Minor Preface – The discussions of this ‘series’: to conjure to acknowledgement & counter socio-economic etcetera thought control mechanisms, include ‘my’ interpretations applied towards each of the texts, hence are not intended as a verbatim reproduction, to do so you can read the philosophy (it is ‘free’ so you will not participate in the mode of capital, a theme demonstrated & suffused throughout the treatise); this one Being Tony Robert Cochran’s ‘Being and State Contra Negativity & Notion’.
Cochran introduces a Nihilist Negatory Ontology (NNO) - formulated as a disruption to the field of Being. The subject is a reflected-reflecting consciousness as a Being amongst Others, its ‘flow of Being’ for itself is constantly challenged by the ‘facticity’ of the world. Spoken thoughts & utterances disrupt the wrapping of non-Being, through the (contained) historical process of ‘becoming’ [advancement to ‘spiritual’ absolute knowledge]; fashioning a representation of the ever-withdrawing, never-reachable non-Being for itself [although may may mistaken for a Being in itself]. Being in itself may be interpreted by Being for itself as impressionable, meaningful, divine; or futile, void, worthless [not a distinct separation between, can be both concurrently].
Nothingness -ever present through its absences, ruptures, voids- allows spacetime to separate disparate entities (such as the human, whose creations are ‘projects’); for the ‘real’ to exist. Sartre is interpolated here through his concept in ‘Being and Nothingness’ - Being is a perpetually unhappy subject by failing to ‘obtain’ Being in itself. NNO is a means to invert Sartrean ontology [Being for itself, towards Being in itself], the self-certainty of ontology & meaning, because of its oppressive function (that of government systems, a structure (‘it’) that actors (‘they’) form to reinforce their identities (a simulacre); which is implicitly/explicitly acted upon, exploiting existing differences at the centre of Being – fashioned politically through the false dialectic of in-group versus out-group, the two political parties; ‘the spatial and legal allowance for terror’.
‘I’ would translate that the ‘self’ one recognizes is its own distance (Heideggerian clearing), its resemblance to the rupture of foundational entropy by the creation of a life ex nihilo nihil fit ‘against’ nothingness; which really is a faceless subject, an absent person, the zero itself although is (mistakenly? Enter ethics/ego) appropriated as a 1 [the image]. Just as when one remembers someone/something lost, as a result ‘mistaken’ relations (‘why did ‘I’ say that, it wasn’t what ‘I’ meant, ‘why was X left unmentioned’) solidifies memories, creating an irreparable barrier to the mode of conversation with the Other, what we would have liked is impossible – isn’t this a recognition of the wordless ? that inhabits the heart of things- that prescient hollowing, that indifferent initiator of fear/unknown (& its entire omnia of symptoms) itself?
‘‘The Western (Euro-American) contemporary human rejects the Nothing. Nothingness represents itself to the human as an ending, the corpse. His contemporary human cannot see that all its possibilities, as a Being-for-itself, are foregrounded in the future nothingness, the radically open present, which is a liminal space where the excessive future finds specificity.’’
Ergo, composing a certainty of Being as the essence of reality and existence of meaning is considered the first prerequisite for oppression by Cochran, as it imposingly controls the tension between Being for itself & Being in itself – government as a fundamentally violent bureaucracy apparatus, a hive mind (that conditions thought in a non-consensual language game, linked together by an endless chain of signifiers) - ‘’drowning in meaning’’ - by forcible codes, classifications, taxonomies, ontological declarations; the cell surrounding Being for itself.
Government wishes to retain Being (always fails, it lashes out in tantrums, e.g. daily incessant warfare), it thinks itself the ultimate reality, the supreme signifier/signified, a universe in itself; it rejects Nothingness, cannot tolerate uncertainty, dissent, or disagreement – those opposing it are standardized as products, silenced as objects, neutralized (ironically) as nothing: for its insecurities cannot be revealed [they have their own ‘psychoanalytic’ complexes/motivations/biases/gratifications]. By treating it as a group-(non)Being with aforesaid predilections, its vulnerabilities can be predicted, subverted, & effected as meaningless [remind the post-subject that its strivings are existentially similar].
Interesting parallels: deposited plastic/unrecyclables signifying discarded meaning, events such as ‘New Year’s Eve’ functions as a comatose signifier/signified to ontology/epistemology/deontology/teleology etcetera of Being only-no knowledge thereof.
The subject interacts under the aegis of personhood, immersed as a product of conscious/unconscious subjectivities (& complexes) in constant synthesis, resistance, motion, stillness; the ego holds/unifies this chain of signifiers together, affect falls into a world of facticity; language mediates the abstracted re-representations of Being in the world (for itself), the sign is devoid of the ‘thing in itself’ (Being in itself); the receipt for the goods are not the goods themselves – there is no meaning without its referential semiotics.
NNO inverts the subject’s terrene orientation to Being in signs. An internalized temporal subjectivity folded the modern subject (1500-1945) back onto itself, alienated, isolated & connected by the commerce of language, transmogrified to a post-subject who demands virtuality/transparency of self; an imaginary, mythical ‘intimacy’ with the Other. Transparency yields panoptical authoritarianism, capitalism devours itself, the post-subject demands its own oppression by exhibitionism enclosed within tautologous images, a fictitious personality & privacy (even a whimsical/anorexic private language) – the decentred subject who desires rebellion against the medium hasn’t realized that itself is the medium of control [it must destroy itself]. The historical/subject/human/teleological meta-narratives must come to an end, are at the end.
The orthodoxy’s operative dreams and infinite loops, frame [a capturing, a society of the image & appearance] an imaginary future/present of one’s Being, a slave to the altar of capital; while emphasizing a ‘glorious past’ (history). This is the insidious disease of repeated rituals, anniversaries, special occasions, elections, national entertainment ‘sports’ - they re-uphold the orthodoxy with subtleties to its DNA offspring (‘the people’). One must not be part of the uniform mass of capital, for without capital government would lack its claimed explicit & implicit metaphysical divine substance/manna by which it escapes, delays, repackages/recreates Nothingness/Being in itself. Its ideology is the myth of the Nothing that becomes a something, an individual, if it worships capital, sells itself on the production line [artists included], if it objectifies everything into tools, machines, utensils; a technology [techne=art, creation, the primal transgression against the ‘natural’ world/Being in itself; ‘just recreate yourself’, ‘you can be anyone you want to’] of a motionless progression, a replenished unsatisfaction of becoming.
Cochran assembles the classes of creation/production in caste from: billionaire class, general technocracy, haute/petit bourgeois (speculators, professors, doctors, scientists, actors), wage class, quasi-nomadic part-of-no-part/Agamben’s homo sacer [who can be killed with impunity, although whose life is declared sacred – an example is the stateless person (different from a refugee), they have no ‘status’, are not within have the vernacular definitions of Being yet are still subject to ‘universal’ declarations of ‘human rights’ [not upheld].
Orthodoxy even rations sexuality itself – who is deemed socially/economically acceptable, chained to its ideological machinations -if one does not operate using capital (fiat, an infatuation/needs for a Godly substance/manna replacement, a ‘divine’ éxtasis, ‘let it be done’; also includes crypto although latter preferred) their life force/’cost of production’ (ovum/sperm) is prevented from developing into offspring; if the child, the future (& now, when items bought for it) unit of production, is not one of capital – it will be disposed/aborted, and/or replaced by a ‘more functional’ unit. All of this commands a price [not value], if you cannot be bought or sold on the agora you are deemed a universal leper, no region of the Earth is spared from capital, not even travel itself [as a means of Being somewhere rather than nowhere, what is familiar is unknown].
To reach the social status of these classes, one must draw a line [symbolized simultaneously one & infinite] on the barren canvas of Being; dignifying the unfixed directionless neutrality with a sign, a meaning (mark, brush stroke, boundary, source, certificate) – to signify worth as an object by pointing towards/away from something (‘profession, ethnicity, gender, country, currency, image, age’): all are meaningless outside the relational chain of signs; and invented linearity.
Now the empire’s themes have been preliminarily delineated, as a (un)purposeful subversion (that is, a way of Being), Cochran poses that one must negate one’s own negation [the latter is the recoiling subjectivity of the void within a void]. One must not fall into the ‘institutionalized creativity’ of past failures [‘hippies, beat generation, Zen, Buddhism, religions, consumerist capitalism, Marxism, technologism, such isms’] - these approaches to Being have fabricated a Being for itself out of Nothingness, an identity [etymology=sameness, oneness] of becoming which is a semiotic replacement of Being in itself, it can only refer to itself by distinction to something else; rather than any real intrinsic qualities.
Perspicacious debate beyond semantics may be apparent here [for ‘me’] if only for that Cochran asserts ‘a withering of Being produces more of itself’, pure exposed negation contra negation of negation in question (latter seems ouroboros-like, circular, a recurrence of the same) – Being simply is, it is not an iconography or substance to be decoded. Abjection, negation, the unknown – the invert wields these, embraces them; an inexpressible otherness, non-representative in the field of signs, inclined towards fragility; an abjection (ruptured meaning, ‘self’, loss of foundations of Being for itself) – from which one knows the fetishized object of want is derived from, without applying the totalitarian desires of capital to displace & signify its anxiety.
The institute of the prison implements the ‘purging’ of Being (homo sacer removed from the Other/punished, Cochran was a subaltern here) through the word of Being for itself (law, a replicated need for paternal God Other from ego/’it’ insubstantiality), making it’s violations appear natural & legitimate through regularity – manipulating psychical, physical, archetypal, architectural & social existences into a myth of ‘success, becoming, capital, consumerism, subject/object, possession, fetishism, hyper-sexuality, ideology’ - the orthodoxy accepts & cherishes violence/ignorance inflicted onto Being, converting it to a measured uniformity. Inversion, NNO, can and must reveal the real individual removed from the dialectic of capital & its governmental doctrine – an unrestrained Being in itself (Dasein) in the clearing. Embrace abjection, love Nothingness.
[Linked Reading Material: ‘Being and Nothingness’ Jean-Paul Sartre (1956)
Michel Foucault: ‘The Order of Things’ (1970)
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Julia Kristeva (1982)]