When in the course of human events it becomes necessary: spelling disaster.
“It is pointless to argue that the Opposition between the One and the Multiple is ‘static,’ and counter this claim with an assertion of multiplicities “supposed to nourish the unimaginable ‘wealth’ of the movement of thought, the experience of immanence, the quality of the virtual, or the infinite speed of intuition…I consider this vitalist terrorism.” Deleuze, as quoted in Badiou’s The Clamor of Being.
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Any advice the writer may give the reader about writing should be submitted in writing before hand. Yet, from time to time, the writer may wish to purge herself of frivolous and constipated ideas, to stake in the starkest terms the bare notions of an identifying set of beliefs. To put aside the partisan colors of the players in the game, for all belief seems compromised to a partisan, whose irony always wants a sharp and committed perspective.
All intellectuals are public intellectuals. Just recently, the Brooklyn based literary journal N + 1 published an article considering the difference between professional, or New York, writers and the multitude of writers who earn their primary income as an M.F.A professor. This thin homely of professor and professional would seem to name the difference between demographics, class, talent, and commodity production. Contemporary business thinking terms this difference creativity, enterprise, innovation, and most importantly, leadership.
I have always assumed that meaning is out there and it was my responsibility to simply reflect and advocate for the reality I find. Others believe that one must make meaning for themselves by helping others. Still others believe that they give meaning to others by the meaning they create in their work.[1] It is the capacity to understand and accept this last type of dialectical transformation that the true Hegelian is marked off from his often diligent and scholarly, but still profoundly misguided interpreter, who still yearns after the shadowy spectacular climax, the Absolute coming down in a japanese film machine accompanied by a flock of doves, when a simple arrest and return to utter ordinariness is in place. Finite existence in the here and now, with every limitation of quality and circumstance, is, Hegel teaches, when rightly regarded and accepted, identical with the infinite existence which is everywhere and always. To live in Main Street is, if one lives in the right spirit, to inhabit the Holy City, a view that will be deeply shocking to many of Hegel’s transcendental interpreters. The content of the Absolute Idea, the goal of the dialectic is simply the dialectic itself, where the end of the journey is simply seen to be the journey itself, and the method that has been followed on that journey. The astringent realism of Hegel’s final solution is, however, precisely what renders it unacceptable to many who find flights of transcendental otherworldliness nothing but a nauseous opiate.
Why then begin with false and not at once with the true? Truth, to deserve its name, must authenticate its own truth. We cannot begin with the truth, because the truth, when it forms the beginning, must rest on mere assertion. That the truth is only realized in the form of system, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea, which represents the Absolute as Spirit. These words, Absolute and Spirit, are the grounding features of Hegelian philosophy. Spirit is the truth, and the sole truth of the Spirit is freedom. A philosophy of freedom, where each human effort to discern the work of reason in all the processes of reality—in the animate and inanimate, in the motions of atoms and stars, and in the labors and contests of men and nations—is at the same time a phase or moment of an eternal self-activity through which Spirit wins its independence from every form of externality by sensing, willing, and finally thinking this manifold otherness into an organic totality, in which the whole alone is true, and the consciousness of this absolute—freedom.
Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know itself, to make itself objective to itself, and finally unite itself to itself: it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to itself. Only in this manner does Spirit attain its freedom, for that is free which is not connected with or dependent on another.
Spirit, again, is the truth, and the truth is the whole, but this whole is only the process of Spirit’s own development, realized in the world and comprehended as thought. The beginning of any thought is a journey. A beginning, Hegel will say, in the sense of something primary and underived, not only makes an assumption but is an assumption, and its fate is to be abolished as such. Any proper, self-respecting beginning, he holds, suffers this fate at its own hands, its negation being the result of an immanent dialectic that abhors the vacuous abstraction of immediacy and converts its promise into a performance. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes:
A so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it is true is yet nonetheless false just because and insofar as it is merely a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle. It is for that reason easily refuted. The refutation consists in bringing out its defective character; and it is defective because it is merely the universal, merely a principle, the beginning. If the refutation is complete and thorough[2], it is derived and developed from the nature of the principle itself, and not from without. The really positive working out of the beginning is at the same time just as much the very reverse, it is a negative attitude towards the principle we start from, negative, that is to say, of its one-sided form, which consists in being primarily immediate, a mere purpose. It may there fore be regarded as a refutation of what constitutes the basis of the system: but more correctly it should be looked at as a demonstration that the basis or principle of the system is in point of fact merely its beginning.
The demand for a beginning is the work of thought, the universal, and the search for it reason’s effort to find in the chaos and contingency of ‘everything’ the embodiment of its own identity, dispersed and thus submerged there in the form of externality, otherness. [3]The object of philosophy is Truth and in the pursuit of this series of objects philosophy treats the finite worlds of Nature and the human mind, with their relation to each other and to their truth in being. Unlike Science, philosophy cannot rest the existence of its objects on the natural admissions of consciousness, nor can it assume that its method of cognition, either for starting or for continuing, is ever certain or accepted. Some acquaintance of its objects, therefore, philosophy may and even must presume. That and a certain interest, as well. However, philosophy is faithful to a kind of buzzing, blooming confusion: that in point of time the mind makes general images of objects, long before it makes notions of them, and that it is only through these mental images, and by recourse to them, that the thinking mind rises to know and comprehend thinkingly.
But with the rise of this thinking study of things, it soon becomes evident that thought will be satisfied with nothing short of showing the necessity of its facts, of demonstrating the existence of its objects, as well as their nature and qualities. Our original acquaintance with them is discovered to be inadequate. We can assume nothing, and assert nothing dogmatically; nor can we accept the assertions and assumptions of others. And yet we must make a beginning: and a beginning, as primary and underived, makes an assumption, or rather is an assumption. It seems as if it were impossible to make a beginning at all.
The content of our consciousness, what it is taken up by, is what constitutes the qualitative character of our feelings, perceptions, fancies, and ideas; of our aims and duties, thoughts and notions. As such, feeling and perception are the forms assumed by these contents. The contents remain one and the same, whether they are felt, seen, represented, or willed. Whether they are merely thought without feeling, or felt without ‘reflective’ thought. In any one of these forms, however the pigment and coloration, the contents confront consciousness as its object. Yet, as objects of consciousness, the modes of the several forms are allied to their contextual content, and consequently, each form appears to give rise to a special object, a kind of singular object seemingly exempted from its status as a general object of consciousness. Thus, what is the same at bottom may look like a different sort of fact altogether.
The several modes of feelings, perceptions, desire, and will—insofar as we are aware of them—are in general called ideas (mental representations). Roughly, philosophy puts thoughts, categories, and adequate notions in the place of the generalized images commonly called ideas. Mental impressions such as these may be regarded as the metaphors of thoughts and notions. But to have these figurate conceptions—to be confronted with ideas—does not imply that their intellectual significance is appreciated, or whether their correspondence to thoughts and rational notions could be grasped. Conversely, it is one thing to have thoughts and intelligent notions, and another to know what impressions, perceptions, and feelings correspond to them. In our ordinary state of mind, the thoughts are clothed upon and made one with the sensuous or spiritual material of the hour. In reflection and general reasoning—the categories of communcation and acting—we introduce a distilled blend of thoughts into feelings, percepts, and mental images.
There is a common complaint that philosophy is not enjoyably intelligible, and therefore occluded by the pragmatic utility of everyday media. The difficulty lies in a certain habitual incapacity for abstract thinking; an atrophication of the ability to get hold of pure thoughts and move about in them. In many ways, philosophy is unintelligible because it is perceived as too slow. The resonance of an idea stems from a certain affect of speed and appreciation, and there is an impatient wish to have a mental image of that which is in the mind as a thought or notion. When people are asked to apprehend some notion, they often complain that they do not what they have to think. What this reveals is a hankering after an image with which we are already familiar. Yet, with a notion, there is nothing further to be thought than the notion itself. And denied the use of its familiar ideas, the mind feels its secure property fall away, and when
transported into the region of pure thought, cannot tell where in the world it is.
When a motherfucker steps out his place
And gets slapped in his motherfuckin face
Just because the motherfucker tried to base
The G.O.D., the G.O.D.
And while I see his whole click passes by
Motherfuckers think they qualify
And for those niggaz want to try
The G.O.D., the G.O.D.
I'm not caught up in politics
I'm no black activist on a so-called scholar's dick
I come through with the Wu and drop math
And versatile freestyles bombs and phonographs
and deliver, all things and other in weight
searched to death, on how living things relate
Cause at a young age, I was molded in a religion I relied on
and got caught up in superstition
Scared to split pole, duck black cats
Once in a while, threw salt over my back
But with knowledge of self from off the shelf
Made things seemed complicated now small like elves
So turn off the lights light a candle, and have a seance
Pull the lid off the Dean Martin scandal
Witches warlocks spooks and holy ghosts
RZA lets defraud the host
We were on the same ship when the slaves were checked
I had to pull your card you was on the top deck
So I plotted my escape, I saw the Thin Line Between Love and Hate
And fast from the hog on the plate
I suffered brutal pains, from whips and chains
Punishments that were set to wash the brain
So look listen observe and also respect this jewel
drawed up, di-tect and reflect this
light I shine, that cause my power to be find
through the truth, which manifest through eternal minds
Purified gases and masses the same elements
that helped spark civilization classes
I see brothers quote math plus degrees
Look at professor ass niggaz can't feed they own seeds
[1] We are talking about commodities and value, but in a speculative way. We are attempting to understand not only what the meaning of these terms may be, but also the way we understand these terms through the conviction and voice of daily events, or more precisely, being in the world. For Spinoza, “thought and appetite are different aspects of the human conatus, that endeavor to persist in its own being.” The self-actualizing process of Substance multiplies and differentiates itself among all existence, becoming an internally differentiated monistic principle. Yet, for Hegel, despite its status as a precedent of metaphysical monism ‘capable of internal differentiation,’ Substance is over-determined because it fails to come to terms with the dynamic interplay of the human subject (assurance of a metaphysical place). As Warren Marx explains, for Spinoza, substance was the absolute. But, at the onset of the new, Spirit made explicit in idealist philosophy since Kant, philosophy began to see the Absolute, no longer in substance, but in the power of self-consciousness, in the subject. In a sense we have the transference of substance into subject. Deleuze was first to properly grasp that a contemporary metaphysics must consist in a theory of multiplicities and an embrace of singularities…He saw that only be positing the univocity of being can we have done with the perennially religious nature of the interpretation of meaning. He clearly articulated the conviction that the truth of univocal being can only be grasped by thinking its evental advent.
This vitalism presupposes a norm that has not been examined and established, namely that movement, life, time, affirmation, difference are superior to the conceptual immobilities of space, negation, and identity. In these vitalist ‘certainties,’ Badiou writes, there is “a kind of speculative demagogy whose strength lies in addressing itself to each and everyone’s animal disquiet, to our confused desires, to everything that makes.
[2] Fareed Zakiria and Bill O’Reilly: the fear of math; the math of fear. Black Swan; Two Black Swans; Too many sugar plums and a womanly shape, the display of bodies as ballet; the media corporations said that netflix will be dead, and it shall be done: their idea will have been truth.
[3] Something on the objet a
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