This week I was briefly back in Manchester. I stopped off in Altrincham to get some books. This was my haul for the past fortnight.
This week I read Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition.
Lyotard was a French philosopher. Originally aligned with Marxism, he later unhitched himself from it due to its hyper-rigidity, and its inability to adequately describe the situation at hand.
The book seeks to outline the new condition of Western society. Its general thrust was this.
Western societies have entered a postindustrial era. Industry, manufacturing, and manual work were once the cardinal characteristics of ‘modernity’. When a society has moved past these things, or when it is seemingly in the process of doing so, its condition can be called postmodernity. Owing to this change in economic make-up, culture adapts and adjusts with it. What we know and what we knew alters alongside culture. Knowledge expands in some ways, and contracts in others.
Scientific knowledge and technology has brought about this change. The second half of the twentieth century exhibited a tendency whereby most fields of research became concerned with language. The Second World War and its aftermath had called for global communications technology, for telematics, for long-distance transmission of computerised information. New technology, from the TV to mass media to the computer, from ARPANET to the internet, gave rise to the computerised society – a ‘man-computer symbiosis’, as Licklider put it. Mass bureaucracies, now reliant on information tech, required new ways of processing and storing information. New programming languages were born. Genetics, the mapping of the Human Genome, and the burgeoning fields of health tech that it spawned all called for research into DNA, into individual biomarkers, into the language that underwrites the human organism. Instant-communications tech was rolled out to everyone on the planet in the form of social media. Relationships were digitised. Even money was digitised. Coding and cryptography proliferated, leading to the blockchain technology that is at the base of cryptocurrencies. Even more recently, advances in AI, generative text and language processing, such as Chat-GPT, have spread like wildfire across the world in a matter of mere weeks.
Such changes, based on evolving conceptions of language, have had an impact on knowledge: how it is formed, how it develops, how it is transmitted, how it is received. Machines to transmit information have been miniaturised and commercialised. Everyone now holds a powerful computer in the palm of their hand, in which knowledge is at their immediate fingertips. It has altered the way we speak, the way we interact, the way knowledge permeates the social sphere.
Knowledge has been mercantilised. It became a commodity to be traded, it is produced in order to be sold, it no longer circulates merely for its own sake. Units of knowledge are exchanged for a price. Knowledge has become the principle force of production, dethroning capital, transforming power dynamics, installing ‘the information economy’ as the new global operating system. The multinational corporation, transcending state boundaries, linking the world into a tangled global network, has propagated this system across the earth.
With the mass availability of knowledge came a mass multiplication of differing modes and methods of interpreting it. No more could there be a single metanarrative. No longer could an overarching account be given, no holistic story could be told, no master-narrative could act as the verbal cement and regulatory mechanism, holding a group, a clan, or a nation in balance. The crisis of the postmodern age, as postmodernists like Lyotard saw it, is the legitimation of knowledge. Who decides what should be known, and what must remain unknown?
Millenia ago, Plato sought to solve this same problem by combining the knower and the legislator in one. His formula for upright governance was the Philosopher King. But in an age of mass information, much of it meagre, flimsy, half-formed, distorted or just plain wrong, where a million warring narratives accumulate and each is vying for pole position – the inevitable outcome is a crisis of authority, the slow collapse of shared values, the unravelling of common symbols and meaning structures, and an eventual submersion into a chaos of ‘misinformation.’
Some suggest that the path forward is ‘to follow the science.’ Science, for them, has become the substitute for the Philosopher King. But science was never the totality of knowledge. It always existed alongside, whether in conflict or at ease with, various forms of narrative knowledge: religion, ideology, storytelling, traditions, customs, and so on. At the same time, science was driven by its own justifications, its own narratives, namely: that its progress would invariably lead to the ‘liberation’ of humanity, and that a unity of all knowledge, a ‘theory of everything’, could be formulated.
Science itself is not the legislator of knowledge; it does not decide what knowledge and information proliferates among peoples; it does not hand down ordained commands as to its use or status as a norm. The fact that so many today believe, or are at least willing to pretend, that men are or can become women, is a simple demonstration of that.
The legitimation crisis resides in the hands of those who hold the reins of power, those who manage the flow of information. They decide what knowledge is ‘valid’ (academia), and they control the communications technology that broadcast ‘spectacles’ of propaganda to the public (the mass media). The narrative knowledge they subscribe to and propound is sometimes in direct contradiction with scientific knowledge as it stands. Science is subordinate to the interests of narrative knowledge, and in many ways has become more subservient, more reliant on the state than ever before. It is this relationship between knowledge and power, with power deciding what ought to be known, and what should remain unknown, that has been amped up to a level of intense rancour in the so-called ‘postmodern age.’
Lyotard uses this hypothesis as the basis for his social analysis. I will be publishing a full piece on this book within the next few weeks.
Next.
In an early scene of The Matrix, Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. the computer hacker Neo, snatches a book from his shelf: it is Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. The book is hollowed out. Inside, he keeps floppy discs containing hacking tools.
The choice of Baudrillard's book for the film was apt, since its core premise is that ‘postmodern’ society has created a world in which everything is mediated, warped by advertising, packaged as a spectacle and ensconced in layers of simulation. That the book depicted in the film is a cover, a disguise for something else (a storage folder for illicit objects, which themselves contain programs intended to deceive – simulacrum stacked on top of simulacrum) is a perfect reflection of Baudrillard’s premise.
In the last few years, the film’s writers and directors, the Wachowski brothers, both came out as ‘trans’ – what are the odds of that? Since they supposedly became the Wachowski ‘sisters’, the film has been retconned as an analogy for transgenderism. Whilst the Wachowskis and a million other men simulate ‘womanhood’, Baudrillard noted:
The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation… in a bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely realised no longer through destruction, but through simulation and deterrence… from the phantasm of the myth and the stage… it has passed into the transparent, falsely transparent, operation of things.
This quote is relevant to ‘gender dysphoria’:
Simulating is not pretending: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms.” (Littre)
Relevant to digital transgenderism, where an anime avatar and she/her in the bio magically transforms a male into a female:
By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials – worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra.
Relevant to Wokeism:
All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on “consciousness raising,” indeed a “raising of the unconscious” of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.
I will be writing about the book on my piece to do with Postmodernism.
I bought the first volume of Dikötter’s trilogy.
It covers the years 1945-1957, in which the Communist Party gained and solidified power in China. I wrote about the third volume in the trilogy, on the Cultural Revolution, here (scroll down to find it).
I also bought Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down, another hefty tome on the Cultural Revolution, this time from a Chinese, insider’s perspective.
I finally managed to get hold of a second-hand copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty.
I read somewhere a long while back that this was the book Thatcher removed from her handbag and slammed on the table of a policy meeting sometime in the 80s, declaring ‘This is what we believe!’ Not sure if it’s true.
Since the publication of The Road to Serfdom in the 40s, Hayek had a cult reputation amongst those who called themselves ‘conservatives’. His potent attacks on the collectivist instinct, on socialist central planning, and on the disasters befalling the communist states had moulded many young political minds. Some, like Thatcher and Reagan, would rise to prominence in the 80s.
The Constitution of Liberty was published in 1960 but didn’t achieve real currency until the late 70s. In the postscript, Hayek outlines why he is not a conservative. It is this argument, this outlook of his, that came to define the transformation of Western ‘conservative’ parties into what the left later started to call ‘neoliberal.’
Hayek starts by noting ‘the confused condition’ in which words like ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, and ‘socialist’ circulate in the West. This confusion is still with us.
They are usually represented as different positions on a line, with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading.
In Europe, from the French Revolution onwards, a conservative was someone who traditionally aligned themselves with the old feudal order, the Ancien Régime. This type of conservatism, embodied by writers like Joseph de Maistre or Louis de Bonald, was an attempt to apply the brakes on violent breakneck change. It was ‘probably necessary’, Hayek states. Those who hitch their colours to ‘progressive’ or ‘revolutionary’ causes, historically, have had a great tendency to kill, murder, purge, and execute people en masse so soon as their doctrine holds the whip. The French found this out, as did the Russians and Chinese in the twentieth century. Opposition to such drastic, breakneck changes are ‘legitimate’, otherwise you end up with the Great Terror.
In America, allegiance to this old European order had been largely unavailable, since the very foundation of the United States was built on the principles of liberalism itself. The European type of conservatism was, and still is, alien to America. A ‘conservative’ in America, nowadays, is someone who holds to the Constitution, to the Declaration of Independence, to the bourgeois Enlightenment liberal value-system and the institutions which cement it. These things were, in a very real sense, the radical ‘leftism’ of their age.
After the second world war, many observers identified the direction in which Western societies seemed to be headed. It was depicted as a move towards ‘socialism’. Some, with a clearer perspective on things, saw that it was some sort of new formulation, a mishmash of capitalism and socialism, a ‘Third Way’, the type of composite ideology and economy that James Burnham called ‘managerialism’ in the 40s, or the sort of ‘postmodernism’ which I wrote about above. ‘Liberals’ had aligned themselves with it, as they believed that the right path must lie somewhere between the extremes.
Hayek draws up the psychological distinctions between conservatives and liberals:
One of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead.
He continues:
There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed strong. But the conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension…
I note the word ‘faith’.
Although I would agree that this general conception of conservative and liberal psychology is accurate, the concepts of left and right have been distorted and transmogrified, especially so in the last few years, since The Crash.
Today, there are ‘rightists’ who speak about ‘deconstructing the administrative state’, who write tracts on the superstructure of ‘the regime’, and who, in their rhetoric and general tenor, ironically sound a lot like Leninists or Trotskyists. Some of them embrace the idea of ‘accelerationism’, in which the ‘spontaneous forces of adjustment’ ought not merely be left to unravel, but should actively be encouraged to speed up, so that the whole system is forced to change so swiftly that it thus collapses in a flurry of chaos and contradiction, opening the way for something else to be built.
Meanwhile, that which calls itself ‘the left’ today is almost completely aligned with established power: its messaging is pumped out by mass corporations, it finds large parts of its philosophy fully funded and bolstered by capital, a great array of its policies and programs are lauded by almost every major institution, and even intelligence agencies use its rhetoric as a marketing tool.
What happened?
I will attempt to answer this in future, but let me hear your views.
I found Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed in a charity shop.
This was published in 1936, a few months before Stalin’s show trials began, where high-ranking communist party leaders were purged and executed. A vast quagmire of parasitic bureaucracy had arisen in the USSR, and the tentacles of the Comintern leviathan had snuck into every nook of Russian life. Trotsky believed the USSR was recoverable, that it could be saved from Stalin, that the Moscow bureaucracy would be overthrown, and that it was his and his comrades’ task to ensure it was so.
As for novels, I started reading Yukio Mishima’s Beautiful Star.
I’ve been slowly working my way through his books. I briefly mentioned some of the ones I’ve read here and here (scroll down on both). This one is different. He purportedly viewed this as his masterpiece. It has only recently been translated into English.
The opening chapter is quite strange. A Japanese family set out in the dead of night to climb Mt. Rakan nearby the city of Hannō. They clamber to the heights, and sit about in the chill of night, staring at the sky, waiting for the arrival of UFOs. The family believe they are to be visited this night by their extraterrestrial relatives.
It began with the father’s obsession. One day he happened upon a book about flying saucers, and over the next few months began eating up everything he could get his hands on with regards the topic. He awoke one night, half-dazed, and felt himself called outside by a curious urge, which ushered him to an abandoned industrial estate. There, he claims to have witnessed a floating circular orb, emitting some sort of energy field. It darted off into the night sky, emitting a trail of green haze.
From this night onwards, the father came to believe that he had been visited by his relatives from Mars. They had gifted him some sort of gnostic knowledge about how he was destined to bring absolute peace to the earth. He tells his family. At first they ridicule him and laugh it off. But one by one, they all experience something similar: an event in which they each come to believe they’ve been visited by their otherworldly relatives.
The mother receives a visit from Jupiter, the son from Mercury, and the daughter, who at first was raucous with laughter at the preposterous suggestion her family were imbued with the spirit of aliens, is the last to be called in on by her compatriots from the planet Venus.
The four of them await the arrival of the aliens atop the mountain.
I haven’t read much further than this but the peculiar premise is quite engrossing.
I got this compendium for 99p. It was edited by Stephen Hawking, but features the key papers from Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.
The Scientologists used to have their lackeys out on high streets, inviting passersby into their local outlet for auditing exams, in which the marks would be hooked up to some stupid little gizmo called an E-meter, and their electrodermal activity would be monitored in relation to certain personal questions. They would be told they’re ‘stressed’, need a copy of Dianetics, and ought to commit part of their salary to a thought-reform/auditing program courtesy of the Church of Scientology. I sometimes wonder if anyone audited in this manner has ever been told, “No, you’re not stressed, you’re completely fine, you don’t need our help, be on your way.”
The Woke Cult basically use tracts like the book above as their auditing operations. It’s practically an indoctrination manual aimed at white people, in which the author delivers a week-by-week, day-by-day ‘course’ where a white person, like the Scientologist, will eventually ‘go clear’. They will come to recognise how they uphold the invisible social codes of ‘whiteness’. They will learn that they need to ‘do the work’ to understand how ‘white privilege’ pervades their every social instinct, how ‘white supremacy’ is the modus operandi of Western society, and how to even question or mock this unadulterated gibberish is a surefire sign they are afflicted with ‘white fragility.’ It includes all sorts of reflective journalling prompts where one is obliged to reminisce on what a racist bigot they’ve been all their life. If you’re weak-willed and eager to be guilt-tripped by the warblings of a neoracial cult leader, then this book will suit you.
I bought McCarthy’s screenplay The Counsellor. Haven’t seen the film. Have you?
Last summer I visited the island of Elba, off the coast of Italy.
I’ll be publishing a travel piece on this in a few weeks.
Napoleon was exiled to Elba on April 11, 1814, after he abdicated his role as Emperor of France. The villas and palaces he stayed in or had built are preserved on the island. I saw one of them. In 1815, he returned to Paris, reclaimed his title, but suffered final defeat at the battle of Waterloo.
He was born on the island of Corsica. I found the book below in a charity shop for 99p, and have wanted to visit for some time, so may get around to it this summer.
Let me know what books you’ve been reading.
I recently read two small books from Guy Debord, & Raoul Vaneigem, of the Situationist International and it's interesting to plot the links between them and between them and Baudrillard's work, I think Society of the Spectacle was quite pivotal, quietly, and although leaning on Marx perhaps gave some inspiration to a more consumption-than-production orientated Baudrillard [art/language, spectacle/simulation]. Simulacra was an excellent yet dense read.
'The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation between people mediated by images'
Debord/Baudrillard are a bit like Stirner/Nietzsche in some ways.
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Corsica is excellent and well worth a trip, I was over there for 5 years and loved every minute. Some of the best mountain walking in Europe [GR20], accessible but high mountains and glorious beaches. If you're on Napoleon's trail then visit Calvi's citadel, enjoy.
You will recall that The Matrix was received as gnostic spirituality at first, before it was reinterpreted as gnostic gender spirituality.