Democracy Needs Saving from Itself?...

Slavoj Zizek, "Saving Democracy from Itself"

Through a de facto partial suspension of democracy, Macron kept the far right out of power and restored stability.

In Agatha Christie’s novel The Hollow, the eccentric Lucy Angkatell holds a dinner party for the Christows (John, a famous doctor, and his wife, Gerda), various members of her extended family, and her neighbor, detective Hercule Poirot. The next morning, Poirot witnesses a scene that seems strangely staged: Gerda stands with a gun in her hand next to John’s body as it bleeds into the swimming pool. Lucy, Henrietta (John’s lover), and Edward (a cousin of Lucy’s) are also present. John utters a final urgent appeal, “Henrietta,” and dies.

It seems obvious that Gerda is the murderer. Henrietta steps forward to take the revolver from her hand, but apparently fumbles and drops it into the pool, destroying the evidence of Gerda’s fingerprints on the handle. Poirot realizes that the dying man’s “Henrietta” was a call to his lover to protect his wife from imprisonment for his death.

Without any conscious plan, the entire family joins in the plot and deliberately misdirects Poirot. Each of them knows that Gerda is the murderer, so they stage the crime scene, but in a reflexive way: the deception lies in the very fact that it appears staged. The truth masks itself as artifice, such that the faked elements are, in fact, “clues.” As another of Christie’s famous detectives, Jane Marple, remarks in They Do It with Mirrors: “Never underestimate the power of the obvious.”

If we replace John’s body with democracy and Gerda with French President Emmanuel Macron, we can open a window onto France following its parliamentary election this summer. After the far-right National Rally won the first round, Macron was caught holding a smoking gun. But in the weeks and months thereafter, he managed to protect French democracy by partly suspending it, thus denying the second-round winner – a leftist coalition called the New Popular Front (NFP) – the fruits of its victory.

The French constitution – which was imposed by Charles de Gaulle at the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958 – stipulates that the president nominates the prime minister, whose appointed government can operate even if its members have not been confirmed by the National Assembly. It was owing to this peculiarity that François Mitterand later decried the Fifth Republic as undemocratic, describing it in 1964 as a “permanent coup.”

The rationale for this constitutional feature was that the French people should be forced to make a choice, and that if their choice is unclear, the president has the authority – and the duty – to maintain order and stability. The June European Parliament election and the French general election both indicated that French voters were unable or unwilling to make a clear choice. In doing so, they gave Macron the opening he needed to sideline both the far right and the NFP by allying his own coalition with the Gaullist Republicans.

Macron was widely criticized for calling an election so soon after National Rally had finished first in the EU election. But National Rally ultimately finished third, and other parties have de facto supported his handling of the situation by not calling for a no-confidence vote against his recently appointed prime minister, Michel Barnier.

Something similar happened in France during the historic May 1968 protests, which almost toppled de Gaulle and his government – or so it seemed – only for him to return with a new National Assembly in place. Notably, the protests erupted at the very high point of the French welfare state, when the standard of living was higher than it had ever been before.

The implication, in retrospect, is that a strong case can be made for enlightened dictatorship. France is lucky in that its constitution allows for the type of partial suspension of parliamentary democracy that Macron indulged in. Just imagine what will happen in Germany when there is no possible way to form a government without including the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

Although I disagree with Macron’s politics and policies, I respect his quick reaction to the far right’s apparent ascent this summer. His decision to dissolve parliament was certainly risky, but it was a risk worth taking. The new fascism must be fought with haste and vigor wherever it appears.

Though National Rally’s Marine Le Pen was denied her victory in the second round, CNN described the result well: “Macron’s gamble has kept the far right out of power, but plunged France into chaos.” Because Macron and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (the key figure in the NPF) are so far apart, no deal to forge a grand coalition seemed possible. Instead, the country seemed set for a prolonged period of instability and anti-left subterfuge – bad news for an already brittle economy and efforts to fend off the far right in the 2027 presidential election.

Instead, France has not been plunged into chaos. For now, at least, it seems that Macron’s gamble has restored a semblance of normality. Some will wonder whether a non-elected government can drag on indefinitely; but others will answer, “Why not?” It is certainly preferable to a hung parliament, prolonged political unrest, and social and economic chaos.

Through a de facto partial suspension of democracy, Macron kept the far right out of power and restored stability. For that, he deserves congratulations and support. With neo-fascism on the rise globally, similar measures may prove necessary elsewhere. As the philosopher Jon Elster concluded in 2020: “We can reverse the common dictum that democracy is under threat, and affirm that democracy is the threat, at least in its short-termist populist form.”

...More Like Leftists Rejoicing in "Enlightened Despotism" 

Lacan 101

On Intersectionality and the Formation of Symbolic and Totemic Social Capital

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton, 432 pp., $35)

Oliver Traldi, "Who the Woke Are"

A new book delivers keen insights into the human condition while speaking directly to concrete social phenomena.

What is a theory? In philosophy, we usually think of it as a set of propositions. These propositions might be challenged directly, or they might turn out to generate empirical predictions or logical consequences that could be challenged instead. But we can also think of theories as things that live in people’s minds—ideas that shape our vocabularies, our maps of the world, our attunements to perceptions, our instincts about what jumps out as important in our environments. Thinking this way, a theory’s measure is its number of adherents. What ought to be evaluated is how they think when gripped by the theory, not what the theory’s abstract implications might be.

Theories of politics in particular seem apt for this sort of evaluation. Some political philosophies do not specifically entail that horrible things ought to be done. But if such a theory’s adherents always seem to do horrible things once they get power, that should count against the theory.

Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke presents an account of the character and causes of woke politics. It fills a gap in this regard: al-Gharbi, primarily a sociologist, gives a different kind of perspective than, say, Yascha Mounk’s relatively centrist history of wokeness as rooted in radical academic ideas or Richard Hanania’s relatively right-wing history of wokeness as rooted in activist jurisprudence and the administrative state. But at a further remove, We Have Never Been Woke is a story of how theories—both the woke theories criticized and the more classically leftist theories used to criticize them—simultaneously open our eyes to some things while blinding us to others.

The details that stick out to al-Gharbi are often strikingly simple. In the introduction, he recalls how in the fall of 2016, during his first semester as a doctoral student at Columbia University, undergraduate students claimed to be so traumatized in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory that they couldn’t do their work. Such students, al-Gharbi notes, were in fact attendees of an elite institution on their way to an elite life. As they claimed the mantle of the vulnerable and downtrodden, they focused on their own mental health rather than the material struggles of Columbia’s actual working-class community—“the landscapers, the maintenance workers, the food preparation teams, the security guards.” Al-Gharbi cast a similarly sharp eye on the pro-Palestine protests this spring, noting at Compact, where he is a columnist, that while no Columbia student “faced more than a single misdemeanor charge[,] those who faced charges at City College, the nearby public university raided by police the same night, were all hit with felonies.”

The conclusion, which becomes a starting point for the book, is that “we have never been woke.” In other words, if we conceive of wokeness as an ideology or philosophy or set of precepts, it’s not one that “woke” people generally adhere to. Rather, the woke are, in the words of the book’s subtitle, “a new elite” beset by “cultural contradictions,” which emerge from the very motivations and incentives that drove them to become woke to begin with. In another instance of sensitivity, al-Gharbi suggests that researchers in his fields tend themselves to be part of this new elite—and that their work on the sociology of elites, and on issues related to wokeness, thus suffers from persistent blind spots and biases.

The woke are, for al-Gharbi, “symbolic capitalists” whose occupations require the manipulation of words and data and who face a certain amount of inherent economic precariousness, which is compensated by higher social status. It’s widely acknowledged that writers and professors accept lower salaries for this “symbolic capital,” but al-Gharbi is the first to tie this fact rigorously to the rise of wokeness, centered as it is in these professions. The book’s perspective is perhaps best articulated in the following passage:

Elites, especially those who identify with historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups, increasingly define the relentless pursuit of their own self-interest as a “radical” act. High-end consumption is redefined as an act of “self-care” or “self-affirmation” . . . because they . . . are “worth it” and “deserve it.” Likewise, elites from historically disadvantaged groups who accumulate ever more power or influence in their own hands are described as somehow achieving a “win” for those who remain impoverished, marginalized, and vulnerable. . . . [B]ehaviors that would be recognized as exploitative, oppressive, or disrespectful if carried out by people who are white, heterosexual, or male are often interpreted as empowering, righteous, or necessary when carried out by “other” elites and elite aspirants.

In my view, al-Gharbi is more consistently correct about wokeness than any other author on the subject. He accurately traces wokeness to well before Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, finding its origin in the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, attended, in his view, by many of the same people who wound up embracing full-fledged wokeness. I like to say that it started even earlier that same year: in April 2011, when the Obama administration’s Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter requiring that universities receiving federal funding adjust their procedures around adjudicating claims of sexual assault.

Indeed, at times al-Gharbi seems to suggest that the desire for more symbolic capital, for more social status, is a more essential human drive than the desire for more money; financial gains hit a threshold of diminishing returns and baseline satisfaction, whereas symbolic gains don’t seem to. And “because status is intrinsically relative . . . status competition much more closely approximates a zero-sum game.” Thus We Have Never Been Woke is ultimately not just a sociological book about a new cultural elite, the causes of the Great Awokening, or the causes of awokenings in general. It is also a philosophical book about ineliminable aspects of the human condition that draws its inspiration from concrete social circumstances.

Al-Gharbi gives a grand theory of awokenings—accounting for not only the recent Great Awokening but also social changes in the leadup to the Civil War, in the 1920s, and in the 1970s—and finds multiple threads of causation common to them.

One such thread is elite overproduction. When too many would-be elites are produced, they don’t get the standing they think they deserve, and sometimes seek to be revolutionaries instead. In cases where elite overproduction occurs simultaneously with more widespread social unrest, would-be elites can co-opt and redirect political movements toward their own goals—which, according to al-Gharbi, is often correlated with plateaus when it comes to those movements’ successes on their own terms. The biggest victories of these redirected revolutions are often “social justice sinecures,” or carved-out positions for the elites among supposedly marginalized groups.

According to al-Gharbi, elite overproduction leads to resentment and reactive calls for revolution: “Frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants sought to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” But this isn’t completely clear. If wokeness is a legitimating ideology of a successful and powerful elite class, how can it also be a kind of formation aimed against that class by those who failed to join it? Some disentangling of this sort of tension could have helped highlight the book’s overall thesis amid the forest of fascinating detail.

In the recent Great Awokening, al-Gharbi notes with his characteristic eye, the new group of over-credentialed underachievers mostly consisted of women, and a significant majority of the jobs in the administrative bloat that was created in the wake of woke upheaval—the HR and DEI bureaucracies—went to women. Later on, he writes: “The feminization of the symbolic professions is significant in light of the robust and ever-expanding lines of research in moral and social psychology demonstrating that . . . men and women tend to engage in very different forms of conflict, competition, and status seeking.” This feminization is linked, for al-Gharbi, to the rise of a “victimhood culture” oriented in part around the concept of “trauma.” The psychology of victimhood fits the broader sense of superiority that al-Gharbi attributes to the woke symbolic capitalists: “Research has found that people who understand themselves as victims often demonstrate less concern for the hardships of others; they feel more entitled to selfish behavior; they grow more vicious against rivals . . . [T]hey also gain a sense of moral superiority relative to everyone else.”

Further, the risk-aversion and fear of ostracism that characterizes the psychology of most symbolic capitalists leads to reduced innovation in spheres as diverse as science, business, and pop culture. This section is more speculative than most, but I was happy to see al-Gharbi address the ubiquity of remakes, adaptations, and spinoffs in contemporary cultural output—just what one would expect if culture is dominated by those who have spent their lives getting better and better at following the rules. Progressive culture seems to resemble the political equivalent of bankers showing off their near-identical business cards to one another in American Psycho. Thus We Have Never Been Woke also improves on earlier accounts of wokeness by linking it to other contemporary phenomena that are obviously related but hard to associate as a matter of pure political belief.

Another such phenomenon is widespread mental illness among symbolic capitalists; al-Gharbi writes: “As symbolic capitalists’ attitudes about the social world changed, their emotional states moved in tandem.” It seems to me that it could have been the other way around; either way, I would have loved to read more on that topic.

Beyond symbolic capital, al-Gharbi introduces a new term for a kind of social status arising out of victimhood culture: totemic capital. This is the “authority afforded to an individual . . . on the basis of claimed or perceived membership in a historically marginalized or disadvantaged group.” This—along with a kind of raw assumption of totemic homogeneity—fuels, for instance, the infamous “as a” construction (e.g., “As a mentally ill Jewish-Italian man of size, I find that comment offensive”). It also explains the phenomenon of “race faking,” in which white people, especially white women, purport to be members of minority groups, just as victimhood culture itself explains the prevalence of hate crime hoaxes. Indeed, for al-Gharbi minority elites themselves are engaging in a kind of race faking, “trad[ing] on the struggles and experiences of lower- to moderate-income nonimmigrant and monoracial Black people—enhancing their own credibility and life prospects by purporting to speak on behalf of these others.”

Al-Gharbi deserves credit for mentioning these phenomena (and is even audacious enough to name Elizabeth Warren as a race faker), but he likely underestimates their importance. The problem is that his theory of totemic capital is in tension with his theory of symbolic capital as the root of wokeness. If symbolic capitalists are riding a false egalitarianism into increased social status and power, why would their theory enjoin them to cede authority to totem-bearers? If wokeness developed in the self-interest of elite white liberals, why would it involve such bowing and scraping? Why would it require the handing off of opportunities? The admission that one’s accomplishments aren’t really one’s own, but rather the result of privilege and discrimination? Why do woke whites so favor affirmative action that might hurt their own prospects?

This is where al-Gharbi’s own forms of theory-building, based on various forms of capital, cause him some blindness of his own. Examining the quasi-religious aspects of wokeness would have been useful in this context; his account of symbolic capitalists as self-interested could be rescued if the interest in question is some sort of purging of their souls of original sins, like unconscious bias. And, since al-Gharbi sometimes seems to place wokeness mainly in the minds of white liberal symbolic capitalists, it would make sense to acknowledge that totem-bearers don’t have to be woke in order to gain the sort of symbolic capital that woke whites seem to want. In fact, one might regard wokeness as simply parasitic on the totemic capital that al-Gharbi describes—an essentially derivative phenomenon that is, in some sense, a kind of anti-whiteness.

Similarly, though al-Gharbi analyzes symbolic capitalists’ divergence from their stated egalitarian ideals, he doesn’t seem to question the intuitive appeal of those ideals. This is so even though the apparent hypocrisy seems related to other phenomena he’s skeptical of, like victimhood culture. The third chapter, titled “Symbolic Domination,” begins: “Who are the elites? In contemporary America, it seems no one wants to adopt the label.” But of course elitism is in tension with egalitarianism. At a philosophical level, it’s hard to know how we can evaluate wokeness without evaluating the various egalitarian claims that underpin it. This relates to another tension throughout the book: though at some points al-Gharbi suggests that the woke ideology, with its purpose of legitimating the position of elite symbolic capitalists, is held as a genuine set of core beliefs, at others he seems to suggest that it’s held opportunistically or as a mere pretense.

Because academic and journalistic elites are symbolic capitalists, political analysis of disagreement from dominant elite views in the academy and media often falls into the diagnostic mode. Sharply combining critiques of discourses around terms like “fascism” and “misinformation,” al-Gharbi writes that “interpret[ing] deviance from, or resistance to, our own preferences and priorities in terms of pathologies . . . or deficiencies. . . . Inconvenient social movements are typically explained in terms of some noxious counterelite.” But surely, for all its many virtues, We Have Never Been Woke is a similar kind of diagnostic text, which falls into similar patterns. Al-Gharbi claims, for instance: “Although our language often makes appeals to solidaristic altruism, symbolic capitalists primarily deploy political discourse . . . for the purposes of individual enhancement and personal expression.” Perhaps pathology and deficiency are two of the only options we have when it comes to theorizing about ideology.

It would take too long to catalog all the terrific details and vignettes that made their way into this book. To show that symbolic capitalists often win against the superelite, al-Gharbi mentions the case of Henry Ford II losing out against the social-justice orientation of the Ford Foundation. Discussing campus politics, he writes that “many student clubs at Yale are explicitly oriented around social justice but are also highly competitive to get into.” Virtually every aspect of contemporary culture gets some sort of mention and ends up being related in some way to the same forces that have generated wokeness. We Have Never Been Woke is a great book on wokeness, probably the most incisive and interesting one that’s been written. It also holds appeal as a work on political beliefs, as a work of political sociology, and as an incredibly well-sourced piece of cultural criticism. It is very much worth reading.

When Guilt-Pride becomes Totemic Capital  in the minds of an over-produced newly emergent elite!

Axion Haze...

Reference

Re-Enchanting the World

 

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, "Why Isn’t Halloween Scary Anymore?"

When I was 10, I was living in the rural Northeast. That Halloween, one of the neighborhood parents took a bunch of us trick-or-treating in the back of his pickup truck. There were about five of us, thrilled to be riding around in the open truck bed after dark. Our route took us past a cemetery that dated back to the Revolutionary War, sitting down a slope away from the road, surrounded by an old stone wall and hemmed in by thick woods. As we approached the cemetery, the dad behind the wheel killed the engine. We heard some revs and cranks, then nothing. “Sorry, kids,” he called back to us from the cab. “Must be something wrong with the truck.”

It must have been on a dare that we all ended up venturing down the hill toward the cemetery into the enveloping darkness of the woods. As we nervously stood around among the headstones, a figure emerged from the forest covered in ashes, wielding a chain saw, and dragging a heavy chain around its neck. Another appeared out of the shadows, covered in birch bark. We heard a voice coming from under the fallen leaves — the ghosts were converging on us. (They had put a boom box under a leaf pile.) We ran for our lives back to the truck, which miraculously started right back up as soon as the last of us had been pulled up into the back. We peeled away, shrieking. It was an ecstatic moment of terror alongside the delicious relief of safety.

When my kids return to the parks they loved as toddlers, they are always amazed at how small everything is. “This slide used to be huge,” they insist. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the way I feel about Halloween — did it stop being scary, or did I grow up? I’m pretty sure one thing has changed: Terrifying children for sport is not as socially acceptable as it once was. The thought of parents banding together to scare their children on Halloween evokes, more than anything else, the casual and oblivious cruelty of mid-century American life. Perhaps scaring children as a practice has fallen far out of favor because real life is scary enough without a need for added theatrics. Just the same, being spooked on Halloween by a group of adults is one of my favorite childhood memories, and I say this as someone who can’t comfortably handle horror as a genre or fear as an emotion.

It was exceptional for the adults in our neighborhood to get together and plan a prank like this — this was the only time it ever happened, and even decades later, I’m impressed they pulled it off. I wonder what compelled them. I know some people were lucky enough to grow up around adults who loved staging magical or creepy spectacles for local kids, and I know it’s not always a privilege; I’ve spoken to many people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s who had nightmares for years after enduring the antics of adults.

For my kids, Halloween is more of an aesthetic experience than a creepy one, and sometimes I wonder if they’re missing something that I intimately knew — the feeling of a thinning veil between worlds that is hard to describe in words but vividly conjured in memories. As much as I love over-the-top Halloween decorations — and I truly do; I hope the skeletons never stop getting bigger — there is another dimension to Halloween, a numinous enchanted dimension, that I wonder if they have felt before.

This fall, I am teaching night school at a local college, and I recently had my students read a section of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s book, The Crisis of Narration. The section, called “The Disenchantment of the World,” argues that the stories we tell have been stripped of their mystery and magic by an overemphasis, in digital media in particular, on accumulating facts and links of causality. This happened, then this, then this; a world narrated in bullet points, in a rush to get to the conclusion. This is how AI speaks back to us — in the most efficient way to convey information, in the absence of any evocative feeling. I had never taught this essay before, and I wasn’t sure of what everyone would make of it. I was a bit worried it would land as flat-footed kids these days griping.

The students at night school come from all over. Many are recent immigrants seeking to earn enough college credits to apply for a specific training program. Others are students for whom school has never been easy, who are going for a second chance after having dropped out. For easily half the people in the room, English is a second or third language, but they all understood precisely what Han was arguing in the essay. They recognized the disenchantment, and they could describe it. The classroom rippled with resonance as we discussed the chapter.

Parenting today is very consumed with “making magic” — holiday magic, birthday magic, core-memory magic. Being a good parent has become as much about sprinkling an affective fairy dust over your children’s memories as it is about keeping them fed and clothed. And yet, the disenchantment persists — it might even grow. What are we missing?

It would be easy to blame it on something like “consumer culture” or “Amazon” — where’s the magic in shopping your way to a vibe? But that’s an incomplete explanation, not to mention a boring and predictable critical orientation. Hand-making your costumes is not going to re-enchant your world. Nostalgic re-creations of aesthetics of Halloweens past won’t do it, either. Re-enchantment is an emotional process. It has to do with inviting our children, and ourselves, to experience inexplicable feelings that might occasionally overlap with fear. The fear I felt that one Halloween has lasted like a magic elixir in my mind ever since. It’s made me want to find more sources of that feeling, even just for a split second, as I attune my attention while passing an abandoned building or notice a figure pass into the shadows. I think it’s possible that one singular Halloween prank I experienced in the fifth grade permanently enchanted Halloween for me for the rest of my life. It’s crazy how these things happen.

When we cross the threshold into the holiday season, we enter a culturally significant period of memory-making. One way that Byung-Chul Han describes enchantment is when the past and the present momentarily collide, providing us a brief, overwhelming experience of being beyond time itself — “two separate moments in time combining into one fragrant crystal of time. The torturous contingency of time is thereby overcome, and this produces happiness.”

Isn’t this all we really want during the holiday season? Is one fragrant crystal of time too much for a parent to ask for? I wonder if it’s a projection of parents’ anxiety about our own distraction that causes us to salivate so uncontrollably around the idea of “making memories” with our kids. Attentiveness is a necessary condition of memory-making, and we are all spiraling to varying extents about how we are and are not attentive. Maybe our own anxiety about missing out on the important moments is having the unintended consequence of disenchanting our holidays. Maybe by trying to capture the vibe through photo shoots and cute decorations, we’re feeding the wrong dog, so to speak.

So how might we re-enchant our holidays? I couldn’t begin to tell you. For me, the Pict-o-Matic freeze-frame quality of holiday rituals and events — remember when we did this ritual five years ago? Ten? Twenty? — catapults me into a private cosmos of mourning for people and places that I’ll never see again. The enchantment of the holidays, from Halloween all the way through office-party season and past Christmas into the dead zone of the dawning New Year, is for me a feeling of proximity to past selves that makes the present day seem hyperreal. If we’re lucky enough to reach middle age, we are treated to this dreadful and amazing view of all the previous iterations of our life, and to peer over the precipice at all the future ones, and to know that in a few years, it will be this very dinner, this very outfit, this very child’s petulant mood, that will conjure for us the undeniable feeling of the weight of life.

But the midwinter holidays can be so emo. Halloween is not the time to get hung up on your personal history. It’s the invisible world, not the world of our memories, that makes this holiday so interesting. You don’t have to be a horror-movie aficionado to know that when we encounter visions or feelings that are unexplainable or mysterious, it can make us feel more real.

Dugin's Westernology - An Analysis of Current American Politics

Alexander Dugin, "Lacan and Psychedelic Trumpism"

Alexander Dugin applies Lacan’s three orders to US politics, arguing that while Kamala Harris and the Democrats seek to dismantle traditional structures, “psychedelic Trumpism,” influenced by figures like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and J. D. Vance, alongside the Alt-Right, counters from the right, with a warning that a Harris victory could spell the end of humanity.

Lacan’s Method

Let us try to apply Lacan’s topology to the American elections.

Let us recall Lacan’s basic model. It can be represented as three Borromean rings or three orders:

The Real
The Symbolic
The Imaginary

The Real is the domain where every object is strictly identical to itself. This absolute identity (A=A) excludes the very possibility of becoming, i.e., of being in a state of transformation. Thus, the Real is the zone of pure death and nothingness. There are no changes, movements, or relations. The Real is true, like the truth of nothingness that has no alternatives.

The Symbolic is the domain where nothing equals itself, where one thing always refers to another. It is an escape from the Real, motivated by the desire to avoid death and falling into nothingness. It is here that content, relationships, movements, and transformations are born, but always in a dreamlike state. The Symbolic is the unconscious. The essence of a symbol is that it points to something other than itself (it does not matter what specifically, as long as it is not itself).

The Imaginary is the domain where the dynamic of the Symbolic stops, but without the object dying and collapsing into the Real. The Imaginary is what we mistakenly take for Being, the world, ourselves — nature, society, culture, and politics. It is everything, yet it is also a lie. Every element of the Imaginary is actually a frozen moment of the Symbolic. Wakefulness is a form of sleep that does not realize itself. Everything in the Imaginary refers to the Symbolic but presents itself as supposedly “Real.”

In the Real, A=A is true. In the Imaginary, A=A is false. In the Imaginary, no object is identical to itself, but unlike in the Symbolic, it doesn’t want to admit this — neither to itself nor to others.

The Real is nothing. The Symbolic is ever-changing becoming. The Imaginary consists of false nodes of the frozen Symbolic.

Lacan and Politics

Lacan was well aware that the model of the three orders casts doubt on the basic strategies of reformism, progressivism, and revolution. It is no coincidence that in his youth, he was right-wing and a monarchist, close to Charles Maurras. And in the 1960s, contrary to the “New Left,” he supported the status quo and de Gaulle’s rule. This was no accident but stems directly from the Borromean rings model.

The “New Left” revolutionaries (in Lacan’s interpretation) wanted to replace the Imaginary (old social-political structures, order as such) with the Symbolic (surreal, schizophrenic, transgressive). They used Lacan’s ideas in a utilitarian way — ironic Freudianism helped undermine the claims of the Imaginary (Order) to foundational logic (A=A), revealing it as merely a frozen moment of delirium. However, they overlooked the fact that once the old Imaginary collapses or melts under the pressure of critique (whether political, aesthetic, social, or epistemological), the Symbolic cannot take its place. It will instantly become the new Imaginary — equally totalitarian, dictatorial, and absurd.

Examples of this, Lacan saw everywhere, especially in Soviet Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks began with a call for freedom and equality but quickly transformed into a rigid party hierarchy with a totalitarian apparatus of violence. The same happened with Cromwell or the French Revolution. The Symbolic retains its properties only while remaining in the unconscious, in the realm of dreams. The moment it surfaces, it turns into the Imaginary, essentially the same thing, though now dressed in new forms. All Imaginary systems were once Symbolic, alive, and changing before freezing into permanence.

Thus, today’s revolutionary is tomorrow’s totalitarian, cruel official and enforcer of violence. Reforms (in the context of the Borromean rings) are impossible, as they will lead to the same result. The Symbolic can never replace the Imaginary under any conditions.


Lacan believed this, and this conclusion flows directly from his system.

Kamala Harris and the Symbolic

Now to the US elections. Here we see a fierce clash between “progressives” (Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party) and “conservatives” (Trump and the Republicans). In Lacanian analysis, the roles seem obvious: Kamala Harris embodies an invitation to transgression, the legalization of perversions, and liberation from all prohibitions and norms, i.e., the expansion of the Symbolic realm. The Democrats’ platform is a structure of well-tempered delirium: more LGBT, more cancel culture, more illegal immigrants, more drugs and gender reassignment surgeries, more deconstruction of old orders, more BLM and critical race theory.

Of course, the main Imaginary being mocked and attacked from all sides is Donald Trump — the generalized archetype of “unfreedom,” “hierarchies,” and “male rationality.”

Kamala Harris represents the Symbolic, as seen in her strange speeches, endless cold and meaningless laughter, her incoherence, and her expressive gestures that point to something intuitively understandable but indefinable. Harris is a figure of active dreaming. The voter sees in her that the impossible becomes possible, and one thing seamlessly flows into another. But everything remains unfocused and blurry. This is “progress”: Whites become Blacks, capitalists become something else (“Loot the stores — that’s the whole law!”), men and women become vague objects of desire (Lacan’s “little a”), always evading fixation.

In other words, despite Lacan’s own warnings about the unchanging structure of the Borromean rings, the Democrats are actively trying to destroy the American Imaginary, fervently wanting to replace it with the Symbolic.

Psychedelic Trumpism and Right-Wing Dreaming

Where can we find a counterattack on the frozen liberal Imaginary, which has turned into overt totalitarianism? The answer is obvious: in the opposite pole, which we can call “Trumpist Symbolic.” We saw the signs of this strategy during Trump’s first presidential campaign in the Alt-Right, on 4chan, in the figure of the meme Pepe the Frog, in reptilian conspiracy theories, chaos magic, and the delirious theories of QAnon. We might call this “esoteric Trumpism” or, more precisely, “psychedelic Trumpism.” If the Democrats and their transgressive practices have become the Imaginary — frozen in totalitarian prescriptive power structures — then psychoanalytic critique from the Symbolic has naturally focused on the Republicans. Of course, not all Republicans, but the most liberated, “unhinged,” and delirious factions.

Here we encounter an interesting picture. The power held by the Democrats and the neoconservative wing of the Republicans places them as carriers of the Imaginary, that is, the globalist order. However, progressivism as a synonym for the Symbolic clashes with the totalitarianism entrenched in the Democrats, who fiercely cling to power. Even though the Democrats’ narrative depicts the Imaginary as Trump — the tough, feminine Melania, the Republicans, and old liberal America — in the larger system, it is the Democrats who now embody the Imaginary, desperately holding onto power. Kamala Harris is an agent of a rigid, organized system — what is called the Deep State. She is not an organism but a mechanism, a link in the vertical chain of authority. This is how the Imaginary order manifests itself. Appeals to the Symbolic only slightly obscure its true nature.

The only critique capable of identifying and destabilizing this frozen order comes from “psychedelic Trumpism,” which increasingly assumes the function of the Symbolic.

This analysis helps explain the selection of J. D. Vance as a potential vice president or even Trump’s successor in his ideological battle against the liberal establishment. Vance no longer represents the Imaginary but the purely Symbolic. He openly aligns himself with the extravagant, psychedelic field of post-liberal right-wing thought, especially the chaotic Alt-Right universe. Figures like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), and the brilliant French philosopher René Girard (who wrote on sacred violence) are atypical for classic right-wing Republicans. They cannot be used to illustrate the Imaginary (which the progressives supposedly aim to dismantle in the name of the Symbolic). In Vance, the Democrats’ psychoanalytic strategy fails, as Vance himself embodies the atypical right-wing Symbolic pole. It is even possible that he understands this and is familiar with Lacan. Thus, choosing Vance as vice president is a key move in Trump’s campaign. Once again, the magic of chaos — represented by the Borromean rings and their connection to dreamlike psychedelia — comes into play, but this time more systematically.

Strictly following Lacan, the Trump-Vance alliance seems harmonious and full of promise. Trump himself offers the Imaginary that appeals to the right-wing electorate. But this is complemented by right-wing postmodernism, social critique, and the liberating delirium embodied in “psychedelic Trumpism” and, by extension, Vance. The rational, daytime mode of governance, inevitable in any administration and transparent in Trump’s case, is balanced by the nighttime mode of liberated (right-wing) dreaming.

Transgression from the Right

From this application of Lacan’s model to the upcoming American elections, we can draw several more conclusions.

First, it brilliantly explains the totalitarian nature of modern globalist liberalism, which has become impossible to ignore. The attempt to replace the Imaginary with the Symbolic is doomed to failure but will only generate a new Imaginary — one that is more alienated, aggressive, intolerant, and violent. Hence, we see the phenomenon of “liberal fascism.”

On the other hand, the emergence of “psychedelic Trumpism” makes sense, representing not a marginal anomaly but a perfectly reasonable and even pragmatic strategy. If every kind of deviation and pathology is permitted, but Tradition is forbidden, then the will to life and the dynamic of the Symbolic will fuel tremendous energy into normal gender and species-based orientations. Tradition, then, acquires a revolutionary character. When Tradition is outlawed, this alone makes it an object of passionate desire. Progressives freeze socio-political and cultural life, alienating it. Thus, the new counterculture becomes non-conformism from the right.

Who Will Win the Election?

It is difficult to say, but the aggressive, totalitarian elite, betting on minority groups, might fail. By removing the forbidden status from deviations, they automatically make legally suppressed normalcy the center of attraction. If, in the order of the Imaginary, normalcy resides in the “past” — what existed before the progressives and liberals — then in the order of the Symbolic, normalcy resides in the “future.” Normalcy is the suppressed and outlawed today that, like a forbidden fruit, longs to triumph tomorrow. Usually, conservatives struggle with envisioning the future. But “psychedelic Trumpism” offers a unique response, shifting the unconscious and even transgressive practices to the right, thereby capturing the future’s territory.

Be Cautious of Nothingness

Lastly, we have not yet touched on the subject of the Real — one of the Borromean rings.

Here, progressives attempt a complex maneuver: by normalizing the Symbolic, they aim to remove the tension between it and the Real. They hope to bring nothingness (death) under their control rather than excluding it. Likely, this is the goal of AI, migration to cyberspace, and the Singularity, where the identity of the machine with itself will no longer create traumatic flows that awaken the unconscious (the Symbolic). If the Symbolic (as progressives naively believe) has already replaced the Imaginary, then the problem of confrontation with the Real has been solved. To conquer death and the terror it brings, life itself must be eliminated. Hence the focus on transhumanism and mechanical immortality, a theme explored in speculative realism.

The Democratic Party’s ontological project inevitably leads to the elimination of humanity.

These elections in the United States will determine the fate of humanity — whether it will be or not. A Trump victory will maintain the balance between the three Borromean rings. A Harris victory may mean their irreversible collapse.

And here, finally, it must be said that for Lacan, the Borromean rings and their three orders are what constitute the human being.

Physicists Review the 'Dark'... the UAP of the Physical Sciences

Proponent of Anti-Kuhnian Woke Democratized Science

Comments of Byung-Chul Han's "What is Power"?

Power depends upon freedom

Violence eliminates choices

Power:Increases Freedom::Violence:Increases Restrictions

Power thrives on offering Choices

Language is the "tool/ tech" of Power

...and the Gatekeeper is YOU!

...and Joining the Digital Panopticon is on YOU!

Guilt-Pride: Germany's #1 Export (White Wokeism)

Identity Technologies for Achieving Profilic Superiority...

...or Simply Hubris and an Inflated Self-Esteem?

The Identity Tech Underlying the Social Cancellation Phenomena

From The Book of Ecclesiastes:

1 The words of the Preacher,[a] the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

Curtis Yarvin:  "You can only LOSE the Culture War"

Baudrillard goes to Disneyland

...to find America (in the crowd!)

Heidegger, Dasein, and Adjusting One's Metaphysical Frame

Cable Bacteria - Energy Production & Transfer...

...and a little ditty about mRNA off-switches.

Do Neutron Stars Produce Axions?

An axion cloud around a neutron star. While some axions escape the star’s gravitational pull, many remain bound to the star and over a long period of time form a cloud surrounding it. The interaction with the neutron star’s strong magnetic field causes some axions to convert into photons – light that we can eventually detect with our telescopes on Earth. Credit: University of Amsterdam

University of Amsterdam, "Physicists show that neutron stars may be shrouded in clouds of axions"

A team of physicists from the universities of Amsterdam, Princeton and Oxford have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars. These axions could form an explanation for the elusive dark matter that cosmologists search for—and moreover, they might not be too difficult to observe.

The research was published in the journal Physical Review X and is a follow-up to previous work, in which the authors also studied axions and neutron stars, but from a completely different point of view.

While in their previous work they investigated the axions that escape the neutron star, now the researchers focus on the ones that are left behind—the axions that get captured by the star's gravity. As time goes by, these particles should gradually form a hazy cloud around the neutron star, and it turns out that such axion clouds may well be observable in our telescopes. But why would astronomers and physicists be so interested in hazy clouds around far-away stars?

Axions: From soap to dark matter

Protons, neutrons, electrons, photons—most of us are familiar with the names of at least some of these tiny particles. The axion is lesser known, and for a good reason: at the moment it is only a hypothetical type of particle—one that nobody has yet detected.

Named after a brand of soap, its existence was first postulated in the 1970s, to clean up a problem—hence the soap reference—in our understanding of one of the particles we could observe very well: the neutron. However, while theoretically very nice, if these axions existed they would be extremely light, making them very hard to detect in experiments or observations.

Today, axions are also known as a front-running candidate to explain dark matter, one of the biggest mysteries in contemporary physics. Many different pieces of evidence suggest that approximately 85% of the matter content in our universe is "dark," which simply means that it is not made up of any type of matter that we know and can currently observe.

Instead, the existence of dark matter is only inferred indirectly through the gravitational influence it exerts on visible matter. Fortunately, this does not automatically mean that dark matter has no other interactions with visible matter at all, but if such interactions exist, their strength is necessarily tiny. As the name suggests, any viable dark matter candidate is thus incredibly difficult to directly observe.

Putting one and one together, physicists have realized that the axion may be exactly what they are looking for to solve the dark matter problem. A particle that has not yet been observed, which would be extremely light, and have very weak interactions with other particles… could axions be at least part of the explanation for dark matter?

Neutron stars as magnifying glasses

The idea of the axion as a dark matter particle is nice, but in physics an idea is only truly nice if it has observable consequences. Would there be a way to observe axions after all, fifty years after their possible existence was first proposed?

When exposed to electric and magnetic fields, axions are expected to be able to convert into photons—particles of light—and vice versa. Light is something we know how to observe, but as mentioned, the corresponding interaction strength should be very small, and therefore so is the amount of light that axions generally produce. That is, unless one considers an environment containing a truly massive amount of axions, ideally in very strong electromagnetic fields.

This led the researchers to consider neutron stars, the densest known stars in our universe. These objects have masses similar to that of our sun but compressed into stars of 12 to 15 kilometers in size.

Such extreme densities create an equally extreme environment that, notably, also contains enormous magnetic fields, billions of times stronger than any we find on Earth. Recent research has shown that if axions exist, these magnetic fields allow for neutron stars to mass-produce these particles near their surface.

Overview of the four stages characterizing the formation and evolution of axion clouds around neutron stars. Credit: Physical Review X (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.14.041015

The ones that stay behind

In their previous work, the authors focused on the axions that after production escaped the star—they computed the amounts in which these axions would be produced, which trajectories they would follow, and how their conversion into light could lead to a weak but potentially observable signal.

This time, they consider the axions that do not manage to escape—the ones that, despite their tiny mass, get caught by the neutron star's immense gravity.

Due to the axion's very feeble interactions, these particles will stay around, and on timescales up to millions of years they will accumulate around the neutron star. This can result in the formation of very dense clouds of axions around neutron stars, which provide some incredible new opportunities for axion research.

In their paper, the researchers study the formation, as well as the properties and further evolution, of these axion clouds, pointing out that they should, and in many cases must, exist.

In fact, the authors argue that if axions exist, axion clouds should be generic (for a wide range of axion properties they should form around most, perhaps even all, neutron stars), they should in general be very dense (forming a density possibly twenty orders of magnitude larger than local dark matter densities), and because of this they should lead to powerful observational signatures.

The latter potentially come in many types, of which the authors discuss two: a continuous signal emitted during large parts of a neutron star's lifetime, but also a one-time burst of light at the end of a neutron star's life, when it stops producing its electromagnetic radiation. Both of these signatures could be observed and used to probe the interaction between axions and photons beyond current limits, even using existing radio telescopes.

What's next?

While so far, no axion clouds have been observed, with the new results we know very precisely what to look for, making a thorough search for axions much more feasible. While the main point on the to-do-list is therefore "search for axion clouds," the work also opens up several new theoretical avenues to explore.

For one thing, one of the authors is already involved in follow-up work that studies how the axion clouds can change the dynamics of neutron stars themselves. Another important future research direction is the numerical modeling of axion clouds: the present paper shows great discovery potential, but there is more numerical modeling needed to know even more precisely what to look for and where.

Finally, the present results are all for single neutron stars, but many of these stars appear as components of binaries—sometimes together with another neutron star, sometimes together with a black hole. Understanding the physics of axion clouds in such systems, and potentially understanding their observational signals, would be very valuable.

Thus, the present work is an important step in a new and exciting research direction. A full understanding of axion clouds will require complementary efforts from multiple branches of science, including particle (astro)physics, plasma physics, and observational radio astronomy.

This work opens up this new, cross-disciplinary field with lots of opportunities for future research.

Simon Critchley on Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

Deleuze on Nietzsche

Two excerpts from the "Philosophize This" podcast. above:.

If you want to think more along the lines of the picture Deleuze lays out in his work, instead of thinking of the world like there's a bunch of "fixed Essences to things", like a tree is a thing, a person's a thing, rock is a thing, think instead of reality as being made up by a collection of forces that are defined by their interactions with each other. Trillions of different forces that are all vying for expression in each moment as the world unfolds into the future. Well, in that kind of world then, Frederick Nietzsche is not a static identity. What we think of as Nietzsche, when he was alive at least, was the interaction between a collection of forces at a specific location. He was ultimately a "site of becoming". He was many different forces, all vying for expression, overcoming each other, gaining expression.

In other words, think of Nietzsche not as a person with an Essence, like we might typically think of him. Nietzsche is a historical collection of forces that are still having impacts on forces in the world to this day. And when you look at them in that way, again, Nietzsche is not a static identity. To Deleuze, what we call "Nietzsche", in any given moment, is a temporary formation of just a repetition of certain similar forces that gained expression during this particular moment, but haven't changed drastically enough for the illusion of a static identity to go away.

So, on that same note, think of what you are along these same lines. Any identity where it seems like it's what you are right now is really just a temporary pattern of forces that found expression that, through repetition can seem to you like they're a stable identity.

But I mean obviously we also recognize that if other forces that are a part of you found expression, then you would be a different person. And if enough of them changed, and had repetition in another direction for a long enough period of time, then your whole identity would feel like it was something different to people. But never was there a static essence or identity to what you were, and always was there the ability for you to become something totally different, and explore new modes of existence.

Now, this is just a totally different way of looking at what a person is. Classic subjective identity just doesn't apply here. And to take this back to Plato, you can understand this as a totally different way of looking at what a tree is as well. I mean, you go into the Home Depot and you see all those trees. And, on one hand, yes it's all very pragmatic to call all these "trees", the same genus and species, they look kind of similar. But on a different level, this denies the true level of difference that's going on here. Every single one of these trees is a different repetition of forces that are all constantly shifting and adapting within a world and universe that is always shifting and adapting. And this view of reality, in terms of it being an interaction between different forces, is one of the things Deleuze thinks Nietzsche's work lays the foundation for. So, if it's not entirely clear yet, under this view of reality any attempt at making Identity or reality into something fixed and static, while it's undeniably useful when you're checking out at the Home Depot. Which is nothing to gloss over, by the way. It's at another level always in denial of the true state of change that the world is always in.

So you can see here where the critique starts to make sense for the history of philosophy and the supposed "image of thought" put forward by philosophers. To Deleuze, even our concept of thinking is always subject to change. And why wouldn't it be? There are no static categories of thought. There are an infinite number of ways the universe could be conceptually framed and mapped out by philosophers. And, thinking in this limited way sabotages our ability to arrive at new ways of thinking, or new forms of what life is.

You can also start to see how, when you're affirming your place as one small piece of this constant unfolding of reality into the future, how always looking to the past to verify the present starts to deny something very important about what existence is altogether. In other words, you can start to see the similarities we're building to here between the tendencies in our philosophy, and the tendencies in the way people live their lives.

More on that in a second, but for now, since we have a basic picture here of the universe in Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, this is a good place to start to make a case for why he thinks Nietzsche's work is actually the enemy of Hegel and dialectics. He's going to say that the dialectic is making too many assumptions to try to eliminate difference. And it's interesting, cuz usually people will think of the dialectic, and they'll see it as something you use if you're actually acknowledging the true complexity of reality. "You know, Justice isn't some thing out there with an Essence," they'll say. "It's just one piece of an opposition within a more complex network of oppositions."

In the more Marxist type of dialectics, when it comes to social relations, like we talked about in that Zizek episode we did, one very simple way of looking at the world is to see something like a "school" and to think, "well a school is just a school". It's a place where kids go, you send them there to get an education. But as we talked about, somebody thinking more dialectically might look at that and say, "that's an oversimplification, that when you truly dig into what a school is to anyone in a particular structure of meaning, a school is something that has the meaning it does to us only because of its' relationship to all the other things around it in a given Society, or in a network of oppositions. For example, the meaning of a school requires how it relates to what a company is in that Society, or what the government is, or what the economic setup is, or the faculty of the school. These things are not as separate as an Essence driven view of reality might suggest they are. And, as it's said in dialectics, "what this means is that the form of what something is becomes an important piece of what the content of the thing is now. "

As I was just saying, this is typically seen as moving away from oversimplifying things. But, if we take the ideas of Nietzsche seriously through this interpretation by Deleuze, then the dialectic becomes yet another example of one of these needless rational scaffoldings that we're projecting onto a reality that's actually more complicated and dynamic than the dialectic can allow for. Let me give an example. One of the ones Deleuze uses is the dialectic between Master and Slave. Now in dialectics, these two seemingly different things, of being a Master or being a Slave, are in reality two sides of the same coin. They are oppositions to each other. The meaning of them is Unified. You can't understand the meaning of one of them without presuming the existence and the meaning of the other. But under Nietzsche's worldview, he says there's no reason to chop up reality into these oppositions that need to be resolved. Because difference, to Nietzsche accounts for all of these things. For example, Master and Slave to Nietzsche are not two sides of the same coin. Masters and Slaves come from two completely different genealogies. They're explained by two completely different histories. They often come from two completely different moral approaches to reality. So, if each one of these forces are distinct and very different from each other, why do we got to make them the same thing? What, just to remove difference and replace it with negation?

See to Nietzsche, in the actual world, when a master overcomes a slave, or slaves rise up and overthrow a master, that's not an opposition that's being resolved. In Nietzsche's view, this is the affirmation of difference. This is one will to power overcoming another will to power. And subordinating difference to it simply being a negation of a more unified thing, is again a needless rational scaffolding that denies how Dynamic the reality of difference truly is. So picture that world. It's not a bunch of Essences that are all competing with things that have other Essences. It's not a bunch of oppositions seeking resolution and clarification. This just a near infinite collection of Wills that are all competing for and striving for differentiation. The dialectic, in that kind of word world then, the argument is, it becomes unnecessary and quite distorting.

Now the takeaway from this, in a more practical sense, will lead people to call the end result of Nietzsche's philosophy an approach to life that's based on a type of Joy, lightness, or playfulness. The reason for this is, because if we take what Nietzsche has to say seriously, then the picture of life is not one where you have this rigid set of protocols, like a moral code from a God your entire life. It's not a picture of life where there are these countless dialectical oppositions that need to be worked out, so you better go get to work on them. No, the picture of life to Nietzsche becomes almost like a game you're playing, where through affirmation of what life is, you're essentially rolling the dice over and over again, hoping to roll a seven one of these times. But, even if you don't ever get a seven, you're still at least playing the game. In other words, there's a seriousness and an expectation to what life is, that just gets lifted. And instead, it starts to make more sense to just affirm difference in each moment of your life heading into the future, whether it lines up with a set of protoclls that you've created in the past, or not. And this recurring affirmation of difference in each moment as it unfolds in the universe is what Deleuze believed was the true significance of Nietzsche's "Eternal Recurrence". It was the affirmation of difference in each moment.

---- 

...Society itself is a reactive Force that's trying to govern people's behavior. And if history is full of these people that are choosing more reactive ways of living, does that maybe have something to do with the way those societies have been set up? Is it maybe easier to control people when they're encouraged to be passive and reactive?

And for Guilles Deleuze, one of the promising ways forward, when it comes to all this we've been talking about today, is going to be for us to emphasize Art, as opposed to information. Let me explain, because hearing that, you may be like, "Good God, is this guy really going to say we need to do more finger painting and that's going to free us from the bonds of the digital panopticon"? No, just think of what information truly is in the type of Society we live in.

We typically think that information is something that's liberating. You know, "if only people had the information, then they'd be able to make decisions that were better for them and their families". But so often, what happens in the Information Age is that whoever dominates the flows of information, gets to dominate the limited worldview of the people that they're reaching. So when you're given information in one of these modern control societies to Deleuze, it's obviously not about transmitting knowledge. It's most of the time hardly even verified. So what this information becomes is a method of mass communicating the meanings, norms, and directives of the day that people are supposed to internalize and believe in, and then go throughout their lives.

Information is like a police communication, he says. When you watch a news story or a political debate or whatever it is. This is not some neutral thing that's happening, or just "take this information for what it's worth guys, here it is". No, it's a prescription of the meaning of the events that are are going on. Information in a control society he says, is both a snapshot and a command at the exact same time. It carries with it an implicit order that this is the view that polite Society is going to believe in next.

And it's this, combined with the other ways, that people are turned into bits of that information and then manipulated. Information turns out to be a massively effective way of controlling people's behavior. Turns out, it's also very easy to convince people that they have a different sort of way of looking at things, a diverse perspective, even though they're just funneled into the same algorithmic channels that so many other people are given their information in. It's "fake difference" to Deleuze.

But if it's not obvious by this point in the episode, Deleuze is a philosopher that has, as maybe his chief goal above all others, to find ways to facilitate the creation of the new "real difference". In other words, think about what we know about him so far. This constant unfolding of existence into the future. Difference and repetition to replace the traditional idea of a static identity. The critique of philosophers being stuck in the image of thought from the past. Philosophy, to Deleuze, true thinking is a creative activity. It's not prescriptive. It's not a set of protocols to determine how valid someone's thoughts are. Philosophy is about the creation of a new tracing of Concepts that can understand reality in a totally different way. And as important as what Nietzsche would call reactive forces may be, we also need people who are not sitting back being reactive all the time. Deleuze himself doesn't break these forces down into this kind of binary like Nietzsche does, but he's going to say that any activity that truly has as its' goal to not sit around and repeat the traditions and the way that things have been done in the past, but one that actually genuinely aims to find new lines of escape from these traditions, or new forms of what life can look like, that is an activity that he is deeply interested in finding better ways to facilitate, no matter what the context is.

And if you had to give a name to that sort of activity, whether it's in philosophy, science, painting, music, the only name that makes sense that we have really, is Art. Deleuze says that Art is not a form of information, it's not even a form of communication to him. True Art, in the sense that it's about creating a new tracings of reality, in the sense that it's inspiring people to see life in a new way, this is something fundamentally different than what information is, which again, is only trying to give people a snapshot of the past that's loaded with a bunch of meanings and directives. True Art, to Deleuze, helps people think and feel beyond the prescribed limitations of the information they get on a day-to-day basis.

So if you hear Deleuze's philosophy and you feel a little disoriented, like "man this is a truly bizarre picture of what our reality is, how am I ever going to use this way of thinking practically in my everyday life"? Well, that's actually part of his entire point. True Art gets people thinking outside of these rigid boxes. So, you know how they say there's a comedian's comedian, or a musician's musician? This is why I think one way to describe Deleuze is, that he's a philosopher's philosopher. Or at the very least, an artist's philosopher. Cuz his work is designed to inspire someone to think, think different than they otherwise do. Truly different.

Peter Sloterdijk on Becoming a Culture of B*stards

An alternative perspective on Post-Modernity

The Resentment of B*stards...

...of things "Legitimate" and "Illegitimate"

Zizek on Christian Atheism

Happy Columbus Day!

Contra Byung-Chul Han's "What is Power?"

From Wiki:

What is Power? (2005)

"Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power."

"The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.' "

"Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion. "

"A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement. "

"Often what is absent has more power than what is present. "

"When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence. "

"Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time. "

"Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form. "

"Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence. "

"Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent. "

"An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence. "

"Power turns pure being into a having." 

"Violence may capture space, but it does not create space."

"Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces."

"An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game."

"Perhaps power is never free from a feeling of lack."

More Tales from Elon...

America, Many Super-Positioned Cognitive Clusters

...Which May only Collapse the Wave Function and Reveal the State of Schrodinger's Cat One at a Time (typically on Election Day)

|America|

Red grid is a 3-D graph representing the wave function of the photon. Green film represents the photon as a particle, that is, as a collapsed wave function. [Image source: stills from Fermilab video by Dr. Don Lincoln, “Quantum Field Theory” (in the public domain) Jan. 14, 2016; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeALt3rxEA&feature=youtu.be.]

Demapping the Warren: Down the Rabbit Hole with Adam Curtis

 

Referenced Nathalie Olah & Adam Curtis "Crack" Interview

Adam Curtis: The Map No Longer Matches the Terrain

Since the late 1980s, British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has been delving into the unexpected ways in which politics, economics, religion, technology and philosophy intersect to create the world we live in. His television journalism has earned him a cult following across disciplines: his visuals are part of Massive Attack’s current touring live show, which explores geopolitics, climate action and disinformation. In this extended Q&A, author Nathalie Olah speaks with Curtis about climate change, and how nostalgia and doomerism are affecting our ability to organise for, and imagine, a better tomorrow.

Nathalie Olah: What are your feelings on the current climate change discussion?

Adam Curtis: I’m bored of the way climate change is discussed because it seems to completely ignore the central question of power. The discussion is dominated by… not technocrats, but people of a technical mindset; people who think that if you can somehow dial the temperature down then everything will be solved, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. The climate change movement has gone nowhere since the Rio [Earth Summit] conference in 1992. At that point, scientists who conceived of the problem as a system that simply needed to be stabilised took over, and because that’s a powerful model, it bled out into our idea of society as a whole.

NO: Do you think there’s a similar phenomenon happening in electoral politics; a nostalgic yearning for a moment when liberalism appeared to be working more effectively?

AC: Yes, there’s a great deal of nostalgia, of resetting what you had – but if you look underneath the votes that this new government got, it’s delicate. It’s interesting that Labour ignored the green movement, or the climate change movement, to a great degree, in the interests of getting other votes from provincial towns. That seems to have been their strategy. Nostalgia might be at play, although it might be too early to tell how widespread it is. There’s a great yearning among ‘good thinking people’ for everything to just shut up and go back to ‘being nice’ again.

NO: Do you think it’s reasonable for people to draw comparisons between the cultural climate of today and 1930s Europe?

AC: No. I think it’s nostalgic, to be brutal. What’s happening here, over Gaza, is completely new. The kind of societies people were yearning for then were highly centralised and controlled technocracies in which you, the individual, would disappear. This is what fascism in its original incarnation was about. We now live in a world of hyper-individualism. That’s not what people want now.

“We’ve retreated into a sense that there’s always a new apocalypse on the horizon; it’s a terrible teddy bear that the bourgeois greens hug to themselves and say, ‘We’re all going to die, it’s terrible.’ That’s not the way you change the world” – Adam Curtis

NO: What do you make of the American election and the new Democratic vanguard?

AC: It’s inevitable that some journalists, sooner or later, will start saying Kamala Harris has no policies. Others will say that she replaced an old person, but that she and Walz want to bring back an old time, before Donald Trump, so it’s a case of going backwards dressed up as going forward. Then there will be journalists who say she is just as vacuous as Donald Trump. It’s waves of hysteria caused by a total vacuum of ideas.

People who voted Trump were angry and wanted change, but when he got in he didn’t actually carry out many of his pledges. He was lazy, and he reduced taxes for rich people – which is what Republicans do – but apart from that, he didn’t build a wall and he didn’t start fixing the terrible infrastructure in America.

Now, what Kamala Harris represents, and what Keir Starmer represents, is a large portion of the middle class that says, “We’re fed up with all this anger, we just want it to shut up.” They might get their way. The other possibility is that these politicians really do represent the end of a decaying system of power that rose up during the Cold War, and because they are bereft of ideas they are talking in memes and with emotional spasms.

NO: Well, on nostalgia, it’s perhaps that these presidential candidates embody two dying ideologies that Americans can’t let go of.

AC: I think the major, current feeling is of disenchantment with politics because those in charge don’t know. They don’t have a picture of what they want to do and are just trying to manage things. People are waiting for someone to say, “This is the society we’re going to create.” Trump hasn’t done that. Trump has nostalgia, but I’m not sure it’s completely nostalgic; what he’s channelling is anger from people who feel marginalised. That’s true of Reform in the UK, too.

This is a strange year, in which election upon election is overturning the expectations of those who ran the old systems. Everyone thought Modi was going to storm in and turn India into a super-nationalist state, but he was undermined. The ANC is falling apart in South Africa – there’s a mood check. In Mexico, you’ve got a green technocrat. The old smug certainties are being undermined. You get the feeling we’re at the end of something and we have absolutely no idea what’s coming.

NO: On climate change, is there a failure of language? We talk about melting ice caps, rising sea levels and immense floods, but these images don’t seem to precipitate a widespread shift in thinking.

AC: We’ve retreated into a sense that there’s always a new apocalypse on the horizon; it’s a terrible teddy bear that the bourgeois greens hug to themselves and say, “We’re all going to die, it’s terrible.” That’s not the way you change the world. In fact, it frightens people, and when people are frightened they don’t want change. It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen. Of course, there are serious issues. And of course, they’re incredibly dangerous. But fear is the last resort of those who’ve failed to mobilise people to transform the world for the better. I get grumpy about this because it’s almost cowardly.

An aspect of the climate movement ignores the fact that there are people who are having a horrible time right now; for whom poverty today is more important than worrying about the climate tomorrow, and you can’t blame them. The solution is to create a movement that says, “We are going to transform the world so that we avoid the disaster in the mid-future, and we’re going to transform it in such a way that it becomes better now for you.” No one has done that and I wonder why.

I wonder whether the middle classes are feeling their own power waning; that, unconsciously, they’re projecting their doom for their own class status onto the world. What’s also hampering the climate change movement is the narcissism of the boomers. They know they’re about to die, and because they were the first, big individualists of our modern era, they’ve discovered that there’s nothing beyond them and it terrifies them; “It’s not me that’s going to die, it’s the whole world that’s going to die.” They’re driven by solipsism.

What the movement should be saying is, “No, you will die, but in the time you’ve got left, you should be working hard to ensure we create a different kind of society, which helps people now and transforms the world in the future.”

NO: That’s a great diagnosis.

AC: In the old days – and this is not nostalgia, I’m just noting – when you were part of a church, a trade union, a political party or revolutionary movement, you felt that what you did would go on beyond you. Today, people are self-contained units and can’t bear the idea that they won’t exist. That’s not to say there aren’t lots of people doing good things, but what we need more than that is a picture of how this could transform the world now.

“[AI] is a strange haunting; a vast collage of our dreams and fantasies that we’ve put online. AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist” – Adam Curtis

NO: I was thinking about some of the work you’ve made around AI. One of my frustrations with the emphasis on AI is a belief that the world’s problems are down to a failure of comprehension, rather than a failure of will and imagination. AI companies say they can help us understand and optimise certain systems, but without the will to change those systems these improvements will be marginal at best.

AC: Yes, and AI can have no imagination because AI has to be trained on stuff that’s already happened. If I was going to do a clever drama about AI, I’d do a ghost story because, in a way, what’s coming out of AI is stuff that is made of all that. It’s a strange haunting; a vast collage of our dreams and fantasies that we’ve put online. AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist.

NO: Yes, and they have to input ethical heuristics to avoid human rights violations, for example, but naturally, the instinct of AI is to move towards a kind of Malthusian diagnosis of the world, and of ‘efficiency’ at all costs.

AC: Yes, and it also sees the world as a static system, which is another problem with the climate change movement. Feedback is the most terrible ideological problem with the tech world. They believe that if you can get the feedback right, the world can stabilise. Well, history isn’t stable. No, it’s a dynamic world; the forces of history roar on, they change. We surf on them. It’s great.

AI is going to be a very good administrative system. Someone was telling me that the SwiftKey system now in the NHS is brilliant. It’s solving the problem of [access to and backlogs of] appointments. Going back to the earlier point, the real problem with individualism is that it undermines democracy, because democracy depends on accumulating people together.

People have collective power because they all agree on something, and from that point they can change the world. If you have individuals acting like screaming piglets who just want to be themselves, it completely screws democracy. So the other argument is that what you’re going to have – and I don’t know how far I believe this – is a benign AI that manages lots of people’s lives. The problem is: who writes the code?

NO: A system in which we are all conceived of as individual nodes?

AC: Yes, and we would all get to live under the illusion of individualism, but the machine would know the truth; that we are, in fact, all very like each other. “They all like Taylor Swift, give them more.” No one likes to say it, but sometimes you appreciate the stuff recommended by the Spotify algorithm.

NO: We can’t say that, though – this is meant to be a celebration of independent music and thinking!

AC: See – and we are back to the modern rules of liberal fear!

NO: In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein speaks to something I recognised in your work – particularly in the segment on Jane Fonda in HyperNormalisation – which is how the body became the new frontier of individualism; where the focus is on becoming as fit and resilient to the outside world as possible. Have you thought about that in the context of Covid?

AC: Well, that emerged around the AIDS crisis. It’s very paradoxical. I wonder whether we haven’t fully understood the extent to which AIDS has had an effect. They made these terrifying warning adverts about AIDS in the 80s, and I wonder if that’s related to the instinct of thinking, “God, I’ve got to protect my body.” If you have the idea that you can no longer change the world, all you’ve got left is to change yourself. Your body becomes the territory that you can exercise control over because no one is going to look after you. Also, the mind: anxiety, trauma.

NO: And then there’s the book [The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk] that says trauma and the body are one and the same. That trauma is carried in the body.

AC: I know! Have you seen Inside Out 2? It’s all about anxiety. The new character is anxiety; it was trauma last year, anxiety this year. What’s fascinating about Inside Out 2 is that there’s no mention of changing society. This is the modern thing: you deal with it all inside yourself, forget society. I deal with this to an extent in [2002 documentary] The Century of the Self. It’s been around since the 1960s and radical psychotherapy, but it’s become almost physical now.

NO: What makes you the way you are – tentatively optimistic, I suppose, about the present moment – rather than sharing those feelings of anxiety, dread, stubbornness?

AC: I made a film for Charlie Brooker about a problem at the heart of the liberal middle class, which I call “Oh-dear-ism”; you come to this point where everything is bad and your only response is to say, “Oh dear.” It came to a head with Trump and Brexit. What gave that class of patrician liberals its sense of dignity and self-worth was this implicit feeling that they cared for the little people underneath them. They felt there was a feedback of gratitude and the gratitude fed a sense of dignity and self-worth.

NO: It was a paternalistic dynamic.

AC: Yes, and for a long time they were probably right. But suddenly, in 2015 and 2016, those little people turned round and said, “We don’t like you, we think you’re arrogant” – and they can’t bear it. I voted against Brexit but I was astonished by the reactions to it. It wasn’t just a case of [the patrician class] saying, “Oh, we fucked that up,” it was like, “They’re stupid.”

NO: Hillary Clinton is terrible for this, too. As soon as she lost, and arguably before, the tone became extremely patronising. Raymond Williams talks about how the ‘mass’ is just a way of reframing ‘the mob’, which is a way of stigmatising anyone who isn’t you.

AC: I know bourgeois people who still say, “They’re stupid,” and I say, “No, you’re stupid, because you can’t understand why everyone dislikes you.” It’s interesting to observe a class that’s losing power and ask yourself where that power is going. The traditional left position is to say that it’s the bankers, but bankers say, “We do arbitrage, we spot gaps and go for it, we’re just chancers.” That’s not power. It has an effect, but it’s not power. The other left position is that we’ve returned to a sort of feudalism, but I’m not convinced by that. My theory is that the map we currently have in our heads no longer matches the territory we are in. We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts.

NO: So is the new frontier for holding power to account through whistleblowers? And is that going to happen at the scale that is needed when we see what happened to Assange, or the strange circumstances surrounding the people who have spoken out against giant corporate monopolies?

AC: No. The old model was investigative journalism, where you would find a whistleblower, or documents, to expose the corruption to us – the readers, the viewers – and then we would get angry and pressure lawmakers. That doesn’t work now. When I read that rich people hold their money in tax havens, I think, “Yes, I know that, but I also know that nothing is going to happen about it.” In a way, investigative journalism is a cliché now because it’s [only] telling us that the world is corrupt. What I want is journalism that explains to me why nothing is ever done about it.