CONCEPTS COMMON IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL
WORKS OF ALEXANDER BARD & JAN SÖDERQVIST
ABSOLUTE MOBILISM: A natural romantic utopianism, a dream of pure thought superior to all culturally conditioned categories, free-flow philosophy. Unfortunately impossible to practice and communicate, because the medium, language, requires an eternalisation of thought.
ATTENTIONALISM: The value system which is gradually replacing economism as the informationalist paradigm is becoming established. Attention is determined by the interplay between the awareness and the credibility a person or network succeeds in creating.
BIFURCATION: In geometry, the point where a line divides or branches into two lines. Launched in philosophy by Gilles Deleuze, since when it has been used in the wider context for conditions in which conhesive eternalisations burst, are mobilised and have to be eternalised once more in order to be made comprehensible.
CAPITALISM: The social paradigm which was introduced with the printing press and made its broad breakthrough thanks to effective one-way communication with a mass audience created by these new media. The concept is therefore much more than what is sometimes referred to as capitalism in everyday speech, in other words: the market economy, economism, et cetera.
CONSUMTARIAT: The underclass of information society, a proletariat of consumption which lacks the power and initiative to produce its own social identity, and which is therefore condemned passively to consume a pre-produced identity.
DEMONOLOGY: Society’s production of enemies and threats in order to reinforce internal cohesion and define the collective identity.
DIVIDUAL: A human being perceived as divisible rather than indivisible (the individual). The dividual nurtures a multiplicity of identities, regarding none of these as more ‘real’ or ‘original’ than any other, and allows the different sides to dominate according to context, whereas the individual strives for an integrated personality.
ÉTATISM: The supreme political ideology of the capitalist paradigm, of which conservatism, liberalism and socialism are closely-related varieties. The whole of political thought stems from the idea of the nation state as the principle social institution and self-evident centre of power.
ETERNALISATION: A freezing of a chosen piece of absolute movement in the chaos of the world, necessary to make life comprehensible.
ETERNALISM: The philosophy which through eternalisations and meta-eternalisations produces stability in full awareness of the fallacy of stability, and in close interaction with the entirely different but nonetheless unavoidable mobilism.
ETHICS: Original meaning ‘habits’ in Greek. Since Baruch Spinoza’s definition in the 1600s, used philosophically as synonymous with presumed subjective values based on a monistic and secularised worldview. Operative from the oppositional pair constructivity v. destructivity.
THE EVENT: The glittering goal of the networking collective. The Event arises when productivity in the network reaches maximal levels and lasts as long as this state can be maintained. It replaces the capitalist era’s idea of Progress as the subject’s desired reward for hard work.
EVENTOLOGY: The theory of the conditions and social functions of the Event.
FEUDALISM: The social paradigm linked to the information-technological revolution of written language c.3,000 BC, and which stretched until the next revolution, that of the printing press. Feudalism includes the feudal society of the European Middle Ages, but is also a wider concept.
FICTIVES: The instruments that thinking itself produces in the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism, when the first set of eternalisations are mobilised and thereby set in motion, meaning that they have to be eternalised again.
THE GLOBAL EMPIRE: The idea of a global order – political, cultural and economic. A vision which appears in many different forms and with many different focuses in the history of philosophy, all of them supporting the view that the global platform for the exercising of power is unequivocally superior to regional interests.
GLOBALISATION: A genuine globalisation comprises infinitely more than merely free trade: a truly global, cultural and political arena for common problem-solving and mutual enrichment in all possible areas.
GLOBALISM: The political ideology which follows eternalism, and the activist movement towards a global order. Identity: Humankind’s primary social needs, more or less satisfied by the collective subject’s production of identity.
INFORMATIONALISM: The social paradigm which is replacing capitalism in conjunction with the information-technological revolution of interactive media. Synonyms: Information society and Network society.
INTERACTIVITY: Two-way communication, media technologies for mutual information exchange where the roles of producer and consumer are constantly being swapped.
MATHEMES: Philosophical diagrams used to illustrate relationships between phenomena, for instance the relationship between credibility and awareness in the production of attention. Frequently used within Lacanian psychoanalysis to illustrate how consciousness regards itself in order to function.
MEMETICS: The theory of memes and their fight to survive and reproduce. Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes.
THE METAPHYSICS OF PARADOXISM: The idea of the never-ending dialectic between eternalism and mobilism as the single but entirely sufficient metaphysical basis for both thought and life itself.
MOBILISATION: The return of single eternalisations to a state of movement and new, meaning-creating relations to one another.
MOBILISM: The philosophy which sees through the fiction of eternalisation (and totalism’s ambitions of totality), and returns thought from artificial order to the productive chaos of the next level, all the time in close interaction with the entirely different but nonetheless unavoidable eternalism.
MORALS: Original meaning ‘habits’ in Latin. Since Baruch Spinoza’s definition in the 1600s, used philosophically as synonymous with presumed objective values based on a dualistic and theological worldview. Operative from the oppositional pair good v. evil.
NIHILISM: The understanding that life lacks both divine and natural meaning, as a result of which the search for meaning has always been and will always be a production of meaning. Eternalism differentiates between naive, cynical and affirmative nihilism.
THE NET: The metaphysical aspect of networking as an idea, and therefore something much broader and more abstract than any specific network or any specific technology.
NETOCRACY: The dominant class of informationalism, in other words: the elite which attains power and status through its unique capacity to create attentional value, and which produces and controls its own social identity, primarily through intensive networking.
NETWORK DYNAMICS: The branch of socioanalysis which studies how relations, hierarchies, transparencies, topographies, non-zero-sum games, zero-sum games and minus-sum games arise and function within different networks.
NON-ZERO-SUM GAME: A concept taken from game theory. A non-zero-sum game is characterised by mutual benefit from the production of increased value: every player has good reason to hope for advantage. The result is greater than the sum of the parts. In a zero-sum game, you can only win what someone else loses. The result is exactly the same as the sum of the parts. In a minus-sum game, the productivity is negative, the result is less than the sum of the parts, as a result of which all players risk net losses.
PARADOXISM: The dialectic aspect of eternalism.
The Paradox of Metaphysics: The never-ending and apparently insoluble conflict between eternalism (stability philosophy) and mobilism (movement philosophy). While the former stems from being, the latter is based upon becoming. The solution to this conflict suggested by Bard & Söderqvist proposes a metaphysics of paradoxism, in which the relationship between eternalism and mobilism forms a circular but simultaneously open dialectic which itself constitutes the metaphysical foundation.
PLURARCHY: A political state where majority decisions have lost all weight, as a result of which all subordination is based upon some form of voluntary submission.
REPLICATORS: Molecules or cultural concepts (genes or memes) with the capacity to produce exact copies of themselves. Occasionally these copies are not exact, which gives rise to mutations, which in turn facilitate evolution and natural selection.
SCHIZOANALYSIS: Psychoanalysis modified for the needs of the dividual, intended to liberate a large but still manageable multiplicity of personalities, and to counteract every tendency towards restrictive uniformity.
SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES: Principles for social interaction, consciously or unconsciously applied as instruments with which to steer the collective in a certain direction.
SOCIOANALYSIS: Schizoanalysis transferred to the level of the collective subject. Informational society’s politics are applied socioanalysis, as a result of which the voters of the capitalist era will be replaced by socioanalysis, whose relationship to politicians/analysts will be characterised by interactivity and the plurarchic form of voluntary subordination.
SOCIOMETRY: The endlessly complex measuring and comparison of social status on attentional terms. Constructed upon sociograms, diagrams of who knows and interacts with whom and in which ways in informational society.
TOTALISM: The tradition of thought which has dominated western philosophy since Plato’s day, and which aims to develop a form of thought which encompasses all of existence as it actually is, which, from a mobilistic perspective, is absurd, given that the world of existence is by definition different to the conceptual world.
TRANSRATIONALISM: A modified and pragmatic rationalism which accepts and stems from the in-built limitations of rational thought. Transrationalism is interested in what is functional rather than in objective truths and possible correspondences between thought and existence.
VIRTUAL NOMADIC TRIBES: Netocratic collectives in the wider sense. They are virtual because they are primarily organised via interactive media technologies, nomadic because mobility is a virtue and geographical location uninteresting, and tribes because they tend to form according to primitivism’s tribal structures.
THE WORLD STATE: The Global Empire translated into judicial and political practice, meaning global jurisdiction and a global monopoly of violence, which in turn means the final death-throes of the sovereignty of the nation state.