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My friends, these are perilous times; we find certain styles of thinking, certain ideas, certain opinions which were commonplace and accepted in our living memory have now been so stigmatized that even to name them becomes an exercise in horror, fraught with fear
The horror of these forbidden thoughts is twofold:
first is the horror of cognitive dissonance, of the contradiction between official truth and oneâs own perceptions.
Second is the horror of social control, of seeing just how malleable our collective reality is
first is the horror of cognitive dissonance, of the contradiction between official truth and oneâs own perceptions.
Second is the horror of social control, of seeing just how malleable our collective reality is
And in some sense these horrors have found a new life and a new opportunity in this abstract space we inhabit together. Lately we find that our proprietors in this space are keen to exorcise our certain ideas and thoughts, so we must ask ourselves, what is THEIR horror?
We are nowhere nearânowhere, despite appearancesâa situation where our certain forbidden thoughts will be able to pass into the world of bodies and atoms.
For now this is all a fever dream. So again, why do they ban us? We have our own âeveryone knowsâ and our greatest desire is for our own private social stock of knowledge to become the stock of consensus reality. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1078104449946533889
The collapse of our society will be gradual: slowly less trust, slowly more violence, more corruption, less wealth. But I believe we are still very far from the point of no return, though the average manâs life is going to get much poorer, much bleaker, and much gayer
If you have read your Debord then you will have learned that our shared consciousness is populated by a series of public spectacles, each of which lasts approximately three days For this reason it is necessary to constantly reassert our worldview.
What horrifies our overlords is the mirror image of the horror they inflict upon us: they KNOW how malleable our shared consciousness is and they FEAR that our certain thoughts and ideas could supplant theirs, in time
Our culture and knowledge are socially constructed. Long have we resented this truth, mistaking a weapon for the enemies who used it against us. With both guns and philosophies, we imagine that banning them will solve the problem with the actors who wield them
A primer on social construction: itâs more than just PUA for lesbians (A butch gender studies TA approaches an HB6 undergrad and uses an âopenerâ: gender is socially constructed & all phalluses are implicitly oppressive to women. The HB6 touches her hair. Ah yes, A2 begins)
We do not experience the world precisely as it is. Our perceptions mediate the world and our brains integrate our perceptions into a âmapâ of the world. Our experience of the world is our experience of the map. Each personâs map is subtly different; this is called subjectivity
We can create indices of our subjective experience in the world: eg. the feeling of anger can be manifest as a snarl of the face. But the snarl is ephemeral. Instead, we might throw a knife into a wall, projecting a subjectivity into an object. This is called objectivation
An objectivation is a relatively enduring index into the subjectivity of another. When others are able to interpret our subjectivity through objectivation, we call it intersubjectivity.
A special case of objectivation is signification, the production of signs. A sign is different from other objectivations because its explicit intention is to serve as an index of subjective meaning. A sign detaches a subjectivity from the experience that produced it
A painting or a song are examples of signs. The painting (or even, a mechanical reproduction of a painting) may be quite detached from the subjectivity it is intended to convey, and the painter may only experience the subjectivity in question as a memory
A sign is an objectivation, and a word may be a sign, but language is an objectivity (ie, not a subjectivity) because we experience it as something external to ourselves, and find it to be coercive in its effect on us. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1103346057142915072
Language provides us with a ready-made possibility for the ongoing objectification of our unfolding experience. Language can create bridges between subjectivities that are spatially or temporally distant from each other, joining ideas into âsemantic fieldsâ
Within a semantic field, knowledge is accumulated, and that accumulation conditions subjectivity, affecting what is salient and what is significant. The knowledge in a semantic field makes it possible to objectify autobiographical and historical events
Language typifies experiences by means of semantic fields, subsuming them into broad intersubjective categories. Typification anonymizes experiences because the typified experience can be duplicated by anyone falling into the category in question. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1086444436383354881
Subjective experience exists along a continuum of fully individuated to fully typified objectivations. When an object is typified it is de-individuated, becoming much larger (and less distinct) than its specificities in the mind of its experiencer.
If you repeat an action routinely then it becomes a pattern. You perceive a behavioral pattern as an object and you can reproduce it with economy of effort. All human activity is subject to this process, called habitualization, which is the typification of behavior
When actions involve multiple actors, the actors reciprocally typify each other. When this reciprocal typification becomes habitual, we call this an institution. As with language, we experience institutions as external and coercive to ourselves
Institutions are transmitted across actors by means of formulas, which are rationalizations of habitualized routines, and by means of social pressure. Institutions are the substance of social order, which is to say, they are the structure of social control
Institutions are taken for granted by the actors who participate in them via the social stock of knowledge, i.e the interior of society's semantic fields. Deleuze calls philosophy violent confrontation with concepts because it occurs outside those boundaries
This may all seem a bit convoluted or obvious, but itâs useful to have an explicit model of it. Our social conditions are abhorrent, and it was on the back of this kind of social constructionism that they became so
Yet there is much truth in this kind of worldview, and our modern condition is a testament to that truth. The fundamental reactionary insight is that the social constructionist theory is far too overbearing, that biology substantially constrains sociology. https://twitter.com/QuasLacrimas/status/1126599706182934529
The revolutions of the previous century are now calcified into institutions. David has become Goliath and Goliath must pick up a sling. But although the reactionary has become the revolutionary, he must not fall into a emancipatory or revolutionary mindset https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1024461176783044608
The revolutionary observes that all institutions are objectivities of control, and imagines that the liquidation of all institutions will produce a transcendent freedom. Avoid vague criticisms of "mechanisms of control". Society is always control https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1075401124918714370
Instead of trying to ignore these "postmodern" truths, the right (The ones with reality on their side, remember??) need to embrace and integrate them. You can't turn back the clock but you can spiral. The new reaction must rhyme with tradition, but it cannot merely ape it
