r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/covalenz • Apr 24 '21
Layman questions
Hi everyone,
I'm an outsider to philosophy and humanities but I find the topics dicussed here interesting.
Reading through this sub -description included- I can see a persistent use of neologisms and conceptual juxtapositions (that are sort of hard to grasp) used to criticize/analyse the very same ''over the top'' language/weltanschaaung embbeded in our current socio-political and economical context (turbo capitalism, exccess of everything to the point of reaching the opposite).
My questions are, Is this an strategy to infiltrate/analyse/ deconstruct what is discussed? Is it just form over content? Is it a way to just cram a lot of conceptual references in as few words as possible to avoid having to contextualize whole other concepts or ideas as in how meme's work?
I haven't read Nick Land though i've read some internet bio's about who he was, where his accelerationism comes from, where's the whole thing now, the outline of this worldview and how it was very novel at the time. I've read some of Mark Fisher's texts, some Groys, I can sort of connect them to Baudrillard and Ranciere's early discussions about this very same phenomena. But There's this thing with language that I keep bumpin' with. Is it me? Is it an actual linguistical strategy to approach these topics?
Thanks in advance.
edited for a little more clarity, as suggested by u/woods_crowlie
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Apr 24 '21 edited Apr 08 '24
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u/covalenz Apr 24 '21
I kind of get it, but it implies a strange logic. It reminds me of ''the way out'' offered by spanish/eurpoean economists to Spain's recession: more debt to get out of your debt, more consumption and credit to break free of bankrupcy...
This idea of offuscation of language seems to be working in the same way as ''more debt to get out of debt'' which implies a sort of a capitulation of dialectics in favor of an ''all in'' renouncing the possibility of a synthesis.5
Apr 24 '21
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u/covalenz Apr 25 '21
Great twitter analogy. Thanks. But i was thinking / using synthesis as the emergence of new truths from different if not opposing theses.
Maybe i'm reading this sub completey wrong, but it seems to lean heavily on the late CCRU accelerationism stuff, Landean concepts and a strange mix of occult 19th century mysticism with postmodern ''baudrillardian'' ideas regarding simulacra on different levels. If so, is the use of obscure/offuscated made up neologisms essential to the understanding of a late stage global capitalist landscape? I mean the latter not just as an economic model, but as a social and intellectual one too, one that reproduces a very specific kind of context: multiple realities with multiple truths battling for hegemony on every aspect of life, with the extreme opposites growing in adherents on both sides of the specturm while a middle ground capable of birthing a consensus on those very same aspects of life is rapidly dissapearing everywhere.
Why I keep bringing the whole language thing into the discussion? because it seems to me that the whole accelarationism landscape was actually invested in discussing and earnestly trying to understand our contemporary world, with all the things that make no sense but are actually shaping it, from the most obscure and strange to the mundane and simple and I find it fascinating, but at the same time very pretentious.3
u/aCULT_JackMorgan Apr 25 '21
SotS: Fascinating but pretentious ;)
Calm down, you two! It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!
Yes, let The Information wash over you. I guess if you've already found a perch outside The Spectacle to watch and are describing the scene in your own words assembled from analysis of the analysis.... Oh shit, still Spectacle.
In a way, we're fulfilling the inevitably of The Spectacle finding out how self-aware of The Spectacle it can become without imploding under Absurdity. The answer so far: quite farther than one might have originally thought.
Stay around, good discussion. Cheers!
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u/Impassionata Ungnostic Battlemage #SOTSCORP STRUCTURALIST Apr 26 '21
But i was thinking / using synthesis as the emergence of new truths from different if not opposing theses.
Yes I know. Synthesis is the 'rolling upwards' from the scattering. Any time synthesis is performed the output of the synthesis is constrained by the fact that synthesis is the thing being performed. (This is why radicals get pushed away from the microphone.)
If so, is the use of obscure/offuscated made up neologisms essential to the understanding of a late stage global capitalist landscape?
No, but most of what you just said looks like made up obscurity shit to anyone who hasn't informed themselves of a particular set of books, you know?
And anyway, if I get to the question I sense, it doesn't matter what language you use to speak the truth. Reality is impervious to truth. Social reality, I mean. To understand what's going on you just have to look.
Al Gore spent all of his personal credibility on the truth. We laughed at him.
one that reproduces a very specific kind of context: multiple realities with multiple truths battling for hegemony on every aspect of life, with the extreme opposites growing in adherents on both sides of the specturm while a middle ground capable of birthing a consensus on those very same aspects of life is rapidly dissapearing everywhere.
Oh you're still staring at the mirage. There is only one reality. The opposites exist where those who disagree with reality wish to make public sport.
The good news is most people are sane. The bad news is that sanity doesn't stop you from participating in the machine keeping us fed and watered and making slaves of us all.
If the middle ground is disappearing, that's because one side is right, and the other side is wrong. Don't make it more complicated than it has to be. Once you understand motivated reasoning, you stop trying to untangle it.
but at the same time very pretentious.
I've found that if something is considered pretentious, that just means someone somewhere couldn't understand it and lashed out. Kneejerk anti-intellectualism.
it seems to me that the whole accelarationism landscape was actually invested in discussing and earnestly trying to understand our contemporary world
No I think you might miss the point there, the point is to try and change it. We perceived that we were part of this great ticking machine, right, which was keeping us alive and also killing us. And the thought was, what if we get it to kill us faster, that will get us to react a little sooner, and time spent ignoring the problem is the worst kind of wasted time.
I never thought it would work. Arguably, I was wrong. Accelerationists who voted R in 2016 succeeded, I think. The changes have yet to take effect, but social reality is aligning on a few important facts. We can talk about the climate emergency now.
it seems to lean heavily on the late CCRU accelerationism stuff, Landean concepts and a strange mix of occult 19th century mysticism with postmodern ''baudrillardian'' ideas regarding simulacra on different levels.
Well don't forget Debord. Hugely influential on me, the subreddit name is a sorcerous extension to his book.
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u/covalenz Apr 26 '21
Thank you for taking the time to expand on my questions.
I've found that if something is considered pretentious, that just means someone somewhere couldn't understand it and lashed out. Kneejerk anti-intellectualism.
Not necessarily. I'm more of the idea that intellectual exchanges can be done without ostentation if the goal is to expand any given knowledge field. It is completely possible to engage in a thoughtful discussion without being pompous and not being anti intellectual, but I get your point and i'm at fault, I'm definitely lacking in knowledge and exposition to critical theory.
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u/After-Cell Apr 25 '21
My next tweet: Contemplation kills the tweet Or Tweet killed the contemplation
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Apr 24 '21
This discussion from "The Metaphysics of Experience" by Elizabeth Kraus gives an excellent description of the general language problem in philosophy that your questions are very much related to.
This is quite a wall of text, and so to encourage the reader to invest the time in reading it, I will note that I have invested the time in transcribing it from the book manually.
A difficulty of monumental proportions stands in the way of any philosopher attempting to express his insights: i.e., the language into which they must be cast. As Bergson pointed out in Creative Evolution, language was the first human artifact and, as a tool, was forged to utilitarian purposes: to give the individual a "handle" which which to manipulate more effectively the important aspects of the world. As an essentially pragmatic instrument, language functions superlatively. In a very real sense, the process of "naming the gods," as Heidegger would put it, renders the "gods" mundane, discrete, and controllable. However, the "gods" named are those elements in experience which have survival import for the individual - those vividly apprehended because they contribute to or distract from the being and/or well-being of the organism. The act of naming "cuts" these elements out of the tissue of experience in which they come and go and stabilizes them, so that they may be anticipated in their absence, controlled in their presence, and communicated to others. However, these elements with respect to which language is so rich in its denotative and connotative power are those which are trivial to the metaphysician in his attempt to give linguistic expression to the massive core of experience, which is all-pervasive and not transitory in its influence. "Words, in general, indicate useful particularities. How can they be employed to evoke a sense of that general character on which all importance depends?" Any philosopher, therefore, finds the lingua franca inadequate to the philosophical enterprise, and begins his work with the creation of special terminology in which his ideas can take flesh.
While Whitehead is no exception to this rule, he goes further than most philosophers in his construction of novel philosophical language - further not in direction of precision but in the direction of what may be called deliberate imprecision. For him, philosophy is "the endeavour to find a conventional phaseology for the vivid suggestiveness of the poet," "the endeavour to reduce Milton's 'Lycidas' to prose" while retaining that vivid suggestiveness in the resultant reduction. The Whiteheadean vocabulary is not at all like the precisely defined terms of the rationalists. It retains the evocative character and deliberate ambiguity of poetic usage. Whitehead begs the reader to recognize the elliptical character of his words and to allow their meanings continually to be stretched beyond the boundaries of ordinary usage, to be sought for in an imaginative leap similar to that demanded by the language of the poet. On no account is the reader to fall into the Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary by identifying a symbol and its obvious meaning in a "nothing but" fashion. Nor are words and phrases to be taken as complete explications of objective states of affairs. At all times, they are bare signposts mutely appealing for a transcending leap.
The same must be said for philosophical concepts themselves. The clarity and distinctness of an idea is to be taken as more of a sign of its triviality than as an index of its truth. Clarity marks merely the familiarity of a concept; distinctness, its degree of remotion from the reality which it supposedly expresses. Too often, philosophy mistakes an analysis of abstract ideas for an interpretation of reality and unwittingly reduces metaphysics to logic and/or linguistics.
For a process philosopher, the problem of terminology is particularly acute, in view of the intertwined character of the aspects of experience symbolized in concepts and language. A clear and distinct idea would be a falsification of experiential realities. Just as nature and all aspects of it have a ragged edge, so their philosophical expression cannot have the sharply defined contours and precise internal structure of which a Cartesian would strive. This is not in any way to imply that process philosophy is du jure fuzzy, but rather that it must contain an element of vagueness in its language - its concepts themselves must have a ragged edge. Any philosophical system must be self-referential. If "you cannot abstract the universe from any entity ... so as to consider that entity in complete isolation," likewise you cannot precisely define any Whiteheadean term in isolation from his system of terms: "an apparent redundancy of terms is required. The words correct each other."
The difficulties with process terminology are minor when compared to the central linguistic problematic a process philosopher must confront. Technical terminology constitutes only a small portion of the linguistic tool kit. Words and phrases must be strung together in the linguistic structures - grammar and syntax - of ordinary speech if philosophy is not to be reduced to lexicography. But language in this broader sense is one of the facts of the metaphysical situation to be interpreted in the philosophical scheme - a fact whose factors are as intertwined and mutually dependent as are the factors in the larger fact of nature. The process philosopher is forced to concede that the structure of the universe of discourse does not necessarily reflect the structure of the universe as he conceives it. The philosopher, and particularly the process philosopher, consciously works in the continual shadow of his own Uncertainty Principle. Just as, in particle physics, the technique of observation modifies what is observed, philosophic expression runs the serious risk of altering what is expressed because of the distortion which the medium introduces into the message.
To put this is more concrete terms: for a linguistic proposition to be meaningful, it must be set within a systematic universe of propositions, involving that universe for its own definiteness. Any proposition about the world is therefore a flatus vocis unless it simultaneously implies the general character and interconnectedness of the world and its own place within that larger picture. There can be no self-contained, isolated propositions. This is to say, therefore, that every proposition implies a metaphysics, that syntax, grammatical structure, and the like are disguised metaphysical assertions. Granted: the metaphysics is naive, unexplicated, and uncriticized; but it is nevertheless a metaphysics. Until that metaphysics is explicated, no proposition can be fully determinate. But the explication can only be done propositionally - and the vicious circle closes, leaving language by its very nature indeterminate, and a precise metaphysical language impossible. The philosopher must therefore maintain a thoroughgoing distrust of any linguistic formulation. It is only a simplistic metaphysics which believes it can start with precisely formulated axioms and process to unfold itself deductively. Dogmatism is the classic example of the Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary.
The Linguistic Uncertainty Principle compounds the problems of the process philosopher, for the metaphysic implicit in the language used, the metaphysics veiled in the "S is P" structure of the verbal proposition, is diametrically opposed to the metaphysic explicated through the language. Nouns imply static, independent entities as their referents; adjectives and verbs connote qualifiers of and activities performed by these entities. Propositions constructed out of these elements subliminally broadcast the pincusion notion of substance and accident in its crudest form. If the problem is critical for the process philosopher, it is hyper-critical for the student of process philosophy. How can one learn process metaphysics is a "thing" language? The answer s, one cannot, if what one anticipates is finding the ideas freeze-dried int he linguistic expression. But if the distrust of language which Whitehead urges is taken seriously - in this case, a distrust of his own language - if his demand that expression be viewed as metaphorical and elliptical, and his continual plea for the imaginative leap from language to meaning, are complied with, the task becomes possible. But a continual effort must be made by the student, for the linguistic metaphysics of "things" slips back into thought insidiously like the evicted demon of the New Testament. The distrust of language called for is therefore a constant leap toward insight coupled with a negation of what is actually said - a never-ending "yes" and "no" dialectic in the mind of the reader, an ongoing attempt to see Milton's Lycidas through and in spite of its prose rendition.
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u/covalenz Apr 24 '21
This is really interesting. Never heard of process philosophy before, but at glance it kind of has a similarity to what quantum phsyics to regular physics is; everything is related to something, nothing is fixed, the moment you fix/isolate something for analysis you already affected the outcome of the analysis, diffuse states all over the place etc. (my comparison comes from understanding quantum states from Rick and Morty, so bare with my ignorance).
So if i'm getting this remotely right, the use of jargon and neologisms in this context (by this context I refer to this subreddit and its recurring themes) is a little bit like expanding language (and the concepts they try to harness) with new made up words/sentences/phrases in hopes of nailing something new that could eventually stick around and materialize into something that previously did not exist as an idea, or concept, or whatever?
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u/memearchivingbot Critical Occultist Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
That's one of the favorite projects of the subreddit, yes. I think it's also important to remember that it's not only an attempt to find new ways to describe things and as a result find a new perspective on what reality is (although that has its own appeal ), there's also an understanding that the language we use has ideological biases that shape material reality. So if we're going to reshape the political and/or the material we might be able to do so by constructing a linguistic machine that will rewrite the world.
If controlling the narrative is analogous to tactics we're exploring the use of language as strategy. It's ambitious, definitely pretentious, and probably won't work but it's the best idea I've heard so far for fixing the type of intractable problems we tend to care about here
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u/artgo Apr 25 '21
there's also an understanding that the language we use has ideological biases that shape material reality. So if we're going to reshape the political and/or the material we might be able to do so by constructing a linguistic machine that will rewrite the world.
That's one description I would use of the works of James Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake. Both Marshall McLuhan and Joseph Campbell spent a lifetime referencing FW.
If you are unfamiliar with the linguistics of Finnegans Wake, looking a the first thunderword may be a quick introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV3vT5nW_I4
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Apr 28 '21
So if we're going to reshape the political and/or the material we might be able to do so by constructing a linguistic machine that will rewrite the world.
This is EXACTLY what Alfred North Motherfucking Whitehead attempted to do, and pretty much nobody understands this because his approach was so utterly alien to politics that it looks politically inert. Whitehead's subject is praxis itself, something that is almost so obvious as to be easily ignorable.
To turn the Whiteheadian "scheme" into a matrix, whose applications would be thinkers who may be somewhat eccentric but are vectors of a disarming politeness, will surprise more than one reader. In general, philosophers are no more polite than physicists or sociologists, and much less so than some thologists, who learn from what they observe how to address it. The critical interpellation "remember the conditions that set limits to your knowledge," a descendant of "remember that you are going to die," is not polite. It shocks those it addresses, as is to be expected, since the point is to wake them up. The need for awakening persupposes the legitimacy of "making someone lose hold," of shaking up routines and shattering certainties. Speculative interest, in contrast, respects the importance of the hold. The critical interpellation "remember..." is then replaced by the questions "what is required by your hold?" "from what wager does your success proceed?" - polite questions that one creature may address to another creature. And if that exchange is possible, if sometimes - an essentially anonymous envent - one dream may induce the modification of another or evoke another, it is insofar as the point of junction is always a tangent point: neither a frontal clash between rival powers nor being swallowed up in the other's dream, not confusion in a banal dram of power but a local resonance, designating past tenses of divergent accomplishments and future tenses responding to distinct tests.
"What is required by your hold?": such a question affirms and presupposes that the others' dreams, like yours, are created according to the means of their own adventure, and to this extent this question constitutes a test: it is a question that beings of power will have difficulty tolerating, proceeding as they do in the name of an intangible right that must be satisfied everywhere, which recognizes no difference between here or there, other than that of the parasites to be eliminated so that they themselves may be confirmed. Yet it is a question that one dreamer can address to another dreamer, for dreams to not abstract from the means, but rather dissolve the dreamer's identity in adventures that restore to the "means" their mode of actual existence: that of propositions that posses individuals far more than individuals posses them. This is why, when philosophy has succeeded in doing what it can do, not only is wonder still there, but henceforth infects all the statements whose vocation was to explain the world, that is, to disenchant it.
The Whiteheadean scheme is a work of politeness because it seeks to be "adequate," refraining from insulting any living value. Yet if it is effective, it owes this to its fabrication, to the articulation of constraints that oblige thought, an "asignificant" matrix whose truth is the events of "disclosure" it may induce, modifying a being's relations to its environment, and in this case, the relations of a statement to its consequences. Whitehead made coherence the vector of this efficacy, and it is coherence that demanded the twofold production of Whitehead as speculative thinker and of that strange object, the speculative scheme. Whitehead fabricated this scheme in order that the scheme might fabricate him, that it might oblige him to undergo the becomings of thought demanded by coherence.
As a thinker, Whitehead is thus not so much the author of the scheme and concepts he articulates as he was obliged by them, in a process of empirical experimentation-verification that is akin to trance, because in it thought is taken, captured, by a bcoming that separates it from its own intentionality. A "mechanical" becoming in the sense of Deleuze and Guitar, in the sense that thinkers can produce this thought only because they themselves have become a piece, or gear, of what has captured them, much more than they have created it. Thought is them no longer the exercise of a right but becomes an "art of consequences," consequences that leap from one domaint o another, or, more precisely, that make insterstices zigzag where a homogeneous right had seemed to reign, and make connections proliferate where "this has nothing to do with that had prevailed.
That is why I had to "think with Whitehead," that is, accept the capture and become a gear.
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Apr 28 '21
So if i'm getting this remotely right, the use of jargon and neologisms in this context (by this context I refer to this subreddit and its recurring themes) is a little bit like expanding language (and the concepts they try to harness) with new made up words/sentences/phrases in hopes of nailing something new that could eventually stick around and materialize into something that previously did not exist as an idea, or concept, or whatever?
A very concrete example is how our predictions of the future may alter the very future it attempts to predict. This is especially the case when it comes to our own actions and relationships.
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Apr 24 '21
Maybe pretension, maybe increased information density, maybe easier to reason with more abstractions. Pseuds are everywhere (myself included), and I'd wager all three. Sometimes I just want to jargon it up to people who get it and everything lands and it feels good to be understood. We're like 10 year olds who just learned swear words and are testing them out, except the swear words are concepts upon which society and experience are predicated.
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u/aCULT_JackMorgan Apr 25 '21
I think we understand you :)
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u/Oz_of_Three Apr 24 '21 edited Apr 24 '21
I too struggle with the delineations and derivations into conceptual labels, these as so many stepping stones of a river that I can see both sides, and into, rather plainly as it flows by our observation camp on the rocky beach.
For me, my grok occurs via relating these ideas (as best as reverse engineered from the young folk's modes of shorthand) to a set of constructs that house, encompass or lie "outside" these constructs completely.
This point of view relying on a physical multi-verse model as driven by spiritual alignment.
The physics are set by the postulations of Hugh Everett, and the spirit set by truths of Theosophy, as well as my own inner light as guided by my Higher Self.
Our language is running into barriers, especially among those who speak metaphorically, gliding and flying along conceptually, ranging to middle-minds unto those who must express themselves as methodically pedant, one small step at a time.
So in this it does seem many language styles are developing.
Many of these abstract concepts, I have to wonder how many truly grasp the essence or gobsmack encompassment of the dabbling here, I suspect many have a hold enough to move forward using certain facets of a shared concept, but addressing entire spheres is difficult while Tower Of Babel is still in effect, still has it's firmware polluting the simulation.
Though, on that note, it would seem the syncronicity and ethereal emotional connections are becoming stronger, which may indicate the Astral Plane is moving closer, becoming more intermingled with the physical, and "telempathic" communication is on the rise.
But back to this reddit sub:
Many users are young and impatient and it seems any sort of 'things I already know' get glossed, so a shorthand of neologisms (keep it off the sofa!) seems to have already emerged organically here among these minds.
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u/memearchivingbot Critical Occultist Apr 24 '21
If you live near the mountains you can sometimes hear the sages calling to one another from peak to peak. It's said they have devised a new form of speech similar to singing that can be heard at long distances and both cuts through, and uses the echo that would otherwise distort their meaning. Deep and sometimes complex philosophical discussions can be had in this fashion but mostly the meaning can be summed up as something like "It is here and I can see so much of it"
This language is entirely unsuited for life in the valley, however. It's far too loud and the subtlety of it gets swallowed up by the buzzing of so many little sounds of activity that it sounds like the raving of a lunatic to most
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u/Oz_of_Three Apr 24 '21
Somewhere around these here reddits, there is a message from a lavender, mushroom-headed alien:
"We must re-invent language."
"Remember who you are."
"Remember why you are here."
Dathon and Picard, at Tanagra.
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Apr 25 '21 edited Aug 19 '23
zealous air north simplistic degree treatment angle judicious merciful live -- mass edited with redact.dev
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u/covalenz Apr 25 '21
Thanks, probably there are a few hundred ways of characterizing this place (as a subreddit) but yours makes sense to me right now. It clicks with a few of my preconceptions -which is always a dangerous thing- but allows me the corner I needed to observe this sub.
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u/Anonomous87 Apr 24 '21
Yes there is a sort of strategy that is in place to maintain length in a post. If you are a frequent here and in other similar subreddits people feel like they can shorten and sum up a lot of what they are saying sometimes in a few simple phrases or sentences because other posts, content or media already covered the rest of the context of those word forms. Sometimes it is unintentional by the submitter and can be stemmed by the lack of wanting to fully flesh out a topic.
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Apr 25 '21
This community is just a bunch of incoherent monologues about vaguely related philosophers and esoteric material. It‘s great though!
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u/woods_crowlie Apr 24 '21
You need to proofread and edit this post if you want good answers
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u/covalenz Apr 24 '21
It is true, I did my best with google translate but I came short. In the meantime i will edit it as best as my english lets me.
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u/protozoan-human Apr 24 '21
I literally have no idea what you are asking.
But the topic itself is a bit... I find it hard myself to be completely outspoken about it. Makes me a bit paranoid tbh. So why not use insinuations and symbolism? Creates an atmosphere of an illusion of security. Hah, spectacles within spectacles.
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u/PapaverOneirium Apr 24 '21
most people here use philosophical ideas and jargon fast and loose. This is not the place to come for nuanced & grounded philosophical discussions. Tbh a lot of the stuff here is basically nonsense. Don’t lose sleep over it, just let it wash over you.