Superlativity Is an Affront to Common Sense

"To be natural is such a difficult pose to keep up."--Oscar Wilde

Upgraded and adapted from Comments:

Giulio wrote: I wish to... focus on concrete things... [Y]ou are... focusing on abstract issues characterized by endless questioning of others' hidden motivations and "identity". As I see things, I am focused on outcomes, and you are focused on identity.

This comment would be, frankly, flabbergasting if I weren't so completely used to hearing it at this point from my Superlatively Technocentric critics.

Let me ask you a few questions: Are you denying you have unconscious motives that can sometimes be more intelligible to others than to yourself? Are you denying that the normative pressures exerted by social formations impact conduct and perception and can look different depending on whether one is inside or outside that formation? Are you denying that all progress, including technoscientific progress, is shaped by social, cultural, and political factors -- or do you believe that progress is simply a matter of the socially indifferent accumulation of useful techniques and technical devices? Are you denying that the predominate vocabularies through which people talk about "progress" and "development" are shaped by the demands of corporate and military competitiveness, and that this might matter to people concerned with matters of sustainability, democracy, and social justice? Are you denying that argument actually consists of more than simply the delineation of logical propositions and the relations of entailment that obtain between them -- and that the force of argument will depend on metaphor, framing, schematism, to the citation of customary topics, tropes, generic conventions, and so on? Do you deny that cults exist, do you deny that they can be studied in ways that generate useful observations, and that these observations can illuminate authoritarian organizational structures beyond the marginal cult form, fundamentalist religiosity, for example, charismatic art movements, marginal subcultural identity politics, populist politics with mass-mediated celebrity leaders, and so on? Do you deny that some people exhibit what is popularly described as True Belief, largely insulated from criticism and driven by defensive forms of identification? Do you deny that there is a difference between forms of identity politics and other modes of politics, or do you simply deny that these differences make a difference? Do you deny that stress and fear of technodevelopmental change can activate irrational passions at the level of personal and mass psychology and that it actually pays to attend to these effects?

These are all perfectly concrete questions as far as I can tell, to all of which I devote considerable attention here at Amor Mundi, and they are none of them more "abstract" than most of the scientific and "technical" claims that exercise the attention of Superlatively Technocentric people -- they are certainly no more abstract than the sociological claims that preoccupy some who would pooh-pooh cultural readings like mine as "literary" or "abstruse," and -- honestly -- these concerns are easily quite as "concrete," you can be sure, as "hardboiled" predictions about the arrival any time soon of Robot Overlords or digital immortality for embodied human people.

These concerns I've listed aren't the only things in the world that repay our attention, certainly, but to dismiss these sorts of issues as some of my interlocutors sometimes seem to do is really just too obtuse for words. It's hard even to know how to respond to such attitudes sometimes. There is something painfully insufferable about the smug dismissals of "abstractness" in favor of "concreteness" one hears from facile reductionists. And there is something painfully self-defeatingly anti-intellectual about the incessant attribution to whole modalities of intelligent expressivity of a disqualifying "effeteness" "eliteness" "muddle-mindedness" "abstruseness" all in a self-promotional effort to market one's own reductionism as paragon. (To the inevitable idiotic response that I am doing the same thing to the scientifically-minded: I actually deeply respect and affirm scientific rationality, but know that to force it to apply everywhere is as distortive of its dignity and worth as to deny it application everywhere.) I just can't tell you how incessant testaments to these attitudes gets things really off on the wrong foot for somebody like me.

Michael Anissimov, for example, offers up this helpful statement in the opening gambit of a response to me elsewhere in the Moot: "A stumbling point is the sometimes unnecessary verbosity of your writing."

What am I supposed to say to that? Hey, fuck you? Honestly!

"Unnecessary verbosity?" Tell me, Michael, are all your words precisely the necessary ones? Necessary to whom, for what purpose? What if I chose some of my words because they delight me? Because they strike me as funny, because I like the sound of them? You got a problem with that?

What kind of self-image drives the choice to frame a discussion with moves like that in the first place? If I may offer up one of my questionable "armchair psychologizing" readings, I'll admit that there are times when I find myself getting the eerie feeling that advocates for AI try to write like Spock or Colossus would (or think they are so doing, since such projects inevitably fail: conceptual language is always metaphorical, argumentative moves are always as figurative as literal) as some kind of amateur performative tribute to the post-biological AI they believe in but which never seems to arrives on the scene as such. Be the change you want to see in the world... only now with robots!

This isn't a clinical diagnosis, of course, this isn't even an accusation. I know this seems to be hard for you guys to grasp, but I don't really believe it's "true" that you are performatively compensating for the interminably failed arrival of AI by acting out in this way. I obviously don't have remotely enough in the way of data to affirm this "theory" as a warranted belief or anything. Treat it as you would surely treat comparable glib conjectures offered up in actual social conversation, as a kind of placeholder for the real perplexity I often find myself feeling when confronted with the curious claims and moves of technocentric folks. Clearly, something rather odd is afoot that makes you guys talk and act this way. Who knows what finally it's all about? It certainly seems to have a measure of defensiveness and projection in it. Treat my proposal of one kind of provisional explanation that seems to hit the pitch and scale of the phenomenon at least as an utterance of the form: What is up with you guys?

Be that as it may, just to be clear: I do like writing words that are "unnecessary." There are plenty of things I like doing that are unnecessary. I am unafraid of the dimensions of experience and expression that are not governed only by necessity. I can cope quite well with such necessities as I must, but I don't want to live in the (to me) gray world where everything gets framed in those terms. That's a dull, ugly world, a robot world, as far as I can tell. Stop crowing about how not verbose, not abstract, not esthetic you guys are if you want to impress me or the people who likely come here for pleasure or provocation. It's not at all a winning strategy in a place like this.

Giulio continues: I am telling you... forget that I am a God Robot Cultist who engages in Superlative Technology Discourse and believes that the Eschaton will upload him to a Techno-Heaven, and let's join forces to achieve the common objectives.

Are you shitting me? I am quite happy to ignore the Robot Cult thing if we are in conversation about whether it's better to wipe your ass with two-ply or three-ply, but if we are talking about documenting and shaping the ongoing discursive formations through which technodevelopmental social struggle is articulated, then I'm not going to ignore the Robot Cult thing. It's relevant. It's WAY relevant. It's epically WAY relevant.

I think different identities should not matter much as long as there is agreement on outcomes.

Agreement on outcomes? I want to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle, I don't aspire to prostheticized Omni-Predicated transcendence of finitude, incarnation, and contested plurality. Dude, five thousand mostly white North Atlantic sf/popular futurology enthusiasts joined a social club they enjoy (which is perfectly fine and possibly charming) and decided they were a "movement" (which is rather silly but still mostly fine).

Now, when you sometimes seem to want to compare your own discomfort as a "transhumanist-identified person" because people are inquiring into the politics of your organizational structure, the leading metaphors in your canonical literature, and the peculiar entailments of your arguments with the suffering of persecuted ethnic, religious, gender minorities (minorities consisting of millions of people with long histories of documented abuses leaving palpable legacies generating irrational stigmas with which we all must cope as people who share a diverse world) it is, to be blunt, fairly flabbergasting.

When, on the other hand, you try to pretend that your status as a "transhumanist-identified person" is a triviality like eye color or preferring boxers to briefs, this is nearly as flabbergasting: inasmuch as if it were true you wouldn't be going on about it so endlessly, even in the face of my ongoing critique, but also because it's so palpably like saying a person's actually-affirmed identification as a Scientologist, a Mormon, a Freemason, or a Republican is something that one should pay no attention to in matters of urgent concern directly shaped by that affiliation and in ways that tend to subvert one's own ends. Who in the hell would ever think like that? What are you talking about?

"[B]eing or not being a cuckold has nothing to do with politics. It is something else, that belongs to a separate and non overlapping part of life. Same with sexual, religious, and football team preferences: these things have NOTHING to do with politics."

Well, actually, all of these things are enormously imbricated in politics. But bracketing all that, just sticking to the specifically wrong thing you are saying instead of all the many more generally wrong things you are saying here: If you happen to be a cuckold I agree that I could care less about that if we are arguing about a current technoscientific issue (unless attitudes toward infidelity come into that issue in some way, obviously). If you see current technoscientific issues as stepping stones along a path that eventuates in the transcendentalizing arrival at Superlative Omni-predicated outcomes in which you have invested deep personal faith, then it would be almost unthinkably stupid for me not to care about how these curious attitudes of yours might derange your sense of the stakes at hand, the significance of the issues, your estimation of likely developments in the near to middle term, the terms, frames, and formulations that will appeal to you and have intuitive force, and so on.

Even worse tactically, because you wish to disqualify many people who would be in _your_ camp when concrete and practical matters are discussed.

I don't have the power to "disqualify" people. I say what I think is right, what I think is wrong, what I think is possible, what I think is important, and what I think is ridiculous. And I won't stop.

In general, I am not looking for a "camp" to find my way to in any case, and while I am a big believer in political organizing I understand p2p politics well enough to know how foolish pan-movements, party machines, and camp mentalities should be to anybody who claims "tactical" wisdom in contemporary politics.