technical images and linear text

Here’s a fun little discussion to take a look at, from the blog of Kirk Cameron’s ‘Way of the Master’ sidekick, Ray Comfort. I came across it through pure serendipity, because it’s linked back on the same CNN page from the article I wrote about last night.

Fundamentalist religion is a fascinating thing. It’s great for sparking atheist vitriol, and the necessary counterblasts of religious vitriol. Yet in the process of polemicization, atheists and advocates of religion tend to lose sight of the actual issues at stake. Putting my sanity at risk, I decided to throw a couple of pennies into the debate, and I thought I’d re-post my comments here for the edification of a rather less polemical crowd. I love reading when religionists and anti-religionists play with intensely philosophical ideas and pretend that they’re the first to come up with such notions. Religion and philosophy have long toyed with each others’ ideas, but it seems that religionists have now fully lost touch with the philosophical origins of their concepts.
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The first is a fun one: normative thought and racism are fundamentally linked. More generally, we might note that all internal and external totalitarianisms (that is, totalitarianism in thought or in deed), even that fundamental totalitarianism of the ‘Good,’ that good or otherwise Platonic totalitarianism, lead to an essentially anti-humanist pattern of thought. This is a basic thesis of mine, leading me to echo Deleuze and Nietzsche in proclaiming the necessity of a certain inversion of Platonism. And it seems that empirical psychology affirms my belief. I found this article from a few-months-old issue of Discover online. Apparently, people who readily describe phenomena as decisively ‘bad’ or objectively negative are the same people who are racist. Food for thought, in any case.

The other two theses constitute about 100 pages of writing. I thought I’d post them up here for the edification of anyone who’s interested in figuring out what the hell is going on between Derrida and Deleuze, but also dogmatic philosophy in general. I’m going to – as I’ve said in a few posts previously – work up some of my ideas about dogmatism into a more ‘bloggy’ format soon. But in these two term papers (!!!) I wrote in December are the real ‘origins’ of these ideas. The first is called ‘The singular Aufhebung,’ and the second goes by the equally cumbersome ‘Difference/Repetition; Sign/Memory.’ They’re term papers which exploded to the length, if not necessarily the coherence of masters’ theses, and so they’re kind of heavy going in some ways. But damned if I didn’t have a lot of fun writing them, and didn’t feel as though I was really on to some good ideas (in spite of being, no doubt, seriously off in places). I’d be super excited to hear comments from anyone who read them, as I’m very interested in how I might chop these up into conference or publication papers. I’m working up some of these ideas for an abstract to send to the Cornell Theory Reading Group conference, ‘The substance of thought’; it’s maybe out of my league, but it’s focused on the exact ideas that I’m throwing around in these theses, so why the heck not! Please, if you read even a portion of these papers, let me know what you think in comments or email! Even if you violently hated them. Cheers!

so, on the last day of my holiday freedom-of-thought, i’ve been catching up on a favourite comic book of mine, Bill Willingham’s Fables. and comic books have long been a  guilty pleasure of mine: i’m not the kind of dogmatic comic-book booster who is endlessly trying to lift their preferred medium onto a pedestal alongside the classic works of ‘high’ art, since this is clearly absurd and counterproductive given the actual content of comic books as compared to, say, the ‘Ring Cycle.’ nevertheless, i’m also fervently opposed to all those latent dogmata within the ‘media-studies’ set, whereby even though various new media (film, television, internet – take your pick) may be permitted the status of ‘art,’ comic books must remain the sort of puerile fodder for children that have yet to grow up. this is absurd, given that it is founded upon a certain artistic essentialism: new media can be admitted to the ‘art’ party, so long as they play by its long-standing rules and hierarchies. thus a ‘good’ film or television show can be judged according to the same pat criteria with which foolish critics have always congratulated themselves as having understood ‘art’ as such.

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Cryptography and steganography are now used more widely in practice than at any prior moment in history, and so one might expect to find the self-evident origins of these modern practices in the work of cryptographic pioneers like John Wilkins, Francis Bacon, or Johannes Trithemius. Just as Newton’s alchemical leanings give pause to would-be historians of physics, however, so do the mystical and theological elements of early cryptography confuse the contemporary study of cryptographic history. Trithemius’ texts were for many years thought to deal exclusively with magic and the occult; only recently did we realize he was dealing with ‘occulted meaning’ of a less supernatural type. One can find polyalphabetic ciphers in Trithemius’ work, and the early origins of steganography in the Baconian ciphers. But when we ignore their mystical elements and reduce the work of these pioneers to the practical uses of their ideas, we ignore the crucial interrelation of cryptography and graphy.

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As you (hypothetical reader!) may have noticed, I enjoy beginning my little inquiries with patently absurd statements, and then unpacking these paradoxes with theory to demonstrate the logic of the absurd. This is an implicitly Deleuzian method, and also a somewhat puerile one, but it’s also fun and productive for some reasons that will hopefully become a little clearer in the course of this brief piece.

So here’s the absurd statement: Not only were Hitler and the Nazis onto some important ideas, they were ‘geniuses’ of a sort when it came to the Jewish ‘Idea.’ This is not only absurd, but patently offensive to anyone with a reactionary mind. But this sort of reactionary mindset is eminently counterproductive. If we want to actually investigate evil, to understand the structural logic behind its genesis, then we can’t conduct our investigations from the perspective of the goodly thinker, the beautiful soul. Instead, we have to think about the conditions which determine the evil Idea, within its own absurd frame of reference. This is perhaps an ethnography of evil, minus the participant aspect: we have to obtain an emic understanding of what it’s like inside the evil mind, before we can begin to translate it into etic terms, understandable by those of us who are, if not ‘good,’ at least morally unobjectionable.

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