Performance Ontology or the Hyper-reality of the Humanarchization of VO
To Affect VO effectively to address the cancer industry of today’s society, one first needs to be clear on what this cancer is in the first place. While hedonistic subjectivists, anarcho-primitivists, libertarians, etc. will argue it is the monopolization of the valuing of self-value by bourgeoise capitalism and other dominating ideological structures that Marx had limited the horizon, Baudrillard of course, shows the cancer industry of today does not revolve around forces of unremitting production per se, but precisely around the production of subjectivities, in other words of consumption. While the new Humanarchy makes the claim that production of subjectivities is because of the divorce of value from the valuing subject and Sloterdijk is hijacked to make the argument, systemic thymotic curbing alienates the conditions necessary for the valuing of the valuing subject, this is still within the banal paradigm of the market-place and the liberal’s idea of Diversity for its own sake:
In other words, Production attains an ontology of its own, which is then used to explain or to produce production, to (re)produce it.
Production does not infuse the object with value, but now value pre-exists the object and is already infused with it, leading to it being produced, as an effect of the value already present in the worker.
Value precedes the emergence of the object, the phenomenon. no longer a juxtaposition of one with an other, within the context of the environment, in this case the human system, but now a juxtaposition of a human need (natural, drive), with an artificial projection of a hypothetical object/objective that promises to satisfy this need, or needs.
This creates the artificiality of a want, the production of desire connected to primitive instinctive, organic needs, but in an abstracted, indirect way…as symbol, code - “iindividuality”, “freedom”, “being human”… and such feel-good goods.
The value of the desired, the want, is presupposed, within a system of relationships, and social hierarchies, accentuated with marketing (repetition, symbolic references to natural needs).
Once value precedes the production of the object it has already presupposed the work, sacrifice, required to bring it about as something detached from this effort.
The work must now rise to meet the value present.
And value can be manufactured.
Culture becomes manufactured.
It is now not a juxtaposition between phenomena, but between a need/want and a projected idea…a noetic, abstracted, juxtaposition.
This reflects the general nihilistic inversion characterizing Modernity.
From a psychological perspective the individual’s value is already presupposed, forced only to meet an idealized standard which is artificially produced, and reflects socioeconomic hierarchies.
It is the value that brings about the organism, not the organism that evaluates self and otherness in relation to self and otherness.
In Baurdrillard’s thesis on the consumer society it is consumption that brings about production, and not consumption that must adjust to production, creating value.
Manipulating consumption by creating needs, wants, desires, is the driving force of this new world Capitalism.
Exploitation reversed, or call it Reverse-Engineering.
Humanarchy determines VO, than VO creating an arche.
Secular Humanism is hedonistically pre-posited as an apriori - the ideal of society that man must gear towards, is fore-determined.
VO Serves human rights, instead of the Right to being “Human” being determined by VO.
The detachment from probability opening up possibilities that Satan or Lucifer represent, is where the only rule is systemic: the only limit being that one’s projected beliefs do not interfere with those of another.
The world which restricts the healthy rational mind is what they consider cultist, because the world limits what interpretations of it are useful and which ones perish, creating a convergence of perspectives where belonging to the same species is the deciding factor.
With moderns there is no such limiting factor, other than this systemic one. Systemic secular-humanism opens up possibilities to almost anything, from the reasonable to the absurd, from the demented to the noble.
When all is plausible, ignorance can continue to be mistaken for courage/confidence, and nihilism can continue to be a viable, constructive, social standard…for internal consumption.
If in Marx’s times, money ‘overrides the laws of nature and abolishes the distinction between fantasy and reality’, today we see, it can be any symbol - word, number, abstracted ontologies of value; the noumenon replaces the phenomenon by detaching from it and looping back upon itself and referring back to another noumenon.
Masturbation, solipsism, the comforting liberation from a world that remains indifferent to our contrivances, where it is enough to say ‘I am what I am’ because ‘I am what I am’.
Modern multiplicity is really a byproduct of institutional protection; the natural, indifferent, world kept outside its hedonistic premises.
This increases permissibility, within the confines of social rules. The individual grows up to believe that only the system, or other people, is what limits his activities, his beliefs, his tastes and preferences.
The appeal to Diversity is still only one more manufacturing of value, namely, that of ‘market of value-maximizations’.
This is not self-valuings, but self-idolizings.
The paradigm of Satan’s clash with God as exemplifying the new human freedom and its inspiration is again, still stuck in the same Manichean paradigm.
Manicheanism begins as an internal quarrel with J.-Xt., positing the Devil as the artist who animates idols and icons as an independent creator, while the J.-Xt. God as the ‘evil’ who keeps his creatures enslaved within morality; where the Devil as the true God promises true Godhood to man and unlimited powers by ‘setting free’ the material powers like modern day credit is ‘set free’ from tangible gold and holds unlimited purchase power.
How do you persuade anyone of anything if he is addicted to what he’s already decided is best for him, given the circumstances?
When emotion, how he feels about it, is the deciding factor, the standard of evaluating quality is not shared, and because it is not shared, it is just as plausible as any other;
Why extra- and additional-Ontologies have to be purchased and fit in to a working model, a scheme of assemblages that keep the system “functioning smooth” from “disturbances”.
The need for RM:AO to reduce the megalomanicalness of infinite possibilities into probabilities:
Likewise RM needs VO to allow for de-deification and the space for fruitful errors…
Hedonistic Xt. metaphysics [HM] by any other means…
Nothing is ever bad and there is no hate when the war can be redefined as one between different powers of positives. All is love ultimately.
When AO meets VO, God/Christ meets Satan/Lucifer within the manichean paradigm.
Pre-standardized Ontologies and their Quality Controls are like app. markets for Preference Upgrades now offering alchemical browsers seductive magic and the promise of opening up unlimited possibilities.
This is not efficiency, but efficacy.
[b]No longer VO or AO, but HM:PO - the magician’s Performance-Ontology. The world as a magic theatre and performance…
It only has to Perform, then any magic trick is good[/b], and beauty only in the eye of the beholder, why not?
“And the will to the economy of the great style: keeping our strength, our enthusiasm in harness…” [N., Antichrist, Preface]
I haven’t read Baudrillard, and the post below on his writing doesn’t clarify my query. What you call “the production of subjectivities” sounds like what is implied by " the monopolization of the valuing of self-value by bourgeoise capitalism and other dominating ideological structures that Marx had limited the horizon" when those things are taken as active processes rather than monolithic structures which impede one’s step to a ‘beyond’.
Is the implication that the other theories had not accounted for capitalism’s production and implementation of ideological as well as material/environmental systems? If that is so, then nevermind. If you mean something else, could you please clarify?
The latter part of that quote would seem to imply a recognition of the implementation of material and environmental systems to curb thumos, which would presumably be enforced strictures. Without the ability to personally create value, it would seem that the adoption of some externally available (most likely pre-composed) value system would be inevitable.
I’m not sure what you mean exactly by “Diversity for its own sake”. Isn’t the advocacy of diversity from the perspective a capital accumulator and producer for the sake of increasing a target market as well as creating precident for new fashions or models so that production could increase, in other words, ultimately for the sake of capital accumulation and not for its own sake?
From the point of view of the consumer, on the one hand diversity might be advocated and celebrated by any member of a ‘marginal’ group for the sake of their effective integration, and consequently access to power and other perceived goods, and by others not members of a marginal group because of its association to the periced good of peace?
As you quoted here:
the ideology has ties to that of world government, and in one early advocated form and technique (namely Immanuel Kant) the means (and end) of world government was peace, one of the conceptual tools being his famous categorical imperative.
It appears you have an issue with hedonism. Do you hold hedonism to be the striving for pleasure in total, or pleasure as encapsulated by the senses (sensual hedonism), that is to say, do you have a contention against for example the pleasure gained from the increase of knowledge or the obtainment of fame or honor?
Thanks for your interest. Its too long, so I’ll reply them each separately.
Baudrillard’s implication is the former; for clarity:
It is no longer labour per se, but Values that are now exchanged.
In sum, what I call Performance Ontology of HM, when values become detached and what is being produced is the subject-who-values as per codes, signs, valences reinforced by the system through this production of the code-consuming subject:
[quote=“Baudrillard”]
“So far as production is concerned, it is no longer the Earth that produces, or labour that creates wealth (the famous betrothal of Earth and Labour): rather, it is Capital that makes the Earth and Labour produce. Work is no longer an action, it is an operation. Communication is operational or it is nothing. Information is operational or it is nothing.” [The Transparency of Evil]
When man losses himself in his own contrivances he begins to believe his symbols and codes are more real than reality (Hyper-reality), or that they can affect reality without being translated back into a phenomenon. This is call the “efficacy of performance” as opposed to the “efficiency of magic” (a rich metaphor that affects vast complexes without disconnecting the noumenon from the phenomenon is an example of this).
Words begin to acquire their magical force when detached. They exit the time/space continuum.
Words are seductive because they can be used to suspend reality, and the laws that govern it.
He begins to take with words and numbers literally rather than figuratively and as representation, art-forms, simulations, codes of translating and transmitting experiences.
This is what inevitably results in the Nihilism of Modernity, where numbers acquire a magical power, along with words.
Taking the word/number literally means that one replaces the phenomenon with its reference to a noumenon, an abstraction.
The word/number is n o longer a representation, a symbol, but it replaces the referenced phenomenon, and because words are malleable, controllable, man feels like he is gaining control over the world.
Living in a noetic world, a solipsistic self-referential paradigm, where the meme disconnects from the real, creating a memetic alternate reality entirely willful, is how the nihilistic paradigm becomes viral.
Everything is about human choices: sex, race, beauty… everything a matter of human choice.
Man chooses his own tastes, predispositions… nothing is determined for him.
He is “free” from the past/nature.
“First came the word…”
God as word, which precedes reality.
Man projects himself in the place of God, using words to declare himself whatever he wishes were true.
But language has its own logic, and numbers are no different.
When we speak of mathematical logic we speak of an internally validating model.
1+1=2 is a “logical” mathematical phrase once we’ve accepted the magical quality of one, implying a nil, both of which have no reference outside the human brain.
They are magically conjured up as real, and transmitted to the other as self-evident.
The mode of transmitting data becomes the message being transmitted; how to translate the data is contained in the method of its own transferring.
When the mind has been integrated, assimilated, into the shared code, accepting its premises as a given, then the common logic follows.
How the words/numbers are reconfigured into thoughts is part of the translating and transmitting.
This is how words and numbers become instruments of magic.
When a magician does his tricks he is drafting the other into his premises.
The other participates in the magic act; he is a part of the performance.
He is letting him trick himself, using slight of hand, redirection, repetition, and so on.
The ones integrated into the “logic” of words and numbers are willing participants in the conjuring power of these symbols.
By learning a language you become a participant in its magical effects.
Now reality can be inverted, convoluted, invented out of thin air, without any phenomenon to refer to – pure noumenon, pure abstraction, words with mystical powers.
McLuhan told us that “the medium is the message”, meaning the medium of code, of words and numbers is its own message… it has its own innate logic which is transmitted to the brain, as one programs a computer using software.
The brain cannot think outside these premises.
It is trapped in its logic.
The code is the intermediating translation, simulation that can then be re-translated into any other form.
It can be thought of as the fabric of reality, as something to heal cancer, or to explain everything…
The flexibility of a detached noetic device lends itself to any magical trick.
It is not bound by any indifferent reality.
Linear time does not stop it, because it is not limited by phenomena.
And so Will to Power can imply a willing of will… and God can create himself, or love can precede the organic sensation and its survival advantages, and pleasure can be made into an end rather than a sensation of satisfying needs… value can precede the emergence of a brain to pass judgments and to value in accordance with its own needs, and beauty can be chosen with no connection to anything organic and so on.
The applications of this magic are endless, and the one talented in its ways is the shaman, the magi, the priest; the translating conduit between noumenon and phenomenon.
Anything is possible when the noetic abstraction is no longer attached to a phenomenon.
It is magic… pure and simple.
A trick played upon the mind with its participation, willful or not.
The word’s magical power is found in its freedom from reality, symbolizing the brain’s ability to constructs its won reality.
It is a noetic device, a technique, a translation that need not apply to a reality, but remain magically detached and mystical.
“First there was the word…” is a declaration of war against reality.
The noumenon annulling the phenomenon.
Part of the counter-measures can only be the reattachment of words to their original reference points in the world.
Only then is the word demystified losing its magical effects.
PO:
Pleasure/Pain, Yes/No, Positive/Negative, 1/0… HM revolves around performance and functionality with minimal disturbance.
What matters is that there be Efficacy of performance and the trick works, is operational.
Value, for the modern, is tied-up in numerical values, and quantities; standards based on symbols and codes which often have no reference to anything outside the mind’s simplifications.
Given that the code can be abstracted to where it can be purchased, symbolically, by anyone who serves and services the one who protects and cocoons it away from reality, value can be nothing more than a matter of subjective perspective, and market fluctuations: demand, and production.
What runs the cancer industry today is not the forces of production, but the forces of Seduction.
What could be in more demand today in the rising fad of instant-individuality that can be kick-started with identifying with the right signs and packages, than creating that consuming subject which values subjectity and self-valuing. Humanarchization of VO is the Magician’s Seduction to offer the conditions of self-idolizings, not value, as Satan to Faust.
Language has one function: to symbolize a mental abstraction.
A mental abstraction, an idea, being the product of sensual data, collected and processed by the brain, and then simplified/generalized, into an image, at first in its most primitive form, or a concept, attaining the height of a numerical value.
This is where it can acquire a secondary function:
To detach, dismiss, avoid, correct, detach, from the sensual input used to construct it.
This is solipsism at is rawest form. A self-reference begins, as the word, symbolizing an abstraction, can now be looped back to refer to another abstraction.
The real, collected as input, and interpreted (simplified/generalized) as mental-models (abstractions), falls into the background.
Baudrillard refers to this process as a simlacrum of a simualation.
I go further and connect it all the sway back to the Bible, and its obsession with the word.
It’s not that there is a God (an absent absolute, referring to an absolute order, a complete past), but that with the bible the word IS God.
The word is authoritarian because it demands total obedience to its shared definition.
It is determining because it shapes and limits human thinking.
It demands loyalty because the sensual must be denied power - it is cast as the Devil.
The word is malleable and so it is comforting, it offers salvation from the real, to minds who must escape their past/nature.
This “pushing to the limit of total and only positivity” of self-idolatory is being sold in HM:PO as Satan’s dream of ‘Human’ realizing his highest potential.
This is of course bullshite when Secular Humanism has already preset what Human is and Humanarchy simply platonizes this as a given within which VO then operates.
Correct. And so it reloops. The value-systems themselves produce the subject that consumes the subject-producing value systems. From the forces of Labour to the Production market, we have now the forces of Seduction to the Consumption market.
The act of violence has been removed and replaced with seductive methods to persuade you, similar to giving candy to a baby.
Mission has been used in a similar way in the past, but with a different context, such as a religious one with aim to convert you. Modern mission has a material context, something you shouldn’t miss out on, you should buy in and get yours. The rewards are more tangible and attractive, and the benefits are instant where everybody wins, or at least thinks so.
A mission that only requires you to purchase, even purchasing the struggle and hardship, but never directly being involved. This modern mission has a capturing mechanism which results in sedation. The status factor acts as pressuring providing the way for capturing.
Observe how HM:PO operates within the efficacious category of “Success” that while raising the illusion of Diversity and the value-maximizing of the valuing individual and freedom, is actually curbing and depleting its thymotic release as mentioned earlier:
Money’s compensatory adaptability was ideal in a world where culling had no place, and exploitation of weakness became a cardinal sin.
The overcompensation Sloterdijk speaks of is the extension of gluttony.
All genetic factors erased with a few codes.
The smaller the self-esteem was, the higher the needed compensation to make it appear larger. Secular Humanism operates on this same over-compensation that is in reality the individual’s thymotic curbing of real self-valuing.
Systemic thymotic curbing is Feminization by another name - the retention of man in a state of adolescence - retarded development. Feminization is a symptom of this updating of humanity’s greed to what is most necessary in the current - HM:PO.
Money is just a code that can be replaced by any other cancerous dream disconnected from phenomenon in the greed-culture of possibilities…
Having reduced qualities to quantities, and then accepted them as valuable metaphors, all human traits can be reduced to money…purchasing and selling qualities as if they referred to the actual quality, built in the past/nature.
And not only money but symbol, word, number, abstraction…the noumenon replaces the phenomenon by detaching from it…looping back upon itself and referring back to another noumenon.
Masturbation, solipsism, the comforting liberation from a world that remains indifferent to our contrivances.
What is the Current Currency that promises human its worth, its dignity in the updative consumption?
Secular Humanism promising the rational subject the right to self-value was an arbitrary currency that had simply effaced the Judeo-Xt. God’s image on the coin with the face of Human in the name of enlightened reason, science, progress, etc. Humanarchization via VO tries to stabilize that arbitrariness. Not one among many currents, but the superior Currenc-y…
Sec. Humanism in itself is based on the J.-Xt. Currency of equality. The notion of ‘equality’ is directly linked to the codification of reality and its detachment from the aesthetic world of experience.
The tautology that 2=2 or that a=a refers to an ambiguity, a symbol referring to a mental construct with no connection to anything outside the mind, unless one draws the symbol on paper or on some material surface.
The symbol can now refer to anything in the real world, and its only consistency can be found in its strict adherence to a definition, which is itself encoded symbolically. This practice of providing a written definition is necessary because the symbol may lose meaning, being understood differently by every mind, since it has no shared reference point outside the human mind.
This stringent adherence to the code, the written down words, which enforce an intellectual consistency for the understanding of concepts which may or may not have a sensual reference point in space/time now creates the illusion of parity.
Because the word “human” must always be equal to itself no matter how many times it is replicated, or in what medium, or colour, or general linguistic form it is replicated, therefore the concept ‘human’ becomes a concept which implies equality for everyone it is used to describe.
The code must remain true to the definition, the book of definitions, and so the concept the word describes can now also remain constant and uniform no matter how many variation of the same is replicated.
Marxism is a variance of secular humanism, a variance of judeo-christian nihilism.
All are reduced to workers, producers/consumers.
Marxism emphasizes the production end; Capitalism the consuming end.
Both are part of the same mind-set.
Sex, race, heritage, do not matter within the economics where all is reduced to a number, a code, a market share.
In both the individual only matters as a part of the code: numbers being a linguistic symbol, a code, an abstraction of appearance.
The “us” is a construct.
Transhumanism proposes to surpass it through technologies, which are no more than extensions of memes, the physical projections of ideal(s).
The problem is the container: Earth.
It forces compromises, one of which is liberalism.
There are two methods:
Burn it or integrate it into a collage, a weave…requiring processing.
This “processing” part is what we call nihilism, feminization being a symptom of it…but it is better known as indoctrination, dumbing - down, humbling, eliminating identity, being methods. . .
Humanarchization of VO typically seduces with maximum Freedom as the new human currency…
Freedom, as a concept with no definition not related to human constructs, becomes, for the Modern the highest virtue.
For the modern Nihilist freedom means liberty form the past, from nature, from self as it has been determined.
The concept fills the mind with terror, and over time the first excitement turns to a sense of emptiness, and desperation, seeking for something to attach one’s self to, something to light the path towards an object/objective.
The most terrified are the simplest minds; the ones who are the least able to cope with an idea they have no thought through. These simple minds are the first to attach themselves to a new dependence.
Their original overestimation becomes a desperate cry for an alternative incarceration.
Independence is not possible as an absolute.
The moderns dream of detaching themselves from the past but they can do no more than forget, and deny its effect upon their presence.
They mistake their choices as free choices, when the very degree of their options is limited by the past, as it projects itself forward.
The consequences of this delusion is the loss of self, a denouncement of ego; self-hatred becoming a rejection of one’s inheritance, a resentment of presence/appearance, and the desperate attempt to castrate one’s body from one’s mind, as if mind were not the product of brain processes.
This is nihilism twisting a self-annulment into a “positive” value, by projecting it as some coming future state and by refusing to define the word used to represent the feeling the ambiguity gives the brain.
American “individuality” is the most popular manifestation of this drive to self-negate.
Its social purpose is to disconnect the mind form any supporting sources that would increase its resistance to indoctrination.
No, the Christian God didn’t die.
He changed his name, tore off the toga, shaved the beard, and came down from the sky.
He still calls Himself Love/Hope/Freedom…after a short phase where He was also called Jesus in the west…and He now resides in the future, the immanent, or in some magical realm of Platonic Idealism.
God also adapts, or else He really does die.
Yes, it does, but now as an inversion. What you point out is what Zygmund Baumann called pomo. “Liquid Modernity” - this is not Diversity:
Consider also what Zizek says Diversity means now:
Fluidity is the new freedom, but Only within the paradigm of the already pre-determined frame of Sec. Humanism as the highest value; this fluidity being sold as Diversity. Consumption as a “Must” is Efficaciously marketed as a “May”… Therefore, you’ll find the political Right and Left are merely two sides of the same coin of nihilism: “conservatives” only conserve the change that “liberals” push the conserved limit. A continual self-dialectic.
The turning of reality upon its head, the reversed pyramid, indicates an overturning of hierarchies.
The “meek shall inherit the Earth” but only if they buy into a world where definitions are altered - a world of artifices created for them, seducing them into its promised liberation from their condition, using feminine tactics of word-play, verbal manipulation, selling a “positive,” emotional, product by negating, nullifying reality - a process of seduction and emotional manipulation - the Grammatology of Modern Dialectics slowly shelling the world into a Human World and embedding and displacing reality with human reality, human needs, human desires, human concerns of comfort and pleasure.
When a Modern speaks of the world he most often speaks of the world of man.
Even when engaging reality, nature, it does so through a mediating human proxy.
The world is never something it engages directly, and whenever the term “world” is brought up it is always a reference to human artifices, the world of man.
The human world rather than being a tiny part of the world at large, now becomes the all-encompassing paradigm swallowing up reality into its human simplifications.
The world becomes malleable, less stressful, more predictable, simply by incorporating it within human abstractions, expressed with numerical or linguistic codes.
The practice of using the term “world” when referring to man-made artifices, in time, and through constant repetition, becomes established as a norm.
The world can only be engage via a human proxy, or a humanitarian agenda – perceiving must wear the glasses of humanism and see the world through its self-serving decrees.
Having no proxy which would dare offer one which contradicted social conventions, the words are left to describe a subjective perspective.
No attempt is made to refer them to real phenomenon, in the fear of losing control over the words themselves, by placing the standard outside human artifices - artifices which can be controlled and altered at will.
All definitions must be filtered through proxies, referring and deferring to human needs.
When the need is based on the socio-economic, cultural paradigm trying to establish and maintain internal harmony (The Feminization of Mankind), then all definitions which connect words to a reality outside this paradigm are rejected, or judged using the most absolutest, stringent, standards so as to ridicule and then dismiss them out of hand.
A hedonist is a typical utilitarian who thinks in terms of pleasure as the innate good with his instinctive hatred of reality and reduces judgements of reality within this sheltered telos that he has pre-posited. A hedonist cannot make value-judgements on par with reality; his preservation and self-maintenance only and can only exist within a bubble.
Epicurus had a ‘Garden’. These Bubbles may come in different names. To a Master [in the sense Nietzsche meant], the hedonist is a decadent; to the hedonist, a certain kind of hedonist is a decadent. Ethical Hedonism like his which takes for granted Pleasure as the innate good automatically or Bentham’s Quantitative Hedonism changed into some quality for the common good, Aristotle’s Virtue Hedonism which cites excellence as the highest pleasure/good, Sloterdijk’s Sphere of Immunology are all variations within the same branch that posits Pleasure as an ends.
Good, Strong, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Power, Beauty, Self, One, all words describing the same absent absolute.
Each defining the individual striving towards it as an object/objective.
Pleasure = diminishment of need, a partial and temporary alleviation of the consciousness of existence.
Need = consciousness of Flux, a temporal attrition on an ordering/becoming emergent unity.
Suffering/Pain = need left unsatiated, the increase in stress, as the unity begins losing cohesion.
When any decadent mind can make anything that counts as pleasure as his or her end, then HM is an inferior indiscriminate outlook - Reality simplified to a sensation, and turned into an ideal.
A hedonist discriminates by already moralizing pleasure is good in terms of pleasure/pain. When discrimination itself is not an objective assessment, but a ‘pleasuring oneself’, then his reality is skewed, cut off from the sensation of pain, need, suffering, and he indulges in the pleasurable act itself. Hedonism is not ‘that’ noble asceticism where endurance of pain and building tolerance produces a consciousness of power [experienced as pleasure], of what one can do without - which is the opposite of that hedonism which avoids life to indulge in pleasure, or those Xt. asceticisms that engage in painful self-mortifications to repress, numb, and deaden the body so life can become tolerable…
The Master’s asceticism is about cultivating ‘indifference’ which does not mean living carelessly, but a steadfastness of undisturbed inner order manifesting as calm - it is being indifferent to fate to be able to love and affirm life for what it IS!, Reality for what it IS.
To put it simply within my HM:PO context here, it is abstracting the conception of good/bad within the human environment, and does not touch deriving value-standards outside human systems and life at large. The limitations of my reality and my good/bad does not limit reality at large.
HM is equivalent to the phrase “Just Because” - no explanations necessary when values detached from reality are pre-posited as the innate good or highest end. In HM:PO, Sec. Humanism presets the “us”, or humanism as the innate good already - “just because”…
The highest good is Knowing Thyself which is a continuous regressive process into the past, where I and AM are not separate since life is continuous self-(inter)activity… and there is no embedded telos.
“Knowing Thyself” is a be-coming,… a continuous looking back that does not end in some “built-in purpose” - That, would be a nihilism.
And if Lys is willing to bring her thoughts about nihilism down into the world of actual flesh and blood human beings interacting – interacting in a world of conflicting goods viewed from the perspective of dasein – I would like to participate in the exchange as well.
That is a big response, I’m going to need some time to read and absorb it all and formulate a response, if I have a response to make.
The first quotes from Parsons and Baudrillard are very good and throw a unique light on the fate of philosophy in (post)modern society. Much appreciated.
A very keen analysis, and perhaps implicit why James would be reluctant ,(perhaps?) to engage. The symbiosis of the production with the product, with the end result that VO becomes a new Dasein, where the thing is, not, that probable distinctions of
marketability no longer apply, but simply,…that they have reached their limit, and they have become nearly indistinct in probative value. Proba translates
into ‘test’ and the literal transformation of the Badrillard type tv test of various comparable products, have become integrated within the idea of what a test is all about. The simulacra eats up any semblance of logical distinction which may occur to the ordinary consumer. Advertisers, like Bill Gates know how it is easy to manipulate the image as a logical equivalency
with the modus operant of the product as reduced VO into it’s image. What is being done, is, that the product becomes a necessarily logical choice from then on. But there is a critique that could be introduced here, and Bill Gates would be the first to jump on that bandwagon/ vis, the emergence of generic prodicts appear to violate this almost totally accepted procedure. Perhaps, that is, the very reason that generics was allowed, to give the impression of a stable laissez faire.
I’m going to respond to this little by little otherwise I think I will lose my train of thought entirely.
First, since I am not very familiar with VO or RM:AO, I can’t speak for them or really much about them, so to be clear I will be answering on my own terms.
—what I gathered was that you were saying due to the mode of action (or performance) of the capitalist system which comes to deal in value by imbuing objects through an alchemical process (not sure if I’m using the right metaphor here — but the process would be ideological education, advertising (both of which deal with things like social arrangements, norms and so on) as well as with psychological processes, like cognition which guides us through an environment…) with a “significance” which divorces them from the traditionally understood capitalist system of production to meet needs.
A philosophy based around valuation, and which posits value as the measure, would be either ineffecacious or frivolous (again, since I am not familiar with VO or RM, I am just writing what I have gathered based on my own preconceptions and reading your comments).
I am not sure if I have this correctly, but it seems like you are proposing that the ontological measure of reality must be a measure of the act, because values, being represented by words have an infinitely malleable nature allowing a given subject to remain in the world of simulacra, whereas an ontology based in the act would reveal such a situation and make it amenable to interpretation?
Perhaps you could inform me whether I am on the right track here. I will proceed to read the rest.
Are you saying that at the bottom, valuations arise just because?
Earlier you wrote
it seems you are trying to point to a reality outside of the human interpretation that humanists reject, but how could we ever have access to such a reality if all information must be filtered through our minds? It would seem that this obstacle is what gives impetus to humanism to declare the human as the ultimate measure, even the measure of phenomena.
I am just anticipating that an objection that might arise is that, because as humans we are ‘condemned’ (so to speak) to our own minds through which and into the mixture of which we perceive, the positing of any interpretation or valuation (including Being-in-itself, and so the pain, the suffering and all else) would be just that, an interpretation from the human and an attempt to encapsulate reality in our terms — and the expansion of our ability to encapsulate through terms or even to drop the boundaries of applying signs (while I might agree is a good) would again be an act of the human will to interpret the world, and in that sense at least control it.
Again, I will need clarification to the first questions about what you are proposing as performance ontology, but isn’t all performance of the human an attempt to control the world, or at least some aspect of it? Even the reinterpretation of the capitalist system into something which necessitates doing away with it or otherwise circumventing it would in that sense be a controlling nature so that the destiny of humanity could be channeled in a certain direction.
I’m just wondering, when you say
how can you have a problem with the manipulative tendencies of the capitalist system and yet not wish to liberate yourself from the situation, which would subsequently become past, which is at present determining?
I would also like to ask, it seems like you are using nihilism in a moralistic sense, but I wouldn’t mind if you made it clearer exactly how the things you have spoken of (humanism, hedonism, etc.) are nihilism, and how you’ve come to the conclusion nihilism is a bad thing in such a way that the term is applicable to the other terms.
Isn’t knowing oneself a humanism? The focus being on the human (oneself). It seems like you take something like Mirandola’s treatise Origin on the Dignity of Man to be the core expression of all humanism, but as I see it, humanism is just the beginning of taking the interpretation of the world away from divine revelation and centering the persuit of knowledge in the human. To my mind, the foremost figures of humanism are Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Rabelais.
I say this because it seems that your criticism of what you call nihilism would ultimately be for the sake of the human, unless you are positing Being as a quasi-revelation? Even if the latter was the case, by what authority would the revelation be followed, because prior revelation was demanded under the sight of God (or gods), whereas Being only asks what is, and what is possible, and so capitalism at bottom would not be in breach of Being’s revelation (I am trying to understand your argument against humanism and ‘nihilisms’).