Æ Birthday Compendium
Experimental Unit, Hegelian E-Girls, Ben Zweibelson, Baudrillard, Grimes, and more!
Rambly Introduction Remarks
The Experimental Unit video channel is here.
In them, I ramble on and on non-linearly about my ideas, and I show many sources and Wikipedia articles on screen. These tabs remain open and I collect the links here to continue may ago-long tradition of Showing You Stuff I Think Is Cool And Important.
At some point I mention this video by Bill Wurtz, which is super legendary. Did you know that the Sultan of Oman lives in Zanzibar now? That’s just, like, where they live, man.
Side-note: I call everyone they because I’m putting into practice the idea that everyone is agender (well, really more like ægender).
Side-side-note: which means “man” isn’t meant to be gendering you, dudebabe. Babedude? You decide which one you think sounds better. Or alternate, picking whichever one “sort of fits the occasion.”
I’m not gonna watch the video again this instant. But it notably begins with something like lila, where infinite everything-nothing decides it wants to try to be stuff, and then our universe happened (and, did just that happen??).
“Knock knock, it’s the United States,” and there are many more. You can learn about it here. And, if I’m showing you knowyourmeme (I discovered it, okay), I’ll show you TV tropes too in case you are a true virgin.
My go-to TV tropes page is for humanoid abomination. I like to think that we are all humanoid abominations in our own way, some way that has to do with Hegel and HP Lovecraft. A way in which we are unraveling the cosmic horror, which is staring us in the face but we are parsing its grisly beauty anyway.
In the end, what do you expect to happen?
Indeterminacy Between “Soul Healing” And “Warfare”
When we think of war, we think of guns and bombs. But fundamentally war has to do with other people & what they want to do. If we can work with influence operations that are non-kinetic to change target behavior in a way which is agreeable to our objectives, then there is no need for physical force or “kinetic violence.”
Non-kinetic operations in warfare achieve military objectives without physical strikes. Can still harm, or not.
Influence operations seek to change “the will” of the enemy/adversary/other often through non-kinetic means and can constitute military or martial activities.
Military services (top-level Emergency Response Organs, or EROs) conceive of reputation in two dimensions:
Intent Valence: do you intend to help, or harm?
Competence/Capacity: to what extent, if you intend to help or harm, can you carry out your intention?
Note that a protest, for example, was more of a show of force back in the day when weapons systems were not so well-developed. At this point, it is difficult to see how a decisive “battle” could be waged by agglomerating many people non-violently in a place.
The point is that a protest or march might work without blood being shed because it is a demonstration of capacity. Think also of the second æ-bomb at Nagasaki. This showed that more bombs could be made. Both of these instances are remnicient of this competence/capacity side of reputation.
It is more important to demontrate the ability to decisively use force than to actually do it, just as it is more important how you affect people’s wills in general, not just whether you kill people who want to kill you in general or “win the war.” There is no “the war.”
Similar to Heidegger’s notion of technicity, we can posit “militaricity.” So, if you kill you “enemies,” then do more people become your enemies? Or is the other not an enemy to you because they are implied to be beneath you, not a threat. This is perhaps necessary to stabilize the imperial psychology’s of functionaries. Hence why 9/11 is so jarring. We thought they couldn’t hit us back, and we could sleep easy despite being parasites off everyone else.
Anyway, if you look at things from the spiritual kumbaya perspective, a la Sri Ramakrishna as one example, then no one is really an enemy. Instead what you are doing, to the extent you involve yourself in worldly affairs, is to try and get people to get along and see past social differences to their common participation in the magic of incarnation and experience.
In this context we can bring up the word soteriology. Soteriology is concern with salvation, a kind of spiritual healing, perhaps. This could apply to a Christian preacher administering last rites or visiting people or the idea that sermons help you be a better person or connect to something important that brings benefits.
Or it could apply to Buddhism or Hinduism, co-called, in which there is perhaps a state of nirvana or moksha to aspire to. This is sort of like you being “saved” although I also used this word healing specifically to refer to a medicinicity, a way of looking at it which is not about beliefs but simply taking stock of what is going on and how you are moving through the world-processing.
Regardless, the idea is that people can be in less-than-ideal states, and then undergo some process, and then are in a better state. This could be a body thing, or is could be a psychic condition. “Mental health” for example bridges both of these, where a “psychotic episode” could also be described as a “spiritual crisis.”
Ahimsa is something like non-violence or not wanting to harm other beings, motivated by a sense of solidarity among all sentient beings.
You can also see this in the idea of non-violent movements, memorably theorized by Gene Sharp in their book The Politics of Non-Violent Action.
Where do these two bleed together, if I am trying to serve myself and others at the same time by trying to find positive sum solutions involving seeking to undertake something like “influence operations”?
What else is lobbying, for example, or “giving feedback to our representatives”? It is a weird thing where a simple good-hearted motive of trying to intervene into whatever process for the good of oneself, those one loves, and everyone else, leads directly into highly militarized existing conflict nexi.
The world is a cluster of hornets nests and competing militaries, and we all grow up into some sort of role as a response to what we are given.
I want to talk more about the historical context for my usage of the term Experimental Unit, so I want to get into the idea of total art and total war, which was a podcast episode that I had up, but no longer do.
Baudrillard
I moderate the Baudrillard subreddit.
I also set up a catalog of Baudrillard’s near-complete works on the Internet Archive. 6,044 Views, 38 Favorites :))
In particular:
End of the preface:
Names of God, relates to omni-metonymy in Transparency of evil and my paper Metonymy Economy
A Conjuration of imbeciles by Baudrillard
Skepticism Chronicles
Skepticism as “Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of Philosophy”
I discuss that Baudrillard is somewhat like a skeptical philosopher, and that skepticism is in some sense the undefeated, I should have instead said undisputed champion. It’s like skepticm is at the top of the mountain and no one else can leave base camp.
I am a severe skeptic the way Romeny is a severe conservative. I have been discussing this in conjunction with the theme of nominalism.
A major inspiration is the skeptics known as Pyrrho and others inspired by them.
I discuss also Munchausen’s Trilemma, which says that any argument must either be
A bald assertion with no arguments
A circular argument, where eventually the argument rests on the initial statement
An infinite regress, where every “proof” of one “proof” requires another “proof” intinitely
I discuss that uncertainty is part of the cost of entry to the “Charm of incarnation.”
I discuss a spiritual position where we are called to accept everything, but that includes when people don’t accept things, including ourselves. There is a
meta-view” which observes all other functionings and basically approves.
It’s similar to the idea that the kingdom of heaven is at hand
This also relates to my idea of Glaucus’ Lingerie.
Plotinus compares our role as souls, with parts of us descended and some undescended from “The One,” with the god Glaucus emerging from the water. Glaucus would normally be very shiny and emitting a bright light, but this is not visible because he is encrusted with barnacles. These barnacles obscure his divine aura. This represents our souls, the undescended part of us is shining with the glory of God, but we can’t see that because this part of our soul is obscured by those parts which have “descended” from out of the Absolute to something else (within my own mirror universe of discourse with myself, I can appreciate how ridiculous is the notion that part of everything would go elsewhere). These barnacles on Glaucus can be wiped away, and this is the process of us purifying ourselves so that the undescended part of our souls can shine forth.
My issue with this is that I don’t see how the barnacles can be different than the god. How can anything obscure the glory of God? It’s impossible. It is more that the God is so amazing that it can appear ungodly to itself and still be godly, that’s how godly it is. You can forget how awesome you are and it doesn’t matter, because you are still just that awesome.
So, in my formulation, Glaucus is wearing lingerie. The idea of lingerie here is just that people look more attractive in lingerie than they do without it. So, the point is that instead of the addition to the divine making it seem worse, the obscuration of the divine actually makes it more enticing. This is similar to wisdom I have heard shared in Vedanta centers that aspiration is sweeter than attainment. Within the experiment, part of the joy is to work with the illusion that there are stakes, that there is something to find out. Meanwhile what there is to find out is that you never had a mystery at all, you were always at home, always safe, always the greatest. And none of these things matter at all. “It is what it is,” you are what you are. Brahman Brahmans.
Still, lingerie is something other than Glaucus. So, the next level of the parable is to say that Glaucus is really naked. It is simply that Glaucus is tattooed with what looks like lingerie on him. So, God looks like it is wearing clothes, it is hidden. But its hiddenness makes it all the more attractive. Yet in actuality there is no hiddenness. You are actually always seeing God naked. It’s is just that its nakedness is an appearing to be clothed. Its transparency appears to you as opacity (which is the only way it can appear, since “in reality” you are it and you cannot appear to yourself since you are appearance, you are the concept of “to”.
Commentary: The remaining bit is to point out that even in the final panel, Glaucus remains as an image that you are supposed to consider. Someone is seeing God and it seems naked, what is obvious seems mysterious, etc. Yet who is this appearing to? This goes again to show that no parable can express or represent the situation at hand. Instead, what is desirable is to continually introduce new poetic images and tear away and cannibalize the old. And again, in fact this is all we ever do.
Basically the parable is about how the things that seem imperfect are still part of the perfection of everything. The good news is that you are included in the Absolute, basically everything you could ever want is already true. The bad news is that everything you hate or which disgusts you and that you want to see burn in hell, well, that’s part of the Absolute as well.
This discourse has everything to do with Theodicy, so it’s to be expected that it churns the stomach. We have to deal with the most brutal and horrible facts of life, and be willing to get into detail, and realize that the whole time we are very vulnerable and exposed to the same dynamics that we are investigating and trying to intervene in for the good of all sentient beings.
I discuss a “Simplistic understanding,” similar to the idea of refuting skepticism by kicking a rock. In my memory palace, this is the true origin of the appelation “kick rocks.”
In a simplistic perspective, people are overly focused on the causal relationships they experience “in universe,” as part of their daily awareness and reward/punishment/fear/expectation.
What is neglected is everything which for them is going on “behind the scenes” which allows for their usual business to go on as usual.
This is related to the idea of Commodity Fetishism. It’s a form of ignorance, complacency, about causality.
Notably, this can also be because information is not available due to secrecy. See Overclassification. So how can I know what makes the world I see possible, if important parts of the puzzle are hidden from view? And, to try and find out anyway would be interpreted as potentially an act of war?
In a way, that doesn’t matter much, since I don’t really expect to have much protection from anyone who would seriously want to harm me. I think it would be the same for anyone, really. People have whole security details and so on. But it’s always just asking for trouble. How many Roman emperors got killed by their own guard?
Once we get into questions of causality, we open up the issues raised by Hume, for example.
Some people think that we can refute or dismiss skepticism easily, as in the appeal to the stone. Someone says, there’s no world, ey? Well, here I go kicking this rock!
This “simplistic” understanding we might also relate to what Ben Zweibelson calls “The Newtonian.”
Back to causality: another idea we can work with is that everything helps cause everything else. This is related to Pratītyasamutpāda or “dependent co-origination” in Buddhism, which describes how everything is what it is because of the interplay of other things.
In other words, everything is the result of emergence and isn’t just “what it is.”
So, we move from an idea of linear causality to a model where everything causes everything.
We can think of this through quantum by imagining that the whole universe is entangled together. See Quantum entanglement.
We can think of this through a mythological term by considering Indra’s Net, which tries to get across the idea that every “piece” of the world contains every other piece.
This is pretty well related to the idea of “the holographic universe,” with holograms also having this property that the whole is somewhat contained in each part.
We can also think here of the Möbius Strip, in which a 2-dimensional object is in some real sense 1-dimensional.
For more examples we can think of virtual particles and unknots.
Another mythological concept to consider in this context is “The Dreaming” among Aboriginal Australian people.
Ben Zweibelson also writes a lot about Möbius Strips in their book “Beyond the Pale”:
A Möbius strip is a peculiar construct discovered in Germany in 1858, several decades after the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s theory of modern nation-state warfare was published. Yet despite the close chronological ordering of the ideas, the Möbius strip has never (in any searches conducted by the author) been applied to warfare or military strategy. The concept has likely not been adopted in a military context because it is challenging, disruptive, and in many ways paradoxical to Newtonian-styled thinking. The Möbius strip presents several curious properties that differentiate it from straight lines of effort, systematic causal (input leads to expected output) structures, and other spatial frameworks that underpin classical military thinking. The traditional domains of land, sea, and air that fostered much of modern military theory and practice do not have many practical examples of what the Möbius strip introduces. It is the simplest nonorientable surface in three-dimensional space, meaning it is a surface with only one side and does not feature the concepts of “clockwise,” “counterclockwise,” or other orientable phenomenon of everyday life.
For instance, were one to start at a point on a Möbius strip and begin a path around the entire surface, one is at an opposite point to where one began at the completion of the strip. Only by completing a second full loop will one return to the original starting point, making the strip a peculiar nonorientable surface. Were an object to rotate around a Möbius strip and attempt to look at itself as if in a mirror, there would be no “mirror effect” because anything within a Möbius strip cannot orient to itself. In orientable contexts and spaces, a person can look into a mirror and see everything reversed. The peculiar property of a Möbius strip denies this phenomenon for those existing within a reality shaped in a Möbius strip form. Other unique mathematical properties of the Möbius strip exceed this chapter’s intent. For a Deleuzian fold application for strategic designers, figure 50 (above) builds from the previous graphic in the Russian doll “nesting” for folds (fig. 49). However, this nesting arrangement now has Möbius strips within other Möbius strips, creating folds within folds where each strip creates itself with a twist in its one-sided surface, and the nesting of multiple strips generates interiorities and exteriorities of Deleuzian folds as well.
If readers reapply the same “1, 2, 3” sequence of organizational, belief-based, and action-oriented security topics from the earlier Deleuzian fold illustration (fig. 49) here once again, the peculiar twists of the Möbius strips arranged in a nesting relationship of folds, unfolding, and refolding provides a sophisticated arrangement of ideas on a complex security challenge differently than possible in traditional military campaign designs or strategies. This construct does not correlate to “better” or any potential evaluation. Rather, the change in rendering complex security challenges using postmodern ideas enables a greater opportunity to think divergently toward potential advantages when considering complex, dynamic systems and an ever-emerging reality. While there is an infinite expansion of other ways to envision Deleuzian folds for complex security challenges, these two examples are provided to stimulate further research and experimentation by strategic designers.
Deleuzian folds were introduced here along with the overlapping postmodern concept of “rhizomes” as part of the idea of indirect strategic design and how complexity requires vastly different conceptual tools than offered by the legacy warfare frame. Defenders of the modern military institution may object to these positions as well as the notion of bringing postmodern concepts, complexity theory, systems theory, and social paradigm theory into a Newtonian-styled, technologically rationalist approach to modern warfare. Yet modern military decision-making methodologies and strategies have never successfully accounted for how objectivity (science of war) and subjectivity (art of war) interact systemically. French philosopher Maurice Merleu-Ponty contributed an important idea on conscious ness from an individual’s viewpoint, noting, “No matter how strict the connection between external facts, it is not the external world which is the ultimate justification of the internal; they participate together in an ‘interior’ which their connection manifests.”29 This perspective illustrates how Deleuzian folds work logically, where the interiority of ideas within an individual mind fold and unfold with external reality.
Objective facts that are quantifiable interact with subjective perspectives enabled by a second-order complexity of human socialized construction where qualitative inquiry is perhaps the only option. This gap between qualitative and quantitative is itself an artificial imposition created by academics of rival disciplines and belief systems. However, both sides ultimately admit that complex reality encompasses both aspects, and neither can ever sufficiently address that complex reality in total.30 Modern militaries are institutionalized to obsess over scientific objectivity and analytic optimization to the detriment of subjectivity, interpretivism, and those significant phenomena and patterns in warfare that cannot be measured, isolated, or rendered predictable in formulas and rules. NATO and joint forces use their military decision-making today to attempt an objective representation of a complex reality. Tomorrow’s military decision-making design could shift to consider alternatives that might produce a deeper appreciation of those same complex security challenges.
See also solipsism in connection with Atman = Brahman. Atman
Date With Destiny With Technology
The extended Baudrillard analysis I’m doing here has everything to do with a fundamental “showdown” we are experiencing with technology.
This relates to Heidegger’s interview called “Only a God Can Save Us.” Interview here. Heidegger uses the phrase “planetary technicity” here to describe technology operating at a large scale. This could be said to be our fundamental challenge.
It’s interesting to think of this in the context of the idea of “the primary contradiction,” from Mao. See On Contradiction.
See book chapter on Primary and Secondary contradictions.
Relate back to preface to Symbolic Exchange and death, “all dissent must be of a higher logical type than that to which it is opposed.” System and structure by Wilden.
We can also think of this in the context of “the great filter,” which is a kind of strcutural challenge, or series of challenges, which present themselves to any “species”/”civilization”. (See “the species problem” here, and, as for “civilization”)
I have written previously on the great filter here.
The way we confront this situation has everything to do with European Colonialism in our timeline.
“Europe” simply pulled away due to technological differences. See article here on “the great divergence” as it’s known. There’s also a book called The European Miracle which frames it one-sidedly, since most people experienced the phenomenon as one bringing more pain than benefit, not that it’s over, just that people would debate it more now.
No wonder this is touchy though because this is exactly the topic of white supremacy or feeling like a chosen people or something for being at the forefront of technology and military power. Again, this topic is impossible to respond to once and for all but the conversation must go on and become deeper and more self-probative. In Baudrillard’s words, you don’t have to be a Nazi to tend toward something like a “final solution.”
In Chapter One of The Vital Illusion5 “The Final Solution”, Baudrillard charts, “hypothetically” as he puts it, the movement of our species from the earliest life of our cells towards what he anticipates to be an absolute death. So far, so apocalyptic it would seem. However, absolute death is understood by Baudrillard in a particular and peculiar way, as not the end of the individual human being but rather as “a regression toward a state of minimal differentiation among living beings, of a pure repetition of identical beings”.
Compare to Percy Shelley in “A Defense of Poetry” talking about “social corruption:
For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astræa, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time.
Mental rigidity
veneration of the dead is an example of a cultural universal
Friend/Enemy distinction: Carl Schmitt
Can’t get away from political “enemies” because everything we don’t like it part of God (since everything is)
Faulkner - the past isn’t past at all
Good news: you are good enough
Bad news: everyone you hate is also enough
No COuntry: more’s going out the door
From whom much is given, much is expected
Applies to everyone, though
“Liquidating what we cannot respond to” - Carnival and Cannibal
“Nothing human makes it out of the near future” - Nick Land
Close reading of “escapes us” - Carnival and Cannibal
“go on singing”
Hegel, other is part of self
Parmenides and Zeno on the impossibility of change and motion
Heraclitus - The Way Up and the Way Down are the same
Experimental Unit → Unity → “The One”
Henosis - merging with “the source,” God, whatever
Thales, everything is full of gods
James Lindsay on the Gnostic Temptation
Experiment, having to do with experience
Definition of experiment - it includes “having to do with experience.” God is experimenting with experience AKA incarnating
Lila from Hinduism, meaning “divine play” as in theater
We are building Svarga
We are creating our own past
Next Show: Egirl War
Grimes
Grimes Wiki on Miss Anthropocene
Grimes on the Light Ages - tweet
Grimes Chaos Manual - connect to Grand Style and Absolute Exploit
Text of Heidegger 1966 Interview “Only a God Can Save Us Now”
Grimes references this work with their lyric from “New Gods”: “Only Brand New Gods Can Save Me”
Zweibelson Links
Zweibelson on The Archipelago of Design
The Pale Wikipedia - see also paleface, connection to Afropessimism, beyond “The pale” e.g. to “the black”
Whale Songs of Wars Not Yet Waged
Humans "“behind the loop”
My first taste of Zweibelson, from searching “military theory + Baudrillard”:
Preferring Copies with No Originals: Does the Army Training Strategy Train to Fail?
Comments on Baudrillard
Baudrillard clarifies “simulation” as a faithful copy, whereas further stages degrade into simulacra where the artificial is a copy with no original or “hyper real” that a society views as actual.
Not sure about the definition of simulation.
Quoting Jean:
“We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum . . . only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains . . . ”
RE: Berger & Luckmann:
Berger and Luckmann make the case that all knowledge is socially constructed within groups and societies and over time are institutionalized into vast, complex, and expanding bureaucracies.
General comment:
According to Baudrillard, a simulation pretends to have what one does not possess, whereas the progression of simulacra is to create a copy with no original; something entirely false, yet commonly misunderstood by a society or institution as “real.” 11 This is the critical aspect of simulacra; that the society or organization accepts the false reality without critically questioning or realizing it.
Understanding the Military Design Movement PDF on Internet Archive
Baudrillard relevant to Zweibelson: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
Miscellaneous (for now) Links
Ahimsa - harsh words
Lindley on Dr. Strangelove - induce fear to attack
Sun Tzu - Win without fighting
Man on the moon - Hume’s treatise
Hobbesian Trap - also called Schelling’s Dilemma
See also philosopher Schelling :)
Aryan race - is a weaponization of the idea behind the concept “Proto-Indo-European”
Only A God Can Save Us Interview
Grimes - New Gods Lyrics - Only Brand New Gods Can Save Me Now
Conceptual Art - more specifically conceptual design AKA designing concepts
Concept of operations eg warfighting, emergency response
Derive, concept of the Situationists
Concepts destituting concepts like the proletariat abolishes classes
Systems confrontation and destruction warfare
On behalf of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Concepts Division advances the operational effectiveness of the future joint force and enables the introduction of new capabilities by identifying military implications of the future operating environment, developing joint concepts and white papers, leading joint wargaming to evaluate concepts during development, and overseeing the joint concept development community of interest.
Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 “Coming”
Implementing Joint Force Development and Design - 2022
Deleuze and IDF going through walls
Walking Through Walls - Weizman
Quote from Simon Naveh:
SN Several of the concepts in A Thousand
Plateaus became instrumental for us … allowing
us to explain contemporary situations in a way that
we could not have otherwise explained. It problem-
atized our own paradigms.… Most important was
the distinction they have pointed out between the
concepts of ʻsmoothʼ and ʻstriatedʼ space … [that
accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of
the ʻwar machineʼ and the ʻstate apparatusʼ.… In
the IDF we now often use the term ʻto smoothen
out spaceʼ when we want to refer to an operation in
a space as if it had no borders. We try to produce
the operational space in such a manner that borders
do not affect us. Palestinian areas could indeed be
thought of as ʻstriatedʼ in the sense that they are
enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roadblocks and
so on … We want to confront the ʻstriatedʼ space of traditional, old-fashioned military practice [the way
most IDF units presently operate] with a smooth-
ness that allows for movement through space, across
any borders and barriers. Rather than contain and
organize our forces according to existing borders,
we want to move through them
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Grand Style
The grand style (also referred to as 'high style') is a style of rhetoric, notable for its use of figurative language and for its ability to evoke emotion. The term was coined by Matthew Arnold. It is mostly used in longer speeches and can be used, as by Cicero, to influence an audience around a particular belief or ideology. The style is highly ornamented with stylistic devices such as metaphors and similes, as well as the use of personification. In poetry, it adopts strict adherence to meter.
Baudrillard Transparency of Evil PDF
Part about Dreamtime
The strangest feeling one is left with after reading Bruce Chatwin' s Songlines is
a lingering perplexity about the reality of the 'lines' themselves: do these poetic
and musical itineraries, these songs, this 'dreamtime', really exist or not? In all
these accounts there is a hint of mystification; a kind of mythic optical illusion
seems to be operating. It is as though the Aboriginals were fobbing us off.
While unveiling the profoundest and most authentic of truths (the Austral
myth at its most mysterious), they also play up the most modern and hypothet
ical of considerations: the irresolvability of any narrative, absolute doubt as to
the origins. For us to believe these fabulous things, we need to feel that they
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T H E M E L 0 D R A M A o F D I F F E R E N C E
themselves believe them. But these Aboriginals seem to take a mischievous
pleasure in being allusive and evasive. They give a few clues, but never tell us
the rules of the game, and one cannot help getting the impression that they are
improvising, pandering to our phantasies, but withholding any reassurance
that what they are telling us is true. This is doubtless their way of keeping their
secrets while at the same time poking fun at us - for in the end we are the only
people who want to believe these tales.
The Aboriginals' secret resides not in what they omit to say, however, but
entirely within the thread, within the indecipherable filigree of the narrative;
we are confronted by an ironic form here, by a mythology of appearances. And
in the manipulation of this form the Aboriginals are far more adept than we are.
We Whites are liable to remain mystified for a good while yet.
The simulation of Western values is universal once one gets beyond the
boundaries of our culture. Is it not true, though, that in our heart of hearts we
ourselves, who are neither Alakaluf nor Aboriginal, neither Dogon nor Arab,
fail signally to take our own values seriously? Do we not embrace them with
the same affectation and inner unconcern - and are we not ourselves equally
unimpressed by all our shows of force, all our technological and ideological
pretensions? Nevertheless, it will be a long time before the utopian abstraction
of our universal vision of differences is demolished in our own eyes, whereas
all other cultures have already given their own response - namely, universal
indifference.
It is not even remotely a matter of rehabilitating the Aboriginals, or finding
them a place in the chorus of human rights, for their revenge lies elsewhere. It
lies in their power to destabilize Western rule. It lies in their phantom presence,
their viral, spectral presence in the synapses of our brains, in the circuitry of
our rocketship, as I Alien'; in the way in which the Whites have caught the virus
of origins, of Indianness, of Aboriginality, of Patagonicity. We murdered all
this, but now it infects our blood, into which it has been inexorably transfused
137 [««««««««]
T H E T R A N S P A R E N e Y o F E V I L
and infiltrated. The revenge of the colonized is in no sense the reappropriation
by Indians or Aboriginals of their lands, privileges or autonomy: that is our
victory. Rather, that revenge may be seen in the way in which the Whites have
been mysteriously made aware of the disarray of their own culture, the way in
which they have been overwhelmed by an ancestral torpor and are now
succumbing little by little to the grip of 'dreamtime' . This reversal is a
worldwide phenomenon. It is now becoming clear that everything we once
thought dead and buried, everything we thought left behind for ever by the
ineluctable march of universal progress, is not dead at all, but on the contrary
likely to return - not as some archaic or nostalgic vestige (all our indefatigable
museumification notwithstanding), but with a vehemence and a virulence that
are modern in every sense - and to reach the very heart of our ultra
sophisticated but ultra-vulnerable systems, which it will easily convulse from
within without mounting a frontal attack. Such is the destiny of radical
otherness - a destiny that no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for
difference is going to alter
Is referencing Songlines the book
Talks about the dreamtime, it’s also like we are going up on a worldwide acid trip, or the world is ending a la afropessimism.
More on “the dreamtime” or the dreaming”:
And in this context, philosophy is percolating through the military and through sex, basically. If the “e-girl” connotes an idea of an “attractive” “young” “woman” etc., then it’s the oozing of concepts out of the orifices of the body.
Ultimately sex itself is fetishized, as the temple could become a place of the fetish. What everything turns around. What seems so simple, and without words.
But what happens after the orgy? After the orgy of concepts, of spiritual ecstasy, of… actual orgies? There is more. However ideal things are, there is always more to say, more we are driven into language to try and address fundamental problems.
There’s a process of dislocation, which demands an answer.
Contrary to Marxist analysis which posits man as dispossessed, as alienated and relates him to a
total man, a total Other who is Reason and who is for the future (which is utopian, but in the bad
sense of the term), which assigns to man a project of totalization, utopia, for its part, would have
nothing to do with the concept of alienation. It regards every man and every society as already
totally there, at each social moment, in its symbolic exigency. Marxism never analyzes the revolt,
or even the movement of society except as an intricate ornament of the revolution, as a reality on
the way toward maturation. This is a racism of perfection, of the finished stage of reason. It
throws everything else into a nothingness of things transcended. 115 Marxism is still profoundly a
philosophy, even its "scientific" stage, through all that remains in it of a vision of alienation. In
terms of "alienation," the other side of "critical" thought is always a total essence that haunts a
divided existence. But this metaphysics of the totality is not
-- 166 --
at all opposed to the present reality of the division. It is complementary to it. For the subject, the
prospect of recovering his transparence or his total "use value" at the end of history is just as
religious a vision as the reintegration of essences. "Alienation" remains the imaginary of the
subject, even of the subject of history. The subject will not become again a total man; he will not
rediscover himself; today he has lost himself. The totalization of the subject is still the end of the
end of the political economy of consciousness, confirmed by the identity of the subject, just as
political economy is confirmed by the principle of equivalence. Instead of deluding men with a
phantasm of their lost identity, of their future autonomy, this notion itself must be abolished.
Note use of the word Phantasm, ties into Phantasmal War
Neo Leaves it up to the machines - leaving it up to the other is a basic gesture
Karma Yoga - letting go of attachment to outcome
Love in Sufi Poetry often compares the Absolute to the beloved
Bhakti Yoga - devotion, to beloved or deity, compare to e-girl, in context of Zeus and lightning, where digital world is enchanted
Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. The word total is a big deal, see also total war.
Gesamtkunstwerk is associated with Richard Wagner
See also Bauhaus
Interpreting pop songs as songs to God
So much for my happy ending - Avril Levine (see Avril Haines)
I knew you were trouble - Swift
Matthew 19:21 Give to poor
Get over E-girl crush obsession!!
Adam’s Transcommunism Essay/Speech from Baudrillard Conference, later article on transcommunism
On the nature of war - see contest of wills
On “true” and “false” simulation and hope for a new seduction:
The end of The Mirror of Production
The Radicality of Utopia
In fact, Marx is right, "objectively" right, but this correctness and this objectivity were won, as in
all science, only at the cost of a miscomprehension, a miscomprehension of the radical utopias
contemporary with the Manifesto and Capital. In saying that Marx "objectively" theorized capitalist
social relations, the class struggle, the movement of history, etc., one has claimed too much. In
effect, Marx "objectified" the convulsion of a social order,
-- 164 --
its current subversion, the speech of life and death, the liberator of the very movement, in a long-
term dialectical revolution, in a spiraling finality that was only the endless screw of political
economy. 114
The cursed poet, non-official art, and utopian writings in general, by giving a current and
immediate content to man's liberation, should be the very speech of communism, its direct
prophecy. They are only its bad conscience precisely because in them something of man is
immediately realized, because they object without pity to the "political" dimension of the
revolution, which is merely the dimension of its final postponement. They are the equivalent, at
the level of discourse, of the savage social movements that were born in a symbolic situation of
rupture (symbolic -- which means non-universalized, non-dialectical, non-rationalized in the
mirror of an imaginary objective history). This is why poetry (not Art) was fundamentally
connected only with the utopian socialist movements, with "revolutionary romanticism," and
never with Marxism as such. It is because the content of liberated man is, at bottom, of less
importance than the abolition of the separation of the present and the future. The abolition of this
form of time, the dimension of sublimation, makes it impossible to pardon the idealists of the
dialectic, who are at the same time the realists of politics. For them the
-- 165 --
revolution must be distilled in history; it must come on time; it must ripen in the sun of the
contradictions. That it could be there immediately is unthinkable and insufferable. Poetry and the
utopian revolt have this radical presentness in common, this denegation of finalities; it is this
actualization of desire no longer relegated to a future liberation, but demanded here,
immediately, even in its death throes, in the extreme situation of life and death. Such is
happiness; such is revolution. It has nothing to do with the political ledger book of the Revolution.
Contrary to Marxist analysis which posits man as dispossessed, as alienated and relates him to a
total man, a total Other who is Reason and who is for the future (which is utopian, but in the bad
sense of the term), which assigns to man a project of totalization, utopia, for its part, would have
nothing to do with the concept of alienation. It regards every man and every society as already
totally there, at each social moment, in its symbolic exigency. Marxism never analyzes the revolt,
or even the movement of society except as an intricate ornament of the revolution, as a reality on
the way toward maturation. This is a racism of perfection, of the finished stage of reason. It
throws everything else into a nothingness of things transcended. 115 Marxism is still profoundly a
philosophy, even its "scientific" stage, through all that remains in it of a vision of alienation. In
terms of "alienation," the other side of "critical" thought is always a total essence that haunts a
divided existence. But this metaphysics of the totality is not
-- 166 --
at all opposed to the present reality of the division. It is complementary to it. For the subject, the
prospect of recovering his transparence or his total "use value" at the end of history is just as
religious a vision as the reintegration of essences. "Alienation" remains the imaginary of the
subject, even of the subject of history. The subject will not become again a total man; he will not
rediscover himself; today he has lost himself. The totalization of the subject is still the end of the
end of the political economy of consciousness, confirmed by the identity of the subject, just as
political economy is confirmed by the principle of equivalence. Instead of deluding men with a
phantasm of their lost identity, of their future autonomy, this notion itself must be abolished.
What an absurdity it is to pretend that men are "other," to try to convince them that their deepest
desire is to become "themselves" again! Each man is totally there at each instant. Society also is
totally there at each instant. Courderoy, the Luddites, Rimbaud, the Communards, the people of
the savage strikes, those of May, 1968 -- in every case the revolution does not speak indirectly;
they are the revolution, not concepts in transit. Their speech is symbolic and it does not aim at an
essence. In these instances, there is speech before history, before politics, before truth, speech
before the separation and the future totality. He is truly a revolutionary who speaks of the world
as non-separated.
There is no possible or impossible. The utopia is here in all the energies that are raised against
political economy. But this utopian violence does not accumulate; it is lost. It does not try to
accumulate itself as does economic value in order to abolish death. It does not grasp for power.
To enclose the "exploited" within the single historical possibility of
-- 167 --
taking power has been the worst diversion the revolution has ever taken. One sees here to what
depths the axioms of political economy have undermined, pervaded and distorted the
revolutionary perspective. Utopia wants speech against power and against the reality principle
which is only the phantasm of the system and its indefinite reproduction. It wants only the spoken
word; and it wants to lose itself in it.
The first few things to know about experimental unit
Experimental Units in Historical Record
Abstract:
In the past, Experimental units have played a major role in extending combat capabilities and developing new concepts and doctrine for military organizations confronting seemingly insoluble challenges. Consequently, experiment units have become an essential part of the processes of successful and often revolutionary transformation and innovation. This paper focuses on experimental units in the first half of the twentieth century the experimental units of the First World War German Stormtroopers and the British tank corps and the experimental units in the interwar years the German panzer force, the British Experimental Tank Force, and the US Navys carrier experiments. All faced the same types of problems, and any success in the field was based, in part, on their leaders ability to challenge the traditions and culture of their services.
Experimental Unit is not a warfighting organization
based on concept of complex emergency abstracting over war into emergency response
This guide is focused on assisting those organizations concerned with the collective provision of logistics to meet requirements in a wide array of international conflict, humanitarian, and domestic disaster relief scenarios. Together, these scenarios are known as
complex emergencies. These complex emergency situations typically involve combinations of warfare, civil disturbance, and natural and man-made disasters coupled with vulnerabilities such
as food insecurity, epidemics, social conflict, and displaced populations. Often, the scale and scope of these emergencies are beyond the capability of affected nation(s) and humanitarian
actors, requiring the need to draw on military, national, and international response capabilities to provide assistance.
Experimental Unit aims at Absolute Exploit, encompassing comprehensive emergency response, public worship, public merrymaking, and eroticism.
Exploit, per Veblen, refers to taking someone else’s effort and making it serve your project. XU aims at project design such that all effort that would be expended anyway serves our project. Veblen puts war under the category of exploit along with public worship and public merrymaking.
The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually made changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually viewed changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient and substantial upon which the dominant interest of the time throws its light. Any given ground of distinction will seem insubstantial to any one who habitually apprehends the facts in question from a different point of view and values them for a different purpose. The habit of distinguishing and classifying the various purposes and directions of activity prevails of necessity always and everywhere; for it is indispensable in reaching a working theory or scheme of life.
The particular point of view, or the particular characteristic that is pitched upon as definitive in the classification of the facts of life depends upon the interest from which a discrimination of the facts is sought. The grounds of discrimination, and the norm of procedure in classifying the facts, therefore, progressively change as the growth of culture proceeds; for the end for which the facts of life are apprehended changes, and the point of view consequently changes also. So that what are recognised as the salient and decisive features of a class of activities or of a social class at one stage of culture will not retain the same relative importance for the purposes of classification at any subsequent stage.
But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only, and it seldom results in the subversion or entire suppression of a standpoint once accepted. A distinction is still habitually made between industrial and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and drudgery. Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has not fallen into disuse.
The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that any effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its ultimate purpose is the utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man by man is not felt to be an industrial function; but all effort directed to enhance human life by taking advantage of the non-human environment is classed together as industrial activity. By the economists who have best retained and adapted the classical tradition, man’s “power over nature” is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include man’s power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental forces. A line is in this way drawn between mankind and brute creation.
See also the Absolute according to Hegel, see Absolute idealism. See also the absolute religion by Hegel. There’s also Josiah Royce, famous American Hegelian (relevant to e-girls and eldritch Americanism). The end of the Science of Logic:
The Idea which is independent or for itself, when viewed on the
point of this unity with itself, is Perception or Intuition, and the percipient Idea is Nature. But as intuition the idea is, through an external ‘reflection’, invested with the one-sided characteristic of immediacy, or of negation. Enjoying however an absolute liberty, the Idea does not merely pass over into life, or as finite cognition allow life to show in it: in its own absolute truth it resolves to let the ‘moment’ of its particularity, or of the first characterisation and other-being, the immediate idea, as its reflected image, go forth freely as Nature.
We have now returned to the notion of the Idea with which we began.
This return to the beginning is also an advance. We began with Being,
abstract Being: where we now are we also have the Idea as Being: but
this Idea which has Being is Nature.
Experimental Unit or something like it is the Absolute Idea. See also discussion thereof.
See also the absolute as in Brahman, god in general but eg in Sufism.
And seduction according to Jean Baudrillard for connection to eroticism, secondary source.
For us, only those who can no longer produce are dead. In
reality, only those who do not wish to seduce or be seduced
are dead. But seduction gets hold of them nonetheless, just as
it gets hold of all production and ends up destroying it .
Experimental Unit is not an organization, it is a game
See Alternative Reality Games, including Ong’s Hat, QAnon, Another example, and another QAnon article lol.
See also informal organization
See the imaginary party, here’s an introduction
See also Union of Egoists by Max Stirner, recent usage - see how when the conditions fall away, it dissolves, just like the game in Baudrillard as opposed to “The law”
Political theology - combine with “all religions are one” to propose syncretizing all political belief systems
Left-Right distinction
Avril Haines erotica bookstore readings
Bahais on Progressive Revelation
Rainbow Coalition (Fred Hampton)
China and cognitive warfare: why is the West losing?
Third, the West additionally differentiates peace from war: this is not the case for China. The rules of war are not determined anymore by the West but by our adversaries and we have not yet grasped it: “Cunning adversaries leverage the space between war and peace for devastating effect. Washington has a buzz phrase for this: the “Gray Zone.” Others have a strategy” (McFate, 2019). The peace-war distinction is outdated and the West has not conformed and adapted to this new reality.
Definition of currency - concepts are the currency of the future
The society of the spectacle - full text
Adam’s page on WRFG, featuring Experimental Council
Hedonism - Zweibelson to Adam
Terror Management Theory - also ontological terror, metyaphysical horror, & Lovecraftian cosmological horror (racism connection again)
Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Hegelian E-Girl by Charnel House
Tiqqun - Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl
Affect, Meta-Affect, and Mathematical Belief Structures
Jihad, pointing to “Greater Jihad.” I don’t hold we fight the passions but there are emergent meta-affects and meta-emotions, and we ride those.
See also Hume, “the constant revolution in our ideas,” and paradigm shift, and conceptual churn.
Nikki Status on abolishing the family
Platypus Interview with Boris Groys
Anna: Deleuzian Cybernetics not good enough
Hegel, night in which all cows are black
Freud, question of lay analysis
The moral is to the physical as three to one.
Hegelian E-Girl Speeches at Party
Anna Taking a step back from Hegelian E-Girls
Litvrgy thinks Anna is a fascist
It takes a network - McChrystal
Serpent in Genesis - tells you you’re perfect already, temptation, or?
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - re: Miss Boucher going Blonde for Elon?
Dylan - The Times The Are A Changin
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
US Flag - see “eldritch Americanism”
Council Communism - See Hegelian E-Girl Council
Christian Universalism - history of
The metaphysical subtleties of the commodity - similar to of every word, sign. What is helping and what is harming? Related to trilemma
To Ramona - Dylan - someday baby - see end of Transparency of Evil
Foundations of effective influence operations - RAND
Matthew 3:2 Repent, for the kingdom of god is at hand - immanent transcendent
Luke 8:17 - For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.
Measuring the effects of influence operations
Sedna (mythology) - show celestial body
Shakti - Don’t Forget! Shiva is Shakti’s boyfriend - destroyer of worlds quote
Mentioned in the republic
And yet, I said, it is unreasonable to suppose that anything can perish from without through affection of external evil which could not be destroyed from within by a corruption of its own? It is, he replied. Consider, I said, Glaucon, that even the badness of food, whether staleness, decomposition, or any other bad quality, when confined to the actual food, is not supposed to destroy the body; although, if the badness of food communicates corruption to the body, then we should say that the body has been destroyed by a corruption of itself, which is disease, brought on by this; but that the body, being one thing, can be destroyed by the badness of food, which is another, and which does not engender any natural infection --this we shall absolutely deny? Very true. And, on the same principle, unless some bodily evil can produce an evil of the soul, we must not suppose that the soul, which is one thing, can be dissolved by any merely external evil which belongs to another? Yes, he said, there is reason in that. Either then, let us refute this conclusion, or, while it remains unrefuted, let us never say that fever, or any other disease, or the knife put to the throat, or even the cutting up of the whole body into the minutest pieces, can destroy the soul, until she herself is proved to become more unholy or unrighteous in consequence of these things being done to the body; but that the soul, or anything else if not destroyed by an internal evil, can be destroyed by an external one, is not to. be affirmed by any man. And surely, he replied, no one will ever prove that the souls of men become more unjust in consequence of death. But if some one who would rather not admit the immortality of the soul boldly denies this, and says that the dying do really become more evil and unrighteous, then, if the speaker is right, I suppose that injustice, like disease, must be assumed to be fatal to the unjust, and that those who take this disorder die by the natural inherent power of destruction which evil has, and which kills them sooner or later, but in quite another way from that in which, at present, the wicked receive death at the hands of others as the penalty of their deeds? Nay, he said, in that case injustice, if fatal to the unjust, will not be so very terrible to him, for he will be delivered from evil. But I rather suspect the opposite to be the truth, and that injustice which, if it have the power, will murder others, keeps the murderer alive --aye, and well awake too; so far removed is her dwelling-place from being a house of death. True, I said; if the inherent natural vice or evil of the soul is unable to kill or destroy her, hardly will that which is appointed to be the destruction of some other body, destroy a soul or anything else except that of which it was appointed to be the destruction. Yes, that can hardly be. But the soul which cannot be destroyed by an evil, whether inherent or external, must exist for ever, and if existing for ever, must be immortal? Certainly. That is the conclusion, I said; and, if a true conclusion, then the souls must always be the same, for if none be destroyed they will not diminish in number. Neither will they increase, for the increase of the immortal natures must come from something mortal, and all things would thus end in immortality. Very true. But this we cannot believe --reason will not allow us --any more than we can believe the soul, in her truest nature, to be full of variety and difference and dissimilarity. What do you mean? he said. The soul, I said, being, as is now proven, immortal, must be the fairest of compositions and cannot be compounded of many elements? Certainly not. Her immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are many other proofs; but to see her as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity; and then her beauty will be revealed, and justice and injustice and all the things which we have described will be manifested more clearly. Thus far, we have spoken the truth concerning her as she appears at present, but we must remember also that we have seen her only in a condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than he is to his own natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition, disfigured by ten thousand ills. But not there, Glaucon, not there must we look. Where then? At her love of wisdom. Let us see whom she affects, and what society and converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly following this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around her because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of this life as they are termed: then you would see her as she is, and know whether she has one shape only or many, or what her nature is. Of her affections and of the forms which she takes in this present life I think that we have now said enough. True, he replied.
DJ Shadow: Building Steam with a Grain of Salt
Chief! The Spirits! Have Got Me!
Boynne Sulci - Neptune 2075