Testigo's Gnosis

Notes on Social Abandonment

[exorcismz]

© baran.sarper

[zer0rei]

[knogue]

Unsustainable Crimes of the Imagination

I do not mean “crime” in a legal sense, but as a moral violation or spiritual offense. Specifically, I mean the failure to honor the demand for reciprocity—an inability or refusal to afford some person, some place, or some thing the respect that you would want and that you require to flourish as a human being.

A “crime of the imagination” is a violation that compromises a person’s power to form ideas and to form new ideas. So it’s not only a failure of respect, and not exactly a failure of imagination, but it is that activity which seeks to limit and direct the imaginative capacity of the human being, or activity which uses the imagination as a vehicle to deny reciprocity and mutual respect.

A “crime of the imagination” is committed when one person says: “You are THIS (and not THAT). You were born as THIS (and not THAT). You can only be THIS (and not THAT), and you should never think yourself as anything other than THIS (and you should especially never think of yourself as THAT). The offender—let’s say it’s me—takes advantage of my position of authority to limit your imagination, in effort to cut off your ability to make your own choice. I am trying to structure the world by violating your imagination.

A “crime of the imagination” is also committed when I say to you: “Do you see that person OVER THERE? You should not talk to THEM. You should not listen to THEM. That person OVER THERE is unworthy of your respect.” Here, the crime is not only committed to against you, but also against “THEM.”

In the first case, I strive to limit your imagination about yourself. In the second case, I strive to limit your imagination about who ‘We’ are and who ‘They’ are. In doing so, I treat You and ‘Them’ without respect by convincing You that ‘They’ do not deserve ‘Our’ respect. In both cases, I am using your imagination as a tool to normalize the failure of reciprocity. In the first case, I limit, direct, and control your imagination so you don’t know yourself, trust yourself, or understand yourself. In the second case, I limit your imagination to create an Us and a Them.

A third “crime of the imagination”—and the predictable outcome of the first two crimes being endlessly repeated—is one in which I imagines that either You or ‘They’ have violated some law or committed some offense for which I have no evidence. Here, the crime of the imagination is that I imagine that you are a criminal, even though I have seen no criminal behavior.

So in all three cases—whether I tell You to imagine yourself in a particular way; 2) I tell you to imagine Us and Them in a particular way; or 3) I imagines You (or Them) in a particular way—the imagination is put in service of limitation.  Curiosity is discouraged, mystery and uncertainty are banished, and human reality slides into hearsay, myth, urban legend, unfounded opinion, and unprovable falsehood. These three “crimes of the imagination” inevitably lead us to a dubious and troubled relationship to evidence.

Though the word unsustainable—as in, “unable to be maintained at the current rate or level”—can be said about many processes, it is often encountered in environmental discourse, and that is the sense in which I am using it here. And though I would say that our relationship to the ecological environment is unsustainable, I would add that the processes contributing to our information environment, our social and cultural environment, and our moral and spiritual environment are equally unsustainable. It is not possible to treat people, places, or things as though they are unworthy of our respect endlessly into the future.

An “unsustainable crime of the imagination” is “an offense or violation which limits our imaginative faculties, troubles our relationship to evidence, and poisons our various local and global environments.”

[knogue]

Whiteness and the Necessity of Violence

Insofar as whiteness incorporates violence, and depends on violence to reproduce a division it perceives as natural, biological, and inherent, it incorporates and is dependent upon the violation of non-‘white’ others, a violation it justifies through the allegation or belief that it is, in fact, the ‘others’ that violate the ‘white,’ that intrude upon its space and threaten it with contagion. In this sense, whiteness exists in playing the victim of ‘race,’ and whiteness racializes the world, itself, and others in order to perceive itself as and become this violated victim that must strike first in order to protect itself from the other’s aggression. Whiteness consists in believing that non-‘white’ others threaten and value and quality of whiteness, when whiteness actually depends on otherness to perceive its own specifically ‘white’ value or quality. The violation of others that staves off the violation of the ‘white,’ the activity of other-focused violation that protects ‘white’ identity, protects only the broken mirror through which violence is perceived as necessary. Whiteness exists to justify the necessity of its own violence, the violence that is required for race to continue to be a discernible and useful category of human organization. Whiteness exists to make its own originary violence invisible, and to assign violence to the outside. In the ‘white’ mind, ‘white’ violence exists only as a counter-violence, responding to an initial aggression from the ‘racial’ other. Whiteness is this fear of racial violation, this fear that the other will hurt it, contaminate it, ruin it, kill it, or cause it to become extinct. Because whiteness is not human, and does not see itself as human, its violence exists to protect itself from a humanity it does not see itself to be a part of. The counter-violence of whiteness serves to protect those who believe they are ‘white’ from the ‘violating’ knowledge that they are human—merely human, all too human, human like all the rest. The violence exists to protect the division, and the division exists to protect whiteness from the knowledge of its own history, making the division seem timeless, eternal, and part of a ‘natural’ order. Without this historical knowledge, the false and purely mythic identity of the ‘white’ is protected from the knowledge of its own being, and protected most importantly from knowing that the foundations of its identity are rooted in the presence of an ‘other’ which it is constantly shunning, debasing, abusing, and trying to eliminate.

            The violation of the other that protects the ‘white’ from violation does not protect the ‘white’ individual’s life, but instead protects them from the knowledge of an identity rooted in violent activity carried out against the species it is a part of. Whiteness protects the ‘white’ not only from the knowledge that they are human, but conceals and protects the foundational act of violence that divides the species into god-humans and human-animals. Whiteness normalizes the violent bifurcation of human value and strives to institute, protect, and disseminate the ignorance of the species. The very existence of whiteness asserts that self-knowledge would be a human disaster, when in fact it would only be a disaster to a socio-economy organized around the protection of specifically ‘white’ value and meaning. White violence exists to protect white ignorance, and white ignorance exists to protect a white myth, a myth of identity whose value depends on not knowing what or where it comes from, or why. It is ignorance protecting itself from the violation of knowledge.

[knogue]

Whiteness is hypersensitive to its own value...

Whiteness is hypersensitive to its own value, which means that whiteness is hypersensitive to the presence of anything which threatens the value of its particularity. Whiteness is sensitive and vigilant because it must constantly survey the landscape for anything that threatens the myth that organizes its being and its activity. Whiteness is a project of devaluation—the devaluation of everything that threatens its specifically ‘white’ sense of value. To create its own particular value and sense of worth, whiteness must devalue the very thing that gives it shape and meaning. The activity of maintaining a specifically ‘white’ identity is the activity of devaluing everything that is not ‘white,’ as the presence of the not-‘white’ threatens ‘white’ value. This is why people scream and get out of the pool, why they grouse and frown and move to a ‘better’ neighborhood, why they wanted ‘whites’ and ‘coloreds’ to use separate water fountains. To use the same water fountain, the same swimming pool, or to send their kids to the same public school to be educated alongside alleged inferiors threatens the value of so-called ‘white’ identity.

Whiteness is a social convention, and ‘white’ is the name of a conventional relation between human beings that adheres to a standard that transcends them. Because it is above them, it cannot be found within them or among them.

Whiteness is a system of signification, measurement, and evaluation that seeks to affirm human being as a material substance in accord with a myth rendering that substance as something other than human, i.e., either as god or as animal. In this mythic structure of binary value, the species is divided into god-humans or human-animals—the rightful citizens of a heavenly earth, or the criminal intruders to be kept at bay and confined to hell.

[knogue]

Fictitious Identities are Inevitable Failures

Whiteness incorporates and internalizes bias in its foundational attempt to realize a fictitious identity—an identity whose very purpose and attraction lies int eh fact that it is fictitious, theoretical, mythic. For an individual to be ‘white’ and to think of themselves as ‘white’ is itself an act of discernment and discrimination, a calculated act which gives a pre-calculated value to the fiction of identity.

Whiteness binds the individual to a calculation that must be performed in order to establish and maintain the value attributed to particular identities. Whiteness asks the human being to perceive whiteness as a value and as a valuable quality that can be reliably and definitely perceived. The basic calculation of ‘white’ or not-‘white’ is a binary to which ‘white’ identity is attached—the perception of whiteness interprets the world according to a basic hierarchy of value from which subsequent claims and decisions can be made. Whiteness establishes a binary standard of what is appropriate to and for human being—the me and the not-me, the us and them—according to which whiteness simplifies the world and its activity. In its attachment to perceiving one or two things, whiteness, in its attachment to its virtual standard, ignores the actual complexity of the human world and human life. To limit oneself and others in this way is to reproduce the pain and alienation that come from being unconnected from one’s actual surroundings and circumstances, and to be plugged instead into a simplifying myth about human experience. In its struggle to wrangle the world into its system of binary distinction, whiteness perpetuates a lie, and strives to bind human beings to the lie as well as the conditions that reproduce it. Whiteness tries to control the world by lying about what it is, and the bad faith required to support the false calculation leaves us bereft of meaningful, tangible, concrete, actual connection to the world around us. We are lost because we try to insert our bodies into the myth that not only gives them a particular value, but justifies the values that have heretofore been expressed. Whiteness is also an explanation of the world, and why it is structured and organized in the particular way that it is.

Whiteness strives to restrict human being and human life to a series of calculations of human value. Whiteness organizes a market of human being, assigning differential value to visible bodies according to a mythic standard. In this, whiteness is the language of money, particularly when it is applied to the human being to whom it is impossible to assign a price. Whiteness insists on this system of differential value, but its prices can only be applied through Machiavellian insensitivity and violence, with all the attendant lies, obfuscations, and mental backflips required to turn the world into a myth.

[knogue]

Paradigm of Paranoia

Whiteness is a paradigm of paranoia and self-deception that seeks to hide the powerlessness of its own inhuman position. Its petulant resistance to acknowledging itself as part of the species that it belongs to creates a weakness that whiteness must constantly strive to hide. Though it presents itself otherwise, it is an attachment to the powerlessness of the human it is species suicide masquerading as the only life worth living, limitation pretending to freedom.

[knogue]

The Chaos of Fraudulence

Whiteness is fraudulent and chaotic because it relates through non-relation, organizing the world around acquiring distance from the very thing it requires to become legible. Because it denies its honest relationship to the other, it enjoys a dishonest relationship with itself, a relationship that passes through and is shaped by the figure of otherness, a figure that was and is and always will and must be a virtual, mythic figure. Whiteness cannot know itself, for the myth that organizes its perception constitutes the only knowledge it is allowed to have, a knowledge that must pass through a fictional other in order to become valuable. The mirror must remain broken for whiteness to perceive its own ‘special’ value, and it is in this that whiteness is a dysfunctional paradigm. It does not privilege its own ‘humanity’ or limit the humanity of others, it simply denies that humanity exists or has any value at all. It is a paradigm of human worthlessness that gives way to the impoverishment of the species, because it believes that human beings, insofar as they are discernible at all, are not actual, but virtual. Animated symbols in an organizing myth; a myth applied to concrete circumstances in order to realize that myth’s impossible object.

[knogue]

Whiteness is an excessive performance...

Whiteness performs a belief in its own difference, and this performance is necessarily excessive. It overcompensates simply because it seeks compensation for something that is not actually missing. Or, it overdetermines belonging according to an imagined identity to cover up the fact of that identity’s failure to become concrete, and the correlated failure to belong in a tangible, concrete way. ‘White’ activity posits belonging, but demonstrates non-belonging insofar as identity can have no concrete object and actual embodiment. Whiteness strives to make concrete the myth of its own belonging, a myth that relies on the presence and the perception of that which does not belong. Therefore, whiteness needs the one that does not belong in order to lend solidity to itself, but cannot extend its sense of belonging to precisely the one it depends on to recognize itself as distinct.

[knogue]

Whiteness is basically just money...

So-called ‘white’ identity is rooted in the same imaginary value as money, and to admit that each of these are groundless would be an initial step in restoring the species and its relationship to the earth, and grounding this relationship in something other than antagonism and exploitation. But when one’s imaginary identity is rooted in a monetary value derived from antagonism and exploitation, these are not so easy to give up. Whiteness believes that conflict and antagonism are essential to human being, and though it is not necessary to believe this, the belief is so widespread that it will probably have to be seen to its end. It is probably only when the belief becomes concrete (i.e., when conflict, antagonism, exploitation, and unnecessary precarity realize death at a much greater scale) that whiteness as a popular ideology will reach its end. This is why I say that whiteness is the posture that precedes extinction. For its program to be widely disseminated, intensified, and seen to its logical end, great numbers of people will have to die. This is what happens when life is perceived in a broken mirror reflecting an impossible object. To prove the object’s possibility, that which stands in the way of its realization must be eliminated. Of course, the true obstacle to the realization of whiteness is not the presence of those who do not belong to it, or those who do not embody its idea, but the simple fact that it is nothing but an idea—an act of thought that cannot be materialized as anything other than a thought.

[knogue]

Whiteness conditions perception...

Whiteness conditions perception around a myth of human being that cannot be realized in human experience, and specifically ‘white’ activity exists in resolving the gap between the myth of whiteness and the idea of a ‘white’ human being on one hand, and a concrete experience of human embodiment that lacks a final, knowable, internal ‘racial’ designator.

No one is ‘white’ because no one is ‘raced,’ but whiteness strives to achieve an imaginary status that it is not possible for a human being to have in any tangible, concrete way. Whiteness must compensate for the fact that the supposedly ‘white’ individual can provide no evidence of their own difference, but must still believe in it in order to have their particular value in a ‘white’-centered world. Whiteness must prove that ‘race’ exists, while already living as though ‘race’ has been proven.

The breach or division that whiteness claims is natural, inherent, or given is only a breach in its own self-apprehension. Because whiteness strives to see that others are not both merely and fully human, it cannot perceive itself as merely or fully human. It tries to launch itself into a beyond that it cannot reach because it is imaginary, a fantasy, and so it must subject others to the imaginary rules to justify this breach that cannot be located. The infinite quest for what does not exist leaves the ‘white’ (who is always bereft of their whiteness) in a state of anxiety, hostility, and resentment, as the promise of a specifically ‘white’ being goes eternally unfulfilled—and the ‘other’ becomes the cause of discomfort.

But the ‘other’ is only a reminder of the failure and false promise of the ‘white’ imagination, the ‘other’ is the reflection in the broken mirror that reveals whiteness as unfulfilled, and therefore lacking. Believing in whiteness is to believe in one’s own incompleteness—it is a symbolic excess that compensates for what is not there, an excess that must repeat itself as it shouts into a void that has no echo. Whiteness believes that there is more to be gained from a world which supplies an impossible need, and fails to find what it seeks because nothing is missing. But the covert, never-admitted belief in its own lack is what gives whiteness its particular value and allows it to enter guiltlessly into a state of exception.

[knogue]

What is "Whiteness"?

Whiteness is like a language insofar as the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world (Wittgenstein).

Whiteness is like money, and operates as the subterranean, barely concealed language of finance, of a speculation and abstract wealth that realize themselves as material impoverishment.

Whiteness is a concept, a paradigm according to which the world is ordered. Whiteness is a gestalt that alters and organizes perception around a superstition branded as ‘racial’ fact.

Whiteness is not biological, but must present itself as such in order to reliably function. It is a pretense that strives to order a reality that is retroactively named “racial.”

Whiteness cannot be experienced, but only perceived, and only insofar as that perception does not reveal its foundation as a choice. Whiteness is a virtuality that strives to become actuality, an abstraction that strives to become concrete—and it is precisely in its failure to become what it already claims to be that the activity of whiteness manifests itself. Whiteness is an activity that consists of the failure of its own realization as an actually experienced human quality—it exists in giving oneself over to a fiction, and then claiming that fiction as ‘reality.’