​Never has the global economy faced such a thorough challenge from a virus. Previous epidemics scythed through populations and ravaged livelihoods, but they remained contained on a regional scale or, where global, impacted the world economy less precipitously. Noteworthy too is the fact that never in recent memory have Euro-American countries, whose governments and media still dominate global public discourse, been so affected by a health crisis. Pandemics that kill people in Asia and Africa do not create quite the same reverberations in media conglomerates as they do when they hit the hearts of imperial hegemons.
​
Covid-19 has starkly revealed not only the brutal systemic priorities of capitalism--profit-making over life-making—but also the relationship between capital and the capitalist state form. We should be attentive to this relationship in order to face a darker truth about this crisis: that it is far from an anomaly and that lacking a body blow to the system, we should prepare for a world where such crises and its effects become part of our daily lives.

In a recent article, Cinzia Arruzza and Felice Mometti have sketched the heterogeneity of responses of different governments to the pandemic. While some, such as Israel, India and Hungary, have certainly used the crisis to shore up authoritarianism, the pattern, according to Arruzza and Mometti, is by no means uniform. They cite examples of states such as the US where Trump, invoking the old racist “states’ rights” trope, is letting state governors decide the course of action for their own states, and Italy and Germany where attempts to enhance executive powers is being challenged by other governing institutions such as the EU. Given this diversity of governance strategies, Arruzza and Mometti conclude, “[r]ather than imposing abstract formulas upon a complex reality, it is more useful to pay attention to the experimentation with diverse forms of governance, both novel and age old, in the management of the pandemic.”

We agree with Arruzza and Mometti that states have responded differentially in their efforts to govern the crisis. Where we depart from their analysis is when they say that this disparateness implies that abstraction is redundant. We can begin with some general conclusions, drawing on the state-capital relationship.

First, just as at the start of the Great Depression, all governments are seeking to steer the rudder back to “business as usual” as fast as they can. The effort is to project the crisis as a temporary aberration. Second, and following from the first, states are currently investing in life-making institutions—setting up hospitals, distributing food, compensating wages from state funds—but they are doing so because they are forced to and therefore always on a temporary basis, and often such efforts are buttressed by repressive measures. Third, in the coming period we will see state policies seesaw between neoliberal and Keynesian—or even state-capitalist—responses. Such oscillations will undoubtedly produce much chaos at the level of politics. We will see both social democracy and centrism make comebacks, and there is the ever-present threat of authoritarian populism bordering into fascism, but we cannot let these turbulent currents at the level of the political blind us to what are steady pressures from capital: to accumulate with minimal sacrifice to profit and with scant respect for life. Fourth, the crisis is exacerbating existing oppression, amplifying the hardships and iniquities imposed on Black and Brown people, on women, and on the poor.

In tracing common drivers of the crisis, we explore in this essay what happens when the imperatives of life and life-making interface radically with the imperatives of profit-making. Because the crisis induced by the coronavirus is a public health crisis, questions of “economy” and “welfare” are thrust together in an unprecedented manner. We develop our analysis along two doubled axes: one, the dyad of welfare and repressive functions of capitalist states; and two, the dual tendencies towards state interventionism and neoliberalism that we are witnessing in states’ responses to the crisis. The first doubled relation concerns a state’s relationship to its citizens; the other is its relationship to capital.

There is always an intertwined and profoundly contradictory relationship between the welfare and repressive functions of capitalist states. Unlike states in previous class societies, capitalist states have always managed social welfare in order to maintain and constrain the material security of “their” populations. They establish and shape, on a day-to-day basis, institutions of social reproduction of the workforce. These have included, simultaneously, tasks of educating and keeping healthy its citizens as well as labelling, policing, and surveilling them.

These principles, of social policy and of profit-making, may clash in detail, but they share a common root. As one C19 British Poor Law commissioner remarked,

​Today’s “commissioners” tailor welfare institutions to the demands of markets and states for fit, educated workers to enhance capital’s competitive edge. Capital tries to impose its discipline on the biological rhythms of birth, aging and death, but its relationship to life-making is one of reluctant dependence. It is dependent on a healthy, able-bodied workforce but reluctant to have resources diverted to life-making institutions. What makes this crisis so unusual is that it has forced to the fore capital’s dependence on its workforce.
​
If in liberal normality the welfare and repressive spheres, although connected, are most often experienced as separate, right now they’re scrambled together in unprecedented ways. The public health crisis has provoked the imposition of a state of emergency. Security forces are commanded onto the streets as agents of welfare. Police are mobilized as the protectors of public health, the enforcers of social distancing. States are justifying intensified surveillance as a public safety measure.

The unleashing of repressive organs as agents of welfare has brought sickening scenes. In India, a man was beaten to death by the police when he stepped out to buy biscuits. He was of course Muslim. In France, riots broke out in the banlieux, where predominantly racialized groups have long been crammed into high rise accommodation, enduring chronic police intimidation, yet now the streets are patrolled by police as public health enforcers. In America a fascist-libertarian response has been to demand that the state step back from mandating health measures such as quarantine and lockdown. A danger is that such disastrous (and racist and social-Darwinist)arguments find a wider audience precisely because states deploy repression in the goal of protecting public health.

Welfare regimes, or social reproduction capacities, however, are necessarily also double-sided under capitalism. “Welfare from above” includes the investments in social reproduction that capital and states are forced to grant in their own interests. Here is where capital’s reluctant dependence on social reproduction is revealed. But in these pandemic times we are also witness to a rich outburst of “welfare from below,” or class struggle social reproduction. So while states and capital are reversing, temporarily and in a piecemeal manner, a few planks of the neoliberal edifice (not least, the devaluation of care work), workers, especially women workers, are leading wildcat strikes to demand PPE and to insist that production be directed to human need, and ordinary people are setting up food banks and mutual aid networks. The contradictions between the “from above” and “from below” facets of social reproduction will only intensify with the deepening of the crisis. As mass unemployment, poverty and starvation stalk the globe we are bound to witness a sharper polarization between forces advocating social Darwinism, claiming that the limited social reproduction cake be monopolized by the fittest, and forces of socialist collectivism fighting for a world where the cake belongs to the bakers.

​The crisis is unique, in that it begins as a “demobilization crisis.” With swathes of industry shut down in the interests of public health, the onrushing slump is inevitable. It hasn’t yet revealed its shape. It won’t be a V, it may be a U, but it’ll likely be more protracted: a W or an L. With little prospect of a Covid-19 vaccine until 2021, production and consumption look set to be hobbled by fears of coronaviral contagion and by punctuated lockdowns. The dislocation already wreaked, in the shape of mass unemployment, bankruptcies, and ballooning consumer, business, and public debt, will resist easy fixes. A deflationary spiral may loom around the corner, with its escalating effects on debt.
​
The last global “L” (or “W”) occurred in the 1930s, when plummeting output was followed by a deflationary spiral, years of flatlining output, the involution of global trade, and pervasive economic conflict and social pain. Food, then as now, was destroyed by the ton, as demand fell, even as need rose. Businesses scrapped over shrinking markets; workers and the unemployed fought over the few remaining jobs or looked left and fought back through marches, sitdown strikes and unionization.

It was in these fires of the 1930s that new accumulation regimes were forged. From the ashes of economic liberalism arose Keynesianism and the New Deal, import-substitution industrialization, and war economies (fascist, Stalinist, and corporatist). The nation state impressed its contours on the new arrangements: nationalized monopolies, capital controls and national planning–and the captive savings pools from which welfare expansion, or institutions of social reproduction, could be funded.

Will the gravity of the public health emergency, and of the economic plunge, bring back state capitalism and planning? Certainly, the interventionist capacity of the Chinese state vis-à-vis Chinese capital (not only vis-à-vis its citizens) conditioned its relatively swift response to Covid-19. In the West, CEOs are lining up to demand that taxpayers assume their losses. Businesses will be bailed out, and governments will referee and steer the course of collapse, and the attempts to kickstart growth.

Yet although government interventions have been on a massive scale, and we’ve seen governments like that of the US ordering industry giants like GM to produce ventilators, this will not be the state-capitalist 1930s redux. Global supply chains, even though many are being pruned, are too densely interwoven, and finance too internationalized. Neoliberal norms, including the dominance of corporations and the veneration of markets, are carved deep into the architecture of power, in liberal Britain and statist China alike.

State responses will arrive in three overlapping waves: coordinating responses to the health emergency, responding to economic and social collapse, and attempting to kickstart economic growth through stimulus packages.

As a left, we should have our own response to these phases. For the first, we must take our lead from the existing struggles on the ground: the inspiring wildcat strikes by workers refusing to make non-essential goods or to risk their own health and that of their families, the organizing being done by women and feminists globally to protest the double burden of essential work and increased housework during lockdown, and the battles being waged by antiracist activists against the brutality of incarcerating people during a pandemic or penning them in detention camps. The lessons from these battles provide a blueprint for how we should frame our response in the next two phases. We must continue to demand that life-making activities and institutions be prioritized to ward off social collapse, while investment be directed to creating public works programs and a low-energy green economy, a just transition, rather than bailing out the airline industry.

The great Muslim polymath, Ibn Khaldun, who lost his family to the Black Death, observed that the Plague had overtaken dynasties “at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration.” There are uncanny echoes of Khaldun’s comment in how a pandemic is exposing the past brutalities and future ruins of our own “senile” system.

What we outline above are general tendencies within the system that we can expect in the coming juncture. But tendencies within capitalism that have held true since its birth are no longer the only factors that will determine the fate of life on this planet. Our current crisis should be understood against the backdrop of a decaying capitalism. That is to say, capitalism is tending toward sharper economic crises, and it is generating biological and environmental hazards on an escalating scale. The accumulated economic pasts of capitalism and its cumulative depredation of nature have etched their indelible marks on the system.

And rescuing this system through reform is no longer an ambitious hope or the subject of an interesting intra-left debate, but a dangerous fantasy.

​The coronavirus crisis is a crisis of capitalism in its causation and through its effects. A microscopic pathogen is exposing the pathologies of the larger social system. In this sense it is not a “natural” crisis but a crisis wrought by nature thoroughly inflected by capitalism.
​
Let’s start with causation. A zoonotic disease can jump from animal to human. The linkages from bat to pangolin (a likely intermediate host) to human all appear accidental. But if we look behind the xenophobic headlines we can see how deeply system-conditioned they are.

Following Rob Wallace’s argument that agribusiness “has entered a strategic alliance with influenza”, we can see how factory livestock farming sets up ideal environments for pathogens to spread. Once it’s in a chicken, duck or pig, the next hosts are nicely lined up, cheek by jowl, with near-identical genes. Three-quarters of “new or emerging” diseases that infect humans have originated in wild or domesticated animals.⁠

In the case of coronavirus, it’s our relationship to wilderness and its animals that mapped the pathogenesis of this crisis. In early capitalism, trappers fanned out across vast territories to capture creatures for the luxury fur trade. Now almost all the wildernesses are encroached and the primary forests are being decimated. As a recent study by US wildlife epidemiologists has highlighted, deforestation and other forms of habitat encroachment bring humans up close to wildlife. The last four decades have seen a two- to three-fold increase in zoonosis–pathogens’ leaps from animal to human.

Meanwhile the demand for luxury “wild” animal products continues. In China there continues a lucrative trade in wild animals for food and medicine, while as the recent popular series Tiger King shows, exotic breeding programs and traffic in wild animals is not a preserve of China or African countries but is alive and well in the belly of the beast, the US.

We are speaking here of the “metabolic rift”—the alienation of humanity from the natural world with capitalism orchestrating a ruthlessness toward land and the life forms on it.

Capitalist production depends on poverty and encourages waste. Nowhere is this clearer than in agriculture, increasingly geared to meat, the most inefficient means of converting sunshine, rainfall and soil into amino acids and carbohydrates for human consumption. One hectare planted with rice or potatoes feeds twenty people in a year; the same hectare given over to sheep or cattle can feed only one or two. Half of the world’s crops are fed to livestock, and they consume vast quantities of water and (indirectly) oil too. Worldwide, meat production increased nearly 5 times in the second half of the 20th century, and it continues to soar. The fires in the Amazon last year were above all along roads that transport cattle to the slaughterhouses. In this, coronavirus and climate change share a root cause.

And they share something else. They highlight the thwarting of the human ability to mitigate risk, insofar as its mitigation rubs against the corporate grain. The risks of climate breakdown are well known, existential, yet next to nothing is being done to mitigate them–as shown each month in the measurements from Mauna Loa. So too the Covid-19 pandemic. Public health experts and social scientists have for years been warning of a repeat of a viral outbreak similar in scope and lethality to the 1918 pandemic. And just like the Cassandras of climate change, these public health warnings were blithely ignored or ridiculed by states and bosses.

There is a dark temporal suicide embedded in these gestures of bourgeois denial. They ignore the warnings because their noses are at the windowpane of the present alone.

The greatest achievement of the bourgeois discourse of Progress was the secularization of Time. Capitalist progress was projected through time as immanent, as coextensive with ‘Nature.’ Colonizing Europe harnessed this bourgeois Time to conquer Space: colonies, marked by their distance from  the metropole, were cast as “backward.” Our current crisis, cuing up ravaged futures and unmet potentials, is finally extinguishing this Immanent Time as it unmoors historical time from its long-held bourgeois tethers. Pathogens, forest fires and floods are de-naturalizing bourgeois empty time, stamping out its smooth progressive trajectory and reinvesting it with messianic lurches, breaks, and therefore possibilities.

And as the global ruling class fights to restore time and the world to their murderous normalcy, our class can restore the urgency of now, articulated through “leaps, leaps, leaps.”

taken from:

by Nick Land

​This is the freedom of the void which rises to a passion and takes shape in the world; while still remaining theoretical, it takes shape in the Hindu fanaticism of pure contemplation, but when it turns to actual practice, it takes shape in religion and politics alike as the fanaticism of destruction— the destruction of the whole subsisting social order—as the elimination of individuals who are objects of suspicion to any social order, and the annihilation of any organization which tries to rise anew from the ruins [H VII]. 

the republic being permanently menaced from the outside by the despots surrounding it, the means to its preservation cannot be imagined as moral means, for the republic will preserve itself only by war, and nothing is less moral than war. I ask how one will be able to demonstrate that in a state rendered immoral by its obligations, it is essential that the individual be moral? I will go further: it is a very good thing he is not. The Greek lawgivers perfectly appreciated the capital necessity of corrupting the member citizens in order that, their moral dissolution coming into conflict with the establishment and its values, there would result the insurrection that is always indispensible to a political system of perfect happiness which, like republican government, must necessarily excite the hatred and envy of all its foreign neighbours. Insurrection, thought these sage legislators, is not at all a moral condition; however, it has got to be a republic’s permanent condition. Hence it would be no less absurd than dangerous to require that those who are to ensure the perpetual immoral subversion of the established order themselves be moral beings: for the state of a moral man is one of tranquillity and peace, the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest that pushes him to, and identifies him with, the necessary insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government of which he is a member [S III 498]. 
​
We have no true pleasure except in expending uselessly, as if a wound opens in us [X 170]. 
the most unavowable aspects of our pleasures connect us the most solidly [IV 218].

​It has often been suggested—not least by Sartre—that Bataille replaces dialectic and revolution with the paralysed revolt of transgression. It is transgression that opens the way to tragic communication, the exultation in the utter immolation of order that consummates and ruins humanity in a sacrifice without limits. Bataille is a philosopher not of indifference, but of evil, of an evil that will always be the name for those processes that flagrantly violate all human utility, all accumulative reason, all stability and all sense. 
​
He considers Nietzsche to have amply demonstrated that the criteria of the good: selfidentity, permanence, benevolence, and transcendent individuality, are ultimately rooted in the preservative impulses of a peculiarly sordid, inert, and cowardly species of animals. Despite his pseudo-sovereignty, the Occidental God—as the guarantor of the good—has always been the ideal instrument of human reactivity, the numbingly antiexperimental principle of utilitarian calculus. To defy God, in a celebration of evil, is to threaten mankind with adventures that they have been determined to outlaw. 

The Kantian cultural revolution is associated with a deepened usage of juridical discourse in philosophy. Transcendental philosophy equates knowing with legislation, displacing the previously dominant axis of argumentation—extended between scepticism and belief—with one organized in terms of legitimacy and illegitimacy. The sense of logic, for example, undergoes a massive—if largely subterranean—shift; from evident truth to necessary rule. The metaphysical errors which Kant critiques are formally described as crimes, and more specifically, as violations of rights. The subject is divided into faculties, with strictly demarcated domains of legitimate sovereignty, beyond which their exercise is a transgression. Most important to Kant are the reciprocal injustices of reason and understanding, with his First Critique detailing the trespasses of reason upon the understanding, or theory, and his Second Critique defending reason against theoretical incursions into its proper domain; that of moral legislation. The lower faculties of sensation, and, to a lesser extent, imagination, are of more indirect concern, since they are branded as incorrigible reprobates; corrupted by their insinuation into the swamp of the body. 

Kant initiated the modern tradition of insidious theism by shielding God from theoretical investigation, whilst maintaining the moral necessity of his existence. God was exiled into a space of pure practical reason, simultaneously protected against intellectual transgression and underwriting moral law. In his Critique of Judgement Kant describes the moral impossibility of a world without God, and the fate of one attempting to live according to it, in the following terms: 

Deceit, violence, and envy will always be rife around him, although he himself is honest, peaceable, and benevolent; and the other righteous men he meets in the world, no matter how deserving they may be of happiness, will be subjected by nature, which takes no heed of such deserts, to all the evils of want, disease, and untimely death, just as are the other animals of the earth. And so it will continue to be until one wide grave engulfs them all—just and unjust, there is no distinction in the grave—and hurls them back into the abyss of the aimless chaos of matter from which they were taken—they that were able to believe themselves the final end of creation [K X 415–16]. 

This passage might be from Sade’s Justine: the Misfortunes of Virtue, reminding us that the age of Kant is tangled with that of Sade, a writer who explored the exacerbation of transgression, rather than its juridical resolution. Where Kant consolidated the modern pact between philosophy and the state, Sade fused literature with crime in the dungeons of both old and new regimes. Sade insisted upon reasoning about God repeating original sin, but even after obliterating him with a blizzard of theoretical discourse his hunger for ​atheological aggression remained insatiable, Sade does not seek to negotiate with God or the state, but to ceaselessly resist their possibility. Accordingly, his political pamphlets do not appeal for improved institutions, but only for the restless vigilance of armed masses in the streets. ‘Abstract negation’ or ‘negative freedom’ are Hegel’s expressions for this sterilizing resistance which erases the position of the subject. It could equally be described as real death. 

Bataille’s engagement with Sade is prolonged and intense, but also sporadic, consisting of articles and essays which never reach the pitch of intimacy characterizing Sur Nietzsche. After Nietzsche, however, it is Sade who comes closest to such an intimacy, and—like Nietzsche—accompanies Bataille throughout the entire length of his textual voyage, with an intellectual solidarity so great that it touches upon a complete erasure of distinction. Sade plays an important role in luring Bataille’s discussion of eroticism into its abyssal (non)sense, because his writing is baked to charcoal in the sacred. No writer fathoms more profoundly the utter inutility of the erotic impulse, nor its sacrilegious and insurrectionary fury. ‘Sade consecrated interminable works to the affirmation of unacceptable values: according to him life is the search for pleasure, and pleasure is proportional to the destruction of life. In other words, life attains the highest degree of intensity in a monstrous negation of its principle’ [X 179]. 

​The orgies, massacres, and blasphemies of the Sadean text knit almost seamlessly onto Bataille’s obsession with an intolerable sacrificial wastage vomited into the suppurating cavity of the divine. Bataille finds in these texts ‘the excessive negation of the principle upon which life rests’ [X 168], a pitch of voluptuary intensity at which eroticism passes unreservedly into the sacred. Compared to the Sade-interpretations of Blanchot, for instance, despite complex affinities and inter-textual communications, there is a ravine as great as any that could be imagined; an incommensurability of thought insinuated into a common and inevitable vocabulary. ‘Negation’, ‘crime’, ‘atheism’, ‘revolt’, are words that Bataille associates with a heterogeneity so repugnant to elevated thought that its repression must be presupposed in the origination of any possible speculation, whereas for Blanchot these are words that belong to reason itself, at least, from the moment that it is permitted to find itself in the solitude of literature. It is only our inertia and our hypocrisy—as Blanchot suggests with an insidious power—that protect us from the latent fury of reason. Unlike Blanchot, Bataille does not emphasize the ruthless consistency of enlightenment rationalism in Sade’s writings, even though he acknowledges that Sade seems ‘to have been the most consequential representative of XVIIIth century French materialism’ [I 337]. ‘By definition, excess is external to reason’ [X 168], he remarks in one discussion of Sade, and it is an incitement to criminality, rather than an exultant rationality that he detects in passages such as this: 

atheism is the one system of all those prone to reason. As we gradually proceeded to our enlightenment, we came more and more to feel that, motion being inherent in matter, the prime mover existed only as an illusion, and that all that exists having to be in motion, the motor was useless; we sensed that this chimerical divinity, prudently invented by the earliest legislators, was, in their hands, simply one more means to enthrall us, and that, reserving unto themselves the right to make the phantom speak, they knew very well how to get him to say nothing but what would ​shore up the preposterous laws whereby they declared they served us [S III 482].

Either believe in God and adore him, or disbelieve and demobilize, for it is as senseless to rage against omnipotence as inexistence. Thus it is that Sade’s opponents take the two strands of his defiance to be mutually contradicting, to cancel each other, and—once aufhebt—expressing either a futile rage flung into the void, or a desperate plea for reconciliation. ‘Blasphemy is never logical. If an omnipotent God exists, the blasphemer can only be damaging himself by insulting him; if he does not exist, there is no one there to insult’, writes Hayman [Hay 31]. After all, how can one revolt against a fiction? It is perhaps a symptom of fixation or regression, an unresolved infantilism in any case, for affect to be detached so completely from an acknowledged reality. 

In a world divided between theistic enthusiasts and secularist depressives there is little patience for the atheist who nurtures a passionate hatred for God. The mixture of naturalism and blasphemy that characterizes the Sadean text occupies the space of our blindness, to which Bataille’s writings are not unreasonably assimilated. If there is contradiction here it is one that is coextensive with the unconscious; the consequence of a revolt incommensurate with the ontological weight of its object. That God has wrought such loathesomeness without even having existed only exacerbates the hatred pitched against him. An atheism that does not hunger for God’s blood is an inanity, and the anaemic feebleness of secular rationalism has so little appeal that it approximates to an argument for his existence. What is suggested by the Sadean furore is that anyone who does not exult at the thought of driving nails through the limbs of the Nazarene is something less than an atheist; merely a disappointed slave. 

Amongst the diseases Bataille shares with Nietzsche is the insistence that the death of God is not an epistemic conviction, but a crime. It is no less worthy of cathedrals than the tyrant it abolished, and whose grave it continues to desecrate. Indeed, such new cathedrals are inextricable from the unholy festivities of desecration which resound through them, as the texts of Sade, Nietzsche, and Bataille themselves illustrate. 

The illimitable criminality driving Bataille’s writing’s provokes no hint of repentence within it, but that does not make him a pagan, which is to say juridically: unfit to plead. Lacking the slightest interest in justification, innocence is not an aspiration he nourishes. He is closer to Satan than to Pan, propelled by a defiant culpability. Bataille is altogether too morbid to be a pagan, and yet, despite what is in part a reactive relation to Christianity, the thought of necessary crime is an interpretation of the tragic, and of hubris. Tragic fate is the necessity that the forbidden happen, and happen as the forbidden. Quoting what he takes to be a latent popular maxim, Bataille writes that ‘the prohibition is there to be violated’ [X 67]. He associates this subterranean collective insight with an ‘indifference to logic’ [X 67] at the root of social regulation, since ‘[t]he violation committed is not of a nature to suppress the possibility and the sense of the emotion opposed to it: it is even the justification and the source’ [X 67]. One of his formulae for this effective paradox is the ‘viola t [ion of] prohibition …according to a rule’ [X 75]. Such a violation is not so much provoked by prohibition, as it is compelled by an inexorable process to which prohibition is a response. This thought is commonly expressed within his writings in terms of the economic inevitability of evil, and also, occasionally, as the eruption of transgression. 

As an overt theme, ‘transgression’ is nothing like as dominant within Bataille’s writings as is often suggested, and it is only with extraordinary arbitrariness that he can be described as a ‘philosopher of transgression’. If it were not for the sustained discussion to be found in Eroticism it is unlikely that this term would have come to be read as anything more than the marginal elaboration of a more basic problem (that of expenditure, consumption, or sacrifice). Nevertheless, criminal variations analagous to transgression are prolifically distributed throughout his writings, and lend themselves with apparent ease to a measure of formulation.

In a broadly Nietzschean fashion, Bataille understands law as the imperative to the preservation of discrete being. Law summarizes conditions of existence, and shares its arbitrariness with the survival of the human race. The servility of a legal existence is that of an unconditional one (of existence for its own sake); involving the submission of consumption to its reproduction, and eventually to its complete normative suppression within an obsessional productivism. The word Bataille usually employs to mark the preserve of law is ‘discontinuity’, which is broadly synonymous with ‘transcendence’; Bataille’s thought of discontinuity is more intricate than his fluent deployment of the word might indicate. It is the condition for transcendent illusion or ideality, and precisely for this reason it cannot be grasped by a transcendent apparatus, by the inter-knitted series of conceptions involving negation, logical distinction, simple disjunction, essential difference, etc. 

Discontinuity is not ontologically grounded (in the fashion of a Leibnizean monad for instance), but positively fabricated in the same process that amasses resources for its disposal. Accumulation does not presuppose a subject or individual, but rather founds one. This is because any possible self—or relative isolation—is only ever precipitated as a precarious digression within a general economy, perpetually renegotiated across the scale of energy flows. The relative autonomy of the organism is not an ontological given but a material achievement which—even at its apex—remains quite incommensurable with the notion of an individual soul or personality. It is in large part because death attests so strongly to this fact that theology has monotonously demanded its systematic effacement. 

​Because isolation is—in an abnormal sense—‘quantitative’, quantity cannot be conceived arithmetically on the basis of discretion. Base, general, or solar economics— which are amongst Bataille’s names for economics at the level of emergent discontinuities—cannot be organized by any prior conceptual matrix. The distinctions between quantity/quality, degree/kind, analogue/ digital, etc., which typically manage economic thought, are all dependent upon the prior acceptance of discontinuity or derivative articulation. It is obvious that the economics or energetics which Bataille associates with base cosmology cannot be identified with any kind of physicalistic theory, since the logical and mathematical concepts underlying any such theory are devastated by the radical interrogation of simple difference. With the operation of a sufficiently delicate materialist apparatus general economy can in large measure be thought, but in the end its fragmentary and ironic character stems from a delirial genesis in the violation of articulate lucidity. 

The solar source of all terrestrial resources commits them to an abysmal generosity, which Bataille calls ‘glory’. This is perhaps best understood as a contagious profligacy, according to which all inhibition, accumulation, and reservation is destined to fail. The infrastructure of the terrestrial process inheres in the obstructive character of the earth, in its mere bulk as a momentary arrest of solar energy flow, which lends itself to hypostatization. When the silting-up of energy upon the surface of the planet is interpreted by its complex consequences as rigid utility, a productivist civilization is initiated, whose culture involves a history of ontology, and a moral order. Systemic limits to growth require that the inevitable re-commencement of the solar trajectory scorches jagged perforations through such civilizations. The resultant ruptures cannot be securely assimilated to a meta-social homeostatic mechanism, because they have an immoderate, epidemic tendency. Bataille writes of ‘the virulence of death’ [X 70]. Expenditure is irreducibly ruinous because it is not merely useless, but also contagious. Nothing is more infectious than the passion for collapse. Predominant amongst the incendiary and epidemic gashes which contravene the interests of mankind are eroticism, base religion, inutile criminality, and war.

by Nick Land

​It is tempting to understand the difference between ‘general’ and ‘restricted’ economy as commensurate with that between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems. In both cases the former terms seem to refer to the total field of energy exchange, and the latter to the differentiated regions within such a field. A translation of this kind is not wholly inappropriate, but it simplifies the situation excessively. That which circulates in an economy of the kind Bataille describes is less a ‘content’ with a general and a local intelligibility than the capacity for relative isolation or restriction as such. There is a sense (that of scientific objectivism) in which utility presupposes negative entropy, but abstract order of this kind is quite different from the ‘canalization’ [VII 467] which is utility’s basic characteristic. The quasi-autonomous territories which inhibit the concrete universalization of the second thermodynamic law are not conditions of ‘composition’ as Bataille uses this term, they are composition as such. In other words, composition is simultaneous with the real differentiation ‘of’ space. 

It is thus that Bataille extracts ‘production’ from the idealist schemas which continue to operate within Marx’s analysis, those lending the critique of political economy a marked humanist tendency. Work is not an origin, sublating divine creation into historical concretion, but an impersonal potential to exploit (release) energy. The humanized exploitation of class societies is not without a prototype, since surplus production is only possible because of the solar inheritance it pillages. Bataille’s solar economics is inscribed within the lacuna in Marxism opened by the absence of a theory of excess, and describes the truly primitive (impersonal) accumulation of resources. Such cosmichistorical economy is axiomatized by the formula that ‘the energy produced is superior to the energy necessary to its production’ [VII 466], and maps out the main-sequence of terrestrial development, from which the convulsions of civilization are an aberration. 

​Strictly speaking, the libidinal main-sequence, impersonal accumulation, or primary (solar) inhibition, emerges simultaneously with life, and persists in a more or less naked state up until the beginning of sedentary agriculture, sometime after the last ice-age. Life is simply the name we give to the surface-effects of the mainsequence. Compared to the violently erratic libidinal processes that follow it, the main-sequence seems remarkably stable. Nevertheless, libido departs from its pre-history only because it has already become unstable within it, and even though the preponderant part of the main-sequence occurs within a geological time-span, the evidence of a basic tendency to the geometric acceleration of the process is unmistakable.

The main-sequence is a burning cycle, which can be understood as a physico-chemical volatilization of the planetary crust, a complexification of the energy-cycle, or, more generally, as a dilation of the solar-economic circuits that compose organic matter, knitting it into a fabric that includes an ever-increasing proportion of the (‘inorganic’) energetic and geo-chemical planetary infrastructure. Of course, the distinction between the organic and the inorganic is without final usefulness, because organic matter is only a name for that fragment of inorganic material that has been woven into meta-stable regional compositions. If a negative prefix is to be used, it would be more accurate to place it on the side of life, since the difference is unilateral, with inorganic matter proving itself to be non-exclusive, or indifferent to its organization, whereas life necessarily operates on the basis of selection and filtering functions. 

When colloidal matter enters the main-sequence it begins to differentiate two tendencies, which Freud characterized at a higher level with a distinction between ‘φ’ and ‘ψ’, or communication and isolation (immanence/transcendence, death and confusion)8. Organic libido emerges with the gradual differentiation of what seem superficially to be two groups of drives (Freud does not describe them as such until later). A progressive tendency isolates or ‘individuates’ the organism, first by nucleation (prokaryotes to eukaryotes), and then through the isolation of a germ-line, dividing the protoplasm into ‘generative cells’ and ‘somatic cells’. This is the archaic form of Freud’s ‘Eros’; on the one hand a tension between soma and generation, and on the other a conservation of dissipative forces within an economy of the species, leading ultimately to sexuality. But this erotic or speciating tendency is perpetually endangered by a regressive tendency that leads to dissolution (Thanatos). 

The ‘φ’ or communication tendency accentuates the various ‘interactions’ between biological matter and its ‘outside’, and is thus equivalent to a lowering of the organic barrier threshold, essential to photo-reactivity, assimilation, cybernetic regulation, nutrition, etc. This is the complex of organic functions which Bataille associates with primary immanence. The ‘ψ’ or isolation tendency is the inhibition of exchange, a raising of the barrier threshold that generates a measure of invariant stability, the conservation of code, controlled expenditure of bio-energetic reserves, etc. The combined operation of these tendencies effects a selective distribution in the degree of fusion between the organism and its environment (a difference that is not given but produced), which precariously stabilizes a level of composition. The maximum state of φ ( φmax) is equivalent to the complete dissolution of the organism, at which point its persistence would be a matter of unrestricted chance, free-floating at the edge of zero. At any other level of φ the organism sustains a measure of integration, and what we call ‘the organism’ is only this variable cohesiveness, or intensity: the real basis of Bataille’s ‘transcendence’; the mazefringe of death. 

​Isolation or transcendence (ψ) is an intensive quantity, since it lacks pre-given extensive co-ordinates. In other words, there is no logico-mathematical apparatus appropriate to the emergence of ψ, since ψ ‘is itself’ the basic measure of identifiability or equivalence. Communication (φ) escapes both identity and equivalence because it is indifferentiation or uninhibited flow; the intensive zero, energy-blank, silence, death. Only differentiation from φ (dφ=ψ) is able to function as a resource, storing energy, and precipitating compositions (forms, behaviours, signs). The intensive quantity ψ is therefore the basis and currency of extensive accumulation. 

​Bataille’s economics is based on the principle that extensive exchange (ψ1 → ψ2) is primitively accumulative. The extensive exchange is comprised of two intensive transitions: an expenditure (ψ → φ) and an acquisition (φ → ψ), with the latter always exceeding the requirement of replacement, so that ψ1 < ψ2. Bataille’s emphasis on this ​point leaves little room for misunderstanding: ‘the energy that the plant appropriates to its mode of life is superior to the energy strictly necessary to that mode of life’ [VII 466], ‘the appropriated energy produced by its life is superior to the energy strictly necessary to its life’ [VII 466]. ‘It is of the essence of life to produce more energy than that expended in order to live. In other words, the biochemical processes are able to be envisaged as accumulations and expenditures of energy: all accumulation requires an expense (functional energy, displacement, combat, work) but the latter is always inferior to the former’ [VII 473]. More technically: ψ1 → ψ2=dφ → d+nφ.  

​Marx entitled his basic project ‘the critique of political economy’, which is something similar to what some might now call a ‘double reading’ in that—interpreting the accounts that the bourgeoisie give of their economic regime—Marx found that the word ‘labour’ was being used in two different senses. On one hand it was being used to designate the value imparted by workers to the commodities they produce, and on the other hand, it was being used to designate a ‘cost of production’ or price of labour to an employer. With the ascent of the Ricardian school the tradition of political economy had reached broad agreement that the price of a commodity on the market depended upon the quantity of labour invested in its production, but if workers are being paid for their labour, which then adds to the value of the product, it is impossible to detect any opening for profit in the production and trading of goods. Marx’s basic insight was that being paid for one’s labour, and the value of labour, were not at all the same thing. He coined the term ‘labour-power’ [Arbeitskraft] for the object of transaction between worker and employer, and kept the word ‘labour’ [Arbeit] solely for the value produced in the commodity. Having thus distinguished the concepts of ‘labour’ and ‘labour-power’ the next step was to explore the possibility that labour-power might function as a commodity like any other, trading at a price set by the quantity of labour it had taken to produce. The difference between the capacity for work and the quantity of work necessary to reproduce that capacity would unlock the great mystery of the origin of profit. If labour were traded in an undistorted market with complete cynicism it should command a price exactly equal to the cost of its subsistence and reproduction at the minimal possible level of existence, just as any other commodity traded in such a market should tend towards a price approximating to the cost of the minimal quantity of labour time needed for its manufacture. Marx thus speculated that the average price of labour within the economy as a whole should remain broadly equivalent to the subsistence costs of human life. ​Thus: ​Value of labour—Price of labour=Profit  ​

​But why is it that labour-power comes to trade itself at a price barely adequate to its subsistence? There is a twofold answer to this, the first historical and the second systematic, although such separation is possible only as a theoretical abstraction. Both of these interlocking arguments are accounts of the excess of labour, or of the saturation of the labour market:  

1. In the section of Capital entitled ‘The So-called Primitive Accumulation’ Marx attempts to grasp the inheritance of capital, and is led to examine a series of processes which are associated with the events in English history which are usually designated by the word ‘enclosure’. Broadly speaking the mass urbanization of the European ​peasantry, which separated larger and larger slices of the population from autonomous economic activity, was achieved by a more or less violent expulsion from the land: 

The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century. A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour-market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, ‘everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.’ Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal rights as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufacturers, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheepwalks was, therefore, its cry [Cap 672].

Urbanization is thus in one respect a negative phenomenon; a type of internal exile. In the language of liberal ideology the peasantry is thus ‘freed’ from its ties to agrarian production. Liberté! 

2. The labour market is historically saturated by the expropriation of the peasantry, but it is also able to generate such an excess from out of an intrinsic dynamic. In other words, capital creates unemployment due to a basic tendency to overproduction. The pressure of competition forces capital to constantly decrease its costs by increasing the productivity of labour-power. In order to understand this process it is necessary to understand two crucial distinctions that are fundamental to Marx’s theory. Firstly, the distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, which is the distinction between the utility of a product and its price. Every commodity must have both a use value and an exchange value, but there is only a very tenuous and indirect connection between these two aspects. An increase in productivity is a change in the ratio between these facets of the commodity, so that use values become cheaper, and labour power can be transformed into a progressively greater sum of utility. Marx seeks to demonstrate that this transformation is bound up with another, which has greater consequence to the functioning of the economy, and which is formulated by means of a distinction between ‘fixed capital’ and ‘variable capital’. Fixed capital is basically what the business world calls ‘plant’. It is the quantity of capital that must be spent on factors other than (direct) labour in order to employ labour productively. As these factors are consumed in the process of production their value is transferred to the product, and thus recovered upon the sale of the product, but they do not—in an undistorted market—yield any surplus or profit. Variable capital, on the other hand, is the quantity of capital spent on the labour consumed in the production process. It is capital functioning as the immediate utilization of labour power, or the extraction of surplus ​value. It is this part of capital, therefore, that generates profit. Marx calls the ratio of variable capital to fixed capital the organic composition of capital, and argues that the relative increase in use values, or improvements in productivity, are—given an undistorted labour market—associated with a relative increase in the proportion of fixed capital, and thus a decrease in profit. 

The problems that have bedevilled Marxian theory can be crudely grouped into two types. Firstly, there is the empirical evidence of increasing metropolitan profit and wage rates, often somewhat hastily interpreted as a violation of Marx’s theory. In fact, the problem is a different though associated one: the absence of a free-market in labour. Put most simply, there has never been ‘capitalism’ as an achieved system, but only the tendency for increasing commodification, including variable degrees of labour commodification. There has always been a bureaucratic-cooperative element of political intervention in the development of bourgeois economies, restraining the more nihilistic potentialies of competition. The individualization of capital blocks that Marx thought would lead to a war of mutual annihilation has been replaced by systematic statesupported cartelling, completely distorting price structures in all industrial economies.

The second problem is also associated with a state-capital complex, and is that of ‘bureaucratic socialism’ or ‘red’ totalitarianism. The revolutions carried out in Marx’s name have not led to significant changes in the basic patterns of working life, except where a population was suffering from a surplus exploitation compounded out of colonialism and fascism, and this can be transformed into ‘normal’ exploitation, inefficiently supervised by an authoritarian state apparatus. Marxism—it is widely held— has failed in practice. 

Both of these types of problem are irrelevant to the Marxism of Bataille, because they stem, respectively, from theoretical and practical economism; from the implicit assumption that socialism should be an enhanced system of production, that capitalism is too cynical, immoral, and wasteful, that revolution is a means to replace one economic order with a more efficient one, and that a socialist regime should administer the public accumulation of productive resources. For Bataille, on the contrary, ‘capital’ is not a cohesive or formalizable system, but the tyranny of good (the more or less thorough rationalization of consumption in the interests of accumulation), revolution is not a means but an absolute end, and society collapses towards post-bourgeois community not through growth, but in sacrificial festivity. 

​Beyond political economy there is general economy, and the basic thought at its heart is that of the absolute primacy of wastage, since ‘everything is rich which is to the measure of the universe’ [VII 23]. Bataille insists that all terrestrial economic systems are particular elements within a general energy system, founded upon the unilateral discharge of solar radiation9. The sun’s energy is squandered for nothing (=0), and the circulation of this energy within particular economies can only suspend its final resolution into useless wastage. All energy must ultimately be spent pointlessly and unreservedly, the only questions being where, when, and in whose name this useless discharge will occur. Even more crucially, this discharge or terminal consumption—which Bataille calls ‘expenditure’ (dépense)—is the problem of economics, since on the level of the general energy system ‘resources’ are always in excess, and consumption is liable to relapse into a secondary (terrestrial) productivity, which Bataille calls ‘rational consumption’. The world is thus perpetually choked or poisoned by its own riches, stimulated to develop mechanisms for the elimination of excess: ‘it is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury”, which poses the fundamental problems of living matter and mankind’ [VII 21]. In order to solve the problem of excess it is necessary that consumption overspills its rational or reproductive form to achieve a condition of pure or unredeemed loss, passing over into sacrificial ecstasy or ‘sovereignty’. 

​Bataille interprets all natural and cultural development upon the earth to be sideeffects of the evolution of death, because it is only in death that life becomes an echo of the sun, realizing its inevitable destiny, which is pure loss. This basic conception founds a materialist theory of culture far freer of idealist residues than the representational accounts of the dominant Marxist and psychoanalytical traditions, since it does not depend upon the mediation of a metaphysically articulated subject for its integration into the economic substrate. Culture is immediately economic, not because it is traversed by ideological currents that a Cartesian pineal gland or dialectical miracle translates from intelligibility into praxis, but because it is the haunt of literary possibilities that constantly threaten to transform the energy expended in its inscription into an unredeemed negative at the level of production. Poetry, Bataille asserts, is a ‘holocaust of words’. A culture can never express or represent (serve) capital production, it can compromise itself in relation to capital only by abasing itself before the philistinism of the bougeoisie, whose ‘culture’ has no characteristics beyond those of abject restraint, and self-denigration. Capital is precisely and exhaustively the definitive anti-culture. 

Capitalism, then, is (the projection of) the most extreme possible refusal of expenditure. Bataille accepts Weber’s conclusions concerning the relationship between the evolution of capital accumulation and the development of Protestantism, seeing the Reformation critique of Catholicism as essentially a critique of religion insofar as it ‘functions’ as a means of economic consumption, or as a drain for the excess of social production. The Protestant repudiation of indulgences—as well as its rejection of lavish cathedral building and the entire socio-economic apparatus allied to the doctrine of salvation through ‘works’—is the cultural precondition for the economy closing upon itself and taking its modern form. Bourgeois society is thus the first civilization to totally exclude expenditure in principle, opposed to the conspicuous extravagance of aristocracy and church, and replacing both with the rational or reproductive consumption of commodities. It is this constitutive principle of bourgeois economy that leads inevitably to chronic overproduction crisis, and its symptomatic redundancies of labour and capital. It is not that capital production ‘invents’ the crisis which comes to be named ‘market saturation’, it is rather that capital production is the systematic repudiation of overproduction as a problem. To acknowledge the necessity of a stringent (although perpetually displaced) limit to the absorption of surplus production is already to exceed the terms in which the bourgeoisie or administrative class can formulate its economic dilemmas. A capital economy is thus one that is regulated as if the problem of consumption could be derived in principle from that of production, so that it would always be determinable as an insufficiency of demand (during the period roughly between 1930 and 1980 this has typically led to quasi-Keynesian solutions nucleated upon US armaments spending). Bataille, in contrast, does not see a problem for production in the perpetual reproduction of excess, but rather, in a manner marking the most radical discontinuity in respect to classical political economy, sees production itself as intrinsically problematic precisely insofar as it succeeds. 

​by the  book: The Thirst for Annihilation/Chapter 2: The curse of the sun by Nick Land

by Nick Land

Disorder always increases in a closed system (such as the universe), because nature is indifferent to her composition. The bedrock state of a system which is in conformity with the chance distribution of its elements has been called ‘entropy’, a term that summarizes the conclusions of Carnot, Clausius, and their successors concerning thermic engines and the science of heat5. With the concept of entropy everything changes. Natural processes are no longer eternal clockwork machines, they are either extinct (Wärmetod) or tendential. Mechanisms are subordinated to motors; to thermic difference, energy flux, reservoir, and sump. Order is an evanescent chance, a deviation from disorder, a disequilibrium. Negative disorder—negentropy—is an energetic resource, and chance is the potentiation of the power supply. Macht, puissance, as potential for the degradation of energy, as the fluidification of matter/energy, as the possibility of release towards the unregulated or anarchic abyss into which energy pours, as the death of God. Upstream and downstream; the reserve and its dissipation. Order is not law but power, and power is aberration. For Nietzsche, for Freud, and then for Bataille, this is the background against which desire is to be thought. The mega-motor. 

There is no difference between desire and the sun: sexuality is not psychological but cos mo-illogical. ‘Sexual activity escapes at least during a flash from the bogging-down of energy, prolonging the movement of the sun’ [VII 11]. A cosmological theory of desire emerges from the ashes of physicalism. This is to presuppose, of course, that idealism, spiritualism, dialectical materialism (shoddy idealism), and similar alternatives have been discarded in a preliminary and rigorously atheological gesture. Libidinal materialism, or the theory of unconditional (non-teleological) desire, is nothing but a scorch-mark from the expository diagnosis of the physicalistic prejudice. 

​The basic problem with physicalistic thinking is easy to formulate; it remains implicitly theological. Regression to a first cause is an inescapable consequence of the physicalistic position, which thus remains bound to the old theological matrix, even after the throne has been evacuated by a tremulous deicide. The physicalistic contention is that matter receives its impulsion or determination from without; through the combination of an essential lawfulness that transcends the particular entity and the influence of external bodies or forces. Any ‘intrinsic’ process (such as decay) results from the expression of natural laws, whilst all extrinsic process results from the passive communication of an original cosmic fatality (probabilistic physics makes no essential difference here, since the mathematical—hence formal and extrinsic—determination of probability is no less rigorous than that of causal necessity). Physical matter is therefore unambiguously passive, exhausted by the dual characteristics of transmitting alien forces and decaying according to the universally legislated exigencies of its composition. 

There is a sense in which scientific materialism has not yet begun, because it has not registered the distance between its representational object and the real matter/energy matrix, insofar as such materiality is irreducible in principle to the form of the concept. 

​This irrecoverable other of intellectual prehension can be designated as ‘chaos’ (order=0), or, to use a terminology in harmony with Boltzmann’s thermodynamics, as absolutely improbable negentropy. Lest it be thought that this is an irresponsible subphilosophical notion brought to scientific materialism from without, let me quote a profound fable narrated by Boltzmann (and attributed to his ‘old assistant, Dr Schuetz’) in his 1895 essay ‘On certain questions of the theory of gases’:

We assume that the whole universe is, and rests for ever, in thermal equilibrium. The probability that one (only one) part of the universe is in a certain state, is the smaller the further this state is from thermal equilibrium; but this probability is greater, the greater the universe is. If we assume the universe great enough we can make the probability of one relatively small part being in any given state (however far from the thermal equilibrium), as great as we please. We can also make the probability great that, though the whole universe is in thermal equilibrium, our world is in its present state [B III 543–4]. 

It should first be noted that the account Boltzmann gives here is quite possibly the only conceivable physicalistic atheism, at least, if the second law of thermodynamics is to be maintained. It suggests that the thermal disequilibrium which constitutes the energetic positivity (negentropy or ‘H-value’) of our region of the universe might be not only possible, but even probable, if the universe were large enough. Thus the reality of negentropy would be adequately explained probabilistically, without the need for theological postulates of any kind.

Boltzmann’s account introduces a conceptual differentiation between probable and improbable negentropy, the latter—were it to exist—posing an implicit problem for thermodynamics. It is, indeed, a notion of absolutely improbable negentropy that Boltzmann quite reasonably attributes to the critics of the second law, and his speculative cosmology is designed precisely to demonstrate the reducibility of all regional improbability or deviation to general probability or equilibrium (statistical lawfulness). General or absolute improbability would be the character of a universe whose enigmatic positivity was stastico-physically irresolvable. This is not to say that the empirical demonstration of absolutely improbable negentropy could ever disprove general statistical mechanics, since no level of improbability can be strictly intolerable to such a perspective. From the perspective of natural science the re-formulation of cosmology on the basis of a general chaotics could only be an arbitrary step, with a variable degree of probabilistic persuasiveness (something suspiciously akin to a religion). 

In his argument with Zermelo, Boltzmann develops the ideas sketched in the text already cited, although the fundamental thought remains the same. High H-values or negentropies are probabilistic aberrations and do not, for this reason, violate any mechanical law. Boltzmann insists that ‘vanishingly few’ [verschwindend wenig] cases of high or ascending H-value are to be expected according to the second law, but that the multiplication of probability by time (‘t’) can justify any H-value if ‘t’ is given a high enough value. It is worth expanding upon the concept of time at work here, since what is at stake is the dynamic of permutation and not merely an abstract duration, whatever that might be. Even the heat-death condition of minimal H-values are still reservoirs of ​energy, even though this energy is fully degraded or entropic. Degraded energy has lost its potential to accomplish work, but nevertheless remains in a state of restless mutation. The fact that such mutation is, from a probabilistic perspective, highly unlikely to register a significant change in H-value, does not mean that it ceases to run through perpetual permutation. The time function thus generates a quantitatively definable permutational fecundity for a constant energy reservoir, i.e. the sum of cosmological permutation, or potential transformation of H-value, is equal to energy multiplied by time. The improbability of high H-values can be expressed as the expected proportion of such values within a range of permutations of a given magnitude. 

Boltzmann writes: ‘In any case, one can arrive again at a large hump in the H-curve as long as the time of movement is extended enough, indeed, if this extension is protracted satisfactorily even the old condition must recur (and obviously in the mathematical sense this must occur infinitely often, given an infinitely long duration of movement)’ [B III 569].  

It can be argued that when t=∞ any possible H-value becomes probable, and perhaps even necessary. Such an argument actually depends upon the source of transformation being what is called in statistical theory ‘ergodic’, which means that it is non-preferential in relation to possible random occurrences. It does not seem as if the cosmological rendering of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, for instance, is based upon an ergodic source. But there is no need to enter into questions about infinity in order to follow Boltzmann’s argument, since any finite H-value compatible with the physical limits of the universe becomes probable at a certain finite value ‘t’. Superficially it might seem as if even this formulation seems to imply a level of ergodism, since it is conceivable that impoverished cycles of mechanical repetition repeated indefinitely would allow a large ‘t’ value whilst excluding the possibility of high H-values. This argument, an extreme version of Poincaré’s7, is actually nonpertinent to Boltzmann’s position, since Boltzmann is seeking to explain the existence, and the possible repetition, of actual rather than hypothetical negentropy. More importantly, however, a narrowly mechanical—rather than probabilistic—explanation for the reproduction of negentropy would seem to directly violate the second law, which is based upon a rupturing of the reciprocity between ascending and descending H-values. In other words, the second law requires that it makes more sense to talk about high Hvalue humps than about low H-value troughs, since thermal equilibrium does not tend to another state. 

​Boltzmann’s own interpretation of this non-reciprocity takes the form of a fascinating and somewhat naturalized variant of Kantianism. He argues that the departure from troughs of thermal equilibrium occurs in periods of time so extended that they escape observational techniques and thus do not fulfill the epistemological conditions of being objects of possible experience. In his words: ‘the length of this period makes a mockery of all observability [Beobachtbarkeit]’ [B III 571]. And: ‘All objections raised against the mechanical appearance of nature are…objectless and rest upon errors’ [B III 576]. Speculation upon natural processes deviating from the entropic tendency are thus dialectical in a Kantian sense, whilst only those processes following the entropic tendency concern legitimate objects of possible experience. On a pedantic note, it seems to me that Boltzmann is rigorously entitled only to argue that it is ‘vanishingly improbable’ that a negentropic process could be observed. 

For Kant’s timeless thing-in-itself Boltzmann substitutes vast stretches of time characterized by maximum entropy or thermal equilibrium, and thus by minimal Hvalues, whilst Kant’s phenomenon is transformed by Boltzmann in order to rest upon an energetic foundation of negentropy, thermal dis-equilibrium, or high H-values. Both the ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ stretches of Boltzmann’s cosmological time are characterized by the conservation of energy and atomic particles, even in an equilibriated state. Time must be ejected into transcendence, and thought as a pure form organizing the permutational metamorphosis of elements, in order for the probabilistic emergence of negentropic humps to be possible. It is fundamental to Boltzmann’s argument that positive deviations in H-value are equally possible at any time, time being an indifferent grid. 

Libidinal matter is that which resists a relation of reciprocal transcendence against time, and departs from the rigorous passivity of physical substance without recourse to aualistic, idealistic, or theistic conceptuality. It implies a process of mutation which is simultaneously devoid of agency and irreducible to the causal chain. This process has been designated in many ways. I shall follow Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud in provisionally entitling it ‘drive’ (Trieb). Drive is that which explains, rather than presupposing, the cause/effect couple of classical physics. It is the dynamic instituting of effectiveness, and is thus pro to-physical. This implies that drives are the irruptive dynamics of matter in advance of natural law. The ‘science’ of drives, which has been named ‘libidinal economy’, is thus foundational for physics, as Schopenhauer meticulously demonstrates. 

​A libidinal energetics is not a transformation of intentional theories of desire, of desire understood as lack, as transcendence, as dialectic. Such notions are best left to the theologians. It is, rather, a transformation of thermodynamics, or a struggle over the sense of ‘energy’. For it is in the field of energetic research that the resources for a materialist theory of desire have been slowly (and blindly) composed:  

1  Chance. Entropy is the core of a probabilistic engine, the absence of law as an automatic drive. The compositions of energy are not determinations but differentiations, since all order flows from improbability. Thus a revolution in the conception of identities, now derived from chance as a function of differentiation, hence quantitative, non-absolute, impermanent. Energy pours downstream automatically, ‘guided’ only by chance, and this is even what ‘work’ now means (freed from its Hegelian pathos), a function of play, unbinding, becoming. 

2  Tendency. The movement from the improbable to the probable is an automatic directionality; an impulsion. Entropy is not a telos, since it is not represented, intentionally motivating, or determinate. It nevertheless allows power, tension, and drive to be grasped as uni-directional, quantitative, and irresistible forces. Teleological schemes are no longer necessary to the understanding of tendential processes, and it is no longer necessary to be patient with them, they are superfluous. 

3 Energy. Everywhere only a quantitative vocabulary. Fresh-air after two millennia of asphyxiating ontologies. Essences dissolve into impermanent configurations of energy. ‘Being’ is indistinguishable from its effectiveness as the unconscious motor of temporalization, permutational dynamism. The nature of the intelligible cosmos is energetic improbability, a differentiation from entropy. 

4  Information. The laborious pieties of the Geisteswissenschaften; signs, thoughts, ​ideologies, cultures, dreams, all of these suddenly intelligible as natural forces, as negentropies. A whole series of pseudo-problems positively collapsed. What is the relation between mind and body? Is language natural or conventional? How does an idea correspond to an object? What articulates passion with conception? All signals are negentropies, and negentropy is an energetic tendency. 

​The thermospasm is reality as undilute chaos. It is where we all came from. The deathdrive is the longing to return there (‘it’ itself), just as salmon would return upstream to perish at the origin. Thermospasm is howl, annihilating intensity, a peak of improbability. Energetic matter has a tendency, a Todestrieb. The current scientific sense of this movement is a perpetual degradation of energy or dissipation of difference. Upstream is the reservoir of negentropy, uneven distribution, thermic disequilibrium. Downstream is Tohu Bohu, statistical disorder, indifference, Wärmetod. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder must increase, that regional increases in negentropy still imply an aggregate increase in entropy. Life is able to deviate from death only because it also propagates it, and the propagation of disorder is always more successful than the deviation. Degradation ‘profits’ out of life. Any process of organization is necessarily aberrational within the general economy, a mere complexity or detour in the inexorable death-flow, a current in the informational motor, energy cascading downstream, dissipation. There are 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.  

Libidinal materialism (Nietzsche) is not, however, a thermodynamics. This is because it does not distinguish between power and energy, or between negentropy and energy. It no longer conceives the level of entropy as a predicate of any substantial or subsistent being. In contrast to the energy of physical thermodynamics, libidinal energy is chaotic, or pre-ontological. Thus Nietzsche’s devastating attacks of the notions of ‘being’, ‘thinginitself’, of a substratum separable from its effects, etc. Where thermodynamics begins with 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. ‘Being’ as an effect of the composition of chaos, of the ‘approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being’ [N III 895]. With the libidinal reformulation of being as composition ‘one acquires degrees of being, one loses that which has being’ [N III 627]. The effect of ‘being’ is derivative from process, ‘because we have to be stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have made the ‘real’ world a world not of change and becoming, but one of being’ [N III 556]. 

The great axes of Nietzsche’s thought trace out the space of a libidinal energetics. Firstly: a concerted questioning of the logicomathematical conception of the same, equal, or identical, die Gleichheit, which is dissolved into a general energetics of compositions; of types, varieties, species, regularities. The power to conserve, transmit, circulate, and enhance compositions, the power that is assimilated in the marking, reserving, and appropriating of compositions, and the power released in the disinhibition, dissipation, and Dionysian unleashing of compositions. Beyond essentializing philosophies lies art, as the irrepressible flux of compositions, the interchange between excitation and communication. 

Secondly: a figure of eternal recurrence, stretched between a thermodynamic baseline (Boltzmann’s theory of eternal recurrence) and a libidinal summit, a theoretical machine for transmuting ontologico-scientific discoveries into excitations. First the scientific figure: recurrence as a theory of energetic forces and their permutation; chance, tendency, energy, and information. In the play of anarchic combinations and redistributions forces tend to the exhaustion of their reserve of possible states, inclining to the circle, a figure of affirmation and intoxication, as well as a teaching, message, or signal. A ‘sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then returning home to the simple out of this abundance…without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself—do you want a name for this world?’ [N III 917]. Then the libidinal peak; the recurrence of impetus in the ascent through compositional strata, always noch einmal, once again, and never ceiling, horizon, achieved essence: ‘would you be the ebb of this great flow’ [N II 279].

​Thirdly: a general theory of hierarchies, of order as rank-order (composition). There are no longer any transcendental limits; Schopenhauer’s ‘grades of objectification’ are decapitated, thus depolarized, opened into intensive sequences in both directions. Kant is defeated, as transcendental/empirical difference is collapsed into the scales (but it takes a long time for such events to reach us). History returns (what could timelessness mean now?) ‘[T]o speak of oppositions, where there are only gradations and a multiplicitous delicacy of steps’ [N II 589].

Fourthly: a diagnosis of nihilism, of the hyperbolic of desire. Recurrence is the return of compositional impetus across the scales, the insatiability of creative drive. This is ‘Dionysian pessimism’; the recurrence of stimulus (pain) and the exultation of its overcoming. For the exhausted ones, the Schlechtweggekommenen, this is intolerable, for they are stricken with ‘[w]eariness, which would reach the end with one leap, with a death leap, a poor unknowing weariness, which would not will once more; it is that which created all gods and after-worlds’ [N II 298]. Plato first, then Christianity, feeding on human inertia like a monstrous leech, creating humanity (the terminal animal). Nihilism completes itself in principle at once, God is conceived; a final being, a cessation of becoming, an ultimate thing beyond which nothing can be desired. 

​Freud, too, is an energeticist (although reading Lacan and his semiological ilk one would never suspect it). He does not conceive desire as lack, representation, or intention, but as dissipative energetic flow, inhibited by the damming and channelling apparatus of the secondary process (domain of the reality principle). Pleasure does not correspond to the realization of a goal, it is rather that unpleasure is primary excitation or tension which is relieved by the equilibriating flux of sexual behaviour (there is no goal, only zero); ‘unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution’ [F III 218]. This compulsion to zero is—notoriously—ambivalent in Freud’s text: ‘the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant’ [F III 219]. Far from being a discrediting confusion, however, such ambivalence is the exact symptom of rigorous adherence to the reality of desire; expressing the unilateral impact of zero within the order of identitarian representation.  

​Psychoanalysis, as the science of the unconscious, is born in the determination of that which suffers repression as the consequence of a transgression against the imperative of survival. It is the pursuit of this repressed threat to the ego which carries Freud along the profound arch of thought from sexuality to the death drive. At first (in the period up to the First World War) the attempt to explicitly formulate the site of the most irremediable collision between survival and desire leads Freud to his famous reading of the Oedipus myth and the sense of the Father’s law, since it is the competition with the Father— arising as a correlate of the infant’s incestual longing for the mother—that first brings the relation between desire and survival to a crisis. Later, in the formulation of the death drive, the sacrificial character of desire is thought even more immediately, so that desire is not merely integrated structurally with a threat to existence within the oedipal triangle, but is rather related to death by the intrinsic tendency of its own economy. The intensity of the affect is now thought as inherently oriented to its own extinction, as a differentiation from death or the inorganic that is from its beginning a compulsion to return. But despite recognizing that the conscious self is a modulation of the drives, so that all psychical energy stems from the unconscious (from which ego-energy is borrowed), Freud seems to remain committed to the right of the reality principle, and its representative the ego, and thus to accept a survival (or adaptation) imperative as the principle of therapeutic practice. It is because of this basic prejudice against the claims of desire that psychoanalysis has always had a tendency to degenerate into a technology of repression that subtilizes, and therefore reinforces, the authority of the ego. In the terms both of the reality principle and the conservative moment of psychoanalysis, desire is a negative pressure working against the conservation of life, a dangerous internal onslaught against the self, tending with inexorable force towards the immolation of the individual and his civilization. 

Metapsychology is solar pyschology. At the heart of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle he sketches out his dazzling cosmic insight:  

It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the drives if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return by the mazings [Umwege] along which its development leads…For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to make ever more complicated mazings [immer komplizierteren Umwegen] before reaching its aim of death. These mazings [Umwege] to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative drives, would thus present us today with the picture of the phenomena of life [F III 248]. 

Life is ejected from the energy-blank and smeared as a crust upon chaotic zero, a mould upon death. This crust is also a maze—a complex exit back to the energy base-line—and the complexity of the maze is life trying to escape from out of itself, being nothing but ​escape from itself, from which it tries to escape: maze-wanderer. That is to say, life is itself the maze of its route to death; a tangle of mazings [Umwege] which trace a unilateral deviation from blank. What is the source of the ‘decisive external influences’ that propel the mazings of life, if not the sun? 

The most profound word to emerge from the military history of recent times is ‘overkill’; a term that registers something from the infernal core of desire. Superficially it is irrelevant whether one is killed by a slingshot or by a stupendous quantity of highexplosive, napalm, and white phosphorous, and in this sense overkill is merely an economic term signifying an unnecessary wastage of weaponry. Yet the Vietnam war—in whose scorched soil this word was germinated—was not merely the culmination of a series of military and industrial tendencies leading to the quantification of destructive power on a monetary basis, it was also a decisive point of intersection between pharmacology and the technology of violence. Whilst a systematic tendency to overkill meant that ordnance was wasted on the already charred and blasted corpses of the Vietnamese, a subterranean displacement of overkill meant that the demoralized soldiers of America’s conscript army were ‘wasted’ (‘blitzed’, ‘bombed-out’) on heroin, marijuana and LSD. This intersection implies (as can be traced by a systematic linguistic ambivalence) that the absolute lack of restraint—even according to the most cynical criteria—in the burning, dismemberment, and general obliteration of life, was the obscure heart of an introjected craving; of a desire that found its echo in the hyperbolic dimension of war. 

​Is it not obvious that the hyper-comprehensive annihilation so liberally distributed by the US war-machine throughout south-east Asia became a powerful (if displaced) object of Western envy? Almost everything that has happened in the mass domains of noninstitutional pharmacology, sexuality, and electric music in the wake of this conflict attests strongly to such a longing. What is desired is that one be ‘wiped out’. After the explicit emergence of an overkill craving, destruction can no longer be referred to any orthodox determination of the death drive (as Nirvana-principle), because death is only the base-line from which an exorbitantantly ‘masochistic’ demand departs. Death is to the thirst for overkill what survival is to a conventional notion of Thanatos: minimal satiation. Desiring to die, like desiring to breathe, is a hollow affirmation of the inevitable. It is only with overkill that desire distances itself from fate sufficiently to generate an intensive magnitude of excitation. Thus, in Freud’s energetic model of the nervous-system there are two economies that contribute to psychical excitation. There is the quantitatively stable energy reservoir deployed by the psyche in the various investments constituting its objects of love (including the ego), and there is the ‘general economy’ of traumatic fusion with alterity that floods the nervous-system with potentially catastrophic quantities of alien excitation. It was Freud’s recognition of this second economy, and its role in the genesis of 1914–18 war neuroses (stemming largely from the effects of continuous and overwhelming artillery barrages) that was fundamental to the discovery of the death-drive. If such a traumatic economy is readily susceptible to the thought of overkill, it is because trauma is consequential upon an open-ended series of magnitudes within which lethality can be located at an arbitrary degree.

It is because the second law of thermodynamics proclaims that entropy always increases in a closed system that life is only able to augment order locally, within an open system from which disorder can be ‘exported’. The space in which such localization takes place is not thematized by thermodynamic models, but treated as one of their presuppositions. It is implicitly conceived as homogeneous extension, extrinsic to the distributions which occupy it. Bataille, on the contrary, thinks space (rather than assuming it). The base topic associated with such thinking can be summarized under the title ‘labyrinth’, and will be investigated in some detail later in this book. For the moment, however, the issue is a more elementary one: that of theorizing the relation between the closed field of the cosmic energy reservoir (0), and the local pool of nonequilibrium economy, open to exchange. ​

​by the  book: The Thirst for Annihilation/Chapter 2: The curse of the sun by Nick Land

by Nick Land

It is the green parts of the plants of the solid earth and the seas which endlessly operate the appropriation of an important part of the sun’s luminous energy. It is in this way that light—the sun—produces us, animates us, and engenders our excess. This excess, this animation are the effect of the light (we are basically nothing but an effect of the sun) [VII 10]. The solar ray that we are recovers in the end its nature and the sense of the sun: it is necessary that it gives itself, loses itself without reckoning [VII 10].

​The peoples of ancient Mexico united man with the glory of the universe: the sun was the fruit of a sacrificial madness…[VII 192]. 

​There is no philosophical story more famous than that narrated in the Seventh Book of Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates tells Glaucon of a peculiar dream. It begins in the depths of a ‘sort of subterranean cavern’ [PCD 747], in which fettered humans are buried from the sun, their heads constrained, to prevent them seeing anything but shadows cast upon a wall by a fire. The ascent through various levels of illusion to the naked light of the sun is the most powerful myth of the philosophical project, but it is also the account of a political struggle, in which Socrates anticipates his death. The denizens of the cave violently defend their own benightedness, to such an extent that Socrates asks: ‘if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him?’ [PCD 749]. Glaucon immediately concurs with this suggestion. Such violence is not unilateral. The philosopher, after all, has an interest in the sun that is not purely a matter of knowledge. To have witnessed the sun is a gain and an entitlement; a supra-terrestrial invitation (however reluctantly accepted) to rule: 

So our cities will be governed by us and you with waking minds, and not, as most cities now which are inhabited and ruled darkly as in a dream by men who fight one another for shadows and wrangle for office as if that were a great good, when the truth is that the city in which those who are to rule are least eager to hold office must needs be best administered and most free from dissension, and the state that gets the contrary type of ruler will be the opposite of this [PCD 752]. 

​Light, desire, and politics are tangled together in this story; knotted in the darkness. For there is still something Promethean about Socrates; an attempt to extract power from the sun. (Bataille says: ‘The eagle is at one and the same time the animal of Zeus and that of Prometheus, which is to say that Prometheus is himself an eagle (Atheus-Prometheus), going to steal fire from heaven’ [II 40].)  

To gaze upon the sun directly, without the intervention of screens, reflections, or metaphors—‘to look upon the sun itself and see its true nature, not by reflections in water or phantasms of it in an alien setting, but in and by itself in its own place’ [PCD 748]— has been the European aspiration most relentlessly harmonized with the valorization of truth. Any aspiration or wish is the reconstruction of a desire (drive) at the level of representation, but the longing for unimpeded vision of the sun is something more; a ideological consolidation of representation as such. The sun is the pure illumination that would be simultaneous with truth, the perfect solidarity of knowing with the real, the identity of exteriority and its manifestation. To contemplate the sun would be the definitive confirmation of enlightenment. 

​Gazing into the golden rage of the sun shreds vision into scraps of light and darkness. A white sun is congealed from patches of light, floating ephemerally at the edge of blindness. This is the illuminating sun, giving what we can keep, the sun whose outpourings are acquired by the body as nutrition, and by the eye as (assimilable) sensation. Plato’s sun is of this kind; a distilled sun, a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth, and goodness. Throughout the cold months, when nature seems to wither and retreat, one awaits the return of this sun in its full radiance. The bounty of the autumn seems to pay homage to it, as the ancients also did. Mixed with this nourishing radiance, as its very heart, is the other sun, the deeper one, dark and contagious, provoking a howl from Bataille: ‘the sun is black’ [III 75]. From this second sun—the sun of malediction—we receive not illumination but disease, for whatever it squanders on us we are fated to squander in turn. The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves. If ‘in the final analysis the sun is the sole object of literary description’ [II 140] this is due less to its illuminative radiance than to its virulence, to the unassimilable ‘fact’ that ‘the sun is nothing but death’ [III 81]. How far from Socrates—and his hopes of gain—are Bataille’s words: ‘the sickness of being vomits a black sun of spittle’ [IV 15]. 

In order to succeed in describing the notion of the sun in the spirit of one who must necessarily emasculate it in consequence of the incapacity of the eyes, one must say that this sun has poetically the sense of mathematical serenity and the elevation of the spirit. In contrast if, despite everything, one fixes upon it with sufficient obstinacy, it supposes a certain madness and the notion changes its sense because, in the light, it is not production that appears, but refuse [le déchet], which is to say combustion, well enough expressed, psychologically, by the horror which is released from an incandescent arc-light [I 231]. 

Incandescence is not enlightening, but the indelicate philosophical instrument of ‘presence’ has atrophied our eyes to such an extent that the dense materiality of light scarcely impinges on our intelligence. Even Plato acknowledges that the impact of light is (at first) pain, because of ‘the dazzle and glitter of the light’ [PCD 748]. Phenomenology has systematically erased even this concession. Yet it is far from obvious why an absence/presence opposition should be thought the most appropriate grid for registering the impact of intense radiation. It is as if we were still ancient Hellenes, interpreting ​vision as an outward movement of perception, rather than as a subtilized retinal wounding, inflicted by exogenous energies. 

Everything begins for us with the sun, because (we shall come to see) even the cavern, the labyrinth, has been spawned by it. In a sense the origin is light, but this must be thought carefully. Our bodies have sucked upon the sun long before we open our eyes, just as our eyes are congealed droplets of the sun before copulating with its outpourings. The flow of dependency is quite ‘clear’ (lethal): 

‘The afflux of solar energy at a critical point of its consequences is humanity’ [VII 14]. The eye is not an origin, but an expenditure. The first text in the Oeuvres Complètes is Bataille’s earliest published book: The Story of the Eye. It first appeared—under the pseudonym of Lord Auch—in 1928, which roughly places it amongst a group of early writings including The Solar Anus (1931), Rotten Sun (1930, quoted above), and the posthumously published The Pineal Eye (manuscripts dated variously 1927 and 1931). The common theme of these writings is the submission of vision to a solar trajectory that escapes it, dashing representational discourse upon a darkness that is inextricable from its own historical aspiration. 

The Story [Histoire] of the Eye is both the story and the history of the eye, as also The Pineal Eye is a fiction and a history. Every history is a story, which does not mean that the story escapes history, or is anything other than history consummating itself in a blindness which occupies the place of its proper representation. The Story of the Eye climaxes with the excision of a priest’s eye, which is ‘made to slip’ [glisser] into the vulva of the book’s ‘heroine’ Simone, once by her own hand, and once by that of Sir Edmond (an English roué). In this way the dark thirst which is the subterranean drive of the sun obliterates vision, drinking it down into the nocturnal labyrinth of the flesh. 

​Similarly, in The Pineal Eye, the opening of ‘an eye especially for the sun’— appropriate to its ferocious apex at noon—invites an obliteration; blinding and shattering descent. The truth of the sun at the peak of its prodigal glory is the necessity of useless waste, where the celestial and the base conspire in the eclipse of rational moderation. By concluding the movement of ascent that is synonymous with humanity, and providing vision with the verticality that is its due, the pineal eye crowns the epoch of reason; opening directly onto the heavens (where it is instantaneously enucleated by the deluge of searing filth which is the sun’s truth): 

I represented the eye at the summit of the skull to myself as a horrible volcano in eruption, with exactly the murky and comic character which attaches to the rear and its excretions. But the eye is without doubt the symbol of the dazzling sun, and the one I imagined at the summit of my skull was necessarily inflamed, being dedicated to the contemplation of the sun at its maximum burst [éclat[II14].  
The fecal eye of the sun is also torn from its volcanic entrails and the pain of a man who tears out his own eyes with his fingers is no more absurd than that anal setting of the sun [II 28]. 

The perfect identity between representation and its object—‘blind sun or blinding sun, it matters little’ [II 14]—is thought consistently in these early texts as the direct gaze; an Icarian collapse into the sun which consummates apprehension only by translating it into the register of the intolerable. In the copulation with the sun—which is no more a gratification than a representation—subject and object fuse at the level of their profound consistency, exhibiting (in blindness) that they were never what they were. 

​The unconscious—like time—is oblivious to contradiction, as Freud argues. There is only the primary process (Bataille’s sun), except from the optic of the secondary process (representation) which—at the level of the primary process—is still the primary process. This is a logically unmanageable dazzling, quite useless from the perspective of reason, which seeks to differentiate action on the basis of reality. This libidinal consistency, which is (must be) alogically the same as the sun, is the thread of Ariadne, tangled in the labyrinth of impure difference. At the beginning of The Solar Anus Bataille notes that:  

Ever since phrases have circulated in brains absorbed in thought, a total identification has been produced, since each phrase connects one thing to another by means of copulas; and it would all be visibly connected if one could discover in a single glance the line, in all its entirety, left by Ariadne’s thread, leading thought through its own labyrinth [I 81]. 

​All human endeavour is built upon the sun, in the same way that a dam is built upon a river, but that there could be a solar society in a stronger sense—a society whose gaze was fixed upon the death-core of the sun—seems at first to be an impossibility. Is it not the precise negation of sociality to respond to the ‘will for glory [that] exists in us which would that we live like suns, squandering our goods and our life’ [VII 193]? Without doubt any closed social system would obliterate itself if it migrated too far into the searing heart of its solar agitation, unpicking the primary repression of its foundation. It is nevertheless possible for a society to persist at the measure of the sun, on condition that a basic aggressivity displaces its sumptuary furore from itself, so that it washes against its neighbours as an incendiary rage. It is such a tendency that Bataille discovers in the civilization of the Aztecs, whose sacrificial order was perpetuated by means of military violence. In The Accursed Share—his great work of solar sociology—he remarks of the Aztecs that: 

The priests killed their victims upon the top of pyramids. They laid them on a stone altar and stabbed them in the chest with an obsidian knife. They tore out the heart—still beating—and lifted it up to the sun. Most of the victims were prisoners of war, justifying the idea that wars were necessary to the life of the sun: wars having the sense of consumption, not that of conquest, and the Mexicans thought that, if they ceased, the sun would cease to blaze [VII 55]. 

​What unfolds beneath Bataille’s scrutiny cannot be an apology for the Aztecs or even an explanation. What is at stake in his reading of their culture is an economic intimacy, or thread of solar complicity, the pursuit of genealogical lineages that weave all societies onto the savage root-stock of the stars. The raw energy that stabbed the Aztecs into their ferocities is also that which—regulated by the apparatus of an accumulative culture— drives Bataille in his researches. The energetic trajectory that transects and gnaws his entrails is the molten terrain of a dark communion, binding him to everything that has ever convulsed upon the Earth. 

​It is precisely the senseless horror of Aztec civilization that gives it a peculiar universality; expressing as it does the unavowable source of social impetus. ‘The sun itself was to their eyes the expression of sacrifice’ [VII 52], and their energies were dedicated to a carnage without purpose, whereby they realized the truth of the sun upon the earth. It seems to Western eyes as though their hunger for blood were indefensible, based upon ludicrous myths, and exemplifying at the extreme a human capacity to be perverted by untruth. If the culture of the Aztecs had been rooted in an arbitrary mythological vision such a reading might be sustained, but for Bataille the thirst for annihilation is the same as the sun. It is not a desire which man directs towards the sun, but the solar trajectory itself, the sun as the unconscious subject of terrestrial history. It is only because of this unsurpassable dominion of the sun that ‘[f]or the common and uncultivated consciousness the sun is the image of glory. The sun radiates: glory is represented as similarly luminous, and radiating’ [VII 189], such that ‘the analogy of a sacrificial death in the flames to the solar burst is the response of man to the splendour of the universe’ [VII 193], since ‘human sacrifice is the acute moment of a contest opposing to the real order and duration the movement of a violence without measure’ [VII 317].

​Belonging alongside ‘sacrifice’ in Bataille’s work is the word ‘expenditure’, dépense. This word operates in a network of thought that he describes as general or solar economy: the economics of excess, outlined most fully in the same shaggy and beautiful ‘theoretical’ work—The Accursed Share—in which he writes: ‘the radiation of the sun is distinguished by its unilateral character: it loses itself without reckoning, without counterpart. Solar economy is founded upon this principle’ [VII 10]. It is because the sun squanders itself upon us without return that ‘The sum of energy produced is always superior to that which was necessary to its production’ [VII 9] since ‘we are ultimately nothing but an effect of the sun’ [VII 10]. Excess or surplus always precedes production, work, seriousness, exchange, and lack. Need is never given, it must be constructed out of luxuriance. The primordial task of life is not to produce or survive, but to consume the clogging floods of riches—of energy—pouring down upon it. He states this boldly in his magnificent line: ‘The world…is sick with wealth’ [VII 15]. Expenditure, or sacrificial consumption, is not an appeal, an exchange, or a negotiation, but an uninhibited wastage that returns energy to its solar trajectory, releasing it back into the movement of dissipation that the terrestrial system—culminating in restricted human economies— momentarily arrests. Voluptuary destruction is the only end of energy, a process of liquidation that can be suspended by the acumulative efforts whose zenith form is that of the capitalist bourgeoisie, but only for a while. For solar economy ‘[e]xcess is the incontestable point of departure’ [VII 12], and e​xcess must, in the end, be spent.  

The momentary refusal to participate in the uninhibited flow of luxuriance is the negative of sovereignty; a servile differance, postponement of the end. The burning passage of energetic dissipation is restrained in the interest of something that is taken to transcend it; a future time, a depredatory class, a moral goal… Energy is put into the service of the future. ‘The end of the employment of a tool always has the same sense as the employment of the tool: a utility is assigned to it in its turn—and so on. The stick digs ​the earth in order to ensure the growth of a plant, the plant is cultivated to be eaten, it is eaten to maintain the life of the one who cultivated it…The absurdity of an infinite recursion alone justifies the equivalent absurdity of a true end, which does not serve anything’ [VII 298].  * 

One consequence of the Occidental obsession with transcendence, logicized negation, the purity of distinction, and with ‘truth’, is a physics that is forever pompously asserting that it is on the verge of completion. The contempt for reality manifested by such pronouncements is unfathomable. What kind of libidinal catastrophe must have occurred in order for a physicist to smile when he says that nature’s secrets are almost exhausted? If these comments were not such obvious examples of megalomaniac derangement, and thus themselves laughable, it would be impossible to imagine a more gruesome vision than that of the cosmos stretched out beneath the impertinently probing fingers of grinning apes. Yet if one looks for superficiality with sufficient brutal passion, when one is prepared to pay enough to systematically isolate it, it is scarcely surprising that one will find a little. This is certainly an achievement of sorts; one has found a region of stupidity, one has manipulated it, but this is all. Unfortunately, the delicacy to acknowledge this— as Newton so eloquently did when he famously compared science to beach-combing on the shore of an immeasurable ocean (= 0)—requires a certain minimum of taste, of noblesse. 

Physicalistic science is a highly concrete, sophisticated, and relatively utile philosophy of inertia. Its domain extends to everything obedient to God (he is dead, yet the clay still trembles). Within this domain lie many tracts that have momentarily escaped cultivation; ‘facts of spirit’ for example, along with constellations of docility of all kinds, but these are not sites of resistance. Science is queen wherever there is legitimacy; perhaps terra firma as a whole belongs to her. No one would hastily dispute her rights, but the ocean is insurrection (and the land—it is whispered—floats). 

​Even after the infantile hyperbole of the scientific completion myth has been set aside, there is still a question concerning the success of science that remains untouched. It cannot be seriously doubted that philosophy has been damaged by science, for it has even come to anticipate its extinction. It has now reached the stage where it has lost all confidence in its power to know, where envy has totally replaced parental pride, and where the stylistic consequences of its bad conscience have devastated its discourse to the point of illegibility. For at least a century, and perhaps for two, the major effort of the philosophers has simply been to keep the scientists out. How much defensiveness, pathetic mimicry, crude self-deception, crypto-theological obscurantism, and intellectual poverty is marked by the name of their recent and morbid offspring die Geisteswissenschaften. 

The first and most basic source of this generalized neurosis amongst the practitioners and dependents of philosophy is their incomprehension of quite how it was that ‘they’ gave birth to the sciences. They tend to think that they were always bad scientists, or at least, immature ones. ‘If only we had been better at maths’ they mutter under their breath, as they take a mournfully nostalgic pleasure in the fact that as calculators Newton and Leibniz still seemed to be ‘neck and neck’.  

What is lost to such melancholy is the fact that philosophy does not relate to science as a prototype, but as a motor. It was the basic source of investigative libido before being ​supplanted by the arms industry, and if science has not yet been completely dissolved into a process of technical manufacture, the difference is only a flux of inexplict philosophy. For philosophy is a machine which transforms the prospect of thought into excitation; a generator. ‘Why is this so hard to see?’ one foolishly asks. The answer quickly dawns: the scholars.

​Scholarship is the subordination of culture to the metrics of work. It tends inexorably to predictable forms of quantitative inflation; those that stem directly from an investment in relatively abstracted productivity. Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured. They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts—and even pretend to revere them—the result is (this is not a description without generosity) ‘unappetizing’.  Scholars do not write to be read, but to be measured. They want it to be known that they have worked hard. Thus far has the ethic of industry come.

Curiosity has imperilled itself in its questioning, it has even harmed itself. That it has not traversed its history triumphantly is only one of the many certainties that it suffers from. It is all too obvious that the Russian roulette of the interrogative mode has led to its near extinction; maimed in the brain by the rigorous slug of the natural sciences. For the responses it has provoked have usually lacked even the bitter solace of aporia. To some the world is beginning to seem a crudely intelligible place; a desert of simplicity, dotted with the stripped bones of inquisitiveness. 

What if curiosity was worth more than comprehension? This is not such an impossible thought to entertain. Nor is it unreasonable to ask after the necessity that has led the motor of thought to be subordinated to its consequences. Resolution could only be desirable if there existed an interest superseding thought. Otherwise it should be merely a means, the end of which is the promotion of enigma and confusion. That thought has to tolerate solutions is simply an unfortunate necessity. Perhaps not even that. 

Curiosity is a desire; a dynamic impulse abolished by petrification. It would be an idiocy—although an all too familiar one—to try to preserve it in the formaldehyde of obscurantism and mystique. For an eternal mystery is as devastating to curiosity as any certainty could be. The ideology of thought’s exterminators is dogmatism, it scarcely matters of which kind. 

​It is not the ability to preserve riddles that has value, but the ability to engender them. Any text that persists as an acquisition after coming to a comfortable end has the character of a leech, nourishing itself on the blood of problematic, and returning only repulsive inertia. The fertility of a text, on the contrary, is its inachievement, its premature termination, its inconclusiveness. Such a text is always too brief, and instead of a draining anaesthetic attachment there is the sting. 

This book is not of that kind, it slows Bataille down, driving his fleet madness into a swamp of metaphysics and pseudo-science. My refusal to surrender the sun to the denizens of observatories—and the unseemly tussle that results—makes my relation to Bataille somewhat problematic, wrecking large tracts of my text. My relation to scientific knowledge, on the other hand, is nothing less than a scandal.  

​What I offer is a web of half-choked ravings that vaunts its incompetence, exploiting the meticulous conceptual fabrications of positive knowledge as a resource for delirium, appealing only to the indolent, the maladapted, and the psychologically diseased. I would like to think that if due to some collective spiritual seism the natural sciences were to become strictly unintelligible to us, and were read instead as a poetics of the sacred, the consequence would resonate with the text that follows. At least disorder grows.  

by the  book: The Thirst for Annihilation/Chapter 2: The Curse of the Sun by Nick Land

​by  Felix  Guattari

In the pathic apprehension of delire, dreams and passion, it is essential to realise that the ontological petrification, the existential freezing of the heterogenesis of beings which manifest themselves there according to particular styles, is always latent in other modalities of subjectivation. It is like a freeze-frame which both indicates its basic (or bass) position in the polyphony of chaosmic components, and intensifies its power relative to them. Thus it does not constitute a degree zero of  subjectivation, a neutral, passive, deficient, negative point, but an extreme degree of intensification. It is in passing through this chaotic "earthing," this perilous oscillation, that something else becomes possible, that ontological bifurcations and the emergence of coefficients of processual creativity can occur. The fact that the psychotic patient is incapable of a heterogenetic re-establishment does not in itself obviate the richness of ontological experimentation with which he is confronted despite himself. This is why delirious narrativity, as a discursive power finalised by the crystallisation of a Universe of reference or a non-discursive substance, constitutes the paradigm for the construction and reconstruction of mythical, mystical, aesthetic, even scientific, worlds. The existence of chaosmic stases is certainly not the privilege of psychopathology. Their presence can be detected in philosophy - in Pascal or even the most rationalist authors. The Cartesian sequence of generalised doubt - which precedes an encounter of the utmost urgency with the Cogito, to be succeeded by the reunion with God and the refoundation of the world - is akin to this schizo-chaotic reduction: the fact that complexity and alterity are tempted (by the evil demon) to throw in the towel confers on subjectivity the supplementary power of escaping from spatio-temporal coordinates which are otherwise reinforced. More generally, we can see that a collapsus of sense will always be associated with the promotion of a-signifying links of discursivity dedicated to the ontological weaving of an auto-consistent world. The event-centred rupture thus happens at the heart of being and it is from there that it is able to generate new ontological mutations. Distinctive oppositions, syntaxes and semantics relating to codes, signals and signifiers, pursue their rounds - but to the side of their strata of origin. As in delire, signal-systems and semiotics take off. Schizo chaosmosis is a means for the apperception of abstract machines which work transversally to heterogeneous strata. The passage through chaosmic homogenesis, which can be a path to complexual heterogenesis (but this is never mechanically or dialectically guaranteed), does not constitute a translucent, indifferent zone of being, but an intolerable nucleus of ontological creationism. 

​By dismantling the ontological heterogenesis which confers its diversity to the world and its distraction (in Pascal's sense) to subjectivity, schizo homogenesis exacerbates the transversal power of chaosmosis, its ability to traverse strata and break through barriers. Whence the frequently observed capacity of many schizophrenics to reveal, as if by accident, the best guarded intentions of their interlocutors, to somehow read the Unconscious like an open book. Complexity released from its signifying, discursive constraints is embodied in mute, immobile and stupefying, abstract machinic dances. We should be wary of the simplifying and reifying use of categories such as autism and dissociation to describe schizo strangeness, the loss of vital feeling for depression, glischrogeny for epilepsy .... Rather than global and standard deficit alterations of normal subjectivity, we are actually dealing with modalities of autoalterity that are at once plural and singular. I is an other, a multiplicity of others, embodied at the intersection of partial components of enunciation, breaching on all sides individuated identity and the organised body. The cursor of chaosmosis never stops oscillating between these diverse enunciative nuclei - not in order to totalise them, synthesise them in a transcendent self, but in spite of everything, to make a world of them. So we are in the presence of two types of homogenesis: a normal and/or neurotic homogenesis, which stops itself from going too far and for too long into a chaosmic, schizo type of reduction; and an extreme pathic-pathological homogenesis leading to a positioning point of worldly complexions, where not only do components of sensibility (fixed in a time and a ​space) and those of affectivity and cognition find themselves conjoined, but also axiological, ethical and aesthetic "charges" as well. On the passive side of schizo ontology we thus find a reductive homogenesis, a loss of colour, flavour and timbre in Universes of reference, but on the active side we find an emergent alterification relieved of the mimetic barriers of the self. Being is affirmed as the responsibility of the other (Levinas) when nuclei of partial subjectivation are constituted in absorption or adsorption with the autonomy and autopoiesis of creative processes. 

The point of this is certainly not to make the schizo a hero of the postmodern and above all not to underestimate the weight of systemic components (organic, somatic, imaginary, familial, social) within the psychotic process, but to indicate the effects of inter-componential inhibitions which lead to a stand-off with chaosmic immanence. Social stratifications are set up in a way that avoids, so far as possible, the disquieting strangeness generated by a too marked fixation on chaosmosis. We have to move quickly, we mustn't linger on something that might bog us down: madness, pain, death, drugs, the vertigo of the bod without organs, extreme passion... Of course, all these aspects of existence are the object of a functional awareness by the dominant socius but always as the correlative of an active misrecognition of their chaosmic dimension. The reactive approach to chaosmosis secretes an imaginary of eternity, particularly through the mass media, which misses its essential dimension of finitude: the facticity of being-there, without qualities, without past, without future, in absolute dereliction and yet still a virtual nucleus of complexity without bounds. The eternity of a profoundly infantile adult world that must be opposed to the hyper-lucidity of the child in solitary meditation on the cosmos, or the becoming-child of poetry, music and mystical experience. Only when chaosmosis congeals, implodes ​in an abyss of despair, depression and mental derailing rather than revitalising complexions of alterity and rekindling processes of semiotisation - must we of course pose questions about a recomposition of existential Territories, "grafts of transference," dialogic relays and the invention of all kinds of social welfare and institutional pragmatics. Not a heroism then of psychosis but, on the contrary, an unindulgent indexation of the chaosmic body it carries to incandescence and whose bruised wrecks are today eaten away by chemotherapy -now that it has ceased being cultivated in the traditional Asylum, like so many monstrous flowers.
​
The delirious primary pulverisation or the grand narrative constructions of paranoia, the unstable paths healing the intrusion of the absolute, cannot be put on the same level as those well socialised systems of defence such as games, sports, the manias supported by the media, racist phobias .... However, their mixture is the daily bread of institutional psychotherapy and schizoanalyses. 

It is thus equally from a hotchpotch of banalities, prejudices, stereotypes, absurd situations - a whole free association of everyday life - that we have to extricate, once and for all, these Z or Zen points of chaosmosis, which can only be discovered in nonsense, through the lapsus, symptoms, aporias, the acting out of somatic scenes, familial theatricalism, or institutional structures. This, I repeat, stems from the fact that chaosmosis is not exclusive to the individuated psyche. We are confronted by it in group life, in economic relations, machinism (for example, informatics) and even in the incorporeal Universes of art or religion. In each case, it calls for the reconstruction of an operational narrativity, that is, functioning beyond information and communication, like an existential crystallisation of ontological heterogenesis. The fact that the ​production of a new real-other-virtual complexion always results from a rupture of sense, a short circuiting of significations, the manifestation of non-redundant repetition, autoaffirmative of its own consistency and the promotion of partial non-"identifiable" nuclei of alterity-which escape identification -condemns the therapist and mental health worker to an essentially ethical duplicity. One one hand they work in the register of a heterogenesis of bits and pieces in order to remodel existential Territories, to forge transitory semiotic components between blocks of immanence in the process of petrification .... And on the other they can only claim pathic access to the chaosmic thing - within psychosis and the institution - to the extent that they in one way or another recreate and reinvent themselves as bodies without organs receptive to non-discursive intensities. Their potential conquests of supplementary coefficients of heterogenetic liberty, their access to mutant Universes of reference and their entrance into renewed registers of alterity, depend on their own submersion in homogenetic immanence. 

​Nosographic categories, psychiatric and psychoanalytic cartographies, necessarily betray the chaosmic texture of psychotic transference. They constitute so many languages, modelisations among others - of delire, the novel, the television serial - which cannot aspire to any epistemological preeminence. Nothing more but nothing less! Which is perhaps already a lot, because they themselves embody roles, points of view and submissive behaviour, and even, why not, liberating processes. Who speaks the truth? This is no longer the question; but how, and under what conditions can the best bring about the pragmatics of incorporeal events that will recompose a world and reinstall processual complexity? The idiosyncratic modelisations grafted onto one-to-one analysis, self-analysis and group ​psychotherapy ... always resort to borrowing from specialised languages. Our problematic of chaosmosis and the schizoanalytic escape from the prison of signification is directed - to compensate for these borrowings -towards a necessary a-signifying deconstruction of their discursivity and towards placing their ontological efficacity into a pragmatic perspective. 

excerpt  from  the  book: Chaosmosis an ethico-aesthetic paradigm by Felix Guattari ​

by  Felix  Guattari

"Normality" in the light of delire, technical logic in the light of Freudian primary processes - a pas de deux towards chaos in the attempt to delineate a subjectivity far from dominant equilibria, to capture its virtual lines of singularity, emergence and renewal -eternal Dionysian return or paradoxical Copernican inversion to be prolonged by an animist revival? At the very least an originary fantasm of a modernity constantly under scrutiny and without hope of postmodern remission. It's always the same aporia: madness enclosed in its strangeness, reifled in alterity beyond return, nevertheless inhabits our ordinary, bland apprehension of the world. But we must go further: chaotic vertigo, which finds one of its privileged expressions in madness, is constitutive of the foundational intentionality of the subject-object relation. Psychosis starkly reveals an essential source of being-in-the-world.

What takes precedence, in fact, in the mode of being of psychosis -but also, according to other modalities, in the "emergent self' of infancy (Daniel Stern) or in aesthetic creation -is the irruption, at the forefront of the subjective scene, of a real "anterior" to discursivity; a real whose pathic consistency liter​ally leaps at your throat. Must we think of this real as fixed, petrified and rendered catatonic by a pathological accident, or that it was in fact there for all time - past and future - awaiting the activation of a presumed symbolic castration as the sanction of foreclosure? Perhaps it is necessary to straddle these two perspectives: it was already there as an open virtual reference, and it arises correlatively as a production sui generis of a singular event. 

Structuralists were too hasty in positioning the Real of psychosis topically in relation to the Imaginary of neurosis and the Symbolic of normality. What did they achieve? In erecting universal mathemes of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic -considered as a unity each for themselves -they reified and reduced the complexity of what was at stake, the crystallisation of real-virtual Universes assembled from a multiplicity of imaginary Territories and semiotised in the most diverse ways. The real complexions, for example, those of everyday life, dreams, passion, delire, depression and aesthetic experience do not all have the same ontological colour. What is more, they are not passively endured, nor mechanically articulated or dialectically triangulated to other instances. Once certain thresholds of autopoietic consistency have been crossed, these real complexions start to work for themselves, constituting nuclei of partial subjectivation. Note that their expressive instruments (of semiotisation, encoding, catalysis, moulding, resonance, ider,itification) cannot be reduced to a single signifying economy. The practice of institutional psychotherapy has taught us the diversity of modalities of agglomeration of these multiple, real or virtual stases: those of the body and the soma, the self and other, lived space and temporal refrains, the family socius and the socius artificially elaborated so as to open up other fields of the possible, those of psychotherapeutic transference or even those immaterial Universes relating to music, plastic forms, animal becomings, vegetal becomings, machinic becomings .... 

The complexions of the psychotic real, in their clinical emergence, constitute a privileged exploratory path for other ontological modes of production in that they disclose aspects of excess and limit experiences. Psychosis thus not only haunts neurosis and perversion but also all the forms of normality. Psychotic pathology is specific in that for x reasons the expected toings-and-froings and the "normal" polyphonic relations between the different modes of bringing into being of subjective enunciation see their heterogeneity compromised by repetition -the exclusive insistence of an existential stasis that I describe as chaosmic and which is capable of assuming all the hues of a schizo-paranoiac-manic-epileptoid, etc., spectrum. Everywhere else this stasis is only apprehended by way of avoidance, displacement, misrecognition, distortion, overdetermination, ritualisation .... In these conditions, psychosis could be defined as a hypnosis of the real. Here a sense of being-in-itself is established before any discursive scheme, uniquely positioned across an intensive continuum whose distinctive traits are not perceptible by an apparatus of representation but by a pathic, existential absorption, a pre-egoic, pre-identificatory agglomeration. As long as the schizophrenic is installed at the centre of this gaping and chaotic opening, paranoiac delire manifests an unbounded will to take possession ofit. For their part, passional delires (Serieux, Capgras and de Clerambault) would display a grasping intentionality in a less closed, more processual chaosmosis. The perversions already involve the signifying recomposition of poles of alterity which are bestowed from the outside with the power to incarnate controlled chaosmosis, teleguided by fantasmatic scenarios. As for neurotics, they present all the variants of avoidance evoked above, beginning with the simplest and most reifying, that of phobia, followed by hysteria, which forges from them substitutes in social space and the ​body, ending with obsessional neurosis which, for its part, secretes a perpetual temporal "differance" (Derrida), an indefinite procrastination.

This theme of chaosmic immanence and these nosographic variations need to be developed; I have only introduced them here in order to suggest the idea that the ontological apprehension belonging to psychosis is in no way synonymous with simple chaotic degradation, with a trivial increase in entropy. It would be a matter of reconciling chaos and complexity. (It is to Freud's credit that he showed the way in the Traumdeutung.) Why describe the homogenesis of ontological referents - and, by extension, the latent homogenesis of other modalities of subjectivation - as chaotic? It's because, all things considered, worlding a complexion of sense always involves taking hold of a massive and immediate ensemble of.contextual diversity, a fusion in an undifferentiated, or rather de-differentiated, whole. A world is only constituted on the condition of being inhabited by an umbilical point - deconstructive, detotalisating and deterritorialising - from which a subjective positionality embodies itself. The effects of such a nucleus of chaosmosis is to make the ensemble of differential terms (distinctive oppositions, the poles of discursivity) the object of a generalised connectivity, an indifferent mutability, a systematic dequalification. At the same time, this vacuole of decompression is an autopoietic node on which existential Territories and Incorporeal Universes of reference constantly reaffirm and entangle themselves, demanding and developing consistency. This oscillation at infinite speed between a state of chaotic "grasping" and the deployment of complexions anchored within worldly coordinates takes place before space and time, before the processes of spatialisation and temporalisation. Formations of sense and states of things are thus chaotised in the very movement of the ​bringing into existence of their complexity. At the source of a world's constitution there is always a certain modality of chaotic discomfort in its organicity, functionality and relations of alterity. 

​Unlike Freudian metapsychology, we are not going to oppose two antagonistic drives, of life and death, complexity and chaos. The most originary, objectal intentionality defines itself against a background of chaosmosis. And chaos is not pure indifferentiation; it possesses a specific ontological texture. It is inhabited by virtual entities and modalities of alterity which have nothing universal about them. It is not therefore Being in general which irrupts in the chaosmic experience of psychosis, or in the pathic relationship one can enter into with it, but a signed and dated event, marking a destiny, inflecting previously stratified significations. After such a process of dequalification and ontological homogenesis, nothing will be like it was before. But the event is inseparable from the texture of the being brought to light. This is what the psychotic aura attests to when a feeling of catastrophe about the end of the world (Francois Tosquelles) is associated with an overwhelming feeling of imminent redemption of every possibility or, in other words, the alarming oscillation between a proliferating complexity of sense and total vacuity, a hopeless dereliction of existential chaosmosis.

excerpt  from  the  book: Chaosmosis an ethico-aesthetic paradigm by Felix Guattari 

by Mark Seem

"We must die as egos and be born
again in the swarm, not separate
and self-hypnotized, but individual
​and related."
- Henry Miller, Sexus  

​In order to carry out this ambitious undertaking, Anti-Oedipus makes joyously unorthodox use of many writers and thinkers, ​whose concepts flow together with all the other elements in the book in what might well be described as a carefully constructed and executed experiment in delirium.

While Deleuze and Guattari quote frequently from Marx and Freud, it would be an error to view Anti-Oedipus as yet another attempt at a Freud/Marx synthesis. For such an attempt always treats political economy (the flows of capital and interest) and the economy of the libido (the flows of desire) as two separate economies, even in the work of Reich, who went as far as possible in this direction. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, postulate one and the same economy, the economy of flows. The flows and productions of desire will simply be viewed as the unconscious of the social productions. Behind every investment of time and interest and capital, an investment of desire, and vice versa.

​In order to reach this conclusion a new confrontation was required. Not the standard confrontation between a bourgeois Freud and a revolutionary Marx, where Freud ends up the loser, but a more radical confrontation, between Marx the revolutionary and Nietzsche the madman. The result of this confrontation, as the authors demonstrate convincingly, is that Freud and psychoanalysis (and perhaps even Lacan, although they remain ambiguous on this point) become "impossible."

​"Why Marx and Nietzsche? Now that's really mixing things up!" one might protest at this point. But there is really no cause for alarm. Readers of Marx will be happy to learn that Marx fares quite well in this confrontation. One might even say he is trimmed down to bare essentials and improved upon from the point of view of use. Given Deleuze and Guattari's perspective, this confrontation was inevitable. If one wants to do an analysis of the flows of money and capital that circulate in society, nothing is more useful than Marx and the Marxist theory of money. But if one wishes also to analyze the flows of desire, the fears and the anxieties, the loves and the despairs that traverse the social field as intensive notes from the underground (i.e., libidinal economy), one must look elsewhere. Since psychoanalysis is of no help, reducing as it does every social manifestation of desire to the familial complex, where is one to turn? To Nietzsche, and the Nietzschean theory of affects and intensity, Anti-Oedipus suggests. For here, and especially in On the Genealogy of Morals, is a theory of desire and will, of the conscious and the unconscious forces, that relates desire directly to the social field and to a monetary system based on profit. What Nietzsche teaches, as a complement to Marx's theory of alienation, is how the history of mankind is the history of a becoming-reactive. And it is Nietzsche, ​Deleuze and Guattari stress, whose thought already pointed a way out for humanity, whereas Marx and Freud were too ingrained in the culture that they were working against. 

​One could not really view Anti-Oedipus as a purely Nietzschean undertaking, however, for the book would be nothing without the tension between Nietzsche and Marx, between philosophy and politics between thought and revolution; the tension, in short, between Deleuze the philosopher and Guattari the militant. This tension is quite novel, and leads to a combination of the artistic "machine," the revolutionary "machine," and the analytical "machine"; a combination of three modes of knowledge—the intuitive, the practical, and the reflective, which all become joined as bits and pieces of one and the same strategical machine whose target is the ego and the fascist in each of us. Extending thought to the point of madness and action to the point of revolution, theirs is indeed a politics of experience. The experience, however, is no longer that of man, but of what is nonhuman in man, his desires and his forces: a politics of desire directed against all that is egoic—and heroic—in man. 

In addition to Nietzsche they also found it necessary to listen to others: to Miller and Lawrence and Kafka and Beckett, to Proust and Reich and Foucault, to Burroughs and Ginsberg, each of whom had different insights concerning madness and dissension, politics and desire. They needed everything they could get their hands on and they took whatever they could find, in an eclectic fashion closer to Henry Miller than it is to Marx or Freud. More poetic, undoubtedly, but also more fun.

​While Deleuze and Guattari use many authors and concepts, this is never done in an academic fashion aimed at persuading the reader. Rather, they use these names and ideas as effects that traverse their analyses, generating ever new effects, as points of reference indeed, but also as points of intensity and signs pointing a way out: points-signs that offer a multiplicity of solutions and a variety of directions for a new style of politics. Such an approach carries much along with it, in the course of its flow, but it also leaves much behind. Chunks of Marx and Freud that cannot keep up with the fast current will be left behind, buried or forgotten, while everything in Marx and Freud that has to do with how things and people and desires actually flow will be kept, and added to the infernal machine evoked above. This political analysis of desire, this schizoanalysis, becomes a mighty tool where schizophrenia as a process—the schiz—serves as a point of departure as well as a point of destination. Like Laing, they encourage mankind to take a journey, the journey through ego-loss. They go much further than Laing on this ​point, however. They urge mankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring, all myth and tragedy, and all existentialism, in order to perceive what is nonhuman in man, his will and his forces, his transformations and mutations. The human and social sciences have accustomed us to see the figure of Man behind every social event, just as Christianity taught us to see the Eye of the Lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They blind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects. 

excerpt from the Introduction of the book: Anti-Oedipus (CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA) ​by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ​

​Content and expression are not attached to one another by virtue of the Holy Spirit. In the "beginning" of assemblages of enunciation, we find neither verb, nor subject, system, nor syntax ...; instead, there are components of semiotization, subjectification, conscientization, diagrammarism, and abstract machinisms. Whether on a synchronic or diachronic level, systems of correspondence and translation between states of language and states of culture are never self-evident. When they seem to partake in common sense it is because they have been treated in a way suitable for this purpose. Every mode of signification and semiotization must be related to its assemblages of enunciation. These assemblages depend on a degree of autonomy from the plane of content upon which they are inscribed and the readjustment of their angle of significance in relation to the local conditions of the semiological triangle, i.e. in the last analysis, their semiotic capacity of "holding'' a given subset of the world, setting in motion both the representation and the morphemes of the referent, all the while preserving their own functional cohesion within the framework of dominant syntaxes. Thus, the status of the subject does not rest upon a play of the signifier as structuralist psychoanalysis would have it; it is assembled by a set of heterogeneous components, the latter of which even semiotizes what l have called "dominant realities." The individuation of the process of enunciation and the process of semiotically discernibilizing oneself from another person are themselves inseparable from a certain mode of social organization. The split between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement is inseparable from the split between good and bad objects of the unconscious, in other words, the libidinal topics of the social field. The limit between the "received" ego, the semiologized ego, and the extracted ego is constantly manipulated by the socius.2 The disentanglement of the subject, the other, the law, and the plane of content always correspond to particular objects of power. Thus, content does not crystallize a universal world but a worldliness marked by contingent fields of force centralized around very precise systems of subjective resonance. Phallic redundancies, for example, do not concern a universal symbolic function but male dominance, authoritative institutions, and extremely particularized traits of repressive faciality.

​To bring the production of signification back to the concrete ground of micropolitics and matters of expression nevertheless does not assume that its access to deterritorialized systems is prohibited. It is not a question of extracting the assemblages of enunciation and the assemblages of desire on the side of the concrete and the "natural" in order to keep them safe from the abstract and the artificial! This is first of all because deterritorialized desire promotes capitalistic subjectification to a large extent (the ideal of a power essentially based upon semiological subjection and semiotic enslavement), but also because no "molecular revolution" could economize the implementation of deterritorialized assemblages of enunciation.' The contingent nature of enunciatory power formations does not at all imply that they "adhere" to the most material realities and abandon the most complex modes of semiotization.

An assemblage draws its greater or lesser degree of freedom from the formula of its machinic nucleus, but this formula is basically metastable. As such, the abstract machines that compose it do not have any "real" existential consistency; they do not have any "mass," their own "energy," or memory. They are only infinitesimal indications hyper-deterritorialized from the crystallization of a possible between states of affairs and States of signs. We could compare them to the particles of contemporary physics that are "virtualized" by a theory that only preserves their identity for a negligible time; this identity is nevertheless unnecessary to concretely demonstrate since the theoretical-experimental complex can function in a satisfactory way by simply presupposing their existence. It is this metaphor which has led me to coin, in regards to the diagrammatic effect, the expression signs-particles: abstract machines "charge" themselves with redundancies of resonance (signification) or redundancies of interaction ("real" existence) depending on whether they are fixed and rendered powerless in a semiological substance or whether they inscribe themselves upon a machinic phylum.

Until now, we have not focused on the criteria that would enable us to precisely define an assemblage in relation both to its components and the field in which it evolves. We will be able to clarify this question only on the condition that we better characterize: this concept of existential consistency. Indeed, the modalities of the existence of abstract machines are radically different from those of concrete assemblages. Existence as fundamental machinic coordinate concerns three general types of consistency:

​Here redundant elements are strongly crystallized and stratified, allowing flows of redundancies to develop: 

​1. effects of weak resonance (signifying effect, e.g.: puce formal translation); 
2. effects of weak interaction (surplus-value of stratified codes). Later we shall reconsider the fact that the molar/molecular

​opposition cannot be identified with a type of large/small or macro/micro spatial fitting but arises from an alternative of a micropolitical order, an alternative choice of consistency. {It exists, for example, in the microscopic refrains that follow molar or molecular politics independently of the fact that they function on the basis of redundancies of resonance or redundancies of interaction.) What characterizes the molar politics of stratification is the constitution of a world of stratified, identified, or hierarchized objects and subjects, singularities and abstract machines there being held by systems of coordinates that authorize only the minimum degree of freedom necessary for the survival of the assemblages. 

​The exercise of what will later be defined as generative schizoanalysis will remain circumscribed in this low level of molar consistencies. It will consist in operating displacements of consistency within the assemblages, reducing the effects of resonance on behalf of weak diagrammatic interaction. 

​2) Molecular consistency

​Elements of redundancy are conveyed by substrates less stratified than the preceding, allowing flows of redundancy to develop:

​1) effects of strong resonance (the semantic field as a whole, the imaginary field, effects that are poetic, mystical, etc.); 
2) effects of strong interaction {components of passage, such as faciality, refrains ...). 

​It is impossible at the level of molecular interactions to tell the difference between what forms a part of a component, an assemblage, or a field. All machinic intentions count, all redundancies overlap, and all sign-particle trajectories cross. Here we are dealing with the actualized aspect of abstract machinisms. The assemblage, insofar as it represents the dimension of "foreign relation .. and the manifestation of abstract machinisms, coincides with its field effects. We are in the order of "degrees of reality" and "degrees of abstraction" without any noticeable absolute demarcation. This type of inter-assemblage, inter-component, and inter-field consistency is a fundamental micropolitical stake for schizoanalysis so that the degree of flexibility of the assemblages to give in to the various powers of subjection and enslavement-in other words, regarding everything that pertains to social power struggles and the molecular metabolisms of the machinic unconscious. 

​Here machinic elements escape systems of redundancy. (They are outside coordinates, being themselves in the foundation of systems of coordinates.) We will distinguish:

​- the consistency of capitalistic abstractions (Capital, Power, Music, etc ... ) as a cornerstone of signifying resonances and semantic fields, a sort of lethal level of abstract machinisms, but which does not model the universe of representation;

​- the consistency of signs-particles that specifically defines the irreducible nuclei of the abstract machinic possible. 

​Whichever possible is manifested by the consistency of molecular fields, this type of nucleus holds in reserve a "potential possible." This nucleus never dissolves into the universe of fields and components. This non-manifested possible is contained by the singular traits of matters of expression and "stored" in the abstract machines' general plane of consistency. (Example: given the politics of signifying overcoding, it is not inconsequential that it is implemented by a particular matter of expression. Thus, the fact that certain writing machines or certain computer machines are used as instruments of social control can radically change the modalities of the latter.)7 What will later be defined as transformational schizoanalysis is primarily located in these two extreme levels of strong molecular and abstract consistency. It will consist in performing displacements of consistency within the assemblages on behalf of the dissemination ​of components of passage and the launching of new machines of diagrammatic signs-particles to the detriment of semantic fields and capitalistic abstractions.

​The mechanic nucleus that specifies an assemblage is located at the crossing of two types of diagrammatic consistency:

- the fuzzy set of molecular consistencies component-assemblage-field);

​- the undecidable abstract machinic set of intrinsic abstract consistency. 

​Pairing the existential coordinates of consistency {molar-molecular abstract) and the coordinates of efficiency (redundancy of resonance-redundancy of interaction) thus leads to six general types of fields of consistency. 

​Let us underline the dissymmetrical nature of these six types of fields. indeed, if we have on one side the components of the assemblages and the 6dds that can "swell" in resonance to a point of total powerlessness, on the other side we never find pure nuclei of diagrammatic interaction. Asignifying components develop to some extent on the manure of signifying components; they proliferate like microscopic parasites on modes of subjectification and conscientization. Even in the case of a pure computer machinism, at the end of the chain somewhere there alway; remains some semiological terminals that are human. 

Before taking up the mixed semiotic (diagrammatic and semiological) assemblages, we shall return to some characteristics of the extreme cases that represent the transformation of abstract machines into signifying abstraction within the framework of assemblages of capitalistic power. 

​from the book: THE MACHINIC  UNCONSCIOUS (ESSAYS IN SCHIZOANALYSIS) by Felix  Guattari

​Translated by Taylor Adkins

Felix Guattari ​​

​If it is true chat abstract machines arise neither from the subject-object phenomenological couple, nor the set-subset logical couple, and consequently escape from the semiological triangle denotation representation-signification, then how do we conceive the possibility of saying anything about them? What will become of representation when there is no longer a subject to record it? These are a few of the difficulties that will lead us to call the status of the modes of sensitization and subjectification into question. The assemblages do not acknowledge--as of yet-objects and subjects: but that does not mean that their components do not have anything to do with something that is of the order of subjectivity and representation, but not in the traditional form of individual subjects and statements detached from their context. Other processes of encoding and "ensigning," independent of a deixis and an anthropocentric logic, will thus have to come to light. Universality will no longer have the discourse of a subject, incarnating itself in a word, a revealed text, or a divine or scientific law, as a compulsory reference. Logical propositions will be crafted according to machinic propositions. The singular features of a non-semiologically formed matter will be able to lay claim to universality. Conversely, the universality of a process of coding or a signifying redundancy will be able to "fall" into contingency. While conferring onto singularity points a particular power of crossing stratified fields, the signs-particles conveying quanta of possibles will only equip them for a limited number of universal capacities. Indeed, the assemblages that embody the singularity-abstract machine conjunctions remain prone to being undone for the purpose of opening up other possibles and contingencies. Universalist thought always conceals a reverential fear with respect to an established order-be it religious or natural. On the contrary, the thought of assemblages and molecular machinisms should continue connecting all sorts of practices situated in the perspective of the changes and transformations of the existing orders and the diminishing of their power. 

​Linguistics and semiology occupy a privileged place in the field of the humanities and social sciences. Many problems that other disciplines in this field are unable to solve are reinvestigated by the linguists and semiologists who are supposed to know the real story. Benefiting from a favorable bias due to their achieving fashionable status, and credited with a high degree of "scientificity," linguistic and semiological theories are frequently used as an alibi for all sorts of pretexts. One refers to them as though they were dogma or holy texts. Several generations of psychoanalysts thus spouted forth an incredible amount of Saussurian "signifying" without any critical distance, and even, for most among them, without really knowing what they were talking about. The attitudes of linguists and semiologists have seemed in my view to coincide perfectly with that of psychoanalysts on an essential point: everyone agrees to avoid any overstepping of their respective. problematics regarding political, social, economic, and concrete technological domains which are in their common territory. The reflections and suggestions that I devote to questions of linguistics and semiotics at the beginning of this book will focus mainly on questioning of this shared problematic.

​In these essays we will successively approach:

- questions of a linguistic and semiotic nature whose examination, in my view, constitutes an essential precondition for any revision of the theory of the unconscious and in particular the manner in which the problem of pragmatics is posed today;

- questions relative to assemblages of enunciation and pragmatic fields considered from the angle of unconscious phenomena in the social field; 

- two fundamental categories of the redundancies of the machinic unconscious: faciality traits and refrains; 

​- the bases upon which a schizoanalytical pragmatics can be constructed that would be non-reductive with regard to political and micropolitical problems; 

​-in addition, a "machinic genealogy" of the set of semiotic entities proposed throughout this work which, in my view, seems to be able to function within the framework of pragmatics that would no longer be exclusively a matter for linguistics and semiotics. 

​A second essay will be devoted to the trajectory of faciality traits and refrains in the work of Marcel Proust. 

​In order to help the reader familiarize themselves with a few of the problems and terms that will constantly reappear during this essay, but which will be approached from partial angles, I here present a sort of synthetic glossary of some of the essential conclusions. 

​Against the model of the syntagmatic tree, analytical pragmatics and schizoanalysis will oppose something that is not a model, but a "rhizome" {or "lattice"). It will be defined by the following characteristics:

​- contrary to Chomskyan trees, which start at a point S and proceed by dichotomy, rhizomes may connect any point whatsoever to any other point;

​- each trait of the rhizome will not necessarily refer back to a linguistic trait. Every sort of semiotic chain will be connected to a wide variety of encoding modes: biological, political, economic chains, etc ... bringing into play not only all the sign regimes but also all the regulations of non-signs; 

​- relations existing between the levels of segmentarity within each semiotic Stratum will be able to differentiate inter-stratic relations and will function on the basis of the lines of Right of deterritorialization; 

​-under these conditions, the pragmatics of rhizomes will renounce any idea of underlying structure; unlike the psychoanalytic unconscious, the machinic unconscious is nor a representational unconscious crystallized in codified complexes and repartitioned on a genetic axis; it is to be built like a map;

​- the map, as the last characteristic of the rhizome, will be detachable, connectable, reversible, and modifiable.

Within a rhizome, tree structures will be able to exist. Conversely, the branch of a tree could begin to send out buds in the form of a rhizome. We will classify the pragmatic components into two categories: 

​1. Interpretative components, which we shall indifferently call generic or generative transformations and which imply a primacy of semiologies of resonance and signification over non-interpretative semiotics. 

​They will also be divided into two general types of transformations: 

- analogical transformations depending, for example, on iconic semiologies,

​- signifying transformations concerning linguistic semiologies

​Each of these types of the component will only be able to occupy a dominant position within the framework of a particular mode of subjectification of the contents and formations of power: territorialized or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation for analogical transformations and individual assemblages of enunciation and capitalist subjectivity for signifying transformations. 

2. Non-interpretative components, which we shall generally refer to as transformational components due to the fact that the preceding components of formal resonance do not constitute anything other, as I already mentioned, than a particular or borderline case. They will also be divided into two general types of transformation: 

- symbolic transformations concerning "intensive" semiotics (on the level of perception, gesture, mimicry, etc ... but also on the various verbal and scriptural levels that escape from analogical redundancies); 

​- diagrammatic transformations concerning signifying semiotics that proceed through a deterritorialization relative both to the formalism of content and expression by setting into play mutant abstract machines (systems of signs-particles and quanta of possibles working simultaneously within the register of material and semiotic realities). 

At the semiotic level of coordinates of efficiency, we shall distinguish two modes of redundancy:

​- redundancies of resonance corresponding to the semiological components of subjectification and conscientialization (faciality, "refrains," etc ... ); 

​- machinic redundancies or redundancies of interaction corresponding to asignifying diagrammatic components (semiotic or not). 

At the level of existential coordinates, we shall distinguish three levels of consistency: 

- the molar consistency of strata, significations, and realities such as the dominant (or dominated) phenomenology proposes (complete objects, subjects, individuals, etc ... ); 

- the molecular consistency that expresses the degree of manifestation or real machinic embodiment of an assemblage (but on this level we can neither distinguish assemblages from fields nor components); 

- the abstract consistency that specifies the "theoretical" degree of possibility of the two preceding consistencies. The intersection of these two frames of reference ends in six types of fields of resonance and fields of interaction: cf. table page 51. 

​from the book: THE MACHINIC  UNCONSCIOUS (ESSAYS IN SCHIZOANALYSIS) by Felix  Guattari

​Translated by Taylor Adkins

Does the unconscious still have something to say to us? We have saddled it with so much that it seems to have resolved to keep silent. For a long time it was believed to be possible to interpret its messages. A whole corporation of specialists worked away at this task. Nevertheless, the results were hardly worthwhile, for it seems likely they have all gone astray. Would the unconscious definitively speak an untranslatable language? It's quite possible. It would be necessary to start again from the beginning. First of all, what is this unconscious really? Is it a magical world hidden in who knows which fold of the brain? An internal mini-cinema specialized in child pornography or the projection of fixed archetypal plans? The new psychoanalysts have worked out more purified and better asepticized ideal models than the older ones: they now propose a structural unconscious emptied of all the old Freudian or Jungian folklore with its interpretative grids, psycho-sexual stages, and dramas copied from antiquity ... According to them, the unconscious would be "structured like a language." Yet, it goes without saying, not like everyday language, but like a mathematical language. For example, Jacques Lacan currently speaks about the "mathemes" of the unconscious ...

We have the unconscious we deserve! And I must acknowledge that the structuralist psychoanalyses are even less appropriate in my view than the Freudians, Jungians, or Reichians. I would see the unconscious instead as something that we drag around with ourselves both in our gestures and daily objects, as well as on TV, that is part of the zeitgeist, and even, and perhaps especially, in our day-to-day problems. (I am thinking, for example, of the question of "the society we choose to live in" that always resurfaces around the time of each electoral campaign.) Thus, the unconscious works inside individuals in their manner of perceiving the world and living their body, territory, and sex, as well as inside the couple, the family, school, neighborhood, factories, stadiums, and universities... In other words, not simply an unconscious of the specialists of the unconscious, not simply an unconscious crystallized in the past, congealed in an institutionalized discourse, but, on the contrary, an unconscious turned towards the future whose screen would be none other than the possible itself, the possible as hypersensitive to language, but also the possible hypersensitive to touch, hypersensitive to the socius, hypersensitive to the cosmos ... Then why stick this label of "machinic unconscious" onto it? Simply to stress that it is populated not only with images and words, but also with all kinds of machinisms that lead it to produce and reproduce these images and words.

We are accustomed to thinking of material and social facts in terms of genealogies, archaeological residues, and dialectical progress or in terms of decline, degeneration, and rising entropy ... Time goes on toward better days or plunges blindly toward unimaginable catastrophes; unless it simply stares to vegetate indefinitely. We can bypass these dilemmas by refusing any sort of causalist or finalist extrapolation and by strictly limiting the object of research to structural relations or systemic balances. But no matter how one goes about it, the past remains heavy, cooled down, and the future seems largely mortgaged by a present closing in on it from all sides. To think time against the grain, to imagine that what came "after" can modify what was "before" or that changing the past at the root can ​transform a current state of affairs: what madness! A return to magical thought! It is pure science fiction, and yet ... 

In my view, there is nothing absurd about attempting to explore these interactions, which I would also qualify as "machinic," without initially specifying their material and/or semiotic nature. Neither transcendent Platonic idea, nor Aristotelian form adjacent to an amorphous matter, these abstract deterritorialized interactions, or, more briefly, these abstract machines traverse various levels of reality and establish and demolish stratifications. Abstract machines cling not to a single universal time but to a trans-spacial and trans-temporal plant of consistency which affects through them a relative coefficient of existence. Consequently, their "appearance" in reality can no longer claim to be given all in one piece: it is negotiated on the basis of quanta of possibles. The coordinates of existence function like so many space-time and subjective coordinates and are established on the basis of assemblages which are in constant interaction and incessantly engaged in processes of deterritorialization and singularization causing them to be decentralized in comparison to one another while assigning them "territories of replacement" in spaces of coding. This is why I shall oppose territories and lands to machinic territorialities. By distinguishing them from set logic, a "'machinism" of the assemblage will only recognize relative identities and trajectories. It is only on a "normal" human-scale-i.e. that which pertains neither to madness, childhood, nor art- that Being and Tune will seem to thicken and coagulate to a point of no return. Having considered things from the angle of machinic time and the plane of consistency, everything will take on a new light: causalities will no longer function in a single direction, and it will no longer be allowed for us to affirm that "everything is a foregone conclusion."

Following Rene Thom, it even seems possible one can "take back one's throws," since, according to this author, the logos of the biological species would be able to operate a sort of "smoothing of time" in the direction of both the past and future. Due to the definition of this logoi and so long as "space-time figures, as well as their variations, conform to a principle excluding discontinuities and angles," the phenomena that refer to them would be able to influence their predecessors and their successors. Here as well, all in all, machines become independent of their immediate manifestations while "smoothing" a plane of consistency that authorizes every intersection possible! And yet, this logoi inspire only relative confidence in me. I fear that they merely have an irresistible inclination to escape from the physico-biological world in order to rejoin the mathematical universe of their origin! What particularly worries me is that they can only be f.tctored in, as Rene Thorn explains, so that the most abstract are arranged with the most elementary and the most concrete with the most complex. This simple fact seems to condemn them to definitively faU to maintain their hold on reality. The difference between Thorn's logoi and abstract machines, such as I conceive them, stems from the fact that the former are simply carrying abstraction, whereas the latter in addition convey singularity points "extracted" from the cosmos and history. Rather than abstract machines, perhaps it is preferable to speak of "machinic extracts" or deterritorialized and deterritorializing machines. In any event, I consider that they should not be comparable to entities attached once and for all to a universe of forms and general formulas. By preserving the expression "abstract machine" in spite of its ambiguity, it is the very idea of abstract universals that I aim to dispute. Abstraction can only result from machines and assemblages of concrete enunciations. And since there is no general assemblage that overhangs all of them, every time we encounter a universal enunciation, it will be necessary to determine the particular nature of its enunciative assemblage and analyze the operation of power that leads it to lay claim to such a universality.

The ideal of order-the systematic formalization of every mode of expression, the control over semiological flows, and the repression of the lines of flight and lines of dissidence-that dominates university research and the practical fields of the social sciences can never be completely attained, primarily because it is the stake of political and micro-political power struggles, but, perhaps more basically because, as we shall see, languages drift in all parts. Scientific formalization, fortunately, does not make an exception to this rule. The exhaustive dichotic analysis, binarism reduction, and radical "digitalization" of every semiotic practice, whose model has been elaborated by information theory, seems to function today {in league with behaviorism and Pavlovian theories, with which it also has certain affinities} as a sort of instrument of contention in the field of linguistics and the social sciences. We believe that such a method could in principle be applied to any type of social phenomenon. And if we manage to implement it through some sort of sleight of hand, we are then convinced to have grasped the essence of the phenomenon in question: we can stop and pass on to something else. Unless, while pushing things to the extreme, we come from that position to no longer consider any event except in terms of its probability of occurrence, and then, in the name of the sacrosanct second principle of thermodynamics, to proclaim that everything must tend towards a state of equilibrium or that every structural phenomenon must necessarily evolve towards a reduction of tensions and disorder. A few universal principles hangover contingencies and singularities, precisely with respect to probabilizing events on a diachronic axis and structuralizing them on a synchronic axis: this is what the ambition of the various structuralist schools is reduced too! In fact, I believe that this kind of operation always turns up in order to "sweep under the rug" the socio-machinic assemblages which are ultimately the only effective products of rupture and innovation in the semiotic fields that interest us here. Chance ​and structure are the two greatest enemies of freedom. They induce the same conservative ideal of the general axiomatization of the sciences that has invaded their field since the end of the 19th century. And since they have furthermore become inseparable from the philosophical tradition as a pure subject of knowledge inaccessible to historical transformations, they return us very quickly to the meddlesome and sclerotic discourse of epistemology. It is always the same juggling act: through the promotion of a transcendent order founded upon the allegedly universal nature of the signifying articulations of certain enunciations--the Cogito, mathematical and scientific laws, etc ... -one endeavor to guarantee certain types of formations of power, simultaneously consolidating the social status and the imaginary security of its pundits and scribes in the fields of ideology and science. 

​Two attitudes or two politics are possible with regard to form: a formalist position that begins with transcendent universal forms cut off from history and which are "embodied" in semiological substances, and a position that begins with social formations and material assemblages in order to extract some (to abstract some) of the semiotic components and abstract machines from the cosmic and human history that offers them. With this second path, certain "accidental" conjunctions between "natural" encodings and sign machines will affirm themselves, will "make the law," during a given period. However, it will be impossible to consider them independency of the assemblages that constitute the nucleus of their enunciation. It is not a question, as one could be tempted to say, of a re-enunciation. Indeed, there is no meta-language here. The collective assemblage of enunciation speaks "on the same level as states of affairs, states of facts. and subjective states. There is not, on the one hand, a subject that speaks in the "void" and, on the other hand, an object that would be spoken in the "plenum." The void and the plenum are "engineered" by the same deterritorialization effect. ​Connections are only possible at the point where abstract mechanizations and concrete, dated, and situated assemblages enable a connection to their deterritorialization. Also, assemblages arc not delivered randomly to the axiomatic of universals: the only "law" they uphold is a general movement of deterritorialization. The axiomatic returns to the assemblage more deterritorialized in order to solve the impasse of previous systems of enunciation and untie the stratifications of the machinic assemblages that correspond to them. Such a "law" does not imply a pre-established order, a necessary harmony, or a systemic universal of anything.

​Rene Thorn, who knew how to denounce the "dream of information theory" with humor, or rather the dream of those whose hopes depend upon a set of formal systems and morpho-genesis,' perhaps did not come to the end of his intuition. Does he not lend himself to the brunt of his own criticism when he sets out in search of a system of algorithms that would be able to give an account of every morphogenetic change, of every "catastrophe" capable of affecting an assemblage? 

He rightly considers that the "abstract logoi," immigrants of the physical and biological world, never stop "invading" the cerebral world. But there are many other continents from which such "invasions" develop, beginning with the world of socio-economic assemblages and that of the mass media. According to him, every interaction is brought back to the phenomena of formal resonance in the last analysis (page [200]). On the contrary, I will start with the idea that assemblages of flows and codes arc first compared in relation to differentiation of form and structure, object and subject, and that the phenomena of formal interaction constitute only a particular case, that of a borderline case, within the machinic processes that work upon the assemblages before the substance-form coupling.

​Abstract machines do not function like a coding system stacked on from the "outside" on the existing stratifications. Within the framework of the general movement of deterritorialization that I evoked earlier, they constitute a sort of transformational matter, what I call an "optional subject" -composed of the crystals of the possible which catalyze connections, destratifications, and reterritorializations both in the living and inanimate world. In short, abstract mechanisms emphasize the fact that deterritorialization in all its forms "precedes" the existence of the strata and the territories. Nor being "realizable" in a purely logical space but only through contingent machinic manifestations, they never involve simple combinations; they always imply an assemblage of components irreducible to a formal description. "Descending" from the pragmatic fields to the assemblages, from the assemblages to the components, and then from the components to the matters of expression, we shall see that we will not necessarily pass from the complex to the simple. We will never be able to establish a final systemic hierarchy between the elementary and the compound. Under certain conditions, the elementary can always make new potentialities emerge or make them proliferate and include the remainders within the assemblages to which it is related. Also, rather than starting with the elementary, which is likely to be merely a lure, the analysis will attempt to never simplify or reduce what seems preferable to call a molecular level. Machinic molecules may carry the keys of encoding that lead to the most differentiated assemblages. Moreover, the scope of the "most complex" generally seems to depend upon the fact that these molecular machinisms are more deterritorialized and more abstract. 

​​from the book: THE MACHINIC  UNCONSCIOUS (ESSAYS IN SCHIZOANALYSIS) by Felix  Guattari

​Translated by Taylor Adkins

to be continued

​An Interview with Paul Virilio by ​Bertrand Richard

Bertrand Richard: The propaganda of progress raises the question of the propagandists. Who are the people behind this propaganda? And if there are no propagandists, how are we to understand it?

Paul Virilio: There is a destiny connected to the considerable event that has speed dominate light. Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave the objects of the world their shapes. In the light speed of electromagnetic waves that create this instant interactivity, speed has taken power. In a way, waves and not rays illuminate reality; it is a major phenomenon that I would not hesitate to call illuminist. What we are living through now has taken the shape of a religion; it is not unlike a return to sun worship where speed has replaced light. We are experiencing the return of a major myth supported by the propaganda of progress. ​There is nothing behind it, no deus ex machina or pope. We are no longer in the Enlightenment: we are in the century of light speed.

​The question of fear is clearly polysemic and covers all three of the notions that you j ust mentioned. Fear is very resourceful and can use anything at hand, but it has a very concrete explanation. It comes at a time in history when three major fears (the balance of terror with the atomic bomb, the imbalance of terrorism with informational bombs and the great ecological fear with the fear of the explosion of a genetic bomb) have displayed their incredible conditioning power. Gunther Anders, whose broad theoretical reach we have already mentioned, affirmed in his work The Outdatedness of Human Beings (1956): "The power of an ideology is not only measured by the answers it can provide but by the questions that it is able to suppress." In the propaganda of progress as I defined it, the question of speed and its violence (unsanctioned violence) has been purely and simply suppressed. There was a missed connection ​at the origin in the history of ideas, but afterwards the ideology of progress prevented the development of the political question of relativity and the question of its violence. We have conscientiously established an ideology of speed, with all of the fear and terror that comes with it. As the philosopher of war Sun Tzu aptly noted: "Speed is the essence of war." And if time is money, speed is power, the essence of power. How could you not be afraid of the power, ubiquity, and instantaneousness that, very significantly, were first the attributes of the gods? 

​My task, as you know, is to focus on the fear that is hidden by the ideology of progress. The hothouse effect of the siege mentality, the claustrophobia of masses of individuals under siege are the phenomena that draw and require my attention. During the Second World War, an American journalist entered the Warsaw Ghetto and noticed that the windows ​were open in the middle of winter even though the inhabitants were burning their furniture to keep warm. When he expressed his surprise, people there replied: "You wouldn't want us to have to close our windows too." This is the siege mentality: foreclosure. The growing atmospheric pressure caused by global warming is joined by dromospheric pressure, the tension created by speed in our daily lives and work. At the intersection between the environment and our ways of life, we can find fears that are related to socio-economic contexts. On this topic, how can we not think of the wave of suicides that swept France Telecom at the beginning of winter in 2009-20 1 0? And the scale! How can we not see that fear has been administered, in the strict meaning of the term, by instant interactivity, in particular in the functions that relate to real-time communications? The acceleration of reality has had a considerable impact on social rhythms and has started to wreak havoc. The notion of arrhythmia that I also mentioned earlier is obvious in the slogan "Time to move," the management program implemented within France Telecom to ensure the permanent mobility among its executives. The rhythms of the past were tied to seasons, the liturgical calendar, Sunday holidays, the Sabbath; they have been pushed aside in favor of 24/7. "For what reason should we stop people from working on Sunday? 

The world is changing," is the refrain we now hear. With the rural exodus in the 1 9th century and the urban exodus that is beginning (since a number of Western cities have seen a decline in the net migration rate) , with the change from an artisanal rhythm to an industrial rhythm to a postindustrial rhythm characterized by logics of synchronization, we are now experiencing firsthand the loss of the sociopolitical rhythmology that has always governed human beings.
​
Temporal compression, as it is technically called, is an event that concretely modifies everyone's daily life at the same time. In the face of this acceleration of daily life, fear has become an environment, even in a time of peace. We are living in the accident of the globe, the accident of instantaneousness, simultaneity and interactivity that have now gained the upper hand over ordinary activities. 

​The word "environment" is an Anglicism in French. The key word to remember here is "habitat" or the place of our habits. But there is almost no space left, because of both spatiotemporal compression and the ruin of ecosystems. This contraction has made a fusion possible between the sanitary ideology of ecological Great Health and the security ideology of the search for Lebensraum. This ​hybridization can lead to biopolitics, as Giorgio Agamben has denounced it, and to meteorologicalpolitics. Seasons and their rhythms no longer condition and shape our social temporalities; it is now a meteorological-politics w.\iere weather patterns threaten to replace the geopolitical chronicles of History.

Biopolitics is the contemporary extension of the Great Health government announced by Nietzsche, a utopia proclaiming the death of God. It was taken up and perverted by the Nazis with their creation of Lebensborn, centers for the birth of pure, Aryan children. They turned it into something other than the aristocratic morality of Nietzsche; it became a "raciality'' "scientifically" developed through racism. Fear has become an environment in the sense of the fusion of security (video surveillance, movement control, etc.) and health; it is extremely problematic and traceability has replaced any real identity.

The fusion of these ideologies has also led to the return of strictly individual existence. "Strictly" because we are very much a society of individuals, yet it is a society of mass individualism. As filmmaker Joseph Losey observed, "It is too late to do anything in private life." The communism of affects is the privatization of communism. In this way, communism has not disappeared from History; it has been privatized, creating a community of ​synchronized emotions. Something happened with progress and its propaganda to make us constantly preoccupied with progress and perpetually occupied by it. We are now in a situation of occupation in both the temporal and martial meanings of the word: we are under the pressure of permanent occupation. This occupation places us under surveillance, watching us, scanning us and evaluating us, revealing us and it is increasingly present, increasingly accepted as a fate, a destiny. Promoting progress means that we are always behind: on high-speed internet, on our Facebook profile, on our email inbox. There are always updates to be made; we are the objects of daily masochism and under constant tension. 

The room is the box: the high-speed terminal and its container. The container is an architectural figure of the box. It becomes an interconnected locus solus. I don't want to be cast as the eternal Cassandra of technology, but it must be said that ​we are encountering a phenomenon that is not at all secular. This ideology of progress, which is not progress, can be seen in certain practices. The notions of resistance and collaboration as I described them at the beginning of this conversation come to mind. But we no longer feel occupied, we feel free, and even increasingly free, delivered. And in fact we are freed from the space-time of duration. The question is whether it is good to be free of it, unless the ideal of liberation becomes freedom without content, intransitive secession. And we notice with this pressure that performance and its demands place us under constantly renewed evaluation, which is the source of enormous stress. Stress: the "mot-valise" that translates the dromospheric pressure I mentioned before. Terror is therefore the accomplishment of the law of movement. When suicide itself becomes a workplace accident (and we are on the verge of official recognition of suicide as a workplace accident), the administration of fear is again at work, albeit now in peacetime. It is a movement from Freudian psychopathy to the sociopathy of the Suicidal State. It is no longer a particular psychological state, it is a common sociological state. 

from the book:  The Administration Of Fear by Paul Virilio

by Achim Szepanski

​In his current essay “Europa Fata Morgana” Georg Seeßlen speaks of post-democracy as a permanent state of emergency, in which the multiple crises (war against terror, financial crisis, Greek crisis, refugee crisis, etc.) fulfilled the function of maintaining it. Seeßlen writes: “The state of emergency can only be maintained if a problem is not solved but set into serial oscillations. Here and as long as we find ourselves in a permanent state of emergency, in a kind of crisis management as entertainment (in a double sense), the great projects of dwindling modernity: democracy, enlightenment, humanism, are suspended.” This is largely consistent with Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis in his book “The Spirit of Terrorism” that today the universal is absorbed by the global. (Baudrillard 2011: 50f.) Baudrillard first states a “deceptive analogy” between the concepts of the universal and the global. While human rights, freedom and democracy can be attributed to the universal values of Western Enlightenment, globalisation is characterised by “techniques, market, tourism, finance, information”. Like Seeßlen, Baudrillard sees Western universality dwindling, while globalization is apparently irreversible. Every culture that tries to universalize itself loses its singularity and must inevitably die off, Baudrillard diagnoses. He states that universalization, which in the Enlightenment still presented itself as a discourse on progress, today takes place as an endless proliferation of values, including their neutralization. He writes: “The same happens, among other things, to human rights and democracy; their expansion corresponds to their weakest definition, their maximum entropy. (ibid.: 51). Human rights, democracy and freedom today circulate globally in an entropic mode. Baudrillard seems to be torn back and forth; on the one hand, like Seeßlen, he notes the suspension of Western guiding values or even their demise in globalization, which in turn has only universalized exchange; on the other hand, he speaks of the entropic and at the same time endless circulation of universal values in the capitalist mode. Baudrillard writes: “First of all, the market, the promiscuity of all exchanges and products, the continued flow of money, is globalizing. In cultural terms this means the promiscuity of all signs, of all values, that is pornography … At the end of this process there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal, the universal itself becomes globalized, democracy and human rights circulate just like any other global product, such as oil or capital” (ibid.: 51). That Baudrillard seems undecided and does not consistently take the second position may be due to the fact that he subliminally equates modernity, technoculture and capital/capitalism. Following this equation, postmodernism must then be regarded as a special cultural formation or as a phase of capitalism, which is optionally described as information capitalism, consumer society, cognitive or simulative or cybernetic capitalism. It should not be denied that in such a philosophically overdetermined representation of capitalism the naturalization of capitalism, as noted by Ellen Meiksins Woods, takes place. She writes: “The specificity of capitalism is lost again in the continuities of history, and the capitalist system is naturalized in the inevitable process of the eternally rising bourgeoisie. (Meiksins Wood 2015: 220) But Woods also remains imprecise at this point because it does not distinguish between capital and capitalism.
​
Capitalism is to be understood as a thoroughly heterogeneous historical formation – from an economic, political and cultural point of view – but one that is essentially determined by the production and circulation logics of capital. Besides the dominant mode of production of capital, capitalism also has non-capital-determined modes of production, be they neofeudal, slum-like, corrupt and criminal economies, but also cooperative economies, which are only partially coupled to capital or not at all tied to it (only about 40-50% of all work done worldwide is directly subject to capital relations). Capital, on the other hand, should be understood as a conceptual and semiotic “model” or as a differential system whose production and circulation cycles follow a specific immanent legality that keeps it in equilibrium as it makes it crisis-like. Capital and its as the motor (which cannot be separated from a relation) of the formation “capitalism”, in which the economy in the last instance determines all other areas such as politics, culture, art, science, etc.. This can be understood as “capitalocentric”, and this concept is also directed against the fashionable concept of the “anthropocene”. (Cf. Moore 2015) Louis Althusser speaks at this point of the capitalist mode of production, which he understands as a conceptual object or object that implies the relation between productive forces and relations of production. (Althusser/Balibar 1972) According to Althusser, the capitalist mode of production is the determinant, complex “core form” of an even more complex capitalist social formation that is pervaded by several modes of production. The theoretical analysis of the historically existing capital that articulates itself today as globalization requires the inclusion of as many empirical facts as possible. Within globalization, there are a number of unequal links, be it the nationally operating individual capitals, the multinational corporations, the respective national total capital, or the states. Yet these entities have a single common interest, namely the maintenance of the capital system. The globally networked context, also called the imperialist chain by some Marxist authors, must – come what may – be reproduced. Globalization is not simply to be understood as the sum of the actions of agents, but as the locationless site of the expanded reproduction of capital. The digital information and communication technologies and the corresponding discourse on global networks provide the material-discursive infrastructures for this purpose.

In this context, Baudrillard’s statement must be understood that the absorption of the universal by the global involves homogenization on the one hand, and fragmentation and discrimination on the other, which are characterized by growing exclusion, one thinks of the useless share of humanity, of the nomads of labor and migrants. Seeßlen writes about the exclusion: “One excludes from the market those who do not make a profit (namely the right people), one excludes from work those who do not bring enough “performance” and will to exploitation and self-exploitation, one excludes from education those who do not join the elite formation, one excludes from supply those who cause too much costs, and so on. Neo-liberalism excludes not only people, but also economic dreams, cultures, views, and finally entire continents”.

As long as the universal values still had a certain legitimacy, the singularities could be integrated into a system as differences. Baudrillard discovered the mantra of the philosophy of difference in consumption even before Laruelle launched his comprehensive attack on it. Baudrillard writes in this regard: “However, this compulsion to relativity is decisive insofar as it forms the frame of reference for a never-ending differential positioning”. (Baudrillard 2015: 90) Now, however, in the course of globalization, it is over: “…but now they (the values) no longer succeed, since the triumphant gloabalization makes tabula rasa with all differences and values by introducing a completely indifferent culture or unculture.”. (Baudrillard 2011: 53). Here, too, Baudrillard remains conceptually imprecise, but does recognize a tendency. Randy Martin has shown in his book “Empire of Indifference” that indifference and endless circulation belong together and that even today the asymmetrical, small wars circulate in the global network. (Martin 2007) What’s more, the corresponding interventions revolve around the possibility of circulating, in contrast to the possibility of proclaiming sovereignty. For Martin, this is a shift similar to that of a shareholder holding the shares of a company to that of a derivatives trader generating wealth by managing risks. The unintended consequence of this risk management, which Martin sees at work both in global financialization and in the U.S. Empire, is the mere intensification of the volatility of what it involves. This results in a vicious cycle of destabilization and derivative wars, a characterization that Martin calls the “empire of indifference. This empire no longer distinguishes itself through progress or development, but promises its occupants only the management of a perpetual presence of risk possibilities. In the totalitarian, i.e. indifferent view of neoliberalism, there is ultimately only capital, including human capital. Consequently, current neoliberal policies intend and multiply the constant modulation of the economic risk for the individual and the statistical sorting of the population, namely into those who are successful in view of the risk and those who are definitely not – and nothing else means simply being “at-risk”. And accordingly, neoliberal governance tends to move from the closed institution to the digital network, from the institution to the process, from the command to the (repressive) self-organization. Although it contains a political program, neoliberalism is anti-social, even more so the anti-social is the modus operandi of the neoliberal state, and this at the same time means indifference as part of its public grimace. Risk-polituations include governance as the governmentality of indifference. However, governance does not simply overlook the hedging of interests against interests, but tests the population’s ability to produce interests in the name of speculative capital accumulation. This kind of risk management implies the universal circulation of monetary capital and with it the circulation of values, human rights and democracy. Circulation in turn corresponds to digital networking or the screen of the global as a one-dimensional universe.

Baudrillard here again states a tendency: capitalization and the digital networks that correspond to it emerge a gentle destruction, a communicative and genetic violence that is virally processed and seeks totalitarian consensus. Whether Baudrillard’s theory of the viral is appropriate here or not, it is true that this kind of violence attempts to exclude all negativity and singularity. What is more, and this in turn calls into question the concept of homogenization and indifference: today, comprehensive inclusion can also take place via divergence or disjunction. Disjunction is a pure relation, a movement of reciprocal and at the same time asymmetrical implications that express difference as such. And difference is communication, infection or virulence through heterogeneities, whereby networking here consists in the fact that different sides communicate with each other in such a way that no unity, fusion or synthesis comes about. Inclusive disjunction means to put foreign elements into communication without a uniform logic being required. Today we have to think pessimistically about connectivity. Deleuze speaks of communication as a commercial professional training, of marketing and the transformation of philosophy into advertising slogans. He counters this with the voids of non-communication that can escape both the circle of communication and control as well as the diffusion of differences through inclusion. Within the system of inclusion, difference is a means by which power and capital perpetuate their domination. The effects of this temporal modulation are events, a set of unverifiable stories, unverifiable statistics and untenable justifications. The accelerating speed makes network media like the Internet a bubbling soup for conspiracies and insinuations, inasmuch as the sheer volume of participants and the incredible speed of information accumulation leads to new material for many other conspiracy theories already circulating in the time when a conspiratorial theory is buried. Everything is circulating. The panoptic view of the sovereign is today supplemented and expanded by the calculation and management of risk, with the agents circulating as information shadows. Total control of information shadows is achieved by algorithmic containment. Risk management is a constitutive part of the circulation of money capital and with its global circulation everything else begins to circulate, including democracy and human rights.

François Laruelle speaks here of “universal capital” instead of “capital”, not in the sense of a historical-social formation, but of a universal “logic” to which all economic, social and political phenomena are assigned and subordinated. The monetary profit production of capital today encompasses a general surplus production that extracts the added value of money not only from labor, but from communication, from the speed and urgency of change. And capital even generates the surplus through the production of knowledge, images, marketing and slogans. (Laruelle 2012: 16f.) It may extract it from democracy and human rights. This “universal capital” works more stubbornly than any other historical formation to seize the surplus. It is more active and persecutes, sorts and guides people more intensively than any previous form of control, it acts softer and at the same time more deceitful than all previous forms of frontal attack, but remains perverse like any form of espionage and accusation and at the same time appears less brutal than open annihilation, less ritualized than the Inquisition – or to put it briefly: The “universal capital” proceeds softly and dispersively, instantaneously and maliciously. It is pure harassment. (ibid.)

We can conclude from this that capital always also needs its philosophical and political legitimation. And so it allows not only money, credit and itself to circulate as capital, but also its legitimatory discourses, up to the most general values, human rights and democracy. As such circulating signs, however, the universal values, in which Baudrillard is to be agreed, neutralized and differentiated at the same time, are emptied of meaning. Indeed: “Their expansion corresponds to the weakest definition, their maximum entropy.”

taken from:

by Achim Szepanski

​Frederic Jameson is quite right when he writes that the substitution of economics by politics is the usual means of all attacks on Marxism, i.e. the liquidation of Marxist critique and analysis of the capital economy and the consequent concentration on the discourses of freedom, equality and political representation. Marxism itself was partly not very vigilant against such attacks; on the contrary, in the course of a discursive figure of the transformation of politics into the political, it joyfully accepted the invitation of the ruling classes to ultimately pursue exclusively representative politics.

In his essay “Lenin and Revisionism”, Frederic Jameson defines the primacy of economics as determining in the final instance, which ultimately gives Marxism its strength and originality. Jameson insists that Marxism, in the unity of theory and practice, holds a completely different system of thought (beyond the theories of power and the political), whose reasonableness and radical critical faculty only come fully to bear today when capitalization tends to encompass everything, at least in the capitalist core countries. After all, every arbitrary monetary stream of expected profits is now regarded as a parameter of capitalization that potentially permeates every singular aspect of social fields – the dominant corporations constantly capitalize human life, social networks, social habits, bodies and genetic codes, affects, wars, and much more, when they can generate income and returns with it. Jameson writes: “At the moment it is clear that everything is economic again, even in the vulgar Marxist sense”. It turns out that constellations that seem to be purely political questions or questions of power have become transparent enough to recognize the economic constellations in them. If both private debtors and states have to follow the demands of financial creditors without ifs and buts, then one can confidently assume that the strategies of neoliberal governments are less based on political decisions than on “necessary” monetary-oriented solutions that are prescribed by financial institutions when they can determine the prices of government bonds in the secondary markets.1

Zizek’s accusation that Laclau/Mouffe and Badiou reduce the economy to the ontable and thus ignore the “ontological dignity” of the economy does not go far enough here, and much more, politicist philosophy and left-wing populism deprive the left of its (last) theoretical weapons.2

Zizek asserts that populism, no matter what kind of playwork is meant, concerns Lacan’s objet a of politics, a special figure that stands for the universal dimension of the political. Populism is not a specific political movement, but the political in its pure form, the “inflection” of the social fabric, which in principle can dispose of any political content. Thus its elements are initially purely formal.

Populism functions as a collecting movement constituted by the absorption of special “democratic” demands (for a better social policy, better education, tax cuts, against war and for the environment, etc.), whereby these demands should be lined up in a series of equivalences in such a way that with this kind of concatenation the “people” can emerge as the universal political subject. Populism is not only interested in the empirical content of these demands, but it is particularly pushing for the formal fact that the “people” can emerge as a political subject through the kind of concatenation and that consequently the struggles and antagonisms appear as parts of an antagonistic struggle between “us” (the people) and “them”. Hegemony is entirely aimed at the appropriation of this antagonism, which is why a number of resentments such as racism and anti-Semitism can occur in a populist series of equivalences.

For Laclau, populism indicates the transcendental matrix of an unfinishable struggle, the contents of which are ultimately determined by the contingent struggle for hegemony, while the “class struggle” uses a particular social group (the working class) as the privileged political actor. This privilege is not based on the hegemonic struggle, but on the objective social position of this group, which, according to Laclau, reduces the political struggle to an epiphenomenon of objective processes.

However, this is far too brief. It is precisely in this context that the authors of operaism distinguish between technical and political elements in the composition of the working class. While the technical composition is related to the organization of the class by capital (division of labor, management practices and the standardized use of machines, but also family and communal relations), the political composition affects the capacity of the working class, more precisely the proletariat, which is always related to the struggle for desires, inclinations and interests – collective actions of refusal, resistance and the partial appropriation of surplus value. According to the Italian theorist Panzieri, the increase in the organic composition of capital is not only based on the process of technological progress, but is also always to be understood as the result of a shock offensive of capital, in order finally to decompose the composition of the proletariat in terms of its political power. Just think of how the resistance of the qualified mass workers was broken by Taylorism and the assembly lines in Fordism, but also led again to a new technical composition of the class, with the possibility of stopping the assembly lines; there is also a relationship between the cycles of struggle and the circulation of capital, one thinks of interruptions of transport, logistics and infrastructure, of disturbances that, according to the operaists, extend beyond production to the entire social factory of life. With regard to the critique of operaism, the group Theory Communist (TC) has discussed the mistakes of the proletariat in the context of the reciprocal relationship between capital and the proletariat, a relationship that is not only to be understood as antagonistic, but in which the two poles are integrated within a single system. And this integration has intensified in the history of capitalism, through the politics of trade unions, social democratic and communist parties, and the politics of the welfare state, but also through the various self-government projects, state planning, and class self-management.

For Laclau, the fact that a particular struggle is elevated to a “universal equivalent” of all struggles is never determined, but is itself the result of the contingent political struggle for hegemony. In one historical situation this struggle can be the struggle of the workers, in another the patriotic struggle of the underdogs or the anti-racist struggle for cultural tolerance. No essential quality can lead to a singular struggle assuming a hegemonic role of the “general equivalent” of all struggles. The struggle for hegemony presupposes not only an irreducible gap between the universal form and the diversity of particular contents, but the contingent process through which one of these contents is transferred into the direct embodiment of this universal dimension in a specific situation. Laclau draws on linguistics and constructs the field of politics within the framework of an irreducible tension between “empty” and “floating” signifiers. Zizek writes: “Some certain signifiers begin to act as “empty”, as embodiments of the universal dimension, and include a large number of “floating” signifiers in the chain of equivalences they totalize. The elegance of this solution lies in the fact that it dispenses us from the boring subject of the alleged “deeper (totalitarian, natural) solidarity” between the extreme right and the “extreme” left. The first concerns his actual definition of populism: the series of formal conditions he enumerates are not sufficient justification for calling a phenomenon “populist”. The way in which populist discourse shifts antagonism and constructs the enemy must be added. In populism, the enemy is externalized or objectified into a positive ontological entity (even if that entity is spectral), the annihilation of which restores balance and justice. In mirror image, our own identity – that of the populist political actor – is also perceived as existing before the enemy attack”. The following conclusion can easily be drawn from this: The left-wing populists are not looking for structural causes in the capitalist system for the struggles, but for the corrupt intruder who has toxicly infiltrated it (for example, the greedy financial speculator); the cause is not inscribed in the structure as such, but is an element that overrides its role within this structure so to speak and draws parasitic profits from it. Here, too, Zizek can be agreed: “For a Marxist, on the other hand (as for a Freudian), the pathological (deviant misconduct of some elements) is a symptom of the normal, an indicator of what is normal in this structure, which is threatened by “pathological” outbreaks, is wrong. For Marx, economic crises are the key to understanding the “normal” functioning of capitalism; for Freud, pathological phenomena, such as hysterical outbursts, are the key to the constitution (and the hidden antagonisms that maintain functioning) of a “normal” subject. Therefore, fascism is definitely populism. Its image of the Jew is the equivalent of a series of (heterogeneous and even inconsistent) threats experienced by individuals: The Jew is too intellectual, dirty, sexually insatiable, hard working, financially exploitative, etc…”

The left-wing populists try to change the feeling as it is staged by the right-wing populists when they turn against the establishment. They assume that the election of right-wing populist politicians is by no means the result of deep-seated racism, but that the sections of the population that are so obsessively engaged in the question of borders and refugees have a deep powerlessness that has to be turned into anger and projected onto the global financial elite instead of onto refugees. One should therefore not lose sight of these rightly angry but misguided masses. The left-wing populists logically try to channel anger into a “healthy revolt” against the global financial elite.

For Mouffe, the dominance of financial capitalism over liberal democracies has reduced the scope and use of political debate to nothing more than competition between like-minded groups that proclaim themselves to be more efficient in attracting investors. This has shifted the focus from social inequality or the social question to the suppression of state sovereignty by the financial elites, to which the right-wing populists refer in a more or less demagogic way. Consequently, according to Mouffe, the left would now also have to shift its priorities in order to be able to oppose the right-wing populists more decisively by again demanding the sovereign power of the state over the elites.

The future belongs to those who take up democratic demands that have perished in the consensus of the political organizations of the mainstream, which reads “There is no alternative”. To prevent the right-wing populists from benefiting from resistance to the dictates of the financial elites, the fixation on the outdated left-right axis must be overcome and, much like the right-wing populists, the priority of vertical division between underdogs and those in power must be recognized. At the same time, in order to reduce the electoral success of the right-wing populists, anti-fascist alliances must also be forged with those forces that are in favor of maintaining the status quo. A progressive policy must also integrate those who vote for the right, because they are misguided democrats whose legitimate feelings of dependence could be diverted.

The movement from a horizontal to a vertical axis of political polarization is not the only common feature of the two populist movements with which they mirror each other. To the extent that both movements put a policy that remains focused on elections first, both left-wing populists and right-wing populists seek to construct a “people” that wins hegemony over neoliberal elites through parliamentary struggle. It is necessary to combat the complicity of governments with those who exert direct influence on the state through the trading of government bonds and transform this condition into the antagonism between “those up there” and “us”.

However, not only important transformations that have taken place in the state apparatuses are misjudged (loss of significance of parliament vis-à-vis the executive branch, deep state, etc.). The “we” that the right-wing populists construct along ethnic lines of descent and through the condensation of xenophobic affects is hardly compatible with a leftist policy that refers to the coalition of democratic demands fed by discriminated minorities, exploited wage earners, and downgraded middle classes. What is more, if one examines the mode of construction of the people, there are undeniable similarities between right-wing and left-wing populism: not only can all populist movements refer to the rejection of illegitimate elites, they also share the view that it is only possible to create this common “we” if credible authority figures articulate a new policy in public (which ones?), summarize affects, and thus attack their opponents.

The fact that liberal institutions have not prevented capital markets from infiltrating democratic areas is undeniable. It is precisely at this point that a comprehensive policy of counter-speculation would have to be set in motion, which, among other things, would specifically target the lobbying of financial capital in the state apparatuses and not simply fuel resentment against the establishment. A discursive strategy that concentrates on “us against those up there”, which Carl Schmitt has already brought into play, is a much more suitable condition for a policy of reactionary movements. For both right-wing and left-wing populism, the free flow of goods and capital is merely a means by which the elites enforce rules and power against “us”, while the free flow of populations remains controversial, and this in turn enables a policy that sets in motion the patriotism of the “we” and the people, a racism from below, which the right-wing populists can serve much more effectively than the left-wing populists.

When the propagandists of left-wing populism then seek a new politics of affect, they deliberately overlook the difference between active and reactive affects, or worse, they deliberately mix them. Thus, in right-wing populism, resentment is an affective substance of antagonistic politics that is not about inequality, but about the feeling that others enjoy what dejure belongs to me and that the wrong people are “up there” in power. A policy that does not distinguish between active and reactive affects is no less toxic in the democratic factory than the anti-populist establishment that tries to deprive people of power, especially by positioning the patriotism of the popular classes against the alleged cosmopolitanism of elites. The “we” that is always imagined is a political calculation that the right-wing populists can serve much better than the left-wing populists.

Therefore, it is also quite absurd to suspect even communist potentials in left-wing populism. Mark Fisher writes: “Communist potentials are only realised once a movement has ceased to be populist, since populism is that which, by definition, is always satisfied with making demands of the Master. That is because populism isn’t proto-fascistic; rather – and this, surely, is the implicit element in Zizek’s argument that needs to be drawn out in order to make it work – it always takes the form of a hystericized liberalism.” The wide range of left-wing authors continues to focus clearly on the analysis of semiologies of signification as regards the problems of the financial functioning of capital, machine/technology and subjectivation. And this is all the more astonishing because today a myriad of machines, which can certainly be described as constant social capital, have long since occupied our everyday lives by more than just assisting our modes of perception and affects, our cognition, even by increasingly controlling and regulating them.

taken from:

​by Achim Szepanski

​For Felix Guattari, even at the beginning of the age of digitized mobility in the 1980s, it seemed crystal clear that large sections of the population, which we now call the global surplus population, would be assigned “a corner on the planet that has become a global factory to which forced labor or extermination camps the size of entire countries are constantly being added. (Guattari) Currently, Achille Mbembe can state that there have never been so many camps in history as there are today. In his book Politik der Feindschaft he writes: “One must say that the camp has become a structuring component of global life. It is no longer perceived as a scandal.”

Following Hannah Arendt and Günther Anders’ remarks on the camp, the sociologist Christian Dries then brought into play the hitherto little-noticed term “world as extermination camp”, a world that is successively approaching a state that can be described – in demarcation from the system of Nazi concentration camps as the world state of camps – as largely unplanned, The border between inside and outside, which is still constitutive for the Nazi camp, implodes, so that the camp has no environment and the world becomes “an unimaginable “‘abort'”, a “cloaca of man”, a “throw-away world”.
​
Today in Europe, but also elsewhere, this abbey is flooded with fuels that originate from paranoia and condense into a mass phenomenon called “nanorassism”, a paradoxical form in which frenzy and anaesthesia enter into an ominous union before finally discharging into spasms. With the term spasm, which Guattari used in his last writing Chaosmose, he wanted to point to the excessive and compulsive acceleration of the rhythms of the economic and the social, to a forced vibration of all rhythms in the everyday spaces of social communication that do not leave the subject unharmed. In the catastrophic, at times apocalyptic visions of Baudrillard, Kroker or Bifo Berardi that follow Guattari, one may recognize a way of rethinking the current processes of subjectivation: the turning away from an energetic-affirmative subjectivation that had still inspired the revolutionary theories of the twentieth century, and the turning to a theory of implosion that refers to subjectivation processes that lead to depression and exhaustion. In such times of paralyzing slackening, nanorassism is then, according to Mbembe, perhaps the best narcotic to which, it must be added, doses of a raging and stimulating adrenalin must be repeatedly mixed if the individual and collective bodies are not to fall completely into stupor.

For the narcotic prejudice, which not only ties itself to the colour of the skin, as Mbembe says, but also wants to eradicate or store the disturbing, must sometimes also be mobilized, flow into the strictly ordered channels of the streets and the social media in order to circulate there and give free rein to the intended malice. “Let them stay at home, they say. And if they absolutely want to live with us, among us, then only with their butts bare and their trousers down. The age of nanorassism is in reality that of a dirty racism, dirty and similar to the spectacle of pigs wallowing in the mud.” (Mbembe)

Gilles Châtelet has written a book entitled To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies. First of all, forgive the animals. And what maxim does Châtelet refer to in his book that demands another life instead of a swinish life? The answer is relatively simple: Always unfold a space that gives justice to all and reinforces your own inclinations. Taking up an inclination, or as Tiqqun say, a forme-de-vie, does not only concern it and the knowledge of it, but it concerns thinking, its differentiation and its enhancement. Whoever understands nothing of this maxim lives like a pig. The neoliberal pig wants, if possible, to arrange everything in such a way that a surplus jumps out; it wants to have everything labelled exactly, priced and consumable and, finally, all its desires, strategies and projects are geared towards increasing the productivity and profitability of its own life. (which is still misjudged as freedom, because it is capital as a system that sets the compulsion to maximize profit via competition). For Châtelet, living differently means discovering unknown dimensions of existenceor to discover, or as Rimbaud says, to define the vertigo (of the system).
​
​
We are far from that, if nanorassism in its imperial spaces wants not only to preserve the dull existing that flows there, without any sensation, goal and conciseness, in its oases of well-being, but it wants those whom it has humiliated, trapped and exploited for centuries and who are now on their way to the oases of well-being, If that is not possible, at least expose them to unbearable living and camp conditions, store them every day, repeatedly impose racist blows and controls on them and leave them in a state of lawlessness. Nanorassism is a banality of a special kind, which suits the stupid machines, the automation of the mind and even the remains of the educated citizen like gears that mesh.

Digital automation short-circuits the balancing functions of the mind with systemic stupidity, and today this affects every actor without exception, from the consumer to the speculator. The systemic stupor has been enforced since 1993 with a series of technological shocks resulting in hegemonic corporations on the Internet, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. The decline of the “spiritual value” reaches a peak point: it affects all thinking and feeling, yes, it affects thinking as such, its consistency, and thus also all sciences, their models and methods. Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno have described these processes as rationalization, which clearly lead to nihilism, which is also constantly concerned about cultivating its racisms.

We all become more or less stupid, yes we even become plaguing and tormented beasts who find little to nothing in the fact that this “bock-footed excrement, i.e. negroes, Arabs, Muslims – and of course the Jews who are never far away -,” (Mbembe) are daily beaten in the abdomen, garnished with endless streams of commands and demands, words and gestures, symbols and stereotypes that further fuel the racial (r)ampf. The stupid mechanisms of the hyper-industrial epoch were already casting their shadows when Deleuze spoke of the control societies, when the disciplinary norms gradually lost their effectiveness, and when the media were transformed into a machine of total regulation. The mind was automated and left to the analytical power of algorithms operationalized by sensors and actuators through formal instructions.

For Mbembe, nanorassism is the inevitable complement of a state-based racism, which he calls “hydraulic racism,” the racism of the institutionalized micro- and macrodispositives of the state apparatuses and the media. A racism that “produces clandestines and illegals by all means, that dumps scum on the edges of cities like a heap of useless objects…”. (Mbembe). All appeals to humanism, universalism and justice – euphemisms of a special kind that, as Baudrillard already knew, circulate like oil and capital – have something of consolation or even more of trivialization, and that is even found in the “appeal to a certain run-down feminism that equates equality today with the duty to force veiled Muslim women to wear a string thong, and bearded men to shave. As already in colonial times, the pejorative interpretation of the way black or Muslim Arabs treat “women” has something of a mixture of voyeurism and lust – the lust for the harem”. (Mbembe)

Yet current racism is less an object of consumption, of design, and it also takes place not only on the new street events of the right, where it draws on the resource of banal emotion, brutality and lechery, much more than that: it immigrates into the drive equipment of the neoliberally economized subject. When it reaches the point of reactivating the madness of annihilation, it is not just a reaction of the losers, of those who leave behind the game of exploiting their own lives as debtors, no, they are themselves the winners of the game, the creditors, who have access to the financial markets and the assets and afford racism as that harmless luxury, that accesoire with which it is easy and derogatory to entertain and with which one escapes the rampant boredom or, alternatively, the rampant stress for minutes. This nanorassism is at times quite anti-authoritarian – frolicsome and jolly, drunk and amused, he amuses himself in unparalleled ignorance about his supposedly harmless jokes, failures and comic stories, trumpeting and effervescent at times. Showing off his trumpet and his frenzy he sometimes demands the “right to stupidity and the violence on which it is based – that is the spirit of the times” (Mbembe).

taken from:

by McKenzie Wark

​The politics of information, the history of knowledge, advance not through a critical negation of false representations but a positive hacking of the virtuality of expression. Representation always mimics but is less than what it represents; expression always differs from but exceeds the raw material of its production. 

​All representation is false. A likeness differs of necessity from what it represents. If it did not, it would be what it represents, and thus not a representation. The only truly false representation is the belief in the possibility of true representation. 

​Property, a mere representation, installs itself in the world, falsifying the real. When the powers of the false conspire to produce the real, then hacking reality is a matter of using the real powers of the false to produce the false as the real power, the power of falsifying property’s verification of its own false veracity , proliferating new possibilities by displacing the false necessity of the world. 

​It is critique itself that is the problem, not the solution. Critique is a police action in representation, of service only to ​the maintenance of the value of property through the establishment of its value. The problem is always to enter on another kind of production altogether, the production of the virtual, not the critical. The one role of critique is to critique criticism itself, and thus open the space for affirmation. 

The critique of representational ways maintains an artificial scarcity of “true” interpretation. Or, what is no better, it maintains an artificial scarcity of “true”interpreters,owners of the method, who are licensed by the zero sum game of critique and counter-critique to peddle,of not true representations, then at least the true method for deconstructing false ones.“Theorists begin as authors and end up as authorities.”* This fits perfectly with the domination of education by the vectoral class, which seeks scarcity and prestige from this branch of cultural production, a premium product for the most sensitive subjects. Critical theory becomes hypocritical theory . 

What a politics of information can affirm is the virtuality of expression. The inexhaustible surplus of expression is that aspect of information upon which the class interest of hackers depends. Hacking brings into existence the multiplicity of all codes, be they natural or social, programmed or poetic,logical or analogical, anal or oral, aural or visual. But as it is the act of hacking that composes, at one and the same time, the hacker and the hack. Hacking re-cognises no artificial scarcity , no official licence, no credentialing police force other than that composed by the gift relation among hackers themselves.

​The critique of the politics of representation is at the same time the critique of representation as politics. No one is authorised to speak on behalf of constituencies as properties or on the properties of constituencies. Even this manifesto, which invokes a collective name, does so without claiming or seeking authorisation, and offers for agreement only the gift of its own possibility. 

​Within the envelope of the state, competing forces struggle to monopolise the representation of its majority. Representative politics pits one representation in opposition to another, verifying one by the critique of the other. Each struggles to claim subjects as subjects, enclosing the envelope of the subject within that of the state. 

​Representative politics takes place on the basis of the charge of false representation. An expressive politics accepts the falseness of expression as part of the coming into being of a class as an interest. Classes come into being as classes for themselves by expressing themselves, differing from themselves, and overcoming their own expressions. A class is embodied in all its expressions, no matter how multiple. 

The ruling classes maintain a space of expression for desire, at the same time as forcing representation on the subaltern classes. The ruling power knows itself to be nothing but its expression and the overcoming of its expression. And thus it overcomes itself, splitting and mutating and transforming itself from a pastoralist to a capitalist to a vectoralist expression. Each expression furthers in its difference the abstraction of property that generates class as a bifurcation of differences, of possession and non possession. The ruling class, in each of its mutations, needs the producing classes only for the purposes of exploitation, for the extraction of the surplus. It has no need of the recognition of itself as itself.It has need only of the vector along which it mutates and pulsates.The producing classes, likewise, gain no thing from the recognition foisted on them in their struggle with their masters, which serves only to keep them in their place. 

The productive classes get caught up in their own expressions as if they were representations, making the representation the test of the truth of its own existence, rather than vice versa. Or worse, the productive classes get caught up in representations that have nothing to do with class interest. They get caught up in nationalism, racism, generationalism, various bigotries. There is no representation that confers on the producing classes an identity . There is nothing around which its multiplicities can unite. There is only the abstraction of property that produces a bifurcated multiplicity , divided between owning and nonowning classes. It is the abstraction itself that must be transformed, not the representations that it foists upon its subaltern subjects as negative identity , as a lack of possession.

​Even when representations serve a useful function, inidentifying non-class forms of oppression or exploitation, they still yet become means of oppression themselves. They become the means by which those best able to be the object of the representation refuse recognition to those less able to ​identify with it. The state becomes the referee of the referents, pitting claimants against each other, while the ruling classes escape representation and fulfil their desire as the plenitude of possession. 

​The politics of representation is always the politics of the state. The state is nothing but the policing of representation’s adequacy to the body of what it represents. That this politics is always only partially applied, that only some are found guilty of misrepresentation, is the injustice of any regime based in the first place on representation. A politics of expression, on the other hand, is a politics of indifference to the threat and counter threat of exposing non-conformity between sign and referent. Benjamin: “The exclusion of violence in principle is quite explicitly demonstrable by one significant factor: there is no sanction for lying.”* 

​Even in its most radical form, the politics of representation always presupposes an ideal state that would act as a guarantor of its chosen representations. It yearns for a state that would recognize this oppressed subject or that, but which is nevertheless still a desire for a state, and a state that, in the process, is not challenged as the enforcer of class interest, but is accepted as the judge of representation. 

​And always, what escapes effective counter in this imaginary, enlightened state is the power of the ruling classes, which have no need for representation, which dominates through owning and controlling production, including the production of representation. What calls to be hacked is not ​the representations of the state, but the class rule based on an exploitative bifurcation of expression into lack and plenitude.

And always, what is excluded even from this enlightened, imaginary state, would be those who refuse representation, namely, the hacker class as a class. To hack is to refuse representation, to make matters express themselves otherwise. To hack is always to produce the odd difference in the production of information. To hack is to trouble the object or the subject, by transforming in some way the very process of production by which objects and subjects come into being and recognise each other by their representations. The hack touches the un-representable, the real. 

​A politics that embraces its existence as expression, as affirmative difference, is the politics that can escape the state. To refuse, or ignore, or plagiarise representation, to renounce its properties, to deny it what it claims as its due, is to begin a politics, not of the state, but of statelessness. This might be a politics that refuses the state’s authority to authorise what is a valued statement and what isn’t. Lautréamont: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.”* Or rather: Progress is possible, plagiarism implies it. 

The politics of expression outside the state is always temporary , always becoming something other. It can never claim to be true to itself. Any stateless expression may yet be captured by the authorised police of representation, assigned a value, and made subject to scarcity , and to commodification. This is the fate of any and every hack that comes to be valued as useful. 

Even useless hacks may come, perversely enough, to be valued for the purity of their uselessness. There is nothing that can’t be valued as a representation. There is nothing that can’t be critiqued, and thereby valued anyway, by virtue of the attention paid to its properties. The hack is driven into history by its condition of existence—expression—that calls for the renewal of difference. 

​Everywhere, dissatisfaction with representations is spreading. Sometimes it’s a matter of sharing a few megabytes, sometimes of breaking a few shop windows. But this dissatisfaction does not always rise above a critique that puts revolt squarely in the hands of some representative or other, offering only another state as an alternative—even if only a utopian one. 

​Violence” against the state, which rarely amounts to more than throwing rocks at its police, is merely the desire for the state expressed in its masochistic form. Where some call for a state that embraces their representation, others call for a state that beats them up. Neither is a politics that escapes the desire cultivated within the subject by the educational apparatus—the state of desire that is merely desire for the state. 

​An expressive politics has nothing to fear from the speed of the vector. Expression is an event traversing space and time, and quickly finds that the vector of telesthesia affords an excellent expander and extender of the space and time within which the expression of an event can transform experience and release the virtual. Representation always lags behind the event, at least at the start, but soon produces the narratives and images with which to contain and conform the event to a mere repetition, denying to the event its singularity . It is not that “once something extra-media is exposed to the media, it turns into something else.”* It is that once representation finally overtakes expression within the vector, the event, in its singularity , is over. Whatever new space and time it hacked becomes a resource for future events in the endless festival of expression.

​Even at its best, in its most abstract form, on its best behaviour, the colour blind, gender neutral, multicultural state just hands the value of representation over to objectification.Rather than recognising or failing to recognise representations of the subject, the state validates all representations that take a commodity form. While this is progress, particularly for those formerly oppressed by the state’s failure to recognise as legitimate their properties, it stops short at the recognition of expressions of subjectivity that refuse the objectification in the commodity form and seek instead to become something other than a representation that the state can recognise and the market can value. 

Sometimes what is demanded of the politics of representation is that it recognise a new subject. Minorities of race, gender, sexuality—all demand the right to representation. But soon enough they discover the cost. They must now become agents of the state, they must police the meaning of their own representation, and police the adherence of their members to it.  

​But there is something else, something always hovering on the horizon of the representable. There is a politics of the unrepresentable, a politics of the presentation of the non-negotiable demand. This is politics as the refusal of representation itself, not the politics of refusing this or that representation. A politics that, while abstract, is not utopian. A politics that is utopian in its refusal of the space of representation, in its hewing toward the displacements of expression. A politics that is “therefore undetectable, not identifiable, invisible, not recognizable, stealthy not public.”*

​In its infinite and limitless demand, a politics of expression may even be the best way of extracting concessions in the class conflict, precisely through its refusal to put a name—or a price—on what revolt desires. See what goodies they will offer when those who demand do not name their demand, or name themselves, but practice politics itself as a kind of hack. In the politics of expression, a hack may deign to unmask itself, to acquiesce to representation, only long enough to strike a bargain and move on. A politics that reveals itself as anything but pure expression only long enough to keep the meaning police guessing. “Here comes the new desire.”*

excerpt from the book: ​ A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark

By Jose Rosales

– What is To Live and Think Like Pigs about?

[Châtelet:] It’s a book about the fabrication of individuals who operate a soft censorship on themselves…In them, humanity is reduced to a bubble of rights, not going beyond strict biological functions of the yum-yum-fart type. . .as well as the vroom-vroom and beep-beep of cybernetics and the suburbs. . .So people with entirely adequate IQs don’t become free individuals. . .instead they constitute what I call cyber-livestock […] All fresh meat, all fresh brains, must become quantifiable and marketable. 

​In the opening pages of his foreword to Gilles Châtelet’s To Live and Think Like Pigs, Alain Badiou repeatedly emphasizes the need for preparation on the part of the reader. In spite of Châtelet’s critical violence, poignant sarcasm, and general disenchantment with the present state of affairs, we readers must prepare ourselves for the encounter with that “rage to live,” which “animated Gilles Châtelet” (‘What is it to Live?’ 5). A rage whose urgency makes itself felt already in the books Preface. However, remarks Badiou, this was always a rage bound to and tempered by a melancholy felt in the face of the fact that more and more each day “we are solicited (and increasingly so) to live – and to think – ‘like pigs’” (5). What is more, adds Badiou, what is additionally exceptional and worthy of note is the fact that despite Châtelet being someone better known for his expertise in the history and theory of the sciences and the philosophy of mathematics, the fundamental commitment and impetus that guides his thought is better understood as one in which “every proposition on science [i.e. principle of Thought] can be converted into a maxim for life [i.e. principle of action].” Thus, if Châtelet is to be remembered, it will be as an individual whose life and thought will forever remain irreducible to the concerns of a pure epistemologist or professional academic. And for Badiou, Châtelet’s is a thought whose chief concern was always the question what does it mean to live? Now, to demonstrate why this is so, Badiou proposes the following five principles that are to serve as an introduction to, and outline of, the architectonic of Châtelet’s life and work as a whole: the principle of exteriority, the principle of interiority, the principle of determination, the principle of the indeterminacy of Being, and the principle of invention.

Principle of Exteriority: Thought is the unfolding of the space that does justice to your body
​
According to Badiou, if we were to identify the single theme that unifies Châtelet’s range of interests, which span from the arts and sciences to questions of revolution, it would be the idea that “thought is rooted in the body;” where body is “conceived of as dynamic spatiality” (5). What does it mean to say that thought is rooted in dynamic spatiality; that the grounds for thought is the body? It means that Thought finds its “origin” (this is Badiou’s formulation) in geometry whereby “all thought is the knotting together of a space and a gesture, the gestural unfolding of a space” (5). In other words, if Thought is rooted in the body or that what grounds Thought is a certain spatial dynamism, then ‘to think’ necessarily means to engender a particular act (gesture) within a particular organization of space (geometric plane) – Thought, says Châtelet, was never solely the domain of the mind and necessarily involves the conjugation of the points of one’s body with those of a plane. And it is this image of Thought as the conjugation of a body with a plane that leads Badiou to claim that Châtelet’s first maxim was as follows: ‘Unfold the space that does justice to your body’ (5). And it is this maxim of finding the space that does justice to one’s body that is the practical correlate to Châtelet’s own image of Thought as being founded upon a body (i.e. spatial dynamism): insofar as we are thinking and thus rooted in a body, we are simultaneously compelled to act in such a way that the conjugation of body and plane does justice to the body of Thought (the body which is the ground for Thought): “Châtelet’s love of partying obeyed this maxim. It is more ascetic than it might appear, for the construction of the nocturnal space of pleasure is at least as much of a duty as a passive assent. To be a pig is to understand nothing of this duty; it is to wallow in satisfaction without understanding what it really involves” (6).

​If Thought is rooted in the body and establishes the obligation of determining the space which does justice to one’s body, what we discover is that for every process of realisation there exists some, “virtuality of articulation that is its principle of deployment. Geometry is not a science of extrinsic extension…it is a resource for extraction and for thickening, a set of deformational gestures, a properly physical virtuality. So that we must think a sort of interiority of space, an intrinsic virtue of variation, which the thinking gesture at once instigate and accompanies”(6). In other words, the fact of Thought being grounded upon the body (as spatial dynamism) has as its necessary consequence the fact that the very function of any given process of realization (or actualization) can only be grasped by understanding its raison d’etre; by grasping why and how a given phenomena was able to be realized in the first place. That is to say, realization or actualization is a process that is not determined by that which it produces (i.e. the latent potential of any social phenomena can in no way serve as reason or cause for that which has been actualized). That said… how does Châtelet view this maxim of Thought as a maxim that also holds for the question of ‘what does it mean to live?’
​
According to Badiou, the fact that processes of actualization are determined by their virtual components are, for Châtelet, indicative of the fact that the process of extensive unfolding of (‘just’) space proceeds via gesture is repeated but this time with respect to what is intensive and belongs to interiority. For, as Badiou remarks, Thought is comprised of “a set of deformational gestures, a properly physical virtuality” (6), i,e. the deformation of a space that remains unjust vis-a-vis our body, and whose movements are guided not by the requirements of realisation but by what is virtually possible and/or impossible. It is in this way that Châtelet’s first principle (Thought is rooted in the body) gives rise to its second: just as the ‘deformational gesture’ is the developmental or extensive function of Thought (the pure function which is to be realised), so too is it the case that solitude as the ‘interiority of space’ and which harbors that ‘intrinsic virtue of variation,’ is Thought’s enveloping or intensive function. Thus Badiou can write that, “[I]n terms of life, this time is a matter of remarking that solitude and interiority are, alas, the intimate essence of alterity…Gilles Châtelet knew innumerable people, but in this apparent dissemination there was a considerable, and perhaps ultimately mortal, dose of solitude and withdrawal. It is from this point of bleak solitude, also, that he was able to judge the abject destiny of our supposedly ‘convivial’ societies” (6). And it is in this way, then, that in affirming the maxim of unfolding the space that does justice to our body; a space that also serves as the very ground for Thought as such; we discover that the development of ‘just’ space is only made possible by preserving the interiority of space for solitude and withdrawal. While embodiment may define the Being of Thought, it remains the case that it is through the solitude of interiority that Thought-as-gesture-of-deformation possesses any degree of determinacy. And in the absence of any interiority; lacking solitude as that “intimate essence of alterity and of the external world;” Thought becomes capable of nothing more than its passive assent to the nocturnal space of pleasure:

At this decades’ end, a veritable miracle of the Night takes place, enabling Money, Fashion, the Street, the Media, and even the University to get high together and pool their talents to bring about this paradox: a festive equilibrium, the cordial boudoir of the ‘tertiary service society’ which would very quickly become the society of boredom, of the spirit of imitation, of cowardice, and above all of the petty game of reciprocal envy – ‘first one to wake envies the others’. It’s one of those open secrets of Parisian life: every trendy frog, even a cloddish specimen, knows very well that when Tout-Paris swings, ‘civil society’ will soon start to groove. In particular, any sociologist with a little insight would have been able to observe with interest the slow putrefaction of liberatory optimism into libertarian cynicism, which would soon become right-hand man to the liberal Counter-Reformation that would follow; and the drift from ‘yeah man, y’know, like…’, a little adolescent-hippy but still likeable, into the ‘let’s not kid ourselves’ of the Sciences-Po freshman. (Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs, 8-9)

Now, if it is the case that virtual solitude alone is capable of rendering Thought’s deformational gestures (gestures which unfold a ‘just’ space vis-a-vis the body as foundation for Thought as such), then the question necessarily arises: What is the criteria or measure by which Thought attains a discrete and determinate existence? If the virtual is what guides the process of actualisation, to what end does virtuality as such aspire? According to Badiou, the virtual determination of actualisation, appears in Châtelet’s text as a form of determination that is oriented toward the ‘latent’ and/or ‘temporal’ continuum. As Badiou writes, “[T]he latent continuum is always more important than the discontinuous cut […] For Châtelet, the history of thought is never ready-made, pre-periodised, already carved up. Thought is sleeping in the temporal continuum. There are only singularities awaiting reactivation, creative virtualities lodged in these folds of time, which the body can discover and accept (6). Now, just as the body is the ground for Thought, the latent continuum as that set of not-yet realised virtual-potentials provide the outline of that which the process of actualisation is to realise. To unfold the space that does justice to one’s body; to deform actual or realised space (i.e. to no longer passively assent to the present order of space); such that thought and gesture are explicated in accordance with everything that has not yet been given its actual and concrete form. Thus, Badiou concludes,

The maxim of life this time is: ‘Reactivate your dormant childhood, be the prince of your own unsuspected beauty. Activate your virtuality.’ In the order of existence, materialism might be called the desiccation of the virtual, and so Gilles sought to replace this materialism with the romantic idealism of the powers of childhood. To live and think like a pig is also to kill childhood within oneself, to imagine stupidly that one is a ‘responsible’ well-balanced adult: a nobody, in short. (Badiou, ‘What is it to Live?’ 6)

It is this latent continuity of the virtual that give form to Thought’s deforming gestures and render it as an act whose very significance is indexed to the not-yet realised potential of interiority. For if Thought is said to be disfiguring in its deeds it is precisely because what is realised are modes of being who remain in an asymmetrical relation to the currently existing order of things. Perhaps we could say that one of the inaugural gestures of Thinking is its disagreement with the structure, and thus reality, of the world which it confronts. Absent this disagreement, Thought confronts, once more, that passive assent which signals its imminent failure.

Now, while it is the case that Thought resides in the latent continuum of virtuality and orients its actualisation in accordance with ‘the prince of its own unsuspected beauty,’ it is also the case that Thought grasps Being only in moments of its indeterminacy. For Badiou, Being as indeterminate commits Châtelet to a certain “dialectical ambiguity” wherein “Being reveals itself to thought – whether scientific of philosophical, no matter – in ‘centres of indifference’ that bear within them the ambiguity of all possible separation” (6). For, as Châtelet writes, it is these “points of maximal ambiguity where a new pact between understanding and intuition is sealed” (7). However, one might ask, what does indifferent Being have to do with the virtual’s determination of actualisation? What is the relation between indeterminate Being and the determinations of Thought? For Châtelet, it is this confrontation of indeterminate Being and the determination of the virtual of Thought that acts as that propitious moment whereby the virtual acts upon the process of actualisation; for it is precisely in the absence of the self-evidence of determinate and definite space, which served as that which Thought passively believes to be “capable of orienting itself and fixing its path,” (7) that the virtual and the actual are drawn together to the point of their indistinction. Thus it is when Being is indeterminate (or ambiguous) that Thought increases its capacity of deforming space in the name of its body. Hence, says Badiou, this principle of indeterminate Being is given the following, practical, formulation: “‘Be the dandy of ambiguities. On pain of losing yourself, love only that which overturns your order.’ As for the pig, he wants to put everything definitively in its place, to reduce it to possible profit; he wants everything to be labelled and consumable” (7).

Thus far we have seen how in beginning with the maxim of Thought as the unfolding of a space that does justice to the body as ground of Thinking, Châtelet goes on to develop the principle of interiority/solitude, which leads to the discovery that the virtual determines actualisation, and thereby obliging us to “love what overturns our order” insofar as Thought’s passive assent to a certain pre-established harmony of space is that which Thought must deform through its gestures. However, the question necessarily arises: is the logical outcome of Thought’s deformation of a predetermined space merely amount to the celebration of disorder pure and simple? As it approaches the limits of what it is capable of when confronted with indifferent/ambiguous Being, can Thought be something other than the discordant harmony of deformed space and the idealized continuum of time? To these questions, Châtelet’s response is strictly Bergsonian. Following Bergson’s insight that it would be false to treat disorder as the opposite of order (since ‘disorder’ is the term used for the discovery of an order we were not anticipating), Châtelet argues that not only is Thought something more than the multiplication of deformed space and ideal time; it is precisely when the preceding conditions, or maxims, of Thought have been satisfied that “the higher organisation of thought is…attained” (8). What is this higher order of Thought? Badiou’s answer to this question, as lengthy as it is moving, deserves to be quoted at length:

​For Badiou, then, Châtelet never faltered in his commitment to Thought as deformational gestures which allow Thought to grasp diversity as such; to grasp the multiple as “the production of a deformation of the linear [the order enforced by the pig who wants to put everything in its place; the space of consumption and circulation] through laterality [the time of inventing new dimensions of existence determined by the latent continuum of the virtual]” (7). That is to say, in every deformed and mutilated act Thought is able to prise open the rigid organization of commercial space and re-establish its relation to those virtual images over-determining the realization of actual object. Thus, Châtelet conceives of the relationship between Thought’s deformational cut, which brings a new order and connection to those spaces of commerce and consumption. And much the same way as Deleuze understood the relationship of the actual to the virtual, so too does Châtelet maintain that the virtual image is contemporary with the actual object and serves as its double, “its ‘mirror image,’ as in The Lady from Shanghai, in which the mirror takes control of a character, engulfs him and leaves him as just a virtuality” (Dialogues II, 150). Hence Badiou can write that at the height of its powers, Thought undergoes a transformation and comes to establish a new “pact between understanding and intuition” such that “separative understanding and intuition fuse, in a paradoxical intensity of thought” (6-7). For it is this moment of Thought’s intensive functioning wherein what is given in our experience of the virtual finds itself without a corresponding actual phenomenal object. And in instances such as these, Thought is obliged to invent or discover the forms by which the temporalization of what is virtual within laterality achieves an intentional and determinate deformation of the axis of linearity. Only then does Thinking reach the highest degree of its power, which is its ability to expose the form or exact dimensions of existence, which will serve as the criteria for the reorganization of space (discrete, discontinuous).
​
Not to live and think like pigs, then. To remain faithful to everything that is at stake in the question of ‘What is it to live?’ and to always inquire into who among us are in fact living. As we have seen, any possible answer to these questions begin with a gesture that desecrates what is sacrosanct in cybernetic-capitalist terrestrial life. And perhaps from the present vantage point we are not too distant from the position Châtelet found himself; thinking and posing these questions – ‘what is it to live? and who among us are living?’ – in the shadow of neo-liberalism’s Counter-Reformation; that era, says Châtelet, which came to be defined by “the market’s Invisible Hand, which dons no kid gloves in order to starve and crush silently, and which is invincible because it applies its pressure everywhere and nowhere; but which nonetheless…has need of a voice. And the voice was right there waiting. The neo-liberal Counter-Reformation…would furnish the classic services of reactionary opinion, delivering a social alchemy to forge a political force out of everything that a middle class invariably ends up exuding-fear, envy, and conformity” (TLTLP, 18-19). And if we were to pose Châtelet’s question for our historical present, one would find an answer from Châtelet himself; an answer that is, however, a negative response:

“…here lies the whole imposture of the city-slicker narcissism…the claim to reestablish all the splendour of that nascent urbanism that, in the Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance, brings together talents, intensifying them in a new spacetime – whereas in fact all our new urbanists do is turn a profit from a placement, a double movement that pulverizes and compactifies spacetime so as to subordinate it to a socio-communicational space governed by the parking lot and the cellphone. From now on the spacetime of the city will be a matter of the econometric management of the stock of skills per cubic metre per second, and of the organization of the number of encounters of functional individuals, encounters that naturally will be promoted to the postmodern dignity of ‘events’ […] In any case, for the great majority of Turbo-Becassines and Cyber-Gideons, cosmopolitanism is above all a certain transcontinental way of staying at home and amongst their own by teleporting the predatory elegance that immediately distinguishes the urban monster as a bearer of hope…from the Gribouilles and the Petroleuses, afflicted with vegetative patience or saurian militancy.” 
​
(Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs, 67-68)

taken from:

​by Ian Buchanan

​Using some ‘real-world’ examples drawn from the work of the Australian policy ethnographer Tess Lea, I want to offer a different view of the assemblage, one that is drawn directly from the work of Deleuze and Guattari rather than secondary sources. Four key differences from Baker and McGuirk’s account of the assemblage will be apparent: firstly, the assemblage is not a thing in the world–it is assemblages that explain the existence of things in the world, not the other way round; secondly, assemblages are structured and structuring (not purely processual), that is one of their principal processes; thirdly, assemblages have a logic, an operational sense if you will, that can be mapped–one always knows what is possible and what is not possible within a given assemblage; and, lastly, assemblages always strive to persist in their being, to use a Spinozist turn of phrase–they are subject to forces of change, but ultimately they would always prefer not to change (this is why deterritorialisation is always immediately followed by reterritorialisation). 
​
Infrastructure good and bad is the product of countless small decisions by many thousands of people over many decades. Those decisions, however well intentioned and well thought through, are not made in a vacuum. Of necessity, they are made in a context defined by a set of constraints to do with cost, existing infrastructure, topography, trade agreements, and countless other factors too numerous to even at tempt to tabulate here, that ultimately blurs the line between the intended and the unintended, the fated and the accidental. The result is a curious state of affairs that is neither the product of deliberate, conscious design, nor the product of a sequence of random, ad hoc experiments, but somehow a combination of the two. It is, in this sense, a highly unstable object that requires a supple ontology to describe it. To begin with, and perhaps most importantly, we have to stop thinking of infrastructure and infrastructure policy in teleological terms because it has neither a clear-cut beginning nor a logical end point (Lea 2014:n.p.).This, in turn, challenges us to re-think the ontology of policy.

Rather than see policy as a blueprint, that is, as a static document or model which guides the construction of specific pieces of infrastructure, Lea argues that ‘policy is an organic–or as I prefer, a wild–force, a biota which thrives on the heralding of cataclysms and thus the cumulative need for policy beneficence’ (Lea 2014: n.p.). I like this notion of wild policy, because of the impromptu, seat-of-the-pants, policy-on-the-fly image it conjures up that goes well beyond the rather tame non-linear feedback loop model of ‘formulation–implementation–reformulation’ DeLanda suggests as a means of accommodating the widely acknowledged ‘gap’ between policy formulation and implementation. As he says, this model works–for his purposes–because it allows for fluidity in the policy-implementation process but still retains the possibility of assessing outcomes (De Landa 2006: 85). Lea’s position is much more radical than this because she wants us to dispense with the fantasy (implicit in DeLanda’s formulation) that policy can be thought in systemic terms and evaluated by wiser critics after the fact, thus failing to think outside the logic of the system being critiqued. As Lea’s work demonstrates, the ‘formulation–implementation–reformulation’ model is intrinsic to policy’s own idea of itself (in Deleuzian terms, one could say it is policy’s ‘image of thought’ [Deleuze 1994: 131]). In its self-reflexive moments–such as so-called policy reviews–policy is sometimes willing to admit that things have not gone as planned, but even this is mere self-deception because the ‘idea of intentions gone awry pretends there was no foundational opacity within original policy forecasts’ (Lea 2014: n.p.).

However, as much as I like the image of ‘wild policy’ I want to set aside the organic model Lea uses to frame it because as several key critiques of organic models have amply demonstrated it returns us all too swiftly to the very thing we wanted to escape from in the first place, that is, teleology. Instead I want to reimagine it in terms of ‘wild analysis’, which is Freud’s term for ‘apparently’ psychoanalytic diagnoses and treatments formulated by ‘untrained’ physicians. He is particularly wary of physicians who have a smattering of psychoanalytic knowledge, but have not mastered the subtleties of the actual practice of psychoanalysis itself, which despite its pretensions to scientificity was and remains an art form. In a way, though, the master himself was as much a practiser of ‘wild analysis’ as the lay practictioners he chastises because psychoanalysis itself is ‘wild’ as Nicholas Spice captures beautifully in this inspired description of the psychoanalytic‘scene’(i.e.the‘encounter’ between analyst and analysand):

Analyst and patient are two people who start to dance without knowing which dance it is that they are dancing or even if they share the same understanding of what a dance might be. But still they dance, and though in time they get used to each other’s steps they never do find out which dance it is. So the patient has to give up his need to know what the analyst thinks about him, since there is no way he can ever find this out, and the analyst must give up every ordinary human means to convince the patient that she really does have his best interests at heart. (Spice 2004: n.p.)

​This, I think, better expresses the basic claim Lea wants to make about policy, namely that policy-making is (1) born in ignorance; (2) an adaption to circumstances rather than a rational solution to a specific problem; (3) subject to constant scepticism and suspicion; and (4) propped up by mutually agreed upon illusions of coherence. Wild analysis calls for the antidote of schizoanalysis (which is assemblage theory’s other name). Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage answers to a number of the issues raised by Lea, but we must be careful to distinguish it from the kinds of distorted versions of it elaborated above, which are all too often imbued with precisely the kind of artificial coherence Lea wants us to escape. There is no point in exchanging wild analysis for wild schizoanalysis. If policy is to be understood as an assemblage, as I want to suggest it should be, then we have to first of all grasp that the assemblage is not a thing and it does not consist of things. I would even go so far as to say the assemblage does not have any content, it is a purely formal arrangement or ordering that functions as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 45). It does not consist of relations; rather, it is a relation, but of a very particular type. 

​To conceive of policy as an assemblage means seeing it purely in terms of the kinds of arrangements and orderings it makes possible and even more importantly the set of expectations it entails. To see it this way we need to separate ‘policy’ as a conceptual entity from its myriad iterations as this or that policy–for example, infrastructure policy, health policy, transport policy, and so on–but also from all sense of outcomes and outputs. We also have to see so-called policy decisions as components of the policy assemblage and not as some kind of climactic moment in the life of a policy. Policy decisions are part of the form of the policy assemblage, not the content. By questioning the very idea of policy Lea has enabled us to see it in a new light. As Lea shows, policy-making is rhizomatic, it takes place ‘in the middle of things’, but always pretends otherwise because it is locked into an image of itself as a special type of agency (assemblage) that defines and measures ‘progress’. When policy ​looks at itself it only sees beginnings and endings, starting points that lack intentionality (a situation that stands in need of rectification) and finishing points that are fully intended (a changed situation). In the middle is action, and though policy claims to function as a guide to what happens it eschews all responsibility.

​In spite of the fact that the concept of the assemblage quite explicitly takes its structure from the work of the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, the one Deleuze and Guattari describe as a ‘dark prince descended from Hamlet’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 43), assemblage theory consistently looks to science, particularly cybernetics, systems theory and complexity theory, as both the source of Deleuze and Guattari’s inspiration and the point of reference that gives the concept its meaning. For instance, in his two books devoted to assemblage theory (A New Philosophy of Society and Assemblage Theory) DeLanda does not mention Hjelmslev. Baker and McGuirk do not mention Hjelmslev either. Not only does this omission obscure the fact that Deleuze and Guattari drew upon a wide variety of non-scientific sources in their formulation of the concept of the assemblage, it also forgets that Deleuze and Guattari were quite explicit in saying that they were not interested in (re)producing science; they wanted their work to be thought of as nothing but philosophy. The concept, as Deleuze and Guattari would later write, has no referent (i.e. something in the ‘real’ world that it refers to and draws its meaning from), something else assemblage theorists of the ‘realist’ persuasion conveniently forget (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 22). 

Of these other sources the most important insofar as the assemblage is concerned was structuralist linguistics, including its dark precursor Russian Formalism. Guattari, particularly, was an avid reader of Mikhail Bakhtin and his putative alter ego Valentin Vološinov, a fact reflected in dozens of footnotes throughout his work. Deleuze, too, was clearly inspired by their work, as can be seen in his cinema books (the sensory-motor-scheme is clearly narratological in inspiration).Ironically, the one scholar to emphasise this connection was the one person who might have been expected to and perhaps even forgiven for seeing only the science side of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and that is Bruno Latour. Latour explicitly links his conception of agency–and hence the concept of the assemblage which he takes from Deleuze and Guattari and adapts to his own purposes–to Greimas’s narratological concept of ​the actant (Latour 2005: 54). I want to suggest that Latour’s insight that agency can and should be thought in narratological terms is helpful in deepening our understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage. Not the least because it returns us all the more surely to Hjelmslev, a key inspiration for Greimas in any case. Greimas helps to put Hjelmslev back in his proper light as a structuralist linguist, which is important because it cuts through the illusory veil of scientificity that has been wrapped around the concept of the assemblage by many of its erstwhile admirers. As I will briefly illustrate, Greimas’s concept is perfectly consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s famous instruction that we should ask not what something means, but only how it works, for this is exactly Greimas’s question too. 

The degree to which the two concepts–actant and assemblage–are congruent becomes apparent the moment their respective definitions are read side by side. Firstly, the actant:

If we recall that functions, in the traditional syntax, are but roles played by words–the subject being ‘the one who performs the action’, ‘the one who suffers it’, etc.–then according to such a conception the proposition as a whole becomes a spectacle to which homo loquens treats himself. (Greimas, quoted in Jameson 1972: 124)

​And as Jameson points out, for Greimas ‘it is this underlying “dramatic” structure which is common to all forms of discourse, philosophical or literary, expository or affective’ (Jameson 1972: 124). This will need more detailed explication, which I will provide in a moment, but before I do that I want to quickly juxtapose it with a brief quote from Deleuze and Guattari just to make apparent the degree to which their thinking is inspired by the same concern to distinguish between superficial appearances and deep structures of action:

​A formation of power is much more than a tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language. Rather, they act as determining and selective agents, as much in the constitution of languages and tools as in their usages and mutual or respective diffusions and communications.(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:63 my emphasis)

​The essential insight of the concept of the actant is that the organising structure of a text (in the broadest possible sense of that word, which can of course encompass both policy and the built environment, our two concerns here) is at once that which allows for maximum variation and that which itself resists all variation (Jameson 1972: 123–9). It is in this precise sense a singularity at the heart of a multiplicity. It has both an internal limit and an external limit, that is, boundaries which cannot be crossed without becoming something different from what it was. The internal limit refers to the sum total of possible variationsit can accommodate; while the external limit refers to the restrictions history itself places on the number of possible variations. Analysis consists of bringing these limits to light. It is important to remember, too, that the actant is a narratological concept. So it always refers to a process of transformation rather than a static situation, or, to put it another way, it is generative not descriptive. Lea’s ethnography of the debate that went on behind closed doors in the implementation phase of Australia’s Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) offers a real-world example of the actant as organising structure. Launched in 2009 with considerable fanfare and a seemingly bottomless well of money, SIHIP was supposed to ‘fix’ once and for all (the echoes to be heard here of ‘final solution’ are of course fully intended) the parlous state of indigenous housing in northern Australia. With a budget of almost $650 million, the programme was supposed to provide 750 new houses and refurbishment of a further 2,500 houses for Indigenous people in seventy-three communities across the Northern Territory. But almost from the beginning it ran into serious problems as cost overruns and blatant corruption on the part of ‘white’ building contractors turned the whole thing into a boondoggle of misused public funds. It was a public relations disaster, a virtual running sore that could not be remedied, because the constant rorting of the programme pushed up the unit cost of the individual houses being built to the point where ‘urban’ Australians (i.e. ‘white’ middle-class voting Australians) began to express resentment at the amount of money being spent on houses for ‘black’ people living in the ‘bush’. The build cost of houses in remote parts of Australia is so high that even modest homes are extremely expensive and by implication appear to be ‘luxurious’ and ‘undeserved’ to uneducated urban eyes. 

I assume I need not comment here on the all too obvious undercurrent of racism fuelling the national outburst of ressentiment the SIHIP fiasco occasioned, but it should be clear–I hope–that not only is racism central to the political fall-out and response, but it also has a material dimension that, as Lea amply documents, finds its purest and most baleful expression in ontology. In order to bring costs down and get the whole mess out of the media spotlight, the politicians and senior bureaucrats charged with ‘fixing’ things invited the building contractors who had hitherto ‘failed’ to deliver appropriately costed houses to reconsider the very meaning and actual substance of the concept of a house. Behind closed doors the builders were told ‘everything is on the table’:

​With ... the invitation to ‘put it on the table,’ the discussion quickly turned to ways of building lower-cost houses at speed by lopping off such seemingly discretionary design features as louvered windows and sun hoods, internal flashings for waterproofing, or disabled access. In the flurry of designing and then undoing the designs for appropriate housing, it was the sound of a built house falling apart in the non-specifiable future that could not compete with the noise of a threatened-and-defensive government in the here and now. (Lea 2014: n.p.)

As Lea argues, by putting ‘everything on the table’ the government effectively gave the builders a free hand to determine not only what constitutes the indigenous housing assemblage in the abstract or conceptual sense (thus redefining its internal limits), but also what constitutes an appropriated welling for an Indigenous person in an actual material sense (thus redefining its external limits). But, she asks, is a house still a house if–as was often the case with the houses built under the auspices of SIHIP–it is not connected to water? Is it still a house if it does not have adequate temperature control or any means of cooling it down in the year-round hot weather northern Australia experiences? Is it still a house if the sewage pipes are not connected to a sewage system? (Lea and Pholeros 2010: 187–190.) These are the internal limits of the housing assemblage, and under normal circumstances it would be impossible to ignore these limits and still call the result a house. But in this instance, with all the rules quite consciously suspended, a new assemblage was brought into being. But the more important assemblage-related question is: according to what criteria is it acceptable and legitimate to not only build houses of this materially substandard variety but also to expect the intended occupants to not only live in them but express gratitude for the ‘privilege’? This question cannot be answered unless we look further afield than the materials themselves. Lea uses the actual materiality of matter in the most literal and granular sense in a dialectical fashion to expose the fault lines in the expressive dimension. By examining in detail the properties of water, for example, and its implications for building houses in tropical locations, she exposes the critical shallowness of policy thinking which is more focused on ticking boxes in the expressive sphere than it is in creating enduring, live able houses in the material sphere. Material for Lea is akin to Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious, it points to ​an unthought dimension in policy formation; it also offers the occasion to write glorious sentences (which I willingly cite below). And in many ways these two operations–exposing an unthought, creating exciting new types of sentences–could be said to sum up (in a meta-commentary sense) the new materialist movement: 

In monsoonal environments, walls suck in rainwater, forcing bricks and mortar to loosen their seemingly fast embrace, with each new striation forging a sweaty path for corrosion. Salt in mortar built with (substandard) building sand encourages water’s entry points. Water softens the muscularity of support beams; and when it dances on metal, shows itself to be an electrolyte, capable of strengthening its conductive properties by taking carbon dioxide from the air and creating carbonic acid, able to dissolve iron. Even better if the water is salt-loaded, be it from the liberation of salts in artesian waters as pastoralists and miners pull more and more liquid from the subterranean earth, or as spray from coastal waters. Salty water and acidified water are electrolytes on steroids, able to deconstruct the functionality of load-bearing steel frames at far greater speeds. (Lea 2015: 377) 

As I have tried to indicate, there are two separate processes at work in this example: on the one hand, there is a set of questions about what constitutes a house in a material-semiotic sense, which corresponds to the internal limit of the actant; on the other hand, there is a set of questions about what constitutes an appropriate dwelling in an ethicopolitical sense, which corresponds to the external limit of the actant. By looking at the ‘house’ in this way, as an actant rather than an apparatus, our attention is directed in a very particular way: it asks us to reverse the usual way of seeing material–material is not, on this view of things, a condition of possibility, as it tends to be in most so-called new materialist accounts; rather, it is anything which can be interpolated and accommodated by the concept. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, drawing on Hjelmslev, material must always be produced; it does not simply exist (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 43–5). We have to resist the empiricist tendency to treat material as given and instead ask the more properly transcendental-empiricist question: how and under what conditions does matter become material? 

​In an Australian context, bricks, timber, pressed iron and fibreboard all seem like ‘proper’ materials for house-building, whereas mud, straw, bark, plastic bottles and car bodies do not. But in fact there is no intrinsic reason why these ‘other’ materials should be excluded. Greimas’s question, then, which I want to suggest is also Deleuze and Guattari’s question, is: what are the limits to what can and cannot be counted as material for a particular actant and how are these limits decided?
​
​Greimas’s implication is that one cannot look to the material itself to find the answer; instead, one has to examine the actant–what are its requirements? What expectations does it create? This in turn leads us to the external limit and the role ‘history’ itself plays in shaping what can and cannot become the proper material of an actant. Now the issue is less what material is suitable for house-building and more what material is ‘fitting’, where ‘fitting’ is an ethico-political judgement about what kinds of houses people ‘ought’ to live in. These same two dimensions are to be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage and although they have different names their operation is almost exactly the same, but with one important twist: both the dimensions themselves and the relation between them are purely arbitrary (something else the new materialists and the realists neglect in their appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari). As Hjemslev puts it, the two dimensions ‘are defined only by their mutual solidarity, and neither of them can be identified otherwise. They are defined only oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the same function’ (Hjelmslev, quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 45). The first dimension (equivalent to the internal limit of the actant) is the form of content, but it is also known as the machinic assemblage of bodies; the second dimension is the form of expression, but it is also known as the collective assemblage of enunciation (88). At its most basic the assemblage combines ‘non-discursive multiplicities’ and ‘discursive multiplicities’–the combination is not total or exhaustive, one dimension does not map onto the other without remainder, something always escapes. This is because they are dimensions of an active, ongoing process, not a static entity. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are complex syntheses (meaning one can not trace back a pure line of derivation, there is always an inexplicable leap) of a range of ideas drawn from a wide variety of sources, so their names change as they evolve and take on board additional components. In this case the name change reflects the combination of Hjelmslev’s ideas (form/content) with that of the Stoics (bodies/attributes) and the work of Leroi-Gourhan (tools/signs) (63). These distinctions cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between things: ‘What should be opposed are distinct formalizations, in a state of unstable equilibrium or reciprocal presupposition’ (67). 

​Foucault’s analysis of prisons–itself inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s work, as Foucault remarks in an admiring note in the preface to Discipline and Punish–is an exemplary illustration of how this works in practice according to Deleuze and Guattari:

Take a thing like the prison: the prison is a form, the ‘prison-form’; it is a form of content on a stratum and is related to other forms of content (school, barracks, hospital, factory). This thing does not refer back to the word ‘prison’ but to entirely different words and concepts, such as ‘delinquent’ and ‘delinquency’, which express a new way of classifying, stating, translating and even committing criminal acts. ‘Delinquency’ is the form of expression in reciprocal presupposition with the form of content ‘prison’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 66)

​How should this model of thought be applied? The ‘preferred method’, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘would be severely restrictive’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 67), by which they mean we should (1) seek to determine the specific conditions under which matter becomes material (i.e. how bricks, timber and steel are determined to be the proper material for housing as opposed to mud, straw and wrecked cars); and (2) seek to determine the specific conditions under which semiotic matter becomes expressive (i.e. how it is decided that a specific arrangement of materials is ‘fitting’ for a person to live in and another arrangement is not). Here I must clarify that for Deleuze and Guattari, expression, or better yet ‘becoming expressive’, does not mean simply that something has acquired meaning(s) in the semiotic sense; rather, it refers to the fact it has acquired a performative function. In the example above, the label ‘delinquent’ is not merely symbolic, it frames a person as deserving the treatment he or she receives. It is clear that ‘indigenous’ functions in the same way–as Lea’s analyses make abundantly apparent, the assemblage ‘indigenous housing ’is very different in its formulation to what we might think of as ‘regular housing’ (a phrase I use purely for convenience without any wish to defend it).  

That these two formalisations are arbitrary and mobile can be seen in the fact that both vary considerably from country to country and more especially from one class perspective to another. The modest suburban home is a mansion to the slum-dweller, and the slum-dweller’s shanty is a mansion to the rough-sleeping homeless person; by the same token, the suburban home is ‘fitting’ for a middle-class ‘white’ person, just as the shanty is–in the eyes of that same middle-class ‘white’ person–‘fitting’ for a poor person, particularly one living in a remote part of the country where he or she is literally out of sight and out of mind. Formalisation means there is a unity of composition, or, to put it another way, there is an underlying principle of inclusion and exclusion. But the principle of inclusion and exclusion for one dimension (content) can be and often is in conflict with the principle of inclusion and exclusion for the other dimension (expression). But what is of central importance–and the reason why the assemblage is such a powerful concept–is the issue of what it takes to yoke together these two dimensions in the first place: this is what the assemblage does. We have to stop thinking of the concept of the assemblage as a way of describing a thing or situation and instead see it for what it was always intended to be: a way of analysing a thing or situation.

​As Deleuze and Guattari say:

​thinkers who do not renew the image of thought are not philosophers but functionaries who, enjoying a ready-made thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim to take as their models. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 51)

​Concepts should bring about a new way of seeing something and not simply fix a label to something we think we already know about. For Deleuze and Guattari, the critical analytic question is always: given a specific situation, what kind of assemblage would be required to produce it? As I have tried to indicate in the foregoing discussion of Lea’s analyses of indigenous housing policy in Australia, this question should be understood as having two interrelated dimensions: on the one hand, it asks: what are the material elements–bodies in the broadest possible sense–that consitute this ‘thing’, how are they arranged, what relations do they entail, what new arrangements and relations might they facilitate? On the other hand, it also asks: how is this arrangement of things justified and more importantly legitimated, what makes it seem right and proper? In this way it points to different kinds of entities, non-discursive and discursive (or better yet, performative) that have been yoked together. However, it must be emphasised here that the assemblage is the yoke, not the product of the yoke. This is why the comparison with Greimas’s concept of the actant is valuable: it helps us to see that the assemblage is a virtual entity with actual effects.

taken from: ​

by Ian Buchanan

​Kevin Fletcher - ornamental low relief assemblage

If the development of assemblage theory does not need to be anchored in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as increasingly seems to be the case in the social sciences, then cannot one say that the future of assemblage theory is an illusion? It is an illusion in the sense that it continues to act as though the concept was invented by Deleuze and Guattari, but because it does not feel obligated to draw on their work in its actual operation or development, it cannot lay claim to being authentic. That this does not trouble certain scholars in the social sciences is troubling to me. So in this paper I offer first of all critique of this illusory synthetic version of the assemblage and accompany that with a short case study showing what can be gained by returning to Deleuze and Guattari.
​
​Keywords: assemblage theory, ontology of policy, infrastructure policy, actant, agencement, indigenous housing

​One cannot help but wonder how different the uptake of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘agencement’ would be if it had not been translated as ‘assemblage’ and an alternate translation such as ‘arrangement’ (which is my preferred translation [Buchanan 2015: 383]) had become the standard? It may be that assemblage theory as we know it today would never have taken off, which would be a pity because the field is enormously productive and it has brought into its orbit a huge range of questions and problematics that might otherwise never have been considered. ​But at least we would not be faced with the problem of how to ‘re-think’ a concept that has all but become a ‘received idea’ (as Flaubert put it), that is, an idea that is so well understood it no longer bears thinking about in any kind of critical way. Unfortunately, the consensus understanding of the concept has been shaped as much (if not more than) by a plain language understanding of the English word ‘assemblage’ as it has by any deep understanding of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. This is particularly evident in the social sciences where there is a strong and–I will argue–undue emphasis on the idea of ‘assembling’ as the core process of assemblages. This is compounded by an apparent consensus that assemblage theory is one of those concepts like deconstruction and postmodernism that no longer owes its development to a specific authorial source. While it is hard to fault the latter view in that one should be free to re-make concepts, its detachment from Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking has led to a considerable loss of clarity and cohesion in the concept.1

The fact that the English word ‘assemblage’ ​is not Deleuze and Guattari’s own word, but an artefact of translation, is rarely, if ever, brought into consideration, and where it is it tends to be dismissed as unimportant, which perhaps explains the emphasis on assembling as the central concern of assemblage theory. There are a number of problems with this view of things, not least the fact that assemblage in English does not mean the same thing as agencement in French. Not only that, it is itself a loan word from French, thus adding to the confusion. As Thomas Nail (among others) has shown, agencement derives from agencer, which according to Le Robert & Collins means ‘to arrange, to lay out, or to piece together’, whereas assemblage means ‘to join, to gather, to assemble’ (Nail 2017: 22; but see also Buchanan 2015: 383). The difference between these two definitions is perhaps subtle, but by no means inconsequential: we might say the former is a process of composition whereas the latter is one of compilation; the difference being that one works with a pre-existing set of entities and gives it a different order, whereas the latter starts from scratch and builds up to something that may or may not have order. A compilation may be a‘ heap of fragments’, where as a composition cannot be.2 The solution, however, is not as simple as insisting that Deleuze and Guattari should (or as some would have it, can) only be read in the ‘original’ French, which is not practical for all readers in any case, because, as I will show, this same plain language approach also applies to straightforward terms like ‘multiplicity’ and ‘territory’. The solution, in my view, is to ‘return’ to Deleuze and Guattari’s work.

I will take as my case in point an essay by two human geographers,Tom Baker and Pauline McGuirk, ‘Assemblage Thinking as Methodology: Commitments and Practices for Critical Policy Research’ (2016), one of the richest, most comprehensive and sophisticated accounts of assemblage theory as it is deployed in the social sciences yet written, and therefore a perfect and anything but ‘straw man’ example of the kind of work I am talking about. In spite of its considerable sophistication, it has completely detached the concept of assemblage from Deleuze and Guattari and replaced it with a synthetic accumulation of readings of readings of Deleuze and Guattari. Ironically, the kind of genealogical reading Baker and McGuirk say is part and parcel of assemblage thinking is completely absent from their own use of the concept. Instead of tracing the concept back to a point of origin, they pull together a heterogeneous ensemble of quotes about the concept of the assemblage from a vast trawl-through of the secondary literature. It is therefore unsurprising, but telling that in defining the concept of Deleuze and Guattari, or DeLanda’ (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 15, n.1). Without any anchor in Deleuze and Guattari’s work the concept floats off into an alternate universe in which all contributions to the discussion are treated as equally valuable and there is no arbitration between the strong and the weak versions, never mind the accurate and the wrong versions.the assemblage Baker and McGuirk do not refer to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which is mentioned but not cited. In a footnote they clarify that for their purposes ‘assemblage thinking refers to a diverse set of research accounts that may or may not engage directly with formal theories of assemblage, such as those of ​Deleuze and Guattari, or DeLanda’ (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 15, n.1). Without any anchor in Deleuze and Guattari’s work the concept floats off into an alternate universe in which all contributions to the discussion are treated as equally valuable and there is no arbitration between the strong and the weak versions, never mind the accurate and the wrong versions.
​
Baker and McGuirk define the ‘assemblage as a “gathering of heterogeneous elements consistently drawn together as an identifiable terrain of action and debate”’ (drawing on the work of Tanya Li), noting that its elements include ‘arrangements of humans, materials, technologies, organizations, techniques, procedures, norms, and events, all of which have the capacity for agency within and beyond the assemblage’ (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 4). They also say, citing J. Macgregor Wise, that the assemblage ‘claims a territory’, and that it ‘is realized through ongoing processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, such that assemblages are continually in the process of being made and remade’ (4). To which they add Colin McFarlane’s suggestion that the ‘popularity of assemblage results in large part from its understanding of the social as “materially heterogeneous, practice based, emergent and processual”’ (4).

For Baker and McGuirk the assemblage is primarily a ‘methodological-analytical framework’ so ‘its application demands an explicitly methodological discussion’, something which in their view is sorely lacking in the literature (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 4, 5). ​This is the most important (and frustrating) part about Baker and McGuirk’s project. While I do not agree with the particulars of their way of constructinga ‘ methodological-analytical framework ’ out of the concept of the assemblage, I nonetheless support very strongly the necessity of so doing.I would add that in my view explicitly methodological discussions of the assemblage are sorely lacking in the secondary Deleuze and Guattari literature too. It is to the particulars of Baker and McGuirk’s ‘methodological-analytical framework’ that I now want to turn. They write:

Assemblage methodologies are guided by epistemological commitments that signify a certain interrogative orientation toward the world. Though abstract, these commitments inform inclusions, priorities, and sensitivities, which together constitute the field of vision brought to bear on empirical phenomena. Sifting through the substantial number of accounts using assemblage thinking [note again the fact they do not refer to Deleuze and Guattari], we can identify four commitments common to those using assemblage methodologically. These are commitments to revealing multiplicity, processuality, labour, and uncertainty. (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 6; my emphasis)

As I will show, the detachment from Deleuze and Guattari’s work seems to compel a plain language approach which, to borrow a term from translation studies, puts them at the mercy of several ‘false friends’, that is, words that look like they should mean one thing but in fact mean something else.

Commitment to multiplicity is, for Baker and McGuirk, an interpretive strategy for setting aside the presumption of coherence and determination that reigns in certain quarters of contemporary policy studies. It holds to the idea that all social and cultural phenomena are multiply determined and cannot be reduced to a single logic. More particularly, in a policy context, it points to ‘the practical coexistence of multiple political projects, modes of governance, practices and outcomes’ (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 6–7). This means policy outcomes cannot be linked in a linear way to a specific determination, but have to be treated as contingent, or, at any rate, indirect. There are three problems here: firstly, we have to be careful not to conflate the content (policy) with the form (assemblage) because however incoherent a policy formation may be in the eyes of its critics, as an assemblage it must as a matter of necessity tend towards coherence, that being one of its essential functions (the problem of unity and diversity is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the assemblage [Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 43–5]). ​Secondly, the assemblage is a multiplicity, but this does not mean it is multiply determined. It refers to a state of being, not its actual process of composition, and there is no reason at all why it cannot have a single or singular logic.3 Thirdly, while it is true assemblages are contingent, their outputs are not. Indeed, what would be the point of the concept if this was the case? As Deleuze and Guattari say, given a certain effect, what kind of machine (assemblage) is capable of producing it? (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 3.) 

​The commitment to multiplicity is enacted via a second commitment to what they call processuality, which Baker and McGuirk define (again borrowing liberally from a diverse body of secondary literature) as what happens in an assemblage. At first glance they seem to be saying assemblages assemble, that they draw together disparate elements and combine them in a provisional fashion; they may tend towards stabilisation, or not, but regardless exist in a state of constant flux:

In methodological terms, a focus on the processes through which assemblages come into and out of being lends itself to careful genealogical tracing of how past alignments and associations have informed the present and how contemporary conditions and actants are crystallizing new conditions of possibility. (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 7)

​But as this quote makes clear, something quite different is meant by processuality. It names, rather, a concern for genesis–but how something comes together and how it operates once it does are quite different issues (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 152). But that is not the only problem here. One wonders how this interpolation of what I assume is Foucault’s concept of genealogy (rather than Nietzsche’s, or even Deleuze’s version of Nietzsche) can be squared with the aforementioned commitment to non-linearity? More importantly, though, the whole idea of a genealogy of the assemblage stands in flat contradiction of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the assemblage, which is focused on the question ‘how does it work?’ and not ‘what does it mean?’ much less ‘where does it come from?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 109).4

​The commitment to revealing the labour needed to produce and maintain assemblages is said by Baker and McGuirk to echo Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘original term agencement–roughly meaning “putting together” or “arrangement”–later translated to assemblage’ (Baker and McGuirk 2016:7), but in fact it echoes the plain language understanding of assemblage as the putting together of things, as their subsequent clarifications of this point make apparent. They go on to say, again borrowing widely, assemblages ‘are not accidental, but knowingly and unknowingly held together’ and they ‘are always coming apart as much as coming together, so their existence in particular configurations is something that must be continually worked at’ (7). Ultimately, what this commitment reveals is that ‘policy and policy-making [is] a laboured over achievement’ (8). Without wishing to dispute their conclusion here–there can be no doubt policy and policy-making is a laboured over achievement–I do want to say for the sake of understanding the concept of the assemblage that the labour required to sustain a particular instance of an assemblage is a kind of local area problem that should not be confused with the actual operation of the concept itself. The assemblage itself is, by definition, self-sustaining: it requires labour to actualise it, to be sure, but its existence does not depend on that labour. There is constant slippage between what we might call actually existing assemblages and the concept of the assemblage in Baker and McGuirk’s account such that the former tends to stand in the place of the latter and the difference between the two vanishes. When that happens the concept becomes adjectival rather than analytical, it describes rather than defamiliarises, which defeats the purpose of having the concept in the first place. 

The fourth and final commitment is to uncertainty and the temptation to know too much. ‘Such a position involves accepting that, rather than producing Archimedean accounts of the world “as it is”, social research can only produce situated readings and, therefore, must make modest claims’(Baker and McGuirk 2016:8). Interestingly, this is not something Deleuze and Guattari advocated. In fact, they argued for precisely the opposite view: as they put it, the only problem with abstraction is that we are not abstract enough. One cannot arrive at the assemblage by means of a situated account because the contents of an assemblage do not necessarily disclose the form of an assemblage; similarly, we need to be wary of assigning every local variety of anassemblage an independent identity distinct from the abstract assemblage. Paradoxically, there is no surer way of winding up in the ‘knowing too much’ space that assemblage thinking is supposed to avoid than the approach Baker and McGuirk recommend because such self-limiting analyses presume to know in advance what knowing enough and therefore what knowing too much looks like. It is precisely this kind of analytic cul-de-sac that ​Deleuze and Guattari were trying to avoid by saying we need to be experimental in our approach. What many readers find infuriating in their work is precisely their blatant refusal to stick to making modest claims.On the contrary, they  make bold, global claims and in the process force us to think differently about the world.

​to be continued ...

taken from: 

​By Max.Ernst

Just as the Renaissance refers to a cultural epoch of a certain kind and points to a departure from conception, the term Remothering * seems to designate opposite developments at the beginning of the 21st century. Demolition: the project of modernity and the Enlightenment is considered failed. As sentiment, it has been absorbed in the folklore of a post-modern cultural concept. 

The postmodernism, which marks the age of repairs, yields to material-based, irreparable wear and tear and turns to new possibilities, or virtualities. After you have failed in the material, you are now looking for an intelligence that lives in programs. The code dissolves further from the material and this is increasingly transformed into description forms. From there one hopes via feedback another transfer: The intelligence should go back into the matter. Which concept of intelligence underlies this back and forth remains unclear. 

The nice metaphor of the big brother, which is associated with the recent developments, refers to the derivation of another metaphor: The mother, a regressive need, which is in the projection of a big mother - Big Mother and back to the cuddly, comfortable , pleasant, comfortable, homey and against the evil out there in the world shows. This is also the basis of the claim to the all-inclusive package for all that one pretends to be able to fulfill to a large extent via algorithms.
​
The virtual mamma is the amniotic sac that is designed to ensure constant adaptation to the most sophisticated needs of highly organized living beings. The dream machine, which one entrusts itself to and promises the protection, where on the other side exclusively "evil" world exists, which can be mastered in the best case with their help in the feedback of an extended fruit bubble (lucky suit). The space is a tautological, a data space, which feeds from the impression of supposedly experienced realities and thus provides the necessary familiarity. Complexities are simplified where possible. Nobody should be scared. All needs are constantly fulfilled as well as permanently maintained. Only then does the symbiosis between the mother and what emerges from it emerge. It is redressed and automated. The mother is a pseudo-organism that feeds from the network of connected vending machines. The subject / objects of the remainder are ideally reduced to some properties as Turing machines. The ultimate goal is the automation of society. Ethical foundations are relevant only insofar as they serve the acceptance of necessary transformation. It is sufficient if illusion is perceived as reality. Once the goal is reached, these questions no longer play a role anyway. It is sufficient if illusion is perceived as reality. Once the goal is reached, these questions no longer play a role anyway. It is sufficient if illusion is perceived as reality. Once the goal is reached, these questions no longer play a role anyway. ​

* Donald E. Cameron ** John Lennon

taken from:

​By Max.Ernst

​Future (um) 2 * / The Perfect Future: The key to artificial paradise, according to the psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner , is the insight that every human being is nothing but a bundle of behavioral patterns - an automaton with predictable and manipulable reactions to the environment. Thus, the only alternative to an anarchic future would be to turn the earth into a behavioral psychological laboratory, so calculated that "soft but insistent ethical sanctions" will keep the order once established ... ** 
​
China 2020, Radical Behaviorism and Behavioral Analysis: When the party's intended target is met, every step, every keystroke, every like or dislike, every social-media contact, every post is subject to state control and finds itself in the personal social rating system, that's artificial Paradise Spinner's become reality -  in the gentle urging and pushing of others and the irresistible spur to confluency, in the sensors in her shirt and the lulling voice that answers your questions, the television that hears her, the house she knows, the bed that listens to your nocturnal whisper, the book she reads ... *** 

... contented coexistence in a conflict-free society based on behavioral control technologies and, in particular, on the positive reinforcement of socially desired behaviors. ** The Algorithm - Procedure for Solving the Problems: It can be formulated in human language as well as implemented in computer programs. Determinism is the rhythm.

Machine (Deep) Learning: the algorithm learns through reward and punishment - teaching penalties how to avoid punishment - a tactic of how to act in potentially occurring situations to maximize the benefit of the agent ****. The key issue of automated humanity has always been "can it make us read minds?" The ability to control human behavior becomes more frightening than the control of nuclear reactions. Art Bachrach and Robert Oppenheimer were in agreement. As part of the Paperclip project, the US also recruited former concentration camp doctors who participated in the experiments (MKultra, Artichoke, etc.) to predict, control and control human behavior.

The novel (Futuru/ Walden 2) does not answer the question of who defines the social framework in the perfect future, or claims the right to define it, and thus determines the coexistence of the members of this society to the smallest detail, including their ethical norms. Skinner later says, "The guidelines of control must be designed by scientists." Analysis / Synthesis: Science shares its root in distinguishing, deciding, separating, and eliminating with another term. Machines change faster than we (ourselves, as well as the algorithms) "understand" (understanding). I want to be a machine - no pain no thought. **** Futility / Futurum 2 -: "I" will have been:

The mother comes and tears me. She tears me in by coming and looking (...) She walks right through the wall of stone. Oh, alas, my mother tears me ...

​* German title by Walden2 / Futurum2 / Burrhus Frederic Skinner / FiFa Verlag Munich

** Spiegel vom 27.9.1971 / Soft Force / BFSkinner - Beyond Freedom and Dignity

*** Shoshuna Zuboff / sheets for German and international politics 11/18

**** denotes a computer program that is capable of specified standalone behavior. Depending on different states, certain implemented processing operations will take place without a start signal being given from outside or external control intervention during the process. / Wiki

***** Heiner Müller / Hamlet machine
​
****** RMRilke / My mother

taken from: 

​by Stephen Zepke

​… In the context of science fiction studies Guattari’s interest in Cyberpunk offers an alternative to Frederic Jameson’s dismissal of the genre as failing to offer anything more than an uncritical celebration of late-capitalism’s technological ubiquity. In fact Guattari offers hisown version of the theory of capitalist and cybernetic Accelerationism that would shortly after be developed by Nick Land and the group of young philosophers gathered around him at Warwick University. While on the one hand Guattari offers an aesthetic acceleration that takes us through capitalism to a point beyond the human, as Land does, he rejects the nihilist ethics Land took from early Lyotard, and privileged to the point of a total affirmation of capitalism’s death drive, as he called it. Guattari offers a radical aesthetic acceleration/deterritorialisation that remains avowedly anti-capitalist, and in this way perhaps offers an alternative to both Land’s alarming (provocatively so) affirmation of neo-liberalism and to the disappointing compromises of the recent Accelerationist Manifesto’s rational and revisionary social democracy …

taken from:

​First thing: “Meta-Neocameralism” isn’t anything new, and it certainly isn’t anything post-Moldbuggian. It’s no more than Neocameralism apprehended in its most abstract features, through the coining of a provisional and dispensable term. (It allows for an acronym that doesn’t lead to confusions with North Carolina, while encouraging quite different confusions, which I’m pretending not to notice.)

Locally (to this blog), the “meta-” is the mark of a prolegomenon*, to a disciplined discussion of Neocameralism which has later to take place. Its abstraction is introductory, in accordance with something that is yet to be re-started, or re-animated, in detail. (For existing detail, outside the Moldbug canon itself, look here.)

The excellent comment thread here provides at least a couple of crucial clues:

nydwracu (23/03/2014 at 6:47 pm): Neocameralism doesn’t answer questions like that [on the specifics of social organization]; instead, it’s a mechanism for answering questions like that. … You can ask, “is Coke considered better than RC Cola?”, or you can institute capitalism and find out. You can ask, “are ethno-nationalist states considered better than mixed states?”, or you can institute the patchwork and find out. …
​​
RiverC (23/03/2014 at 3:44 am): Neo-cameralism is, if viewed in this light, a ‘political system system’, it is not a political system but a system for implementing political systems. Of course the same guy who came up with it also invented an operating system (a system for implementing software systems.)

MNC, then, is not a political prescription, for instance a social ideal aligned with techno-commercialist preferences. It is an intellectual framework for examining systems of governance, theoretically formalized as disposals of sovereign property. The social formalization of such systems, which Moldbug also advocates, can be parenthesized within MNC. We are not at this stage considering the model of a desirable social order, but rather the abstract model of social order in general, apprehended radically — at the root — where ‘to rule’ and ‘to own’ lack distinct meanings. Sovereign property is ‘sovereign’ and ‘primary’ because it is not merely a claim, but effective possession. (There is much more to come in later posts on the concept of sovereign property, some preliminary musings here.)
​
Because MNC is an extremely powerful piece of cognitive technology, capable of tackling problems at a number of distinct levels (in principle, an unlimited number), it is clarified through segmentation into an abstraction cascade. Descending through these levels adds concreteness, and tilts incrementally towards normative judgements (framed by the hypothetical imperative of effective government, as defined within the cascade).

(1) The highest level of practical significance (since MNC-theology need not delay us) has already been touched upon. It applies to social regimes of every conceivable type, assuming only that a systematic mode of sovereign property reproduction will essentially characterize each. Power is economic irrespective of its relation to modern conventions of commercial transaction, because it involves the disposal of a real (if obscure) quantity, which is subject to increase or decrease over the cyclic course of its deployment. Population, territory, technology, commerce, ideology, and innumerable additional heterogeneous factors are components of sovereign property (power), but their economic character is assured by the possibility — and indeed necessity — of more-or-less explicit trade-offs and cost-benefit calculations, suggesting an original (if germinal) fungibility, which is merely arithmetical coherence. This is presupposed by any estimation of growth or decay, success or failure, strengthening or weakening, of the kind required not only by historical analysis, but also by even the most elementary administrative competence. Without an implicit economy of power, no discrimination could be made between improvement and deterioration, and no directed action toward the former could be possible.

The effective cyclic reproduction of power has an external criterion — survival. It is not open to any society or regime to decide for itself what works. Its inherent understanding of its own economics of power is a complex measurement, gauging a relation to the outside, whose consequences are life and death. Built into the idea of sovereign property from the start, therefore, is an accommodation to reality. Foundational to MNC, at the very highest level of analysis, is the insight that power is checked primordially. On the Outside are wolves, serving as the scourge of Gnon. Even the greatest of all imaginable God-Kings — awesome Fnargl included — has ultimately to discover consequences, rather than inventing them. There is no principle more important than this.

Entropy will be dissipated, idiocy will be punished, the weak will die. If the regime refuses to bow to this Law, the wolves will enforce it. Social Darwinism is not a choice societies get to make, but a system of real consequences that envelops them. MNC is articulated at the level — which cannot be transcended — where realism is mandatory for any social order. Those unable to create it, through effective government, will nevertheless receive it, in the harsh storms of Nemesis. Order is not defined within itself, but by the Law of the Outside.

At this highest level of abstraction, therefore, when MNC is asked “which type of regimes do you believe in?” the sole appropriate response is “those compatible with reality.” Every society known to history — and others beside — had a working economy of power, at least for a while. Nothing more is required than this for MNC to take them as objects of disciplined investigation.
(2) Knowing that realism is not an optional regime value, we are able to proceed down the MNC cascade with the introduction of a second assumption: Civilizations will seek gentler teachers than the wolves. If it is possible to acquire some understanding of collapse, it will be preferred to the experience of collapse (once the wolves have culled the ineducable from history).
​
Everything survivable is potentially educational, even a mauling by the wolves.  MNC however, as its name suggests, has reason to be especially attentive to the most abstract lesson of the Outside — the (logical) priority of meta-learning. It is good to discover reality, before — or at least not much later than — reality discovers us. Enduring civilizations do not merely know things, they know that it is important to know things, and to absorb realistic information. Regimes — disposing of sovereign property — have a special responsibility to instantiate this deutero-culture of learning-to-learn, which is required for intelligent government. This is a responsibility they take upon themselves because it is demanded by the Outside (and even in its refinement, it still smells of wolf).

Power is under such compulsion to learn about itself that recursion, or intellectualization, can be assumed. Power is selected to check itself, which it cannot do without an increase in formalization, and this is a matter — as we shall see — of immense consequence. Of necessity, it learns-to-learn (or dies), but this lesson introduces a critical tragic factor.

The tragedy of power is broadly coincident with modernity. It is not a simple topic, and from the beginning two elements in particular require explicit attention. Firstly, it encounters the terrifying (second-order) truth that practical learning is irreducibly experimental. In going ‘meta’ knowledge becomes scientific, which means that failure cannot be precluded through deduction, but has to be incorporated into the machinery of learning itself. Nothing that cannot go wrong is capable of teaching anything (even the accumulation of logical and mathematical truths requires cognitive trial-and-error, ventures into dead-ends, and the pursuit of misleading intuitions). Secondly, in becoming increasingly formalized, and ever more fungible, the disposal of sovereign power attains heightened liquidity. It is now possible for power to trade itself away, and an explosion of social bargaining results. Power can be exchanged for (‘mere’) wealth, or for social peace, or channeled into unprecedented forms of radical regime philanthropy / religious sacrifice. Combine these two elements, and it is clear that regimes enter modernity ’empowered’ by new capabilities for experimental auto-dissolution. Trade authority away to the masses in exchange for promises of good behavior? Why not give it a try?

​Cascade Stage-2 MNC thus (realistically) assumes a world in which power has become an art of experimentation, characterized by unprecedented calamities on a colossal scale, while the economy of power and the techno-commercial economy have been radically de-segmented, producing a single, uneven, but incrementally smoothed system of exchangeable social value, rippling ever outward, without firm limit. Socio-political organization, and corporate organization, are still distinguished by markers of traditional status, but no longer strictly differentiable by essential function.

The modern business of government is not ‘merely’ business only because it remains poorly formalized. As the preceding discussion suggests, this indicates that economic integration can be expected to deepen, as the formalization of power proceeds. (Moldbug seeks to accelerate this process.) An inertial assumption of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres is quickly disturbed by thickening networks of exchange, swapping managerial procedures and personnel, funding political ambitions, expending political resources in commercial lobbying efforts, trading economic assets for political favors (denominated in votes), and in general consolidating a vast, highly-liquid reservoir of amphibiously ‘corporacratic’ value, indeterminable between ‘wealth’ and ‘authority’. Wealth-power inter-convertibility is a reliable index of political modernity.
​
MNC does not decide that government should become a business. It recognizes that government has become a business (dealing in fungible quantities). However, unlike private business ventures, which dissipate entropy through bankruptcy and market-driven restructuring, governments are reliably the worst run businesses in their respective societies, functionally crippled by defective, structurally-dishonest organizational models, exemplified most prominently by the democratic principle: government is a business that should be run by its customers (but actually can’t be). Everything in this model that isn’t a lie is a mistake.

At the second (descending) level of abstraction, then, MNC is still not recommending anything except theoretical clarity. It proposes:

a) Power is destined to arrive at experimental learning processes
b) As it learns, it formalizes itself, and becomes more fungible
c) Experiments in fungible power are vulnerable to disastrous mistakes
d) Such mistakes have in fact occurred, in a near-total way
e) For deep historical reasons, techno-commercial business organization emerges as the preeminent template for government entities, as for any composite economic agent. It is in terms of this template that modern political dysfunction can be rendered (formally) intelligible.
​
(3) Take the MNC abstraction elevator down another level, and it’s still more of an analytic tool than a social prescription. (That’s a good thing, really.) It tells us that every government, both extant and potential, is most accessible to rigorous investigation when apprehended as a sovereign corporation. This approach alone is able to draw upon the full panoply of theoretical resources, ancient and modern, because only in this way is power tracked in the same way it has actually developed (in tight alignment with a still-incomplete trend).

The most obvious objections are, sensu stricto, romantic. They take a predictable (which is not to say a casually dismissible) form. Government — if perhaps only lost or yet-unrealized government — is associated with ‘higher’ values than those judged commensurable with the techno-commercial economy, which thus sets the basis for a critique of the MNC ‘business ontology’ of governance as an illegitimate intellectual reduction, and ethical vulgarization. To quantify authority as power is already suspect. To project its incremental liquidation into a general economy, where leadership integrates — ever more seamlessly — with the price system, appears as an abominable symptom of modernist nihilism.

Loyalty (or the intricately-related concept of asabiyyah) serves as one exemplary redoubt of the romantic cause. Is it not repulsive, even to entertain the possibility that loyalty might have a price? Handle addresses this directly in the comment thread already cited (24/03/2014 at 1:18 am). A small sample captures the line of his engagement:

​Loyalty-preservation incentivizing programs are various and highly sophisticated and span the spectrum everywhere from frequent flier miles to ‘clubs’ that are so engrossing and time consuming in such as to mimic the fulfillment of all the community, socialization, and identarian psychological functions that would make even the hardest-core religious-traditionalist jealous. Because lots of people are genetically programmed with this coordination-subroutine that is easily exploitable in a context far removed from its evolutionary origins. Sometimes brands ‘deserve’ special competitive loyalty (‘German engineering’!) and sometimes they don’t (Tylenol-branded paracetamol).

​There is vastly more that can, and will, be said in prosecution of this dispute, since it is perhaps the single most critical driver of NRx fission, and it is not going to endure a solution. The cold MNC claim, however, can be pushed right across it. Authority is for sale, and has been for centuries, so that any analysis ignoring this exchange nexus is an historical evasion. Marx’s M-C-M’, through which monetized capital reproduces and expands itself through the commodity cycle, is accompanied by an equally definite M-P-M’ or P-M-P’ cycle of power circulation-enhancement through monetized wealth.
​
A tempting reservation, with venerable roots in traditional society, is to cast doubt upon the prevalence of such exchange networks, on the assumption that power — possibly further dignified as ‘authority’ — enjoys a qualitative supplement relative to common economic value, such that it cannot be retro-transferred. Who would swap authority for money, if authority cannot be bought (and is, indeed, “beyond price”)? But this ‘problem’ resolves itself, since the first person to sell political office — or its less formal equivalent — immediately demonstrates that it can no less easily be purchased.

From the earliest, most abstract stage of this MNC outline, it has been insisted that power has to be evaluated economically, by itself, if anything like practical calculation directed towards its increase is to be possible. Once this is granted, MNC analysis of the governmental entity in general as an economic processor — i.e. a business — acquires irresistible momentum. If loyalty, asabiyyah, virtue, charisma and other elevated (or ‘incommensurable’) values are power factors, then they are already inherently self-economizing within the calculus of statecraft. The very fact that they contribute, determinately, to an overall estimation of strength and weakness, attests to their implicit economic status. When a business has charismatic leadership, reputational capital, or a strong culture of company loyalty, such factors are monetized as asset values by financial markets. When one Prince surveys the ‘quality’ of another’s domain, he already estimates the likely expenses of enmity. For modern military bureaucracies, such calculations are routine. Incommensurable values do not survive contact with defense budgets.
Yet, however ominous this drift (from a romantic perspective), MNC does not tell anybody how to design a society. It says only that an effective government will necessarily look, to it, like a well-organized (sovereign) business. To this one can add the riders:

a) Government effectiveness is subject to an external criterion, provided by a selective trans-state and inter-state mechanism. This might take the form of Patchwork pressure (Dynamic Geography) in a civilized order, or military competition in the wolf-prowled wilderness of Hobbesian chaos.
b) Under these conditions, MNC calculative rationality can be expected to be compelling for states themselves, whatever their variety of social form. Some (considerable) convergence upon norms of economic estimation and arrangement is thus predictable from the discovered contours of reality. There are things that will fail.

Non-economic values are more easily invoked than pursued. Foseti (commenting here, 23/03/2014 at 11:59 am) writes:

​No one disputes that the goal of society is a good citizenry, but the question is what sort of government provides that outcome. […] As best I can tell, we only have two theories of governance that have been expressed. […] The first is the capitalist. As Adam Smith noted, the best corporations (by all measures) are the ones that are operated for clear, measurable and selfish motives. […] The second is the communist. In this system, corporations are run for the benefit of everyone in the world. […] Unsurprisingly, corporations run on the latter principle have found an incredibly large number of ways to suck. Not coincidentally, so have 20th Century governments run on the same principle. […] I think it’s nearly impossible to overstate the ways in which everyone would be better off if we had an efficiently, effective, and responsive government.

* I realize this doesn’t work in Greek, but systematic before-after confusion is an Outside in thing.

taken from: 

by Steven Craig Hickman

At this point it may seem that the consolations of horror are not what we thought they were, that all this time we’ve been keeping company with illusions. Well, we have. And we’ll continue to do so, continue to seek the appalling scene which short-circuits our brain, continue to sit in our numb coziness with a book of terror on our laps like a cataleptic predator, and continue to draw smug solace, if only for the space of a story, from a world made snug and simple by absolute hopelessness and doom.

—Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory 

I am no book thief. But I could not bear to part with your words…

—Poppy Z. Brite, On Thomas Ligotti

Why do we read such works as these? A darkness unbearable, a world where nothing good ever happens, a realm of pure and unadulterated hopelessness and doom? Why? Even the notion that one could be consoled by such intemperate melodies of utter death and destruction, madness and delirium seem to send one back to that strange place of emptiness, that weird space of story where the thing we’ve been chasing, the object of horror that we’ve sought even against our own will (do we have a will?) suddenly stands revealed – not as a visible thing that we can observe, nor as a shaded emptiness that we can absolve into the particles of our mindless aberrant fetish, obsess over, ponder as if it were the ultimate answer to our deepest longings; no, such are the illusory tricks of stagecraft magicians, no – what we seek is as in Walter Pater’s aesthetic,

“A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment – and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.” - Walter Pater

It’s this secret moment, this pure effect: a moment that cannot be shared, no testimony brought forth or enveloped with the reasoning powers of intellect; no, rather such moments that suddenly present their absolute aura – a profane light, a flame from the darkness that attests not so much to our fear as to our exhilaration in the face of the unknown. Such moments leave us desperate, longing for the return, for the return of such infinitesimal mysteries, glints from elsewhere that awaken in us neither nostalgia nor some futurial glance into the mists of time forward; but, rather, give us hint of that seed that lies in the depths of our own mind as the outer form of some object breaks over us releasing powers we had as yet to register or distill from the voids surrounding us. For that is the key, we seek what cannot be locked down in the daylight of reason, a hint of that terror at the heart of the world which holds us in its desperate flight, if only momentarily a glance into the Real.

​A host of strangers come together at the intersection of time and space in a world between worlds. Their eyes “fixed with an insomniac’s stare, the stigma of both monumental fatigue and painful attentiveness to everything in sight”.1 We are not given a reason, only that this gray host has returned to a place from which they were excluded. To what purpose if any have they returned. And, more to the point, why did they leave, abandon this place to begin with? A crime, an unimaginable collective massacre, some dark and unfathomable secret or burden to which staying meant certain madness and eventual death; or, was it just inexplicable, no reason at all, or one that they have long forgotten in their collective misery and spiritual ennui. A clue: “Only one had not gone with them. He had stayed in the skeleton town…”
​
But why? Why would he stay and all the others leave, abandon their homes (were they residents?) and depart to unknown lands or cities. Was there a natural or unnatural disaster? Something like those cities abandoned in Russia or American because of ecological and technological meltdown? A collective amnesia: “They were sure they had seen something they should not remember.” A murder, a sacrifice, a collective ritual of such magnitude and horror that they were all brought to that point of mental breakdown whose catastrophic consequence was some form of memory sickness and dementia: “A paralysis had seized them, that state of soul known to those who dwell on the highest plane of madness, aristocrats of insanity whose nightmares confront them on either side of sleep.” There is a sense of solidarity in madness, a hysterical craving after the truth of which they are both enamored and yet absolved to never discover again. And, yet, like one of Beckett’s creatures in the hell of modernity: “I’ll go on. I can’t go on.” This sense of being in-between, caught in the active and passive passage into the vastation on some banal nihil.

We know that for Thomas Ligotti there is a deeper truth unfolded in those darker thought of such men as Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Philipp Mainländer, Julius Bahnsen, Ernst Lindner, Lazar Hellenbach, Paul Deußen, Agnes Talbert, Olga Plümacher and, last but not least, the young Nietzsche. Something of the flavor of that spiritual anomie which gathers itself under the icon of pessimism. Those German Romantics, melancholy and suicidal – poet manqués who would define it as ‘weltschmerze’ (“worldpain”) hinting at the dark moodiness of things whose aura was surrounded by sadness and weariness weighing down the soul with an acute sense of evil and suffering at the heart of existence. As Fredrick C. Beiser will attest “Its origins have been traced back to the 1830s, to the late romantic era, to the works of Jean Paul, Heinrich Heine…” and others.2

​Yet, it was the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899– 1990), even more than the better known Schopenhauer who would awaken in Ligotti the sense of utter futility and the dark contours of pessimism concerning the human condition and predicament:

Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing.3

​This notion of cessation, this withdrawal from the contract of organic Will-to-live in Schopenhauer’s terms is the central motif of Zapffe’s pessimism. Ligotti’s, too.
​
Yet, even in this strangest of tales, the stubborn refusal to die continues as if death were itself the very core of existence, a subtle circulation around a hollow abyss that could never find the flame that would end it all: “Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.” a woman says. When asked what she meant by the invocation she is merely as confused as the interlocutor. Maybe that is how the outside circulates into our world, seeps into the daylight with its dark jets of inky delirium.

​Andrew Maness like many of Ligotti’s officiators is a loner, a scholar or bookworm, and a misfit renegade from reality. As he stands in the room atop a mansion that once housed many of his predecessors he watches these gray citizens wander the streets below him, each following some prerecorded script that even they do not understand but know they are powerless to abandon. In the room is a book that seems to hold both a secret and a mystery, one that Maness himself has sought to decipher for as long as he can remember: “You know what made them come home, but I can only guess. So many things you have devoutly embellished, yet you offer nothing on this point.” As if the book had a personality, as if it knew more than a book should know, a book that not only exceeded the limits of its covers but seemed to grow as the seed in the darkness grows. A book whose title would serve a greater mystery: TSALAL.
​
Many of Ligotti’s tales speak of secret books whose forbidden knowledge reveals to its antagonists certain hellish paradises, utopian realms of utter bittersweet jouissance: a jouissance which compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle (a la Lacan!). What Georges Bataille would speak of as “the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises…”.4 Ligotti as if in agreement has always attributed to the (un)natural objects of his world, the mundane homes and streets of a village or city this aura of terrible promise:

Surrounding this area were clusters of houses that in the usual manner collect about the periphery of skeleton towns. These were structures of serene desolation that had settled into the orbit of a dead star. They were simple pinewood coffins, full of stillness, leaning upright against a silent sky. Yet it was this silence that allowed sounds from a fantastic distance to be carried into it. And the stillness of these houses and their narrow streets led the eye to places astonishingly remote. There were even moments when the entire veil of desolate serenity began to tremble with the tumbling colors of chaos. (ibid., Tsalal)

​As if this unbinding, an unraveling of things mundane as holding within themselves the keys to remote mysteries about to be unveiled. Most of Ligotti’s most memorable passages are of nightwalks along the strange alleys, streets, and thoroughfares of certain villages and cities where the imponderable strangeness of things seems to crawl down out of remote regions to merge and take up residence. This atmospheric prose-poetry is what unveils Ligotti’s greatest strength rather than the narrative of the tales themselves. It’s as if in such places there is a sense that the “magical desolation of narrow streets and coffin-shaped houses comes to settle and distill like an essence of the old alchemists”. In one of his better known essays Walter Benjamin would speak of this as an aura:

​Historically, works of art had an ‘aura’ – an appearance of magical or supernatural force arising from their uniqueness (similar to mana). The aura includes a sensory experience of distance between the reader and the work of art. … The aura has disappeared in the modern age because art has become reproducible.5

​Maybe it’s this sense of loss that pervades most of the stories in Ligotti’s oeuvre. We sense this endless circling round the aura of an object that cannot be revealed without terrible consequence for both reader and author. To name it is to destroy it, so it remains outside in the dark, unnamed and full of that aura that against the modernists remain unreproducible. It cannot be profaned except on pain of death and annihilation.
​
Even as Andrew closes the book the metamorphoses begins, a changing of shadow to shadow, an unfolding to an infernal paradise whose dark transports offer the reader neither comfort nor escape, consolation or reprieve. Andrew’s father, a defender of day and light, a priest, whose dogma’s seem out of another more medieval age reprimands his reprobate son: “There is nothing more awful and nothing more sinful than such changes in things. Nothing is more grotesque than these changes. All changes in things are grotesque. The very possibility of changes in things is grotesque. And the beast is the author of all changes. You must never again consort with the beast!”

​This sense that the orthodox seek an unchanging world, a realm where time stands still and all things stave off the inevitable evil of change and movement. Andrew feels the burden of change growing in him, the “seed in the dark” growing. It allures him and terrorizes him, and yet he knows it is his destiny. Like Adam in the garden, Andrew has been forced to renounce the temptation of his own fallen trees: books, forbidden books, the forbidden knowledge of those infernal regions that offer and allure him toward the remote darknesses. As his father says of these books: “I keep them,” he said, “so that you may learn by your own will to renounce what is forbidden in whatever shape it may appear.”

Returning to that chapter in the Bible where the forbidden fruit of knowledge first offered its allurements we find a serpent whispering in the woman’s ear. The serpent is simply there, the tempter already in place, an unexplained occupant of the Garden—and of the human mind. The serpent appears to be the concentrated and symbolic remnant of an earlier religious age, before the Jews passed through the tumultuous shift from polytheism to monotheism. Nothing yet links the serpent to Satan or to the Devil. It is calmly insubordinate and categorically denies God’s verdict of death for eating the forbidden tree. “Thou shalt not surely die” (3:4). The serpent tells the woman that, rather, the act will open their eyes and make them as gods. The woman eats and gives of the fruit to her husband. Everything goes by halves now. Adam and Eve start out innocent and immortal. The serpent claims that by eating the forbidden fruit, they will achieve divinity without losing immortality. He is half-right—that is, they attain insight into good and evil and at the same time they lose immortality. “And the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever … the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden” (Genesis 3:22). Because they have become mortal, Adam and Eve must now be kept away from the Tree of Life. Prohibition did not work for the first tree. Banishment is the logical answer.

This sense of prohibition and banishment or exclusion as the fruit of a temptation pervades many of Ligotti’s stories. Breaking the prohibition leads in many cases to utter madness and a break with the sane everyday world of humanity, where the codes of sleep and blindness encode most humans in a dubious form of wakefulness. Yet, it is this very prohibition that awakens Andrew’s desire: “But how wonderful he found those books that were forbidden to him.” Or, again,

​He somehow knew these books were forbidden to him, even before the reverend had made this fact explicit to his son and caused the boy to feel ashamed of his desire to hold these books and to know their matter. He became bound to the worlds he imagined were revealed in the books, obsessed with what he conceived to be a cosmology of nightmares. (ibid.)

​Andrew would spend hours within this forbidden paradise of books and knowledge, mapping the underbelly of a universe that only he could see in his mind’s eye. He imagined the stars in this private infernal universe: “They had changed in the strangest way, changed because everything in the universe was changing and could no longer be protected from the changes being worked upon them by something that had been awakened in the blackness, something that desired to remold everything it could see…and had the power to see all things.” This sense of a dark presence, a power of creativity and surprise that could suddenly remake the universe at will, an agent of change and metamorphosis such that in “those nights of dreaming, all things were subject to forces that knew nothing of law or reason, and nothing possessed its own nature or essence but was only a mask upon the face of absolute darkness, a blackness no one had ever seen.”
​
Ultimately even these forbidden books offered little consolation to Andrew, what he sought was another book, access to a forbidden knowledge that seemed to offer a counter-creation:

It was another creation he pursued, a counter-creation, and the books on the shelves of his father’s library could not reveal to him what he desired to know of this other genesis. While denying it to his father, and often to himself, he dreamed of reading the book that was truly forbidden, the scripture of a deadly creation, one that would tell the tale of the universe in its purest sense.

​Remonstrating with his father over the hideousness of these prohibitory measures, that all they did was cause the very thing his father sought to end – the desire for a forbidden knowledge of things that no book held or could hold but the one book whose very temptation was bound to the darkness of his own mind and nightmares:

You preached to me that all change is grotesque, that the very possibility of change is evil. Yet in the book you declare ‘transformation as the only truth’—the only truth of the Tsalal, that one who is without law or reason. ‘There is no nature to things,’ you wrote in the book. ‘There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.’ You wrote that there is not true growth or evolution in the life of this world but only transformations of appearance, an incessant melting and molding of surfaces without underlying essence. Above all you pronounced that there is no salvation of any being because no beings exist as such, nothing exists to be saved—everything, everyone exists only to be drawn into the slow and endless swirling of mutations that we may see every second of our lives if we simply gaze through the eyes of the Tsalal.

​I will not spoil the ending for those who have yet to read Ligotti’s works. It’s this sense of a counter-world, not a mirror world but a realm that is counter-factual and disturbs, even intrudes our own world; a world that is already seeping into ours from remote dimensions out of mind that is at the heart of Ligotti’s works. As if all along this very realm we are in is that eternally metamorphosing infernal region of change, but that through the secret wizardry of those dark agents of time – the time of change was stopped, and that we’ve all been imprisoned in a lifeless universe of the death-drive, pursuing a circular and repetitive course of unchanging repetition. Isn’t this the dream of those oligarchs of thought surrounding us with a world of capitalistic desire, a realm in which the only circulation is that of immaterial goods and money, a realm where nothing changes so much as the static representation of change. A change that is itself a repetition of death?
​
Maybe in the end we – all of us are Andrew awakening to the truth, a truth he comes to see as the horror of his and our unchanging society. As he shouts it to his father:

“You knew this was the wrong place when you brought me here as a child. And I knew that this was the wrong place when I came home to this town and stayed here until everyone knew that I had stayed too long in this place.”

​We all know this is the truth, that we’ve allowed this world to continue down its unnatural course, allowed leaders to lead us nowhere and nowhen – a circular void of capitalist desire in a vacuum of consuming consummation. A realm where time and space have accelerated into a virtual hellhole of circulating capital to which we are all bound like servants in a vast machinic system. Knowing what we know we still desire it: and, that is our burden and our downfall. And, yet, we all have known for a long while that the forbidden knowledge that would free us of this trap has been in plain sight all along, our eyes glued to its strange temptations: the eyes of the Tsalal. Shall we open those eyes, now, and begin to change, metamorphosize beyond this seeming world of stasis and repetition? As we open our eyes the infernal seeps in… the dark seed sprouts…

In the ancient Gnostic Gospels of Valentinus there is this play between the Pleroma (“Place of Fullness”) and the Abyss (“Place of Emptiness”), in which a dialectical interplay transpires between the powers of fullness and absence, an oscillation and hesitation between the visible darkness and the darkness made visible, a seeming that stages a cosmic battle and forces that which cannot be named to give birth to the dark seed: the parental abyss, at once foremother and forefather, from which the babe rushes forth into our emptiness. And, we, like the cannibalistic village must consume the fleshy remains of such corruption, become one with its energetic will, let the white bones sink into black earth where in the darkness a light will begin to shine: a nihilistic light, glimmers of strange wonders filtering up from the radiant Abyss.

Ligotti, a subtle master of the unsaid, never exposes the reality below the surface edge of his prose-poetry, rather he hints at it, allows the reader to intermingle in the shifting sands of his dark waters where either the seed will awaken in her the mystery from elsewhere; or, close the door forever in a momentary gleam from the impossible enchantments that trap us in our own allurements.

1. Thomas Ligotti. The Nightmare Factory. Carroll & Graf (June 27, 1996)
2. Beiser, Frederick C.. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 (p. 1). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
3. Ligotti, Thomas. The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (pp. 28-29). Penguin Books; Reprint edition (October 2, 2018)
4. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1994) p. 234
5. Walter Benjamin. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Schocken/Random House, ed. by Hannah Arendt. (1936)

taken from:

​In continuing to explore the domains of the digital and the analog, I’ve come to an unexpected conclusion, one that will no doubt be obvious to others but which I nevertheless found surprising. I’ve finally realized the extent to which analogicity has been hounded out of technical history. In the past I had assumed, incorrectly, that digitality and analogicity were more or less equal alternatives. Yes there was a litany of digital techniques in human history — moveable type, arithmetic, metaphysics — but so too history could furnish its share of analogical triumphs, right? Not exactly. In my unscientific survey, the digital techniques far outweigh the analog ones. And many things categorized as blockbuster interjections of peak analogicity — the invention of the calculus, Richard Dedekind’s 1858 definition of real numbers — harbor deeply-ingrained anti-analog biases upon closer inspection. Dedekind sought to discretize the real, not think the real as pure continuity, and his tool of choice was the cut, a digital technology if there ever was one. And while Newton’s “fluxions” are genuinely strange and interesting, both Newtonian and Leibnizian calculus aimed to “solve” the problem of pure continuity via recourse to a distinctly digital mechanism: the difference unit, or differential. Good show, now try it again without cheating! It almost makes me nostalgic for Euclid. At least he stayed true to the analog sciences of line and curve, without recourse to the digital crutches of algebra or arithmetic.
​
So while I’m deeply skeptical of the analog turn in theory — a few decades ago it was all language, structure, symbol, economy, logic, now it’s all affect, experience, expression, ethics, aesthetics — it’s only fair to admit the profound rareness of analogicity. Particularly in philosophy, which is almost entirely dominated by digital thinking. (In mathematics it’s not even close: math is one long sad story of arithmetic subduing geometry, the symbol subduing the real.) It’s exceptionally difficult to think continuity as continuity. Very few have accomplished this feat. So if anything we need more work on continuity and analogical sciences, not less. More work on signal processing, noise, randomness, modularity, curves and lines, heat and energy, fields, areas, transduction, quality, intuition. Less on arithmetic and discrete breaks. More on bending, blurring, bleeding, and sliding. More on the body, more on real experience. More on what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of life.

The answer is all around us, in real materiality. Here is the theorist Karen Barad talking about how quantum particles unsettle the various abstractions fueling Western philosophy and culture:

“Quantum particles unsettle comfortable notions of temporality, of the new, the now, presence, absence, progress, tradition, evolution/extinction, stasis/restoration, remediation, return/reversal, universal, generation/production, emergence, recursion, iterations, temporary, momentary, biographic, historical, fast/slow, speeding up, intensifying, compressing, pausing, disrupting, rupturing, changing, being, becoming.”

​In other words, if computers are black boxes, and if they can be opened, revealing other black boxes, with boxes inside of those boxes, still there exists one black box that’s not like the others, the black box of the world. It’s the box that can never be opened.
​
Or I should clarify, we can open it. That’s what phenomenology teaches; our mode of being inquires into the conditions of real materiality. So we can. But computers can’t. Computers can process data but they can’t be there present in and as the data. I mean this 100% phenomenologically. Digital computers can’t not formalize. That is their special curse: always only form. Always only box. Presence isn’t part of the equation. Computers require input, but they have a hard time generating input out of whole cloth. Computers require givenness, but they can’t, ultimately, give it themselves.

In other words, computers finally solved the old mind-body problem from Descartes. It was easy. Just keep the mind, and amputate the body! Computers are idealism, perfected. And every perfection comes at a cost.

I’m exaggerating, of course. Computers exist in the real world. For instance, crypto-currency mining is defined explicitly as a thermodynamic process (the expenditure of energy) not an immaterial process. And to be clear: my point is really about digital computers in silicon. DNA computers and quantum computers are something quite different: DNA computers because they’re massively parallel; quantum computers because they don’t follow the logic of exclusively-binary states. And we know that computers can generate data until the cows come home, even if, as I maintain, computers are difference engines and not “presence engines.”

But what about neural nets and the kinds of images drawn using AI, don’t they generate new data? No, these kinds of algorithms are just glorified techniques for computing averages. The semantic essence of these images was pre-tagged and databased by some underpaid intern or Mechanical Turk worker. Don’t be dazzled by Deep Dream. You made the data, Google just crunched the numbers. In the 19th Century it was called “composite photography” and it was used for eugenics research. Oh how the world turns. And anyway artists like Jason Salavon or Trevor Paglen have made much better use of this technique than the AI companies ever will.

Of all genuinely computer-generated data — not the stuff tagged by workers — the most successful is probably procedural noise. Procedural noise is essentially a pseudo-random sequence of numbers. It has been incredibly influential in computer graphics and other areas.
​
Procedural noise is mathematically elegant. It’s what they call a “fract of a sine” – that is, the fractional component of a sine wave. How does it work? First, compute sin(x); then go deep, deep rightward past the decimal point and grab an integer; that number will be, for all practical purposes, random. Do it again, and you have a pseudo-random sequence. So it’s the fractional component — or “fract” — of a scaled-up wave:

//compute the sine of x
sin(2) = 0.90929742682

//multiply by a large number to scale the value way up
​0.90929742682 * 100000 = 90929.7426826

//lop off the fractional component
//the remaining value is pseudo-random
.7426826

//voila the formula for a pseudo-
random number random = fract(sin(x) * 100000)

​There’s already enough noise in the system. You just have to know where to look for it, in this case deep, deep down inside a sine wave. But this makes perfect sense. Of course the source of this random “noise” would be a wave form, the sine wave. For we know that there is no greater analog technology than the wave form. And we know that all randomness — perceptual or actual — has its roots in the analogical real.
​
Another success is the JPEG compression algorithm, used in both still images and digital video. Philosophers like to wring their hands anxiously over the fact that digital images can be synthesized (and thus manipulated and even faked), breaking the supposed link between referent and representation. But, as usual, these philosophers don’t really know what they are talking about. If you’re nervous about images being inauthentic, the queue for complaints is twenty-five hundred years old and it starts right behind Socrates.

It’s not that digital images can be manipulated; if they are images compressed through JPEG (or similar algorithms), they are *100%* synthetic. The image exists strictly as a combination of what they call “DCT basis functions” with corresponding coefficients. The DCT basis functions are little wavelets and they work a bit like the alphabet does, only with more significant visual impact. There are 64 of them, just like a chess board. Every inch of your image is synthesizedfrom combining these 64 thumbnail elements in different strengths determined by the coefficients. The “D” in DCT stands for “discrete.” The “C” stands for “cosine” — not “sine” but a wave form nonetheless. So, again, the analog is the “real materiality” at the heart of the digital.

In other words, the light at the end of the black box is an analog light. The computer is one half of an asymmetrical relation. Computers need their inputs; and most of the inputs come from other computers. But there’s one terminal input, the transductive interface where the analog real enters through the side door.

taken from: