Kafka's antagonists are part of a system that has become so convoluted, involuted and abstracted from reality that it has lost track of its means and ends, or even its business model. It is reduced to fractured process jerking that is as arbitrary as it is random, in a world of deep alienation and disconnection that makes no sense to either its subjects, or its objects. It does not need to, because it has taken on a life of its own that no one controls, but everyone participates in, in ways that normalize and perpetuate its completely irrational operations.
This regime may indeed form part of the background to the present crisis, but things have moved right along since Kafka's day, to the extent that the fundamental disciplines that define the boundaries between knowing fantasy and unknowing delusion have been so deregulated, privatized and subjectivized, that the system isn't even able to maintain the integrity of its irrational rationality, that at least had some semblance of process ritual.
The present regime is crumbling both from forces from without and within. The international order that came out of WW2 is disintegrating as we speak. The internal civil consensus that defines legitimacy and consent is similarly breaking up. The whole system is becoming unsustainable across all of its platforms, whether talking about the natural environment, social infrastructure and its governance, or the existential securitization of individuals.
2016 seems to have been a disastrous tipping point to this unstable and insecure brew, that was epitomized by on the one hand the unexpected presidency of Donald Trump, in alliance with old capital and the rebellion of the working class in the American hinterlands, and on the other, their coastal city regime Ascendancy that controlled the means of social reproduction and administration, who when they recovered from their shock and panic, administered an overwhelming set of counter-strokes. The Woke Ascendancy responded to the threat to its legitimacy and authority by engineering a devastatingly successful series of coups based around a misère hand of racial and sexual minorities, where low cards were trumps, that was aimed at a complete institutional defenestration of its enemies.
The extent of the threat was the level of hysteria it has created in defense of a system of social hegemony that has over a period of 50-70 years, along with its mining manufacturing and industry services opposite numbers, created a world that has gradually, but lately swiftly, moved from irrational rationality to irrational irrationality in a kind of Lewis Carrol sense of disappearing into the mirror of its own reflections...which is why so many Woke pronouncement seem so weirdly redolent of the Wonderland and Looking glass characters with which he populated his 'children's' stories.
We are living in a world where former asylum inmates who having successfully closed down the system that safely contained them, have escaped into our world, colonized and taken it over and are now trashing not just anyone who gets in their way, but the system of social reproduction itself, that was already in dire condition before the Woke brou ha ha blew up.
We are in awful strife. Frances may get some semblance of a hearing, because the charges against her are so facile and palpably irrational, but as we have seen with the absurd charges levelled at Jordan Peterson by his local psychology peak organization, even legal process is no longer safe against the arbitrary insanities of the Red Queens. They are all off their faces with the same kind of hysteria and megalomania that prompted the witch hunts and The Inquisition during the crises of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
One is never likely to see any justice out of social justice warriors or their lickspittle in the judiciary. If Frances is 'lucky', she'll regain her job, and her opportunity to go back to the filthy rat's nest down at Mount Royal, where they are as likely to fall on her if they do not ideologically disembowel themselves first.
I want to believe things aren’t so bleak, Christopher, but I can’t contest what you say. Your comments make me pay attention, and I appreciate them, but they also make me wish I still had a 30-year-old brain in my 60-something head (although no brain at all might be more comfortable).
I also want to thank James for the summary of the, er, “case” against Frances. I’ve read this background before in various places (mostly Woke Academy of course), but it’s useful to have it summarized and weighed in one place.
Dear Joan, we must steel ourselves for what is to come. It won't be easy or pleasant. The following is my account of how we have come to our present condition and what may (or may not) become of us.
How delightful to be informed on Kafka’s The Trial while reading about the Frances Widdowson case, the latter relating to harassment where the mob-inciting idiocy and cruelty of an indigenous prof and others is excused by corrupt MRU officials while the innocuous satire of a beleaguered truth seeker is made the villain of the play.
Kafka's antagonists are part of a system that has become so convoluted, involuted and abstracted from reality that it has lost track of its means and ends, or even its business model. It is reduced to fractured process jerking that is as arbitrary as it is random, in a world of deep alienation and disconnection that makes no sense to either its subjects, or its objects. It does not need to, because it has taken on a life of its own that no one controls, but everyone participates in, in ways that normalize and perpetuate its completely irrational operations.
This regime may indeed form part of the background to the present crisis, but things have moved right along since Kafka's day, to the extent that the fundamental disciplines that define the boundaries between knowing fantasy and unknowing delusion have been so deregulated, privatized and subjectivized, that the system isn't even able to maintain the integrity of its irrational rationality, that at least had some semblance of process ritual.
The present regime is crumbling both from forces from without and within. The international order that came out of WW2 is disintegrating as we speak. The internal civil consensus that defines legitimacy and consent is similarly breaking up. The whole system is becoming unsustainable across all of its platforms, whether talking about the natural environment, social infrastructure and its governance, or the existential securitization of individuals.
2016 seems to have been a disastrous tipping point to this unstable and insecure brew, that was epitomized by on the one hand the unexpected presidency of Donald Trump, in alliance with old capital and the rebellion of the working class in the American hinterlands, and on the other, their coastal city regime Ascendancy that controlled the means of social reproduction and administration, who when they recovered from their shock and panic, administered an overwhelming set of counter-strokes. The Woke Ascendancy responded to the threat to its legitimacy and authority by engineering a devastatingly successful series of coups based around a misère hand of racial and sexual minorities, where low cards were trumps, that was aimed at a complete institutional defenestration of its enemies.
The extent of the threat was the level of hysteria it has created in defense of a system of social hegemony that has over a period of 50-70 years, along with its mining manufacturing and industry services opposite numbers, created a world that has gradually, but lately swiftly, moved from irrational rationality to irrational irrationality in a kind of Lewis Carrol sense of disappearing into the mirror of its own reflections...which is why so many Woke pronouncement seem so weirdly redolent of the Wonderland and Looking glass characters with which he populated his 'children's' stories.
We are living in a world where former asylum inmates who having successfully closed down the system that safely contained them, have escaped into our world, colonized and taken it over and are now trashing not just anyone who gets in their way, but the system of social reproduction itself, that was already in dire condition before the Woke brou ha ha blew up.
We are in awful strife. Frances may get some semblance of a hearing, because the charges against her are so facile and palpably irrational, but as we have seen with the absurd charges levelled at Jordan Peterson by his local psychology peak organization, even legal process is no longer safe against the arbitrary insanities of the Red Queens. They are all off their faces with the same kind of hysteria and megalomania that prompted the witch hunts and The Inquisition during the crises of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
One is never likely to see any justice out of social justice warriors or their lickspittle in the judiciary. If Frances is 'lucky', she'll regain her job, and her opportunity to go back to the filthy rat's nest down at Mount Royal, where they are as likely to fall on her if they do not ideologically disembowel themselves first.
Things are becoming that unstable.....
I want to believe things aren’t so bleak, Christopher, but I can’t contest what you say. Your comments make me pay attention, and I appreciate them, but they also make me wish I still had a 30-year-old brain in my 60-something head (although no brain at all might be more comfortable).
I also want to thank James for the summary of the, er, “case” against Frances. I’ve read this background before in various places (mostly Woke Academy of course), but it’s useful to have it summarized and weighed in one place.
Dear Joan, we must steel ourselves for what is to come. It won't be easy or pleasant. The following is my account of how we have come to our present condition and what may (or may not) become of us.
https://www.writing.com/main/books/item_id/2064958-The-Secular-Fundamentalist
How delightful to be informed on Kafka’s The Trial while reading about the Frances Widdowson case, the latter relating to harassment where the mob-inciting idiocy and cruelty of an indigenous prof and others is excused by corrupt MRU officials while the innocuous satire of a beleaguered truth seeker is made the villain of the play.