A snippet from my ongoing labors concerning The Feminization of Mankind
If the system can be compared to an evolving organism then assimilation can be compared to this organism feeding upon its environment. Humans like to romanticize their own existence, place themselves on a pedestal of life, yet, try as they might, they cannot escape the fact that if humanity is a product and a part of life then it is also, like all life forms, to be considered a resource.
And like all resources it is exploitable and accessible to all other entities that wish to deconstruct it for their own purposes. The superorganism, being one of those entities, and having acquired a life of its own, is the one feeding upon human flesh; devouring it, as it were, and recombining it in accordance with its own requirement.
Now, since the superorganism is a noumenon, an idea that extends beyond the organic mind, when it feeds, it does so noetically. If it does not consume the physical parts, digesting and integrating them into its own organic forms, in its early stages, it consumes minds and ideas. The system, the proverbial superorganism, is a predator feeding on consciousness, and like all predators it prefers, when it can, to hunt the sickly, the weak and the still immature.
When an idea sets in, scavenging new ideas, giving rise to others, growing to the status of a memetic life form it does so by assimilating into tis contexts those who are unable to resist the impact of its force. The young are its favorite meals, because with them the self-identity, the ego, the self-consciousness which would refuse to be eaten alive is still in an undeveloped state, making it vulnerable to all external interventions.
The Church, at first, and then the more sophisticated State, takes the unripe before the hormones kick in and before another foreign meme steps in, and they begin to inject them with mind-altering prescriptions and mind-numbing remedies for what ails them. And what ails these poor souls, according to the particular system, but its natural proclivities and tis primal urges? These must be curbed, redirected towards “productive” activities, or stifled before they overwhelm the mind with their own programming making it unusable by a system which depends on efficiency and total discipline.
Of course, harvesting the young does not always result in success, as the accumulated mass of the past still weighs the mind down, anchoring it to a more earthly calling; its visceral energies not expunged, but choked into silence.
The individual is never allowed to be free, to develop in accordance with his own drives as these have been shaped in him by a past (s)he cannot escape, though (s)he might deny it until his death. The individual’s individuality, such as it is, has now been taken over by a eugenics program, which professes to despise all such interventions upon human development. The interventions can be so successful that many would think that nothing pre-existed its stepping in, to save a poor soul from itself, as it were.
The idea of a tabula rasa Science offers the added advantage of saving the “progressive” from the possibility that he may be contradicting his own principles when he advocates “education” or the “right” upbringing when it comes to youngsters. Desiring to disassociate himself from the more direct and honest eugenics of his adversaries, such as the eugenics of Hitler’s Nazis or the re-educations programs of Mao Zedong, he cleans the mind of all pre-existing information, making his own programming and re-education a matter of simple, innocent, education. He can now claim that sex, the most basic instinctive drive, is also a matter of upbringing, or, if he is harsher, that conditioning is all that exists within the mind of a infant since it is born with no nature and so cannot be imposed upon. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to the usual inconsistencies, as when in his haste to defend homosexuality from any follow-up interventions that promise to heal it back to heterosexuality he admits that at least this sexual tendency is inborn and no conditioning need be applied…as it once was when they were convinced that this sexual mutation could be corrected with a few bursts of electricity and hours of productive talk. Though he can deny that man is determined by anything in the “vile” past, and that all men are born equally gifted, with the potential to be anything they want, at least in this case he can tell himself that there is an innate aspect to sexuality; but only in this case. Compartmentalization The debacle of wanting to preserve some human contrivances while dismissing all others on the grounds that they are evil or unnecessary continues.
The assimilation of the simple and the immature is easy enough; maintaining them in that perpetual state of adolescence and protecting them from the reality of their simplicity is more challenging. Entire industries have been erected for this purpose alone. Show Business The balancing act of pretending to be an “open and free” society, tolerant of all cultures and peoples while, at the same time, assimilating all within the same values and principles, is a delicate process that cannot be pulled-off without becoming apparent and gaudy. An example of this is the United States where under the premise of multicultural tolerance a melting pot is set up, cooking all its participants down to their rudimentary forms, so as to burn away any previous identifications; this including natural ones. In this melting pot, as with all smelting furnaces, the in ingredients are purified, either to separate and refine them or, as is most often the case, so as to integrate them further, until they remain indistinguishable to all but those with a more sensitive palate.
Initiation Rituals
Like most feasts a good dinner is preceded with the appropriate rituals. One must give thanks, after the preparation of the dish and its cooking has resulted in a desirable outcome. Undoubtedly when the superorganism feasts upon its host it must also be grateful for its sacrifice and it must teach itself, beforehand, to prepare it; gutting and skinning it, then cleaning it and cooking it in a way that will make it both nutritious and tasteful.
There is a cannibalistic slant to the affair but although the system might profess to be humane it certainly cannot claim to be human.
The cooking metaphor is not only not a hyperbolic device but it is made obvious in such rituals as when in the Christian tradition a baby is douched in oil and then dunked in a pot full of water. A marinating before the symbolic drowning and then cooking takes place. The symbolism is undeniable. The baby is figuratively put to death so as to emerge a new human; one enjoying the appreciation of his Lord, who literally saved him from himself. If one is born in sin then this sin is part of his nature. To be a product of such primal “vileness” as penis into vagina penetration must be cleansed away, along with greed, selfishness and all that nasty ego that makes life so miserable to0 all but the few.
In the Jewish tradition the ritual of Brit milah has its own wonderful symbolisms. Ceremonial castration is part of many rights of ascension into maturity. The male is figuratively detached from part of his manhood. He is symbolically marked exactly where it hurts and where he can never forget about it.
In Confucianism the changing of the name – the giving of the zi – marks a division from the past. The individual is no longer to be judged by his nature, but by his social role and his community service. The changing of names marks this desired shift in consciousness. No longer one as self, but one as many part of Self. In Hinduism the ceremony of the Dvija establishes a point where the individual begins to serve his group. Undoubtedly the digestion of an individual by the superorganism is a slow and meticulous affair for such a complicated creature as man. The ego thrashes and punches away at anything that threatens its existence. In Christian baptisms it is accompanied with a lamenting cry; a loss which is irreconcilable with its purpose. If his assimilation and reshaping is to be conducted successfully then a slow, methodical and subtle approach is essential, or else failure will be the consequence. Failure which might lead to a lifetime of social problems.
Subverting and redirecting energies which have evolved over millennia is not easy. A slight mistake and the individual might be damaged for a lifetime; his consciousness confused by feelings of inadequacy, being out of step with the many, divided between two worlds. The severing of the mind from its past, creating this private and this public persona, is fraught with dangers. Narcissism and Schizophrenia In these days of broken families the child is released into a world where it is torn between its biological imperative and its social duties, taught to despise aspects of its nature which conflict with social values, forcing it to keep them hidden, or to deny their existence altogether.
Where the ritual was meant to make the individual feel part of an intimate group, in this globalized heterogonous world the individual feels alienated from the principles of homogeneity, as these are proposed to it daily and consistently. It wants to feel the connection, and if it is dull enough and simple enough it might, but it just cannot accept the foreign as its own, based on a few similarities.
Maintaining this division between the past and the present is like a balancing act. One walks a tight rope where tumbling on either side means certain death. On one side, actual physical death; on the other side a death of the mind. The systemic creation of mindless bodies, acting but totally detached from their physical forms, from their past; completely taken over by a vacant mind that hungers for a sense of self, wishing to digest its own identity, is prevalent in movie scripts.
The Zombie metaphor: an activity totally detached from reason; pure hunger (consumerism) cut away from all goals except feeding an insatiable appetite Hedonism; mindlessness raised to the level of a value to be emulated.
We can relate. Just as sex can drive a man to madness, making him think and do things he would not do if he were in his right mind, if he were reasoned, so too does this practice sublimate the libidinal energies, redirecting them towards a different kind of hedonism…feeding. The relationship of sex and eating should not be dismissed casually. How chocolate for many females has become a substitute for intimacy or why obesity is often caused by an absence of sexual release is well documented, if it is not openly admitted. We can see it in the act itself. There is a frenzy about it, this unquenchable desire to consume the other in the throes of passion. The teeth bite, the cock inserts itself into a gaping mouth of need, sucking it dry of its life-energies. Domination is a form of assimilation. In order to assimilate a mind one must first understand it enough to pursue and catch it (empathy); one much have the teeth to chew it up and then one must have the digestive tract to decompose and integrate it within its own premises. Even the act of kissing, indicative of the baby’s suckling motions (pure innate hunger), refers us back to nutrition. What was once an act of exchanging grinded, processed food has now become an act of veneration between the mindless Zombies populating a world they cannot come to terms with and lacking the brain to do so.
The system offers us its kiss. Will we respond? Think about how a female tilts back her head, exposing her neck, when receiving a kiss form her male mate.
When harmless methods of self-control get out of control, they become harmful to our ability to maintain self-control. So while we're always trying to find ways to advance ourselves and ascend, we are simply creating memes to be clung to by those with a need to belong, which in turn diverts its original meaning.
I believe these are unintentional nets in the same way a superior artist will suffer from copycats.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Sloterdijk tearing away at Assimilation, Domestication & Cultural Marxism in his powerful writings;
Sloterdijk ['You must Change Your Life'] wrote:
"...the art that takes humans themselves as its material - in Trotsky's words, by seizing on the human being 'as a physical and psychic semi-finished product'."
Quote :
The demographic policy based on unconditional growth led to the typical modern vicious circle in which the incessant, soon apparently fateful overproduction of humans caused a massive overtaxing of upbringing potential in families, and hence a higher risk of epidemic child neglect. The response to this disastrous situation was, for understandable reasons, usually to appeal to the modern school system - not only so that it would provide the modern community with the necessary numbers of achievers, but also in the hope that the vast group of hopeless and superfluous people might form something resembling useful, or at least harmless members of society after all - a task at which the educators of the early modern state were doomed to fai1. When the toughening disciplines of school and the integrative effects of professional life fail, a second rescue system is required to 'catch' the surplus individuals. It is in this regime of administrative severities that the Foucauldian phenomena - the disciplines of custody, sedation and correction in the classical state - developed.
What we call social policy today is initially nothing but the modern state continually tracing its self-created vicious circle. 'Capitalism' only contributed to it after the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, by beginning the never-ending crusade to lower the cost of the labour factor. This all-too-successful campaign is still giving the postmodern therapy and redistribution state a chronic headache, as it does not know what to make of the confusing simulta neity of high unemployment and low birth rates; de facto, this points to the excessive success of the economic system in its search for ways to reduce labour costs - a success that inevitably leads to the mass dismissal of workers, yet can only be attained at the expense of the social system. But even the absolutist state, which 'made live' too much from the start by producing substantially more humans through its control over sexual parameters than it - or rather the families, schools and factories - could equip with humanizing qualifications and chances of economic employment, was damned to erect its ever higher-towering pyramids of polytechnical virtuosity over a substrate of impoverished and over-numerous humans.
For them, compulsive disciplining was the only way to achieve some form of completion, however pitiful. Looking only at these phenomena, however, is not enough to understand the disciplinological adventure of the Modern Age as a whole - neither in its artistic and artisanal dimensions nor in its scholarly, epistemological and engineering aspects, to say nothing of the neo-athletic and anthropo-political departures in the late nine teenth and complete twentieth century.
Modern pedagogy reacted to the new order situation in its own way: it took advantage of the state's chronic need by making itself indispensable to the modern body politic for centuries. It sharp-wittedly rose to become the discipline of all disciplines. It single-mindedly combined the crude education-political imperative - supplying the modern state with usable human beings - with a modern form of the absolute imperative: 'Instead of changing your life later on, you should let us change you from the start.'
At the start of their offensive, educators were committed almost without exception to this rule, as they almost all came from church traditions - or, in our translation, from the institutionalized practice forms of ethical difference. They knew from venerable sources and early-morning introspections that man is the being which needs to be brushed the wrong way. The era in which Rousseau and the anti-authoritarians would spread their confusion had not yet dawned; it had not occurred to anybody that one need only let children follow their own inclinations in all matters for free citizens to emerge. Even the most terrible fouetteur d'enfants - to use the epithet Rabelais coined for Pierre Tempete, master of the Parisian College de Montaigu (where Ignatius of Loyola studied), who became legendary for his brutality towards students - was abso lutely convinced that he was merely doing what was necessary, as a Christian and schoolmaster, to turn little monsters into adults with character. In the certainty that idleness is the beginning of all vice, the pious educators of that time did everything in their power to ensure that the devil had no chance of finding a pupil's mind unoccupied.
From the modern state's initiation of human production emerged, through the intervention of the educators, the most powerful idea of the last five hundred years: the notion of world improvement appeared on the scene when the Baroque school accepted the task of warding off the human catastrophe triggered by the early modern state through its policy of unfettered human production. In this situation, improving the world meant improving humans en masse. As this was no longer practicable as the self-improvement of an ascetic minority, it required improvement of the many through educational institutions. Hence the pedagogues of early modernity, for the first time, applied the metanoetic imperative directly to chil dren. Only then did the meaning of the thesis that all education is conversion truly become clear. The later totalitarian systems would be heir to the invasive schools, reclaiming the prerogative of com pletely capturing the young.
With the support of the human production state, which was demographically competent (and hence strong) but pedagogically incompetent (and hence in difficulties), educators on the eve of the Enlightenment realized that they could only perform their duty successfully on one condition: they would have to reach for the whole human being in each student: they already saw the child as the future citizen. They consequently decided to pre-empt metanoia, the ethical revolution in mid-life, by planting the seed of change at the begin ning. Because of this disposition, the early modern school became the cell of ambition for the world that was to be changed - indeed, the incubator for all later 'revolutions'. It not only wanted to prepare for the better world while still in the worse; it sought to pull the world as a whole onto the better side through the production of graduates who were too good for the world as it was. School had to become the place where the adaptation of humans to deficient reality was thwarted. A second overproduction was to compensate for the damage caused by the first.
Implanting the change of life in the beginnings of each life demanded, to begin with, no less than the transference of monastic discipline to the school setting; this was the minimum price for the project of modernity. From the start, its goal was nothing but the correction of the erroneous world text - the emendatio mundi. It consisted in the replacement of the current depraved wording with a lost original version that could only be rendered legible once more by theologians, philosophers, and now also educators. This idea - which could only have occurred to the typesetters and printers, the correctors and pub lishers of the Gutenberg era and their accomplices, the schoolmasters and educators of adults, who would call themselves members of the Enlightenment soon afterwards - could be applied most plausibly to the souls of children in the burgeoning age of print. School transpired early on as the moral distillation flask of modern 'society', being the place where the metanoetic appeal to retreat from the world was to be taken up by a secular institution and turned towards profane ends. Here it was always important to maintain the semblance of subor dination to the state mission - no publicly funded school in the time between Erasmus and Hartmut von Hentig has ever stated openly that its aim was the production of socially unusable characters, let alone modern hermits. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that every educator of quality had thoughts about the true goals of their profession that did not exactly coincide with the expectations of statehood.
This, then, proved to be the highest form of art with humans in the age of Christian humanism and its school projections: the availability of procedures for incorporating imperatives of humanization into education and imprinting the watermarks of the ideal indelibly upon the souls of the youngest. The premises for this change lie in the dissonant alliance between state and school: the mercantilist state of the early Modern Age identified the movements of monastic flight from the world, which were still massive, as an unwelcome tendency, almost a subversive evasion of potential workers from the spreading dictate of universal usefulness. It believed it was acting circumspectly and in its own interests by giving educators the power to take the young by the hand early on, and thus commit them to a curriculum of general usability from their first steps on. Its miscalculation would become evident in subsequent centuries; whoever relies on pedagogues to produce citizens should be prepared for unexpected side effects."
"Because school has a logic of its own, modern culture was flooded with an enormous surplus of dead-end idealisms - personalism, humanism, utopianism and mor alism being the official varieties. This excess provoked a series of culture-pathological reactions, from escapism and inner retreat to Romanticism, revoltism and immoralism.
The character mask of the cynic conquered the late aristocratic and bourgeois stage from the eighteenth century on - the Mozart-da Ponte operas would be quite incomplete without the figure of the hard-boiled philosopher who, wrapped in his foul-smelling donkey hide, always expects the worst of humans. At the same time, the modern novel unfolded a veritable phenomenology of private reason turned bad. Hegel's philosophy, at its didactic core, is nothing other than a machine for processing frustrated idealism; for what he calls 'education' is essentially disappointment management. It refers not to the decentred wandering of bourgeois curiosity between this and that thing, as today's equation of 'culture' with leisure implies. Bildung demands the hard later conditioning of the flaring-up idealistic subject, which must abandon the illusion that the world owes it any adjustment to its morally exaggerated expectations.
The pseudo-symbiosis of school and state holds some of the most baffling dysfunctionalities of modern culture - it causes frictions whose dissonant potential goes beyond the old symbiotic dualism of church and state. A retelling of this dangerous liaison would not only have to show how, to this day, countless graduates of the modern school systematically dream in directions unrelated to the conditions of the 'working world'; it would also have to explain the state's chronic attempts to defeat the single-mindedness of the 'pedagogical province' for pragmatic and utilitarian reasons. Such attempts would provide the running thread leading to a history of school as a history of school reforms - always from the ideal school to the real one, of course."
"Whoever wants to teach becomes a member of the modern world's most powerful organization: teachers without borders. If world time and school time converge in future, it is due to their actions. No author of the burgeoning era of teachers formulated with more elan, more comprehensively or more radically how pervasive the new pedagogy had become than John Amos Comenius. His works give the impression that he wanted to correct Shakespeare's statement, 'All the world's a stage / and all the men and women merely players' replacing it with the counter-thesis that all the world is a school - and all humans merely pupils. We are inhabitants of a creation in which everything revolves around instruction.
"2. That it is right to call the world a school is shown first of all by the matter itself [. . .J for what is a school? It is generally defined as a company ofpersons who teach and learn what is useful.?! If this is true, then the world is a school, since it is entirely made up of an order of teachers, learners, and disciplines.
3. For everything that exists in the world teaches or learns, or it does both alternately . . .
5. Therefore everything is filled with disciplines, i.e. with various tools for admonishing, advising and driving on: therefore it is not wrong to call the world a house of discipline."
For human beings, the created world is a 'prelude to eternity': it offers a preparatory course that we must attend before we are admitted to the heavenly academy, Comenius has no doubts about the material that has to be covered during the stay in the house of discipline: the world-pupil must work through three books to acquire the necessary wealth of knowledge:
The first and greatest book of God is the visible world inscribed and illustrated with as many characters as there are creatures of God to be seen in it. The second book is man himself, made in the likeness of God. [. . .] But God has given into man's hands a third book [. . . J the Holy Scripture.
If one takes into account the depraved nature of man, it is hardly surprising that mortals have so far, for the most part, made no proper use of the aids given to them. They rejected the universal books granted to them thanks to the free availability of divine teaching tools. They wilfully insisted on imaginary special knowledge, causing them to sink into darkness and eternal quarrelling. As a result, there is no redemption in the world, only a civil war between the pseudo-knowledgeable and the ignorant. At the time he wrote these statements, Comenius was not only looking back on the Thirty Years War, which he had experienced in its entirety; he could also see the beginnings of the never-ending cold war that modern experts in international law whitewash as the 'European state system' established in the Peace of Westphalia and rationalized by the Ius publicum europaeum."
"This movement, which always points forwards and upwards, contains the original gesture of world improvement. Improving the world means comparing the corrupted text to the intact one and correcting it to restore it to its original state. If there is no access to an original world text, improvers must rely on the dialectical assumption that the negation of the wrong will automatically produce the right. Against this background, it is clear why the Critical Theory of the early Frankfurt School, especially after its reduction to a negative dialectics, was not only a camouflaged Marxism without a revolutionary perspective; at the same time, it constituted a late daughter product of Baroque world-improving idealism - or, more precisely, its regression to a 'sad science'. Need we still add that during its best years, Baroque idealism carried out the transference of the Reformation from matters of faith to matters of knowledge? According to this idealism, we should be saved not only by faith, but also through knowledge. Enlightenment begins as pedagogical gnosis."
"For those producing art with humans in the seventeenth century, the mission of emendatio mundi entailed a wealth of further conclusions: they quickly had to produce universal books (the plural is used here merely as a formality), universal schools, a universal college and a universal language. 'In this, no corner of the earth, no people, no language and no class of society will be neglected.' The books of light, schools of light, colleges of light and languages of light are urgently required in every corner of the universe; the unforced force of self-evidence will win out everywhere, in accordance with the Comenian motto: Omnia sponte fluant, absit violentia rebus. The primal light and the technical light campaign for the same cause: books are the lamps of world-illumination, schools the lamp-bearers, scholars the lamp-lighters, and languages the fuel for the flame of universal illumination.
Words and things are still so close together here that one can easily cross over from one side to the other. The world is the orderly tableau of essences, and as such it is easily understandable as a whole; that is why the encyclopaedias of the early Modern Age were still a form of atlas reproducing all the continents and countries of being 'topically' in clear maps. God and humans share the same 'conception of the world'.
Comenius' manifesto of the pedagogical international uncovered substantial premises for world-improving action: for those who choose the way of light, haste is as necessary as the conviction that they can pass on universal knowledge. A hundred years later, one of the editors of the Encyclopedie took up the impulse provided by Comenius. Diderot's vigorous call Hatons-nous de rendre la philoso phie populaire can therefore also be reversed: to make philosophy popular and effective requires an acceleration. Only by its haste can one recognize that progress is apocalypticism under a bourgeois guise. For the philosophical apocalypticist, the way to the light is the way of light itself: it is the absolute in history. It has accepted performing the work of world-pervasion since the beginning of all creation, and in our time the enterprise has entered its final phase. If there has ever been a version of the 'project of modernity' in plain terms, it can be found in the work of Comenius."
"The postulate of omniscience recalls a time from which we have long since been alienated, when knowledge was viewed as something almost exclusively qualitative and grounded in the nature of things. It viewed itself as essential knowledge and claimed to offer penetrating insight into the structure of the rounded cosmos of essences. It referred to an effectively complete, but phenomenally disordered world in need of repair, and thus seemingly incomplete - but nonetheless reparable. At that time, the world-improvers were any who wanted to give the world back its original perfection - whereas today, one must assume that every repair causes new imbalances, new imperfections. For the pansophists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was nothing presumptuous in the call for omniscience; it merely drew the inescapable conclusions from the basic assumptions of classical metaphysics, which rested on an ontology of the perfect and compre hensible world. This could at most be augmented by a therapeutics that enabled humans to heal into the whole.
These assumptions echo in the admonition of Comenian pedagogy to build the new school on the summation of all summations, so that future tuition would be based on a universal book. Even omniscience can be given a child-friendly form. The pan-pedagogical intention is unmistakably based on other premises than the ancient way of practising towards omniscience. For the Sophists, it did not come from an overall insight into the circle of knowledge joining the world, but rather the decree that the artiste in the eternal rhetorical training camp should be able to speak spontaneously and triumphantly on any given subject."
"As early as the seventeenth century, then, or the eighteenth at the latest, anthropotechnics opened up a second front by projecting the impulse of artificial human moulding onto android machines. For Comenius there was no doubt: school had to become a machine. Its task was to send perfect reproductions of humans into the world - as genuine, well-formed humans.
Here we also witness the reactivation of a disposition that was already familiar to the Stoic teachers: when they gave the students who chose the philosophical way the task of working on their 'inner statue', this contained the suggestion that the empirical human should step aside for the ideal figure."
He's a post-modernist, using N.'s hammer to tear down all globalizing forces, in favour of the kind of cosmo-poli-tanism 'democracy' practiced by the ancient Greeks [remember Historyboy and Fixed Cross?], if I understand the drift of his work; the most imp. being 'spheres' which I haven't read yet.
'You must change your life' is his recent 2013 work,, Rage and Time, 2010. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
His most recent work is 'Towards a philosophical theory of globalization':
If N.'s imperative was to restore nature back and re-naturalize everything, Sloterdijk wants to restore Human back into humanism after the dwarfing, and stunting of 'man' since the greeks. What he fights against is cynicism that the 'Human' is a done deal; hence that book on a critique of cynicism, towards a wholesome dionysian bridging of what's been divorced so far - nature, animal, man, technology...
If Heidegger Apollonianized N., Sloterdijk wants to Dionysize him.
This is my current understanding; I'll have to read more.
"What is the relationship between will-to-will and the objectification of the real?
Heidegger argues that in order to establish and maintain its conditions of enhancement of power, the will-to-will requires a ‘guarantee of stability’ regarding those conditions on the basis of which it posits and projects towards its goals. This guarantee of stability, Heidegger claims, “is just as essential for “life” as “increase” and “escalation”.” Technological man seeks to accomplish this stability “through a complete ordering of all beings, in the sense of a systematic securing of stockpiles, by means of which [its] establishment in the stability of certainty is to be completed.” Thus the world is ceaselessly objectified, qualified, quantified, and systematized—in essence, reduced to the level of stock, or resource (Bestand). What cannot be objectifi ed cannot be put to use, and what cannot be put to use is useless, and thus redundant. The human being is no exception.
In the unconditional demand for objectification attendant on technological enframing, man himself and every aspect of human culture is transformed into a stockpile which, psychologically reckoned, is incorporated into the working process of the will-to-will...[T]he fact that...mankind has become a “human resource,” ranked behind natural resources and raw materials...is grounded in the unconditioned character of objectification itself, which must bring every stockpile, no matter what its nature, into its own possession and must secure this possession.
According to Foucault, in seeking to advise the prince on how to keep his principality, Machiavelli was addressing a problem that had dominated political thought since feudal times—namely, how was the sovereign to secure his legitimate power over his domain? Yet, at the time of publication of The Prince, a growing number of political thinkers were already seeking to replace this problematic with another—a problematic based about the question: how is one to govern?
Foucault ties this shift in problematic to the end of the age of empire. In the sixteenth century, he argues, a “new historical perception takes form; it is no longer polarized around the end of time and the consolidation of all the particular sovereignties into the empire of the last days; it is open to an indefi nite time in which the states have to struggle against one another to ensure their own survival.” Confronted with the exigency of competition between states, the problem of government was refocused about the question of how to reinforce the state from within. Increasingly, government was to become a matter of resource management: a “question of how to introduce economy...into the management of the state.”
The ideas of the early-modern political theorists were not simply implemented through the legislation of some progressive sovereign. Rather, these ideas were taken-up and transformed in the process of a more general development, which occurred throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is the formation of a new kind of power over life. Whereas previously power had been a matter of ‘impeding [forces], making them submit, or destroying them’, since the seventeenth century, Foucault argues, power has worked “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it; a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them...”
This new mode of setting-upon and organizing the forces of life is what Foucault calls biopower. Biopower seeks to bring ‘life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’—to objectify the forces of life, to quantify them, measure them, and on the basis of this knowledge, to set them into productive coordination. Foucault begins to develop this argument in detail in Discipline and Punish. He argues that from the seventeenth century onwards, there was a veritable explosion in productive technologies of power. These new technologies were focused on ‘the body as object and target of power’, Through a ‘multiplicity of often minor processes’, in schools, hospitals, and military organisations, an ‘art of the human body’ was born—a whole anatomo-politics, directed not only at the growth of....skills, nor at the intensifi cation of...subjection, but at the formation of a relation in the mechanism itself that makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely... The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.
A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the effi ciency that one determines. Disciplinary power permits ‘a “knowledge” (savoir) of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more than the ability to conquer them: this knowledge and this mastery constitute what might be called the ‘political technology of the body’. Heideggerian resonances aside, this argument has important implications for the human sciences. According to Foucault, the political technology of the body developed in the seventeenth century “made the human sciences historically possible.” On the one hand, Foucault argues that the human sciences “have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious minutiae of the disciplines and their investigations.”39 On the other hand, the very object of human-scientific inquiry—‘man’—is held to be a product of disciplinary power: Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation.
In terms of the genealogy of biopolitical government, the emergence of disciplinary power was only one part of a double development. The second pole of development— ‘formed somewhat later’ than the first—arose on the basis of the objectifi cation of human beings attendant on disciplinary power. Biopolitical government requires this process of objectification, this institutional generation of bodies as manipulable objects. It is only on the basis of the objectifi cation of human beings on the level of their biological traits that government can assume the task of the administration of life.
In the eighteenth century, the science of statistics—which had previously functioned within a monarchical administrative apparatus concerned primarily with the management of state resources—was turned to the analysis of the state population. With the application of statistical techniques to the government of populations, a new form of political management came into being: one no longer focussed upon the body of the individual, but: on the species body,...propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life-expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population.
Presiding over processes of birth, death, health, and illness, biopolitical government surveys the global mass in the manner of physician, deploying forms of regulation as required, measures to inculcate positive orientation and productive coordination, institutions to maintain standards of sanitation, public education, and welfare, techniques to activate the indolent, strategies to control forms of dissent—deploying, in short, a broad array of techniques of ‘bio-regulation’. These have the end of establishing ‘economy’ at the level of population-resource. The word ‘economy’, Foucault claims, referred in the sixteenth century to “the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family (which a good father is expected to do in relation to his wife, children, and servants) and of making the family fortunes prosper.” By the nineteenth century, it had come to designate a level of reality proper to the management of states—a complex composed of resources of various kinds, structured not only through a set of relations established between individuals and things (wealth, territory, intellectual and physical resources), but also through those relations that individuals establish with one another, and the relations they establish with themselves.
In this respect, the difference between Foucault and Heidegger’s accounts is merely a matter of scope. Whereas the viewpoint of technological enframing encompasses reality as such, biopolitical government is concerned with a limited fi eld of reality-resource: the state population. Second, we have an instrument al continuity. In both these critiques, the process of objectifi cation-commodifi cation of the real is thoroughly mediated by technology, being inseparable from the deployment of technical concepts, structures practices, and procedures, and governed by an overarching perspective on the world that would situate all forms of life within a domain of technical manipulation. Third, we have a strategical continuity. Both biopower and technology pursue the overall management of life. Reducing the forces of nature to raw material, both seek to set this material in order—implementing mechanisms to establish regular patterns of cause and effect, checks and balances to ensure the flow of energies into productive, self-enhancing systems, thus to achieve a heightened measure of mastery and control over this object-domain.
As we have seen, both biopolitical government and technological enframing represent modes of existence that seek to mobilize and manage the forces of life for the sake of the enhancement of power. Reducing the real to raw material, both attempt to establish regulated economies of objectifi ed resource.
Such continuities strongly suggest that in his interpretation of the present, Foucault had Heidegger’s reading of technological modernity in mind. Yet, the continuities themselves do not determine the extent to which Foucault’s critique of biopower recapitulates Heidegger’s critique of technology. I have argued in this paper that Foucault recapitulates Heidegger’s critique to the extent that he uses Heidegger’s way of thinking as an ‘instrument of thought’. Displacing this instrument from the world of Heideggerian concerns, and reinserting it within a Nietzschean realm of practices and struggles, Foucault turns Heidegger’s way of thinking to a different end. Whereas Heidegger’s critique of technology seeks to recover the experience of what is always already forgotten in enframing, Foucault’s critique of biopower pursues an experience in which the biopolitical subject itself is forgotten: the moment of desubjectivation. In this transformation of Heidegger’s way of thinking we discern not only the essence of Foucault’s relationship to Heidegger, but an essential aspect of Foucault’s own philosophical practice, which we might describe as a way of questioning being freed from the transcendental theme."
"The existence of men being considered as having preceded their coexistence, the transformation of the simple plurality of individuals into a society should be explained. The traditional response is the contract or the market. Unlike an association in the biblical sense, the social contract is a pact contracted between equal partners. Following the example of business, it results from a calculation of self-interest. For Locke, the aim of all political association is economic: ‘The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property’. Possessed naturally, the rights are, besides, conceived on the model of the right to property. One understands that in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, the theory of rights was the privileged instrument used by the bourgeoisie to succeed in playing a political role proportionate to its economic weight.
But by the same token, politics loses its status of a cause to become an effect. The fact of society being no more than the consequence of a contract undertaken between individuals, power is no longer an organising force but a secondary product of society, a superstructure that is always threatening to the members of the society. (This role of superstructure, present among all liberal authors, will recur in Marx.) Concomitantly the political relationship is found to be entirely redefined on the basis of a new legal norm, corresponding to the subjective rights of the individual. Civil society, finally, is identified with the private sphere, that is to say, to that part of the society shielded from the political life, where individuals are thought to be able to act freely. ‘The philosophical stake of modern natural law’, writes Marcel Gauchet, ‘...is going to be the double redefinition of politics according to the subject: as regards the political element, the citizen, as the subject of individual right, and also, as regards the political whole, the political community, as the collective political subject’.
Thus a triple revolution is accomplished. On the one hand, the notion of will is substituted for the notion of order. On the other hand, the individual has moved to the centre and the law has become his attribute. Finally, the law is identified with ‘justice’, the latter having henceforth an essentially moral complexion. With Hobbes and his successors, life in society is conceived in view of the utility of each at the heart of a world where nature as a unified totality has no more intrinsic value, nor significance, nor finality. Right is henceforth an individual property, a quality inherent in the subject, a moral faculty which grants permissions and authorises demands. Reason is conceived, fundamentally, as a simple faculty of calculation. The legal matter ceases to be the just solution (dikaion, id quod bonum est), and becomes an ensemble of sanctioned norms and conducts. The state and the law itself are no longer anything but instruments destined to guarantee individual rights and to serve the intentions of the contracting parties.
Every philosophy of human rights is thus a philosophy of subjectivity, of a subjectivity of course said to be universal, but recognised initially as individual and unique.’" [Alain de Benoist, Beyond Human Rights]
"A more ambitious alternative is that of Kantian philosophy, which advocates a morality founded on the independence of the will. ‘The true moral choice’, affirms Kant, ‘implies the freedom of the will, that is to say a free will which is self-determined in freeing itself of all natural causality’. Defining as just every action ‘insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law’, Kant makes freedom the sole ‘original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity’. In this view, the pure essence of law resides in human rights, but the latter are no founded on human nature, but on dignity (Würde). To respect the dignity of man is to respect the respect of natural law which he bears in himself. ‘Humanity itself is a dignity’, writes Kant, ‘for a human being cannot be used merely as a means by any human being (either by others or even by himself) but must always be used at the same time as an end. It is just in this that his dignity (personality) consists, by which he raises himself above all other beings in the world that are not human beings and yet can be used, and so over all things’.
Compared to the preceding theoreticians of human rights, the change of perspective is radical. ‘Originally’, recalls Pierre Manent, ‘human rights are the natural rights of man, those which are inscribed in his elementary nature... Human dignity, in contrast, is constituted, according to Kant, in holding a radical or essential distance in relation to the needs and desires of one’s nature’.[46] The moral theory of Kant is in fact a deontological theory, that is to say, that it does not depend on any substantial proposition concerning human nature or the human aims which would derive from this nature. Reason no longer receives a substantial definition within it but a purely procedural definition, which means that the rational character of an agent is demonstrated by his manner of reasoning, by his manner of arriving at a result, and not by the fact that the result of his reasoning is substantially exact, in the sense of a conformity to an external order. Emanating from will alone, the moral law expresses the status of the rational agent. This is an extension of the Cartesian theory of a ‘clear and distinct’ thought, itself derived from the Augustinian conception of interiority. For Kant, the decisive procedure of reason is universalisation. From that time, not only are laws no longer derived from human nature, but they are in a certain way opposed to it. To act morally is to act according to duty, not by natural inclination. The moral law is no longer imposed from outside, it is prescribed by reason itself. The natural order no longer determines our ends and our normative objectives, we are henceforth obliged to produce the moral law from ourselves. That is why Kant recommends that one conform no longer to nature but to construct an image of things by following the canons of rational thought. Freedom, in Kant, is not a tendency or an attribute of human nature, but the very essence of human will — an absolutised faculty, detached from all contingency, a faculty permitting one to detach oneself from all forms of determinism and whose only criterion is the relationship to the moral universe of abstract humanism. (An idea rather close to the Calvinist doctrine: human nature is sinful, and the moral attitude consists in freeing oneself from all desire or natural tendency. One finds this idea already in Plato.) The abstraction of human rights, affirmed at an eminent level, thus places nature out of the picture. At the limit, humanity is defined as the capacity to free oneself from nature, to emancipate oneself from all natural determination, since every given a priori determination contradicts the independence of the will." [Alain de Benoist, Beyond Human Rights]
"The ideology of rights classically defines ‘human rights’ as the innate rights, inherent in human nature, that are borne by every individual since the time of the ‘state of nature’, that is to say, before the development of all social relations. Being subjective attributes of every man insofar as he is a man, relating to an isolated individual, who is pre-political and pre-social, these rights are therefore necessarily individual in nature: they are those which the individual can implement according to his will alone; they constitute the privileges which the agent that possesses them can enjoy. They are a prerogative of all human beings, supposed to be independent of space and time, valid at all times and in all places independently of personal conditions, political situations and socio-historical attributes, they are besides universal and inalienable by definition. No state can create them, grant or abrogate them, since they pre-date, and are superior to, every social and political form. The public powers can only recognise them by making sure that they guarantee and respect them. The general idea which is deduced from this definition is that man is not reducible to his social being, and that his true self is elsewhere. Human rights are ahistorical, but they nevertheless have a history. Besides, the expression jura hominum[1] besides is not older than 1537.
Originally, law was not at all defined as a collection of rules and norms of conduct (which derive from morality), but as a discipline aiming at determining the best means of instituting equity within a relationship. For the Greeks, justice in the legal sense of the term represented good proportion, the equitable proportion between distributed possessions and duties. The jus of Classical Roman law aimed equally at determining the ‘good distribution’ that should exist between men, the just share that should be attributed to everyone: suum cuique tribuere. Cicero thus says, in relation to civil law, that ‘its end is to maintain among citizens, in the distribution of goods and in legal cases, a just proportion resting on the laws and customs’. The jurist is one who determines this just distribution.
Being constituted of the equity and rectitude of relationships between persons, justice aims from that at the harmony of the group. The privileged domain of the law is therefore that of distributive justice, that is to say, of a justice placing the citizens in order among themselves and in relation to the common good. Human nature serves as a reference but is not apprehended according to conscience, independently of all social relations. It is in itself only an element of a hierarchical Nature which assigns to it its place and function.
In this conception of Classical natural law, there is no place either for universalism, or for subjectivism, or for contractualism. A subjective law, a law which would be an attribute of the person outside all social life, is unthinkable. ‘Rights’ are only distributions which should go to such or such, the result of a distribution ordered by the judge. The law thus never concerns itself with an isolated being, an individual considered as such. It does not concern itself, either, with man taken in his generality: generic man remains an empty category.
The first rupture appeared with Christianity. The Christian religion proclaims, in effect, the unique value of every human being by positing him as a value in himself. Insofar as he possesses a soul which puts him in a direct relationship with God, man becomes the bearer of an absolute value, that is to say, of a value which cannot be confused either with his personal qualities or with his belonging to a particular collective group. Concomitantly, Christianity gives a purely individual definition of freedom, which it makes the faculty of choosing, for a person endowed with reason, in accordance with morality, and between the means that lead to an end (Radix libertatis sicut subjectum est voluntas, sed sicut causa est ratio, as Thomas Aquinas would say). This accent placed on free will implicitly contains the idea that man can free himself of his natural qualities, that he can effect his choices on the basis of reason alone and thus make the world accord to his will. At the start, this will is posited as a power of consent. The superior life proceeds from a transformation of the will that is the work of grace.
By these major anthropological innovations, Christianity digs a ditch between the origin of man (God) and his temporal existence. It withdraws from the relative existence of the human being the ontological anchoring that is now reserved for the soul. The relations between men are, of course, always important, but they remain secondary, for the simple reason that the common life of men, their collective life, is no longer confused with their being. It is thus not wrongly, from this point of view, that Hegel was able to make the coming of Christianity coincide with subjectivism.
It is above all in the Augustinian tradition that the fact of belonging to the supra-terrestrial city would be affirmed at the expense of that which ties man to those similar to him. ‘The Christian ceases to be a part of the political organism’, writes Michel Villey, ‘he is a totality, an infinity, a value in himself. He himself is an end superior to the temporal ends of politics and his person transcends the state. Here is the seed of the modern freedoms of the individual, which will be opposable to the state, our future “human rights”’. By proclaiming the metaphysical destiny of man, Christianity tends to divert human justice from its interest in the world of the senses.
Augustine also develops with force the Christian idea according to which the path towards the higher passes through the interior: Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas (‘Do not go abroad. Return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth’). The internal conscience thus replaces the world as the locus of truth. It is through the conscience, the locus of a secret freedom which is also the seat of the soul, that one can go to God. A tendency toward reflexivity is introduced into Western thought through this theme, which will later be transformed into pure subjectivity. The idea that the conscience is the locus of truth announces, in fact, the modern idea of a private sphere, cut off from the public sphere and detached from external contingencies, which would be the privileged place of the blossoming of the individual. Descartes will resume the theme of Augustinian interiority and orient it in a new direction by situating the sources of morality in the cogito. Privatisation, one could say; the promotion of a private sphere where the good life is reduced henceforth to the ordinary life, begins with this promotion of the conscience.
The belief in a sole God allows one, besides, to represent all men without distinction as being equally sons of this god. Humanity acquires a moral significance by the same stroke. Radicalising a universalist tendency already present in Stoicism, the Christian doctrine proclaims the moral unity of mankind. ‘It is indisputable’, writes Olivier Mongin, ‘that the egalitarianism which underlies the natural law of belonging to a human community cannot be separated from its Judaeo-Christian context, indeed from Evangelical values’.
Although Christian love (agapè) may well put the accent on the ‘love of one’s neighbour’, by definition it never stops at the neighbour. Even if it can admit a hierarchy of pleasures or legitimate certain preferences, on the metaphysical level it does not know any borders. The neighbour, especially, is not so much ‘loved’ for himself as he is as a creature of God. In other words, he is loved only for that by which he does not differentiate himself fundamentally from other men — for that even which makes him similar to the others (the fact of having been created by God).
The relationship is not addressed to the visible and suffering body, it is addressed to something invisible, to the soul, if you like, more precisely to the dignity of the person’.[18] This way is the Christian way. Christian universalism, being unlimited, contains the seeds of all the later developments of the idea of fundamental equality. Agapè already announces the modern ideal of practical universal benevolence: all human beings should be treated with an equal respect to which their equal dignity gives them a right.
The Church proclaims the universal fraternity of men in Christ and their equality before God, but does not draw from it, originally, any particular message about the social organisation of humanity. Under the influence of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas continues to profess the idea of an ordered cosmos and to relate the exercise of the law to the common good.
Considering only the individual as existing, there results from this the fact that the collectivity is only a juxtaposition of individuals, the rights becoming naturally legitimate individual powers.
Nominalism maintains besides that the natural law is not so much the reflection of the divine order as of the divine will. Its partisans argue that a natural order which would indicate good and evil by itself would finally prevent God from deciding on good in a sovereign way. Taking into consideration the absolute freedom of God, it follows that no necessity is imposed by itself in nature, which permits William of Ockham to declare that the law is not a just relation between things but the reflection of a law willed by God. Thereby the universe is already emptied of sense and of its intrinsic raison d’être.
The Jesuit Francisco Suárez declares that social and political reality cannot be explained merely by the natural inclination to sociability: an act of will is also required of men, and is an accord of their wills. (The same idea was later taken up by Pufendorf.) Francisco de Vitoria adds that ‘the right of people is what natural reason has established among all peoples’. Rights, then, become synonymous with an individual faculty conferred by the moral law, with a moral power of action. With subjective law, notes Michel Villey, the individual becomes ‘the centre, the origin, of the legal universe’.
This evolution, sketched rather rapidly, allows us to apprehend the fundamental difference existing between Classical natural law and modern natural law. While the nature of which the first natural law spoke was that of the cosmos which, as an extrinsic principle, defined an objective perspective, even though the law which was deduced from it was also an objective law, modern natural law is a subjective law wholly deducible from the subject. The principles which it enunciates, deduced from the rational nature of man, are the principles according to which men should live, independently of the existence of a particular society.
From a cosmological naturalism, one is thus, at first, passed to a theological naturalism. Then, in a later period, the justification of rights was no longer sought in the fact that all men have been ‘created in the image of God’ but in the nature of their nature. Right was no longer thought of as derived from the divine law but from human nature alone, characterised by reason. It was a revolution at the same time philosophical and methodological that will have immediate political consequences.
The first modern theoreticians of human rights argue in turn from the idea of a ‘state of nature’, an idea which one found already in the Sixteenth century in the Spanish Jesuit Mariana. ‘The right of nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale’, writes Hobbes at the opening of Chapter 14 of his Leviathan, ‘is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature’. ‘Neither by the word right is anything signified’, he adds elsewhere, ‘than that liberty which every man hath to make use of his natural faculties according to right reason’. In the state of nature, law is a power which man can make use of freely. And selfinterest is the rule of this law. For Hobbes, as for Locke who permanently seeks his own self-interest, his advantage, his utility. It is therefore because he thinks he finds an advantage in it that he enters into contractual relations with others (to guarantee his right to property, according to Locke; in order to defend oneself against the hostility omnipresent in the state of nature, according to Hobbes).
Inheritor of nominalism, Hobbes also writes, ‘But whatsoever is the object of many man’s Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good’. The formula is immediately reversed: the desire and the will of each individual determines his degree of good, and each individual is the sovereign judge of his own happiness.
The first rights are therefore, above all, rights to freedom. Equality is only the condition required for their realisation. This priority of freedom is simply explained. Freedom, the expression of a pure being in itself, an incarnation of the uniqueness of the individual, qualifies the nature of man independently of all social relations. Equality is certainly a correlation of freedom defined in this way (if everyone is comprised of a free and absolute desire to be oneself, then all are in a way identical) but, contrarily to freedom, it requires a minimum of social life to acquire a significance." [Alain de Benoist, Beyond Human Rights]
"Being-‘subject’ means taking up a position from which an actor can make the transition from theory to practice. This transition usually takes place once an actor has found the motive that liberates them from hesitation and disinhibits them for action. Since time immemorial, the most powerful agent of disinhibition has always been compulsion through command – whether of an inner and affective or an external and social nature. As the activity culture of modernity constitutes itself against heteronomy, however, it will seek and find methods to place the commanding authority inside the hearer of the command themselves, so that they seem only to be obeying their inner voice when they submit. In this way, the fact of ‘subjectivity’ is demanded, created and fulfilled. What is meant, then, is the individual's co-determination of the authority that can give them commands. This organization of disinhibition usually makes itself invisible by claiming that in the moment when the actors make the transition to action, they are not following rousing passions or inescapable compulsions, but rather obeying sound self-understood reasons and sensible interests.
Correctly understood subjectivity, then, always implies the capacity to act, but not in the sense of an irrational rapture or a submission to unresolved drives – which French psychoanalysis noted in the term passage à l’acte. And contrary to what Lacanians and crypto-Catholics believe, not everyone who stands under the symbolic order of some ‘great Other’, of God or the fatherland, is a subject, but rather one who takes part in the experiments of modernity in the psychological formatting of entrepreneurial energies. This task always has to be borne in mind when one speaks of being a subject as ‘acting of one's own accord’ or thinking for oneself. An entrepreneur is constantly in transition to acting ‘from within themselves’, and the bridge to action erected by them or someone else is constructed from interests – which could certainly also include reasonable interests. Whoever knows how to interpret their interests is obeying, in the parlance of modern philosophy, none other than the ‘voice of reason’. It is thus sufficient to declare reason entirely one's own in order to remove any suspicion of heteronomy from one's actions. Admittedly, the advanced Enlightenment found it increasingly problematic to say whether that voice can fully become the intimate property of its listener, as its demands led not infrequently to conflicts with the other intimissimum of the subject, namely its own feelings. Romanticism escaped this dilemma by giving priority to emotion, crediting it with being ‘more reasonable than reason alone’.
Revealing the figure of self-obedience at the core of Modern Age subjectivity means showing how ‘subjects’ upgrade themselves to action-capable agents by advising themselves, persuading themselves and giving themselves the sign to shed inhibitions and act – or acquiring it from third parties. Subjectification is thus inseparable from authorizations and corresponding forms of training. In noting this, we reject critical theory's misconception of modern subjectivity as an agency for self-control – an obsessional neurosis, psychoanalytically speaking. The true meaning of becoming a subject can only be understood in terms of the arming and self-disinhibition of the actor – their hystericization, in a sense. A modern actor cannot get into shape without support from a specific training of auto-consultation and auto-persuasion. The aim of drawing on such capacities is not usually theoretical insight as such, but rather the application of insights in order to achieve practical goals. Then self-advice and self-convincing will ultimately result in self-disinhibition.
It is the transition from theory to practice, then, that defines the nature of subjectivity. One can never, of course, be certain where this might lead the actors. An agent who might take some action for inner reasons more or less opaque to the outside observer, at any rate, displays the primary characteristic of the subject: unpredictability.1 Moral philosophy processes this state of affairs into freedom, or indeterminacy of action. Anyone who desires the empowerment of the subject on account of its freedom, however, must thus find a way to bring this activated power point in the world under effective control. Hence reason is meant to ensure this power control from within. But what if it remains unclear to what extent reason is at the helm within the interior of the released power points or subjects? It is thus advisable for anyone who deals with subjects to be fundamentally suspicious towards them. We can go further: only those whom one suspects of being up to some mischief can effectively become notable as a subject. Because subjectivity implies indeterminate offensivity, one can only do it justice with the attitude of a suspended distrust.2 One factor in the fundamental dubiousness of the construct we call the ‘subject’ is the difficulty of establishing whether the suspect carries out their potential and present deeds ‘from within themselves’,3 or is rather a possessed person or an automaton, subordinated to anonymous forces – be they mechanical or demonic. The subject is a non-trivial complex of ambition and reflection, or of energy and insidiousness.
The first subjects of the Modern Age in the precise sense of the word were, as we shall hint in the following, the Jesuits, who established themselves in the sixteenth century as a special intervention group of the Counter-Reformation – with the unmistakable intention of helping the Catholic party to catch up on the lead of the motivationally superior Protestants. As an explicit attempt at psychotechnical and medial modification, Jesuit subjectivity was driven by the longing to understand the successes of the Protestants better than the Protestants themselves. This passing manoeuvre revealed the unique disinhibiting value of the confession: whoever expresses their creed in actions undeniably has the force of vigour on their side. In the era of religious wars, this observation resulted in a psychosemantic arms race in the course of which confession was used not only as a motive, but also as a weapon. But while the Protestants appeared as primary fundamentalists, the Jesuit position was based on the parodying of their opponents’ fundamentalism. The Jesuit theatre, with its large repertoire, essentially derives from the Jesuit position: it dictates a role to each actor in which orthodoxy becomes performance. On this path, obedience likewise had to become an overbearing exercise. The secret of the order lay in the fact that it knew how to create a Catholic equivalent to Protestant psychodynamics: its aim was to exploit the new combination of an enthusiastic motivation system with an ascetic executive system for the Catholic party in the global civil war of faith.
These radically available activists could not, therefore, leave it at the humilitas–castitas–paupertas vow that had applied to Christian monastic life since the days of the great rulemakers. With their notorious fourth vow, they placed themselves – in a rather modern way – under the pope's supreme command. They conceived themselves, one might say, as exquisitely weak-willed precision instruments that placed themselves entirely in the hands of their user. To set them going, therefore, no less than the will of the highest possible earthly motivational authority in Catholicism was used. With fanatical irony, the Jesuits offered themselves up as marionettes of the most modern construction whose strings were to be pulled by a single puppeteer, the Roman commander of countermodernity. (Note: whoever wants power must serve the powerful to the point of indispensability.) To become such puppets, they developed a far-reaching combination of exercises and study – the first to crucify their own will and make themselves usable as pure tools, and the second to enter the battleground equipped with the newest state of the art. The metaphor of Jesuit ‘cadaver obedience’ refers to the classical implementation of subjectivity as the combination of maximum motivation and pure availability. The exaggeration of obedience on the Jesuit path to subjectivity highlights the fact that the incentive to act here comes entirely from an external authority; this factor would taint the model for non-Catholics and anti-authoritarians until the twentieth century. From the start, it was impossible to doubt the efficiency of the construction. The power of the intelligent instrument was so great that even its master could not but become suspicious – a suspicion that, after long intra-Catholic quarrelling, would lead to the dissolution of the order in 1773.
In its design for the Catholic subject of the post-Tridentine era, the Ignatian turn unifies four traditional motifs of self-moulding practices: athleticism, monasticism, soldierdom and scholardom.5 All of them are cultural manifestations of the ability to suffer and cultivations of pónos (effort, exertion), of which the Greeks of the classical age had already taught that without it, no paideía, no instance of the human-shaping practice known as education, will produce the desired results. The medium in which the unification of older exertion techniques was able to succeed was initially provided by late medieval passion piety, whose significance for the emergence of the culture of subjectivity cannot be overestimated. The controlled inward turn, furthermore, had been prepared through the decree that annual confession was compulsory for all Christians after 1215. Thanks to a broad religious trend towards the awakening of a taste for the passion among the middle classes of early modern cities – the keyword for this was imitatio Christi, and its liturgical mark the establishment of the feast of Corpus Christi in the thirteenth century – there emerged that inclination towards an active appropriation of one's own passivity without which the modern-subjectivist stylization of the human condition would have been inconceivable. When a sequence of adverse events can be experienced as a passion, suffering is converted into ability. Only through this transformation can the subject appear as the bearer of all mental ‘representations’ [Vorstellungen], which then also include all modifications of passive sensuality and all motives that dispose the subject to become active. This means that only someone capable of learning how to master and possess their own suffering can be a subject.
Later generations of subjects naturally drew on more modern means than the Jesuits to organize their disinhibitions. In keeping with the changed spirit of the age, they drew on inner authorities such as evidence, moral principle, genius or decision, as well as the influences of allied external elements that made themselves useful as lawyers, secretaries, advisers and therapists. Regarding the inner factors, which were later unified with the term ‘faith’, William James noted in his 1896 essay ‘The Will to Believe’ with constructive irony that even empirically minded people often behave like ‘infallible popes’ when formulating their central hypotheses on life. This bon mot tells us that modern individuals are generally quite successful in the establishment of a ‘final authority’ that is personally binding for them. The liberal American psychologist had realized that ‘papacy’ is not an exclusively Roman speciality, but rather a ubiquitously valid mental function that must be explicitly activated whenever individualistic life forms begin to dominate.
The inner pope has the task of stopping the endless regression of doubt in order to establish the psychosemantics of dogma, namely resting on a secure foundation and being able to take it as a point of departure, at an individual level. It is due to the actions of this authority that the ‘subjects’, though usually equipped with ample inhibitions (viewed more as neuroses by psychoanalysis) thanks to their typically modern pedagogical grooming, find their way through the uncertainties of the ‘society of opportunities’. This enables them to make the transition from hesitation to action whenever inner and outer circumstances invite it. Only a minority fixed in endless reflection emphasizes, in agreement with Hamlet, that it is out of the question to be truly convinced of anything – which inevitably results in a chronic inhibition to act and a possible compensation for this in the form of disinhibition procedures, especially the collection of the subject for a ‘leap’ first examined by Kierkegaard.
The dominant figure of modernity is thus by no means the excess of reflective inwardness, as some authors have suggested, or the continuous state of inhibition that results from it; rather, it reveals itself in a pragmatic hesitation whose conclusion usually succeeds within limited time spans – whether alone or with the help of others. What becomes manifest in the process is that the task of reflection is to prepare the desired disinhibition. Only in the most exceptional cases does modern thought gain a fundamentally procrastinating function – from which one can conclude, furthermore, that nothing is less likely in modern times than the stance of an observing philosophy.
According to Descartes, Kant, Fichte and Marx, the subject-to-be no longer progresses from mortification to practice, but rather from theory to practice – though ‘theory’, of course, no longer means the quiet gazing of thinkers before the icons of being; what is now meant is the active establishment of sufficient reasons for successful deeds – an undertaking that is only productive until the point of disinhibition or action is reached.
For people with plans, the immeasurable advantage of viewing oneself as a subject is clearly that one can mentally remove the external master – taken as the epitome of inhibiting power – and the master's resistance must indeed be removed as soon as we claim freedom of expression and enterprise for ourselves. If the master shows no sign of opening the way in reality, then the first undertaking of the united expressive-expansive ‘subjects’ will be to dethrone him through a ‘revolution’. Thus ‘revolution’ is not only a type of political event, but even more a philosophical motto: it stands for the phantasm of disabling the oppressive, obstructive and depressing qualities of the real as such. That is why, since 1789, political coups have usually included a delegation of liberation philosophers.
Memories of the great days when the first interferer in the state was disposed of constitute the happy moments in subject history; liberal parties process them into the authentic New Mythology. National holidays are thus always independence days – they call to mind the animated scenes when the people removed their external master and elevated the entrepreneurial and expressive freedom of the offensive middle classes to the starting point for a new legislation. The naïve happiness of such special days flows from the allegation that the entire resistance of the real is concentrated in the master, and must dissolve with his removal. Post-revolutionary times are those in which the ‘subjects’ outgrow this naïveté. The great disadvantage of being a subject reveals itself in the fact that the function of the master, namely the authorization – granted by managerial powers – of disinhibition among the subalterns, cannot be adopted one to one when I apply it to myself. Autocracy may be a task inevitably faced by the moderns on account of their historical screenplay; that same script tells us that we chronically fail in this task and why.
The quandary of being a subject creates markets for intellectuals who offer their support for needy, under-informed and under-motivated subjectivity. The gaps left by the master's removal were filled between 1793 and 1968 by the ideologues, until their more discreet successors, the consultants, appeared and took up residence in the hollows of lordlessness. The ideologues (whose functional predecessors in the sixteenth century were the Italian secretarii and the father confessors of the princes) usually disinhibited themselves and their clients in the name of ‘history’ and its iron laws – hence the inevitable task for these advisors of presenting their not infrequently violent promptings as products of a ‘science of history’. As ‘history’, alongside ‘nature’, was viewed for a time as the highest client of action, invocation of its assignments held the greatest disinhibiting value. Needless to say, historicism of this type was the legally cloaked form of opportunism. Obedience to the ‘law of history’ (and its application to the opportunities) provided the most discreet method of participating in supposedly unavoidable acts of violence – although most intellectuals were careful not to contribute personally to the crimes they advised or considered acceptable. With their willingness to provide the keywords that would trigger attacks, left and right extremists proved close relatives, as embarrassing as both parties may find this proximity.
The only strong keyword for disinhibition that can enable the transition to practice after the fading of ideologies all over the world is, quite simply, ‘innovation’. Only a few people are aware that this represents a stage of attrition in the erstwhile ‘laws of history’. Ever since the new human being was taken off the market in a major product recall, technical novelties, procedural novelties and design novelties have constituted the strongest attractors for all those who are still condemned to ask what they can do to reach the top. Whoever innovates can be sure that the maxim of their actions could become the principle of a general legislation at any time.
With the rise of fun as a disinhibition agent from the 1980s on, even the pretext of innovation became dispensable. As vulgar sovereignists, the actors of the fun culture frolic in their superficial feel-good zones and consider wilfully letting themselves go an adequate motivation. They could dispense with consultants, as they address their seducers directly; if anything, they confide in their entertainer, trainer or gag-writer. Sovereignty means deciding oneself what to fall for.
Modern perpetrator consciousness presupposes a well-functioning auto-persuasive agency that constantly unlocks actors for deeds by arranging a combination of special permission, promises of gain and the prospect of later absolution. No one has illuminated the way in which the disinhibiting auto-persuasion of future perpetrator subjects works in individual cases with greater precision than Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel Crime and Punishment, written in 1868.
Raskolnikov quotes to the prosecutor Porfiry from his own article ‘On Crime’, in which he believes he has shown the unbreakable connection between innovation and delinquency:
In short, I argued that all people – not only the great, but even those who deviate only marginally from the common rut, that's to say who are only marginally capable of saying something new, are bound, by their very nature, to be criminals – to a greater or lesser degree, of course. Otherwise they would find it hard to get out of the rut, and it goes without saying that, again because of their nature, they could not possibly agree to remain in it.
According to Raskolnikov's reasoning, belonging to the group of extraordinary or innovative people is sufficient in order to have the right and duty to commit crimes – which, in the present case, simply means removing the obstacles to the new posed by ordinary people. The term ‘crime’ thus stands for ‘the destruction of the present reality in the name of one that is better’.4 The intellectual's self-persuasion leads to success from the moment when they manage to take themselves, with sufficient evidence, for a member of the extraordinary category – needless to say, this is where Dostoyevsky will come in and characterize his hero as the victim of a demonic (one would later call it narcissistic) fallacy. One can tell from the experimental set-up of the novel that the structure of the modern disinhibition to action can generally be found in the synthesis of exceptionalism, innovationism and evolutionism – and it does no harm to include a supplement of democratic-messianic motives too. This forms the matrix for countless crimes of modernization against Christian and humanistic backgrounds.
The concept of the ‘extraordinary people’ holds a reference to a division of humanity on the basis of different speeds, differing intensities and different paths of becoming. The result of this division is that individuals who live in the midst of accelerated research, more daring expeditions and more refined methods of production will gain access to particular truths, realities or techniques earlier than others. Through this temporal privilege of access to the new truths, new realities and new techniques, they gain a headstart that forces the rest to respond whether they like it or not, either by deciding to follow or by refusing to do so – arguing, for example, that those headstarts lack any normative power. If one dispels the pseudo-anthropological aura surrounding Raskolnikov's talk of ‘extraordinary people’, what remains is a resilient process-theoretical core: what is addressed here as exceptionality is nothing other than the inclusion of individuals and groups on courses of being that could be termed advanced ‘developments’, assuming it is possible to use this word without implicitly making a statement about the duty of the others to catch up with these ‘developments’ sooner or later. When Dostoyevsky's hero emphasizes the gulf between those people who can speak the ‘new word’ and those who repeat the old and familiar, he adopts one of the basic assumptions of progressism, which stipulates a duty for ordinary people to catch up; the alternative is consenting to be cleared out of the way. His conception of the world shows him a humanity of two speeds – and its division into the overtakers and the overtaken. Two generations after Raskolnikov, Joseph Schumpeter would state in his theory of economic development that in economic life, functionally speaking, there are ultimately only innovators and imitators.
Such assumptions urge towards a naïve ontology of progress in which the distance between the vanguard and the main body can consistently be interpreted as the pilot function of those at the forefront: it shows the sluggish majority where the journey as a whole is heading. Although Raskolnikov does not deny the conservative rights of the average humans, he even claims to believe in a constant conflict between movement and preservation. In this schema, the headstart of the extraordinary is made possible by a vocation to disinhibition that forges ahead solely through active contempt for the restrictive power of morality and convention – hence the thesis of the inevitable criminality of the innovators." [The World Interior of Capitalism]
"This ideal synthesis of selflessness and self-service sums up the Modern Age-enabling psychotechnical figure of ‘self-enthusiasm’ or ‘autogenic mania’ – in due course, German philosophers would mystify it as ‘self-determination’ and generalize it beyond all recognition. If self-enthusiasm has to take on smaller forms, it appears as selfcounselling and self-persuasion – those two pragmatic expressions of the new effort of being a subject. Because most actors in the Modern Age were only partly successful in their self-motivation, however, they became dependent on advisers who supported them in their attempt to believe in their mission and their luck. For project-prompters and astrologers, overseas traffic in capital marked the start of the Golden Age – which was still in progress at the threshold of the twenty-first century. With its compulsion to act into the distance, the Modern Age became a paradise for soothsayers and consultants. The concern for capital that was intended for realization on journeys around the world bestows a sixth sense. It would indeed be amazing if people for whom reality is the flow of money and goods did not also believe in subtler forms of inflow and outflow. Fluxbased thought (in telepathic, astrophysical, magnetic and monetary forms) broke the hegemony of substance-oriented scholasticism – though it would take everyday Euro-American life four centuries to complete the adjustment.
What characterizes a substantial part of the current consultancy industry is the adoption of spiritual traditions which are then filtered into realistic business – a paradigmatic example being the adaptation of Zen Buddhism to a decidedly non-meditative clientele.
It cannot be emphasized enough, then, that what was termed European expansion was not originally rooted in the Christian mission idea; rather, expansion and systematized colonial and mercantile risk-taking over great distances triggered proselytization, transmission and bringing as a type of activity in its own right. This type also encompasses general salvific transfer, exportation of advanced civilization, consultation and all procedures for the transference of success and advantage. In this sense, we can say that the Modern Age as a whole is the object of a secular missionary science. The Christian missionaries simply recognized their historical chance early on by jumping aboard the departing ship.
The group of advantage-bringers in the Modern Age includes conquerors, discoverers, researchers, priests, entrepreneurs, politicians, artists, teachers, designers, journalists – all of them supported by their own advisers and outfitters. Without exception, these factions dress their practices in manic assignments, that is to say secular missions. They constantly attempt to close their depressive gaps and clear away their doubts by insuring themselves through the services of paid motivators. These are meant to show them ways to become a modern subject, that is to say a rationally motivated perpetrator." [The World Interior of Capitalism]
"The history of the last two millennia bears witness to a slow rise of indistinction — which began with monotheism. Indeed, the assertion of the existence of one single God implies the unity of the human family, not only at the level of biological species, but also from the viewpoint of spirituality. To argue that there is only one God means to assert at the same time that all men are part of only one family and that all other gods need to be discarded. This boils down to the instauration of a new regime of truth in which otherness becomes a source of falsehood or error. “The One was first the specificity of the Judeo-Christian culture” and later of modern culture, writes Michel Maffesoli. The One excludes the Other which threatens its exclusivity. The Other must be therefore rightly annihilated. Throughout the history of the West, the obsession with Oneness has never ceased to operate as the guiding principle. Historically, it has been the motor of intolerance, of exclusion and of separation, and later of fragmentation that gave birth to all kinds of inquisitions and justified all efforts to remove otherness.
In the modern age, Christianity itself transcends all cultural and ethnic differences: it does not deny them, yet it regards them as inessential. In God’s eyes, there is neither “Jew nor Greek,” neither man nor woman (Gal. 3: 28). God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17: 26). At the same time, just as the separation of the spiritual and temporal power had introduced a fateful division in the notion of sovereignty, the new religion began to separate the city of God from the city of Man, the generic man vs. the citizen, the universal religion vs. the local beliefs. It promotes humanity at the expense of patriotism. “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matt. 28: 19). This was the first directive that dismissed all borders.
The ideology of progress
This idea has not ceased to expand, that is, the idea that what makes individuals and peoples distinct must be therefore incidental, accidental, contingent, and in the last analysis negligible or harmful. In the modern age, transposed into the secular realm, it takes on the form of an assertion of the immediate (but not mediate) belonging of man to humanity. Accordingly, we are human beings before belonging to a specific people, or to a specific culture. In reality though, the very opposite is true: we are human beings insofar as we belong to a specific people or to a specific culture. It is by means of our specificity that we have access to the universality.
The ideology of progress claims that all peoples are called to achieve the same kind of society by following the same stages. As St. Augustine already argued, they must progress in a unitary manner (“Human reason is conducive to unity“). In the same vein the Enlightenment declared the futility of any heritage, which it conflated with a mishmash of superstitious customs and habits. In order to become “free” the past is depicted as a hurdle that needs to be rejected. The only choices admitted are those which are made downstream from One’s Self (“it is my choice”) whilst the choices conditioned by what is upstream from One’s Self are disqualified as illusory. From this derives the ideal of “autonomy,” patterned after the model of independence, the questioning of every status and of each authority experienced now as a humiliating deprivation of unrestricted freedom. This is the modern myth of the creation of the Self by means of the Self alone (and from scratch), which implies the rejection of both “nature” and of all inherited traits. Such a liberty conceived as an absolute commencement and not determined by anything, bestows upon man a prerogative that was once attributed to God.
The drive towards indistinction is based on reducing equality to Sameness; there is no way of being equal unless becoming identical; one can have the same value only when adopting the same roles. By contrast, any acknowledgment of differences, even the most glaring ones, would perpetuate inequality and oppression. This aspiration to Sameness (Auguste Comte rightly spoke of reductio ad unum)—also fueled by a mimetic desire—is a major characteristic of modern society. Man is supposed to be the same everywhere. What is good for one (for us) must be also good for all (the rest of mankind), regardless of whether this takes place in the political, economic, or social realm. Tocqueville had keenly identified this modern desire for resemblance; not empirical resemblance, nor similarity, which is at the basis of sociability, but a resemblance based on the idea of equal dignity of all human beings, and equally distributed to each human being, in a manner of an attribute of human nature, that is to say, prior to any political or social life.
Equality of conditions, a great theme of modernity, cannot be understood unless one takes into account economic transformation which has turned the mercantile exchange into the basic human bond. “Similar human beings”, of which Tocqueville wrote, are unable to connect to each other except by means of work and trade. Money appears as the general equivalent whereas utility becomes a corollary of equality. The labor force is not conducive to the homogenization in the amount of the wages; instead, it brings about the homogenization of humans by setting up the reign of homo economicus — a species exclusively focused on his immediate material gratification. As Christian Laval has noted, “Equality of conditions is the equivalence of the same individuals in a society fueled by economic and mercantile issues, i.e. a society in which the only legitimate differences are those that relate to the measure of their utility.”
Universalism and individualism march hand in hand. In the postmodern era indistinction has become widespread just as narcissistic individualism and the metaphysics of subjectivity have become major features of the dominant ideology. Everything becomes fluctuating, short-lived, transitory and “liquid”. The loss of reference points leads to social anomie, the widespread uncertainty of concepts (“anything goes”), the effort to erect each singular desire into a general law of “equality” with everybody else. Made up of individuals with no location, of single atoms from everywhere and therefore from nowhere, society turns into a semi-chaotic structure, a caravanserai deprived of any conscience of the common good. The more people separate from each other, the more mass conformism sets in. Individuals become slaves without masters, uprooted and without culture, interchangeable and vulnerable, as well as targeted preys of the double grip of the market and the state within a system that claims to be all the more tolerant in general as it is intolerant in particular.
Without belonging, without identity
Any belonging or any collective specificity is described as incarceration, a misleading fiction, or as an illusory “construction.” Any concern to a sense of belonging is labeled “fanaticism” or “fundamentalism.” “In order to establish ‘real freedom of choice,’ one must therefore liberate students from any determination, be it family, ethnic, social, or intellectual,” declared Vincent Peillon, the new minister of education. Simultaneously, a catch-all concept of ‘discrimination’ is invading the judiciary and the penal language. While this word described originally a treatment unfairly applied to such and such individual (or a category of individuals), it has now begun to stigmatize all kinds of distinction among people. Tocqueville, again, notes that “in the age of equality nothing revolts humans so much as the idea of being subjected to the forms.” The forms are perceived as limitations and constraints. Contemporary art has already abolished aesthetic categories. The ultimate “deconstruction” is the deconstruction of elementary sexual differences, implemented by the “gender” ideology and gender studies. The reign of the “no-form” has set in.
Indistinction means also the negation of all frontiers and of all limitations. The bottom line is how to get rid of a measure. The One goes hand in hand with excess (hybris), just as the logic of over-accumulation of capital is itself a form of limitlessness which has turned into its own “raison d’être.” At all times cosmopolitanism has strived toward the erasure of borders. Today it has taken on the form of nomadic behavior. The leftist ideology of no-borders converges with the rightwing ideology of free trade, with both interpreting globalization as across-the-board social hybridization. The ideology of “no borders” is jointly espoused by the financiers, the smugglers and the mob. “No borders” and “the undocumented”— that is to say, no adherence and no identity.
Yet, borders are not barriers, but only locks in a waterway. In the era of globalization, they are primarily intended to regulate trade and protect the most threatened ones. (Régis Debray: “The poor has only his own pasture left to himself”). This is the reason why the Capital International — the only one that thrives — requires the removal of all borders.
The only thing remaining is what Freud called “the narcissism of petty differences” — differences that are unessential and that are being projected on the system of objects (one has the “choice” between Shell and Chevron, Windows or Apple, Renault and Peugeot, Coke or Pepsi). This is a fake diversity, based only on differential purchasing power. “Diversity,” as a form of euphemism, is in reality just another word for indistinctive mixture. The ideology of miscegenation, which has become widespread today, must be understood as going well beyond the mixing of bodies and cultures only. One could use the word “in-mixture” (mélangisme), in the promotion of general indistinctiveness as a moral imperative and as a normative project that must be achieved. Although “miscegenation” of any kind (be it cultural, ethnic, artistic, linguistic, and so on) and “diversity” completely contradict each other, the “miscegenation” is hailed as a method of salvation, lending itself thus to the redemptive fusion on its path toward the undifferentiated.
The apology of nomadic life everywhere, the deterritorialization of all problems, the dream of “world governance,” a systematic removal of all roots, the encouragement to all kinds of hybridization — the fantasy of the One who has finally landed in the field of mandatory in-mixing — becomes the rule. “The global hybridization, writes Pierre-André Taguieff, resembles the steamroller which brings about the homogenization, levels all cultures and finally abolishes every cultural diversity.” Shuffling and blending everybody with everybody and everything with anything – this is the final and ultimate form of indistinction today."[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
"The full-blown city coincides with the development of writing–especially of phonetic writing, the specialist form of writing that makes a division between sight and sound. It was with this instrument that Rome was able to reduce the tribal areas to some visual order. The effects of phonetic literacy do not depend upon persuasion or cajolery for their acceptance. This technology for translating the resonating tribal world into Euclidean lineality and visuality is automatic. Roman roads and Roman streets were uniform and repeatable wherever they occurred." [Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man]
"In mathematics, in the field of group theory, a HN group or hypernormalizing group is a group with the property that the hypernormalizer of any subnormal subgroup is the whole group.
For finite groups, this is equivalent to the condition that the normalizer of any subnormal subgroup be subnormal."
"HyperNormalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before."
"In mathematics, in the field of group theory, a HN group or hypernormalizing group is a group with the property that the hypernormalizer of any subnormal subgroup is the whole group.
For finite groups, this is equivalent to the condition that the normalizer of any subnormal subgroup be subnormal."
"HyperNormalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before."
^lol that's going to normalise the term "White Supremacy" and as Seinfeld would add - "He's a White Supremacist, not that there is anything wrong with that."
