What counts as data? With the addition of something like a cut, I take away from the emptiness or innocence of sense-data so that the form is less receptive/susceptible to any meaning whatever. So goes the well-worn move, such that attenuated, uprooted forms forfeited of meaning, “purified” of experience, constitute meaning that is collectively determined on the basis of sense-data taken in aggregate. If it’s in this sense that the cut or the judgement effects a ‘loss’ or delimitation, then it isn’t the case that traumatic collective loss is a necessary requisite to the formation of so-called collective soul lines. Not at all. Moreover, if one thinks of that added something as a forged memory of shared fault or loss of innocence whose judgement as such provides a make-shift, disposable, collective soul that binds for the purpose of facilitating the appearance of movement from the place, what does this say about the nature of that which belongs together solely on the basis of the cut? The problem of quality with respect to what is thereby unified matters in a world where it’s anybody’s game to sow discontents in the interest of fostering unities, particularly when the undertaking is knowingly informed with problematic propositions passed off as apodeictic. For the taking to every would-be political strategist is the solution to the puzzle McLuhan posed a half century ago, namely, what to do with waste energy fragments, those remnants of logical errors and defective reasoning once used to cajole and corral into place values held in common. What was demonstrated at that time was the bundling of fragments to stabilize a surface area in order to effect a recollection and retrieval of repressed knowledge in holographic form, such that the energy reclaimed might only be what was used formerly to effect and cue periodically the repression itself. In this sense it’s correct to say political polarization doesn’t aim after statements of truth. The point is rather to charge the surface with concepts that approximate lived conditions on the ground. The most forward looking of visionaries recommend a kind of nationalism premised on differences or disagreements because what they are after is a polarization of the field to give it an overall electric charge. Yet, insofar as cynicism is a characteristic of their own worldview and not what could be referred to more generously as a healthy skepticism, this gives rise to a greater probability that their gifts of discernment will not accompany their actions despite the authors’ fondest intentions. At best, what it does (in addition to signaling its own boredom) is underwrite the urgency to understand the empty passage as a bridge, the artist’s skywriting of a cloud, rather than as confirmation of an uncomplicated notion of cosmic man as a fundamental natural law. The difference between most other methodologies and that which seeks to apply at a remove a current over a body in the way of a solution can be demonstrated with the idea of civilizational checks in Aristotle. There the idea is posited in a way that is consistent with the project of grouping according to class in the interest of governance (Ch. 9, Lesson 9). But where Idea results from counting successors and then dividing, and where it is asserted that division applies only to numbers and that units can’t be counted in among numbers, all of this suggests, among other things, that direct governance over the individual was not the original intention, at least not by this method. The further laying down of ground rules for the staking out of such claims is traceable to Russell, one among many who sought to unfasten consciousness from claims to morality. Russell extended Peano’s argument that any property shared by successor and non-successor belongs to all numbers, so as to say what attaches to language belongs to everyone. Morality becomes irrelevant in that case. It is irrelevant because amorality doesn’t have a deleterious effect on the ability to think where those faults are distributed. But in such a view, neither can the attainment or acquisition of said consciousness, spoken or unspoken, connote a morally advanced state or even motion toward this, independently of the use to which it is put. The corrective might have been intended for those who took to heart what only ever was an effort to manage collective action, to limit the number of permissible interactions at a given time and place, where there obtained a tacit assumption of the necessity for correction later. The latter assumption is in the first place what allows for the introduction of a problematic judgement in order to govern a collective most efficiently. Russell was among those who exposed the above premise as naturalized convention. Nonetheless such reasoning and justification persist at sites with fewer platforms where the number of exchanges is limited. The difference in approach with respect to political polarization also is apparent in Lacan’s instruction on how to tell sexuality that is generative of life from sexuality redirected in the service of the death drive. The straight answer is whether one arrives at multiple meanings or just one, which is not to say there exists an infinitude of multiple meanings insofar as an infinite number can be said to exist solely on the proof of an internal conviction that each exists. In that case you would arrive at only one meaning in an infinite number of cases. Rather, the pleasure in absolute knowing of a thing because you killed it, i.e. imposed your own phallic-centric meaning on it, which meaning is the force that prevents it from becoming otherwise or unrecognizable, you’d have to not do that in order to appreciate what it means to regard the Other as unknowable. Further, if political polarization promises recovery of knowledge, which retrieval may simply be the energy now made available upon suspension of structuring repression, by what guiding principle are these cuts being made? How deep do such distinctions run and can they in fact be undone? And if the post hoc empty speech that everywhere attends these decisive turns in public opinion is informed by the approval seeking, preening self-admiration that it appears to be, wouldn’t you want to know just whose infinite existence divided up previously is reclaimed presently to yield up ‘jouissance’ or the power of proof with respect to existence? The least you would want to know is that your methodically planned and systematically carried out persecution was not in vain, that you are not being killed all over again by the aestheticization of politics in a new guise that appropriates the memory of others to smooth talk one’s way into forgetting.Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2018 Shumi FergusonCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2018-2019 Shumi Ferguson