Categoría: articles in English

(May 26, 2019)

Time is the emergence of difference, full equality is therefore the absence of time. Without difference of place (geometry) or qualitative difference, time does not exist. Neither in a logical sense nor for our perception.

But the simple difference is not enough to make temporality “emerge”, another element is needed: proportionality. And this arises from a simple intuition, which thus becomes an essential mode of knowledge. Simple intuition freed from culturalized resources of all kinds allows us to access essential phenomena in the grasp of our reality.

But the intuition of proportionality is prior to any formed knowledge.

For example, when listening to a musical melody, we have the full perception of proportionality. Not only in the orderly and “at time” succession of each note, but also in its harmony (proportion in the vibrations of the air, that is, the musical tones).

This intuitively grasped order is not due, and this is my hypothesis, to the fact that we have in our perceptive capacities something like an internal metronome, nor a perfect ruler to measure proportions. But it is because the “proportion itself”, non-existent a priori, creates reality itself, giving it entity and making it emerge.

The experience of the musical melody itself is the experience of time itself, the enjoyment we experience with it is the enjoyment of “feeling” time as it passes, having the experience of temporality is what gives us aesthetic enjoyment. Being aware of one’s own time: that would be the pleasure of music.

Because otherwise we would have to follow a “culturized” path to explain why we instantly “understand” that some sounds are in order according to an exact temporal succession, and that also the sounds in the air vibrate in concrete and exact proportions: the harmonies.

All of this would have to be “analyzed” by the brain instantly and we are, at last, transferring the analogy of a calculator to our consciousness, as if the calculator had existed first and then consciousness. As if we were essentially a complicated computer.

Does the appearance of proportionality give intelligibility to the real? Intensity? What I am trying to say is that the experience of proportionality is prior to and independent of its own verification, and in the case of time we have access to its experience through it, then ¿to the experience of space do we have access through geometric proportionality?

We have developed geometry or built calculating machines to carry out what consciousness “intuits” in reality from the beginning. Machines have to act on matter just like our body, but they imitate “intuitions” (I call them that for lack of a better name), which self-consciousness possesses.

If the simple auditory succession of a rhythm makes time “emerge” for us, what other successions or forms will open up other dimensions of reality for us?

In short, what I am saying, for example, is that before geometry itself, space did not exist. But at the same time, consciousness did not need it to perceive, for example, a harmonious physical form or equality in its proportions.

As in a visual hallucination, reality shows us its infinite variety of proportions, lights, colors and shapes in an endless dance. The ear can also be given those auditory sensations of infinite proportionality through a construction of experimental, electronic and to a certain extent harmonic music.

Both experiences reveal to us the conformation of reality through its infinite proportionality.

With touch, with the fingers, we can also perceive proportionality and succession, touching an ordered row of things with our eyes closed, in order, we can have that same perception of proportion and also succession , without having to use sight or hearing. Have access to crystallization of difference and proportionality, that is, time.

Although the knowability of the real seems to go hand in hand with a certain possibility of the vision, in a certain way the infinite is not known because it cannot be “seen”, “encompassed” in our knowledge as “vision”.

The knowable is the graspable, what makes us trust in our capacities for knowledge is the idea that we can always “reduce” the totality of being in such a way that we make it “graspable” for our understanding, even for our sight.

(May 14, 2019)

If there are already material and technical means to appease human need, why has it not been done? Does the appeasement of human needs depend exclusively on technical capacity? Can we really affirm that an increase in technological development necessarily implies a greater liberation of humanity?

Nowadays, perception seems to be directed, rather, to the opposite pole. The more technological the relationships, the greater the poverty; The more technology exists, the greater the exclusion produced.

Does humanity need more technology? Is technology still involved in a liberating dialectic? o Have we entered a process of inflation where more is less for the well-being of human beings?

For all this, I can’t help but wonder: Have technical development and the improvement of existence stopped going hand in hand? What is the relationship between increasing technology and the increasing impoverishment of populations?
At what exact point did this change of direction occur? The steam engine enslaved factory workers like never before and developed a historical process to subvert its alienating and exploitative use. The very concept of exploitation emerges from this process.

The movement that followed attempted, hypostatizing the technology itself, to reap its fruits and benefits for the populations as a whole. That is to say, he assumed that the technological development of productive processes generated a first moment of exploitation and then the possibility of subverting it and twisting the technology for use for the common good.

Probably the dialectic was not exclusively in technological development.

Without a doubt, the triad of rationality, technology and capital accumulation continues to be of great relevance; but such concepts have not been hierarchized in a consistent way until now.

Technology would thus seem to be an “instrumental” extension of the will to privatize and exclude.

The relationships between the economy itself, capitalist accumulation, and technological development do not follow clear lines. Each discovery or technical development is not followed by a clear use, application and economic deployment. And on the contrary, simple economic needs do not end up, even if they try hard, to limit the field and direction of technology.

It is a relationship of greater depth, which invokes past modes of operation: technological possibilities are kidnapped, privatized and put at the service of modes of absorption of capital, knowledge and life itself. Or, alternatively, they could operate toward novel modes of development that were open, non-alienable, and harmonious with life.

Technology continues to be tied in its emergence, development and purpose to deep historical milestones such as possession, property, self-referentiality and the paranoid delusions of States.

The result is a growth in technology that turns against the populations themselves, as weapons technology or as devices that displace human capabilities, at the service of an ever-increasing, more restrictive, violent accumulation that escapes the control of communities.

It is argued that technology is, let’s say, “neutral” and that it is its use that certifies its morality. Is technology just used in a bad way? Or is the growing situation of expulsion of the majority from welfare intrinsic to its use and growth?

Demonstrating this would require demonstrating how the dialectic of technology itself goes hand in hand with that of its private possession, and that its absolute expansion would be the dream of any totalitarian power. We would then be faced with a technology whose essence is the domination of nature and capabilities, an essentially violent technology.

Currently generated technology increases domain capabilities and does not mitigate human needs.

We could also ask ourselves if technology makes life easier or simply modifies it by imposing new ways of ordering it. By creating mediations with reality and defining it itself, technology imposes its own ontology.
The ability to manage information with greater power and speed further facilitates capitalist accumulation. And from improved information processing modes such as Artificial Intelligence we can only expect, from the start, an economic cumulative use and increasing manipulation.

Imagining the conditions of a technology that is not privatized and not entangled in the growing tangle of power is a necessary and urgent task. The more technology makes up our reality, the more alienation we feel towards it, as we move towards a plan in which we have not participated at all.

“A society of blood gave way, partially, to a new social class with its new needs for the construction of justifications of power.”

When God was replaced by nature as the keystone of the forms of rationality, the task required a few drops of empiricism and a deep examination of the natural world. If God required a theological-philosophical knowledge, nature an empirical exploration.

That nature replaces God is the same as saying that theology is replaced by a system of increasing complexity and balance (The paradigm of disaster). It is the perfected attempt to complete the Cartesian program. In its constant expansion since the eighteenth century and especially the nineteenth century, the most “speculative” knowledge was losing place.

The progressive scarcity¹ of space for philosophical discourse had several consequences, one notable was the emergence of philosophies that focused on language and discourse itself, since “being” had progressively become naturalized and objectified.

The philosophies that have delved into language sought in discourses that change that had occurred outside of transcendental and philosophical knowledge.

What could we talk about if not speeches? This re-circulation of reason on itself implies a relocation of reason and probably also fed on the growth of the “texts” available since the State began the enormous task of taking note of any aspect of existence.

The proliferation of statistical texts (belonging to the State), and the creation of innumerable “scientific knowledge” left philosophical reflection hardly without purpose. The texts themselves were thus an objective material on which to act.

This could be the common thread between philosophical schools as seemingly distant as Anglo-Saxon philosophies of language and French structuralisms.
After the “Natural Histories” of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century asked to set in motion, in a definitive way, a history that ran in the bosom of nature.

A society of blood partially gave way to a new social class with its new needs for the construction of justifications for power. The new framework of rationality had changed and the study of nature and with the passage of time, the study of life in general, must have seemed promising to a new social class that accumulated power even more rapidly than the one it came to replace.

The “best adaptation”, “better capacities”, “biological superiority” … thus became very powerful anchors within the new structure of nineteenth-century rationality in which to grasp a discourse of dominance that is still in full force.

If Darwin himself was a fan of liberal capitalism or if his travels were financed by powerful bankers, they are nothing more than appendages of an age in search of their own truths. An imposing metaphor that of the boat trip for a social class that began its initial accumulation with commercial companies around the globe.

His complaints with various curiae are the fireworks of an underground celebration, the feast of a society that could no longer be conceived from theology or the aristocracy.

“It is not my fault that I have better genes”

Natural selection was the new mode of support and justification for a secular class society like the bourgeoisie that made its way with strong inequalities and needed new justifications in the face of an old regime of blood and noble inheritances.

Medieval theological rationality appealed to a full and self-sufficient order, the world was ruled in harmony as long as the divine plan that kept kings and priests at the top was fulfilled. But this divine plan ensured worldly and spiritual order.

Certainly the Modern Era with its absolutist kings provide other concepts of power, but the inclusion in the history of the thought that a war had unleashed in nature (as in human society itself) only needed a further step: “animalization” or “naturalization” of the human being. To include him, in that way, in that incessant war for survival.

An idea very much in harmony with a new way of managing populations, and with a liberalism that once the order of the “Heavenly Jerusalem” was crushed, considered every population suspected of vagrancy and laziness.

Biology, beyond an activity of knowledge, is a knot of the Modern Era in which numerous forms of rationality and justification of our current world are tied as the nerve center.

Biology is a knot that ties an important part of the rationality of our time. It functions as an individual and social discourse and is behind and in the last place as an axiom of numerous ideologies. Unmasking it, showing its limits and alliances would be a vital task to open horizons.

Notas:

1) Scarcity was and is a central concept in economic “science.”

Before returning to the world, we must leave it. To be able to get out of the web of confusion that the human world, its education and its constant influence weave around us. Leaving the world is essential to see yourself in its pristine essence.

The noise is the constant affirmation of the compulsion that has us trapped. Getting rid of noise is the appearance of an initial emptiness, it can almost be scary at first. The “silence” is only the beginning and we are not talking here about “sounds” for our auditory system, although it is clear that they have their importance. It is a silence of the human sense that is everyday for us.

The demands of those around us build walls and bars around us in such a way that when we come to be aware we no longer find a way out. Many times they are delicately woven, day by day for many years, they give us warmth and company, but they deny us the deepest essence of facing the mute real essence of the world.

Noise prevents us from knowing who we are, and it prevents us from knowing the oppression that surrounds our spirit and our material reality. The noise is orchestrated, it is composed of historical layers of oppression that have made us usable objects by a power that in essence despises us in everything that goes beyond our immediate usefulness to its petty purposes.

To get out of the world of noise we have to silence the rhythm of consciousness and time that has been set for us. Replacing it with another rhythm and temporality alien to the usual one.

The hearing of non-everyday sounds, rhythms or noises (looking for an avant-garde sound creation will help us, as long as we do not know it previously and that we do not give it any kind of cultural load on what it “means”)

If we accompany this hearing with a slight relaxation of the senses, we will lead our consciousness to break with the logic of meaning that prevailed in us and to discover that our universe is reconfigured in unusual possibilities and opens up to an infinite number of possibilities and configurations, and in all of them we are the center. A journey of no return.

The supreme intuition must then arise, the very subtle sensation that there are relationships between all things, internal and external, small and large, visible and invisible.

That the world is barely explored, that the names of things are worn out and are huge weights that keep us from moving forward, that everything is not already invented, that everything is yet to be done and that this task is only achievable by those who stop Be themselves and transcend the limits.

There must be a unity between the material revolution and the revolution of consciousness, they can no longer go their separate ways.

After all, a machinable world is a world for capital.

(If you use psychology, you trust its functioning, you feel sick, etc … probably this presentation of ideas may not be for you)

Psychology (as a social device) abstracts all the concrete conditions that make us up in an abstract and unreal way, in this sense it mocks reality and denies it.

Its purpose as “science” is to create a series of abstractions and generalities that describe the “human being”, regardless of any characterization that makes it concrete. All scientific or knowledge methodology tends to seek the most general concepts of its “field of knowledge”, this choice is always a critical moment, a selection, an elimination of other possibilities.

But this choice becomes meaningful the moment it is made, discarding all other possible options.

“Scientific” psychology masks concretions in favor of political generalizations. Policies because they ignore the powers operating in each individual, policies because the selection of generalities is congruent with a way of operating in society, consistent with their powers.

All those characters adapted to the market and production are enhanced, which become virtues. On the other hand, it is found in deficiencies, negativities, absences, unadapted characters. Those from whom labor, capital or submission cannot be extracted.

They are political generalizations precisely because of their ability to mask differences and all the aspects that individualize each circumstance.
It equates and identifies all the factors, simplifying a model so that only individuals and circumstances exist. The funny thing is that such individuals and such circumstances are never equal to each other, and their differences would really be the key to understanding the problems.

On the other hand, a medical-administrative division by genders, races, ages, classes would only have a statistical purpose and would not go out of the scheme in any sense. In a way it would only sarcastically deepen the masking.

“Scientific” psychology acts as a biological and medicalizing closure of the explosive energy of each individual. It institutionalizes and is institutionalized, elaborates and establishes normalities and abnormalities.

If all this were not enough, medicalization and pharmacologization generate “patients” as any other industry generates its products.

It locates suffering, or what it considers an absence or lack, in an isolated conceptual place, and denies the possibility of linking that place with a discourse that links different general and concrete aspects of human life; to extract relations of power and injustice in that network where discomfort appears.

It uses universal teleological postulates, which define a priori everything that has not yet been covered by humanity.

To illustrate what I mean, I will give an example. To specific individuals who feel bad in a group or when interacting, a generality such as: “human beings are social” is blurted out, which acts as a deductive and casuistic theorem or etiology (science of causes).

It serves both to discover the abnormal and to prescribe a solution. In addition to serving as a moral and behavioral rule.

We do not know if such a statement is intended to be an ethical imperative or if it rather refers to a biological configuration as a species. If it is the first case, free choice should preside over that imperative, if it is the second we find ourselves in the murky waters of natural species and their characteristics of normality and abnormality.

Only if we could place ourselves outside the world, outside the real, outside of time could we verify this postulate about the sociability of human beings, their meaning, their need or their intensity.

In our real world, we are beings shaped by circumstances, classes, races, sexes, economic power, hierarchical relationships … and anchored to a history and a never resolved future.

How can we know in advance the content of those universals that direct the inner life of human beings?

***
An anarchist or libertarian psychology should not define human principles and capacities a priori, it should, on the contrary, denounce every micro power and subordination that generates frustration. It should point out every painful element in every vital circumstance. Show alternatives to the cultural, political and social structures that generate frustrations.

The universal index to which their universals would be directed would be a vector direction, and each atom of individual concretion would be “moments” of that nebula of directions. The universal postulates would no longer be defined but with the passage of time they would fill with meaning.

We still do not know what the human being has to be, we cannot define it according to the needs of a historically specific society. Not much less according to the structures and interests of the concrete domination system. This will never be knowledge.

***
Excursus

Depression is a warning, and a wake-up call to our circumstances, an opportunity for introspection.

Since medicalization stole our “states of the soul” we can no longer enjoy the deep feeling of introspection of our sadness.

They have been socialized in a particular and laboratoryized way. We have stopped possessing our insides, we may never have had it, certainly not now. They have stolen the states of the soul and the enjoyment of chatting with them, contemplating their tones, colors, scales and landscapes.

If I were crazy, medicalized and sick, I could “understand” what is happening to me. There would be a socially validated reason for my feelings. My interior would become part of the common and institutional discourse and thus, I, like my surroundings, could find consolation.

My ravings would have a translation in a network of normality and pharmacology would be my silent social bed. The entire network of signs of medicine, psychiatry and psychology would cradle me to rejoin reality, even from its far edge.

Not being able to translate experiences into a discursive normality is living on a different plane, at the antipodes of the human sense, in an unwanted but unavoidable exile.

If he were mad, he could be exterminated in a gas chamber or lulled by a chemical cage of pharmacology according to the oscillations of power.

If I were crazy, I should relax my passions and exaltation, so as not to force the web of reality, it would be my main obligation. Returning as soon as possible from the trip out of the meaning and accepted symbols.

If I were crazy, I would accept that my ideas have no meaning in an outside, that there is no outside in my madness, that everything happens inside me. Interiority is the place of madness, without exteriority, nor relationship with the rest of human reality.

Madness as a social construction is an immense wall against immigrants who come from the chaos within us.

La psicología como dispositivo social

Could a geography of consumption be made? But not one that matches cities and countries, continents, trade routes. If not one that maps more than physical places, conceptual places, their forces, gates, openings, flows and magnetism. The routes it creates and unfolds, the plains and moats it builds.

But such a static view would not reflect well how it works. We need a dynamic description, to make the consumption process independent in order to describe it in its deprivation / promise processes. Its static and dynamic places.

It would be necessary to have a Theory of consumption flows. Imagining consumption as the flow of a liquid with channels and gates. A hydraulics. Consumption maps would emerge from it and, from its operation, possibilities of movement. Permitted, prohibited movements and directed physical flows.

Obviously the hydraulics of consumption is a part of the more general of capital, and the other side of the hydraulics of production. Notwithstanding its logic, it needs particular aspects, it needs a comprehensive protection system for the merchandise, it needs a merchandise promotion system and finally it needs a system for relating merchandise to its consumer.

Vision of paradise

Marketing and product design have raised merchandise to a new dimension, color, lighting and variety emulate the primordial sensation of the vision of naked nature in all its brilliant variety (the psychedelic vision of perceptional liberation).

As in a journey in which the primordial reality and nature show all their naked and radiant colors. An encounter with proliferation and exuberance is the vision of the crowded shelves of products

A paradise of lighting emotions, of games of colors and shapes, accessible to the eye and to the hand, arranged in a linear arrangement that generates perspectives and angles. There is no place for distraction, for rest, for repose. Tidy according to reason, generous like mother nature.

The shelves surround us, there is no room for distraction, all the goods are there at our fingertips, there is nothing outside of them. In large supermarkets the ceiling is ungraspable, too high to stare at. Only by looking at the ground could you avoid the vision of paradise, but avoiding looking is a humanly reprehensible gesture and attitude. One would have to constantly be looking at hell in order not to see paradise.

In supermarkets the flow runs from the superfluous to the most necessary. The foods that have always been considered basic are in the most inaccessible and lateral places. The unnecessary is the central protagonist of the theatrical arrangement of the merchandise.

Fruits and vegetables are generally not packaged. Its own presence is paradisiacal, it does not need a marketing that transmutes it, as a wrapper turns a simple handful of dried corn into a desirable portion of heaven.

Out of the flows

A blow to indifference, a turn of the corner Why are beggars always lying on the ground, level with him? Why are they never perched on something, elevated, above passersby? What history does begging hide? Why is a prayerful, supplicating position, something that is below us?

It allows us a superior vision, a vision of the Lord. When someone begs standing up we almost think that he robs us. Animalize, crawl, reptilize, for them it is an obligation that helps us calm down, the tranquility that order provides.

Imagine some beggars on anything, like a raised platform. The impression that they would make on us would be terrifying (for us), their life and their meaning would also rise, they would be closer to the truth, closer to the divine, that is why we need them lying on the ground. Its ontological reality is less and it facilitates indifference.

The elimination of beggars, the first commandment of the logic of a consumer geography. Dirty cleaning task that the economic sphere has no qualms about delegating to the State. Task that he takes on with pleasure, “the cold-winded dog” is the necessary infrastructure for consumption.

Every social outcast is a warning note, a shouting sign of the limits of the social project itself. A descending ladder for those who do not comply with social logic. But at the same time they have the utility of showing the majority that there are still limits lower than themselves. That the price to pay would be very high.

Identifying “poverty” with the excluded or with an ethnic minority makes it easier to avoid the reproduction of demands for distribution by the population. Built in a symbolic space of contempt and misunderstanding, scarcity is preferred for all rather than benefiting “those parasites we hate.” As an ideology of control, it is impeccable.

La lógica del consumo II