“what does dominic mean?”, asks my visitor-from-Google, in who knows what anguished tones. I will tell you: it means “of the Lord” - in other words, “God’s gift”. To whom or what is not stated: only that Es gibt Dominik, it gives (some) Dominic, or il y a Dominique , he/it has there Dominic. (Note that Dominique is a girl’s name).

After reading through the k-punk archives, with particular reference to the topic of cold reason, I’m quite taken with the idea that “Dominic” could be seen as the name, not of a person, but of a given - a confluence or constatation of givens.

One of the lines that stands out for me in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns is the one addressed to his “obstinate, outclassed forefathers”:

‘Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate, outclassed forefathers, I too concede, I am your staggeringly-gifted child.’

I’m not all that interested here in the aura or miasma of “giftedness”, understood as a category of “special educational needs”. What is interesting is rather the way Hill plays on the double sense of “gifted” as both “possessing or having been given gifts” and “having been given, or made a gift of”. And then, “staggeringly-gifted”: the image (it suggests a Christmas scene, if not a nativity scene) is of a child tottering across the room bearing more than an armful of ribbon-wrapped packages, but it also indicates that the child himself is a gift, a concession - and somewhat of a surprise, a rebuke even - to his “obstinate, outclassed forefathers”.

This staggering of the gift-child can be seen as a kind of Freudian limping, an asynchrony or falling out-of-kilter: something about the given is not in step; its stance is lopsided. The point, as I understand it, about “cold reason” is not the liberal assertion that “the person is the product of his environment”, or, “the individual is the product of society”, but the more troubling stipulation that “the person”/”the individual” never actually arrives as such: ideology posits such things as persons, under a regime of competitive individuality, but these entities are hyperstitions, fictions that become real (but never altogether real). The pathos of individuality lies in the continual attempts of the putative individual to shore up his uniqueness, his a priori and unimpeachable goodness, aloofness and right to a separate existence, without ever recognising that all of these things are machinic by-products, the disjecta of a viral entity hell-bent on mindless (and mindlessly destructive) self-replication. They can’t be made to cohere, or gain a firm foothold in reality, and their failure to do so is not a personal pathology but a schism within the architecture of personality itself.

Being a bourgeois individualist, I am much happier with the “cold” scenario than I am with the “liberal” scenario, in which such warm-bodied entities as persons do indeed exist but are framed by social “contexts” (made up, ultimately, of other persons) that entirely pre-determine the possibilities of what such a person can be, or do. The “cold”, Spinozist, scenario is ultimately more open to the possibility of change and transformation, at the same time as being more honest about the inhuman, impersonal underpinnings of “the human” and “the personal”. What “the kollective” is not is an aggregation of persons; still less a subsumption of individual personalities under the identity of a single Person, a F?hrer or Will-of-the-People. Rational collectivity leaves space for - demands, even - experimentation and the pursuit of joyful intensity (it’s no surprise that Libidinal Economy is one of mark k-punk’s key texts). Kollectivity is open source humanity, its bugs (and bug-like beginnings) exposed “[f]or all to see. In Times Square. In Piccadilly”.