4.25.2022
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
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A Critique of Online-Idiotism
There is a chapter in South-Korean-born German Philosopher Byung Chul Han’s book, Psychopolitics, titled Idiotism. The chapter is an excursion into idiocy or the idiot savant. Han describes this figure as an agent opposed to the Neoliberal utility regime of control.
“The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice.’ Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness.” - pg. 92 (Epub version)
Han argues that the Idiot Savant, the fool, and the Heretic is the modality of being which can escape or circumvent conformity. In many of Han’s works, from The Agony of Eros to The Burn Out Society, Han criticizes Neoliberalisms's particular form of Subjectivity production. The subject under Neoliberalism is one that has subjugated oneself. We are not a subject that needs the big other to reprimand and enforce biopower over us; instead, we do this to ourselves; we become our own Master and Slave. This subject formation is illustrated via the Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic, which, to summarize, is the construction of two distinct subjects, the Master and the Slave, in which these two categories or Identities preside in the other; the Slave is only intelligible via their relation to the master and vice versa. Thus, the tension between this dialectic is resolved when the Slave who initially was subjugated by the Master placed in this submissive role turns this dynamic when the Slave realizes that the Master has become dependent on the Slave.
With this in mind, Han argues that we no longer need the Big Other, the figure representing power and exercising power on one’s body to get one to conform; the Dialectic is instead enacted within ourselves by becoming ‘we can’ subjects there is no longer any negativity, and thus our internal desire to push ourselves constantly is the driving mechanism that simultaneously subjugates us, reprimands us (you can do better).
The idiot is then posited as an example of a modality to overcome this. The idiot does not conform but instead rebels and is entirely outside of the utility Regime of the ‘we can’ subject. But some argue that even idiocy itself can be subsumed and weaponized to subjugate and control the Idiot.
“Therefore, intelligence does not exercise free choice: it can only select among the offerings the system affords. Intelligence follows the logic of a system. It is system-immanent. A given system defines a given intelligence. Accordingly, intelligence has no access to what is wholly Other. It inhabits a horizontal plane. In contrast, the idiot has contact with the vertical dimension inasmuch as he takes leave of the prevailing system – that is, abandons intelligence. ‘The inside of idiocy is delicate and transparent, like a dragonfly’s wing – it glistens with intelligence that has been overcome.” - Pg. 94
Han makes this criticism of Intelligence, echoing the book's central thesis, that within striated non-spaces under Neoliberalism, such as the web. One can not opt-out of the logic of consumption and subsumption. Under this regime, the psychological tendency and urge to resist Capitalism is already integral to the system itself; many writers like Deleuze and, Subsequently, Mark Fisher have written about this; Fisher even coins the term: Capitalist Realism.
The idiot then to Han is the individual which abandons this, as they exist outside of this control function. But an area of criticism lies in that idiotism itself can be subsumed. If we speak of articulate idiocy, and idiocy in which one see’s idiocy as a mode of subject and not as a modality in itself. Heresy is not active in the same sense as Intellect; one can reason, but the fool does not himself reason, nor do they come to reason to be outside the norms or conventions of their time, for if they were genuinely other, then they do not recognize themselves within theframework of the masses , but always only within their own.
Thus internet idiocy is already captured; the only idiocy that can amount to anything is the idiocy of the artist, the artist that makes their life their medium. Art escapes definition intrinsically. Art embodies a true vitalism. It’s always avant-garde; once art has been territorialized, it is encased within Epistemic or metaphysical regimes, but always posteriorly. I’ve always stated that Art is independent of theory and philosophy. Art has conceptual supremacy over philosophy and, by extension, other disciplines or institutions. Art can be mapped, framed, and conceptualized. True art is always inexhaustible of its medium (when it’s good Art) that’s why the fool, or the heretic utilizes art.
Art is the excrement of the fool.
~Links~
“The inside of idiocy is delicate and transparent, like a dragonfly’s wing – it glistens with intelligence that has been overcome.”
— Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics
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