The final giving way to dominant cultural commodities, and not the head-on arguments of atheists, will finally unpick the knots of religious fundamentalism. Of its fanaticism, only a repackaged residue of vague spiritual misgivings will remain amongst the general elevation of populations to spectacularised subjectivity. Effectively, this unpicking has already been achieved – the commodity process is fundamentalism's condition for appearance and raison d'etre, causing established religion to spew out its archaic principles in alien form. The process of commodification is the event for which religion has no proper term, little understanding, and no capacity to resist. But then religion is not the special case that atheists seem to think it is – all ideas are bound by the current phase of materiality. Commodity process has undermined the fundaments within all formations of self-separating consciousness, as well as within the possibility for such formations. Atheism merely falls sufficiently into line with what has already happened: a levelling to general equivalence, and the relativisation by inclusion of all possible subjective states. No idea which opposes itself to commodification does not also advance it simultaneously against that opposition – ‘traces’ of pig meat will be found in ‘Halal burgers'. Under such circumstances, the dying sun of consciousness, in this its post-fundamentalist phase, is in position only to wish that the ongoing depletion of its terms will eventually record such meagre returns that these fall below the threshold of viable exploitation. Whereupon, it might escape irrelevantly into a feral, collateral, form. At this point, consciousness, humbly acknowledging its previous delusions, and admitting its powerlessness over that which drives it, reencounters the mystery and wonder of its own conditioning.
Thursday 9 May 2013
An emptiness that has been emptied
The final giving way to dominant cultural commodities, and not the head-on arguments of atheists, will finally unpick the knots of religious fundamentalism. Of its fanaticism, only a repackaged residue of vague spiritual misgivings will remain amongst the general elevation of populations to spectacularised subjectivity. Effectively, this unpicking has already been achieved – the commodity process is fundamentalism's condition for appearance and raison d'etre, causing established religion to spew out its archaic principles in alien form. The process of commodification is the event for which religion has no proper term, little understanding, and no capacity to resist. But then religion is not the special case that atheists seem to think it is – all ideas are bound by the current phase of materiality. Commodity process has undermined the fundaments within all formations of self-separating consciousness, as well as within the possibility for such formations. Atheism merely falls sufficiently into line with what has already happened: a levelling to general equivalence, and the relativisation by inclusion of all possible subjective states. No idea which opposes itself to commodification does not also advance it simultaneously against that opposition – ‘traces’ of pig meat will be found in ‘Halal burgers'. Under such circumstances, the dying sun of consciousness, in this its post-fundamentalist phase, is in position only to wish that the ongoing depletion of its terms will eventually record such meagre returns that these fall below the threshold of viable exploitation. Whereupon, it might escape irrelevantly into a feral, collateral, form. At this point, consciousness, humbly acknowledging its previous delusions, and admitting its powerlessness over that which drives it, reencounters the mystery and wonder of its own conditioning.
