by  XENOMACHINES

​How then, are we to use fiction as a method if the outlined concept of futurity resigns us to a closed horizon of politico-fictional potential? To fiction a political imaginary against this system-time we require an alternate sense of time, and thus it is at this point that we return to Bergson (and the embellishment upon his thought by Deleuze) who conceives of a metaphysics of time that can be read as an alternative method of fictioning.

To understand this ontology, we must first establish the status of the actual and virtual. In Deleuze’s Bergsonian system, the primary claim is that “the virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.”1 This way of thinking forces us to recognise a dissolution of the previous positioning of real and possible as dichotomous zones in which fictions are rendered. Here, the virtual is simultaneously real and possible. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the opposition between present and future (which had previously been equivocated to the opposition between real and possible) is no longer of primary concern as the future in this schema is understood as “a past that has never been present”2 such that any ‘future’ is represented as an articulation of a potential realisation of the past. As Bergson says: “to foresee consists of projecting into the future what has been perceived in the past, or of imagining for a later time a new grouping, in a new order, of elements already perceived.”3 Thus, the virtual and the actual (and the future and the present) are not designated as localities like the real and the possible, but are best conceived of as “phases of a continuous process.”4 The future does not need to be instantiated in present to be real, it is merely actualised within this continuous process and is always-already ‘real’ even prior to actualisation. Given this, time is best understood as virtual, a “continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”5 It is an insatiable excess that blooms without measure, with no spatio-temporal limit demarcating it from any other ‘moment’ of time. Furthermore, if we accept Bergsonian time we see that, unlike Shaw and Reeve-Evison’s mode of fictioning there is no outside from which the future can bear upon the present as a distinct site of temporality. Instead, the ‘future’ is an emergent property of the past-present relation that does not need letting in from ‘the abstract-outside’.

To understand the fiction at the heart of Bergsonian time requires an understanding of its internal structure as constituted in opposition to a certain conception of ‘geometric’, or ‘mathematical’ time. Bergson’s articulation of time comes from a concern he had with the imposition of the ‘geometric’ order onto the ‘vital’. Whilst Aristotelian Time is determined by Space, Bergson maintained that time was irreducible to any “linear progression of the measure of movement”6 and, as such there is a lexical movement required to reconceptualise a temporality previously thought of as a spatialised past-present-future. He reconceptualises this lexicon in Creative Evolution against a ‘finalist’ conception of Time – a traditional teleology of the reality of Time, following a distinct order ‘guaranteed due to first principles’. In other words, Retroactive Futurity. The future is fixed for the finalist – dependent upon a linear ordering of time in its ternary form – whereas for Bergson, the future does not depend upon any sequential progression of time for its reality, seeing it instead as a “reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself”7 – already contained within the present. Bergson maintains that finalism appears only as an inversion of mechanism, in which there is a substitution of “the attraction of the future for the impulsion of the past.”8  Thus, it now emerges that the Kantian form of fictioning is a rectilinear mathematical mode organised point-to-point, supervening upon a notion of the future as a possible spatio-temporal realm in order to fix the present in its determination towards this possibility.

​The eschewal of a linear progression of time isn’t purely Bergsonian however, and the spectre of Hegel haunts Bergson’s temporal logic as it does Kant’s, also presenting a metaphysics of time in which the linear sequencing of temporality is scrambled and the causality of the past-as-origin no longer has primacy. In his Mechanics, Hegel defines time as “the being which, in that it is, is not, and in that it is not, is”9, articulating a twofold time in which (1) past and the future are seen as passing instants of the present’s becoming and (2) Time is non-identical with itself. The dialectical synthesis of time is the “negative unity of self-externality”10, irreducible to a singular point and differentiated from itself temporally, exteriorising the present from its past (and vice versa) to give itself a history.

The noteworthy point of difference between Bergson and Hegel concerns the process of negation. As Keith Ansell-Pearson clarifies: “In the Hegelian schema of difference a thing differs from itself only because it differs in the first place from all that it is not. Difference is, therefore, said to be constituted at the point of contradiction and negation.” 10 So, whilst Hegel’s Spirit moves through time, as Time, via negation, Bergson maintains the nuance of duration: situated against becoming precisely as it is a multiplicity without negation. In Bergsonism Deleuze defines Bergsonian time as possessing four key ontological characteristics: (1) Contemporaneity (past as contemporary with the present). (2) Co-existence (past co-existing/is simultaneous with itself at every juncture). (3) Pre-existence (past pre-exists the present – i.e. present is actualised from the past as a ‘contracted degree’). (4) Second tier co-existence (the entirety of the past co-exists with the present – i.e. the present itself is the past)11 In this final sense the present (in being) is not and the past (in being) is, much like Hegel. However, as Catherine Malabou clarifies, Hegel believes that “time is and is not to the degree that its moments cancel each other out; the present is a ‘’now’ which exists, but as it is something which passes, it will…almost immediately…exist no longer12 whereas Bergson believes that the present exists simultaneously with the past (second tier co-existence). Hence, any conception of the past-present ceasing in order to transition to a ‘future’ is to mistake the concurrency of the future which is actualised in its simultaneity with the present, demonstrating a clear divide from what might be seen as a Hegelian form of fictioning.

​Given this, I suggest that any formalization of Bergsonian fictioning must function in a similar manner. It must avoid the faulty decisions of a Kantian science-fictional schema, which scissions the world between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ and which forges straight path to the future based upon speculation. Instead, I look to Levi-Bryant’s essay ‘Towards a Realist Pan-Constructivism’ in which he moves to separate the notion of ‘what is’ from that of what ‘ought’ (to be) – and suggest that Bergsonian fiction operates in the chasm opened up in their decoupling, that place of what could be and which becomes, given that it already is. It is the temporal logic that operates immanent in the relationship between past and present which sees the past extend itself along a new vector, towards an alternate form of counter-futurity. I believe that Kodwo Eshun utilises such a form of Bergsonian fiction in his considerations of Afrofuturism and “the alternate futures the present world makes possible.”13 The logic through which the present makes future(s) possible, represents clearly Bergsonian fiction, locating the nexus of the future as a determination evinced in the relationship between the past and the present, providing a new method by which to construct a political imaginary.

​In Further Considerations of Afrofuturism Eshun forges a connection between capital and the future, drawing upon Mark Fisher’s concept of ‘science fiction (SF) capital’, which delineates a circuit of ‘positive feedback’ between future-focused media and capital, in which information about the future circulates as commodity, and time is an asset of the powerful who “employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past.”14 In this schema, a fictioning from above manufactures a closed system, much as we have noted with RF, where Capital perniciously forecloses on any openings to the Outside, deploying fictions in order to avoid entropy, feeding back on itself from its possible future in order to redouble its existing boundaries and re-order its Inside, reaffirming domination of those who live in its now-past. This negentropic function of Capital becomes clear through the fictive method, as the manipulation of time-variables to prevent disorder and realise a static present in which its possible future is always being made real.
​
As a result, Eshun guides his fictioning through a clear Bergsonian premise, where control is not required over a future to come, but the future as already present. In this vein he notes “…fiction is a means through which to preprogram the present… never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present.”15 However, from where is this feedback engineered, and what becomes-present if not the possible future? Is this not just mobilising a form of RF ‘from below’? I suggest that in this mode of thinking the ‘future’ surfaces in relation to, out of, and alongside the past-present; that which Deleuze terms “the fifth aspect of actualisation: a kind of displacement by which the past is embodied only in terms of a present that is different from that which it has been.”16Here the past is embodied as a differentiated present, with the present recognised as a ‘preferred future’ already implicated in the dimension of the past-present. As a result, reconfigurations of the political imaginary should be taken to invoke an Icarian flight to the inside, where fictions (Eshun terms them ‘counter-futures’ – new futures emerging from the same past as the present) are architected by the Afrofuturist, articulated in a ‘future conditional’ syntax that enunciates the latent potential of the virtual past through the actualisation of the present in order to construct speculative futures against the ‘outside’ of the present-fiction of (SF) capital.

In sum, we see the way in which Eshun makes use of a Bergsonian schema to re-conceptualise the way futurity is conceived and realised, where Afrofuturist fictioning brings forth the future that is below, clawing at the skin of the present from the Inside. This contrasts it clearly with the RF model, which progresses from an Outside already determined by the linear mechanics of the ternary form of past-present-future, and also demonstrates how both RF and Bergsonian Fiction can be parsed as alternative methods for reading and understanding philosophical and political thought.

​[1] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 208
[2] Joe Hughes, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2009), 111
[3] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. (New York: Dover Publications Inc. 1998), 22
[4] John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 58
[5] Bergson. Creative Evolution, 20
[6] Jose Rosales, Bergsonian Science-Fiction: Kodwo Eshun, Gilles Deleuze, & Thinking the Reality of Time, 3
[7] Bergson, Creative Evolution, 259
[8] Bergson, Creative Evolution, 55
[9] G.W.F. Hegel ‘Mechanics’ in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Volume 1, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), 229 Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 229
[10] Keith Ansell-Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. (Oxon: Routledge, 1999), 21
[11] For more on this see Levi-Bryant’s ‘A Brief Note on the Virtual’ at: https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/08/26/abrief-note-on-the-virtual/
[12] Catherine Malabou. The Future of Hegel. (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 13
[13] Rosales, Bergsonian Science-Fiction, 4
[14] Kodwo Eshun, Further Considerations of Afrofuturism in The New Centennial Review, Vol.3, Number 2 (2003), 289
[15] Eshun, Further Considerations of Afrofuturism, 290
[16] Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism. (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 71

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica.

– J.G. Ballard – Manhole 69

In  J.G. Ballard’s short story Manhole 69 we discover a world where humans no longer sleep and the future is set adrift upon the currents of time. As one of the scientists says to a group of test subjects:

‘None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives.’ (Ballard, p. 51)

​When we think of Sleep we think of peace, silence, and the interminable flows of strange dreams and nightmares that jut their heads out of the darkness of our inner lives. Sleep’s porousness is suffused with in-flows between waking and death, a nightland where our darkest thoughts begin to shadow us and we succumb to the drift of a timeless inner mythology as if from some infernal paradise. Sleep is the recurrence in our lives of a break in the temporal flow of our timebound  consciousness. It affirms the necessity of postponement, and the deferred retrieval or recommencement of whatever has been postponed. Sleep is a remission, a release from the “constant continuity” of all the threads in which one is enmeshed while waking. It seems too obvious to state that sleep requires periodic disengagement and withdrawal from networks and devices in order to enter a state of inactivity and uselessness. It is a form of time that leads us elsewhere than to the things we own or are told we need. Sleep is the dream of a non-utilitarian world, a world without labor.2

​So when Ballard portrays a world beyond sleep, of endless light and work, he is satirizing the core motif of our hypercapitalism of 24/7 non-stop speed: non-stop production – otherwise known as interminable work (or as in Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic unbound). In defense of this 24/7 world of sleeplessness Neill, one of Morley’s protégé’s will say: “For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica.” (Ballard, p. 51) Morley will remind him of the short story by Chekov of a young man who bet his life-in-total isolation and sense-deprivation to win a million rubles. At one minute before he is to emerge and win the bet suddenly steps out of the cage: and, as Morley says: “He was totally insane!” Neill for his part will chortle, saying:‘I suppose you’re trying to say that sleep is some sort of communal activity and that these three men are now isolated, exiled from the group unconscious, the dark oceanic dream. Is that it?’ (Ballard, p. 52) Finally, in exasperation Morley will throw up his hands and shout at Neill:

They’re never going to be able to get away, not even for a couple of minutes, let alone eight hours. How much of yourself can you stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the shock of being yourself. (Ballard, p. 52)

One of the participants or victims of the experiment Lang will the next day speak up, speaking to Morley:

​Lang gestured expansively. ‘I mean up the evolutionary slope. Three hundred million years ago we became air-breathers and left the seas behind. Now we’ve taken the next logical step forward and eliminated sleep. What’s next?’

Morley shook his head. ‘The two steps aren’t analogous. Anyway, in point of fact you haven’t left the primeval sea behind. You’re still carrying a private replica of it around as your bloodstream. All you did was encapsulate a necessary piece of the physical environment in order to escape it.’ (Ballard, p. 58)

​This notion of encapsulation of a “necessary piece of the physical environment in order to escape it” has been central to many self-organizing forces in the world and universe. Boot-strapping processes or recursion is that ability to insert the loop of thought, self, process into its own circle of self-organization. A sort of time-spiral of progression in which things continually spawn ever greater change within their own systems. Complexity unbound. One of the central motifs of complexity theory, non-linear dynamics, and chaos theory in connection to the life sciences is this very ability of non-organic matter to display through these very processes the thing we term life. Some believe that this very notion of self-organizing complexity is not bound to humans only, but will in fact at some point in the ‘future’ be productive of machinic-life, too.
​
As the story goes on we see the men slowly devolve into insanity, their minds slowly losing all sense of time and space. Slowly they begin to feel a certain amount of closure of the world upon them till in the last instance each of them feels that they haven been shut up in a small manhole from which there is no escape. Neill and Morley will find them the next morning sitting in the gymnasium blank and unresponsive. They will try many things to bring the subjects back out of their psychosis. Speaking among themselves they surmise:

‘This room in which the man is penned for ten years symbolizes the mind driven to the furthest limits of self-awareness . . . Something very similar happened to Avery, Gorrell and Lang. They must have reached a stage beyond which they could no longer contain the idea of their own identity. But far from being unable to grasp the idea, I’d say that they were conscious of nothing else. Like the man in the spherical mirror, who can only see a single gigantic eye staring back at him.’ ‘So you think their withdrawal is a straightforward escape from the eye, the overwhelming ego?’ ‘Not escape,’ Neill corrected. ‘The psychotic never escapes from anything. He’s much more sensible. He merely readjusts reality to suit himself. Quite a trick to learn, too. The room in Chekov’s story gives me an idea as to how they might have re-adjusted. Their particular equivalent of this room was the gym. I’m beginning to realize it was a mistake to put them in there – all those lights blazing down, the huge floor, high walls. They merely exaggerate the sensation of overload. In fact the gym might easily have become an external projection of their own egos.’ Neill drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘My guess is that at this moment they’re either striding around in there the size of hundred-foot giants, or else they’ve cut it down to their own dimensions. More probably that. They’ve just pulled the gym in on themselves.’ (Ballard, p. 66)

This notion of psychotic closure and breakdown as a response to sleeplessness has been described in many journals of psychiatry, etc. In one recent article the researchers discovered:

Recent research suggests that each day with insufficient sleep increases our sleep debt and, when this sleep debt becomes large enough, noticeable problems appear (Coren, 1996a). These sleep-debt-related problems are most predictable at certain times of the day. This is because the efficiency of our physical and mental functions show cyclic increases and decreases in the form of circadian rhythms. While our major sleep/wakefulness rhythm has a cycle length of roughly 24 hours, there are shorter cycles as well, with the most important of these being a secondary sleep/wakefulness cycle that is around 12 hours. – See Sleep Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency

​This notion of circadian rhythms is related to our perception of time: day/night, etc. Humans, like most living organisms, have biological rhythms, known as circadian rhythms (“body clocks”), which are controlled by a biological clock and work on a daily time scale. These affect body temperature, alertness, appetite, hormone secretion etc. as well as sleep timing. Due to the circadian clock, sleepiness does not continuously increase as time passes. A person’s desire and ability to fall asleep is influenced by both the length of time since the person woke from an adequate sleep, and by internal circadian rhythms. Thus, the body is ready for sleep and for wakefulness at different times of the day. (see Circadian rhythm sleep disorder)
​
Chronobiology studies the affects of temporality upon living organisms. It is a field of biology that examines periodic (cyclic) phenomena in living organisms and their adaptation to solar- and lunar-related rhythms. These cycles are known as biological rhythms. Chronobiology comes from the ancient Greek χρόνος (chrónos, meaning “time”), and biology, which pertains to the study, or science, of life. The related terms chronomics and chronome have been used in some cases to describe either the molecular mechanisms involved in chronobiological phenomena or the more quantitative aspects of chronobiology, particularly where comparison of cycles between organisms is required. (see Chronobiology)
​
In an earlier novel The Drowned World a biologist named Bodkin tells his colleague Kerans of this process of reversion-recursion:

​‘Not in our minds, Robert. These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories— from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organization of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. (Ballard, J. G.. The Drowned World: A Novel (p. 56). Norton. Kindle Edition.)

​For Ballard the fascination of Time has always been hooked to the rhythms of some primordial tension at the heart of the human evolutionary process. This notion of the archaeopsychic past jutting up in our nightly dreams, and of this fusion of night and day in an endless sleepnessness releasing the Triassic zones of intermittence from its reptilian lairs in our early brain stem gives rise to a world in which our nightmares not only become real, they are the very core of our inhuman being.
​
Bodkin’s continues:

 ‘If you like, you could call this the Psychology of Total Equivalents— let’s say “Neuronics” for short— and dismiss it as metabiological fantasy. However, I am convinced that as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amnionic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as recognisable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as they re-appear we’ll be swept back helplessly in the flood-tide like pieces of flotsam.’ (ibid., p. 57)

In a previous post on Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep I spoke of Ballard’s notion of the fugue state as a form of space sickness:

​At first touching only a small minority of the population, it took root like a lingering disease in the interstices of its victims’ lives, in the slightest changes of habit and behaviour. Invariably there was the same reluctance to go out of doors, the abandonment of job, family and friends, a dislike of daylight, a gradual loss of weight and retreat into a hibernating self.(Ballard, 1064)

​Crary will see in our inability to envision the future a form of this space sickness, an inversion of the original Enlightenment project of progress that has instead begun to fill in the gaps of the future with pure simulations: this means in our contemporary world: the relentless capture and control of time and experience (Crary, 40) is the new project, the financialization of experience is the closure of the future within a command and control simulator that seeks algorithms of speed rather than acceleration and evolution in the usual sense of that term. Instead of self-organizing processes that lead to invention, design, art, and play we see the involuted dis-organizing principles of a static state-machine revolving in its own empty systems of hypersignification. The Reality Engineers of our new economics have taken over the place of religious prophets of ages past and now dictate the future as a financial project that only they as the truth mouthpiece of the invisible hand of the Market Gods know or understand. The new Economics of Reality is the closure of the loopholes in time, the exclusion of growth and the evolving systems of life for those of death and the interminable dance of a void that seeks only to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
​
We know that before the establishment of the Second Law, many people who were interested in inventing a perpetual motion machine had tried to circumvent the restrictions of First Law of Thermodynamics by extracting the massive internal energy of the environment as the power of the machine. Such a machine is called a “perpetual motion machine of the second kind”. The second law declared the impossibility of such machines. Yet, we see out Oracles of the New Economics of Globalization seeking just that: the power of a “perpetual motion machine” in which the InfoSphere as an data energy system changes the game. What they seek is to escape the “arrow of time” and entropy, to install a machinic pylum that will feed off the very thing it seeks to escape: the Future. The Future is a debt system, a way of pushing the debt indefinitely beyond out present moment. One could say that the new cosmopolitan centers of financial capitalism in the global context are Time Machines to stave off the ever accelerating truth of entropy. Chrontopias that seek to push the entropic affects into the far future through a veritable speeding up of the hypermediation of technology.

​Most of these ideas are not new. One can see the notional truth of this scattered among various thinkers from Plato and Aristotle onward. Yet, it was only in the age of modern physics that these ideas could take on a more distinctive hue, enable thinkers in various worlds of physcis, economics, sociology, philosophy, and the sciences of complexity, non-linear dynamics, and chaos theory, etc. that a new enframing of the world became apparent. As Maurizio Lazzarato has shown in his The Making of the Indebted Man we live in a vacuum world that creates its illusion of timelessness on the backs of blackmail. Debt itself has become the new commodity, and the humans that support this death machine create a future that is always just out of reach because if the payment of the bill ever stepped out of the future into our present moment everything would collapse. So debt becomes the engine against entropy in a financial system that fears both the future and the payment it entails. One thinks of those sleep researches that discovered in their findings that as insufficient sleep increases our sleep debt noticeable problems appear. One can only begin to understand the problems appearing in a sleepless world of zombie consumerism as austerity measures and the insurmountable debt against the Future piles up, and the humans in various countries supporting such a Time-Machine begin to close down in their own manholes. How will the psychotic break that is to come discover its way out of the dark rooms of its own sleepless mind?
​
Ballard in many stories will study the effects of temporality from various perspectives. Ballard will in one of his interviews speak of the sense that Time is ending, not in the sense of an apocalypse but rather our very inner sense of time as change and movement:

Sections of the landscape will have no connection whatsoever with each other, in the way that many arts, such as pottery or ceramics have no connection to the events of politics or social eruptions.(Extreme Metaphors, p. 163)3

​He will tell the interviewer that people no longer share a sense of a ‘central experience’: not “in the way people from the thirties can speak of a shared feeling of everyone being involved in great political currents, when you could see change coming and everybody shared in it equally” (EM, p. 163)

“Time will in a sense cease to exist; it won’t matter whether you’re living in 1982 or 1992 or 2002 – that sense of a single world will go. – (EM, p. 164)

​Are we not living in that bleak landscape of timelessness in which the future has stopped, a speed world of accelerating electronic hypermedia in which the closure of time has encapsulated us within an irreal, anti-realist realm of simulated indifference rather than brought us to a point of emergent newness? Franco “Bifo” Berardi will document this Age of Apathy and disengagement, the slow corrosion of time and its closure within the speed factories of financial globalization:

​During the twentieth-century social struggle could change things in a collective and conscious way because industrial workers could maintain solidarity and unity in daily life, and so could fight and win. Autonomy was the condition of victory because autonomy means the ability to create social solidarity in daily life, and the ability to self-organize outside the rules of labor and exploitation.4

​He will see the new ICT technologies of information and communication as the key to this accelerating disaffection, saying, the “InfoSphere has dramatically changed and accelerated, and this is jeopardizing the very possibility of communication, empathy, and solidarity.” (Berardi, p. 14)
​
The Philosopher of Information Luciano Floridi will explore this notion of the accelerating InfoSphere suggesting that it denotes the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities (thus including information agents as well), their properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations. It is an environment comparable to, but different from, cyberspace, which is only one of its sub-regions, as it were, since it also includes offline and analogue spaces of information. Maximally, it is a concept that, given an informational ontology, can also be used as synonymous with reality, or Being.5

So the notion that financial capitalism and globalization are a project to stop time and the temporal movement of the future through speed techniques of hypermedia, an inversion of temporal evolution and progress – replacing a notion of a self-organizing evolving economy and political world of human solidarity with a timeless ultraconsumer society of zombies feeding off the remaining resources and each other for the profit and pleasure of a specific elite and cosmopolitan class of wealth is at the heart of this diagnosis.

Ballard himself in his last three novels began to explore this devolving world of the new wealthy elite and its global shutdown of the future. The voyeuristic zombification of the wealthy as vampiric and apathetic consumers of a rotting pleasure-pain criminality is at the heart of Cocaine Nights, Millennium People, and Super-Cannes. I have barely touched the surface of J.G. Ballard’s prescient diagnosis and fictionalization of our current malaise. At the center of it is a dark vision of Time in its various temporal stabilizations/destabilizations, its synchronic/diachronic time-loops and bootstrapping fallbacks, its deterretorializations/reterretorializations, and decodings/recodings of what Nick Land once suggested as its Templexity. If as Nick Land suggests cities of the global financial system, the cosmopolitan home of the great corporate networks and their affiliates, the playlands of the corporate and political elite are becoming Time-Machines, then what of the excluded realms where most humans will exist in misery and suffering be  beyond the glitz and glitter of these paradisial enclaves?

​1. Ballard, J. G. (2012-06-01). The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (p. 51). Norton. Kindle Edition.
2. Crary, Jonathan (2013-06-04). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (p. 126). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
3. Extreme Metaphors. J. G. Ballard Collected Interviews Editors, Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (Fourth Estate 2014)
4. Franco “Bifo” Berardi. After the Future. ( AK Press, 2011)
5. Floridi, Luciano (2013-10-10). The Ethics of Information (p. 6). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

taken from:

by Emilia Marra

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

​Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

This few pages ask to their readers to express their own judgement on a very particular trial in the courthouse of the absolute immanence. With the aim of present this case in his complexity, I firstly have to conduce a raid into the theory of immanence, trying to clarify what the assumption of a reflection on haecceities and affects, rather than the one on subject individuations, means and carries with itself. Indeed, if we really want to express what the Deleuzian «a life» is, we should restart from Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s path, which ultimately implies abandoning the more classical theories based on the identity and on the Cogito’s priority. In order to present properly this new field without renouncing to show contradictions and dan​gers related to a similar arena, I will introduce the character of Moosbrugger, one of the most famous Robert Musil’s lonely planet in his own Nietzschean solar system. I would like to show here that this irrational murderer, who I will describe in the third part of this text, offers a faithful representation of what rejecting the classical logical dichotomy between difference as quality and difference as quantity signifies. In my opinion, this last subject is in fact one of the possible starting points we need to investigate in order to understand the oddity that Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze have in common. For this purpose, I would like to present the argument by three steps:

​1) firstly, I would like to start from the first chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic, showing how the German philosopher poses the conceptual pairs of quality and quantity, giving logical priority to the first against the second;

​2) secondly, I will compare Hegel’s position with Spinoza’s propositions, in order to identify by opposition the fil rouge which ties together the tradition that Deleuze calls, in Difference and Repetition, the univocity of being;

​3) finally, I will present Moosbrugger’s example to show practically which kind of life could be approached following this change of perspective, and to understand if it is a sharable position for a political fight or not.

​In the very beginning of his Science of Logic, Hegel explains the necessity of a re-foundation of the entire logic, still based on Aristotle’s directions and not more useful for the Modern Age. The interest in logic as ground of confrontation in philosophy lies on the fact that it is in this field, more than in every other science, that, according to Hegel, we have to start from the thing itself. Dealing with the thing itself directly means to follow the old metaphysic, in order to keep together objects and thoughts, exactly the contrary of what Kant had done. If we were not able to represent the world keeping in it not just the finitude, but also the infinite, the conceptual possibility of the Spirit would simply be unthinkable. It is important to underline that the Spirit, as Musil suggests in his The Man Without Qualities, is always the big maker of alternatives: so that we have essence and existence, thoughts and things, reason and passions. Hegel follows the trend of the thing itself, which is, from his point of view, the dialectic movement, the necessity of passing by the true negation, that is, the determinate one, to reaffirm the indissolubility of the one. Therefore, Hegel has to commence his logic with a qualitative difference, which would be solved only in the very end of the self-comprehension of the Spirit. Now, the troubling issue with this choice is precisely that every duality is posed as an incommensurable opposition at the very beginning of every reasoning. This means, on the ​one hand, to suppose that dichotomy is more important than the infinite graduation existing between the two parts of the opposition, and, on the other hand, the necessity of a strong definition at least of one peculiar characteristic, to let the thing we are looking at becoming a something. Instead, an empiric approach to the nature tends to suggest that slowing down with the very first definition of a thing in front of something else offers a valid alternative to this position, an alternative that is also closer to the human experience than the dialectical method. Graduation rather than opposition, plurality rather than duality, Spinoza-Nietzsche rather than Hegel. It seems in fact that Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza as Nietzsche’s heir offers the possibility of reading Spinoza as a Hegel’s alternative: if Hegel accuses Spinoza’s system of being motionless, the reproach in now reversed. As Dosse writes:

​Pour Hegel, Spinoza est l’auteur d’un système purement théorique et, à sa suite, Kojève considère que l’on ne peut rien faire avec Spinoza dont la philosophie est soutenue par un système mort, excluant autant la liberté que la subjectivité. Or Deleuze sort Spinoza de cet enfermement : « En faisant de lui le grand « héritier » de Nietzsche, le grand vivant, Deleuze retourne complètement les choses »1

​It is quite easy here to understand that what is at stake here is a whole different way of thinking immanence. According to Hegel, we have at first an opposition, i.e. a logical qualitative difference between essence and existence. Qualitative difference has then an ontological priority over the quantitative difference. As a result, we immediately have to rely on a movement, the dialectic’s one, that, as Hegel specifies, is not an external movement, but the truth of the thing itself. Thus the challenge here becomes to suppose that we may delay the moment of the qualitative definition. More than this, we also propose that the advantages we have trying to think the quality as a product of a quantitative difference are more than the ones we have supposing an ontological difference between quality and quantity. Therefore, our hypothetical starting point would be a Being Without Qualities, which simply means a being without definitions.

​This deceleration offers the possibility of thinking in terms of power: instead of questioning the specificity of something, we will concentrate on the degree of power this thing has. The very first consequence of this way of thinking is that everything could change in anything else. Quoting Musil in one of his de​scription of the average bourgeois man of his century:

He his capable of turning everything into anything – snow into skin, skin into blossoms, blossoms into sugar, sugar into powder, and powder back into little drifts of snow – for all that matters to him, apparently, is to make things into what they are not, which is doubtless proof that he cannot stand being anywhere for long, wherever he happens to be.

​It seems in fact that this description is exactly the condition of the contemporary human being; what if, instead of just imagine this transformation, we suppose to retard the moment of the definition (snow, skin, blossoms, sugar...), trying to reasoning starting by affects and haecceitas, in terms of power, in terms of a real possible modification of everything into anything else? If we follow Spinoza we may propose to skip the division between essence and existence restarting from the IV book of the Ethics. In the demonstration of the IV definition, Spinoza explains that every being is animated by the power of existing, which is a part of the infinite power, i.e. the essence, of God or of the Nature. The difference existing between the power of God and the man’s power is not a qualitative one. It is exactly the same, but in his entire in God, fragmented in human beings.

​As we can easily appreciate, Spinoza’s solution to the problem ​of the very first difference supposed in the Hegelian logical system is the introduction of his own ontological building of the power. It is exactly starting from power that we can understand the empiric differences in terms of quantity, because all the elements we have are involved at first on the same level, the level of a Being without qualities. Then, we have a progressive stratification, a growing transformation of everything into anything else. We found that it is only at this point that we can offer definitions, useful in our everyday life to communicate each other and to make choices. In theoretical words, we suppose here to take seriously the hypothesis of the real existence of the infinity in act, as Spinoza suggests in his famous letter 11 to Meyer. We also remind that, at the very end of the first part of the Science of Logic, the same Hegel suggests that the Spinozian position on infinity is much more interesting than Kant’s one, reversing for just one moment his deep conviction in the progress of the thought in the timeline.

As we can easily appreciate, Spinoza’s solution to the problem ​ of the very first difference supposed in the Hegelian logical system is the introduction of his own ontological building of the power. It is exactly starting from power that we can understand the empiric differences in terms of quantity, because all the elements we have are involved at first on the same level, the level of a Being without qualities. Then, we have a progressive stratification, a growing transformation of everything into anything else. We found that it is only at this point that we can offer definitions, useful in our everyday life to communicate each other and to make choices. In theoretical words, we suppose here to take seriously the hypothesis of the real existence of the infinity in act, as Spinoza suggests in his famous letter 11 to Meyer. We also remind that, at the very end of the first part of the Science of Logic, the same Hegel suggests that the Spinozian position on infinity is much more interesting than Kant’s one, reversing for just one moment his deep conviction in the progress of the thought in the timeline.

Quality as a consequence of a quantitative distribution of power, power to affect and power of being affected. It seems that it is the only possible way for a pure theory of immanence. It also seems to be a useful instruction in order to start reflecting on an accelerationist theory, where it is at first very important to value the techno-social acceleration not just as the other we have to fight, but as something we have to pass through, to exceed in speediness. If we look at the technical acceleration as ​an augmentation of quantity of makeable actions in the same arc of time, we can easily imagine the entire historical timeline as an augmentation of power. However, if we accept to think in terms of quantities instead of qualities, we seriously risk to fall into a trap, namely the lack of responsibility for every personal action, followed by the collective passive acceptation of every event. The question we may ask at this point is: is there still an I in the Deleuzian “a life”, made of events? Can we still suppose the existence of something like an “ethic of affects” without rejecting all our moral convictions? Instead of trying to give an answer to these controversially questions, I rather prefer to present here, as I announced in the introduction, the Moosbrugger’s case, inviting to take position on the following inquiry: is Moosbrugger the victim or is he the solution to the problem of modernity?

But who’s Moosbrugger? The carpenter Christian Moosbrugger is a huge, physically powerful man who is something of a simpleton. Moosbrugger has «a face blessed by God with every sign of goodness» but also just happens to be a crazed sex murderer whose trial for brutally slaughtering a prostitute forms one of the many leitmotifs of The Man Without Qualities. In particular, the debate on the mental insanity of Moosbrugger and, consequentially, on the appropriate punishment to inflict to ​ him, is one of the most fascinating threads in the novel, because of the fact that every character has to answer to this question, which is the question of the dark, unconscious viciousness and irrationalism pulsating underneath Kakania’s rancid optimism: «If mankind could dream collectively [als Ganzes]», Ulrich reflects, «it would dream Moosbrugger». During the novel, we have the impression that Musil is asking to his public to take position on this topic. Trying to choose one of the options that the other characters of the novel propose, we deeply understand the impossibility of a judgement on Moosbrugger, which is a clear symptom of the impossibility we have to find a definition of ourselves. As Celine Piser wrote:

Thus the modern city becomes “a realm of alienation” (Jonsson, “Neither Inside nor Outside” 34) for its inhabitants: the modern subject does not know how to define him or herself or with which abstract government to identify. At the same time, the modern subject feels pulled in even more directions as he or she is suddenly exposed to different countries, traditions, and ways of life. This proliferation of alternatives becomes a crisis for the modern individual. The feeling of fragmentation challenges his or her affinity for continuity, tradition, and stability. Regardless of whether or not these ideals have disappeared in modernity, the illusion of fragmentation prevails.2

In order to understand why Kakania’s inhabitants could think Moosbrugger as an alternative to their everyday life, we have firstly to underline that this representation is not the one that the giant has of himself. According to his point of view, he is a victim of society. He cannot sufficiently defend himself because of his difficulties of communication: his alienation starts from the impossibility to give a stable definition of something, firstly of his proper analyse of the world, secondly in the any talk with the others. When it happens to him to think that a girl has lips like blossoms, he is not able to really distinguish lips from blossoms, and he feels the desire to cut them off with a knife. Even in mathematic field, he refuses to give a unique answer to his judges:

They’d always shoot a question right back at him then: “How much is fourteen plus fourteen?” and he would say in his deliberate way, “Oh, about twenty-eight to forty.” This “about” gave them trouble, which made Moosbrugger smile. It was really so simple. He knew perfectly well that you get twenty-eight when you go on from fourteen to another fourteen; but who says you have to stop there?
​
Moosbrugger is an alternative because of his capability to feel the sense of possibility, which Ulrich theorizes at the very beginning of the novel. In particular, Moosbrugger’s disturb ​allows him to feel his body with no separation from the others: he does not feel the difference between the inside and the outside. Slaughtering the prostitute means to kill a part of his own corps, and, as Ulrich explains, there is no more powerful man than the one who does not fear his own death. To fight fragmentation, Moosbrugger strives for unity, surpassing in speediness every Hegelian tentative to reach the entire. He is interesting and fascinating all the other Musil’s characters because of the fact that he has in himself the Nietzschean chaos, and Kakania’s people is wondering if it will be enough to give birth to the dancing star or if he is just a psychotic. Because of his refutation of society’s dichotomies, he is suspended, in society’s eyes, between two worlds, an unexplored space where something like “a life” seems to be still possible, even if just suggests as a fantasy in the middle of the night, when a «punctilious department head or a bank manager would say to his sleepy wife at bedtime: “What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger?”».

​What is sure here is that we can define Moosbrugger a pharmakon for the modern society. If he is a poison or a medicine, the choice is up to you.

1   F. Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Biographie croisée, Edition La Découverte, Paris 2009, p. 178.

2  C. Piser, «Dreaming Moosbrugger: The Other versus Modernity in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities», More than Thought (Fall 2010), http://morethanthought.community.officelive.com, p. 2.

​Emilia Marra

Emilia Marra holds a Master in « Philosophies allemande et française dans l’espace européen » - Europhilosophie Erasmus Mundus (UTM, UCL, BUW), and she is now a PhD student at the University of Trieste with a project on the concept of system between Hegel and Spinoza and their contemporary French interpretations. Her researches mainly investigate the French contemporary philosophy, with a special focus on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. She published in journals such as Esercizi filosofici, Interpretationes, Philosophy Kitchen, S&F, Estetica. Studi e ricerche, La Deleuziana, of which she is member of the editorial board. She also translated Pierre Macherey’s Hegel ou Spinoza (Ombre Corte, 2016).

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