Simon’s response to the Surfascism piece is so interesting and if I may say so, so uh symptomatic that I think needs to be addressed point for point.
-- Isn’t fascism precisely the alliance of atavism/abjection and cold rationality? Atavism on its own might produce a pogrom, or an isolated Travis Bickle type paranoid schizo, or a Bataille-style perv. But it takes a dose of cold technocratic reason to create Treblinka (or for that matter the gulag).
I think right here we are at the heart of the problem.
My issue with what Simon says is that it seems to be generated entirely out of a Romantic abstract machine, which equates rationality with a brutal instrumentalism. This is something like the view of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, who famously opposes what he calls reason - but which is in reality utilitarian logos - to some irrational Factor X. It is not that EITHER utilitarian logos OR factor X are fascist; it is that the dichotomy itself is constitutive of fascist thought.
The well-known idea that Nazis administrated death camps in the day but listened to classical music and read Goethe in the evening is indicative of this, and only if we understand rationality to mean instrumental utilitarianism could Treblinka be described as ‘rational’. But rationality in the Spinozist sense – and no one could have been more systematically anti-Romantic than Spinoza – is precisely about consistency, ethos: i.e. it involves total immanence, meaning that, far from being ‘emotionless’, Spinoza’s cold rationalism is also at one and the same time about emotional engineering, and must be.
What has to be resisted at every level – and all the great thinkers of CR, from Schopenhauer to Freud to Lacan – is the idea that emotions are some ineffable and inexplicable slurry. The great breakthrough of Freud was to return to the Spinozist insight that all emotions have rationales. The devastating radical enlightenment thought is also astonishingly simple. Everything that happens – and crucially that has to include emotional reactions - has a cause. But a prior - or mechanical – cause, not a final cause or teleology. Via Descartes and Spinoza, Newton’s insight invades philosophy and theology, enabling the total destruction and discrediting of the Aristotlean-Catholic conviction that everything in the universe has been designed to fulfil a final purpose. The human animal is freed from authoritarian mystagoguery (the Judgements of God), it is able to think of itself as a machine, but a machine capable of reflecting on its own performance and constitution. Evolution, genetic engineering, AI-symbiosis: everything is possible once you no longer think of yourself as made in the image of Yahweh.
We neurobots….
Romanticism is a kind of secular resistance to the radical implications of this Cartesian-Spinozist mechanism, the return of Jahweh in the form of the ‘inner self’. What is important, Romantics convince themselves, is what we feel (with feeling explicitly opposed to thought and action). The true reality of ourselves lies ‘inside’, in the interior, the phenomenological. Somehow, this alleged interior is to be thought of as absolutely independent of its material substrate. Feelings and consciousness aren’t epiphenomenal side-effects of socio-neurochemical interactions, they are irreducible traces of some ‘deep’ and ‘eternal’ human soul. This faith is alive today in what passes for Philosophy in university depts in the deeply anti-rational ‘qualia cult’ that deifies human consciousness as some ineffable mystery which, it is said, neurology will never be able to explain. This is mysticism, not philosophy.
So I think I would want to position Fascism not as a successor to Romanticism, but as one of its variants.
It is important to hold onto the Virilio/ D/G critique of fascism as essentially suicidal – a line of abolition. There are many more lines of abolition than fascism, but fascism, because it is allied with a modernization-industrialization program that is precisely not rational – in what sense are bigger buildings, more alienated factory labour and population explosion ‘rational’? – is the most dangerous. (Gray is right, in Al Qaeda and what it means to be Modern to insist on the essential relation between modernization – NOT modernism, this is important – and fascism, so that Islamism can be properly conceived of as fascist precisely because it is not about atavism per se but atavism in the context of modernization).
---there’s an awful of potent, provocative culture that exists in that dodgy zone between Romantic/primordialist and fascist/totalitarian. In rock alone, there’s elements of glam, Killing Joke, metal, rave, gabba, industrial, crunk, maybe even Roots reggae, that work off those ambiguous energies. Then there’s the whole modernist/fascist mini-tradition of writers like Wyndham Lewis, Celine, etc -- a personal obsession of mine.
Surely we have to distinguish between fascism and totalitarianism here. Totalitarian states (e.g. Stalinist Soviet Bloc states) seek out sustainable control. The libidinal attraction of destruction and death has no doubt been contingently implicated in the totalitarian machine, but it is not necessary to it. (Stalin could have killed far less people than he did, and indeed might have been even more successful if he had not indulged in mass bloodletting). It is possible to imagine a totalitarian state founded on a virtual threat of violence that is never actualized. But death, destruction and ultimately self-destruction are intrinsic to fascism. They are what it is about – that well-worn Dionysian – which is to say Romantic - theme of the glorious annihilation of the self, now given a techno-industrial modernizing machine to mass produce itself.
--Just because fascism uses the appeal to the atavistic/pagan/primordialist, doesn’t mean it owns those categories (c.f. the anti-natalist argument -- fascist regimes encourage childbirth means breeding is proto-fascist = not very good logic)
But that wasn’t the argument. The argument was that the political exhortation to breed by the state is fascist. Hitler did it, Mussolini did it, and now Blair does it. Why the need for children? So that we can fill our fatherland with ‘our people’, who will both remove the need for immigrants to take ‘our jobs’ and contaminate ‘our culture’ and also act as more cannon fodder for our armies of defence against the foreign invaders.
And as I said, it isn’t the invocation of the primitive per se that is constitutive of fascism – it is the seemingly paradoxical mass industrialization of the drive backwards towards a time of organic unity with the soil.
-- Isn’t it as facile to say that Romanticism leads to Fascism as the converse argument (advanced by disillusioned French post-marxists in the 70s) that the Englightenment led to Auschwitz/the gulag?
Straightforwardly, it was the Counter-Enlightenment and modernization that led to Auschwitz and the gulags. The counter-Enlightenment doesn’t operate by denial of the Enlightenment (i.e. it is canny enough to realise that Aristotlean-Thomist teleo-superstitions cannot be re-animated --- at least not without cyborg implants) it tries to contain and redirect it. Yes, the ovens and the trains could not have been built without the science that the break out of irrationalist Papist authoritarianism made possible, but the use of those ovens and trains for atavistic-primitivist blood sacrifice rites is precisely a turn away from Enlightenment rationality.
There are presumably many mixtures and inbetween states and coexistences that intermingle reason and non-reason. and those are places where most of us live, practically.
Yes, but as anyone whose analysis has any political bite has demonstrated (Spinoza for sure but also Schopenhauer, Marx, Sartre, Burroughs, Foucault, Irigaray, Debord, even Nietzsche) most people are ‘control addicts’, enslaved puppets of their own passions. ‘Where most of us live’ is not a good place. Human Security or Human OS is constituted as the defence of the emiserating Oed-I-Pod, animal narcissist subjectifying machine = hell of the self. The planet is an irrationalist gulag overseen by tortured monkeys in hell.
--- this is the question I’m most interested in actually, which is appropriate given what this blog is 97 percent about: Music. Where does it fit in the cold rationalist scheme? (Nick Land: "Every theorist who hasn’t a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia.”)
Seems to me that the way Mark’s thought is developing he ought to end up in a Plato-like stance of being suspicious of music itself as irrational, counter-revolutionary, and so forth. After all, what is Music if not emotion, intoxication, sensuality, violence, the orgiastic? Or more precisely (and intriguingly) perhaps one could say that Music operates at the cusp of the the abstract/conceptual and the sensory/sensual (you have to have a body to be able to hear it; even classical music appeals to the body, works through rhythm and the psychomotor apparatus).
Whoa! Way too many equivocations here.
I obviously won’t invest anything in the overcoded and reterritorializing concept of ‘music’ – but sonic manipulation, far from being antithetical to CR, is one motor of it. It is not accidental that the major advocates of CR – Ray, Nina, Alberto, myself – are totally immersed in sonic culture.
There is no essential opposition between sensuality and rationality if you are a Cold Rationalist. Of course, CR will never fall for the naïve realist view that the senses give us direct, unmediated access to the world – but that doesn’t matter. The senses are not ‘windows upon the world’ but ‘feelers’ (Freud/ McLuhan) which, in the default state of affairs, sample the world according to preprogrammed protocols. Since CR thinks in terms of affects and bodies (rather than in terms of organisms) it is capable of conceiving of a sensuality reprogrammed either by input (this is where sonic manipulation comes in) or by changing the receiving body itself (by thought/ drugs/ neurological enhancement) OR both at once, in an intense destraficatory feeback circuit. Neuropunk. That is why
Music is always simultaneously a contemplative and physical experience.
But of course thought itself is always a physical experience too.
Moreover all attempts to reformulate music according to allegedly rationalist procedures ended up with things like Schoenberg and the twelve-tone scale ie. music which only Ben Watson (a sort of hot rationalist? he's into shagging!) enjoys? There is an absolute mystery and an arbitrary senselessness to music which invites words like “magic”.
This couldn’t be more wrong, and as Mclary argues in Feminine Endings this anti-musicological cult of the mystery and magic of music is indistinguishable from a culture in which the male body (and its priapic-climax circuits of excitation and tristesse) are privileged and transcendentalized. Power, mystery and authority always require one another. How particular sonic stimuli incites the CNS of populations is a technical question for a socioneurobiotics to answer. Despite what Qualia Cult thinks, any ‘mystery’ here is merely contingent. It’s a technical matter that is likely to be resolved eventually, and even if human beings can’t do it, that would be a comment on our limitations, not upon the impossibility of providing a description.
(Music is certainly my window to the Sacred, the one thing I feel mystical about). The loveliness of melody, the violence of "annihilating rhythm" -- there are rules that govern how these things work, but the rules themselves in their very existence have no reason to be, they are arbitrary, pointless, non-purposive.
Exactly! That’s precisely the Cold Rationalist anti-Aristotlean view!
(Same applies incidentally to the poetics and musication of language: Rhyme without reason). There is a superfluousness, a futile gloriousness, an excess to requirements, an utterly non-necessary aspect to music--- which relates very well to the Bataillean worldview.
There’s too many equivocations here again. Nothing is necessary beyond the judgements of God and beyond the pleasure principle. This insight is precisely what CR makes available.
-- via the fact that one “plays” music (as listener or performer), I’d ask where “play” as a concept fits into the CR worldview--“play” and its related concept of “mischief” a/k/a the imp of the perverse. (this is something where having kids, or hanging out with them, is a very useful reminder. Kids being simultaneously Pantheism's angels walking among us, and little devils).
Spinoza says children are abject because they do not know what causes their actions or desires. Like many adults, they confuse being free with ‘doing what they want’, when freedom entails attuning your desires and emotions to your reason.
You’re right that CR is contemptuous of the aleatory, the improvisatory, or anything which hymns the praise of the alleged creative efflorsescence of the cosmos. Jahweh is a drunken child abuser bungler and the Spinozist god doesn’t play dice.
-- finally I do kinda share commentator Axiomatik’s amused puzzlement at how swiftly Mark (and presumably others in the post-CCRU milieu) have junked one entire canon of thought (nietzche, bataille--whom nick land wrote a great book, The Thirst for Annihilation, about--Deleuze & Guattari, presumably Ballard too now as he’s a big fan of surrealism, mythology, etc) for its complete inverse. But I guess it’s all part of the adventure that is the life of the mind.
I think this misapprehension is becoming so consensual that it needs to be killed dead right now.
This requires a diversion into biographism, but since everything is impersonal, including the so-called personal.. no matter.
You’ll look in vain to find anything of any substance that I’ve said that’s positive about Bataille. I read, or rather tried to read Story of the Eye as an undergraduate but found it so tedious that I couldn’t complete it.
From the age of eighteen, my canon has been Jewish/ Protestant – Spinoza, who even as an undergraduate was my favourite philosopher, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Kant, Beckett, Freud, Kubrick. I’ve never had any time for Catholic transgressivism, which is why Nick’s book on Bataille was never much to my taste. But I see very little connection between the machinic Land of ‘Machinic Desire’, ‘No Future’ and ‘Cybergothic’ and that. Nick mobilised the crucial CR circuit of Kant, Freud and Schopenhauer. The tactical investment in Deleuze and Guattari was really a codename for that. I don’t think I’m alone in CCRU in having limited interest in Deleuze’s own work – and certainly the D and G of Nick and Iain Grant were much more interesting than actual D and G. (You always had to subtract too much yucky Lawrentian creationist vitalist pro-creationism to keep it libidinal). And the Deleuzian equivocation of Spinoza with Nietzschean embodied subjectivism and Bergsonian élan vitale has always been a disaster from which we are only now recovering.
Ironically, there is a figure who much better fits the requirements to be the death-drive successor of Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer and Freud than D/G – and that’s Lacan. So, in short, far from being some new absolute reversal, it’s a development, and more about inclusion (we’re allowed to read Lacan now:-) ) than some exclusionist repudiation.
>Ironically, there is a figure who much better fits the requirements to be the death-drive successor of Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer and Freud than D/G – and that’s Lacan.
And yet Bataille's influence on Lacan is well known. I quote from Roudinesco's intellectual biography on Lacan, simply because I have it to hand:
'Not only did Bataille's reading of Nietzsche supply Lacan with a new interpretation of the philosophy that had influenced him throughout his adolescence, but Bataille also initiated him into a new understanding of Sade, whose writings would later lead him to formulate a non-Freudian theory of pleasure. Moreover, Lacan borrowed Bataille's ideas on the impossible and heterology, deriving from them a concept of the "real" seen first as "residue" and then as "impossible"'.
The reason I bring this up is that I have great difficulty understanding why you are so sympathetic to Lacanian thought as part of a rationalist project. I would suggest that Lacan actually feeds quite nicely into those bits of D&G which you find most problematic. Freud can be twisted in such a way as to fit with a materialist rationalist approach and still remain Freud, but Lacan? I'm not so sure.
Posted by: johneffay at December 13, 2004 02:39 PM
or, to put it another way, the inclusion of lacan in a list of 'cold rationalists' must provoke the question whether 'cold rationalist' is a useful category. ah, but useful to whom? after all, some people have strange ideas about use-value: 'only if we understand rationality to mean instrumental utilitarianism could Treblinka be described as "rational".' semantics for undergrads.
Posted by: henrymiller at December 13, 2004 04:37 PMQuite honestly John what you are saying is bizarre: it is definitely the other way round. Everything bad about Deleuze and Guattari, almost programmatically, is where they depart from Lacan. Lacan saw himself as an assiduous reader of Freud, no more, no less; and I don't see a problem with that description of his project. But Lacan fixates on everything that hippy-clappy D and G loathe: specifically the death drive, which he runs almost all of his interesting work through. Obviously Lacan was a rationalist, he was a psychonalyst, and psychoanalysis, when rescued from Oedipalism, just is Spinozism in that it is
about addressing the causes of people's behaviour in order to change it.
Yes, of course Lacan was influenced by Bataille and Sade, in the way that everyone in that generation in France was. But did his mature work have anything to do with either Sade or Bataille? I don't see the connection. It's clear in for instance 'Courtly Love as Anamorphosis' that Lacan is much more interested in Masoch than Sade. Sade just is the tedious treadmill of the pleasure principle, as everyone including Lacan knew. And I just don't see any connection with Bataille's transgressivism in Lacan at all. On the contrary, isn't he its greatest critic?
Henry Miller: troll warning. Have some content in your posts. Say something. Or stop wasting our time.
Posted by: mark k-p at December 13, 2004 07:29 PMMark I'm not out to attack Lacan, as much as I am out to question your attacks on Bataille, although it's worth remembering that whilst Lacan 'saw himself as an assiduous reader of Freud', an awful lot of people disgreed with his reading.
>Yes, of course Lacan was influenced by Bataille and Sade, in the way that everyone in that generation in France was
Contre-Attaque met at Lacan's House; he attended the College de sociologie meetings; he was definitely on the fringes of Acephale and attended their meetings, he may have been more intimately involved; and let's not forget, he married Bataille's ex-wife :)
All circumstantial, I admit, but the point of the Roudinesco quote (and she is far from alone in this) is that the Lacanian Real with it's 'vestige' (or whatever the term is) is directly lifted from Bataille's general economy of the accursed share; a theory which I think we can all agree is intimately linked to Bataille's transgressivism.
>did his mature work have anything to do with either Sade or Bataille?
'This position is not tenable for us. Experience shows us that Kant is more true, and I have proved that his theory of consciousness, when he writes of practical reason, is sustained only by giving a specification of the moral law which, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state, that very desire that culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one's human tenderness - I would say, not only in the rejection of the pathological object, but also in its sacrifice and murder. The is why I wrote 'Kant avec Sade'' (Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis).
Which was published in 1973. Note the use of the concept of sacrifice. The admirable but untenable (at least for psychoanalysts) position he is referring to is Spinoza's.
I won't bore you with the D&G argument. We obviously don't agree with the role of Lacan therein, although I agree that it isn't to shore up D.H. Lawrence.
>Obviously Lacan was a rationalist, he was a psychonalyst,
So was Jung; is he a rationalist? Seriously though, I've always had a lot of time for psychoanalysis (I started reading D&G for that very reason), but I'm not at all certain that it's either rational or scientific. Bateson says somewhere that Freud is incredibly important, but that he speaks of concepts as if they were rigid and precise when they are in fact wooly, and sooner or later science will take psychoanalysis and firm it up into a truly scientific discipline. I'm not sure that the latter will ever happen, but the former is doubly true for Lacan.
Posted by: johneffay at December 13, 2004 09:20 PM
"the major advocates of CR [Cold Rationalism] – Ray, Nina, Alberto, myself"
Presumably you checked with those concerned that they are appy to be so enlisted as advocates of your position, Mark ...?
Posted by: Bloot at December 13, 2004 11:20 PMCold Rationalism is not 'my' position.
It doesn't belong to anyone.
We're not persons (you aren't either natch), and we certainly don't care about bourgeois politesse.
But the other three are more responsible for channeling CR than I have been.
Whether they would 'agree' with everything in this post, that's another matter.
Again, though, it is not a question of quibbling between persons. Disagreements are a sign of potential inconsistency and are to be sorted out at the level of reason, not at the level of personological dispute.
That is what CR is about.
Posted by: mark k-p at December 14, 2004 07:50 AMJohn
Think the relationship of Lacan to Spinoza is more ambiguous than that one quote suggests... and 'Kant avec Sade' is saying that Sade is a Kantian... it is the ultimate act of Lacanian anti-transgressivism: the libertine is actually the deontologist. It is the superego that demands that we 'enjoy ourselves.'
As you know, the theory of sacrifice and the accursed share ultimately originate with Mauss (a rationalist who abhorred the irrationalist direction the College went in).
As for psychoanalysis and rationalism ---- Psychoanalysis often botched it, but the basic project is Spinozist rationalist --- about uncovering the causes of our actions ---- and as everyone knows, Jung is not a psychoanalyst but a proto New Age mystic. His theories are anti-pyschoanalytic.
Posted by: mark k-p at December 14, 2004 08:03 AMYeah, the relationship with Spinoza is more complex. I just threw that in in passing. I won't mention the relationship with Hegel ;)
The theory of sacrifice is present in Mauss, the concept of the accursed share is not; at least not in the way that Bataille and Lacan utilize it.
> and as everyone knows, Jung is not a psychoanalyst but a proto New Age mystic. His theories are anti-pyschoanalytic
Have you read much Jung, or are you just going on what 'everyone know'? The reason I ask is that if you actually read what Jung writes on the collective unconscious, you'll find that he rigorously ties it to the physical structure of the brain which anthropomorphizes reality; critiques Freud for basically molar overcoding and deriving everything from case histories of neurosis; and Kant for universalizing from his own experience. In contradistinction, Jung claims to empirically derive the archetypes from extended research across a range of disciplines. Whether he achieves this is debatable but anti-psychoanalytic? I don't think so.
Posted by: johneffay at December 14, 2004 10:12 AMi would also query (again, and this time a response would be appreciated) m k-p's knowledge of psychoanalysis. he can hardly be unaware that 'Lacan saw himself as an assiduous reader of Freud, no more, no less; and I don't see a problem with that description of his project' is a very unusual statement on many levels: it's a bit like saying althusser was 'clarifying' marx, and similarly loaded with prejudice.
no doubt melanie klein et al were 'trolling' though.
he can hardly be unaware that 'Lacan saw himself as an assiduous reader of Freud, no more, no less; and I don't see a problem with that description of his project' is a very unusual statement on many levels:
I agree that the big Other wouldn't agree -- but then he wouldn't, would he?
You can only expect a response if you make a point. Simply being a mouthpiece for the big Other ('some people might disagree with this')or gnomic journalese put downs ('semantics for undergrads') does not constitute an argument. If you have a substantive point, i.e. an ARGUMENT with REASONS please present it.
Posted by: mark k-p at December 14, 2004 12:47 PMMy substantive point was quite clear: Lacan was not an 'assiduous reader of Freud, no more, no less'. Was this a Big Other speaking? Well, as everyone knows, just as Jung is not a psychoanalyst, that is possibly true.
Posted by: henrymiller at December 14, 2004 02:12 PMMark -- to answer you in the same kind of dogmatic (“It is so!”) bullet-point style (not my preferred mode of discourse, I must say, but I’m in any case too busy to get into anything more involved just now):
“We're not persons (you aren't either natch), and we certainly don't care about bourgeois politesse.”
I *am* a person, as is Ray, Alberto and Nina (though, admittedly, I can already hear Ray rejoining “*I’m* fucking well not!”) -- you too (natch). I’ve always found each of them extremely courteous and polite, which suggests to me that they do value what you deride as merely ‘bourgeois’ mores. In fact, they are all *such* decent and polite folk that I very much doubt that they would object even if they secretly DID feel a little uncomfortable with being enlisted as proponents of something called Cold Rationalism as you present it.
“But the other three are more responsible for channeling CR than I have been.”
So, although CR is not a position which *belongs* to anyone, some people (people, who, allegedly, do not even exist) are more *responsible* for it than others? Can anything other than a PERSON be *responsible* for an intellectual position or discourse?
“Whether they would 'agree' with everything in this post, that's another matter.
Again, though, it is not a question of quibbling between persons. Disagreements are a sign of potential inconsistency and are to be sorted out at the level of reason, not at the level of personological dispute.
That is what CR is about.”
Could you please explain how you propose to disentangle this (so far extremely nebulous) notion of “the level of reason” from all references to the persons who propound the propositions out of which it is (presumably) constituted?
Now, before you rush to accusing me of being a “monkey” (whether of the humanist, psychologicist [sic.] or subjectivist varieties) consider the following question: Is it really possible to retain the notion of the “consistency” of a rational position or discourse while dispensing with the entire language of commitments, entitlements, endorsements (and *responsibility* for those commitments, which you yourself have already had recourse to in your brief response above)? How do inconsistencies get “sorted out at the level of reason” except in terms of dialogue between rational subjects (persons) who who in the very act of forming propositions undertake rational commitments for which they are *responsible* in the sense of being under a certain socially instituted normative obligation to justify their entitlement to them? In this sense, a ‘person’ is nothing other than a rational animal (where being ‘rational’ essentially involves being subject to the force of the better reason) and a locus of responsible action. In fact, simply by participating in this dialogue you are constituting yourself as such a locus of responsibility (person) by offering arguments for which you are responsible in the above sense of being obliged to provide reasons for your entitlement to them (i.e. in terms of their inferential implications with your other commitments). Surely one who keeps insisting that people who are unprepared to provide ARGUMENTS and REASONS (see response to henrymiller above) for what they say are unworthy of his time is not now going to deny such things?
There's a really a great deal more I could say, and I can already anticipate some of your responses, but really, life is short ...
Posted by: Bloot at December 14, 2004 03:12 PM
So, as if to prove that he's NOT a person as above defined (locus of *response*-ible action), Mark simply disavows the putative obligation to *respond* ... Well, fair enough I suppose, since I had admittedly not bothered reading your lengthy presentation above (I can only stomach dogmatic tirades in very small doses), but rather just skimmed through it and seized upon an entirely incidental comment that caught my eye ...
Anyway, I spent a few minutes reading it just now (I'm waiting for the shower to become vacant) and picked out the following passage for brief comment (the other issues you raise are far too difficult and involved for me to get into them here, though I also have enormous misgivings about your views on those too):
"Romanticism is a kind of secular resistance to the radical implications of this Cartesian-Spinozist mechanism, the return of Jahweh in the form of the ‘inner self’. What is important, Romantics convince themselves, is what we feel (with feeling explicitly opposed to thought and action). The true reality of ourselves lies ‘inside’, in the interior, the phenomenological. Somehow, this alleged interior is to be thought of as absolutely independent of its material substrate. Feelings and consciousness aren’t epiphenomenal side-effects of socio-neurochemical interactions, they are irreducible traces of some ‘deep’ and ‘eternal’ human soul. This faith is alive today in what passes for Philosophy in university depts in the deeply anti-rational ‘qualia cult’ that deifies human consciousness as some ineffable mystery which, it is said, neurology will never be able to explain. This is mysticism, not philosophy."
I honestly feel that you must be completely out of touch with the goings on of academic philosophy, Mark. 'And so much the better for it!' you will doubtless rejoin. But it seems to me that you're really not getting the kind of 'critical feedback' that you would need to really establish your position(s) on solid critical grounds in these web-log dungeons with their myriad assorted 'trolls' and cretins and ego-maniacs. I suggest that if what you really want is well-informed and rigorously argued responses (and it's obvious that you're frustrated that you don't get it *here*), you're simply hanging out in the wrong dens ...
Now, trust me, I'm NOT defending the present state of academic philosophy in general (far from it), but really, your characterization of it above as thronging with 'qualia-cult' neo-Romanticists who believe in some utterly mysterious eternal soul which the sciences will in principle never be able to explain is utterly misguided. In fact, of the very tiny number of those who DO obsess about so-called 'qualia' (e.g. Thomas Nagel), if you actually *read* them (you won't, I know) you'll find that their position at least has the virtue of being well argued (though, obviously, there are of course always at least equally good counter-arguments) and rarely resort to mere polemical ranting replete with gradiose pronouncements supported by nothing other than fiery rhetoric -- unlike, I'm afraid to say, everything I've so far read by yourself. It's simply not good enough, for example, given the immense literature which has emerged on this issue (much of it in the last 10-20 years) to simply declare by fiat that what is called 'consciousness' (I don't care for the word myself) is an epiphenomenal side-effect of socio-neurochemical interactions and that anyone who remotely disagrees, on whatever grounds, MUST BE motivated by some kind of crypto-religious belief in an extra-natural eternal soul and should therefore be discredited in principle. This kind of 'argument' (obviously, it isn't one -- it's just an unsupported claim offering itself as an irrecusable, scientifically established truth [pro-science rhetoric is precisely *rhetorical*, not *scientific*] and backed up by insults, as is virtually everything you write) should really be unworthy of first-year undergraduates (ergo should be utterly unworthy of someone as clearly erudite as yourself).
Honestly -- I'm not just having a go -- go back through your recent posts (I've not seen earlier ones, but would be surprised if they're any different) with your examiner's hat on, as it were, and ask yourself whether your assertions are backed up by proper evidence and rigorous argumentation (conclusions following validly from premises) -- which you claim to prize very highly -- or whether they do not rather resemble the ravings of the political manifesto, recognizing no other authority than sheer bloody-minded advocacy and aesthetic preference. (And, by the way, at least on the evidence of what is so far available in English, it seems to me that Badiou's exaltations of mathematics 'in the Grand Style' are also motivated by little other than politico-aesthetic preferences -- mathematics, he says essentially, provides him with a suit of armour which will make him look hard when doing battle with the soft-ass contemporary Romanticists with their religiously-inflected pathos of 'finitude'; similarly, his advocacy of 'Platonism' seems like little more than one more rhetorical / polemical strategy, providing as it does the ideal dialectical foil for doing combat with the rabid neo-Nietzschean anti-Platonism of the post-war Parisian scene.)
Anyway, shower's free now ... gotta run ... Ciao.
I suspect that when his mates, the other 'major advocates of cold reason' (read:tolerant recipients of eager-canine intellectual frottage) tire of the sketchy caricatures and drop him like a stone, cartoon-badiou will fade away (and after all badiou is bad enough, but badiou without the sophistication is worse) to be replaced by something else equally halfbaked, propounded with equal vehemence.
Meanwhile, even accepting the viability and superior philosophical pedigree of sub- or im-personal explanations of human behaviour (which haven't been thought through or argued for with any degree of clarity), the sheer galumphing silliness of Mark's posturing warrants his being treated as a person/agent/monkey/male-ego-construct and mercilessly lampooned as such: it's quite patently the right tool for the job (just as it was in sphaleotas vs land where I believe Mark spoke in defence of satire).
As Troll has already pointed out, the major inconsistency here is the use of the claim to have transcended personhood ('vive the depersonalized!') as a tool for bullying, powermongering and evasion tactics. But of course, exactly as in sphaleotas vs land, the use of an elementary bit of spoofing to expose this dissimulation is decried as the crime of the century and an occasion for epuration sauvage!
As it goes I'd say it's evident to any reader that the becoming-invisible anon.troll is more tactically sophisticated: the trouble it's caused is thanks in large part to the overstretch of Mark's ambition over his capability to cover the ground (as in all guerilla campaigns) and the deadweight of his overcompensating character-armour.
All the talk of trolls re-oedipalising the heroically-destratifying cold-rationalist is just another way to amass paranoiac tautological 'proof' of the global conspiracy against His Rightness, and at the same time delete all criticism.
Posted by: Posh Spice at December 16, 2004 12:15 AM
Thanks for that Posh Spice -- undoubtedly the most intelligent, acute and insightful commentary upon this whole so-called 'troll incident' since it began. Obviously, as you so well put it, Mark's attempt to try and turn what was essentially just a hurriedly composed piss-take of someone with a horribly overinflated sense of his own importance and of the invincibility of his own intellectual stance into an issue about wicked 'trolls' who are resentfully hell-bent on 're-oedipalising' everything and thus thwarting the Hyperstitional revolution (about which I knew precisely *nada* when I wrote the spoof comment) simply served to further fuel his paranoid delusions and was used as yet another tactic for bullying and evading criticism.
Really, a quite brilliant set of observations there Posh (I'm sure Becks would be proud) -- observations which I'm quite happy to let stand as the last word on this (for me at least) as I finally slip out the back door and scarper.
Posted by: Troll/Bloot/Undiluted/Axiomatik et al. at December 16, 2004 02:52 AMNo thanks necessary. Hmm, I wonder whether we know each other - Here's to the authority-disruptive force of anonymity as against the repressed personalism of the assumed mantle of 'neutrality' and 'rationality'.
As a testament to this, the bloot-complex is a more intriguing and confounding character than the schlocky, lifeless occult confections usually found in this neck of the woods ( I'm sure the hits to this page would tell the same story) - and is obviously a intolerable nexus of multiplicitous irresolution for Mark since manservant sphaleotas has been charged with tracking down the culprit and *naming* him or her. )
The truth is, far from being a 'personalist' (or indeed 'peronalist') sideshow to the real (man's) work of 'destroying the human operating system', systematically obstructing intellectual-extremist mastery, cult-fabrication and claims of excarnation is the very heart of the matter.
This obstruction may well bring certain people down from their theoretical high, which obviously will make them grumpy and cause them to protest, but since it is those very same people who are arguing vehemently *against* intoxication, the 'logic of supplementarity' that undermines this protest - (undermines, in the terms of the most sophisticated post-humanist advocate of the very enlightenment tradition of argumentation that is being espoused, who whilst arguing passionately and against all 'common sense' and academic propriety for the independent non-organic life of writing systems, as a necessary correlate also *repudiated* the all-too-human dream that biography and personality could be escaped 'in one leap') - the logic of this undermining, ought to be quite 'clear and distinct' to all.
Now I know that oprah-style confessions have played an important part in the history of the 'cold rationalist' programme, but it seems that only when they contribute to the shoring-up of an intellectual (or, let's be honest, religious) position are 'personalist' episodes tolerated. Otherwise they are subject to a deletion that, unfortunately will never be complete, and - let's hope - will not go unremarked so long as the gadflies and trolls refuse this 'cold' intoxication.
Posted by: Posh Spice at December 16, 2004 10:55 AMPosh Spice is dead right, too, about Mark's hypocrisy: when Nick asked Mark not to encourage Sphaleotas' satire of him, Mark simply brushed it off with the following comment:
"Nick,
I'd prefer to be positive about this and think that it raises interesting questions about the acceptable limits of satire, appropriation, names, personae, pseudonyms, (cf Linda Trent on pseudononymous abominations). Surely the bizarre context of the Sphaleotas site makes it unlikely that anyone would think that the piece was the work of the 'real' Nick Land."
Funny that he wasn't prepared to be so tolerant and 'positive' this time around, eh? Presumably, then, Mark's own answer to his "interesting questions about the acceptable limits of satire, appropriation, names, personae, pseudonyms ..." is, in a nutshell: look, it's acceptable and interesting JUST SO LONG AS IT NEVER HAPPENS TO ME! (qualified by hopelessly [and performatively] self-contradictory assertions about how, in any case, *his* name doesn't really designate 'him', because *he* is not a 'person' blah blah ...)
Posted by: Hypocrisy Detector at December 16, 2004 11:03 AM
Posh -- again, a fantastically acute post, right to the heart of the matter. I believe I only know one 'person' who is *that* acute, and yes, I definitely think we do know each other -- even rather well (check my email for a clue -- if you don't get it, we probably don't).
If it is who I think it is -- sssshhhhhh, you haven't seen me, alright? ;-)
Posted by: Bloot-HypocrisyDetector-Adam55 et al. at December 16, 2004 11:21 AM>sssshhhhhh, you haven't seen me, alright?
It doesn't matter, since we're not 'persons' anyway, LOL
Posted by: Posh Spice at December 16, 2004 11:54 AMreal (anonymous, naturally!) email address is hypocrisypatroll@yahoo.co.uk.
Let's form a kollektive ;)
Alright, re-reading your posts, I think you're probably *not* who I thought you were -- especially given the allusions to Derrida (who is not especially well-liked by the person I'd originally thought of) -- though I certainly agree with your suggestions that Derrida is far and away more sophisticated that those (e.g. Mark) who, like the buffoon of Zarathustra's Prologue, think that it is possible to overcome man 'in a single leap'. Anyway, now I'm thinking you're someone else (lol), but really, I'm perfectly comfortable with anonymity and am not going to start getting paranoid about it. Cheers.
My name is legion ;)
Incidentally (and although I am no particular fan) Derrida seems to have pinned down the geopolitical import of hyperstition in 1984 ("No Apocalypse, Not Now") - pointing up a helpful distinction in a later interview: "That’s why I’m very interested in rhetoric but very suspicious of rhetoricism." That is to say, he attempts to address occult material 'logics' (or unlogics if you must) without abandoning (or thinking it necessary or even possible to abandon) the enlightenment ideals of rational argument. Preferable, one might say, to flip-flopping between an all-is-hyperstition neomystical idealism and a hardman rhetoric of purified rationalism - which would be a rather comical illustration of the reversible trapdoor-logic of metaphysical mastery rather than a serious challenge to it.
"if you actually read what Jung writes on the collective unconscious, you'll find that he rigorously ties it to the physical structure of the brain which anthropomorphizes reality"
Rigour? There's rigour in Jung?
Posted by: Catherine at December 16, 2004 05:51 PMwell done lads, excellent work. I think we might see another resignation quite soon
Posted by: terry at December 17, 2004 05:13 PMIsn't all psychoanalytically-descended discourse about a rigorous description of unreason, which can sometimes dovetail into a unrigorous description of reason (we must brave the defiles of the signifier, etc.)?
His introduction to the I Ching is good, anyway;)
Posted by: undercurrent at December 18, 2004 10:52 AM