On the significance of a transition from a condition of subsumed truth to one in which a truthful situation must be produced, as it is situated (metaphysically) in the current empirical context and reflected in the broader culture.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

George, tell me again about them rabbits.

Well, there once was a time when the truth was hidden among the ways of us people as if all tangled up back in them there nest of trees. There once was a fella, Derek Cianfrance, back in the early 2000s, he done went 'an made a film about it, had Ryan Gosling and some other fella who never was worth much up on screen in't. Well, the point of this'ere film was that what's right an what's wrong, an what's true, it ain't what we think it is, it ain't something of an objective nature. Its like we each got somethin' in us guidin' the way and all the things that happen to us—just like you an me, out here on the road, ain't got nowhere's to go, thrown outta work, strugglin' through—but we ain't losing sight of where we's headed.—That's right George, we got dem rabbits and dat alphalpa, an dem chickens.—Well, the thing about those rabbits and that alphalpa patch, Lennie, or what's left of'em, has to do with this orange feller who tried to get hisself into office. He just set the whole country ablaze, sent the world all into a frenzy. Couldn't contain'em selves, wouldn't have 'em runnin' the country, drummed up fake charges, printed fake stories up in their papers, did everything they could to blind us people to our God-given sense of what's right and wrong. But they went too far. And so now, rather than just you 'an me sittin' like we was in our separate parts of the country not given a damn about each other—that's right George, not givin a God damn whether you live or I die—that's right, Lennie. So, like I was saying, now, rather than us all in our own worlds tellin' one another what's wrong an what's right, but all the while doin nothin' but carin' about usselves an nothin' else—well, Lennie, we ain't got much out here livin' like this, but we got each other and we're working towards somethin' now, although God Almighty knows what in the hell that is broadly-like, 'cause there ain't much of any particulars, Lennie, nothin' guys like us can just go up and hang our hats on.

The transition from a situation in which truth endures in a context to one in which it is required to produce a context consistent with itself is characterized by a transition from a situation over-determined by context that renders choice as fidelity clarified by a refusal with respect to a context that makes itself known as wrong to one determined by more imperceptible rules according to which pieces of a fractured context need to be thought with respect to ideas that unify them according to some sense of purpose, which is to say to the purposes still perceptible in the pieces according to a broader vision subsumable to laws (both natural and human-moral). The refusal of this transition has sedimented for so long a liberal condition that has persisted as a mode of the application of an impoverished understanding of 'objectivity' and 'universal law' that have been construed as fascist (because universals are construed as inherently totalizing), and the indeterminate dispersal into a multiplicity of specificities (and the invention of their identities) construed as 'freedom' (and any dysjunction from that totalizing procedure as inherently fascist in its unconstrained unpredictability). And yet, this 'freedom' can be clearly seen now (i.e, through COVID, Ukraine) as pathological and as subsumed within this pathology of moralistic posturing that has no other function than fomenting a sense of belonging without other purpose, through which it establishes an hysterical, exponential political context that breeds pointless dissolution at the same time that it feeds off of it.

This reality now telegraphs its understandable perversion in the prospect of an election defined on both sides of the political spectrum by 'revolution'. Understandable because, on the one hand, on the 'left', the de-facto adoption of Bernie Sanders's rhetoric broadly by liberals and neoconservatives that manifests itself as a simulacrum of 'revolution' that obfuscates its continued subsumption to the precise forces it once opposed but now finds itself allied to in a performance (this time, broader and deliberate, and with access to all the instruments of media necessary to foment it: a real possibility, in this sense¹). And understandable, on the other hand, because, rather than an election of ideas commensurate with this moment, the potential, based on an overly casual and confident assessment of its prospects and the now wide-open nature of the situation, the comprehensible belief that finding organizing principles that transcend the fragmented particulars and all their demands and motivations are beyond reach; or that, likewise, has the potential to look for its own sense of purpose in little more than the production of a temporary feeling of belonging in its own revolution (that liberal opposition has created the conditions for, in its refusal to allow for a dysjunctive politics and the devolution and impossibility of reasoned politics, by whatever method of determining 'reasoned' one wants to apply, which will be discussed below).

And yet, in the recent effort (by indicting Trump) to subsume all of these possibilities into a moralistic political framework, the possibility for understanding the more fundamental morality according to which the present is being determined, and according to which the future can likewise be determined, presents itself in the underlying political dysjunction determined by this more fundamental morality. This is a politics of another kind. The opportunistic simulacrum of the liberal left can be understood to need reproach. For while there have been demonstrations there of the potential for a non-politically expedient purity of concern that itself could have set an example for a reformulation of the terms according to which the present is defined², this possibility is now being re-entrenched into the usual, ideologically convenient form of moral posturing the characterized the liberal left³. Refusing to admit the significance of the broader trends in which they find themselves enmeshed, they cling to a semblance of morality that they attempt now to dig deeper down to a more primitive construence pertaining to more fundamental moral perversions of our society (i.e., equal justice in an unfair, tilted system). But this can only be a constuence because its purpose is only about the displacement of a real politics into an immanent process (to be consummated eventually, sometime, who knows) that exonerates itself from the emergence of this real (dysjunctive) politics which brings with it the necessity for the abandonment of political delusions and a recognition of the actual conditions within which America now persists.

From this, a sense of a (moral) metaphysic of this situation can be grasped: a superficial politics that has overstretched itself and is irredeemable without a reproach that would render an authentic contribution possible through the imposition of a necessary duty to the broader integrity of the country (and world); and the morality of this moment, that introspects to the more basic truths about American society that Trump reflects, a process that itself has unifying potential beyond the irredeemably moralistic. And what the latter looks like: on the one hand, an awareness of all of our own vulnerability and semi-competance at life that has fetishized a form of showmanship and self-celebrity deriving from compulsion that define the broader vacuous dysfunction of what was once a serious American pragmatism that is now displaced into performances of competance and unreflective politicized thoughtlessness upon which this broader cultural emergence is based⁴; and on the other hand, a redemption of precisely this (performative aspect), as a simple dimension of who we are as Americans now, and that sees in this the potential for a politics not neutralized by the rational, moralistic intelligence of specification and planning that ends-up incorporating every larger vision and idea into its legalistic and moralistic deconstructions producing political disintegration⁵. The capacity necessary for overcoming this bind could be conceptualized as transcendental hubris, a concept that is both dysjunctive politically and unifying according to other, non-rationally, non-purely-elaborative means: a hubris subject to supersensible law⁶. The problem, though, is that any such expression (of hubris) faces, as it moves into open territory beyond its traditional subsumption within the liberal media superstructure, a dearth of redeeming culture. In this sense, the broad strokes on this cultural problematic might be worthwile.

Traditionally one might be able to characterize conservative culture as a genealogical culture, focused on the gaudy, wooden representation of belonging to an historical lineage, and the concomitant determinations of self and its intellectual culture as pontificating, superficially open to critique, but, using its position of privelage, always guiding the discourse back to reference points that acknowledge nothing more than the hierarchy of entitlement according to position within a lineage and, more generally, to a position of authority deriving from simple economic power or the dysjunctions of 'experience'. And so while liberal-cultural production may be (now) ideologically circumscribed in its potential to effectuate social and political tranformation commensurate to the underlying (empirical) conditions, constrained as it is by its fetishization of difference according to which it cultivates homogenized multiplicities determined through their effort to realize their sense of belonging through endless creativity (devolved, now, to its bare expression through its proliferation in social-media), it is nevertheless also true that it is worthile to consider the way in which this (liberal) culture functioned, historically, as producing a unifying inter-subjective dimension within which particular purpose (of persons) were coordinated into a broader sense of purpose (of society, under and through culture). Which is also to say that, as a mode of reflection on the past, while it is easy to perceive the homogeneity of that past through a unified cultural perception, it is also necessary to realize the extent to which, underlying that perception, persisted an empirical form of alienation of (suburban) life, the drudgery of jobs, driving around to and from pointless errands—the entire mechanical social substrate. And further than this, the way in which the relationships between the structure and the incentives and compulsions, necessities, within this substrate and the broader culture constitute a metaphysics of cultural representation through the way in which representation coincides with the forces of the social and its necessities, and the way in which they, by being reflected in a broader culture, achieve an articulation as a whole towards an end not determined exclusively by them⁷.

And so what then does a transcendental hubris mean and what role can it play in resolving these problems today? On the one hand, it does present itself as an expression of American cultural potential as it exists today, according to its interpretation as a restatement of a seriousness historically attributable to Americans that manifests itself in this (transcendental) mode as an ability to accomplish things as a virtue in its own right; on the other hand, though, it presents the potential for a misguided endeavor whereby transcendental self and cultural reflections (that might otherwise be particular to material reality, broader law and governance) present themselves as not in any way commensurate to the problems and realities of the world. In this way, they would, as a result, be once again immanently subsumed by the mechanics of that world and the forces that determine it, thereby rendering this transcendental hubris as little more than a broader transcendental farce. In this sense, then, while it is possible to analyze the political metaphysics of the moment, subject them to a trascendental analytic that evokes the future towards which they are moving, as well as to indicate the empirical conditions according to which this movement is subject, it is nevertheless, not possible to produce prescriptions that can be followed to produce a result that would not be subject the (limited) capacities and conditions from out of which a person would attempt to implement them. Which is to say, that without a generalized belief in the worth of the inter-subjective dimension (a willingness to move beyond a rationalized cynicism and fear of simple dysjunction) and an honest, open process of working through the nature of these problems that gets to the bottom of them and the possibility for their transcendental articulation as politically significant⁸, it is not possible to imagine such a transcendental process of reformation that would not be anything other than as impoverished as the impoverished context from out of which it would arise. And to which, devoid of the impulsion to work together towards the discovery of empirical conditions and their real exigencies, the formation of a truly serious American politics commensurate with reality would only amount to an anachronism (albeit a comedic one with incidental possibilities, that should not themselves by discounted), or a younger-generation clown-show, deliberate or otherwise.

One thing one can say (prescriptively), though, about anyone who wants to know what is transcendental hubris: Lennie, why don't you kneel down by the brook over there and tell me one more time about the political revolution.

Footnotes