The Matrix already fused these rival fantasies: of the mindless mechanism that controls us, and of the diabolical cabal that writes us.
Both strains of pseudocritique find exemplary proponents tracing to the Socialist Workers Party (Marcyites and Cliffites vs Larouchies). Both fantasies have been constructed with the work of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a once forgotten thinker dismissed as a subHegelian crazy, revived and made very fashionable by the books of Giorgio Agamben, popular in Italy France and the UK, and the PhD thesis of Gopal Balakrishnan, in the circle of Verso - New Left Review in the 90s. Not coincidentally, the Schmitt revival in anticommie New Left milieux occured at the same time the NLR socialist apostate editors were making a celebrity of Slavoj Žižek, who 1. apes Schmitt directly, 2. like Schmitt, recycles the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in a faux serious register and 3. Unlike Schmitt, “paraconsistently” and paradoxically mixes and fuses liberal platitude with the (de-satirized) satirical Satanico-Machiavellian critique of liberalism from the Golovinsky.
Fittingly, Shitzek’s first hit hipster book in English was a “contrarian” pro-war harangue called Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the line from and ad slogan for the Time Warner megahit; it relied a lot on parts stripped from Baudrilliard and the Wachowski film fandom.
Helpfully, the Larouchie cell that plagiarizes, mimics and vitiates the output of myself and my comrades actually came out this week and admitted they believe they “live in a story written by the ruling class.” Perhaps in their typically misanthropic overseer way, they really meant to say YOU live in such a story, and they alone do not. But what they actually said was they live in a story written by the ruling class, and they no doubt believe this, or make-believe it, because they are ruling class tools. Their principal activity is a non-stop cut and paste of texts handed to them and scavenged materials.
Ok, first I have to pick up again the topic of Lorianism.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
— Alexander Pope*
And the littler the learning, the greater the danger.
This by the way was not a rare but a routine occurence:
John Steppling, quoting and misquoting, risibly, Mad Magazine movie ad style, Terry Eagleton (followed by a collage from my dms, gchats and tweets — chess, beach, Gramsci of whose writings JS never read a word —half-digested and vitiated):
I attempt to engage this in the middle of a futile effort to wrest the protocols lunacy from Morningstar, Steppling and Hamada:
[“But I like it. It’s simple. Of course, not for me, it’s too stupid for me, but for the dumb people who read my blog.” Honestly! ]
Eh voilà..the actual passage from Eagleton;
And this is routine with Steppling, Examples are endless. Another in his latest blog, where he has obviously come across, somewhere, a passage from a cynical tract by Timothy Bewes, a typical mediocrity and poseur recycling popular digests of “theory”, much like Enzo Traverso.
You don’t even need the context to know the author is mocking some unnamed rival academics, in Shitzekian style, for a stance that is not even clearly enough described to consider or rebut, but is vaguely indicated as committing the woke post-colonial sin of denouncing the concept of reification (or the act? that too) as somehow or other, he can’t quite put his finger on it, tainted by Eurocentrism.
He can’t be any clearer than this, because he is accusing figments from the Nietzschean-Shitzekian neocolonial phantasmagoria (the i.d. pol, the multiculturalists, the vulvoliberals) of the usual uppitiness and superstition.
But it is evident from the selected snippet of text alone, even without the full chapter, that the author is not advancing these notions but attributing them to someone else he dare not try to identify (because this is the dumb demagogic style of reactionary rant now, railing against hazy caricature scapegoats. Steppling and gang do this themselves constantly.)
In the preface to his book, Bewes announces his mission to rescue the concept of reification (yes laugh, do laugh, it’s comical, but there is a method to this madness) from the revolt of the uppity ressentimental slaves:
Ok so from this already we know this is an inane and unscholarly book, brazenly parading a revanchist project against some degenerate hydra of fashionable posty critique, but
it’s identical to the nonsense purveyed by Steppling himself and his circle, deploying the same pop psych eyeball diagnoses of other people’s degeneracy, the same pseudo method of pseudo social science and pseudo critique with the preference for recounting crap teevee shows obsessively viewed as proof of hazily advanced hunches that other people are not as real as oneself
that its position — as is obvious from the passage Steppling chose to excerpt, but this absolutely proves — is exactly the opposite of that attributed to it by Steppling when purporting to critique it.
As with the Eagleton example, we are confronted with sheer intellectual incompetence. Sheer absence of comprehension of standard English text. Every day is backwards day in that clique. Lately they have decided “credulity” means “incredulity,” and class means degenerate rootless cosmopolitans versus wholesome trad wives in gingham — class, a word that can only be neurotically incanted, cited in quotations, declared unspeakable, and never deployed in an intelligble observation or proposition. But there are rhetorical political uses of this “bumbling.”
Observe: this Bewes book is yet another Shitzekain tome, an iagoesque con job, a slippery operation of endless innuendo. (With whom could this guy even be pretending to argue?) Here is the context for the excerpt deployed in the blogpost
:
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking
it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look
into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the
back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an
unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down
before, and offer a sacrifice to…”
Ok as, having slogged through this strategic gibberish, we arrive at the twist in the mobius strip, you all I hope recognize the fascist maneouvres, the unrolling of the masquerade here — the Shitzekian innuendo, the iagoesque, Straussian operations now so familiar — and can see how the whole topic of reification (which isn’t after all complicated in the least) is made to serve as the fulcrum of sophistry and a pretext for this ressentimental reassertion of a beefed up imperial proprietor supremacy. Reification, whattayouknow, both the social-cognitive-ideological process of thing-production named and its self awareness as such production: the Phallus! And lo and behold nobody but the Master Race even wants it!
Above, it couldn’t be clearer, as we observe the author turning the term “reification,” oscillating between signifier and two referents (abstract and concrete) (and actually this a very simple word not a scientific term), into another flashing Indicator of crank supremacism, crank supremacism wronged by the ressentimental drawers of water, disresprected by the Priests rousing that rabble, and vindicated Nietzschealy, a “concept” (oh the grandiosity) with a coded real meaning, an unspeakable secret sense which the author obviously aims here to redeem by a sleazy process of caricature of unnamed postcolonial agents accused, in passing and obliquely, a. of defaming this notion, and in so doing rejecting civilization, and b. of deploying it victimologistically. (That move about Stephen Lawrence’s murder followed by a consideration of the ‘hate-filled demonization of the suspects’ is classic Shitzek: are we still talking about reification? No obviously not. The author has slid sneakily into a crank tabloid discourse. Oh ho ho —who is the real reifier? And in this instant, we readers not yet too damaged cognitively know that from the start, this was all a con: that’s why it seems like such a stupid effing pointless book, such a needless exercise, and of course from Verso! “Reification” served as a pretext, and a euphemistic vehicle for lots of forbidden content, content taboo with the audience addressed, taboo-in-decline - or really ersatz taboo, and this iagoesque Straussian method of the backhanded creation of always already violated yet evergreen taboos deserves further explication — at Verso, Zizek’s platform and Bewes’.)
Bewes goes on:
I’m laughing this guy is writing a book on “reification,” a verbal noun which ends in -tion, and he has discovered toward the end of the book, that the “concept” may itself be reified.
Ok he goes on:
Ok it’s begun to slide away from the tangle of quasi intelligibility, and here we see the word “reification” has been shifted all the way from its concrete referent (say, collectively producing The State to be theorized and attributed a psyche and much else) now to the signifier, stacked atop the two referents and melted with a blowtorch, for maximal disavowals and nonsense, maximal euphemistic flexibility:
Isn’t it fascinating how this fascist babytalk is going in disguise as academic prose here? A slight pomposity in the language is affected to mask the Shitzekian parade of vintage stereotypes and the strange charges laid against them. I ask you, friends romans countrymen, what the hell is this guy saying of interest?
Rehashing not Edward Said, profound reader of Conrad politically and aesthetically, but Saul Bellow and Dinesh D’Souza and Jordan Peterson, this Student of Shizz is repeating an ancient complaint, that’s been made on tv and in time magazine by every halfwit reactionary psood, that Chinua Achebe ressentimentally denounced Conrad as racist because he, Achebe, had a hate filled obsession with ‘reification’: he like all the villains reviled by the Canon of Crank, just hates the phallus of John Galthusser and prefers to wallow dans la boue. Badiou was the last celeb thinker, I believe, of any erudition and stature, to try to give this canard a shiny new coat of jargon.
*It’s almost obligatory to concede after having cut and pasted this famous quotation, that Alexander Pope was a dick. (Excuse me, reification). Granted.
…to be continued