by Steven Craig Hickman

Q6. Does hyperstition exist outside of time and how is it hidden? This is fascinating, particularly in relation to the apocalypse meme, which is not at all. How do the two terms relate?

​R6. Time is the working in historical time of that which lies outside (but constructs itself through) historical time. Apocalypse closes the circuit.

– from interview with Nick Land by Delphi Carstens

​Over and over as I read various theory-fictions the name that seems to hover like a bad nightmare, yet circulates through many texts like an invisible presence or corruption, an immanent field of jouissance – a bittersweet degradation is that of Nick Land:

​Or Bataille’s “archontes” – those deadly kellipots of the Lurian Kabbalah: “The acephalous gods who, as we will still need to show, represent matter are precisely the images of dismembered bodies that the substitutions of the series are rushing toward. If the dismembered body represents one of these primal images that sets in motion the chain of images, and if the series is once again inclined toward an approximation of this image, with regard to the movement of the chain, we are dealing with a form of circulation. With the dismembered body, a circle closes itself but only to unroll itself once again.”1
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Land will turn the gods into capitalists and retro-viral infestations blitzing the last stop gap of a no future zone:

​Acephalization = schizophrenia: cutting-up capital by way of bottom-up macrobacterial telecommerce, inducing corporate disintegration. The doomed part of intensively virtualized techonomic apparatuses subverts the fraying residues of anthropomorphic guidance. Control dissolves into the impossible.2

​Think of Deleuze’s notion of Aion and Chronos: the force of non-linear time cannibalizing historical time, a narrative between the linear dynamics of the monotheistic or Blakean notion of narrative as Genesis > Apocalypse (History, Chronos > chronological); and the circular and eternal return of Joyce’s “riverun past Eve and Adam’s” of the cyclical times of Shelley’s fossil poetry (Cyclic, Viconian, Nietzsche’s amor fati – love of fate – the eternal return of the Same, Deleuze’s Aion or the eternal return of “difference”, etc.).

​Symptomatic of a type of cultural illness induced by future shock, the hyperstitional ‘infection’ brings about that which is most feared; a world spiraling out of control. This, manifestly, is the task of the’ hyperstional cyberneticist,’ according to Land – namely, to “close the circuit” of history by detecting the “convergent waves [that] register the influence of the future on its past”. As Land indicates, a hyperstition signals the return of the irrational or the monstrous ‘other’ into the cultural arena. From the perspective of hyperstition, history is presided over by Cthonic ‘polytendriled abominations’ – the “Unuttera” that await us at history’s closure. Lovecraft’s tendrilled gods as immanent Ideas from the future relayed through Quantum engines into unsuspecting humanity, releasing programs and algorithms that bring about the convergence of technology and intelligence: the Singularity. Instead of the Platonic notion of eternal Ideas, the sense of those fallen powers in matter itself as the immanent force of intelligence and productive power: the Red Tower unleashed (Thomas Ligotti story).

Or, as Badiou would say, “Generic Intelligence” not “General Intelligence”. For Badiou, this sort of experience inheres within what he calls a “generic procedure.”　Since such a procedure “has nothing to do with the limits of the human species, our　 ‘consciousness,’ our ‘finitude,’ our ‘faculties,’” it has to be thought through the same mathematical formalism as the “glacial world” of Cartesian extension described by Meillassoux. To quote from Logics of Worlds:

​For Badiou, it is the event which interrupts the regime of custom by exposing an absence of necessary connection as a positive metaphysical possibility rather than an epistemological deficit. As an alternative to “habit,” what Badiou calls “fidelity” constitutes the synthetic principle of “inhuman experience” proper to a generic procedure. The subject of a generic procedure is cast along an aleatory trajectory on which every term of experience is encountered as radically new—shorn of the regularities of habit— and is either included or excluded (in a binary fashion) from the construction of a generic truth.
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For Land a hyperstition is such a generic truth. Exulting in permanent ‘crisis mode,’ hyperstition accelerates the tendencies towards chaos and dissolution by invoking irrational and monstrous forces – the Cthonic Old Ones. As Land explains, these forces move through history, planting the seeds of hyperstition: John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: “I thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write.” ‘They’ are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress.

As Land would say in an interview: What is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages – a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.

Think of what Kabbalah actually was for those Hebrew scholars: a map of the Mind’s Cosmos… this sense that the Sefirot were the broken vessels of a catastrophic universal system of entropy, and that the gathering of the darkness from those scattered vessels to reweave the body of the universe, etc. As Zizek would say “traversing the fantasy”: in the fantasies of scholars comes the hyperstitional creation of the future, a future that comes as a memory not of the past but of the future itself. Think of Einstein in New Mexico: he had a room built above his studio, a room with 13 steps to reach it, a room with nothing in it but a chair, a room painted solid black and sealed to the point that no light of any kind could seep in. He would sit there in the darkness for hours contemplating his mathematical equations. I remember when I took acid in the sixties and seventies of visualizing in the darkness forms: mathematical figures and entities in hyperreal colors; geometric and number based entities that would move into and out of patterns creating architectural objects as if something were trying to deliver a strange new message in a language barely understood.

Think of the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan a mathematical prodigy who dreamed equations. Ramanujan credited his acumen to his family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work, and claimed to dream of blood drops that symbolised her male consort, Narasimha, after which he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes. He often said, “An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.” He visualized math even if couched in religious terms. More a savant, he was barely literate and failed other subjects, etc. This notion of lucid dreaming and receiving these complex scrolls of informational content aligns with this Landian sense of the computer vectors from the future, etc. Or, the Gnostic sense of “more than rational” gnosis (knowledge).

Couched back in secular terms our brain is computational device that is not bound by chronological time, rather it taps into Aion or other dimensions of timespace for its systems. What we term genius is just accidents of the brain itself: gifted individuals tap into the gaps in the filter that most others are unable too. As Scott would say: the BBT closes us normals off from accessing this computational device, instead it delivers to us only the environmental (local) data we need and keeps the rest.

All those ancient traditions of Sorcery and entheogens is pathways to circumvent the blind brain’s filtering mechanism, to short-circuit it and open up gaps in its armor to release informational content otherwise closed off. (I’m sure Scott would (in his scientistic) belief system explain all this away. Or, maybe not!) But why else did humans spend thousands of years developing relations to entheogens and rituals surrounding the use of hallucinogens even in Greece, Rome, and other cultures, India, China, Africa… etc. Most of our monotheistic religions shut all this down just like the reformation closed off the hermetic and magical traditions they feared from Renaissance thinkers, etc. What men fear they demonize and reject, associate with evil… but if Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, Land etc. are correct then “evil” is the creative in us, or as Black acknowledges “evil is eternal delight” “energy”… etc.

​The problem with both modern sciences and philosophy is that it binds itself to tradition, constrains its thoughts and ability to think by ingrown codes and systems of knowledge and power (Foucault) that force academic or para-academic thought into molds of acceptable discourse etc. When certain humans discover techniques or other paths to thought, math, etc. that do not fit into those networks of affiliation they are marked as either “obscurantist” or “genius” as if they must be abnormal or outside the normative parameters of acceptable or polite company. People are afraid to face the unknown and new, they’d rather hide in their received traditions than venture outside the circle or fence into the wilderness. Ask yourself why that is? We know that when the sciences or even philosophy come up with something new it takes if not a generation then at least a very wide consensus of cowards to come to terms with a new “truth”. People fear what they cannot reduce to their surround abode of thought, their habitat of sameness. What’s funny is that the cry of modernism was “Make it new!” Yet, when one reads their work one discovers nothing new, only the cultural malaise of outworn and belated thought rerouted into a stylistics that appears new only in that it hides the same under the affective relations of ethical cowardice. Think of Eliot, Pound and Wyndham Lewis who are the arch-modernists: each harbored fascist dreams of tradition and constraint, of authority and control. Nothing new here.
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Sadly most thinkers in our day revert to a zero degree of thought caught between older battles of idealism or materialism under the guise of immaterialsm of the updated physics of Quantum theory. Between advanced semioticians of finance, or the vitalistic charade of mythic matter, or the mathematical entities of some generic procedure, or the Subject as self-reflecting nothingness etc. each seeks out of the past rather than the future a path forward into chaos beyond the human. We seem bent on an inhuman vision of escape or exit, one that flattens or corrupts the human into the inhuman or anti-human. It’s as if we were ashamed of being what we are, as if to be this strange animal with consciousness – with a sense of the linguistic “I”, that signifier that hooks and rambles across the screen of the mind like a puppet made of papier-mâché and strings of thought rotating in a void were to be ruined (Foucault) cast out into the outer darkness of non-thought (Laruelle).

As if we woke up one day and thought that being human were a mistake, a disease, a degradation on the face of earth… as if suddenly secular philosophy had agreed with the monotheistic religions after all and we were just stains and fallen beings, sinful creatures who had instead of acting against God had acted against the rest of creation. We hear over and over that ours is the Age of Anthropocene: the age of human degradation of the climate, earth, the geosphere, etc. Is this not a new religion of earth come to bite us in the ass. Are we not reinstalling the sacred in a new mode? Whereas we abandoned the monotheistic religions in the Enlightenment, now we are expected to abandon both the liberal order, the seat of Reason, and the Self as Subject for the non-human, inhuman, anti-human (take your pick). Why would I who struggle so hard to free myself of Christianity and become an atheist (without God) want to now enslave myself in a new religion of the non-human couched as it is in a philosophical jargon? No. Something is wrong here. We seem to be abandoning the sciences in the very moment when we need them most. The sciences are based on sense-data, empirical and also mathematical modeling, etc. A balance between Set and Synthetic theoretic in math is the basis of twenty-first sciences. Both the Life (biological) and Physics need to work in balance together to form a more viable path forward.  Too many philosophers have denigrated the sciences, when its the powers of government, finance, etc. that enforce, fund, and control the flow and direction of R&D etc. that should gain our Eire, not the sciences as a human tool or heuristics.

I guess I’m tired of the Left who is either full of malaise or full of optimism for everything but the human itself… as if now humans must become themselves the sacrificial scapegoat of a new earth religion. Cast out in favor of the non-human other: the inhuman, anti-human, or non-human, etc. As if Gaia had replaced Yahweh as the arbiter and judge of human Sin and degradation. As if our sin was not against heaven but the earth. Time to walk away from either reversion, monotheistic or earth based, obscurantist or philosophical. All these false philosophers who seek to escape the human seem like old school transcendentalists to me. Let’s escape the human condition, become something other… We are what we are, let us act on what immanently is the force of our intelligence in this cosmos, without being blinded by religious forms of transcendence. Otherwise we’re doomed to fatalism concerning the real problems we face ahead. Both posthumanist and transhumanist discourse is replete with this transcendence crapology, seeking to exit the human project for either biogenetic enhancement through pharmaceutical, genetic alteration, etc.; or, by merging with out technologies: robotics or virtual assemblages. Yes, we as a species like every previous species that has already gone extinct may reach that point where we give way to something else, but this is not the time nor the age to abandon hope. Dante was wrong: there is no sign above the human prognosis that say “Abandon hope all ye who become human!” It’s time to accept who and what we are and deal with it.

I’m not saying that the sciences might very well in the future provide just such machinic or enhanced lifestyles, rather the point is not to make it into a religion, secular or otherwise. One need only reread the cyberpunks and newer science fiction to realize that such dreams of immortalization may not lead to what our promoters of transhumanism and posthumanism believe. I like David Roden’s “disconnection thesis”:

​Let’s leave it open or fictionalize it. Or even use the hyperstitional, memetic, or egregore to bring it about if this is truly the path forward. But let’s do it under the light of Reason, not religious and irrational behavior guided by either pessimistic or optimistic rhetoric. For years the Left has been under the superstition that the Enlightenment is our Number One Enemy. One can read through the entire gamut of Leftist thought and see a critique not of the Enlightenment per se but of its so to speak “instrumental reason”. That it was turning us into machines, etc., forced by mechanistic “invisible hands” of economic servitude, etc..  Yet, now we want to affirm another fatalism? Abandon one secular myth for another? Enter the servitude of metamorphosis into non-humans? A migration out of reason into what?
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Nietzsche whom people either love or hate wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t live long enough to finish his project. Yet, he had in his brief creative life developed a theory of meaning: nihilism. It was a concept that allowed us to understand the history of human “meaning,” and how culture shapes the symbolic fictions of truth that guide our ethical, religious, and scientific – philosophical frameworks toward either ruin (passive, romantic nihilism of self-destruction and self-ruinous hatred), or toward positive-feedback loops and auto-productive active nihilism full of that creative and energetic abandonment: beyond good and evil, shaped by the amoral, impersonal, and alien force of immanent intelligence from the core of our inhumanity. Cloaked in his mad prose of the end were sparks and sigils, guideposts toward what we’ve become in our time: the fretful denizens of a postmodern age of nihilistic despair, else a culture of death mobilized the evil and creative energetics of a posthuman future. We are those of whom he spoke, the very measure of both passive and active forms of nihilism. And in this generation the balance between these two forms of nihilism are far from equilibrium and bringing about a great civil-war among cultures and peoples of the earth. It remains to be seen whether the reactive and ruinous forces of passive nihilism (tribalism, ethnic and religious violence, etc.) or active nihilism (neuroscientific and transformative, energetic powers and dispotifs toward overcoming present frameworks, scientific and philosophical, posthuman and transhuman) will win the day. We stand on the cusp of this great battle fearful of what it portends.

Our cultural measure is the various registers of art, literature, music, film, and other modes of creativity; along with the various sciences as they enable the convergence of NBIC technologies (nanotech, biotech, information and communications). Every intellectual and media pundit knows we’re in a great transitional period, part chaotic, part dynamic non-linear movement that could go either way: toward break through, or break down. No one has the answer to which. One has to decide which side of the world one is on: passive and regressive nihilism, or active and transformative nihilism. The so called post-nihilism is just that Post… like David’s posthumans, we just don’t no what’s beyond the – as my friend Scott Bakker terms it the ‘crash space’ of the Semantic Apocalypse. Here we are. That’s all.

Some like Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism thought we should just give things a nudge, accelerate things to the point of collapse or break through. Nick Land followed their trajectory and updated it with hyperstitional notions of fictions that create the thing they envision on the fly. Active revisions, programming reality. Most thinkers like to stay within the boundaries of the known and safe, rather than venture into the wilderness of unbound thought. Not being a philosopher but rather a speculative adventurer in thought I’ve never seen the difference between theory-fiction (as they term it now), and science  or speculative fiction. One needs to broaden the path across the borderlands of the known and unknown, skirt the edges of the darkness without being sucked into its labyrinth of chaos and thermospasm (Land).

My friend Scott Bakker points out a tendency in thinkers to stay within the fold of their peers, the consensus reality show of acceptable discourse and narratology. I have never felt restricted by any authority whatsoever. Many misconstrue my writings as affirmations of the thinkers I discuss when it’s just a need to understand. One need to be bound by what one reads and critiques, explicates or comments on. I read all sides of a particular thought… Left, Right or otherwise in politics, etc. To bind oneself to only one’s inner circle of thought is to blind one’s self as well.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the Middle Way refers to the insight into śūnyatā “emptiness” that transcends the extremes of existence and non-existence, the two truths doctrine.

​Sometimes I think my early martial arts training, along with investing many years in Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions I developed a sense of siding not with either thought (idealism) or being (materialism). And, most definitely not with reducing the one to the other, but in staying with the middle path between; yet, in contradistinction to the above almost Platonic system of transcendence, I have felt that this cosmos is itself the home we seem forever unable to accept or resolve ourselves to so that the middle path I speak of inverts the notion of transcending the extremes, and rather seeks to enter the strife in oscillation between the extremes like Ulysses striding between Charybdis and Scylla.

​In allegorical fashion to flow in-between Idealism and Materialism is to be like the light wave or particle in quantum physics: to adapt to the screen of existence and flow in-between the barriers that would seek to entrap me in thought or being, reduce me to one or the other side of the equation. Collapsing into the future between two states of being without being forced to cross-the-Rubicon as One or Two, but as the Middle accord in-between – an oscillating and vibrating string of possibility and potential that only effects disclosure in the retroactive participation of future intervention into the past. In some ways we are already in the future playing through the scenarios of our past lives in a game of draughts Heraclitus long ago spoke of in which (fragment 52) “Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child”.
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Nietzsche relates these concepts of eternal, universal law with Heraclitus’s ethics in the following passage, which he begins by quoting Max Heinze (with whose interpretation of Heraclitus Nietzsche disagreed in a previously-cited passage on page 73 of The Pre-Platonic Philosophers):

“What should justice punish if the eternal universal law and Logos determine all things?” This is pure error! There exists no clash. To the contrary, insofar as humanity is fiery, it is rational; insofar as he is watery, he is irrational. There is no necessity, qua human being, that he must acknowledge Logos. (PP 74)

​This passage describes Nietzsche’s conception of the lack of moral necessity in the writings of Heraclitus. According to Nietzsche, Heraclitus’s writings are purely descriptive accounts; their purpose is not to suggest how people ought to live, but rather to describe how people do live. By charging that Heraclitus rejected ethical imperatives, Nietzsche is making a statement about Heraclitus’s worldview: it is not simply that Heraclitus did not make claims about how things ought to be, he could not even make such a claim because there are no imperative “oughts” in his universe. Actions, decisions, and events can still be good and evil in this view, but there is no longer any impetus for the evil to be rejected and the good to be accepted.4
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In Bataille evil is energy and creativity, base matter is intelligent and active, a part of that ancient system of immanent archontes or entities that like our quantum flux collapse upon our material universe from the thermospasm (Land). Our skewed reasoning has sought false reasons for life in a supposed inorganic system of dead matter, when it is our framework of thought that is inaccurate and unable to decipher the potential (virtual; Deleuze) from the actual. We assume the actual as all when it is but the tip of a vast iceberg as in modern cosmology of Dark Energy and Dark Matter which account for 95% of the universe according to current mathematical models. Only 5% of baryonic matter, the phenomenal universe we see around us makes up the visible and known universe.

Even recently Einstein’s theory of gravitation waves become truth:

​We know so little about ourselves or the universe that all our learning is but the games of a child playing draughts. In the coming centuries if we live long enough as a species, if survive and collaborate to face the many issues of this century: climate change, global civil-war and unrest, poverty, viral catastrophe, etc. will we begin to realize just how ignorant we still are. The universe is an unfinished system that we are barely able to see much less know with out senses or instruments. For us to shape either scientific, religious, philosophical or socio-cultural systems of totality and closure that enclose us in frames of myth or secular reason without an openness to the unknown and the future is not only stupid but suicidal. Yet, that seems to be what is happening in many areas of religious, civil, and global existence. We bicker over Left or Right with closed minded aggression and irrational glee as if we all had some ultimate answer to the question of the meaning of life, when in fact we have no “theory of meaning” that can give us but the scratch on the screen of existence.
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Time to wake up people. The universe doesn’t give a shit who or what you are, there is no peek-a-boo demon or God beyond the dark veil of the Great Wall. No pecking order in the universal scheme of things. Only the impersonal and indifferent productivity of a universe dancing to its own inhuman music. Why am I an “inhumanist” rather than a humanist? Because we have been unable to accept the universe on its own terms without human meaning being stamped and imposed on it. Nihilism was a start, it brought many to ruin under the torsion of psychological collapse; others, it opened a door onto freedom – the negative or negation of negation. Seeing we are without ethical or socio-cultural support systems (Symbolic Order) external to our mode of being, that shape our human meanings as fate or freedom, as harmony or catastrophe, we have literally in our age been thrown back upon ourselves to defend ourselves against the past Law of religious control as well as the power of governments or dictators. All that is over with. Now we must forge new tools and theories of meaning out of the invisible and visible truth of what is and works… as one old Sanskrit saying has it:

Tat Tvam Asi,  “Thou art that“.

Yet, this is not the closure of thought on being, or being on thought – but, rather of the middle way of knowing and being aware of knowing one is that… the subtle knowledge that there is a difference within the difference in-between thought and being – a “gap or crack” within which a vibration occurs, an oscillation between the two, wave and particle, a quantum fluctuation: a restless strife and unending questioning and questing for the Real. 

taken from:

by Steven Craig  Hickman

– Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

​Stanislaw Lem had that unique ability to combine humor and science, philosophy and pessimism in the right proportions: a recipe for collapse and disaster. His books are the type you’d bring along on a long voyage to Orion. Along with Shakespeare and the King James Bible his are the works I return to over and over again to keep the madness at bay. Shakespeare because I never cease to be amazed by his command of language and that unique ability to portray characters more alive than most people I meet in life. The King James Bible to remind me why I became an atheist, along with the fact that it too is one of those treasures of linguistic power and rhetoric that teaches you the power of narrative and its ability to shape a culture. Lem because he conveys the sense of what a cosmic pessimist is: the creature who combines the fatalist and the comic stance against the idiocy of the world.

In the Memoirs Found in a Bathtub we discover that unique thing, the demise of our own civilization written from the future, a future that is both impossible and real. Knowledge is our environment. Information is our bread and butter. We exist in iPhone, iPad, the Internet of things, InfoSphere: bubbles of artificial madness and delight. We are connected in an onlife world 24/7 to a realm of information that never ceases. But what if in the blink of an eye all this vanished? What if the information flow stopped, utterly. What would happen? What would you do if you were disconnected from the world of information? In this short work he imagines the time of our time when the world of information ceased, when knowledge itself collapsed, when libraries dissolved before our very eyes:

It must have been a cruel blow indeed to the pride of Late Neogene man, who saw himself already reaching the stars. The papyralysis nightmare pervaded all walks of life. Panic hit the cities; people, deprived of their Identity, lost their reason; the supply of goods broke down; there were Incidents of violence; technology, research and development, schools— all crumbled Into nonexistence; power plants could not be repaired for lack of blueprints. The lights went out, and the ensuing darkness was illumined only by the glow of bonfires.1

T​he “papyralysis nightmare” to which he refers is the disappearance of books due to a biochemical attack in which paper was the victim. Of course Lem wrote this before the massive influx of the desktop computer age, when only the great behemoths of IBM and other mainframe systems were making there way into governments, military, and many academies. Other such works such as John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy will parade this pre-computer age of mainframes, but not quite as uniquely as will Lem. No Lem had that ability to make us laugh at the truth, to parody the things we cherish without knowing we cherish them. His studies are microparodies of our civilization. He could take the most innocuous subject and turn it into the key to civilizations downward course into oblivion.
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As he describes it the world of the sciences and academy, think-tanks and knowledge-bearers were victims of their own specialisms. Because of this after the collapse, the great amnesia of knowledge set in, the world became primitive again while only a few specialists held the key to our advance sciences, philosophies, cultural memory, etc. Within a generation they knew this would all be lost. What to do? Think about it: if our libraries, our computers, all our informational storage systems vanished from the earth what would we do? Primitive societies were built on mnemonic techniques of ritual enactments and mimetic narratives that conveyed the cultural memory from generation to generation. In fact this truly is what culture is: a memory system that acts as a communication device to convey information about the social-body through time. But how would an expert be able to describe his knowledge to people who could not understand the “meaning” of that knowledge?

Niklas Luhmann in his systems theory of communication would describe social systems as “systems of communication”:

​So Luhmann would develop the notion that in the medium of meaning, there is no “nature” and no “essence.” And there are no boundaries that cannot be crossed (for otherwise they would have no meaning as boundaries, as indications of something else). Instead, there are only horizons that move along with every movement. And meaning can only be defined self-referentially in recursive connections that refer to other things, and always to the unmarked state of the world, thus passing into instability. Identities materialize by the repetition of operations. At the same time, they are the structure by which repetition recognizes itself as repetition. In short, meaning is “autopoietically” constituted by systems that can only recognize their own boundaries in the process of constituting meaning by providing themselves with inward and outward referents, their own distinction of self- and other-reference. Each observing operation draws a distinction and is distinguished by performing the distinguishing.2
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This view of the unmarked state of the world combined with the notion that meaning is the fruit of repetition, operation, and distinction as a process of autopoietic or self-referential feedback inserting itself into the repletion by way of an operation or the marking of a distinction produces meaning. Luhmann also believed that each system has a distinctive identity that is constantly reproduced in its communication and depends on what is considered meaningful and what is not. If a system fails to maintain that identity, it ceases to exist as a system and dissolves back into the environment it emerged from.

So one can understand why Lem in his comic novel is investigating just this: What happens in a society (system of communication) when it’s very systems of memory and repetition falter, break down, and collapse. Does society return to some zero point of environment? Do we become savages again? Or does something else happen? And, if so, what? Lem will describe his hypothetical society as doing this:

​What he hints at is that it isn’t the world of “lost” information that was the problem, but rather what they were able to salvage of the remaining knowledge that became the issue. What he’s describing is the judgment of humans on what is worth saving of our heritage:

​This notion of a bare knowledge, of salvaging only the minimal information needed to support this remaining civilization through its darkest period, this alone makes you ask: What would we do? What do we consider the bare minimum needed to rebuild our civilization? Have our leaders, academics, philosophers, literary or sociological thinkers even begun to recon with the collapse of civilization in these terms? If as many presume our vast global civilization could over the next few hundred years be vulnerable to various global disaster scenarios, have they thought of what is the bare minimum of knowledge needed to rebuild our scocius if such a collapse of civilization were to happen? And, if so, what does that tell us about ourselves?
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I began reading Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological trilogy recently which he wrote due to this need for a knowledge arc as he termed it or a space-station. His sense of the use of the metaphor of the space-station as a total or spherical environment as the coupling of man and his environment was to bring the truth that the earth is this artificial space now. When one thinks of an astronaut in space enclosed or encapsulated by his artificial environment every aspect of his existence is dependent on this environment maintaining its integrity. So that if it is not repaired and maintained then the astronaut herself is at risk. It’s this sense of the earth as this total artificial environment that concerns Sloterdijk, the sense that we in our time treat the earth as something else than this total system that encloses us in its environment, and that we are totally dependent on its resources, mechanisms, systems for our survival; and, yet, we seem incapable of realizing just that, and instead allow this artificial system to break down and become corrupted, polluted, and decayed not realizing that as it lose integrity so will we. We have politicized the system that maintains our integrity at the expense of the system itself. We treat the earth as Other, as Gais or Goddess; as Resource – a dead substance to be manipulated, extracted, used as we see fit for our benefit; as Theme Park – a wilderness or wild zone where humans can enjoy something termed Nature as if it were a Zoo to be maintained… all these various approached to a world that we objectify as simply Other. Yet, it is not. We and it form a coupled pact. We are enclosed within it, a part of it, and it is our survival suit against the massive radiation and emptiness of space.

Lem’s novel describes a world that has forgotten this truth.

​What he portrays here is a society that was so enclosed in its own systems of self-referentiality, so closed off from the Outside of thought, the real… that it began to enter that paranoiac state of total information implosion when even our ability to trust the outer form of each other’s existence becomes itself the trivial pursuit of an anti-life repeating the anti-realist gestures of a game in which information is feeding only on its own emptiness: the pit of collective madness. Are we entering this stage? Have we forgotten that our artificial environments were once connected to a life-support system that existed independent of our systems of signification? That reality is not information in a bubble, that knowledge once connected to something beyond us? As we fold ourselves into oblivion we should remember Lem’s diagnosis:

​Are we feeding on our own social body like cannibals lost in a cosmic nightmare? Sociologists have always tried to take the chaos of the world and either discover or construct an order from its fragile idiocy. Lem like those strange travelers among the labyrinths of dusty libraries delivers to us a world that is not so much in search of order, but is rather seeking to unravel its impending sense of oblivion, of a mindless chaos whose madness is the horizon of our own minds. This reversal of the sociological paradigm brings with it a sense of new degradations: the power of chaos creates its own order through ceaseless and unmitigated repetitions of a strange autophagia… Freud would put a name to this beast from the abyss: the Death-drive…

taken from:

Some initial thoughts about Reza Negerastani’s complexity critique of the Disconnection Thesis made during a recent New Centre Seminar: ‘The Future of Intelligence in the Age of Intellectual Scarcity’:

​The critique hinges on the claim that unbounded posthumanism depends on an instability analysis of complex systems. To wit, that in a dynamic system characterized by a positive global Lyupanov Exponent (LE), exponential divergence from initial anthropological conditions (The human whether described naturally or functionally) is liable to produce ‘unbounded posthumans’ (Reza’s term, not mine) that do not conform to these conditions and which cannot be engaged with or interpreted by humans (‘practical asymmetry’). Following Robert Bishop (2011), Reza objects that this analysis departs from a complexity ‘folklore’ to the effect that exponential divergence in chaotic systems is necessitated by a global LE, whereas this is an idealization over infinite time and thus isn’t applicable to real physical systems. In real physical systems, he argues, uncertainties tend to decrease over time, thus rendering prediction tractable in principle.
​
This is a hard objection to meet in part because it doesn’t obviously resemble any argument I make in Posthuman Life.

I do claim that were disconnection to occur it would be weakly diachronically emergent because it would exhibit novel technological characteristics that couldn’t be inferred from earlier technologies (Roden 2014, 118). But I explicitly dissociate this claim from any inference to radical alienness or practical asymmetry between humans and posthumans:

“As Humphrey reminds us, diachronic emergence is a one time event. Once we observe a formerly diachronically emergent event we are in a position to predict tokens of the same type of emergent property from causal antecedents that have been observed to generate it in the past. Diachronic emergence has no implications for the uninterpretability or weirdness of posthumans since their nature is left open by the disconnection thesis.” (Roden 2014, 119)

And this is just what we should expect given that the disconnection relation is multiply satisfiable and need not involve radical practical asymmetry. It might, as Darian Meacham has argued, involve a much milder ‘phenomenological speciation’ whereby technically produced posthumans dissociate from us due to their perceived strangeness (Meacham 2014).
​
Admittedly, I do argue that modern technique is unpredictable over medium to long terms and invoke the self-catalysing nature of technical change, as well as long-distance relations between sites of technical change, as an explanation for this property. This is an informal and general analysis of the causal structure of technological networks. It isn’t a dynamic systems analysis in the mathematical sense but an ontological proposal based on examples from the history of technology. Indeed, I explicitly deny this here:
​
“Technique is self-augmenting, according to Ellul, where it “tends to act, not according to arithmetic, but according to a geometric progression” (Ellul 1964: 89). We should not take this mathematical representation too literally – for one thing, it seems unlikely that all the relevant variables by which we might measure the development of a technical system will grow indefinitely. Particular technologies – like particular biological populations or sales of commodities – tend to be characterized by logistic growth functions or “S-curves” whose middle parts approximate to the endlessly accelerating growth that Ellul describes but whose later parts flatten out as the process hits resource limits (Kurzweil 2005: 44). For example, Theodore Modis notes that US oil production followed an accelerating growth pattern between 1859 and 1951 only to decelerate in the 1960s and 1970s. The same considerations will probably apply to Moore’s Law – which states that the number of silicon transistors in microprocessors approximately doubles every two years – since physical limits on the size of microcircuitry will tell eventually (Modis 2012: 316–17).”

I suspect that one reason why this critique misses is revealed by the phrase ‘unbounded posthuman’. I speak, of course, of anthropologically unbounded posthumanism (AUP). But this is an epistemological claim about the inefficacy of transcendental ‘filters’ based on ideas of rational or phenomenological subjectivity when thinking about the long-term future. AUP doesn’t necessitate anything. It implies that the hermeneutic horizon for thinking about a technologically uncertain future is radically open; not that this must be characterized by a physical system systematically marked by radical orbital divergence between initial conditions. The divergence – in this sense – is not characterized physically at all.

None of this is to say that Reza’s critique isn’t a helpful contribution to the debate about posthumanism – it is, and I hope to engage with it more as I work through his book.

​References:

taken from:

by Himanshu Damle

In the 1930s the scientist Sir James Jeans wrote:

​The idea of matter being crystallized light echoes what H. P. Blavatsky wrote half a century earlier in The Secret Doctrine, where she speaks of “that infinite Ocean of Light, whose one pole is pure Spirit lost in the absoluteness of Non-Being, and the other, the matter in which it condenses, crystallizing into a more and more gross type as it descends into manifestation” (The Secret Doctrine). Material particles, she said, were infinitely divisible centers of force, and matter could therefore exist in infinitely varying degrees of density. Our physical senses have been evolved to perceive only one particular plane of matter, which is interpenetrated by countless other worlds or planes invisible to us because composed of ranges of energy-substance both finer and grosser than our own.
​
Modern science has analyzed matter down to the point where it vanishes into wisps of energy. Energy is said to be a measure of motion or activity. But motion of what? It is a truism that there can be no motion without something that moves. Scientists in the last century believed that wave-motion took place in a universal medium called the ether. This hypothesis was abandoned because the ether proved to be chemically and physically undetectable, and science was left with the unlikely idea that waves are transmitted through “empty space.”

Modern physicists believe that underlying the material world there is a quantum field, also called the quantum void or vacuum. The quantum field is said to be “a continuous medium which is present everywhere in space” (The Tao of Physics) and matter is said to be constituted by regions of space in which the field is extremely intense. Scientists assert that the quantum field is non-material, but deny that it is mere nothingness. Paul Davies states that the quantum void is not inert and featureless but throbbing with energy and vitality, a seething ferment of “Virtual” particles and “ghost” particles. (Superforce) It therefore seems to be actually a form of ether, which is non-material only in the sense that it is not composed of physical matter. Rather than material particles being “knots of nothingness,” as Davies calls them, they may therefore be seen as vibrations in an etheric medium composed of a subtler, superphysical grade of substance. The same reasoning applies to all the other “non-material” fields and forces postulated by science.

Everything is relative. Physical matter is condensed energy, but what for us is energy would be matter for beings on a higher plane than ours, as is suggested by the fact that energy does not exist in a continuous flow but is composed of discrete units or quanta. Likewise, the energy on the next plane would be matter to an even higher plane. The loftiest form of energy in any particular hierarchy of worlds is what we call spirit or consciousness. As H. P. Blavatsky put it: “Spirit is matter on the seventh plane; matter is Spirit – on the lowest point of its cyclic activity; and both — are MAYA.” (The Secret Doctrine). To say that spirit and matter are “maya” or illusion does not mean that they do not exist, but that we do not understand them as they really are. Any particular plane of energy-substance can be understood only with reference to superior, causal planes. Everything — from atom to human, from star to universe — is the expression of something higher.

Throughout the ages, sages and seers have suggested that hidden within the phenomenal world in which we live there are inner worlds of reality — astral, mental, and spiritual — and that the physical world is but a pale shadow of the spiritual world. These inner worlds cannot be investigated with physical instruments, but only by delving into the depths of our own minds and consciousness, and this requires many lives of self-purification and self-conquest. Scientists using only materialistic methods are in no position to deny point-blank the possibility of such higher planes.

Most scientists, in fact, now believe that some 90% of the matter in the universe exists in a state unknown to them; it is called “dark matter” because it is physically unobservable, and its existence is known of only by its gravitational effects. Such matter is suggestive of the higher subplanes and planes postulated by theosophy, which are composed of matter of increasingly slower rates of vibration and are therefore beyond our range of perception. Given scientists’ confessed ignorance of most of the matter in the universe and their inability to explain satisfactorily the evolution of life and consciousness and the “laws of nature” along materialistic lines, any suggestion that they are on the verge of discovering the innermost secrets of nature or of reducing the mystery of existence to a single equation is premature to say the least!

In theosophical philosophy, the physical universe is regarded as no more than a cross section through infinitude. Universal nature is composed of worlds within worlds within worlds, filled full of conscious, living beings at infinitely varying stages of their evolutionary awakenment. Our finite minds cannot embrace the infinite. As G. de Purucker says in his Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, we can do no more than to try and form a simple conception of the Boundless All: never-ending life and consciousness in unceasing motion everywhere. The ancients, he says, were never so foolish as to try to fathom infinitude. They recognized the reality of being and let it go at that, knowing that an ever-expanding consciousness and an ever-growing understanding of existence is all that we can ever attain to during our eternal evolutionary journey through the fields of infinitude.

taken from:

​Eastern mysticism approaches the manifestation of life in the cosmos and all that compose it from a position diametrically opposed to the view that prevailed until recently among the majority of Western scientists, philosophers, and religionists. Orientals see the universe as a whole, as an organism. For them all things are interconnected, links in a chain of beings permeated by consciousness which threads them together. This consciousness is the one life-force, originator of all the phenomena we know under the heading of nature, and it dwells within its emanations, urging them as a powerful inner drive to grow and evolve into ever more refined expressions of divinity. The One manifests, not only in all its emanations, but also through those emanations as channels: it is within them and yet remains transcendent as well.
​
The emphasis is on the Real as subject whereas in the West it is seen as object. If consciousness is the noumenal or subjective aspect of life in contrast to the phenomenal or objective — everything seen as separate objects — then only this consciousness can be experienced, and no amount of analysis can reveal the soul of Reality. To illustrate: for the ancient Egyptians, their numerous “gods” were aspects of the primal energy of the Divine Mind (Thoth) which, before the creation of our universe, rested, a potential in a subjective state within the “waters of Space.” It was through these gods that the qualities of divinity manifested.

A question still being debated runs: “How does the One become the many?” meaning: if there is a “God,” how do the universe and the many entities composing it come into being? This question does not arise among those who perceive the One to dwell in the many, and the many to live in the One from whom life and sustenance derive. Despite our Western separation of Creator and creation, and the corresponding distancing of “God” from human beings, Western mystics have held similar views to those of the East, e.g.: Meister Eckhart, the Dominican theologian and preacher, who was accused of blasphemy for daring to say that he had once experienced nearness to the “Godhead.” His friends and followers were living testimony to the charisma (using the word in its original connotation of spiritual magnetism) of those who live the life of love for fellow beings men like Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, the “admirable Ruysbroeck,” who expressed views similar to those of Eastern exponents of the spiritual way or path.

In old China, the universe was described as appearing first as q’i (chee), an emanation of Light, not the physical light that we know, but its divine essence sometimes called Tien, Heaven, in contrast to Earth. The q’i energy polarized as Yang and Yin, positive and negative electromagnetism. From the action and interaction of these two sprang the “10,000 things”: the universe, our world, the myriads of beings and things as we perceive them to be. In other words, the ancient Chinese viewed our universe as one of process, the One energy, q’i, proliferating into the many.

In their paintings Chinese artists depict man as a small but necessary element in gigantic natural scenes. And since we are parts of the cosmos, we are embodiments of all its potentials and our relationship depends upon how we focus ourselves: (1) harmoniously, i.e., in accord with nature; or (2) disharmoniously, interfering with the course of nature. We therefore affect the rest: our environment, all other lives, and bear full responsibility for the outcome of our thoughts and acts, our motivations, our impacts. Their art students were taught to identify with what they were painting, because there is life in every thing, and it is this life with which they must identify, with boulders and rocks no less than with birds flying overhead. Matter, energy, space, are all manifestations of q’i and we, as parts thereof, are intimately connected with all the universe.

In India, the oneness of life was seen through the prism of successive manifestations of Brahman, a neuter or impersonal term in Sanskrit for divinity, the equivalent of what Eckhart called the Godhead. Brahman is the source of the creative power, Brahma, Eckhart’s Creator; and also the origin of the sustaining and supporting energy or Vishnu, and of the destructive/regenerative force or Siva. As these three operate through the cosmos, the “world” as we know it, so do they also through ourselves on a smaller scale according to our capacity. Matter is perceived to be condensed energy, Chit or consciousness itself. To quote from the Mundaka Upanishad:

​In another Hindu scripture, it is stated that when Brahma awakened from his period of rest between manifestations, he desired to contemplate himself as he is. By gazing into the awakening matter particles as into a mirror, he stirred them to exhibit their latent divine qualities. Since this process involves a continuous unfoldment from the center within, an ever-becoming, there can never be an end to the creativity — universal “days” comprising trillions of our human years, followed by a like number of resting “nights.”
​
We feel within ourselves the same driving urge to grow that runs through the entire, widespread universe, to express more and more of what is locked up in the formless or subjective realm of Be-ness, awaiting the magic moment to come awake in our phase of life.

Tibetan metaphysics embraces all of this in discussing Sunyata, which can be viewed as Emptiness if we use only our outer senses, or as Fullness if we inwardly perceive it to be full of energies of limitless ranges of wave-lengths/frequencies. This latter aspect of Space is the great mother of all, ever fecund, from whose “heart” emerge endless varieties of beings, endless forces, ever-changing variations — like the pulsing energies the new physicists perceive nuclear subparticles to be.

In the Preface to his Tao of physics Fritjof Capra tells how one summer afternoon he had a transforming experience by the seashore as he watched the waves rolling in and felt the rhythm of his own breathing. He saw dancing motes revealed in a beam of sunlight; particles of energy vibrating as molecules and atoms; cascades of energy pouring down upon us from outer space. All of this coming and going, appearing and disappearing, he equated with the Indian concept of the dance of Siva . . . he felt its rhythm, “heard” its sound, and knew himself to be a part of it. Through this highly personal, indeed mystical, experience Capra became aware of his “whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance.”

This is the gist of the old Chinese approach to physics: students were taught gravitation by observing the petals of a flower as they fall gracefully to the ground. As Gary Zukav expresses it in his Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics:

​That is: the dance of Siva is the dance of attraction and repulsion between charged particles of the electromagnetic force. This is a kind of “transcendental” physics, going beyond the “world of opposites” and approaching a mystical view of the larger Reality that is to our perceptions an invisible foundation of what we call “physical reality.” It is so far beyond the capacity or vocabulary of the mechanically rational part of our mind to define, that the profound Hindu scripture Isa Upanishad prefers to suggest the thought by a paradox:

Indeed, there is a growing recognition mostly by younger physicists that consciousness is more than another word for awareness, more than a by-product of cellular activity (or of atomic or subatomic vibrations). For instance, Jack Sarfatti, a quantum physicist, says that signals pulsating through space provide instant communication between all parts of the cosmos. “These signals can be likened to pulses of nerve cells of a great cosmic brain that permeates all parts of space (Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics).” Michael Talbot quotes Sir James Jeans’ remark, “the universe is more like a giant thought than a giant machine,” commenting that the “substance of the great thought is consciousness” which pervades all space. Or as Schrödinger would have it:

Other phenomena reported as occurring in the cosmos at great distances from each other, yet simultaneously, appear to be connected in some way so far unexplained, but to which the term consciousness has been applied.

In short, the mystic deals with direct experience; the intuitive scientist is open-minded, and indeed the great discoveries such as Einstein’s were made by amateurs in their field untrammeled by prior definitions and the limitations inherited from past speculations. This freedom enabled them to strike out on new paths that they cleared and paved. The rationalist tries to grapple with the problems of a living universe using only analysis and whatever the computer functions of the mind can put together.
​
The theosophic perspective upon universal phenomena is based on the concept of the ensoulment of the cosmos. That is: from the smallest subparticle we know anything about to the largest star-system that has been observed, each and all possess at their core vitality, energy, an active something propelling towards growth, evolution of faculties from within.

The only “permanent” in the whole universe is motion: unceasing movement, and the ideal perception is a blend of the mystical with the scientific, the intuitive with the rational.

taken from: 

by Steven Craig Hickman

– Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation

​Nick Land like his compeers – Nietzsche, Bataille, and Cioran has that quality of aphoristic power that keeps one returning here and there to his dark disquisitions and divigations into the night worlds between desire and death. I’ve asked myself many times why certain writers force me to reread them over and over and over again; and, as such, why with each new reading I discover bits and pieces of something I’d missed, or not been aware of within the last set of notations. For, yes, these are writers for whom one takes notes, jots down certain aphoristic sentences that suddenly awaken one’s own machine, one’s own mind, exciting it and generating other thoughts.  There seems to be under the darkening layers or scales of his thought an energetics, a theory of composition that seeks its habitation at the crossroads of eroticism, death, and the infinite inroads of desire. Life is a child of the sun, and its curse: to wander in a maze without outlet bound to an infernal machine of desire that seeks only ever more powerful ways of dodging the fatal Minotaur of inexistence.

As a pariah and outlaw philosopher Land in his one book and several essays pushed the limits of mind like some Rimbaud of the last thought. No need to go over the history of that again. Too many superficial readings of his physical and mental breakthroughs and breakdowns into vastation or emptiness are already misunderstood. And, that he has returned not as his former self, but as a gnomic agent proclaiming his cultural provocations to a certain reactionary mindset is only another masked distancing from his earlier wildness.

As he will remind us Bataille’s “thirst for annihilation is the same as the sun” (33).1 Yet, it is not a “desire man directs toward the sun, but the solar trajectory itself, the sun as the unconscious subject of terrestrial history” (33). This notion that the history of the earth is guided by a secret history of the sun, its dark proclivities and mythologies guiding the pathology of human civilization and the inhuman forms that shadow us. Is this not the truth we seem to fear? We seem to hide from the white death of its blinding gold mask, the eye of death that would turn us to ash if we were not protected by the ions swirling in the ocean of our atmosphere. That the ancients who sacrificed to the sun, who with obsidian or bone knives cut the living hearts of its victims from their chests and held them to the sun as to the great glory and splendor of heavenly sovereignty. That blood, and only blood; the violence of death could keep this great power churning in the heavens, this furnace of life, this engine of all creation: was this not at the heart of all ancient religion? Human life consumed in the furnace of the sun? Is not all economics an economy of the Sun? As Land will tell us:

​The notion that all organic life on earth is part of a vast consumption machine, a living mouth. Is this not the truth of it? And, what are we consuming? Is it not the excess of the living Sun itself? Are we not fed by the sun and its excessive life? Sometimes I think of those nineteenth century mythologizers who sought to understand ancient religious practices under the auspices of solar mythologies; or, as Land will have it, there “is no difference between desire and the sun: sexuality is not psychological but cosmo-illogical” (37). Land will obliterate the Physicalism of science or philosophical thought through the light of the sun, and out of its ashes – like some new born phoenix, “libidinal materialism” will arise: a theory of unconditional (non-teleological) desire, which as he satirically put it “a scorch-mark from the expository diagnosis of the physicalistic prejudice” (38).

Physicalism was bound to theology, to the One. It was a dualism, having formulated matter as dead and passive and mind as other than this stuff. It was already caught in its on fly-trap, bound to false assumptions before it even began explaining the universe of its reasoning madness. After a thorough investigation of thermodynamics, entropy, negentropy and Boltzmann’s mathematics and findings he will recenter his understanding of “libidinal matter” saying,

​In his theory Land is moving toward a non-intentional philosophy, one that is “not a transformation of intentional theories of desire, of desire as understood as lack, as transcendence, as dialectic” (42). So against Hegel, Marx and their progeny Land offers another libidinal materialism. One must turn to thermodynamics and ‘energy’ for an alternative view of materialism. Two-thousand years of metaphysical blundering is overthrown and new tropes rearrange our relations to science and philosophy: Chance, Tendency, Energy, and Information. He will offer a new cosmographic cosmos:

​The universe is an open, rather than closed system: “no closed systems, no stable codes, no recuperable origins. There is only the thermospasmic shock wave, tendential energy flux, degradation of energy,. A receipt of information – of intensity – carried downstream” (43). Yet, against Boltzmann who built his notions of thermodynamics within an ontology, libidinal materialism sits in chaos outside any thought of Being. What Land offers is a processual theory based on composition, one in which Being is an effect of chaos composition rather than some static substance: the “effect of being is derivative from process…” (44).

Out of Nietzsche he will demarcate a general libidinal energetics: 1) a questioning of the mathematical underpinnings of science as same, equal, or identical – as essentializing; 2) the figure of eternal recurrence as libidinal engine producing energetics; and, 3) a general theory of hierarchies, of order as rank-order (composition). Idealism and Physicalism collapse, transcendental philosophy from Kant till now is decapitated; finished; and, finally, 4) a diagnosis of nihilism, of the hyperbolic of desire (the terminal end-point of humanity in null or God). (44-45).

Land will admit Freud into the new philosophical world of libidinal materialism: he, too, is an energeticist: “he does not conceive of desire as lack, representation, or intention, but as dissipative energetic flow, inhibited by the damming and channeling apparatus of the secondary process. Yet, Freud – even though recognizing the truth of the drives will bolster up the old metaphysics of ego and the reality principle against their force, going against the very truth of the pressure of the drives as modulation of self not as intentional agent but as temporary control point for the drives in their fluxuations and endless compositions. Land will discover in Freud another Solar Mythologist, one found within his Beyond the Pleasure Principle where he discovers life as a mazing in complex escape from death or null zero, an endless wandering in the labyrinth of time against death: “a maze wanderer” (47). Then Land asks: “What is the source of the ‘decisive external influences’ that propel the mazings of life, if not the sun?”

Life is not an accident as some suggest, but is rather the curse of the sun. Land is our postmodern Lucretius teaching us that death is nothing to be feared, death is merely the form life takes in its infinite mazings and compositions under the gaze of the Apollonian eye of the Sun. “Confronting the absolute posed by our inevitable extinction, we feel brave, proud of ourselves, we permit ourselves a little indulgence, swooning in the delectations of morbidity. … Across the aeons our mass hydro-carbon enjoys a veritable harem of souls.” Desire continues its quest for the sun. Or, as that Shaman of the Evening Lands says it:

​Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.
– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

​The secret of the labyrinth is in its “scalings” – like dark matter and dark energy which structurate and energize the visible matter we see in the universe the drives within that chaotic sea produce the veritable universe of light and suns and galaxies around us. Composing and decomposing and recomposing matter in an infinite play without purpose or teleological goal.  There is no whole, no totality, there is nothing but the labyrinth and process, comings and goings and returnings, endlessly all the way up and all the way down.

Land will remind us that for Bataille the natural and cultural worlds that envelope the earth or nothing more than the evolution of death. Why? Because in “death life becomes an echo of the sun, realizing its inevitable destiny, which is pure loss” (56). He will add that such a materialist discourse is free of that intentional subject that mars all idealist discourse, and that it offers a non-metaphysical and non-intentional understanding of the of the economy as pure poetry rather than philosophical plunderings of either Descartes dualism or Marx’s dialectical modes of thought. Instead, as Bataille will affirm, poetry is a “holocaust of words” (56).

In fact bourgeois culture is not an expression of capitalism, it is its antithesis: capitalism is anti-culture (56). In the older feudalism of the aristocracy and Catholicism the notion of “expenditure” and pure loss were central, in the new modern economies cannot accept the need for expenditure or even admit that overproduction is an issue or problem. Instead of waste and excess, sacrifice and pot-latch festivals of total expenditure we get endless cycles of overproduction, deflation, and depression.

One remembers those anthropologists who studied the notion of potlatch:

“In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his ‘power’ to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his ‘power’ was diminished”.2

​As Earnest Becker in his Escape from Evil will remind us “primitive man created an economic surplus beyond basic human need so that he would have something to give to the gods; the giving of surplus was an offering to the gods who controlled the entire economy of nature in the first place”3, so that he needed to give to keep the power flowing, the cosmological circuit of power from sun to earth and back again moving, allowing the obligation and expiation to channel its forces of accumulated riches rather than hording them. In the potlatch when the entire goods of a community and a chieftain were destroyed and annihilated it was to open up the power of the gods and sun to the community as a whole: “the eternal flux of power in the broad stream of life was generated by the greatest possible expenditure; man wanted that stream to flow as bountifully as possible” (30). 

In our time War is the potlatch feast of nations, the way in which nations sacrifice to the gods of life and expend their generosity and glory to the ancient sun and death. As Paul Virilio in Pure War speaking of the atrocities of Pol Pot will tells us: “If they had let Pol Pot act as he saw fit, there would have been no one left. Cambodia is the scale-model of the suicide State which no longer gathers populations in order to exploit territory, but which infinitely dissolves it” and allows the festival of a endless annihilation of expenditure.4

In our time philanthropy and other so to speak redistributions of wealth back to the community have become parodies and examples of the forgotten truth of those ancient potlatches. Even in the latest democratic pitch to redistribute the wealth to those in need is a parody. We’ve lost the truth of giving, of expenditure, or the pure waste of goods to the gods and sun. We live now in that labyrinth without outlet where no expenditure and no waste exist, only the endless cycles of repetition and economic depression. The riches of the world continue to be accumulated in the hands of a few who will never all those to return to the community or the sun. Yet, as the debt and guilt of this accumulate the earth and sun will have their day, too.

As Land will tell us the “mobility peculiar to the labyrinth – real cosmic motion or liquidation – is not confined by the scales, instead it finds a shaft of facilitation passing from one to another, a “slippage”, the full consequence of which is an illimitable dispersion across the strata: communication through death” (203). Harold Bloom in a book on The Labyrinth will tell us that the ancient identity of rhetoric, psychology, and cosmology is preserved in the figuration of imaginative literature “as a breathing, moving labyrinth”.5 James Joyce once said that “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake”, and Finnegan’s Wake is a figural labyrinth within which both secular and sacred mazings repeat themselves in moving kaleidoscope of pun in which the reader is condemned to wander between sea and sea. But then again maybe the truth is that the living labyrinth doesn’t want you to escape, that in truth it lulls you into wandering its dark corridors forever in hopes that you will never discover the exit; for to find the exit is to discover neither escape nor freedom, but the final termination: death. 

Land will leave us one last sublime darkening, a philosophical knowing (kairos-happening) or gnosis (not Gnosticism but a knowing that is at once a corruption and a degradation of all we have been or will be):

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

​“Time is not governed by physical laws because it is the laws itself that are governed by mad Time.”.– Quentin Meillassoux

“The thermospasm is reality as undiluted chaos. It is where we all came from.” – Nick Land

“Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound its own circle, stretching itself out into a straight line.” – Gilles Deleuze

“The Real – the over-abundant obscene-morbid vitality of the primordial…” – Slavoj Zizek
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“The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.” – H.P. Lovecraft

​In this post I want to bring together the notions of time in Gilles Deleuze, Nick Land, and Quentin Meillassoux: Aion, Thermospasm, and Hyper-Chaos. Even Slavoj Zizek whose horror of the Real and disgust of the Flesh involve him in a strange and ironic dialectical battle against this hyper-chaotic time world shows his acknowledgement of its effects even as he tries to transcend its dark secrets. I’ll see these through the lens of the holographic principle as suggested in a previous post.
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Now if we go back to my previous post The Holographic Universe: Black Holes, Information, and the Mathematics where the notion of the  ‘holographic principle,’ the idea that a universe with gravity can be described by a quantum field theory in fewer dimensions, has been used for years as a mathematical tool in strange curved spaces. New results suggest that the holographic principle also holds in flat spaces. Our own universe could in fact be two dimensional and only appear three dimensional — just like a hologram. The notion that our visible universe is a projection from a 2 dimensional surface or flat horizon of information in mathematical terms then we might apply this to the Aion/Chronos forms of time with Land’s Thermospasm and Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos time to give a expanded picture of what is going on.

Deleuze’s Aion, Land’s Thermospasm, and Meillassoux’s Hyper-chaos are tropes (descriptions) referencing this 2 dimensional holographic principle of which our present time – Chronos, etc. are the 3 dimensional projection of the holographic time-dimension. Against any confusion with the Platonic notion of something outside the universe (realm of Ideas, etc.) the sciences seem to be in agreement with these forms of philosophical speculation in the sense that we’re entangled (quantum physics) in layers of reality rather than exposed to some inside/outside incorporation of a theological divine world of Ideas. This sense of intra-dimensional movement, process, becoming rather than horizons of presence/absence, inside/outside tropes is becoming more and more prevalent in mathematical physics and in philosophy of materialism. Ultimately philosophy will give way to science in this endeavor in my opinion. Philosophy has become ill-suited to the task of description in its linguistic phase, yet will probably remain the best tool for a heuristic device in conveying information for educational and social mentation available for non-mathematicians. There are even debates among quantum physicists as to whether mathematical description will ever be able to describe facets of this extreme terrain as well (i.e., the principle of uncertainty or indetermination, etc.).

Yet, this essay is about the philosophical not scientific quest to describe this strange noumenal time-system underlying our phenomenal universe. We’re dealing with temporal descriptions, linguistic descriptions, that Meillassoux hopes to prove through mathematical description at some future point. Ultimately this is about temporality, time, complexity and information. It’s a universe in which Being is an effect of this 2 dimensional projection from the thermospasm, hyper-chaos, or Aeon time-dimensions. Or to put it in other terms following Land, Meillassoux and Deleuze: It’s about the composition of the universe out of thermospasm, Aeon, or hyper-chaos; a libidinal energetics that composes being as processual forms of chaotic and immanent effects that we apprehend as the universe around us. For Land it the mazings of the 3 dimensional Chronos time or the present eventually leads back by circuitous route to the 2 dimensional mad time of the pre-ontological surface. Eternal recurrence is this movement between the 2 dimensional hyper-chaos into the 3 dimensional present (Chronos) of our universe and back again. A cyclic or spiraling image of cosmology as process. (One could bring in Whitehead and many others…)

Zizek will acknowledge it as Deleuze’s realm of the Virtual:

​So, to conclude, if we return from the second to the first part of Parmenides, i.e., to the status of Ideas, then the result should be that Ideas do not exist, do not have ontological reality of their own: they persist as purely virtual points of reference. That is to say, the only appropriate conclusion is that eternal Ideas are Ones and Others which do not participate in (spatio-temporal) Being (which is the only actual being there is): their status is purely virtual. This virtual status was made clear by Deleuze, one of the great anti-Platonists. Deleuze’s notion of the Virtual is to be opposed to the all-pervasive topic of virtual reality: what matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual (which, in Lacanian terms, is the Real). Virtual Reality in itself is a rather miserable idea: that of imitating reality, of reproducing experience in an artificial medium. The reality of the Virtual, on the other hand, stands for the reality of the Virtual as such, for its real effects and consequences. ( Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Kindle Locations 1738-1746). Norton. Kindle Edition.)

This sense of the virtual ‘as such’ of the Aion time-dimension out of which forms (Ideas) are composed into being as effects rather than causes (Lacan’s Real). It’s as if Zizek sees it through a glass darkly but just want quite give up his dialectical notions, his need for transcendence rather than immanence, his Subject as Substance, etc.. Zizek is a philosopher of ‘fixity’ instead of pure process, who moves between substance and subject rather than following the trail back into the Real. His is a philosophy of disgust, a wavering among the realms of the for itself. He casts a wary eye upon the likes of Land, Meillassoux, and Deleuze for their anti-metaphysical materialisms. So we will not follow Zizek into the labyrinths of transcendental dialectic but instead enter the mazings of non-dialectical materialism in Land, Meillassoux and Deleuze as they discover the hyper-chaotic realms of mad time…

​Nick Land will point out the basic premise of ‘libidinal materialism’ as being outside the probabilistic universe of thermodynamics because of the simple fact that “libidinal energy is chaotic, and pre-ontological” (p. 43).1 Against the laws of thermodynamics which is situated in an ontology of energy, of particles (Boltzmann), of space/time, and then interprets distributions and entropy levels as attributes of energy, libidinal materialism accepts only chaos and composition (p. 43). I’ll refer the reader to a previous post on Land’s materialism: The Curse of the Sun: Libidinal Materialism as the Composition of the Universe for a more in depth study. In such a world Being is an effect of chaos rather than something that exists in-itself.
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Libidinal materialism he calls it: thematically ‘psychoanalytic’, methodologically “genealogical, diagnostic, and enthusiastic for the accentuation of intensity that will carry it through insurrection into anegoic delirium. Stylistically it is aggressive, only a little sub hyperbolic, and—above all—massively irresponsible…” (TA: 14). A voyager in dissolution, a decadent hyperpilot of a psychedelic finitude, a scientist of strange days he tells us that no “one could ever ‘be’ a libidinal materialist. This is a ‘doctrine’ that can only be suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought. It is a hyperlepsy of the central nervous-system, ruining the body’s adaptive regimes, and consuming its reserves in rhythmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating” (TA: 14).

Nick Land will term hyper-chaos differently, saying: “The thermospasm is reality as undiluted chaos. It is where we all came from. The death-drive is the longing to return there, just as salmon would return upstream to perish at the origin. Thermospasm is howl, annihilating intensity, a peak of improbability.” (p. 43) Meillossoux too will affirm such an anti-metaphysical gesture, stating that all metaphysics seeks to establish reasons, to fix substance and Idea, to bind being and becoming to laws and necessities. While both libidinal materialism and speculative materialism situate themselves outside of all metaphysics in a time “that is so completely liberated from metaphysical necessity that nothing constrains it: neither becoming, nor substratum” (Meillassoux, KL 341). As he’ll remind us hyper-chaotic time “is able to create and destroy even becoming, producing without reason fixity or movement, repetition or creation” (KL 342).

What I want to do now is expand on Quentin Meillassoux’s  Time without Becoming. His speculative materialism set out to understand how something or someone could think reality independent of a subject, and do this without returning to any pre-critical or naïve realism. He starts out telling us:

The entire effort of modern philosophy was to do without the concept of truth, or, according to me, and more interestingly, to fundamentally redefine this concept, replacing truth as adequation with truth considered as legality (Kant), or intersubjectivity (Husserl), or interpretation (hermeneutics). But what I try to show in After Finitude is that there is in ancestrality a strange resistance to every anti-adequation model. Yet this resistance doesn’t directly concern the truth of scientific theories, but rather their meaning.1

​We know that modern quantum mechanics with its principle of uncertainty or indetermination is situated within this ‘adequation’ model of testability based on probabilistic or statistical mathematics. Notions of adequation or correspondence theories of truth go back to Thomas Aquinas: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus (“Truth is the adequation of things and intellect”), a statement which Aquinas attributed to the ninth century neoplatonist Isaac Israeli. Aquinas also restated the theory as: “A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality”.
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Meillassoux will refine his argument asking “what is nature without man, and how can we think the time in which nature has produced the subject, or Dasein?” (KL 154) This is to ask the simple question: How can we think of a time before man, or even ask what the conditions must have been to bring such a subject as we are into being? This is the Kantian trick of correlationism:

​So that his whole goal in his early work After Finitude was an attempt to refute every form of correlationism – which is to say that he tries to demonstrate that thinking, under very special conditions, can access reality as it is in itself, independently of any act of subjectivity. (KL 80) This is where his problem of ancestrality is brought into play, and will be resolved by his interjection of a new concept he terms the principle of factiality (“ principe de factualité” en français). (KL 87)
So he’ll start with a simple question: what are the conditions of possibility of ancestral statements? (KL 95) Which is defined as a statement about a time preceding the subject, or consciousness, a time within which subjectivity or being-in-the-world itself emerged, and which perhaps will disappear along with humanity and terrestrial life. If we are bound by the Kantian correlational circle of thinking external reality or even the past as being bound to the notion of “for us”, then if time is a correlate of the subject, then nothing can actually precede the subject – as individual or more radically as human species – inside time. Which is an absurdity, but how to prove this? How to prove that one can develop scientific description, mathematical or otherwise that will provide statements about temporal events that happened before humans even existed: a world without us?
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To do this he states that we will need to redefine correspondence, to find a very different concept of adequation, if we are serious about rejecting correlationism in all its power. Because what we will discover outside the correlation is very different from the naïve concepts of things, properties and relations. It is a reality very different from given reality. (KL 192)

Kant and those that followed him would be bound to a dualism of subject and phenomena (rejecting that noumenal reality could even be observed or correlated). Ultimately what Kant tried to do was overcome the dogmatic absolutism of the pre-critical philosophers: Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes rationalist arguments for the knowledge of an absolute. As Meillassoux will state correlationism claims “that we are locked up in our representations – conscious, linguistic, historical ones – without any sure means of access to an eternal reality independent of our specific point of view.” (KL 207)

For the dogmatic rationalists there were two paths: first, the notion of an absolute reality that exists outside the subject thinking (naïve realism); and, second, that there is not independent reality but that what we observe is only an Idea in the mind of the subject, and this, and this alone is real (Idealism). Meillassoux reports that both of these will need to be refuted if speculative materialism is to succeed.

Against any form of absolute that would provide either an absolute ground or necessity for the laws of reality, or for the absolute laws of mind (Ideas) he intervenes with ‘facticity’:

​In other words we are in an infinite regress if we try to discover in stable ground or absolute cause or law. There is none. Contrafactually he will argue that once we take away the ground or absolute we enter the terrain of contingency, a realm of unreason that “becomes the attribute of an absolute time capable of destroying or creating any determinate entity without any reason for its creation or destruction” (KL 262). Because of this he’ll argue that everything can be conceived of as contingent, depending on human tropism, everything except contingency itself. Contingency, and only contingency, is absolutely necessary: facticity, and only facticity, is not factual, but eternal. Facticity is not a fact, it is not one more fact in the world. And this is based upon a precise argument: I can’t be skeptical towards the operator for every skepticism. (KL 272-275)

This will bring him to the second principle of factiality. Factiality is not facticity, but the necessity of facticity, the essence of facticity. And the principle which enounces the factiality, he’ll simply call “the principle of factiality”. Finally, he calls “spéculation factuale”, “factial speculation”, the speculation grounded on the principle of factiality. Through the principle of factiality, he’ll maintain that he can attain a speculative materialism which clearly refutes correlationism. He can think an X independent of any thinking: and he knows this, thanks to the correlationist himself and his fight against the absolute. The principle of factiality unveils the ontological truth hidden beneath the radical skepticism of modern philosophy, to be is not to be a correlate, but to be a fact, to be is to be factual, and this is not a fact. (KL 276-282)

This is where it begins to get interesting. He’ll ask: What is facticity once it is considered an absolute rather than as a limit? His answer: time, but a very special kind of time, one he’ll term “hyper-chaos”. This is where he seems to touch base with Nick Land. Land speaks of chaos that is pre-ontological, not the chaos of thermodynamics and Being but a realm outside that cannot be distinguished between energy and power, or between negentropy and energy – this is not part of the thermodynamic universe but what brings that into existence. Meillassoux will define his “hyper-chaos” as neither physical (ontological) nor ordinary chaos (complexity); rather, instead of the usual chaos of disorder, randomness, and eternal becoming of objects, entities, things this is a realm he defines as “supercontingency” in which like the subatomic realm there is no end to the warring elements, no ground or fixity.

Against Heraclitus who he terms a philosopher of “fixity”, Meillassoux will argue instead that nothing is fixed everything is in flux, there are no laws underpinning things, only the contingency of facts not necessity: becoming is a fact without necessity or law; or, even reason. He admits to being a rationalist, and that reason cannot demonstrate the necessity of laws. Instead of demonstration we should accept laws as facts not arguments of necessity, and that facts are contingent not necessary; and, facts can change without reason at anytime.

​Whitehead, Alfred North (2010-05-11). Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 96). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
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Alfred North Whitehead is a good example of a modern philosopher of fixity. In Process and Reality he’ll define his philosophy as being “governed by stubborn fact”:

​Whitehead’s is a philosophy constructed against the transience of time and the fading of organic consciousness. “Each new epoch enters upon its career by waging unrelenting war upon the aesthetic gods of its immediate predecessor. Yet the culminating fact of conscious, rational life refuses to conceive itself as a transient enjoyment, transiently useful. In the order of the physical world its rôle is defined by its introduction of novelty. But, just as physical feelings are haunted by the vague insistence of causality, so the higher intellectual feelings are haunted by the vague insistence of another order, where there is no unrest, no travel, no shipwreck: ‘There shall be no more sea.’” (p. 340) What he sought was the exact opposite of hyper-chaos and perpetual change, instead he would follow the realm of timelessness and the unchanging world of fixity: “The perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing. The perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity.’” (p. 338)
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So Whitehead offers us only the sad glimpse of a dying universe, the entropic passing of organic into inorganic zero. For Whitehead the only conclusion was theological:

… We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified— the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore. (p. 352)

So for Whitehead there is the objective immortality of process and change as fixity, of a realm of novelty that continues to churn away in the perpetual motion schema of a universe that revolves within the immanence of God.

​We will leave Whitehead to his God and return to the mad time of Deleuze’s Aion…

​“Time is not governed by physical laws because it is the laws itself that are governed by mad Time.” (Meillassoux, KL 333)

Strangely we might also bring in Zizek who – though being a follower of Hegel/Lacan, brings in the idea of the Real:

The Real we are dealing with here is the Real of the pure virtual surface, the “incorporeal” Real, which is to be opposed to the Real in its most terrifying imaginary dimension, the primordial abyss which swallows up everything, dissolving all identities— a figure well known in literature in multiple guises, from Edgar Allan Poe’s maelstrom and Kurtz’s “horror” at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to Pip from Melville’s Moby Dick who, cast to the bottom of the ocean, experiences the demon God:

Carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes … Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke to it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.3

​This Real (whose best-known Freudian case is the dreamer’s look into Irma’s throat from Traumdeutung), this over-abundant obscene-morbid vitality of the primordial Flesh, is not the Real of pure appearance which is the truth of the Platonic Idea. It is again Deleuze who can help us draw a clearer line of distinction between these two Reals. On the very first page of his Logic of Sense, Deleuze describes pure becoming with a reference to Alice in Wonderland: when Alice “becomes larger,”

she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now. Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa. (Zizek, KL 1588-1592)

​Deleuze introduces here the opposition between two modes of time, Chronos (the time of bodily substances) and Aion (the time of immaterial becoming): the cyclic time of material transformations, of the generation and corruption of things— which is, at its most basic level, the “terrifying, measureless present” of the primordial Chaos— and the pure linearity of the flux of becoming. In Chronos, “only the present exists in time. Past, present and future are not three dimensions of time; only the present fills time, whereas past and future are two dimensions relative to the present in time.”  This Now of Chronos should be opposed to the Instant of Aion:

​In accordance with Aion, only the past and future inhere or subsist in time. Instead of a present which absorbs the past and future, a future and past divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once. Or, rather, it is the instant without thickness and without extension, which subdivides each present into past and future, rather than vast and thick presents which comprehend both future and past in relation to one another.

Whereas Chronos was inseparable from circularity and its accidents— such as blockages or precipitations, explosions, disconnections, and indurations— Aion stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction. Always already passed and eternally yet to come, Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound its own circle, stretching itself out into a straight line.(Zizek, KL 1615-1627)

​Meillassoux knows that he has destroyed the correlational argument of the principle of reason and fixity, but in doing so he has also uncovered a flaw – he has at the same time undermined the very foundations of scientific truth. What to do? If there is no rational structure of being, if the ‘principle of reason’ upon which science is founded is no longer valid then what will replace it?
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He’ll tell us his thesis: he thinks there are specific conditions of facticity, which he calls “figures”: by this he means, facticity is for him the only necessity of things but to be factual implies not to be just anything. To be factual is not given just to any sort of thing. Some things, if they existed, wouldn’t obey the strict and necessary conditions for being a factual entity. That’s why these things can’t exist: they can’t exist, because if they existed, they would be necessary, and to be necessary, according to the principle of factuality, is impossible. (Meillassoux, KL 352)

Ultimately this notion of a mad time, of hyper-chaos rests on the principle of non-contradiction: it is because the metaphysical principle of reason is absolutely false, that the logical principle of non-contradiction is absolutely true. (Meillassoux, KL 353) “The perfect  “logicity” of everything is a strict condition of the absolute absence of reason for anything.” (Meillassoux, KL 356) This is why for him metaphysics is dead, mute: because metaphysics always believes, in one way or the other, in the “principle of reason” (Meillassoux, KL 357).

One issue that he has yet to resolve he states as follows: Would it be possible to derive, to draw from the principle of facitality, the ability of the natural sciences to know, by way of mathematical discourse, reality in itself, by which I mean our world, the factual world as it is actually produced by Hyper-chaos, and which exists independently of our subjectivity? This is his future project, and will also resolve the ancestral problem that has yet to be resolved.

​Land following Bataille will remark that no “ontology of time is possible, and yet ontology remains the sole foundation for discursive accomplishment. There are only the shattered spars and parodies of philosophy, as ruinous time pounds thought into the embers of an unwitting sacrifice, wreathed in a laughter as cold and nakedly joyous as the void.” (Land, p. 95) Here Land admits the foundations of philosophy that rest on the principle of reason are sacrificed upon the shores of hyper-chaos, mad time. As Land will affirm Time, mad Time is the “ocean of immanence, from which nothing can separate itself, and in which everything loses itself irremediably. … The thought that matter is not a content of time is perhaps the preeminent shadow of a truth that is ‘at once’ an impossibility and an abomination (also an ecstasy). (p. 95)”. For Land all the metaphysicians, Kant and his progeny are nothing more than priests in academic trappings, that what we’ve been led to believe is in a synchronous, book-keeping, work-a-day time-world of fixity, bound to the principle of reason and contradiction. But under it all is the hideous truth of Aeon, the hyper-chaotic cesspool of energetic time that knows not the order of reasons – nor the “imperative rationality of the divine” (p. 97). We are moving inexorably into the accumulated time of the Aeon where what “is dammed up in the Aeon is the densely material time of rupture and ruthless re-creation…” (p. 97). Ultimately against the metaphysicians and any principle of reason Land offers

“Nature, far from being logical, ‘is perhaps entirely the excess of itself’, smeared ash and flame upon zero, and zero is immense.” (p. 104)

taken from:

Actuel: When you describe capitalism, you say: 

"There isn't the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality {not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathology, of this madness, for the machine does work, be sure of it}. There is no danger of this machine going mad; it has been mad from the beginning, and that's where its rationality comes from. "

​Gilles Deleuze: We do not use the terms "normal" or "abnormal.'" All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It's like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational-not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type ​of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn't been adequately discussed about Marx's Capital is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalist mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So what is rational in a society? It is-the interests being defined in the framework of this society-the way people pursue those interests, their realization. But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous Rux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious Rows that make up the delirium of this society. The true history is the history of desire. A capitalist, or today's technocrat, does not desire in the same way a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and for themselves, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the "right" to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A "disinterested" love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed, and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all. 

​Gilles Deleuze: Are delirium and interest, or rather desire and reason, distributed in a completely new, particularly "abnormal" way in capitalism? I believe so. Capital, or money, is at such a level of insanity that psychiatry has but one clinical equivalent: the terminal stage. It is too complicated to describe here, but one detail should be mentioned. In other societies, there is exploitation, there are also scandals and secrets, but that is part of the "code," there are even explicitly secret codes. With capitalism, it is very different: nothing is secret, at least in principle and according to the code (this is why capitalism is "democratic" and can "publicize" itself, even in a juridical sense). And yet nothing is admissible. Legality itself is inadmissible. By contrast to other societies, it is a regime both of the public and the inadmissible. A very special delirium inherent to the regime of money. Take what are called scandals today: newspapers talk a lot about them, some people pretend to defend themselves, others go on the attack, yet it would be hard to find anything illegal in terms of the capitalist regime. The prime minister's tax returns, real estate deals, pressure groups, and more generally the economic and financial mechanisms of capital-in sum, everything is legal, except for little blunders; what is more, everything is public, yet nothing is admissible. If the left was "reasonable," it would content itself with vulgarizing economic and financial mechanisms. There's no need to publicize what is private, just make sure that what is already public is being admitted publicly. One would find oneself in a state of dementia without equivalent in the hospitals. Instead, one talks of "ideology." But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the "economico-ideological" distinction or opposition, but the organization of power. Because organization of power that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic-haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression. 

​Gilles Deleuze: Not at all. To say "ideology is a trompe l'oeil," that's still the traditional thesis. One puts the infrastructure on one sidethe economic, the serious-and on the other, the superstructure, of which ideology is a part, thus rejecting the phenomena of desire in ideology. It's a perfect way to ignore how desire works within the infrastructure, how it invests it, how it takes part in it, how, in this respect, it organizes power and the repressive system. We do not say: ideology is a trompe l'oeil (or a concept that refers to certain illusions). We say: there is no ideology, it is an illusion. That's why it suits orthodox Marxism and the Communist Party so well. Marxism has put so much emphasis on the theme of ideology to better conceal what was happening in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power. There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power once it is admitted that the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure. Take two examples. Education: in May 1968 the leftists lost a lot of time insisting that professors engage in public self-criticism as agents of bourgeois ideology. It's stupid, and simply fuels the masochistic impulses of academics. The struggle against the competitive examination was abandoned for the benefit of the controversy, or the great anti-ideological public confession. In the meantime, the more conservative professors had no difficulty reorganizing their power. The problem of education is not an ideological problem, but a problem of the organization of power: it is the specificity of educational power that makes it appear to be an ideology, but it's pure illusion. Power in the primary schools, that means something, it affects all children. Second example: Christianity. The church is perfectly pleased to be treated as an ideology. This can be argued; it feeds ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology; it's a very original, very specific organization of power that has assumed diverse forms since the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and which was able to invent the idea of international power. It's far more important than ideology. 

Felix Guattari: It's the same thing in traditional political structures. One finds the old trick being played everywhere again and again: a big ideological debate in the general assembly and questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary, determined by political options. While on the contrary, the real problems are those of organization, never specified or rationalized, but projected afterwards in ideological terms. There the real divisions show up: a treatment of desire and power, of investments, of group Oedipus, of group "superegos," of perverse phenomena, etc. And then political oppositions are built up: the individual takes such a position against another one, because in the scheme of organization of power, he has already chosen and hates his adversary. 

Your analysis is convincing in the case of the Soviet Union and of capitalism. But in the particulars? If all ideological oppositions mask, by definition, the conflicts of desire, how would you analyze, for example, the divergences of three Trotskyite groupuscules? Of what conflict of desire can this be the result? Despite the political quarrels, each group seems to fulfill the same function vis-a-vis its militants: a reassuring hierarchy, the reconstitution of a small social milieu, a final explanation of the world ... I don't see the difference. 

Felix Guattari: Because any resemblance to existing groups is merely fortuitous, one can well imagine one of these groups defining itself first by its fidelity to hardened positions of the communist left after the creation of the Third International. It's a whole axiomatics, down to the phonological level-the way of articulating certain words, the gesture that accompanies them-and then the structures of organization, the conception of what sort of relationships to maintain with the allies, the centrists, the adversaries ... This may correspond to a certain figure of Oedipalization, a reassuring, ntangible universe like that of the obsessive who loses his sense of security if one shifts the position of a single, familiar object. It's a question of reaching, through this kind of identification with recurrent figures and images, a certain type of efficiency that characterized Stalinism-except for its ideology, precisely. In other respects, one keeps the general framework of the method, but adapts oneself to it very carefully: "The enemy is the same, comrades, but the conditions have changed." Then one has a more open groupuscule. It's a compromise: one has crossed out the first image, whilst maintaining it, and injected other notions. One multiplies meetings and training sessions, but also the external interventions. For the desiring will, there is-as Zazie says-a certain way of bugging students and militants, among others.

​In the final analysis, all these groupuscules say basically the same thing. But they are radically opposed in their style: the definition of the leader, of propaganda, a conception of discipline, loyalty, modesty, and the asceticism of the militant. How does one account for these polarities without rummaging in the economy of desire of the social machine? From anarchists to Maoists the spread is very wide, politically as much as analytically. Without even considering the mass of people, outside the limited range of the groupuscules, who do not quite know how to distinguish between the leftist elan, the appeal of union action, revolt, hesitation, or indifference. One must explain the role of these machines-these groupuscules and their work of stacking and sifting-in crushing desire. It's a dilemma: to be broken by the social system or to be integrated in the pre-established structure of these little churches. In a way, May 1968 was an astonishing revelation. The desiring power became so accelerated that it broke up the groupuscules. These later pulled themselves together; they participated in the reordering business with the other repressive forces, the CGT [Communist workers' union], the PC, the CRS [riot police]. I don't say this to ​be provocative. Of course, the militants courageously fought the police. But if one leaves the sphere of struggle to consider the function of desire, one must recognize that certain groupuscules approached the youth in a spirit of repression: to contain liberated desire in order to re-channel it. 

What is a liberated desire? I certainly see how this can be translated at the level of an individual or small group: an artistic creation, or breaking windows, burning things, or even simply an orgy or letting things go to hell through laziness or vegetating. But then what? What could a collectively liberated desire be at the level of a social group? And what does this signify in relation to "the totality of society, "if you do not reject this term as Michel Foucault does. 
​
Felix Guattari: We have taken desire in one of its most critical, most acute stages: that of the schizophrenic-and the schizo that can produce something within or beyond the scope of the confined schizo, battered down with drugs and social repression. It appears to us that certain schizophrenics directly express a free deciphering of desire. But how does one conceive a collective form of the economy of desire? Certainly not at the local level. I would have a lot of difficulty imagining a small, liberated· community maintaining itself against the flows of a repressive society, like the addition of individuals emancipated one by one. If, on the contrary, desire constitutes the very texture of society in its entirety, including in its mechanisms of reproduction, a movement of liberation can "crystallize" in the whole of society. In May 1968, from the first sparks to local clashes, the shake-up was brutally transmitted to the whole of society, including some groups that had nothing remotely to do with the revolutionary movement-doctors, lawyers, grocers. Yet it was vested interests that carried the day, but only after a month of burning. We are moving toward explosions of this type, yet more profound. 

Might there have already been a vigorous and durable liberation of desire in history, apart from brief periods of celebration, carnage, war or revolutionary upheavals? Or do you really believe in an end to history: after millennia of alienation, social evolution will suddenly turn around in a final revolution that will liberate desire forever? 

Felix Guattari: Neither the one nor the other. Neither a final end to history, nor provisional excess. All civilizations, all periods have known ends of history-this is not necessarily convincing and not necessarily liberating. As for excess, or moments of celebration, this is no more reassuring. There are militant revolutionaries who feel a sense of responsibility and say: Yes, excess "at the first stage of revolution," but there is a second stage, of organization, functioning, serious things ... For desire is not liberated in simple moments of celebration. See the discussion between Victor and Foucault in the issue of Les Temps Modernes on the Maoists. Victor consents to excess, but at the "first stage." As for the rest, as for the real thing, Victor calls for a new apparatus of state, new norms, a popular justice with a tribunal, a legal process external to the masses, a third party capable of resolving contradictions among the masses. One always finds the old schema: the detachment of a pseudo-avantgarde capable of bringing about syntheses, of forming a party as an embryo of state apparatus, of drawing out a well brought-up, well educated working class; and the rest is a residue, a lump en-proletariat one should always mistrust (the same old condemnation of desire). But these distinctions themselves are another way of trapping desire for the advantage of a bureaucratic caste. Foucault reacts by denouncing the third party, saying that if there is popular justice, it does not issue from a tribunal. He shows very well that the distinction "avant-garde-lumpen-proletariat" is first of all a distinction introduced by the bourgeoisie to the masses, and therefore serves to crush the phenomena of desire, to marginalize desire. The whole question is that of state apparatus. It would be strange to rely on a party or state apparatus for the liberation of desire. To want better justice is like wanting better judges, better cops, better bosses, a cleaner France, etc. And then we are told: how would you unify isolated struggles without a party? How do you make the machine work without a state apparatus? It is evident that a revolution requires a war machine, but this is not a state apparatus. It is also certain that it requires an instance of analysis, an analysis of the desires of the masses, yet this is not an apparatus external to the synthesis. Liberated desire means that desire escapes the impasse of private fantasy: it is not a question of adapting it, socializing it, disciplining it, but of plugging it in in such a way that its process not be interrupted in the social body, and that its expression be collective. What counts is not the authoritarian unification, but rather a sort of infinite spreading: desire in the schools, the factories, the neighborhoods, the nursery schools, the prisons, etc. It is not a question of directing, of totalizing, but of plugging into the same plane of oscillation. As long as one alternates between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the bureaucratic and hierarchic coding of a party organization, there is no liberation of desire. 
In the beginning, was capitalism able to assume the social desires? 

Gilles Deleuze: Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring-machine. The monetary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It's enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomena of desire. And fascism too-one must say that it has "assumed the social desires," including the desires of repression and death. People got hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don't think so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had its organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vacuum, but ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation. 

On the contrary, 1 think that the rising bourgeoisie imagined and prepared its revolution· throughout the Enlightenment. From its point of view, it was a revolutionary class "to the bitter end, " since it had shaken up the ancien regime and swept into power. Whatever parallel movements took place among the peasantry and in the suburbs, the bourgeois revolution is a revolution made by the bourgeoisie-the terms are hardly distinguishable-and to judge it in the name of 19th or 20th century socialist utopias introduces, by anachronism, a category that did not exist. 

Gilles Deleuze: Here again, what you say fits a certain Marxist schema. 'At one point in history, the bourgeoisie was revolutionary, it was even necessary-necessary to pass through a stage of capitalism, through a bourgeois revolutionary stage.' It's a Stalinist point of view, but you can't take that seriously. When a social formation exhausts itself, draining out of every gap, all sorts of things decode themselves, all sorts of uncontrolled flows start pouring out, like the peasant migrations in feudal Europe, the phenomena of "deterritorialization." The bourgeoisie imposes a new code, both economic and political, so that one can believe it was a revolution. Not at all. Daniel Guerin has said some profound things about the revolution of 1789. The bourgeoisie never had any illusions about who its real enemy was. Its real enemy was not the previous system, but what escaped the previous system's control, and what the bourgeoisie strove to master in its turn. It too owed its power to the ruin of the old system, but this power could only be exercised insofar as it opposed everything else that was in rebellion against the old system. The bourgeoisie has never been revolutionary. It simply made sure others pulled off the revolution for it. It manipulated, channeled, and repressed an enormous surge of popular desire. The people were finally beaten down at Valmy. 

They were certainly beaten down at Verdun. 

Felix Guattari: Exactly. And that's what interests us. Where do these eruptions, these uprisings, these enthusiasms come from that cannot be explained by a social rationality and that are diverted, captured by the power at the moment they are born? One cannot account for a revolutionary situation by a simple analysis of the interests of the time. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Party debated the alliances and organization of the proletariat, and the role of the avant-garde. While pretending to prepare for the revolution, it was suddenly shaken up by the events of 1905 and had to jump on board a moving train. There was a crystallization of desire on a wide social scale created by a yet incomprehensible situation. Same thing in 1917. And there too, the politicians climbed on board a moving train, finally getting control of it. Yet no revolutionary tendency was able or willing to assume the need for a Soviet-style organization that could permit the masses to take real charge of their interests and their desire. Instead, one put machines in circulation, so-called political organizations, that functioned on the model elaborated by Dimitrov at the Seventh International Congress-alternating between popular fronts and sectarian retractions-and that always led to the same repressive results. We saw it in 1936, in 1945, in 1968. By their very axiomatic, these mass machines refuse to liberate revolutionary energy. It is, in an underhanded way, a politics comparable to that of the President of the Republic or of the clergy, but with red flag in hand. And we think that this corresponds to a certain position vis-a.-vis desire, a profound way of envisioning the ego, the individual, the family. This raises a simple dilemma: either one finds a new type of structure that finally moves toward the fusion of collective desire and revolutionary organization, or one continues on the present path and, going from repression to repression, heads for a new fascism that makes Hitler and Mussolini look like a joke. 

But then what is the nature of this profound, fundamental desire which one sees as being constitutive of man and social man, but which is constantly betrayed? Why does it always invest itself in antinomic machines of the dominant machine, and yet remain so similar to it? Could this mean that desire is condemned to a pure explosion without consequence or to perpetual betrayal? 1 have to insist: can there ever be, one fine day in history, a collective and enduring expression of liberated desire, and how? 

Gilles Deleuze: If one knew, one wouldn't talk about it, one would do it. Anyway. Felix just said it: revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine and not of the state apparatus, of an analyzer of desire and not an external synthesis. In every social system, there have always been lines of flight, and then also a rigidification to block off escape or certainty (which is not the same thing), embryonic apparatuses that integrate them, that deflect or arrest them in a new system in preparation. The crusades should be analyzed from this point of view. But in every respect, capitalism has a very particular character: its lines of flight are not just difficulties that arise, they are the conditions of its own operation. It is constituted by a generalized decoding of all flux, fluctuations of wealth, fluctuations of work, fluctuations of language, fluctuations of an, etc. It did not create any code, it has set up a sort of accountability, an axiomatic of decoded fluxes as the basis of its economy. It ligatures the points of escape and leaps forward. It expands its own boundaries endlessly and finds itself having to seal new leaks at every limit. It doesn't resolve any of its fundamental problems, it can't even foresee the monetary increase in a country over a single year. It never stops crossing its own limits which keep reappearing farther away. It puts itself in alarming situations with respect to its own production, its social life, its demographics, its borders with the Third World, its internal regions, etc. Its gaps are everywhere, forever giving rise to the displaced limits of capitalism. And doubtless, the revolutionary way out (the active escape of which Jackson spoke when he said: "I don't stop running, but while running, I look for weapons") is not at all the same thing as other kinds of escape, the schizo-escape, the drug escape. But it is certainly the problem of the marginalized: to plug all these lines of flight into a revolutionary plateau. In capitalism, then, these lines of flight take on a new character, a new type of revolutionary potential. You see, there is hope. 
​
You spoke just now of the crusades. For you, this is one of the first maniftstations of collective schizophrenia in the West. 

Felix Guattari: This was, in fact, an extraordinary schizophrenic movement. Basically, in an already schismatic and troubled world, thousands and thousands of people got fed up with the life they led, makeshift preachers rose up, people deserted entire villages. It's only later that the shocked papacy tried to give direction to the movement by leading it off to the Holy Land. A double advantage: to be rid of errant bands and to reinforce Christian outposts in the Near East threatened by the Turks. This didn't always work: the Venetian Crusade wound up in Constantinople, the Children's Crusade veered off toward the South of France and very quickly lost all sympathy: there were entire villages taken and burned by these "crossed" children, who the regular armies finally had to round up. They were killed or sold into slavery. 

Can one find parallels with contemporary movements: communities and by-roads to escape the factory and the office? And would there be any pope to co-opt them? A Jesus Revolution? 

Felix Guattari: A recuperation by Christianity is not inconceivable. It is, up to a certain point, a reality in the United States, but much less so in Europe or in France. But there is already a latent return to it in the form of a Naturist tendency, the idea that one can retire from production and reconstruct a little society at a remove, as if one were not branded and hemmed in by the capitalist system. 

What role can still be attributed to the church in a country like ours? The church was at the center of power in Ulestern civilization until the 18th Century, the bond and structure of the social machine until the emergence of the nation-state. Today, deprived by the technocracy of this essential fu nction, it seems to have gone adrift, without a point of anchorage, and to have split up. One can only wonder if the church, pressured by the currents of Catholic progressivism, might not become less confessional than certain political organizations. 

Felix Guattari: And ecumenism? Isn't it a way of falling back on one's feet? The church has never been stronger. There is no reason to oppose church and technocracy, there is a technocracy of the church. Historically, Christianity and positivism have always been good partners. The development of positive sciences has a Christian motor. One cannot say that the psychiatrist has replaced the priest. Nor can one say the cop has replaced the priest. There is always a use for everyone in repression. What has aged about Christianity is its ideology, not its organization of power. 

Let's get to this other aspect of your book: the critique of psychiatry. Can one say that France is already covered by the psychiatry of Secteur and how for does this influence spread? 

Felix Guattari: The structure of psychiatric hospitals essentially depends on the state and the psychiatrists are mere functionaries. For a long time the state was content to practice a politics of coercion and didn't do anything for almost a century. One had to wait for the Liberation for any signs of anxiety to appear: the first psychiatric revolution, the opening of the hospitals, the free services, institutional psychotherapy. All that has led to the great utopian politics of "Sectorization," which consisted in limiting the number of internments and of sending teams of psychiatrists out into the population like missionaries in the bush. Due to lack of credit and will, the reform got bogged down: a few model services for official visits, and here or there a hospital in the most underdeveloped regions. We are now moving toward a major crisis, comparable in size to the university crisis, a disaster at all levels: facilities, training of personnel, therapy, etc.

The institutional charting of childhood is, on the contrary, undertaken with better results. In this case, the initiative has escaped the state framework and its financing to return to all sorts of associations-childhood protection or parental associations... The establishments have proliferated, subsidized by Social Security. The child is immediately taken charge of by a network of psychologists, tagged at the age of three, and followed for life. One can expect to see solutions of this type for adult psychiatry. In the face of the present impasse, the state will try to denationalize institutions in favor of other institutions ruled by the law of 1901 and most certainly manipulated by political powers and reactionary family groups. We are moving toward a psychiatric surveillance of France, if the present crises fail to liberate its revolutionary potentialities. Everywhere, the most conservative ideology is in bloom, a flat transposition of the concepts of Oedipalism. In the children's wards, one calls the director "uncle," the nurse, "mother." I have even heard distinctions like the following: group games obey a maternal principle, the workshops, a paternal one. The psychiatry of Secteur seems progressive because it opens the hospital. But if this means imposing a grid over the neighborhood, we will soon regret the loss of the closed asylums of yesterday. It's like psychoanalysis, it functions openly, so it is all the worse, much more dangerous as a repressive force. 
​
Gilles Deleuze: Here's a case. A woman arrives at a consultation. She explains that she takes tranquilizers. She asks for a glass of water. Then she speaks: "You understand I have a certain amount of culture. I have studied, I love to read, and there you have it. Now I spend all my time crying. I can't bear the subway. And the minute I read something, I start to cry. I watch television, I see images of Vietnam: I can't stand it ... " The doctor doesn't say much. The woman continues: "I was in the Resistance ... a bit. I was a gobetween." The doctor asks her to explain. "Well, yes, don't you understand, doctor? I went to a cafe and I asked, for example, is there something for Rene? I would be given a letter to pass on." 

The doctor hears "Rene"; he wakes up: "Why do you say 'Rene'?" h's the first time he asks a question. Up to that point, she was speaking about the metro, Hiroshima, Vietnam, of the effect all that had on her body, the need to cry about it. But the doctor only asks: "Wait, wait, 'Rene ... what does 'Rene' mean to you?" Rene-someone who is reborn (re-ne)? The renaissance? The Resistance means nothing to the doctor; but renaissance, this fits into a universal schema, the archetype: "You want to be reborn." The doctor gets his bearings: at last he's on track. And he gets her to talk about her mother and father. It's an essential aspect of our book, and it's very concrete. The psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have never paid any attention to delirium. It's enough just to listen to someone who is delirious: it's the Russians that worry him, the Chinese; my mouth is dry; somebody buggered me in the metro; there are germs and spermatozoa swimming everywhere; it's Franco's fault, the Jews, the Maoists ... all a delirium of the social field. Why shouldn't this concern the sexuality of the subject-the relations it has with the Chinese, the whites, the blacks? With civilization, the crusades, the metro? Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts hear nothing of this, on the defensive as much as they are indefensible. They crush the contents of the unconscious under prefab statements: "You speak to me of the Chinese, but what about your father? No, he isn't Chinese? Then, do you have a Chinese lover?" It's at the same level of repressive work as the judge in the Angela Davis case who affirmed: "Her behavior can only be explained by her being in love." And what if, on the contrary, Angela Davis's libido was a social, revolutionary libido? What if she were in love because she was a revolutionary? That is what we want to say to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts: you don't know what delirium is; you haven't understood anything. If our book has a meaning, it is that we have reached a stage where many people feel the psychoanalytic machine no longer works, where a whole generation is getting fed up with all-purpose schemas-Oedipus and castration, imaginary and symbolic which systematically efface the social, political, and cultural contents of any psychic disturbance. 

You associate schizophrenia with capitalism; it is the very foundation of your book. Are there cases of schizophrenia in other societies? 

Felix Guattari: Schizophrenia is indissociable from the capitalist system, itself conceived as primary leakage (fuite): an exclusive malady. In other societies, escape and marginalization take on other aspects. The asocial individual of so-called primitive societies is not locked up. The prison and the asylum are recent notions. One chases him, he is exiled at the edge of the village and dies of it, unless he is integrated into a neighboring village. Besides, each system has its particular sickness: the hysteric of so-called primitive societies, the manic-depressive paranoiacs of the great empires ... The capitalist economy proceeds by decoding and deterritorialization: it has its extreme cases, i.e., schizophrenics who decode and deterritorialize themselves to the limit; but also it has its extreme consequences-revolutionaries. 

from the book: Chaosophy ( texts and interviews 1972-1977 ​) by Felix Guattari 

​In the second decade of the nineteenth century, a now famous progenitor of American letters wrote (in mockery of the naturalist Buffon) that ‘all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number’ (Irving 1819:809). While readers of the time might have been surprised to learn that the author of this statement, one Geoffrey Crayon, was also that famous New York historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, those who know the ‘real’ identity of both writers as Washington Irving recognize Irving’s position in the American canon as that of a literary imitator. Irving’s pseudonymous Crayon completely transformed the original German locations of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’ into terrain seemingly indigenous to the new world. 

​I deliberately use the term ‘real’ to describe this author’s identity— not to question the existence of the man known as Washington Irving, but to dramatize (in conjunction with American ‘degeneration’) that the position of the author is bound inextricably with the transformation of his subject matter, so that the resulting amalgamation might respond to the question: ‘Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat big blob’ (Q 100). Such is also the case with the American transient William S. Burroughs, who jigged about the map in his effort to produce a corpus that exists never in only one place and time, but rather, finds itself moving toward what he calls a ‘final ecological jump’ (Zivancevic 1981:525) into space. 

‘Space’ has at least two meanings when applied to Burroughs’s work; first, he encourages the evolution of humans into a form best suited for cosmic nether-realms via a spirit body (see Russell 2001:155–87); second, ‘space’ can also signify a postmodern dissolution of Enlightenment-imposed limits in a world no longer bound by the flat logic of hegemonic ‘reason’. This latter value acts as a continual hedge against the more fantastic elements of the Burroughsian cosmology, but also finds connection with the political struggles characterizing the emerging global economic order, where ‘all of nature has become capital, or at least has become subject to capital’ (Hardt and Negri 2000:272).

Accordingly, Burroughs’s entreaties for humans to evolve from ‘time’ into ‘space’ can be productively analyzed in terms of the material vagaries of global politics that are contemporaneous with his movement, not away from writing, but into a creative space (in the second sense of the term) populated with a variety of multimedia projects. As noted by a number of critics (Miles 1992; Sobieszek 1996; Murphy 1997), Burroughs has a long engagement with aesthetics beyond the written form, and this engagement can be traced back to at least the late 1950s in his work with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. 

Significantly, such supplementary activity quickly assumed a prominent theoretical position in Burroughs’s work, which became increasingly fixated on conceits of media as both resistance and control. This ambivalence is crucial, both deployed and circumscribed by the language of its articulation, so that Burroughs’s work—offering a symbolic language of media production—always searches for opportunities to exploit formal processes as a means of scuttling the forces of commodification: Burroughs not only argued for the efficacy of cut-ups, but also used them as a production tool; he not only wrote about films and recordings, but also made them throughout his career. His reflexive empiricism thus carries the significance of his work beyond that of a simply innovative writer, providing it with a ‘double resonance’—an awareness of its structural limits in terms of both content and production. 

Robert A. Sobieszek notes that Burroughs’s film and recorder projects ‘startlingly anticipate MTV rock videos of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the devices of “scratching” and “sampling” in punk, industrial, and rap music of the same decades’ (1996:20–1). Still, it is important not simply to perceive the sound manipulation techniques that we consider contemporary, including ‘inching’— represented on Break Through in Grey Room (a 1986 collection of early Burroughs sound experiments)—as the progenitors of today’s ubiquitous rap and DJ culture; worse yet, to consider this culture from the banal academic perspective that would label those techniques as still effectively ‘resistant’ ignores the mass culture’s ability to absorb innovation. In both cases, such plaudits run the risk of paradoxically diluting the work into the neutralized extensions of Madison Avenue. Rather, we must examine subversive possibilities that remain ever wary of the media, while simultaneously exploiting the field’s incessant desire to cover. Accordingly, media literacy campaigns dedicated to reversing a default one-way information flow (as per the ‘Senders’ of Naked Lunch and their ‘biocontrol apparatus’ [NL 148]) have found some success in recent years. Image-savvy groups such as the indigenous rights-oriented Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as the coalition of activists involved in the ‘Battle of Seattle’ protest at the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization and the similarly motivated 2000 protests against the World Economic Forum’s Asia Pacific meeting in Melbourne, Australia, demonstrate that the anti-globalization movement not only ‘manifests viscerally in local spaces but it also depends upon broad non-geographical media spaces’ (Luckman and Redden 2001:32).

Significantly, the clutch of struggles affiliated with the anti-globalization movement is always locked into a split-level effort: on the one hand, such movements must attempt to prevent the pandemic erosion of public space and public resources (air, water, wilderness, and so on); at the same time they must battle against the co-optation and dissolution of their public voices into the droning mass of the culture industry—any middle-American mall-rat with a pocket full of allowance can purchase a Che Guevara T-shirt. Burroughs’s sound collaborations, while always in danger of becoming just this sort of empty prattle, are nonetheless ideally positioned: not to overthrow the control machine by ‘storming the reality studio’—a goal too idealistic to combat a control machine that routinely deploys the techniques of media-savvy dissent—but to map, onto the material effects of its own delivery systems, strategies of guerilla resistance imbued with enough reflexive potential to hold the grey room after the oft-envisaged ‘break through’. 

As Tom Hayden comments (on a poster at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago): ‘[T]hose administering the regressive apparatus […] cannot distinguish “straight” radicals from newspapermen or observers from delegates to the convention. They cannot distinguish rumors about demonstrations from the real thing’ (cited by Walker 1968:36–7). Hayden’s statement seems to imply the opportunity for guerilla intervention, but for Burroughs, there is no such ‘resistance’ that can avoid the possibility of being spun from a reverse angle. Thus, the ‘double resonance’ of his sound production has as ​much to do with the undesirability of supposedly ‘transformative’ technological identity cast in the illusion of hybridity, as it does with the possibility of producing aesthetic artifacts capable of exploding the limits of conventional discourse.

Regarding Burroughs’s first official sound release, Call Me Burroughs (1965), Barry Alfonso remarks (on the reissue liner notes) on the ‘antique metallic resonance’ of Burroughs’s voice—linked to the resounding ‘echoes of older America’—which, with its meta-narrative pronouncements from texts such as Nova Express, assumes meanings not possible on the page. On the same track, ‘Where You Belong’, the straight-ahead voice tells us: ‘We pull writers of all time in together and record radio programs, movie soundtrack, TV and jukebox songs […] all the words of the world stirring around in a cement mixer, and pour in the resistance message’ (CMB). Still, the Englishlanguage portion of the original 1965 liner notes, written by Emmett Williams, oversimplifies the connection between Burroughs’s voice and the cut-up ‘message’, misattributing interpretative clairvoyance to Burroughs’s already prophetic reputation. For Williams, Burroughs reading Burroughs might be taken as ‘an indispensable key to the arcana of The Naked Lunch and Nova Express’ (CMB liner notes).
​
Is this the ‘real’ Burroughs then—the producer and interpreter of text through its own articulation? According to Williams’s playful and perhaps hasty summation, we can envision Burroughs feeding himself media on the subliminal level, processing himself through performance, and thus producing a hyperbolic carnival version of his own narrative fête. Such jouissance might point to the ‘real’ Burroughs in the same way that Crayon or Knickerbocker were at various times associated with the early American ‘degenerate’ called Washington Irving. Any correlation beyond simple identification or attribution remains only local, no more emblematic of the essential Burroughs than the $25 T-shirt is representative of the South American revolutionary. 

Despite Williams’s desire to ‘discover’ in Burroughs’s voice some vital essence, what may be most significant about Burroughs’s early forays into visual and sound culture is that the work itself never surrendered to the ‘countercultural myth’ that characterized much avant-garde output of the time—as Thomas Frank calls the myth that resistance operated in binary opposition to the ‘muted, uniform gray’ of the business world (1997:6). Frank, for instance, notes PepsiCola’s early 1960s invention of a completely commodified populace who could be set against the apparently rigid mores of old America (in this case represented by Coca-Cola) for mercantile purposes: ‘[I]n 1961 [Pepsi] invented a fictional youth movement, a more wholesome version of Mailer’s hipsters but still in rebellion against the oppressive demands of mass society’ (1997:170). Such easy binaries are not to be found in Burroughs’s arsenal; marked by the ‘double resonance’ of his content and production, the ambivalence of addiction along with its complete hold on the subject assures Burroughs’s readers that they would be wise to remain continually suspicious of the standard counterculture line: ‘The prolonged use of LSD may give rise in some cases to a crazed unwholesome benevolence—the old tripster smiling into your face sees all your thoughts loving and accepting you inside out’ (Job 137).

Accordingly, we might investigate Burroughs’s later sound production as a project evolving from his early tape recorder and film pieces, because once the mass media entered its current period of rampant self-reflective narcissism, Burroughs’s rise as a pop-culture figure was on one level assured by the fact that he was still alive and producing. Popular constructions of Burroughs as junkie-murderer Scientologist-Nike shill-painter-homosexual-et al. might be read as reminders of the control machine’s adaptability; no doubt, these ‘ports of entry’ will each remain enticing gateways for the Burroughs mythology, but Burroughs’s continued suspicion of language’s ‘ability’ to offer a clear message can also countermand the accreted meaning and interpretation of his popular persona: ‘If they write an article attacking the Olympia Press as sexualizing congruent accessibility to its heart of pulp fecundate with orifices perspectives in the name of human privacy they have placed their thesis beyond the realm of fact […] The words used refer to nothing’ (Job 107). Language betrays any attempt to hang Burroughs onto a particular commercial hook, but also compromises—‘informs’—on his retorts.
 
Even so, Burroughs’s multimedia collaborations might still be interpreted as ‘lines of flight’ from the structures of advanced capital. The ‘double resonance’ of Burroughs’s work and cultural appropriation attempts to perform key reversals, what Saul Alinsky calls ‘mass political jujitsu’ (cited by Klein 2002:281), so that while the forces of commodification try to assimilate the viral seed of Burroughs’s language, they remain unable to force the words into their desired meaning.

In his classic treatise Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali articulates our first inversion—that recorded music and sound have become representative of a fundamental shift in the relationship between performance and recording. Whereas the original purpose of recording was to preserve the live concert experience, Attali argues that the evolution of mass reproducibility and the concomitant rise of the ‘recording star’ changed the live performance into a repetition of the recorded situation. The authority of original production and that of the recording industry are both called into question (1985:85–6), guaranteeing that even in its popular manifestation of apparent counter-cultural forms (for example, the Beatles), the recording industry ‘assured that young people were very effectively socialized, in a world of pettiness constructed by adults’ (110). 
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Burroughs and Gysin, aware of the deep structural ambivalence of the linguistic medium, argued that ‘[t]he word was and is flesh […] The word was and is sound and image’ (3M 159), and thus focused their recording energies on pieces that would somehow cultivate a reproduction of ‘aura’ that could grow through replication, while at the same time questioning the efficacy of their own involvement in the control mechanisms of the pre-recordings. In the liner notes for Apocalypse Across the Sky by the Master Musicians of Jajouka featuring Bachir Attar (produced by Bill Laswell), Burroughs and Gysin position the special caste of musicians (‘the 4000-year-old rock ‘n’ roll band’) in an era pre-dating the traps of language and technological recording: ‘Musicians are magicians in Morocco […] They are evokers of djenoun forces, spirits of the hills and the flocks and above all the spirits of music’ (Apocalypse liner notes). Yet, Burroughs and Gysin also admonish the consumers of the music to ‘let the music penetrate you and move you, and you will connect with the oldest music on earth’ (Apocalypse liner notes). In order to account not only for the apparent contradiction of discovering such ‘auratic’ magic in the technological medium, but also for Attali’s sense that recording sound and music becomes subordinate to the replicated long-player of capital, we must determine how Burroughs uses such an inversion to his advantage. 

‘Burroughs Break’, the first track from the Burroughs and Gus Van Sant collaboration The Elvis of Letters (1985), offers the line, ‘Whatever you feed into the machine on a subliminal level, the machine will process’, and this sample is seemingly copied straight from the Call Me Burroughs record (as are other portions of Elvis). Van Sant’s twangy guitar backs up the majority of Elvis, most effectively perhaps on the second track, ‘Word is Virus’, which repeats the ideological mantra of Nova Express: ‘Word begets image and image is virus’ (48). While such exercises, which mix Burroughs’s spoken word recording with musical accompaniment, are notable advances from the deadpan delivery on Call Me Burroughs, the potential of Van Sant’s project to overcome the limiting interplay of sound and text, while always relying more heavily on spoken word material, remains in question. 

The privileging of the Burroughs text on this record is evident in the resonance of such sound recordings to the events of global theater. Stash Luczkiw, writing in Italy Weekly of the beleaguered Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, attributes a connection between Burroughs’s line, ‘Word begets image, and image is virus’ (Luczkiw 2003), and the co-opting power of image politics to the Italian media elite. Luczkiw cites a rumor concerning the outlawed Masonic Lodge, Propaganda 2 (P2), and a supposed 1976 document, the ‘Plan for Democratic Renewal’, detailing an objective ‘to gain influence and, ultimately, control over the mass media by infiltrating various newspapers, publishing houses and TV stations’. Significantly, Luczkiw names Berlusconi as a ‘former member of P2’ (2003), but his essay represents more than the political application of Burroughs’s paranoiac cosmic-opera ideas. 

Applying Burroughs’s work to theoretical materials that attempt to explain the metaphorical implications of his prose is certainly a viable critical tactic, yet even casually drawing such conclusions (as Luczkiw does) from a text used in The Elvis of Letters does not specifically address the recorded nature of the disk. For it is the material of the recording, to return to Attali, that puts a unique spin on the replicating inversion of the original/recording relationship within the space of global capital. In order to circumnavigate the trap of ‘double resonant’ production applied only along its single written dimension, we must more precisely trace the relationship between recording and original.

Expanding on Roland Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ in the late Structuralist moment, Michel Foucault offers a salient conception of the ‘author function’ that characterizes our second inversion. Foucault traces the history of the ‘author function’ as born from an alteration of the common cultural notion of the ‘author’ preceding the text that she constructs from the genius of her creative faculty. After demonstrating how the author has indeed become subject to the legal vagaries of advanced capital, including ‘ownership’ necessitated by the rise of copyright law, Foucault shows how this ‘author function’ does not precede the text in the same way as the humanist notion of ‘Author’, but how it assumes a limiting function for the text(s) that it accompanies. The ‘author function’ becomes a projection of the ‘operations that we force texts to undergo’ (1969:551)— a chimera made real by its own culturally sanctioned image and its ability to reinforce epistemological discursive limits.​

As one embodiment of this ‘author function’ that is complicit with control, Burroughs, the author-cum-counterculture-icon, must somehow intervene directly into the milieu of control in order to alter the discursive practices that are ‘natural’ to the capitalist environment of his production as an ‘Author’. This task is not unlike his oft-used comparison for the limits of the space program (‘Yes sir, the fish said, I’m just going to shove a little aquarium up onto land there, got everything I need in it’ [PDR 41]); language, understood as a virus, precipitates its own dissemination in a way that forces a certain limited meaning at every juncture. If the solution to this post-structural quandary, as offered in such texts as the ‘Academy 23’ section of The Job, is recourse to pictorial associative systems, how can we reconcile Burroughs’s work with image/sound as being any more successful than his already circumscribed-by-capital textual production? 
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The key to this ‘solution’ lies in the second reversal mixed with the first: if recording has become a means to replicate the live act that is now constructed as a facsimile of the recording (Attali), and if the ‘author function’ is in part an illusory product of copyright-inspired capital transactions of ownership (Foucault), then any disruption must occur in a way that scuttles the efficacy of the signifying chain separating ‘original’ from ‘copy’ while at the same time destroying the relational mechanisms that authorize such compartmentalization through the function of the ‘genius’ author or intellect.

One of the more interesting sound works of Burroughs’s later period is the 1997 remix release version of the classic Material album Seven Souls (1989), a sort of unofficial soundtrack to Burroughs’s last major novel, The Western Lands (1987). Significant to this discussion is the way that the music, along with Burroughs’s readings, creates an interplay that moves beyond the reliance on written text; as Murphy notes about the track ‘The Western Lands’, excerpts from different sections of Burroughs’s novel have come together in the song (1997:225), creating an orchestrated cut-up at the altar of the mixing table. The final track of both the original and the remix record, ‘The End of Words’, returns the listener to that assumed connection between the text and its performance, which features ‘Middle Eastern scales and overdubbed chants’ (Murphy 1997:225), before Burroughs drones through the final passages of The Western Lands, including, significantly: ‘The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then?’ (WL 258) 
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Expressed as both text and sound versions, this passage is ostensibly the ‘same’ in each instance, yet the difference between the ‘original’ written iteration of this passage and its re-articulation on the remix record becomes more than just a refraction of the ‘real’ world of the text into a sound medium. Such movement between mediums is not simply, as the Critical Art Ensemble laments, ‘trying to eat soup with soup’ (1994:86). Rather, the context has been altered to locate this new articulation, as a new expression of the ‘double resonance’ that exploits Attali’s retroversion. 

In Attali’s conception, the artist originally recorded her work as a way of preserving the live performance. In this case, at first analysis, the live performance of Burroughs’s reading would comport, in the straight-ahead style of Call Me Burroughs, to the reverse structure that Attali attributes to the pattern of replication typified by advanced capital: Burroughs reads and records the text during a live performance, in order to preserve (as per the reversal), through voice, the ‘original’ written text and any ‘original’ live performances that presumably preceded its recorded articulation. Significantly, this live performance is recorded. 

Yet, with Laswell’s band not so much performing a cut-up on the text as radically re-contextualizing it, the situation undergoes a subsequent and crucial re-inversion: the recording of the spoken word reading, which Laswell uses on his 1989 record, becomes the original performance of the aural material (or the articulation that serves as such within the new regime), and the Laswell-produced track ‘The End of Words’—a new recording—works in Attali’s formula as a way of not merely limiting the new original by reproducing it again, but changing the new original—which is not, of course, the ‘real’ original—through the détournement of its first and only temporary position in a tenuous chain of signification (as an aural copy of the written text, which has been elided from the sound process completely).

For Burroughs’s work, the context has now shifted, and his ‘end of words’ proclamation becomes a prophecy that plays itself out in the inability of that language to fix the ‘meaning’ of its articulation. Just as Magritte’s picture of a pipe is no longer a pipe itself, Burroughs’s text about the ‘end of words’ is no longer a fixed written text that attempts to signify an insoluble concept through appreciable limits, because its recording and subsequent re-situation plays upon Burroughs’s own narrative critiques of the insolubility of originality. The recording and mixing process redirects the specter of repetition, so that any relation to the ‘original’ is not one of only preservation and repetition (as per Attali’s reversal), but, potentially, one of evolution. 

Still, it may be clear from such an example that Laswell’s work, while certainly innovative, is little more than a clever crossapplication of the cut-up method to a sound medium, and thus, the new articulation quickly exhausts its apparent insight into the system of replicated reproduction. While manipulations of spoken word texts are by no means legion in the popular arena, enough of this type of activity has been performed that the reader might see the re-signification of Attali’s reversal (complicated by Burroughs’s own production techniques, discussed earlier) as subject to Frank’s cogent analysis of the countercultural myth, or Foucault’s notions of the complete penetration of the power apparatus in a society of control. Without discounting these critiques, let us lay down the ‘second reversal’, that of the ‘author function’, onto this track.

Recall that Foucault expresses that the ‘author function’ is born contemporaneously with the text, and is, in fact, the limiting agent to which the text is attributed, a sort of phenomenological enforcer of Burroughs’s ‘Board Books’. Burroughs’s solution, offered throughout his career, might be cited as: ‘Equipped now with sound and ​image track of the control machine […] I had only to mix the order of recordings and the order of images’ (SM 92). This possibility is developed in works such as the CD Break Through in Grey Room (due to the fact that a text that has as its subject ‘recording’ is then manipulated as a recording itself), but let us consider the remix of Seven Souls for a later iteration of this methodology as a musical concept once removed from the ‘originating’ consciousness of the idea as already developed by Burroughs. 

The original 1989 ‘Soul Killer’ track, also a collection of passages from The Western Lands, expands upon ‘Total Death. Soul Death’, the consolidation of energy that occurs in that mummycontrolled ‘space’ of the Western hegemonic afterlife. From the track: ‘Governments fall from sheer indifference. Authority figures, deprived of the vampiric energy they suck off their constituents are seen for what they are: dead, empty masks manipulated by computers. And what is behind the computers? Remote control of course’ (WL 116). On the most provocative remix from the 1997 record, DJ Terre Thaemlitz’s ‘Remote Control Mix’ of ‘Soul Killer’, Burroughs’s famous dictum that there is ‘nothing here now but the recordings’ (which also ends the 1989 Laswell version) closes with the same warning about the ‘recordings’: ‘[T]hey are as radioactive as an old joke’ (WL 116). The familiar metallic timbre of Burroughs’s voice gives way to the distorted soundscape that one reviewer notes ‘evok[es] imagery of Morocco or somewhere equally as exotic’ (Stoeve 2002). The sonic wasteland is ethereal enough to situate the few remaining and audible Burroughs sounds, no more than quick glitches in time, in a way that implies that the ‘author’—the absent Burroughs—has been drowned by the same ‘remote control technology’ that he conducted an excursus upon in the 1989 recording. From the time of 6:30 to 7:00 on the remix, we hear almost inaudible and certainly defamiliarized fragments of what sounds like Burroughs’s voice buried beneath the sands of the engineer’s table: ‘originally’ words in the pages of The Western Lands (assuming erroneously but deliberately that typing/scripting is the origination point of language), these words are no longer ‘words’ at all. 
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 Here we enter the realm that lies submersed beneath the ambient waves of the postmodern musical era, served under the imprimatur of direct noise that one might find on the records Greg Hainge cites in his essay, ‘Come on Feel the Noise: Technology and its Dysfunctions in the Music of Sensation’, including Reynol’s Blank Tapes or Francis Lopez’s Paris Hiss (2002:42–58). In the postindustrial ​wilderness that closes Thaemlitz’s mix, the warning about the ‘radioactivity’ of the pre-recordings becomes the last completely audible (although manipulated) portion of the track, so that this final desert of the red night not only plays upon the radioactive nature of the ‘old jokes’—the old America that contributes to the degeneration of its inhabitants—but also continues the ‘double resonance’ that infuses the best of Burroughs’s spoken word material: remixed almost beyond aural recognition, the spoken word ‘text’, a mélange of the textual and sonic, a distorted re-recording of a previously manipulated recording of a live performance of a written ‘original’ (with multiple variations across a history of Burroughs’s work) hopelessly spins the Attali equation on its head, but also pushes toward Foucault’s vision of the text as no longer constrained by the author function (although Foucault always envisions some form of constraint). We need no longer lament the replication of a recorded text or performance in its live iteration, because all of these categories are problematized by the conflation of the original and the recording. The identity of the ‘real’ originator Burroughs (while still ‘present’ on the remix) finds his flickering persona fed into the recording machine in so many iterations, both through his own instrumentation and that of other like-minded collaborators, that it is cut backward and chopped apart until the computer sample of ‘his’ voice, the recording of a recording, implodes. 

Burroughs’s ‘double resonance’ provides a limit, a glass ceiling for him to vibrate toward in an attempt to ‘rub out the word’, so that it is only with a soul death, a total death effectuated—through the use of the recording process that seeks to eliminate his voice from his own descriptive passages—that we can see our way forward to Foucault’s vision of a future without the ‘author function’. Foucault’s future is founded not upon a reversal that allows the ‘author’ to again precede the ‘text’, but with an acknowledgement of the signifying limits of the author that accelerate the evolutionary changes, suggesting, like Burroughs’s buried and distorted clicks at the end of the ‘Soul Killer’ remix, that: ‘All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur’ (Foucault 1969:558). Listen as closely as you like to the Thaemlitz track’s final minutes, between 6:30 and 6:50; rewind and replay as often as you can; wear noise canceling headphones to better preserve the snippets of deconstructed Burroughs that pass through your ears—and you will still hear only the murmur of standard narrative intelligibility.

This murmur is an apt metaphor in its ethereality—in its ambivalence between presence and absence—to bring us toward closure. N. Katherine Hayles, upon listening to Nothing Here Now But the Recordings, expresses the disjunction between the ‘explanatory’ prose segments on sound manipulation and the practical application of the method: ‘I found the recording less forceful as a demonstration of Burroughs’s theories than his writing. For me, the aurality of his prose elicits a greater response than the machine productions it describes and instantiates’ (Hayles 1999:216). Significantly, Hayles’s analysis also identifies the danger of Burroughs’s sound experiments to ‘constitute a parasitic monologue’ if not ‘self-disrupted’ (215) by manipulations that might counteract the trap of language—so that sound can be expanded to not only echo the sounds of the body (an internal engine), but in its self-deconstruction, become an external mechanism that produces ‘a new kind of subjectivity that strikes at the deepest levels of awareness’ (220). Elsewhere is this collection, Anthony Enns attends to Hayles’s critique through the primacy of Burroughs’s use of the typewriter, yet we must also consider her hesitancy to embrace Burroughs’s sound recordings as a reminder of the difficulty in escaping the parasitism of the control machine that feeds on the iconic image.
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This brief reading of Burroughs’s sound-related projects cannot possibly approach an exhaustive study, nor can it imply that such current sound production will actually produce Hayles’s new subjectivity, because in many ways the works of contemporary musicians/ sound performers, no matter how seemingly ‘revolutionary’, exist in a different cultural location than once-‘obscene’ texts such as Naked Lunch. Great gains have been made for provocative aesthetics; while I never read Burroughs as a student, his work routinely finds a place on my syllabus as a professor, representing a local manifestation of Kathy Acker’s statement that ‘we are living in the world of Burroughs’s novels’ (1997:3). Even though we might now simply view a picture of Burroughs holding court with Kim Gordon and Michael Stipe, or hear socially conscious rock band Radiohead sample lead singer Thom Yorke’s live voice for immediate playback during performances of ‘Everything in the Right Place’ (an application of ‘Burroughsian’ principles), we must still force ourselves to reconcile the overwhelming persona of the speaker against the cult of the image that dilutes its message, while simultaneously applying ​the same concerns to the medium. Perhaps, as both Attali and Hainge suggest, the solution can be found in the productive power of noise, because ‘in its limited appeal […] the Noise genre subverts the relationship between product and demand in the age or repetition and mass consumerism’ (Hainge 2002:56). 

The inherent problem of such pronouncements is that the control machine also listens to its own noises—and it never hesitates to engage in playback. During the ‘psyops’ (psychological operations) phase of the 2003 Iraq war, the US military followed Burroughs’s admonition in ‘Electronic Revolution’ to use sound as ‘a front line weapon to produce and escalate riots’ (now in Job 175): ‘The military also uses the recordings during tank assaults as “force multipliers”, sound effects to make the enemy think the forces are larger than they actually are’ (Leinwand 2003).
 
​Burroughs would advocate fighting fire with a recording of fire, and while even the recent rise of file sharing protocols might create conditions (in the separation of recording from corporate ownership) to cut the association lines of the mass media, the fact that we cannot eat soup with soup also argues for constant vigilance against the corporate and commercial forces. If the cop not only needs the criminal, but also is the criminal, we must also see the dominant culture’s ability to absorb the ideologically ‘resistant’ as the key to the ‘double resonance’ of Burroughs’s sound projects. Senator Orrin Hatch, himself a musician of the patriotic/religious variety, recently advocated integrating viruses into Internet downloads to damage file sharing culprits, which, in Hatch’s words, ‘may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights’ (Bridis 2003:2B). 

If the corporate body can literally consume everything it tastes, there is no sense in hiding the food. Instead, Burroughs’s position must be fed into the machine in so many ways, from so many coordinate points, that not only will that position overwhelm the machine on the subliminal level, but the machine will be fundamentally changed so that it no longer recognizes a source for the recordings at all. The best way to put Burroughs’s concepts to use may be to get rid of ‘Burroughs’ altogether.

​And at the same time, we must make of ourselves a meal.

​by David Roden

Traven lost within the blocks

With the exhaustion of his supplies, Traven remained within the perimeter of the blocks almost continuously, conserving what strength remained to him to walk slowly down their empty corridors. The infection in his right foot made it difficult for him to replenish his supplies from the stores left by the biologists, and as his strength ebbed he found progressively less incentive to make his way out of the blocks. (Ballard 2014, 40).

In J G Ballard’s “The Terminal Beach” an ex-military airman, wanders Eniwetok Atoll, a former US nuclear test site dubbed the “nuclear trash can of the Pacific”. Malnourished and delusional, he is haunted by intimations of World War III and tracked across its concrete desert by his dead wife and child, victims of a fatal car crash (31).

There is no psychological pretext for Traven’s presence on the atoll. The narrative is unconcerned with motivation or history which only breaks its surface in fragments: an opening reminiscence of a birthplace in Dakar, images of night bombing raids on Japan, a reference to Auschwitz, the vigilant ghosts of Traven’s family (29). His existence is now equivalent to his exploration of its synthetic landscape:

The system of megaliths now provided a complete substitute for those functions of his mind which gave to it its sense of the sustained rational order of time and space. Without them, his awareness of reality shrank to little more than the few square inches of sand beneath his feet (40).

Traven has become his traversal of the island; what passes for his world the unity of his disparate encounters.  The island is thus a function of temporal synthesis or time binding. As Ballard writes: “if primitive man felt the need to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche, 20th century man had reversed this process; by this Cartesian yardstick, the island at least existed, in a sense true of few other places.)”
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Traven=Eniwetok
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The reduction of Eniwetok to these obsessive circumlocutions is Ballard’s aberrant version of the philosophical position that the speculative realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism”. Correlationism gets its initial formulation in Kant’s claim that concepts cannot be dogmatically assumed to hook onto a mind-independent world but, instead, cook or create connections between experiences or judgements. Thus, objects are not external to thought but must be conceived in terms of what thinking performs.
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Correlationism holds that “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 2006, 5). Meillassoux describes Kant as a “weak” correlationist, however, because a non-correlated thing-in-itself remains conceivable in his philosophy, if unknowable (35). Subsequent “strong” correlationisms, such as Husserl’s phenomenology or Hilary Putnam’s internal realism, view the very idea of an absolute reality as incoherent.

For Meillassoux, strong correlationism marks a profound failure of metaphysical nerve, locking philosophy into a closeted reflection upon human experience which struggles to make sense of the inhuman vistas revealed by mathematical natural science (Meillassoux 2006).

Ballard’s writing is likewise forgetful both of the cosmic “great outdoors” explored by traditional science fiction writers and the narrowly personal horizons of literary realism. In the 1995 introduction to Crash, Ballard suggests that the inner life of traditional literature has become pre-empted by mediated lifestyles and identities. There are no “true” or “authentic” needs when we are free “to play games with our psychopathologies” (Sellars and O’Hara, 288).

As Jean Baudrillard points out in his essay on Crash, there is no more perversion in Ballard’s universe, no yardstick to measure the pathology of our sexual aims (Baudrillard 1994,113). A correlationist analysis of our mediascape is justified, then, because the social has already acquired the consistency of a dream. Ballard explores a posthuman topos where the “elaborately signaled landscapes” of motorways and airport termini, the launch gantries of Cape Canaveral, are metaphorical bindings to the future. Their matter or proper function is irrelevant.
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Posthuman desire is correlated with technique while technological systems form the crucible of our “time filled” unconscious (Ballard 1995: 5). This “Cyborgian desire” can be revealed in fetishistic enjoyment. In Crash, the central protagonist “James Ballard” observes Gabrielle, a recovering crash victim, finding affinities between her damaged body – sleeved in its enticing orthopedic exoskeleton – and the display vehicles at the Earls Court Motor show (Crash 1995 …).

However, the true sexuality of the novel pivots around the terminal metaphor of its title. Vaughan, the self-appointed ideologist of its Cyborgian world dreams of dying in a car crash with Elizabeth Taylor; remarking that this “unique vehicle collision … would transform all our dreams and fantasies” (Ballard 1995: 130).

The actual collision, with which the novel opens, is bathetically, Vaughan’s “one true accident” (Ibid., p. 7). His car misses Taylor’s limousine, careening into an airline bus below the London Airport Flyover. Vaughan’s poor aim fuels’ the novel’s fatal machinery, however. Ballard is clear that Gabrielle’s alluring thigh wound or Vaughan’s “heavy nipples” are not erotic in and of themselves.[1] They are pure relata within its mediatized world. It is being-in-relation-to that is of erotic interest.

Early in the novel Ballard’s sexual reveries are occupied by the “dulled aluminum and areas of imitation wood laminates” of airport buildings or the coincidence of a “contoured lighting system” and the bald head of a bartender. These are substituted by a savage inventory of overkill bodies: “the over-white concrete of [an] evening embankment”, ruptured genitalia, luminous drifts of safety glass, copulating bodies sheathed in “glass, metal and vinyl”, skin incised by underwear, or chromium manufacturers’ medallions – all erotically interchangeable (Baudrillard 1994: 113).

There is no ruling metaphor for these functions beyond the one sex=death we know can never happen. Everything can be concatenated with anything because the event these couplings allude to is a dream of unmediated presence beyond the flat multiple of the world.

Towards the end of “The Terminal Beach” Traven discovers the corpse of a Japanese doctor tucked in a crevice at the edge of a vast bunker complex (46). It tells him that the island is an “ontological Eden” which can free him “of the hazards of time and space” if he accepts the plurality of the universe (48).

But acceptance is no solution to the potent yet empty time of the blocks. Traven must look beyond the actual posthuman world, “suspended from the quivering volcano’s lip of World War III.” The “historical and psychic zero” binding modernity’s excremental fragments through the extirpation of sense and history (30-31).

In Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction Ray Brassier enlists catastrophe to explore the relationship between his speculative realist ontology and the crisis of human meaning or “nihilism”, which he proposes as the liberating consequence of scientific reason.

This catastrophe is the extinction of matter following the heat death of the universe, when even nucleonic particles will decay in a shower of gravitons and only an “implacable gravitational expansion will continue … pushing the extinguished universe … into unfathomable darkness” (Brassier 2007, 228).

This absolute terminus pulls the curtain down on Brassier’s dark vision of Enlightenment. It marks the point at which scientific will to know discovers life and thought to be deflections on the path to extinction (Brassier 2007,). It supposedly marks an event for thought that could never be correlated for thought since embodiment and intelligence will have long ceased before the final “asymptopia”. Brassier’s catastrophe is thus a transcendental event that, he claims, forces us to consider radically asubjective and anti-vital conditions for objectivity and truth.

As Paul Ennis observes, death is ontologically flattened in this narrative: “the sun is dying precisely to the same extent as human existence is bounded by extinction” (223). It is no longer human death, or death for us; no longer the horizon of human finitude (Ennis 2016, 23). Reason, meanwhile, is shown as a vector: “for an alien process … that actively undermines attempts to provide our species with a unique, special status within the cosmos”. (26-7)

If everything dies in the same way, everything is equally consequent upon the “purposelessness which compels all purpose” (236). If our experience suggests that the world is meaningful or that we are in a world suffused with purpose, then so much the worse for it. Our phenomenology – as I have argued independently – is dark (Roden 2013, 2014). Cosmic extinction shows reality to be alien to thought: thus thought to be alien to itself. As the tag-line to R Scott Bakker’s ultra-dark thriller Neuropath has it: “You are not what you think you are” (Bakker 2009).
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If thought is inimical to life, then what drives it? Brassier likens this all-corroding will-to-know to Freud’s death drive, the tendency for all life to seek a lifeless state. In divesting our humanist conceits thought seeks to become adequate to its death. It copes with the traumatic real of extinction in a universe hurtling towards death – by somehow “identifying” with it:

It is this adequation that constitutes the truth of extinction. But to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation, nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction (Brassier 2007, 239; Ennis 2016, 26).

Brassier’s catastrophe is thus analogous to the terminal metaphors of Crash and “Beach”. Ballard’s ontological catastrophe lacks all positive qualities beyond the excision of sex=death. The zero-promise ratifying our abrasive sexualities. For Brassier, the zero is the real determining knowledge of itself from outside the correlation between thought and object, even outside chronological time (230). The thing comes to know itself as thing (Woodward 2015, 33).

Yet learning I am dead, or selfless, cannot make me deader. Extinction through the medium of thought is thus not the spatio-temporal extinction of the asymptotic universe (228, 130). If knowledge seeks death it misses its target, just as Vaughan misses his appointment with the actress. Both events are strictly impossible. Brassier will articulate a somewhat a more tenable itinerary for the dead subject; though, as we shall see, this substitutes an encounter the strictly unthinkable for the impossible. Both formulations imply an alien drive to encounter the dark side of our phenomenology.

So who, or what, is in the driver’s seat?

​My first viewing of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) was shattering. I was upended by its dislocated narrative rather than the body horror of its denouement, where image extrudes into reality, bodies explode or form erogenous control surfaces. I could not see how this unreality grew from the film it initially seems to be: a paranoid thriller unconventionally crossed with an s/m romance involving Max, a director of a cable TV station specializing in soft porn (James Woods) and a masochistic radio psychiatrist, Nicki Brand (Blondie’s Debbie Harry).
​
My psychotic blip was aptly mimetic of the ontological catastrophe it depicts. The Videodrome of the title is a snuff TV signal which causes brain cancers and reality-warping hallucinations.

Retrospectively, it is easy to see that Videodrome is never realist. Its cinematic world is potent with disaster from the first.

This is evident in the early scene where Max and Nicki meet on a television panel show hosted by Rena King. The topic is sex and violence on television. Rena challenges Max to justify then erotic content on his station. He responds that it’s a “harmless outlet” for his subscribers. A defense which seems to draw interest the third guest, “Media prophet” Professor Brian O’Blivion.[2]
​
O’Blivion replicates an exaggerated version of this posthumanist ontology in video monologues curated by his daughter Bianca. She later tells Max that he invented the Videodrome signal to facilitate our “evolution as a technological animal”. In a reveal that might have inspired young Brassier, we learn that the Professor was quietly killed by fascists hoping to use Videodrome to purify North America. Rena’s guest is only a recording from Bianca’s video vault.

Still O’Blivion “responds” as Max speaks. He turns in his baronial chair, stroking his pencil moustache. When Rena asks him about the effects of erotic TV, he again “returns” her glance from the monitor. The content of the interview scene is less important than its formal erosion of the cue or frames distinguishing the real from its electronic simulacra (Browning 2007). Cronenberg cinematic world will deliquesce like old film stock; reforming as “new flesh”; infinitely plastic, deliriously non-compliant. Like Brassier’s extinction, Cronenberg’s catastrophe has already taken place.

​The de-framing is reiterated in the gun scene in Max’s apartment. He is watching a recording of O’Blivion stating that the video-induced cancers are new organs of perception:
​
I think that it is not really a tumor, not an uncontrolled, undirected little bubbling part of flesh, but that it is, in fact, a new organ, a new part of the brain. I think that massive doses of Videodrome signal will ultimately create a new outgrowth of the human brain, which will produce and control hallucination to the point that it will change human reality. After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there? You can see that, can’t you?

At this O’Blivion’s face fills the screen – effacing the partition between virtual and real. There is a reverse shot of Max’s face and naked torso. He has been absently stroking a sore patch on his abdomen with a gun, which has now opened into a wetly dilating vaginal slit that will double as his data port (Wilson 2016). Max is becoming the incarnation of the “new flesh”.

This brings us to Debbie Harry’s Nicki.
​
During O’Blivion’s video monologue on the Rina King show, Max asks her out. Back at his apartment, Nicki looks through his VHS’s for “porno” to get her “in the mood”. She picks up the Videodrome tape. He tells her it’s a constant round of torture and murder: “It ain’t exactly sex”.

Nicki is concerned by the poor quality of the pirated tape but she’s “turned on” by its representation of a women being flogged in a bare room with wet clay walls. (14.39) Max is unsettled by Nicki’s insouciance, though he later accedes to her desire for pain.[3] Nicki wears an off-the-shoulder top which allows her to show Max the cuts on her neck by lifting her hair. She invites him to cut her with his Swiss army knife (Browning 2007, 63).

This segues to an incongruously tender scene: Max and Nicki naked together on a rug; Videodrome torture images washing over them while Max perforates Nicki’s ear with a needle (Browning 2007).

The effectiveness of the sequence relies on the vulnerability both leads bring to their characters. The pornographer is revealed as a considerate lover, concerned for Nicki and her desires. Harry, meanwhile, convinces us of Nicki’s vulnerability and self-possession.

These s/m scenes are the erotic core of Videodrome. They seem preoccupied with a secret – Nicki’s “desire” – which is unveiled as another kind of death drive. In a later scene, Nicki tells Max that she’s been assigned to investigate Videodrome in Pittsburgh, where she intends to audition for the show. When he warns that its owners play “Rougher than even Nicki Brand wants to play” she asks him for a lighted cigarette, with which she burns her left breast.

Nicki’s sexuality remains opaque, however. We cannot know whether she always wanted to be killed on the show, whether her statement was foreplay and bravado; or, again, whether, like Max, her desires and fantasies have been accentuated by exposure to Videodrome signal.

At the same time, the ontological catastrophe of Videodrome renders these implied depths irrelevant.

Bianca later shows Max video footage of Nicki being strangled in the room with red clay walls (1.10.31). But, like O’Blivion, she persists as image – except by the end of the film the boundary between image and reality has eroded. As Nicki’s video avatar tells Max near its end, she has learned through Videodrome that “death is not the end”. Videodrome does not allow Nicki – or perhaps anyone – to die. Instead, she is co-opted as a kind of muse for the new flesh.

Max first hallucinates her in this form as a hooded torturer. After showing her garroting O’Oblivion in a coda to one of his video logs, the television tumesces with black veins like an auxiliary sexual organ from one of James Ballard’s machinic reveries. The scene ends with enormous video lips enveloping Max in hyperreal fantasy of sexual availability. The ambivalence of desire is lost.

But what is the new flesh? Its ontology mixes two contrary ingredients: a neuro-reductionism for which experience is a technically manipulable brain process, and a mad dog idealism, in which reality is plastic because nothing (including brain processes) is real.

However, these converge in hyperplasm. Boundaries between desire, fantasy and flesh crash.[4] Videodrome’s catastrophe is fundamentally different to that of Crash – an unthinkable absolute that, like Brassier’s extinction – is outside the correlation. In Videodrome, it is the extirpation of the secret, of death, and reason.

​Brassier’s eliminativism is complicated by his rationalism. He is prepared to eliminate consciousness, but must place reasons in a dead universe. His philosophy after Nihil follows Wilfred Sellars in proposing that agency arises for beings capable of interpreting their mental lives in terms of moves within communal language games. (See also Negarestani 2014 a and b).

This allows them to infer the psychological states of persons from what they do; and what they will do from what they ought to do in the “space of reasons”. Since psychology, unlike physics, is governed by rational norms, strict laws relating mental and physical descriptions is impossible.[5] Such an anti-reductionist physicalism resists arguments for eliminating the manifest image of persons and reasons while leaving natural science sovereign in its own sphere.

However, in a hyperplastic world the manifest image would boil away like plasma without leaving any residue that is even thinkable within the space of reasons.

Define a hyperplastic agent (HP) as one able to alter its body at any grain (without compromising its agency).
Anti-reductionism implies psychological changes in a system cannot be reliably inferred from physical changes in it (or vice versa). So, attributing a psychology to an HP would never tell us what it was going to do. Some auto-intervention could always delete any mental state we attributed to it and reason would be powerless to infer which. Nothing would follow about its future. We could not make sense of an HP using our psychology and neither could it.

We have already seen that Brassier’s analogy between philosophy as the “organon of extinction” and the Freudian death drive is problematic because the itineraries of knowledge and cosmic burn out diverge. In a later essay, he latches onto a speculative passage in the work of philosopher and cognitive scientist, Thomas Metzinger, to lay out a clearer itinerary for a dead subject. The extinction vent is now the neurotechnological ability to model the self as a vastly complex causal system rather than the selves we think we know.

Human personal experience, according to Metzinger, is a dynamic and temporally situated model of the world, which represents the modeler as a distinct and always present part of the phenomenological scene. The phenomenal world model thus includes a phenomenal self-model (PSM). However, neither model represents the subpersonal cognitive processes that generates it. To borrow a phrase from Michael Tye: the phenomenal world- and self-models are “transparent”. It is as if we looked through them into an immediately given world out there and a self-present mental life “in here” (Metzinger 2004 131: 165). However, this is a cognitive illusion generated by the brain’s inability to look under its own hood.

Metzinger calls this constraint “autoepistemic closure”. The world “out there” and our “inner” life appear not to be models or simulations because the brain neglects its own causal complexity. Autoepistemic Closure explains selfhood as a specific computational strategy. If selfhood is a higher-order model there is a rationale for keeping the representational load incurred by modeling process to a minimum.
The vivid immediacy of conscious experience is thus nothing to do with qualia – mythical intrinsic properties of conscious states. It is an artifact of neglect, or phenomenological darkness (Roden 2013): experience is a poor yardstick for understanding experience.
​
If so, Metzinger claims, we can also conceive of a Self/World model that did include this extra information (Metzinger 2004, 336).

A being with such a world model would lack the immediate consciousness of self or world. It would, in effect, be the completely objectified subject of a completed neuroscience.

The idea of a subject that knows itself as an object might seem paradoxical; but, taking up Metzinger’s hypothesis, Brassier argues that occupying space of reasons does not entail consciousness. Subjectivity, in this Kantian sense, is the practical capacity to acknowledge or deviate from norms or rules. It “requires no appeal to the awareness of a conscious self….” (Brassier 2013a) Thus, the subject of a completed neuroscience can be understood as the apotheosis of our scientific quest. A zombie subject, maybe, but one lying within the horizon of human thought.

However, if the argument for hyperplasticity goes through Brassier’s prospectus for a completed neuroscience is outside the scope of our normative epistemic vocabulary. This is because the hypothetical selfless agent would have just the information needed to engage in fine grained self-interventions of a hyperplastic kind (Roden 2014, 100-103; Roden Unpublished).

And if hyperplasticity renders the space of reasons inoperative: the self-less agent could not qualify as a rational subject either. The completion of neurotechnology would not only eliminate conscious selves but rational agency as such.

​In Videodrome Cronenberg transposes the correlational posthumanism of Ballard and much of the academic “posthumanities” onto a speculative account of the posthuman as a technological rupture in the correlation.

This idea of rupture can be conceptually tamed up to a point – that is, roughly, what I sought to achieve in Posthuman Life. So, we can wrap up the idea of the posthuman in schemas like SP which states:

SP: Descendants of current humans could become inhuman due to some process of technological alteration.
Where the idea of becoming inhuman through technical alteration is addressed in a distinct schema that I call the disconnection thesis (DT). Very roughly DT equates becoming nonhuman with agential independence from the social-technical systems we designate as human (Roden 2012; 2014, Ch5).

Brassier and Metzinger’s hypothesis of an objectified subject also conforms to this schema for rupture – since it implies a radically different agent, unlike anything humanly attainable. But the argument from hyperplasticity gives it an added twist. This agency (it appears) would lie outside our normative vocabulary. It would be an agent we could not understand as agent.

Speculative posthumanism is consequently unbounded by any concept derived from human experience or sense-making.[6] Or otherwise put, if our concept of agency or subjectivity extends to “hyperagency” we never got agency in the first place.

If I am right, then, speculative posthumanism corresponds to a hole in our understanding of the technological future. Even Brassier’s hyper-bleak futurism founders here, in darkness more absolute than Crash and cosmic burn out.[7] It seems, then, that the conception of the posthuman is threatened by an incoherence not unlike that afflicting Cronenberg’s new flesh ontology. It is, as Derrida might put it, a “regulated incoherence”, however. It allows a thought of posthuman agency even if this thought is forced to confront its own darkness and inadequacy (Derrida 1998, 259).[8]  This dark posthumanismrequires us to confront a future beyond intelligibility. In Claire Colebrook’s words, it asks how we orient to a “life beyond humanity, beyond ethics and politics”[9]. But whence this demand, this need for orientation?

Unbounded posthumanism is the Xenomorph blood eating through the pseudo-rigorous formulae defining human/posthuman succession or “disconnection”.[10].  It seems, then, that the desire or demand for orientation is not elicited by a concept.  Yet if our relationship to the posthuman is not conceptual – or ethical – might it be aesthetic?

That is, at least, a model we have traditionally used to understand relationships to things which involve a feeling unbound by concept or need. As Steven Shaviro writes “Aesthetics involves feeling an object for its own sake, beyond those aspects of it that can be understood or used.” (Shaviro 2014, Loc 878).[11]

But there are no posthumans. Whatever demands or elicits feeling here is not the posthuman as such.[12] There is nothing to feel. However, aesthetics need not be occupied by things. Ballard’s and Cronenberg’s texts are not things but blocks of metaphor and sensation whose incoherence is also regulated by formal operations that adjoin disparate or antagonistic elements. They are, likewise, invested in something real – if not object-like – our intimate involvement with a planetary technical system too abstracted to be predicted, interpreted and too complex and large to be felt.[13] Hypermodernity: extreme derangements and shocking metamorphoses.  The protean social in Ballard; the intimate coupling of desiring-media in Cronenberg: micro-disconnections that, far from being oriented by the will-to-know or the will-to-nothing, are counter-final. The zero horizon which cannot be contained in any idea of progress or reason (Roden 2014, Ch7).

The burden of this encounter rows us back from the alien shores of the hyperplastic to a fissure running through the thought of Ballard, Brassier and Cronenberg. SP is constitutively aesthetic because it perceives the human as massively contingent – nested in a space whose limits are inadequately conceptualized, or unknown. Yet this contingency is not thought but executed in machineries of brutal and uncompromising abstraction.

​Bakker____2014, “Zahavi, Dennett, and the End of Being” https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/05/28/zahavi-dennett-and-the-end-of-being/, Accessed 22 June 2016.

Ballard, J.G. 2014, The Complete Short Stories Volume II, London: Fourth Estate.

Bakker, R.S., 2009. Neuropath. Macmillan.

Baudrillard, Jean (1994). ‘Crash’. Simulacra and Simulations, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser, Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 111-119.

Brandom, R. 1994. Making it Explicit: Reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Harvard university press.

Brassier, R., 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brassier, R., 2011a. “Concepts and objects”. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, re. press. pp.47-65.

Brassier, Ray 2013a. “Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom”, http://www.mattin.org/essays/unfree_improvisation-compulsive_freedom.htm (Accessed March 2015)

Brassier, R. 2011b. “The View from Nowhere”. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 17: 7–23.

Browning, M., 2007. David Cronenberg: author or film-maker? Bristol: Intellect Books.

Burns, Edward M., and W. Dixon Ward. “Intervals, scales, and tuning.” The Psychology of Music 2 (1999): 215-264.

Caputo, J. D. 1984. “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ‘Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology”. Husserl Studies 1(1): 157–78.

Colebrook, C., 2014. Sex after life: Essays on extinction, Vol. 2. Open Humanities Press.

Derrida, J. 1998. Of Grammatology, G. Chakravorty Spivak (trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hägglund, M. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford Ca.: Stanford University Press.

Lyotard, J.-F. 1991. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, G. Bennington & R. Bowlby (trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Metzinger, T. 2004. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Negarestani, Reza. 2014a. The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human | e-flux. Retrieved April 30, 2014, from http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/

Negarestani, Reza. 2014b. ‘The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman’ | e-flux. Retrieved April 30, 2014, from http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-ii-the-inhuman/

Roden, David. (2012), “The Disconnection Thesis”. In A. Eden, J. Søraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds), The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, London: Springer.

Roden, David. 2013. “Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology”. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72: 169–88.

Roden, David (2014), Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge.

Roden, David (Forthcoming). “On Reason and Spectral Machines: an Anti-Normativist Response to Bounded Posthumanism”. To appear in Philosophy After Nature edited by Rosie Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn.

Roden (Unpublished). “Reduction, Elimination and Radical Uninterpretability: the case of hyperplastic agents” https://www.academia.edu/15054582/Reduction_Elimination_and_Radical_Uninterpretability

Sellars, S., & O’Hara, D. (2012). Extreme metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard 1967-2008. Fourth estate (Kindle Version)

Shaviro, S. 2012. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. MIT press.

Shaviro, Steven 2014. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shaviro, S. 2016. Discognition. Watkins Media Limited.

Wilson, S., 2016. “Death to Videodrome: Cronenberg, Zizek and the ontology of the real”.

Woodward, A., 2012. “The End of Time”. Parrhesia, 15, pp.87-105.

Woodward, A. 2015. “Nonhuman Life”. In Roffe, J. and Stark, H.L., 2015. Deleuze and the Non/human, 25-41.
[1]  “Vaughan excited some latent homosexual impulse only within the cabin of his car or driving along the highway. His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers – a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum – but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car. Detached from his automobile, particularly his own emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest” (117).

[2] O’Blivion is an effective caricature of the media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who claimed that new media alter us in virtue of the way they vehiculate information, not their content. The capacity of television or the internet to stimulate sexual desire through pornographic imagery is trivial to compared to their deracination of sedimented ways of life.

[3] Max is as shocked by Nicki’s interest in pornography (presumably assuming this to be an exclusively male preserve) as by her enthusiasm for a snuff movie.

[4] Apparently, an earlier draft of Videodrome included a scene where Nicki, Max and Bianca merge into an “orgiastic fusion” sprouting “mutated sex organs” from its ancillary orifices (Browning 2007, 70).

[5] See Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” in Essays on Actions and Events, (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001), 207-225.

[6] Some might hope to re-impose anthropological horizons by insisting on a local correlationism for agency: i.e. the only agents are those interpretable in principle “our” norms imputing beliefs, desires or actions. However, norms or reasons are not – as Robert Brandom concedes – “part of the intrinsic nature of things, which is entirely indifferent to them.” (Brandom 1994, 48).  So pragmatist accounts presuppose a further subject to interpret some events as normative. Since this extra subject (hors-sujet) remains outside pragmatist theory, the concept of agency is irreducible being interpretable in the light of social norms. “interpretability is ill-defined unless we have some conception of what is doing the interpreting.” (Roden 2014, 128; Roden Forthcoming). In-principle-interpretability is undefined unless we have some idea of what is doing the interpreting (Roden 2014, 128).

[7] Videodrome can be viewed as confused preview of “the semantic apocalypse” obsessively discussed by the psychologist protagonists of Bakker’s Neuropath. This is moment where science’s propensity to expunge meaning from the world doubles back on us, leaving a reality in which there are “innumerable causes for everything, but no reasons for anything.”

The book’s main antagonist, Neil Cassidy is a brilliant rogue neuroscientist who employs technologies acquired during his work for the US government’s anti-terrorist program to warp human mind/brains into terrible shapes of his devising. As Steven Shaviro points out in his book Discognition the epistemological double bind Bakker cultivates leaves the reader unable to apply convenient motivations or labels like “psychopath” to Cassidy. For he has used these same neurotechnologies to “subtract” all his illusions of selfhood and empathic communion. Reason and meaning are no longer on his agenda, as he informs us:
“What you folk-psychologists call anxiety, fear; all that bullshit. They’re little more than memories to me now. But I’ve also shut down some of the more deceptive circuits as well. I now know, for instance, that I will utterly nothing. I’m no longer fooled into thinking that “I” do anything at all” (Bakker 2010, 346)

[8] Bioethicists who take the long view will need to bracket any privileging of anthropoform subjects. For sure, subjects or moral persons may deserve consideration; but we cannot preclude the existence of non-Kantian agents no less deserving of consideration.

[9] “At the very least, it is time to question the ‘we’ who would subtend and be saved by the question of ethics and politics. If that ‘we’ is annihilated what remains is less a subject of thought, a common humanity, a proto-politics, but a fragile life that is not especially human. And once that is all that remains one might ask about the viability of living on: if humanity values life, rather than imagining itself as that which supervenes upon or survives beyond life, then that valuation would have to consider those modes of life beyond humanity, beyond ethics and politics. This would not yield an environmental ethics, for an environment is always that which surrounds or houses a living being as environs or milieu. What it might be is a counter ethic for the cosmos?” (Colebrook 2014: 148)

[10] A standard objection to speculative posthumanism is that it presupposes the kind of essentialist account of humanity which critical posthumanism, not to mention AUP, asks us to drop. In Posthuman Life I argued that we could side-step human essentialism by treating succession as a disconnection between human wrought social systems and some technologically constituted entity formerly belonging to those systems. An entity is posthuman if it acquires the functional autonomy to operate outside this assemblage (Roden 2012; Roden 2014, Chapter 5-6).

The Disconnection Thesis (DT) avoids essentialism by treating the Wide Human as a thing rather than an abstract property: an assemblage with both biological and non-biological components. Becoming posthuman is not a matter of losing a necessary property of humanity, but of moving from one environment and learning to function in another.

DT understand becoming nonhuman in terms of agential independence. An artifact like a robot is a “wide human” so long as it depends on its role in human ecologies to exist. It becomes posthuman if it comes to work outside them and enters other functional relationships – e.g. by learning to utilize free energy from nonhuman sources or replicating itself with foraged waste matter.

This is well and fine, but it still depends on characterizing the robot (or cyborg, AI, post-mortal, synth vampire, etc.) as a technically constituted agent. But what is an agent? AUP, as we saw, renders this question illegitimate because it denies there is a substantive theory agency that could apply to all agents. Not only does DT not tell us what posthumans are like; it has no critera for determining when a disconnection occurs.

It follows that understanding the posthuman (if possible) must proceed without rules. Kant argued the same of aesthetic judgements of taste. There are no rules for determining when something is beautiful (and, unlike the Kantian aesthetician, we cannot even appeal to the presupposition of universal assent when identifying disconnection – Roden 2014, 186-7). Similarly, artistic creation shapes objects or events which generate new rules or affordances; it is not limited by pre-existing rules. Unbounded posthumanism cannot lean on an aesthetic theory; but it is conditioned by aesthetic encounters and by the production of the new. Now, if this is right, then we need to ask what kind of encounters and productions furnish its distinctive content.

[11] “A subject does not cognize the beauty of an object. Rather, the object lures the subject while remaining indifferent to it; and the subject feels the object, without knowing it or possessing it or even caring about it. The object touches me, but for my part I cannot grasp it or lay hold of it, or make it last. I cannot dispel its other-ness, its alien splendor. If I could, I would no longer find it beautiful; I would, alas, merely find it useful” (Shaviro 2012, 4)

[12] Or at least, the only reason why we might think there are is an artifact of the lack of stable critera for identifying an event or a thing as posthuman.
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[13] “The self-augmenting/counter-final nature of modern technological systems implies that the conditions under which human ethical judgements are adapted can be overwritten by systems over which we have no ultimate control. A disconnection would be only the most extreme consequence of this “divergent, disrupted and diffuse systems of forces”. An ethics anthropologically bounded by the human world thus ignores its monstrously exorbitant character (Roden 2014, 186).”

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