Badiou has all the answers

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
A passage from Badiou's <i>Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism</i> HIGHLY relevant to a number of recent threads here:

'What is the real unifying factor behind [the] attempt to promote the cultural virtue of oppressed subsets, this invocation of language in order to extol communitarian particularisms (which, besides language, always refer back to race, religion, or gender)?

It is, evidently, monetary abstraction, whose false universality has absolutely no difficulty accommodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms.

The lengthy years of communist dictatorship will have had the merit of showing that financial globalization, the absolute sovereignty of capital's empty universality, had as its genuine enemy another universal project, albeit a corrupt and bloodstained one: that only Lenin and Mao truly frightened those who professed to boast unreservedly about the merits of liberalism and their general equivalent, or the democratic virtues of commercial communication.

The senescent collapse of the USSR, the paradigm of socialist States, provisionally suspended fear, unleashed empty abstraction, debased thought in general. And it is certainly not by renouncing the concrete universality of truths in order to affirm the rights of 'minorities,' be they racial, religious, national, or sexual, that the devastation will be slowed down.

No, we will not allow the rights of tue-thought to have as their only instance monetarist free exchange and its mediocre political appendage, capitalist-parliamentarism, whose squalor is ever more poorly dissimulated through the fine word 'democracy'."

Yay.... go girl!!!!!!!!
 

Woebot

Well-known member
k-punk said:
And it is certainly not by renouncing the concrete universality of truths in order to affirm the rights of 'minorities,' be they racial, religious, national, or sexual, that the devastation will be slowed down.
Of course a relativist approach to truth will get one precisely nowhere, and I for one would laud the pursuit and affirmation of universal truths, but isnt the problem rather that "the truth" is always subjectivised by people's idealogy?

I seem to recall you coming to a similar point with regards to organised religion, praising it to the skies, but still not offering a way past the problem that religious belief for the most part is beauracratically managed by extremely secular institutions (maybe you should explain the structure of your own cosmology, of uttunul, so people can understand how this works?)

Vis a vis 'minorities' here. This may be by the wayside but I thought i'd bring it up anyway, when Luke was invoking the instance of his mother being a lawyer, I don't think (and correct me if i'm wrong here Luke) he was saying she should be innure to criticism because he was related to her, he was merely saying that, because he knew exactly what sort of things she got up to (on account of knowing her, er, like a son), that he found it hard to believe she was evidence of a "structural evil" That the assertion couldn't be correct because as far as he knew it wasn't applicable to the quarter of law that attempts to deal with matters such as child protection.
 
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luka

Well-known member
well, yeah.

its like this

mark wants to play a game he learned in university. no one else realised he wanted to play a specific game with specific rules. i'm sure if he had explained the game and its rules he would have found some people to play the game with him. they might even have been tactful enough to let him win if thats what he wants.

but he didn't do that, he just went cuckoo when anyone broke the rules of the game, which, since they didn't know what the rules were, was fairly bloody inevitable.

i feel a little guilty for going off on one, of course i do, but i still feel aggreived at marks attitude. he think hes gone cuckoo. the most obvious sign of someone going cuckoo is that you can't speak to them anymore, you can't communicate, the lose that ability to listen and to understand where you're coming from, they're off in their own little tunnelll vision thing. i seen it happen lots of times with people with addictions, but not from people who read to much. thats a new one on me.

so mark, i am sorry for going off on one and i hope you will descend to earth to explain the rules of your game and to try to be a little more considerate and indulgent of other people, decadent humanist nonsense though that may be.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
luka said:
so mark, i am sorry for going off on one and i hope you will descend to earth to explain the rules of your game and to try to be a little more considerate and indulgent of other people, decadent humanist nonsense though that may be.
well that may be going a bit far
redface.gif
there's nearly always some solid thought behind mark's position. if there is a problem it's in getting him to explain that position to ignoramuses like you and me. i'm not proud, i dont mind striking up asking what must appear to be innane questions, in the pursuit of my own greater understanding...
 
Thought and argument is a discipline, if you think everything is subjective and personal then why bother telling anyone about it. The game is not played by rationalists they use reason as a tool for persuasion and philosophy. The game is played (play in the sense of ruleless spontinaeity) by those who cant/wont formailise their ideas. Capitalism would love us all to abandon rational discourse and simply exchange remarks about our favourite perfumes. Politics, social critique and philosophy are not shopping, there are good theories and shit theories but something that cannot be approached by rational criticism is not a theory at all, it has the status of yellow ie. fuck all.

Something of a rant but its annoying to see people attacked for trying to write clearly and rationally with a sense of purpose beyond "self expression".

If peole want to be subjective then we could set up a thread were we exchange inarticulate grunts and then congratulate each other.
 

luka

Well-known member
i don't buy this thing about if you call yourself a rationalist it makes you rational. i don;t think its that easy.

the student wing of the forum likes to use big words and unweildy sentences, i don't think that makes it more convincing.

for example, craner is more convincing than your good self on that nightmares thread, even though i don;t agree with him. he has some knowledge. thats what makes the differnce. knowing the names of philospohers is no substitue for knowledge. that was my original point. mark was making these crazy assertions about things hes entirely ignorant of. hows that disciplined rigourous thought, its just stoopid.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Message from the Professor of Watching Countdown

You don't learn rationality in universities. On the contrary, they are full of the same idiotic embedded subjectitivities that we find defended here and elsewhere on a planet run by an animal which is programmed towards destruction and self-destruction.

As Foucault says, universities are the institutions in which societies reproduce themselves as painlessly as possible.

A personal reference, which is of course irrelevant to rational discourse, as are all personal traits, biographical histories and other random monkey minutiae. But mentioned because it MAY - though this is doubtful, given their virulent intransigence - give the lie to certain parties' resentment-soaked self-loathing-inspired oedipal fantasms. IT may, that is to say, if they are prepared to accept evidence and reasons, if that is part of the 'game' that they are playing. Bts what game are they playing? Just being themselves? Which is 'normal', is it?

Ah, that old ideological gambit. (Where did they learn their game, I wonder? University of Life, with Finchy? )

But - the personal interjection is simply this. The idea that Infinite Thought, Savonarola, Ray Brassier or myself were lauded by the academy is preposterous. We have all been subject to naked psychic terrorism, to every underhand trick in the book that established power uses to protect itself against the threat of reason.

Because rationality, far from receiving institutional support, is by its very nature anti-authoritarian, for the simple reason that authoritarianism is by ITS nature stupid. What is subordinating yourself to authority <i>except</i> saying that you will suspend all capacity to think in the name of idiot subservience to arbitrary monkeymatic convention?

Rationality is hard. It precisely involves suspending ALL your ethnicities, because THERE IS NO GOOD ETHNICITY. And we have to understand ethnicity, as Badiou does, in the widest possible sense, i.e. yes, nationality and race, but also sex and species.

The one thing that makes human beings unique as animals on this sad picture planet is precisely their capacity to DISIDENTIFY with what they are. Sheep have to be sheep. Amoeba have to be amoeba. Yet, because of a strange and random combination of socio-biochemical contingencies, a species has emerged with the capacity to develop thought that is independent of the organismic packaging that has given rise to that very capacity.

This is the strange situation in which we find ourselves. Or rather: that we ourselves are.

Now, this is actually the point at wich religion connects up with politics. The problem with so-called organized religion is not that it overly systematic and inhibits 'natural' 'creative' 'spontaneous' spirituality. There is no such spirituality, and if there were it should be crushed without mercy. No: the problem with organized religion is that it erects a random bureaucratic structure of superstitious mummery to protect human beings' most pathetically anthropomorphic and anthropocentric conception of themselves and their place in the universe.

The idea that the cosmos was created for the benefit of human beings.... that there is a purpose and meaning behind everything laid down in advance by a big benevolent daddy in the sky... that all bad things will be made good at Judgement Day... Organized religion has peddled these sad, infantile and not even minimally coherent fantasies because it makes it easier for it to control populations. And of course, Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquizitor speaks truly when he says that the theistic bureaucrats are merely acting out the WISHES of that population who do indeed want to be controlled, want to be told nice, reassuring bedtime stories, want to have an easy life.

Yes, that is what they want. Even though it is not at all good for them.

Acting rationally is the same thing as acting in your own interests. But this is not the same thing as doing what is pleasurable. What is pleasurable is about doing what is easiest. Yes - intoxicate yourself, fire up the x-box, watch TV - rather than reading a book because, hey, I've had a stressful day and you can't expect me to THINK too? Thus speaks the voice from the oed-I-pod, we've all had it in our heads, we've all succumbed to its temptation.

Lemurian sorcery, like Spinozist religion, is pitiless. The Spinozist God aka the Lemurian uttunul will not reward you, will not love you, will not judge you: not because it is cold, impassive, etc but because no personal predicates of this kind can be applied to Nature (and abstract Nature) as such. There is no personal god, but then there are no persons either.

Learning to dismantle yourself and learning to love uttunul are two surfaces of one auto-affecting libidinal band. Love of God for Spinoza is precisely <i>intellectual </i>: not a matter of erotic love, i.e. of a love slaved to the pleasures of the organs, but a love that can only develop through the cultivation of a rationality that hails from beyond the pleasure principle.

This is the only way to Laetitia, or joy. Because for Spinoza, as for Lemurian Time Sorcery and the Gnostics, being a self, a being situated in the conditions in which it was unfortunate enough to be born (and there is no good situation in which to be born, all organismic existence is of its nature abject) is the only hell there is.

Hence the Gnostic Christ enjoins us to total disidentication with all human bond(age)s, all the bio-social ties that bind.

"Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14 : 25-26)

If any of this has any validity, it is not because 'I' say it.

Writing that comes through my brain and spinal cord to my fingers onto the keyboard is only of worth if it doesn't matter that that happens to be the route it took.
 
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Craner is certainly Knowledgable in the way that only watching fox news can make you.
I am glad you dont agree with him, does that mean you agree with me?
I only refer to philosophers inorder to locate short posts within a wider framework of ideas and to make the disscussion more interesting.
And dont be so hard on non-students you all have the power to rationalise and write eliquently even the sons of lawyers can give it a go.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I think I find Mark's vocabularly frustrating for two reasons - that I don't understand it, and that I do.

a) I don't understand it because I just don't have the breadth of knowledge, background and so on. Which is frustrating and affects me in a number of ways - some +ve and some not.

b) I do understand it because I've seen the style elsewhere, and it seems to connect with some things I'm interested in. But I'm not sure I completely understand it, which takes me back to the paragraph above.

So, for example, the first post in this thread seems to simply be saying that all stuff that liberals chuck into the mix (race, religion, gender) are irrelevant, because ultimately they can be fully accomodated by capitalism - all can be oppressed equally for the greater good of profit.

Can it really as simple as that, though? If it can - why not say it like that? If it can't - what am I missing. I think I know...

...but obviously I don't know for sure, because the langauge and because of (a) and (b) above.

This leads to a number of scenarios - that I should learn more - to get up to speed, that I should ask for clarification, that I should just reflect on it, that I should focus my energies elsewhere instead.

This argument with myself reminds me a bit of the whole argument about rationalism and irrationalism. Duelling dualities. As much as Mark tries to escape it, humans are made up of the rational and the irrational.

Which is a good thing to remember, because ultimately any magickian knows we should be trying to transcend dualities and not trying to violently escape them.

Mark seems to be about communicating with a few people (in this persona at least). We all, of course, only communicate with a few people. But I think I prefer at least to leave the doors a bit more open. Maybe some people do want an "easy life"*, but that doesn't mean they don't know things, can't teach you things, can't make that spark happen, that tiny connection flare up.

The trouble with elitism (and I think I'm right in saying there's stuff on the k-punk blog about being elitist, and if there isn't I'd be interested in why not!) is that it's counter-productive. You get so far with it, but then fall over, because you haven't left any space for the noise, the irrational, the random stuff which kick starts everything else.

Which is why I think rationalism should be a model, can only be a model. It's not the territory...

The more you try to banish the irrational the more it will leap up and bite you on the bum.

So mote it be.



*not that they will necessarily get it, no matter how many books they read, and perhaps they will be subject to psychic terrorism far worse than that meted out on/by a bunch of academics.

And what's wrong with wanting an easy life anyway - isn't that the ultimate aim of communists?
 

luka

Well-known member
i don't get all the vocab but i think rationalist translates as supercillious prig.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
There would be an easy ad hominem rejoinder to John Eden's post, along the lines of wilfully obscurantist esoeteric white male magickians with a small press audience of ooo 20 calling k-kettles black... but...

The claim that I am in any bad sense elitist is ridiculous.

I AM a teacher.

I teach in 16-19 year old kids a Further Education college. The only selection policy is self-selecting: i.e. anyone who has five GCSEs can come to any course I teach.

And more or less everything I say here and on k-punk, I teach to those kids, and they are quite capable of understanding it. That's partly because their minds have not yet been tramlined into a rigid set of binaries (which they first impose then claim they want to spirit their way out of).

In addition, calling someone from my class background 'elitist' is also ridiculous. I was not born into an elite, am not now in an elite in any institutional sense; on the contrary, all of my writing is available on the internet, for free, to any who are interested in it.

Yes, I've been to a few universities, but if you've been to university, you'll know that you don't get taught very much there. You have to learn it yourself.

So my assumption is that if I, from my background, can learn something, anyone can.

There's nothing special about me, except perhaps enthusiasm and a kind of will to consistency.

I am elitist in the sense that I believe that not all human beings are worth the trouble. But I don't make the decision to withdraw from engagement with them a priori. I make it on a case by case basis, when it is clear that they are committed to being stupefied dangerous animals dedicated towards self-destruction.

Elitists in the bad sense are committed to talking only to one another, whilst perversely being obsessed with what the so-called lesser populace think of them. They get their kicks from feeling superior to a group whose supposed inferiority they constitutively require.

They will be unwilling and almost certainly unable to explain their position to others.

I am willing to explain my position to those who want to hear it.

I have no interest in what 'general opinion', that most insubstantial and unconvincing of the big Other's guises, thinks of me.

Yes, reading theory is demanding.

But so is mastering any discipline.

We're talking about escaping human OS here.

Of course it isn't easy.

Of course it's hard work.

Of course you have to learn some new language and some new concepts.

That is precisely why what I am committed to at every level, in my working life and in my writing, is teaching.

But you can't teach those that don't want to learn, those who want an easy life, that's obvious, you learn that very quickly in teaching.

And by definition, there is no point arguing with irrationalists.

O and btw, the idea that communism is about an 'easy life' is horrific and grotesque.... What, utopia is lying around smoking dope and consuming or something? Think yr confusing that with hippiedom mate...

Naturally, the Spinozist paradox is that an easy life, one dedicated to persisting with the same dreary defaults is grindingly demanding. The effort of changing defaults can be immense, but then life actually gets less agitating, if more exacting.
 

luka

Well-known member
er, remember when all you fucking ever did was sit on your arse watching tv?

yeah, i remember. and who was it telling you to get off your fat arse>? yeah, you didn't mind people being humanist irrationalists when they were being kind did you? get your ego back off the ground and suddenly you don't need anything as decadent as friends, at least not ones that don't read the same books as you.

nonce. i thought you had a bit of potential. thats why im so disappointed.

and now you spouting all this rubbish. no wonder you want to ignore me. you took what you needed and now you want to tell me i'm dumb. grow some balls. be a man.
ha! yeah, be a man! thats what you need to do.

you can think great thoughts all you like but if you don't behave properly you're not a man.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
So your persona here can't be elitist - because you're a teacher?

That doesn't sound very rationalist to me. - who was going off on one about personalising everything the other day?

Do you think teachers are "structurally evil"? I know people who do.

BTW, TOPY was all about demystifying magick anyway - hence reaching a global audience of hundreds of thousands of people. But that's in the distant past for me, really.

Clearly communism isn't utopian but I think a lot of people would agree that a society which wasn't based around selling your labour to some wanker for most of your life just to get food on the table and have a roof over your head (if you're lucky) would be relatively "easy". And then who knows what will happen? Certainly I'd like more time to pursue various esoteric pursuits like studying white philosophers as Mark has.

As for escaping the human OS, I'm all for evolving, but to me the mission is to become more human, in both the rational and irrational senses.

So... was I right about that Badiou quote, Mr Teacher? Do I get a gold star, or a "see me"?
 

johneffay

Well-known member
john eden said:
I'm all for evolving, but to me the mission is to become more human, in both the rational and irrational senses.
How would you define becoming more human? I'm assuming that you're not just talking about denying our animality, but I'm not sure where else you could go with this. I agree that we should be attempting to develop both the rational and the irrational, but could this make us more human? I'm not sure. My concern with this sort of theorizing (not that I'm suggesting that you are advocating it) is that if some people are more human, then others become less human.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Fair point, John.

I think what I'm trying to say is that the way society is structured is dehumanising at the moment.

So people have to struggle with all sorts of shit just to meet their immediate material needs: the bottom rung of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

I'd prefer to society structured in other ways, so that everyone can have a go at a fulfilling life.

Cleary it's almost impossible to do this for most of us at the moment, so we have to work together to change things.

In working together we make connections, and perhaps come to know ourselves and each other a bit better.

In self-knowledge and in knowing others, we maybe understand what it is to be human and human condition more...

does that make sense?
 

johneffay

Well-known member
john eden said:
does that make sense?

Yes, I'm happy with that. I'm not sure what the human condition is, but I am sure that irrationalism plays such a major part in the lives of so many humans that the idea of getting all these creatures to disidentify with it is a non-starter. It's far better to see what positive uses you can get out of it.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
thanks

well i'm happy that mark has explained "where he's coming from" in more detail. there's no denying that he went to some trouble.

i'm still waiting for the in depth discussion of lemurian sorcery though...
 
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noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
babies and bath-water

Mark -

I've tried to follow some of what you've had to say on yer blog and in here - and i very often find your writings interesting and provocative, sometimes even inspiring and enlightening :) Although, like others here, i too am not sure if I understand you correctly much of the time. Certainly I appreciate what i read as your highly 'utopian' and idealistic position - it is brave and i hope your motivation is one of jumping at the sun to catch some stars.

It seems to me that ultimately not only do you want to do away with / rewrite Human OS (perhaps it is not the kernel of the OS that has problems but the various levels of bloat, viral infection and general garbage?) - but also the BIOS and hardware as well - if you are in possession (a pun?) of new improved versions of these or alternatives for sale/trade/free then i'd be interested in checking them out - although I am quite fond of my own hardware, and of that belonging to certain other bio-units of my acquaintance.

Eventually, probably, you WILL transcend Human OS, and you WILL leave the hardware behind, Just not yet. Unless you carry on thinking things like:

"and there is no good situation in which to be born, all organismic existence is of its nature abject"

The only hell I know is living with that kind of belief system installed! Born bad huh?. Sounds like some kind of unhealthy religious doctrine to me. Where you see "stupefied dangerous animals dedicated towards self-destruction" I see human beings unaware of just those kinds of subroutines operating within themselves. The Gnostic Christ was quite possibly mis-translated, misunderstood or just quoted out of context!

We dismantle 'ourselves' so that we can reconstruct - hopefully incorporating more intelligent, pleasing (yes - pleasure is now allowed, having initially bypassed the pleasure prinicpal to bash the metal), effective ontologies (i hope this is the right word) - ways of interpreting information, communicating and acting that are more effective/efficient/fun/open-ended/in accordance with reality/lived-experience (our own and those we find areas of mutuality with), take your pick. There is possibly a highly utopian feedback loop here - as we operate better, and understand more about the system we are a part of, the system itself works better - debug yourself for the good of everything. if i understand any of what you're saying then i think we must be in agreement on some of this.

That said, we can fantasize and theorise as much as we like about how things should be, would be, could be - and indeed i think these are some of the most important and noble activities for humans (if they have the 'luxury') to be engaged in - but we must also deal with things AS THEY ARE, or at least try and find out what that means, even if just for the sake of being able to continue the research and get results that are relevant! We are embodied, we are human, we perceive subjectively and we are a part of a system observing itself from the inside. Some truths are less relative than others...

As John Eden says - humans are rational and irrational - we don't have to be 'rationalists' or 'irrationalists'. Actually I think we need a new and more holistic conception of 'rationality' for the word to make any kind of sense at all. If rationality presently implies not taking into consideration vast amounts of human experience, then it is some kind of one word oxymoron when applied to humans. 'cold-rationality' makes more sense, but only from the lofty observation tower you seem to be sitting on.

Jules -

For the most part (and i remain open to the possibility of some kind of continuous transcendent consiousness being an achievable possibility for incarnate beings) lived experience is, by its very nature, subjective - this certainly does not mean we have to abandon discourse, 'rational' or otherwise. One valuable purpose of discourse and communication in general is to find areas of mutuality we can then call more or less universal 'truths' - wonderful! And surely more productive than using reason simply 'as a tool for persuasion and philosophy' - how debased is that? How about using reason for understanding? Just because you are able to persuade someone of something does not make it true or even useful! Finding areas of un-mutuality can be equally useful in showing us where our subjectivism is being mistaken for universality. Vive le difference.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope I've made some kind of sense and not contradicted myself to the point of negation (huh, maybe that woud be a good thing). Sorry if i've misinterpreted or misrepresented anyone here - i'm sure you'll let me know. Ideas about the nature of nature/reality/existence, the future, human/post-human-potential and the problems facing society (humanity, the collective) are necessarily speculative and open to revision. If we don't admit that, we're being as dishonest as those who employ power-tactics based on false authority and the manipulation of unconscious HOS subroutines.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
"Rationality is hard. It precisely involves suspending ALL your ethnicities, because THERE IS NO GOOD ETHNICITY. And we have to understand ethnicity, as Badiou does, in the widest possible sense, i.e. yes, nationality and race, but also sex and species."

I can see the efficacy of utilising this POV. But let's not forget, this kind of rationality has been attributed to many AI systems, aliens, higher intelligences and insane super-criminals in numerous sci-fi and fantasy narratives (obviously Terminator and The Matrix) - the 'logical' course of action very often turns out to be: "exterminate the Human plague, or use them as slaves." Perhaps these stories are a future-echo of our fears that we are in fact superfluous, faulty, insane baboons? Perhaps they are an indication of our general low self-esteam as a species.

Other biases to watch out for in your own thinking: dimensionalism, existencism, laws of physicsism. Is it really necessary to think that far outside the box? Are we really able to do this?

Damn my ethnicity, the Humans are my crew, planet Earth is my ends, and i'm representing!
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
as much as viewing people as bio-mechanical units is an interesting theoretical position, which raises some fascinating questions and offers as many useful answers, this is an entirely abstract position and we need to remember that.
absolute cold rationalism is *impossible* for a human to achieve and as for overriding the human OS, i can't think of anything more horrific.
my humanist identification with the tribal subsets (male, working-class, white, heterosexual, northern english and so on ad infinitum...) to which i "belong" is not to be looked down upon and can only be viewed as a limiting, mindless crutch from this disengaged wannabe "objective" stance.
it's actually called self-awareness. cultivate this and the chances are you will be better able to understand other people, too. (cf the catholicism thread: my understanding of my own upbringing as catholic enabled me to see how dangerous a precedent a series of violent polemic assaults on one faith set for both its individual members and members of *any* faith-based community, especially in these ideologically inflamed times)
cold rationalism offers no opportunity for this and is ultimately a divisive viewpoint rooted in denial. denial of your background, upbringing, very humanity. up to you if you want to do that, but it doesn't immediately mean you will transcend the bounds of ego and subjectivity, in fact you're more likely to become more bound up in your own manufactured ideology, this leading to an intensification of the importance of both.
gimme warm irrationality every time, at least there's scope to make friends, fall in love, fuck, and, y'know, actually share things and find commonality with other people - now that's really overriding the default human OS.
 
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