12.20.20

Notes on the 12.2.20 OPR Interview with Cornel West:

Decay and decline? Civic virtue, moral character of the citizens, spiritual decrepitude…

If Civilization is the excrement of the lingual state, the fixity of the State and the strength of its institutional pillars, is then the capacity to sustain the object—the objective perspective.

Is Empire over? Has the internet rendered the empire into pluralistic factions? I think not—quite the opposite. The threat of fascism is directly related to the capacity for censorship, and the invisible cloak of power that is the taboo. Algorithmic language is a totalitarian language. It does not consist of dialogues, but only of causative determinations. Algorithmic language is a superposition of two objective perspectives—0 and 1—there is no metaphor or poetry possible.

This is to say that algorithmic language is to written language what written language was to oral tradition. The rending of the Voice from the Word is the terrifying advancement. The object rather than the subject becomes even more dominant as the measure of reality, as the paradigm of information has become dominant and unquestioned. The State is the collective divestment of the creative will (the imperative of responsibility), which is the collective desire for a state and the capacity to sustain that illusion of object-hood. So then, algorithmic language has the self-enclosing objective structure to sustain an ultra-State.

We can already see the corporate silicone kingpins, such as Instagram, able to wield near total autonomy in censoring people within the veil of its corporate fiefdom, but also in its privy to algorithmic language. State, institution, corporation, and citizen all seem to be tacitly subscribing to fascism. The American Project, which then engorged into the American Empire, is justified by Freedom above all other idealogical concepts. The Internet was also envisioned as an escape from the State. We dislocate the concept from the body, the word from the voice, and the irony is the fate of doing something for the sake of itself (which is engorgement without moderation, consumption without justice). The freedom of information is a grand double-blind stasis, in which anything we say does not matter because for every object of our attention (the 1) there already exists an objection to our negligence (the 0).

The problem is what is the town square—where are the commons—and how did we let the town square, of almost all modern nations, become a corporately owned mainframe?

If Empire is the ordering by the most ruthless technology of bureaucracy, which broadly was preceded as the contract-document (which is the form by which Justice justified the genocide of nature societies), but is now superseded by the algorithm-code (we don’t have to negotiate because the best answer has already been decided for us). The American Project might be engorged or subsumed by this form of ultra-Empire that the Internet has enabled, but it is a moot moniker for which under a wholesale divestment of the creative will takes place. It may be Russian, Chinese, or Crypto Empire—the curbing of human dignity, and the increased exoticism of the sovereignty of being, will be equally administered.

Stone tablets with commandments “not to kill” gave rise to endless militaries. Electric diodes with “true” or “false” gives rise to infinite hypocrisy?

So how do we demand true democracy (which is to not have the politician at all, but only sincere citizens without divestment of representation) and our sovereignty of being in the wake of this new ultra leviathan that has been born in our lifetime? How do we manifest the poetic mode of algorithmic language? Is it possible to demonstrate how to be human in the face of our collective subscription to monstrosity, in hopes that the monster dissolves into sovereign beings?

Virtue and conscience requires seeing spirit, feeling inspiration. We cannot trust each other without the conviction that our fellow citizen has virtue and conscience—therefor the purpose of the State for us is to suspend each other, rather than empower each other. How can we purify our instruments of sensitivity to spirit and inspiration, when we can barely use the word soul?

Aesthetics is the justice of being, and it is the responsibility of the artist to demonstrate the unknowable, which allows for the possible—our own agency and sovereignty of being. The mode that resists any state or stasis, and therefore the State, is the creative-transformative-metaphoric mode. Ethics attempts to describe the cause and effects of purity of being, but truth always exceeds language because it is in our potency that we find truth. The proclamations of true and false allow for nothing and show no beauty. Love and be loved, and even an algorithm can become a poem.

10.22.20