shane brighton, tragic witnessing – discourse
shane brighton, tragic witnessing
2025 · 1,244 wordsthe way to escape war is to never find yourself in one.
prompt war → epistemic sovereignty · turn tragic witnessing → generic processing · residue medium as memetic carrier
- prompt
- war → epistemic sovereignty
- turn
- tragic witnessing → generic processing
- residue
- medium as memetic carrier
- scale
- source → 1,244 words
brighton sets out to ask who gets to say what war even is, or means, as a fight for epistemic sovereignity, but ends up with a half drawn genealogy by the end, that says almost nothing about war, truth or democracy. fortunately, all the questions he does ask have an underlying, extremely powerful current to them, that question a variety of abstractions outside their seemingly one-sided literary studies foregrounding.
its true, in the same way that marines prior to the gulf war really did watch oliver stone's platoon in a way contrary to its authentic intentions, precisely assimilating the very parody mocking them and their way of (war) life into an assimilable lifestyle, the same can be said about, say, conservative americans trying to make sense of something like verhoeven's starship troopers.
the movie can criticize the fascist tendencies behind military conquest in a way that say, klaus theleweit analyzes male fantasy as cold and emotionally unattuned, or objectifying, or totally disregarding of the subjectivity of the other (female, sexual desire), even expendable to an ecological degree, and even tying themes of imperial or colonial expansion as insufferably disregarding of other modes of life, and the way this feeds back into the soldiers psyche, but again, the parody can precisely also serve as the best material or fodder.
it warns of the dangers of attempting to school the cynically unschoolable, those who do not feel any pride in actually holding their position, but only feel justified in the position itself, those who simply have no meta awareness. so how does someone become this way? the answer can only lead to a traumatic removal of subjectivity, branded as a ritual de-egoification. all forms of narcissism other than opinions that agree with the urban status quo are forcibly removed or made dangers for the holder of those views.
the power of banality can only spread bureaucratically once its seen as not worth it to even hold the other opinion or form of logic in juxtaposition to it, and then its scaled upwards, holding the alterior perspective comes with the threat of increasing and crumbling pressure. the latent removal of possible re-considerations of ones lifestyle is especially potent in places where its most dangerous to reconsider your standings, and these places, contrary to the first belief of being actively hostile, are more usually the type of urban enviornments that are at best only passively mundane.
as for brightons own concern, the way love assimilates and promotes the tragedy as an existential context rather than a particular ontological logic that pervades and attacks all possible domains of living truth, and attaches all forms of meaning only in harmonial retrospection to the general form of life, it seems obvious that only a severe, deathly evil call, the most boring of criticisms, can ever truly negatively impact system-logics. so boring that it is not even normative, simply detecting possible variations. the detection of possible variations is not only axiomatic.
the axiomat relies on a fixed ontology, thats what makes it bureaucratically deadly in towards network-rich world of the powerful. but they ignore how, backwards axioms can threat epistemic ontology by raising curiosities regarding logics in a fully definable way. the problem with irony to brighton is that it passifies by reducing something too much to the very elements it promotes in its appearance, allowing for anyone who's already dumb enough to not care about which ontology they exist in, to continue existing in that very one
i speculate, with total disregard for something like homer, which, to me, is as irrelevant as any manga today, because fine art itself is kitsch from todays perspective - infinitely subversive and scalable (with no care for the status or earliness of the thing, of course), may i even suggest it would be boring to read or open it up to even make any more relevant remarks towards it. whats more important is my speculation, and this is the following - homer trivializes all existential (meaning-producing) problems between the order of war and its potential for coextensivity with the order of life, in agamemon vs. odysseus in regards to whether zeus abandoned them for the other side (who does he favor?) precisely because he needs the medium to trivialize these connections in order to make them appear complex.
to truly universalize a specific logic, you require the medium to carry the weight. this is why every great work - every work considered a great work - usually carries the status of something iconic (a badiouian event) not because of its total rupturing non conformity to pre-existing sets as he may suggest, but on the contrary, they perfectly contain the logic they want to replicate, with very little of anything else. this is why homer succeeds, his story is blind to everything, and i know it is because it carries with it a type of mythos that suggests this be the case, no matter what is written. these great questions of war and love, they are not existential questions at all, they're just carriers of social memetics.
there is nothing profound in them, they precisely obfuscate because they're too busy wondering how to ever want to wonder whether to. they're craftsmen, they are enamoured, obsessed by the craft. and this is a great piece of artistry, precisely because we're all preconditioned to something. brighton, through weil, is preconditioned to wondering if life is coextensive with war, when surrounded by stories of war in his very career placement. homer on the other hand, he simply enjoys writing about it. he would never ask such a question, that doesn't somehow serve continuing that medium. this is at least where, plato's ion does the considerable work of comprehending the blindness of the illustrative worker.
so to say, my answer to your worry (well, your worry from a long time ago that you already probably fixed on your own) generally brighton is that, as the genericality of the world ends up dominating the complex of subjectivities, it ends up creating ways to process them rather than ways to think about them. homer, plato, weil, they serve this end as well, even weil's wisdom, if assuming it greater than homer, ends up creating a pseudo-weilian that replicates that logic. the way to escape war is to never find yourself in one. the way you escape love is actually the same thing. the way you escape them connecting is never being exposed to that connection long enough to start believing in it.
and a plurality is not meant to be discovered, in a spinozian manner the world already contains its plurality, and a virtuality on top of it that can endlessly expand us outward, but the problem is that the generic ends up dominating and constraining everything to its tight narrow margin. the intellect is limited, and it ends up knotting and thinning out. as it thins, cruelty becomes porn becomes sex becomes love becomes war becomes medium becomes an audience becomes criticism becomes fear and pain and death and irrationality and so on. and this world in its hypocrisy can hold all of that in one place, whilst also holding a bunch of things that are way more similar in largely isolated and distant fragments, much to our confusion. yes, ideally, everything that is separated is novel. thats the only world that makes sense. if theres a boundary, theres a fundamentally different law. but this isnt the type of logic we find ourselves in.