by Neil Vodavzny

To challenge the mainstream, an alternative of the Right needs a competitive-edge, batting from roughly the same ballpark as DanielS here:

I don’t have to tell you that racial identification can be catastrophic. Those who have sought to ward-off that bias have held sway since World War II. Now we have thorough proof that anti-racism can be equally genocidal. Our task is a tricky one - to reconstruct genetic identity which does not lead to fratricidal identifications, nor unnecessary conflict with other races, but symbiosis. I believe that one of the greatest ontico-epistemic obstacles to that achievement is the overvaluation of competition and its corollary, the stupid right-wing focus on inequality as a “healthy” fact of ordinary, everyday human life. This would be in contrast to observation of pervasive cooperation in human, social scaled patterns, the analysis of which would model and provide for fair treatment of human capital as warranted in its historical breadth.

I have to say, though, that generalised observations only go so far. In terms of creativity and talent no political creed, let alone philosophy, can be subordinated to race. Rather, philosophy is the determination of principles which may well contain racial elements. Two examples are J-L Godard’s linking of “text” to Jewish film-makers, and Heidegger’s of racial calculation. To willynilly apply racial criteria over creative industries is unhelpful at best, particularly when you consider artists almost by nature tend to be outsiders from the mainstream (if they’re good). The only criteria of art should be how it affects you – having no conscious control over it.

The French have a quite Gallically correct attitude: know your subject. “I feel good” instantly elicits a James Brown moment, Jew’s harp Stevie Wonder, a throbbing guitar riff White Stripes’ 7 Nation Army. It’s just not about race per se, it’s navigating genres and just being cool. Blacks are cool if you like the right music. The fantastic negativity of contemporary hip-hop is for sure noteworthy so, OK, I’ll note it.

The corollary is, what is bad art? which is much more to the point. Then one can bring-in the liberal scientism of art, such as the aforementioned Maus (Spiegelman) where subjective criteria are laid aside in the insistence on experimental validity of second-hand observations. By subjective, I mean emotive force etc. Anyway, this is getting a bit far off the point. Being entertainment, sci-fi writers are either good or bad, not Jew or gentile. The best way to attempt to inaugurate a competitive-edge (to the Right) is to elucidate principles and see where it leads.

Case-in-point: I have to cop to being a close-study as well as recipient of Harlan Ellison’s newsletter. This guy has audio CDs which tell you the story of writing for the pulps way more authentically than I and I refer you to them.  Aficionados (any here?) may know of his work as the embodiment of temperament – of one bitter and ill-at-ease with modern life. Second, a complete acolyte of Lewis Carroll who resides at Ellison Wonderland. Third, a believer in the positives and negatives of fantasy worlds as embodied in ancient gods. In this specific instance this is all about temperament, that is how to understand the work. (I just recollected Snyder’s film of Watchmen omits the pulpish denoument of an alien monster – a similar premise is found in Architects of Fear (Outer Limits 1963) – just shows what a cop-out the film was).

Ellison’s first teleplay for OL, Soldier (1964) is a study in exaggeration, foreshadowing Kirby’s New Gods as well as X-Men: Days of Future Past. It tells of a character from the future bred in a state-hatchery for the sole purpose of being a foot-soldier in a centuries-old war. His speech (to a contemporary ear) is jargon, slang barely comprehensible as English. The effect is literally like a cartoon-character come to life employing a language of steel and thunder in an exaggerated mode redolent of 18th century satire (Swift, Hogarth). It’s pure fantasy, able to home-in on the tics of a certain type to reach the kernel of truth.

Exaggeration is an authentic mode of truth-telling, as well as a form of racial or sexual caricature. Ellison’s story gets to a kernel of truth in the slang of a super-soldier, pure fantasy but it struck me people who live to buy products are another specialized breed, even down to employing incomprehensible slang (text, lol).

As I think I said before, succumbing to sensory deprivation is not a good idea – indeed, almost hands the enemy your head on a plate. Art is about appreciating the senses in others. That said, not everything to do with senses makes sense. This happens when the sensory world becomes a type of techne. Allow me to introduce Shane Hope of the Hybrid Institute:

Shane is a GraviTV Programmer of Everware-There-Is-Masstaken-iPlentities, Quacker-Caster of Hyper-Spatial Sentient Sopper See-Source Serum and Artist-in-Residence at the Hybrid Reality Institute. He received his MFA in Qubit-Built-Quilted Public Panopticon Powder Policy from the Accelerationistas School of Add-Ons Off Your Overclocker Rocker POV-Vapor Xmit Rights and founded the Morph-Feral-Foglet-Fabbed Fertilizone which forges algorithmicracked-out crypto-junk-DNAnarch-keys to un-nanoblockonomic-lock fine jouler-bots-that-gots-watt-a-lots. His current practice flocuses on artilectual femtofactured mind-splaces, fluidentities, thunkuppetrees, post-conscious subthreaded sales-swarms, and prescient peek-a-boo plunderware portraiture on percept pus. He has exhibited widely including at the Gooplex Gallery of Goo Gardeners’ Collablobject-Oriented Co-op Computronium Commonage Corpus Cluster; the Mass-Mod-Mood-Meds Museum; and the whEnvelopment-nDevelopment Center for getArtistTraces

His portfolio is something to do with 3D printing, and is a prime example of the scientism of art going further and further into the realm of questions and away from intuited answers (see Clifton quote here). It’s a prime case of text over image. Those of a hybrid disposition go way beyond CGI – which in skilled hands can be imbued with a certain poetry – and are immersed in techne.

Hybrids, who seem to be the more or less performing art side of H+/Transhumanism, have no resources (praxis), mainly machine-code. Theirs is a sensory world, not a sensual world which has to incorporate sensation. Without praxis – a world of visible resources – sensation is just a techne.

The distinction between text and image may have further ramifications. Text, in Godard’s critique, is a type of pedantic attitude to storytelling, less free-flowing or ultra-calculated. Now, as I said previously, sensation is related to both sex and techne. Freud, in his terminology, subordinates most things to sex via the all-conquering (male?) libido. Here’s a quote from Speaking About Godard (NYU Press 1998, Silverman with Farocki):

Ever since the publication of Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality, we have become accustomed to thinking of affective relations in the language of capital: we invest libido in objects, thereby increasing their value but reducing our own psychic reserves, sometimes to the point of absolute bankruptcy. However, whereas terms like “investment”, “value” and “bankruptcy” are for Freud only metaphors for the erotic, New Wave (1990) again refuses to subordinate one term to another. The economic is not merely metaphoric, but literal as well, and it not only signifies, but is signified by, the erotic. (p 203/204)

What this means is a Sultan (say) ostentatiously invests “Eros” as a force in itself. The value of his opulence is in Eros, the value of the Taj Mahal is erotic. Its economic (cultural) worth is signified by Eros as a force unto itself. This is way more like how the ancient world operates to establish prestige and hierarchies. There is no pedantry at stake here; what you see is what there is. We are not in the realm of the phallus but of Eros, the sensual (Islamic architecture is maybe more feminine in terms of curves). Hence, the pedantic link of libido with capital is only true if we take away praxis (resources) – the sensual element – and view it as a type of techne.

What I want to stress is that both these things are a type of truth, but a textual truth. It’s not that there’s some sort of Freudian conspiracy going on – reality plays tricks on us in ways that the ancient Greeks would recognize. Reality, in effect, conspires against us.

This is the Achilles’ heel of text because it’s not a visible reality (it’s formula or ideology), so it’s not necessary for anyone to conspire because the nature of text is that it can be fooled by reality. The probability is that one has to place greater emphasis on praxis – and of course poesis – as a means of reconfiguring a resource-based, sensual world, one not utterly at the mercy of technology and Freudian subtexts.

This in practice would have a competitive-edge in antithesis to Freudian-capital. Something akin to ethno-resources. Definitely more related to ethno-traditions in architectural styles, farming methods, crafts. Techne can then be incorporated as I suggested as a type of retro-futurism. Competitive-edge would also favour a type of temperament, someone way more independent-minded and settled, like a smallholder, so less easy to displace, equable and more inclined to philosophy etc.
Things can flip, so that one becomes aware of surroundings, tempo, pace and texture of life and how it affects us in every way – social, health, political. The way that is represented is literally in terms of architecture, town & country, the pace of living and multitudinous interactions with man and beast (when was the last time you spotted a donkey?)

Now, I’m forever trying to work-in to the discussion environment and genes – together. We can’t consider one without the other (DanielS) because of: temperament.

The mainstream may already be beyond reach (to the Right) but, by the same token, if it loses credibility could flip. This can happen overnight. I know a lot of outsider-types – smallholders (in Welsh organic cooperatives) or artists – who never ever would dream of voting. These independent-minded a-political types are directly affected by a flip in attitude: they can be a natural constituency of the new order, the elite.

What we have to do realize is all the products of a H+/Transhumanism/Hybrid future are textual – code of some type – and not resource-based or sensual. While it’s true their future is advanced, it has no longevity, no temporal actuality or being (like gossamer). Their products become the Cartesian multiverse – ie, mainstream reality, which is essentially a fake. Since this is inevitable, anyone in the mainstream will be way too associated with products, and hence the mainstream may start to fade-out. A new order of the Right then becomes way more feasible.