۱۳۸۷ فروردین ۱۳, سه‌شنبه

Debate about the name of "Persian Gulf"

این متن که در تاریخ یازدهم دسامبر 2004 نگاشته شده بود، از یک گفتگاه قدیمی بدینجا انتقال یافت.
First there was nothing but "Word". And Word was GOD!
First Esmail Yazdanpour opened a new Perspective to the Debate about the name of "Persian Gulf". The Discussion was directed to the concept of Identity, rather than the relation between Possession of something, the right to name it, the historical approach of using the name, and like these.
Now the Discussion is entering into some wide Fields, and encountering some wider Dimensions. It seems more than 60 thinkers are coming to take part to this Discussion. One of them will be produced some fewer lines below; It is proposed by HYPERACTIVITY and may be important for all or many of partners of this Discussion. But I would like to write something before:
When we are challenging or debating about a name, simply must think about any Function or Effect of NAME, I suggest. Then we can be satisfied from what we have asked or how we have judged. Occasionally Name comes to protect human-being against the Loss of Identity. And this Reason seems to be enough to force us to protect the Name: We protect the Names and they protect our Identities. What a good Socio-Historical commerce!
But
"Imagine there's no heaven, no Hell below us, Imagine all the people..."
Yes! The Problem accrues, just when we want to love eachother, to be with eachother, to fade the Borders, in one hand, and to exist as human-being, in another hand. Although I have to protect and even defend the Name of "Persian Gulf" and all other Socio-Historical Names. And I'll Do. Now let's read what is written in HIPERSTITION's and othres' Post:

« Surfascism Main
December 10, 2004
To Western Decadent intellectuality
This is not hyperactivity but since I promised mason and Infinite Thought to write something about the perplexing culture of Iran, I post it here. This is the first part, entitled ‘To Western Decadent intellectuality’, the second part is about Iranian intellectuals and why they usually failed both in Iran and on the global scale.
***
Recently, I received an email from my friend Esmail Yazdanpour who asked me to comment on the issues around the ‘Persian Gulf’ whose name has been changed to Arabic Gulf or The Gulf. The question was profound especially from the angle that Esmail opened it: the multiplicity of identity for Iranians (not from the angle of alienation). This is my utterly crude and over-repeated answer:
***
For Esmail Yazdanpour
I have no significant comment on ‘the Gulf problem’ but I think you are absolutely relevant when speaking of multiple identities; Iranians have multiple identities... there is nothing wrong about it as long as you shift it to something positively multiplying, something that evades sedentarization. Identity problem as it is discussed in the west carries the camouflaged politics of pseudo-fluxional western politics, economical affordance and the State’s monitoring policies. Identity presupposes a mutual affordance, an economical openness which is survivalist to the core: “I can open to you ‘as long as’ I afford you, otherwise I will be cracked open.” This is the ultimate politics of liberalism, ‘openness towards everything’ but an openness which has already been configured and refined through the dynamic boundary of the system, based on capacity of the system to handle it, and at the other pole, this economical openness is heavily interconnected to the most pathetic modes of organic and quotidian political survival. Once it was liberalism, now it is suicidal liberalism (let’s save us by committing suicide) and its offspring: neo-evangelism promoted by neo-messianic propaganda and supported by a reformed frenzy towards a loathsome rationality (they cunningly dissimulate themselves as Anti-capital but we have seen in Necromancers and Sorcerers series that they are appropriated lines-of-escape, grounded, and blind towards the exploitive stratagems of the State; they save the State’s macropolitics in a volatile / micro-economical status that is to say a higher level of solidus management ... fertilizing the ground by unconventional modi operandi).
Openness is never discussed as polytics of ‘being opened’ but the economical, self-preserving politics of ‘being open to’, a higher level of system management; here, identity is a thermodynamic pattern modulated / invented based on political affordance. Everything that threatens the economical affordance i.e. the capacity (emerging from openness as ‘being opened’ instead of ‘being open to’), is an imminent danger for identity.
What introduces itself as the dominant western culture is not open to us, it can only try to afford us, afford our teeming multiplicity. To afford us efficiently and effectively (let’s say with minimum waste), it has erected many guardians, identity is the strongest of them as it links the individual to the crowd, operating spatially rather than locally ... every (western) Identity must afford our multiplicity or appropriate it to a consumable resource; otherwise, in the case of failure, there is always the danger of eradication, of being alienated (cracked open) which is directly associated to suicide or madness (All the dominant western culture cares about is its deeply meshed Survival Economy; this is why, suicide is the best necrocratic terror to play the role of a scapegoat, a scarecrow for those who are fearless enough to tread at the borderline of this economical openness, of this Survival Economy). Have you noticed that the dominant western culture is unable to digest our ferocious multiplicity which is flowing smoothly in our life; western culture is merely capable of ‘trans-forming’ our multiplicity to reproduced ‘Life-Styles’; the western creativity to domesticate the most rabid and frantic lines of our multiplicity is almost potentially limitless; it is great and fantastic in domesticating whatever it finds (pet industry); we cannot deny its spectacular achievements in organic repression and boredom-complex. To this extent, I find ‘speaking of identity’ -- as what western intellectualism maps -- absolutely both dangerous and ridiculous. Our identity is a multiplying multiplicity. Yes, we Middle Eastern people and Iranians in particular are irrelevant to the contemporary world. We are an offbeat / offtime current in the chronology of the whole globe; an autonomous sorcerous machine working out of aeon. I regard this as an ample opportunity to forge our warmachines, polytics and multiplicative identities, instead of ceaselessly importing whatever is attached to western identity-complex and seek to localize it, eventually being infected by their boredom-complex that is now turned into an active messiano-punkism (yes, punk-positive), the Aristotelian circle is rewired (solidity to fluidity to solidity to fluidity: solidus-in-circulation). Messiano-punkism has reserved a room for you in heaven (the messianic / evangelist Outside), save your souls. The urge to vomit is intolerable.
A lesson from crusades: Horsemen were afraid of camels, because of their awkwardness ... we have been always awkward.
If we accept our multiplicity and resolve our problems around it, we can come to this conclusion that for us peace is not opposed to War (war&peace political regime of the new world order is also another symptom of affordance and identity), since we invent peace as its true form, peace as ‘pax’ (pax iranica, pax islamica, etc.): we are a pack and for a pack war has already been cracked and laid open by peace; this is our peace, we should accept that we are the new world disorder; actually, we have always been but the only solution to trigger it and bring it to the course of positive function is ‘participating’ with it, not an economical participation based on mutual affordance and thermodynamic conservatism (economical openness) but a radical one, free from the identity-complex of the West. Thinking of perfection (ne plus ultra) is ridiculous; we are a diverging process not a telos. Our only option: we should think strategically. Let’s be cunning.
Posted by R. Negarestani at December 10, 2004 04:06 AM


Comments:
Reza - have you come across Paul Berman's work? especially Terror and Liberalism?It seems very germane to this topic.While definitely not a 'liberal' in the American sense, I was still massively impressed.His argument about localization (of apocalyptic totalitarianism which he traces back to Revelation) is at the heart of his discussion, and clearly linked to your polemic here. Berman's remarkable (one could say 'peculiar') refusal of 'Western intellectual decadence' will probably damn his influence to practical irrelevance, however. Utopian gesticulation has entirely swamped the left-field of the Western debate over contemporary geo-politics (on this, fantastic piece by one of my heroes, Robert Kaplan, on the cult of victimology in the world media:http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/kaplan_print.html)Posted by: nick at December 10, 2004 06:21 AM


Reza if this is your text on the decline of western intellectualism then I can’t wait for your text about Iranian intellectuals ;-) Man, you are a blade!Posted by: Mohsen at December 10, 2004 04:05 PM


Reza,
I find your writing to be provocative and challenging, but it seems disturbing (and somewhat simplistic) that a theorist that celebrates multiplicity and difference so easily stereotypes/slots bodies of people as a uniform Western culture... as if there is just one Western impulse (is this not one of the negative impulses of Western culture that you are condemning?)
Also can you attempt to explain your we, they and us ...? It seems that if you want to develop a Western understanding of your multiplicity it would be best if you didn't reinforce a sense of singularity through your language?
I only ask this because I find your thought and writings to be interesting and want to learn more...Posted by: Thivai Abhor at December 10, 2004 04:09 PM


Thivai Abhor,
>>> that a theorist that celebrates multiplicity and difference so easily stereotypes/slots bodies of people as a uniform Western culture... as if there is just one Western impulse (is this not one of the negative impulses of Western culture that you are condemning?)
Thanks ... possibly a misunderstanding, the title of the text is to Western ‘Decadent’ Intellectualism. It could be simply ‘to western intellectualism’ but it picks a particular strain of western intellectualism (the decadent one). Plus, I have continuously emphasized on the ‘dominant’ (see how many times I have repeated this word) western intellectualism which is not very different from the word intellectualism in its negative potential. Plus, I’m speaking of intellectualism not intellectuals; does the dominant western intellectualism mean western intellectuals, does it imply that I’m unifying all people under one flag? I don’t think so. Don’t you think that the politics that pushes us to conclude such a formula is actually a symptom of what we criticize here? Moreover, this is a critique on a political trend not its agencies. Hyperstitionally, we are all puppets.
>>> Also can you attempt to explain your we, they and us ...? It seems that if you want to develop a Western understanding of your multiplicity it would be best if you didn't reinforce a sense of singularity through your language?
Adam Sandler in ‘Anger Management’ after being harassed by flight attendants moans: "what is wrong with you people?" The black cop answers back: "what do you mean by ‘YOU people’, I don’t tolerate any racist propaganda sir." Sandler angrily, replies: "I don’t mean ‘You people’, I mean you people; what’s wrong with you people?"
Nick has addressed to an excellent article by Robert Kaplan (http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/kaplan_print.html); interestingly, he discusses the same issue. ‘You’ and ‘We’ are now exploited to engineer a propaganda based on victimhood by terror-media. Let’s tear apart this victimhood complex. The propagandas around the negativity of ‘You’ and ‘We’ actually presupposes nothing but racism itself, smeared and camouflaged by victimhood complex. If you wait I’m writing an answer to Nick about this victimhood complex and how it works as a Terror-propagating virus, a terroristic weapon actually.
Anyway, thanks very much for the kind words and comments. Posted by: Reza at December 10, 2004 06:09 PM


Dear RezaYes, I agree with you that speaking of identity is not a healthy and safe strategy for the ‎Middle East. But the idea of “identity”, even with its overloaded liberal and western ‎connotations, is used ‘in our fashion’: it is a plural, flexible, and camouflaged event. ‎Therefore, it is not yet another guardian, but a mask, made in Iran. ‎Nowhere in history has this region showed the current degree of openness to the others, ‎including to the west (and nowhere in history has the west shown such a gaze). While ‎insisting on the utility of the distinction between “being opened” and “being open to” at ‎another level of discussion, I think as soon as a system is ‘open’, it is open to anything, ‎beyond the original intention of the act of opening; that is why they, in the liberal camp ‎‎(including the suicidal-liberal branch), insist upon de-finition and closure. ‎I do not know about the Middle East, but we Iranians have always acted tactically, tactics ‎against the strategies of the others, and against our own tactics, produced by our own ‎plural altar-egoes. To make masks and camouflages and to act tactically is our strategy; ‎complementary to this we hesitate and postpone.‎This issue is hard to pursue from this perspective, don’t you think that resorting to ‎hyperstitionalism may prove more fruitful, albeit tactical.
PS. Thivai and Nina say that we are no more awkward.Posted by: esmail at December 10, 2004 07:20 PM


Esmail,
>>> But the idea of “identity”, even with its overloaded liberal and western ‎connotations, is used ‘in our fashion’
Exactly, it is reinvented, recomposed and mutated to not only something else but to other things uncharted and unreported (offspring from the space of an-omalie); this is why Iranian (and I think the whole middle eastern) culture(s) are so perplexing, so contagious to be grasped and ana-lyzed. One should be unfathomably blind to grasp what is going on.
>>> While ‎insisting on the utility of the distinction between “being opened” and “being open to” at ‎another level of discussion, I think as soon as a system is ‘open’, it is open to anything, ‎beyond the original intention of the act of opening.
Well, it is sensitive topic; intention as you suggest is not enough; yes system can be open to everything; this was the discovery of the Greek philosophy that boundary does not enclose system but starts them from the edge of what is believed to be the system to the outside, not for opening the system to the outside but to accommodate the Outside within the boundlessness of system. This is not a radical openness; this is what Gibson calls ‘affordance’ or the economy of surfaces. System can only communicate through affordance otherwise its intrinsic survival (which maps it as an entity running through life) will be terminated; it will cease to process, it will cease to be a system. Have you read Necromancer and Sorcerer series? it is a brief discussion that openness of open systems only contributes to the Outside as an economical openness. Yet on the other hand, as you suggest when you open a door, anyone can come in. this is where radical openness (as the plane of being opened: or the communication of the Outside) camouflages itself and creeps to the system via its economical openness, eventually unlocking doors of its own (read Holocaust of Freedom).
>>> tactics
When tactical lines reach a terminal multiplicity, the immergence of strategy as an autonomous entity and hyperstition carrier is inevitable. Posted by: Reza at December 10, 2004 08:23 PM


>>> PS. Thivai and Nina say that we are no more awkward.
well, Nina has already been contaminated here so she is descending to Tartarus, therefore, when she says 'no more awkward', you should think of the opposite or at least other options. ;)
awkward: 'upside down'; it diagrams catadromic functions: collpase, katabasis, and descent (into Tartarus?) awkwardness doesn't mean 'wrong' but it suggests an anomaly. Posted by: Reza at December 10, 2004 08:31 PM


if this is the meaning of awkward, that is the case with Thivai, I am sure; and with anybody who looks through this looking-glass.Posted by: esmail at December 10, 2004 08:36 PM

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Blogger R said...
oops sorry for reposting ...

just traced your blog via technorati link cosmos; thanks for addressing the post ... and great to see another iranian active on the field. just wanted to say, corrected some typos in the post and comments ... so you may want to replace it with the new one. best
12/11/2004 9:45 PM

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