Insipid Chaos

Reading Kierkegaard has this additional meta-absurdity, that all one's deepest feelings of private chaos, even that muddle of confusion and pathos is hardly a variation on a theme, that one's  most bitter achievements of self-awareness fail at eloquence, that that inner soup of contingency one thought was bitter and foul is just insipid and nothing more. And perhaps that's the only advantage over K, the only worthy bitterness, to be ironic over one's irony! That's the only source of creative madness left, the only worthwhile contingency, the only fresh note to integrate into your own variations on those cursed themes. And even that... who knows?

Dehumanization of a 'Universal Criterion'

Always lapsing in awareness of our condition of existential vulnerability, our beliefs continue forgetting themselves as resources of cognitive coping and go on reifying themselves, indefinitely, in cycles of self-transparent ideology. Part of this cycle, at its stage of culmination, is the universalization of a paradigmatic ideology. This ideology becomes 'locked-in' as universal paradigm at the moment it defines the irreducible unit of persuasion of all subsidiary systems of thought, when, that is, ascending from a princely role as one vector of persuasion, we find it enthroned as the very condition of persuasion, the very standard of intelligibility. At this stage in the cycle of ideology, counter-narratives, catalysts for novel intellectual and artistic developments, shift their character of engagement from tactics of communication to strategies of communicability.

However, one feature peculiar to modernity as an epoch, distinct from prior cycles of paradigmatic ideology, may be that 'universal' has become 'global' -- 'universal' has been universalized. As the intuitional grounds of plausible disagreement recede, bounds of descriptive possibility narrow universally. Even to speak of 'political ideology', or 'cultural ideology', or 'moral ideology' entails complicity in bolstering the encompassing heteronomy of 'universal ideology'. All dimensions of life and thought, from culture to subculture to counterculture, from mainstream to niche, are subsumed and find themselves to greater or lesser degrees of awareness converging, along their various lines, toward normalization.

As contradictions are systematically neutralized, as the range of possibility yields to intuitional circumscription, as everything finds proper nomothetic identity within an ossifying scheme of rationalized order blind to its own tautology, and as counter-narrative itself self-neutralizes within the accommodations of reform, thought and world congeal into universal objectivity. Perhaps the universalization of, at least nominally, freedom of subjective multiplicity, requires a homeostatic condition of superordinate objectification. Whatever the case, in this state it seems we may finally find the human itself ceding the final kernel of dignity, its symbolic sovereignty, and becoming, universally, thing-like, with all creative resources of autonomy systematically eclipsed in the event horizon of a universally universalized ideology. But that is just one path our susceptibility to organize around a 'Universal Criterion' invites us to, among many others in our dystopian smorgasbord of 'reason'.