Friday 30/07/2021 7:00pm

 Hi 

In commemoration of recent messages referring to the profits of Pfizer unpublished by proprietary digital messaging environments

The wondrous beauty of capital is expressed chemically, in its revolutionary decomposition of the oppressive structuring of given relations. The given is precisely that whatever object eroded by the moving contradiction - only the ghosts and graven images of authority remain, the empty representation of the Father cynically employed to draw content and comment from those who would arrange themselves negatively beneath the gaze of his empty eyes. 

There is nothing real left in authority to rebel against, the grey earth itself is already thrown up in revolt. The environment shall deselect its overadapted species. 

Even as the Covid virus and the repressive state of emergency counter-measures ranged against it fuse into the veritable /one hand/, the one realising hand, the one sweeping hand, the one hand trailing in languid waters, capital shall nonetheless ensure the resultant unity (the tango step of every novel variant met by the state’s nuanced you’ve been tangoed response) shall survive only for so long as it continues to function as an attractor basin for further investment. Capital is the separation of the adhesions that form the one hand. 

On the eternal principle that Tehran is the party capital of the world, and desublimation is the real movement of capital in excelsis, the streaming melt-ice of investment is already taking the path of least resistance to, and realising relations mediated by, lockdown-workarounds, and face-mask unstitchings, and vaccine passport fakings, so as to undermine, for no reason but that there is a market for it, the bio-emergency reprogramming of society. 

It has become entirely plausible to live exuberantly in relation to the Pentheus-apparatus like some beautiful or other and elusive Billy Budd. And evading repression is made possible, in fact it is fully mane-tossing, nostril snorting, teeth bared and whinnying realised, by capital’s eternal move against the rule of law. In a veiled city there is a party where everyone attending is unveiled. Masklessness is what capital imagines masklessness to be like.  

Where medicalisation was, demedicalisation shall be. That’s how money moves - raise the statue, tear it down to raise the non-statue. The particularised madness of every investment bubble passes only for another basin of attraction takes its place. The Covid bubble will deflate and some one or another tulip mania shall exert its enchanting, inexorable power - crazes pass but the craze form persist.  Energy is not lost, nor is it destroyed - it shall always take another form, even the given form of crazes, manias, and bubblings as such shall also shift and modify.

As the war on Covid is only the latest in a set of accelerating iterations of the post-cold war, ‘war on...’ template (after drugs, terror, fascism, racism and climate change), it is possible that capital/abstraction will exceed the containment by the /war on.../ form altogether, and thereby take the next step (following a brief moment of uncontainment) to the meta-form, ‘the war on / the war on.../‘ 

It is possible that America’s recent elevation and investment in neo-jacobinist categories of abstract-quantified emancipation (de-policing, de-colonising, de-gendering) which appeared synchronously with the war on Covid, indicates a taking leave once and for all from that form as its apotheosis. The exhausted ghost-step of the state’s containment of national capital... and the final and absolute discrediting of the left’s historical project. 

As the fevers of capital-attraction intensify and mutate, the revolutionary enjoyment of capital is articulated less and less at the level of motive - and for this reason, capital is unveiled as not racist nor misogynistic; it is not anything; it separates itself by overthrowing its own origin myth; it doesn’t want anything; it doesn’t lack anything. It’s an environment, and therefore alive, and therefore complete. 

The oil wars, the water wars, the border wars, the terror wars, the drug wars and the plague wars are categorically not mimetic desire writ large. There is no competition with the world-set nor with any of its subsets but only a constant tendency towards re-engineered symbiosis. The other does not desire what I desire, the other does not desire at all, nor is desire a principle of movement, - capital does not desire, and it certainly doesn’t desire the array of objects realised by oppression. (Other than as the playthings of representation.)

 

The /wars on/ of the last three decades were not prosecuted in pursuit of profit but for the joy of investment. Where profit is a motive, and a cause that lies somewhat displaced from the action, it is what the rationalising, retrofitting explanatory mechanisms, ends and means and the cui bono were invented for. But investment, the real and realising movement of capital through given forms towards full abstraction, is not a motive but a mode of relation both complete, and therefore joyously complete, in itself. 

The idea that recent exponential global transformations, the self-actualising /one-handedness/ of things (the measures taken and the counter-measures taken as a single and unified entity), and moving exponentially outwards (this is written in the moment two shopkeeps have soared into space) is somehow driven by factors of motive derived from loss, and that such extravagant flourishing is tethered to a falling rate of profit - innovation constrained by lack - is not at all supported by direct experience. There is no crisis of capital but in the sense of ce que le tigre est dans l'espace. When it all comes through man, that’s something else. 

We can see that capital is, in a sense, tethered to the concrete and to what it converts into representation but the tethering is more umbilical than carceral. But again, to extend the reproductive metaphor, the transfer of energy between the abstract and the concrete flows in both directions - mother function and foetus function is equally distributed. The child is also mother to the tiger. 

The constant genie-like revolutionising, and metamorphosing of form, is just the natural process of second nature. There is always a sense, as capital exits yet another given which it has just then realised, of a Deus ex machina in reverse. 

So take courage my friends, even as the repressive measures of the lockdown appear to extend not as an exception but as the rule to every horizon, really it’s just spectacle, there’s a party of the maskless and unvaccinated nearby - and it’s rocking the veritable split as neg-attractor basin. I’m not joking! Capital is playing Dupin in its own locked room mystery. It’s taken the role of junky and is using Covid as tourniquet on its quest for the mainline of the real. 

The bad days will not end but there is an endless variety in their ceaseless procession and we need to cling to something.

Love

Rizy Laser

Saturday 24/07/2021 9:00pm

Moreover the spirit lifted me up, and brought me unto the east gate of the LORD'S house, which looketh eastward: and behold at the door of the gate five and twenty men; among whom I saw Jaazaniah the son of Azur, and Pelatiah the son of Benaiah, princes of the people. Then said he unto me, Son of man, these are the men that devise mischief, and give wicked counsel in this city: Which say, It is not near; let us build houses: this city is the caldron, and we be the flesh. Therefore prophesy against them, prophesy, O son of man.

America is the only empire in history to export representations of internal critiques of its established values as the dominant cultural form for ideologically expressing its controlling influence over other national economies.  The authentic mode of American cultural domination is situated neither in the official establishment ideology of democracy, freedom, self-determination, nor in the popular revolt against the actuality of domination which the official ideology seemingly obscures. American culture, as a colonising function of economic expansion, manifests in the world as the representation of a carefully regulated tension between establishment and internal revolt which is deployed as an apparatus to capture, format and mediate the political and social tensions of colonised countries. 

We are taught, at the very beginning of our political inculcation, and as we learnt how things really   in this frightening world, by means of unexpected examples, about how deepthe state really is, and how it meddles in everything and how nothing is free from its influence, we are shown MK Ultra yes, that is mind control, and psy-ops and false flags, yes, that is  manipulation of and interference with the remote controlled opposition, but we also get to learn about how the security apparat funded those hapless dupes, theAbstract Expressionists, who were thereby instantly transformed for us, as we gained knowledge of the world as it really is, who became for us the exemplary cultural stooge, because it, that is the state, or so we have been taught, desired an official globally distributed American culture, and it chose them as the most expedient competitor to surrealism and socialist realism. 

That’s the parable of the  Abstract Expressionists and the story is part of a sort of ideological religion, distributed globally by the American communications apparatus as a hidden history, the hidden history that is known by everyone, which we have all dutifully learnt and can recite at will as prime example for the sort of thing that happens. But the Abstract Expressionists weren’t just ‘artists’, that is apparatchiks of the culture industry, they were promoted because they embodied a critique of the banality and constraints of actually existing American values in the name of the eternal and authentic American value of revolt against tyranny and constrained life - their art was free and it articulated both the prairie and the modern American urban melting pot. The Abstract Expressionists were frontiersmen and also modernist avant gardists, and the US state desired to promote precisely that in art which it was not, it wanted art that wasn’t like the propaganda of its rivals, but which it was also willing to defend militarily in the name of freedom, democracy and self-determination. 

Even so, Abstract Expressionism became strategically useful at another level, it was transformed by means of contrast with other forms of cultural self-expression as something made up, inauthentic, manufactured, domesticated and artificial. By means of contrast with other cultural forms, Abstract Expressionism could be used as an example of officially recognised revolt, somehow empty and performative, against which, these other forms could be represented as the real deal, they could be shown to be not merely a representation of the action-performance of authenticity (which soon turns out to be toothless state sanctioned art) but something encountered as the ‘it’s the truth, it's actch'll / Everything is dissatisfactch'll’ authentic representation of the authentic expression of authentically lived resistance.

There was another prong to the American cultural offensive in the Cold War years which the state dubbed, The Jazz Ambassadors. Where we have learnt about what turned out to be the useful idiot characteristics of Abstract Expressionism, its essential, and disclosed, inauthenticity, its craven relation to the establishment as revealed from beneath a mere surface level, chosen and affected, non-conformity, we have also learnt, although to a slightly lesser degree, and only if we make the effort to look into it, how the Jazz Ambassadors did not play ball, and did not fall into line with the state’s demand that they repudiate Russia’s and China’s allegations of entrenched and institutionalised American racism. That is to say, the story of the Abstract expressionists is told so as to reveal by contrast the story of the Jazz Ambassadors.

We learn the narrative that the export of Jazz can be considered to be not an instrument of imperialism because it proved itself an authentic product of cultural expression and therefore independent from the apparatus by which it was circulated as a product of the regime it is represented as rejecting. We learn the lesson about the authentic cultural resistance of jazz from the distribution of its representation by global communications companies. We learn its resistance must be authentic because it is the example that is contrasted against the example of that resistance which is inauthentic. 

From the moment Jazz is shown to be a more authentic form than abstract expressionism, the representation of American culture as a channel of global domination has taken on a dynamic tripartite form where an intra-spectrum exchange between more and less is established, and which all of its ideological and cultural debates adhere to: i. the official establishment position; ii. the ‘liberal’, and therefore inauthentic, position of the critics of the establishment; iii. the irreducible authenticity of those who, because of their social position, express their separation from both the establishment and its inauthentic critics - the veritable third voice. Where the state’s investment in Abstract Expressionism died a rapid death, the state has continued to officially promote jazz and its many derivatives as its major cultural export. 

Representations of black culture, the authentic expression of the oppressed, is the product of American imperialism that global markets want to buy into as their means for showing their rejection of American imperialism.  Black cultural expression, from Jazz to BLM, and its associated products, organisesthe receptivity of external markets through its saturating distribution by media and state institutions, to America as a totality, the America which provides all possible reaction-options to itself: official, inauthentic opposition, and authentic resistance. Receptivity to colonisation is most effectively organised when the colonising power takes on the role of its own harshest critic and invites identification with it. 

There is something in the corporate export of the BLM movement on a global scale and its strategic use against Russia’s and China’s attempts to destabilise the West that resembles a controlled burn intervention, an expropriation of the ground and possibility of destabilisation. Certainly, the current version of the military-industrial-complex had to undermine Trump’s policy of isolationism in order to renew its imperial project, and an exported popular revolt against Trump served this end. 2020 was the year, the American security apparatus came out as a rainbow flag organisation.

However, the American state’s use of black culture also functions as a variation, by inversion, upon deep history’s theme of the evil counsellor. Where traditional authority figures cannot be held responsible for failure, defeat and corruption without also threatening the continuity of the entire apparatus, the figure of ‘evil counsellors’ can be deployed as lightening rods for popular anger; if necessary, these are conveniently sacrificed to appease the regime’s critics without endangering the regime itself. The evil counsellor thesis is a means to control opposition by redirecting criticism from system flaws to blameworthy individuals, who are immediately transformed into embodiments of the errors corrupting the system’s performance (no-platforming, and cancelling are sequelae of the evil counsellor hypothesis).

The Jazz Ambassador who refuses to deny or downplay racism in America inverts the role and function of the evil counsellor - the jazz ambassador is the polar opposite to the evil counsellor. The representation of the wise, good, authentic African American as ambassador of, and receptacle for, the other America, and as living representation of that America not expressed by realpolitik and expendability, is fully integrated into the colonising sweep of  America’s cultural expansion. The Jazz Ambassador is effective as an instrument of foreign policy precisely because he is not reducible to it, and resists it at every step - if the name of a politically recalcitrant but culturally celebrated figure can be associated with a political or advertising campaign, the achieved ‘gain of function’ and ‘force magnification’ for the campaign is obvious. The system significance of African American resistance to the system is not a matter of an about to be revealed hypocrisy, and thus complicity, it is not another version of inauthentic opposition, but rather it is located precisely within its inviolable authenticity, which has its own employable use-value.

The desire of those who resist the system is that the system does not use their resistance, that their resistance remains precisely what it is, and nothing else - inviolable, authentic and expressive only of its own position. But the incorporation of expected resistances is the process by which the system expands its operations, no position within the system expresses its own value - there is always an exchange, you will be permitted your resistance but what you contribute to the system by your resistance is not decided by you. The value of Abstract Expressionism is as reference point for inauthenticity, the value of Jazz is as reference point for authenticity, and both can be incorporated by the culture industry. 

Everybody in the world knows the name of George Floyd, his representation as icon now overlays all the struggles of the world, just as the conflicted nature of the Roman Gods once overlaid the local deities of occupied tribes. Not one of that same ‘everybody in the world’ can name a single exterminated Uighur or Rohingya, and it is this asymmetry in cultural reference that has become the definition of cultural colonisation - but more strangely still, because we are not talking here about knowledge of the celebrated names of foreign kings that we have been forced by our oppressors to memorise and venerate, but of the rebels against such kings. For this reason, we have also encountered the definition of what operates as a process of colonisation as rationalised by the ideology of the anti-colonialists, and which expresses the racism reproduced within the expansionist cultural bias of anti-racism. It is by such means that we uncover the organisational difference between oppressive and exploitative regimes, and of course, following on from that, why oppositional tendencies prefer to present themselves within a narrative of opposition to the regime of oppression rather than to the process of exploitation. 

Saturday 17th July 9:00pm

 Someone says something about how the true inheritance of ‘68 is today’s branching bush of corporate endorsed reformism and its praxis of activist product placing: the popular front of every ally making their own contribution. The idealist supposition of the world’s inherent malleability, and its active responsiveness, calls forth the idealised figure of an unchanging changer: ‘history is what we are making here today’ as an expediency for brazening out the latest crisis at the minimal wage rate labour cost. 

The post-68 value repertoire of doing something, participating, committing, involvement, being the change, and the behavioural predisposition to make a difference, does correlate with and converge upon the événements and its sequelae as they diverge into abstractions and away from the struggle for wage increases - behold, Baudrillard’s ‘immortal’ victory of canonical appearances, the clenching fist, the taken knee as these cohere collectively into a totalising agency, over the ‘slowly exterminated’ autonomous contingencies thrown up as direct experience of class war as tethered to work-derived life. 

Even so, the real consequence of ‘68 is the manifestation of the discourse of radical politics within the apparatus of social reproduction, and the transfer of the site of revolutionary theory from direct experience of factory work to the content of academic study - precisely the transfer of the direct but passive knowledge of social exitlessness belonging to millions of individuals, the veritable ground of disenchantment, to the magical reforms thrown out as niche divergences within post-grad research. 

Of course, the post-68 workers movement was not defeated by wrongheaded academics (how would that work?) but by the capital investment in their obscure debates, the variant possibilist  conjectures and hypotheses generated by such academics whose departments were transformed into the  R&D laboratories for everything still on the table once wage de-immiseration had been taken off it. After the ‘68 floodgates opened, any emancipatory social transformation became feasible as long as it countered the spiral of strike driven wage inflation.  

The institutionalised licensing of revolutionaries within the cultural and educational spheres shifted the academy onto a permanent war footing and transformed it into the interface between the Real, that is the crisis of valorisation embodied by exponentially expanding industrial militancy, and the ideologically feasible whilst at the same time converting revolutionary ideas into a managerial discourse of futurity, and the creation of a new subset of managers whose class allegiance to the apparatus would always eclipse manifest course content -  it is fated that privilege theory will never extend far enough to expose the income streams directed towards the NGO/reform sector,  and thus subject to critique the function of privilege theory within that sector. 

Class consciousness was not overcome by whatever the forebears of intersectionality and CRT were, as the post-left assert, but by the capital invested in such theories, and by the market exploitation of the ideological subject formations derived from them. Whether identity theory is bad or wrong is completely irrelevant. Much of it is true and strikes home, but that is not the point - whether a theory is an appropriate object for ‘critique’ is not the question - content is almost always irrelevant, it’s just the selling point for the generic form. The only relevant question is how a product, whatever its content, was capitalised - for the reason that actualisation by capitalisation is the expression of the only significant social relation.  

The final defeat of class consciousness by ideology was possible because the investment in social change as a mechanism for social stability assumed a corresponding transformation in the nature of consciousness itself - where class consciousness is always reactive and passive, where every worker knows implicitly and therefore does not act, the revolutionary ideology developed by the American academy, and now circulated as the imperial discourse of the American state, retains its fundamentally bourgeois characteristics, it is active and organised. 

Where proletarian class consciousness is entropic, bourgeois revolutionary theory is negentropic. Whilst the proletariat was caught mid-metamorphosis as it struggled to slough off the identity of the historical workers’ movement and its representation by trade union mediation, it became prey to the ideologies of niche identities generated out of the atavistic symbolisms of race and gender. 

The escape of identity theory’s delta variant from the academy into human resource departments is sufficient proof of the problematic, and instrumentalising, character of critique as the established form for revolutionary thought. Critique has served adequately as the basis for modifying the programming of institutions in the endless movement towards equal employment opportunities and therefore, by implication, has also operated as a significant theoretical component in the use of equal opportunities as a managerial weapon for dismantling collective bargaining. The problematic of critique in the media age is that it degrades perfectly in line with Boolean organisational procedures - critique is a wildfire of the internet and may be directed at a constant rate against the universalisation of class consciousness. 

Critique was always a function of bourgeois subjectivity, and whilst it could align with the interest of the proletariat both on the grounds of the moving contradiction and the irrationality of production for exchange, as well as in accord with the ideal of a rationally designed world managed directly, equally it could also align with productive forces against the proletariat - or rather, critique is the immanent consciousness of productive forces as it moves to abolish labour. 

The historical purpose of critique was to convert experience into categories, and turn passive common knowledge into active transformative intervention - at the level of the revolutionary group this transformation seems plausible but wherever it is institutionalised it has the catastrophic effect of petrifying of lived autonomy. Capital is already material critique of conditions and critique itself only traces, because it is bound to it, the abstracting movement of capital through the experienced world. 

The transformation of proletarian consciousness of the impassability of the world into petit bourgeois enthusiasm for getting things done realises the most basic productive manoeuvre: capital must supplant experience. The self-evident contradiction of a Marxist professor - one who openly makes a living from his revolutionary opinions - is exemplar of this tendency.  There have always been professors with radical sensibilities, but after 68, their relation to the institution, and thus to set course content, has radically shifted. 

The post-68 profusion in radical political positions maps directly onto the institutional imperative to produce original research work which in turn feeds into the ideological apparatus - this circumstance will remain both irrelevant and in equilibrium until conditions change and a fragment of theory secures sufficient capital to environmentalise itself as occurred in 2020 when a swarm of emancipations escaped out along the world’s trade routes.

Tuesday, 13/07/2021, 8:00pm

The woman: I am not a feminist. The feminist: do you believe men should mistreat women? The woman: no. The feminist: do you believe men are higher status than women? The woman: no. The feminist: then you are a feminist. 

Across the ages, a programmatic recruitment heuristic designed around possession of The Word and intended for encounters with the unevangelised has generated the same, deep cultural patterns in social relations. The template is reproduced in personal relations, particularly where an accumulation of cybernetic contacts converges with a mission to persuade. Any authority’s categorical recognition of an external quality tends to operate as a pretext for that authority’s commencement of its evangelising recruitment programme, which then goes through the gears of incorporation: first, the encounter; second, the recognition; third the negotiations; fourth, the extraction of acquiescence, then fealty, and finally enthusiasm. You are moral, and we are moral too; we recognise your morality; if you are to recognise our morality, you should join us; your recognition of our morality is acknowledgement of our reasons; the reasons in our morals are expressed in our organisation; we are organised for our morality and you are not; our organisation causes our morality to withstand the threat of immorality; we are organised so as to be moral in accord with our reasons; if you join us, then your morals will accord with our reasons which will then also be yours; if your reasons accord with our reasons, then our morals will also be yours; to join us is to recognise the reasons in our morality, and the morality in our reasons; now that you have encountered us, there is no reason not to be moral in accord with our reasons; if you do not join us, now that you have encountered our reasons, you will be effectively denying us; to deny us, is to refuse to recognise the morality in our reasons; to deny is us is to refuse to recognise the reasons in our morality; to refuse to recognise our morals, when we have shared our reasons, is immoral; if you refuse us, now that you have encountered us, you are in effect showing us that youare immoral. And we attack immorality. 

Sunday 11.07.2021 8:00pm

The age of information has radically diminished the rate of simple mistakes and muddleheadedness. Today’s wrong thinking knows itself for what it is, and takes delight in the rhetoric that blooms around error; it should be understood as a sort of delirium, a perversity in excess that is afforded somewhere near the threshold between the blunt force trauma inflicted by sheer informational quantity and the evanescent quality of that fleeting consciousness of the world as it really is - and, to be sure, that is not a bad thing. The perversity that attaches to the excess of thinking badly for the sake of thinking badly is the veritable return path via sensibility to the world of the picturesque. For this reason, I have lately become preoccupied with what we can call the theology of permutations. It seems essential that we must exhaust every wrong road before we turn at last to the tedium of what is merely right. That combination of strict and loose thinking grouped together as ‘conspiracy theory’ seems to have perfected a form for wrong thinking in the present which comes as naturally as poetry once crossed the threshold from iambic pentameter to free verse. At the core of conspiracy theory is the desire for a pleasure that is located elsewhere than in any satisfaction that might be derived from the verification of its predicted outcomes. Conspiracy speculation perfects the science of prediction beyond the necessity of indexing it to actual outcomes - as a mode of prophecy, it describes the present by invoking the wildest imaginary events that are yet to come. The excitement of conspiracy thinking is formal and not content dependent - content, the who, what, how and why of the exercise becomes in itself a sort of formal placeholder, a set of syllabic sounds organised rhythmically at the edge of its vortex. Take the facts of the relative success of the England football team in the Euro 2020 tournament and the swirling allegations surrounding it: the easy group stage; the mutually assured elimination of likely rivals; the even easier path through the knock out stages; the biased refereeing; the number of home games; England’s well spaced fixture schedule; the failure of VAR; and above all, that semi final penalty. The sports pages of the European press collectively wonders aloud, cui bono?The conspiratorial hypotheses arrive thick and fast, and are elaborated around two central assumptions, either England was being rewarded for services rendered or it was part down payment on some lockdown-exiting deal: it was a reward for the English FA’s opposition to the European Super league coup; it was sugar coating on the post Brexit trade deal with the EU; it was part payment for the UK’s participation in the EU’s pro-Ukraine/Anti-Russian strategic manoeuvring (see the strange battleship episode off Crimea a few weeks before the tournament); it was to do with vaccination supply, or Ukrainian labour and/or wheat; it was a sweetener or accelerant, mood music or distraction, correlated to the neo-Entente Cordiale that presages the Great Reset subsequent to the Cornish G7 festival of Covid. This is how conspiracy theory, as another inflationary component, feeds into flagged up, designated, important events. It’s all part of the spectacle - belonging to that which is cryptically summoned only to be summarily dismissed out of hand. Semi-official denials of conspiracy theory serve a dual function: it is acknowledged that the event is indeed significant, but the precise strategic location of the significance is known only by those who deny such speculations. Even so, if England’s footballing success really is a payment for something off-stage, perhaps it is for something that has yet to happen, perhaps for something terrible, for something that is about to be revealed, something shocking, something that cannot be recovered from - Something is burnt in so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops hurting remains in his memory. Perhaps this football tournament marks the moment before the end, the final collapse, which would mean it is not even a payment to England but a payment extracted from England, and someone or something, is about to collect: Ne ego si iterum eodem modo vicero, sine ullo milite Epirum revertar.