Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

Your taxes fund the empire. Terrorism collects no tax.

Concrete politics and results can show us what our enemies have done, whom they ally with, how many of them have been killed, how many of us they have killed, etc. But it cannot tell us the significance of a phenomenon like terrorism, or the meaning of the Arab Spring. Events such as this aren't reducible to their facts.

 

[SentinelSlain]

I would avoid basing your whole analysis on philosophical rants by old marxists. These people have basically developed a semi conscious bigotry against the West and just keeping going around in circles finding different ways to blame it for everything.

 

[Einherjar86]

What if what we need is some good semi-conscious (hell, go for broke; fully conscious) bigotry against the West?

 

[Dak]

Your taxes fund the empire. Terrorism collects no tax.

Terrorism is a tactic, not even an ideology, and certainly not a group, so certainly it collects nothing. However, Al Qaeda is funded via the empire by tax dollars. Terrorism is a tactic used by guerrilla groups and uniformed services alike.

If "we" are the empire we are also the terrorists. Also, by this extensionist logic, since we exist within a culture we perpetuate it and all it's extenions, so we are also Charles Manson, and Westboro Baptist Church, and Perez Hilton, Obama, and so on and on and on.

Concrete politics and results can show us what our enemies have done, whom they ally with, how many of them have been killed, how many of us they have killed, etc. But it cannot tell us the significance of a phenomenon like terrorism, or the meaning of the Arab Spring. Events such as this aren't reducible to their facts.

Problem: This assumes "concrete" politics is the entirety of the matter. I don't know why the "Arab Spring" has so baffled people. Agent provocateurs stirring up the disenfranchised for political purposes where needed. It's about as unorganic as any "Color revolution".

 

[Einherjar86]

Terrorism is a tactic, not even an ideology, and certainly not a group, so certainly it collects nothing. However, Al Qaeda is funded via the empire by tax dollars. Terrorism is a tactic used by guerrilla groups and uniformed services alike.

Terrorism, in a very explicit sense, may be just an action; but there's no reason it can't be an ideology, nor should we automatically assume that terrorism means the same thing when applied to the American military. US soldiers going in and "terrorizing" Middle-Eastern families in their homes is not the same thing as radical militants flying planes into the World Trade Center.

The atrocity of 9/11 is an event of Terrorism, and it's nothing like what our soldiers do, although you might describe both things as "terrifying."

If "we" are the empire we are also the terrorists. Also, by this extensionist logic, since we exist within a culture we perpetuate it and all it's extenions, so we are also Charles Manson, and Westboro Baptist Church, and Perez Hilton, Obama, and so on and on and on.

Don't you know me well enough to know my response to this by now? We are all those things.

Problem: This assumes "concrete" politics is the entirety of the matter. I don't know why the "Arab Spring" has so baffled people. Agent provocateurs stirring up the disenfranchised for political purposes where needed. It's about as unorganic as any "Color revolution".

That's the most absurdly simplistic explanation you can give, and it completely squares with your rationalist empirical value-based approach to absolutely everything.

I never said I was baffled by the Arab Spring, but reducing it to the most efficient and cost-benefit-analysis means of explanation does an injustice to your intelligence.

You choose to ignore, very often in fact, the influence of a very, very prevalent symbolism of all events, everywhere, all the time. You choose to "see past" such symbolism, because in your opinion that's not what events really are. There's some ascertainable reality lurking back there, and you can just trace your funds and figure out the basic tenets of reality. I'm not saying tracing the money doesn't reveal certain things - it certainly revealed a great deal for Chomsky when he wrote Manufacturing Consent. But there's so much more that you hopelessly ignore.

The Arab Spring functions as a symbol, and that is equally if not more important than the concrete facts that led to it or that we can follow and use as catalysts for explaining its occurrence. Likewise, 9/11 is a symbolic event that means more than who funded whom. The symbolic structure of these events, while it may be something that looks like a veil to be pierced through, actually has an effect on the texture of reality itself. The symbolic effect changes the reality.

So, the Arab Spring, 9/11, etc.; these things are not merely Islamic uprisings or acts of terror. They establish a symbolic network, some of which is absolutely and ideologically (again, in the symbolic/imaginary sense) opposed to Western thought. This is so because the West constructs it as opposed. We can deconstruct these binaries and oppositions, but doing so doesn't change the verifiable symbolic effect that is, more than anything, an emergent phenomenon.

 

[Dak]

Terrorism, in a very explicit sense, may be just an action; but there's no reason it can't be an ideology, nor should we automatically assume that terrorism means the same thing when applied to the American military. US soldiers going in and "terrorizing" Middle-Eastern families in their homes is not the same thing as radical militants flying planes into the World Trade Center.

The atrocity of 9/11 is an event of Terrorism, and it's nothing like what our soldiers do, although you might describe both things as "terrifying."

I don't see any reason for distinction other than uniforms. Oh yeah, symbols. On that later...

Don't you know me well enough to know my response to this by now? We are all those things.

You are Snow White. It's absurd.

That's the most absurdly simplistic explanation you can give, and it completely squares with your rationalist empirical value-based approach to absolutely everything.

I never said I was baffled by the Arab Spring, but reducing it to the most efficient and cost-benefit-analysis means of explanation does an injustice to your intelligence.

You choose to ignore, very often in fact, the influence of a very, very prevalent symbolism of all events, everywhere, all the time. You choose to "see past" such symbolism, because in your opinion that's not what events really are. There's some ascertainable reality lurking back there, and you can just trace your funds and figure out the basic tenets of reality. I'm not saying tracing the money doesn't reveal certain things - it certainly revealed a great deal for Chomsky when he wrote Manufacturing Consent. But there's so much more that you hopelessly ignore.

The Arab Spring functions as a symbol, and that is equally if not more important than the concrete facts that led to it or that we can follow and use as catalysts for explaining its occurrence. Likewise, 9/11 is a symbolic event that means more than who funded whom. The symbolic structure of these events, while it may be something that looks like a veil to be pierced through, actually has an effect on the texture of reality itself. The symbolic effect changes the reality.

So, the Arab Spring, 9/11, etc.; these things are not merely Islamic uprisings or acts of terror. They establish a symbolic network, some of which is absolutely and ideologically (again, in the symbolic/imaginary sense) opposed to Western thought. This is so because the West constructs it as opposed. We can deconstruct these binaries and oppositions, but doing so doesn't change the verifiable symbolic effect that is, more than anything, an emergent phenomenon.

Symbols. Are for simple. And I don't mean symbols absolutely, like language (what is an "A" anyway amirite?). I'm talking about what amounts to modern totemism, but in an even more abstract sense, which is what you are pushing here as something meaningful beyond the real.

Edit: To speak directly to he assertion of "symbolic networks": You are reading more into it than is there, yet in a way which does not assist us in any fashion which at least a good conspiracy theory does. A conspiracy theory is normally the tying together of potentially seemingly disparate factors to create a framework for understanding events on a real level. Sometimes symbology must be appealed too, at least a desire for the actors to conform to some revered or superstitious symbology.
But this isn't the symbolic network you are referring to of course, and totemism is entirely fictional, useless, and subjective to the point of nothingness. It's little more than cloudwatching, and noticing THAT one looks like a camel, and no more or less meaningful in itself. Maybe as a Rorschach?

 

[Einherjar86]

Every response you make reinforces my disagreement with you.

You are Snow White. It's absurd.

You don't think you're part of a cultural network that produced Snow White? That you're somehow connected to a complex of meanings and values that brought Snow White into being? And that Snow White doesn't maintain a category in our culture as a symbol?

Meaning is involved in a very complex relationship between materiality and ideality, and occupies an ambiguous category in cultural interpretation. The idea that certain things mean something cannot always be reduced to specific material conditions that make rational sense; but their consequential meaning does have material effect.

Symbols. Are for simple. And I don't mean symbols absolutely, like language (what is an "A" anyway amirite?). I'm talking about what amounts to modern totemism, but in an even more abstract sense, which is what you are pushing here as something meaningful beyond the real.

Edit: To speak directly to he assertion of "symbolic networks": You are reading more into it than is there, yet in a way which does not assist us in any fashion which at least a good conspiracy theory does. A conspiracy theory is normally the tying together of potentially seemingly disparate factors to create a framework for understanding events on a real level. Sometimes symbology must be appealed too, at least a desire for the actors to conform to some revered or superstitious symbology.
But this isn't the symbolic network you are referring to of course, and totemism is entirely fictional, useless, and subjective to the point of nothingness. It's little more than cloudwatching, and noticing THAT one looks like a camel, and no more or less meaningful in itself. Maybe as a Rorschach?

You should be careful how you talk about "the real" because you're not addressing the issue very thoughtfully.

Meanings may not be tied to material factors in any discernible way beyond mere contingency, but that doesn't change the causal material influence that meanings themselves have on the world and on subjects. Meanings can be, in the most explicit sense of the word, illusions; but they're objective illusions. And that's to say "fantasies." These fantasies aren't conspiracy theories, which appeal to material facts that don't exist, and that don't possess popular appeal. Rather, fantasies are myths that the vast majority hold but that may not be grounded in rational (i.e. causal) material conditions.

However...

Once they come into existence they subsist on their own, and they begin to have material influences that cannot be reduced to the material conditions of society from which they whimsically sprung.

It's as though you want to say:

"The idea that the king has absolute power is absurd. He doesn't have absolute power, and in fact his power is only possible because of the subjects that call him king."

But you can't tell the subjects that and expect them to become enlightened. The meaning of "king" goes a hell of a lot farther than you're thinking it.

 

[Dak]

You don't think you're part of a cultural network that produced Snow White? That you're somehow connected to a complex of meanings and values that brought Snow White into being? And that Snow White doesn't maintain a category in our culture as a symbol?

Meaning is involved in a very complex relationship between materiality and ideality, and occupies an ambiguous category in cultural interpretation. The idea that certain things mean something cannot always be reduced to specific material conditions that make rational sense; but their consequential meaning does have material effect.

Connected in what way? Of course I'm connected in an epistemic sense because I know what it is. I don't find that something "remarkable", or in other words worthy of much attention. However...

You should be careful how you talk about "the real" because you're not addressing the issue very thoughtfully.

Meanings may not be tied to material factors in any discernible way beyond mere contingency, but that doesn't change the causal material influence that meanings themselves have on the world and on subjects. Meanings can be, in the most explicit sense of the word, illusions; but they're objective illusions. And that's to say "fantasies." These fantasies aren't conspiracy theories, which appeal to material facts that don't exist, and that don't possess popular appeal. Rather, fantasies are myths that the vast majority hold but that may not be grounded in rational (i.e. causal) material conditions.

However...

Once they come into existence they subsist on their own, and they begin to have material influences that cannot be reduced to the material conditions of society from which they whimsically sprung.

It's as though you want to say:

"The idea that the king has absolute power is absurd. He doesn't have absolute power, and in fact his power is only possible because of the subjects that call him king."

But you can't tell the subjects that and expect them to become enlightened. The meaning of "king" goes a hell of a lot farther than you're thinking it.

It appears you misunderstand me to think or mean that these fantasies don't have some causal force. I certainly recognize that they do, and this is something to be understood only insofar as we can strive to smash them, and that this causal force of symbolism is not so ambiguous or "deep" as suggested, and certainly not objective.

I have no respect for the totemistic symbology that does hold sway over so many, and do see it as remaining elements of anti-enlightenment, to directly respond to that last point. That you often can't merely say that the emperor has no clothes to achieve mass enlightenment, doesn't bestow mystique. The science of brainwashing (and I am trying to use that term in as neutral a way as possible) is fairly simple.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think our main problem is that I completely disagree with your last sentence.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I think the main problem is you speak postmodern babble.

I think Chomsky said it best:

What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.

 

[Einherjar86]

Too bad that comment has been sufficiently (in my opinion) rebuked and the "postmodern" (as you so inappropriately label it) approach vindicated:

Chomsky's method for dismantling his opponent's ideology involves assailing them with a seemingly endless series of facts and counter-facts, with data proving the propaganda false. There is indeed a great importance for this kind of work, but however necessary a fresh view of the facts may be, this approach is not always sufficient. Because Chomsky downplays or even ignores his own ideological presuppositions, he incorrectly presumes that facts alone can dismantle opposing viewpoints. While the facts may indeed be with him, as they almost always are, his political interpretation is not guaranteed by the cold, hard facts alone. There is no royal road between the facts and their interpretation. The stars may shine, but their light does not automatically bring the constellations with it. Importantly, Žižek is hardly the first to level this critique at Chomsky. As Edward Said commented in his review of Fateful Triangle, "The facts for Chomsky are there to be recognized [...] [but his work] is not critical and reflective enough about its own premises" (Permission to Narrate, Journal of Palestine Studies 13.3 [1984]).

If Chomsky is speaking at the level of facts, Žižek is concerned with the ideological framework in which they are interpreted. Importantly, this does not mean that the facts do not matter for Žižek; they are just not his primary focus. For this reason, Žižek's critics have frequently sought to discredit him for factual inaccuracies. But while any mistakes at the level of empirical data are certainly unfortunate, Žižek's contribution does not stand or fall on facts alone. For Žižek, as for other theorists, facts never speak for themselves. They are always already filtered and mediated by invisible forces. If Chomsky's approach suggests that we fight myth with fact, Žižek rejects the possibility of making such a clean-cut separation between the two. The goal for him is not to escape ideology all together but to locate its cracks and points of failure, the exceptions which prove false ideology's claims.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/chomsky-zizek-debate-snowden-nsa

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

What would the appropriate label be?

 

[Dak]

Too bad that comment has been sufficiently (in my opinion) rebuked and the "postmodern" (as you so inappropriately label it) approach vindicated:



http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/chomsky-zizek-debate-snowden-nsa

Now I'm sure there's more on this from Chomsky than that one quote, and maybe in those other places we may find something to substantiate the claim that Chomsky is a "hard-datarian" (one whose retreat is "I only look at the raw data/hard facts/etc"). Of course this perspective is flawed, because we do always already look at things though a lens, a filtering framework.

But I don't think Chomsky is committing the "hard data fallacy" if you will, in that quote. He appears to be submitting, as I have, that a lot (not all to be sure), of the "post modern" (for lack of a more precise term), is unactionable, or inapplicable in a real sense.

Going back to the statement on brainwashing, what is there to disagree about? Brainwashing techniques are pretty fleshed out at this point, immersion and repetition being primary tools.

 

[Einherjar86]

I have no idea; but when you say "postmodern," you can possibly be referring to a plethora of actors, many of whom have differing, if not contradictory, theoretical methodologies (e.g. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida; both credited for being "postmodernists" and both totally opposite in their approach to language).

Žižek loathes the term "postmodern," and Fredric Jameson claims that postmodernism is a "problem" that doesn't do much more than allow us to begin to see something called "modernism." Postmodernism isn't a theory or a method. It's a vague historicist term that attempts to ask the question: "if we talk about modernism, then we must posit a limit to modernism; and thus, there must be something after modernism..." This approach, of course, assumes that we're not able to comprehend the notion of modernism until we begin to move out of it; postmodernism, above all else, is the term we've used to mark that development.

If I had to label what I'm talking about, I'd call it structuralism; but it's also nothing like what the traditional structuralists (Saussure, Barthes, etc.) did.

EDIT: @ Dak

Brainwashing, on a large-scale level, operates in ways you can't reduce to those petty techniques. Officials high up in the elite are still victims of brainwashing. I know we've discussed this before, but again, this is where we won't agree. You like to think there are shadow operators pulling the strings, but the truth is that brainwashing and ideology permeates everywhere. Your effort to simplify it is symptomatic of the conspiracy-theorist mindset; you want to try and cognitively map the entire system to thereby flush any sense of uncertainty.

 

[Dak]

EDIT: @ Dak

Brainwashing, on a large-scale level, operates in ways you can't reduce to those petty techniques. Officials high up in the elite are still victims of brainwashing. I know we've discussed this before, but again, this is where we won't agree. You like to think there are shadow operators pulling the strings, but the truth is that brainwashing and ideology permeates everywhere. Your effort to simplify it is symptomatic of the conspiracy-theorist mindset; you want to try and cognitively map the entire system to thereby flush any sense of uncertainty.

No, this is not conspiracy theorizing, and I'm not suggesting that it is impossible for the "elite" to "believe in" their actions. Of course it permiates everywhere. I alluded to that by including "immersion". Of course, along with immersion is usually some degree of isolation. It's not a simplification in entirety, it's merely an attempt to start from the bottom, rather than somewhere in the clouds.

It's roughly the same argument going on between micro and macro economics. Macro economists think they can understand phenomena by just looking at "aggregate data". This is always already outdated at best, and aggregating frameworks themselves do not have to correspond to any interpretively useful information. Then of course we get the hard data fallacy, where it is ignored that choosing aggregates generally, and then respectively, is a "lens".

Extensionism, struturalism, etc, are tenuous attempts to understand somewhat arbitrarily aggregated human action outcomes while functionally rejecting or ignoring what underlays the whole thing. It is much less ambiguous to define a tree than to agree on the boundaries for a forest, and the tree can tell us much more about the forest than the forest can about the tree, without looking at the tree first. We have to start somewhere in analyzation, and bottom-top(-bottom) is better than top-bottom.

It makes no sense to view a dying (or flourishing forest) and wax long and verbose about the whys and whatnots of how the unhealthy forest has led to the death of it's trees. The forest is merely an arbitrary sum.

 

[Einherjar86]

I don't understand how they're tenuous or unactionable. Criticism is always actionable.

 

[SentinelSlain]

Too bad that comment has been sufficiently (in my opinion) rebuked and the "postmodern" (as you so inappropriately label it) approach vindicated:



http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/chomsky-zizek-debate-snowden-nsa

Well what a rubbish rebuking. Also, you have to read your own replies to my posts to see that you're doing the same thing Chomsky criticised. Basically it's a bit like this:

"I have being a leftist intellectual for 30 years, so theorising why the West is shit is my forte. There is hard data to show this, from wars and economic data, all of which is contestable and debatable, but I don't are about that, I'm just going to take that position that me being right on my core premise is incontestable and then extrapolate reams of nothingness from it, always avoiding any kind of historical analysis that goes too far back, so as to avoid going back beyond the period of dominance of the Western white man. I will idealise any other society or civilization as a kind of misunderstood noble savage, without ever going into any further analysis than that and I will put forward a insinuated progressive course of action which, critically, ignores the long term demographic changes and shifts in the balance of power across the globe. That way I can keep my whiteness studies racket going even though it will end up being about as useful as the field of social science dedicated to researching communism and the soviet union, after it failed to predict its demise.

I don't care about what the real hard data on things like false flag ops, phony regime changes or the relationship between US and Russian intelligence services and agencies and the various Islamic terrorist organisations. That would be to bother my mind with the primitive and unworthy aspects of international relations. For me, the theory, the more effete, inapplicable and detached from human life, the better. That is what is good in life, lift the flask, taste it, it is good nectar.


So when you hear me cry for more bigotry, you know why. I have no rational course of action left to take and I grimace at the notion of falling upon my sword".

 

[Dak]

I don't understand how they're tenuous or unactionable. Criticism is always actionable.

OK, it lacks any framework for prescription. How are they not tenuous? Lol

 

[Einherjar86]

OK, it lacks any framework for prescription. How are they not tenuous? Lol

You can't even develop a competent dismissal of what I'm talking about. All you can do is run around in circles doing nothing more than claiming that you don't understand the arguments of Žižek, or Jameson, Derrida, but you've never even read them.

I leveled criticisms at SS's article, but of course, he ignored those. I read what I find to be hopeless drivel like free market solutions that do nothing to positively develop theories on how economics and politics are intertwined, but only seek to achieve some basic form of human sustenance that somehow precludes politics. That something of the sort is possible is the most idealistic kind of golden-age thought.

I cannot understand what is so illustrious and revelatory in the mind of a Ludwig Von Mises. It strikes me as shallow. It strikes me as unidirectional thought. It strikes me as high German proselytizing that cannot wrap its brain around the fact that the free individual isn't some essential, archaic being that needs to be rediscovered; the individual is a creation of societal and philosophical thought, traced quite easily to the early modern period.

Nothing you say convinces me because everything you say merely aims to ignore the criticisms of leftist Continental theorists by calling them "unactionable." It's easy for people to convince themselves that theories are impractical, and cast them aside because of that notion, without thereby realizing that the impracticality arises because of their persuasion in the first place.

 

[Dak]

You can't even develop a competent dismissal of what I'm talking about. All you can do is run around in circles doing nothing more than claiming that you don't understand the arguments of Žižek, or Jameson, Derrida, but you've never even read them.

No, I'll readily admit I haven't. Not because of a lack of interest but time and money. I'm not dismissing the value of of novelty. My point is that I have yet to see a 3rd party take the concepts provided by Continental theorists and use them to prescribe any sort of human action that doesn't fall along the lines of what has already been reasonably answered both empirically and theoretically in the last three hundred years (at least). The theories may be novel but the prescriptions almost never are.

Where there has been something quite useful I am always open to it. A more robust understanding of contingency vs limited cause and effect being forefront in my mind.

I leveled criticisms at SS's article, but of course, he ignored those. I read what I find to be hopeless drivel like free market solutions that do nothing to positively develop theories on how economics and politics are intertwined, but only seek to achieve some basic form of human sustenance that somehow precludes politics. That something of the sort is possible is the most idealistic kind of golden-age thought.

What do you mean by positive theories on how economics and politics are intertwined? I don't think anyone denies their intertwining, so I can only assume prescriptive theories on mixed markets. There are no shortage of those at all (just obviously not from any free market source. Free being antithetical to mixed).

I cannot understand what is so illustrious and revelatory in the mind of a Ludwig Von Mises. It strikes me as shallow. It strikes me as unidirectional thought. It strikes me as high German proselytizing that cannot wrap its brain around the fact that the free individual isn't some essential, archaic being that needs to be rediscovered; the individual is a creation of societal and philosophical thought, traced quite easily to the early modern period.

I can see understanding praxeology as unidirectional, but denying acting man, however unrevelatory it may seem, flies in the face of reality. LvM is only one, and not even the first, in a wide field of economists operating under the Austrian/proto Austrian tradition.

The free individual as an ideal may be relatively new, or at least newly rediscovered (we simply don't know the totality of history), but the bipedal hunk of meat and bones that acts with purposes (from where-ever they derive) is not new. Your statement confuses an ideal of freeing the individual with acting man, and thus discounts acting man entirely. This is a perfect example what I mean about being up in the clouds. The Continental discussion of ideals has entirely lost contact with the dirt.

Nothing you say convinces me because everything you say merely aims to ignore the criticisms of leftist Continental theorists by calling them "unactionable." It's easy for people to convince themselves that theories are impractical, and cast them aside because of that notion, without thereby realizing that the impracticality arises because of their persuasion in the first place.

I certainly don't ignore it, and I'm always open to a good argument. I just can't find much that provides any measure of usefulness, and a lot of it appears to be a "reshuffled deck with different pictures" if you will, when someone starts trying to apply it.

Of course in many cases "impractical" is really an uneducated way of saying "the switching costs are too high". That is different from unactionable. If someone tells me to smoke weed before a drug test that is impractical. If someone tells me flapping my arms will let me fly, that is unactionable.