Reza - have you come across Paul Berman's work? especially Terror and Liberalism?
It seems very germane to this topic.
While definitely not a 'liberal' in the American sense, I was still massively impressed.
His argument about localization (of apocalyptic totalitarianism which he traces back to Revelation) is at the heart of his discussion, and clearly linked to your polemic here.
Berman's remarkable (one could say 'peculiar') refusal of 'Western intellectual decadence' will probably damn his influence to practical irrelevance, however. Utopian gesticulation has entirely swamped the left-field of the Western debate over contemporary geo-politics (on this, fantastic piece by one of my heroes, Robert Kaplan, on the cult of victimology in the world media：http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/kaplan_print.html）

Reza if this is your text on the decline of western intellectualism then I can’t wait for your text about Iranian intellectuals ;-) Man, you are a blade!

Reza,

I find your writing to be provocative and challenging, but it seems disturbing (and somewhat simplistic) that a theorist that celebrates multiplicity and difference so easily stereotypes/slots bodies of people as a uniform Western culture... as if there is just one Western impulse (is this not one of the negative impulses of Western culture that you are condemning?)

Also can you attempt to explain your we, they and us ...? It seems that if you want to develop a Western understanding of your multiplicity it would be best if you didn't reinforce a sense of singularity through your language?

I only ask this because I find your thought and writings to be interesting and want to learn more...

Thivai Abhor,

>>> that a theorist that celebrates multiplicity and difference so easily stereotypes/slots bodies of people as a uniform Western culture... as if there is just one Western impulse (is this not one of the negative impulses of Western culture that you are condemning?)

Thanks ... possibly a misunderstanding, the title of the text is to Western ‘Decadent’ Intellectualism. It could be simply ‘to western intellectualism’ but it selects a particular strain of western intellectualism (the decadent one). Plus, I have continuously emphasized on the ‘dominant’ (see how many times I have repeated this word) western intellectualism which is not very different from the word intellectualism in its negative potential. Plus, I’m speaking of intellectualism not intellectuals; does the dominant western intellectualism mean western intellectuals, does it imply that I’m unifying all people under one flag? I don’t think so. Don’t you think that the politics that pushes us to conclude such a formula is actually a symptom of what we criticize here? Moreover, this is a critique on a political trend not its agencies. Hyperstitionally, we are all puppets.

>>> Also can you attempt to explain your we, they and us ...? It seems that if you want to develop a Western understanding of your multiplicity it would be best if you didn't reinforce a sense of singularity through your language?

Adam Sandler in ‘Anger Management’ after being harassed by flight attendants moans: "what is wrong with you people?" The black cop answers back: "what do you mean by ‘YOU people’, I don’t tolerate any racist propaganda sir." Sandler angrily, replies: "I don’t mean ‘You people’, I mean you people; what’s wrong with you people?" --- oh and the rest of story: the cop gives him a nice electrotherapeutic shock, and a fake court finds Sandler guilty, the anti-citizen one.

Nick has addressed to an excellent article by Robert Kaplan (http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/kaplan_print.html); interestingly, he discusses the same issue. ‘You’ and ‘We’ are now exploited to engineer a propaganda based on victimhood by terror-media. Let’s tear apart this victimhood complex. The propagandas around the negativity of ‘You’ and ‘We’ actually presuppose nothing but racism itself, smeared and camouflaged by victimhood complex. If you wait I’m writing an answer to Nick about this victimhood complex and how it works as a Terror-propagating virus, a terroristic weapon actually rooted in the Thermodynamic law of Lex talionis.

Anyway, thanks very much for the kind words and comments.

Dear Reza
Yes, I agree with you that speaking of identity is not a healthy and safe strategy for the ‎Middle East. But the idea of “identity”, even with its overloaded liberal and western ‎connotations, is used ‘in our fashion’: it is a plural, flexible, and camouflaged event. ‎Therefore, it is not yet another guardian, but a mask, made in Iran. ‎
Nowhere in history has this region showed the current degree of openness to the others, ‎including to the west (and nowhere in history has the west shown such a gaze). While ‎insisting on the utility of the distinction between “being opened” and “being open to” at ‎another level of discussion, I think as soon as a system is ‘open’, it is open to anything, ‎beyond the original intention of the act of opening; that is why they, in the liberal camp ‎‎(including the suicidal-liberal branch), insist upon de-finition and closure. ‎
I do not know about the Middle East, but we Iranians have always acted tactically, tactics ‎against the strategies of the others, and against our own tactics, produced by our own ‎plural altar-egoes. To make masks and camouflages and to act tactically is our strategy; ‎complementary to this we hesitate and postpone.‎
This issue is hard to pursue from this perspective, don’t you think that resorting to ‎hyperstitionalism may prove more fruitful, albeit tactical.

PS. Thivai and Nina say that we are no more awkward.

Esmail,

>>> But the idea of “identity”, even with its overloaded liberal and western ‎connotations, is used ‘in our fashion’

Exactly, it is reinvented, recomposed and mutated to not only something else but to other things uncharted and unreported (offspring from the space of an-omalie); this is why Iranian (and I think the whole middle eastern) culture(s) are so perplexing, so contagious to be grasped and ana-lyzed. One should be unfathomably blind to grasp what is going on.

>>> While ‎insisting on the utility of the distinction between “being opened” and “being open to” at ‎another level of discussion, I think as soon as a system is ‘open’, it is open to anything, ‎beyond the original intention of the act of opening.

Well, it is a sensitive topic; intention as you suggest is not enough; yes system can be open to everything; this was the discovery of the Greek philosophy that boundary does not enclose the system but starts it from the edge of what is believed to be the system to the outside (true open 'system'), not for opening the system to the outside but to accommodate the Outside within the boundlessness of system. This is not a radical openness; this is what Gibson calls ‘affordance’ or the economy of surfaces. System can only communicate through affordance otherwise its intrinsic survival (which maps it as an entity running through life) will be terminated; it will cease to process, it will cease to be a system. Have you read Necromancer and Sorcerer series? it is a brief discussion that openness of open systems only contributes to the Outside as an economical openness. Yet on the other hand, as you suggest when you open a door, anyone can come in. this is where radical openness (as the plane of being opened: or the communication of the Outside) camouflages itself and creeps to the system via its economical openness, eventually unlocking doors of its own (read Holocaust of Freedom).

>>> tactics

When tactical lines reach a terminal multiplicity, the emergence of strategy as an autonomous entity and hyperstition carrier is inevitable.

>>> PS. Thivai and Nina say that we are no more awkward.

well, Nina has already been contaminated here so she is descending to Tartarus, therefore, when she says 'no more awkward', you should think of the opposite or at least other options. ;)

awkward: 'upside down'; it diagrams catadromic functions: collpase, katabasis, and descent (into Tartarus?) awkwardness doesn't mean 'wrong' but it suggests an anomaly.

if this is the meaning of awkward, that is the case with Thivai, I am sure; and with anybody who looks through this looking-glass.

>>> if this is the meaning of awkward, that is the case with Thivai, I am sure; and with anybody who looks through this looking-glass.

Why? ;)

Very interesting post, Reza. I will respond to this piece over on my page shortly....I will descend further into Tartarus/the mirror in reality (hyperstitional!) shortly too, where I hope to consolidate (or disintegrate) my entirely mixed feelings about all your masks...or am I too toxic already..? Your contaminated friend...

Thanks ... Descensus Averno facilis est ;) ... or not?

like what nick said elsewhere about making a "gripping movie" & new york's what makes "a horror tale more powerful". it's a failure of the imagination when "Noble Cause" sentimentalized & not transformed into an integral carrier of The Bush Doctrine. it's not made subordinate to the imagination. are confused soldiers & "predetermined scripts" indicative of narrative failures? failures to subordinate The Fantastic Imagination to a gripping story? who's supposed to be telling this story anyway?

Linda Trent's first post here about two key hyperstitional components: 1) collectivization of the fictional system & 2) practical deployment of the fictional system. similar to Robert Price defining Cthulhu Mythos: 1) Lovecraft Mythos proper with individual myth-cycles (Smith, Howard, Bloch &tc) & 2) August Derleth Mythos cross-pollinating & meshing all myth-cycles together.

is there a War on Terror Mythos? are there times when we DO NOT want fictions becoming hyperstitions? when do we want them to? n+1 critiques China Miéville's "New Crobuzon" novels, contrasting Jennifer Howard's review of "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" & its failure to get jiggy with the fantastical.

Fantasy Remade (n+1) - www.nplusonemag.com/mieville.html
Fantasy is conservative to the extent that it does what Howard wants it to do, by becoming a kind of storytelling that is disconnected from politics. The fantastic imagination – i.e., the capacity to imagine places where the rules work differently than they do here and now – can help to puncture the spurious sense of permanence on which everyday politics rely, the sense that the way things are now is the way they inevitably must be. The fantastic imagination shows that our guiding principles and power arrangements can be different, and perhaps that they *should* be different. But if genre fantasy does what Howard says she wants it to do, by creating a hiding place far from the complexities of politics, then it becomes what its critics have always claimed it is – an exercise in escapism.

The Uses of Fantasy (Howard) - www.bostonreview.net/BR29.6/howard.html
When the news strays so far from the familiar moral contours of the struggle between Good and Evil, it’s tempting to lose ourselves in stories in which this battle is fought in clear terms and on an epic scale. Good over here, Evil over there—call it the Lord of the Rings model, in which heroes may be flawed but are always recognizably heroes, and their enemies want nothing less than to stamp out (as one of the good guys puts it in Peter Jackson’s recent film adaptation) “all that’s green and good in this world.”
...
There was a time when one could turn to fantasy, if not for escape, then for a working-out, a cathartic reimagining, of the world’s crises. "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" takes epic fantasy down a road that leads away from large moral conflict and instead doubles back on itself and the reader.
-------------------------

fundamental Hollywood 101 says if it bombs over here at least let it sell overseas. doesn't that define The Bush Doctrine in a nutshell? kinda harsh, but there's nothing "gripping" about it. the number one movie at the global box office remains 9/11; a foreign production usually nominated for Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film. top-grossing films come from Hollywood; "Titanic" currently number one at $1,845,034,188. "The Sound of Music" (1965) box office #1 (knocking off "Gone With the Wind" released in 1939; returned to #1 after 1970 re-release) until Jaws released in 1975. amazingly, "Gone With the Wind", adjusted for inflation, still remains #1. 1939 peaks Hollywood's golden years with its most memorable films. 9/11 knocked all of that out of the ballpark. on one day.

How Do Fictions Become Hyperstitions? - hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003345.html
If Lovecraft remains the archetype of a hyperstitional practitioner, it is because his fictions have long since escaped their putative author. A work has crossed over into hyperstition when it has become impossible to treat it as the product of a single author’s imagination. The author can no longer be considered the final authority upon the work attributed to him. Thus the question, posed in all seriousness by a devotee: Why does Lovecfraft persist in the pretence that he invented the Necronomicon?

my favorite movie quote from "Grand Canyon"; Davis, the Hollywood producer of violent action thrillers: "That's part of your problem: you haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies." Jimmy Breslin's "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" googled in 1997 pops Newt Gingrich & Republican House leadership; google today & you get:

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2092151,00.html
Although it hurts me to differ with the Pet Shop Boys, Bush is not stupid. But his administration is reeling from one mishap to another. So let me proffer another explanation for the sometimes comically inept gang that cannot shoot straight, unless it’s at an elderly lawyer mistaken for a duck. They’re tired. Not just tired, actually, but exhausted. They can barely keep their eyes open. They’re sleepwalking through their second term. And you cannot really blame them.

predetermined script? at its core, the War on Terror Mythos is a horror story (9/11). do we want this fiction becoming real? New York nails it:

"my point is really just that a horror tale is far more powerful if there is the possibility that good might prevail against evil, but that it should ultimately fail to do so, because the horror lingers in a much more powerful way with the viewer if the essential evil is still potent at the end. You walk out of the theater and don't get relief, at least for awhile, because didn't care about reassuring you against Vile Bodies and Babies (as in Rosemary's), instead of providing Baubles, Bangles and Beads. That's why the escape of the Shelley Duvall character and son in the film of 'The Shining' but leaving the sinister house still functioning without a single witness to back them up; and preserving the Vampire Status Quo and/or Ancien Regime in the novel of 'The Hunger' are so much more powerful than their sell-out counterparts. I'm not talking about real life, just that horror fictions are useless unless the horror prevails at least in some works."

there's no relief from the 9/11 horror story. we may need a well-told heroic epic. making sure not to skip the Fellowship of the Ring part & going directly to Return of the King. Miéville, the Marxist, a Lenin's Tomb poster; i'll throw Long Sunday's 3-part interview in tangents .... think this one of n+1's key points about his work:

"Iron Council" gives us the necessary clues to figure out what Miéville is up to. He’s Remaking genre fantasy, not as an art-form that is entirely subordinate to given power relationships, nor as a means of escape from them, but as a specifically *political* act of imagination. He’s arguing that stories, if they’re understood rightly, can allow us to reinterpret our circumstances and think through how to change them. Fantasy is important because it’s potentially political in the most profound sense — it can choose neither to reaffirm politics as they exist today nor to hide from them, but to challenge them. In "Iron Council", fantasy can even create a radical break in history, revealing new possibilities of political action.
...
"When tactical lines reach a terminal multiplicity, the emergence of strategy as an autonomous entity and hyperstition carrier is inevitable."