GABlog

Central to the GA form of Neoabsolutism is the elimination of what I call “supersovereignties”—disciplinary concepts, such as “justice,” “rights,” “equality,” “general welfare,” “popular will,”...

I found myself with the phrase constituting the title of this post at the end of my previous post, as a distillation of the pedagogical order to be strapped into the technomedia order, a distillation...

It seems to me that we’ve gotten to the point, with the emergence of computing as a “metamedia,” where there’s no basis for distinguishing between “media” and “technology.” All media, including the...

The “classical” understanding of the aesthetic in GA is that it derives from the oscillation on the originary scene between attention paid to the sign pointing to the central object, on the one hand,...

The title of this post was actually the thought that got me started on the “hypothesizing the present” post, which, however, ended up going in a different direction. Coming across the following...

In my previous post I found myself in possession of a neat and very promising distinction between the ritual/myth nexus, on the one hand, and the practice/hypothesis nexus, on the other. This means...

I have always operated as if, since the originary hypothesis founds a new form of thinking that is essentially indigestible by the existing disciplines, and therefore necessarily at odds with those...

This post will deal with the implications for knowledge production of the meta-practices of converting the ritual-mythic nexus into practices and the Big Scene into an articulation of centripetal...

This post could be seen as a “successor” to my previous post on model events insofar as it identifies the kind of event we should be looking towards as models. In a recent post I extended an...

In my latest post on self-appification , I proposed that algorithmic inquiry begins with a model event on one side, and actual events on the other side, with the subsequent inquiry identifying...

I’ll be coming back here to issues addressed in a post from April 9, 2019, “The Big Scene is the Anthropological Basis of Anarchist Ontology,” and which I can now place in the context of the...

A practice, as I have been using the term, is doing something so that something happens as a result of what you have done. The better the practice, the more it is reduced to only those means that...

This post continues the thinking initiated in “The Pursuit of Appiness” several posts back. What I want to emphasize is the importance of thinking, not in terms of external attempts to affect and...

What is true? Whatever enables you to further perfect your practice. You have a practice when you can point to something that happens that could only have been a result of something you did. So, if I...

The ether is replaced by the constancy of the speed of light; phlogiston is replaced by oxygen; and, of course, geocentrism is replaced by heliocentrism. In each case, critical experimental results...

To my knowledge, no one has ever placed the transition of power at the center of political theory—neither as an explanatory principle distinguishing regime forms from each other, nor in normative...

Haun Saussy, in an excellent book on the relation between orality and literacy (and media history more generally), suggests a way of thinking about orality that reframes the whole question. Rather...

One broadly, maybe even universally held agreement among “postliberals” is that, contra to liberalism, a properly ordered polity would have a unified project that would command unanimous consent,...

When you “signify” in any way, there are two ways of thinking about what you have done: first, you have conveyed or communicated some meaning, or content, in a package, so to speak, to be delivered...

All discourse is with and of the center; all exchanges are of and with the center; all discourses are mediating exchanges with and through the center. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the human is...

In a very interesting (and short) book, Urban Planning for Murder: Murder Fact Event , Aristides Antonas argues that the governing logic of the city is to render murder anonymous, and therefore...

Hamlet, before following his father’s ghost’s demand to avenge his death, decides to put on a play. The play is to reproduce the event of Claudius’s murder of his brother, Hamlet’s father, and the...

David Olson makes nominalization, in particular the nominalization of verbs, central to his theory of the metalanguage of literacy. To review: the metalanguage of literacy supplements those elements...

Think about how medical treatment currently works—it invariably involves some kind of intervention from the outside. Of course, there’s preventive care, or simply taking care of yourself, by paying...

The declarative sentence makes explicit what remains implicit in ostensives and imperatives. Ostensives and imperatives “work” because a whole scenic configuration is already in place and goes...

This will be my first run at Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (2016), a book that is extremely interesting in its own right (and likely to continue to be so) while also representing a new area of...

Traditional logic, a central pillar of metaphysics, involves turning a subject-predicate relation into a definition, and then using that definition to “certify” another subject-predicate relation....

The hunger artist of Kafka’s story ultimately reveals that he has spent much of his life eating no more than was absolutely necessary to barely stay alive not as an astonishing feat of asceticism but...

I’ve written this post in response to the following comment on the Absolutist Neoreaction reddit page: I’ve noticed that even in your recent articles there’s something still off. That’s in regards...

I’ve been working for a while with the assumption that the “Axial Age” created the conditions for the generation of a new, post-sacrificial morality. Sacrificial morality relies, ultimately, on human...

When I listen to Michael Bloomberg, I hear a very wealthy and powerful man who, whether out of a lack of self-awareness or indifference to the effect of his attitude on others, sounds very much like...

The most destructive thing about liberalism is the systematic falsification it imposes on all of reality. One could say that this has gotten worse—that, for example, mid-20 th century liberalism...

The declarative was invented in the course of deferring the imperative, so it follows that one trajectory of the declarative is to imagine the abolition of the imperative. Not of the ostensive,...

My previous post set up a couple of paradoxes, which we can formulate as elements of a historical dialectic. First, I advanced the notion of history as a process of desacralization, or...

Jurgen Habermas saw the differentiation into various spheres of life, whether in terms of public and private, or the different forms of experience like cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as central to...

To act morally is to sustain the center, which means sustaining, repairing and extending the shared attention or linguistic presence that relies on the center. It’s possible to get more granular...

The discourse of the center bypasses concepts such as “desire,” “resentment” and “mimesis.” Using these concepts, as I mentioned last post, exempt you from the very things you are describing: insofar...

It seems to me we have a very simple way of speaking about “media” in a way consistent with GA: the “media” is whatever enables the constitution of a scene. A sign directs participants on a scene’s...

The ritual order provided models, along with comprehensive initiatory practices to enable members of the community to adopt and inhabit those models. The demise of the ritual order means the end of...

Any center is fit out with a link to the origin—therein lies its power. Even more, any center is itself an origin, an ever emergent origin. Any use of a sign entrains the entire history of sign use...

Let’s say neoabsolutism is the organization of those who seek out commands from the central authority, in distinction from those who make demands upon the central authorities. In distinction from,...

The Linguistic Turn and Generative Literacy I’m going to begin with the assumption that the linguistic turn entails the rejection of any attempt to find legitimation for what we say in language in...

A sign is the deferral of violence. The first sign deferred imminent violence; subsequent signs may also do so, or they may defer intimations of merely possible violence, raising the threshold of...

I’ve been using the phrase “post-sacrificial culture,” generally in conjunction with the “Axial Age acquisitions,” to refer to the breakdown of the “imperative exchange” constitutive of sacrifice....

I’m going to follow up on this definition of the “market” that I offered in my “The Event of Technology” post: “what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with...

Insofar as power is desacralized, there is nothing but mutually hostile “interests” engaged in struggle over the decaying corpse of the social body; at the same time, power is never genuinely...

The origin of the aesthetic lies in the oscillation of the participant on the originary scene’s attention between the sign (the aborted gesture of appropriation) put forth by the other, on the one...

It is in the nature of the declarative to both supplant and appropriate the ostensive. The declarative comes into being by deferring some imperative and, first of all replacing it with the...