large;">Sometimes we wonder what the deeper critique of technology might look like; and for starters, it would seem obvious that it requires a renovation of <i>all</i> forms, until nothing has the identity primed for form, the notion of a repetition, waiting in the wings. To say that there is a big difference between civilization or domestication and wild nature is to reify two forms of life that actually (really) speak inside one another. There are feral cats within civilization; and there are repetitive structures outside of civilization. Being outside, then, implies that one is differentiating by way of another binary. Not the binary then of Nature and Domestication; but the difference between chaos and containment. Nature and Civilization are similar by way of containment; the truth of the matter is that <i>both</i> contain chaos. And of course, this is Agamben's point in the notion of the outside/inside state of the exception; the one being named as the sovereign, the other named as that which falls outside bios. We might make the point in a different way by pointing to thanatos, or, the death drive of society and its negativity, and the chaos in everyone, the chaos of the virus, the chaos of adapting by making <i>new</i> legislation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">That is, it is presumed in contemporary scientific ideology that the individual conforms to the world; that harmony is the desire of the system; that balance is the move. And yet, it would seem obvious to this writer that nothing is adapting to anything because <i>nothing is a stable something</i> to which one might adapt. Everything is unfolding into whatever. Even thinking that there will be a bad kickback for a plethora of bad, presumes that order is the point. But what we are really saying is that we can contain the disorder that becoming has always been.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Technology is the containment of whatever being into something legible; into something bound by law; bound by identity. If we say that decomposition is the technological critique, then it will become apparent that the rupture of everyday life by the death drive of capitalism will be within our desire; and this is a point that we cannot deny. The destruction of everything for immediate gain is a delightful proposition for the disorder to come. We do not deny that we find it thrilling to see the capitalists managing the nothing they create. And we see it as sad to see our comrades fight for the nothing that the capitalists have created. Society is nothing worth fighting for. Being able to adapt is the ticket; and their monies will never get anyone there; for their forms were always simply technologies of containment that stave off the disaster of life. To live in the disaster then. To adapt to the disaster. Even better: to create the disaster by which one adapts.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-91731068161370430922017-11-27T17:14:00.002-08:002017-11-27T17:15:11.555-08:00Identity Nihilism<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">1.The term “queer” has been <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reclaimed</i> as sexualized; for it doesn’t
necessarily have sexual connotations. Concrete traces in “deviance”, or
“perversion” flesh out an understanding. It is evident that if the
State-apparatus, here or there, accepts a gay future alongside a
heteronormative future (Schotten 2015), it is only one that isn’t queer in the
sense of destabilizing the regular flows of capitalism. In so far as it does
disturb, the orbit of queer is anti-social, and this negative position, defined
as such by the political apparatus, is perceived as transgressive by
conservatives and liberals alike. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">This
paper will assess the degree to which queer theory in its negative mode; in its
mode that affirms an oppressive pejorative, is thereby <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">made</i> to be a threat. Of course, labelling X as danger, is surely in
part a mechanism to lure that named kind away from that which is outside and
threatening, into that which is inside and acceptable. But there is an opening
here, outside of the intended line that draws back into the fold, that is
revolutionary for queer theory. And this position permits an opportunity to get
clear on what we mean by a just society <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">without</i>
exclusion. The argument then is of a species of deliberative rhetoric; I wish
to argue what is independent of the Symbolic drive to impose identity, is
better than Oedipal configurations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">2. Society is addressed as
heteronormative and reproductive by Edelman’s queer theory (2004); and in this
gesture, it would seem possible that social theory might conceive of a
consistent class critique. The Marxist story of appropriating the means of
production for the purposes of the dictatorship of the proletariat was espied
by Bakunin to be insufficient with respect to utopic vision because there was
no reason that a newly established hierarchy, however temporary, would
relinquish command of the new society. In short, anarchists didn’t believe that
the state would “simply wither away.” Along these lines it was theorized after
the events of May ’68 that our own libidinal desires had to be “desublimated”
to use Marcuse’s term, or “deterritorialized” to use the parlance of Deleuze
and Guatarri because they were already captured under identity with its
predictions and permissibilities. If we spill our desire onto ourselves rather
than onto the future, proclaiming no future instead, we rob the bourgeoisie and
its doubles of its protection within the Symbolic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">To
follow Lee Edelman and affirm the properly homophobic assertion that queers
ought to be destructive of the political apparatus, or, more precisely, to
affirm <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">its own destructive (death) drive</i>,
which the Symbolic continuously occludes through its forward-looking
possibilities embodied in the Child (4), is to transvalue the antisocial and
shore up the Symbolic as a sham (7-8). The Symbolic calls us to be forward
looking, forever deferring our perversions for the sake of a future that we do
not know, but which, we are promised, will be glorious; but for Edelman,
seizing desire <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">now</i>, on our own terms
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance</i>), however meaningless for
others, however counter-productive for others, is within our grasp. The vision
of queers going wild, in myriad ways, makes it impossible for a state (and its
subjects) to be singular in desire, which, to be clear, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> the post-structuralist meaning of fascism (Bersani 1995, 171).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">If
the Symbolic is forward-looking, fetishizing the White Child, there is no place
in its imaginary for queers that do not submit their desires for repression. For
us, surely somewhat queer heteros, we might say that we refuse to reproduce identities
because we refuse to sacrifice <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our lives
to the future</i> and to the creation of a better world for everyone to come,
which, even if not a blatant lie, seems to always exclude us (Edelman, 30). On
the other hand, we wager that the death drive of the Symbolic, the capitalist
nightmare, is in its death throes, which, we insist, cannot, and ought not, be
resuscitated by our children. The capitalist class extracts surplus labour from
the working class of tomorrow; but if there is no working class of tomorrow,
society will be hard pressed to reproduce itself. Rather than deferring the
responsibility of “seizing the means of production” to the future child, if it
is even still within any imaginary, perhaps we might commit to leaving unborn
children out of the capitalist mess, and watch as our appropriation of its
meaninglessness demonstrates the catastrophe of the Symbolic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">The
beauty of claiming queer as a mask is that in doing so one is not obligated to
exist in an identifiable and so, predictable way. Failing to be predictable is
the betrayal caught up in the text below. But, importantly, this doesn’t mean
that we always “out” our political nihilism; sometimes we play along, wearing a
mask; sometimes we play a different game too; our couplings might be very queer
because when you are already out of bounds, there is nothing else out of
bounds. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">3. Jean Genet follows this negative
line of thinking. He wishes to reclaim evil, but in a way that doesn’t fall
necessarily into the difference of social order. Rather, his position is
outside; for it is a betrayal or “dépassement of the field of transgressive
possibility itself” (Bersani 1994, 10). According to Leo Bersani’s reading of
Genet, in the properly figured act of homosexuality itself, the bodies reject <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the idea of reproduction</i> because they
mythically emphasize “the sterility of a relation from which the woman’s body
is excluded” (1994, 10). Inside the anus, positioned from behind, bodies are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> in a face to face exchange that
produces intimacy; these bodies are “cruising”, pleasure seeking machines. The
difference then is doubly transgressive: the betraying act gestures in a pure
form as an affront to the human world that defines (sexual) desire as
reproductive purpose; and positionally, these bodies, with respect to each
other, deny intimacy. It is not impossible to say that for Genet, the inhuman
act of pleasure seeking is the betrayal of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everyone</i>,
and that such a gesture ultimately leads to the possibility of betraying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anyone</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For Genet, the value of reclaiming the negative, is to
point at a world that may not be oppressive. In the final analysis, for
Bersani, this is possible only if we will the death of our desires for ordering
other people, to destroy the desire to become new masters for potential slaves.
No future! For Genet, profaning the social and betraying it by individual
gesture, which we might call radical homosexuality, allows the birth of the new
after the destruction of Oedipal desire. Pure stimulation, pure affectuality, with
utter disregard for what’s proper and socially reproductive, allows for the
possibility of life without prediction (Bersani 1994, 17). And it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unpredictability</i> as a prior category,
that turns <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mere</i> evil within the
Oedipal apparatus into a chaos prior to Oedipal politicization. In the best
possible light, one might very well support the ultra-left revolution, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">right up until the moment comes where it no
longer serves ones’ interest</i>, say, because the revolutionary moment has
been lost and Oppression has reorganized with its variety of compatible reforms
(Bottig, 410). And, on the other, one might find <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pleasure</i> in supporting a fascist cause <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">merely because it undermines social order</i>. And so on. For Genet,
only creative unpredictability can save us from repetitions within Oedipus. In
the place of unpredictability; in the privacy behind the mask; one has remained
a letter, and denied the possibility of being captured and signified by the
Symbolic. One is here, perhaps, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i>
for the cause of pleasure, which doesn’t necessarily exclude pleasure in death.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">4. One might object here
saying: isn’t pleasure always desired? What then of suicide? Metaphorical
suicide, of course, seems odd because it denies the self; but we said above
that this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doesn’t preclude</i> a new
birth in a solitary, unpredictable self, behind the mask. On the other hand, if
we think that pleasure as a value includes its permanent arrival to sense, we
fail to understand that there are degrees. A life of moderate pleasure, or even
minimal, might <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> be worth living;
and so, the rush of suicide or an erotic physical death, might be better on the
whole. As Epicurus articulated: death means nothing to us; for one would not be
around to lament the loss. In general, the choice of pursuing oneself unto
death, creates an indifference towards everyone else, that also happens to
translate into a rejection of unborn babies, which we can spin as positive and
caring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the view that has been put forward in this paper so
far, Identity is something that we are socialized into; we are nurtured as
women and men; and if we are discovered to not fit with the desires of being as
such, sexually or otherwise, that is, to fit with the heterosexual future, we
are named queer. But rejecting identity and how it constructs us, opens the
possibility of forever queering. Being in opposition to the reproductive future
for the immediate now of desire is not, then, the explicit privilege of Queers.
It seems to me that resistance to Identity is the beginning of an unravelling
that queer theory holds for denying class and social investments. But if we are
to go all the way, queering everything, we need to be open, too, to betraying
the Oppressors on both sides of the political spectrum, which may mean finding
ourselves at once in opposition to the left and the right, or fighting
alongside either project because such provides the conditions for an immediate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the words of the authors of Baeden:
“Queerness marks the space which is outside and against political logic” (22).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">5. Marxists of many stripes
have taken issue with individualism for being petit bourgeoisie, the privilege
of white males; and they have not resisted making similar remarks about queers,
to find themselves ashamed, at least by those queers willing to play along with
their social justice project. The queer that affirms the death drive, however, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lusting after jouissance</i>, doesn’t fit
into the futuristic thinking of Marxists; and it is from this tension, between
being free from responsibility and also wanting to demolish the entire
apparatus, that the Marxist doesn’t know what to do with the space of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance </i>and whomever might occupy it
with masks or genuine intentions. However, it should be unequivocally clear,
that the death drive <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> a problem for
social Marxists, specifically because it is the production of the upper class
against the poor; and it is from that reason that their scandalous claim fits
the queer individualist. But the argument we have followed above notes that fascism
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">requires</i> the organization of classes,
which structures by identity, and that the subjects of each class behave <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">according to reproductive futurism</i>.
Thus, queers that fall outside of the destiny of the left and its future reproductive
drive, queers who reject the claim that their sexuality just isn’t figured into
an identity yet, note the fascistic tonality of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">politics</i> (Identity) and aim to be apolitical or anti-political.
Given this telos, if individuals affirm the death drive as their own, if they
appropriate the meaningless logic of the Symbolic in their own <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance</i>, the only question is whether
they are individually passive or active in their nihilism. That is: are they
decadent, or dangerous? To get the idea here, we ask: have we been, all along, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">just</i> talking about circuit parties and gay
narcissistic cruising? Edelman himself is a gay university professor—hardly the
sort that would carry out social war. The articulation, then, in this critique,
is that queer negation must be of a different order than a plain gesture at the
destruction of society in terms of its ontological decadence. Destruction falls
outside of the social order, and remains outside; decadence is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">perfectly compatible</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The criticism from the authors of Baeden against Edelman
is, at least in part, that his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance</i>
is repetition, and therefore fits too neatly into the Identity of being-gay.
Negation as something outside the social order requires more. Following <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance</i> to our death pulls at our
sense of ourselves. It is therefore beyond individual control in the sense that
one is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">given </i>to the drive, one gives,
come what may, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whatever might come</i>.
Thus, it is not conservative; it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>
‘come’ as predicted in the repetition of the same. Thus, simply being gay might
have its consequences in Afghanistan; but not in San Francisco. Queer negation
means actually being outside the social order, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">relative to the order</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">This
is generally the tension between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">apolitical
passivity</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anti-political
activity</i>; but problems arise on both sides. Apolitical passivity falls
easily into the order, as a kind, however invisible; whereas anti-political
activity, too, falls into a kind. The problem is that if you don’t commit to
the revolution, at any point, others will affirm that you are passive. But it
is not clear how activity doesn’t fit into yet one more identity by which you
might invest or divest, and therefore, how this isn’t just one more operation
of the potential Symbolic to “suture ones’ empty subjectivity to some
abstraction outside of oneself in an attempt to find some meaning” (Baeden,
23). We have implied that Genet’s betrayal cuts across both lines, brokering no
commitments. Genet calls for the death of repetition, along with the death of
Symbolic order in favor of the unimaginable queerness of appropriating the
death drive. And this is why we have suggested a form of straddling; where we
pass willingly back and forth between activity and apoliticity, the former only
to escape the latter, and vice versa. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">6. In the context of prefiguring
a new world to live within, after the state has been <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">made</i> to wither away, queer negation posits a world that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">isn’t</i> well ordered. And yet, if the
state is made to stay away <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">because</i> people
no longer find it necessary to order other people, because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance</i> flourishes, we have the beginning of an ethical vision
that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">resists</i> exclusion. People would
simply be people, queer to every imaginable degree, and not valid because of
structural permissibility, sublimated according to appropriate desire. Presumably
in such a world there would be no centralizing force that sublimates
permissible desire. Individuals might take it upon themselves to be
unrelational, of course; but the sense of Oedipal, or Symbolic, deviance would
be lost. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What I am <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>
saying is that in this world everything is good and permissible. What I am
saying is that a world in which desire is desublimated, or unhinged, or no
longer repressed, is a queer world that the question of queer forces us upon us,
and that this question addresses the question around making sense of “the state
withering away”. Without a centralized Phallus administering law, we wouldn’t
have the capacity to lock away criminals for failing to fit; we would be forced
to live with criminals. It’s a queer proposal, surely; but perhaps <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we</i> can find room to grow. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">From the idea of
queer non-identity, it is not impossible for social workers to see that the
reformist, leftist, inclusive vision that encodes capitalist survival in the
out of control experiment that is civilization, even if given rhetorical appeal
by labels such as “radical” and gestures at liberatory Marxism, is liberatory only
for a repressed Identity. What gender fluidity, or identity nihilism, permits
us to see is that </span><i style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;">identity</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is in
trouble in this post-structural age of anti-essentialist desire. </span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-48761367056974751532017-07-21T10:55:00.005-07:002017-08-20T18:42:58.083-07:00Passive Nihilism<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The sense that there is something wrong with the anarchism of active nihilism is proper to thinking about nihilism. Deleuze’s Nietzsche suggests that active nihilism ends in passive nihilism, specifically when there is nothing left for activists to do; that is, when there is nothing left to correct. This kingdom of heaven—oppression free—makes it so that “nihilism” and traditional anarchism can be easy bedfellows. The projected world of anarchism, like the idea of the end of history (utopia, the secular kingdom of God), requires the destructive engagement of active nihilism to carry out anti-oppressive (punitive) justice, prefigured as the goals of the properly oppressed—as defined by liberal reform. Passive nihilism, thus, is the plateau supposed to be present at the end in liberal free market capitalism, or, in the marxist telos, desires of economic redistribution. Passive nihilism ends active nihilism; the end of active nihilism, that which is responsible for it, is passive nihilism. Those are the definitions in Deleuze’s Nietzsche.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">In anarchist thought, passive nihilism as a pejorative, takes Nietzsche’s meaning for it: “there is nothing left to do”, further beyond, to the slothful and despairing “do nothing”. Anything that contains even a bit of pessimism is labeled as such, implying not so much that we have won and there is nothing left to do—which capitalists would say of Fukyama’s End of History—but rather that one has given up on doing anything at all, for some reason forever found to be inadequate. But are there good reasons to suppose that there is Nothing we could do? Or will the enemy always win anyways? (On the point, one might reckon that bite sized winning is preferable to the ridiculously immature presumption that the Rev is immanent. And the reason for this position is, of course, that most people that live in civileges don't wish to destroy leviathan, thereby biting the hand that feeds their wealth. Full stop.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The ontology of nihilism without traditional anarchism is caught up in the materialism of marxism; or rather, the anti-idealism of marxism. And yet the question we have is: <i>Just how much of the projected future of a stateless society is theological, or ideal?</i> To posit that there is no god, defines the idea that there could be a secular kingdom of god-as-us, waiting at the end of history, waiting <i>finally</i> for when there is nothing left to do. In this sense then, the idea of a secular kingdom of god is like the final cause that calls us away from the individual “I will” to the “we can, together” waiting at the end of history; our better selves that do not require God to help us overcome our failures. From this (project)ed ideal, we might very well build a morality, democratically; and out of it we might derive a sense of justice to come; but justice is the kind of thing that seems difficult to approach form a non-hierarchical position. Is such a matter of the wild-west where we let individuals sort matters themselves? What of bad people that go against the morality we democratically adopt? Jail? Prison? Exile? Secular kingdom of God, indeed!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Under these auspices, nihilism would be on a leash; it serves the phallic goals of unity and togetherness, come what may; and yet it is exactly the nihilist implication, desired for the purposes of the secular kingdom of god, that would still continue to nevertheless rupture every secular theology. Nihilism is rupture, sedition; it cannot be contained by utopia.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The idea that we are either passive in our nihilism or active in our nihilism is flatfooted and designed to create the need for utopias, whether of the older workerist variety, or the garden variety in primitivism. Crucially it is important to realize that we are islands of desire, and yet, too, that we are built for relationships. Thus, we might recall the word of ‘disassociation’, a gentle echo in anarchism, if not forgotten, which is already happening with respect to unity: People don't really go to events; only opportunists care about mimicking and parroting the scenesters; for they <i>too</i> are looking to be among the next round of paid leaders in activist NGO’s. Nihilism calls us to divisiveness and sedition; and yet our hearts call us to find others, somewhere. The left would have the nihilists force states to make leftist governments; the active nihilists would follow in lockstep; the passive nihilists seem unbothered, unhinged like monastic ascetics. The trick to overcoming final causes made for us (state-programs), is to take these notions and use them, or (better) cut them out, here and there, like pruning, so that we might be free to create new ones, for ourselves, to turn the purposes of what we do, altogether, into things that we do authentically for what we want. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The nihilist questioning of whether it is possible to have a utopia is a correct response to the absurdity of the anarchists that oppose this question of nihilism. But just because we note that we cannot win, doesn't mean that we might as well lay down and die, as they say we are if we are not doing anything. We might act or we might not; we are human; we have the capacity to be active or passive. No one is <i>fully</i> active or passive after all; we are usually grades between. Some of us are more active, some of us are more passive. No one is so stuck, so irredeemable that they might not grow this way or that; but no one has to do anything, because being human just means that you have the freedom to design your own purposes, which may or may not go against the secular kingdom of god, which, practically, is always open to sedition because it is so built on the shoulders of nihilism. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">——</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">I propose that we follow the distinction advocated by Deleuze’s Nietzsche, and yet fold the difference back into the notion of passive nihilism if only because passive nihilism, or hopelessness, seems adequate with respect to <i>the projections of our “friends” on the left</i>. We will not win, we just don't have power, as Thrasymachus was correct to articulate in saying justice just is power, to an incredulous Socrates in Plato’s <i>Republic</i>. But there is no prima facie reason that this makes it so that we cannot just leave to find others to act with their purposes in mind, passive or actively, to whatever degree we like, as many of us have already decided. In so far as Nihilism is an ontological thesis, the idea that there is nothing that is going to make the world better for us, places the creation of that world onto us; and yet the leashed active nihilist, the nihilist leashed by the left, is instructed to follow a prefigurative program, a dictatorship of the precariate in determining this utopia. Nihilism of the active variety pushes us towards open revolt and sedition; and it remains leashed so long as it seeks revolution of an order that is fixed in someone’s ideology-for-us. The seditious act of nihilism shadows its own pessimism if its goals are human sized; this invisible community here, that squat there, this life there, that life there; this indifference towards activism here; that activism there. If folks become free to do as they please then it follows that we will not have a well oiled utopia but rather an incredible weirdness, sort of like international relations, but without the extension of my penis into your affair. If you want to do active-ism in your crew, the result may be sedition or unity. Or whatever. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Anarchy under passive nihilism is just this whatever-being, flourishing and opening more sedition or unity or whatever. Nothing from heaven will make things better, under the proper nihilist banner; nothing from the left will make things better, under the properly seditious nihilist banner; only the birth of whatever is what I mean by anarchy under an unhinged nihilism without end that stands in opposition to anarchism. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">While it is difficult to see that the world is or could be ruled ultimately by justice/God, there can be no mistake that the world is largely ruled by punitive consequences and incarceration. Of course this isn’t necessarily so. Most crimes remain unpunished; most interpersonal conflict is absorbed by survivors. But that doesn't mean revenge isn't an option. The question is: where does retaliation stop? In “the weakness” of absorption, of course. We hit back, they hit back; we hit back, <i>ad infinitum</i>. They give up? Unlikely, but possibly… <i>Unless you say: It stops with me; unless they say it stops with us…. To arrest this ongoing once and for all, </i>we leave; and so we stop participating; and so we walk away; and so we become invisible. <i>And so we become invisible to be free to act as we please, or whatever. And so we adopt passive nihilism, they say, as if we weren't deliberate in our indifference.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">They say that </span></span></div>
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<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">active nihilism is the shit </span></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">and that</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">2. passive nihilism is apathy. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">We respond to 1] saying,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">R-1: Active nihilism must become unhinged from the swinging door of revolution or reform because,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">3. nihilism is always seditious </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">and </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">4. Pessimism about the capacity to win is proper and useful.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Moreover, we say</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">We affirm 5 because it would seem obvious that passive and active modes are proper to a flourishing life; sometimes we are passive, other times we are active. The term passive nihilist as a pejorative can be spoken against civilians, of course; for they often simply live according to the final causes designed for them by capitalist flows; but in the sense of being unfree, the active nihilist or the activist, we would say, is passive in their meaning with respect to sedition and creating personal final causes. Wanting to oppose our passivity and activity to the ideology of the utopians, we affirm passive nihilism as our start, and out of our desire to birth whatever, we affirm that while those on the left might say we are passive, we know that we are just unhinged, ready to join in a fight if it suits us, or sit out if we think the project is ridiculous and lacking intelligence. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">From this it would seem that passive nihilism is far more complicated than some would suppose. With activity folded into a proper human life focussed on eudaemonia (happiness), the gesture of being whatever includes both forms. Not only one or the other, then, but an incredible weirdness without prediction caught up in a properly frustrating both/and. </span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-86238772886028713382017-04-30T21:31:00.000-07:002017-05-03T09:53:32.924-07:00What is Truth?<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Truth is the kind of thing that doesn't make for anti-imperialist programs. For if something is true, it is so independent of whatever you might think about it. It requires a kind of humility towards the thought that one has the truth already, locked and sealed; it makes it so that one has to revise ones' reasons. Realist conceptions of truth therefore imply falsifiability--not by virtue of ones’ peers, necessarily--but by virtue of revelation itself. Thus, truth and justification are at odds, to some kind of degree, as we note in the definition of knowledge as justified <i>true</i> belief, which opposes mere justification.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The possibility that something might be be false and yet fully justified entails that some proposition might fail utterly in being justified, and yet still be true. Thus, truth is not the kind of thing that depends on justification, not even in the sense that it could be justified by some audience, <i>pace</i> Richard Rorty. This was Bertrand Russell’s realist point about truth. The gloss that makes better sense while avoiding Kant’s <i>ding-an-sich</i> is just that truth is not dependent on what we do make of it, which contains the reminder that it is not dependent on <i>whatever</i> we make of it; for truth might very well rupture our justifications, even to the point of being without justification. It might then be unverifiable. We might say truth is sovereign in the sense that it is free to come and go as it pleases. It is therefore unlike the Form that is contrary to the instances; it is instead like the form in Avicenna that is indifferent to being justified or unjustified. Therefore it is not that it <i>cannot</i> be justified, like the <i>ding-an-sich.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">William James had truth of a different order in mind when he described it as bearing fruit. In particular, what he had in mind was the notion of truth that attends the creation of the kingdom of God, which we might very well find to be useless (at least for the moment) for our own self-constitutive desires. If God makes something true, it bears fruit, as the wheat is discerned to be unlike darnel seed in the instantaneous harvest. “I am the way the truth and the life”, then, just means “I can be tasted to see that I do in fact bear fruit.” And this doesn't mean, necessarily anyway, that the justification will be objective; it might very well be subjective. It is a path through the thicket of failed efforts that seek to correspond to the good; but what is good is not the kind of thing that seems good to anyone: Christ was notorious at shielding the kingdom of heaven from anyone that would fail to hear it. “He who has ears, let him hear…” And yet, this cannot be exact because there is also the sense that one </span></span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica;">will</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> see the kingdom, the face of God. So it would seem anyway, that the secret is seeing the truth, is seeing the kingdom of heaven, of hearing it, of understanding it, despite the doubt and sin that would draw us </span>onto<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> a different path. </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The order of the kingdom of heaven is impossible to figure in its entirety; and similarly, I would say that truth is impossible to discern by standards of the world. Therefore the secret order of truth is always of a different sort of thing than the order of objective discernment. It is important to understand, fully, that justification and truth are at odds like the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of the world (two orders of truth). Sometimes these worlds collide and the kingdom of heaven is built, as Christ was executed without cause--innocent, yet guilty (cf. Agamben, <i>Pilate and Jesus)</i>; other times it is left to the secret, as Christ continuously ran from town to town and specified that spreading the good news (of this or that healing) was often times to be avoided (kept secret). Pilate wanted to know the truth but couldn't hear it, and so he handed over Christ to be crucified, after deliberating in a way that was visibly uncomfortable, after being allured <i>beyond</i> his own conception of justification...</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is because truth is not completely hidden that the truth can be seen, here and there, for a taste; but the fact that it is secret makes everything difficult to hear. Truth is easy as disquotation and (mere) justification under the kingdom of the world (the demonic); truth in the kingdom of God, which adequately bears fruit with respect to anti-worldly values, is of a different order that will always be counterintuitive for those without ears to hear, <i>and</i> with those that are human and so, cannot have <i>perfect</i> ears. The kingdom will forever rupture our expectations because the order of truth resists being <i>ours</i>. The important intuition of realist conceptions of truth, finally, is that the final cause of truth is God himself; therefore, anything on the way, anything justified, might be spoiled and fail the order of the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of truth (heaven) is beyond justifiability as the sky is beyond the sea.</span><span style="font-size: 11px;"> </span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-90585224288746157332017-04-11T13:15:00.001-07:002017-04-11T20:36:41.752-07:00Form-of-life: Affirmation!<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is well known that Stirner and Nietzsche—first the former—were opposed to Christianity for the paradox contained causally by its demonology. The paradox of Christian life is that one is free insofar as one is a slave (to Christ). It is enough to say that being a slave, in any sense, is improper for the concept of freedom, for Nietzsche. For as he amplified tirelessly by way of a series of enthymemes in his <i>AntiChrist</i>:<i> all that is life denying is bad; all that is life affirming is good.</i> If we string along Nietzsche’s definitional meanings, it seems obvious that he contains a set of propositions that are almost Stoic, or perhaps Epicurean. In <i>Thus Spake Zarathustra, </i>life just means “the instinct for growth, of permanence, of accumulating forces, of power”, while Good just means “all that enhances the feeling of power, the will to Power, and power itself in man.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">For anyone familiar with the therapeutic tradition in philosophical ethics (eu-<i>daimon</i>ia) the idea here is that one ought to return <i>to oneself </i>in order to overcome weaknesses. In the Christian monastic tradition the idea is that one ought to return to God in order to overcome weakness. For Nietzsche, of course, this is weakness; and yet, for the Christian, relying on oneself is weakness. Strength is good if supplemented by God; strength is bad and leads to vice if supplemented by anything opposed to God (including the self). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Christian demonology caught up in mystics like Eckhart, Francis, the desert Fathers, and monasticism would articulate that the meaning of life-affirmation is precisely what’s up for grabs. More specifically, Christian demonology wouldn't take issue with such a distinction between life-affirmation and life-denial, only, it would articulate that <i>true life</i> begins only in the folds of God; for God releases us from death (sin), or more specifically, God releases us from having been abandoned by God. Life affirmation in Nietzsche is precisely to reject the folds of God; and, for Paul, Nietzsche’s trajectory puts us on the way to slavery to sin. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The point is that Nietzsche is rhetorical and depends on already agreeing. Our terms make it impossible to speak. For Nietzsche, the term “life affirmation” is, for the Christian, slavery to sin. For Nietzsche, Christian slavery, which we said was freedom, is obviously “life denial”. How we understand our opponents terms depends on our capacity to relate; and yet the Christian cannot see Nietzsche as having produced a desired concept; and for Nietzsche, the Christian will always appear a fool for Christ. And so it goes, back and forth. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Nietzsche gains the upper hand by keeping his intention closed. The whole rhetorical narrative, powerful as it is, depends on <i>not</i> disclosing freedom. That is, we don’t exactly know what Niezsche means by freedom; but we think that what St. Paul meant was <i>obviously</i> false. That is, we have a concept of God that makes it so that determinism is true in some sense if God is involved as first cause, and that somehow if blind forces and the return of the same are the metaphysical underpinnings of reality, these leave us free(er) to take responsibility. If we live in a moral universe, we have to accept a correspondence theory of moral truths (however hazy); if the world is amoral, if we simply create the law as we see fit, given our perceptual approximation on the common good, nothing stops us from seeing the matter differently, of redescrbiing the moral Good. (And of course, if the latter is what we want, it is not clear how negative theology doesn't give us the same possibilities).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Of course, taking issue with the idea of God in general depends on clarifying concepts of what we take God’s revealed messianic word to be. If we take the <i>Christ</i>ian word on the messianic to be our desired focal point, the most interesting notions are those that are spelled out in his beatitudes. The most promising conception of the messianic Christ is the word against punitive justice (Matthew 5:38-42): not returning evil for evil, but good for evil. Thus while we are told to refrain from stealing (because the promise is that such is failing to trust God—and so, how often do we fail to not idolize in how we make our own plans, thereby fail to have faith), if someone steals from us, we are to give more; to see to their needs independently of the punitive aspects of the law. Imagine the insanity of having someone break into your house and you send them on their way with more, or you let them take and you go further and cook them a meal. Such is the radicality of mercy and forgiveness in opposition to the evil of punitive justice. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Christ here would make us indifferent to our things, indifferent to the vicious desire for retribution and wrath—which can easily get out of hand and become something very undesired, indifferent to revenge, perhaps; all this in order to seek out a transformative moment, whereby everyone involved is altered according to a different economy. This is slavery to producing the good with the help of divine assistance in the in-breaking messianic word that fulfills the law. Slavery to sin would be to follow the world. Slavery to Christ is far more than simply following a set of rules. How the messianic word operates in hearts is unwritten and non-legalistic. Such is why it is Messianic. And yet it, too, starts from a kind of character.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Let us say that one is never absolutely bound by vices or virtues; and yet that we <i>are</i> bound by our characters. (Aquinas never tires of reminding us that one moment of vicious behaviour doesn’t destroy the character that one has.) It would seem to follow, then, that while one is not bound to do X, one might be likely given to a predictable character. Given this naturalist outlook, it is hard to see what God has to do with our being such that we are. By way of choices and decisions, we have come to develop <i>moral</i> habits, upon which we are ready and disposed to act, <i>but not necessarily</i>. Thus, <i>prima facie</i>, that idea that we are slaves must have something to do with the <i>likely</i> disposition to act. The Christian prediction is that if we follow our own desires, continuously rejecting God, we will harden our characters (developing hardened hearts), and our own drives will be lost for their uniqueness insofar as they fall under the yoke of the World. Never completely, of course.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">In Christian freedom, the messianic existence, <i>how the word lives in us,</i> implies that one is predictable perhaps at the beginning of the act, or at the outset; and yet how these words operate in love is unspecified; for the infusion of the supernatural theological virtues (faith, hope and love) open us to a world that is curious. The everyday Christian that doesn't spend time defining how Christian life is better and opposed to the life of the world will not experience the infusion of these virtues. Christianity will always remain legalistic and very much of and in the world. Paul was a <i>willing</i> servant (slave) of Christ because he espied that the world had nothing to offer in comparison to the taste of God and the messianic inbreaking in its overall crescendo; and by this he meant he wished never to choose otherwise than God, making himself always nothing (Paulos) (cf. Agamben, <i>The Time That Remains)</i>. The infusion of the supernatural gives the capacity to become otherwise than what is predictable given the world. Does it make us predictable otherwise? Is this not necessarily a legalistic question?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">A lot of what Christ says is negative and defined in opposition to what is expected from human characters <i>structured according to the world</i>. It would be a mistake to see the economy of God as a similar kind of thing because the legalistic repetition of Christ’s life (<i>memesis</i>) is only the starting point; the ends to which we are suffused in willful submission to God bring us forever outside, into the open, into freedom from Worldly desires that bog us down and make us incapable of making a unique event. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Uniqueness is always retained in the freedom to reject what our characters, or what our bodies dictate. The desire to be independent of the yoke of God says nothing to the problem of being thereby yoked to the world—Nietzsche’s blindspot. From this angle, it would seem that monastic Christianity is evidently iconoclastic in the messianic question: <i>What does this living word do?—What life is it capable of?</i></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-53130585666922283732017-03-27T19:41:00.003-07:002017-12-11T15:47:29.436-08:00Descartes' Angelus Novus<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">1.1 The terms <i>a priori</i> and <i>a posteriori</i> indicate a difference in epistemic warrant that has purchase throughout our linguistic culture. G.E. Moore circled this difference with his open question: X may be pleasurable, but is it good?—and we can pump an analogous difference by asking of warrant <i>per se,</i> noting well that something <i>might</i> be justified but that this doesn’t mean the idea, or whatever, is true. In juridical terms it is possible to ask of any law, whether it is in fact right. All these points are grounded in the belief that Truth doesn't depend on <i>whatever</i> you may you think of it (or even anything you make of it--making it inaccessible); Reality isn’t whatever you want it to be, one might say; if something is true, it is true come what may, as Quine might say (differently). If something is right, it was always right. And so on.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">From this question of truth, the anxiety of (sterilized) doubt quickly arrives. What if everything (or anything) we believe is wrong? Truth (the kingdom of God?) opens up in our discourse to shatter our epistemologies, forcing us to provide better reasons, that then could again be questioned, or perhaps, force us to figure the notion in a way that escapes open questioning altogether. In another register we might say, Derrida’s impossible (quasi-transcendental) could never break out of doubt because it was always messianic in the sense of an arrival of <i>whatever</i>. My immodest claim is that Descartes' messianic moment of truth may very well be intended to overcome a demonological moment of doubt.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">1.11 Descartes’ skeptic was such an <i>a priori</i> move. Looking for a certainty <i>for</i> experience, he noted that what couldn't be doubted was that, in the event one <i>is</i> doubting, that one is actually doubting. I might doubt that I believe the assertion that “this is an indexed statement”; and I can doubt (t1) that I was <i>then</i> (t1-1) in a (de re) moment of doubt; but in the propositional attitude of doubt that x (tn), whatever X, doubt is legitimate and unassailable. All of this reasoning already begs the question of course in that Descartes presumed space to be made up of points that are unextended; that souls occupy space (have place (<i>topos</i>)) without being extended, and that therefore, consciousness itself, in a moment, doesn't permit simultaneous doubt. The argument, of course, can be justified by making the following seemingly true considerations: I can always doubt the past; I can even doubt that I was doubting in the past; but in a moment of doubting whatever, I cannot doubt the doubt <i>in that moment</i>. There is no supervenience here! I might very well turn to represent the previous moment and doubt that I was doubting (supervenience); but this then pushes Descartes' almost trivial point one step back. In the moment of doubt towards X, the doubt that I have is not something I can doubt; in the moment of having had doubt, I can doubt that I had it, but not that I am doubting the previous moment. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">1.111 The ontology of experience is tricky, especially if we consider that what we are talking about is meant to be conceived as <i>prior</i> to experience. <i>What is the experience of doubt if not fully in experience?</i> Perhaps the supervenient point is always made and the reality of the moment that Descartes relies upon to pull the trick is completely illusory. And yet it seems intuitive that in the moment of having had doubt, I can doubt that I had it, but not that I am doubting the previous moment. Nevertheless, it is hard to picture how this comes down to as being prior to experience. The sense of some event of thinking being prior to experience is difficult to understand (because thinking is an experience, of course!). In any event, perhaps what Descartes was trying to say was that it would be irrational to suppose that a demon would have an agenda of making us doubt that we are doubting. Or perhaps what Descartes was saying was that only God (Rationality) could pull us out of doubt. (And that this wasn't an idol). This is the tension I wish to explore: If God saves rationality, was the rational proof above obviously weak?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">1.12 The argument that there is reason to doubt <i>everything</i> is a difficult one to make. In fact, it is clear enough that we have no way to understand the problem. But what was the problem? The <i>demonological</i> point that Descartes makes signified a common understanding, once, long ago; it was <i>providence</i> that was being questioned. The first cause of <i>existence</i> (God) yields a bridge to the a priori indubitable “moment” of Descartes. In this protected (protracted a priori experience) we are not second causes (even though we are created); it almost seems necessary to say that the bodily order is a <i>different</i> sort of secondariness (ontologically fallen) let us say, while the beautiful soul, the crown and jewel of creation, is a <i>proper</i> form of secondariness. What’s that? The reasonable man has entered once again into the garden, on his <i>own</i> strength of rationality?—As though reason were <i>already</i> redeemed? In Aquinas, the seat of reason is <i>not</i> perfect. In Eckhart we have moments of perfect union (with God)—provided we are self-less and without expectancy for God. Whatever that means. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">But what if that first cause that guarantees the second order entirely, isn't really there—asks Satan (or the demon, or whatever). Answer: of course it is; it constitutes <i>the trust</i> that we have. But how? And, as we know, the proof falls apart, and Descartes is caught in his circle. Of course it might be incorrect to see the lopped off soul as being the sort of thing that is secondary in a different sense. But my point is theological. If we are talking about doubt (sin) and we are looking for solutions, the theology of Descartes would have it that what is required is <i>faith in God; or</i> trust in God himself. And not faith in reason. When we doubt our capacities, or we doubt what we believe God has told us to do (consider Abraham, a knight of faith in Keirkegaard), what makes the despair of doubt <i>vanish</i> is putting our faith in God, <i>God himself</i>. So then what is curious about the demonology of Descartes’ skeptic is that God comes after the fact, later on in the proof as if they were detached, as if reason didn't require God--and this is how the argument has been taken up by rationalists. If this proof is virtual; if God was always necessary and the proof is only half good (if not utter bunk) without God, then we have an interesting problem because Descartes has rarely been considered as having made a demonological point. The point I’m making above about “moments” might then come down to the point that Reason was <i>never good enough</i>. <i>If Descartes had just said only God can make the doubt disappear.</i> But then what is this sense of doubt? Could it be something more than just seeing a proposition as possibly false?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">implies that Y might be false. And its opposite seems to be that </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">In our common everyday world of intuition, the certainty of Y is basically whether or not it is grounded in experience. If I hold up a hand, and you see it, you won’t likely doubt that it is a hand unless you’ve taken some entry level epistemology class. Of course the way out is to insist that the burden of proof is not on the one holding the hand; it is on the question in the first place. That is, it seems in keeping with ordinary common sense to doubt what is <i>not</i> evident. Any change in the conversation made by the epistemological skeptic, will seem out of place, like a conversation stopper. In sum we no longer find it believable that <i>a posteriori </i>experience requires <i>a priori</i> justification. And the epistemological skeptic is always asking an a priori question. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The contemporary problem with understanding Descartes, therefore, is that God as guarantor for certainty <i>in trivial matters </i>seems unnecessary; and in matters that are less evident, aseity is completely out of place. God might sufficiently explain everything, of course—such is in keeping with the difference between truth and justification; but most people just don't live in Descartes’ world: God seems like a conversation stopper, offered in a no longer medieval world.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">1.31 One point that I find exceedingly interesting stemming from the thoughts on Descartes’ demonology is that “X believes Y” is not the same as “X has faith that Y”. Faith is not the simple opposite of doubt. One might say that faith is independent of objective <i>a posteriori</i> evidence. Is faith then independent of reasons? Not necessarily. What of <i>objective</i> a priori reasons? Perhaps these will do, but we might also call upon experience as long as it <i>is</i> subjective. What is clear is that God doesn't arrive with the simple calling of his name, or at least God doesn't arrive in a way that is explicable, objectively, by others. Descartes wanted to make God superficially rational--evidently enough; but that doesn't mean that what he was saying wasn't deep too. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Believes that Y and having faith that Y seem to be different sorts of things; but doubt is the opposite in both registers. If I have faith in God, I will certainly suffer from doubt when I have reason to do so. If I have faith that God is with me, (and he actually is), it is highly likely that I will experience doubt about that belief. And what is the nature of <i>this</i> doubt that has little to do with everyday problems like whether or not there is a hand, or a cat or a bed--that resonates not completely differently than it did to one thinking through the mechanics of sufficient reason? Sovereign Providence implies that so long as God permits doubt to be compounded there is nothing but his own saving power that can break through the cycle. Such a form of doubt is not a rational mode. In other words, when real demons arrive to make us doubt, there is no reason to suppose that they are rational and willing to be tricked; and there is every reason to suppose that seeing them as tricked <i>is</i> part of their trick; that such <i>is</i> part of their doubt. Doubt for a demon is only in a superficial way the kind of thing that ends quickly in reason.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">**It is very important to note, however, that reason is not identical throughout philosophical history. For Aquinas it is clear; he means prudence; for Descartes it is less obviously like Aquinas, <i>unless what I said above is on the way</i>. Unless rationality was always too weak and too simple and too much like an idol.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">1.4 Therefore, the simplicity of "doubt in Descartes", in analytic philosophy, catches only part of the meaning of doubt in terms of its vicious elements. And it seems that this is important. If the Kingdom of Heaven is Truth and everything else is a lie, then the mode of faith that we have lost in the simple analysis of belief and doubt can only be caught up with a new meaning of doubt, and perhaps, with a fresh reading of what Descartes was searching for. If he was looking for a way out of the <i>vice</i> of doubt, then it should be expected and unsurprising that he sought this ultimately in God; and yet, if we read this demonology ever more back into Descartes, it would seem evident that the grounding of doubt <i>in itself</i> was always too flimsy (and Descartes saw it). </span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-22126105776867177492017-03-18T17:46:00.003-07:002017-07-21T11:06:50.938-07:00Supplementary Halos<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">There are a variety of meanings appended to the sense of freedom. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">We might mean moral freedom, implying that we are responsible and not absolutely determined; that causality is efficient in some sense; that material causes do not strictly determine the ends that one is inclined towards. It's complicated, of course; but moral freedom starts with the assumption that one is <i>always</i> free, “radically free” as Sartre put it; for even in the moment of strict coercion, one can still choose. In <i>The Nick of Time, </i>Johnny Depp is coerced to kill some politician, or his daughter will die. Sartre's point is merely that no situation necessarily produces a predetermined result. So even though the choices are limited (Kill this politician or do not (and your daughter will die)), the fact is that Johnny is <i>not determined to do X to the exclusion of Y.</i> It is likely that most people will kill someone they don't know rather than permit someone they love to die, but perhaps not; perhaps one will choose to end their own life instead, avoiding the given disjunctive choice altogether. In this sense, the claim is that</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">F1: One is always radically free from a metaphysical perspective because nothing coerces us (or determines us) to choose any end.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Of course, the argument may be that there is some prior causal sequence that explains whatever end there may be, and that therefore, the will is nothing more than an alley way of drives that precede it to their ends. And yet, in the moment of coercion above, it seems evident that no drive explains what Johnny Depp is going to do; after the fact, we might explain it--give it a narrative; but in the moment it seems unclear, and the latter <i>ad hoc</i> explanation seems to give us no real understanding into the meaning of coercion, the moment of choice, which one is “under”. Neither the drive to kill the politician nor the drive to let his daughter die, nor the self-destructive drive to kill himself, can offer itself in any objective prediction. The drives give us <i>plausibilities</i>, not necessities. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps then, this sense of radical freedom, is not freedom as we usually mean it; and of course that makes sense. For we are rarely coerced. Or is it more the case that we rarely <i>feel</i> like we are coerced? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is for this reason that I wish to entertain another sense: political freedom under the presumption that <i>No one feels coerced to live life.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Financial freedom and political freedom go hand in hand, we are told. If you have enough money to survive, evidently you are free from the burden of work. If you have enough money to have whatever you <i>could</i> ever want, you would always be free from simplicity, and free from having to do anything necessary. (You could always pay someone to do anything, and everything). If you are poor, you will of course never be free from doing anything necessary, and you are likely, intuitively, not to be free from desiring more. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Epicurus distinguished necessary needs and non-necessary needs; to track only the former is to be run by the principle of simplicity; to have a problem with simplicity and to only focus on non-necessity is to be run by the desire for more. The question of being run by X (being had by X) and having X, then, strikes me as relative; one has what one is not had by. Therefore, the rich are had by avarice but they have necessity; the poor are had by necessity but they have avarice (perhaps). Therefore,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">F2: One is free from X to the extent that one has whatever X one isn’t had by. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">I said above that no one feels coerced to live life. And yet what I mean is simply that being had by debts, life, and work, if such is your conception of life—which is the conception of life we desire if we are fully sublimated by civilization—makes it so that we <i>have</i> nothing but homelessness. (We are not had by the need to find shelter.) That is, if we live life as it is designed for us by the forces of biopolitics, the only thing that we are truly beyond (the only thing we have) is dependence in the sense of fully depending on the charity of weather, good people, and luck outside the city gates, of course to the degree that we are financially independent. Thus, if we are fabulously rich, we are <i>not</i> had by these biopolitical forces, we have them; and yet, as we said above, we are then probably had by avarice, an insatiable greed for more security for the self in things. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">So from this, the notion of coercion follows to the degree that we are had; and the phenomenological sense that we are had depends on how much financial freedom we have. One is always had by something; the rich by avarice, the poor by necessity. Accordingly, there is no such thing as autonomy. The homeless man, however, while he is had by the need for shelter and security, mirrors the wealthy person who is had by avarice; if only either would turn back into <i>the security of necessity</i>. Then one can be free of even being had.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Is the homeless person had by necessity? There are needs in day to day life, of course, as Epicurus said: necessary needs are food and shelter and yet, in our culture, these things are readily available given the general rule of charity. The homeless person is not had; the homeless person is had (perhaps) by the need for more for themselves, a better situation. Or they are had by the shame that ultimately propels us towards Avarice. The homeless person, too, might have necessity all figured out. They might even have diminished every sense of fear.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps what Giorgio Agamben meant in “Halos” (<i>The Coming Community</i>) is simply this turning from vice into virtue: “The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different”.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Agamben goes on to write:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">“The theory developed by Saint Thomas in his short treatise on halos is instructive in this regard. The beatitude of the chosen, he argues, includes all the goods that are necessary for the perfect workings of human nature, and therefore nothing essential can be added. There is, however, something that can be added in surplus (superaddi), an “accidental reward that is added to the essential,” that is not necessary for beatitude and does not alter it substantially, but that simply makes it more brilliant (clarior).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The halo is this supplement added to perfection - something like the vibration of that which is perfect, the glow at its edges.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The question of having nothing doesn't put one in a position to be unhad by anything. Something supplementary is required to make one indifferent in the proper sense. Joyful indifference places us beyond being had by necessity, but this turning, perhaps, requires a different sort of infusing. One is not naturally joyful, in Thomas’ sense; one does not <i>naturally</i> have beatitudes (stemming from their own capacities). Zoe requires a super infused addition. </span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-79902381612015502582017-03-08T09:44:00.003-08:002017-03-08T09:44:57.790-08:00Form-of-LIfe: Beyond Law?<span style="font-size: large;">In Giorgio Agamben's <i>The Open</i>, the crucial point is to understand that every generation of the concept of man as not-animal because functional of developing a concept of animal, produces a possibility: Neither man nor animal; a figure that resonates as delineating a more complete picture of the metaphsyics of <i>homo sacer. </i>And if you'll recall the vision at the end, the idea of Feasting on Leviathan (ahem...) is caught up in the figure of the acephalus, the one that has become ignorant of division within (<i>existence</i>): the one that no longer sees herself as human, essentially, and, as such, willing to become a mini-Eichmann; for it is the definition of 'human' that produces bios (citizen) and thereby produces the outside (zoe), and therefore, also, the virtual possibility of 'bare-life', if it is not already present in the mere reality of non-citizen being a function of citizen. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The extent to which we are willing to merely follow orders is proven by our willingness to entertain bios. We go to work, we make a wage; we consume products that have nasty origins in Third world countries; and the bios that is given to us in entering into citizen-life marks us. Our essence is built on the bare-life of the outsider that cannot become one of us, because they must produce the possibility of us. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The politics of civil disobedience are often associated with pacifism; but existential sedition, or drop out culture has more to it than is recognized. This is why monasticism is analyzed in his <i>Highest Poverty. </i>If you know anything about the cell and the monk, it is the case that the Franciscans held no personal property and as such, were in tension with their catholic "owners". Francis traveled to see Pope Innocent III after having his church burned to the ground; and yet, the meeting between Innocent and Francis became a different kind of thing. Here was a Christian focused on Jesus, and that very same Jesus led him to poverty, to a life of charity, and to holiness and anti-materialism. The Pope was humiliated for what had been done, but he responded in humility by kneeling to Francis' feet. From thence, the relationship was tense between the Franciscans and their "sponsors" (Dominicans) because the politics of Jesus tends to call the church into question (even now!). And metaphysically too! The politics of the Franciscans was based on the simplicity of metaphysical individuation--the privileging of nothing above anything else: the animal and the stone, the human and the weed; <i>all</i> are creatures, on equal footing, under God as created-being. Here, in this beautiful metaphysical vision, there can be no sense of "bare life". </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If Francis called for a rejection of the hierarchy of (created) beings under Uncreated Being, then it is not impossible to see this (heavenly?) economy as having far reaching consequences. The revealed Christian economy of God (to become a fool for Christ, as Francis did) calls us out of the wisdom of the world into the foolishness of faith. It calls us to <i>serve</i> God, never ourselves; it never calls us to serve Mammon (You cannot serve both God and Money). And so, it is no surprise that more can be said about the early Christians than their mere resistance to Emperor Worship (as the common Conservative Evangelical tradition would have it). As Hornus articulates in <i><span class="a-size-large" id="productTitle">It Is Not Lawful for Me to Fight: Early Christian Attitudes toward War, Violence, and the State, </span></i><span class="a-size-large" id="productTitle">the early church was also guided by indifference to the state and its desires, to the point that governing the vast sections of Christian reality became impossible because <i>they</i> were unwilling to participate in Mammon politics. We know that the early church, after Pentecost, were led to sell all their possessions and live to feed the poor. That we don't do this is testament to our lack of faith. Indeed, one might spend a life figuring out how to link not-World economy with God's Economy. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span class="a-size-large" id="productTitle">It is not impossible that this vision of non-participation is what Agamben has in mind. There can be no doubt that it rejects the principle that None are Free unless all are Free. And yet, it seems clear enough that this position of non-participation cannot fail to do violence to Mammon. The real question is why the early Christians were so effective, and why contemporary anarchist approximations don't catch fire. Could it be that the monastic life involves more than mere existence?</span></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-10946880298710954022017-02-09T16:08:00.001-08:002017-02-10T12:02:30.557-08:00"Beyond" Contraries<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: large;">1. The law of the excluded middle implies that every conceivable proposition must be either True or False; that there is no third way for a proposition to be. According to Aristotle, two terms are </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-size: large;">contrary</span></i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: large;"> if they share the same genus and are “separated by the greatest possible difference” . If two terms are contraries like good and evil or humility and selfishness, a curious logic is invoked in saying that there is something beyond both. 'Neither A nor not-A', and 'Both A and not-A', indicate a third term, an “intermediary” </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-size: large;">(Aristotle 12a15ff)</span></i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: large;">. If A and not-A are mutually exclusive, </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-size: large;">in fact</span></i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: large;">, then the claim that there is an intersecting, or intermediary, possibility, is impossible; if they are mutually exclusive and constitute the entirety of possibilities, then Neither A nor not-A indicates an impossible zone. Thus everything hinges on whether the two terms are mutually exclusive. In other words, If every act is either good or evil, then to affirm that some act is neither evil nor good means denying that everything is either good or evil, and the person making the argument will most likely be denying the definition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">2. Eckhart calls us to detachment, as a primary virtue that metaphysically unites us with God. His meaning of course is that we are to aim for this perfect union, and that one does so by going beyond humility in <i>not</i> attending to anything but God, since creatures distract, which is enough to find “fault” in them (<i>“Detachment” </i>91). Humility before other creatures means going out into them, to be attached to them, to care for them, to be worried about them, whereas detachment is a never-having-gone out. The two virtues are closely bound up; “Detachment” “completes” humility—as though detachment contains humility (ibid., 89). And even humility is course corrected if it moves us to nothingness with respect to ourselves. The fact that under God we are all metaphysically equal (mere humanity) seems to be the mode that puts us in unity with God; while humility rests (or never rests, rather) at keeping us under others. Neither above nor below creatures—neither humble nor selfish; and never above God (never selfish), and always below God (humble). Obviously humility with respect to creatures and humility with respect to God must have different meanings; only the latter is detachment.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">3. Another way of seeing Nietzsche’s position of being beyond good and evil—returning to master morality, good and bad—is to see it as articulating that Good and Evil are neither mutually exclusive nor fully constitutive. Good, as Nietzsche laments, once meant something different from what it was constructed genealogically to mean; of the couple Good-Evil, what is Good is roughly identical to what is Bad in the “distinct” couple Good-Bad. Aristocratic values are praised and Christian “priestly” values are blamed in his rhetorical maneuver. So the gesture “beyond good and evil” cannot fail to include some sense that there is an alternate definition on the “tables”. In saying that there are different meanings to Good, we are saying that the terms Good and Evil as defined by the priests do not exhaust the moral universe. Thus ,for Nietzsche in <i>The Genealogy of Morals</i> (GOM) the phrase,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">2.1] Not in the least, action X is Good, for it is life affirming!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">And the phrase</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">1.2] Action Y is virtuous, proper Good; for it is proper to be self-sacrificial</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">2.2] On the contrary, such is bad, lowly, life-denying!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Here, the meaning of Good under the heading 1.2 is redescribed as bad at 2.2, while evil at 1.1 is redescribed as Good at 2.1. We ask, in order to determine what we mean by “beyond” the following question: In saying that Aristocratic values are praiseworthy, is this move a strict inversion of master morality, or does his epideictic rhetoric produce a third term? Relative to the bounds of Christian morality, Good and Evil are fixed as contraries; Nietzsche’s position is, in the least, a naming of slave morality as a privation of his <i>natural,</i> positive, “life affirming” praise. Once stipulated, once returned to traditional values in some broad sense, that is to say, good and bad become rough contraries, approximating the possibilities of Zarathustra. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The inversion that these responses produce, undermines the way we think about values; values are <i>not</i> a matter of correspondence, but are, rather, perspectives on the way that we would prefer to say the world is. What happens in the genealogical trace of the term Good, is that we can no longer make sense of it in terms of having the appropriate sense; its has been associated with its opposite in a way that makes correspondence no longer a straight shot affirmation—as if it ever were. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Now, whether an act is justified by the universe <i>in a correspondence sense,</i> is strictly indeterminate one way or the other. If an act is wrong, the nihilist, who doesn't even admit the sense of saying there is a morality divided between good and evil, merely says that nothing external to our language games support us. Beyond our language games there are just consequences at best, that are only ever enacted by some language game. Nothing but actors can produce the possibility of consequences; the universe is amoral and will not do this for us. If someone has wronged us, by our lights, we can hit back, or remain passive. It was never the universe that carried out the need for revenge—we give out own language games this extra <i>gravitas</i>, and thereby delude ourselves that there is anything that cares beyond us. For Nietzsche an act is genuinely bad if it is life denying. Accordingly, all Christian slave morality is bad, even though Christ says that his completion of human virtue in the coming of the Holy Spirit (the counsellor to come) is The Way, the Truth, and the Life. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">4. In denying that there are good and evil people, both Christians and nihilists agree. The marxist wants to praise the worker and blame the boss; the nihilist points to the fact that we are all bosses and workers, complicit in the gears of oppression. There are no good and bad guys means that it is not so easy for anarchist moralists to define the target of their rage. In the nihilist world of brute materialism, there are just consequences, none of which are Just, but rather, only ever what we can get away with given our capacity to will.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Nietzsche, in advocating what is life affirming as good gestures with Primitivism against <i>Thanatos </i>or decadence. Evidently Nietzsche and Primitivism go separate ways as Nietzsche affirms good and bad in a way that celebrates the individual as possibly-Zarathustra, while primitivism is collectivist. For primitivists, we would be free as individuals only if we made the world free of white-settler colonialism, free of us, that is to say. Nihilists would argue that this position is too ends oriented, to good oriented, too Manichean, that such is, perhaps a piece of deliberative rhetoric that is forever deluding itself. The nihilist might then say of Nietzsche, that he, too, is a little too moralistic in his lament. Perhaps the nihilist has no use for the term “good” or “bad” or “evil” and would prefer to generate a series of contradictions out of the mere relativism by which these terms are supported. Not to pick them up, like Nietzsche in his <i>Aufheben</i>, but to cross them out.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Is it good enough for a nihilist to say of moralism that such is what I do, if I do it, <i>ceteris paribus</i>; or is that even too far? Is this perhaps what Nietzsche also said?</span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-27344636278116246212017-01-28T17:30:00.001-08:002017-02-06T13:36:21.338-08:00'White Male'<span style="font-size: large;">MRA activists have historically been subjected to violence from feminists and their allies. And the reasoning behind this is evident; for the celebration of men as such, men as functioning in lockstep with abusive men, violating womyn, etc., ought to be shameful. Similarly, the celebration of being white is ridiculous if it is not distanced from lynching and violence carried out against APOC folks. Unqualified celebration of whiteness, then, leaves open the criticism of association with white supremacists; <i>qualified </i>whiteness or maleness that unequivocally makes the association with violence impossible should be sufficient for getting on with the celebration--if celebration were even to be a thing that anyone should care about. The problem is that no one would have ever thought of celebrating whiteness if it were't for the fact that folks have been attacking whites for simply being white. That is, everyday white people don't like being told there is something wrong with them; for there isn't; there would only be something wrong with them if they were actual white supremacists, and being white (in skin colour) is obviously not sufficient.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I've written before that being white and male in the intended sense is a matter of <i>performance</i>; being white male means living at the peak of privilege, which is ugly/repulsive in itself. Being white in this sense is a matter of not necessarily being white; thus one that is black can become white, while remaining black; for Obama was performatively white even though he was black. Accordingly, white people, if they are white in the performance sense, <i>pass</i> easily; Black people might <i>perform</i> very well but may have difficulty <i>passing</i> in every context. The question for bio-political beings is a question of passing; if <i>anyone</i> can perform whiteness, <i>anyone</i> can fail to pass. The advantage of being white in the sense of having a white body is therefore that one might be 1] perceived to pass, when in fact they are complete privilege-failures, and 2], that <i>if</i> they want to perform, such can come "naturally". Being an anarchist makes 1] the only possibility for white people, to say nothing of the easy simplicity assumed by the conditional at 2]: There is nothing <i>natural</i> about being a capitalist, whether white or APOC; thus, it is not easier for white people to get the hang of capitalism because privilege, now, in late capitalism, is more than likely simply a matter of earning it. That is, anarchists shouldn't want privilege. Hence, 2 seems to be a non-starter. We no longer live in a world that <i>assumes</i> only APOC folks are revolutionary subjects. Performing white is all it takes to avoid the marker; for anyone can be captured and rendered "bare life".</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">People know there is nothing wrong with being white. Anarchists should affirm that <i>there is </i>something wrong with being performatively white. Without making a qualification about what we mean by saying there is something wrong with being white, we allow for trolls like Milo whatever the fuck his name is to affirm there is nothing wrong with being white. When will anarchists agree? When their APOC friends authoritatively permit them to do so? Fuck that.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-8935800013251665682017-01-28T11:38:00.001-08:002017-04-17T12:04:06.218-07:00The Significance of Trump in the Age of Exception.<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The limits and reality of counter-state violence is gestured at by Walter Benjamin in his Kantian <i>Critique of Violence</i>. We take it as obviously true, without conspiracy, that States only let us get away with what they can handle. This is because <i>resistance is legal. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A moment in radical left reality, say a march, or a parade, is oK if it is permitted. Therefore a moment outside its purview is the <i>unpermitted</i> march. Cops hate this; but chances are good that they will lead the entire way anyway, containing it from becoming an insurrection. The march or parade or legal protest becomes extra-legal when it turns into a riot, or an unlawful assembly, first; declared whimsically by the cops, first as unlawful (perhaps, which is to say not-necessarily), then as riot, then finally as abandoned insurrection. Yet, even Ferguson wasn't genuinely abandoned; it was left to be as such, as though this event! would eventually fizzle, thereby justifying further biopolitics. For the State there must not be an outside!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The paradox of Sovereignty, as outlined by Giorgio Agamben, is that there are few checks on the limits of power that the constituitive function of power maintain (and so), can legally undermine. The possibility of martial law, slowly eroded from legality, attests to the brute fact that the Sovereign can will whatever, come what may, against whomever may come to challenge. The outlaw who can, somehow, outrun the legality of the state and its imposition, is the one that can retain a moment of the state of nature, against that which, it seems, contains every possibility of violence in its orbit. The contract that our European ancestors gave up, from administering justice themselves over to the one that would do it on our behalf--do we still believe this incredible proposition?--permits the state to <i>will into reality whatever it likes</i>, from "pacified/pacifying" means of violence in everyday police reality and maintenance, to the brute force of fiat law <i>ex nihilo</i> caught up in the concept of martial law. If, however, martial law in the microscopic merely entails the creative act of law, then every moment of police impunity carries this reality, making martial law the rule, and rarely the exception. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Chance are good that Trump won't do much that his predecessors already were wont to do. His cronies, however, the alt-right that are dying for a chance to be accepted by Trump--at present his sin is a mere act of omission--have somehow been enabled to carry out the divisive work his own genesis as possibly-president required. The white-privilege protector who carried out a shooting for which he was absolved with his word: "self-defence," did so as though the state of nature wasn't really challenged, even though, importantly, the violent legality of the act as such, undermines the monopoly on violence of the Sovereign. Perhaps then what we witnessed here is a moment of doing the right thing by the lights of the Sovereign, <i>on behalf of the Sovereign</i>, which was forgiven without reprimand. Free Policing! Witness Leviathan!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I predict that Trump will do nothing extraneous with respect to growth in power, that unity will be the goal by way of biopolitical mastery (the ultimate goal being political docility). I propose that the divisive elements caught up in the origin of Trump, must be occluded, somehow, and yet that the state of exception as martial law (lawlessness) will be permissible everywhere so long as one acts only on the way to the divisions that already exist and already make life disturbing. Trump, then, is merely an intensified Obama. Under Obama we already saw the possibility that anyone deemed a terrorist could be thrown in jail without trial; we saw nothing done by a "Black" president for police powers that carry out racist shootings; under Trump we will see the term terrorist figure itself as indicating anyone that doesn't put America first, which is understandable, indeed reasonable for its citizens, and a total joke for members of other Sovereign nations. And we will probably see more police. But this was a long time coming. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I also want to say that it is very possible that Trump functions to recuperate the radical right, a real threat to state sovereignty. These must then get a pass, just as the Black bloc is given a pass, for the most part. They must be punished, or seem to be on the whole and for the most part, but carrying out such acts must never be made impossible, for the obvious reason that people got to sublimate somehow, given repressed desires. If Trump never condones racist acts of the police (turning them instead to iterations of proper job-functioning) and sometimes ignores racist shootings so long as they can have some legal justification (in the above case, self-defence), then it will forever be the case that the white rebel is contained, and the ultimate legality of the USA is never overturned. A little goes a long way. That is, I bet Trump will never clean his robes of his origins because governmentality must contain and make docile every american citizen, even reactionaries. Let's hope the real racists never realize they've been duped...</span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-39507589941687513912017-01-20T11:35:00.000-08:002017-01-23T08:11:31.562-08:00Negation II<span style="font-size: large;">To say that one is Anti-X implies that one is against something, opposed, in opposition. Strictly, being an enemy of X is to be opposed to X. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But the matter is hardly easy to address, which is why the word of the margarine word contains so much insight: It is too easy to say that <i>if you are not with us, you're against us</i>, that, if you are in opposition to leftism (because it is pro-state/civilization), you agree with right wing politics.--As if these positions were easy to figure. In Negation I, I implied that there is a world of difference between double negation contained and spelled out in Logical operations, whereby not-not A is logically equivalent to A (boolean equivalency), and, on the other hand, the operation that occurs in a delicate qualification when we bracket the position and negate, as in not(not-A); for in the latter moment, the term has a different meaning, because the negation being negated does not permit alteration. Of course, it is not that this operation of bracketing functions <i>coercively</i> to deny the reduction to boolean equivalence, obviously; it is that this possibility might shed some light on some contradictions and difficulties in anarchist practise. Consider being against the left. By now most of us can see that being post-left doesn't mean one is right wing, alt-right or whatever; the explanation is that the margarine world (Cf. Margarine Words) is a rendering only by coercion and ignorance, of logical reductions switched and imposed upon pragmatic uses. However, the important thing is that the margarine word as a logical maneuver doesn't have any loyalty. Given that most of us can see that post-left signifies a position beyond the right and beyond the left, perhaps this can-opener can help us to see other issues. To gather the question before us, I want to note that <i>Nationalism is not a special property of Fascism</i>, <u>unless</u> <i>Left Fascism means something</i>. Now, Antifa doesn't seem to see the point spelled out by Fredy Perlman <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-the-continuing-appeal-of-nationalism" target="_blank"> here</a>; only groups <i>roughly associated</i> with Neo-Nazis fit the bill; rarely, if ever, Stalinists; rarely, if ever, Maoists. The critique that both these authoritarian positions are fascisms <i>because capital creates classes, because the state never withered away in Leftist Countries </i>is important; but even more important is the historical fact that <i>Nationalism has supported popular leftist uprisings</i>. It would seem then that, <i>prima facie</i>, Nationalism is not sufficient for defining right wing politics. Perhaps we can untangle the problem by making a concerted effort to understand the social imaginary around "race". </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Terms like "racism" are nearly meaningless because they tend to be vaguely univocal, to the point that it is difficult to convince someone that falls under racism, from one side, to think of themselves as such. If racism was originally defined as being anti-Black, that a racist¹ is one that is trying to protect the white race, then, analogously, the idea is that, in its second stage, it is racist² to be against immigration <i>because</i> such is an effort to protect White (read: national) privilege. The racist¹ position is that, the one that has been rendered included (bare-life, on the way to full inclusion, however subordinate) ought to remain subordinate with respect to rights; in the second sense, the idea is that those <i>that have been included, without rights</i> ought not to have rights, and ought to be returned wherever, and that <i>those not yet included ought to remain excluded</i>. The aporia surrounding this double sense is that everyday people think we are talking about racism¹ when we are talking about racism², and that, importantly, protecting national privilege has, at once, something properly historical to do with being white--which everyone accepts--but which now (under racism²) means the problem of having become (or becoming) white. Thus, one can easily point to the problem of the black President leading the Empire of white privilege; his blackness was never poor; it was never the APOC revolutionary figure set to challenge white privilege, because, National privilege is no longer white privilege in the sense that reifies external bodily markings. <i>Anyone can become an enemy of the state, anyone can become bare-life under the continuous threat of martial law defined as such in an exemplary and ontologically explicit way for the prisoner or the homeless person. These have been rendered right-less; and it is because the state gives us rights that these can be taken away. The State is Sovereign and independent of us in its capacity to narrow and make explicit the ontology of Martial Law, which need not be totally explicit. Thus, if anyone can be rendered bare life, anyone can participate in the production of wealth that is signified by the meaning of Becoming White. </i> The obvious conclusion which returns to mark race¹ and race² as a mere and difficult analogy to argue is that not All National Privilege is the sole property of white people, because, being a white person isn't necessary for Becoming White. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And so, the average poor person in the west may very well be anti-immigrant--given the problem of vying for scraps, for jobs--but it is difficult to label them racist because, as they would insist, they are evidently not anti-black. They do not hate all blacks--they have black friends, they might say--they are <i>just</i> pro-nationalist, and as such, it is a consequence for them to despise Others in the way things are going badly, Others in an uncertain future that might still be controlled to their redneck favour through a few petty reforms of law. The redneck that hates the immigrant, perhaps not explicitly but rather simply because they themselves are patriotic, is no more common on the left than on the right, since patriotism is neither explicitly left or right. The racist that thinks all blacks should be lynched deserves nothing good, obviously. What I want to say is that the redneck living in the woods that doesn't really care about much except life with their family and survival, may very well be a racist, but it is not simply because they love their country that they are racist. <i>It is mere rhetoric to label them nazis; the negation of what anti-fascists say poorly is not noncoercively reducible to neo-nazi fascism.</i> Nationalism is <i>not</i> essentially neo-nazi fascism. This is another consequence of the logic of the margarine word; we have to watch the slippage it creates. And not because racists deserve a free pass, but rather because everyday people aren't political. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-75232532802119234852017-01-12T14:08:00.002-08:002017-04-14T21:17:18.493-07:00Archaeology: Developing Agamben's Homo Sacer<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Zoe And Bios</i> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Zoe and Bios are two terms that indicate Nature and Culture, respectively; and these two terms animate the analytic of Agamben's <i>Homo Sacer. (</i>Henceforth, HS)<i> </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">First, it is important to note that zoe, or bare life, is functionally defined by bios, as that which is prior to capture, as that which is not yet included specifically into the citizenry. Yet here the term indicates that which is also included in being excluded. That is, even though Zoe is technically excluded from bios, it is also marked as biopolitical; the process (one might say of domestication) is one of being released from existence (invisible) to zoe (very visible) in order to be included in bios (passable). That is, with zoe, one is banned from bios in order to be included in bios, or, perhaps, to be further excluded. It is the latter moment that constitutes the camp, where one is neither bios nor zoe, if we take zoe to mean the intention for X is to be included in bios. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This frame of zoe and bios has always been part of the history of the West. Aristotle noted that human being (men, more specifically) is "animal with the capacity for politics" (HS, 3, 7), and yet, in order for it to achieve <i>eudaimonia</i>, it requires being grafted into politics. Of course, not all men were potentially political. According to the history of the concept of The People (cf., <i>Homo Sacer</i>, pp 176-7), the term People traces an index of ambiguity; for the term, "The People", cannot fail to exclude the mass, a group of people <i>incapable of rule</i>, one might say, but of which it would be more precise to say, as rendered incapable of ruling by the ruling class. Aristotle says that the common man, with his hands dirty from the trades, has not acquired the capacity to be contemplative enough to participate in politics. It was always the exclusion of poor people, refugees, migrants, from ruling everyone that made the construction of Zoe possible; yet, if class politics are essential in the modern state, the concentration camp as permanent potential zone isn't surprising. If the need to define bios, traced in Nazi Germany as the need to define the Germanic people by way of eugenics, is part of what we do--and the trace, The People, indicates this possibility--, then the camp is not some distant moment in the past, but is, rather, "the hidden matrix and <i>nomos </i>of the political space in which we are living." (HS, 166).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Sovereignty</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Sovereign is the one that has the legal capacity to establish martial law, which is a legal moment (thus, justified) in which (s)he can suspend the law (HS, 15). In this moment of suspension, the rule of law that certain crimes are punishable, is no longer present. In this moment whereby the sovereign can act as they please, they have <i>legally</i> made themselves an exception to the law; rather than suppose that the chaotic state of nature is left at the gates of the city, those captured by the (papa)ratus are forced to yield (with the threat of remaining zoe to the paparatus), to the sovereign which takes into itself the possibility of redressing the state of nature writ large. The state of nature is not what is prior to domestication; no, the state of nature is the result of the sovereign suspending the rule of law; the creation of chaos (in order to produce the filial desire for order) (HS, 35). Given that the legal function of the Sovereign contains the legal possibility of illegality, or rather, the possibility of this term no longer making sense, the Potentialities of the state conjoin as <i>legality and extra legality</i>, whereby the law and the state of nature become indistinct. Only the Sovereign is legally outside the application of martial law; everyone within becomes potentially zoe. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If individuated natural violence is inadmissable because it is extra-legal, because it short circuits the need for the maintaining violence of the state (the police), then the only extra legal violence that is permissible is the forever potential <i>natural </i>violence of the sovereign in enacted martial law. What justifies this potential? <i>What a silly question</i>. <i>Some might say that it is because we, the people, cannot do anything about it</i> <i>that it justifies itself. It is because the sovereign is independent that we cannot do anything about its potential (and ongoing) violence.</i> <i>We are impotent before the law because it has made itself indefeasible.</i> To explain the genesis of this situation, we might affirm that it is precisely because our legal system is defined as "representational" that something like the state of exception or martial law can have a potential <i>legitimate</i> function. <i>It is that everything is already in play, and only things in play can challenge what is already in play. Therefore, stopping altogether, which is what is required, is out of the question because the game is in motion.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>What of the Constitution? What of the need for re-election? So many of us know that its rigged against us, that we can do nothing to stop it; that the continuity of the health of the nation is what defines the capacity of the Sovereign to Dissolve as it pleases. Our existence is already fully biopolitical in the fact that natural violence is already always out of the question. </i>What constitutes the maintenance of violence is something outside the state, necessarily; but all that is outside the state (culture) is what is natural; The extra-legalized sovereign, in Potential Act, fills this space. What Constitutes is merely the capacity to say such is unconstituted; and the state, the elite, the wealthy, the rulers, bios, relative to the nation, have taken away every capacity to say such is unconstitutional. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Now, that doesn't mean there isn't the possibility of overthrowing the law; that organized messianic violence and the destruction of everything couldn't be possible; the problem runs deeper. It's that we who desire revolution, we on the side of god that wish to abolish property and class, must contend with the mini-sovereigns that would oppose us (HS, 84). In the state of ban, perhaps, it is possible for a revolutionary to kill without impunity; but <i>a revolutionary already kills without remorse because they know the game is stacked</i>. The mini-sovereigns, in the ban, can also kill, and it is to be expected that they will also kill <i>for the health of the biopolitical community. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>So long as we don't step out of line, the liberal reasons, everything goes well. Since they agree with the rulers that everything is well, that is, all is well in the mere potentiality of the law, they will kill the one that willfully steps out of line, that threatens their conception of peace, if the maintenance of violence doesn't already. Whether or not the State will kill us, depends on how much we threaten the more or less majority ruling on peace, on how much we fall under the notion of terrorist. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Government of the People for the People sounds nice, provided the terms are univocal; above I reiterated Agamben's position that they are equivocal; that bios rules whatever it defines as zoe. With the constitution we are told that our rights will be protected, and we are deceived into thinking that we ratified it. We can look at them, more or less, and, relative to our own nation-states, say that they are very utilitarian; but the question is always and only whether we have in fact <i>given them to ourselves, or whether they have been given to us</i>. And the test is simply that if they are altered by rulings, or acts of amendment, whether we can do anything about it. If they are taken away, and public outcry does nothing, obviously it is the government of <i>a people</i> by another people. Only a complete destruction of the legal apparatus can make it so that we are a people that rules ourselves. If we think that our representatives listen to us, we aren't listening to what they are saying: At best they could only ever do what is going to guarantee their re-election, which is always and forever stacked against the individual.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Form-of-life</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">At the end of <i>Homo Sacer</i>, Agamben outlines four "arbitrary" possibilities given the analytic of bios, all of which have something to do with <i>Homo Sacer.</i> I haven't really outlined this particular concept because I have already been talking about it. The concept is taken from Roman Law, whereby a person is marked as being sacred (but not capable of sacrifice). The term itself trades on an ambiguity at the root of being set aside. To be set aside, like a pig in Jewish gastronomy, simply means to have been taken outside the realm of ordinary politics (bios) whereby a person would have been protected by the sovereign. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">To be abandoned to bare life (zoe), that is to say, captured and not permissibly given to bios, constitutes the most interesting possibility for militant anarchists: being outlaw. (HS, 183-4). Yet, here one is always already potentially caught under the paparatus because one is defined as zoe. Insofar as one is not caught however, and rendered a prisoner or dead, one has a curious relationship to the fuhrer, barring the fact, of course, that the were-wolf, the half-man-half animal that retains the rite to natural violence, is always an enemy. The fuhrer freely moves back and forth between zoe ad bios because whatever is his existence is defined as the proper essence for the existence of the specific kind of people. The fuhrer spoke, that is to say, and it was law; The health of the fuhrer is the health of the state. Thus the outlaw is never bios, whereas the fuhrer must always be bios or (freely) zoe. Finally, the fuhrer wants to render the outlaw who has zoe, to the group, the Jew in the camp that has neither bios nor zoe. The question of leviathan's Gears is whether the Jew in the camp is the final cause, drawing the poor. The pure bios individual (Flamen Diale) (HS, 182-3) is what life in bios holds out for the one that never has to worry about becoming zoe, say, because they are financially secure. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">For Giorgio Agamben, the final (desired) position is neither zoe nor bios, but rather something prior to both (HS, 188). Form-of life picks out a being that is <i>only</i> its own bare existence, whereby its zoe (bare life) is already its own bios. In this final gesture we can see that perhaps what Agamben is saying is that if one is to avoid being seduced by the city, and so, seduced by the herd mentality of constituting a biopolitics that would kill the abandoned being, as if one were simply a lacky of the sovereign vying for power, one must seek <i>eudaimonia</i> on one's own terms, rather than presume it is given by the Sovereign. In this sense, Agamben is advocating for existential sedition. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Early on in the text (HS, 12) Agamben notes that his conception of the ban and the logic of Sovereignty is conceived in part as a criticism of Anarchism. Anarchism is at fault for developing a morality, for developing a sense of good and evil, which will always construct a notion of bare life that it will ostracize. Whether or not mere association and disassociation is sufficient for the non-morality of the anarchic politics to come is the question, I think, that anarchy leaves open without passing into (Marxist) anarchism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Of course, Agamben does not think that it is easy to avoid the panoptic eye; Nothing appears to offer a way to avoid the demands of the Sovereign, "it seems" (187). So long as one is in the city, one will be sorted as bios or zoe, depending on the way in which one follows the law, lockstep. But this little possibility, this little moment of breaking away and becoming existentially seditious, and (of course) invisible, might make all the difference imaginable in our way of life.</span><br />
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<i> </i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-47182010923561342792017-01-08T21:43:00.002-08:002017-02-09T13:37:48.069-08:00Negation<span style="font-size: large;">The logic of negation is evidently ambiguous. One can be so against something that they seek to destroy it, within their intentions and actions; or one can be against something merely in intention. Passive nihilism and active nihilism speak to this distinction, and by this account passive nihilism is a prior disposition from which one acts. Pessimists seem to have the intentions to destroy and yet are blocked by something, some incapacity; classically, we would say they lack the virtue of courage <i>because</i> they are given over to the vice of cowardice. These bodies are mutilated ontologically.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A lifetime of doing nothing then would produce the vice; whereas acts, here and there, would be sufficient to develop the virtue of courage. Temperance (and prudence) are required to know when to act and when to remain in intention. From this it follows that actionists, those that act all the time without end, or without consideration of burnout, lack temperance (and prudence). </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Negation is then twofold; on the one hand we have anti-X whereby one has given themselves over to a cause. The cause takes over. One is bound to act, whenever, not when one should, when it is prudent, when it is wise. On the other hand, negation might be qualified, as in double-negation, which is not straight away reducible to a similarity with our enemies. The logic of the margarine word ruptures this delicate qualification. It reduces not-anti-politics to a pro-political standpoint. However, our words here betray the simplicity of our language: anti-politics doesn't just mean, univocally, whatever one says anti-X means; rather, "anti" contains the logic of delicate qualifications. Thus, one might take issue with the plan; but they are not straight away reducible to one that is against all plans. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It turns out that pessimism and passive nihilism are not necessarily synonymous. And they shouldn't be. It allows us to say </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">(1) "there hasn't yet been anything reasonable to do", </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">isn't the same as </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">(2) "there wouldn't be (or could't be) anything reasonable to do." </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">(1) evidently negates </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">(3) there is always something to do, and also </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">(4) there is something to do; </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and with this idea (1), along </span><span style="font-size: large;">with the argument that not all double negations are reducible to nothing,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">we rupture the boomerang logic that would return us to our enemies, while making our anarchist line of flight more like an ellipsis than a period. </span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-64205945850907415322016-11-23T06:18:00.000-08:002016-12-03T22:40:35.890-08:00I can do better<span style="font-size: large;">Critics of reform tend to suppose that the one advocating for reform hasn't thought about the ends in play. Post-structuralism and nihilism suppose that the end is present already; that everything visible is just waiting to be recuperated according to the machinations of state-nihilism. Reformists disagree, supposing that the end is (or could be) in no ones' hands--that history is yet unwritten; that sometimes--it seems anyway--one can beat back the state, as though the state could regress, as though it were possible to force it to give ground--as though it didn't have a number of cards up its sleeves, willing bargaining chips... And on and on it goes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I've mentioned before that there is something curious about the logic of better and best; both are structured according to The Good; and the claim here is that better is (or could be) on the way to the best, because, evidently, the things that we anarchists want, are non-repugnant with a future world that we could stomach, presumably, minimally, No State, No Marxists, No Anarchist Leaders; in short, the death of all collective hierarchy. So then while it is obvious that getting trans washrooms installed, or, even more curious, the replacement of gender biased washrooms for gender neutral washrooms, seems ridiculously reformist--because in no way is the state giving ground here that would make its functioning impossible--such a reality links up what we envision in the world to come, namely, a consequentialist world in which individuality is abandoned to flourish because everyone is abandoned by everyone else. Many of us have already abandoned the projects of the collectivists to be left alone to make ourselves abandoned, to make ourselves invisible, in stark contrast to the militant visible milieu. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The best demands that we do better. It is therefore problematic to suppose that the better is the best. We can never then say, pragmatically, that we have done enough. But what is this collective pipe-dream of the best? The world in which all individualities are abandoned? What of the many that cannot imagine a world without commodity? Or a world without the state? Or a world without the possibility of trading work for further excrement? The many cannot abandon the shit show that we live in, and would die defending it against us--those that would see it destroyed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If then there is no best because it is unlikely, because anarchists shouldn't (pragmatically) be utopian dreamers, if we are deflationary about revolutionary hope, then it would seem that all there is, is the better. But what is better? What is this reformism? More exacting language is required here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the first place, the act of destruction, while not itself recuperable, often leads to further repression, unless the act can be ignored by leviathan. But if the act of destruction leads to repression, then what of the idea that one has merely provided an opportunity for the state to reform itself? Isn't one then a reformer? Here it should be objected that one is ignoring the fact that the term reform means more than mere re-form, or, a reiteration of a form to matter. But that is precisely what re-form comes to! If democracy is just diluted fascism, it would seem that there is a whole host of virtual possibilities that only bolster the power of the state--which just means the possibility of its destruction to be pushed further and further away. The difference here that is of value, of course, is that in the moment that leviathan becomes ugly, becomes fascist, such a hidden face, revealed, goes against its posturing of peaceful reform. Following tightened measures, comes the peace that merely waits to unleash ugliness for (ultimately) "beautiful" one-dimensionality. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I said above that the act of destruction and the act of reform are like two differences that end the same; this is ultimately because we are too weak to produce The Conditions for Permanent Revolt, for Continuous Visible Individual Insurrection. But if we drop the sense of best, that attenuates better, we might focus on what is better, what we mean by re-forming ourselves in abandonment to the Re-forms of the state and its anarchist allies. </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-30408826901039143082016-05-06T23:26:00.001-07:002016-07-16T07:52:01.571-07:00On Margarine Words<span style="font-size: large;"> Reflections on Anarchist linguistic Practise.<br /><br />[A] nihilist [may also]… knowingly point[] to the unknowable, to the background… stating more or less what everyone knows, but will not admit” (A de A, The Impossible Patience, 266)<br /><br />Alejandro De Acosta has diagnosed the anarchist scene as one that is essentially sided by way of an “Anarchist identity machine”, an apparatus that sorts bodies this way or that. This identity involves a morality of a pernicious kind, one that develops sides, while, perhaps tongue in cheek, claiming to be antiauthoritarian. In “To Acid Words”, A de. A has approximated this sorting by way of a term, picked up from Barthes, called “margarine words”. The meaning of this term is complex. Clearly, we can say that:<br /><br />1] Margarine words may be slogans or they may be oily words (138)<br /><br />so that while,<br /><br />2] Slogans are “phrases whose function is to circulate, not to mean”, and<br />3] oily words “slip from mouth to ear, person to machine situation to scene, <br /><br />these terms <br /><br />4] are repetitive: “functioning as code words or pass words, their appropriateness assumed, never shown” (138)<br /><br />In this rendering, A de A. has proposed that anarchists simply function as sloganeers, throwing around terms all the while, more likely that not, marshalling a morality behind the words. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that margarine words can also be coded negatively (139). These variants do not simply pass as code words, that is, as “a gentle reminder of shared morals” (138), but rather, signify a type whom one mustn’t be. One is one of us (good); or one isn’t one of us (bad), and in both cases margarine words slick the activists language into appropriate behaviours, coding good bodies and bad bodies according to the anarchist identity machine.<br /><br />On the topic of the assumption at (4), one might stipulate that Anarchists use/interpret words with “vague agreement”. And while this ambiguity is part of the story (166), the terms are not intended as ambiguous; rather, what is presupposed behind the spoken word is an unambiguous morality. Therefore, we say the term itself passes without analysis; passes in the sense that it merely functions to index a background morality. Of course, analysis may be where the limits of the margarine word apparatus go into hyper-meta-mode; for if one were to inquire about this indirect sign, one might be labeled a trouble maker, or an intellectual, a rhetorical sign that closes down the conversation with a reiteration. And even if this is supposed to be an unthinking auto mechanistic response, it is still possible that it stems from self-defensive thought; for one may have thought the matter through, in fact returning to polite conversation with a critiquing strategy. A. de A.’s response here is that this is because one is primarily afraid of the opposite: “Margarine words mobilize fear” (167). Consider the term privilege: What could it mean to deny that this term has traction in any specific case constituted as such by the liberal “privilege" churning machine? Most importantly: Who wants to be that guy? In fact, a whole host of negative pejorative terms come to the defence of the original morality. If you ask about whether shit is so simplistic, in a conversation about patriarchy with a feminist or even a queer, you might be labeled a manarchist. Anarchists are stuck in binary thinking, a stupid form of thinking that stems from dialectics.<br /><br />In order to clarify what’s at stake here, consider the margarine word: nihilist. Coded negatively and under its best denigration, this term is meant to exclude from possible anarchist behaviour the mutilated being of a hopeless nihilist. One mustn’t disfavour action, no matter how foolish; one must either be an activist, always doing “something”, or an actionist, always looking for action (147). To round out the thought, the active nihilist might then name the one that is beyond the meaning of actionist as activist, for active nihilism seems open to differences towards which the mere actionist is closed. Without morality, active nihilists are without a moral agenda.<br /><br />Such is how melting the (negatively coded) margarine word “nihilist” functions, a denial of the presumption that a nihilist identity were so simple and obviously undesirable. We could melt pretty much any other margarine word, or—that is, if the metaphor has lost its saltiness—uncover its meaning, slowing matters a bunch, and demand from the users of these slippery terms that simply pass around without thought, the meaning of what they are trying to say.<br />Indeed.<br /><br />What would it mean to speak with the intention of being understood, while not wishing to be sorted according to an anarchist identity machine? <br />Why bother?<br /><br />According to one theory of propaganda, the most important thing for dissolving power-over would be to permit ones intentions to be present; to take off the mask; to aggressively undermine any implication that one might be trying to manipulate an audience; that unpacking a meaning is always participatory. Bakunin used the term rational persuasion to index this definiendum; and this suggestion seems opposed to A de A’s meaning of acid words-- which isn’t an issue, of course. But let us start from the beginning.<br /><br />Nihilists have their own margarine words. After all, what do we intend to mean when we use our own margarine word, say “liberal”, denoting those that practise dialectic politics, politics, and certainly not anti-politics, those that we find boring as fuck? All progressivist positions antecedently presuppose some sort of morality; to criticize comes from a better place, surely. But how this position occurs is not as clear: are these nihilists looking for other accomplices to join in the game? or are they simply desirous of not feeling compelled to argue that there is neither point nor future? A de A. often speaks of a studied silence (which still cannot avoid the implication that one is in a better position). And so, perhaps we cannot kick away the ladder as Wittgenstein discerned, since we are situated in language games (of morality); or perhaps, such is a problem of interpretation, as though we cannot help but be roped into a morality even if we intend to avoid it. Surely, however, nihilists use margarine words. So then if so, what does the attendant morality look like? A de A. has also gestured at two other options: acid words and mana words. And here the point above is made clear(er). The orality of mutant speech discloses an opacity of morality; anarchists can’t be sure which side they are on because they do not understand what is going on. This result shouldn't surprise; for militancy was always a matter of secrecy.<br /><br />Perhaps the game is a straddling, then; perhaps we don't want to come off as predictable, so that the burden is on us to take off and replace masks as we please. Perhaps, that is, we don’t want to be perceived as immoralists; but rather, mask wearers, those that would have morality (or ethics), when it suits, rather than those that would be had by it, those that suit Morality. But perhaps, then, this is why A. de A. has articulated mana words moving towards acid words, words that fail to provide meaning because, while the words themselves are certainly opaque, so too are even the background assumptions. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-8167265122543256782016-05-06T22:49:00.000-07:002016-05-25T22:08:04.250-07:00Revenge<span style="font-size: large;">Seeking revenge is an anarchist principle; a principled ethics of doing wrong to those that have done wrong to us. The taste (and completion) of revenge is like honey; and if one does nothing to remove it, the injustice persists. In general, principles can move us; and, in particular, emotions may carry us to qualitative avenues, forestalling ontological pessimism, possessed mutilation, or passive nihilism. By this family of resemblances, I mean the sense that one need not do anything, or worse, that there is nothing worth doing, given some weird argument for efficient action. In other words, getting angry is one way to overcome an over-all sense of indifference—the sense in which one has been rendered indifferent. But why does one have to become angry? This is precisely where revenge fits. Given that revenge could suffice to auto-move us to anger, revenge is a plausible candidate for clarifying genuine against-ness, genuine “active indifference” that completely bypasses the problem of getting or becoming angry because one is not yet so. A good candidate for distinguishing when one is angry versus when one isn’t really so, seems to be revenge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But this point is merely on the way to another point that we wish to explain. We think solidarity is premised on a false sense of against-ness. We hope that we might explain why allyship (disingenuous against-ness) fails, by setting out the boundaries of being angry, or <seeking revenge>. For it is our guiding hypothesis that most anarchists do not act from revenge, but attempt to piggyback on another’s revenge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We mean to argue that friendship is structured artificially in activist circles because this piggybacking is in part determined by a narrative of pity and guilt. But what if we jumpstart our hearts in another way? What if instead of trying to structure friendship from ideology, we turn the matter around and grow with our friends? What if instead of trying to find people we feel obligated to agree with, we start by acting with those that we like?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">2. Nietzsche theorized equality in terms of pity: One is made to feel as though equality across the board is Just, even though, evidently, one doesn’t see others necessarily as ones’ equals (con-sentiment). The problem of making a claim on someone else (justice) is that it has to first meet a sense in the other that is correct, or proper fitting; or else one has become so self-sacrificial that anyone to come might open them to charity. If we see that Justice is ambiguous, we have warrant to purge the last qualification below:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“<anger> as a longing, accompanied by pain, for a real or apparent revenge, for a real or apparent slight, affecting a [persyn] or one of [their] friends, when such a slight is undeserved.” (Aristotle, 1378a)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Under this reading, anger is qualified as appropriate given just cause, that X has had something undeserved done to them. Yet the idea of being undeserved implies that all the dudes could get together and agree, as though principles are intuitive. Is Aristotle suggesting here that one might only feel the need for revenge in the context of an undeserved slight? Well, then, imagine the situation in which two persyns are talking, the one cautioning the other to not act because they deserved it. Clearly these two could not be said to be sharing the feeling because they disagree on the justice of the matter. What I want to talk about is this concept of shared feeling, and how we go about trying to create it, given that, as Aristotle gestures, we can feel it already with our friends, and, as I would add, even if not everyone would necessarily agree with how we see it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">3. If friends feel our pain already, as Aristotle notes, isn’t it because they identify with us, in the sense of having a kind of being that is identical? And if so, might we say that this is not a matter of crossing a distance? But then doesn’t this spell out a precise issue with identity politics given that this is so often a matter of relating, identifying, so often a matter of crossing vast differences in solidarity? </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Friends are those that we love not because they are such and such. Giorgio Agamben says that friendship is neither a quality nor a property of a subject (What is an Apparatus, 31): “Calling someone friend is not the same as calling them, ‘white’, ‘Italian’ or ‘hot’” (ibid.,) That is to say: friendship is not just a relationship between two separate individuals, joined together by common natures, but is an expansion of the self into the other, and vice versa, so that pain, happiness, or whatever, felt by one, is already felt by the other. Con-sentiment is precisely shared feeling from below, a question of transcendental immanence, a question of beings living, fighting and dying together; not an abstract similarity, or a subsequent division of beings imposed from above (ibid., 34). This links back to Aristotle’s definition of anger: Our friends are those that really share our feelings and really want what’s best. So because both obligation and pity seem to implicate a distance to be crossed, a not yet identification, a rupture in con-sentiment, we ask, as our down-going starting point for friendship, exactly this: When is motivation neither obligation nor pity? For when there isn’t real friendship, guilt or pity is required to cross the distance, or close the gap, between (I can relate to that) and (I’m already laying plans). But surely this distance never genuinely contracts. As Aristotle says: “The persons men (sic.) pity are those whom they know, provided they are not too close connected with them; for if they are, they feel the same as if they themselves were likely to suffer.” (1386a12ff)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">4. An appeal to pity is seen as unjustified in some contexts because it derails rational self-interest. Victimization tends towards an analogous derailment. For it nearly goes without saying that those structured without victimization (by a domesticating apparatus) are guilted into acting for those that identify with their own victimhood. The standard critique here is that one should be able to act for themselves, that, if they have the capacity to manipulate with ressentiment, one should be able to muster up enough strength; for victimization is hardly liberating given that its product is a species of codependency.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But there are legitimate moments of pity, or at least moments not caused deliberately by one that is trying to capitalize on their structured victimization. However, the identity apparatus, even after it has been qualified with intersectionality, necessarily produces the conditions for pity by reifying conditions for victimization. The problem here is that all are made un-free via a domesticating morality, while only some—those with a stake in the design of the mechanism—get to define liberatory politics for everyone. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps it would be here objected that we are just as obligated by the friend. Am I compelled to act for my friends, as I am compelled to act for those that would manipulate me with pity and guilt? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Here we sense that a friend might have become a property of an other, in the sense of an expectancy—what are friends for?—but in this, Obligation does its darkest work. For we think it is a sign of disingenuous friendship that one expects something from their “friends”. The important point is that friends permit options to each other because they care about one another. We do not possess our friends; our friends possess us and we possess them. And we hold space for our friends precisely because we do not wish to put them in a box of obligation, precisely because we care. This requires a denial of complete self-interest in all parties involved, an endlessness, a growth in power-with. Allyship, on the other hand, is a giving away of most self-interest in oneself to the complete interests of another. Rather than doing the hard indeterminate and consequentialist work of an ethics of power-with, it is an end to individual interest, and an entering into an asymmetrical power network that merely inverts perceived (socially constructed) power-to, in a new morality for the world some want to create. The best pragmatic ethical programme is to let individual bodies be to find their own desires and those that let them get away with whatever; or, at least, this seems more liberatory than a morality that would seek a domesticated behavior for all, a morality, that cannot define the free aspect of free association. (For us, free association only means something if one can dissociate without consequent punishment; it means the freedom to be left alone; yet, with the effort of mass movement building being under the surface in most activist moralities, freedom is a fucking joke.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A friend, if you’ll recall, is one that we love not because they are such and such, but because we share something beyond a project or ideas: because we share a form of life, an already-existence, not justified by similar essences. Allies are not friends; for allies are those that we relate to because they are such and such. The ally is the seeming friend that “claims” your help with the cunning strength of Obligation, and the hidden implication of Pity or Guilt. Allyship, then, is at best that attempt to generate a paper-thin feeling of friendliness in another that is not obviously a friend.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">5. The ruminating thought here is that we either have hearts that are in it because the principled act is for our friends, or we do not have hearts that are in it. And if we do not have hearts that are in it, must we ask how we might grow larger hearts? For whom? Prima facie, it’s down right foolish to love the other that would just as quickly manipulate us to love them if we do not respond adequately. And perhaps the real reason, after all this, is that the one that would force us to love them, the one that would guilt us to care, is our enemy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the least, if one has wronged us or one of our friends, Aristotle points us to a shared feeling between friends (con-sentiment) that is different in kind from those that we pity, those with whom we are not close. The other that we can empathize with is not the friend, because we have to go about orienting ourselves to their needs, pitying them. And to do this, we have to replace our lack of knowledge about them as individuals, as potential friends, relying solely on how they occur—or more factually—how we take them to be, essentially, under the activist apparatus of imposed identities. This other might boost our anger, if we are open to them, if they do not put us off with obligation; but we might not be moved.—And not because we are never moved; but rather because it takes resilience—and courage!—to discover things that genuinely move us!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Above we indexed what we mean by con-sentiment by noting that in the network of friendship one has to relinquish complete self-interest. And we used this articulation to trouble the notion of ally-politics, noting, almost trivially, that such is a denial of complete self-interest. Derrida’s “My Friends, there are no friends” suggests that perhaps the friendship model only produces lone wolves that desire revenge. But perhaps not. Perhaps. And so, we say revenge (or genuine against-ness) is strongest, in the sense of life-affirming growth, when it is exacted for friends, and with friends, or, when it is exacted for, and by, oneself. And we affirm that revenge is weakest when it is within the framing of allyship, when the relation between bodies is structured as a distance that requires closing to carry out the trick of feeling. This closing as “bad faith”—whereby essence displaces con-sentiment (shared existence)—can be noticed best in the hidden, but attendant, rhetoric of pity, and its contrary, but functionally redoubling consequence: guilt. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-56215878733796537122016-05-06T22:42:00.000-07:002017-01-22T23:35:50.731-08:00White Ally<span style="font-size: large;">1. Morality is sometimes distinguished from ethics—perhaps fruitfully. Typically the distinction intended is the one indexing the difference between happiness as a function of the rule of association, and Morality as a come what may rule. Duty based ethics, often referred to as Kantian in essence, here takes the name Morality; and by this distinction even utilitarian ethics might pick up the tip. Given that anarchism is essentially anti-authoritarian, the best of anarchists mitigate the lacuna about back pocket morality with a healthy dose of irony, while the rest attempt to differentiate their versions of power-over as collectively constituted. It is no wonder then that Alessandro de Acosta has resurrected the difference between ethics (eudaimonia (the good life) or ataraxia (freedom from suffering)) and morality, as one that earmarks a rupturing of anarchist morality. Therefore, while it is not necessarily the case that morality and ethics must be distinguished, it is useful to see them as distinct, even if the original terms that clarify the difference aren't so. We follow De Acosta and reject Morality, choosing ethics; and what this means is that our project for living is not <i>a priori</i>—prior to experience—but is, rather, a muddling through without foregoing agency, a power-with; a growth of voluntary participation, so long as we find it works, which is our right to association—which doesn’t fail to include disassociation. Given this, what does it mean to reject the morality of white ally?—Obviously it is we who accept this will to morality especially if we ironically play the game of privilege. But if we adopt the principle of being performatively white, we watch ourselves domesticate ourselves in a matrix of power-with.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">2. Given that the distribution of privilege is a function of a morality that divides, a margarine word in the writings of de Acosta, for the nihilist, the produced position of the one with power-to is always problematic in the network of power-with. To say nothing of rigidity, this word-machine fixes discourse—without style. Objectively speaking it is simple to say that X has an advantage over Y, given, say, various abilities; but the potential attribution of fitting into the way things are, which is the language of passing in society, is far from clear at two levels. The first point is the assumption of experience—that if you are white, you just get privilege—; the second point that is often left unaddressed, is whether one ought to desire to pass, a move that completely ignores the question whether one should. Following the problematizing here it it proposed that certain individuals just have potencies—unactualized actualities—that set them at an advantage. The principle of white ally as a Moral essence, ends in the one necessarily with power-to yielding to those without power-to so that power-with becomes a revolution-machine in which the white ally is a special and boxed in instantiation of white-performativity. I propose that just as the passing transgendered person is left unmarked and invisible in the gaze, what is meant by being white is that one passes as such. I can always make myself invisible by passing easily and without effort; but it’s tough to want to be perceived as fitting in, unless, of course, such is to my advantage. This is how we pragmatically have ethics, over and against being had by Morality: my power-to is mine, to do with what I will; it cannot be yours, unless I gift it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">3. The assumption of Moral essences ought to be replaced with the answer of ethical passing. But if the language of passing here is permissible, we can say that performativity is a matter of fit. Given that my body has a white cover to it, it is often assumed by other bodies that I fit into their project of success, or better, that I could more readily. But there is nothing normative about whiteness <i>per se</i> unless a morality is added: How one is white, and how one ought to be white. And only after this question is settled can we begin to discuss how one fits or fails to fit. “It’s easy to spot the white person”, you might say: “It’s skin tone, after all”. With the language of ethical passing, we might say, with a tone of jealously if we do not share the pertinent quality, that it’s easier for a white person to become invisible. But is it really so impossible to play society for the fool? To fit in as a civilized human? Its simple: just go to work, buy things, be normal, play the game, at whatever level of poverty you find yourself. Irony requires performative disguises; and it’s easy to neutralize yourself as a subject—which is what the state is trying to do anyways. The difficulty here is not that there is some quality that you possess to the exception of anyone else that stands in the way of being neutralized. The problem is that the whole fucking thing feels fucking gross. To be courageous enough to attack the state has nothing to do with determinations that follow from bodily constitution. This requires a choice and techniques of invisibility—even if you have a white cover. After all, the liberal term “terrorist” is colourblind. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">4. For those of us that have our physical constitution covered in a colourless cover, are we supposed to perform whiteness? or are we to destroy the performance? Surely we are not going to try to mutilate our bodies. So, it is argued that if we perform as white, rendering ourselves invisible because of the passing power-to that a white substance carries, we can necessarily receive privilege that can be utilized in a power-with matrix. If we accept white-ally performativity and we adopt the principle of moral essence with its ends gestated in the belly of prefigurative politics, we filter our power-to into a form of power with. (From the consequences of adopting this moral principle, I think we can say: we pass for being white whether or not we are invisible; that if we fail to preform whiteness, we can still pass; and that if we destroy our performance, we become very visible, but never strictly outside the morality generated by privilege.—Importantly, it seems irrelevant if privilege politics fails to address this last difference given that the state hates back really well.) But being performatively white, is split according to ends and means, which casts a dark shadow on the possibility of prefigurative politics. Whitey is urged to performatively follow the conditioned means of the state, but to filter ends differently, for the revolution. One is urged to pass, and pass well, visibly; neither invisibly, nor visibly as a failure. Obviously these dictated behaviours only resemble an anti-authoritarian power-with if one sips the Kool-Aid. The important thing to remember is that power-over has many forms; and it may be the case that according to Uri Gordon, power-to is always the fixed gear, forever fighting power-over like a nihilist in a network of means without end. Such is where we start.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">5. One might say, “different outputs, different principles; there cannot be an analogy between the state and the activist.” On the contrary, the liberal stands at the end of the just state, and in both cases, the state and the activist, a morality is given. In the case of the state, the given morality is a solidarity mechanism that occludes class difference by eroding its sense. In the other, in the case of the inverting activist, it is a prescription of performative whiteness as virtually wealthy, and therefore, as having a greater capacity to rise the ranks of privilege; to be a contributing sort in building power-with, in the broadest (and therefore most useless category). Becoming uncivilized, going against the grain of privilege is a starting point for a deepening into freedom; it is most certainly not a trajectory from whence one starts on the way to becoming moral and civilized. Instead, reject moralities, and opt for ethics. And so, we say that our possibilities, too, are away from the cities; and that, as such, privilege isn’t well defined. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Because the term freedom is more fundamental to our sense of life than collective self-sacrifice, we see privilege, in the reformist sense, to be civilized through and through, and that becoming uncivilized, becoming monstrous individualities, achieving qualitative success, is what it means to determine revolution. The inversion, rev-for-us, is something that anarchists accept because some of us are too weak to reject it and aim for our own liberated desires. We think there are better ways to orient oneself with respect to this inversion, precisely because the term ‘freedom’ is up for grabs. Being white is to maintain the way things are; and if one wants to see civilization razed to the ground, one is not only a bad whitey, given the state’s morality, but also a bad whitey given activist morality. The inversion that precedes us, our anarchist utopia—given to us by manufacturers of revolution—would delineate being a good whitey. The state may want this too. Since we neither have an idea how to define what we mean by revolution, nor wish to, to say that there are options plays rather well with the notion of living your life. Only a morality can say that one is failing the rev-for-us, whatever that means. This nihilist ruptures all of it by rejecting morality. And the reasoning might be that one doesn’t want to be a recuperable, reformed, assimilated. Being bad whitey, however the activist looks at it, could be a goal, if one cares enough to take a position. If, after all that, that were advantageous.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-505271392480264042015-09-10T21:48:00.002-07:002015-09-17T20:32:28.848-07:00touchy topics<span style="font-size: large;">Those of us that are tired of the identity politics game tend to suppose that its easy peasy to distance oneself from purported behavior. But this is experientially false because people tend to impose structures onto us, assuming that since one is white, one is racist, for instance; or that since one identifies as male, one is sexist. And if not actually so, more than likely potentially so. Two problems already arise: what does it mean to be white? and what does it mean to be racist? One way of painting the (performative) picture in today's world is to note that the all-amerikkkan family is quintessentially white and quintessentially racist given a general failure to understand the way the world works, how wealth accrues through exploitation, theft of preliminary capital, etc., and that the defense of these values and actualities produces borders, and a keeping out those that have had their lives stolen for the possibility of being performatively white. Built into this concept of being performatively white is being-heteronormative, or what's the same, being reproductive of the same (shitty, one dimensional) future. The domestic family is a machine of a larger machine, named Gender in Baeden 2, that produces the experience of alienation, distancing the other, even to the point of dejection, among a whole host of other divisive features--but most importantly--the separation of self from oneself through capture and recombination.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The entire apparatus of privilege theory functions in a similar way; that is to say, functions to distance oneself from oneself by way of capturing bodies into its functional (socialist) future. The only question then is how it is that the desired world, the utopia of a completed revolution, fails to look like the world that we hate? If domestication keeps us in place, what of the world that would do the same, and yet, nevertheless, call itself transformatively radical? </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ask yourself: <i>is privilege good or bad</i>? If it is bad--say, because it is predicated on a wholesale dismissal of non-humyn peoples, or because it fails to have a healthy relationship with the land (gelassenheit)--why should one that has it, give it away, <i>rather than destroy it</i>? Because it will always be projected? And if it is meant to be shared because it is only bad in its form, and yet good, if equalized, how can we overlook the privileging of the humyn, the production of Agamben's anthropological machine? (Agamben says that whenever a distinction is posited between humyns and animals, it follows that those that do not fit (rectudio) become excess to be destroyed, like those animals that fall under the privative term and are, as such, destroyed. Here, it's easy to paint the picture: those that do not work, those that cannot, those that hate the white bread of the state (hell); these are so many failures of futures that suck. <i>And yet, even as failures,</i> <i>these are still captured by privilege</i>.) So, through all this we have to ask ourselves always: Is privilege good or bad? And if we say always, without question and equivocation, <i>bad</i>, it will always be obvious that those that would make us do something with it, fail to understand what they are talking about. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps a vanguardist temporary state is necessary to force the state to "wither away"; and so, <i>mutadis mutandis</i>, privilege must be adopted ironically, <i>until it withers away</i>--until it is meaningless. But I thought that was what we are doing when we render our bodies uncaptured, monstrous? Perhaps privilege association is always a lacking in reference when it comes to us. And this is the ultimate root about why we think identity politics is forever insufficiently anti-politics.</span><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-57464629963700939462015-08-19T02:54:00.000-07:002015-08-23T21:25:53.003-07:00Exploring Passive Nihilism<span style="font-size: x-large;">Fuck.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Ive been reading Christian Anarchism lately and I'm troubled by the linchpin word 'non-violence', and, in particular, how this term means in the milieu.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Fuck.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Of course, sorting the term in a subsequent way produces differences. But what if one doesn't accept ones' sorting?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Fuck.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Some Quakers suppose that property damage, like fires and shit, falls square within the orbit of non-violence. And so it would seem that the difference is not clearly given by the state; nor is it therefore a simple matter of acceptance, a willingness to abide. Nor is it therefore enough to read Gene Sharp's (Otherwise excellent) writings on non-violence to get clear on the term.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Nope: doing violence in the milieu, isn't cut and dry, friends; and with Quakers making the intuitive point that you can't hurt property (even if scumbags find themselves in their stuff), the problem is only made explicit.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">If then anarchism wants to distance itself from one small aspect of nihilism (assassinations), then this distancing completely demolishes any a priori, theoretical effort to untangle the terms. Is an anarchism sans assassination non-violent? We want to say no because we don't want to be seen as pacifists; but can we say no?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Fuck. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Oh you shitty Christian Anarchists; you bastards that turn againstness away from non-action into action of a curious sort; you bastards that confuse the difference between pacifist and passive-ists; how can we still say we aren't Christian anarchists; how can we claim that we are not non-violent, against douchey liberals, when "pacifist action" is taken up <i>in opposition</i> to passivity, when these pacifists without passivity produce violence as a well defined term that we can support?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">On this reading, the orbit of permissible pacifist actions doesn't reduce to non-action, to bearing witness, to doing nothing. Until anarchists define what they mean by violence, thereby making explicit their differences, it would seem that they confuse the whole (non-violence) for a part (non-action). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Fuck.</span><br />
Fuck<br />
fuck<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-25412255964475855702015-07-28T11:30:00.003-07:002015-08-20T08:43:39.488-07:00(Solid)arity<div class="MsoNormal">
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--></style> <span style="font-size: large;">One more word, to be dissected and discussed—if adequately
labeled a “margarine word”—is <i>Solidarity</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
(A de A, </span><i>The Impossible, Patience)</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
Notes from dissecting this word stem from a discussion held in "Hamilton", on July 14<sup>th</sup>, 2015. If there are conversations missing from
this account, or if it sucks, please do not hesitate to critique everything.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">1. One might argue thus: </span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Material solidarity is distinct from lip-service. </span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Therefore, it is not enough to say one is in solidarity; one
must show it.</span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Some say this latter term “lip-service” functions
rhetorically as if one were to distinguish rhetoric from that which has
“substance”, words from deeds, the game from the politico-aesthetic. </span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We prefer genuine solidarity and
fake solidarity to mark the difference that is meant, and will go about the
matter in this way. But problems arise almost immediately. First, when we say <i>we
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">are in solidarity with Marius, whether we
are carrying out an action, the question of
whether Marius is in solidarity </span><i>with us</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> isn’t addressed. It </span><i>might</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
be the case that he would be in solidarity with us, would he have but known us
by what we do. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So perhaps the function of <i>support</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, material support, visiting, paying for, helping,
writing to, whatever, constitutes the prior possibility of the subsequent
reality of Marius being in solidarity with us. But isn’t support just
solidarity?</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">One point here is that solidarity
is a two way street; it is not enough to say that one is in solidarity; it
takes symmetry to undermine asymmetry for the adequacy of the relationship
“solidarity”. The one with whom we are in solidarity must accept the gesture!</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: large;">There is a nest of terms that we utilize to describe the
term solidarity that means something (and remember here we are saying, <i>if</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> there is prior support): empathy, allyship,
affinity, and complicitity.</span></span>
<br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Sometimes, in a rather disgusting
way, we use the term <i>empathize</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, as if to
suppose (or pretend) we have crossed over into material identity. We try to
identify. Obviously, putting oneself in anothers’ shoes is impossible, given
contextual differences, to say nothing of differences in identity.—We have fake solidarity here, a
pretending </span><i>to be solid</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Allyship strikes me as the most honest account, an account
of having different interests too, a sense in which doesn’t try to identify,
but rather moves towards being solid, perhaps hoping to be supportive, <i>without
supposing that one has become identical</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The
other has to be supported by me, in a direct way, for me to say, nontrivially,
that I am in solidarity with them. Of course, not everyone would take ‘allyship’
in this direction. For those of us that do, perhaps we ironically use the term ‘allyship’.
I want to note that 'allies' includes the prior implication that one has
independent interests. And this is perhaps the reason that affinity and
allyship are sometimes seen as synonymous.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Affinity, on the other hand, seems
to be willingness to act in tandem with the tendency, or whatever, <i>because
ones’ heart is in it</i><span style="font-style: normal;">; yet this is an individualist
implication; that one acts from one’s self. The question of affinity, I want to
say, is not so much whether we are willing to be in solidarity with someone
else, but rather, that the other must be in solidarity with our motives, first,
before we are willing to say we want to be solid with them. </span><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">It seems almost too obvious to note
that ‘allyship’ is an asymmetrical relationship. We gift our agency to the
other. Affinity is reactionary to this, a reclaiming of genuine agency, or perhaps it
is a function of parachuting purposes, feigned solidarity, a nihilist
maskwearer. Perhaps under the last category we can
discern a better sense for allyship, for here too we have a gesture of failing
identification, one that avoids empathy and pity. Genuine affinity certainly comes from real mutual support. Perhaps
allyship in its best sense presupposes <i>mutual</i> support too.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">2. I want to say something about being solid with
oneself. Which other? My future self. <i>The self is a community of peoples</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, future selves and past selves aiming for coherency,
</span><i>perhaps</i><span style="font-style: normal;">; for just as there is </span><i>no
unanimous community</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, (with whom to be
solid), there is no prior self to whom we (ourselves) are accountable. Yet,
despite all this, despite that point that there are rarely unities of agreement
across whole swaths of individuals—and perhaps exactly for this reason—we
affirm a </span><i>unity</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of disunities, one
that is in opposition to the unifying feature of alienation. How? By way of
practicing becoming solid. For instance, by becoming solid </span><i>because I’m
in it</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, not because I feel I must be, <i>because
I feel guilt</i>—or worse, because I haven’t yet exorcised constitutive structuralist liberal
demons, that fitting (however poorly) some intersectional analyis auto-obligates me into allyship. No! As individuals invested in our own freedom, we want <i>affinity and complicity to define allyship, and affinity and complicity to blot out passive nihilism</i>. Because, in these moments of irascible </span><i>human</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> being, of blemmyes, we find our
solidities, our solidarities. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It is precisely because we are untied in possibility, that we must bind ourselves, <i>yet only if it comes from us, from below, from our own coeurage</i>.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> For here we are in it; for here our hearts have achieved coeu(rage). That is, we sense the conspiring others; we are in touch with how they feel, their backgrounds; we have invested our hearts into knowing them; we sense their capacity to be in solidarity with us, and we give ourselves to becoming solid with them and ourselves. Of course finding others is more difficult than finding oneself; yet finding the capacity to be solid with oneself is difficult too, given that nothing coerces. In the least,</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> if I cannot say that I would be willing to be had, as I
have the other, perhaps I have no right to claim solidarity. And if I am not willing to say that I <i>can</i> have myself, or that I have myself, I have no right to call myself solid. And if I can't call myself solid, if folks <i>know</i> I'm not, what could it mean for me to say that "Im in solidarity with X"?</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4917405574406358889.post-53194587366643831002015-07-20T17:36:00.002-07:002015-08-08T20:47:09.777-07:00Being had<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 40px;">There is a difference between active nihilists
with commitments, and cruel nihilists that we name as cruel, to oppose them in
order to provide matter for our targeted againstness. (Depending on how well we
hide these acts, we remain <i>un</i>targeted
by their againstness). Whether active or cruel nihilist, then, one has commitments; the passive nihilist, on the other hand, is indifferent to commitments, it would seem. From this
distinction it is often presumed that everyday people, because they are
apolitical, they therefore do not have commitments. But everyone has
commitments, in the least, they are committed to their survival, unless, of
course, they are death drivers, in the sense of desiring death. Commitment then carries with it a morality, good and bad. And everyday folks fail to have the right kind of commitments.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 40px;">The trouble is that this often is utilized to make predictions, predictions that are <i>prima facie</i> false: not every persyn that is apolitical is <i>simply</i> passive; apolitical
people are not guaranteed to do nothing <i>come what may</i>. Perhaps they will act; perhaps they
will riot. <i>Perhaps we too will stay home</i>. Of ourselves we know, come what may, that we will never be cruel nihilists <i>because</i> we are committed to the
opposite, <i>because</i> we are committed to the destruction of those that intentionally
manage the state and defend it at all costs; of apoliticals, these may join us <i>or</i> may fight against us, alongside the
fascists and the pigs; or they too might stay home. With our commitments, we
are explicit; apoliticals are not explicit with theirs; therefore, it is meaningless to
suppose that we know what their implicit commitments are. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 40px;">We argue elsewhere that it is fruitful to
talk about passive nihilism in the bad sense as acting <i>indifferently</i>, by which we mean, passively consuming
without explicit commitments. And we do this if only to mark a difference
between active nihilism and passive nihilism, as well as a similarity, given that
'Nihilism' is equivalent to 'Nihilism', and 'active' is <i>not</i> equivalent to 'passive'. Taking the term Indifference--intuitive as placeholder for nihilism--we suggest that (politically) activated <i>indifference</i> involves commitments, arrows from
origins, to be distinguished by origins, and that acting <i>indifferently</i> is another beast, but not one without commitments. It may not even be precise to say that a passive nihilist is indifferently committed, that every belief is open to revision. Perhaps we mean, undecided, simply put concerning the question of insurrection and freedom. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 40px;">Given Nietzsche’s stance on the term
nihilism (active or passive) and his criticism of anarchism by way of
suggesting that active nihilism ends with utopia where everyone becomes
passive, suddenly we became aware of the meaning of nihilism for the Geist of His-Story.
Liberalism is purported to be at the end of His-Story, a point from which there
is nothing left to do. We argue elsewhere <i>contra</i> Nietzsche that “means without end” just
means the union of passive and active nihilism, forever dancing, without rest.
We are nihilists in this sense of struggle, always abutting to anarchist
projects and always desirous of transgressing stated limits in favor of more
freedom for ourselves. As anarchism is parasitical upon liberalism, nihilism is parasitical upon anarchism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 40px;"><br /></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 40px;">The moral question for the passive nihilist is: <i>Is one ready to act? </i>This main question is different from the question of whether one
wants to act, whether they can, or worse, whether there is a point, the latter being a question that “dogs” the
nihilist. The insurrectionist says it well against the pessimist when they say <i>there
is always a point: Doing something in rejection or revenge is fun!</i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 40px;"><i>Does one have the commitment to act?</i> Knowing what I am capable of depends on
the degree to which we are friends; and even this distinction is not quite
enough because there is still a deeper question of trust. We wish to
distinguish the being as such of a persyn on the basis of habits <i>as they
really are</i>, and not on the basis of habits as they appear.<i> (An important distinction in mask interpretation). </i>One
is surely activated into politics when one has a commitment that one is ready
to act on, a habit, or belief as C.S. Peirce or William James would say. Habits
are those things that we have. And yet, post rationalist thinking suggests that
habits, too, have us. The term (<i>habitus</i>) in medieval texts, has to do with a
whole series of virtues and vices—and a wonderful demonology, to be sure; and
yet, interestingly, medieval texts correspond with post-thinking in supposing that while
we have habits, <i>they have us too</i>.
Consider the profound irascible function of bravery which has us in Thomas’ discussion
of cardinal virtues. We have fortitude too; and as such, the virtue itself is two, not
one; for sometimes it is structured under temperance and prudence, and
sometimes not.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">If, then, the question of being had is on
the table, and it is--given that we are talking about the question of what makes one <i>incapable </i>of acting--I think it is important to note that <i>the way in which we
are had</i>, the tone, the strength, is the question. Obviously our commitments have us; and we need to get
out from under implicit or explicit commitments that suck, say, going to work, consuming the
excrement of leviathan, being <i>completely</i> selfish, whatever. This may require intense modification. Of course, to be clear, it’s not that being had <i>per se</i> is the issue; indeed, we would say <i>we want to
be had by the desires of our friends</i>. And perhaps this beautiful idea, this obligation from below, from selection, from desire for having a right to hang out without awkwardness, is sufficient to help us develop new habits, habits that we want to have us. For we want our friends to have us, and not because we want to have them, but simply because we want to <i>be</i> solid. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0