Alexander Verney-Elliott (M.A. Contemporary European Thought), my partner in life, recently wrote this interesting piece that deals with ‘Speculative Realism’

Alexander Verney-Elliott

Objects have no dimensions and no meaning in themselves only in relation to others as objects withobjects as others with other: a chair is not a chair when there is no one sitting there when there is no their there: objects only become objects when one is objected with objection like abjected with abjection and objects are being when being in objects being for objects becoming being-objects like the sculptor is in clay being for the forming like the fucker is in flesh being for fucking for being-in is being-for and the meaning of objects comes from their sculpting into something comes from their fucking into something but objects have no meaningful being when beingful in themselves for beingfulness needs no meaningfulness which is why not all objects are da-sein for an object is the not there of the meaning not there when being object for itself as in an out of body state wheresensationing negates meaning and a chair is not there when no one is sitting there like a being is not there when there is no body being there. In out out of body state there is a world outside our own that we have access to and when we come back to our bodies after being out of body we begin to have access to a world – the world in itself as our being in itself where we are one object as one-dasein where objects become one object present at being no longer withdrawn from being from our being but being one with our being as being beingful and not meaningful. When we become one with the world we are no longer object with objects but being with beings as being one with the world as being-world no longer being a tool-being of da-sein of a flat-ontology. Being one-with-the-world is being-one-in-the-round (of the world) as a round-ontology where one circles the circle eventing the earth-event of being-worlding no longer with-drawn from the world but world-drawn with one being drawn into the world whirling the world without the lack of language and the menace of meaning but just by being-one as one-world and when one is truly being-in-the-world as being-one-with-the-world as being-world then there are no objects just being (and then no need for Speculative Realism). Ontology observes that there are no objects only being.

“In recent years [Martin Heidegger] has allowed his anti-Semitism to come increasingly to the fore, even in his dealings with his groups of devoted Jewish students… The events of the last few weeks have struck at the deepest roots of my existence.”

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), 4 May 1933, after Heidegger, as Rector of Freiberg University, had revoked Husserl’s access to the University Library [quoted by Richard Wolen, Heidegger's Children, Princeton University Press, 2001, p.11].

“Among these prophets, Heidegger was perhaps the most unlikely candidate to influence. But his influence was far-reaching, far wider than his philosophical seminar at the University of Marburg, far wider than might seem possible in light of his inordinately obscure book, Sein und Zeit of 1927, far wider than Heidegger himself, with his carefully cultivated solitude and unconcealed contempt for other philosophers, appeared to wish. Yet, as one of Heidegger’s most perceptive critics, Paul Hühnerfeld, has said:  ”These books, whose meaning was barely decipherable when they appeared, were devoured. And the young German soldiers in the Second World War who died somewhere in Russia or Africa with the writings of Hölderlin and Heidegger in their knapsacks can never be counted.”… What Heidegger did was to give philosophical seriousness, professorial respectability, to the love affair with unreason and death that dominated so many Germans in this hard time… And Heidegger’s life — his isolation, his peasant-like appearance, his deliberate provincialism, his hatred of the city — seemed to confirm his philosophy, which was a disdainful rejection of modern urban rationalist civilization, an eruptive nihilism.

… When the Nazis came to power, Heidegger displayed what many have since thought unfitting servility to his new masters — did he not omit from prints of Sein und Zeit appearing in the Nazi era his dedication to the philosopher [Edmund] Husserl, to whom he owed so much but who was, inconveniently enough, a Jew?“

- Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider 

Excellent analysis from  On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy by Tom Rockmore here: (full text here)

“Here, his objection to National Socialism is always limited to its failure as a theory of Being. Heidegger’s failure to object to the political consequences of the Nazi worldview is significant, since it suggests an incapacity of his thought — that is, the thought of a great thinker, in the opinion of some observers the most important thinker of this century — to grasp the political specificity of National Socialism. It is an error to hold that after the rectorate Heidegger breaks with Nazism on a political plane. Even in the rectorial address, his commitment to National Socialism was tempered by his refusal of the hegemony of politics, which he intended to found in philosophy. In the Beiträge his view has not changed, since he continues to accept the point he has always shared with Nazism: insistence on the authentic gathering of the Germans.

In the Beiträge, in his “postphilosophical” phase, from the vantage point of the other beginning Heidegger criticizes National Socialism as a mere Weltanschauung like Christianity or liberalism. According to Heidegger, both the Christian view of transcendence and its denial in terms of the Volk as the aim of history are forms of liberalism (Liberalismus).

The problem with the Nazis, according to Heidegger, was not that they terrorized and murdered people, and started World War II, but that they had the wrong attitude towards metaphysics. Whether they would have still been murderers if they had the right metaphysics is a good question. One of the most disturbing things about Heidegger’s thought is that the murders — or even the public thuggery that he could have seen in the earliest days of the Third Reich — don’t really seem to have disturbed him all that much. It was not the murders or the public mayhem that discredited “existing” Naziism but simply the wrong attitude towards philosophy, i.e. Heidegger himself. The most damning accusation, however, is just that Naziism was a form of liberalism!

We are already familiar with Heidegger’s frequent assertions, common in claims of orthodoxy, with respect to the views of Kant, Nietzsche, and Jünger, that only he, Heidegger, has understood them. Here [in the Introduction to Metaphysics], he makes a similar claim with respect to Nazism. For Heidegger evidently thought of himself as the only “orthodox” Nazi, as the only one able to understand the essence of National Socialism… To the best of my knowledge there is nothing in the public record to suggest that Heidegger was at all sensitive to the human suffering wreaked by Nazism, in fact sensitive to human beings in more than an abstract sense.

Heidegger is not a moralist and does not have anything like a theory or system of moral principles. It is not clear how a prohibition of murder would even be grounded in his system. A “resolute” and “authentic” murderer actually sounds pretty good.

Although in theory resoluteness is the call of conscience, in practice there are absolutely no criteria that enable one to recognize where conscience lies, to make a rational choice. The words and deeds of the Nazi dictator are as good as any other form of resoluteness. For a theory that insists on resoluteness at all costs, resoluteness about pushpin is as good as that about poetry, and Nazism is as good as altruism. Heidegger’s notion of resoluteness is, then, the ultimate parody of the Kantian idea of moral responsibility based on intellectual maturity and a wholly rational choice of moral principles.

If the ethical component is not present in the beginning, it will not be present at the end; and it was not present in — in fact, it was specifically excluded from — Heidegger’s “antihumanist” meditation on Being.“

Eilif discusses his limited understanding of time, and pleads for a collaborator-physicist (theoretical) for an imagination-speculation project on temporality. Nonsense! Proceed: Fermions, bosons and morons unite!

I wasn’t going to post this on my blog, and recorded it some time ago. With renewed debate about Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, I am putting this short analysis of Harman’s Heideggerian-inspired ‘objectified’ ontology and its sociological consequences.

Hyper-Mobile Connectivity

Below, Eilif Verney-Elliott argues for a psychoanalytical-philosophical examination of the ‘nebulous circuit board of capitalism,’ a system where all of us are implicated or, at the least very least in relation to. The ‘nebulous circuit board’ includes everything from Voyager I and II space crafts to ‘smart’ phones and the way people interact (sometimes compulsively) within- against- toward- all varied typologies of human-computer fusions and fissures. This video is the introduction to the beginning of a book by Eilif about ‘internetivity’ and being(s) in the world. Internetivity produces theoretical conceptions that turn everything ‘flat’ like a screen (Levi Bryant’s “Flat Ontology”) or into ‘objects’ whereby a mobile phone, an ant and a baboon are equal to their innermost being or ontologically equal (Graham Harman’s “Object-Oriented Ontology”). Harman is particularly addicted to the internet; posting his frustrations about being without wifi and posting nine, twelve etc blog pieces a day. He, like Levi and others, are ‘screened’ – they are to use Herbert Marcuse’s term, entirely, ‘One-dimensional’ but many of us are implicated in this as they are simply a sociological outgrowth into philosophy of their symptoms and the symptoms of the nebulous circuit board that envelopes everyone from the Wall Street banker to a hermit in a cave. 

“The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat …  Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.” 

- Noam Chomsky

Here I examine the contemporary state of the intelligentsia, including the prominent philosophers Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. Zizek is a Stalinist and Badiou considers himself a Maoist. At a time when the Left needs to regain its senses and work on immediate issues of civil liberties, decentralising power, ending economic inequality and democratically mobilising against US, Chinese and Russian imperialisms, it is striking that these totalitarians are not marginalised. But they are not. Like Heidegger, Zizek and Badiou wish for a ‘decider’ a ‘strong leader’ to move ‘the people’ and the discourse into a different direction; both eschew democracy, and both are ready to attack democratic socialism vowing themselves to a passive analysis of the ‘Idea of Communism’ (which seems to continually float around from one epoch to another without doing its ‘job’ except in certain Stalinist and Maoist re-contextualised potentialities.) Zizek egregiously states that Hitler did not go far enough, was not violent enough in changing the status quo; this shows Zizek’s inability, laziness and insensitivity regarding Hitler’s dramatic change and challenge to the liberal, democratic status quo of the Weimar Republic.

Additionally, both have leant their weight to the obscure Speculative Realist philosophical movement through highly influential book endorsements. Within Speculative Realism is Object-Oriented Philosophy which purports that all objects from a computer chip, Maoism, fascism and your child are equal in their ‘being.’ Another flavour of Speculative Realism is ‘Flat Ontology’ which, like the aforementioned, reduces all ‘things’ or ‘units’ or ‘chunks’ (their words) to the same ‘being.’ Flat ontology is a clear product of the screen age, whereby the flat screen (TV) and computer screen penetrates the consciousness of the deepest recesses of contemporary philosophical jargon.

The sociological implications of Zizek and Badious’ insidious love for totalitarian leadership, along with these obscure new movements within philosophy distract from the immediate work that needs to be done by the intelligentsia and others. The entire pull of these philosophies and their jargons drain much needed time and resource out the immediate political and social needs of ending economic inequality, civil disobedience against the US, Chinese and Russian imperial projects, and bringing war criminals like Obama to trial for crimes against humanity. Like the obscure philosophers of the 60s and 70s – Foucault (anti-humanist philosopher) and Kristeva (a Maoist until the late 70s) – these ‘fashionable’ thinkers are the nexus of many a dissertation and thought within and outside of academia.

We must question this trend, and look to intellectual like Noam Chomsky as a counter-balance.

“Unlike many leftists of his generation, Chomsky never flirted with movements or organizations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, antirevolutionary, or elitist. Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism offered to many of Chomsky’s disillusioned contemporaries an alternative to what they saw as blatantly exclusionary American-style capitalism. When reports about what had actually occurred in the former Soviet Union and China began to filter through, many felt betrayed. We now hear a lot about how the left has been discredited, the hopelessness of utopian thinking, the futility of activist struggle, but little about the libertarian options that Chomsky and others have so consistently presented. The type of dismay that has permeated contemporary intellectual circles has not touched Chomsky. He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century. And yet, most of his criticisms of American policy, past and present, are seldom mentioned in the mainstream press or by the instructors and professors who teach history or politics. Political science departments rarely use his material on Vietnam, the Cold War, Central America, or Israel.”

- Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1997

“Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve” – Noam Chomsky

Here I map out the work of some various Speculative Realist philosophers, their propositions and sometimes dogmatically anthropocentric and limiting theories. I also examine the sociopolitical consequences of Object Oriented Ontology and the dubious relationship betwixt Quentin Meillassoux and his Maoist, anti-Semitic teacher Alain Badiou, along with the endorsement by the Stalinist philosopher Slavoj Zizek for the book “After Finitude.”

Graham Harman

Here is a piece of earlier critique specifically regarding Graham Harman and Object Oriented Ontology

“Graham Harman writes about objects. When considering two ‘objects’ he notes their interaction. For instance, he writes about cotton burning, ‘the cotton burns stupidly.’ If all objects are ontologically, or in their Being (Sein) ‘democratised’ or equal, then a certain philosophical ground arises from this proposition. Since these objects are equal, that is to say, the same ontologically, then it follows that they can be interchangeable – ontologically – with any other objects. Objects are objects. Moving from the ‘objects’ of cotton and fire, interacting as they are through what Harman calls a ‘sensual vicar’ – another object that is created from the interaction of the two objects, let us apply this proposition to another case. When a Monk in Tibet sets himself aflame, when he self-immolates in protest against China’s occupation of Tibet, does the Monk too ‘burn stupidly?’ Since the Monk and the cotton are in-their-being totally equal, an Object is an Object, the Monk, just another ‘object’ can be said to ‘burn stupidly.’ Political ideologies to light to Monks and cotton are all ‘objects’ for Harman. The object withdraws, as ‘we’ or ‘I’ or another object can never fully know its being. This is a proposition he picks up from Martin Heidegger the Nazi philosopher. Harman associates himself so much with Heidegger that he says he is more of a Heideggerian than Heidegger himself. Given Heidegger’s support for the discrimination and even extermination of Jews and other (objects), we can deduce via Harman’s object-oriented ontology that he would, at an ontological level (that is at the level of Sein) find no problem with Nazi ideology, for it is simply another object that withdraws and relates with other objects. We must then ask, given Harman’s fetishising of Heidegger and his objectification of everything, does ‘the Jew burn stupidly?’ That is to say, does the life of the Jewish person under the object of Nazism represent a mere interaction of equal objects via a ‘sensual vicar?’ … Does the Jew get gassed stupidly under the object of Nazi philosophy which is entirely equal to the Jew and interacts with the Jew through the sensual vicar of another object that being the gas – the gas supposedly I would imagine an object that interacts with the Jew that’s being killed and the gas chamber through a sensual vicar creating another object – everything is ontologically equal – what are the political consequences of that?”

Eilif Verney-Elliott, Let’s Move On, & Graham Harman’s OOO: 2013

Slavoj ZIzek

Further critique of the contemporary philosophical mise en scene

Here I scrutinise the contemporary state of the intelligentsia, including the prominent philosophers Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. Zizek is a Stalinist and Badiou considers himself a Maoist. Both have leant their weight to the embryonic Speculative Realist philosophical movement through highly influential book endorsements. Within Speculative Realism is Object-Oriented Philosophy which purports that all objects from a computer chip, Maoism, fascism and your child are equal in their ‘being.’ Another flavour of Speculative Realism is ‘Flat Ontology’ which, like the aforementioned, reduces all ‘things’ or ‘units’ or ‘chunks’ (their words) to the same ‘being.’ Flat ontology ‘correlates’ as a product of the screen age, whereby the flat screen (TV) and computer screen penetrates the consciousness of the deepest recesses of contemporary philosophical jargon.

The sociological implications of Zizek and Badious’ insidious love for totalitarian leadership, along with these obscure new movements within philosophy distract from the immediate work that needs to be done by the intelligentsia and others. The entire pull of these philosophies and their jargons drain much needed time and resource out the immediate political and social needs of ending economic inequality, civil disobedience against the US, Chinese and Russian imperial projects, and bringing war criminals like Obama to trial for crimes against humanity. Like the anti-political nihilist or totalitarian philosophers of the 60s and 70s – Foucault (anti-political nihilist) and Kristeva (a Maoist until the late 70s) – these ‘fashionable’ thinkers are the nexus of many a dissertation, energy and thought within and outside of academia. They cannot be dismissed, yet they can be critiqued.

Regarding Zizek’s Stalinism and Badiou’s Maosim, I am here posting a Noam Chomsky response to a caller’s request for his thoughts on socialism, during a 2003 interview by Brian Lamb, for C-SPAN’s “In Depth” program. He describes how socialism was erroneously equated with the Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist model of the Soviet Union and China by both the USA and its allies on the one hand, and the USSR and its allies on the other.

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To ‘take place’ is both a temporal (took, take, taken) and a spatial relational statement. More formally, it has two signifiers that release themselves into a potential for an infinite string(s) of signifiers (a semiotic chain): taken place (past), take place (present), and will take place (future): infinity as time.  The clock ticking represents both our finitude Heidegger’s ‘being-toward-death,’ and our infinity, or rather our immersion in infinity, for the clock ticks on after death. The clicking clock, a symbol of the 19^th Century positions itself as the infinite. Since standardization of European industrial practices, arising mainly from monastic rituals and Christianity’s obsession with time management (whether by god, for Catholics; or by being ‘good workers-sheep for god,’ for Protestants). But the ticking clock surpassed its masters and makers. Father time himself dissolved into all bodies exposed to the clock. His Spirit lives, breathes and animates us. It gives many of us life, for the clock-industrial revolution increased Terra’s population from 1 billion to 7 billion homo sapiens within a century.

‘The artist’ – whether they be a painter or sculpture etc. – often speaks of their work as something that they wish to either keep or sell ‘to a good home.’ They love their work, often more than they love people. Paradoxically, whilst they may love their work, they hate the objects they create, and wish to retain them within an economy of the known, not letting them circulate freely (anal-retention?). Either they keep them as reminders of the thing-itself, or they move for them to be sold. Presumably someone will not destroy an artwork they have purchased. There is an unspoken contract of retention. Tentatively speaking of retention, for there is far too much to say here conclusively, the artist has a scatological relationship to their work: the work, the act of shitting – can be mildly or extremely enjoyable – but the object produced is hated in its inverse. Unlike the horror of the scat, when the artist sees their work they are horrified to retain it, instead of flushing the work. But with retention a certain flushing happens. Through a negation of pipes underneath, the people who made the canvas, the people who shipped it, the universe it springs forth from etc., they hold the object, ‘smelling’ in a type of neither-either world. It must neither be destroyed, or it must either be sold. The registers of the economy bridge the scatological need to expunge the horrifying object of creation, the turd of the toilet, the word of the poet or the pain-tings of certain artists. Now, this is contingent on the co-presences of the artist’s specific psychical investment, here we can speak of ‘economy’ and ‘investment’ in purely philosophical terms because of the ubiquitous capital-philosophy. In a spirit I enjoy, the Chinese artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei breeches this code of retention by destroying or painting over (effacing) ancient retained vases.

“Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” by Ai Weiwei Courtesy of ameliagroom.com

Chronicity, which I define as both a spatial-temporal phenomenon and an ontological discharge must be laid down to its bare bones. To ‘lay’ something ‘bare’ is also to sexualise it. Sexuality, sex is the (imaginary)Darwinian comedic-tragedy of reproductive-evolution for mammals (and others.) As an aside, we impose temporal and spatial constraints on sexual activity. One ‘must not’ as an adult-being have sex with a baby-being, toddler-being or young- teenage-being. The specific boundaries for sexual activities include the notions of public and private space- place. Temporally, the specific boundaries for beginning sexual activities, especially intergenerational sex, usually vary from 16-years-old to 21-years-old.

A sexual relation with time is a priori consensual for time always wants to fuck. It also ‘fucks with us’ on a daily (and nightly) basis, in an absurd non-consensual quasi-sexual (violation?) which is necessary for existence. Shall we ‘fuck back?’ Yes. Besides time is a concept not a creature, and therefore these ethical constraints don’t apply (or do they, for time maybe a creature?)

Chronicity is birth and born. It is also slowly eating away at the flesh sack that is ‘you.’ Its Sein is an epistemological construction and discovered-being with a pre-epistemological ontology. Chronicity for the homo sapien is deadly, as in Heidegger’s philosophy of ‘being-toward-death.’ Life is a terminal illness; Chronicity itself states so much. Levinas contra Heidegger injects time’s Sein with a much-needed enjoyment of Eros, the erotic ‘not-yet’ or ‘the future in the present.’ Both are interpretations of life-death. And both provide a balance of an ontological-epistemological concept being I will develop as- into- (uncovered-?) Chronicity. However, I will ‘move far from’ these 20^th Century thinkers although I will note their work and its resonance-residue.

We are finite creatures immersed-immanent in- to- a sea of infinity. Music especially expresses time in its barest form, symphonic vibrations, Jazz flows, screaming Punk Pangs, these vibrations can be felt in the tactile by the deaf or hearing impaired. There is a certain musicality of time as well. Time-perception, which is a neurological movement, slows in boredom; for instance, waiting for a bus ‘goes on forever’ its movement is a slow adagio, yet time ‘flies when you are having fun,’ a cliché that expresses the quickening movement of time. Time itself is musical-water, with its own waves, tides and beings-immersed in it. We are finite creatures immersed in the sea of infinity (and infinite possibilities.)

In Buddhism time is cyclical and the ‘goal’ as it were is to ‘get out of the cycle of samsara.’ Paradoxically, samsara (cyclical time-suffering or eternal return of being-toward-death) is not separate from nirvana. My knowledge of Buddhist philosophy is limited to Soto Zen studies and a month at a Zen monastery; therefore, I will, for now, limit myself to Christianity and post-Christianity temporal obsessional neurosis. However this limitation will dissolve along with this analysis.

Christianity, it is well known, is obsessed with beginnings and endings; from genesis to the ‘return of Christ’ god sets up a definite time structure for his followers.  My reading of this original (?) temporal obsessive is god-as-Father Time first embodied in Christ and then dissolved into the Holy Spirit, the movement of god through his church (for Catholics, the pope; for Protestants other institutions.) For the philosopher Žižek, this Holy Spirit means the people (especially the excited-leftist masses). Žižek is widely known to eschew what he calls the pre-Christian cyclical pagan view of time. Unexpectedly, His-his (god and Žižek’s) exegeses ‘enjoy’ the cut off from the pagan cycle into the linear temporality of the corpus of Jesus, and then into the communicative element of the Holy Spirit. A related thinker, Badiou takes up temporality and place in an interesting and novel sense as well; for Badiou the very idea of Communism floats from one era – in a linear but not always clear manner – to another, consistently motivating homo sapiens toward drastic cuts with the past, a commonality of theory that is shared between these three thinkers (god, Žižek and Badiou).

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Chronicity is a concept that drives me mad. It, with the element of time pressing down on- to- the subject I (one can note Kant’s anal-explosive obsession with ‘getting it all out’ in time); this manic madness is as if one with optical vision looks directly at the sun, not for seconds, but for hours. How can a concept drive? Driving something implies temporality and place (a car, a chariot, a brain). Was Kant driven to madness about time? Was he not such a temporal obsessive, a measurement freak, that people set their watches by his entirely precise movement through the park? Although I can be a temporal obsessive, my situation is not nearly as severe as Kant’s – thanks mainly to contemporary pharmaceuticals that alleviate such natural OCD trips.

I must start again, re- noting and re- tracking myself. I’ve made my exegesis about old (grand) Father Time, the great incarnation and then Spirit of Christianity. To steal from some grammatically challenged church managers of a place of worship in the United States: He is Risen. Now it was time for the Jesus-zombie to return to his heavenly abode, the redemption of humanity via a linear process is now going along smartly. He is either reunited with himself (according to some) or reunited with his father (according to some others.) Either way, the body is gone from Terra. Raped by god (her son?), Mary gives birth to it: Jesus. Her son has been killed for god (himself?) and returned to himself or his father. His Holy Spirit will act, and Christians will wait for his return (this time without rape, just a lot of killing, burning and eternal – but tediously linear  – redemption or damnation.) (This whole narrative and its interpretations trump Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and make it seem intensely ‘normal.’)

Via industrialised standardisation the amount of humans has increased from 1 billion at the beginning of the 20^th Century to 7 billion at the time of this writing: the early 21^st Century. Deeper still, did these early 18^th and 19^th Century (god-inspired) managers with their click- clock and tick- tock uncover something beyond the Spirit of Finitude (the Christian exegesis?) In other words, did these temporal obsessives (factory managers, monastics, cargo-shipment dealers, etc.) epistemologically uncover an ontological phenomenon? More radically, did they uncover a part of reality, a quanta of everything with their watches? Did Kant’s numina, the only inferable, dissolve on the factory floor?

Chronicity, in this sense, may perhaps have subsets from the (pre-) beginning of the universe (the Big Pang), to movements in a symphony, or the body of a turtle, to the reflective contemplation or boredom you maybe experiencing whilst reading this. Chronicity gives birth and is born. It unravels through seasonal cycles, the Christian end-beginning, the theoretical concept of Eddington’s ‘time arrow’ that leads from the Big Pang to the ‘heat death’ of the universe – a realm where time, but perhaps not Chronicity (!), may stop, can time-in-itself die? Chronicity is the underbelly of cultural change(s), Darwinian-biological-genetic-phenotype evolution, and space itself, for how can I arrive at any space without first arriving.

 Gender and sexuality theorist Judith Butler locates performativity, ‘the norms and mores that contour, animate … a [human] body” as a repetitive copy of a copy; performativity is temporal in that it is birth and born. It is something that happens over time and in time [for us-Beings and other creature Beings], but its genesis is not known, cannot be accessed. To arrive over time, is this not Chronicity-in-Itself as an (un-) folding ‘over’ and ‘in’ and ‘under’ and ‘for?’ For Butler this performativity is highlighted in the social constructions of gendered norms and mores. Uncovering this type of over time repetition without a definite beginning results in some questionable conclusions: (a) Is Butler working with the tick- tock of the clock, for she needs this ‘momentum’ to drive her bodily (spatial) performativity-anality and anal-ysis, and (b) she may have uncovered yet another aspect of Chronicity, that is its gender(ing) and its suspension or (un-) knowableness (and even its Symbolically encoded heterosexuality via the (imaginary-conceptual) numina?)

Chronicity’s being-in-itself, if we suspend ourselves in- to- manic psychosis for a minute, May envelope the ‘we,’ and yet have its-own- multiplicities qua fractures of alterity. As an ontological phenomenon, that is in-itself as universal and infinite, both as birth and born it yet does not structure or materialise every- thing. Kant’s numen remains intact. The hubris of ontology of everything is reduced to ashes. As Avital Ronnell notes, the philosopher must start with stupefaction (and befuddlement) and end with it.

The tides of Karma in Buddhist philosophy offer another potential uncovering of Chronicity’s being. As stated earlier, perhaps the movements of time, and ‘time’ itself are a subset of being-as-Chronicity; time through the tick tock clock is an uncovered element of the necrosis of time for homo sapiens and other animals and perhaps the universe itself. Now secularized and sectioned, time stands alone above and creates a concept. Perhaps time, to crudely put it, ‘angry’ by its new constraints, its new institutionalisation, for it can no longer be an ultimate signifying chain for humanity; language and dis-covering has uncovered a potential dis- ease with life, a breakage of the linear consistency of the subset of Chronicity called time. Heidegger’s ‘being-toward-death’ realised this ‘contemporary’ driving that now has the emergency break on!

(Temporal obsessives from the monastics, to the hypochondriac Kant, to factory managers and scientists have grabbed the emergency break and the car-care which is now skidding out of control.) Many political and personal ramifications result from this 19^th Century accumulation of partially uncovered Chronicity, or necrosis without redemption; one can note the atheism of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, Heidegger’s own fatalistic vitality for Nazism and France’s contemporary hyper-secular ban on Muslim head-scarves and body coverings for females. Not only confined to the linear string of signifiers imbued in Christianity and its manifestations in monastic, industrial and post-industrial temporal neurosis, time itself has other features. These features are uncovered in various ways through different cultural lenses, and perhaps the pre-Christian pagan cycle and other cyclical uncovering(s) of Chronicity throws the entire concept and this entire project into nothing more than mere waist? Chronicity’s bare bones may be another chimera, another distraction of junk philosophy, yet the I continues, perhaps in vain.

Returning to Buddhist philosophy, temporal constraints and transcendence from constraint, are products of actions, this is a relation with time that is also shared with Christianity (whereby an eternal or perpetual god is the genesis of actions).  However, in Buddhist phenomenology there is no singular beginning from an eternal Sein, but rather an endless- eternal return of cycles, cycles that can be overcome through various actions. In this sense, the human being or the hungry ghost may be able to – through appropriate actions – ameliorate their condition, becoming gods or humans and ultimately may even leave this cycle altogether, whilst paradoxically remaining a part of it: nirvana and samsara are not two. At this point, given my limited knowledge of Buddhist philosophies I will leave the subject, but its constrained exegesis is here, as promised earlier.

Finally, returning to the heterosexuality of time, yet also the neuter of Chronicity, have I managed to ‘lay bare’ that which ‘fucks with us’ that which ‘we waist’ that which ‘we kill’ that which we … and so on… The temporal language is not lacking. Chronicity is birth and born. It grows into both beautiful and monstrous edifices, and it can even produce beautiful monstrosities like life-toward-death. Death is a central part of Chronicity’s dictionary definition; its denotative Sein is construed through the senses of homo sapiens whether impaired, damaged or functioning ‘normally.’ Heterosexual, Chronicity needs to interact with the Other on a sensual level, the Other; from the pond of shit grows the food.  Yet the movement of birth and born is also homosexual, for Chronicity fractures and rubs against itself, creating ripples: Einstein’s demonstration of the phenomenon of time slowing as an object moves faster may uncover yet another (homosexual) aspect of time. Whilst Chronicity infers the numina of its Other, and jolts against it, this is a deeply humanist and post-humanist reflection, for what is numina other than what is purported to be only ever inferred by humans and language or more broadly bodily semiotics. Orgasmic juices, bosons, gluons, fermions and morons fly out in (im)possible directions based on probabilities. Chronicity breaks down the distinction of phenomena and numina. The homo sapien ego breaches into its unconscious, which withdraws from inspection; the (human) ego’s battles with the super-ego’s invocations of Father Time, dissolved as it is through various mechanisms into the Holy Spirit of European & Western discourse, result in probabilistic quantitative and qualitative psychosocial biological and other bodily embodiments as the super-ego internalizes, along with the ego, the secularism-Christian nuclear battles and subsequent radiation of modernity and post-modernity. The Holy Spirit contra other Uncovered Chronicity both reside within and outside time: without gender, without time, out of time, running out of time, having plenty of time, being finite and infinite, a crawling paradox, a jolting (Darwinian) play of birthing and borning, an infant, the aged, the free and the caged: how can It be ‘laid bare’ when it lays us (fucks with us?) The I is- are- laid bare before the numina, the only-inferable-Being of Chronicity and its ever pleased- discontented- subset: Time.

________________________

(Note: The senses I mentioned earlier can be damaged, and it is important for philosophy to recognize this fact. A philosophy that does not and/or eschews any technological advancement for the amelioration or complete recovery of damaged senses is dubious. Here the anarcho-primitivist  (or anarcho-ableist) theorist John Zerzan comes to mind.  Anarcho-primitivism advocates for the total abolition of technology to a pre-Neolithic era. A return to Eden as Zerzan himself admits, and does not account for a plethora of Being-realities, at best, or despises them as refuse of the techno edifice, at its worst.)

“If people listen to me its because there is always a small crowd around an accident” – Georges Bataille

At base, I am attempting, hesitatingly creating a new queer theoretical analytic of the spacial, scatological, temporal and psychical relations we have- to- with- anality, sexual abjectivity and hegemonic meta-narratives of individualism. The anus is an important (and central) site of this investigation; scatological investigations invoke numerous tropes ripe for examination. For instance, the statements “my life is shit” or “I have a shitty life” or the supremely interesting declaration “fuck this shit,” all encapsulate what I am calling the sensual relationship betwixt sexual abjectivity and intestinal divinity.

If there is a place for divinity it is in our intestines, the guts of the human specimen. Dissecting this alive cadaver, the living dead, or the undead, a negativity of sewage, sullage and sludge combined with a positively painful jouissance of erotogenic zones. Bataille, who Foucault called the most important writer of the 20th Century, notes these various caverns in his collected works Divine Filth. Bataille writes, “Looking out at London, I became engulfed in anguish and cried. Childhood memories of little girls playing paddleball merged with the funny. I was empty, and this void, I imagined would be difficult to fill: What horrors would I use? I was powerless and degraded, and in this state – where it’s impossible to imagine a creature more washed up than me – I was Filthy. In that room, and in those dives we visited, our hearts were crushed by anguish and we exceeded our limits.” (Italics are my own)

Exceeding one’s limits is a central point within psychoanalysis. Knowing one’s limits is a matter of tarrying with gaps, caves, underground places and also ascending the manic limits of rapture. Also knowing that we cannot always know our limits creates a a type of neo-Freudian (and Marxist) class-based reality-testing that allows for a centrality of investigations around our own powerlessness and the caprice of the chance, society and ultimately death. Here the pleasure principle is united with reality-testing for both want to avoid pain and pursue pleasure; however, pain and pleasure are terms that are often interchangeable. (Bataille goes on to note whips, chains and other forms of debasing pleasures in Divine Filth, a book I will use as a companion in my continuing analysis.)

A scatological-queer analysis will seek to disrupt contemporary memes in the western canon of both popular and academic culture – often the two are interchangeable. I would like to anal- yse the various workings of technocratic administration in government, whereby entire peoples turn over their political agency, sometimes with little or no protest and also the neo-manifest destiny ideologies of the so-called positive-thought movements.

Furthering this, as we beat around- and in- the bushes and nettles of New Age psychosis, I will attempt to uncover the radical evil of capitalism’s positive psychology and the integration of Buddhism into new forms of oppression; the ideologies spewed forth by the pedlars of positivity like Eckhart Tolle, author of the creepily Biblical book A New Earth and The Power of Now, to D.T Suzuki Roshi, the Zen Buddhist fascist-cum-hippy guru who left Japan for San Francisco in the late 1960s, and the insidious Dalai Lama who inanely proclaims “The purpose of life is to be happy.” Well, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes what if god or happiness is the Nazi official pushing the button that gases the masses of Jews? What if your happiness is radically unethical? And then, we are pushed into the realms and reams of ethics.

I am deeply suspicious of Buddha (and Buddhism), as I am of Christ (and Christianity) both figures of patriarchal fiat, ennui and privileged asceticism; Buddhism actually has a more aristocratic and elitist beginning than Christianity, and therefore was more easily assimilated into the culture of its day.  According to myth”the Buddha” ran away from his wife and child on a decade long journey of “self exploration” until he “became enlightened.” His enlightenment produced risibly banal proclamations about suffering that became radically codified into monastic rituals. He retroactively disguised himself as the progenitor of ethics by establishing that we must “abandon our attachments;” I am sure this rolled well with his hiatus from fatherhood.

Returning to Bataille, he writes “Zen neglects nothingness, the given supposition/ no longer evoking nothingness/ the idea of luck/ must return.” What is Bataille stating? There can be multiple analyses of this statement, but I read it as an ode to chance, luck and caprice; ostensibly ideas Zen would embrace, however the tyranny of Zen’s (and Buddhism’s) eternal present (which so easily fits in with today’s capitalism) creates a hegemonic structure, encapsulating an anti-intellectualism, anti-social change trope that emanates from the Buddha and “blooms” like Lotus in the New Age psychotic. A book called The Secret written by the sadist charlatan Rhonda Byrne is the penultimate example of this contemporary western-capitalist psychosis. Byrne, who stated that after the 2004 massive tsunami in Indonesia and the South Pacific that the people there were thinking tsunami like thoughts (!), and that they – as agents of the seismic activity  - brought the catastrophe upon themselves.

Here I will quote some of the ideology from Byrne’s website:

“The Power is the handbook to the greatest force in the universe – The Power to have everything you want … Perfect health, incredible relationships, a career you love, a life filled with happiness, and the money you need to be, do, and have everything you want, all come from The Power … the life of your dreams has always been closer to you than you realized, because The Power – to have everything good in life – is inside you … To create anything, to change anything, all it takes is just one thing…” Perhaps the problem with Holocaust victims was that they were thinking “genocidal like thoughts?” Or Africans en route through the Middle Passage as slaves of European colonialism where thinking “slave like thoughts?” The disgusting consequences of these ‘thinkers’ and ‘cultural figures’ in the body politic cannot be underestimated. I recall speaking with a young, white gay man – middle class – living (comfortably) in Los Angeles who on the issue of the Prison-Industrial Complex and other oppressions shrugged off these after ascribing to this/these neo-manifest destiny Amerikan ideology.

Auschwitz victims’ corpses - New Age psychotic-sadist Rhonda Byrne would say these people “manifested” their reality and deaths during the Holocaust.

We are then left at the end of the page, viewable here, with a plethora of links leading us to various places to buy Byrne’s Power, which is definitely giving her all “the money [to] have everything [she] wants.” I am wondering what this “Power” is?

David Lynch, the renowned film director, became smitten with Transcendental Meditation, whereby through an expensive introduction you are given a mantra that puts you “in the the Unified Field.” Apparently, in this “Unified Field of modern physics” (where Lynch embarrassingly fails at basic science; where is Alan Sokal on this?) you receive the qualities of “bliss, creativity … ” and whatever else suits your fancy.

All of these neo-manifest destiny West (Coast) New Age psychotic delusional tropes have one thing in common: the individual is master of themselves. If you fail, it is your own damn fault. There is no room for social critique. If you are poor, think ‘rich thoughts.’ Don’t organise and express your rage at the system of inequality, don’t question why we must meet each other on these strange, hierarchal terms; no the subject is told to ‘go inward.’

“Buddha on a Barcode” Picture by Eilif Verney-Elliott (2013) taken from a “Yogi Tea” box.

Perhaps acknowledging the “shitty lives” we lead, shitting daily as we do, we can “fuck this shit up” and create a real “insurrection at the ontological level” (Judith Butler); perhaps a new move for queer theorists is to take up the call for reality-neurosis contra neo-manifest destiny psychotic withdrawal (I am using psychotic here in Lacan’s terms) along with a move into a scatological position of deconstructive propositions making embodied antagonisms to the structural-Symbolic issues of patriarchy, class and other oppressions. 

Communism is togetherness – the Mitsein, the being-with – understood as the belonging to existence of the individuals, which means, in the existential meaning, to their essence. Society means an unessential – even if necessary – link between individuals who are, in the final analysis, essentially separate.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. “On communism.” in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

…Communism says more and says something else than a political meaning. It says something about property. Property is not only the possession of goods. It is precisely beyond (and/or behind) any juridical assumption of a possession. It is what makes any kind of possession properly the possession of a subject, that is properly an expression of it. Property is not my possession: it is me.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. “On communism.” in: Critical Legal Thoughts. July 26, 2009. (English).

Psychoanalysis is often represented as both a wound to- and bound with- the confessional, Christian ideology of the self-made self: being-toward-god, for god. Philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway notes several of these wounds to self-centered theological, anthropocentrism of Western Christianity: the (1) Copernican Wound (we aren’t the centre of the universe), the (2) Darwinian Wound (we are just a part of process, not its epitome or ideal), the (3) Freudian Wound (we are not rational subjects) and more recently the (4) Cybernetic Wound (an ever increasingly fractured, globalised and quickening subjectivity). These Wounds dissimulate and disrupt the self-made self; more specifically the self-made man. Freud utilised various techniques, including his vast knowledge of history, context and culture to un-cover what he called the unconscious. Slavoj Žižek describes the unconscious as “things that we don’t know we know.” In other words, within a the sphere of ourself, in my definition, exists a level outside that is inside. Lacan calls this the Other within. And this split-subjectivity and subject (person) cannot reconcile particulars and universals in the Hegelian self-consciousness sense of Absolute Knowledge; therefore Lacan calls this the cut, a cut within the subject. 

The quest(ion) I am moving into here now is about how Capitalism is the primary structure – conscious and unconscious – of our lives, and how we can and should disrupt this ubiquitous, meta-narrative. From various psychoanalytical perspectives and critical queer theoretics we have a vast repertoire of notionality, or what I am developing as a particular, heterogenous and paradoxically monolithic psychosocial and economic structure that orients the ways in which objects, people and Things* come within our sphere of existence (for more on this see Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology). 

The various Wounds mentioned above involve a de-centering, or a shaking, of the psychosocial and epistemological ground; an apt description might call these moments of collective, existential earthquaking, yet these are also deeply idiosyncratic and personal quakes. Throughout the arch of Western envelopment new subjectivities have been born through performative citationality; performative citationality is in part about tradition, the transmission of knowledge, including what constitutes and frames acceptable and unacceptable acts and desires; this interacts, in what we can crudely call a dialect, with individual, instinctual and driven againstness- or (with-) outsiderness. A dance or tarrying with reality testing and pleasure, both involving sadism and masochism. Performativity, as I develop it, is a being-in-the-world a ‘not yet’ and also a deeply present now of Thisness. Citationality is more about conserving, or referring to traditional mores, parental invocations or onto-religious demands; citationality is about an active citing and recalling of these norms to contain bodily practices and psychical imaginings; citationality is not always reactionary as when precarious populations preserve their histories against the megalith of imperial and/or other oppressions (renaming Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples’ day is an example). Performance and citation operate on both the conscious and unconscious level. (Performativity tends to be more unconscious whilst the opposite is true of citationality.)

My engagement as a Leftist, deeply committed to ending Capitalism is: How might we collectively engage in a collective psychical, economic and existential Anarcho-Socialist Wound to Capitalism Itself. And what do we want this Wound to be? The Wounds, as described by Haraway, that I have mentioned above are often called ‘Turnings.’ Whilst a turning or a series of turns is necessary for the events described above, they comprise the processes that precede- and proceed from- the break-point (or Wound) itself. The Wound can never be localised; it can only be approximated by its turnings, so this idea of turning is helpful in that it moves away from narrow concept of the Event to a situated but fluidly temporal Eventness. We need an anti-captialist Wound more than ever. Or rather Capitalism demands of us that we Wound It, for it is no longer even acceptable at its most basic ethical level. Built on citationalities of racism, the slave trade, heterosexism, patriarchy and imperial ambitions, etc. Capitalism Itself is involved in its own desecration as a systemic paradigm for us, beings-in-the-world. I perennially ask: Why Must We Meet Each Other On These Terms? 

“New Breed of Bargain Hunters Move From Supermarket to Supermarket to Find Best Prices” (2011) Courtesy of http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk

Often the experience of shopping for my most basic needs – food – invokes the above question. When I meet the person – who is made to be a regulatory automaton – at the ‘checkout,’ there is this sense of purposeless; a dissociation from the act of food distribution and from the person (people) distributing the food. These matrices of power become far more complex when we note economic class; the shopper is attached to (momentarily) the cash-register, and (generally) the checkout (girl) person is a secondary Object, who becomes feminised through their position. In this instance I am referring to the idea within patriarchy that the feminine, in Kantian terms whereby he locates the female as beautiful which therefore must be protected- and can be exposed to more abuse (especially economic exploitation.) Kant notes the male as sublime and therefore a deeper, more reflective (protective- protected and more able to cause harm) creature. Here I am playing with Kant by adding my own feminist notes in parentheses.

So, I ask: Why Must We Meet Each Other On These Terms? And how do we develop a collective, psychical series of turnings from which we can produce an Anarcho-Socialist Wound to Capitalism Itself? Here begins the core questing blow: How Do We Dismantle the United States Government and Empire That Is the Centre of Capital’s Stability? In subsequent analyses I may develop a sketch if you will of various programs and performative theatre (in the radical sense of the word, see John Steppling’s work on theatre here) that might avail, incite and help us create or enhance turnings against Capital leading to an Eventness of radical democratic Anarcho-Socialism. To finish, and this is an ongoing dialogue, we must take over the means of production (and here we must consider violence id-if necessary) from the Capitalist Elite who maintain their hegemony over the structures; this may involve a degree or degrees of hierarchal, technocratic revolutionary engagement alongside- and developed with- mass action to abolish economic class structures creating new possibilities for different psychosocial, LIVEABLE realities.

“Dunu Roy: Slums are a best practice” Courtesy the alternative.in

*I will discuss Things in the Lacanian-Heideggerian sense at some point, and want to hold this word as a referent for future resonance within my work. I apologise for the lack of description of Things but suggest the reader investigate Heidegger’s notion of the Thing, along with me.

* I suggest reading the article related to the last image here.

If what Freud discovered, and rediscovers ever more abruptly, has a meaning, it is that the signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and irregardless of their character or sex; and that everything pertaining to the psychological pregiven follows willy-nilly the signifier’s train, like weapons and baggage.

- Jacques Lacan, The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’. 1955.

Just as there is a power to punish, a power of working (labor-power) [force de travail], etc., there is a prephonetic and prephonological speaking-power, but it’s always invested in phonetic and phonological productions.

Such a formula is capable of generating, if not a “new” linguistics, at least a new functionality of objects traditionally described by linguistics, both the structural and the generative type: for it is a question of a generativity that’s considerably less Cartesian but, hopefully, a little more “powerful” [puissant].[13] What this generativity first contains is the critique—not the destruction, but the displacement—of the instrumental and functional conception of language [langage]: language does not speak to communicate, it speaks (to) speak and (to) communicate eventually, as if speaking were first an immanent process, a production, a speaking speaking before being this spoken speaking that linguists call a “Corpus”, thereby turning it so easily into a simple instrument of communication. Speaking language [langue] is the formula of a pregnancy: as if the means were pregnant with its ends, gained the dignity, continuity and limitlessness of its ends and sovereignly attributed to itself their nobility for “itself”. This is precisely what an “active” linguistics must think from the start: speaking [le parler] as simply speaking [parlant] our generativity to us, an unlimited speaking that enjoys its limitlessness.

-  François Laruelle, Toward an Active Linguistics (The Notion of Phonesis), (translated by Taylor Adkins, full here)

‘Basically, I have only one object of historical study, that is the threshold of modernity. Who are we, we who speak a language such that it has powers that are imposed on us in our society as well as on other societies? What is this language which can be turned against us which we can turn against ourselves? What is this incredible obsession with the passage to the universal in Western discourse? That is my historical problem.’

- Michel Foucault

The sensation of the corpse is immanent. When traversing space, we feel the body. With time we feel the death of the body. At moments I have felt as if I was pulling my body, a corpse around with me. I am sure this is not atypical; in fact, if it is not consciously experience, the death notation is sublimated into the unconscious. Dreams, or lack of remembering them, indicate all types of interesting formations that people attempt to avoid whilst awake. The Spectre of the Corpse haunts us, but we cannot investigate it psychically when there is so much white noise; the sensation of the corpse has been both physically and psychosomatically diffused from contemporary Western culture. Culturally, the so-called West, has been devoted to eliminating death from the public discourse. As Michel Foucault so aptly pointed out, graveyards moved slowly from the centre of the city to its periphery; executions moved from public spectacles to indoor, intimate events betwixt the accused, the law assemblages and the victims. A narrowing of the spaces for death discussion occurred in Europe around the 18th Century. A whole assemblage of devices of the imaginary came into play, especially lanced onto the body of the newly constructed being: hitting- creating- a regime for the homo sapien at its earliest with the child. Foucault states,

When, with Rousseau and Pestallozzi, the eighteenth century concerned itself with constituting for the child, with educational rules that followed his development, a world that would be adapted to him, it made it possible to form around children an unreal, abstract, archaic environment that had no relation to the adult world. The whole development of contemporary education, with its irreproachable aim of preserving the child from adult conflicts, accentuates the distance that separates, for a man, his life as a child and his life as an adult. That is to say, by sparing the child conflicts, it exposes him to a major conflict, to the contradiction between his childhood and his real life. If one adds that, in its educational institutions, a culture does not project its reality directly, with all its conflicts and contradictions, but that it reflects it indirectly through the myths that excuse it, justify it, and idealize it in a chimerical coherence; if one adds that in its education a society dreams of its golden age [...] one understands that fixations and pathological regressions are possible only in a given culture, that they multiply to the extent that social forms do not permit the assimilation of the past into the present content of experience.

Here Foucault draws a line, an analysis, and also makes a conclusion. Generally, Foucault is not prone to both diagnosis and prognosis. The “sparing the child [of] conflicts” also, of course, means shielding them from death. As theological certainties diverged, multiplied and divided into Enlightenment questions, a new aegis was needed: the certainty of the child, the innocence of the child, and the perfection of childhood. And more importantly the certainty of adult, the parental arbiter of Truth, the realm of nuclearised family; the existential crisis provoked by various accumulations, new assemblages, lines of flight, flows, break-flows, rhizomes, circles and protestations sparked an unconsciousness of the conscious.

Holbein’s Dance of Death, 1538, Described as “The Nun in her rich apartment listening to a serenade by her lover … when Death extinguishes her candles” Courtesy of :http://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/hans-holbeins-totentanz.html

Above we behold Holbein’s Dance of Death from 1538, here Death is present; or, more radically, Death is presence. The psyche construction is variant, heterogenous and diffused by our perspective eyes, descriptors and nouns, yet I aver a consciousness of the unconscious is present. The unknown, yet imminent presence of Death is consciously present. Oppose this to my earlier matrix of an unconsciousness of the conscious, and the picture becomes clearer: The unconscious is not a mere ‘negation’ of the conscious, it stands alone (U), yet there is space between them, far more complicated than ‘the preconscious;’ it is negated consciousness or -Q. Or, in other words, the negation of consciousness exists in- and without- whilst still being retentive of its existent juices; Jacques Lacan asks simple, yet striking question (almost a Koan), “What is an unconscious thought?” In other words, the Middle Ages addressed Death without a mere negation, unlike post-18th Century European morals, which is process or ‘drive’ but really without an object of desire (Heaven, etc.), or with desire as its own object (X=X) . For instance, in contemporary Christianity, the loop between drive and even the most basic object petite a never reaches a line, it is always in the Imaginary: ritual flights: whether ‘speaking in tongues,’ mass services, or ‘paradise on Earth’ memes from Jehovah’s Witnesses to anarcho-primitivists. In our limited vocabulary, it is difficult to say much more theoretically, as we are in a regime of pure drive (-X): a ceaseless obsession with categorisation- taxonomy, circulation, monitoring, checking, checking, checking; asking our-Selves ’what is there, who am I, how am I, how are you?’ Even, and especially, if this process is unconscious, for we live in what I am calling the ages of an unconsciousness of the conscious.

Holbein’s imagery typifies the way ‘feudal-theological’ death can be juxtaposed to the (post) Enlightenment-era negation of the negation; or the sublimation/repression of the death drive even further into the basements of our psyches. Death is not stamped out after the 18th Century from our psyches, but it is certainly dissected, pressed into obsessive sublimation, regression, repetition, repression and endless process or drive (-X). New regimes of taxonomy label, insert and prod the scalp, the corpus, new ‘races’ are created, new ideals of sexuality and familial bondage bubble and turn in stew. The corpse is becoming alive. Animated! Zombies. Here is a Turning from an consciousness of the unconscious to an unconsciousness of the conscious. In the first Q —> (U) via (-Q), and in the second U —-> Q via (-Q), then later —-> (-X) (X=X). However, it isn’t this simple. First, “a culture does not project its reality directly, with all its conflicts and contradictions, but … reflects it indirectly through the myths that excuse it, justify it, and idealize it in a chimerical coherence” exemplifies a cultural assemblage of U —-> Q via (-Q), or movements from theological collectivity to theo-educational sublimation/regression/repression. Foucault notes the obsession with ‘bringing to light’ the asylums, mad houses (with Philippe Pinel), and the later regimes of total bio-political control obsessed with transparency, processes and knowing; adding Freud, Lacan and Marx (F+L+M = Wha?) together we can note these psychosocial accumulations lead (or are led by) a transition from feudalism to mercantile petite bourgeois individualising (not individualism at this point) in parts of 18th Century Europe.

Kelly Osbourne and (Strangely Disaffected) DJ Luke Worrall attend the Heidi Klum’s 10th Annual Halloween Party in West Hollywood, California.

Within Holbein’s 16th Century imagery is the kernel of this accumulation, or perhaps the initial Symbolic 16th Century individualising snowball turned later into the 18th Century individualism avalanche, and our contemporary celebratory- consumerist- celebrity cultural ‘cute’ unconsciousness: American (!) Halloween.

Anne E.G. Nydam writes,

Holbein’s Dance of Death wasn’t first published until 1538, possibly because of disapproval of its content – it was pretty seditious in some ways, highlighting the corruption of pope, emperor, and magistrate, among others.  Despite or because of this, it was popular enough to change the Dance of Death genre.  For example, before Holbein it had been common to depict Death and all the people in one large scene dancing together (perhaps pointing more directly to the Black Death and other episodes where many people were struck down at once.)  Holbein instead showed separate vignettes of each person being summoned in his or her own daily environment.  Sometimes Death is actually the one killing the victim, not just notifying him that his time has come, as had been the standard before.  Holbein’s Death is often quite mischievous, as for example stealing the rich man’s money, or trying to draw the astrologer’s attention away from the heavenly spheres and toward contemplation of a skull instead.

Remarkably, the visibility of death in Holbein’s oeuvre leads “away from the heavenly spheres and toward the contemplation of a skull instead!” Here we have the individualising aspects that later become atomised features of daily life, psychic assemblages and (later, 21st Century) ‘social networks.’ But for Holbein, Death is “quite often mischievous, as for example stealing a rich man’s money;” Matthew 6:20 implores the reader/listener to “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.” Also Death could be playing with Matthew 19:21, where Jesus states, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Both statements obviously revived – within all Christian traditions – during the Reformation (Holbein was commissioned by Catholics, Lutherans and Humanists alike).

Nydam continues,

At this time of year [Halloween] people in my neighborhood blithely decorate their houses with skeletons, skulls, and Grim Reapers, thinking of it as fun and festive.  It occurs to me that perhaps we should reconsider our condescension toward people in what we like to call Dark Ages and ignorant times — they apparently had a much more sophisticated and multi-faceted view of images of Death.  What we glance at and dismiss as cute holiday decor they would perceive as moral lesson, social commentary, and humor, simultaneously knowing the very real fear of Death and acknowledging what it says about life.

The consciousness of the unconscious transmogrifies into the unconsciousness of the conscious. Hereby, “with Rousseau and Pestallozzi, the eighteenth century concerned itself with constituting for the child, with educational rules that followed his development, a world that would be adapted to him, it made it possible to form around children an unreal, abstract, archaic environment that had no relation to the adult world … culture does not project its reality directly [to a child], with all its conflicts and contradictions, but that it reflects it indirectly through the myths that excuse it, justify it, and idealize it in a chimerical coherence.” Simply, the ‘child’ becomes a sheltered being, educated in the ways of the Imaginary, yet not into the Symbolic or the blotchy mistakes of the impossible Real. As we live in an ever widening- heightening- zenith of the Imaginary, pure drive (-X) of an unconsciousness of the conscious, Nydam’s remarks should be taken even more seminally, “it occurs to me that perhaps we should reconsider our condescension toward people in what we like to call Dark Ages and ignorant times — they apparently had a much more sophisticated and multi-faceted view of images of Death.  What we glance at and dismiss as cute holiday decor they would perceive as moral lesson, social commentary, and humor, simultaneously knowing the very real fear of Death and acknowledging what it says about life.” We need Symbolic efficacy, or as Foucault noted “one understands that fixations and pathological regressions are possible only in a given culture, that they multiply to the extent that social forms do not permit the assimilation of the past into the present content of experience.” Here, I will end this process.

“And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.”

― Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons

What is the reality of a sphere? I have distant visions with faint hymns, but these cannot tell me the answer. The palpitating coolness of inverted destruction – some call it self-destruction – is but one effect of a formation. This formation we call the sphere of reality. Payday loans, credit cards, kids digging up coal and shitting in outdoor latrines – these are from Santa. Our wish-lists are getting more moribund by the year. “Can’t I just get through the day without wanting to throw myself in front of a bus?” The answer is maybe no.

If there is anything so heretical about existence it is this: that we have one!

Typhoons strand entire fleshy masses: some people are islands unto themselves. Who cares? We – in the so-called ‘West’ - pretend to care when we aren’t simply coiled into the blanket that is Alan Carr: Chatty Man. Our care is a text message, a £1 sent to some aid agency that will spend 99p on administration. That’s care.

So the sphere, albeit undefined, defying a label, defines us. We are within the reality of the sphere. Terrain terror. Happy new year: have you thrown up that vodka with lemon, yet? And the story goes on. We get up. It’s the 2nd of January: time to work. Cleaners, Tesco employees and a few others have been hoovering the grounds during the ‘holiday’ period, keeping things at minimal functionality. London: Tomorrow the great artery system of the metropolis begins pumping at regular intervals: coffee, nicotine, cocaine, Facebook, lunch, the kids, TV. Jean-François Lyotard states,

Eclecticism … the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.

Time for a tummy tuck? Did you buy a puppy for Christmas and watch Al-Jazeera? I am wondering about the spaces between the trees and the need to have a street? Functioning failure, this is what is a part of the sphere’s reality. We live in the sphere, that nebulous circuit board of capitalism and all its veins, its muscular tissues, its scars, its brain haemorrhages, its bruises, “Will Schumacher make it?” the (European News) world cries. But who is Schumacher and who is the (European News) world? The parabola, the cone, the sphere, the right angle and the line all swirled around making nice little happy zones of care. But care has broken itself.

To care is not to care. We need to affect a revolution is psychosomatic models of psychoanalysis and, especially, philosophy. The bones are breaking under the weight of waiting. Time is moving forward into the abyss. We aren’t really here. Lyotard continues,

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences.

Isn’t this heresy? The Marxists, the Christians, the Islamists, the Buddhists, the Hindus, Starbucks …  tell us to move on. We’ve got a destiny to keep! The revolution; the coming; the foaming latte!  So many things need to be recorded, but the VCR is broken. I need a flash drive? No wait, a canister to throw at the police? New Apples are diffuse oysters living on the sides of subjectivity as it floats through the cold Atlantic of consciousness. Here is the end: Communism. But what is the reality of a sphere? The scalpel is not yet adjusted; who will understand?

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself. ”

― Martin Heidegger