Tag: diogenes

Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief: The Continuum of Belief (methodology cont.)
1/03/2026

Perception of the Mundane <-> Common Sense <-> Knowledge <-> Faith <->
Belief <-> Parabelief <-> Disbelief <-> Repression of the Impossible

In what I have constructed as a continuum of belief, there is a pull stretching toward necessary deniability and another stretching toward undeniable necessity. The former is guarded by what is deemed absolutely impossible; the latter, by that which is so obvious to the senses as to be mundane. At the center of the continuum stands two phases: that which is plausibly deniable (mere belief) and that which was once deniable but has been strengthened by the continual repetition of affirmation (steadfast faith). When faith becomes communal — in other words, structured in a collectivity — it becomes knowledge; and when knowledge becomes consensus for the collective, something akin to a law, it bears the title of common sense; and, in its final stage of reification, it becomes a fact so everyday as to be obviously perceived as undeniable truth by both children and those of old age. Likewise, when belief becomes that which is only believed because others believe or is only half-heartedly believed so as to avoid underlying and abyssal cracks in one’s own “belief system”, it becomes what I term parabelief, a seesawing agnosticism teething at a sieve; and when those cracks become undeniable and thus unavoidable fissures, marking a break, a cynicism against an idea, bleeding out into that sieve as a sort of atheism or iconoclasm or nihilism, disbelief is experienced; and finally, when there is no sense in even debating the validity of an idea — when it has become so nonsensical as to be rendered useless, even dangerous and psychotic, fantasy at best and insanity at worst — what he have is the reification known as all that is deemed impossible. 

Mundanity and impossibility are two poles of opposing forces, absolute reifications of being and non-being. However, this is only true from the perspective of the belief system that founds a faith in a collective knowledge grounded in the intuition of a common sense that has already preemptively divided the world into the undeniable and the implausible. But what of the perspective of all those beings and things that are only half believed in or not believed in at all, that are denied the right of recognition and instead banished into the impossible realms of absolute abjection? So the abjectivist wonders, looking out from the pits and caverns, heavens and fantasies, and dreams and nightmares of the as yet-to-be seen and the yet-to-be heard. All that is abjected and rejected from the belief system known as reality are the very sufferings and pleasures that reveal reality itself to be constructed, that insist on the constructibility of the unseen and unheard into another kind of reality, a reality beyond the reality of consensus, a postreality that, by the very insistence of its novelty and abnormality, demands that the true be confronted by the Real — the Real that is only articulable through the infra- and surreal, the abjective that cuts through consensus with a blade crafted from a siphoned pool of chaos, the chaos of the impossible. It is from the depths of this abysmal pool of segregated and untouchable flows of affect, belief, understanding, questions, perspectives, dismal thoughts, and collectively abandoned and only dangerously posited as possibly possible possibilities that the hyperobjects known as hyperstitions, mythologies, and transgressively speculative fictions emerge. Thus it is no sheer happenstance that hyperstition emerges from the amphetamine and Lovecraftian-riddled mind of a half-here, half-there being of the 1990s called Nick Land; and no accident that Aphrodite is born of the castrated genitals of Uranus or that Marduk constructs the universe by dismembering Tiamat. It is only in deepest recesses of what can never be true that the very foundations of a goddess of eternally incomparable beauty, the act of creation itself, and the possibility of creating something that in turn creates itself within that creation even become possible. Without the pregnant, disarticulating flows of the impossible as our foundation, beauty becomes the product of a mere algorithmic evaluation based in contemporary taste, a fleeting game of copycat in which subject and object chase a continually enshallowing artifice that manicly and anxiously picks at itself in a draining negative feedback loop of reflexivity; and like the beautiful, the story of our origins and the possibilities of our becoming become similarly self-reflexive, apish imitations of collective mediocrity, the streamlined cobwebification of the true and the possibile under the supervised judiciousness of commentators commenting on commentaries. If, as Alfred North Whitehead suggested, the history of Western philosophy can be characterized as merely “footnotes to Plato”, I cheerfully consider Diogenes of Sinope and his plucked chicken to be the greatest footnote yet. And to add my own footnote to a footnote, to stay connected to the glorious tradition of Knowledge: if one were to ask Samuel Johnson and not Descartes to prove that man exists, how would that plucked chicken fare?