TOTW: Floccinaucinihilipilification

Album cover for black midi's "Cavalcade" (2021)

As the accelerationist [1] hyper-post-modern antidisestablishmentarianist status quo oversees the proliferation of semantic machicholations and siege engines, we witness an onslaught of textual dromology [2], steadfast bulwarks of imponent vagueness facing unrelenting barrages of verbiage. Neo-liberalism orders the decentralized globally coordinated productivist hierarchization of semantics trending towards extinction. Bolstering it, coexisting post-ironic neo-reactionary trolls and dual power mutual aid networks conjointly serve as paramilitary and para-state in the war-and-peace quantum superposition state of governance in cybernetic politics by all means other[3].

Its purported challengers, the decentralized autonomous horizontalist humanitarians, obfuscate the aimlessness of their trifling obstreperousness via imputationist revisionist histories, retrofitting a strategy projected into an autopoietic [4] teleology, utopia-as-ideology-as the holographic apophenia of augmented reality. We’re all always-already eating from the trashcan [5], the world is a landfill, we’re the detritophagic microbiotic gut flora of Leviathan [6].

In the desert of the real, all trips have taken place [7] Math is the language which maps the territory to quantum level. Path-dependent trope iterations instigate the farcical (s)tragedies of agonistic circuitous interlocution tending to impasse [8], while large language models, developed through machine learning and data mining, are flaunted as the latest signifier of progress [9].

The proliferation of theory [10]off the back of a reproducibility crisis, two sides of the same coin. The name of this currency is clout. In an age where texts can be automatically generated, publish-or-perish haste takes precedence over rigorous attempts to replicate and falsify [11], leading computer jockeys and data clerks to birth more texts than offspring, as the illiterate denizens of the web proliferate rampantly. Citation indexes track impact, just like engagement metrics used for analytics on any other social media site. Living at the edge of a line graph, another pump-and-dump scheme, like meme stonks [12] and the boom-and bust-cycles of the economy and population. When will this theory bubble burst?

“Fashionable nonsense! J'accuse...!” [13], scream the useful idiots and willfull dupes of the church of scientism, who decry others’ misbegotten lucubrations used to fleece flux dynamics jargon to flummox readers as a flex. The Sokal affair [14], was not an illustrative satire, but a lackluster instance of the public secret it intended to expose. Public secrets are like inside jokes that serve as comic relief in the service of hypernormalization [15]. NFT and crypto scams are analogous, pettier and cruder caricatures of the complex hegemonic digitized political economy of the world-system [16]. Critique is a second-tier derivative auxiliary spectacle [17]. Since critique-as-attack is futile, serving as feedback for the development and refinement of the systems it targets [18], any sincere and candid expression against the current order is in vain [19], hence earnestness is seen as cringe, which has led to a generalized vanity-as-ethic and cringe-as-aesthetic in lieu of earnestness.

As ecosystems degrade and all is lost, the spectacle crescendos into maximalist virtual decadence. The music of this era mirrors these affects, a whiplash of Daycore depressive nostalgia and Nightcore mania, along with Shitcore, and the proliferation of -core genres and sub-genres, mindless machinal algorithmic alterations to the yottabytes of readily available repertoires of oeuvres, their permutations, corruptions, and random noise. Still, the dizzying projection of tedium at an ever-increasing frame-rate and pixel resolution creates the illusion of novelty in movement. The droning meaninglessness of automatically generated unconscious stream-of-consciousness A.I. music streams is just one symptom of the diarrheic turn of cultural production that is coupled with the bulimic turn of consumers who binge-watch and shit-post, making up the society of “The Human Centipede”[20].

The aestheticization of politics and the politization of aesthetics aided by mechanical reproduction at the service of mass culture [21]at this speed of automation seems to be approaching an escape velocity that would launch it on trajectory away from meaning. But where can meaning be found? Where can we trace the initial conditions of this limit cycle [22]?

The argumentative theory of human reasoning [23] suggests that language emerged not as a means to describe the world, but as a means to argue, persuade, and coerce others within a social group, an instrument of politics. Polemos is truly the father of all things [24]. There’s a reason debate consists mainly of a long list of biases and logical fallacies, and an even longer list of ad hominems: the basis of all dialectic [25]. Language contains from its emergence the integral accident [26] of unreasonable arguments and misunderstandings, uttered nonsense and politics are integral to each other. After all, the basis of populism lies in the creation of empty signifiers [27].

This free-play of signifiers reminds us of jazz: quoting licks, appropriating, re-contextualizing, re-signifying. Mixing-in lyrics with scat, while today’s top streaming hits are just shit. Jamming is a double-entendre which simultaneously signifies playing in accord, and the interruption of signals, the message and its detour. What seems free-form to the uninitiated, is deeply structured, undergirded by music theory and shared musical vocabulary, shaped in insidious ways by culture, subculture, and context (i.e. “playing the room”). The same jazz standards from the desert of “The Real Book” (which is a “fake book”) [28], played with new arrangements by new ensembles comprised of exchangeable session musicians, hired guns, mercenaries. Jazz, irrevocably modern, is therefore terribly legible and formulaic despite its apparent complexity. Jazz musicians are elite scribes, painfully transcribing improvised segments by the greats so that they can be rehearsed, rendering legible the chaotic variables. Just like so many other technocrats doing the cultural dirty work of the media sphere, making up for the lack of genius, with protestant work ethic [29].

Etymologically, jazz [30] came from jasm, meaning spirit or spunk, which later came to be jizz. This vibrant music scene named after life-giving force embodied the spirit of the era, the zeitgeist. We’re not haunted by this specter [31], this is our world’s soul, our anima mundi[32]. This is not a nagging lingering ghost, it’s an eternal élan vital, although current zoomerist presentism can only catch whiff of it as a fleeting “mood” or “vibe”. This is the happenstance metaphysics of emergence [33] from chaos.

Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation [34]. Hence it’s no surprise we get sober insurrectionists inebriated with élan devoted to the cult of the offensive, attack for attack’s sake, thrust into action in search of kinetic pleasure, mirroring the Dionysian nihilist’s hedonistic strife for jouissance, the egoists who base their affair on nothing, and the post-left’s legacy of cantankerous vacillations which languishes beside the ultra-left’s bookish notions of leisure, the anti-spectacular critique that wasted its time. Meanwhile Marxistic Machiavellic Neo-Leninist machinations march-on doing the busywork aspirational omnipresent entryism. It’s all for nothing, and nothing for all (1:1). Only tautology is truth.

“In jazz, Utopia is not realized, but disappears, because jazz forgets music’s futile and enigmatic moral attempt to ‘lend a voice to suffering’ and thereby express the truth of the dissolution of the individual in and the untruth of modern capitalist society. Jazz is not demythologized prayer but rather secularized social composition.” (Lewandowski, 1996, p.117)[35]

Facing this truth, yet not relinquishing said moral utopia, some anarchists retreat into silent prayer, quietism as a religious stance towards the world [36], avoiding said secularized social composition, in which, like captive mantises under intrusive laboratory observation [37], they would risk cannibalizing each other in a rendezvous.

After the death of god [38], man [39], the author [40], and the alphabet[41]: Will aphonia lead to ataraxia?[42] Is such a proposition attractive to anarchists with a penchant for nullification, fond of attaching the a- prefix to everything? Or will anarchists keep turning their heads at oikeia hedone[43], forever swayed by a boisterous riotous gregariousness in the name of vulgar colloquial hedonism? How can a proposition for the abolition of literacy and the oblivion of language be uttered eloquently as if to distance itself from the memefied “chrr chrr grr grr” of “RETURN TO MONKE”?[43] How will language (which includes music and math) be broken? How will it be when meaninglessness echoes triumphantly over the ruin of language after the fall of sense-making apes? The floccinaucinihilipilification of language will serve as consolation prize for primitivists once it becomes apparent that the flight of theory never departed from lowly guttural grunts and growls.

But further still, going beyond what can be uttered: Has knowledge and cognition ever been possible? Perhaps the universe remains utterly oblivious, unaware of its unawareness.


Hinted Allusions & Loose References:

1. Srnicek, N.; & Williams, A. (2013) #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics. Retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an...

2. Virilio, Paul. Speed and politics: an essay on dromology ([2006 edition] ed.). South Pasadena, CA. pp. 68–69, 84. ISBN 978-1-58435-040-8. OCLC 81145420. ; John Armitage (October 18, 2000) The Kosovo War Took Place In Orbital Space: Paul Virilio in Conversation, Ctheory https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0735-2751.00092

3. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Classics, 2003) ; Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Translated by J. J. Graham, Wordsworth Editions, 1997

4. Maturana, H. R.; Varela, F. J. (1991-08-31). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-90-277-1016-1.

5. “I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.” — Slavoj Žižek (2012). The Pervert's Guide to Ideology.

6. Perlman, Fredy (2002). Against His-Story, Against Leviathan . Black & Red. ISBN-13: 9780934868259

7. Baudrillard, Jean (1994) [1981]. Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, p.6

8. Mouffe, Chantal (2005). On the Political. Routledge. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-415-30521-1.

9. Barr, Bernard (2023) Will ChatGPT and Bard really change the way you work?. Raconteur. Retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://www.raconteur.net/technology/chatgpt-change-work-opinion/

10. Cointreau, Latrans (2023) “The Importance of Theory”. Theoretical Journal of Theory, 69 (4) 20- 35.

11. Popper, Karl (1934) The Logic of Scientific Discovery (as Logik der Forschung, English translation 1959), ISBN 0415278449

12. Hayes, Adam (2022) “What Are Meme Stocks, and Are They Real Investments?”. Investopedia, retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://www.investopedia.com/meme-stock-5206762

13. Sokal, Alan; Jean Bricmont (1998). Fashionable Nonsense. New York: Picador. ISBN 978-0-312-19545-8. OCLC 39605994

14. Sokal, Alan D (1996), "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (PDF), Social Text, 46/47 (46/47): 217–252, doi:10.2307/466856, JSTOR 466856, retrieved 2 July 2017

15. Yurchak, Alexei (23 October 2005). Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. (In-Formation). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691121178 ; HyperNormalisation. Directed by Adam Curtis, BBC, 2016.

16. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. 2004a. "World-Systems Analysis." In World System History: Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, edited by George Modelski. Oxford: UNESCO/EOLSS Publishers ; Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. The Uncertainties of Knowledge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

17. Debord, Guy. (1988) Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. First published in French by Editions Gerard Lebovici, 1988. Translated into English by NOT BORED!

18. Anonymous (2013) "Critique of Critique". Attentat. Pistols Drawn

19. Debord (n 14)

20. “The Human Centipede” (First Sequence) (2009)

21. Walter Benjamin (1968). Hannah Arendt (ed.). "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations. London: Fontana. pp. 214–18. ISBN 9781407085500.

22. Lorenz, Edward (1993). The Essence of Chaos. University of Washington Press. pp. 181–206.

23. Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34 (2), 57-74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X10000968
https://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MercierSperberWhyd... ; Johnson, John A. (2011) “The argumentative theory of reasoning applies to scientists and philosophers, too.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34 (2) doi:10.1017/S0140525X10002931
https://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/5/j5j/papers/BBSFinal.pdf

24. Heraclitus; Brooks Haxton (Translator), James Hillman (Foreword). (2003) Fragments (Penguin Classics) (English and Greek Edition). Penguin Books. ; Fried, Gregory (2000). Heidegger's Polemos: From Being to Politics. Yale University Press

25. Schopenhauer, A.; Grayling, A. C. (2004) The Art of Always Being Right: Thirty Eight Ways to Win When You Are Defeated ISBN 1-903933-61-7

26. Virilio (n 2)

27. Laclau, Ernesto (2005). On Populist Reason. Phronesis. London: Verso Books. ISBN 9781859846513.

28. The Real Book 2nd edition, Hal Leonard (publisher) (2004)

29. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, Routledge, 2001.

30. “jazz”. Etymonline (2023) Retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://www.etymonline.com/word/jazz#etymonline_v_1682

31. Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge

32. Plato (1925). Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 9. Translated by Lamb, W.R.M. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press; London:William Heinemann Ltd. – via Perseus Project.

33. Bray, Mark; Nappalos, Scott (2019) Emergence and Anarchism: A Philosophy of Power, Action, and Liberation. Retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/scott-nicholas-nappalos-emergenc...

34. Baudrillard, Jean ([1990] 2009). The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London: Verso.

35. Lewandowski, J. D. (1996) Adorno on jazz and society. Philosophy & Social Criticism 22(5):103-121 DOI:10.1177/019145379602200506 Retrieved on 2/26/2023 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249625801_Adorno_on_jazz_and_so...

36. Praying Anarchy (2019) from HAPAXX (Enlgish translation by Anarchist News) retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/praying-anarchy; Praying Anarchy pt. 2 (2019) from HAPAXX (Enlgish translation by Anarchist News) retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/praying-anarchy-pt-2

37. Liske, E.; Davis, W. J. (1984). "Sexual behaviour of the Chinese praying mantis". Animal Behaviour. 32 (3): 916–918. doi:10.1016/S0003-3472(84)80170-0. S2CID 53144893.

38. Stirner, Max (1845) The Unique and Its Property. Translated by Apio Ludd aka Wolfi Landstreicher, 2017. Little Black Cart. Retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-unique-and-its-p... Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974) The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs; translated, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books. ISBN 0-394-71985-9

39. Foucault, Michel ([1966] 1994) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books; Foucault, Michel ([1969] 2002) The Archaeology of Knowledge (Routledge Classics). Routledge

40. Barthes, Roland (1972) Mythologies . Hill and Wang: New York.

41. Engel, Sascha (2023) Breaking the Alphabet. Little Black Cart.

42. Wilson, Catherine (2015). Epicureanism: a very short introduction (First ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom. ISBN 9780199688326. OCLC 917374685.

43. Aristoteles (2013) Poetics (Oxford World's Classics) Reprint Edition, translated by Anthony Kenny. Oxford University Press.

44. Zerzan, John (2009) Language: Origin and Meaning. Retrieved on 2/25/2023 from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-language-origin-and-...

There are 42 Comments

so basically dont do anything? and everyone is cringe except accelerationists?

most accelerationists are also cringe

thought experiment: you're already the room-mate of atomwaffen, you've made large mistakes thus far in your young life and as you look down the barrel and realize your psycho nazi room-mate is literally about to kill you over dirty dishes or a nazi love triangle or whatever, as you die, your last thoughts are about how the whole thing is still a bit cringe

clue to "thought experiment", you Millenial: ask yourself what you've been doing with and atomwaffen chud for roommate, and grab a bus/train ticket to some other state, and start a new life.

This made me laugh out loud and I only had to go two commenta in.

Also I may have to look up every word in this damn post. Call it a penance.

Rambling "parodies", especially those of jargon, tend to display a good amount of insecurity, so in that sense, this should probably be taken at face value. (whether it wants to or not)

Then again, approvingly referencing Karl Popper, of all people, puts a serious dent into whatever parodic qualities this might have.

Guess there'll be an unveiling at some point, like Sokal did, and with the same self-defeating effect

Markov chain generated text? Drunk ChatGPT? Is the TOTW submitter okay? Someone should check on them.

a karate instructor can show you the necessary moves, but cannot make you a great fighter.

a lover of books can think the words themselves are of value. but it is the meaning that isn't recorded by language that is valuable.

or so sayeth the sages.

Very self-referential, I might add!

Alfredo Cospito, "I will die soon, I hope that someone after me will continue the fight."

Anews, "TOTW: Floccinaucinihilipilification"

i am sorry to say i literally lol'd because starving to death seems like one of the least pleasant ways to die. (as if i would know).

otoh holding two (or more) differing ideas in ones head at the same time is entirely possible.

Spoken like a true news personality that lacks actual empathy for the stories they cover. A robotic excuse to justify not actually caring beyond a sound bite for the spectacle.

Another parallel would be: 'I vote every 4 years.'

Alfredo is starving to death in the dungeon of the enemy of anarchy, right now. How is this not in the forefront of your robot mind? How is this not displayed across your websites?

I kinda doubt your comment is even in good faith cuz as anon already pointed out, there are lots of articles about Cospito that have "splashed" across this site. Heck, you could reasonably argue this is the highest profile English-language website with real info on Cospito and the anarchist movement in Italy.

Heck.

Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

Good faith is a spook.

no u, glowie

I do not think that word means what you think it means, brah.

Well said, brah. This TOTW makes no sense. The author is probably lacking vitamin D.

Interesting essay. At least this answers the "what happened to all the adderall?" question.

On the other hand, if, in fact, this was written entirely by a human without machine learning or markov chaining then your talents are entirely wasted publishing here.

last week’s topic asked of the question of how anarchists engage with references and sources, this week’s topic is mostly a bibliography. i guess we’ll see how they fare in real time. might take them a while to read all those texts, unless someone claims to have read them all, and given they’re so disparate, i doubt it. at least not the sciency ones

i don’t need to read no references to know bullshit arguments when i see one!

i guess there is something to be said about internal consistency/inconsistency and coherence/incoherence, as well as internal and external validation, not to mention kneejerk responses triggered by past experience which may be called biases or prejudices and can get you in trouble, but are sometimes helpful in making quick time-saving judgement calls

"FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION"
OooOooh nOooo, every!anarchonihilistknowsthis!!

In order to think in terms of ‘prefiguration’, one has to consider the psychological/logical ‘topologies’ of anarchist community/microcosm vis a vis authoritarian community/microcosm and there is no mention of it in the TOTW commentary.
For example, anarchism in the Zapatista microcosm is where one must use BOTH/AND (quantum logic) in understanding the relationship between the microcosmic ‘inhabitant’ [anarchist community] and the macrocosmic ‘habitat’ that the anarchist community is included in. In this topology, the microcosmic community takes its form from its dynamic habitat-inhabitant, macrocosm-microcosm equilibrium. The microcosm is NOT a ‘thing-in-itself’ and therefore does not require a central authority and ‘centre of intelligence’ to rationally drive and direct its behaviour. Its circle-councils operate to ensure sustainability and resilience in its outside-inward --- inside-outward relational dynamics. In other words, it is a yin/yang ‘prefiguration’ whose participants understand the world in yin/yang terms.

For those who put EITHER/OR Aristotelian/Newtonian logic in precedence over BOTH/AND logic and therefore see community as a ‘thing-in-itself’, ... an ‘all-yang assertive machine’ that is fully and solely responsible for its own rationally planned development and behaviour [NOT how communities evolve in nature], it must, therefore, by this same either/or logic, have a central authority and centre-of-intelligence to drive and direct its development and behaviour. This is what happens when the BOTH/AND logical understanding of habitat-inhabitant is hijacked by EITHER/OR logical understanding of habitat/inhabitant; i.e. instead of the community sustaining its dynamic form by a yin/yang outside-inward --- inside-outward dynamic balancing, the community models itself as an all-yang exploitive machine.

In the country, the Zapatista microcosm can develop such a yin/yang sustainable relation with the land, but in the city, the state controlled urban habitat is marching to the beat of the all-yang authoritarian drum and it is thus ‘soil that is toxic’ to the sustaining of yin/yang community.

Historically, communities were yin/yang microcosms, but when they felt threatened, they gathered armies together and switched to all-yang martial law organization, driven and directed by a central authority/centre-of-intelligence. This ‘special case’ mode of organizing appealed so much to those who managed to rise to positions of power, that they would not let go of it, so that even though these communities had evolved by the outside-inward yin attraction of fertile lands drawing in human inhabitants and inspiring and shaping their inside-outward asserting yang actions, the PREDOMINATING mode of organization switched to central authority/centre-of-intelligence driven and directed yang-only drive and direction. [While worker community, if global, would not cultivate warring pockets of absolute thing-in-itselfnesses within it, it is the habitual monotheist God-emulating way of European Kings in their competition to colonize and control as much of the world as they are able, using sovereign statism backed my military force to do it. The 'people's republic' of the United States has become a clone of the colonizing kingdoms by giving precedence to its 'corporatist' aspect].

Once an anarchist community moves to ‘secure its perimeter’ [by real threat or by political ruse], it is switching to EITHER/OR logic in regard to its habitat/inhabitant relation; i.e. it is switching from a yin/yang to an all-yang mode of operation [swapping out its anarchist mode of organization for authoritarian mode of organization]. this centre-driven mode of organization is a defensive tool seen in many of nature’s dynamic forms, the turtle, the sea anenome, the porcupine, the coiling snake, however, these natural forms do not ‘get stuck’ in that mechanical mode of organization; i.e. as Emerson observes, in the case of Western humans, ‘the tool runs away with the workman, the human with the divine’ [by the 'divine', Emerson means the spiritual force associated with accepting that one is an included inhabitant in an unpredictably unfolding habitat and thus called upon to continually 'rise to the occasion' and transcend who one is as one lets one's development and behaviour be orchestrated and shaped by the outside-inward influences of the continually transforming relational space one is uniquely, situationally included in. Of course, the alternative is to 'stay with who we are and try to maintain control over 'the rest'.]

We have architected the ‘corporation’ to put EITHER/OR logic into unnatural precedence over BOTH/AND logic in understanding its habitat-inhabitant relation, and it has become the globally dominant architecture for organization; i.e. it sees itself as a machine-inhabitant whose job is to produce product according to central authority/centre-of-intelligence driven and directed instructions. This reduces its effective understanding of habitat to a ‘reservoir for securing inputs’ and a ‘receptacle for discharging waste outputs’. As Dina Rasor observes, as many others also have, this corporatist architecture, embodied in the capitalist 'free market economy', thrives on conflict, competition, war.

“I found that a new War Service Industry had arisen. Unlike the better known Military Industrial Complex, this service industry needs a hot war or occupation to survive.” ---Dina Rasor

“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies and debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war and in the degeneracy of manners and morals engendered by both. No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

.

Those truths are well established. They are read in every page which records the progression from a less arbitrary to more arbitrary government, or the transition from a popular government to an aristocracy or a monarchy.” ---James Madison, "Political Observations" April 20, 1795

The people's republic of the United States has, by letting its war-machine tools run away with the workman, has become the king-colonizer archetype its initial inhabitants detested and joined in with the European king-colonizer machines to firmly establish this organizing mode as the globally dominant architecture.

The ‘militarized sovereign state’ itself is an all-yang mechanical system, a ‘war machine’ and it has spawned the ‘corporation’ as an all-yang war machine, the transnational forms of which are in control of the ‘global economy’ which sovereign states are now dependent upon [the masses listened to the story of the benefits of globalization which have, by now, removed the vital organs from the self-sufficient community and relocated them here and there around the worlds, under control of 'competitors, a kidney over there, and liver over there, leaving only the testicles hanging beneath the proudly flying flag]. This globally dominating all-yang system is held in place by the military policing that was originally instituted by the people to defend the people, but which is now defending the run-away system against the people’s attempts to change or ‘do away with it’.

As Nietzsche has pointed out, the all-yang concept of thing-in-itself, is the ego-archetype. So long as humans see themselves as ‘things-in-themselves’ and thus see their habitat-inhabitant relation in an EITHER/OR [mutually excluding] context, and are persuaded to do the same in the case of the ‘microcosm’ of community, the sovereign state and the productive enterprise, then we shall continue to let the tool run away with the workman and move towards implosion as we continue this cold mechanical attack against ourselves.
in summary, ... ‘prefiguration’ cannot be spoken of sensibly, without exploring the topologies of microcosms-in-macrocosms; i.e. ‘inhabitants-in-habitats’ and the ‘psychology’ that underlies whether we put into precedence EITHER/OR logic over BOTH/AND logic in understanding the microcosm-macrocosm relation or whether we put into precedence BOTH/AND logic over EITHER/OR logic. the former precedence puts us in central authority driven and directed mode while the latter precedence puts us in anarchist mode.

[citation needed] and who are you? you need accolades for gravitas.

Academic philosophical sites galore, doctorate in cut /paste methodologies level 5 Editor, imagines juxtaposition creates parallel realities and emotions. Caffeine addiction. ( or heavier stimulant abuse )

i understand that, as you see it, my views are complicated. but these complications are not in my views but derive from the over-simplification that we build into our cultural standard views. so if we go back to the simple physical basics and don’t over-simplify, we don’t generate all those complications that arise from over-simplification.

the basic issue is simple. nature’s dynamics have both relational [wave] and non-relational [particle] aspects. the relational view is ‘less simple’ than the view in terms of ‘things’ and ‘what things do’. Poincaré points out that it is ‘less simple’ in the manner that a polynomial of degree two is less simple than a polynomial of degree one.

if we opt for the ‘simpler’ ‘particle’ [what things-in-themselves do] view of dynamics, we generate more complications than if we start with the slightly less simple ‘wave’ [relational-spatial] view.

for example, in the relational view, the world dynamic is a relational flow and the dynamic forms in the flow are ‘relational features in the flow’. noun and verb language simplifies this view by taking dynamic forms [e.g. storm-cells in the relational spatial flow of the atmosphere] to be ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’, and reconstructing the dynamics that we observe in terms of ‘what these things-in-themselves are doing’ and presuming that the space between the ‘independently existing things-in-themselves’ [simply captured in language by a ‘noun’] is empty of influence.

this over-simplifying of visible dynamic forms leads to the complication that we must now explain the behaviour of those forms which we have simplified into local, visible, material things-in-themselves; e.g. Katrina, the hurricane, ... or Sam, the human, ... in the one-sided terms of what goes on inside the dynamic form that we have given an over-simplified portrayal [thanks to the over-simplifying powers of language]. these leaves only biochemistry, biophysics and psychology to explain the behaviour of an individual human. that is complicated due to our over-simplification that re-renders the relational feature in the relational flow as a ‘thing-in-itself’, instead of accepting the less simple but still not so complicated view of the form as a relational feature in a relational flow. and of course, it gives us a very different understanding of how the world works and this complicates our individual and collective behaviour in a manner that cannot ever be resolved, due to the over-simplification in our foundational premises. so we not only did not ultimately benefit from over-simplifying our definition of forms and making them out to be ‘things-in-themselves’, ,... we complicated our understanding and our related individual and collective behaviours in a manner that it is impossible to resolve. our infusing of irresolvable complications due to our initial over-simplification [independent material beings that inhabit ‘absolute’ space] is termed ‘incoherence’ [Bohm]. so, over-simplification leads to unbounded complication that is incoherent and irresolvable; e.g. obtuse rationales to explain the behaviour of things in a purely inside-outward asserting manner [e.g. biophysics, biochemistry and psychology] when, in slightly less simple relational model, we would permit ourselves to acknowledge that the behaviour of a dynamic form [as a relational feature in a relational flow] is orchestrated and shaped from outside-inward influence.

Katrina, the hurricane, is not really a ‘system-thing-in-itself’, as in our language-based over-simplification, but is a relational feature [resonance based whorl] which ‘transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which its genius can act’. those words are Emerson’s and apply to dynamic forms in general, such as humans. they are consistent with mach’s and schroedingers view of ‘things’ as relational features in the relational flow;

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). …” ... “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. …” ---Erwin Schroedinger

so, if we see a fenced-off field full of wheat and right beside it a camp full of starving children with mothers with the skills for pounding grain and baking bread, and we have a pair of wire-cutters in our toolbox, the relational [simple but not overly-simplified] understanding is that these dynamical relations orchestrate and shape our behaviour, of opening up access to the wheatfield so the mothers will make bread and feed their starving children. but because of our over-simplified view of forms as ‘things-in-themselves’ with internally driven and directed behaviours, on top of which we have built a set of laws to manage social dynamics on the basis of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, we have to start our understanding process from the independent individual’s inside-outward asserting behaviour, ignoring the outside-inward orchestrating/shaping of his behaviour. we have institutionalized the checking out of this notional ‘independent’, ‘what a thing-in-itself does’ behaviour against a list of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviours, again, assuming that these behaviours derive from internal biophysics, biochemistry and psychology [intellection and purpose etc.]. these can lead to ‘complications’ wherein we are trying to understand a behaviour as if it were from the inside-outward driven and directed, when it is instead outside-inwardly orchestrated and shaped.

since we apply, generally, this over-simplification that dynamic forms are ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves with their own inside-outward driven and directed behaviours’, ... we assume this is true of social collectives, and this is how we get to the complication known as ‘the sovereign state’ and ‘the corporation’; i.e. we try to explain their behaviour in an inside-outward only driving and directed manner, which is often termed ‘top-down’ or ‘hierarchical’. this is so, since, when we over-simplify the dynamic form -relational feature in the relational space-, and make it out to be a ‘thing-in-itself’, we have to replace the outside-inward orchestrating/shaping influence with an internal God-like voice or ‘mind’ that we impute to be a ‘central authority’ within the inside-outwardly directed thing-in-itself. this complicates things enormously; it is the so-called dualist mind-body split. those organisms like Western acculturated man, who believe in these over-simplified models, try to gather up ‘ideas’ in the ‘mind’ to direct the behaviour of the body. Ideas such as ‘thou shalt not steal’, for example, get in the way of the naturally arising outside-inward relational orchestrating/shaping of behaviour as would naturally induce the wire cutting of the fence to open up access to the wheatfield. even if all the wheatfields in the world were monopolized and fenced in, ideas such as ‘thou shalt not steal’ can still prevail in those who believe in the mind-body split that comes with the oversimplification of reducing a relational feature in a relational space to a notional ‘things-in-itself’ in ‘absolutes space’ whose behaviour is seen as purely inside-outwardly driven and directed.

now, all of this talk is about complication that derives from over-simplification, by choosing a view of ‘habitat and inhabitants’ that is non-relational [inhabitants are over-simplified and seen as things-in-themselves in absolute space]; i.e. choosing a view that is simpler in the manner a polynomial of degree one is simpler than a polynomial of degree two. however, if we had accepted the slightly less complicated polynomial of degree two; i.e. the relational or ‘curved’ space view, ... we would have avoided all kinds of unnecessary complications, that we are then forced to try to deal with but can never resolve because by over-simplifying from the beginning of our inquiry, we are ‘constructing twenty pound theorems from ten pound axioms’. this is the source of incoherency, irresolvable complications which arise from our confusing an oversimplified pseudo-reality with the physical reality of our experience.

our initial error was to notionally reduce our understanding of forms by oversimplifying them from relational features in relational space to ‘absolute, independently-existing things-in-themselves, in absolute [non-influencing] space’. this is where the complications arise from that we then find ourselves having to try to deal with, but they are impossible to resolve [short of going back and rethinking our earlier over-simplification] since we have used over-simplification to construct twenty-pound theorems from ten pound axioms; i.e. we are generating 'incoherence' where the system we think we are engaging with is not the real physical system that we are actually experientially engaging with.

the amount of commenters here who are taking this seriously is hilarious

the first sentence is: "As the accelerationist [1] hyper-post-modern antidisestablishmentarianist status quo oversees the proliferation of semantic machicholations and siege engines, we witness an onslaught of textual dromology [2], steadfast bulwarks of imponent vagueness facing unrelenting barrages of verbiage."

the fact that 'antidisestablishmentarianism' is the longest word in the English language should tip you off, but "steadfast bulwarks of imponent vagueness facing unrelenting barrages of verbiage" literally just means "walls of meaningless text with too many words"

hence the TOTW being...people writing like this!

@news readers are not known for being very smart however!

SooOoo you're not familiar with 'Emile' are you, who delivered 5,749 comments totalling in 427,000 words without uttering one single expletive and abusive word.

"There is reward for “hot takes” and bombastic statements that reduce complex issues to catchy soundbytes and sick dunks. Novices to Left scenes cut their teeth by testing out new positions. The deep understanding of complex topics one needs to be an expert in historic movements, modern practices, or nuanced theoretical arguments inherently creates a barrier to entry around the conversation. Quickly barfing out an incendiary position with a patina of leftist thought can garner one clout, and using poor interpretations of existing radical theory can be used to attack naysayers. Not all individuals who take wingnut positions or start “discourse” are explicitly seeking power, but their arguments can be commandeered by those who are looking to gain power.

[...]

To pile these cases on further, between submitting this zine and its acceptance, two popular figures in the online anarchists world were outed as engaging in affinity fraud and sexual abuse: Dennis the Peasant (from the US) followed by Anarqxista Goldman (from the UK). I would be remiss to leave these two additions out.

Dennis had a rapid rise to online notoriety by posting low-effort anarchist memes and takes, being incendiary, and insinuating more involvement with both the George Floyd insurrection and Portland anarchist scene than he actually had. He hand stitched patches on to his jacket, listened to Pat the Bunny, and extolled the virtues of Tiqqun and Foucault. He got outed and then admitted to rape and other forms of sexual abuse. When doxxed, it was learned that he was a trust fund yuppie who attended a private university and was afraid to set foot in infoshops.

Anarqxista had a similar ascendency online for being a prolific (merely by quantity) writer who churned out several books with hundreds of pages, for being a take-no-shit firebrand anarcha-feminist, and in no small part for being hyper-sexual, a full-service sex worker, and a conventionally-by-western standards attractive woman. She too posted low-effort, generally unobjectionable memes and takes which gave her legitimacy. When her pro-pedophilia takes weren’t enough to completely drive her from online leftist spaces, she died a perfect hero’s death defending a random young woman from domestic abuse. Except she never existed in the first place and was the fabrication of Andrew Peter Lloyd, a mid-50s man who used her persona (and at least one known previous persona) to coerce sex out of sex workers and nude photos from online acquaintances.

Both of these individuals explicitly used anarchism as a cover to get access to women’s bodies. Both of them were able to use high-prestige values and identities to elevate themselves. Both of them relied on people trusting their claimed politics and identity to defraud them. But most importantly, with both of them, there were warning signs coming from their shitty, incomplete, or incoherent politics that alerted more experienced members of the community, and these warnings were ignored and dismissed by others. Many of those they abused were harmed after Dennis and Anarqxista said problematic things. Online and off, these things rarely happen out of the blue. There are warnings.

Both Dennis and Anarqxista used recycled generic memes and takes to gain legitimacy. Speculatively, the knowledge barrier to infiltration mentioned earlier (that feds think anarchists read too much to infiltrate) is maybe no longer true for ascending in online spaces. This isn’t “just an online problem” though as both Dennis and Anarqxista were able to use their online legitimacy to hop to physical spaces. If too much reading is a barrier for feds, then memorizing quips as a proxy for political analysis will be a shortcut they use."

by Håkan Geijer from https://c4ss.org/content/58015

Here's a quote from Illich's "Tools for Conviviality" (1973, p.21), as found in Kevin Carson's The Thought of Ivan Illich: A Libertarian Analysis". Each mention of 'tool' in the original was replaced with 'language', and once with 'theory', to illustrate a point:

"[Languages] are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of the [languages] that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters [languages], he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by [languages], the shape of the [language] determines his own self-image. Convivial uses of [language] are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial uses of [languages] deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most ["theory"] today cannot be used in a convivial fashion."

If convivial society hinges on "allow[ing] all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others."(1973, p.20), how do we evaluate the circulation of language tools (academic theory, discourse, rhetoric, etc.) through means (telephone, print, the internet, radio, television) that could be considered industrial (as opposed to convivial) technology? If institutions produce knowledge in such a way as to concentrate and preserve their power, their privileged position as managers, what are anarchists doing to modify these language tools, and how do they use them in a way that is convivial, instead of contributing to the "specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turn[ing] people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines."(p. xxiii-xxiv.)

yeah, the danger with LLMs is not that it becomes sentient, but the way bullshitters can use it a force multiplier of their bullshit, not just using it to produce text, but using the existence of these tools, and how people a trained to relate to them, as rhetorical devices used to devalue and dehumanize people and putting forward amoral frameworks to justify power-grabs

“The potential cannot be given or rehearsed, it has to be found. And the thing is, to find the potential of anything, all these musicians have to be courageous and humble enough to not want to flaunt their musical credentials. Sometimes you put on display things that you have learned in packages and the packages are supposed to be consumed by applause and sales, and there has to be an expectant with this package, but if no one knows what’s coming, it’s going to take as much courage for the audience to seek the unexpected as we are, thinking we are finding it, finding, finding the way to use potential.

Wayne Shorter

Words can never capture or exhaust great artistic creation, and more often than not, they distract, or worse, distort.

And what can we possibly say to add to the beauty of Wayne Shorter’s music?

If we mourn and celebrate his passing, it is because his extraordinary body of work will live on, and in some sense, through it, he will as well, along with the many musicians that created and played with him. Shorter often said that there is no beginning or end to things; they rather emerge from the cosmos, from life, only to return to it in death, in a perpetual flow of metamorphoses. In some sense, his musical life was one such journey as he moved through different jazz styles and genres, learning and playing with some of the most renowned jazz musicians of his time, while mentoring those who came after.

Without straining or forcing the analogy too much, there is a freedom to the way jazz music is played, or that it can be played by artists such as Wayne Shorter, that speaks perhaps to what anarchism could or should be – not as an ideology, but as a way of life.

Shorter’s words, that we quote above, could almost be taken as a summary of how anarchists should create: not by or through pre-planned models and ways of social life, but in the openness to a creativity of collective life that has no fixed beginning or end, but which in the moment, with each moment, aspires to the truest expression of freedom and equality, never quite knowing for sure where we are going. “Try to create how you wish the world to be for eternity; taking off the layers and becoming what we really are, eternally.” (The Guardian – 02/02/2023)

What Shorter once said of jazz, we could say of anarchism: “Jazz shouldn’t have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that’s required to sound like jazz. For me, the word ‘jazz’ means, ‘I dare you.’ The effort to break out of something is worth more than getting an A in syncopation.” … “This music, it’s dealing with the unexpected,” he adds. “No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?” (“Wayne Shorter On Jazz”, npr music – 02/02/2013)

[…]

But it is never all that can be said, or as Wayne Shorter himself says in the documentary below, “The mystery is way better than explaining it.””

From https://autonomies.org/2023/03/for-wayne-shorter-1933-2023/#more-15679

“…the gesture’s familiarity makes it unsettling, surreal, like the punchline to an obscure joke. How could a text so full of noise and contradiction end on such a weak point?

whose hectoring anti-charisma may be the text’s most distinctive element, whether you hate its free-associative rants or wish he’d dial them back just a hair. (For me, and I suspect plenty of other fans, it’s a little of both.)”

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-midi-cavalcade/amp/

lol, GTFO you fucking hipster.

let's stop playing coy here, is no one going to point out there's an obvious fake reference in here?
10. Cointreau, Latrans (2023) “The Importance of Theory”. Theoretical Journal of Theory, 69 (4) 20- 35.

Add new comment