November 19, 2006
Lumpen Orientalism
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Gauttari’s notes on Islamic philosophers are insufficient and in many cases poorly and incorrectly ripped off from obsolete French translations of works written on Muslim philosophers, manipulated in the most liberal and avant-garde technique: adding your words to them and then quoting or paraphrasing them back as an overseas philosophical support to your philosophy: inverse-plagiarism.
Lovecraft on the other hand knows very well the ineffable charm of Arabic names or Near and Middle Eastern pronunciations. Although both Deleuze and Lovecraft have contributed to Lumpen Orientalism (borrowed from China Miéville) as far as their reputations have allowed but on the other hand they have proven in a very pragmatic way that Orientalism in general which is mostly Lumpen Orientalism is not totally irrelevant, exactly because in an ironic twist the social, political and ethical bodies in Asia have remained irrelevant to Western tools of analysis and handling. This irrelevancy maintains its affirmation to the West and Western approaches through a cunningly political indifference. Such an irrelevancy illustrates itself in a pathologically but politically evasive and rebellious (against the West) situation to Western configurations not through radical dissociation but through superficially exotic off-beat and off-time entities and events which share (affirm) much with Western aspirations instead of negating the West in a vengeful or victimologic retaliation. An example of this encounter and subversive cooperation has already been followed in Lovecraft’s linguistic distortion and its social influences (the text is not available anymore).
If for the most part, encounters with the East continue to be Lumpen Orientalist, it is because in a contagiously and hugely active way – and not neutral or detached – both Lumpen Orientalism and the East itself can participate and join together in producing anomalous offspring through their converging irrelevancies, one in itself, and the other to the forces which try to map and environ it. And in fact, both Deleuze and Lovecraft (and in a strange way, more Lovecraft than Deleuze) have come to their viral existence as the offspring of this participation, which is potentially a massive object of examination, creativity and elation in itself.
Now, in a visually mind-eating and tongue-binding way, the first self-proclaimed and registered Lumpen Orientalist.
But more than satiating morbid interests in bizarre bazaars among archeological lurkers and people who try to sell you sentient junk relics and organic oddities I am looking forward to the Lumpen Orientalist’s photo-essay which interrogates the Deleuze problematic of Nomadism by rigorously delving into forgotten nomad fabrics and their blood-bond with the State.
Posted by Incognitum at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2006
Nomadic Imperialism, Sedentary Hegemony
One of the factoring causes for the US that continues to be in quandary in Iraq is originating from an orthogonal opposition (hence sharing a center along identical axes) between the nature and quality of US militarization and the US policy i.e. the US territorial policy.
Although US remilitarization aiming at engendering a highly dynamic army to both ward off the obscure hostilities in Iraq (lack of definite target in a military sense) and to continue its existence as a more obscure entity (inter-states soldier, intra-state enforcer and constabulary) succeeded but it resulted in an attritional situation for US domestic and foreign policies. Not only to occupy and remain in Iraq but also to prevent the war from turning into a war between states which results in a pro-longed organized resistance, US army underwent a drastic re-militarization marked by two axial reassemblies. One was involved with a shift from open battlefield to urbanized spaces – thus subjected to more complex rules and policies on both command and tactical / executive levels. The other was the radical infantrication of the army to leverage the US military might against urban defenders whose military peculiarities vacillate between the two poles of ex-civilian soldier and ex-soldier civilian (militia?), and whose military obligations are from completely different agendas. In short, the remilitarization was based on bridging a dynamic and versatile nexus (minimally under the influence of territorial functions) between the quality and level of the army as a foreign army or what can operate as an inter-state force, and a quasi-police force with a designated focus of activity which is tackling not military forces of another state but forces which have little in common with the military forces of the State ruling over them. Such a dynamic bridge established within the US army for eliminating threats both from the decreasing State’s resistance and growing militias with rather obscure origins and mostly outside of any connection with the State fully pushed the US army to a new military realm. The characteristics of this new realm could be summarized as the progressive loss of static qualities and military configurations or formations of the army to maintain a constant vigilance and capacity against the hostilities in Iraq which are instigated by the urbanized soldier or militia as a free-play and unconventionally dynamic military interference rather than the solid State’s resistance which is diminishing. The consequence of this re-militarization for the US army was losing the ability to fully settle. In order to be settled, or more precisely, to occupy a concrete territory and acting as an occupant merely caring about the geographic that is to say concretely spatial aspects of occupation, the US army must be consolidated as an inter-States force of colonialization or a conventional Imperial army. But to be such an army with a stationary yet geographically expanding ambition is not compatible to being vigilantly dynamic and polymorphous and not in line with mustering the hegemonic (necessarily dynamic at all costs) objectives of the US policy in seeking out Jihadies from civilians or the other way around.
The nomadic configuration of the US army in its hegemonic war against the Jihadi-civilian or the ‘Jihadi under Taqiyya’ prevents the army to fully settle in a geographic space or territory. Meanwhile, complete occupation of a territory or ‘excluding a spatial region’ is necessary for defending. To defend can only be made possible by asserting control over a geographic area (territory) and the exclusive use of territory; without possessing such a ‘territory’ defending is almost impossible. The consequence of this lack of defense capacity in Iraq for the US army leads to at least two conclusions. One is that if the US army does not have a consolidated defense program or military formation of this kind in Iraq then it is mounting up around purely offensive and intrusive configurations. The singularity structure of the American hegemony as the liberating leadership in the region and a paradigm for international policies, too, in the same way hammers out its dynamic edge out of offensive tactics. The next immediate conclusion, in the wake of this bipolar military disorder of the US army in Iraq is developing a suicidal attitude and direction because pure offense (through nomadic remilitarization) fulfills an immanent tactics that fails to survive because its dynamism escapes what the planes of logistics and strategy provide for the line of tactics: survival gravity.
The excluding attitude of the US domestic policy (manifested in its homeland security) is always willing to exponentially compensate what it lacks outside of its concrete geographic territory that is 'full settling' and 'home', by exerting more territorial regulations and escalating the territorial functions of the homeland. The perplexing nature of the US military machine and its policies in Iraq and the rest of the globe are originating from the consummation of the US as an enigmatic Imperialist which is too nomadic outside of its geographic state and too sedentarized inside its territory to be hegemonic.
Posted by Incognitum at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2006
Collapse corollary (The Militarization of Peace)
Today Taqiyya or adhering to the logic of a Takfiri connects survival of a believer who conceals his practice and belief that is the way of the warrior under Taqiyya to a catastrophic consequence for the enemies’ community in which survival of individuals or collectives particularly the very existence of native and indigenous entities must turn into an object of police curiosity or even liquidation, because the hostile entities who exploit Taqiyya practice and revere everything but their own systems, they populate every niche and land but their own.
It is not the extremist under Taqiyya who is targeted as the object of eradication and assault but potential hosts or the positions (niches) which can be occupied by him; and if the survival in a hostile environment is the mere reason of the Takfiri’s Taqiyya and parasitic activities aiming at civilians, then it becomes an imperative task for constabularies to shift the direction of the hunt to survival in general as the threatening subject, probing everywhere that an attempt for survival takes place. In the presence of a warrior under Taqiyya who just tries to survive, becoming the native civilian of the hostile society does not only render the event of ‘being a civilian’ (civilian-hood) menacing but also forms a polarity in the society which is the polarity of the State and insurgent militia (sabotaged civilianhood), a polarity which moves on the corkscrew of escalation and diffusion. Every suspect Jihadi who is eliminated by the State results in stronger attempts for survival from the Jihadi under Taqiyya which in turn leads to a more powerful Taqiyya, that is to say, diffusing among new hosts to a higher degree as well as increasing the potentiality of being a Jihadi through every civilian or native host (recrudescence in the sense of disease). The State’s wholesome reaction to such an outbreak and incursion through civilians intrinsically begins with a social tenement (isolating suspect civilians from the rest of society) which tends to capture civilianhood within the tractable matrix of taxonomic framing of the social body. This event manifests itself in the rise of ethno-religious quarantines which are less rigid and segregative than ghettos because they are not addressed in themselves (as in anti-Semitic or apartheid ghettos of Warsaw and Johannesburg) but in relation to the politics of civilianhood. However, this event is strong enough to take the form of an inter-society exodus, or return to the minority side of each civilian (minority subsistence instead of social wholesomeness). Because of the Takfiri’s minority or religious and ethnic peculiarities, this minority fission that creates a perforated population (hence with a different behavior towards the forces of territoriality) is happening more on the side of religion than anything else.
“the deepest secrets of religion lie in its minorities” (ibn Maimun)
A Jihadi who has undertaken Taqiyya completely and in every aspect overlaps the citizen, the voiceless, the ordinary, the friendly, the inconsequential by shutting down all his conflictive and war fueled activities. By becoming one with citizens who exist as expendable entities for the State, the warrior under Taqiyya shifts the battlefield to the homeland and conjures the attention of the State and its instruments of policing to citizens rather than outside forces. This hypercamouflage or Taqiyya gives a voice to the voiceless (civilian that is), a voice which is in fact the voice of the warrior under Taqiyya or the logic of hypercamouflage. If the best war machine is an expendable warmachine, then civilian as a citizen who is expendable and replaceable for the State exactly because of the policies and the order of the State, becomes an expendable warmachine, that is to say, the best war machine against the State in the wake of Taqiyya or hypercamouflage. The warrior under Taqiyya does not possess civilians or citizens of the hostile community; he becomes ‘one of them’ in every sense even if becoming one of them practically opposes his beliefs and pragmatic assumptions. Only by becoming one of them or being possessed by all positions and characteristics of a citizen or a civilian of a hostile community – the very opposite of possessing civilians – the Taqiyya practitioner can undermine the citizenship or civilian-hood (both its State-dictated inconsequentiality and harmlessness) and the State itself. This is nothing but the machinery of Revolution, twisted from the beginning, epidemic to the end.
Posted by Incognitum at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2006
Matter does not exist outside of the kitchen
CYCLONOPEDIA (forthcoming)
"The demonic is only attainable by becoming chef or returning to the culinary aspects of matter."
Posted by Incognitum at 07:51 PM | Comments (0)