Neo-Con Times are Non-Sociological Times

This one is brute force.

Those who cut their eye-teeth on the likes of Austrian economics ten or fifteen years back have moved far beyond the analytical limits of the utilitarian framework and the facile solution to every social problem in terms of getting Big Government off our backs and leaving it to Smith’s invisible hand to automatically harmonize the private interests of individuals with the policy interests of the State and forge organic solidarities within and between Nations through the operation of the law of comparative advantage, while the State prudently limits itself to enforcing contracts and seeing to the military defense of the Nation. They are trying to perceive those aspects of life that lie outside the field of vision of the force-economics binocular- namely, Man’s specifically and irreducibly social being.  They have come to question the view of individuals as homogeneous, interchangeable, and isolate utility-maximizing machines endowed with rights derived from a fictive “state of Nature” in which all social relations are abstracted away as a methodological first principle, held to take shape only posterior to a putative “social contract” that binds the hitherto asocial individuals together, and only through the media of self-interested economic exchange and common subjection to the coercive power of positive law. In their rebellion against the poverty of these economic and juridical abstractions, they strive to piece together the concrete existence of the individual as a social animal compelled by its very Nature, and not just rewards and punishments, to seek out and affiliate with others….

Let’s contrast this inherently sociological current in politics to its nemesis. The latter strives to efface every aforementioned dimension of social belonging and personal identity and lump every individual into one big boundless mass, differentiated only in terms of technical specialization in the capitalist production process and by a proliferation of sexual and other “identities” shorn of their social substance and freely adopted and then discarded at will by consumers as though so many shifting vagaries of fashion. The social ties of shared descent, territory, memory, language, tradition, religion, and rule are progressively delegitimized by a relentless campaign of propaganda, homogenizing consumerist monoculture, and not least of all, coercive government action including military conquest (“regime change”). Meanwhile, asabiyyah is derided as so much ridiculously obsolete superstition, dull-witted provincialism, and mental pathology that stunts and “oppresses” the individual. Each particular society is progressively stripped of its boundary-maintaining capacity and slurred into the others- and since only particular societies exist, this means that society itself is becoming an endangered species.

Advertisement

Simultaneity

Let us introduce the concept of space using the notion of reflexive action (or reflex action) between two things. Intuitively, a thing x acts on another thing y if the presence of x disturbs the history of y. Events in the real world seem to happen in such a way that it takes some time for the action of x to propagate up to y. This fact can be used to construct a relational theory of space à la Leibniz, that is, by taking space as a set of equitemporal things. It is necessary then to define the relation of simultaneity between states of things.

Let x and y be two things with histories h(x_τ) and h(y_τ), respectively, and let us suppose that the action of x on y starts at τ_x⁰. The history of y will be modified starting from τ_y⁰. The proper times are still not related but we can introduce the reflex action to define the notion of simultaneity. The action of y on x, started at τ_y⁰, will modify x from τ_x¹ on. The relation “the action of x on y is reflected to x” is the reflex action. Historically, Galileo introduced the reflection of a light pulse on a mirror to measure the speed of light. With this relation we will define the concept of simultaneity of events that happen on different basic things.

Besides we have a second important fact: observation and experiment suggest that gravitation, whose source is energy, is a universal interaction, carried by the gravitational field.

Let us now state the above hypothesis axiomatically.

Axiom 1 (Universal interaction): Any pair of basic things interact. This extremely strong axiom states not only that there exist no completely isolated things but that all things are interconnected.

This universal interconnection of things should not be confused with “universal interconnection” claimed by several mystical schools. The present interconnection is possible only through physical agents, with no mystical content. It is possible to model two noninteracting things in Minkowski space assuming they are accelerated during an infinite proper time. It is easy to see that an infinite energy is necessary to keep a constant acceleration, so the model does not represent real things, with limited energy supply.

Now consider the time interval (τ_x¹ − τ_x⁰). Special Relativity suggests that it is nonzero, since any action propagates with a finite speed. We then state

Axiom 2 (Finite speed axiom): Given two different and separated basic things x and y, such as in the above figure, there exists a minimum positive bound for the interval (τ_x¹ − τ_x⁰) defined by the reflex action.

Now we can define Simultaneity as τ_y⁰ is simultaneous with τ_x^1/2 =_Df (1/2)(τ_x¹ + τ_x⁰)

The local times on x and y can be synchronized by the simultaneity relation. However, as we know from General Relativity, the simultaneity relation is transitive only in special reference frames called synchronous, thus prompting us to include the following axiom:

Axiom 3 (Synchronizability): Given a set of separated basic things {x_i} there is an assignment of proper times τ_i such that the relation of simultaneity is transitive.

With this axiom, the simultaneity relation is an equivalence relation. Now we can define a first approximation to physical space, which is the ontic space as the equivalence class of states defined by the relation of simultaneity on the set of things is the ontic space E_O.

The notion of simultaneity allows the analysis of the notion of clock. A thing y ∈ Θ is a clock for the thing x if there exists an injective function ψ : S_L(y) → S_L(x), such that τ < τ′ ⇒ ψ(τ) < ψ(τ′). i.e.: the proper time of the clock grows in the same way as the time of things. The name Universal time applies to the proper time of a reference thing that is also a clock. From this we see that “universal time” is frame dependent in agreement with the results of Special Relativity.

Reza Negarestani’s Ontology as Science of Cruelty and Deleuzean Excavation of the Architectonic. Thought of the Day 40.0

The problem of the principle of reason/ground is architectonic. As such it is the great theme of modern philosophy: how and where to begin? The two classical answers are provided by romanticism and enlightenment thinking. If there is a romantic side to Heidegger, as Deleuze says, then Meillassoux inherits and continues a long-standing tradition of enlightenment. Whereas the first always looks for a foundation or ground, even if it turns out be an abyss, the critical reason of the latter rabidly dismantles all grounds. Alternatively, Deleuze calls for a third answer which he calls modernism or constructivism and which always begins by the milieu (par le milieu). Instead of rising out of first principles like a tree from its roots, his metaphysics proliferates like a rhizome, never straying far from the events at the surface in a groping experimentation with the conditions of real experience. For Deleuze, the milieu is not the solid ground on which we stand, but neither is it an abyss or a void. Rather it is the fluctuating ground in which we must learn to swim. It is the element of the problematic as such, an element that matters and calls for an ethics of life. To think by the milieu means to think both without reference to a fixed ground yet also without separating thought from the forces it requires to exist. Whereas Meillassoux reinstalls the Kantian tribunal of reason and the generality of its judgments, Deleuze always emphasizes his own conditions of enunciation, i.e. the matters of concern that enable him to learn. While the anti-correlationist position is one of right, Deleuze’s own position is always one of fact.

A more nuanced criticism of Deleuze than that of Meillassoux, i.e. one that includes the ethical or practical import of his Principle of Sufficient Reason, is put forward by Reza Negarestani, who agrees with Deleuze that ontology is the science of cruelty whilst adding that the univocity of being should be abandoned in favor of a universal void on which any intensive course of unilateral distinction remains dependent (equivocal inexistence): Philosophy of cruelty explains ontological determinations in terms of sadistic (imperative) and masochistic (contractual) bondages to that which does not belong to being, i.e., the problematic chains to the void. In order for the ethics of justice to confront the problems and conditions associated with ontological determinations ourselves and our world it must tread through such problematical fields which are equivocally determined by the void and the ontological medium. The philosophy of cruelty, in this sense, inaugurates the opportunities of grounding ethics on a new definition of being unshackled from the priority of its ontological necessity and mobilized by its chains to that which is exterior to it – the universal.