The essential difference between structuring contradictions in thought and structuring repression lies in the immateriality of the former as distinct from the irretrievability of the latter to consciousness, or so it is said. People who try to persuade you the second thing ‘never happened’ are either confused or guilty of gaslighting, whereas to claim this of the first is to point up the necessity of guardrails, as Bertrand Russell sought to do.

With respect to the first thing, this is how thought exercises can be used as aids in governance and guidance. The idea is to make coincide, to fabricate synchronicity, to engineer events so that contradictory propositions occupy the same relative position or the same area in space. This may force their consideration relative to each other, which can give rise to the discovery of a new sensibility. Perhaps the naivety involved here is more likely to find forgiveness where some measure of restraint accompanies the fashioning of the concept.

As well, the immateriality of the concept must be made discernible along with the conceptualization itself, without which care this ‘smoke from the hill’ may be taken as indication of real fire, which Russell warned against. Attributes we give to phenomena in order to understand them should not be confused as really belonging to those phenomena. It’s possible to be further separated from knowing the nature of a thing if we rely excessively on structuring contradictions as supports in order to understand or rather determine our place in relation to them.

Examples of what can happen when these subtleties are overlooked are not in short supply. Whether in the service of military backed ethnic cleansing or isolated attacks, claims for the preservation of religious values in defense of actions that bring degradation to the spirit itself are not only legible, what’s revealed is a declining, desperate spirit that takes the more familiar and expedient route of structuring repression over that of structuring contradictions in thought. Such expediency also makes evident the consequent. Once cherished values are now less dearly held, concepts themselves are made idolatrous, reified, outmoded. Such legibility rests not on indifference and complacency alone, but on the active marshalling of collective velleities. That is to say, where a shared narrative may have once bound a collective more strongly, this is now achieved owing merely to the gathering up of the weakest impulses.

Yet, just as demands for action in the guise of justice can be fabricated in this way, worth noting is that resistance of weak lines should also fall off upon abstraction, thus effecting a restoration of indeterminacy with respect to their origin or their fate. To remain mindful of the trompe l’oeil effect as having the capacity to exact a real pull within conceptual space where one is inclined to believe in it would render clumsy appeals to the very immateriality of said space as empty and even suspect gestures.

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