The Philosophy of Abraham Leonard Keefe (2023)

It has been roughly two years since theRedPen’s own lead political and cultural theorist, Abraham Leonard Keefe, began his move away from this Medium-hosted publication, onto his current project: a YouTube webseries titled Towards a New Perpetuity. In this series, Keefe comments on multiple existing academic disciplines and discourses, attempting to tie together his reflections into a comprehensive and idiosyncratic metaphilosophical framework. While production of the series remains ongoing, the current tally of eight videos has been received by a small following, and is currently available to view freely through the Abraham Leonard Keefe YouTube channel, which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ep9b3KcV0pLeFQ6_-rnmA

However, for those who prefer to have a text document to reference on hand, we at theRedPen have compiled a collection of quotes from a variety of Keefe’s videos, which we believe convey Keefe’s most essential concepts thus far, including: craniomodernism, craniostructuralism and cranioanalysis; usufructarian communism, complementarity and controlled socialisation; the craniocentric premise; entification, fulcra and the startpoint-endpoint-fulcrum model; and — arguably most importantly of all — intellectual perpetuity and craniomodernity. Decoding these concepts, and how they relate to each other, is the key to understanding the point to Keefe’s work, the society he wishes to realise, and any insights he may provide to that end.

There are many routes into the philosophy of Abraham Leonard Keefe, through which his arguments and concepts can be introduced to those yet unfamiliar. One could introduce Keefe as building off a Deleuzian anti-ontology, which dispels the static entity into a multiplicity of processes of becoming, or one could instead introduce Keefe’s craniomodernism as a reaction to the implicit constraints of the metamodernism identified by van den Akker and Vermeulen. However, we feel that the way to introduce Keefe’s core premises most comprehensively, is through an extrapolation of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, and the poststructuralist movement which this technique of literary criticism would herald.

Deconstruction is difficult to define, but could be described somewhat as an interrogation into the context-dependency of language. Deconstructing a statement such as, “That big brown dog is in the tall green grass,” might involve taking out each word and considering how it may convey a totally different meaning when applied in different contexts, thus considering the underlying shared context that two humans must have with one another in order for their words to communicate meaning through language. Moreover, as no human being has the exact same influences, sensory perception or sociological roles, the context through which they interpret those words will have slight variance: your imagined picture of the big dog may not look exactly the same as mine, and so forth.

What deconstruction ultimately demonstrates is that communication is not, and can never be, objective — however much I may clarify what my big dog looks like, we’ll never get them to exactly match. All words, all sensory stimuli, every interaction we have the world, ultimately has to pass through a lens of subjective and personal interpretation to be received, repurposed and responded to by each person. This extrapolation is labelled by Keefe as “the primacy of interpretation,” or “the primacy of subjectivity,” which in turn lends itself to a concept he calls the “craniocentric premise.”

This first extract is from “With Cranio- as our Prefix,” and introduces the craniocentric premise in a discussion of the meaning of life:

Those who claim that there is one meaning to human life, by nature are claiming that there is an objective static essence that all humans share, that such meaning refers to. These essentialists claim that said essence precedes our very existence and is thus present in all humans and not in non-humans. But this perspective does not fit well with evolutionary theory, in which strictly, objectively defined essences to either species, or socially created categorisations like race or gender, become impossible to fully ascertain. We are the way we are due to compiled conditioning, coupled with mass extinction of all conditioning compilations incompatible with material conditions — there is no logical pretext to introduce the notion of any bequeathed identical, static immovable “essence” given to humanity at any point during its evolution, either by a deity or by nature.

It is oversimplifying to the point of falsehood to reduce any life to a crude caricature of identity or identicalness, as opposed to a more nuanced picture of changing convergences and divergences, both biologically and behaviourally. Upon a more contextualised analysis, we can begin to see the social constructs cultivating our attitudes and actions, and their sociological primacy.

[Once we acknowledge existence as preceding essence], we must determine and cultivate our purpose, our meaning, through making choices and mentally structuring our understandings of ourselves and our worlds accordingly. In doing so, we define our own ontology, we set our own hierarchies of “being,” and we then operate in accordance with each. When we make a choice, truly freely from coercion of human beings, material conditions or social hierarchies, we are exercising subjectivity; we are running our situation through our complex subjectivising, abstractifying epistemology, and producing from it a unique choice. There is an argument here to be made that every free decision is in a sense an act of implicit intellectualism, and is inevitably interpretive. As we self-define the meaning to our lives, in where we choose to take it (as existentialism posits), it is making choices, hence interpretation, hence a degree of subjective, abstract thinking and rationalising, that spurs the development and cultivation of an essence, a meaning for life.

The crux, ultimately, is that not only is the meaning of life preceded by our existence, but is derived from an interpretation, from abstract, subjective thinking, as opposed to objectively derived formula. Whatever that necessarily subjective meaning of life may be, and it must be subjective given the absence of identical essence across humanity, it comes from interpretation, a form of abstract thought. We have covered many times the fact there is no objective perception, so abstract thought and subjectivity must precede any condition we interpret. Thus assigning meaning, questioning and understanding what meaning may be, and then living by said meaning, are all linked to our capacity, as human beings, to engage in abstract thought, to exercise subjectivity. To leave our mark — including, for that matter, finding out if that mark is indeed worth leaving — we must accentuate the human condition by generating and accumulating as much abstract thought as we can.

This is the craniocentric premise. It is encompassed in the notion that the human condition is therefore synonymous with subjectification and abstractification, the codifying of subjective reflection into a larger created system from our interpretation. It gives us the conclusion that to accentuate humanity, to be pro-human, we must accentuate those things. Cranioanalysis gives us insight into how this plays out, and which conflated processes come to constitute a meaning of life; craniomodernism acknowledges and platforms this abstract thought consequently. We might even then call the attempt to facilitate this, namely craniomodernity, the fundamentally pro-human political or cultural movement.

Furthermore, Keefe extrapolates from the craniocentric premise, an ideal he identifies as “intellectual perpetuity.” He proclaims this condition to represent an amplification and maximisation of human subjectivity, and thus, the human “meaning” we give ourselves:

The craniocentric premise presents itself with an ideal to strive for, that being the concept of intellectual perpetuity. It constitutes a condition in which one can immerse themselves entirely in choice, subjectivity, desire, the abstract, the hypothetical, and hence most efficiently generate their own expressive contribution to human culture. It is about being free from restrictive systems of coercion which aim to turn us moreso into formulaic objective machines than subjective agents, and consequently maximising both the uniqueness and frequency of expression. There are two major conditions for this, the first being the removal of social anchors that pin us to certain fulcra (grand involuntary hierarchies, property and so forth), and the second being the satisfaction of anchors that cannot be removed, such as the biological demand for food and water, so that we can get to the more open subjectivity as quickly as possible. Making sure these conditions are met is where our political prescriptions then come into play.

All of the other positions I hold, be they communism, usufruct, controlled socialisation, whatever they are, are only my beliefs because I believe them to advance humanity towards intellectual perpetuity. It is all derived from that craniocentric premise, and I would abandon each and every one of those beliefs if I ever came to the conclusion that they no longer serve this goal. So when you strip it down to the fundamentals, my politics is not dictated by personal self-interest, or a longing for cosmic justice, rather solely in advocacy for the human condition as a whole. Before I am communist or usufructarian, I am pro-culture, and I am pro-human. I sincerely do want the best for all people, and hope that my own philosophising can resonate in any way productive to the generation of further ideas.

To expand upon the political prescriptions that Keefe advocates as a means of establishing intellectual perpetuity, our next extract is taken from “The Proprietarian Clause,” in which he expresses his preference for usufruct over the current paradigm of property. Making this point, he refers to the work of the communalist writer Murray Bookchin:

The communalist philosophy in its modern sense actually directly posits an alternative to property: usufruct. Usufruct is an arrangement that currently exists in law, in which the person with the usufruct may perform two of the three property interests onto the object or service that the usufruct is for. To demonstrate this, we can look at these three property interests that property rights bestow, and how usufruct, as it exists with proprietarian society, differs from property.

Usufruct legally gives the subject right of usus (the right to use the object) and fructus (the right to profit off the fruits of that usage), but leaves out abusus (the right to destroy or exchange that object at their will). Within our current society, usufruct is usually given by property owners to other people, with the user gaining right of use but not inherent ownership, which remains with the proprietor. But in a communalist [or usufructarian] setting, without property, Bookchin envisions the concept of usufruct to become the norm instead of property, in describing the relationships between objects and people.

Both the collective property of Marx and the mutual aid of Kropotkin are criticised by Bookchin as intrinsically proprietarian, as they still trace the mandate for an individual to appropriate and use a certain thing, to an inherent proprietary nature of that object. This idea of an inherent relationship of ownership within the metaphysical capacity of an object, Bookchin saw no reason to maintain — such a static relationship is unnecessary. Insisting on the redeemability of certain types of proprietorship only serves pave the way for restriction of other people’s freedom to use, and could provide justification in itself to the notion of other forms of property. The right to forcibly infringe upon the right to use (which to Bookchin was the right integral to life, property merely being one flawed way of trying to ensure it), were themselves a creation of property rights, be they private or personal.

Bookchin’s view of usufruct was posited as providing a replacement framework for the justification of the right to appropriate something. Instead of “who is the inherent owner” of an object being the focal point on the question of who can use what, such questions would become instead about respecting the right of the current user to usus and fructus of everything as a sort of non-property — when they finish using the thing, relinquishing any inherent right to appropriate it. In other words, an object’s allocation to a certain person would be guaranteed conditionally based on other rights: the right to use, as well as the right not to be assaulted, which would need to be broken in order to forcibly divorce a person from what they’re using — something that only property rights happen to legitimise on an irrational, undemocratic basis.

Given democratic decision by all those concerned was still very much supported by Bookchin even to justify abusus or extraordinary circumstances, the reality is that in practice, Bookchin’s communalism and communism aren’t too dissimilar — you keep rights to use what you use, and lose rights to own things you don’t use. The difference is largely philosophical, as to whether you actually own the things you are able to keep rights to use. But it’s an important difference to Bookchin, even just in emphasising user rights as more fundamental than owner rights (the latter of which need not exist). It’s fundamental to the way we perceive not only our rights, but our relationship with the surrounding world as well; and the way we perceive this relationship will undoubtedly become internalised within the culture we create, making it of additional significance.

The task for the usufructarian, in proposing an alternative to the current proprietarian consensus, is to demonstrate how usufruct can guarantee everything one relies on property for, and more. An important thing to know, in order to approach such a debate in appropriate context, would be the historical impetus for property and the conditions which proprietary arrangements were designed to best navigate. In many societies, particularly on the proto-American continent, the concept of property was not introduced as an organic response to material conditions, but through conquest by those whose societies had given rise to property.

Not all impressive historical civilisations were built upon modern, Western-style concepts of property. Historical development can be approached in a multitude of different ways and in different directions, reflecting the specific shared understandings, with relative codes of behaviour and morality. What we can look at is a shared foundation for all of these traditions in the form of what Marx called “primitive communism.” While this society was hardly a model we should seek to replicate, understanding it can help us to demonstrate that more egalitarian and collective alternatives to proprietarian institutions are hardly incompatible with any “human nature,” for they have existed far longer than property itself. We can evaluate, from analysing this society, the characteristics of society that such institutions were adopted to respond to — notably Bookchin’s concept of complementarity.

The change in conditions begetting proprietarian institutions can, in short, be identified with the recognition of a sort of “scarcity ceiling,” in tandem with the territorialisation of production, in which simply moving into undepleted territory no longer became as viable for sustainable survival. Consequently, institutions that allow personal reservation of land and resources, which are now subject to a scarcity that even collective action couldn’t fundamentally overcome at the time, was adopted within Eurocentric traditions as a means of survival insurance. With this variability in resource opportunity came new power relations and grand involuntary hierarchies that ultimately would become all-consuming in their pertinence to lifestyle. Accumulation, individualist self-interest and exploitation, to maintain one’s place on this hierarchy, become self-defensive measures, and proprietarian society evolves consequently.

Our task now, be it within the context of a greater cultural movement or within political institutions, is to evaluate whether the needs for something like property that were responsible for its creation, still apply. In a world defined by overproduction, the spectre of automation, and a multitude of crises for which we need complementarity back, I would posit that property — all property — has exhausted its function to our society and now exists as a net negative. The vast majority of people in today’s society are now unequivocally more limited by reservation of things outside of one’s immediate possession, than empowered by it. Unlike when property first manifested, our capacity to use (hence to survive, to express ourselves freely, to follow our dreams free from dictation, to have choice and security and so forth) would be increased were we to make the switch from property to usufruct.

The much needed re-emergence of collective interest as a priority of self-interest would only serve to expand personal responsibility, and would be the natural consequence of removing the market’s artificial incentives in favour of the natural survival impetus that has sustained our species long prior to property’s existence. As for the question of economic efficiency, the use of new technological frameworks like liquid e-democracy would allow us to expand the dynamic nature of a horizontally planned economy to a much greater reach than ever before, to be updated instantaneously with far more precise information as to the nature of demand and the supply available than any speculation-driven market or price signal could ever provide as a middle man. All of the advantages and needs we see in the institution of property, seem only to be one-upped by usufruct within a society of our current technologies.

I insist on posing myself as a critic of property as opposed to merely a critic of capitalism, and I feel that this lexical choice is a crucial one. The appropriation of “anti-capitalism” by the culture industry, into a term of vague academic critique, deliberately obfuscates the central, easily understandable principle which lies behind accumulation, inequality of economic power, fragmentation, stratification, and so much else. I am not just anti-capitalist, anti-capital or anti-private property. I am anti-property.

It is the very notion of proprietorship, in particular individualised proprietorship, that has produced the grand hierarchies which we have societally internalised, that has fragmented humanity and steers us towards corporate oligarchy and ecological destruction. This issue goes beyond capitalism, feudalism, the so-called lower-stage of socialism, or any other application of property — it is the same issue that persists within each. Meanwhile, government in its present state, both on national and international levels, simultaneously serves as a prop for the interests of property and a propaganda outlet of its ideological narrative, all while playing a vital role in facilitating the institution in the first place.

Keefe also refers to the Bookchinian concept of complementarity, as a condition existent within a society of our current technological capacity, which could in turn facilitate a usufructarian social structure:

Complementarity is, in essence, a condition in which the principal obstacles to self-interest can be more efficiently overcome through an integration with collective interest. We currently live in a world in which our currently existing technological capacity is pushing the “scarcity ceiling” (scarcity that collective action like production can no longer overcome) significantly higher, where reservation no longer becomes a necessity in meeting needs and desires, and so serves as a limiting factor. It is therefore linked heavily to the property-usufruct debate.

Keefe however diverges from Bookchin in how he believes we can transition towards this more usufructarian or communistic society. In “To Control Socialisation,” Keefe writes the following:

The historical failures of both Marxism and anarchism can be perhaps most succinctly summarised in the mention of one principal obstacle, to which neither have proven to aptly consider or respond: a hostile subconscious. This is ultimately due to the shortcomings of both in assessing and navigating the creation of the entity in human thought processes, and the subsequent internalisation of our surroundings both during socialisation and thereafter. I propose that cranioanalysis and controlled socialisation are frameworks available to best understand and address these insufficiencies, and therefore could provide central insight into the search for a viable path to communism — a path which I believe to be interwoven with craniomodernity.

Of course, no disrespect is meant to Marxists or anarchists here — I happily support anarchism where it works and revolutionary socialist states where those work, for purposes of cutting off capitalist feedback loops and improving human life. So long as, when the time comes to take the step further into communism, one takes my problematisation into account. You could say my view of socialism or local communes thus resembles how many Marxists might view social democracy.

Many will probably already be somewhat familiar with the idea of some thoughts, actions, behaviours and motivations as being conscious, and others being not conscious. Subconscious is generally a term used to describe when that not-conscious stuff is revealed and manifests. When we say conscious thought, conscious behaviour, you’re actively thinking, deciding and choosing what it is you are thinking or doing, it’s right there in your head. But there are other things you do, think or feel, that you don’t mentally observe until it happens, be it something instinctual, where our consciousness doesn’t have time to act, intuitional, in which we rely on a premise we aren’t able to find the root reason we started believing it, or something that has crept in so incrementally we haven’t come to acknowledge it yet. These factors may not appear consciously until they’ve already been influencing our thoughts, feelings and actions for a long time — if it ever even does.

When people say that egalitarianism or usufruct is antithetical to human nature, they’re demonstrably wrong, but they do in a roundabout way have a very important point. Clearly, in the way we learn to think and act, the conditioning of socialisation can channel these things in a very specific manner and cultivate certain instincts and subconscious premises that ultimately, as a survival strategy, align with survival in a hierarchical or proprietarian social mould. We default to the ways of survival we have tailored to our current system, because this is the lens by which our surroundings and cultures have taught us to understand existence. We might not have a definitive nature, but we definitely do have a sort of contextual nature, existing as a de facto objectivity.

It takes massive conscious effort to discipline and repress that which we’ve internalised subconsciously. So it’s no surprise that if our subconscious is conditioned and structured around the logic of our existence under proprietarianism and hierarchy, we’ll be fighting an uphill battle that will always be on thin ice. Be it from socialism or directly from capitalism, that last jump into a usufructarian communist structure is going to be incredibly difficult, and if that subconscious ever makes itself apparent, we risk our work swiftly falling apart. But human will and abstract thought is not to be underestimated here. If we put our mind to something, to approaching an ideal like communism and building compatibility with it, we can absolutely change the world for the better. This begs the question, instead of the subconscious working for what we have now, leading to us most likely defaulting back into a proprietarian mould whatever our conscious aims may be, can we recalibrate that subconscious to default us back to usufruct and complementarity instead?

Much of this is in itself derivative of the way in which the construction of a concrete epistemology assembles and designates the “static entity,” ontologically designating a particular condition or assemblage no longer as process but as a latent state, of sorts [see below]. The internalisation of a society and its condition, is for current purposes nearly synonymous with this activity of “entification.” It is the conflation of all constituent parts of process into one unique unit that subsequently obscures the process’s subdivision, deconstruction and reformulation from conscious mind, instead embedding this conflation into the subconscious realm of instinctual assumption [see below]. Entification is, in turn, essentially the process by which a fulcrum, or set protocol, is strengthened to the point to which it can serve as a startpoint or endpoint for further processes, removing that fulcrum’s original startpoint and endpoint from conscious thought and instead causing that now subconscious, instinctual process to now more rigidly or formulaically orbit in accordance with the process’s means (that fulcrum) [see below].

Cranioanalysis is an understanding of how an epistemology, or way of thinking, is built — where premises for subjective choices and systems of rationality come from. If we understand every “entity” to be a fulcrum and a conflation of a process behind it, we can begin to probe deeper into the instinctual assumptions and conflations that we’ve internalised, and how these shape the way we think and act. To locate, analyse and “attack the fulcrum,” both collectively and personally, is in this sense an act of revolutionary potential, especially should such become culturally standard. It is to reclaim socialisation, to reclaim the premises which we have buried below consciousness yet ought to consider reassessing. In short, cranioanalysis is the tool for controlled socialisation, as it allows us to understand where the sources of obstacles to communism come from, and what we can do to circumnavigate them.

This temporal capitalist-adjacent nature has parallels to other phenomena of internal self-limitation too — sexual orientation and gender identity are great examples of this, clearly not determined in conscious mind, but also shouldn’t be assumed to be innate, as per Occam’s Razor.

To build communism, we need cranioanalysis to be ubiquitous — for it can tell us how and what we need to do to control socialisation in the first place, and overcome past internalisation if need be. Reclaiming conscious territory as such allows for more fluidity and creativity in finding new ways to live, that we can then go on to respectively internalise themselves. Such is true for undoing our programming to proprietarianism or grand hierarchy. I no longer believe, logistically, that we can have a realistically applicable plan that could be applied universally, but nonetheless the general gist of engagement with controlled socialisation should be something that we consider as an essential part of the process of building communism. We certainly don’t have to rely on generational segregation, but an increased consciousness around socialisation and cranioanalysis, as could be achieved with the realisation of craniomodernity as a successive reaction to metamodernity, would work wonders. Ultimately, in what way and to what degree controlled socialisation can be coordinated, demonstrated and enacted, will depend on the sociocultural situation of each respective time and place, and for the politicians and analysts of the moment to navigate.

One could perhaps say that controlled socialisation is not a question of reforming society through political channels, and is as such unpolitical. If we are to seek controlled socialisation through craniomodernity, then cultural and academic entryism is arguably of far greater importance than political power at this stage. We don’t have to rely on the political system to build communism, but build it from the ground-up by mainstreaming the centrality of entification, cranioanalysis and socialisation’s prescience — for everything we do and every way we live. This is the most efficient means of building a conscious movement capable of addressing this subconscious obstacle. A demonstration of controlled socialisation in secured communist projects may also prove to be an effective tool. Furthermore, building upon cultures and traditions instead of replacing relied-upon political institutions mitigates the risk involved in building communism to a minimum. Ethically speaking, any qualms about controlled socialisation as “brainwashing” are in fact far less valid than characterisation of the otherwise inevitable uncontrolled socialisation as such — at least this way we have a sense of democratic or personal control over the shaping of our own epistemologies.

And even if controlled socialisation does fail, we will learn from its failings so as to rectify our approach and get it closer the next time we try. Such lessons would only add more clarity to the nature of any forces obstructing communism. I see no reason why even those of differing political sympathies wouldn’t want to find out what our options for society could be, through allowing and observing this altogether low-risk project of reclaiming our understanding of socialisation.

The main tool that Keefe discusses as a means of actualising controlled socialisation is cranioanalysis, which he describes allegorically in “Cooking Spaghetti Fulcrumese:”

There is one important dynamic to remember, which is that each process, each verb, is made up of smaller processes. The analogy we shall use here shall be “preparing spaghetti fulcrumese.” But for example, some of the smaller processes within this process include going to the shop to buy some ingredients, and laying these out on the table like so.

Say I were to zoom out a bit, and say, condense this process down into a thumbnail or a title. You will see reference to the name of the dish, and perhaps the broad process of preparation, but you won’t see all of the little parts like “laying out all the shopping on the table” represented in that title or thumbnail, or at least it’s less likely. This is because the more we zoom out, the more the details and subprocesses are obscured — still inevitably part of that process, but made more difficult to see. This goes for all analysis, cranio- or otherwise.

The more you condense a process into a digestible nugget, the more obscure the implicit assumptions or subprocesses will be in the greater picture. Zoom out, you see the cohesion, the greater picture, the point. Zoom in, you get to see all the little, more hidden parts of what the process fully entails. Zooming in is analysis.

Zooming out, however, is entification. You take a process, or a verb, and you condense it into a noun of its own, an entity, at the fulcrum of its process [see below].

It is by condensing that process of going to shops, finding the products, paying, that we can simplify it into one noun, the shopping. This is how we come to more closely define my shopping. And I also have other ingredients which I already had in the kitchen even before I went shopping. So I have shopping here, and kitchen ingredients here. How do they become one entity — that is to say, spaghetti fulcrumese ingredients? Well, it’s because when I put everything out onto the table, or when I use all of these things in my cooking, I’m applying within each of the processes that shopping and non-shopping are going through, the same protocol.

That’s what a fulcrum is, in the end. A protocol. And the more invariable that protocol, the more defined that process is. If I were to always go to the same shop, for example, then the entity of “shopping” that I created, would be even more closely defined.

So firmer protocols make for stronger fulcra, which make for more rigidly defined entities. And the more you closely you define something, just as the thumbnail and title “defines” this video, the more of the subprocesses and implicit assumptions you obscure from the naked eye, or from our direct consciousness. This means that this entification we’re talking about, creating nouns from verbs, is resultant largely from strengthening fulcra, and developing tighter standards in your assumed protocols.

When you look at the completed dish, now as one, completed entity, we’ve zoomed out. But this entity is a collection of processes and smaller entities, which themselves are made up of processes. And in just looking at it now, these nuances are much more difficult to see. So if I want to know what this will do to my body, or I’m going to like it or not — stuff which derives from these unseen nuances — we have to pry a little. We have to analyse.

When we break down “spaghetti fulcrumese” into all of its components, we can then reassess them. We can look into the processes that made those things in turn what they are, and other possible protocols we could adopt for those processes. We can consider how a change in the startpoint or endpoint of those processes might merit in change in protocol. And thus, we can constantly go back and forth, entifying processes to see if they lead to any important or generative premises for new processes, and then attacking those fulcrums once their utility dries up.

Cranioanalysis is essentially about doing this, but for exploring conscious thought and navigating its unconscious premises. The way we do that, is through application of the startpoint-endpoint-fulcrum model, and the knowledge that an entity comes from a conflated process. Thus through this understanding, we can gain greater insight into whatever fulcra we’ve internalised subconsciously, and challenge their fulcrumatic strength, exploring the multitude of other ways to carry out the processes that birthed them.

Cranioanalysis explores intuition, instinct, and the way we structure or process information. It is the study of entities, and what the consequences of turning a fluid process into one statically defined entity may be — positive or negative to the generation and accumulation of abstract thought.

In “Organ Growth,” Keefe lays out certain fundamental dynamics of cranioanalysis, built around understanding subconscious internalisation through the startpoint-endpoint-fulcrum model:

Through “fulcrum charts,” one can illustrate the key conceptual functions of process as a means of understanding the effects which one might aim to critique. Naturally, such diagrams are extremely crude and highly interpretable, but in concept such illustrations attempt only to draw parallels to evident phenomena such as that of consistent change in both goal and setting, realisation of one state of being while starting within another, and the development of means to enact this traversal. I would encourage any viewer to imagine it as if it were in infinite dimensions, for the infinite range of possibly identifiable variables by which conditions (either before or after realisation of the process’s ends) could shift, adjust, or even radically change.

Point S on a fulcrum chart serves as an indication for Startpoint, the starting condition at the very commencement of the process, which stands to change to the conditions identified as point E, or Endpoint. S is constituted of multiple parts, some of which it will share with E, others it will not. Every startpoint and endpoint can be (upon closer analysis) divided into an ever more complex compilation of processes that affect its placement. S and E in this chart are therefore merely fulcra that bind these respective processes.

With the distinction of S and E, either by an objective condition or continuity in a moving world, the human (as an agent of subjectivity) uses existing processes of abstract thought to conceptualise and influence the traversal towards our subjectively implanted endpoint. Existing fulcra, as epistemological premises, exert gravitational pull on said traversal consequently, as well as the placement of E in the first place (hence influencing objectives, directions and fluidity).

In the case of subjective processes, conscious effort is taken to connect S and E in efficient and manageable ways. In the case of de facto objective processes (for instance those not by agents of subjectivity), the fulcrum emerges immediately to hold S and E together, and serves as a centrepoint around which S and E mutually revolve, should one change. But human thought and action is not objectively determined in this example.

As the protocol for the process is set in one place, it develops a fulcrum to definitively connect S and E into one perceived entity, making the process more instinctual and usable as a premise for new processes. Eventually the fulcrum will absorb and obscure the subdivision of this new entity (in default conscious mind) into the process we are describing. As the fulcrum increases in strength towards this point, the process becomes increasingly rigidified and formulaic, with S and E moving in tandem around the centrality of the fulcrum, seen and evaluated increasingly in reference to its proximity to perceived objectivity. The solidification of the fulcrum and designation of an entity correspond to the internalisation of the process into the subconscious mind and instinct — represented here in a more cohesive melodic line.

As people converge in experiences and affiliations either willingly (such as within a relationship), or through the pull of anchors, they will develop shared fulcra, manifesting as in-group knowledge or culture. The perceived coalescence of shared fulcra between group members hence enshrines that particular means of traversal from S to E as a de facto objectivity (dfO) within that setting. Consequently the division of the entity back into the process will become an unchallenged truth until one can diverge out from that particular social group. Convergence and divergence therefore manages the creation, destruction, rigidity and fluidity of perceived truths, protocols, cultures and epistemologies.

The assignment of physical territory or collective infrastructure to specific dfOs, for example with the institution of property or the planning of the metropolis, can serve to physically anchor someone to a specific fulcrum, that they must then route their specific process through, even if the dfO ceases or becomes subject to immediate conscious challenging. This physical territorialisation in the form of social anchors is differentiated from the mental territorialisation in the form of fulcra, and is used to regulate the extent to which one can converge into or diverge out of a dfO.

While a weaker fulcrum may be subject to minor push and pull from S and E, the stronger the fulcrum, the less that fulcrum will adapt from its usual protocol even when the conditions of S and E inevitably shift. As a result, a process that might otherwise now be able to be traversed in a more direct and efficient manner may become subject to a major detour due to the continued protocol to route this traversal through the fulcrum. Consequently, the fulcrum may become degenerative or “dried up” instead of providing a useful premise for new generation of thought.

The liberatory condition in cranioanalysis is not necessarily schizophrenia, but perpetuity: free subjectivity, unimpeded intellectualism, a pathological wonder. A liberatory society is therefore one in which one can fluidly converge and diverge without being confined to the impositions of involuntary hierarchy. Without this, any productive schizophrenia is simply an enigma.

Intellectual perpetuity and craniomodernity is about nothing if not empowering the generation and accumulation of abstract thought from human subjectivity and intellectualism. So if we want to free ourselves from that which would objectify, compartmentalise and regiment our thought and roles in society, we must have a society in which we can locate, analyse and attack the fulcrum.

Keefe proposes that cranioanalysis could be introduced and mainstreamed culturally, through a proposed cultural movement he refers to as craniomodernism. In “Kittenic Philosophy,” Keefe describes craniomodernism as follows:

The metamodern perspective attempts to blend the modernist direction with the self-awareness of postmodernism, so that we embark on a direction, but understand that our capacity to understand that full universal truth is limited — so we have to be prepared for that universal truth that we see, to shift and adapt as time goes by, as we learn new things, and as we encounter new perspectives. This is why one of the key words to describe metamodernism is oscillation: oscillation between, for example, sincerity and insincerity, between the hopelessness and hopefulness, between confidence and non-confidence; all of these binary factors that are attached to either modernism or postmodernism. It’s essentially about finding a good mix, and mixing these characteristics around, for an approach to questions of meaning and purpose (in regards to kittens for example) that is both productive, and also comprehensive and holistic. So the metamodernist perception of a kitten, as an analogy, may be conditionally quite like the modernist one, although preferably described through the means of irony or doubt.

The craniomodernist perspective on the kitten, contrastingly, would start from the fact that often questions of meaning and purpose have already been internalised by the society that is asking the question. So for example, in relation to kittens, we as a society already have internally convinced ourselves of a meaning and purpose for a kitten, as for example a pet, and that internalisation has become something that we wouldn’t be able to divorce ourselves from. So arguing in in defence of oscillation, or that we can’t attain meaning, is almost pointless, because we’ve already secured this de facto objectivity within our own judgment, that we can’t easily remove. It is an idea, this idea of meaning for a kitten, that has injected itself so deeply into society, that it should be treated as objective, and this means that when we confront this question, we’ll often perceive it as objective, when in truth it may not be quite as universal as we expect it to be.

This may seem relatively trivial, especially in respect to the question of determining meaning for kittens, although on certain larger issues, such as the issue as to whether or not there is a human nature and what it consists of, the particularity of the craniomodern approach can make all the difference, and this is why it needs to be its own movement. We have to understand that meaning, purpose and truth are the product of our own ideas, and that overwriting them is exceptionally difficult, once these truths have become well established.

The process of enshrining this de facto objectivity is quite an interesting one. It starts with abstract thought, maybe in the form of artistic or philosophical ideas, which then go on to forefront a cultural movement, and then when this cultural movement is materially applied onto a certain society and becomes consensus in its ways of thinking about the question of truth, for example, or at least approaching truth, this consensus can then be collectively internalised by the population, which then leads to it being the basis for further abstract thought, and further cultural movements. It’s through this kind of process to which we design our own ethics, our own metaphysical understanding of the world, and also our own epistemology (our way of dealing with truth; a truth that may include the meaning of kittens).

This is the essence to craniomodernism: the process through which we as humans can use our abstract thought to essentially create our own static rules and principles for society. Needless to say this goes beyond just tradition or protocol, which can be more easily shifted than questions of truth. But also crucial to craniomodernism is a metametaphysical question, as well as just a metaphysical one. We’ve been dealing with the metaphysical question as to what the meaning and purpose of a kitten is, but within craniomodernism, we also have to ask ourselves why we are asking this question, why we are trying to find this meaning in reality, as opposed to finding hypothetical meanings that we should then look to try and bring about. It also means placing particular emphasis as to the process of socialisation as a child, and how they internalise society — what parts of their surroundings are going to stick within their concept of truth, perhaps forever? We, as a society, need to be culturally prioritising questions like how we think the impressionable among us will go on to form their meaning (of kittens, for example), based on what they’re exposed to, and how.

Keefe writes, again in “Kittenic Philosophy,” about what craniomodernity (or the realisation of craniomodernism) could include:

What we can do is maximise our generation and accumulation of abstract thought. One of the first things to do, in order to achieve this, is to inspire a cultural movement that places priority and significance to the role of abstract thought within society (i.e craniomodernism). It would also have to include that nobody within society is at risk of material precarity and poverty, so that as many people have the potential to engage with the hypothetical as possible. It is very difficult to take your mind away from reality, to engage in intellectualism, when you’re battling for survival.

This is actually the reason that I identify as a communist, because fundamentally I wish to free people from the volatile hierarchy of capitalism, so that they can engage in uninterrupted intellectualism, or intellectual perpetuity (intellectualism can come in many forms, and can to some translate merely as the free pursuit of desire). Furthermore, transition to a more automated society might also aid our liberation from the less intellectual tasks that human beings must otherwise preoccupy themselves with. Once needs are taken care of, the individual can then pursue their personal wants, which in itself is an intellectual action and judgment, especially after the dismantling of consumer culture and commodity fetishism.

I also have tried to explain why simply one cultural shift isn’t enough to alter and change the existing truths that we hold internally — and this is in turn why one special focus of craniomodernity must be the emphasis to confront the issues of internalisation, and more consciousness surrounding our practices of socialisation of the most impressionable in our society. Only this way can we rewrite the de facto truths that may be impeding either kitten appreciation or automated luxury communism.

Humans have not always been structured, throughout their history, into grand hierarchies, pitted against each other to such the extent that they must engage in obscene self-prioritization, but it is also demonstrably evident that these structures and practices have been fully internalised, and have somewhat disastrously prevented communism from being achieved in the past. But craniomodernity provides hope, for people’s needs, for intellectualism and free expression of individuality.

In “The Truth in Religion,” Keefe further elucidates the notion of free convergence and divergence within craniomodernity, so as to allow for optimally navigating generative thought:

I am strongly in favour of recording, advancing and defending a tradition and its artefacts, so that anyone can study, live and immerse themselves in any practised culture or style of living, from any time and any place in human development. I am also strongly in favour of creating and exploring new traditions, cultures and ways of life, for anyone to live by should they choose to. This is the lens through which I view religion — a prime example of what a rich and developed tradition can look like.

The ubiquity of religious buildings, religious art, religious ritual, is somewhat inspiring to this end. It is a ubiquity that I only wish we could replicate with museums, cultural centres, libraries, archives — if all of these, alongside the religious buildings, could be found as a cultural centrepoint to practically every community, the amount of potential inspiration for further subjectivity would no doubt herald a new cultural golden age of intellectual and expressive liberty and diversity: craniomodernity.

And then, within this fascinatingly deep and complex body of amassed knowledge and culture, the individual can fully immerse themselves in each tradition, jumping from one to another at will and whim, unrestricted by rigid channelling or stratification — in Deleuzian terms, a body without organs; or perhaps, from a Jewish perspective, omni-Bundism. The eventual goal is to make a society in which one can live either extremely conservatively or extremely progressively, either upon past-accumulated thought or newly generated thought. To create a foundation upon which the lifestyles in conservatism and progressivism can coexist, converging and diverging as freely as they choose.

If you care about conserving the old and the traditional ways and values, craniomodernity, or at least intellectual perpetuity, is a blessing for you. If you care about starting completely new traditions and values, craniomodernity is a blessing for you too. Whether you wish for an immersion in religious tradition, or the ability to disassociate. So long as neither side is mandated by a rigid, indestructible state monopoly on force, they can and will coexist.

But this requires, at the same time, a degree of caution around the cementation of organised religious and traditional hierarchy, a lively and engaged debate both between and within religions and traditions, a commitment to good academic practice and logical consistency, and cranioanalysis on both personal and collective levels.

Finally, Keefe also mentions the concept of craniostructuralism within “Kittenic Philosophy:”

Firstly, we have to consider the structuralist movement, which was a movement that sort of lies somewhat in between modernism and postmodernism, in that it critiques modernist ideas (such as dialectical materialism for instance) which hold to a universal truth, because different structural frameworks of different places and different cultures around the world all yield different conclusions, due to the biases of these systems, of these structures, all of which are somewhat unique from each other.

Structuralism aimed to critique these differences, and investigate them, but poststructuralists like Derrida saw this as fundamentally futile, because it involves using those systems which are already containing their own biases. So in that sense, you can never have an objective study into the effects of certain structures such as language. If we look into why we, as a certain society, define kittens in the way that we do, and why we have given them the meaning that we attach to them, it becomes extremely hard to do this properly.

And this, in turn, is why we need metastructuralism, which (similar to metamodernism) would balance the idea that we can’t have it completely objectively and perfectly and do everything to optimal objectivity, but that shouldn’t necessarily deter us from acting conditionally as if we did have that level of objectivity. Metastructuralism is essentially again about oscillation, about acknowledging poststructuralist concerns, but also not giving up on inquiries into structures.

This means that metastructuralism and craniostructuralism are actually very similar, the difference between them being in the metastructuralists’ emphasis upon cultural factors being the source of their unobjectivity, where the craniostructuralist might instead attribute this to cross-cultural internalisation, that extends far beyond one mere culture, and therefore even in the case of dramatic cultural shift, across the period of a lifetime for example, this isn’t enough to change one’s original inner de facto objectivity, instead of granting another separate and different unobjective perspective. In other words, to craniomodernists and craniostructuralists, the difference in how we perceive kittens is not so much about differing cultural perspectives, so much as it is about differing internal truths, that are not subject to easy adjustment from learning about different cultures for instance, or even being immersed in them.

Keefe also provides a few additional thoughts on some examples of entification:

Let us consider some notable examples of the development of fulcra, entities, and their effects.

One such example of a process collapsed into a singular entity is that of the condition of “life” itself. If subdivided, life is (like anything else) procedural, be it in maintaining or managing an “alive” state. Once the child is disconnected from the management of the mother, S and E diverge and hence their subject is immediately tasked with facilitating the traversal. However, prior to conditioning in the form of any preceding fulcra to premise subjective interpretation and abstract thought, the fulcrum developed is predicated most notably on the nuances of the placement of S — although is not inherently of objective relation to S. This is depending in part on parental and environmental factors, as well as the limited biological fulcra developed through the history of human evolution.

This fulcrum ultimately conflates the process into the perception of life as a state or entity, with consequently an implied staticity. The process of “continuing to live,” taking breaths and so forth, becomes swiftly instinctual and subconscious. Quite the nature of the fulcrum and its placement therefore serves as one of the first premises in the construction of the child’s epistemology, through which they shall eventually perceive and interpret worldly phenomena and generate abstract thought. This particular example fulcrum therefore has a particular relevance to the earliest emergences of subjectivity and individual formulation of desire. It is a fulcrum that will exert gravitational influence on numerous other processes and formulations of thought.

The detouring of the process through an inefficient or indirect fulcrum is perhaps best exemplified through the example of ideology, the process by which one person or interest group can condition the perception of another to affect the beliefs and perceived interests of another. Routing thought and perception processes through such channels can hence stray considerably from the processes that one might expect to organically develop without such a fulcrum in place, and can (as the fulcrum gets stronger) have an effect upon the placement of E. This rerouting not only represents the limiting of human subjectivity from authentic expression, but also provides a less providing premise for generation of further abstract thought within that specific epistemology, as it is less likely to relate and interact with the other generated fulcra of the individual.

Constructing ideology here also extends to the imposition and external cultivation of fetishes relating to the commodity, manufactured compliance, and to a certain extent religious faith. While faith is undoubtedly a hugely useful tool for connecting S and E in expressive and rational processes, should it manifest into a strong fulcrum it can yield restrictive and similarly degenerative effects as ideology, in particular in that fulcrum’s gravitational pull on E and the endpoints of other processes. A BwO type structure, in this case perpetuity (see model below), is therefore ideal in allowing for faith’s fluid existence, allowing convergence into objectives for the purpose of direction and motivation, yet divergence out of objectivity when such becomes regimenting and objectifying.

Subversion of trajectory (narrative, historicity, etc.) is not a subversion of objectivity, in fact quite the reverse, for the essence of trajectory is that its directly constituent processes remain within the realms of conscious will — tethered to certain fulcrums, but with such confliction that startpoint and endpoint are clearly distinct and available for conscious evaluation or deterritorialisation. Meanwhile the isolation and reproduction of the snapshot (in contrast to trajectory), such as with pornography, fast food and so forth, aims and explicitly succeeds in establishing a more concentrated fulcrum with greater conflation of process into an entity, thus becoming more prone to solidification into a dfO than its trajectory-adjacent counterpart.

With a perverse irony, postmodernity has actually served to further regiment and structure society as we know it. To acknowledge this consequence of philosophical and political projects which enable postmodern restructuration, and make clear demands for a revival of trajectory, may well be the most promising chance at subversion of the modern, within the continuous fight for subjectivity and freedom. In short, this is why the craniomodern is moreso able to be supplanted onto the metamodern than the postmodern.

Keefe also reflects upon the nature of personhood:

Don’t all animals interpret and respond to their surroundings? Don’t all animals make choices? Aren’t then all animal intellectuals? The answer is, put simply, no, because there is an important caveat. In our current world, only humans are able to accumulate the product of our responses and interpretations, and formulate from that abstract principles and meanings. To other animals, the rationale to their choices, the constructing of framework of understanding, eludes their conscious thought — only we can navigate the subconscious with our conscious thought. All humans, regardless of abilities or limitations, internally create complex epistemologies that all merit appreciation, which we can then seek inspiration from. All humans, instinctually, develop shared cultures as a sum of accumulated abstract thought — again our goal should be to accelerate and appreciate this process — but due to a lack of shared reference with, say, the bovine or canine experience, we do not create shared culture in the same way outside of humanity.

Therefore in the generation and accumulation of subjectivity, the principle upon which to operate is centred around what advances human intellectual perpetuity, what allows us to engage in least-obstructed, least-coerced subjectivity. It’s a consequentialist ethical position in which the consequence is increased human involvement, increased human impact, and increased human knowledge of what we think to be the right mark to leave. So to apply such a lens to questions, for instance, of animal life and meat-eating, the question we must ask ourselves is this: does this practice bring us more satisfaction or more discomfort? Does it keep us immersed in material thought or does it allow us to immerse ourselves instead in the more abstract? Does it allow us to both fluidly assert and attack fulcra at ease, or does it rigidify us or coerce us into a set assumption around which we must structure our lives? What are the doors it opens for cultural expression, and what implications does it have for understanding reality without cultural bias? Is living according to virtue essential to enacting proactive change, or does it distract from more consequential collective action on the level of production, or even make it less practical?

I don’t believe there is a catch-all answer to these questions, especially after taking into account cultivated fetishes and cognitive dissonance — but these are the questions craniocentric ethics asks. And similar questions can be applied to many other different moral and ethical debates, all fundamentally returning to how each affects human subjectivity. There is a lot I find appreciable about the vegan movement, but the main tendency I would caution against within it would be the refusal to recognise an ontological difference between human person (which has the capacity to generate and accumulate abstractities) and other animals which don’t. This difference — not based on essence but rather practical consequence — merits different treatment philosophically, such as in human prioritisation of human life.

Incidentally this ontological point also can be demonstrated in the distinction between a fetus and a baby, why the latter is a person and the former is not. From the moment the child is born, in which they come into the world in which they shall live, so to speak, they are already reacting to their surroundings and hence beginning to build their epistemology into a framework of subjectivity; consequential entification has started for them. It is hence detrimental to the generation of a range of subjectivity, to take the life of a child, in almost any situation. Murder in principle is wrong from a craniocentrically derived ethical system. Whereas a fetus has not been exposed to the world yet — if there is indeed any entification or epistemology-building activity they implicitly engage in, it is not with consequence to the world in which they will live, react and express. Hence the abortion of a fetus is not an erasure of human subjectivity, but the dispelling of an anticipatory fetish — and while there is nothing wrong with attaching additional anticipatory meanings and qualities onto your fetus, insisting others fetishise theirs in the same way is an attack upon their subjectivity and hence not a defence of subjectivity overall.

There is also, to note, the “violinist argument” that it shouldn’t matter whether a fetus is person or not, as to whether we should ensure reproductive rights are upheld. One could argue that this can also be reconciled with craniocentric ethics, through the importance of usufruct to cultural self-expression, and hence the right for someone to have control of their body insolong as they are in use of it (which would essentially mean their whole life).

It might not surprise you to learn that in my own forays into academia, I am a predominantly a man of the arts, humanities and social sciences, as opposed to formal, natural or applied sciences. It is no surprise that the disciplines most predisposed with fundamentally subjective interpretation and formulating such into principles, premises and epistemes, are called “humanities” — participating in said humanities is merely an extension of performing that human condition in a formal and disciplined academic context. Therefore if we accept that interpretation must ultimately precede knowledge, so must the humanities precede any sciences less variable in subjectivity. Underneath all the systems of understanding and deduction we have, there is some abstract philosophy in everything — even if it be in coming to trust one’s senses or matching perception with rationalisation, navigating cognitive dissonances. Our building of an identity, of preference, of knowledge and of personality — becoming who we are is a question, at its root, of our building a philosophical framework by which to understand the world. This is the human value of humanities for you, with arts resulting as the subsequent expressions or products of our humanity — this is why the two are so vital to investigate and study.

Scientific and mathematical systems, don’t get me wrong, are incredibly interesting and provide pertinent insights too. They also do often require degrees of interpretation, for that matter — at least when done properly. But I would contest the often made claim by their practitioners that such systems convey objectivity or exist as universally objective. They, as with any other purportedly objective system, are less simple than being binary coded into some programming of the universe — they are systems designed to best tie perception (a subjective, perhaps largely intersubjective thing) to framework of understanding (another ultimately subjective-intersubjective thing), and hence by being constructed and designed by humans to navigate and link two subjective variables, they too are not immune from being preceded by the analysis of subjectivity provided by the humanities, or the expression of subjectivity provided in the arts. Nonetheless, pragmatically the systems we have established here seem to largely work in pattern prediction between the two, making them nonetheless extremely useful, such as for instance in medical advancement, technological capabilities or historical retelling.

Pattern prediction within existing academic traditions or cultural traditions is largely something that can be automated and even more efficiently be carried out through computing technology. Perhaps this is why artificial intelligence as it currently exists can much more easily be used to extrapolate existing systems to new discoveries and conclusions (be it scientific or even artistic traditions with clearly established rules or protocols), than to organically create new or add to traditions in a subjective manner. Emulation, finding codified rules and protocols and copying them, is not subjectivity, nor is it humanity, nor is it personhood. Whereas the complexity and development of an epistemology that can, authentically to itself, interpret its surroundings and spit out something abstractly new, that can organically navigate when to perform rule-adherence and rule-breaking, this is subjectivity that I can only see as coming from humanity even once all the menial and objective tasks (i.e. those for which we value predictability and standardisation over subjectivity or interpretation) are rightly automated.

So could an AI be a person? Well, if one were to build a synthetic human brain, and spend many years conditioning it and developing it through living a human experience as one would a non-synthetic human brain, then sure — but there are assumedly more straightforward ways to make people, or so I’ve been told… All-in-all, I would happily accept that as the direct, less interpretive work is taken over by machines, humanity’s role will become progressively more centred around intellectualism, culture, desire, subjectivity, abstraction, philosophy — the things you can’t objectively program and hence would have difficulty programming an AI to do, have they not been raised, developed and cultivated as a human themselves. This is a wonderful prospect, and I think it accentuates our humanity more than any other future — so it is the future that I believe we ought to all fight to realise.

Keefe also has some thoughts on the concept of price discrimination, and thus by association capitalism:

Robinson, whom I agree with in this instance, refers to the concept of price discrimination and monopsony in explaining the dynamics of this Pigouvian Exploitation. Price discrimination refers to selling a thing at different prices to different democraphics. Because the worker can only sell their labour to the company they work for at that one time, that company has monopsony, or, a monopoly on purchase and consumption. Therefore, as the worker has no option but to be part of the expropriation of labour, the price determined by the company for that labour can be valued low, to the capitalist expropriator’s benefit. But then, the capitalist can switch their valuation of the labour in that production process to drastically higher, when selling on the product to consumers, often utilising fetish cultivation tactics like spectacle and distance, or playing into marginal utility or supply and demand mechanics.

Hence due to the situation of the capitalist, they can play market forces to their benefit and maximise their own earnings, at the exploitative expense of either worker or consumer (depending on the approach you look at it). Had we cut out the capitalist and the expropriation of labour, and had the workers have control over the fruits of their labour (fructus), communicating with consumers themselves, they would be better off within any transactional society. In today’s society however, the capitalist can leverage their wealth, power, monopsony and social reach to accumulate without doing anything productive, anything that the workers wouldn’t be able to do in an instant themselves had they the possession of the capital, from which they are currently excluded, by the institution of property.

The Austrian School and various capitalist apologists, including many Keynesians, love to use the weaponisation of price discrimination as a supposed justification for capitalist exploitation, but this shouldn’t be our conclusion at all here. As a consequentialist, I believe this ability to perform price discrimination, fetishisation and exploitation is something we should criticise and condemn, due to its role in exacerbating feedback loops of accumulation and stratification. This leads in turn to more inequality, and as a result increased propensity for the powerful to subjugate the powerless into their own fascistic, regimented order, and suppressing the freedom for many to engage in liberated intellectual perpetuity, to contribute to the generation and accumulation of abstract thought so central to the human experience.

Ultimately, to summarise, the work of Abraham Leonard Keefe over the past two years has intersected multiple different subjects and approaches each through a whole host of different concepts — many built off of the work of preceding philosophers and theorists, and others less so. It is far from over, but up to this point in September 2023, we feel that the extracts included above provided best summarise many of the different material covered thus far in Towards a New Perpetuity. We hope you will give the series a watch if you have further interest, and will stay tuned for further developments.

Furthermore, if you find resonance in any of Keefe’s concepts, you may reach out to him through his email at abrahamleonardkeefe@gmail.com. Any inspiration to further thought, expression, analogy or critique is much appreciated, and we at theRedPen would be more than happy to consider including your own work within this publication. For that matter, there is no reason that the next summary of a craniomodern thinker we post here couldn’t be about you and your own thought.

I would reiterate — were it not already quite clear — that any ideas I put forth are ultimately open-source in spirit. — Abraham Leonard Keefe