Object oriented Ontology & Hugo Chavez's last horcrux

As opposed to my own entirely novel theory of ontological dysphoria, Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) is nothing new. In ancient Byzantium, according John Julius Norwich, it was believed that the soul of a thing or being might be distributed across a number of disparate physical entities- an old tavern sign, a mole on the face of a Chemistry teacher, a cart horse, a mulberry bush.

Similarly, behind the 'Masters of Suspicion'- Marx, Nietzche, Freud et al- lay even more profound Pundits of Paranoia and Sages of Schizophrenia for whom the horcruxes of the bourgeoisie were as much in the commodities they fetishized as in fetishes that led them to, as the Big Lebowski said, treat objects like women, and commoditize heteroclite conjunctions of things- the smell off coffee, eighteenth Century maps, the prose of Stevenson, being sodomized by Pinochet, the color of lianas in bloom, being sodomized by Pinochet, saying things twice, being sodomized by Pinochet, saying things thrice, the neighbor's cat who conspires with Mossad to steal my toothpaste replacing it with a product identical in every respect but up to three percent less effective in fighting plaque.

It is in this context that though Hugo Chavez is dead, for Object Oriented Ontology and the great mass of the Venezuelan people, his Revolution lives on for its horcruxes are to be found wherever an Industry is fucked over by bien pensant price controls and an Economy is sodomized in the name of Ecology or Egalitarianism or the Empowerment of Educationally Backward Cats wot are stealing my toothpaste.
Fuck you cats- I will get even.
Personally, I blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.

Bourdieu & Indian Politics

For many deeply provincial- i.e. foreign trained- Indian intellectuals, like myself, who came of age in the early Eighties, the writings of Pierre Bourdieu appeared not so much a revelation as a canonical expression of a previously 'unthought known'. At that time, it seemed obvious that historical processes are always structural and that structural transformations are only objectified at the level of subjective, individual, habitus. This enabled us to give content to Alok Rai's (whom I met at the durbar of a cartoonishly corrupt Iyer, U.P cadre, I.A.S officer)  notion of 'damaged modernity- at once embryonic and addled' as defining 'the field' of Indian political culture such that Huma, the legendary bird, the touch of whose shadows confers Empery, hovers over but does nothing to hatch such foul-smelling egg-heads as Indians refer to as the progeny of the owl and who rule the roost in New Delhi because, as the last Moghul wrote-

Bulbul ne aashaiana chaman se utha liya 

Uske bala se boom basay ya Huma rahay

(Now the nightingale no longer rests in garden bowers

Who cares if the owl nests or Huma hovers?)

Put less poetically, the Indian political 'field'- i.e. the arena for arbitrage operations between different types of Bourdieusian 'capital'- operates according to the laws enacted by a parliament of bird-brains impotent to hatch any greater mischief against the common-weal than that constituted by their own continued, craven and concurrency-deadlocked existence. 

In this context, it would be natural to gas on about the 'habitus' of the Indian political class- though it is precisely this style of reasoning which, ab ovo, vitiates our public discourse before it ever even encounters- not its alterity- no, Caste being what it is, that was never on the cards- but, apotheosis, for, as Zatalli tells Bedil- Che ‘Urfi che Faizi ba pesh-e tu phus- what, facing us, now are the Pitr progenitors due the pinda oblation? So far have we advanced along their well trodden circuit, they are nothing save that flatus or anal eructation detecting which Gayatri Spivak consoled the sadly flatulent Matilal by quoting Derridera's assertion that upon the fart, at least, ontology can lay no brusque or bugger's hand.
 Since India, Hindustan, Bharatvarsha, is defined, for Indians, as always constituted by a heterogeneity of 'dharma-as-karma-overcomings'- i.e. India, in so far as it exists, is an ideal marga of meta-hexis simultaneously paced, shoulder to shoulder, by every desi habitus- it follows that it exists only as a hopeful Utopia of the Ernest Bloch type to which, in articulo mortis, the concurrency deadlock that is its proper inertial property, only gives voice when the other Hirschman options of loyalty and exit have been providentially- i.e. by lying technocrats or military men manqué - foreclosed and rendered cheerlessly phantasmogoric.
The 'scandal' of 1968- for France, for West Germany- the stumbling block to faith in Scholastic Sociology represented by this Yahoo repetition of 1848 when History reached a turning point but failed to turn- though Adorno was routed from his lectern by the naked breasts of his (German, and therefore ugly) students- was, of course, for India, a scandal in the common, not theological, sense of the word. The one true and tiger breasted Desi Goddess, whose eagerness for bloodshed exceeds that of pallid PhD Poli Sci jholawallah students, revealed her intention to 'Garibi hatao' - remove Poverty- and indeed, within a decade, no politician in India was left who, if not feathering a familial nest, disdained corrupt practices of the most shameless sort on behalf of his or her Party, which increasingly was a solitary or entirely personal cultus.
In this manner, Indians became Bourdieusian avant la lettre and in their belated jumping on his bandwagon- witness this negligent piece of tosh- one too readily detects the double bind of Metropolitan condescension and patronage towards a benighted Francophone colon because, after all,  for any Indian- 'Che Foucault, che Bourdieu ba pesh-e tu phus'- we have advanced on our progenitors in every degree of paranoia, and created a 'Gandu-nama' to which not Zatalli could hold a candle without risking more than his eyebrows.

A moment's thought will show this isn't really a paradoxical, or even a Socio-proctological, result because Bourdieu's field is heavily dependent on a particular type of epistemic reflexivity- a bit like Muth Rational Expectations or the Chomyskian notion of an i-language or Habermas's 'ideal speech situation' or Rawlsian rubbish- but, sadly, one bound up with a finitist Research Program- an inconsistently finitist one, as Nelson's recent debacle has shown- such that ontologically dysphoric positions are ruled out in advance, or diminished to sub-proletarian noise. In other words, what is banished from Sociology is precisely what makes a subject Sociological rather than purely Mathematical without, however, the salutary measure being taken of putting a lamed Politics out of its misery or profitably disposing of it to a glue factory. This wouldn't matter- and Cliodynamics wouldn't be silly- if people, in the main, didn't use language or the market or politics or whatever not to advance within the Muth Rational 'correct' theory of Reality but to mark their desire to emigrate from Reality, emigrate from inter-subjectivity, emigrate from that foundational aspect of Exchange which the genius of Graciella Chichilnisky has uncovered- viz. the necessity for Goldilocks preference diversity, not too little, not too much.
In this sense, the real world is like Rick's Casino in Casablanca- not only is the roulette table rigged, but the magnet is a strange attractor, it could go either way, it does go either way, till the qibla of Rick's hegira is finally decided for him and he emigrates into myth and legend and sophomore fantasies of Sophistication, stepping off the Warner Bros backlot.
Now it may be argued that 'ontological dysphoria' only exists in my mind and I'm just a drunken bum but, the problem is, most bloggers are drunken bums with ontologically dysphoric views of the world. Worse, most people, most of the time- even academics, even mathematicians- are exactly like me. We feel we are living in the wrong world.
Chomsky may see himself as following in the tradition of Plato's 'Meno'- where a slave boy is shown to have knowledge-as-anamnesis of Geometry- and thus his own individuating project, or reckless disregard for the truth, remains anchored, in some sense, in the real world- which is why he is ridiculous. However, such is emphatically not the case with my own preferred world, my own personal project of rendering myself fulminable from this, the infernal reality of my risibility, which gives rise to my patented brand of ontological dysphoria such that I am only at home in a world where Isosceles triangles relentless pursue a bitter blood feud with Vasco da Gama coz Virendra Fernandes stabbed me with his compass back in 1974 and, guess what?, Brother Morrissey caned both of us tho' Virendra was clearly the aggressor and the whole thing was witnessed by Isosceles who was only prevented from filing an f.i.r at the Gol Dhak-khana thana coz Pythagoras raped him but nobody believed him so he got a reputation as the choir-boy wot cries wolf all the time.
Why do I believe most people, most of the time are ontologically dysphoric? The answer has to do evolution- more particularly, the dynamics of convergent evolution. We can probably all agree that the reason there has been no genetic canalisation such that we are hard-wired for a particular 'universal' language is because the field dynamics of our out-of-Africa ancestor militated against the possibility. Hunter gatherer groups were simply too small- by reason of their mode of production- for the reverse to be the case. But, the fact that language use- at the neural level- is always convergently evolved- had other benefits and probably explains a lot about why we, as a species, think we are smart. But, this fact also means that all human communication has a big noise to signal problem since neither transmitters nor receivers are standardized. The advantage of having an ontologically dysphoric Lebenswelt is that all signal can be classed as noise till selectively 're-constructed'. But this means reflexivity- save in abstract areas, like price signals, which can be represented by a physicalist hexis- can't be founded in Bourdieuian 'habitus'. This is not to say something which looks like habitus aint ubiquitous. But it aint essentialist nor is it structural. It is ontologically dysphoric is what it is. 'Natural languages'- by Gold's theorem- are indeed unlearnable if our hexis, our habitus is Nature- thankfully; it isn't, we are ontologically dysphoric which is why the psychic cost of conforming is negligible, since there is no need to re-write any 'Darwinian algorithm of the mind'- i.e. re-program any context specific emotional-response-unit- and, in any case, the same convergently evolved mental module which detects Schelling focal points always, by default, provides enough points of similarity for the Socio-Criminologist to say 'lo! 'tis the same fingerprint, by Jove! Proof conclusive of the fine Italian hand of that bounder Moriarty!'

What has all this to do with Indian Politics?
Well, people of my generation were influenced by Prem Shankar Jha's Gramscian notion of an intermediate class which was, in essence, ungovernable and anti-national by reason of being chauvinistically casteist or communal or like chewing paan all the time and spitting all over the place.
Behind Jha, or Nandy, or other such soi-disant 'thinkers', was- we now recognize- a Bourdeiusian habitus dissimulating its virtuality in an attention-seeking manner at once hospitably histrionic and meretriciously manic.

In other words, as with Mill, Macaulay or Marx, Bourdieu too, in so far as he is taken up by Indians, possesses a revolutionary potential in the sense of permitting everybody to make a 360 degree turn- or not, if they used their compass to stab the boy in the next desk and it was confiscated by teacher.

Constipation is the soul of wit

Semele, in the drifting sands of what Desert fathers write.

Is the Miltonic phrase, dazzled, fulgurite
A constant inspiration moving mouths to shit

Proving constipation the soul of wit.

What the hawthorn marks or the hazel mends

Madness loves me, this I know

But wasn't so sure a score years ago.

When those feet, in Ancient Times

Trod the Tuirgen of all Treason's crimes

Misprision is madness, but madness such a bore

Till brokering a deal for Arimathean Joe-

A classic long firm fraud on Credulous druids

Rood worshipers rude fuddled by alcoholic fluids-

I saw that, like Athens, Albion endures behind walls of wood

Which the blood of Christ cures full sour but good

Yet Nelson's oaks set the child Jesus free

To board the Armada of Calvary

Envoi- Prince! what the hawthorn marks or the hazel mends

            Breathless, yet, the Ash tree bends.

Wallerstein, Wallenstein & Ghalib, the Grand Turk

Like many fat, sedentary. and deeply unadventurous Tamil Brahmins, I have an unreasonable and unreasoning love for the Turks and Mongols and, dunno, like Magyars and Bulgars and Khazars and so on. Why? I guess it has to do with the origin story of the Gokturks. They were slaves forced to labour in the iron mines of the Altai Mountains till one day, a little less or more than two thousand years ago- i.e. a time when the Greeks and the Romans and the Iranians and the Indians and the Chinese were already middle aged and the Copts and Hebrews and Babylonians virtually senescent- they just Spartacized themselves and upped and rebelled and began the second (the Bronze age was the first) great process of Globalization- i.e. the creation of a World Historical System-  in a manner that clearly established that, for this World, Tengri- the Sky- is the limit. Oppression and exploitation aint fucking karmically ordained and don't fucking move things along towards the proper Hieros-gamos, or sacred marriage, between Earth and Heaven which, like the samadhi/satori of the Buddhists, arises absent, or irrespective of, any structure to events or, indeed, the hysteresis of history.

Mutatis mutandis, as of the Turks, much the same thing can be said about a bunch of adventurous fishermen off the Western coast of Eurasia whose courage and good cheer outlasted the walls of wood that defended them from the stupidity of slavery in situ, granting them instead a Marine passage to Ariosto's moon.

The great, good and always utterly wrong, Immanuel Wallerstein- who, sadly, never got drunk with Obama's dad, even vicariously, though sharing the same vantage point on 'African Socialism'- is my target for a Tesco-Champagne fueled mugging today coz like he didn't connect with the young Graciella Chichilnisky, preferring to talk to the likes of Samir fucking Amin back in the Seventies. As I have often explained- '68 was nothing special- not because History reached a turning point but failed to turn, but by reason of the patriarchal attitudes, the misogynistic practices of the 68-ers- the soixante-huitards as pseudo-intellectuals term them- who failed to understand that 69- pace Ahdaf Soueif-  is sublime and always present as a liberative praxis outside history and sans any fucking Structure at all. Had Wallerstein's tickly mustache been pressed into service against Chichilnisky's immaculate, mathematical and uterine font- rather than a dialogue with other hairy Seventies' Marxist or soi-disant Marxist men- the project of a World Systems Analysis would not have been still-born. 

Oh dear.
If structures pre-exist and Historical processes are structural- then there is no convergent evolution, everything is genealogical; the human faculty for Mathematics, for abstraction, is unavailing- there was no reason for it to evolve- a casteist karma, a biological destiny, binds us- & as in 'the Death of Wallenstein' all that is left for us to say is-
Stern is the on-look of necessity,
Not without shudder may a human hand
Grasp the mysterious urn of destiny. 
But this is a funeral, not Keat's Grecian, urn which once grasped, at last gasp, you grasp only ashes.

Ghalib, proud of his Gokturk origins, says- 

Since Sorrow can tax the Free no more than one breath

Lightning's the lone candle we light for a death

butm because Ghalib was an Indian pensioner of John Company he adds-

Ours too is a World- but one barren to its own passion, tumult & wrath

& we the nuptial taper of the heart's bed-chamber of its moth

How to be sure you have a Political ideology- and why it matters

How can I be sure I have or lack a Political ideology? Suppose
1) I belong to a political party- how can I be sure I understand and support not merely its Manifesto, with its list of concrete policy proposals, but the ideology behind that Manifesto?
2) I don't belong to a political party but feel a sense of sympathy with some section of the conventionally given political spectrum. Is it the case that I have, at some sub conscious level, a political ideology and a political preference of a Platonic sort which I find imperfectly expressed in the menu of options available to me as a voter? How can I be sure either way?
3) I have no interest in Politics and no fixed Political allegiance but vote for particular individuals who somehow capture my imagination or who appear to be tackling an issue I feel important. Is it really the case that I have no ideology or is it that I do have an ideology which, for some reason, it is not tractable for me to articulate? Is there any way to tell for sure which camp I fall into?
4) I am sure I have a Political ideology and believe it corresponds to a publicly recognized brand but all of the knowledgeable people peddling that brand keep telling me I'm a fuckwit and that I don't know shit and should just kindly fuck off coz wot I got is a paranoid obsession not an political ideology at all. What should I do? How do I prove I do too have a political ideology and what's more it can kick the ass of your political ideology and fart in its face and make fun of its puny genitals.

What is Ideology?
Something physiological.  Either ideas are secretions of some sort which tell us about the disposition of our internal organs or else they sui generis change something internally such that we produce more and more of the same thing.
Suppose Ideology wasn't physiological, wasn't supervenient on some biological fact, then it would change as the Weltgeist changes and be nothing in itself- under these circumstances, as happened with Johannes Peter Muller, studying Hegel would lead, not to trying to shit higher than one's arsehole, but to the rejection of any theory not founded upon the most exacting and scientific observation of the facts of the case including the researcher's own internal organ responsible for secreting this Research Program. Here, it is indeed the case, contra William James, that psychologus nemo nisi physiologus- and thus the question 'do I have an Ideology' is answered at the same time as the Researcher establishes to which Rudolphi species of humanity you belong and which regime (think 'Hymn of Hate' Ernst Lissauer,  'Man without Qualities' Walter Rathenau or, the Kaiser's friend, shipping magnate Albert Ballin) makes best provision for a cozy little gas chamber for people of your sort.
On this view- the only way to find out if you really have a Political Ideology, absent some structured Social crisis so constituted as to elicit that information, is, by an application of Muller's law of specific energies', to artificially stimulate the organism such that the same sensation is experienced.
What this means is that all we need to do is to remove a portion of your skull and stick electrodes into your brain- but also into your spinal cord, just to be on the safe side- and have ourselves a party till, hopefully before the booze runs out, we duplicate whatever Social process it is that would elicit your ideology.
Unfortunately, I'm no longer allowed to perform brain surgery- my little sister complained and Mum got real stroppy and said she'd just summarily marry me off to Vandana Siva (got a good dowry, that girl) if I tried it again- so, I guess this is a good time to introduce two crucial concepts linked to ideology- viz. responsibility and punishability.

Having an ideology will soon mean- so invidious all post-modern insurgency- that the ingrowing Cliodynamics of Peace-as-War will hold you to a, higher if vicarious, 'command responsibility'  even if you yourself are utterly and self evidently ineffectual in terms of accomplishing whatever evil it is you term the Good. The other side of the coin, is that ideology becomes ipso facto punishable, indeed, in the recoil from Nuremberg's weakening of the standard of mens rea, ideology took the Cabaret spotlight as the Blue Angel more intrinsically guilty.
In this context, it becomes urgent you immediately take
The Iyer test for Ideology
Task- construct a partial ordering over Stalnaker-Lewis closest possible worlds  to establish a Konus index.
Method- for any change, i , from what currently obtains, O, look at the closest possible world to our own in which it occurs and select that persona (or possible self)  in it which leaves you indifferent between worlds. Repeat, for that world's closest neighbor till you get a closed path- i.e. you are back in the original world which we designated as O.  Call this your Konus curvature for i- call it K(i).
Rank all K(i)  weakly. Call the result you Konus curvature for O. Rank for all O, to get your Konus index.
Query- what if you can't get a closed path for any O? Then you don't have an ideology. You might be Napoleon- consult a psychiatrist- but whatever you lack in inches you do not make up for by being an ideologue.
Similarly, an incomplete Konus index, implies your ideology is incomplete or of the type of a Napoleon le petit.
A bonus- if your closed paths take in every possible person then your ideology is subjectively Universalisable in the sense that there is some assumption re. preferences over basic goods plus degree of risk aversion you can make such that you can plausibly argue that everybody might acquiesce in the type of Society you choose from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.
Distinguishing between Strategic and Tactical changes.
Since Ideologies counsel tactical retreats as part of a wider strategy, the difficulty arises that Ideologies might seem self-contradictory or that they end up appearing operationally indistinguishable from each other. However, since you now have a Konus index you can treat Tactical changes as being like the Slutsky Subsititution effect and Strategic advances as being like a positive Income effect. In other words, changes in real world constraints can be represented by shadow prices and the whole question of Ideology becomes tractable for Economic analysis.
Globally, it remains the case that Ideologies continue to be observationally indistinguishable- but this follows from the Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem and has no bearing on whether or not you yourself have a coherent ideology. True, knowledge of this 'anything goes' theorem may change your Konus index or render it incomplete but that is a separate matter.
What about ontologically dysphoric ideologies?
It might be argued that ideologies are essentially ontologically dysphoric- i.e. they represent an unhappiness with having to live in a real world, with real people, interacting according to real laws- and thus the relevant domain for the Konus index is not the Stallnacker-Lewis sphere of closest possible worlds but another set of logically impossible worlds which nevertheless motivate ontological dysphoria in our sphere. In this case, those impossible worlds project into our Lewis sphere to alter preferences- i.e. that information is not being thrown away but rather is encoded in the Konus curvature.

The serpent of the English tongue

'I know my rights' is the serpent of our Edenic tongue

Tho' to but count its wrongs can it to song be stung

Now, to Salem's a-sail Albion's homo sacer of the tree

Can tears' salt avail to season the sea?