Capitalism, if it is truly the condition of our existence, cannot be known. We may hope at best, if we are successful in hoping, that it may become wholly unknown...That is not to say that knowledge ought not take a scientific or objective turn, only that this serves no transformational purpose.
Class consciousness is not the possessed truth of objects (or classes of them) by subjects (or vice versa). It's not even merely a perspective or variable of approach (ie., a 'theory'), but an extended perceptual horizon illustrating that wealthy leaders' very existence hangs upon the exclusion, misery, exploitation or extraction, in other words, the subjection of others. It's a matter of environmental awareness, even compassion should one be carried by experience or by the tales of those who are themselves so carried.
Subjectivity and objectivity are universally meaningless or they are interchangeable. For any detection, the object in hand is said to be data (circuitously defined as 'that which is subject to handling or sensory engagement and manipulation'). Like a bird, it may be the subject of inquiry or merely an obstacle to be tossed aside, in which case, the "real" data remains unknown or, like an undrilled oil well, is yet to be groped – it may be nothing. The object which is subjected to handling is the subject, whether the experiment or investigation is of things or set upon processes. Very often, like in psychological experimentation, a subject means "a live one", but then where does one place school subjects like history, math or grammar except as more real than students? It's all a matter of where you place your exponent.
Value as such, smooth or rough is the subjective experience of the handler of objects, and whose objective is manipulation (literally, 'fingering figures') or an intermediate stage in quite another purpose. This mediation is what we mean by exploitation – the ownership of the means:
"He who controls meaning controls the world"– Old Man's Tale
Where there is damage to the subject, object or process by the processing of data, the subjective experience is misery from one perspective and pragmatics from the other. It is the basis of (or it lurks under) capitalism, and is justified as "natural" when compared to eating and "neutral" when compared to art. On the other hand, it clearly rhymes with cannibalism, a rarity in nature and typically frowned upon as it is the last stage of any class or species prior to extinction. The rhyme may be chance but the equivalence it portends is not lost on either "side": From the perspective of the leader-eaters (gods), the eaten has always been classed as overwhelmingly other – meat, receptacle or "natural resource". On the brunt of such semantic transformation, one is said to be "objectified", made the equivalent of an inanimate object.
"The Regnorak in Nordic myth-time is the last battle of each against all. Not a single god survived, but some folks did who'd left for the hills or rowed a boat back into mother, eons before or timely, when the shitaree had turned to fire."– Old Woman's Tale
When there is death or destruction to the subject, object or process by the mining or processing of data, the subjective experience of onlookers from any one perspective (even when pragmatic or utilitarian from another) is war or rape so it, pragmatism, is clearly no universal justification for anything. In the same way, transgression is merely a cross-wise movement on the one hand but no mere "struggle" in the context of war. And like christianity, capitalism cannot thrive unless all of nature other than the immediate subject (the Cartesian ego) is considered a collection of obstacles or otherwise hostile. This is the basis of both Hobbesian and Cartesian (or narcissistic) philosophies and their infinitely recursive cogitations.
The ratios, misery to struggle and war to death, are equivalent. Such is mathematic or objective value in contradistinction to subjective experience. Money is merely it's medium of exchange creating the value-form or commodity. All such exchange cancels experiential value like an electrical shunt to ground, where justice becomes a euphemism for the inability to tell shit from shinola, leaving one always in need of expert opinion. When ensconced in the midst of hostility, value must always come from elsewhere.
One of the illustrations as well as problems with understanding is its method-as-destination, 'going to ground'. This is both the discovery and formation of the subject (thinking, therefore amming), and as integrity demands a line, position or a stand, one is now subject to all the vagaries of nature, be they kind or cruel. The subject position must therefore always come from the ground of slavery or other such stasis. Neither form of immobility has been uncovered by archaeologists digging for first principles. Going to ground with high expectations, one goes nowhere but under or atop a dungheap or other similarly constructed midden. It is home only to the excluded middle and lost art.
To de-fence requires wire-cutters; o'r-fence is a leap or a climb. Either destruction or transcendence demonstrates a will to distributivity, not the content stasis of being, even for more seedy types. Life is becoming and cannot be said to be mimicked by art, which coldly produces beings – still life – although at times, they may signal a favorable movement, just like a biohazard sign stuck in the ground can be a source of moving inspiration. Of course a sign in it's navigational sense and a gesture in any sense are rarely taken as representative. They invite or discourage.
It's not even the other way around, except when life and art are seen as synonyms – one theatre merely mimicking another with no sense of representation and only in this sense it can be said to be reproductive, but not of identities such as the cloning operations along any assembly line, be it academic or industrial. A better word would be "generative", since what is produced is always difference. It may merely be the play of otherness. Why then, asked Roger Caillois, wouldn't a moth disappear into the bark of a tree even when there is no wasp giving chase? Certainly not always the errors of paranoia! That itself may be the stand from the paranoia of eros, and quite unbecoming at that.
If the subject is the seed, the fragrance of tomorrow's lilac bush is irrelevant. Any modification of perspective transforms the subject into object. Any third position does the same regarding the other two. First, second and third are therefore equivalent and interchangeable, and even trialectics decomposes. The problem, of course, is the logo, lect or ligature misunderstood as the landscape or territory rather than the simulation, snapshot or map that they are.
One may merge with any traffic, but there are always off-ramps – a moth has wings (with or without cammo) – even if the exit is through the guard-rail, and without the security of a seat-belt, there's a chance one will be thrown from the vehicle before the fuel tank explodes on the rocks below. In either case, the lay-off may be no gentler than a certain resignation. To move or be moved is often the question, but what difference if the destination is the same?
Understanding's destination is truth, a stoppage or turning point. Nominalism only comes up with lists of names, jargon and talking points – the basis of applied journalism. Equipped therewith, one establishes leadership, only practical when there abound barbarians, unbelievers and heretics. The 'lazy' follower is part and parcel of that leadership, having the same intention, a delegation or relegation of "will" (or "perception", in the sense Aldous Huxley used it) in the interest of conservation ( – see 'blinders'), so presents no antagonistic distinction in the same way that the head and tail of an ass present no zoological contradiction so are never expected to transgress, much less revolt one over the other.
Without truth, morality disappears and without that hobgoblin, war and antagonism are meaningless outside the context of eating and being eaten, and whose result is still a mutual merger, a transformation on both counts. Like integrity and consistency, we should not confuse consciousness or awareness (even coupled to the memory of familiar sequences or patterns) with knowledge or truth. Only the former are provisional, and as Einstein warned, without an arrival and departure point, speed is irrelevant and time itself is always relative to one or another's standing still. Hegel gave us the dialectic, but Charles Fort corrected it with the hyphen. To wit, master-slave and slave-master are identical according to the principle of reversibility. This principle only states that if something appears uni-directionally linear like a geometrist's straight lines in empty space, there is somewhere an error in judgment or need for an optometrist. Even a crow doesn't fly as the crow flies; sometimes we just confuse one thing for the other when what it is – is no equivocation, it's just one-another, oui?.
Without the objectivity of the nominalists (or environmental vivisectionists), barbarians, unbelievers and heretics are just folks, unless, of course, they're also run-aways. But what's in a name? Clearly the manipulation of language is no justification, much less rationale for anything. Sometimes it's just fun. Altered states of consciousness are not achieved until one substance moves through the environment or its substance moves through you. Such is adaptation by any means you have selected. Just be careful what you wish for: hard enough, you'll likely get it.
"What exactly does this chorus mean? It means all that is possible to find in it. ...beyond the subject represented by the [word] "one," perhaps equally understood as being an outside observer (in this case, fully disapproving) and as being the subjective judgment of this youth (and, in this case, expressing a philosophically or cynically lucid satisfaction). All of this is true, one must not delete anything...
Each time – and this is quite frequent – that a word or a phrase has two possible meanings, one must recognize and maintain them both, because the phrase must be understood as entirely veracious in both senses. For the ensemble of the discourse, this also signifies: the totality of the possible meanings is its only truth.
...One must also sense that this is not a simple irony: must they ultimately be experienced as truly ironic? One must leave this doubt intact."– Guy Debord
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