Supraordinate Architecture: Baseball & Notes from the Political Borderlands

00:00

So I want to give you kind of a notes from the borderland, political borderland style lecture. And to just talk about, as we’ve discussed in the past couple of orations, we’re kind of creeping further and further toward the culminatory moment of 20th century Western metaphysics and philosophy, which is to say the existential predicament of being human as a sort of impossible or irresolved or irresolute circumstance — and how that’s directly translated through the order of the everyday… and the attempt to ritualize this impossibility and normalize this impossibility through the historical cycles of humanity.

So I particularly am looking here at baseball and baseball history as a political constancy, which goes, to me — far deeper, far deeper than the political cycles, which we’ve come to know as America’s political ontology of being; humanity’s… which is to say — its ruptures and its reparations, which are the attempts to create unity in the greater primordial existential fracture of being human as it’s represented in the modern American political context of, let’s say, race or power or class... as these ruptures of this greater complex of desire, which I think we know today, you could speak of it as the American dream or the hyper individualism of Western philosophical history, which we can trace back to at least Descartes if not earlier.

Which is, at a more fundamental level — the political history of oppression. Is fiefdom and feudalism, all the way up into the techno feudalistic modernity of the high technological order as modern industry… as a way of consolidating power and instituting class oppression at massive scales, greater scales.

02:45

These are all, right, to just make this very simple… this is not anything other than a response to the existential human condition. It is all in an attempt to ordinate and coordinate the existential despair and inordinate contradiction which is native to the human condition which is a contradiction between impossible and massive historical forces — many of, if not all of which are entirely unrecognized or even un-languaged or unlinguistic-ed by the massive and great force of humanity proper. This is a lived, felt, experienced reality. A reality silent and silenced by the great power and powers of its lived and living force but by and through history’s greatest metaphysicians and their respective articulations.

And we witness the power of baseball in particular as this organization, this articulation in the order of the political underclass of American history and civilization for the past 150 years, now almost 200 — where there has been the institution — by way of and through the American industrial capitalist order which is a history of 150, almost 200 years now — of the rapid scaling of the American political complex.

Everything that we emerge in terms of the war, the war of desire and the war for power and control that we understand… is the modern global world where political and national boundaries, ethnic and racial boundaries are drawn as ways of distinguishing human beings and the variety and scaling of the different importance of different human lives and whether or not those lives are human.

03:55

This is...

A ritualized war at the heart of the existential emptiness of humanity and the human being and the fundamental existential problems of being human… in the human condition, which is an abyssal nothingness beneath all space and time and the attempt — right, from within the aperture of the biological organism to create or construct meaning or to experience meaning as in pleasure, even just sense consummation. This war is a profoundly arbitrary war of jockeying for the realization of meaning as a political field. The realization of something even remotely suggestive of origin or origination as in the supraordinate power which organizes and orders the human experience itself.

These are the fundamental questions which structure all of the appearance of the realities that we participate in, including civilization and including baseball, right?

So when we look at baseball in the history of American modernity, we are again looking at — as we’ve gestured to so many times in this series… a history of labor, a history of class destitution, and a history of the American political underclass in the face of this relentless... and relentlessly growing hyperfascistic modernity, which is the impulse toward power and control through the creation of political force. An exponential growth of that order as an economic and political order through technology. Whether that’s military force or economic force as in currencies of production and distribution and movement of wealth… which is a way of wielding, right? Again, wielding power and control — historically as a way of orienting the trajectory of history itself.

5:39

We’re looking at this underclass and this political and cultural phenomenon of the underclass as in the creation and institution and participation in baseball… and baseball history as a ritualization and repetition of the direct engagement with the existential condition of being human, which as we’ve discussed — is the aestheticization of the powers of the will and as such realizing them on a cultural stage through play, which stands in direct opposition to political power and political history as the human history of bio-power… until it’s consolidated in an American historical context in the 1970s, which I don’t believe is a coincidence in terms of the loss of the gold standard and the institution of the petrol dollar in the United States. This is also the collapse of baseball and the cultural field of America and American history proper into profound abstraction; the severance and offshoring of the labor power, the real ontological, existential force of the American working class — which is hyper-accelerated in the Reagan era policies of the 1980s.

We’re looking at a political underclass phenomena which makes available the existential conditions of human being and engages them directly and as such realizes them, digests them, and metabolizes them through ritual play as opposed and outside of history. This is, quite simply, through the grounded essence of the working class in the real labor and laboring assemblage of the American civilizational architecture itself — working within the skeletons of its skyscrapers upon the cultural fields which are the formalization and the ritualization of the life force and force of willing cultivated in the bios and biosphere acts of construction and survival and metabolic heat and generation native to the working class.. of the realization of those powers within their native civilizational cultural movement — which is also necessarily metabolically physical and embodied as in the primary existential dilemma of human existence… the thermodynamic, thermonuclear, entropic body itself — and the expression and realization of the primordial will and willing therein.

The timeless aspect of baseball is critical.

07:03

And as we’ve discussed, the timeless aspect of baseball is its mythical and legendary dimension, because it’s a repetition of same, right? The ritual and rules of baseball in so far as they’ve been ever so slightly changed historically… remain the same and thus are immediately identifiable and recognizable in terms of a confrontation with the powers of will, the generation of the powers of will through the body as a representative force — which you could just understand is athletics and athleticism; beyond that, through aesthetic objects… such as the baseball, the baseball bat and the baseball glove. And this is all contained within and reproduced on the field of play, which is the baseball diamond.

So this is a repetition of same and this is across 150, almost 200 years now.

07:56

You have the same ritual event occurring within the same distinct parameters over and over and over again, which if you understand, this is super-historical, right? This is a cultural ritualistic phenomenological event of the production and reproduction of the powers of will through the aesthetic field of baseball, which is not altered by history. Of course, there are slight tweaks and changes to the laws and rule books of baseball.

But again, what this stands in the face of in terms of a revolutionary cultural phenomenon and a revolutionary existential phenomenon is that it’s supra-historical. And as such, a revelation of the supraordinate.

When we think of history, we’re looking at a movement and a transference of powers, as in ages of empires, ages of conquering and ages of overthrowing of various different cultural mythologies and class systems and hierarchies of power — which is the will thrown into the political theater of control over the larger willing nature, which is to say the resources and the technological apparatuses… which are created by societies and cultures and civilizations to construct their basic mechanics, whether those are the aqueducts, whether those are the ways that supplies are created and distributed and moved throughout a network or political economy. This is the distracting phenomenology of human history as a pocket of cultural movements which we traditionally call ‘human history’. But rather — they are the different disguises or guises of the greater metaphysical failing and failure of the human species itself… which is to say a revelation of the powers of the will and thus an apocalypse of the being-human proper.

09:27

These… these appearances are the things which are the distinctions that change over time that are characteristic of civilizations and history — which again is an archive of power and control moving back and forth across political terrain. A meaningless, empty movement which is like a dirge of sleep, a dirge of somnambulistic war over primal circumstance.

And again, right, this is something that at a superficial level can also be mapped onto baseball in terms of in-loss records and world champions, so on and so forth… and the rise and fall of different empirical figures who define and alter the course of the legend and history of baseball.

But we’re talking specifically about its ritual performative reproduction. The literal rote and repetitive motion and movement of the game itself. Not its apparent outcomes and forms. Deviations and elevations of specific perceived phenomena or figures. Instead… its ritual architecture.

10:23

So when we’re talking about the existential condition of being human, we’re looking at two modes — one of which is altered by glacial history, deep space and deep time, which we’ve referenced prior, which is the evolutionary force and nature and figure of the human being over great time scales… which is to say the advent of different prosthetics which become part of the human organism: different parts of the brain or different senses or different body parts or organs, which change the apparatus and the mechanism of perception and recreating and reproducing reality through the organism itself.

The reproduction and creation of the will through the organism itself.

So we’re looking at that aspect, but we are also looking… at a deeper level than I think is introduced in most of 20th century existentialist philosophy... we’re looking at a fundamental characteristic state of existence itself, which is beyond human, which in short and simply, I would just call the will itself

The existential condition of the will, as in a universal force and power which simply changes forms or changes constructs through time, whether that’s through genes, whether that’s through historical phenomenological events which change forms… such as collision courses of different cosmological objects, creation of new star systems, etc.

11:50

So we’re looking at a deeper metaphysical truth, which is closer to Indian philosophical history, ancient Indian philosophical history, than it is Western philosophical, ontological and phenomenological history — which is to say the revelation of the powers of the will through and beyond the human being as something transcendental, ahistorical and timeless. Outside of the waveform architecture of human phenomenological history which is just a changing of the appearance; the jockeying of the powers of the resourced human will toward pseudo-biological supremacy within an animal ecosystem of consumption, production, reproduction — as it is mimetically constructed in and as the ritual architecture of our civilizations, which are produced from that same state of consciousness.

So we’re breaking through the veil of these political histories. And this is the essential contribution of baseball to the Western philosophical framework… which is the repetition of same and at large the construct of a ritualistic field of play, which is the realization of the metaphysical field of play — which is to say the essence of being through the creation of that aestheticized field. A way of being so as to realize the higher powers latent in and inherent within the human condition proper.

12:46

So again, we’re looking at a field of play which is reproduced across history which is a revelation of the timeless object… an artifact, an essence of being itself. And this is what’s necessary — it is to step out of time and to break time as in a ritualized hypnotism and hypnosis of the human biosphere unto a sleepwalking in and amidst the transcendent primordial powers of the will as in a system architecture which must be ‘jailbroken’, so to speak, in and from and unto infinity proper as a total realization of the cosmological, inordinate… cosmological self. Out of bounds.

And of course, this is something that has yet to be realized in the political dimension and aspect of human history, because so much of human history is a story and tale of power and control as a historical push and pull… and is as such a historical script of the rise and fall of empires. This, too, is a ritual architecture. An unconscious architecture of the lower form of the will, the animalistic will of the political ontology of the animal — witnessed and realized over and over again on the world, global historical stage of power unto chaos, destruction, fragmentation; repetition.

Again, as we described in the transformative poem by Percy Shelley, Ozymandias, we’re looking at a human history which has failed to be realized in the sense that it has not achieved the transcendental timeless aesthetic dimension of the will itself as a revelatory force of play as so described in Heraclitus: the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls, right? To loosely quote the Heraclitus fragment.

We’re looking at a failure in a larger social political sense as in a mass form of consciousness to realize the essence of the will, even as we’ve created these ritualized apertures — particularly in the case of American history, baseball — to make apparent and to realize the powers of the will. Again, through aesthetics, through the aesthetic dimension of play… and as such, to engage with reality, the world, and existence itself as a construct of will entirely. In this realization of perception and the orientation toward the ontology of being proper, a real, spiritual political revolution of consciousness which breaks the cycle of history at the root — the root of the revelation of the incarnate truth of being proper; the higher power through the rote aperture of the animal, man.

14:36

Again, to aestheticize the will is to create a representational plane through which the will can be perceived, as we discussed with Hack Wilson’s swing in the previous oration. It creates the opportunity to take the will out of the strictly survival-based constructs of human biology and to realize it through the aesthetic dimension of play or culture as a mirror or a canvas for the gesture and gesticulation as a force proper; then as such to identify with it as the greater underlying essence of human existence and reality itself. To observe the will as the movement, the deeper wellspring and force of movement from within the biological movement and automaton of the organism proper as a pushing and pulling toward ritualized objects of being in time — food, water, reproduction, political power, et cetera.

To realize the greater historical project of Western philosophy and the main crux and turning point of existentialism as it emerges in the breach of World War II… which is to say become greater than human, to realize the will as the fundamental cosmological force and power at work, and as such to be transformed and to be stripped away from and thus disillusioned from the powers of the will as they appear in this… again, to reference the Hindu, the maya-n, as in maya construct of the aperture of the human being — which is a phenomenological appearance through the willing construct of the human being as a genetic construct, which is to say the willing construct of the human being is a biological form with biological drives as in a genetic code which is a programmatic apparatus, which ally it to a production-reproduction consumption cycle of the sustaining and reproducing of the organism history as a genetic history of information.

16:25

So this is an aperture. This is a way and a form of perception through which the will is being carved into a terrain or it’s fitting into a vessel of perceptive experience, which is necessarily limited — because that perceptive experience is being mapped onto a specific ontological reality as in a programmatic rupture of perception unto unification, as opposed to being realized as an essential trans-phenomenological cosmological reality. This is the field beneath and beyond the programmatic biome and biosphere of man. True ontological perception of the total powers of reality and being proper — manifest as a universal field of being; therein scalar in terms of realms and fields and domains of the production and reproduction of phenomenological orders of realities of will as in this essential repetition of force of being within clothes of form.

Again, beyond construct, beyond form, beyond concept — as a primary, primordial existential reality.

This is, again, the realization of the existential philosophical project.

16:54

A realization at the depth and the root and the base of ontology of being itself. Again, to realize that… through the appearance of the will, as in Vishvarupa, again, the ancient Hindu, as in Vishvarupa, the phenomenological appearance of the full cosmological powers of the will — which is to say the appearance of the formless within form, as we discussed in our analysis of Hack Wilson’s swing.

There needs to be a high contrast representation of the appearance of eternity within the ephemeral, which is a realization. It is a realization through phenomenological contrast as in extremity — the breaking of the plane of the everyday as in a rote order of phenomenological organization and order of history as a repetitive rite of bio-organismic focus of power and powers — of the supra-historical transcendental essential will through… again, it’s breaking through the plane of phenomenological reality, which is the perception of the biological organism.

17:49

And so this is the importance of a ritualized aestheticization of the human will, which is to say making the human biological organismic will and aesthetic dimension… engaging with that will primarily and entirely through observation and participation. And then, as such, ritualizing that dimension of the human power and force and thrust — normally dedicated to these biological constructs of self-realization — realizing this self through the aesthetic dimension of will and willing, as in participation upon the field of play of baseball.

Again, through aesthetic objects — the ball, the bat, the glove— realizing and pushing the will through these technological objects and vessels to perceive it in and upon the field of play, which is importance of photography throughout baseball history, particularly in the early modern baseball history.

The photograph allows for the image or the transcendental object to be captured through this theater, this ritualized theater of play — which includes everything from the bats, balls, gloves, uniforms, the field, which is the stage… the spectators, populating the stadium to witness this revelation in the spectacular moment of transcendental movement of the will as in the improbable impractical act of the realization of the full powers which are possible to be realized through the human being.

The existential primordial universal cosmological will to be realized through the aperture and vessel of the metabolic thermodynamic — in a scalar sense — nesting doll thermonuclear apparatus and appearance of the human individual.

20:05

This is a realization of the ontological powers of being itself, in the most primary cosmological sense, through the vessel of the human. But again, to realize those powers, they must be incorporated consciously through the aesthetic construct, let’s say that’s of baseball... and availed through the vessel of the being into an aesthetic object, into a transcendental object — which is to drive the body towards a spectacular, full, splayed out… as you would call it in baseball, laying out, catching the baseball in the glove. Or the full thrust of propelling the baseball through space toward the catcher’s mitt. Or the full thrust of the swing of, let’s say, Honus Wagner’s massive bat through space, right?

21:01

So these are, this is not oriented towards even a specific object, which is the fulfilling of the survival impulse of the human being, as in swinging an ax through space to cut a tree down… to build a fire, for instance, to generate heat and warmth.

This is a... removal — even in terms of the creation of the technological apparatus of the baseball bat, carving that wooden bat out from a tree — not toward the perpetuation of the survival instinct and impulse of the human being, but toward the realization of the hidden latent, super historical cosmological powers of the universe itself through the human being, as in an aesthetic object, which is away from history.

21:29

Again, so you can think of history in the way of empires and the overturning of power constructs and civilizations and the different appearances of cultures throughout history, time and space, which are attempting to accumulate the necessary resources to reproduce their larger cultural communal body or a species body.

But you also then have to think of it as a... possibility within the evolutionary breach of time, which is a species continuance, a cultural and civilizational continuance — to create that hyperspace of the super historical realization of the cosmological drive of being and existence itself through the necessary cultural artifact as a reflection or refraction of the primordial essence or source in form, which is taking the primordial will as it is manifest through the biological organism.

In it, the organism as such is scripted towards certain realization paths, which again are food, water, sex… the metabolic survival mechanism of the organism itself. This is that which is scripted towards that act by way of and through natural history, which again is what constructs and perpetuates civilizations and cultures. This is the underlying survival drive which actually creates the larger historical reality and scripts these almost predictable and rote power grabs and grabs for control over these larger civilizational bodies as a realization of this…

I mean, there might not be a better way to put it than the predatorial drive of the organism to perpetuate itself, which again is a survival drive, the consumption drive, the reproductive drive — these base biological, highly animalistic primal drives that exist at the foundation of the organism itself…

But to take those drives and harness them consciously through the aesthetic act and the ritual architecture, particularly through an embodied athleticism, let’s say baseball again — as a high aesthetic ritual… to take those drives, to metabolize them, to transform and transmute them and not to lose a single ounce of their powers, but rather to multiply them through the conscious dedication of that force of will and that action of will toward the realization of the transcendental object in space and time — which is the great supra historical act, as we described in Hack Wilson; the architecture of that oration.

The supra-historical act of the consummation of the cosmological will — the true existential will, which is necessarily beyond human and beyond species and beyond phenomenology, beyond phenomenon… in and through the body, which is the body of history, the body of time, and the body of space; which is produced and productive of and by history itself.

24:39

This is, again, it’s super historical. It’s to step out of time and achieve the transcendental object, which is that ritual unity, which is itself the consummation of the powers of history and the powers of time.

And this is the essence of what we’re looking at. And we’re talking about here ontologically… as a realization through the culture and history of baseball. But this is primary to the project in the sense that it is primary beyond any cultural artifact itself.

25:07

The cultural artifact and construct, such as in baseball, is just simply a ritual mechanism. It is the way into this cosmo-existential truth of the powers of being proper. It is a way of revealing and unveiling that… through its repetition, which is the stage of and for that possibility to emerge. And that stage must necessarily be an ahistorical one because it lays the same grounds. The laying of these same grounds is the priming of and for revelation as in a repetitious emergence of the essence through and in space and time. It is a continual laying of the eternal grounds consciously as in the dedicated cultivation of the terms of the aesthetic act outside of the transformative action of space-time, almost as in a defiance of it; a return to the primordial ontological grounds of being in form itself. This is a creative act at the root of human-being as a return to being proper; as such is the site of all historical mysticism. Ritual itself; the powers of the site of the rite therein as in revelation.

And these grounds, while perhaps not being entirely ahistorical, just due to the nature and function of space and time and the… the possibility of producing and reproducing a phenomenological event in the changing conditions of space and time — must be as close to a-historical as possible in the sense that they’re matching up to this deep time glacial transformation which is occurring at a species level, which is making possible the creation of a cultural artifact through which to perform this massive, heroic, transmutative act of the revelation of the essence of the will beneath the phenomenological architecture or the clothes or the garments of the biological organism and vessel itself… which contains the seed of that will within its latent biological chemical architecture — which is devoted to specific rote tasks as a reproduction of this glacial nature of the evolution of space and time and consciousness itself. It is a stage therein. A slow stage of evolution as in phenomenological evolution of the essential.

26:57

So again, these are the phenomenological conditions of the existential being of human proper as a process movement in glacial time… upon and through and for which a stage must be set to draw out those latent powers and fully realize them within form, right? A cultural constancy as in a repetitive return to the ontological site of being to maximally stage and thus realize the powers latent within this specific formal ontological evolutionary site; therein to unify being and becoming as in the essential transcendental force of being and will within the site of being in time as in the human evolutionary stage proper. The cultural artifact is the grounds for the impulse to emerge, natively, nakedly — into the light of historical time and thus realize the goal and trajectory of history out from under its presupposition of the necessity of a natural evolution of consciousness as in a somnambulistic movement toward revelation within the garments proper.

Form as prior to space and time and phenomenology… as the vessel of the embodiment or the essential bone deep architecture which can hold that latent force and will and realize it. The form is realizing it within space and time as a phenomenological phenomena.

Right? As a phenomenological appearance. But the form itself is that which those powers are appearing in, as, and through. It’s necessarily the channel for this greater primordial force, this existential essence and the existence of being itself… that the possibilities of its realization are far deeper than culture or history or time.

27:44

But the cultural artifact and relic as a phenomenological architecture for that being or that form or that force to manifest that existence, that essence… into space and time — is a necessary representational mirror. And again, this is as far as the history of visual art or the history of... the process of self-realization and self-awareness and self-actualization as a expression of the being or the expression of the essence of the will which can be seen and observed in space and in time.

Which again, this is the essence of phenomenology. It’s that there must be an appearance. And in that appearance, we observe and analyze that appearance to understand its fundamental essential construction, right? Its elemental form, its archetypal form, that which is beneath the appearance of things. Its true constitution.

But again, this is the importance of a ritualized architecture, particularly the theater or the stage of the sport of baseball — is that it allows for the biological organismic will to participate in this theatrical action of play in space and time. For the transcendental to appear in history through the creation of the a-historical dimension of repetition. This is a shamanic understanding native across all cultures and historical bounds.

And through the participation in that theatrical architecture, the greater essential transcendental will can emerge through the form in these pockets of space and time, which are ritualized and regimented through play, right? Through the action and structure of play.

29:28

The emergence of this essential will is entirely encompassed in and formalized in the construct of the being itself. So again, the emergence of this will is still something that’s super historical, but the cultural artifact itself creates the historical as in space-time conditions for this will to emerge. So long as that cultural artifact as in civilizational, communal aperture or rite for the realization and revelation of the powers of the will extraterrestrially out from under the condition and aperture and perception of the human continues to exist, its essential, innate possibilities of revelation remain in play as in a revolutionary force and field of being within history as a site of rupture; a site of quantum rupture of perception and time and the phenomenological field of being itself.

This makes me think distinctly of the Aztec rituals of human sacrifice as the powers of the revelation of life beneath life; will beneath will as an appeal to the transcendental. These forces; the spectrum of these occurrences historically as cultural relics are diverse in and unto their sophistication as in violent rupture or aesthetic rupture. War itself, as we discussed in the WWII oration, exists as and upon this spectrum as a distinct cultural and historical relic of human being in action and movement as a force in and upon the field of human existence and the existential question — as an exorcism of this primary force of will and willing.

But again, as we ask here; we asked in that former work — can and does will realize the transcendental possibilities latent within the human architecture itself creatively, or does it cathartically let the unrealized action therein as an animal movement toward and from scarcity, control, and violence as a reorganization of the same power constructs which organize and contort the rise and fall of human orders time immemorial? The answer — to me, and to this oration — is quite clear.

29:53

So that’s essentially what this...

essay or lecture is the vehicle of here.

So I will catch you on the next one and that’s what I got for you.