Tuesday, December 4, 2007

"History was our strong hypothesis"

"History was our strong hypothesis, the hypothesis of maximum intensty" (Baudrillard 2005: 128). History has become an alibi, an explanation for a present which refuses to yield. It has become a synonym for virtue, but a virtue capable of the most refined as well as the most egregious vice. History now names the reasons why perpetual violence, without hope of victory, is not only acceptable but good, indeed The Good, for the USA, for Israel, for every fundamentalist sect from Belfast to bali. History has become the name of its own end, for the lack, loss, foreclosure of the future.

Against Baudrillard, to argue that it is not the end of history but the end of the future that is achieved in Integral Reality, the froth on the daydream of change as 'minimum intensity' (ibid) caught in the feedback loop between happening and information about what happens.

Firstness is not innocence – when it poses as a goal. Secondness is not violence done to innocence when it shakes apart the endless shimmer of perception to release the difference. Identity thinking is not the only way to appropriate the manifold for thought or action. But reducing every perception back to the status of the merely perceived is the politics prior to the commodification of information, the general equivalence. Critical to the possibility of action, and therefore of event, is the tactical task of remaking perception, specifically as regards secondness. Unless there is a better way, ation will not be possible at all; only, as JB has it, terror.

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